It’s one that can be helpful for all parents, including those who are not willing to unquestionably “affirm” their child’s choice. Most books today on the subject encourage parents to do the latter; this book is by two therapists who are podcasters at “A Wider Lens” on YouTube and they are generally excellent. I’ve watched many of their videos and so far every one has been good.
Here’s the Amazon link to the book, which is called Is My Child Trans?: A Guide for Parents. It will be available in October.
Here’s a podcast in which the authors describe the book:
As of Friday, 225 people who failed the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test used for teacher licensing from 1994 to 2014 had already been notified they’re getting settlements of at least $1 million, according to an analysis of Manhattan federal court records.
Court rulings found the exam violated civil-rights laws, allowing far more white candidates to pass.
The case is expected to generate hundreds of other future million-dollar awards.
Herman Grim, 64, of Queens, on July 5 was awarded the biggest judgment to date — a jaw-dropping $2,055,383.
It includes $1,583,114 in back pay for time never clocked, lost interest accrued, and other compensation.
It was de Blasio who agreed to the payouts, during the last weeks he was in office. Taxpayers will, of course, be footing the bill – which includes hefty lawyer fees. The huge amounts of the payments reflect the amount of time the suit has been going on; earlier failed applicants get more money, later ones get less.
Grim said he’s in disbelief but the money can’t come fast enough because he’s racked up serious debt on his Queens home and credit cards.
He couldn’t recite examples of why the test was biased.
But Grim recalled hiring private tutors and studying for it during the early 1990s, before failing many times.
Here’s an example of this supposed bias:
More than 90% of white test-takers passed the 80-question multiple-choice and essay Liberal Arts and Sciences Test between March 1993 and June 1995 — one version of which had questions such as asking teachers to explain the meaning of a painting by pop artist Andy Warhol.
But black applicants on average scored passing grades only 53% of the time, and Latinos had an even lower passing rate, just 50%, according to the lawsuit.
Disparate impact can only be explained by bias these days; any other possibility – including normal variation among all groups, which exists on almost every dimension of life – is unacceptable.
It also seems to me that, if any such awards are given, they should be based on the difference between what the person supposedly might have earned as a teacher during those years and what that person actually earned doing something else. But that doesn’t seem to be the way these awards are being calculated.
More:
Arthur Goldstein, a recently retired veteran teacher at Francis Lewis High School in Queens, said the former test wasn’t a good indicator of how well candidates would perform in the classroom and the city would’ve been better off resolving the issue decades ago by hiring many of those who sued.
“All this money for nothing – nothing!” he fumed. “I’ve been teaching in … overcrowded classrooms in miserable conditions when we could’ve had more teachers working. Instead, we just have the city paying [money] for no reason at all. It’s ridiculous.”
One Brooklyn principal said the city was “crazy” to settle the case.
“The standards are the standards,” he said. “It shouldn’t be based on what would be easy for blacks or whites. To hire people who are not qualified and change the requirements because a certain group didn‘t pass the test is bulls–t.”
Yes, but it’s BS that is very popular in legal and leftist circles.
…it does not signal any disruption or fundamental break in the devotion of the Biden administration to the policies of the Obama administration in dealing with Iran.
Although we don’t seem to really know exactly what may be going on, you can read something about it here:
News of the suspension of Malley, the head of the U.S. negotiating team for a “new” nuclear deal with Iran, was first published on June 29th on the Iran International website, which noted that Malley had not been participating in meetings and discussions regarding Iran for some time. This forced State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller to confirm the report, without saying when and why exactly Malley had been removed from office.
Official announcements stated that the suspension followed orders from the State Department’s security department, which claimed that Malley had allegedly done something to compromise the rules of confidentiality, indicating that he passed classified information – whether in the form of documents or verbally – to someone who was not authorized to know it.
During Obama’s tenure:
[Malley] acted as a Middle East adviser to President Barack Obama, and urged the administration to support the Muslim Brotherhood, who won Egypt’s post-Arab Spring election, and met with representatives from Hamas – after which, he was fired. Later on, Obama appointed him as special envoy for Iran, and two years ago, President Joe Biden appointed him special envoy as well, and put him in charge of negotiations on a new nuclear deal.
What a guy.
Now the Republicans in Congress want answers:
The Republican representative’s [Michael McCaul] letter [to Blinken] presented an ultimatum: Blinken must announce preparations no later than Monday evening for a classified briefing of the Committee [on the subject] to be held on or before July 26th; if it fails to do so, “I am prepared to request testimony on this matter in a classified hearing and to compel the appearance of requested witnesses should they refuse to appear voluntarily.”
I have written at length about Malley in this previous post. I suggest you read the whole thing; it’s not all that long, but you may be shocked if you don’t already know much about Malley.
I was going to make the following video an open thread. But then I realized that I had so much to say about it that it seemed to merit a regular post instead.
First, the video:
Boy, did that bring back memories of my youth riding the old IRT. That was always an adventure, and usually not an especially nice one. There was the incredibly loud screeching, particularly as it rounded the bend. Long minutes spent waiting for the local after getting off the express, a wait that could feel interminable, especially in the evening. The exhibitionists. The crazies. The men who told me to smile because I looked too gloomy – and this is when I was a child of ten or eleven.
I rode the subways mostly to ballet classes from the time I was about ten years old till I was about sixteen, often in late afternoon and early evenings. My trip was to Times Square, which was not a fun and kid-friendly place in those days.
I never noticed the different shapes of the entrance and exit kiosks that the video narrator points out, but I certainly noticed the mosaics and other decorations. My mother had shown them to me when I was even littler, and explained that every station was different.
I never saw rats in the subway till many years later, but when I did they were huge and numerous. And in childhood and adolescence I used to have nightmares about concentration camp-type selections that for some reason were always set in the NYC subway.
A better story: once when I was a young adult, sitting in a half-empty subway car in late-afternoon, in walked my brother on his way somewhere. Complete coincidence. We made a big show of crying out in glee and hugging each other.
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dished out wild COVID-19 conspiracy theories this week during a press event at an Upper East Side restaurant, claiming the bug was a genetically engineered bioweapon that may have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
Kennedy floated the idea during a question-and-answer…at Tony’s Di Napoli on East 63d Street.
“COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
“We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact,” Kennedy hedged.
Where to begin?
There are probably “papers out there” that show that RFK’s father was assassinated by space aliens.
And I guess Ashkenazi Jews are not “Caucasians,” according to RFK Jr.. Who knew? You learn something new every day.
In June 2020, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in England and Wales published the results of an investigation into mortality from COVID-19 by religious group. The analysis revealed a significant “Jewish penalty”: coronavirus mortality of Jews was shown to be relatively high compared to the British Christian majority.
This would have been prior to vaccination, so vaccine rates in different groups would not be relevant.
After a broad backlash to his comments, first reported by the New York Post, Kennedy took to Twitter to defend himself, calling the reporting “mistaken” and writing that he did not believe Covid-19 had been deliberately engineered against specific ethnicities.
“I have never, ever suggested that the Covid-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews,” Kennedy wrote.
Sure sounded that way, RFK. Why cite this stuff if you didn’t mean to call attention to it? And what race do you think Ashkenazi Jews belong to, if not the “Caucasian” race? Just curious.
I wonder whether he’s aware of historical anti-Semitic theories that feature the Jews as infectious agents: poisoning the wells, bringing the Black Death, and of course Nazi propaganda. If not, here’s a little history lession:
The best-known case of this kind of persecution was attacks perpetrated against Jewish communities in the German Empire between 1348 and 1350. At this time, the Black Death devastated the continent, and Jews were accused of intentionally spreading the disease by poisoning wells. A series of terrifying massacres ensued, destroying many of the major Jewish communities in Europe. This was not, however, the only case in which such charges led to persecution. In 1321, lepers in south-western France were accused of attempting to spread their particular illness by poisoning water sources. These accusations evolved to include the idea that the plot was initiated by Muslim rulers and aided by the Jews of France. As a consequence, both Jews and lepers suffered violent fates, from expulsion or isolation to execution by fire.
The Nazi propaganda poster featured here was created in 1941 for public display in German-occupied Poland. The Polish-language words translate roughly to “Jews are lice; they cause typhus.” Designed to link Jews and typhus closely together in the minds of non-Jewish Poles, the poster shows one of the feared typhus-ridden lice drawn on top of the face of a Jewish man that has been made to look like a skull. Several other examples of antisemitic Nazi propaganda depict Jews covered in lice, but this image seems designed to suggest that Jews and lice are similar creatures equally responsible for spreading the disease.
Kennedy’s antisemitic connection is not unique, as an Oxford University study found that one-in-five British people believed that Jews created the coronavirus pandemic for financial gain.
RFK Jr. is abysmally ignorant if he’s not aware of the effect of statements such as his, whether he means them to sound the way they sound or not. And the statement itself was abysmally ignorant.
It wasn’t hard to understand why the FBI was organizing a censorship scheme, or why companies like Twitter and Facebook that lived off lucrative regulatory subsidies were going along with one. The motives of the powerful actors in all this were never mysterious. The part that didn’t compute was why so many in the general public were accepting of the situation. This included people I knew. Many people in America are not just accepting of digital censorship, they believe it to be vitally necessary.
Growing up I was very influenced by organizations like Nadine Strossen’s ACLU. Liberals I knew were as proud of having fought to let Nazis march in Skokie as they were ashamed of the FBI and police in cities like Memphis having spied on Martin Luther King.
Taibbi’s answer has to do with the internet and its ability to influence thought without the consumer necessarily know it’s happening:
First [Americans] became addicted to the Internet as a tool of convenience. Then it became a cheap substitute for real-life interaction. Finally they learned to submit to the wisdom of crowds, which on the Internet, as we also found out, is really an artificial representation of a crowd, generated by political and social engineers from the FBI, DHS, the Pentagon, Meta, Google, and other bureaucracies.
Yes, the internet shapes thought, in particular social media but also search engines. I first noticed many years ago that search engines – Google in particular – had changed, and the information to which the algorithm led users was not politically neutral. Simply put, it favored Democrats and the left. So I agree that this is huge.
But I think Taibbi misses something, which is the inherent bias. The artificial crowd being represented is a left-leaning crowd, and therein lies the key to why so many organizations and people who are liberal or on the left, who used to speak in favor of free speech, are now all in for censorship. It’s because it’s censorship on behalf of their side. Their people are the censors, so it’s all to the good.
Their devotion seemed to have been to free speech, but it never really was. It was contingent on their fear that they would become the censored ones. Now that the Gramscian march is nearly complete, they are no longer afraid of that, because they are in control. So censorship becomes a virtue when practiced by the virtuous – which they define as themselves.
Twas ever thus.
There are still some old-fashioned liberals or even a few on the left who champion free speech and are against censorship, and I admire them. I’m thinking of Dershowitz and Turley and yes, Taibbi. But there’s a blind spot there, at least in Taibbi. The devotion of many liberals and leftists to a neutral principle of free speech was never as neutral and principled as it seemed.
As for the American right, it is my impression that for the moment, many more people on the right are against censorship. But I’m not sure how neutral that stand is, and how it would change if the right was doing the censoring. I do think that, in general, the right is less “ends justifies the means” than the left, and that people to whom liberty is more important naturally tend to gravitate to the right these days. But people are people, and it’s my impression that a devotion to liberty must be taught and inculcated in order to really take hold.
The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday opened a formal investigation into why the FBI snooped on two Republican House Intelligence Committee staffers during the height of the Russia collusion probe, suggesting the seizure of their private email and records may have been retaliation for the panel’s efforts to expose bureau misconduct.
If they want to target Republican members of Congress or their aides, they’ll do it, and no one will be the wiser until maybe five years later:
In an extraordinary intrusion on congressional oversight, the Justice Department used grand jury subpoenas to secretly obtain the personal email and phone data of at least two top House Intelligence Committee investigators back in November 2017 just as they and their boss, then-Chairman Devin Nunes, were assembling bombshell evidence of FBI abuses in the Russia collusion probe, Just the News has learned.
The subpoenas, obtained by Just the News, show the DOJ demanded that Google turn over personal email and phone data from the two senior staffers on Nov. 20, 2017 and that responsive materials were to be returned to DOJ by Dec. 5, 2017…
Nunes’ committee was locked at the time in a bitter struggle to force the FBI and DOJ to turn over records to the committee.
The DOJ subpoenas came to light in the last few days when the former committee staffers were informed by Google that their records had been taken, consistent with the Big Tech company’s policy of alerting customers five years after law enforcement takes such actions.
How can you fight back against a group with that much power?
The internet and our resultant dependence on electronic communications are by far the best tools the totalitarian state has ever had, far far better than Orwell’s telescreens. It used to be that authorities had to obtain the actual hard copies of communications in order to spy on people, or install recording devices in their offices and homes. Now it’s far easier and far more comprehensive, and far less detectable by the target.
Nunes said the subpoenas gave the DOJ and FBI unprecedented potential to learn in real-time what his investigation was learning about misconduct in the Russia probe. He called on the new Republican Congress to probe the subpoenas aggressively.
“The FBI and DOJ spied on a presidential campaign, and when Congress began exposing what they were doing, they spied on us to find out what we knew and how we knew it,” Nunes told Just the News. “It’s an egregious abuse of power that the next Congress must investigate so these agencies can be held accountable and reformed.”
Good luck with that.
And of course:
Spokesmen for the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney’s Office did not respond to requests Monday for comment.
The western Paris suburb of Nanterre, where 17-year-old Nahel M. was killed by police, is one of many municipalities to call off their annual Bastille Day fireworks displays for fear of further unrest.
“We can’t celebrate our national day because of hooligans, I believe things are much worse than people think,” David Lisnard, the head of the French Mayors’ Association (AMF) told broadcaster France Inter on Wednesday.
Lisnard, a member of the opposition conservative Republicans (LR) party, said the cancellations were “a sign of a very deep unease in French society”.
President Emmanuel Macron will celebrate Bastille Day, which marks the fall of the Bastille prison in 1789, seen as igniting the French Revolution, with ally Indian President Narendra Modi at the traditional central Paris military parade under heavy security.
The two leaders are also set to watch the main Paris fireworks display at the Eiffel Tower, which has been maintained, after nightfall on Friday.
I realize that Bastille Day is basically a French national day rather than being only about the storming of the Bastille, which was a seminal part of the French Revolution. But it also occurs to me, and not for the first time, that the French Revolution is hardly something about which to be proud. And there’s something ironic about Bastille Day celebrations being disrupted by the threat of riots.
The French rallying cry “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” sounds something like our “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but in actuality it different. Although originally the “equality” meant equality under the law, things changed quite soon [emphasis mine]:
This identification of liberty and equality became problematic during the Jacobin period, when equality was redefined (for instance by Frané§ois-Noé«l Babeuf) as equality of results, and not only judicial equality of rights. Thus, Marc Antoine Baudott considered that French temperament inclined rather to equality than liberty, a theme which would be re-used by Pierre Louis Roederer and Alexis de Tocqueville, while Jacques Necker considered that an equal society could only be found on coercion.
The third term, Fraternité, was the most problematic to insert in the triad, as it belonged to another sphere, that of moral obligations rather than rights, links rather than statutes, harmony rather than contract, and community rather than individuality.
It is no coincidence that the French Revolution was marked by the Reign of Terror, and inspired both the Soviet and Chinese communist revolutions.
Nothing against the French people themselves. It’s a country I’ve visited many times and enjoyed greatly, especially the countryside.
As I’ve done a deep dive into the transgender phenomenon and its current abuses regarding the medical treatment of children, I’ve watched an enormous number of really informative videos. I’ve only linked to a couple here, but there are many many more. The podcasters at A Wider Lens are especially good. They’re very knowledgeable therapists themselves and they interview extremely well-informed and articulate people.
Here’s one of their videos I highly recommend. Most are about an hour long, but although I recommend watching the whole thing, you can still get something out of watching only part of it. Another trick I’ve mentioned before, if you tend to be impatient like me, is to click on settings and speed up the talk; usually it’s still very understandable. Here’s one from a whistleblower speaking about a gender clinic where she worked, run by Washington University in St. Louis:
That’s the main topic of the video, but that’s not really the main topic of this post. I was struck by this section that I’m about to highlight, which is about politics. I see this sort of thing in video after video from other people critiquing the current medicalization of children identifying as transgender, or from detransitioners themselves: the phenomenon of the person speaking being very adamant about the fact that he or she is not on the political right.
On the one hand, that’s quite heartening, because I have long thought that this is an issue that should transcend politics. The headlong rush to give troubled young people dangerous blockers, hormones, and surgery, without even taking time to explore their other problems that might be factors in the genesis of their dysphoria, is something that all people who care about children and parents, and who want to protect them, should be against. And yet, sadly, with politicians and legislators it breaks down rather cleanly along political lines, with Democrats being for and Republicans against.
And that is why people such as the ones in this podcast are at pains to describe themselves as liberals, and to say that their opponents who accuse them of being puppets of the right are incorrect. I would like to ask them two further questions: are you still a liberal, and why? And do you also think of the right as a bunch of mindless Neanderthals (nothing against Neaderthals, but one of the people in the podcast uses the expression), and if so, on what is that based?
Anyway, here’s the clip. It’s quite short (the woman with the headset is the whistleblower, and the woman to her right on the screen is her lawyer). And please don’t let this little bit put you off from watching the rest of it, which is truly excellent and very eye-opening:
I maintain that, even in many clear-thinking and intelligent people (including many I know), this idea of Republicans as troglodyte-ish haters is very strongly entrenched, and keeps them from seeing that most of their actual opinions and positions are in accord with the right rather than the left. The activist left – including the MSM – is highly aware that this perception is instrumental in keeping the left in power, and they take every advantage to fan the flames and keep that viewpoint going. It probably accounts for at least 20% of the Democrat vote, and maybe more.
An error like that could happen to anyone, right? See this.
Joe has never been much of a respecter of boundaries, has he? Even back when he was supposedly of sound mind.
This latest episode reminds me of something I haven’t thought about in many many years: the phenomenon of political baby-kissing. But if that’s what Joe was trying to do here, he seems to have forgotten that it’s something the parent requests, it’s not a spontaneous act on the part of the candidate. Nor was Joe campaigning here, except in the sense that all politicians are always campaigning.
[NOTE: If you’ve never read this 1974 interview with the young and ambitious Joe Biden, it’s also an eye-opener about how creepy he was even back then.]
