CNN said it, I believe it, that settles it

CNN came under mild criticism recently when it claimed “ It’s not possible to know a person’s gender identity at birth, and there is [sic] no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth.” I value CNN’s expertise on all subjects, and believe everything it says, but I was left a little confused by this: is “consensus” reached by everyone agreeing with the person who’s doing its own self-identification, or are there objective criteria to be considered? Prowling the Internet, it seems that the LGBT++-- ???! community believes we should go with the first option: an individual’s belief trumps anything biology might have to say on the matter.

So okay, I stayed on the net a bit longer and came up with this case history from Psychology Today. Question: does a genuinely held belief about one’s species overrule conventional biology?

Thought experiment: substitute “girl” of “boy” for “cat” in this story: would your answer be different?

Discuss. Twenty minutes.

The boy who believed he was a cat

…. Paul Keck Jr. of the Harvard Medical School, wrote up the case in a 1990 issue of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. One day, a 17-year-old boy was in a psychiatrists’ office seeking help after experiencing a bout of major depression. During the session, he made a passing remark that was nothing short of astonishing. He said that since early adolescence, he had led a secret life as a cat. Even more astounding – he had been able to keep his secret from his friends and relatives. 

During the initial consultation, the patient admitted that as a child, he felt closer to his family’s pet cat Tiffany than to his parents. In fact, he said he fell in love with Tiffany and came to believe that he too was a feline, and that at age 11, he learned to “speak cat.” The man’s childhood was far from normal; he was often tied to a tree in the yard, and grew angry with his parents. It was at this time, he ‘fell’ for Tiffany and looked upon her as a “surrogate parent.” What he reported next is so remarkable, I will quote directly from the psychiatrists report, lest you think I am embellishing: “When alone, he began to regularly hunt with cats, to eat small prey and raw meat, to have sexual activity with cats in serial monogamous relationships, and to converse with them by mewing and feline gestures. He reports that the activities have been continuous and are not confined to episodes of depression.” He also told of paying frequent visits to zoos to see the tigers, where he attempted to talk to them “in tiger language” and collect their loose fur. By age 17, he reported coming to the realization that he was a tiger cat due to his affinity for tigers and his large build. It was at this time that he began to confide in his friends and psychiatrists of his secret cat identity. He said that Tiffany had encouraged him to ‘come out of the closet’ with his human friends. 

At the time the psychiatrists wrote their report on the case in 1990, he was 26 years-old, and had been under psychiatric care for the past several years. Treatment ranged from electroconvulsive shocks to psychotherapyand an array of anti-depressants. His most severe episode of depression occurred after he had been infatuated with ‘Dolly,’ a zoo tiger, whom he had hoped to release. Upon learning that Dolly had been sold to an Asian zoo, he tried to hang himself. He had become obsessed with Dolly after breaking up with his girlfriend who left to attend a distant university. 

While the man was able to function in society, his belief that he was a cat was unshakable. He also would have stood out from the crowd as he wore tiger-striped clothes, sported exceptionally long nails, and had long, bushy hair and a beard, giving him a distinctive cat-like appearance. At the time of their report, the man, while taking a variety of drugs to control his depression, was gainfully employed. He was living in an apartment that he shared with two flatmates, and yes, a cat!

More of this, please

you’re outta here!

Climate Activists Get So Woke They Cancel Themselves

In a lengthy post on the group's Facebook page, leaders explained that the organization "has been a racist, white-dominated space" that has "avoided, ignored, and tokenised BIPOC voices and demands."

That’s right, get the whites out of all this nonsense and it will be first, marginalized, and then disappear, just as the Anti-Viet Nam protests dwindled after Nixon put in a draft lottery. The first year, 1969, the cut-off number for being subject to the draft was 195; the next year it was 125, then 95. Brilliant: 2/3 of draft-eligible men discovered that they were exempt, and we bid adieu to the few suckers left behind: “Okay, so long, and be careful out there – write us at Yale”.

And so went the anti-war movement. We can expect the same phenomenon as whites are marginalized in the arts, the global warming hoax, and college protests. If they’re unwelcome, and there’s no place for them, they’ll go off and find something equally as stupid but, hopefully less harmful to occupy their tiny brains.

Will blacks and Eskimos have the numbers to support all these things on their own? No. How many whites will be wiling to pay, say, $200 to watch a Broadway musical whose entirely-black cast spends two hours shouting at and insulting them? Oh, there will always be some New Yorkers eager for abuse — remember Lennie Bernstein — but how many of them are there, and will they return often enough to keep the box office open? How many tourists will want the same thing, even once?

The same for symphony orchestras, books, and movies. And if they can’t march at the front of BLM marches, or whatever the cause du jour may be, why march at all? Greenpeace, PETA, the Sierra Club (did you know that John Muir is no more, banned as a racist?), outdoor recreation, even birdwatching, for fuck’s sake; all must go dark.

And I think that’s great.

Now this is more like it

Boy Gary shaking the dust from his feet and saying goodbye to Old Greenwich

Selling off Hillcrest Park, heading north, and south

Our New Mexico correspondent provides the backstory: Howard Stern producer Gary Dell’Abate selling $3.2M Greenwich mansion

Baba Booey is going bye-bye. 

Gary Dell’Abate, longtime executive producer of “The Howard Stern Show” who’s affectionately known to fans as Baba Booey, is selling the custom-built Connecticut mansion he has lived in since 2007. 

Located in the upscale Hillcrest Park’s Old Farm Lane community in Old Greenwich, the five-bedroom, seven-bathroom estate spans a massive 7,600 square feet and was specifically designed for the producer. 

The move comes after Dell’Abate, 60, spoke on the Stern show last year about possibly moving further north to Maine after he and his wife, Mary Dell’Abate, took a trip there and fell in love with the state. 

“The idea is to have a small place in Maine and maybe a small place in Florida, eventually,” he noted in a September 2020 episode. “I’ve got one big house — I can trade it in for two much smaller houses.”

Leaving aside the NY Post reporter’s naive idea of what a “mansion” is here in Greenwich, I wonder whether Baba Booey has priced homes in either the Pine or the Sunshine states; he may find that “much smaller” is as disappointing in one way as the reporter’s idea of a mansion is in the other. Of course, given his long tenure on the show — hell, he was there when I listened to Stern, and that had to be more than 25 years ago – I’m sure he can afford to buy whatever small houses he wants to, without breaking a sweat.

And good for him. He has long been a fixture in the town’s volunteer community, including serving on the Parks and Rec Committee, and will surely be missed by a grateful town.

Circling Back: By the way, I usually don’t post the name of buyer or seller, but in this case, I did check the internet before publishing, and a search for “Gary Dell’Abate Old Greenwich” instantly turned up his voter registration card, listing his address. That’s about as public as you can get, and Dell’Abate obviously doesn’t care, so I went for it.

Oh my, how could this have happened?

Britain’s “SAGE” — Scientific [sic] Advisory Group for Emergencies now admits that it deliberately used phony data to justify calling for extension of Britian’s lockdown.

SAGE's Covid death predictions may be downgraded by tens of thousands because the vaccines are performing better than expected against the Indian variant and the estimates were based on out of date data.

In papers submitted to the Government this week which ultimately led to Freedom Day being pushed back to July 19, modellers at Imperial College London warned that there could 200,000 more fatalities in the UK by next June. 

While that model looked at a 'worst-case' scenario, other universities forecasting the crisis for SAGE said it was realistic to expect 40,000 to die in that time. 

However, the gloomiest forecasts were based on assuming that two doses of AstraZeneca's vaccine gave as little as 77 per cent protection against being hospitalised with the Indian 'Delta' variant. 

They also worked on the assumption that being fully immunised with Pfizer's jab may only reduce admissions  by 84 per cent. The groups' central assumptions had protection slightly higher.

But it has since emerged the vaccines perform much better against the mutant strain than any of the estimates plugged into SAGE's models.

Public Health England's best guess is that two doses of AstraZeneca's jab cuts the risk of hospitalisation by up to 92 per cent, while the figure for Pfizer's was even higher at 96 per cent.

The new vaccine efficacy estimates, based on real-world data of 14,000 Delta cases in England, were made public just minutes after SAGE's frightening forecasts were published on Monday, which led many to assume it was too late to use PHE's data in its models.

Yet Dr Susan Hopkins, the deputy director of PHE's national infection service, admitted to MPs yesterday that the Government knew about the figures last Friday. It suggests ministers and their scientific advisers pressed ahead with publishing the calculations, which strengthened the argument for delaying June 21, despite knowing there was more accurate data available.

Tory MPs have questioned why the real-world data hadn't been given precedence and have called for the models to be re-calibrated with the new estimates.

For weeks now, “experts” have been claiming that the new India variant is causing an increase in hospitalizations of COVID patients, and the panic porn media has repeated, even shouted the news. Turns out, those “increased hospitalizations” amount to around 50 nationwide, while China Flu patient admissions are way down. Since the Indian version is now the most prevalent strain, it makes perfect sense that hospitalizations would reflect this. Perfect sense, even any sense at all, is not found in our media.

SAGE, by the way, is dominated by the Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, the same person who at the beginning of the flu excitement predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. (he attributed his original estimate of 22 million to a typo — uh huh). This is the same man who completely blew his assessment of the risk of Foot-and-mouth (probably should be called foot-in-mouth) disease back in 2001, yet he’s still around, setting policy.

John Fund writes:

[Imperial College epidemiologist Neil] Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. He also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die. There were fewer than 200 deaths. . . .

In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. In the U.K., there were only 177 deaths from BSE.

In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.

In 2009, a government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a “reasonable worst-case scenario” was that the swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths. In the end, swine flu killed 457 people in the U.K.

Last March, Ferguson admitted that his Imperial College model of the COVID-19 disease was based on undocumented, 13-year-old computer code that was intended to be used for a feared influenza pandemic, rather than a coronavirus. Ferguson declined to release his original code so other scientists could check his results. He only released a heavily revised set of code last week, after a six-week delay.

So the real scandal is: Why did anyone ever listen to this guy?

There’s no real science anymore, it’s all agenda-driven. Goebels is (wrongly) said to have declared,“When I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my revolver.” Whoever said it, I share his sentiment as it applies to “scientific opinion”.

That's a shame: Greenwich MLS has further restricted access to sold listings

so we’ll use old photos instead

7 Turner Drive sold yesterday for $6.725 million, substantially above the $5.885 the sellers paid for it in July 2018, and after just 28 days on market.

Mob Justice

Rick Moran, PJ Media:

A Young Composer Condemned Arson and Then the Mob Came for Him. Hard.

This is a story about the exercise of raw power and the cowardice of those unwilling to stand up to the injustice of it.

Daniel Elder is a Nashville composer of choral music who had been making a name for himself in the music industry. His first commercial album had just been released and things were going well for the young musician.

Then came the death of George Floyd, and riots and protests rocked Nashville. Elder lived a couple of blocks from the courthouse and his neighborhood was victimized by rioters who smashed windows in the courthouse, spray-painted graffiti and set it afire.

Elder was upset by social media posts in his feed that justified radicalism and violence. Although a self-described man of the center-left, he couldn’t abide people justifying destruction.

Before deleting his Instagram account in disgust, he made one final post:

“Enjoy burning it all down, you well-intentioned, blind people. I’m done.”

Reason.com:

The post was unambiguous: Elder was criticizing the activists who had set the courthouse on fire. He did not malign their cause or their ethnicity (and in fact, the perpetrator was white). He did not attack the Black Lives Matter movement or criminal justice reform. He implied that the militants had good motives (“well-intentioned”) but were oblivious (“blind”) when it came to the self-defeating nature of their tactics.

These sentiments are not racist; in fact, they are correct. Social science research and voter surveys show that violent and destructive protests tend to backfire, eroding support for the cause in question. While a small number of far-left agitators support these tactics, the overwhelming majority of people oppose looting, riots, and arson. That is especially true of those who live in communities of color.

When Elder woke up the next morning he was surprised to find his social media posts and email full of hate, invective, and accusations that he was a “racist” and “white supremacist.”

“I’ve relatively recently become aware of your work and have enjoyed your compositions for their sensitivity and artistry,” wrote one former fan. “However, after learning of your insensitive comments on social media, however perceived as misunderstood, I’ve decided to unsubscribe from your [YouTube] channel and will no longer recommend your compositions to colleagues.”

A music department head threatened to ban his music from the school unless he apologized.

“I am a choir director and department head for the music department for a private school in Ohio,” the department head declared. “I want to inform you that your rhetoric surrounding the recent protests is unacceptable and my school will not be programming your music unless and until a public apology is issued.”

Almost immediately after the tumult began, his publisher, GIA Publications, suggested he apologize. The bastards even wrote him an apology that they wanted him to post.

“There is no justification that I can offer for my post,” the publisher wrote for Elder. “So, rather than try to offer an excuse for what was done, I offer a promise for what I will do going forward. I commit to making amends and to dialogue. I commit to continue educating myself about privilege and bias. I commit to continue seeking an understanding of the experience of others, especially the Black community. I know that working for justice requires that we each first act justly. My work begins now.”

“I chose to be that guy who didn’t issue the apology,” he says. “Things went from there and it wasn’t good.”

It turned from simply nauseating to inexplicably bizarre.

Within hours, GIA issued a denunciation of Elder.

“The views expressed in composer Daniel Elder’s incendiary social media post on Sunday evening do not reflect the values of GIA or our employees,” it read. “GIA opposes racism in all its forms and is committed to do what Michelle Obama called ‘the honest, uncomfortable work of rooting it out.'”

What “incendiary” statement was that? Elder had the misfortune of giving people who spend all day looking±searching for something to be offended by or that they can play the race card on—a clear opening.

There are no clear boundaries that normal people can avoid and not transgress. But that’s the point, isn’t it? If everyone is worried about causing offense, the racial bullies win. They alone get to decide what is offensive and what is not. They alone decide what is racist and what isn’t.

That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of very few people. And as the Elder case shows, they regularly abuse it over trifles.

“Powerless,” indeed.

I have a friend who escaped to the US when communism collapsed in her native Poland. The most wonderful thing about her new life, she told me, was that she could have a conversation in a coffee shop, or in a social gathering and speak unguardedly, without looking over her shoulder or worrying about someone reporting her to the authorities. That freedom, she insisted, was worth far more than even the fully-stocked shops in America, say, or the variety of entertainment offered in theaters.

That was then. Flash forward twenty years to California, where I have a friend in the music industry, earning in the high six-figures. That income makes him more, not less vulnerable to the horde, because there’s much more to lose, and as a conservative and (gasp!) Christian, he knows that one wrong comment to the wrong person can lead to his denunciation and the destruction of his career, instantly. As the result, he stays off all social media, and constantly monitors what he says both when working and among “friends”. This story about fellow musician Daniel Elder will, I’m sure, drive him even deeper underground.

We’re back to the days of Polish coffee houses and soon, 4:00 A.M. raids.

I'm sure voting is also too stressful for the poor, delicate things

“if it saves the life of just one child ….”

WHO demands that women of “childbearing age” not drink alcohol

Think this could never happen? Did you ever think the WHO could order the world’s entire population to be locked in its homes and the global economy shut down? Successful proof of concept experiments always encourage more.

But hey, follow the science, wherever it leads. Like the FDA forbidding ignorant, child-like darkies from smoking menthol cigarettes, for instance, “for their own good”.

Or requiring children to wear useless, suffocating masks at summer camp, “out of an abundance of caution”.

We’ll save global warming for another post.

"Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice".

He’s not this dumb (well, his masters aren’t)

Biden’s handlers have flipped Hanlon’s Razor on its head. Over at PJ Media, Stephen Green asks, “What is Biden’s Middle East Policy, Anyway?” He gives an answer, but doesn’t address to my satisfaction the ultimate question: why? I think I know.

There’s a seeming chaos, even a malicious randomness to the Biden administration’s posture toward the Middle East, but a careful examination reveals an actual policy at work.

Policy, whether domestic or foreign, consists of a series of actions designed to achieve a desired goal.

With that in mind, let’s take a quick look back at Presidentish Joe Biden’s first five months in office, and I think you’ll see his administration’s Middle East policy reveal itself.

In no particular order:

Biden’s first action on Middle East policy was actually domestic: his Day One executive order halting the Keystone XL pipeline. While there are ramifications beyond the U.S. and the Mideast (China will benefit, too), it’s part of a larger picture of Biden’s war against domestic energy production. Just days later, Biden would sign another order banning “any new fracking on federal lands despite his campaign promise not to ban the practice.” (A judge has since blocked that order, but we’ll see what happens.)

The less energy we produce domestically, the more we have to purchase from overseas — including the Mideast. More on that shortly.

In April, Biden restored millions in “humanitarian” aid (that Trump had cut) to Palestinian groups. This, even after the White House had “privately confirmed to Congress” that “the Palestinian Authority has continued to use international aid money to reward terrorists” back in March.

American taxpayers are back in the business of subsidizing terrorism. And the thing about subsidies is, you subsidize that which you want more of.

But Hamas and Hezbollah are small beer compared to Iran, with whom Biden has engaged in reckless appeasement.

Foreign Policy noted in April that “Biden has inherited a relatively peaceful Middle East,” yet nevertheless “is considering lifting terrorism-related sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran.”

Iran had been left largely broke by Trump’s sanctions, and far less able to continue its imperialist efforts in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. Still, Biden last February lifted some of Trump’s sanctions and will press for even more relief for the Mullahs’ regime. That’s up to and including a revived version of Barack Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal, which will fill Tehran’s coffers full once more.

Former Trump national security council member Richard Goldberg called it “insane,” but I’d call it “evil.”

Perhaps most telling was White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s blithe dismissal of the historic Abraham Accords, which brought official peace between Israel and seven Arab nations. Originally signed in August of 2020 by only Israel and the UAE, the Accords were designed by the Trump administration to bring more Arab nations on board, as soon as they were ready — and sure enough, six more nations quickly signed on. Given time, more were sure to follow, with perhaps even Saudi Arabia as the capstone.

Trump’s people — Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner — took advantage of two things. First, American energy independence was a wake-up call to the Arab world that American dollars wouldn’t be so easy to come by any longer. The second was Trump’s willingness to cut out the Palestinian leadership, which isn’t interested in peace, anyway.

Trump made peace where he could, opening up doors to more peace deals in the future.

Nevertheless, Psaki described the Accords like so: “Aside from putting forward a peace proposal that was dead on arrival, we don’t think they did anything constructive, really, to bring an end to the longstanding conflict in the Middle East.”

Combined with reinstating aid to Palestinian terror organizations, the message from the White House is clear: Any further peace process will have to go through the intransigent Palestinian leadership — and therefore there will be no peace.

…

All of this is the long way of saying something I’ve been quipping at Instapundit this week: Biden is making us more dependent on Middle East oil while at the same time weakening our position there and strengthening destabilizing influences like Hamas and Iran’s Islamist regime.

So what is Joe Biden’s Middle East policy?

It’s the same as his domestic policy: to hobble America’s economic, military, and social strengths by emboldening and enriching the very worst among us.

It’s my belief that, with the Kung Flu Fraud winding down, Biden’s crew needs a new national crisis to advance its agenda still further. Return the country to dependence on foreign (Middle East) oil, destroy our own energy structure, then set the Middle East afire again. Bingo, the oil embargoes are back, the economy shuts down again, the government can push its Green reset program further and faster, and curtail our freedoms even more than it already has.

Stephen Green calls Biden’s new friendship with Iran “evil”, but I think the whole plan is. The smart set in Washington needs a war and is determined to get one. And the jackals of the press will howl their approval.

It wouldn't surprise me if this one is going via multiple-bids

74 Cedar Cliff Road, Riverside, priced at $4.699, pending after 12 days. Built in 1933, it’s been renovated, updated and expanded over the years, obviously. It’s certainly a different house from when the Barnum family lived here long ago.

It’s a popular house, on a popular street. It was listed for $3.250 in 2005, and this owner had an accepted offer of $3.410 in mere days.

And even a price war in Cos Cob (!)

12 Maplewood Drive asked $1.875 million, got $1.972. That’s not all that much higher than the $1.775 the sellers paid for it in 2006, but this time it went to contract in 13 days, whereas the previous sale took 283.

Mapllewoo’s a nice street, just one street over from Laughlin Park and an easy walk to the school, the library, and the train. And the house is cute, which always helps.

The photos have been taken down from the web, but here are few taken from the GMLS site.