Wednesday Potpourri

First, it’s a rather obvious point, but Omri Ceren makes it well:

American colleges and universities spent the last decade censoring conservatives - canceling events, punishing teachers, etc. - because they said they wanted to ensure their students never felt unsafe. They spent uncountable millions institutionalizing leftwing diversity programs and staff, with the same pretext. Either they were lying or Jewish students don't count for them. Or both.

Second, when you’ve lost Alan Dershowitz…. The emeritus law professor has broken with the Democratic Party. Hmmm. He cannot belong to a political party that countenances anti-Semitism.

During an interview on the “Just the News, No Noise” show, Dershowitz expressed profound disappointment in his party's failure to address the pro-Palestine demonstrations at Columbia University that have been ongoing since last Wednesday.

Remember when Sen. Chuck Schumer denounced Israel for defending itself against Hamas. 

I am sure that you do. Now, however, when much worse is going on across academic America, these fearless opponents of the radical right have nothing to say. Dershowitz continued:

“We're hearing nothing from Democrats. We are hearing nothing from Chuck Schumer,” Dershowitz explained. “We're hearing nothing really direct from President Biden. He made a very disappointing statement. In the same breath, he talked about the demonstrators in passing and he said, ‘but you have to understand the Palestinian situation.’ No, you don't have to understand the Palestinian situation. When people are calling for rape and murder and beheading. The Democrats are an extraordinary disappointment."

The result, one less Democrat:

"I am no longer presumptively voting for Democrats," he added. "I'm gonna vote for whoever is the best candidate, that may include Democrats, but I have no loyalty anymore to the party.” 

And Dershowitz connects the current campus anti-Semitism with diversity admissions programs:

“Many of the students [protesting] today are unqualified students,” Dershowitz said. “They were admitted because of DEI. They were admitted because Qatar and other Arab countries are paying for foreign students. These are not the best and the brightest students, they are the loudest students, but they're certainly not students who are looking out for the best interests of America.”

As for the comparisons with Carlotteesville and January 6, Dershowitz debunks them:

“What we're seeing is something that I believe, and this is going to be very controversial, I believe is potentially more dangerous than January 6, which was terrible, and than Charlottesville, which was terrible,” Dershowitz said. “Because those didn't involve as many students, not as many elite people, as many future leaders. We're hearing the future leaders of America chanting ‘We are Hamas.’ In other words, ‘we are rapists. We believe in raping Jewish women. We are beheaders. We are kidnappers. We are murderers.’ That's what they're chanting. And these are people who will run for Congress ... 10 years from now, who will be partners at law firms, and who will be working in the editorial rooms of CNN, and the New York Times.”

Of course, if foreign student nationals are participating in the rioting, they are here with student visas.

Would it be too much for our State Department to cancel their visas and deport them?

Third, Randy Barnett counters the notion that what is happening in blue cities and on college campuses represents America. It is a useful qualification:

This is important. What’s happening is not “America.” It is Democrat-governed cities, generally in blue states, and on college campuses. Focus your concerns on the “root causes” of Jew hatred and intimidation in these venues.

Fourth, on the other side of the pond, anti-Semitism is alive and well. To the point where the British police allow pro-Hamas rallies, while warning Jews to stay away from such rallies. Julie Burchill comments:

Every week the British police tolerate the pro-Hamas rallies which have defaced and disgraced the capital since the 7 October pogroms in Israel. We’ve seen the gallantry displayed by the boys in blue towards the boys with the black flags; we’ve seen policemen watch helplessly as Palestinian protestors clamber onto war memorials, and stand by amiably as the genocidal slogan ‘From the river to the sea’ is beamed onto the Houses of Parliament. This led the Conservative MP Andrew Percy to state: ‘It’s the pathetic response we’ve come to expect from the Met – a force that has at times appeared to act more like a PR arm for the protesters than a law enforcement agency.’ So protective are they of their team that a young Iranian man was arrested after carrying a poster which read ‘Hamas is terrorist’. He was wrestled to the ground by five police officers.

She concludes:

I would venture that ‘anti-Semitism’ doesn’t cover what’s going on right now – ‘Judeophobia’ says it better. For this really is an irrational neurotic ailment. Why are people so hostile to such a loyal, productive, well-assimilated, un-criminal, non-violent immigrant group, who have often driven me into sullen silence when they insist on singing the National Anthem of the UK at every public meeting? Why are we treating them so badly and – in the case of the police – assisting other groups in tormenting them? Why, for the first time last year, when figures on hate crimes against Jews hit a record high, was there for the very first time at least one incident in every police region in the UK, which means that anti-Semitism now exists in regions even where there are no Jews? No one with any sense believes that this is about the number of deaths taking place in Gaza; the big giveaway is that the first London rally took place before Israel fought back. It was a simple celebration of Jew-killing, the oldest hatred dressed up in fashionable new clothes.

Fifth, do you believe that migrants, especially the illegal variety, are more prone to commit crimes? Statistics appear to suggest that such is not the case in America, but, then again, one suspects that the statistics are being systematically falsified.

So, to find more accurate and honest statistics, we look to Germany. Guess what? Germany is seeing a migrant crime wave.

Ben Bartee reports for PJ Media:

 

The number of foreign suspects soared to around 923,000 last year, representing a massive 18 percent increase in just one year nationwide, according to crime statistics from the German Interior Ministry released on Tuesday. However, the even more shocking number may have to do with violent crimes, which soared to record levels in 2023.

The data from the interior ministry shows that 41 percent of all crime suspects are foreigners, with 2.246 million people in the country suspected of a crime in 2023, which is 7.3 percent more than in 2022. Overall, foreigners only represent 15 percent of the population.

This corresponds to an increase of almost 18 percent, reports Die Welt, citing the as yet unpublished crime statistics for 2023 from the Federal Ministry of the Interior. They now account for almost 41 percent of all suspects. A total of 2.246 million people in Germany were suspected of a crime – 7.3 percent more than in 2022.

So, to recap: 15% of the population commits 41% of all crime — and that’s relying on the government’s numbers, which we can only take with a boulder of salt given the inconvenience that migrant crime poses to the preferred policy of replacement migration.

Sixth, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman seems to have conquered his depression and even his brain damage. 

He said this about protest demonstrators:

If you show up in a Starbucks with a bullhorn and start yelling at people, that doesn't make you noble; it just makes you an asshole.

Seventh, regarding the notion of military proportionality, recently introduced into books about warfare in order to score propaganda points against the Israeli military’s Gaza operation, NYU Professor Scott Galloway had this to say on the Morning Joe show:

2,200 American servicemen killed at Pearl Harbor. We go on to kill 3.5 million Japanese, including 100,000 in one night. 2,800 Americans in 9/11. We go on to kill 400,000 people in Afghanistan and Iraq. We weren’t accused of genocide.

While the Biden administration insists that it supports Israel, it has just put that nation on a list of the most egregious human rights offenders, that is, of Iran and Russia.

This shows, among other things, that the current wave of anti-Israeli protests are designed to open a new front in the Gaza war, the better to restrain Israel and to save Hamas. 

Eighth, the bloom is coming off the rose. That means, the current rash of demonstrations in favor of Hamas atrocities is damaging more than the education of the students, Jewish and otherwise, on these campuses.

They are damaging the reputations of these schools, to the point where more and more parents are looking to send their children to schools that do not belong to the Ivy League.

Famed pollster Nate Silver tweeted this:

 “Just go to a state school. The premium you’re paying for elite private colleges vs. the better public schools is for social clout and not the quality of the education. And that’s worth a lot less now that people have figured out that elite higher ed is cringe.

Ninth, following the money, we discover, by reading Jonathan Pidluzny in the City Journal, that much of the anti-Semitism on college campuses is being funded by foreign governments, like the government of Qatar.

He explains:

Centers dedicated to the study of the Middle East, many receiving lavish foreign financial support, do more to promote anti-Zionist and pro-Hamas narratives than virtually any other force on campus. Even a small number of biased faculty can have an outsize influence because the dominant intersectional ideologies leave students primed to embrace anti-Semitic attitudes.

He recommends the following steps:

Universities should refuse all gifts from entities with interests antithetical to this country’s, especially gifts related to academic programs. Programs built on foreign donations should be dismantled unless they are obviously worth supporting from the general fund. State lawmakers can pass legislation to forbid, or at least carefully scrutinize, partnerships and contracts at public institutions with countries of concern.

And this, from the Daily Mail:

Top American Ivy League universities including Cornell and Harvard have received over $8 billion in the last 35 years from Arab countries, a report has revealed. 

According to a report by the Executive Director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, Cornell University received over $1.5 billion from the Middle East. 

The report, authored by Dr. Mitchell Bard, was originally released in 2021 and showed how the Ivy League school received 127 gifts totaling $1,513,778,660. 

I hope you found this potpourri to be informative. To receive more like it, just subscribe to my Substack.

Double the Anti-Semitism

Many of us, myself included, were encouraged when the president of Columbia University, one Minouche Shafik, had the police arrest several dozen of the anti-Semitic pro-Hamas protesters who had invaded and occupied parts of her campus.

Alas. it was not to be. The protesters came roaring back and took back the territory they had lost. They started attacking Jewish students and made life so unsafe for Jews that one campus rabbi recommended that Jewish students decamp from campus and go home.

And, naturally, numerous faculty members have now sided with the protesters. Several alumni, however, are now saying that they will stop contributing to the university. We will see how loudly money talks.

Now, president Shafik has caved to the demonstrators. She admitted that her campus security detail and the New York Police Department could not or would not suppress the growing anti-Semitic anarchy. So, Shafik advised all students to leave campus and to take their classes remotely.

Hard as it is to grasp, these students were inspired by the events of October 7. As were more than a few faculty members. One student protester at Columbia was promising thousands of more pogroms, just like what happened on October 7. 

They had learned that Western civilization was bad and that Islam was good. Therefore, they concluded that they needed to be on the side of Hamas, as opposed to Israel. Nothing shows intelligence better than taking the losing side in a clash of civilizations.

Given the season, one naturally recalls the book of Exodus regarding how Moses led his people out of multicultural Egypt into the promised land of Israel. He left a culture based on multiple cults to multiple deities and replaced it with one that was based on one God. 

Thus, the protesters and demonstrators are going back to pagan idolatry and to human sacrifice. Does it sound familiar?

If you are going to return to multicultural Egypt, you can rationalize any violence committed against Jews, because they rejected pagan deities. 

Dare we notice that Islam, as an Abrahamic religion, is involved in its own culture war. What the terrorists see as Islam is not what countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates see as Islam. Surely, one knows that the October 7 attack was not merely directed against Israel. It was directed against Saudi Arabia and its modernization program. The Saudi leadership has no sympathy for terrorists or for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Need we mention, yet again, that the students who had been trained to be social justice warriors were also trained to be profoundly stupid.

These young people, favoring women’s rights, gay rights and trans rights are protesting in favor of groups that have no use for women’s rights, gay rights and trans rights. Don’t they understand that radical Islam considers homosexuality a capital crime? Apparently, not.

As for how we got to where we got to, the analysis offers a multiplicity of factors. Among them, as Roger Kimball mentions, is the simple fact that many of America’s greatest universities are led by women, and that strong empowered women appear weak, not in control. Witness the failure of the president of Columbia University.

He writes:

I might frame the second question as an observation. Harvard, UPenn, MIT, Columbia, Dartmouth, Williams: there is an epidemic of distaff leadership in the elite precincts of higher education. It’s almost as if the mentality of the Human Resources establishment had rolled into the leadership of American higher education. This fact raises a host of questions. I won’t try to answer or even fully articulate them now, but I urge you to bear them in mind and ponder their significance. 

Second, I point out that, beginning in the late 1960s, American academics became infatuated with a new way to read texts. It was called deconstruction. It came to us from France, from a philosopher named Jacques Derrida and also from Germany, from a philosopher named Martin Heidegger.

Of course, Heidegger was a Nazi, and strongly supported the Brown Shirted Nazi terrorists. 

So, American graduate students were learning to think like Nazis, only they did not know it. Many of them figured it out when a Venezuelan academic named Victor Farias wrote a book about Heidegger and Nazism in 1987. It should have sufficed. It did not. New York professor Richard Wolin has written many works showing that Heidegger’s Nazi leanings were consonant with his philosophical practice.

After all, deconstruction is merely a fancy term for pogrom.

Those who signed up for deconstruction shielded themselves from the truth of their ideology by declaring war against Nazis, that is, against Republicans and white supremacists. They had to do something to cover up their dereliction. 

It gets worse. Have you noticed that the current wave of campus anti-Semitism fulfills most of the predicates laid down by Trump haters. 

Those opposing Trump have taught large segments of the population to hate. They have taught that it is good to hate certain people. They have even taught that you must hate Donald Trump with sufficient fervor, or else you will be ostracized and canceled from polite society.

If you consider, as I and some others have imagined, that Donald Trump was America’s first Jewish president, the Trump hatred takes on another valence. 

If Bill Clinton was America’s first black president, as Toni Morrison wrote, why would Donald Trump not be America’s first Jewish president?

As you might recall, Trump was a great friend of Israel. He advanced the cause of peace in the Middle East without making concessions to Palestinian terrorism. He moved the American embassy to Jerusalem and recognized Israel’s rights to the Golan Heights. His Abraham Accords were the best thing that happened to Israel since the declaration of statehood.

And he did it by ignoring the so-called Palestinian cause. And the Muslim countries that signed the Abraham Accords also ignored said cause. They did not want their reputations to be tarnished by deranged maniacs.

So, consider the contrast. In Northern Manhattan bands of students are demonstrating in favor of Hamas. They are promising more violence against Jews. 

In Southern Manhattan, the Biden administration and the New York City District Attorney are subjecting Donald Trump to judicial harassment and persecution. Is this happening because Trump’s policies rejected Palestinian terrorism, did not allow the terrorists a seat at the negotiating table?

Keep in mind, Democratic party luminaries like John Kerry insisted that the Abraham Accords were not a good thing because they did not address the Palestinian issue. They failed to notice that the Palestinian leadership had disqualified itself from any and all negotiations by its support for terrorism and for its virulent Jew hatred. 

It was only yesterday that Joe Biden, who has scrupulously tried to balance his support for Israel with criticism for Israeli leadership declared that while anti-Semitism was bad, we needed also to consider the plight of the Palestinian people. You know, the terrorists who massacred and mutilated Jews in Southern Israel.

Not once did it cross Biden’s pea brain that perhaps the Palestinian people could assert their readiness to join the world’s civilized nations by renouncing terrorism and making peace with Israel.

Better to think that it was right and proper to harass and persecute America’s first Jewish president.

Please subscribe to my Substack.

Bill Maher Against Wokery

Would you believe that Gov. Ron DeSantis was right? Would you believe that Libs of TikTok is performing a public service by exposing the current mania to sexualize small children?

Well, Bill Maher says that you should believe your eyes. Television shows like Nickelodeon and companies like Disney are rife with pedophiles. And they have made it their mission to impose gender ideology on children. In another context this is called grooming.

If more and more children are confused about their sexuality and if more and more children are being sexually abused, then perhaps it was not a good idea to teach five year olds how to perform oral sex.

It is not a huge leap to imagine that the child who learns about oral sex might be tempted to try it out. Worse yet, making gender just another lifestyle choice, and saying that anyone can freely choose his or her sex, must necessarily encourage children to think that they can change sex.

Newsweek reports about Maher’s comments about Nickelodeon:

On Friday's episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher reacted to the recently released documentary Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, which exposed the sexual abuse and hostile work environment that child actors faced at the hands of adults at Nickelodeon.

And Maher stood up for the governor of Florida:

He said that when Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis "was saying the exact same thing about kids and creepy stuff at Disney—that liberals now find intolerable at Nickelodeon—he was dismissed as a hick and a bigot, but why would a kid's content factory like Disney be all that different than the one at Nickelodeon?"

What was the dispute between DeSantis and Disney? Newsweek explains it:

During a legal feud with Disney that started when the company's then-CEO Bob Chapek publicly opposed a controversial bill that restricts certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida schools known as the "Don't Say Gay" law, DeSantis accused Disney of adding a lot of "sexuality into the programming for young kids," which the company denied. The legal dispute was settled in March.

The story was first reported by none other than CNN. Apparently, Disney seems to attract a disproportionate number of pedophiles:

Maher referenced a 2014 CNN article that reported that at least 35 Disney employees were arrested on sex crimes involving children since 2006, according to court records and other documentation.

The comedian also mentioned Disney child stars Alyson Stoner, who said in a 2021 People magazine op-ed that she "narrowly survived the toddler-to-trainwreck pipeline," and Cole Sprouse, who told The New York Times in 2022 that the young actresses on the Disney Channel were "heavily sexualized."

And then, Maher took a step into political oblivion by suggesting that we can judge politicians by objective standards, not according to tribal loyalty. In Maher’s world this is called speaking truth to power.

"DeSantis wasn't wrong, but we're so tribal now the left will overlook child f***ing, if the guy from the wrong party calls it out," Maher said on his show.

And then he took out of Wokeness.

"Wokeness is not an extension of liberalism anymore. It's more often taking something so far that it becomes the opposite," the comedian said. "At a certain point, inclusion becomes promotion. And contrary to current progressive dogma, children aren't miniature adults wise beyond their years, [they’re] morons."

He continued: "They're gullible morons who will believe anything and just want to please grownups and they don't have any frame of reference. So, they normalize whatever's happening. That's why endlessly talking about gender to six-year-olds isn't just inappropriate—it's what the law would call entrapment."

We do not trust six-year olds to make adult judgments on any other matter. Why do we imagine that they can choose their sex. 

Maher is correct to emphasize that small vulnerable children, are under adult protection. That means, they are more likely to believe what they are told; they do not want to distress the people they depend on for food, clothing and shelter. It does not take too much to manipulate children’s minds. Apparently, it takes a great deal of courage to call out those who are grooming children and who have helped produce the social contagion of transmania.

Please subscribe to my Substack.

Boredom and Gratitude

Are you bored? Do you find life boring? Do you find your friends and family to be insufferable bores? 

Perhaps you are simply depressed, detached and feeling down. At the least, you are not connecting with others and feel like you lack purpose. Besides, you do not feel like you desire much of anything and do not gain any pleasure from pleasurable activities.

Well, psycho researchers have found a solution. You can overcome boredom by putting yourself on a gratitude drip. An infusion of gratitude will help you to overcome boredom and will render your life more meaningful.

I will confess that I agree wholeheartedly with the gratitude side of this equation, but that I find the appeal to concepts like meaningfulness to be vapid. No one really knows what it means to have a meaningful life. 

When you are bored, you will feel like whatever you are doing is a waste of time. You will feel numb to stimulus and will feel disengaged from other people. As I noted, it seems to be another term for depression.

Vladimir Hedrih reports on the recent research for PsyPost:

Boredom is defined as “the aversive experience of wanting but being unable to engage in satisfying activity.” It is a negative emotion associated with a perceived lack of stimulation, interest, or engagement in one’s environment or activities. Boredom often accompanies feelings of restlessness, dissatisfaction, and a desire for change or novelty. It can arise from repetitive tasks, a lack of challenge, or a mismatch between an individual’s interests and their current situation.

Boredom is often intertwined with feelings of meaninglessness and is associated with various adverse psychological outcomes, such as depression, anxiety, or stress. 

It sounds bleak and depressing. The researchers recommend curing it with gratitude:

Gratitude, which is the appreciation of what is valuable and meaningful in life, can potentially mitigate feelings of boredom by shifting focus from what is lacking to what is present and positive.

As noted the studies glom on to the concept of meaning.

Similarly, boredom is inversely related to the meaning in life. When individuals perceive their activities and existence as meaningful, they are less likely to experience boredom. A sense of meaning in life provides a sense of purpose and direction, which can counteract the feelings of emptiness and disinterest that characterize boredom.

As I said, I find this to be blather. As for what it means to find meaning in life, the therapy world tends to recommend that you turn your life into permanent psychodrama. Live out a story and you will not be bored. You might become insufferable, but it beats boredom.

The important issue is not that you feel gratitude. It is-- that you show gratitude. If someone does you a favor you should return the favor. That shows gratitude. 

If your heart is brimming with gratitude and other positive emotions toward the other person, and you do not return the favor, and do not even say thank-you, you are an ingrate. 

That is, you engage in an adult transaction, one where you are both giving and receiving, interacting with another person, connecting with him. The point is not what you are feeling but what you are doing. You will notice that the researchers seem not to have considered this possibility.

Individuals feeling more gratitude tended to feel much less bored (Study 1). Individuals feeling more gratitude also tended to experience more meaning in life. Statistical analysis suggested that gratitude might increase the experience of meaning in life, which, in turn, reduces boredom (Study 2a). This link between gratitude, meaning in life, and boredom remained even after controlling for the positive and negative emotions one feels (Study 2b).

I defy anyone to tell me how you can find more more meaning in life. And yet, when I speak of the moral obligation to return favors, to engage in exchanges with other people, you will know exactly what I mean.

True gratitude requires you to engage in a constructive exchange. It is transactional. Your feelings are only incidental to the process. At the least, your consistent practice of the proper exchanges will cure your boredom.

Please subscribe to my Substack.

Saturday Miscellany

First, is the tide turning? Columbia University called the police to remove pro-Hamas, anti-Israeli demonstrators who had camped out on the college green.

The New York Post editorialized:

We’re glad to see [Columbia President] Shafik stand up that vow; clearly, Congress deserves some credit for putting educrats’ feet to the fire on this issue.

Academia has been handling anti-Israel demonstrations with kid gloves, sending a clear message that they’re fine even when they feature rabid antisemitism.

Students need to see administrators stand up and make it clear that antisemites don’t get a free pass to violate school policies just because they’re on the left.

And yet, the next day they were all back, accompanied by no other than an anti-Semite named Norman Finkelstein.

Describing the October 7 massacre, Finkelstein said this:

… it warmed every fiber of my soul.

Now we know where his soul is going to be spending eternity.

Second, slightly more than two dozen Googlers occupied executive offices to protest Israel’s defensive actions in Gaza. The company decided that enough was enough. It fired the protesters.

Perhaps the tide is turning.

Third, over at Hobart William Smith College, faculty member Jodi Dean celebrated the October 7 Hamas atrocities. The college suspended her for the rest of the semester.

Lisa Schiffren has the story at The College Fix. She quotes Dean’s remarks:

The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating. 

Who could not feel energized seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and flying freely through the air?

Now she has been disciplined. Again, perhaps the tide is turning.

Fourth, the next time you hear about all of the innocent civilians who have been killed in Gaza, keep in mind that most of them support Hamas. Many of them assisted Hamas in their October 7 attack.

Alan Dershowitz explains:

Among the so-called innocent "civilians" who Hamas claims have been killed by Israel, there are thousands of guilty and complicit civilians without whose assistance Hamas could not have succeeded in their barbarisms….

All in all, the number of absolutely innocent Gazans — babies, children and adults who are not complicit in Hamas crimes — is a fraction of those claimed by Israel's enemies, including so-called human rights groups.

Fifth, meanwhile in New York City, we are seeing more and more empty storefronts. This is what happens when organized retail theft becomes the order of the day. And it is what happens when weak prosecutors do not enforce the laws.

The New York Post editorialized:

Vacant storefronts are both a sign and a cause of economic distress — and they’ve nearly doubled in the city since the pandemic.

Per the city Department of Finance, more than 11% of Big Apple storefronts now sit empty, discouraging nearby commerce and attracting disorder.

“They are creating havoc because there is homeless, garbage, and the business next door hurts,” City Councilwoman Gale Brewer, whose Upper West Side district has been hit hard by the vacancies, told The Post.

But her fellow progressives seem pretty clueless about their own responsibility here.

It’s hard to keep a retail shop running when city and state lawmakers micromanage what you have to pay workers and how you can schedule shifts, and even mandate benefits.

Not to mention the high taxes they impose and the get-out-of-jail-free cards they issue to even chronic shoplifters.

Sixth, this description of diversity politics feels rather harsh, and it would be harsh, unless, of course, it is true. From the Twitter account of SleepForever 33:

Facts, there's an epidemic of DEI hires in every almost every business sector who are unqualified for their positions. Even worse, we've also created thousands of fake positions with substantial salaries for these people who contribute nothing to society.

Seventh, Canada has seen an increase in the number of assisted suicides. Apparently, Canadian psychiatrists have decided that it is cheaper to allow patients who are depressed to kill themselves, than to treat them.

Not to be outdone UCLA medical school is now promoting self-immolation as an act of revolutionary suicide.

From the Washington Free Beacon:

UCLA medical school’s psychiatry department hosted a talk earlier this month that glorified self-immolation as a form of "revolutionary suicide," raising concerns from prominent doctors and deepening a public relations crisis that has embroiled the elite medical school.

The talk, "Depathologizing Resistance," was delivered on April 2 by two psychiatry residents at UCLA, Drs. Ragda Izar and Afaf Moustafa, under the auspices of the department’s diversity office and UCLA’s Health Ethics Center, according to slides and emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The talk reflects the erosion of what was until recently a bedrock medical norm: from the American Psychiatric Association to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, all professional mental health bodies warn against glorifying self-harm, lest it inspire others to harm themselves.

That norm has weakened with the rise of activist doctors and their capture of medical organizations. Pediatricians got a vivid taste of the brave new world in 2022 when Morissa Ladinsky, in an address at the American Academy of Pediatrics’s annual conference, praised a transgender teenager, Leelah Alcorn, for "boldly … ending her life" and leaving a suicide note that "went viral, literally around the world."

At UCLA, Izar and Moustafa, who are practicing psychiatrists, argued that self-immolation is a reasonable response to geopolitical events and that the taboo against it serves "the interests of power." By "perpetuating the stigma of self-immolation," they said, psychiatrists "discredit" resistance to "power structures" like "colonization," "homophobia," and "white supremacy," framing legitimate acts of protest as signs of psychiatric dysfunction.

Nothing quite so reasonable as self-immolation. And this from the medical school of a major American university.

As I write this post, I remark sadly that a man immolated himself in downtown Manhattan. His name was Max Azzarello and he called himself an investigative researcher. He was from Florida.  I suspect that he did not attend the meeting at the UCLA Psychiatry department.

Surely, he needed psychiatric care, but apparently did not receive it.

At the least, we know that he hated both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Is that a consolation?

Eighth, the University of Southern California canceled their student graduation speaker, apparently because she was an outspoken Israel hater.

As for the backstory, Nellie Bowles reports it in the Free Press:

USC canceled their outspoken, anti-Israel graduation speaker, saying it was “necessary to maintain the safety of our campus and students.” The speaker, the student valedictorian, believes that Israel should be abolished, and that there should be only one majority-Muslim Palestine. This, of course, means the death of Jews and whatnot. But USC didn’t cancel the speech because the content was going to be hateful. They canceled it for “safety” reason, which is how people now wiggle out of many hot situations. 

As with most things, this one is complex. As a friend of Free Press put it: “A faculty committee picked this student out of a group of 100 precisely so that she could turn USC’s graduation ceremony into a Nuremberg rally. And we’re supposed to be ashamed that a grown-up figured out what was happening and shut it down? The two most famous USC students are OJ and Aunt Becky’s daughter. And that’s okay!”

Ninth, every time Joe Biden opens his mouth he sticks his foot in it, but not in the cannibalistic way. So, Biden recently announced to the world that his uncle Finnegan had been shot down in the Pacific during World War II, and had been eaten by cannibals in New Guinea.

It made for a compelling story, especially if you are on a diet.

Anyway, a serious academic in Papua New Guinea took some exception to the story. The Daily Mail explains:

Outraged Papua New Guinea academics have slammed President Joe Biden for his 'unacceptable' suggestion that his uncle was eaten by cannibals in the country after his plane was shot down during World War II.

Biden implied on two occasions Wednesday that his maternal uncle 2nd Lieutenant Ambrose J. Finnegan had met a grisly end at the hands of cannibals after his plane was shot down by the enemy over New Guinea in 1944. 

But the White House and official defense records confirmed that Finnegan died when the military plane he was in experienced engine failure and crashed into the Pacific Ocean, not over land.

Michael Kabuni, a political science lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea, told The Guardian cannibalism was previously practiced by some communities in very specific contexts and that locals 'wouldn't just eat any white men that fell from the sky'.

Other analysts branded Biden's claims as 'unsubstantiated and poorly judged', especially during a time in which the US has been trying to strengthen its ties with Papua New Guinea. 

Tenth, married special needs teacher Jessica Sawicki was caught in flagrante delicto with a seventeen-year old. Now, she has been released from jail in order to take care of her two children, aged five and two.

Are you outraged by the injustice of it all?

It used to be called courtly love. Now it’s a felony.

Eleventh, on the transmania front, some good news from France.

BillboardChris reports:

Yet again, I have to share good news. It just won’t stop! The Senate in France has proposed a ban on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender surgeries on minors. 

Gender-affirming care — the euphemism for childhood sex changes carried out by deranged cultists who have infiltrated our medical system — is dying all around the world. What a beautiful sight.

Please subscribe to my Substack.