An brilliant novel, first published in 1947, by Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place.
Thursday, August 4, 2022
Britain's Tavistock Scandal (VIDEO)
Douglas Murray's at the video below.
And at the New York Times (the mainstream, noncontroversial take), "England Overhauls Medical Care for Transgender Youth: The National Health Service is closing England’s sole youth gender clinic, which had been criticized for long wait times and inadequate services."
Also, at Spiked, "How ‘The Blob’ smothered the Tavistock scandal: The civil service is determined to crush any dissent against gender ideology."
And from Kathleen Stock, at UnHerd, "Why the Tavistock had to fall: Its ideological roots were rotten from the start":
For years, the seeds of the Tavistock’s downfall have been hiding in plain sight, as a picture has slowly emerged of its clinicians doling out harmful drugs to gender-confused youth as if they were sweets. At the same time, though, a more subtle clue to the clinic’s endemic dysfunction has been contained in the generic communications that followed each new crisis. “Thoughtful” is a self-description that crops up repeatedly. In response to critical reporting from Newsnight in 2019, the clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service insisted that it was “a thoughtful and safe service”. When Keira Bell and others took their case to the High Court a year later, arguing that under-16s could not give informed consent to puberty blockers, a GIDS spokesperson replied obstinately that theirs was “a safe and thoughtful service”. And when the Care Quality Commission rated the service as “inadequate”, the Tavistock’s ensuing statement defensively began: “The first thing to say is that GIDS has a long track record of thoughtful and high quality care.” Alongside this manic insistence on thoughtfulness, there has also been a marked tendency to engage in special pleading about the especially difficult and highly contested cultural position the service occupies. For instance, in response to the damning CQC report, CEO Paul Jenkins replied that GIDS “has found itself in the middle of a cultural and political battleground”. And to the news of the closure last week, a spokesperson commented, with the air of someone sighing heavily: “Over the last couple of years, our staff… have worked tirelessly and under intense scrutiny in a difficult climate.” Presumably what they really mean by this is that, as is now known, for several years GIDS has been caught between the emotionally blackmailing demands of transactivist organisations such as Mermaids and GIRES, talking constantly about suicide risk and lobbying hard for yet more relaxed attitudes to medicalising children, and the criticisms of those who profoundly object to the notion of a “trans child” in the first place. Former employees such as Susan Evans have reported the historical influence of Mermaids and GIRES on managers at the service, despite their lack of formal medical expertise and the possession of clearly vested interests. Now, you might think that it is the job of a healthcare provider — and especially one who dispenses medication to children — to try to remove itself from current furores, social trends, and pressure from political activists, and to just get on with providing evidence-based medicine according to whatever gold-standard methodology is available at the time. And you might also think that while being thoughtful is all very well in a medical provider, you don’t exactly want them to emulate Hamlet. But to apply these earthbound medical standards to GIDS is to fail to recognise some of the distinctive and converging influences on the service that have led to the unholy mess we now see. A crucial yet underappreciated part of the story is the clinic’s strong emphasis on psychoanalysis and psychodynamic approaches to mental health. The founder of the Tavistock, Hugh Crichton-Miller, was explicitly influenced by Freud and Jung. And when Domenico Di Ceglie founded the Gender Identity Service for children in 1989, later commissioned nationally as the only English NHS provider, he too was heavily influenced by psychoanalytic methods. In a 2018 article describing his process, Di Ceglie quotes a Jungian perspective approvingly: “the psyche speaks in metaphors, in analogies, in images, that’s its primary language, so why talk differently? We must write in a way that evokes the poetic basis of mind… it’s a sensitivity to language.” He goes on to describe some of the metaphors and images he has found useful in trying help young dysphoric patients understand their own experience: the metaphor of being “a stranger in one’s own body”, for instance, or the image of navigating between the binary of sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis from The Odyssey. Throughout Di Ceglie’s published writing, there is an emphasis on the co-creation of meaning with young patients in the absence of access to any empirical certainty about who the patient “really” is. This intellectual focus upon the fluidity and construction of meaning, and upon the power of narrative to create more stable personalities, is also heavily present in the published work of Bernadette Wren, Head of Psychology for 25 years at what insiders tweely call the “Tavi”. By her own description, she was “deeply involved” with the GIDS team for much of that time. Alongside psychoanalysis, she adds post-structuralist philosophy to her formative influences, citing figures such as Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault as important in her thinking. True to the relativism of these philosophers, in Wren’s intellectual vision there are no objective truths but only a series of subjective narratives. She writes: “If the idea of living in the postmodern era means anything, it is that in all our activity together we are in the business of making meaning.” She continues: “In our time, it is hard to see any knowledge or understanding as ‘mirroring’ nature, or ‘mirroring’ reality.” She concludes: “There is an implication here for our work in gender identity clinics: that we are in the business of helping actively to construct the idea and the understanding of transgender, and for this we should accept responsibility.” In other words, ordinary binary notions of truth and falsity, or of discovering what is right and wrong, are inapplicable when it comes to the treatment of gender-dysphoric youth — because there are no prior fixed facts about identity, or truth, or morality here to discover. All meaning is up for grabs. Against this intellectual background, the Tavistock’s flannel about being a thoughtful service sheltering from the storm of our present culture wars starts to make more sense. At least historically, senior clinicians at the Tavistock have never believed there is anything but certain context-bound forms of thought, floating about in a post-modern void. They have assumed meaning is constructed, not found. They have denied that there is any certain or timeless knowledge, but only specific cultural dynamics to navigate in the here and now. Under such an approach, what else could you do but be “thoughtful”? A recognition of ambiguity within the life of the psyche would be perfectly fine — indeed, I assume, therapeutically helpful — if all that had ever happened at GIDS was that people sat around talking to one other. But the general relativist stance of senior clinicians was made incredibly dangerous for patients by the presence of an additional factor in the therapeutic mix, nestling somewhat anomalously among Di Ceglie’s stated foundational aims for his service. Alongside commonplace psychodynamic goals such as “to ameliorate associated behavioural, emotional and relationship difficulties”, “to allow mourning processes to occur”, “to enable symbol formation and symbolic thinking” and “to sustain hope”, we also find: “to encourage exploration of the mind-body relationship by promoting close collaboration among professionals in different specialities, including paediatric endocrinology.” I don’t know about you, but when I read this, the birds — or rather the mermaids, perhaps — stop singing...
How Crazy-Ass Tom Cruise and 'Top Gun' Saved America (VIDEO)
I saw this movie. Folks are right: It's very good.
From Matt Taibbi, on Substack, "America needs to get back to meaningless fun, and "Top Gun: Maverick" delivers in colossal doses."
How Democrats See Abortion Politics After Kansas Vote
At the New York Times, "‘Your Bedroom Is on the Ballot’: How Democrats See Abortion Politics After Kansas":
A decisive vote to defend abortion rights in deeply conservative Kansas reverberated across the midterm campaign landscape on Wednesday, galvanizing Democrats and underscoring for Republicans the risks of overreaching on one of the most emotionally charged matters in American politics. In a state where Republicans far outnumber Democrats, Kansans delivered a clear message in the first major vote testing the potency of abortion politics since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade: Abortion opponents are going too far. The overwhelming defeat of a measure that would have removed abortion protections from the state constitution quickly emboldened Democrats to run more assertively on abortion rights and even to reclaim some of the language long deployed by conservatives against government overreach, using it to cast abortion bans as infringing on personal freedoms. (As of Wednesday, the margin was 58.8 percent to 41.2 percent.) “The court practically dared women in this country to go to the ballot box to restore the right to choose,” President Biden said by video Wednesday, as he signed an executive order aimed at helping Americans cross state lines for abortions. “They don’t have a clue about the power of American women.” In interviews, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, urged Democrats to be “full-throated” in their support of abortion access, and Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the House Democratic campaign arm, said the Kansas vote offered a “preview of coming attractions” for Republicans. Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat in a highly competitive district, issued a statement saying that abortion access “hits at the core of preserving personal freedom, and of ensuring that women, and not the government, can decide their own fate.” Republicans said the midterm campaigns would be defined by Mr. Biden’s disastrous approval ratings and economic concerns. Both Republicans and Democrats caution against conflating the results of an up-or-down ballot question with how Americans will vote in November, when they will be weighing a long list of issues, personalities and their views of Democratic control of Washington. “Add in candidates and a much more robust conversation about lots of other issues, this single issue isn’t going to drive the full national narrative that the Democrats are hoping for,” said David Kochel, a veteran of Republican politics in nearby Iowa. Still, Mr. Kochel acknowledged the risks of Republicans’ overstepping, as social conservatives push for abortion bans with few exceptions that polls generally show to be unpopular. “The base of the G.O.P. is definitely ahead of where the voters are in wanting to restrict abortion,” he said. “That’s the main lesson of Kansas.” Polls have long shown most Americans support at least some abortion rights. But abortion opponents have been far more likely to let the issue determine their vote, leading to a passion gap between the two sides of the issue. Democrats hoped the Supreme Court decision this summer erasing the constitutional right to an abortion would change that, as Republican-led states rushed to enact new restrictions, and outright bans on the procedure took hold. The Kansas vote was the most concrete evidence yet that a broad swath of voters — including some Republicans who still support their party in November — were ready to push back. Kansans voted down the amendment in Johnson County — home to the populous, moderate suburbs outside Kansas City — rejecting the measure with about 70 percent of the vote, a sign of the power of this issue in suburban battlegrounds nationwide. But the amendment was also defeated in more conservative counties, as abortion rights support outpaced Mr. Biden’s showing in 2020 nearly everywhere. After months of struggling with their own disengaged if not demoralized base, Democratic strategists and officials hoped the results signaled a sort of awakening. They argued that abortion rights are a powerful part of the effort to cast Republicans as extremists and turn the 2022 elections into a choice between two parties, rather than a referendum just on Democrats...
Still more.
The Dam Breaks: Key Dems Run Away From Biden '24
From Byron York, at the Washington Examiner, "You've seen the polls showing that large majorities of Democratic voters want the party to pick a new nominee for president in 2024, bypassing incumbent President Joe Biden. Now we're seeing the living embodiment of those polls as some important Democratic lawmakers distance themselves from, or outright oppose, a reelection run by the nearly 80-year-old president."
The Origins of Erika Jayne's $800K Diamond Earrings — a Mystery
At the Los Angeles Times, "Unraveling the mystery of Erika Jayne’s $800K diamond earrings — and Tom Girardi’s finances":
Not long after they started dating, Tom Girard presented cocktail waitress and aspiring actress Erika Chahoy with a pair of $800,000 diamond earrings.
“It was the first significant gift I had given her,” Girardi recalled years later to tax authorities. The earrings set the tone for the private-jet-and-haute-couture lifestyle the pair would enjoy as a married couple. Now, with the demise of the Girardis’ relationship and fortune, the jewelry has become a plot point in the quest to unravel the disgraced lawyer’s finances. The trustee overseeing the bankruptcy of Girardi’s famed firm, Girardi Keese, has moved to seize a pair of diamond stud earrings, with plans to sell them to compensate cheated clients and other creditors. Erika Girardi at first agreed to relinquish them, but last month, her attorney announced that she was switching strategies and would battle for the baubles in court. The earrings’ current location — a safe deposit box — is one of the only certain things about them. Neither the trustee nor Erika has described them in detail. There are no confirmed pictures of the jewelry, despite the star of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” having been a red-carpet regular who was photographed by paparazzi as she conducted her life in Los Angeles. When Times reporters attempted to trace the gems’ provenance, they found a tangled web of contradictions that pointed to a deeper mystery. By his own account, Tom Girardi loved showering his third, much-younger wife with expensive jewelry. The diamond earrings he gave her around the time of their 2000 wedding, when he was 60 and she was 28, were part of a collection that grew to include rings, bracelets, watches and other jewelry with a total value he once estimated at $15 million. The earrings and other pieces came from M.M. Jewelers, a small shop tucked in a warren of similar outfits in downtown L.A.’s jewelry district. As a lawyer for the store’s owners, the Menzilcian family, acknowledged, “The relationship goes back a long way.” Minding the store on a recent morning, Ared “Mike” Menzilcian said his father, 85, had a decades-long relationship with the lawyer, 83. Menzilcian declined to provide specific information as to the cut or clarity of the diamonds in the earrings, but he said the two stones — one for each ear — were “near flawless,” adding, “They were extremely large.” Erika Girardi possessed the earrings until at least 2007, when she embarked on a career, bankrolled by her husband, as pop singer “Erika Jayne,” according to court records...
Also, "Tom Girardi’s epic corruption exposes the secretive world of private judges."
In Debate, Democrat Congressman Jerry Nadler Refuses to Say That Biden Should Run For President; Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Says She Doesn't Believe He Is Running for President
Wednesday, August 3, 2022
Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis, Tearing Us Apart
At Amazon, Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis, Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.
John Eastman Was Always Looking for Election Fraud, and Looking to Get Paid
I've met this guy, years ago at the David Horowitz retreat at the Terranea, on the Palos Verdes pennisula.
He's not as he first appears, not be a long (money) shot.
At the New York Times, "Trump Lawyer Proposed Challenging Georgia Senate Elections in Search of Fraud":
SCOOP: John Eastman sent an email to Giuliani two weeks after Jan. 6 arguing they should sue in Georgia to keep searching for the fraud his email acknowledged they had failed to find - and also sought $270k in payments @lukebroadwater https://t.co/z88H3qqUef
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 4, 2022
On the day of President Biden’s inauguration, John Eastman suggested looking for voting irregularities in Georgia — and asked for help being paid the $270,000 he billed the Trump campaign. John Eastman, the conservative lawyer whose plan to block congressional certification of the 2020 election failed in spectacular fashion on Jan. 6, 2021, sent an email two weeks later arguing that pro-Trump forces should sue to keep searching for the supposed election fraud he acknowledged they had failed to find. On Jan. 20, 2021, hours after President Biden’s inauguration, Mr. Eastman emailed Rudolph W. Giuliani, former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, proposing that they challenge the outcome of the runoff elections in Georgia for two Senate seats that had been won on Jan. 5 by Democrats. “A lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud, and this would be a way to gather proof,” Mr. Eastman wrote in the previously undisclosed email, which also went to others, including a top Trump campaign adviser. “If we get proof of fraud on Jan. 5, it will likely also demonstrate the fraud on Nov. 3, thereby vindicating President Trump’s claims and serving as a strong bulwark against Senate impeachment trial.” The email, which was reviewed by The New York Times and authenticated by people who worked on the Trump campaign at the time, is the latest evidence that even some of Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters knew they had not proven their baseless claims of widespread voting fraud — but wanted to continue their efforts to delegitimize the outcome even after Mr. Biden had taken office. Mr. Eastman’s message also underscored that he had not taken on the work of keeping Mr. Trump in office just out of conviction: He asked for Mr. Giuliani’s help in collecting on a $270,000 invoice he had sent the Trump campaign the previous day for his legal services. The charges included $10,000 a day for eight days of work in January 2021, including the two days before Jan. 6 when Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump, during meetings in the Oval Office, sought unsuccessfully to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to go along with the plan to block congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6. (Mr. Eastman appears never to have been paid.) A lawyer for Mr. Eastman did not respond to a request for comment...
Kizer Cormorant Pocket Knife
This thing's a beauty, at Amazon, Kizer Cormorant Pocket Knife, S35VN Steel Folding Knives, Green Micarta Handle EDC Knife, Ki4562E3.
Also, the old reliable, Buck Knives 119 Special Fixed Blade Hunting Knife, 6" 420HC Blade, Black Phenolic Handle with Leather Sheath.
Vin Scully, 1927-2022
I can't add anything better than what all the other heartbroken folks have said. Major League Baseball lost a monumental soul, and all of America too.
At the Los Angeles Times, "Vin Scully, forever the voice of the Dodgers, dies at 94" and "The Dodgers lost their voice when Vin Scully died. Angelenos lost a family member."
At the video segment, his last day in the announcers booth at Dodgers Stadium, October 2nd, 2016, and his comments on socialism below:
Vin Scully tells the story of what made him fall in love with the game of baseball 💙
— Baseball Quotes (@BaseballQuotes1) August 3, 2022
pic.twitter.com/7whI1dBTqg
Vin Scully on socialism. pic.twitter.com/oaNC7vhsZW
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) August 3, 2022
San Clemente Considers Creating 'Abortion Free Zone'
Beautiful city. Classic California beach town. I was just down there over the weekend shopping at Beach Town Books.
Didn't see any pro-aborts protesting, however.
At the Los Angeles Times, "This Orange County city to consider banning abortions, becoming ‘sanctuary for life’."
This City Council in Southern California is considering a resolution that would make it an abortion-free zone.https://t.co/dPQJR6ysHI
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) August 3, 2022
Tuesday, August 2, 2022
Will Bunch, After the Ivory Tower
Out today, from Will Bunch, at Amazon, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics―and How to Fix It.
The Left's Assault on the Middle Class (VIDEO)
Here's Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, for the Rising on the Hill TV:
Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster Antitrust Case Goes to Court
Opening arguments were held yesterday.
The attorney for Penguin Random House, Daniel Petrocelli, is a freakin' firecracker.
At the New York Times, "The trial to decide whether the publishing giant may buy Simon & Schuster is a test of the Biden administration’s push to expand antitrust enforcement."
And at Vanity Fair, "The Antitrust Showdown to Determine Simon & Schuster's Fate Is About to Begin":
Jonathan Karp is rallying the troops at S&S as its suitor, Penguin Random House, heads to trial Monday against Biden’s Justice Department. The witness list is a who’s who of publishing bosses, power agents, and authors—including Stephen King—with a $2 billion deal on the line. On Monday, as lawyers for Penguin Random House and the Department of Justice were sharpening their sabres ahead of the antitrust duel of the summer, CEO Jonathan Karp fired off an email to his approximately 1,500 employees at Simon & Schuster, the nearly century-old publishing house that Karp has lorded over for the past two years. The fate of Simon & Schuster—whose catalog stretches from the classics of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, to the mass-market gold mines of Stephen King and Mary Higgins Clark, to the recent political blockbusters of Bob Woodward and Mary Trump—has hung in the balance since the publisher was put on the block in March 2020 by its parent company, now called Paramount Global, which arose from the tortured recombination of Viacom and CBS, whose focus on mounting an offensive in the streaming wars leaves little room to manage a comparatively antiquated book-publishing business. Almost nine months after the sale was announced, Bertelsmann’s PRH bested Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins with a $2.18 billion bid for S&S, a proposed mash-up that would turn the Big Five publishers into the Big Four. However, the Champagne toasts turned out to be premature: Last November, Joe Biden’s merger-averse DOJ sued to block the deal, citing concerns that it would give the world’s largest book publisher “unprecedented control” over the industry, resulting in “lower advances for authors and ultimately fewer books and less variety for consumers,” a string of claims that PRH characterizes as ludicrous. S&S has been in limbo ever since—a discontinued operation as far as Paramount Global’s earnings releases are concerned, and yet still bereft of its suitor’s embrace. Which brings us back to Karp’s memo, a sort of pep talk to counteract the lingering uncertainty. “As I’ve told you before, I am hopeful that Simon & Schuster will become part of Penguin Random House,” wrote Karp, a 58-year-old former reporter and theater buff who rose up to become one of the most powerful and highly regarded figures in the publishing industry. “I spent 16 years at Random House, and I know their culture is a lot like ours—wholeheartedly devoted to books and deeply committed to its employees and authors. Penguin Random House’s parent company, Bertelsmann, has been in the book business since 1835 and shares Penguin Random House’s profound commitment to improve public readership. I strongly believe that Penguin Random House will be an excellent steward of Simon & Schuster’s legacy, and that we, and our authors, will benefit greatly from becoming a part of this superb publishing company.” The fate of S&S will soon be decided one way or another, with PRH and the DOJ gearing up to face off in court. The bench trial is set to begin Monday, adjudicated by Judge Florence Pan at the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. Three weeks have been allocated for the trial, which is slated to run from August 1 to August 19. The attorneys will then have until September 7 to submit any additional briefings to the court, and Pan is expected to rule sometime in November. The witness list is stacked with A-listers from the publishing world, including executives from S&S and PRH, as well as top literary agents and authors. Karp and Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle are both due to be called, as are King (for the government), Hachette Book Group CEO Michael Pietsch (ditto), and power agents Andrew Wylie (whose client roster includes Vanity Fair), Gail Ross, Joy Harris, and Elyse Cheney. (Those agents and a few others are notably being called by the defense.) The array of potential witnesses includes PRH honcho Andy Ward and the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and best-selling author Charles Duhigg. “During the trial, our ability to comment on the testimony and proceedings will be limited,” Karp told his staff. “We will keep you informed of further developments when we have news that we can share.” PRH buying S&S is a small deal in the grand scheme of things, but the merger is being closely watched insofar as it reflects the Biden administration’s push to stem corporate consolidation. It also has obvious implications for the already much-consolidated publishing space, where there’s skepticism about creating another behemoth in an industry that has been upended by Amazon. As one big shot editor told me when the lawsuit was first announced, “I don’t know anyone who would think this is a great thing to happen.” Both sides filed their pretrial briefs last Friday...
Fit to Print? UNC's Settlement with Nikole Hannah-Jones is Bad News
Great piece from Phil Magness, for the James G. Martin Center, "A reporter who hasn’t dreamt of one day writing for the New York Times is a rare bird..."
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