Mick Hartley

Blog

  • Holocaust Memorial Day

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  • First person in Ireland to marry themself

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  • More likely that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a lab leak

    re likely that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a laboratory leak rather than emerging from nature, a spokesman said.

    The question of the source of the virus that has killed more than seven million people is politically charged and China has repeatedly denied responsibility.

    For years the CIA said it could not definitively say what Covid’s origins were but the spy agency has now shifted that assessment while stressing the finding was “low confidence”.

    “CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” a spokesman said in a statement on Saturday….

    In his first interview since being confirmed by the Senate as the new director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe said one of his first priorities was for the agency to make a public declaration on its assessment of the origins of Covid.

    “That’s a day one thing for me,” he told Breitbart. “I’ve been on record as you know in saying I think our intelligence, our science, and our common sense all really dictate that the origin of Covid was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

    Also:

    The Trump administration is preparing an executive order that would halt federal funding, at least temporarily, for a risky and controversial kind of research into viruses that makes the pathogens more dangerous or contagious.

    The goal of the order would be to stop scientists with U.S. funding from conducting “gain-of-function” research on viruses that could endanger human health, people familiar with the plans said….

    Some Republicans have blamed the Covid-19 pandemic on gain-of-function research. Defenders say it helps scientists assess the potential of pathogens to infect humans and find ways to combat them.

    President Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, has expressed support for a pause on the research.

    Doesn't seem such a bad idea – considering, you know, that it's quite possible that earlier “gain-of-function” research on viruses shut the world down and caused the death of some 7 million people.

  • Engaged and holding on tight

    there may well be cultural changes that last, because Trump is pushing at a door which — to the distress of progressive Democrats — seems to be wide open.

    Immigration is top of this category. Already Democrats are beginning a long, painful conversation about whether they want to oppose the deportation of criminals: a deportation bill named after Laken Riley, who was murdered by an illegal immigrant, has already passed both houses of Congress and done so with the backing of Democratic politicians.

    The same is likely to happen with bills mandating promotions in government based on merit rather than skin colour.

    But the biggest of the Trump open doors is on sex and gender. His executive order on the subject was tightly written and clearly focused. He has not (yet) waded into the rights and wrongs of childhood gender transition, but he has expressed very clearly a desire to see trans women out of female sport and out of female prisons. Both are, according to opinion polls, popular policies. Do the Democrats want to fight to keep biological males in prisons with women?

    To judge from the Dems' reaction so far, the answer is, yes. It's the hill they're choosing to die on.

    The problem — whisper it — is that for many Americans, including a fair swathe of Democratic party voters, their party has become the extremists.

    Polls taken during Trump’s first week suggest some enthusiasm for the new world. A CBS poll finds nearly a quarter of Kamala Harris voters declaring themselves optimistic about the next four years. To this cross-party group, Trump is not making America great again. He is making it normal again.

    They don’t want to buy Greenland, according to CBS. But the threat has their attention. At the start of the wild ride ahead, they are engaged and holding on tight.

    The comments, it's fair to say, are mixed:

    "What an appalling, fawning and obsequious article."

    "The article is none of these things. It is scarily prescient for those of us who despise Trump, as it recognises that he might actually get some things right."

  • The decline of teen culture

    , later, reggae. It was the sheer joy of the music, I think – music which was genuine, undeniably from the streets, and as far away from middle-class hippies as you could hope for. And the connection with alienated black youth. So we got all that Skinhead Moonstomp and the like, which was built on by Madness and the whole Two-Tone thing. But I digress…

    Now, recently, this perpetual style revolution seems to have stopped. Teens are stuck in their bedrooms, on social media. They're prey to all these social contagions, like gender dysphoria. They (seem to be) miserable, anxious, wondering which particular form of mental problem suits them best.

    Back in the day there was always this thing about corporate culture catching up and taking over. The Man. As soon as a youth movement was established, the suits moved in and soaked it up, and rebellious youth moved on to the next style. That was part of the dynamic. Now the suits – the tech bros – seem to have won. Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, and TikTok and the rest. With, on the other side, the dictates of DEI and identity politics providing the predetermined categories into which you're allowed to fit.

    Hadley ends with the hope that things get better:

    It will be fascinating to see how young people define themselves in this Trump era. I hope they find a way to do it with more joy than last time around, when Greta Thunberg’s anxious, unhappy face seemed emblematic of her generation. Say what you want about 1990s magazines as a youth movement, but at least they had a sense of humour. And I hope they find something that allows for a collective experience, rather than the atomised loneliness fostered by the internet. Yes, things are bad, but the style magazines emerged in the Thatcher era, so you can create fun in the bleakest of times. It’s your turn now, Gen Z: put your best Face forward.

    Well…we'll see.

  • Pretend complex

    and one male father, it is only pretend "complex" for clicks" pic.twitter.com/q1LHn4Hj5Y

    — Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) January 25, 2025

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Ridiculous Guardian article here.

  • Pittsburgh panorama

    Ca. 1910. "Schenley Park and vicinity. Panorama shows the University of Pittsburgh, Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, Carnegie Museum and Library, the Hotel Schenley, Forbes Field, Phipps Conservatory and Schenley Park. Also shown are the neighborhoods of Schenley Farms, Oakland, Shadyside, East Liberty and Squirrel Hill."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Co.]

    A composite of four 8×10 inch glass negatives. To be viewed full size (click on image).

  • Man silenced

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  • Imposing delusional ideas on impressionable young people

    ion Secretary Bridget Phillipson, pointing out that peer-on-peer abuse is affecting ever younger children, including in primary schools.

    Yet many schools are switching to “gender neutral” toilets, forcing girls to share facilities with boys. The prospect of teenage girls having to change tampons within feet of jeering adolescent boys doesn’t appear to worry headteachers eager to demonstrate their commitment to gender ideology. The campaign group For Women Scotland has found that at least 60% of Scottish secondary schools allow “trans” children to use the toilets designated for the opposite sex, regardless of how other pupils feel.

    What this represents is an increasingly hostile climate for girls. No one should be surprised if some respond by pretending that they’re not female at all, using the language they’ve been taught in sex education lessons to declare themselves trans or non-binary. This has been promoted by influential organisations and even Government ministers, who have been more concerned with being “trans allies” than safeguarding….

    This is state-sanctioned child abuse. But when gender ideology has established such a hold in education, it’s easy to see how an unhappy or autistic child might think it’s the answer to their distress. The latest figures, if scaled up nationally, would mean that one in every 1,200 kids aged 18 and under had a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. At least the present government has stopped the practice of prescribing puberty blockers, but it needs to go much further.

    There will always be young people, disproportionately girls, who find growing up difficult. Encouraging them to think they were born in the wrong body is no more ethical than affirming weight loss in girls who have anorexia. This is an entirely artificial phenomenon, created by activists determined to impose delusional ideas on impressionable young people. The damage is already apparent, and it needs to be removed from the education system without delay.

  • Undermining Cass

    A sober assessment of the current gender state of play from Mary Wakefield at the Spectator:

    Too many conservatives are behaving as if Donald Trump’s inauguration has somehow done to wokery what garlic does to a vampire; as if they can now sit back and watch the orange mist vaporise ideological insanity across the West. A study released today by the University of York shows just how crazy this sort of complacency is.

    Academics analysed GP records and discovered what looks like a 50-fold increase in diagnoses of gender dysphoria in children between 2011 and 2021. They estimate that there were 10,000 diagnoses made in 2021, up from just 200 in 2011. It’s horrifying, especially when you consider all the countless others who currently self-identify as trans and are now somewhere in the rainbow pipeline, drifting towards diagnosis.

    Do MPs imagine this is some sort of high-water mark, before the turn of the trans tide? It’s really not. The response to the story makes that perfectly plain. If we really were waking up, as a nation, to the state our kids are in, there’d be horrified comments from doctors and a commitment across Whitehall to addressing the situation; we’d be discussing the fact that the Stonewall agenda has grown live ivy into, and around, all the institutions we assume will keep children safe. In schools and in after-school clubs, on TV and online, children are surrounded by adults who actually suggest to them gender dysphoria may be a cause of their ordinary anxieties.

    As noted in the previous post, Stonewall may be on the way out, but its influence remains. It's "grown live ivy into, and around, all the institutions we assume will keep children safe", as Wakefield has it.

    On Wednesday, members of the Women and Equalities Committee (WESC) met to discuss the “evidence base on the safety and effectiveness of puberty blockers.” As Hannah Barnes, (author of Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service), says, it was an appalling sign of what’s to come.

    Dr Hilary Cass spent four years looking into gender dysphoria and puberty blockers, but she was not invited to contribute. Instead, the committee heard from consultant paediatric endocrinologist Professor Gary Butler, who was responsible for prescribing medication, including puberty blockers and hormones, to young people at University College London Hospitals; and from Professor Simon Giordano, who has argued that it is in the best interests of a child to offer puberty blockers early. It seems to me that both of these two are so deep into sunk cost that they’ve almost no choice but to keep sinking.

    Barnes said: “That the committee would try to better in two hours what the Cass Review spent four years carefully investigating is incomprehensible.”

    If even after the Cass review – even after all the sad, sometimes horrifying stories of people who’ve “detransitioned” – politicians still cling to the idea of gendered souls, what hope do school children have?

    Hannah Barnes' article at the New Statesman on the WESC meeting – Are politicians trying to undermine the Cass Review?

Powered by