Mick Hartley

"Baltimore waterfront and skyline." Circa 1912.

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Co.]

A skyline dominated by the Emerson Tower on the left, better known as the Bromo-Seltzer Tower, surmounted by a giant, 20-ton Bromo bottle.

It's not as bad here as it is on US campuses, but it's still bad. In the Times – Jewish students at UCL say they are facing rising antisemitism:

When [Romilly] Blitz posted on social media in the hours after the attack about rapes perpetrated by Hamas, a classmate said that she was “clearly racist and Islamophobic” given her lack of focus on Palestinian victims.

As pro-Palestinian protests began on campus, a tearful Blitz decided to leave. Waiting to be picked up by her mother, her sense of anger erupted when a demonstrator walked past with a sign reading “Free Palestine — this is justice”.

Blitz, a history and politics student, returned to campus two weeks later from her family home only to soon find herself at the centre of what her mother described as a “whispering campaign”.

The student, who is not an Israeli national, sought to challenge some of the opinions that were proliferating about events in the Middle East, putting forward her perspective as a Jew. In response, she was referred to as a “psychopathic genocidal Israeli” who had been “brainwashed by Zionist propaganda”.

She said: “Things just really got spun so when I would go to classes people would boo me, people would not move, I’d have to sit on the floor at the back if there were no seats because people were so rude.”

Yep… antisemitism.

Photographer Jamie McGregor Smith has been visiting brutalist and modernist churches across Europe for his book Sacred Modernity: The Holy Embrace of Modernist Architecture.

From Dezeen:

The churches in Sacred Modernity have sculptural concrete forms that break away from the mould of conventional churches, which typically have a floor plan in the shape of a cross.

McGregor Smith claimed this was part of a trend after the second world war, which sought new styles separated from traditional architecture of the past.

"While traditional churches evoke a sense of familiarity and reverence through their classic designs, brutalist and modernist churches challenge these norms with their bold, austere and provocative aesthetic," he said.

"These architectural styles emerged in the post-war period as a rejection of the past's orthodoxy and a pursuit of a new social order free from associations with opulence, authority and war."

L'église Saint-Nicolas in Switzerland

Chiesa di Santa Maria Immacolata in Italy

The Wotruba Church in Vienna, Austria

St Matthew's Church, Birmingham, UK

Tempio Mariano di Monte Grisa in Italy

St Reinold Kirche in Düsseldorf, Germany

Santuario della Beata Vergine della Consolazione in San Marino, Italy

St Mauritius Kirche in Munich, Germany

St Paulus Kirche in Neuss-Weckhoven, Germany

St Matthäus Kirche in Düsseldorf, Germany

Chiesa di San Nicolao della Flue in Milan, Italy

Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione in Rome, Italy

L'église Saint-Nicolas in Heremence, Switzerland

Cathedral Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Bristol, UK

Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche in Vienna, Austria

Kościół świętego Dominika in Warsaw, Poland
[All images © Jamie McGregor Smith]

Well well – in the Guardian, no less. David Bell – The Cass review of gender identity services marks a return to reason and evidence – it must be defended:

The policy of “affirmation” – that is, speedily agreeing with a child that they are of the wrong gender – was an inappropriate clinical stance brought about by influential activist groups and some senior gender identity development service (Gids) staff, resulting in a distortion of the clinical domain. Studies indicate that a majority of children in the absence of medical intervention will desist – that is, change their minds.

The many complex problems that affect these young people were left unaddressed once they were viewed simplistically through the prism of gender. Cass helpfully calls this “diagnostic overshadowing”. Thus children suffered thrice over: through not having all their problems properly addressed; by being put on a pathway for which there is not adequate evidence and for which there is considerable risk of harm; and lastly because children not unreasonably believed that all their problems would disappear once they transitioned. It is, I think, not possible for a child in acute states of torment to be able to think through consequences of a future medical transition. Children struggle to even imagine themselves in an adult sexual body….

Characterising a child as “being transgender” is harmful as it forecloses the situation and also implies that this is a unitary condition for which there is unitary “treatment”. It is much more helpful to use a description: that the child suffers from distress in relation to gender/sexuality, and this needs to be carefully explored in terms of the narrative of their lives, the presence of other difficulties such as autism, depression, histories of abuse and trauma, and confusion about sexuality. As the Cass report notes, studies suggest that a high proportion of these children are same-sex attracted, and many suffer from homophobia. Concerned gay and lesbian clinicians have said they experienced homophobia in the service, and that staff worked in a “climate of fear”….

Those who say a child has been “born in the wrong body”, and who have sidelined child safeguarding, bear a very heavy responsibility. Parents have been asked “Do you want a happy little girl or a dead little boy?” Cass notes that rates of suicidality are similar to rates among non-trans identified youth referred to child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). Indeed, the NHS lead for suicide prevention, Prof Sir Louis Appleby, has said “invoking suicide in this debate is mistaken and potentially harmful”….

The pendulum is already swinging towards a reassertion of rationality. Cass’s achievement is to give that pendulum a hugely increased momentum. In years to come we will look back at the damage done to children with incredulity and horror.

At UnHerd they note the Guardian's unfortunate history on trans matters in general, and the Cass review in particular:

A day after the report was released, it published an article by transgender writer Freddy McConnell which criticised Cass for “failing to take on clinicians who doubt the very existence of trans children” and “giv[ing] credence to anti-trans bias”. McConnell’s article was later amended after a previous version suggested that the feminist campaigner Julie Bindel had likened trans adults to Jimmy Savile….

A number of former Guardian writers have since spoken publicly about a culture at the paper which stifled gender-critical views and of staff who bullied women for criticising the Left-of-centre orthodoxy on “gender-affirming care”. Suzanne Moore, who used to be a columnist there, wrote for UnHerd in 2020 about her experience of being ostracised by colleagues for her views on sex differences, while former staff writer Hadley Freeman stressed in an essay that “it’s not bigoted” to stand up for single-sex spaces and the rights of biological women.

Speaking to UnHerd today, Bindel said, “I know how hard David Bell had to try to get the Guardian to agree to him writing an opinion piece, following his complaints about the Freddy McConnell article. I don’t believe for one minute that the Guardian has decided it has been wrong all along on this issue, but its hand has been forced.” Speaking about the newspaper, she went on, “What a monumental mess it’s made of everything, losing decent feminist journalists and readers in order to capitulate to transactivists on staff and contract.”

Here's North Korea's famous Arch of Reunification in Pyongyang:

[Photo © Filippo Venturi] 

Not any more. After Kim Jong-un's recent declaration that reunification with the South is no longer possible and South Korea has become "the principal enemy", the arch had to go.

Recent imagery from the Maxar WorldView-3 satellite confirmed that the Monument to the Three-Point Charter for National Reunification — a symbol of Kim Il Sung’s dying wish for the reunification of Korea — was demolished and the site wiped clean. Based on the images and satellite images run in overseas media reports, the monument appears to have been torn down methodically rather than blown up….

The monument stood above the Pyongyang-Kaesong highway at the entrance of Reunification Street in the Kwanmun 3 neighborhood of Rangnang District, the gateway to Pyongyang. Completed on Aug. 14, 2001, the arch represented two women — one from the North and the other from the South — holding aloft a map of the Korean Peninsula. It was 30 meters high and 61.5 meters wide, the latter number representing the June 15 North-South Joint Declaration of 2000. The body of the tower was composed of 2,560 granite blocks weighing over 60 kilograms each, while about 740 “memorial stones” sent by groups in the North, South and overseas Koreans adorned the interior of the monument. It also reportedly used precious stones sent by South Korean groups such as Hanchongnyon and the South Korean branch of the Pan-national Alliance for Korea’s Reunification. With North Korea’s demolition of the tower, the noble intentions of Korean groups in both halves of the peninsula and overseas vanished into thin air….

The Monument to the Three-Point Charter for National Reunification symbolized Kim Il Sung’s dying desire for Korean reunification. The Three-Point Charter for National Reunification refers to three items: the July 4 South–North Joint Statement of 1972 that laid out the Three Principles of National Reunification of independence, peaceful unification and great national unity, the “Democratic Confederal Republic of Korea” plan presented during the Sixth Party Congress in October 1980, and the Ten Point Program for Reunification of the Country presented during the Fifth Meeting of the Ninth Supreme People’s Assembly in April 1993.

Daily NK opinion:

South Korean military surveillance assets detected North Korea burying landmines on stretches of the Seoul-Sinuiju road and East Sea road in the DMZ late last year and demolishing dozens of street lamps along these roads. In February, KBS confirmed that remnants of the four-story Inter-Korean Liaison Office in the Kaesong industrial complex were removed. North Korea’s recent string of violations of inter-Korean agreements was confirmed once again in high-res satellite images of the Monument to the Three-Point Charter for National Reunification before and after its demolition. It is hard to gauge the intention and inside story behind these recent actions that suggest a young leader trying to erase the dying wishes and traces of his predecessors, and one worries where this recklessness will eventually go.

Well, the recklessness is nothing new. The fixation on nuclear weapons is surely more concerning than the breakdown of the reunification dream, which was by now inevitable anyway. For Great Leader Kim Il Sung reunification would have involved the triumphant North, a beacon of socialist success, taking in the hopelessly corrupt and decadent South. As it's turned out the South's been resurgent, an economic and cultural powerhouse, while the North's turned into a starvation-ridden dystopian basket case. The only conceivable reunification now would follow the collapse of the Kim dynasty, with the South trying to pick up the pieces – at huge cost.

From North Korea's official point of view, then, reunification has now to be truly dead and buried.

Biden has condemned the protests on US campuses…sort of: “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” the president said on Monday, before quickly adding: “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” As Jerry Coyne puts it, "It’s as if he said, “I condemn the attack of ships in the Red Sea, but I also condemn those who don’t have empathy for the Houthis.”"

Gerald Baker in the Times – Biden can’t risk alienating the racist far left:

"There were very fine people on both sides.” When he can remember, or at least when he is capable of reading the script written on the screens in front of him, Joe Biden likes to claim that the moment he knew he had to run for president against Donald Trump came in the summer of 2017 when Trump uttered those words.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, a demonstration against the removal of a statue of the top Confederate commander was dominated by a motley assortment of white nationalists and reconstituted neo-fascist ideologues. Carrying tiki torches, channelling their inner Horst Wessel, chanting slogans such as “Jews will not replace us”, they marched through a city park, clashing with counter-demonstrators. In the ruckus a woman was killed when one of the thugs ran over her with his car….

Biden launched his presidential campaign in 2019, citing the events in Charlottesville. Noting the preponderance of neo-Nazis “chanting the same antisemitic bile heard across Europe in the 1930s”, he recalled what Trump had said: “With those words the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any other.”

In New York City this week, Columbia University, an Ivy League college where full tuition costs about $85,000 a year, has been the latest focus of often violent anti-Israel protests. Pro-Hamas supporters have in effect shut down the campus, planting a huge “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the main quad. A week ago police moved in and arrested more than 100 but in days an even larger number were back.

Inside and outside the gates of the university, in the face of counterprotests by pro-Israeli and Jewish groups, the Hamasniks have vented their hate. “Al Qasam’s Next Target”, read a sign held by one with an arrow pointing to a Jewish student group near by. (Al Qasam is the armed faction of Hamas that carried out the October 7 attacks in Israel.) “Al Qasam, you make us proud,” a group chanted. “Burn Tel Aviv,” said another.

The situation is so volatile and dangerous a rabbi issued a warning to Jewish students to stay away from campus for their own safety. According to Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, who has been mobilising pro-Israeli protests in response, they didn’t need to be told: “Most of the Jewish students on campus fled — and I don’t use this word lightly. They didn’t leave. They fled,” he told me.

The White House issued a statement denouncing the protests, and later Biden was pressed by a reporter. “I condemn the antisemitic protests. That’s why I’ve set up a programme to deal with them. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

Taken at face value of course, Biden’s remarks are as unobjectionable as Trump’s defence of people who are against the tearing down of historical monuments. But context is everything. When you see on the one hand a group of Jewish students struggling to assert their right to go to college unmolested, and on the other keffiyeh-clad, Hamas slogan-chanting, Jew-baiting freaks, and you treat both sides evenly, are you not, in effect, saying something like: “There are very fine people on both sides.”? …

The possibility that a Jew might find himself on the streets of New York, or London, under threat from some tiki-torch-bearing brownshirt demanding a “Judenrein” nation is a good deal smaller right now than the probability that he could find himself on his way out of a synagogue menaced by some elite college student demanding a free Palestine “from the river to the sea”.

But Biden and most of his Democrats can’t — or won’t — acknowledge that. They know that the small but growing band of Islamist extremists in the US, and the much larger group of young far-left radicals aligned with them — mostly from upper-middle-class backgrounds, schooled in the doctrines of critical race theory and neo-Marxist cultural dogma — are a rising threat. But in a close election, Biden can’t risk alienating any group of voters who could cost him the presidency. And so the Democrats must burn the village in order to save it: to spare us from the supposed evils of another Trump presidency, we have to tread delicately around the tender sensibilities of another, larger, more vocal and more visible group of racists.

Like a religious meeting. Indoctrination at Canada's Professional Women's Hockey League:

I went to a PWHL game last night. Before the game, the audience was asked to read the following pledge out loud together. Part of the intention is to train the audience (which was full of young girls) to accept boys in their sports and to vilify people who don't. pic.twitter.com/yOh4DzHmmS

— Michelle Alleva (@MichelleAlleva) April 25, 2024

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On #TransingAwayTheGay, here's the German endocrinologist who in 2005 put a 12-year-old Kim Petras on puberty blockers:

"Before puberty blockers came along we accepted that most of these kids would simply grow up to be gay, but now that we have them I'm happy to 'take the risk'…

— MrMenno 🏳️‍🌈🎶 (@MrMennoTweets) October 24, 2023

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Full text:

"Before puberty blockers came along we accepted that most of these kids would simply grow up to be gay, but now that we have them I'm happy to 'take the risk' of possibly preventing a homosexual development."

From a paper he wrote in 2018 (paraphrased and emphasis by me, actual quote below). At that time he'd "advised and partly accompanied" over 500 youngsters.

As I'm reading up more on this, it strikes me how it was common knowledge among doctors and therapists throughout the 80s, 90s and early 2000s that the majority of 'gender dysphoric' and / or 'gender non-conforming' kids would grow up to be gay.

And then a drug came along and everything changed – even when others explicitly urged caution over the link with homosexuality.

They KNEW what they were doing 🤯

If you ever ask "How did we get here?" it's doctors like Wüsthof that provide the answer. I'll do a bigger piece on this.

Full quote:

"Debate continues over the question whether an early hormone treatment iatrogenously cements and fixates a certain development, thereby possibly preventing a homosexual development. A few years ago, when hormonal treatment options did not yet exist, a person with a sex/gender identity disorder would almost perforce have tended towards a homosexual orientation. For this reason a certain doubt always lingers with us who administer the treatment that there could be a mistake in the assessment and that we are changing the fate of a human life with our therapy. I am aware of this great responsibility and at the same time prepared to take on the risk of this interference with nature." – Dr Achim Wüsthof

The latest from Lawrence Freedman, on western miscalculations following on from Biden's early declaration that the US would never get involved in a war with Russia:

We miscalculated how much control of Ukraine mattered to Putin, and were therefore shocked when he gambled on being able to subjugate his neighbour in a matter of days. We miscalculated again when we assumed this would succeed quickly when the invasion failed to achieve its immediate objectives. The Russian campaign soon faced yet more setbacks, leading to a massive loss of life and equipment, and a need to devote ever more resources to the war effort.  Yet Putin did not buckle and from late last year was confident that he had regained the initiative.

The main reason for this is the painful Congressional dance surrounding military assistance to Ukraine, now finally concluded. But we must also consider to what extent Ukraine’s lack of vital capabilities, or at least the delay in getting them, which meant that it could not do more when it had the initiative, is due to Western countries allowing themselves to be intimidated by what are considered to be Putin’s extreme risk-taking propensities, including a readiness to contemplate nuclear escalation.

My argument in this lecture is that the West was influenced by a combination of Putin’s assumed recklessness shaped by a familiar strategic construct  – the escalation ladder – that can be seriously misleading.  In particular I’ll argue that it led policymakers to start with the most dreaded scenario – nuclear use – and then work backwards to ask how it might come about. A better approach would have been to start with the situation faced by Putin and the options available to him, of which nuclear use was but one and by far the least compelling….

Conclusion:

I am not arguing in this lecture for sanguinity about either nuclear risks or  Vladimir Putin’s mental state. I am arguing against allowing our analysis of one of the most difficult and fateful conflicts we have seen in Europe for almost 80 years to be overly influenced by our worst fears and simplistic theories about how they might be realised. Hard strategic assessments of the state of the war may lead to awkward conclusions but we have not helped ourselves, let alone Ukraine, by opting for an approach which has results in demands that Ukraine accept a bad peace and caution in providing it with the weapons it needs to achieve a better peace.  

The life of a North Korean stationmaster:

The North Korean Ministry of State Security has recently informed senior officials at provincial bureaus about the punishment given to people arrested in connection with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s visit to Russia last September, Daily NK has learned….

According to the material, the stationmasters at four stations on the railroad that Kim Jong Un rode on in North Hamgyong Province and South Hamgyong Province on his way to Russia were arrested on the spot for failing to demonstrate their loyalty to the North Korean leader.

The stationmasters were quietly executed or sent to political prison camps on Apr. 12, seven months after their arrest, in line with the Central Committee and the Ministry of State Security’s internal decision that the legal procedures should be completed before the Day of the Sun (Apr. 15, birthday of Kim Il Sung).

“Two of the stationmasters were arrested and executed in private for failing to be in the proper spot when the Marshal’s [Kim Jong Un] train passed by. The other two stationmasters were arrested and sent to political prison camps after the Marshal raised concerns about the dilapidated state of the railroad and surrounding areas while riding on the train,” the source said.

The classified material from the Ministry of State Security also said that the stationmasters’ families were notified of their fate and then whisked away by local state security departments early in the morning on Apr. 13….

The Ministry of State Security asked its bureaus in each province to diligently fulfill their duty of maintaining ongoing supervision and oversight to safeguard the government and preserve the physical safety of Kim Jong Un.

The ministry also reminded bureau officials that the position of the party and the government is that anyone subject to Kim’s personal criticism should be targeted and investigated without mercy, the source said.