Isn’t it nice to hear The Cowsills again? I know, I don’t think so either. Other than that sappy song and being the inspiration for “The Partridge Family” (which gave us Danny Bonaduce as well as the late, lamented David Cassidy), the group’s major contribution to culture was probably their rendition of the “Love American Style” theme song.
Let me begin with the parks: on the various news channels I kept hearing how the government shut-down was really beginning to hurt the general public because National Parks are closing and tourist attractions in D.C. have reduced hours. Talk about wealthy, privileged nation problems! Wow.
Meanwhile…
1. Doing my Ann Althouse imitation (The Madison, Wis. bloggress is obsessed with AI bots, especially Grok, and regularly writes about her conversations with them, I asked the WordPress bot to write an “overview of major ethical issues in today’s news.” “This overview highlights some of the most prominent ethical concerns currently making headlines,” the bot began. It listed six: AI and data privacy, misinformation and media integrity, environmental Responsibility and climate change, social justice and “equity,” corporate governance, and global health and vaccine distribution.
No trans issues. No political violence. No judicial bias and overreach, no sanctuary cities and resistance to immigration enforcement. Apparently the government shut-down has nothing to do with ethics either. I did like this phrase: “As climate change intensifies…”
2. Now the Pope. He was asked to defend a ridiculous “Lifetime Achievement Award for support to immigrants” proposed by Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, an ally and friend of Leo’s, to be bestowed on long-time Ethics Villain Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill). Durbin is an abortion fan, so real Catholics were offended by the award, which Durbin —wisely, for a change—decided to turn down. In the process of blathering on about how opposing abortion wasn’t really “pro-life”, the Pope gratuitously referred to “inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States.” I wrote about the hypocrisy of a Pope saying this sort of thing with Pope Francis, here. It’s essentially the same post I would write now, though it would be nice if God’s messenger would eschew deceit: immigrants are treated just fine in the U.S., and it is illegal immigrants that the Pope thinks are treated badly, apparently by not letting them get away with breaking our laws. The comments Althouse got on her flagging of the Pope’s remarks yesterday were remarkable, with almost all commenters mocking the Pope and collectively making the same points I had regarding Pope Francis. And that’s supposedly a left-leaning blog.
3. I don’t see how the judicial stays of Trump’s National Guard deployment in LA and Portland (and eventually, I assume, Chicago) survives SCOTUS review. The acts of violence against ICE agents and the deliberate refusal of local police officers to ensure that they can do their job fit the terms of the Insurrection Act. Democratic Party figures like the Illinois Governor saying otherwise on the Sunday news shows were engaging in that old standby, “It isn’t what it is.”
4. And speaking of political violence, Judge Deborah Boardman sentenced Nicholas Roske to eight years in prison last week for attempting to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh in June 2022 in the weeks before the Supreme Court’s landmark Dobbs decision. Roske now goes by “Sophie” and identifies as transgender. This apparently worked in his favor by moving the sensitive judge to give him well below the Federal sentencing guidelines for trying to kill a SCOTUS Justice who was daring to overrule Roe v. Wade. Of course, I am reading Axis media “Republicans pounce” framings of the story, but again, everyone should be disturbed by the sentence in the wake of the Charley Kirk murder and the continuing rationalization of political violence by the Mad Left. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years for his role in organizing the J-6 riot. Maybe the judge would have been more lenient if he called himself “Sophie.”
5. Addendum: there have certainly been a welter of transy mass shooters and assassins lately. What might we take from that? That gender dysphoria is, in fact, a signpost of mental instability, which might lead us to conclude that society should not be glorifying it? That the stress of dealing with the process of “becoming” the opposite sex is so exacerbated by the hostility and bias on the Right that these people snap, thus mandating compassion and mercy from the justice system?
6. On sombreros...Is it really racist to make memes showing Democratic leaders in sombreros and Frito Bandito mustaches to symbolize their support of now expiring Obama health care subsidies that are available to non-citizens? Memes are just modern political cartoons and they communicate in symbols and satire exactly the same way. The “Racist!” defense to legitimate criticism is apparently evergreen on the progressive side: when a metaphorical shot hurts, the default defense isn’t facts and logic, but to cry racism.
Here, courtesy of the Powerline blog’s weekly memefest, are examples of the sombrero orgy by conservative wags. (Oh, before that: No, it is not Presidential or ethical leadership for the President of the United States to indulge in sombrero gags. But…the Julie Principle.)
and finally….
7. (Added) Just read that “Rosie O’Donnell is applying for Irish citizenship.” Why is this news? Who cares, except for Stage 5 Trump Derangement victims who will cheer, “You go girl, whoever you were”? There is so much information the public should know and is never told about; there is no excuse for taking up any time or space reporting a non-story like that. Next up: “Pauly Shore is constipated.”
Ethics Alarms 
Addendum: there have certainly been a welter of transy mass shooters and assassins lately. What might we take from that? That gender dysphoria is, in fact, a signpost of mental instability, which might lead us to conclude that society should be glorifying it? The stress of dealing with the process of “becoming” the opposite sex is so exacerbated by the hostility and bias on the Right that these people snap, thus mandating compassion and mercy from the justice system?
Off the top: The reality is that trans-people, specifically, and queer-people, generally, tend to rack up diagnoses like ticker tape at a Pride parade.
But in mitigation: I’m not sure if queer people are actually less well, or just more diagnosed. In order to get a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and transition, you usually have to see a licensed therapist, so the majority of the population has had the opportunity to be diagnosed. And maybe I’m jaded, but I have the impression that on a long enough timeframe, anyone walking into a therapist’s office will eventually end up leaving with a diagnosis of something. Regardless, I have it in the back of my head that conservatives probably see less value in therapy, and are less likely to go, maybe them unlikely to receive a diagnosis. I’m probably on the autism spectrum, and I’m sure that were I born 20 years later than I was, I’d probably have been diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin, but I’m also not trying to hack my junk off, and think that I have good relationships, so I don’t see a reason to go.
Also in mitigation: I’m not sure that all queer people are queer, so much as there’s a nugget of queer people surrounded by a penumbra of mentally unwell people who say they’re queer because the lobby has great PR and they like the trappings of being queer. I know trans people, I watched them grow up in a time where being trans didn’t have the infrastructure it does today, they struggled like the kids today can’t imagine. Did that discourage some level of transition? Probably. But it also meant that the people who transitioned meant it. We went from tractions of a percentage of people being trans and maybe 3% of the population being gay, to entire classrooms identifying as some brand of queer. I’m not sure that’s real, so much as it is a whole lot of unwell people acting on a desire to belong to something that seems outwardly very accepting and loving.
Which leads me to my last mitigation: I’m not sure whether the problem is that trans kids aren’t alright, so much as the kids, generally, aren’t alright, and kids have always skewed progressive and have never been more likely to identify as trans. What I think is that we have a massive undiagnosed mental health problem – That the last decade has been exceptionally rough on people; From the isolation of lockdown, to the grip of screentime, to the stress induced by a 24 hour news cycle, people are just looking for happy escapism, and where you’d usually expect to find happy escapism, you instead find more politics and angry people. Movies have gotten darker, humor isn’t as safe as it used to be, people are cutting their families off over political stances that none of them have any real control over… And this is radicalizing people. And I think the younger they are, the worse of they are, and we on the right might be the beneficiaries of age demographics in politics… I believe it likely that if the majority of people under 25 polled Republican, we would be seeing a slew of right-wing violence very akin to what we’re asking the left to justify. The rhetoric doesn’t help, but I’m not sure the rhetoric is the cause, rather than the symptom.
It does seem that the trans community has, on average, a significantly increased chance of psychological comorbidities. I read somewhere (so this should be taken with a whole dang shaker of salt) that one of the most common other diagnoses that goes along with gender dysphoria is that of depression. Ignoring the chicken and egg nature of WHY they are depressed, when people are diagnosed with depression, they tend to get depression medicines. Many depression medicines, especially those used for people with more diagnoses than just standard depression, have a potential side effect of psychosis, which rarely comes as a severe psychosis and even more rarely becomes a dangerous one. In addition I read somewhere that the trans community has a higher than average chance of self-medicating with marijuana (again, with no easily found sources, take with more than a grain of salt). Marijuana, especially the enhanced versions easily available today, has a side effect of potentially violent psychosis. So now we have a community that gets a higher than average amount of drugs that potentially cause psychosis, even violent psychosis, and even if the percent chance of getting to the violent psychosis is small, it still raises their rates well about the average population.
I also wonder about the violent rhetoric. Of course, you have the right for the government to not punish you for whatever you say, but one of my favorite Catholic speakers is a psychologist and he brought up an interesting point. Regardless of governmental intervention, he said that for the vast majority of normal, healthy people, hearing inflammatory rhetoric will not cause you to take up arms and kill people. But, for the vast majority of his patients, who are not mentally well, when you are told and told often, that someone (or a group of someones) is an existential threat and they are compared to villains like Hitler, the Nazis, etc., then they are more likely to see this as true and imminent threat to their personal well being. We have, in our human makeup, the tendency to want to rid ourselves of a real and immediate threat. I know that if someone came at me or my children with the intent to kill us, I’d want to shoot them before they could do so. Of course, I recognize that no matter who the politician is or what they say, they are not equivalent to a man with a weapon charging me. However, according to this psychologist, many of his patients do not have the same ability that I do, and as they are told that there is an imminent threat to themselves and an existential threat to something they hold dear, they are more likely to take a violent approach. He cautions that the rhetoric, while acceptable to the majority, is actually inciting a minority with mental health conditions.
To me, these situations combine in an ugly fashion. We have a group of people with a higher than average set of mental issues, with a higher than average exposure to drugs that makes certain conclusions more likely and violence to be a more acceptable solution, fed rhetoric that leads a certain mentality, enhanced by illness and drugs, to violence.
Taking these into account, my conclusions are as follows. Should we tone down the rhetoric? Yes. Is the rhetoric fully to blame? No. Is the trans community inherently dangerous as potential shooters? Not without other factors considered. Should we be concerned about marijuana and/or depression meds that have small probabilities of psychoses? Yes. What can we do? Nothing practical seems to be a real solution. We will not put the weed back in the jar. We do not want to stigmatize getting help for mental illness. We should not alienate those who consider themselves as trans, even as we mean to assure the majority of them (intersex is a whole ‘nother ball game) that their biological sex is more important than some imagined “gender” and there is no surgery that will do more than basic cosmetics. The best we can do is try and tone down the rhetoric, but that can only be privately handled, so our “do something” mentality is not going to come to a solution.
Parks: Of course, they are emphasizing the negative affects of the shutdown. The job of the politicians is to cause the shutdown; the job of the media is to explain how it affects the common man and why it’s the Republicans fault.
Grok: Grok only knows what it’s told is important. AI isn’t sentient yet. It’s just a Democratic Party Talking Point bot.
Pope: And as an American, he should be smart enough to understand the difference between legally-present immigrants and not-legally-present illegal immigrants.
ICE: My TDS-suffering sister is taking her students to Chicago and made sure to mention how scared they all are. They are making sure all their documents are in order and she is frightened that it won’t be enough. Yes, for some reason, she thinks the thing most dangerous about Chicago is ICE.
Trans-sentencing: Oh, come now, you know that only fascists and literal Nazis like Kavanaugh or the Speaker of the Virginia House, his wife and children deserve to be treated harshly. And, to channel Sideshow Bob here, what type of crime is attempted murder anyway? Do they give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry?
Addendum: These are people who have been allowed to believe something that isn’t true, joined with a few loudmouthed opportunists. Should we be surprised that they also believe other leftist propaganda that isn’t true, such as everyone who opposes trans ideology is a fascist who wants kids dead and deserve whatever they get?
Sombreros: No, it’s not racist. It’s just really stupid.
Rosie: Good riddance. Is she keeping her U.S. citizenship? Trying to have her cake and eat it, too? Or is she really going to become solely an Irish citizen and put her future personal liberty in the hands of a fickle European country?
You should tell your sister to bring her students here to Des Moines. Our school superintendent reports no ICE activit…oh, wait…
“the deliberate refusal of local police officers”
They’re under orders not to help surely.
On trans/mental related shootyness:
For the U.S., can the types of mass shootings be reasonably categorized as culturally white/black events?
Twice per week, I have the opportunity to be in an environment where there is a thorough mixed of black and white people. The obvious difference between people other than skin color is that black people are 99% emotionally expressive about everything and willing to openly say stuff all day long in an animated way that would otherwise get a white person fired or cancelled. The white people in this environment are all 99% stoic.
What I take from this contrast is that white culture is emotionally constipated, and for the mentally unhinged who have not outlet, eventually expression results in the school shootings, assassinations etc. However, in the black community emotional communication is the norm and the shootings are largely gang related or otherwise escalations of a personal fight between individuals or groups rather than targeted political acts.
That is emotional expression is healthy. Taking some inspiration from Steve Harvey.
https://youtu.be/ijBR77iK3Tw?si=8jjlprABHpaHp-_5&t=130
A propos of nothing, Rush is going to tour in 2026! Wahoo!!
https://www.rush.com/rush-fifty-something-tour/
Here a couple of comments: