EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: These BLS downward revisions have become a bad habit — or something worse. “Worse, had the BLS not drastically slashed the May number from 9.582MM to a laughable 9.165MM, the drop would have been almost 800K job openings. And yes, today’s downward revision… continues the recent trend of every single data point in the Biden administration being revised sharply lower in subsequent month(s), in a coordinated propaganda attempt to make the economy look stronger, then quietly revise it away when everyone forgets.”
They promise better lives for workers, but they deliver deprivation and suffering.
They promise harmony, but the reality of socialists societies is division and discord.
One obvious conclusion is that communists are despicable people That’s true, and the people who give aid and comfort to communists also deserve scorn.
Another conclusion is that we should disbelieve anything communists say.
Based on the above examples, that would be an understandable conclusion.
But I have found a communist who is semi-truthful. His name is Kohei Saito and I trust him because he is telling people that his policies will lead to less prosperity.
Here are some excerpts from a New York Timesstory by Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno.
When Kohei Saito decided to write about “degrowth communism,” his editor was understandably skeptical. Communism is unpopular in Japan. …So a book arguing that Japan should view its current condition of population decline and economic stagnation not as a crisis, but as an opportunity for Marxist reinvention, sounded like a tough sell. But…Mr. Saito’s book “Capital in the Anthropocene” has sold more than 500,000 copies, exceeding his wildest imaginings. Mr. Saito, a philosophy professor at the University of Tokyo, appears regularly in Japanese media to discuss his ideas. …Mr. Saito said, …“there are too many cars, too many skyscrapers, too many convenience stores, too much fast fashion,”… Mr. Saito is not clear exactly what shape a world under degrowth communism would take, but he insists that it would be…focused on expanding communal resources.
It is safe to say that Mr. Saito is an immoral idiot.
But I have to give him credit for accidental honesty. Communism is very capable of delivering “degrowth.”
If Japan follows Saito’s advice, it is a sure bet that there will be fewer cars, fewer skyscrapers, fewer convenience stores, and less fashion.
By the way, in addition to being an immoral idiot, Mr. Saito is also a hypocrite (a common problem on the left).
Mr. Saito’s critics have called him out for castigating the capitalist system he himself has benefited from… He recently moved into a three-story home in an upscale neighborhood..
It’s unfortunate that the New York Times decided to devote attention to a crank like Saito, though I guess it is somewhat newsworthy that he has sold 500,000 books.
So I won’t criticize the authors for writing the story. But I can’t resist pointing out some economic illiteracy in their report. They write about supposed problems with capitalism, but the Japanese policies they cite – easy money and wasteful spending – are examples of statism.
Mr. Saito has tapped into what he describes as a growing disillusionment in Japan with capitalism’s ability to solve the problems people see around them… Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, has worked for years to promote economic growth… But there are strong indications that the country’s…policies of ultracheap money and big government spending are reaching their limits. The interventions have done little to stimulate growth.
Keynesian policies didn’t work? At the risk of being overly sarcastic, I’m shocked, shocked.
I’ll close with a few general observations about Japanese economic policy.
The good news is that post-war capitalism enabled Japan to become reasonably prosperous.
Wildlife and parks wants to exterminate the cats of San Juan.
The National Park Service is once more taking aim at the boriqua gatos and seeks to exterminate them. Make your voice heard. Because Viejo San Juan without gatos is unthinkable.
This ill-conceived and murderous idea garnered national media attention for its nastiness and dishonesty. Literally no one in Puerto Rico wants this: not the locals, not the tourists, no one. Google “cats of old san juan” and look at images. there are a zillion.
Tourists take these pictures in the ten’s of thousands every year. Ask anyone what they remember about old San Juan. See how often you hear “cats.” If these gatos got royalties from their images, they could afford to buy the parks for themselves.
This plan is classic bureaucratic overreach with little thought and less concern for the desires of those these policies would affect. The National Park Service is deeply in the wrong here
The last attempt at this awful plan led to an absolute outpouring of response. Their website crashed from the volume of comments. Their meetings were jammed with people making impassioned speeches against this mean-spirited policy of extermination.
And they were not going to be denied.
On Wednesday night, dozens of people gathered for the first of two public meetings on the issue. But when National Park Service officials said there would be no hearing and asked people to only write down their comments, the crowd erupted in anger.
“This doesn’t make sense!”
“We have doubts! We have questions!”
“Let’s defend the cats!”
The crowd kept yelling, demanding a public hearing until officials relented. They opened the doors to a small theater as one elderly activist blew on the emergency whistle of his keychain to herd the crowd in.
People spoke one by one amid loud applause. Their biggest concern was that the cats would be euthanized, even though the National Park said it is still receiving public comments and that any decision would be based on those.
Yeah, that’s right. We damn near had a cat riot here.
Bueno.
“I’m not alone in wanting to know the answers,” he (Toru Dodo, Old San Juan resident) said amid claps and cheers. “These are one of the wonders of Old San Juan.”
Yes.
Yes they are.
And I, for one, would have them remain so now and always.
Many have asked for an update on this matter and until now, there appeared to be no update to give. It seemed that the NPS had slunk off and abandoned this policy. But, not so.
Now, in the dog days of summer when many are away, they are trying this again and the game they are playing is even more dishonest this time.
And so once more, I will reach out to help ensure that they are stopped.
Because this one matters and there is no “undo” on extermination.
Last time, they came with two plans:
Do nothing and leave the cats be.
Pay someone to trap and “remove” the cats (And kill them. Make no mistake about this part. They are not being re-homed, adopted, or sent to some nice neighborhood. There is zero money or resources for that. They will be murdered wholesale and NPS are using euphemisms and pretending this is not so to mask how ghoulish this plan is.)
They were so overwhelmingly told to take a hike and that everyone wanted plan one that any reasonable or responsive group would have dropped the matter.
But that is not who these people are.
So they come back with option 3 which a careful reader will rapidly realize is just option 2 with a 6-month lag as though this minor reprieve somehow makes it OK.
Well, it doesn’t.
(highlight mine)
They claim this will “improve the visitor experience” but that is rank tripe. The visitors come to see the cats. They are so beloved that local shops sell “Cats of Old San Juan” calendars to tourists. Everyone stops to pet and feed them.
And you know what the other option is? Rats. Lots and lots of rats. I wonder how the visitors will feel about this? This is “kill all the wolves in Yellowstone”-level stupidity brought to you by the same people who made that very mistake.
And the plan has zero chance of working. It will just be a needless massacre.
It focuses just on the parks and greenways that surround and penetrate Old San Juan. But cats do not read “stay out” signs. Nor should they have to. This is the very definition of “attractive nuisance” in a tort sense and it’s just going to pull in more and more cats who will see an empty park and walk in. Because that’s what cats do. Pretending otherwise is as dishonest as pretending that "trapped and removed” does not mean “killed.”
This is the place where banal bureaucratic diktat becomes slaughter.
And this needs to have a serious end put to it.
Because enough is enough.
There is a special bond with these animals and a great many people (including me) make daily habits of feeding them. And no one but these “Who asked you anyway?” jumped up park managers wants this. It’s a way of life and a source of joy.
“This is like Disney World for cats,” said Alfonso Ocasio, who has been going to Old San Juan since 2014 to feed the cats a couple times a week. “I don’t know how these people dare face the world with their proposal.”
Exactamente.
Their proposals are just plain despicable.
Cats were introduced to Puerto Rico to battle plagues of rats and other vermin. Many are direct descendants from their Spanish lineage. Now they’re as much a part of Old San Juan as the colorful buildings and city walls.
They keep calling the cats “an invasive species” but this is a suspiciously specious claim. Just how long must you be someplace before you’re considered local?
These cats have been in San Juan for 500 years, having been brought by the Spanish to control the rodents on the ships and in the city. Their presence is as old as the colonial architecture and far older than even the United States, much less a squalling infant like the National Park Service.
And therefore one might ask some pointed questions here about just who constitutes the “invasive species” around here.
One might also pose some further inquiry on “Aren’t you supposed to be protecting the heritage of San Juan?” Because these cats are a part of that and I fail to see how their extermination serves anything remotely like the alleged mission of these agencies.
They are the ones showing up and looking to demolish long-standing ecosystems.
And perhaps it is they that we need to remove or restrain…
There are already programs in place to trap and neuter cats and control populations. Save a gato does a great deal of work here, yet the NPS seeks not to aid them but circumvent them. The fact that supporting them is not even considered as a proposed option in their list speaks volumes.
And make no mistake, this plan will be wholesale extermination. The cats are not being “trapped and moved.” There is nowhere to move them, no one to take them. PR animal groups are already overwhelmed.
This plan consigns them to death. Needless, inhumane death.
And so I would ask a favor of you:
There is no study here, no ethics, no sound reason to change 500 years of practice.
It’s the ill-conceived hobbyhorse of some uncomprehending apparatchik.
The cats live in San Juan and have since the time of gold galleons.
The people of San Juan like it.
The tourists like it.
If these fine felines are extinguished, you are going to not only lose the joy and cultural heritage of it, but you are going to get a rodent romper room the likes of which you cannot believe.
And who cares what NPS wants? Why are they even a relevant stakeholder here? They are supposed to serve us, not we them. It is not theirs to dictate, it is ours to demand. This is boriqua heritage, not theirs.
Once more, NPS is asking for “substantive comments.”
They define them as follows:
That seems a reasonable ask, so should you choose to share your views with them, please be polite and factual and most of all firm in calling this like you see it.
Ask questions about the basis of this analysis. How do they justify disrupting a 500-year-old ecosystem? What about rats? Will we trade chemical poisons for organic paws? What about the heritage and character of San Juan? Does anyone even want this? How is this not “killing the wolves of Yellowstone” all over again? Do they really think they can confine this to parks and not wind up luring all the surrounding cats in? If they are so concerned, why not just fund groups like Save a Gato instead?
This sort of comment campaign really does work and overwhelming response rates are how we stop bad ideas like this from becoming reality.
We backed them down last time, and now we must show the resolve to do it again. And again. And make it clear that we are not going away. Trying to slide this by in the Summer doldrums in hopes no one will notice is a sneaky trick. I would be grateful if you would ensure it does not work.
One of the questions asked in a recently conducted poll of my religious community was “Did your view of the government change at all because of covid?” along with a text box to explain your answer.
The following is an adapted essay version of what I wrote (the original response I posted on Substack).
I used to regard the government as extremely inept/incompetent, fairly corrupt, and facing incentives that pushed institutions/officials to be generally corrupt and inept.
Now, I regard the government as fundamentally evil on par with other classical evil regimes throughout human history -- something made clear by the government’s behavior during the pandemic.
1. The government went out of their way to suppress, sabotage, and destroy every available effective covid treatment, which by itself caused hundreds of thousands of deaths if not millions around the world. This wasn’t merely the government making claims disparaging the safety and efficacy of covid treatments – the government aggressively marshaled a “whole of government approach” to wield every available political lever to ruthlessly crush any and every treatment. The government took a leading role in targeting, harassing, deplatforming, delicensing, and terminating the careers of heroic dissident doctors who chose to treat covid patients in defiance of the nihilistic guidelines promulgated by the NIH and other agencies to ‘do nothing’ and send patients home until they ‘turned blue.’ The government also was an enthusiastic participant in conducting fraudulent trials for the express purpose of conjuring false data showing that popular effective covid treatments had no efficacy treating covid.
2. The other covid policies - lockdowns, facemasks, and the other forms of social restrictions - were some of the most evil and pernicious policies ever implemented by a society that considers itself to be ethical. It is now clear that the death toll from these policies exceeded the genuine death toll from covid disease (which itself was only significant because of the suppression and denial of treatment as stated above).
Moreover, the very policies championed and savagely implemented by Federal and state governments worsened the morbidity and mortality of covid disease. Forcing people to stay indoors, avoid exercising, avoid social contact, and a bevy of other things that dramatically raised the stress levels and obesity of the population at large made people far more susceptible to covid disease (as well as a host of other medical conditions).
Even more shockingly, these society-upending policies lacked any supportive evidence before they were implemented. It is now well-documented that none of the covid mitigations had any epidemiological impact. Lockdowns had no effect on the transmission or epidemiology of covid waves. Cloth/surgical facemasks did not reduce the spread of covid at all, and even the various types of N95 masks proved utterly useless in the hands of the general population.
Key government officials including Fauci actually admitted that they never took into account the myriad harms that such policies would inflict on society, which is not an ‘oversight’ – the least horrible possibility is that they had no regard for carnage caused by their policies, which is genuinely evil.
3. The covid vaccines - funded, marketed, and mandated by the government - were barely effective for maybe a few months at most, but caused a significant amount of death and severe life-altering injuries (I have done research work in this area, including compiling 3,300+ case report studies documenting various covid vaccine injuries/deaths in the formal academic literature). The government is STILL denying that there were any deaths associated with the mRNA vaccines at all – in 2023, with well over 300 cases of vaccine-associated deaths reported in the formal academic literature (!!!).
The toll from the covid vaccines in just the US is probably somewhere between 100,000-300,000 deaths, and maybe more (this is based on analyses of excess mortality, government disability data, insurance data, pharmacovigilance data, and survey study data). There are probably at least half a million people in the US living with significant injuries caused by a covid vaccine, and possibly more than 2 million. Because of the shockingly poor quality of US data and studies, it is very difficult to sort out the various causes of excess morbidity and mortality (covid disease, covid policies, covid vaccines) or to get a firm idea of how much is “excess” in the first place, but one thing is undeniable: the covid vaccines inflicted mass carnage across society.
4. The government tried to dehumanize unvaccinated people, and largely succeeded according to polling showing that a significant percentage of people if not outright majorities held a variety of shocking views about unvaccinated people including that they are selfish; stupid; a danger to society; should be forcibly confined to their homes; have their children taken away; and be relocated to “quarantine facilities.” A considerable plurality of vaccinated people, in a word, overtly despised the unvaccinated.
This sort of evil abhorrent demagoguery is historically exactly how a society is groomed to accept genocide of a minority group or faction within society.
5. The government prosecuted the most significant and consequential censorship regime in the history of any Western country, which besides for the widespread carnage it caused also demonstrates that the government has no regard for the rule of law or legal norms whatsoever and believes in a radical “ends justify the means” with no clear limitation.
It is worth underscoring that the carnage wreaked by censorship isn't just the destruction of the social compact of society or the lethal effects of censoring knowledge of effective treatments from people who bereft of them died, but encompasses all sorts of second-order minutiae that you wouldn't think of, such as suicides by people suffering from various conditions who were disconnected from their support groups when Facebook deleted the group and the personal accounts of its members.
6. The government is now acting like a dictatorial regime to label and categorize the positions of its political opposition as a "terrorist threat" (e.g. parents protesting school boards, religious Catholics, Latin mass adherents, advocates for gun rights, parental rights, etc., opponents of covid and other governmental policies, people who are skeptical of the official "man-made climate change" orthodoxy, et al).
7. The government is persecuting political dissent. The most obvious examples of this are the indictments of President Trump. However, this stretches far beyond the Trump indictments. The political prosecutions of thousands of January 6 protesters - if you pay attention to the actual Jan 6 criminal prosecutions – are a moral abomination. The vast majority of defendants did not do anything remotely violent or even illegal, but were held without bail for years in ‘unique’ prison conditions; denied proper legal representation (their public defenders were on the side of the government); denied a fair trial (a trial by jury of rabid political activists who hate you is a farce); and are being charged for crimes using novel concocted legal theories that have never been enforced for any other type of protester, including the far more violent and societally disruptive BLM/Antifa riots over the summer of 2020. The government also attempted to jail a pro-life activist for a decade on clearly spurious charges for shoving someone threatening his ten-year old child that was (surprisingly) rejected by a jury who found the defendant not guilty.
8. The US government is not only endorsing, marketing, and using its considerable power to impose the barbaric ideology of a litany of sexual deviancies that are nihilistic and depraved even beyond anything ever attributed to Sodom. This includes the federal government’s currently ongoing efforts to force institutions to implement demented wicked barbarism like the psychological, physical, and hormonal mutilation of children as "gender-affirming" care by withholding some types of federal funding for even schools or hospitals that refuse to allow men in the women's bathrooms (or provide said 'medical care' if relevant). The sacrificing of children on the altar of demented gender ideology is quite literally a modern-day incarnation of Moloch.
9. The government is deliberately and willfully trying to impoverish its own citizens, and deprive them of many products that have become staple amenities in society (such as air conditioning, gas stoves, cars, etc etc etc etc). To properly flesh this out and demonstrate the 'willful/deliberate' nature of this would require a lengthy analysis of numerous decisions, statements, and actions of the relevant people/agencies that is beyond the scope of this "comment." I mention this here only because it is one of the standout egregious dimensions of the cold-blooded wickedness that is the weltanschauung of the government today.
10. The government is encouraging and implementing a systematic regime of apartheid, particularly against straight white men. DEI seminars and workshops portraying white people, straight people, and religious people as invertebrate incorrigible evil racists are a ubiquitous feature across government agencies and public sector corporations. This evil and racist ideology is implemented through hiring/admission policies, spending priorities, conditions attached to receiving government grants, and pretty much anything that the government exerts any influence over.
11. The government as a general entity is a pathological liar so much so that if it were an actual person it would make Pinocchio a paragon of honesty by comparison. It is hard to distinguish between the US government and the USSR government at this point – practically everything they say now is a calculated lie.
In a general sense, the government is a diabolical, evil institution that is primarily concerned with pushing twisted ideologies, mutilating children, and persecuting political dissent, while willing to kill millions in pursuit of whatever political or other objectives they are trying to achieve.
A study from South Korea indicates that N95 masks – supposedly the gold standard for protecting users from Covid infection – may emit toxic volatile organic compounds at levels eight times above safety guidelines.
moment of silence for everyone who relied on AI chat bots for research when it’s going around saying shit like this.
[image description: search that reads “country in africa that starts with K”. the featured snipped is from www.emergentmind.com and reads “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter “K”. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a “K” sound, but is actually spelled with a “K” sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.” /end ID]
The St. Rochus Catholic Family Centre in Kerpen, which features a childcare facility with dedicated masturbation rooms for toddlers.
A few of you have asked about reports of “sexual exploration rooms” in German childcare centres, where young children are encouraged to masturbate and touch each other. While I have no doubt the field of child sexual pedagogy is unusually depraved, I suspected the reports were exaggerated or lacking important context. In this, I was very wrong. I have spent about six hours exploring this very disturbing rabbit hole, and I need a shower. Maybe ten of them. Read the rest of this post at your own risk.
Children should be able to “withdraw into a protected space” “to discover and satisfy themselves physically,” proclaims a day-care centre in Kerpen. In its sexual education plan, the institution promises to offer “children free space to experiment with their childlike sexuality. Masturbation is normal. Allowing masturbation” in day-care centres is “of great importance.”
In a day-care centre in Rheinberg, allowances are made for playing doctor in side rooms – but with rules for the little ones: “They [should] carefully choose the child to play with.” And before they do so, “the children are told that no objects are to inserted into bodily orifices (e.g. genitals),” according to their plan, which was recently made public by Alternative für Deutschland.
Should such schemes be tolerated or banned? There are different views on this nationwide. Nearly identical statements were reported earlier this year from a day-care centre in Hannover, where the Youth Welfare Office and the state of Niedersachsen put a stop to it.
In Nordrhein-Westfalen [where the Kerpen and Rheinberg day care centres are located], views are somewhat different. When asked how the Child Ministry there, now under Green leadership, regarded the handling of masturbation in the these two day-care centres, they replied that “sexual behaviour by children” could “not be prevented.” The Ministry emphasises that “separate rooms solely for sexual self-exploration in day-care centres” are “not provided for.” The Ministry, however, refuses to intervene at the day-care centres.
Welt reminds readers that parents, at least in theory, have the right to exclude their children from this depravity. The Ministry also told Welt that separate child-exploration rooms would be forbidden by the Child Welfare Office in NRW. “You can float all manner of crazy ideas in plans and programmes – but not in reality.”
eugyppius: a plague chronicle is a reader-supported publication. maybe you subscribe?
This last point is misleading at best. I think Welt have made a small error in their reporting, which a Child Ministry spokesperson then exploited for the purposes of issuing a misleading denial. It is specifically the dedicated rooms for mutual sexual exploration that the Ministry claims are forbidden by the Child Welfare Office. Everything else – sexualised “doctor play” and opportunities for developmental masturbation – appear to remain on the menu, at least for children of parents who don’t actively intervene.
As Welt notes, a childcare centre in Hannover tried to implement a nearly identical child sexuality programme earlier this year, only to be shut down by the Niedersachsen Child Welfare Office. The details are important:
The “body exploration room” announced by a day-care centre run by the Workers’ Welfare Association of Hannover has been stopped by the Niedersachsen Youth Welfare Office. According to the office, the pedagogical plan in this form endangers child welfare and is unsupportable … Previously, the Bild had reported that the day care centre had announced such an exploration room in a letter to parents, complete with rules for conduct.
Among other things, one rule from the letter obtained by Bild reads: “Each child [should] decide for himself whether and with whom he wants to play physical and sexual games.”
According to the chairman of the board of the Workers’ Welfare Association in Hannover, the letter to parents had not been coordinated with the Association or approved by their experts.
When it comes to so-called body exploration games in childcare centres, it is always a matter of carefully guiding the child’s curiosity about his bodies, Maywald told the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung … “I would find it strange to set up a separate room for this” …
Maywald said: “We should not overemphasise adult ideas about sexuality.” All children, he said, have curiosity about bodies, and their educators need to provide rules for this. Childcare centres have to make sure that children do not cross boundaries and are not assaulted. He emphasised: “Body exploration and sexual education do not have to take place in the childcare centre solely through touching. You can also use picture books, for example.”
I am not an expert on childhood development, but all of this makes me extremely, profoundly uncomfortable, and I’m pretty sure it would’ve made me massively uncomfortable when I was a child too. I’m also not sure which is worse: Childcare centres which encourage child sexual activity in front of adults, or childcare centres which set aside separate rooms where it can happen out of sight.
Anyway, I’ve consulted the “Sex Education Programme” of the (alas) Catholic St. Rochus childcare centre in Kerpen, and can confirm that somebody has taken a tactical decision to keep all the weird sex stuff, while jettisoning the separate rooms idea.
From the introduction on p. 3:
A sex education programme is an important part of our overall childcare programme. Sexuality in the day care centre is no longer a taboo subject.
In a community, children quickly notice the differences between their own bodies. This is a completely normal sign of healthy psychosexual development. Children are driven by curiosity, not by sexual desire. This is a worry we adults have, but it is completely unfounded. This sexual phase is important for children to gain learning experiences for the rest of their lives and develop relationships with other people.
We make it possible for our children to have these experiences, for example by playing doctor. For these games there must naturally be clear rules, and they must always take place under the watchful eye of educators.
“Playing doctor” is a strange recurring obsession of this document, the subject of a whole section on p. 20:
13. Roleplaying - “Playing Doctor”
Between the ages of 2 and 3 and beyond, sexual curiosity increases significantly. Children not only want to discover their own bodies, but they also look at, observe and explore with interest the bodies of other children, parents and siblings. Children compare themselves to the opposite sex and there is nothing more exciting than looking closely at and “examining” themselves while “playing doctor.” Doctor’s visits are familiar, concrete experience for children. When they play doctor, they act out what they have experienced during their doctor’s visits. They give each other injections, administer medicine, listen to each other or take a temperature.
If these mutual examinations become more intensive, it is important that the children know and adhere to applicable rules for this.
Playing doctor has nothing to do with adult sexual desires, but only with children’s curiosity and their spirit of discovery.
In our childcare centre we offer the children space to try out their childlike sexuality. We see it as our task to support and accompany the boys and girls in their development.
There are rules for “playing doctor” on p. 13:
The age difference between the children playing with each other should not be too great. The developmental stage of the children playing should be taken into account.
Each child should decide for himself whether and with whom he wants to play “doctor.”
Older children and adults have no place in these games.
The children should not hurt each other.
Nothing may be put into bodily orifices and/or tied off.
Each child should decide for him- or herself whether and where he or she wants to be touched.
The game is always voluntary and the child may leave at any time.
There is no pressure to talk or be silent about it.
The children are allowed to talk to the staff and ask for help at any time.
There’s also a whole section on masturbation at p. 17:
10. Masturbation
Masturbation is something normal, it is not harmful or sick.
By masturbating, children discover their bodies and their feelings. It helps childrenfeel very close to their bodies and experience pleasure.
In this area as in others, every child develops differently. Some children discover masturbation in the womb as a satisfying activity, others much later.
When a young child plays with its genitals and touches them with obvious enjoyment, he knows nothing of social taboos, of what is “improper,” let alone that what they are doing is considered indecent or dirty. He explores and discovers his body and lingers at points where it feels particularly good.
If you stop your child and tell him that it is not allowed to touch himself “down there,” you can do great harm, because the child learns: There is something wrong with my body that is not right, not good and somehow indecent or disgusting.
This is fatal for body positivity, which is an important part of a child's self-confidence. A child must be allowed to take possession of his body, because it belongs to him and no one else has the right to regulate him in this respect. It is precisely this bodily awareness that is important for your child to be able to clearly say “no” when he or she finds that something is unpleasant.
Masturbation is something very private that does not belong in public.
We respect and accept it as part of the child’s privacy. Masturbation is of great importance for the development of the child’s self-identity and for good bodily awareness.
Children are sexual beings from birth and have a sense of pleasure which they like to act out because it is fun, feels good and can sometimes be comforting. What we teach children, is that masturbation is an intimate matter that can take place in a safe and personal setting.
So, there will not be mutual “body exploration rooms” at St. Rochus, merely masturbation rooms, where “individual children may be allowed to withdraw into a protected space … in order to discover and satisfy themselves physically” (p. 12).
The other facility mentioned by Welt, the “Sunflower” Caritas Childcare Centre Reichenberg, have also put their “sexual pedagogy programme” online, and in reading it I noticed a weird thing: The worst bits are phrased almost identically to the worst bits of the St. Rochus child sexuality manifesto. The same contradictions (“playing doctor is just about curiosity, it’s not sexual, that’s why it’s important for the development of childhood sexuality!”), the same weird list of sexplay rules – everything. The Hannover letter to parents about “body exploration rooms” also has some of the same verbiage, right down to the rule (quoted by Bild) that “Each child [should] decide for himself whether and with whom he wants to play physical and sexual games.”
As it turns out, this is because all three documents have been plagiarised from a 2013 book called Sexual Education in the Childcare Centre: Protecting, Strengthening and Guiding Children. Its author is none other than Jörg Maywald – the very man who criticised the Hannover plan because he thinks children should engage in their sexual play in front of adults rather than in dedicated rooms.
It is Maywald, in this book, who calls for developing “sexual education programmes” like those published by St. Rochus, and who laments the lack of them “in most German childcare centres.” He has an entire chapter on “Playing Doctor, or Sexual Assault?”, which explains where our childcarers got this obsession from. He even provides “Rules for Playing Doctor,” which the child sexuality officers at St. Rochus and Sunflower have changed in some curious respects. In addition to prohibiting penetration, for example, Maywald also writes that children are not to “lick each other’s bodies” during their sexual play, and he says that if staff are insufficient to oversee all of these games, they should impose further restrictions – “for example, they should not allow the children to play doctor naked.” I wonder why they left those points out? Perhaps they were wary of making the topic seem too obscene?
Maywald’s book is a house of horrors. After outlining the rules for playing doctor, he turns to the problem of childhood sexual assault – that is to say, instances in which playing doctor goes wrong. Maywald is greatly interested in this aspect; to judge from the pages he spends on it, he finds it vastly more interesting than “playing doctor” itself.
He provides various examples of the problems you can expect in Maywald Childcare Horror Land and how to handle them. For instance:
Enrico, Emre, Dominik and Tobias like to retreat to the quiet room at the childcare centre. The room is freely accessible to the children during the afternoon hours. Up to five children can use it for half an hour at a time by appointment. For some time now, the four- and five-year-old boys have been hanging a cloth in front of the glass door during their quite time so that they cannot be observed from the outside. One day, Tobias’ mother angrily tells the head of the day-care centre that her son has complained to her because the other boys are forcing him to participate in “humping.”
Clearly, Maywald explains, the boys are pantomiming some kind of "sexual intercourse,” and the problem is that one of them doesn’t like it. The staff should “assure the mother that they take the incident seriously and will ensure it doesn’t happen again.” They’ll meet with the offending boys and emphasise the importance of “boundaries” and explain that nobody should be forced to play any games he doesn’t want to. The four boys should also be prevented from using the quiet room together, and the staff should work harder to ensure the room remains visible from outside. That’s it, no big deal, problem solved!
I could continue, but I don’t have the strength for any more. This stuff is disgusting and insane.
eugyppius: a plague chronicle is a reader-supported publication. maybe you subscribe?
A study by two economists who found opening strip clubs or escort services caused sex crimes in the neighborhood to drop contains “fatal errors” and should be retracted, argues a group of past and current law enforcement officers, including three academics.
“None of us are prudes or even anti-strip club,” Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and a former Baltimore police officer, wrote in a thread on X (formerly Twitter). “But if you claim strip clubs reduce sex crimes – and by 13 percent! – you’re delving into serious policy issues.”
He added: “This is very typical of academics getting out of their field. They have second-hand data. They crunch the numbers … They don’t know what the data mean.”
“We find that these businesses decrease sex crime by 13% per police precinct one week after the opening, and have no effect on other types of crime,” wrote Riccardo Ciacci, of Universidad Pontificia Comillas, in Spain, and Maria Micaela Sviatschi, of Princeton University, in their abstract.
What the data suggest, the duo speculated in an opinion piece in The Washington Post, is that “Men otherwise inclined to commit assaults might instead spend more time in strip clubs or hiring escorts.”
Predictably, the findings drew a bit of mediaattention. But in the view of Moskos and his colleagues – two former police officers turned academics and the commander of the crime-strategies unit in the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority Police Department – they should never have passed peer review.
As the four told the journal in an August 2021 email seen by Retraction Watch, after corresponding with the study authors, “ultimately we could not reconcile the study’s conclusions with the distinct limitations of its data.”
In the email, they pointed to three major concerns:
The study relied on the date a business was registered with the state as a proxy for when it opened. But for strip clubs, licensing and inspections can lead to delays of months between registration and opening.
The study used NYPD Stop, Question, and Frisk data as a proxy for sex crimes. These data have been heavily criticized; Moskos and his colleagues claim that more than 94% “are records of people who were legally innocent of a crime at the time and place of the encounter.”
The study’s baseline data on strip clubs missed a number of establishments Moskos and his colleagues knew to exist. (They name-check several, including Wild Wild West, Corrado’s and Sweet Cherry.)
In a preprint posted to SSRN this month and submitted for review to Police Practice and Research, they boiled it all down to this:
What the study has done is measure changes in police encounters with innocent people in the week after an entity has filed the paperwork necessary to start the processes that will eventually allow it to open a strip club.
But The Economic Journal apparently failed to get the point. In an email seen by Retraction Watch, Editor-in-Chief Francesco Lippi replied to the group:
The journal is open to considering comments on published papers. In the case of empirical papers, comments are expected to be based on systematic analyses of the data, highlighting differences between the results obtained in the original paper and in the new analysis.
“We said the data shouldn’t have been used in the first place, and their response was to suggest we re-analyze the data and point out differences,” Brandon del Pozo, the corresponding author on the preprint and an assistant professor at Brown University, told Retraction Watch. (Del Pozo is also a former police officer.)
Reached for comment, Lippi did not directly address the issue of the data being unfit to address the study’s hypothesis, but said:
This criticism was based on a data analysis that used a small subsample of observations for which the authors were able to gather more precise measurements.
He added that he had not heard back after sending the email welcoming a re-analysis of the data. “As far as I am concerned, a serious (scientifically sound) confutation of the original thesis has not been given yet,” Lippi told Retraction Watch.
Del Pozo said that after failing to move forward with Lippi, he and his colleagues sent their concerns to the Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics. But the journal:
declined to publish them based on a response from the authors that we frankly found a little bewildering. They used an irrelevant case of a person buying an existing business from someone else to say we didn’t prove strip clubs don’t open on the day they are registered with the state. Then they said their robustness check, which used data that principally derives from the main dataset, showed similar results at the precinct-month level, so their results were good.
Ciacci told Retraction Watch in a brief email that the preprint contained “plenty of imprecise information about” his and Sviatschi’s paper:
This is why at least two journals, to the best of my knowledge, decided not to publish that article. Indeed, we were contacted by JCRE (Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics) to reply to their paper. After reading our reply the Editors of JCRE opted to reject their article. Likewise, the Economic Journal decided to reject their article.
Ciacci, who said he was on vacation, did not reply to a follow-up email asking for specific comments on the arguments in the preprint. Sviatschi declined to comment, noting that she was “on maternity leave with my baby and no help.” [See update at end of post.]
“And so it is,” Moskos wrote in his punchy prose on X.
And so it is. You have a peer-reviewed article saying all open up a titty bar and sex crimes go down! Big, if true. And all we can do, and we're pretty qualified people here on this issue — cops, professor, & the chief crime analyst of the NYPD — is complain on twitter.
Update, 8/25/23, 1345 UTC: del Pozo tells us that “Police Practice and Research has peer reviewed, using reviewers with expertise in the data, our article and decided to publish it.”
Update, 8/31/23, 1600 UTC: Ciacci provided del Pozo et. al.’s critique submitted to the Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics, and his and Sviatschi’s response.
Hundreds of bald eagles and other large birds are being killed by wind turbines across the U.S. every year, but green activists don't seem to care, as California rolls back its protections yet further.
If we had a functioning news media, there’s a video that would be leading every newscast right now. It has nothing to do with a plane crash in Russia, a GOP primary debate, or even the indictment of every lawyer who’s ever given Donald Trump legal advice, as important as all those topics may be. This video is about Americans — including children — who died horribly this month. It’s about how their deaths could have been prevented if their government was even remotely competent.
The footage I’m talking about is an interview with a survivor of the fires in Maui. This interview was conducted not by CNN or NPR but by a real estate agent who moonlights as a citizen journalist. He spoke with a man who goes by “Fish” and survived the blaze in Lahaina. Here’s what that man saw. . . .
He says, “All the cars were lined up, but none of them were moving. . . . And I was wondering what was stopping the traffic. It was a policeman.”
A law designed to build affordable housing in Montreal—and which an elected official predicted would lead to 600 new units a year—has led to zero units of affordable housing, according to the city’s data. The law required developers to either build housing or pay into a fund. Every developer chose the second option.
In April 2021, Montreal adopted the Bylaw for a Diverse Metropolis. According to the law, developers who build five dwelling units (or the equivalent in terms of space) must sign an agreement with Montreal to either construct new city-subsidized housing or new affordable housing subsidized by the developer, along with other subsidies. If developers don’t build this housing, they can either donate land or pay directly into a fund that the city will use to build affordable housing units.
According to data on the city’s website, and first reported by CBC, 150 agreements have been signed under the bylaw as of May 2023, resulting in 7100 units of housing, all of which are market rate. Every single developer opted to pay a penalty and five donated property rather than build affordable housing.
There was less money to be lost in paying up than there was to be lost in building “affordable” housing.
If cities really wanted affordable housing, they’d eliminate the taxes and regulations that help make housing unaffordable. But they’re more interested in grift and showboating.
SOD OFF, SWAMPY: These 14 American Cities Have A ‘Target’ Of Banning Meat, Dairy, And Private Vehicles By 2030. “C40’s dystopian goals can be found in its ‘The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World’ report, which was published in 2019 and reportedly reemphasized in 2023. The organization is headed and largely funded by Democrat billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Nearly 100 cities across the world make up the organization, and its American members include Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle.”
I can’t wait to hear what “progressive” celebrity chefs like Tom Colicchio will have to say about that.
Lucy Letby is a nurse who has been found guilty of 7 counts of murder and 6 counts of attempted murder of babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital during 2015-16.
Although the mainstream media is portraying her as britain’s most evil baby murderer there are a few legal and other researchers who have seriously questioned the quality of evidence in the case and suggested there may have been systemic causes of the baby deaths at the hospital which were nothing to do with Lucy Letby.
Dr Scott McLachlan is one such researcher. He completed his PhD on the topic of Learning Health Systems under my supervision in 2019. He has been following this case for a while now and is especially well qualified to comment on it. That’s because, in addition to his PhD, he not only originally worked as a nurse but also has several legal degrees and is currently a Lecturer in Digital Technologies for Health in the Division of Applied Technologies for Clinical Care with the Faculty of Nursing at Kings College.
Today I interviewed Scott to discuss his concerns:
My own interest in this case was piqued by this chart that was used by the prosecution:
I tweeted about this:
Richard Gill has also been expressing concerns about the way the case has been handled:
Richard is concerned that the errors in previous 'killer nurse' cases may have been repeated here.
Relevant to that, here is a video I made about the whole issue of the probability the same nurse will be on duty during a series of unusual events (this was related to the Ben Geen case):
For the medical material about the Lucy Letby trial, the site to visit is Science on Trial
They promise equality, but the elite enjoy lavish lifestyles while ordinary people suffer.But…Mr. Saito’s book “Capital in the Anthropocene” has sold more than 500,000 copies, exceeding his wildest imaginings. Mr. Saito, a philosophy professor at the University of Tokyo, appears regularly in Japanese media to discuss his ideas. …Mr. Saito said, …“there are too many cars, too many skyscrapers, too many convenience stores, too much fast fashion,”… Mr. Saito is not clear exactly what shape a world under degrowth communism would take, but he insists that it would be…focused on expanding communal resources.
