Welcome to Thursday, February 5, 2026, and National Optimist Day. This is NOT my day! Here’s a Jewish joke about the stereotypical mindset:
What’s the difference between a Jewish pessimist and a Jewish optimist?
The Jewish pessimist says, “Things can’t possibly get any worse.”
The Jewish optimist says, “Sure they can!”
It’s also Disaster Day (!), National Chocolate Fondue Day, National Fart Day, National Sweater Day (in Canada), and World Nutella Day. Here’s a photo of Jango, the ticked tabby cat whose staff is reader Divy. He got under the covers by himself and then took a nap, crossing his paws:
I first tasted Nutella last year. It was okay but a bit too sweet when spread on toast (I’ve had variants from other countries that are better). But I’m aware of its immense popularity; Here’s how it’s made commercially (note that it contains palm oil, which is not only bad for you, but whose production contributes to deforestation).
And there’s a new Google Doodle honoring the Olympic games: click to see where it goes. Curling!
Posting may be light until next Tuesday as I have paperwork to do and talks and debates to hear. Some retirement!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 5 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Sadly, I hoped this wouldn’t happen, but massive layoffs at the Washington Post suggests that the renowned paper is now circling the drain (h/t Thomas).
The Washington Post told employees on Wednesday that it was beginning a widespread round of layoffs that are expected to decimate the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.
The company is laying off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.
The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first several years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.
Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said on a call Wednesday morning with newsroom employees that the company had lost too much money for too long and had not been meeting readers’ needs. He said that all sections would be affected in some way, and that the result would be a publication focused even more on national news and politics, as well as business and health, and far less on other areas.
“If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape,” Mr. Murray said. “And after some years when, candidly, The Post has had struggles.”
Mr. Murray further explained the rationale in an email, saying The Post was “too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product” and that online search traffic, partly because of the rise of generative A.I., had fallen by nearly half in the last three years. He added that The Post’s “daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.”
“Even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience,” he said.
The Post’s sports section will close, though some of its reporters will stay on and move to the features department to cover the culture of sports. The Post’s metro section will shrink, and the books section will close, as will the “Post Reports” daily news podcast.
Mr. Murray told the staff that while The Post’s international coverage also would be reduced, reporters would remain in nearly a dozen locations. Reporters and editors in the Middle East were laid off, as well as in India and Australia.
This is ineffably sad; For man years the Post was almost co-equal to the New York Times as the Paper of Record. It was the Post that tracked down the Watergate scandal thanks to Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting, and also played a key role in publishing and publicizing the Pentagon Papers leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. Those papers helped bring an end to the useless Vietnam War. Now the Post is a shadow of its former self, and I wonder if it will survive. Blame Jeff Bezos, if you wish. I myself don’t really understand why great papers fall apart like this.
Matthew sent several tweets about PostGate. The first one live-tweets the downfall of the Post, section by section, including sports and books:
Speaking to WaPo employees, editor Matt Murray says cuts are about “positioning ourselves to become more essential to people's lives, and what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape, and after some years when, candidly, the Post has had struggles to do that."
In addition to sports, the Washington Post is killing its book section, suspending its Post Reports podcast, restructuring its metro section, and shrinking its international footprint.
Matt Murray's full email to staff about today's cuts at the Washington Post
THE BOOK SECTION IS GONE!
Unbelievable
*Bret Stephens, who is rapidly becoming my favorite NYT columnist, has an op-ed giving Democrats further warning about nominating California’s governor as a Presidential candidate: “Will Newsom be the Democrats’ next mistake?” Another op-ed I highlighted a day or two ago another op-ed criticizing Newsom for his waffling, while Stephens points out that his record as governor won’t impress many centrist Americans.
Gavin Newsom has a memoir coming out this month, “Young Man in a Hurry” — another heavy hint that he intends to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. To judge by some of the more fawning media profiles (Vogue describes him as “lithe, ardent, energetic, a glimmer of optimism in his eye; Kennedy-esque”), he’s practically already won.
Democrats should be careful whom they crush on. Newsom’s record as governor of California is a Republican strategist’s perfect foil. Among the more salient points:
Some of the points (there are others):
Affordability. That’s supposed to be the Democrats’ magic word against Republicans amid persistently high prices, especially for first-time home buyers. Yet U.S. News & World Report ranked California dead last in 2025 in its affordability rankings. The California Legislature’s own Analyst’s Office noted that “Prices for mid-tier homes are about $755,000 — more than twice as expensive as the typical mid-tier U.S. home.” And in 16 California counties, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Alameda, a six-figure salary can still be deemed “low-income” for a family of three, according to the state’s housing department.
Poverty and income inequality.The U.S. Census Bureau reported last year that California is tied with Louisiana for the country’s highest “supplemental” poverty rate, which takes account of cost-of-living calculations over a three-year period, with roughly one in six Californians living in poverty. In Pennsylvania, by contrast, the number is about one in 10. California also has one of the country’s highest rates of income inequality: In 2022, the average income of the top 5 percent was nearly $600,000 higher than the average income of the bottom 20 percent.
Education.To its credit, the University of California system remains one of the jewels of American higher education. K-12? Not so much. U.S. News ranks California 38th in the country, behind Mississippi and Louisiana. Cal Matters found that while the state had increased “per pupil spending by 102 percent since 2013, reading comprehension has remained flat while math skills have dropped.”
. . .Wokeness.Newsom understands that Democrats’ obsession with progressive social justice causes, and the censorious spirit that goes with it, hurt the party in 2024, which is why he has gone out of his way to engage with right-wing influencers on his podcast, “This Is Gavin Newsom.” Last year, he made waves when he seemed to break with progressives on the question of trans athletes, calling the participation of biological males in women’s and girls’ sports “deeply unfair.”
Then again, Newsom signed SB132, the law that allowed a biological male, Tremaine Carroll, serving 25 years to life for violent offenses, to transfer to a women’s prison, in which Carroll is alleged to have raped two female inmates. Newsom signed another bill that forbids educators from being required to tell parents that their children have changed their names and pronouns. That won’t be easy to defend in a general election where the race will hang on tens of thousands of votes in states like Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina.
As the early swooning over Newsom suggests, some voters’ hearts are fluttering over the prospect of his candidacy. Democrats who take the 2028 stakes seriously should stick to just using their brains.
The other issues not mentioned here include a high rate of people moving out of the state (the fastest rate in the nation), people fleeing high taxes and unaffordable housing. .
Well, these would be negatives so long as voters in the rest of the country know about them. But Republicans are savvy enough to glom onto them in campaign ads, and Newsom will have to defend them in any debate. He’s too slick for me, and his latter-day pretense that he’s really a centrist is unconvincing. I still see no viable Democratic candidate on the horizon.
*This is a first, and hopefully a bellwether: The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has recommended that gender-related practices by its members be delayed until the patient is 19.
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons recommended on Tuesday that its members refrain from performing gender transition procedures on young patients until they reach age 19, a shift that comes at a time of mounting opposition to such care at the state and federal levels.
The group’s new position stands in contrast to those taken by most major medical associations in the United States, which endorse a range of treatments for adolescents and teenagers struggling with gender dysphoria. The treatments include puberty-blocking drugs, hormone therapies and, in rarer cases, surgeries.
In its statement, the society said the new recommendations were prompted by what it described as a lack of quality research on the long-term outcomes for young people who had undergone surgical interventions like mastectomies and cited “emerging evidence of treatment complications and potential harms.”
The announcement drew praise from the Trump administration, which issued a statement commending the group for “disavowing pediatric sex-rejecting procedures.” In the statement, Jim O’Neill, the deputy health secretary, said, “Today marks another victory for biological truth in the Trump administration.”
Kinnon Ross MacKinnon, a social scientist who studies transgender medicine at York University in Toronto, said the medical group’s new position reflected the growing political backlash over gender-affirming care as well as liability concerns for practitioners in the field.
Last week, a jury in New York State ruled in favor of a woman who claimed a mastectomy she received as a teenager had left her disfigured, making it the first malpractice verdict against providers of gender transition care by a patient who later came to regret the decision.
The ASPS is not a tiny organization: it represents 11,000 American and Canadian physicians. Wikipedia has just added this to its entry: “In February 2026, the ASPS became the first major medical association in the U.S. to change its guidance on gender transition surgery for minors, recommending to its members that chest, genital, and facial surgeries not be performed until age 19.”
I agree with this decision: 19, which is between the two ages I suggested (19 and 21) is about the right age to allow people to make their own decisions about surgery, which have been rushed by rah-rah parents, friends, and doctors for too long. You can read their new 9-page position statement here.
*Mayor Mamdani is deep-sixing programs for gifted and talented students in NYC kindergartens. He’s also facing blame for that, as well as for the deaths of 16 homeless people who froze to death in recent weeks (Hizzoner decided not to force people into warming centers; see Luana’s tweet below). From the Free Press article by Maud Maron:
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism for his plans to phase out the public school system’s gifted and talented (G&T) program for kindergarten, starting next year. This feels like Groundhog Day for public school parents like me who fought former mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to end G&T, abolish entrance exams for the city’s prestigious specialized high schools, and root out, in the name of “anti-racism,” any honors program that smacked of academic excellence.
The same tired arguments about the racism of meritocracy are still unconvincing and are still unsupported by data or evidence, yet tenaciously hang on like land acknowledgments, “hands up, don’t shoot” chants, and the idea that socialism will actually work this time.
No matter what happens to the New York City school system, which had 906,248 students during the 2024–25 school year and is the largest in the United States, Mamdani’s first month as mayor will be forever marred by the deaths of 16 people who “passed away outside during this brutal stretch of cold,” as he put it on Monday. The new mayor reversed a policy by predecessor Eric Adams that would have allowed the police to get the homeless inside. Mamdani’s brand of progressivism essentially handcuffed the police in order to “protect” the homeless from the very people who might have saved their lives.
About 18,000 elementary school students in the city are enrolled in G&T, with about 2,500 admitted for kindergarten each fall.
Abolishing the program shares with anti-policing policies the cruel consequence of managing to do the most harm to those who are cited most often as deserving of help. In a study of student data from 2010 to 2019, black and Hispanic students in G&T programs showed the largest increases in academic proficiency scores. About 90 percent of the city’s 148,000 charter school students are from black and Hispanic families who have chosen to leave the one-size-fits-all equity education offered by the “abolish G&T” crowd to whom Mamdani panders. (That number does not include the roughly 50,000 children who are on waiting lists.)
When Mamdani was running for the New York State Assembly in 2020, he told the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club: “New York State continues to uphold policies that perpetuate educational and residential segregation, mass incarceration, and economic disenfranchisement. As a graduate of Bronx Science, I have personally witnessed just how segregated New York City public schools are, especially our specialized high schools. I support measures to integrate our public schools and fully fund our education system, including the abolition of the SHSAT.”
Under Mamdani’s brand of communism democratic socialism, all shall get the same education, even if children as a group are better off with “segregation”, as Hizzoner calls it. It’s clear that I’m no fan of the Mayor, who I see as an antisemit who makes promises he can’t keep. Well, all politicans do that, but his promises are what got him elected: free daycare, free public transportation, city grocery stores, and the like. I’d eat my hat if he manages to keep them, though I don’t have a hat and have nothing to lose. He’s slick and said to be charming, but he’s not good for NYC or its Jews. Fortunately, he can’t do much damage to the rest of the country, and Ceiling Cat help us if he runs for another office (like a Representative) after his term as mayor.
*Sick of war, many Ukrainians are increasingly favoring giving up land to Russia in exchange for peace and also security guarantees.
Ms. [Khrystyna] Yurchenko is among a growing number of Ukrainians who say they would hand over the part of the Donbas still controlled by Ukraine to Russia if that would end the war.
This represents a notable shift for a war-weary Ukrainian population. Giving up territory that Russia has been unable to capture has long been considered a red line. But what once seemed impossible now appears less so, as the Kremlin insists that U.S.-backed peace negotiations will advance only if Ukraine agrees to walk away from the Donbas.
“For me, peace is the priority, and if there would definitely be no war after we give away the Donbas, I would be ready to leave,” she said. She would support surrendering the territory, she said, only if Ukraine’s allies offered strong guarantees for the country’s postwar security.
The future of the Donbas is among the thorniest issues as Ukraine, Russia and the United States continue talks in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, on Wednesday.
Ukraine has spent years fortifying cities in the Donbas, and has lost a huge number of soldiers defending the industrial region. The territory covers parts of several regions, including Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine still holds about 20 percent of Donetsk but has lost all of Luhansk.
. . . In public statements, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Ukraine remains opposed to a unilateral withdrawal from the Donbas. But he has also occasionally hinted at flexibility, saying that both Russia and Ukraine must be prepared to compromise as Ukraine comes under pressure on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.
Polling reflects a growing openness to territorial concessions.
. . . Still, a majority of Ukrainians remain opposed. Many say they are prepared to continue enduring hardships, including Russia’s campaign to knock out the country’s energy infrastructure during a bitterly cold winter.
This is as sadder than the downfall of the Post. Although many Americans seem unconcerned with the war between Russia and Ukraine, it is a just and moral war for Ukraine. The bloody Russians just invaded and took whatever land they wanted in a latter-day Anschluß. It’s not right, but there’s nothing anybody can do about it. Will Russia do this with other countries? Who knows?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pondering the past.
Hili: What did garden look like like ten thousand years ago?
Andrzej: It had a thicker layer of ice.
In Polish:
Hili: Jak nasz ogród wyglądał dziesięć tysięcy lat temu.
Ja: Miał grubszą warstwę lodu.
*******************
From My Orange Cat is a Little Shit (and the cat likes the water shaken, not stirred):
From Meow Incorporated:
From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:
From Masih. Yep, Mamdani’s office issues a “Hijab Day” celebration announcement. Masih doesn’t like it:
Mr. @ZohranKMamdani, really? Right now?
To be honest, I feel tortured in my own beautiful city of New York, watching you celebrate “World Hijab Day” while women in my wounded country, Iran, are being jailed, shot, and killed for refusing the hijab and the Islamic ideology behind… https://t.co/EW0GLq9I5n— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) February 4, 2026
I guess it’s “diss Mamdani Day,” as I got this from Luana
Mayor Mamdani confirms sixteen deaths during dangerously cold weather in NYC https://t.co/pQ0L9i5Yzz pic.twitter.com/zHAPfvu95u
— New York Post (@nypost) February 2, 2026
From Malcolm, a scaredy-cat (“can’t touch this”):
I’m convinced cats have a sense of humor and do things like this as a joke 😂 pic.twitter.com/wn7xhqjukN
— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) January 24, 2026
This was tweeted by Titania, but of course Alana Akbar is an online fiction, not a real person
Alana Akbar, the most empowering drag queen of her generation, is about to tour the Middle East.
Can’t wait to get my tickets. 🥳🇵🇸✊ pic.twitter.com/XagG5DERoh
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) January 26, 2026
But we have the fictional person for real here, though only in the U.S. Alana wouldn’t last two minutes in Palestine. Chickens for KFC!
This is Alana Akbar, one of the fiercest drag queens on the elementary school circuit.
Her burqa must’ve been at the dry cleaners… pic.twitter.com/MpKZlDYwXU
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) April 24, 2024
One I retweeted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This Hungarian Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was about four years old, and would be 86 today had he lived. https://t.co/jNRXo2TSNv
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) February 5, 2026
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a fish wearing a jellyfish coat. But what is this “partly” immune to its sting stuff?
Imagine wearing a #jellyfish as a helmet!?!Well, that’s exactly what this juvenile jack is doing! Mostly immune to its sting, the jack has taken the jellyfish prisoner. Shot using #scuba, out over the deep abyss, drifting at night. #blackwater #blackwaterdiving #scubadiving #gug
— Chris Gug (@gugunderwater.bsky.social) 2026-02-04T11:54:01.639Z
TRUE FACTS about kittens:
After a month of careful study, I have been able to identify the key times when kittens go nuts:- Just after food- When hungry- Just after a poo- When needing a poo- Night time- Day time- Misc
— David KC (@davidmuttering.bsky.social) 2026-02-04T10:01:57.170Z
A BIRTHDAY HOUGHT:
A hungry man is not a free man. -Adlai Stevenson II, lawyer, politician, and diplomat (5 Feb 1900-1965)
Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere.
– O Pioneers! Willa Cather
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left, Toulouse.
-Vincent van Gogh
Bert Brecht famously wrote “Erst das Fressen, dann die Moral”. First eat, then morality. (“Fressen” is the word “eat” but used a) for animals or b) for humans implying that “they eat like animals” as the term is used colloquially (most animals just eat normally).)
Curling!…reminds me that I need to sweep the garage floor today.
I am afraid that the WAPO and NYT provided a unique comfort for me and maybe I am of the last generation to feel that comfort of sitting back with a print newspaper and leisurely reading through headlines and those articles that seem to be of interest. I grew up watching my parents read the local paper and started my own reading with the comics and sports page; I was introduced to the WAPO in college as it was hand delivered to dorms, offices, and labs daily; then to the NYT (no comics!) when the Post went a bit off the rails when, sans Ombudsman, they published a made-up piece on a four-year old local crack addict…a series on their front page..that even if true should maybe have been in the Local/Metro section. Then NYT went woke and I switched back to WAPO…then WAPO went woke and I dropped it. Went to electronic Common Sense/TFP until Bari went nuts. I truly miss having a trusted hard copy daily newspaper, but it is a social and cultural vacuum of a nice to have…not a must have for someone of my age and stage…. You kids get off my lawn!
The content of these papers provided a social glue which is an important issue, but the form of the print copy had personal importance to me.
I know you’re an older guy, Jim, and tho I’m a spring chicken at 55 I do miss print papers. I note that they’re still very popular in Japan (mainly with older people, which Japan is full of) where newspaper delivery is still a fairly big Thing. Along with faxes, business cards and suits.
William Gibson said: “The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed”.
The same can be said for the past.
best regards,
D.A.
NYC
Let’s not get too weepy about the WP’s past glories. When I came to America and lived in DC for a few years I subscribed and it was…… excellent. (30 years ago). From what I’ve heard and (a bit) noticed, in recent years it has become basically a translation of Hamas’ press releases.
Institutions change over time: many decrep and decline.
World Hijab Day is DREDFUL religious propaganda propagated by Third World Socialism, Islamism and the UN. And note also, always that TERRIBLE “DEI art”. A visual crime for a wildly amoral, sexist cause.
D.A.
NYC
The rise of the internet has left a lot of traditional media behind. For example, even the NYT shows declining revenues in real dollars.
“I still see no viable Democratic candidate on the horizon.”
In my opinion, the Democrats have many potentially strong candidates. Some of them include Klochubar, Whitme, Moore, Beshear, Moulton, Booker, and more. Will I vote for them? No. But the Democrats do have many strong choices (in my opinion).
The battle over G&T in New York City brings back memories (bad ones). Blasio lost. In my opinion, Mamdani will lose. Parents will win (these days, mostly Asian).
All of the Democratic candidates mentioned have strong possibilities. I really like Klobuchar and Whitmer, especially. But will they run?
The whole circus surrounding the 16 deaths due to cold is baffling.
Leftists insist that individual choice needs to be respected over the wishes of the state, the proponents of rugged individualism in shock that those poor souls were not forced into the warmth of collectivism.
If the homeless choose to stay outside even though there is a warm place offered, it is their choice and that choice is one of the few things left to many homeless.
The system has produced many downtrodden. Forcing them to into the warmth for a short time so they can live in squalor for longer seems cruel.
Umm. . many homeless people are mentally ill and not capable of making a decision. Do you want to let them “choose” to be in the cold? Also, it is suicidal and in my view I don’t think they really want to die. What you are saying is that they should be left alone so they will die and no longer have to live in squalor. Given the situation of many homeless people, that is cruel.
Yes, many homeless might be incapable of making such a decision. So is it right to get them into the warmth during the worst cold and kick them out once it is milder? They would need long term care and therapy.
Many homeless resist being taken in. How much force is OK to be applied?
I am not in favor of people dying of cold. I question the motives for the stances towards those deaths since they are the opposite of the principles usually espoused. It reeks of a society that doesn’t want to face the worst consequences of their choices. The US brand of capitalism has produced a sizeable population of outcasts. But letting them die is ugly. Better to use force to destroy their encampment and force them into a shelter – but only as long as the weather is bad. Is that really the ethical choice?
You mean you question MY motives for thinking that homeless people in lethal cold should be put in shelters? Too bad, I have no qualms about that. And if they resist, how do you know they aren’t mentally ill.
This is the end of the discussion per the Roolz.
FX Kober notes, “I question the motives for the stances towards those deaths since they are the opposite of the principles usually espoused.”
Your confusion stems more from the collision of caricatures that you embrace than from any American political principles supposedly at play among our hapless folk. You suggest that it is US capitalism that “produced” our homeless outcasts, yet for whatever problems exist in our economic system, the matter of mentally-ill men and women living on our streets has a more interesting history. It largely indicts both well-meaning progressives of an earlier era as well as budget-cutting free-market aficionados, the latter generally holding selective notions of autonomy apparently opposed to but otherwise not unlike your own. As your comments presume a statist solution, which you oppose with a “rugged individualism” foil, let me point out that to the native ear the latter is an outdated idiom outside the circles of those who embrace an equally-caricatured and misunderstood “nanny-state liberalism.”
I know families who at their personal expense, aside from providing food and clothes, have housed the homeless in hotels during brutal cold snaps that surely would have killed them. Perhaps the benefactors should have saved the money: not being able to solve all the men’s problems, and releasing them to the street when the weather warmed, they should have fixed none. Then they could have rested content in practicing your foolish consistency while demanding that institutions do more.
My understanding is Mamdani forbade the city from clearing homeless encampments. Whatever the merits of that, none of the victims of the cold were from those encampments. IOW, none of the victims would have been housed under the old policy anyway. The circus is political. The old policy was good; those kinds of encampments should not be allowed.
To me the blame is misplaced. It is on all of us. Mamdani was wrong to forbid the city to do anything about the encampments, but that was not why these people died. They died because we are a cruel, heartless society who leave people who are (likely) mentally ill out in the snow.
I’m the optimist in your joke.
Not the only one, I assure you. We need a flag, or a t-shirt, or something.
The rise of the internet has left a lot of traditional media behind. For example, even the NYT shows declining revenues in real dollars.
“I still see no viable Democratic candidate on the horizon.”
In my opinion, the Democrats have many potentially strong candidates. Some of them include Klochubar, Whitme, Moore, Beshear, Moulton, Booker, and more. Will I vote for them? No. But the Democrats do have many strong choices (in my opinion).
The battle over G&T in New York City brings back memories (bad ones). Blasio lost. In my opinion, Mamdani will lose. Parents will win (these days, mostly Asian).
I enjoy your cat videos. The photo today of the kitten (and when they go nuts) reminded me of a kitten/cat when I was young, Smokey. It’s interesting how such animals can bring such comfort and laughter to humans.
With the homeless, Mamdami seems to be the other side of a double-headed coin, with Junior Kennedy on the other side, where Kirk Milhoan*, JrK’s pediatric cardiologist head of the ACIP (vaccine review board), defends de-recommending vaccines to maintain individual choice – efficacy notwithstanding – as being akin to continuing to sell alcohol in the face of alcohol dependency. He gets that wrong, of course, since alcoholism isn’t contagious.
*Seems to be a Jesus-bot, too.
The Wash Post has indeed done downhill just as the NYT has, seemingly captured by progressive ideas &, as someone notes above, Hamas/gender/all Repubs bad propaganda. They’re both also reluctant to confront their young, progressive employees, who of course yell the loudest. What’s remarkable to me is that Bezos, with his wealth, hasn’t stamped down hard on it & to hell with the repercussions. He certainly started out with plans to turn it around, bringing in senior management from the UK, along with some other senior centrist folks from respectable corners of the industry. (They also reached out to my husband, who seriously considered making the jump solely on the basis that Bezos would be the one to stamp out the woke mob.) But for whatever reason, he never did that, and people left, including our two friends. It’s sad to see.
Bezos changed WaPo to print right wing editorials. But the right already has their sources and very people came due the new right wing editorials. However, hundreds of thousands of left wing readers cancelled their subscriptions, leaving sharply falling revenue.
But Bezos refuses to either sell the paper or go back its old politics. He’s using it to please Trump, presumably to help with any regulatory difficulties with his new rocket business.
Allowing mentally ill homeless individuals to endanger their lives in sub-freezing cold illustrates the woke mentality: an incoherent amalgam of a distorted collectivism copied from the old Left, yoked together with limitless individualism copied from the 1960s. The former underlies the campaign against all G&T and honors programs in schools. The latter strand yields the worship of anything subjective, including drug abuse, genderwang, and the academic poses of postmodernists and grievance studiesists.
I think Mayor Mamdani made the least bad choice among a list of bad options.
The police can’t arrest anyone unless they see him committing an offence or have reason to think he has committed or is about to commit one, or believe he is an imminent danger to himself. (The last is how they grab people in the act of trying to climb the parapet of a bridge.) Arrestees who seem to be insane are taken for psychiatric evaluation under arrest. The rest go to jail.
In the Anglosphere the police are independent of the politicians. A mayor doesn’t command the police and can’t direct them in which laws to enforce or against whom, and which to ignore. This is true everywhere in Canada. I’m told it varies in the United States but I’m also told that in New York City the police don’t take direction from the Mayor. (Militarized national police forces where the Executive commands the police are called gendarmeries, such as the Gendarmes in France and the stylishly uniformed Carabinieri in Italy.)
So it seems to me that neither Mayor Mamdani nor the NYPD have the authority to take any person to any place he doesn’t want to go unless he has committed a crime or is about to kill himself. (By long-standing practice, slowly killing yourself with alcohol or drugs is not a police matter. Addicts who wake up after a shot of Narcan are free to walk away and score another hit, no matter how cold it is.)
In Canada we know a thing or three about cold winter nights. All cities operate warming shelters. These are often municipally or hospital-owned meeting spaces that have to be returned to their intended use in the morning, so the warmed people have to be turned back out into the street for the day. The police also won’t let people congregate in warm(ish) public spaces like transit stations. But our police will not take people off the street unless a social work volunteer who does the wellness-check rounds with them can convince them to come inside voluntarily. Some die. The mayors know they can’t direct the police to break the law out of kindness. The political independence of the police is fundamental to Anglo-American justice.
“Democratic Socialism” is a thought-terminating cliché :
“Loading the Language
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. ”
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism — A Study of “Brainwashing” in China, p. 429
Robert J. Lifton
W. W. Norton & Co. 1961
UNC Press, 1989
https://books.google.com/books/about/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psychology_of_Tot.html?id=FU_ifHrIIg0C
My take from what informs me:
Russians also must be feeling the war as the dead mount up and the economy suffers, is it a war of attrition? Slowly and surely but gathering pace I’d say.
The economy and inconveniences being more important than the dead as the russian elite and military leaders show very little regard to the cost in lives, military or civilian.
Ukrainian resistance needs to hold and counter wherever it hurts the comfort level of russian civilian life to apply the same medicine as it were. I dont like it but a breaking point has t9 be found and exploited.
The misery inflicted on the Ukrainians by a mindless dictator is reminiscent of the arrogant puffery of WW1 and the resistance to Hitler of WW2… the russians/putin have learnt nothing from either conflict. It is depressing that putin has no other choice but to carry on with this farce. Humiliation is not his option.
Why do once great papers fall apart, our host asks? The answer is that they get taken over by woke group-think and become little more than propaganda outlets for the anti-Israel, pro-Islam, trans activist, open borders, global warming hysteric, globalist, collectivist far Left. Which in turn alienates most potential readers. The woke take over because of indoctrination in journalism schools, where most new recruits come from these days. And they are True Believers.
The ASPS Statement is comprehensive and compelling. It’s not quite accurate to say that it recommends 19 be a mandated age cut-off for sex-manipulating surgery, though. The Society (as you would expect from a medical association) recommends against legal restrictions on any medical care and prefers that the profession demonstrate that it can police itself through its historical privilege of self-regulation in the public interest.
In this light, the ASPS stresses the grave responsibility that surgeons (and “upstream” clinicians prescribing psychotherapy, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones, none of which have a respectable evidence base either) bear to ensure that a patient requesting treatment has a mature enough understanding of the nature of the surgery and its long-term implications to give informed consent. The Society advises that it is prudent to assume that this won’t happen before 19, but imprudent to assume the 19th birthday is automatically OK. It’s not like “being old enough” to get a tattoo or buy liquor. Rather, the surgeon should be very cautious about concluding that mutilating, function-destroying surgery with no evidence of medical benefit meets the fiduciary obligation in anyone still considered to be an adolescent. (I would say, “in anyone.”, but the ASPS didn’t.)
Nothing in the ASPS statement is binding on plastic surgeons. Individual surgeons can operate according to their own lights and can testify as expert witnesses in malpractice and licensing actions according to what they are prepared to testify, and be cross-examined on, as to the standard of care. Nonetheless a statement by a professional society that nearly all plastic surgeons belong to would be held up as a starting point in litigation about surgery. A surgeon shouldn’t assume he’s home free just because he operated on a 19-year-old.
And the AMA has now agreed with the ASPS’s new position: https://x.com/LeorSapir/status/2018888126974812652
What’s the difference between a Jewish pessimist and a Jewish optimist?
The Jewish pessimist says, “Things can’t possibly get any worse.”
The Jewish optimist says, “Sure they can!”
Optimist: We live in the best of all possible worlds.
Pessimist: I know.
The reason newspapers are struggling almost everywhere is simple: people are mostly not willing to pay to read them, now that you can get your news free on social media. At the same time, advertisers are less to advertise in them, because they can get more views elsewhere.
You might point out that a lot of social media commentators rely on old-style newspapers to break stories and report facts they can then opine on. That’s true! But the fact is it’s hard to run a business if people won’t pay for your product. I agree it’s a shame, but it’s what people seem to want.
As a Brit, I was unaware that Bret Stephens is the ex-husband of Pamela Paul. It looks like Paul’s take in the NYT on transgender “healthcare” is being vindicated by the changing attitudes of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) and the American Medical Association (AMA).