Happy New Year 2024

Happy New Year everyone, we’re now officially 54 years into the future by my reckoning.

How so? In the first science fiction book I read as a kid set in a definite year, “The Door Into Summer” by Robert Heinlein the first-person narrator mentioned it was 1970.

In Heinlein’s 1970 we had survived a nuclear war, had household robots, and services that would freeze you to be thawed out at some date in the future.

Ah the perils of prediction! We were supposed to be exploring deep space in 2024.

Well we are, just not in person. We didn’t anticipate we’d be using robots to explore the solar system.

So keeping in mind that things never turn out just as you expect, here are some of my New Years predictions.

Ukraine, nothing good I’m afraid.

Ukraine cannot win unless Russia decides to pack up and go home. The disparity in manpower is just too great. They can inflict terrible damage on Russia, for which Russia will take a terrible revenge when and if they take Ukraine.

The world will howl with outrage. Russia will give the answer of the Athenians to the Melosians before they wiped out the adult male population of the island.

“The strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must.”

Best outcome, stalemate in the eastern part of Ukraine with something like a North/South Korea long-term cease fire.

In America a manufacturing boom in the munitions industry as we replace the ammunition we gave Ukraine.

However that was about due anyway. We gave them a lot of stuff nearing the end of its shelf life we’d otherwise have had to dispose of in an expensive process the Greens are sure to have protested.

The Middle East, crazy as usual. No permanent cease fire, Hamas has crossed a line that can’t be uncrossed. Israel cannot grit their teeth and write off their murdered and raped women and children as a cost-of-living expense.
It’ll be worse when the remaining hostages are returned, or their bodies found.

Israel will reverse its policy on civilian gun ownership (stricter than most Americans imagine since a mass shooting event years ago) and become a heavily armed society again.

Any resolution short of the total destruction of Hamas and we might see a revival of something like the underground organization Irgun as Israelis seek personal vengeance for their families.

The American economy, makes no sense. We have a debt and unfunded mandates that amount to a sum economists call without a trace of hyperbole, “all the money in the world.”

Yet it keeps piling up. Paid for by pumping more funny money into the economy. Something like forty percent of all US currency ever issued was created out of thin air within the past three years.

Yet the effect has been surprisingly small. Prices rise, but not at the rate of expansion of the money supply, for which we should count our blessings.

Keep in mind Stein’s Law, “That which cannot go on forever, will stop.” Something is going to happen. Exactly what, not even I will venture to guess.

Annnnnnd the 2024 election, in many ways unique in our history. A significant number of Republicans believe the last election was stolen, more than will talk about it readily I assure you.

Democrats are running scared and trying to keep Trump off the ballot in an effort the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Civil War.

It’s going to be chaotic and it’s not going to end on election day.

Sorry I couldn’t be more cheerful, maybe next year.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Why I support Israel

“I have a premonition that will not leave me: as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.”
– Eric Hoffer

First of all, no I’m not Jewish. I suppose however that I’m a Zionist though I say that with some surprise as it never occurred to me to call myself such before now.

By Zionist I mean I support the right of Israel to exist, to have secure borders, to have the right to control immigration, to defend itself by all means recognized for any other state, and to retaliate against aggression by all means recognized for any other state.

Why? No seriously why? What business is it of mine?

Well for one, consider the alternative. The atrocities of Hamas are well known in sickening detail and cannot be denied because Hamas is documenting and boasting about them.

Still they are being denied, even justified by some of the vilest people one can imagine. That should be enough in and of itself.

Israel by contrast still attempts to minimize civilian casualties among a population that hates them. And one wonders why. They’re not going to affect public opinion that way.

It appears to have something to do with Jewish ethics. And here we come to an important reason.

Israel is part of Western Civilization, is in fact historically one of the twin roots of the West. The other being ancient Athens, with the emphasis on ancient.

Us anthropologists like to classify human organization in ascending levels according to how many people they can support: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states.

We tend to forget there’s a level above states – civilizations. A civilization is a group of nations with recognized commonalities of culture, law, etc. The definition gets vague around the edges but can often be practically defined as speakers of related language families.

Isolationists do not see a level above their country. A luxury only maintainable in big powerful states such as ours.

When we play the parlor game of “When did Western Civ begin?” it’s fun to argue, was it when the democratic party of Athens swore not to take revenge on the out of power oligarchs even for the murder of their families? Was it when the Romans put the Twelve Tablet of the law in the public forum for all to read?

Or was it when the Prophet Nathan told King David, “Thou art the man!”

One moral law for king and peasant alike, what a concept! One that is not shared by every culture, even today.

I believe Western Civ has evolved some basic assumptions that are worth keeping and worth spreading for the benefit of all mankind. Such as the rights of Man, equality under the law, the dignity and worth of the individual.

Our civilization is under attack, from without and within by an axis of enemies united for the sole purpose of opposing the West. Israel is one front in a multi-front attack on the West. I believe Ukraine is another, and I greatly fear the opening of another front, perhaps in Taiwan – or here.

But perhaps that’s a bit tin-foil hat conspiratorial for some of my readers. So here are some practical questions I like to ask.

Who is more likely to develop…?
– A cure for cancer?
– Significant life extension?
– Clean cheap sources of energy?
– Cheap practical desalination tech? (Oops, cross that one off. Already done.)
Seven million Israelis or 700 million Arab Islamists?

And that’s why I support Israel, for my own self-interest.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Israel under attack, more questions than answers

Israel is at war again and disturbing questions arise, more than we have answers for.

To begin with, why now?

The attacks took place a day after Biden released a bunch of money to Iran. Biden supporters rightfully point out the planning for the attacks took a lot longer than a day and suggest it’s because of Putin’s birthday or something.

Nonetheless it is not unreasonable to suppose the one had something to do with the other. Hamas doesn’t make a move without Iran’s say-so. Perhaps Iran was holding back till now lest it delay the release?

It’s worth noting the attacks came 50 years almost to the day after the October 6, 1973 surprise attacks that began the Yom Kippur War. Dates are important to the jihadists.

What’s the connection with Russia? Did Russia support this as a distraction from Ukraine? Do they hope for a strategic diversion? Is this the opening of another front in a wider war?

And how did Israeli intelligence not see this coming?

Is it possible preparations were made somewhere out of the theater of operations beyond Mossad’s area of activity? If so, under whose sponsorship?

The attackers came across the border on motorbikes, pickup trucks, and motorized parasails. That last has a dramatic effect beyond the merely practical. Is there a message there?

And why attacks of this kind with conspicuous atrocities?

They killed women and children hiding in their homes. They kidnapped civilians and took them back to Gaza. They paraded the naked body of a young woman around and made sure it was videoed. They showed a terrified mother with two redhead boys humiliated by their captors. They showed a terrified young woman tourist captured at a concert dragged by her hair into a vehicle to be taken to Gaza.

It’s not just that they committed recognized war crimes, it’s that they made sure we saw them.

Preliminary photo collages of the missing show a preponderance of young women. What do they intend to do with them? Use them as human shields? Sell them back?

And what are they doing to them now? God help them, rape might be the best they could hope for.

We are dealing with people whose thought processes and world view are alien to us and too often we try to fit their actions into what makes sense to us, rather than try to figure out why it makes sense to them.

We could start by realizing that though these are military actions they do not have specifically military objectives.

They gain no territory nor do they significantly impact Israel’s ability to wage war.

They may hope to provoke a response so violent it would bend world opinion in their direction, but those lines pro and contra Israel are already firmly drawn and not likely to change. And why would they make sure the world sees those horrific atrocities if that’s their goal?

After 9/11 the German composer Karl Stockhausen had an insight that repelled a great many people. He called it, “The greatest work of art of all time.”

I suggest if we can get past the shock, there is a point here.

What the jihadists are doing, is theater. The audience is both the West and their own people.

To Israel it’s a taunt, “You can’t protect your women!”

To their own a boast, “Look what the warriors of Allah can do with pure hearts and intentions!”

However this turns out I think it’s a new turn in the Long War, and it’s not just Israel in danger.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

When conservatives go for commies

One of the most bizarre things to come out of the war in Ukraine is the emergence of conservative women who are “Rootin’ for Putin.”

No, I don’t mean the remnant of our home grown commies who miss the Soviet Union and proclaim, “That wasn’t REAL communism.”

And I don’t mean the naïve libertarians among us who lionize Edward Snowden for exposing the dirty deeds of the NSA and throw hissy fits when you point out he is by definition a Russian asset (and now a Russian citizen as well).

I don’t mean Old Right style isolationists who take the position we’ve got enough problems at home and don’t need to spend precious resources trying to set the world to rights.

And I certainly don’t mean the people who are rightly alarmed about playing nuclear brinksmanship with Russia.

Commies are actually simple to deal with. You just have to recognize this is a person who would murder you and your family in the event they were told it would serve the Cause and treat them as a potential, if presently unlikely threat.

Naïve libertarians are frustrating to deal with and like to accuse you of being a “Fed” when you point that out about Snowden. So what? You don’t have to deal with them and as a political force they’re of negligible importance anyway.

Right-wing isolationists, conservatives and more sensible libertarians, are another thing. They have well thought out objections to foreign entanglements that need to be considered. And we may very well have to default to something closer to their position in the future as our ability to project power lessens due to the sheer expense of it all.

No, I’m talking about middle-aged Christian ladies who think Putin is “a great and good man” in the words of one such.

There is a Russian propaganda apparatus that has operated in the United States for just over a century now. It would be naïve to think it went out of business in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

You can see its footprints all over social media. People repeating boilerplate Russian talking points, and some who appear to be more directly plugged into the source.

But traditionally they have aimed their appeal at left-wing intellectuals. The kind who read The New York Times and think the country went off the rails when Adlai Stevenson didn’t become president.

Nowadays they seem to have pivoted rightwards to appeal to social conservatives by crafting the narrative Russia has wholesale rejected communism and returned to its Christian roots.

“I identify more with…Putin’s Christian values than I do with Joe Biden’s,” said Lauren Witzke, 2020 Delaware GOP candidate for U.S. Senate.

In a word, horse pucky.

You don’t get as high as Putin in the KGB if you’re a believer and you don’t get there with clean hands.
Putin is a stone killer who likes to have dissident journalists and political opponents murdered in their living rooms to send a message you’re not safe anywhere. Something Putin fangirls seem to wave off with, “Oh everybody does that.”

But Patriarch Kiril of Moscow and all Rus, Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church supports Putin and endorses the war!

So Putin has a Patriarch in his pocket, what a surprise.

For some Putin seems to have the appeal of a charming bad boy, more masculine than any Western leader, skilled in Judo and Sambo, and smooth talking when he wants to be.

Ladies, just remind yourself how that worked out the last time you fell for that line.

Posted in Op-eds, Politics | 2 Comments

Sound of Freedom a Rorschach test for all sides

Sound of Freedom opened July 4 in a limited number of theaters with comparably little advertising and immediately beat out Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Wow.

So let’s get some questions out of the way.

Is it a good movie?

Yes, very good. The cinematography is excellent, the acting superb, the plot is gut-wrenching and the horrors it depicts are hinted at rather than shown explicitly, like all the best horror movies. They get more emotion out of a man closing a curtain than any slasher flick. This is the kind of movie the audience sits through so silent you could hear a pin drop.

Is it QAnon adjacent?

What the heck does that mean? Does it promote nutty conspiracy theories? No. Does the lead actor Jim Caveziel believe in some? Maybe, so what? Alec Guiness thought Star Wars was juvenile trash and still did a heckuva job as Obi-wan Kenobi.

Some of that impression seems to come from the fact Caveziel in interviews conflates the very real trafficking of children for prostitution and porn with the just as real African practice of using body parts of children and albinos for magic. They’re both real horrors, but not the same thing.

Does it promote religion?

Noooooo, not really. There is a religious undertone but the phrase “God’s children are not for sale” occurs only three times in the film, and there is one reference to a religious epiphany when the character Vampiro describes his road to Damascus moment that led him to quit the cartels and start rescuing children.

But if you believe the notion that pedophilia is… you know, wrong, is a purely religious position then I guess it does.

Is it based on a true story?

Well there lies the problem. One source, an investigator with years of experience in child protection, tells me Operation Underground Railway is kind of dodgy.

Do they exaggerate the magnitude of the problem and the effectiveness of their operations?

Possibly. Which would not be the least bit unusual in any advocacy organization. So how exaggerated does it have to be before you consider the problem not worth your time and attention?

But my source tells me they are vague about how the children they allegedly rescue were rescued. When pressed they say by passing information on to law enforcement, which is not a bad thing but not nearly as dramatic as elaborate stings and commando style-raids.

Worse, they have not been transparent about the collection and disbursement of funds, as required by law for non-profit organizations.

Internet sources say they stage stings for potential donors in countries where prostitution is legal and there the age of consent is low. (How low? As in 12, like our neighbor to the south.) I have no idea how to evaluate that claim.

But some of the criticism is just off-the-wall weird. Rolling Stone called it, “A Superhero movie for dads with brain-worms.”

Even if the movie were nothing but a rollicking good adventure story, that attitude is really creepy.

Reactions like that have convinced lots of people the movie has terrified Hollywood pedophiles.

Nonsense. I have no doubt there are lots of Hollywood pedophiles, but they’re not terrified. In their arrogance they think they are untouchable.

What terrifies Hollywood is that a movie this good, this popular, and this profitable was made on a budget of $14.5 million.

The cost of movie-quality cameras, editing equipment, and even CGI has fallen to the point what matters in making a popular movie is the acting and the writing. Precisely what Hollywood has lately so conspicuously failed to deliver.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Memorial Day weekend exhaustion

Memorial Day weekend is a time for somber reflection on the price paid for the freedom and sovereignty of our nation.

This year somber reflection felt a lot like sheer exhaustion. I’m in the process of moving to our new house. For weeks
I’ve been taking carloads of everything portable to the new place, and soon I’ll rent a truck to move the furniture.

Exhaustion, fatigue. I think of that and I remember what my mother said after she’d watched Ken Burns documentary The War.

She remembered the war. She was in nursing school and was commissioned as a Navy nurse just before it ended. She remembered shortages, rationing, and Gold Star mothers.

American Gold Star Mothers, Inc. was a private non-profit organization chartered in the First World War consisting of mothers who’d lost a child in the war. The name came from the custom of service families hanging a banner called a service flag in the windows of their homes with a blue star for every member in the Armed Forces, and a gold star for every member killed in the line of duty.

While the organization still exists I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a service banner in my lifetime. I think this generation might think it a bit macabre.

Like everybody in her generation she followed the events via movie newsreels. Newsreels allowed people to feel closer to the front than ever before. But they didn’t realize how heavily censored the films were.

I’ve seen footage of the carnage they were not allowed to see. Dead men placed in body bags a piece at a time. But what she noticed in Burns’ documentary was the faces of the living men at the front.

“My God how tired they looked!” she said.

You see the faces, lean and lined with fatigue and realize with a shock that these were men in their teens and early twenties.

And I wonder are we exhausted, as a nation and a civilization?

Are we tired of mounting guard on the free world and keeping the sea lanes open?

Are we tired of the casualties in wars whose purpose is unclear, whose painfully won gains are casually wiped out in a matter of days?

My son is now of an age to consider enlisting, and he tells me all of his friends currently serving tell him not to.

And I think of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Recessional’ written for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, a somber poem that went against the grain of the optimism of the time.

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Posted in Eleagic mode, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Dangers from without and within

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
“Who will guard the guards themselves?”
– Juvenal

There are two things every citizen ought to remind themselves from time to time about intelligence services; that they are absolutely necessary in a dangerous world, and that they are hideously dangerous themselves.

How dangerous has just been confirmed by the release of the Durham Report.

The basic facts are not in dispute. The White House, CIA, and the Justice Department decided that We the People had no “right to be wrong.” That the dangers of a Trump presidency outweighed Constitutional niceties, and to insure it didn’t happen spied on his campaign Watergate-style and promoted a narrative about Russian collusion they knew to be a lie.

Many media figures dismiss this as a “nothingburger.” It is not, and Americans need to realize that whatever you think of Trump, love him or loathe him, you should be scared to death of this.

It has been almost a century since Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson shut down the office for breaking diplomatic codes in 1929 with the explanation, “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.”

Alas for a simpler time when spy services were organized on an ad hoc basis during wartime and disbanded in peacetime. When FBI agents weren’t allowed to carry guns and couldn’t make arrests without a local warrant.

The rise of organized crime during Prohibition led to the vast expansion of powers of the FBI, and the Cold War led to the hasty reorganization of the wartime OSS as the CIA.

Necessary for sure. But many rightly feared the creation of permanent agencies which necessarily operate in secret and deal in lies, would lead to a secret police state much like the dreaded KGB.

Americans tend to think of the KGB as the Russian CIA and FBI rolled together. That it is, but it is also the Russian Border Patrol, Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and lots of other stuff.

Officially the precursor agencies the Cheka and OGPU were founded by the Polish noble “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky. But in fact the bones and sinew of the organization were already centuries old. Because when a regime changes you don’t throw away a perfectly good secret police. You may chop off the head, and what secret police chief expects to die in bed? But you must keep the mid-level bureaucrats and the networks of street informers and foreign assets.

Over time this became the “secret empire” of the Russian state. Which once ruled as partners in a troika of Party, Army, and KGB but now appears to have absorbed the state with the rise of Vladimir Putin to power.

To prevent this American agencies were separated by function. The FBI was for purely domestic crime fighting and counter-espionage, the CIA for foreign intelligence, and later the NSA for signal intelligence (SIGINT).

The Coast Guard, Border Patrol, and ICE weren’t even in the same departments.

Each was supposed to operate within strictly defined limits, cooperating as necessary but jealous of their own prerogatives. And most crucially they were not supposed to interfere in domestic politics.

We know that in practice that principle is flexible. FBI counter-intelligence operations had to deal with elected officials suborned by the KGB or the Mob. And since the CIA often engaged in fixing foreign elections it surely must have occurred to some that the same skill set applies at home as well.

And if you think this was good and necessary in this case, how will you feel when it’s your guy in their sights?

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Crime and tyranny

“A nation that will not enforce its laws has no claim to the respect and allegiance of its people.”
~Ambrose Bierce

Well, one Jordan Neely is dead and the Marine who put him in the fatal chokehold has been identified as Daniel Penny.
No charges have been filed but the usual suspects are already howling for his blood, most notably the Rev. Al Sharpton.

“I’m looking at the video. You got one man choking and the other holding him down. They all need to be in front of a grand jury,” Sharpton said.

Sharpton over the course of his career has incited riots in which 11 people were murdered but remains a free man.

Protestors have been flooding the subway and jumping on the tracks to slow down the system. Ironically making the stations more crowded than they’ve been of late as subway ridership has been way down due to crazy people aggressively panhandling and attacking people at random. Such as the Asian lady who was thrown onto the tracks in front of a train, or the Asian lady who was beaten to within an inch of her life, or the gay man pummeled by someone shouting homophobic slurs… examples multiply.

Sharpton, AOC, and “Public Advocate” Jumaane Williams are calling this a hate crime by a White Supremacist. Photos of the incident however show Penny was one of at least two men restraining Neely and the other is black.

This incident brings into focus a feature of life in some of our largest cities. Street crime is making certain urban areas unlivable and the law is doing nothing to suppress it. Suspects arrested are often back on the street before their victims can get home.

Felonies have been downgraded to misdemeanors. Flash mobs looting stores unopposed has become common enough for some retail outlets to abandon the inner cities.

And by now everyone knows about the homeless encampments of Los Angeles and the feces-coated streets of San Francisco.

There’s no point arguing over solutions, the solution is known. Put crazy people in mental institutions and criminals in jail. Don’t pass laws with harsher sentences, enforce the ones we’ve got.

Rudy Guiliani actually succeeded in making New York more livable but since then the people of the Big Apple have seen fit to elect mayors and city councilmen who are in that old right-wing trope, “soft on crime.”

Inevitably when anyone advocates for letting the police do their jobs and backing them with convictions and sentences, people who don’t live with the problem will accuse them of advocating a “police state.”

So I’m going to let them in on something I discovered while living in actual police states and recovering police states. “Soft on crime” is not a bug in liberal democracy, it’s a feature of dictatorships.

The paradox of police states is that they have lousy police.

No I don’t mean brutal and cruel, I mean undertrained, under-armed, and not good for much but marching around in threes. (Because, “One can read, one can write, and the other to keep an eye on the two intellectuals.”)

The heavy hitters in law enforcement are special units devoted to suppressing dissent.

Leftist intellectuals who live far from the gritty reality of the streets tend to see criminals as “Primitive Rebels” in the title of a book by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.

Dictatorships have little interest in suppressing crime, and in fact are sympathetic to criminals. (Read Soviet-era prison literature and you’ll notice criminals formed an aristocracy in the Gulag lording it over the politicals.)

And they are ferociously hostile towards citizen self-defense.

The clamor from the Left is for Penny’s blood, and I greatly fear they will get it.

Posted in Law, News commentary | 1 Comment

Humoring delusions

Trigger warning, there’s a lot to unpack here and it’s ugly. So if your delicate sensibilities are offended by hard truths turn the page.

Last week 28-year-old Audrey Hale shot her way into a private Christian school in Nashville and murdered three children and three adults. Nashville police responded heroically and Hale is dead.

Hale was trans. It is not clear if she had begun transitioning with hormones yet but she was reportedly being treated for unspecified psychological issues so it seems likely she was on psychoactive meds – a common thread that runs through mass shootings nobody wants to talk about.

This happened just days after Democrat activist Cenk Uygur urged trans people to arm themselves and just before a planned demonstration “Trans Day of Vengeance,” just cancelled for fear of “credible threats of violence.”
And perhaps because it wouldn’t be in the best of taste? Like that T-shirt with a bunch of rifles that says, “Trans rights … or else.”

And it turns out the last four mass shootings were by trans or “non-binary” people, though there is some suspicion at least one of them may be shamming to get themselves better accommodations.

Because we live in a society in which rapists can get themselves sent to women’s prisons by claiming to be trans.

Now read very closely because what I’m about to say is going to be willfully misrepresented.

Gender dysphoria is a mental illness and is still recognized as such in the DSM. There is no necessary connection with violent behavior, but such delusions do tend to come in clusters.

As delusions go it’s not even the most extreme. I highly recommend neurologist Oliver Sachs fascinating book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat.”

It contains many accounts of neurological conditions such as the man who did indeed mistake his wife for a hat and tried to hang her up on the coat tree in his office.

There’s a condition whereby a blind person is convinced they are sighted. Their brain builds a picture in their head of the environment around them based on memory and other sensory cues. And when they trip over an ottoman that “isn’t there” they tend to freak out.

I once knew a psychiatrist who told me of a hospital patient who had become convinced that all the evil in his body was concentrated in two fingers – which he was chewing off. After trying restraints and painting them with foul tasting stuff they finally gave in and took him to surgery. (They were ruined anyway.)

He went back to work, but I have no idea what happened afterwards.

During the brief time I worked as a psych aid in a mental hospital they told us the cardinal rule of dealing with patients is, DON’T HUMOR THEIR DELUSIONS. Ask any nurse they’ll tell you they were told the same on psych ward rotations.
So here is a synopsis of what I’ve said in discussions with trans people.

If you are an adult and choose to go this route, that’s your choice in the land of the free. But you will never become a real woman (man), you will never have normal sexual functioning, never become a parent, and no normal straight man (woman) will want to have sex with you.

“Trans rights” is nonsense. You have all the rights of your fellow citizens. What you demand is for us to humor your delusion.

Transitioning children is Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy and should be treated as such.

So call me a bigot, I’ve said my piece but I’m not your shrink.

Posted in Op-eds, Politics | 2 Comments

The Swap

In journalism you know you’re doing a good job covering an issue when both sides agree you’re being fair, or both sides hate your guts.

I fear one of those times is upon me for what I’m about to say about ransoming WNBA star Brittney Griner in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

That sounds you hear on the right are howls of outrage that they got a major player in the international arms trade and we got a player in a sport nobody watches, whose claim to notoriety is publicly stating she doesn’t think the national anthem should be played at sporting events and refuses to come onto the court while it is.

Furthermore there are two American ex-Marines, who have been held in durance vile since 2021 and 2018 respectively. And as Ms Griner could tell you, in Russia durance can be pretty vile.

It’s probably no secret I don’t think highly of Biden. I don’t trust his competence, nor his truthfulness, and I sometimes suspect he’s just the public face of whoever is really running things.

Nevertheless I have to say, this time the outrage is misplaced. Biden got the best possible deal he could.

The administration proposed a swap for Griner and Paul Whelan, imprisoned on espionage charges since 2018.

At this time it is not known why he didn’t ask for Marc Fogel, a former Marine who has been imprisoned since 2021 after being arrested for possession of 17 grams of cannabis extract he used for pain management.

Putin flat refused to consider a package deal, and Putin holds all the cards. He loses nothing by keeping them.

In Whelan’s case, things are murky. It turns out he was booted out of the Corps for embezzlement and using fraudulent social security accounts. And he also holds British, Irish, and Canadian citizenship.

Fogel appears to be an exemplary citizen and inactive Marine in good standing. He was a history teacher for years at the Anglo-American
School in Moscow. Which makes you wonder how the heck he could have been so damn dumb as to cross the Russian border with illegal drugs.

(If one is going to bring contraband across a border, which I strongly advise against, one should travel by train and stash it under the towel waste in the bathroom before going through customs. Theoretically speaking.)

Putin probably held on to Whelan because he can get concessions from the UK, Ireland, and/or Canada. I don’t know why Fogel seems to have been forgotten. Perhaps they’re holding out for a really big score.

But Biden had only two choices, take what he could get or let Griner rot.

Some have expressed the opinion that’s exactly what he should have done. So how’d you like to be on the receiving end of that philosophy? For your opinions.

A rational policy would be to declare we will take Americans back by force when possible but never buy them back.

We can’t do that. As a people we don’t have it in us. So sometimes we do buy our citizens back and accept the fact that puts more Americans at risk.

Remember when the Obama administration ransomed former Miss North Dakota Roxana Saberi from Iran in exchange for terrorists with American blood on their hands?

Griner’s an American, possibly a bad one but American nonetheless. And we look after our own – no matter what. If she were to be hanged on arrival I’d still want it done on American soil by American hands.

I hope she’s learned to appreciate this extraordinary country of ours, but we’ll see.

Posted in News commentary | Leave a comment