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BOOKS

In the war of 2034, China has won the first battle without firing a shot  by Jamie McIntyre

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/in-the-war-of-2034-china-has-won-the-first-battle-without-firing-a-shot

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:  “Instead of us doing business with China, and China becoming freer, what has happened is a place like China has bought our silence with their money,”

Retired four-star Adm. Jim Stavridis has a hot property on his hands.

Stavridis is the co-author of a critically acclaimed bestseller, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, a scarily plausible imagining of how the United States and China could be drawn into a war and how badly it could turn out for both sides.

With a cast of complex, finely drawn characters and true-to-life depictions of current and future military capabilities, it’s just the sort of made-for-Hollywood technothriller that seems destined for a big or small screen near you.

The book had been out only a few months, when sure enough, Stavridis’s phone rang.

“I was called by the CEO of one of the largest studios in the country on a Friday who said, ‘I’m reading the book. I love it. The only question in my mind is whether we’re going to do a movie or we’re going to do a miniseries. Who’s your agent?” he said.

As Stavridis recounted last month on the podcast Chatter on Books, he spent the weekend scrambling to get an agent with experience negotiating movie rights and called the CEO back on Monday.

But by then, something had changed.

“Bad news,” said the CEO. “I read to the end of the book, and you know, I just can’t sell this in China.”

Stavridis may yet see his work of cautionary fiction, written in the spirit of classic Cold War novels such as On the Beach or Fail-Safe, turned into a movie or streaming series. Still, for now, the unseen hand of Chinese censorship has killed the project without lifting a finger.

Fauci resisted Trump directive to cancel virus research grant linked to Wuhan lab, new book says Excerpts from the book, “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” are being released.By Nicholas Sherman

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/fauci-allegedly-resisted-trump-directive-cancel-virus-research-grant

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ top infections disease expert, resisted a directive from President Trump to cancel a research grant for a non-profit that was linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a new book detailing the Trump administration’s handling of COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump issued a directive to Fauci and the National Institutes of Health in April 2020 to cut funding for a study examining how coronaviruses jump from infected bats to humans after it was reportedly linked to the lab in Wuhan, suspected of having leaked the virus.

The exchange between Fauci and the White House is detailed in an upcoming book by Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta called “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” according to Fox News.

The study’s sponsor, EcoHealth Alliance, was then told to end the remaining $369,819 balance of its 2020 grant.

According to the book, on April 2020, Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins received notice that Trump wanted to cancel the grant. Fauci and Collins resisted, telling the White House they “were not sure the NIH actually had the authority to terminate a peer-reviewed grant in the middle of a budget cycle.” 

IT IS JUST HYPE TO CALL ELECTISM A RELIGION? John McWhorter

ttps://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/it-is-just-hype-to-call-electism

Some think it’s just that I don’t like religion and haven’t studied it. And they’re right. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t watched a religion emerge since last year.

I am flattered to see that a person or two out there has actually taken it upon themselves to review my postings of excerpts from my The Elect, as if it were already an actual book. And from these reviews, I can see what a major strain in reviews of the actual book, Woke Racism (out from Portfolio in October) will be. I will be roundly slammed for seeming disrespectful of religion, and for not knowing enough about it to sully it with a comparison to Elect ideology.

I get it. I can see how insufferable I will seem in my take on religion, despite that Woke Racism will pull considerably back on the tone I often took in The Elect. I am, indeed, an atheist. Not an agnostic, but an atheist. And I openly admit that religious commitment perplexes and sometimes even irritates me. It’s partly a matter of personal history.

Want a bit of that dirt? First, the fact that many black Americans are devoutly Christian puts a barrier between them and me that I wish weren’t there. Second, it kept me from being able to share much of my life with a very good childhood friend when he decided to embrace an especially conservative branch of Christianity.

However, those biases acknowledged, my point that Electism has become a religion stands. My point is that religion typically includes a wing of belief that must stand apart from empiricism, that at a certain point one must just “believe.” This is not to dismiss the reams of profound, cosmopolitan close reasoning that theology has produced over the millennia, nor is to dismiss devout people as unintelligent.

Rather, it would seem to me that religious belief requires a person to sequester a part of their cognition for a kind of belief that is not based on logic. Yes, the theologian can slice and dice brilliantly in seeking a rational basis for the faith – but at a certain point, you hit that wall: one must “just” believe, “take that jump and” believe, one must believe … “.. (I don’t know) …”.

My point about The Elect is that its ideology involves – and actually is founded significantly upon – that type of religious thought.

Can Vivek Ramaswamy Put Wokeism Out of Business? Corporate America ‘makes money critiquing itself.’ The rest of us pay the price in diminished freedom.By Tunku Varadarajan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-vivek-ramaswamy-put-wokeism-out-of-business-11624649588?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A self-made multimillionaire who founded a biotech company at 28, Vivek Ramaswamy is every inch the precocious overachiever. He tells me he attended law school while he was in sixth grade. He’s joking, in his own earnest manner. His father, an aircraft engineer at General Electric, had decided to get a law degree at night school. Vivek sat in on the classes with him, so he could keep his dad company on the long car rides to campus and back—a very Indian filial act.

“I was probably the only person my age who’d heard of Antonin Scalia, ” Mr. Ramaswamy, 35, says in a Zoom call from his home in West Chester, Ohio. His father, a political liberal, would often rage on the way home from class about “some Scalia opinion.” Mr. Ramaswamy reckons that this was when he began to form his own political ideas. A libertarian in high school, he switched to being conservative at Harvard in “an act of rebellion” against the politics he found there. That conservatism drove him to step down in January as CEO at Roivant Sciences—the drug-development company that made him rich—and write “Woke, Inc,” a book that takes a scathing look at “corporate America’s social-justice scam.” (It will be published in August.)

Mr. Ramaswamy recently watched the movie “Spotlight,” which tells the story of how reporters at the Boston Globe exposed misconduct (specifically, sexual abuse) by Catholic priests in the early 2000s. “My goal in ‘Woke, Inc.’ is to do the same thing with respect to the Church of Wokeism.” He defines “wokeism” as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the “moral vacuum” created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and “the identity we derived from hard work.” He argues that notions like “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion” and “sustainability” have come to take their place.

“Our collective moral insecurities,” Mr. Ramaswamy says, “have left us vulnerable” to the blandishments and propaganda of the new political and corporate elites, who are now locked in a cynical “arranged marriage, where each partner has contempt for the other.” Each side is getting out of the “trade” something it “could not have gotten alone.”

ABIGAIL SHRIER: ON IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE

One hundred and forty-six people in Halifax, Nova Scotia wait on a list to borrow a library book. A question hangs over them: Will activists let them read it?

The book is mine — Irreversible Damage — and it is an investigation of a medical mystery: Why is the number of teenage girls requesting (and obtaining) gender reassignment skyrocketing in the United States, Canada, Scandinavia and Europe? In Great Britain, it’s up 4,400% over the last decade.

Though it shouldn’t be, this has become a highly controversial area of inquiry. The book is an exploration of why so many girls would, in such a short timeframe, decide they are transgender. And it raises questions about whether they’re getting appropriate medical treatment.

The book is not about whether trans people exist. They do. And it is not about adults who elect to medically transition genders. As I have stated endlessly in public interviews and in Senate testimony, I fully support medical transition for mature adults and believe that transgender individuals should live openly without fear or stigma.

Yet since publication, I have faced fierce opposition — not just to the ideas presented, challenged, or explored — but to the publication of the book itself. A top lawyer for the ACLU called for it to be banned. Powerful organizations like GLAAD have lobbied against it and pressured corporations — Target and Amazon among others — to remove Irreversible Damage from their virtual shelves.

There’s a pattern to such censorship campaigns. A fresh example presented itself this past week at Science-Based Medicine, which bills itself as “a group blog exploring issues and controversies in the relationship between science in medicine.”

On Tuesday, one of the blog’s long-time contributors, Dr. Harriet Hall — a family physician and flight surgeon in the Air Force with dozens of publications to her name — posted a favorable review of my book. She examined the scientific claims as well as the medical ones and wrote that the book “combines well-researched facts with horrifying stories about botched surgeries, people who later regret their choices and therapists who are not providing therapy but just validating their patient’s self-diagnosis.” Dr. Hall not only shared my criticisms of “affirmative care” — that is, immediately agreeing with a teen’s self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria and proceeding to hormones and surgeries — but also noted that many physicians and therapists feel the same way but are afraid to say so.

The Books Are Already Burning The question is only: How long will decent people stand by quietly and watch it happen? Abigail Shrier

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-books-are-already-burning

Do you remember the names Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying?  I wrote one of my earliest New York Times columns about the bravery they displayed as tenured professors — words that do not typically appear in the same sentence  — at Evergreen State College. 

It was 2017 and the professors, both evolutionary biologists, opposed the school’s “Day of Absence,” in which white students were asked to leave campus for the day. You can imagine what followed. For questioning a day of racial segregation wearing the garments of social justice, the pair was smeared as racist. Following serious threats, they left town for a time with their children, lost many of their friends, and, ultimately, resigned their jobs. 

But they refused to shut up.

They started a podcast called DarkHorse, where they suggested in April 2020 that Covid-19 could have come from the lab in Wuhan — a position that made them a laughingstock among so-called experts more than a year before Jon Stewart talked about it on The Late Show.

Their willingness to challenge conventional wisdom and take on third-rail subjects has drawn them a large audience: Last month, DarkHorse had almost five million views on YouTube. But speaking freely has come with a price. The couple’s two YouTube channels have each received several warnings and one official strike, which the company says was because of their advocacy of the drug ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19. Three strikes from YouTube and a channel can be deleted. According to Weinstein, that would mean the loss of “more than half of our income.” 

How have we gotten here? How have we gotten to the point where having conversations about important scientific and medical subjects requires such a high level of personal risk? How have we accepted a reality in which Big Tech can carry out the digital equivalent of book burnings? And why is it that so few people are speaking up against the status quo?

I can’t think of a person better situated to answer these questions than Abigail Shrier, the author of today’s guest essay.

You may have heard of Shrier. She is the author of Irreversible Damage, which the Economist named one of the best books of last year, and a dogged journalist who has taken on the difficult and thankless subject of the enormous rise of gender dysphoria among teenage girls.

I say thankless because it’s hard to capture the decibel of the vitriol that has met her work. To give you a taste: one of the ACLU’s most prominent lawyers said that “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” (The subject of how the ACLU came to favor book banning is taken up brilliantly here.) And this is to say nothing of the personal defamation of Shrier’s character, smears that bear zero relationship to my courageous friend.

You do not need to agree with Shrier about whether or not children should be able to medically transition genders without their parents’ permission (she is opposed), or for that matter with Weinstein and Heying’s bullishness about ivermectin (I had never heard of of the drug before they put it on my radar). That’s not the point. The point is that the questions they ask are not just legitimate, they are of critical importance. Meantime, some of the most powerful forces in our culture are conspiring to silence them.

That is precisely the reason it is so important to stand up and say: no. To say: progress comes only when we have the freedom to disagree. To say: It is outrageous that tech platforms are censoring such debates and that some journalists are cheering them on. To say, in public: enough. In my case, that means making sure to publish those voices who have been shut out of so many other channels that ought to be open to them.

— BW

How Flawed Social Science Leads Us Astray By Michael M. Rosen

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/07/01/how-flawed-social-science-leads-us-astray/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

There are two classes of people in the world, the old saw goes, those who divide hu­manity into two classes, and those who do not.

The charms of easy categorization and broad generalization have tempted social scientists for centuries. But the trend has picked up speed, especially in psychology, over the last several decades, as Jesse Singal capably demonstrates in The Quick Fix, his engaging and persuasive examination of the growing, unfortunate popularity of faddish theories and their prosperous purveyors.

A heterodox liberal who wrote for various center-left outlets before succumbing to the Substack revolution and starting a popular podcast with fellow nonconformist Katie Herzog, Singal characterizes his book as “an attempt to explain the allure of fad psychology, why that allure is so strong, and how both individuals and institutions can do a better job of resisting it.” The product of rigorous research and thoughtful interviews, The Quick Fix surveys a broad expanse of social-science findings and methodically assesses their flaws.

Singal bemoans the all-too-typical “jump from claims that are empirically defensible but complex and context-dependent to claims that are scientifically questionable but sexy and exciting — and simple.” Instead, he argues in favor of slow, incremental progress in social-science research that, while less flashy than the regnant style of inquiry, would not be as susceptible to debunking.

The Quick Fix takes aim at a wide range of pop-psychological trends, including those originating on the left (such as the self-esteem movement, inaugurated in Northern California) as well as those coming from the right (such as the “superpredator” theory of juvenile crime in the mid 1990s, which conservatives championed and which even Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden came to embrace). These swiftly adopted theories all fell woefully short in practice, however, frequently confusing correlation with causation, falling prey to attribution error (unduly emphasizing personality-based explanations over situational reasons for a given phenomenon), and confounding scholarly and popular work.

Particular forms of statistical manipulation have come to infect many of the studies purporting to document key psychological trends. One such method is “p-hacking”: massaging data so that they fit snugly under a widely accepted statistical threshold designed to help exclude results that could have been the product of pure randomness. “Hidden flexibility” is another: suppressing testing results not congenial to the desired hypothesis and instead publishing only supportive data. “File-drawing” is yet another: ignoring unpublished studies that revealed results contrary to the published ones. Then there is “range re­striction”: clustering data samples in a particular segment of distribution, yielding a misleading result.

The Key That Unlocked World War II By Michael M. Rosen

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/book-review-war-of-shadows-the-key-that-unlocked-world-war-ii/

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East, by Gershom Gorenberg (Public Affairs, 474 pp., $34)

Russia, Winston Churchill famously said on the eve of World War II, “is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”

In an illuminating, thoroughly researched new book, Israeli journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg provides a different kind of key to another mystery involving a different sort of Enigma, namely the Nazi system of codes that proved critical to their failure in the Middle East and their ultimate defeat.

In War of Shadows, Gorenberg unlocks a central mystery that befuddled military historians for decades: How was the famed Nazi field marshal Erwin Rommel able to steamroll British and Allied forces in North Africa for more than a year, reaching the brink of conquering Egypt and cracking the British Empire nearly in half, only to suffer an ignominious and consequential humiliation at El Alamein in July 1942 that began to turn the tide of the war?

Gorenberg describes his own book as “a distinctly new portrait of one of the great turning points of the last century.” Indeed, he has marshaled an impressive array of diplomatic cables archived at various British, Israeli, German, Italian, and American facilities, as well as the personal papers of numerous key figures in the story.

Enigma was, at least in theory, an immensely complex system, comprising nearly 2 billion possible settings in its original design. It relied on three toothed wheels containing a nest of wiring that connected a keyboard to a lamp board and enabled encryption. Each keystroke moved the first wheel a single notch, and, after 26 entries, the second wheel ticked one slot. Only after the second wheel completed its full rotation would the third wheel move as well, meaning it took more than 17,000 (26 to the power of three) keystrokes for the wheels to return to their original setting.

Why Shutdowns and Masks Suit the Elite Covid restrictions seem less onerous from the standpoint of ‘expressive individualism,’ which defines the self in terms of ‘its will and not its body.’

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-shutdowns-and-masks-suit-the-elite-11624038950?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A marvelous review in these pages last November inspired me to read a new book by O. Carter Snead, “What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Human Bioethics.” It was published by Harvard University Press on Oct. 13. Covid-19 had begun its transformation of American life a few months before, and of course the book made no mention of it.

Yet Mr. Snead’s volume helped explain the bizarre and at times perverse response of prosperous Western nations to the pandemic: the long discontinuation of economic life, the belief that pixelated screens can facilitate human relationships, the prohibitions on ordinary social interactions, the fetishization of masks. These policies and practices weren’t handed down from the ether by Reason and Science but bore the weight of contemporary assumptions about—to borrow Mr. Snead’s title—what it means to be human.

His book isn’t about public health but “public bioethics”—the effort to make humane laws and rules for biotechnology and medical care. Mr. Snead’s premise and theme is that humans are embodied creatures, not mere wills and intellects. That premise stands in contrast with the dominant modern worldview, which he calls “expressive individualism”: the belief that the human self “is not defined by its attachments or networks of relations, but rather by its capacity to choose a future pathway that is revealed by the investigation of its own inner depths of sentiment. . . . Because this self is defined by its capacity to choose, it is associated fundamentally with its will and not its body.”

Mr. Snead is a law professor at Notre Dame and director of its de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. On a recent trip to the Midwest, I drove to South Bend to ask what the pandemic year has revealed about our understanding of humanness.

The New Children’s Crusade Goodbye, Dr. Seuss. Hello, woke books for kids. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/new-childrens-crusade-bruce-bawer/

On March 2, 2021 – celebrated as Read Across America Day – Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which manages the estate of the late children’s author, announced that after consulting “with a panel of experts, including educators” it had decided to cease publication and licensing of the following books: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer.

What was the problem with these books? According to DSE, they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” This was, in any event, the conclusion reached in a 2019 academic paper, “The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books,” by Katie Ishizuka of The Conscious Kid Library and Ramón Stephens of UC-San Diego. Read every word of this turgid paper if you wish; if not, suffice it to say that these six titles, originally published between 1937 and 1976, contain material that offends contemporary woke sensibilities. And that can’t be allowed.

These aren’t the only children’s books being canceled these days. Former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss recently noted the removal from high school curricula of such classics as The Scarlet Letter, Little Women, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lord of the Flies.

But fear not! To commemorate Read across America, the National Education Association (NEA) has compiled a list of recommended titles for kids, most of which are explicitly designed to indoctrinate children in some aspect of woke ideology.

Some are more innocuous than others. For example, the short picture book All Are Welcome (Knopf, 2018, 44 pages), written by Alexandra Penfold and illustrated by Suzanne Kaufman, sends grade-school pupils “the important message that school is the place where every child is welcome.” It is composed in quatrains – three rhyming tetrameter lines followed by “All are welcome here.” Move over, Dr. Seuss: 

We’re part of a community.

Our strength is our diversity.

A shelter from adversity.

All are welcome here.

The banal message of diversity is repeated on every page. Kids of every color waving, smiling, playing, holding hands. One of them is a little girl in hijab. Her mother’s in hijab too. Her dad wears a regular sweater and blue jeans. What message is that sending?