Monkeypox and the Monkeypox Vaccine: A Brief History 

In the Aug. 19 issue, I wrote briefly about Monkeypox, a virus that some health officials are predicting might spread as fast as COVID-19 but with a lethality rate 10 times as high.

There was a time – and not terribly long ago – when I would have considered such a news item to be a scary fact. But now, after researching so many of the early “facts” we were given about COVID, I’ve become suspicious of any sort of news or analysis that comes from the world’s major health organizations, and especially the WHO, the NIH, and the CDC.

Here is Meryl Nass, the astonishingly prolific scientist/researcher on viruses and vaccines, tracing the 20+ year history of the Monkeypox virus and the vaccine developed to combat it, and explaining why she calls it Monkeypok$.

Antisemitism Watch: Inside the Campaign to Blacklist “Zionist” Therapists 

A therapist on a professional listserv in Chicago posted a request for a therapist who was a Zionist because the potential patient was dealing with feelings about the “current geopolitical climate.” Apparently, this is a common practice – not only to use these professional platforms to make and accept referrals for patients, but also to indicate a preference for a therapist of a particular ethnicity, gender, religion, etc.

One member of the group responded by saying, “I’ve put together a list of therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to.” She added: “Please feel free to contribute additional names as I’m certain there are more out there.”

And the situation escalated from there.

As psychiatrist Sally Satel writes in The Free Press:

There are two stories here. The first, no less troubling for being obvious, is that trying to prevent clinicians who support the existence of Israel – or are Jewish, or have Jewish-sounding names – from treating patients constitutes a grave breach of professional ethics.  Interfering with the work of colleagues for political reasons is unconscionable.

But the blacklist is also part of a larger drama unfolding within the world of psychotherapy as more and more clinicians insist that psychotherapy is, foremost, a political rather than a clinical enterprise. It is a trend that I, a psychiatrist, find alarming.

Read more here.

“Terrible Racists” 

Joel Bowman, an acquaintance and colleague who writes Notes from the End of the World, recently attended a family reunion in Pigeon Forge, TN, a town of just over 6,000 people. Spending an evening in town one night, he and his wife, he says, were “confronted with some truly awful racists…”

Read his account of what happened here.

Escaping the Madness: Two Hikes into the Wilderness 

It’s been a crazy few weeks after three years of drama cooked up by Big Medicine, Big Government, and aided and abetted by Big Media.

As a mental dip into a refreshing mountain stream, The Free Press published this essay written by Elias Wachtel, who, as an intern for the publication in 2020, escaped from the COVID and political hysteria by deciding to disappear for a while and hike the entire 2,193-mile length of the Appalachian Trail.

And if that puts you in the mood to read another escapist adventure, here’s my account of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in February 2010.

“I Do Not Need to Defend Myself for Believing That Political Candidates Should Be Chosen Democratically” 

I was going to write something like this and publish it as a Special Issue. But Freddie deBoer, the smartest leftist in the country, beat me to it.

Eight Quick Bites 

Since K and I set off to Japan on June 24, I’ve not read a single book or watched a movie. Now that my speeches and meetings here are done, I’m hoping to get back to writing movie and book reviews. In the meantime, I’ve written mini-reviews of various newspaper articles and magazine essays I’ve read on trains and in cars, shuffling from one place to another, which I found – for one reason or another – worth recommending.

* The Boycott Against Israel 

The anti-Israeli protests and rallies that were ubiquitous among Western colleges and universities since the beginning of the year have diminished considerably since the summer recesses began, but the efforts by academic and cultural groups and institutions to support Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism by boycotting everything Israeli – from Israeli technology to Israeli consumer goods to Israeli participation in educational and cultural events – are stronger than they have ever been this summer. And according to this essay recently published by the WSJ, those boycotts are being felt far and wide in Israel.

Read Time: 12 min.

* The Case for Kamala Harris 

In this piece published recently in Slate, Jill Filipovic, argues that Kamala Harris would be a great replacement for Joe Biden, but she fears that the American public is too racist and misogynist to elect her. I’m recommending it not because I think it has any merit, but to illustrate the almost astonishing detachment from reality and pre-adolescent logic it takes to make an argument like this.

Read Time: 8 min. (but you may give up after 2 or 3)

* AI and the Future of Books 

“Scraping” is a term that describes the process of feeding massive amounts of diverse data into AI entities. When R.O. Kwon discovered that one of her books had been scraped from a book data site that some AI models were trained on at the time, she felt cheated. She realized that not only was her work taken from her without compensation, but that all sorts of elements of her creativity, including her diction, sentence structure, grammar, and literary style were being gobbled up, too. “It’s potentially the biggest rip-off in creative history,” says Douglas Preston, a bestselling author and one of the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit filed against Microsoft and ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

Click here.

Read Time: 55 min.

* Returning to the Music of Natalie Merchant 

“Just around the time I was introduced to Natalie Merchant’s music, Mary Pipher’s book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994) made cultural waves as an exposition of girlhood and adolescence,” Jenny Boyar writes in this LA Review of Books essay about Merchant’s effect on her life, including a theme she sees in Shakespeare’s depiction of Ophelia. There’s no doubt that Merchant’s primary audience has been young women, and particularly those swept up by leftist social causes. But I was a mid-forties, politically middle-of-the-road man when I first got hooked by her. I can’t say Boyar’s insights helped me understand my attraction to Merchant, but they do shed light on why and how she had such an effect on so many smart, young women of that time.

Read Time: 18 min.

* Big Pharmacy-Benefit Managers 

I believe I’ve heard the term before, but I forgot or never understood what it meant. Benefit managers are businesses that corporate health plans and employers hire to manage drug benefits for insured employees. They are supposed to be working for the good of the employees they give advice to. But according to the FTC, they are steering patients away from perfectly effective medicines and therapies that are inexpensive and towards others that are more profitable to them. To the tune of $1.6 billion.

Click here.

Read Time: 14 min.

* Should Businesses Offer Well-Being Days? 

Can you improve the mental health and attitude towards their work by giving employees days off to restore their mental health? In this article from Raconteur Daily, two experts debate the pros and cons. Can you guess which one I agree with?

Read Time: 4 min.

* Why Does NATO Exist? 

I don’t agree with the argument Dan Gardner makes in this essay in support of NATO, but he does a good job of laying it out from an historical perspective. In a future issue, I’ll give you my thoughts. Meanwhile, I thought this was worth reading.

Click here.

Read Time: 11 min.

* An Alternative Education 

In the most recent issue of Doug Casey’s International Man, Jeff Thomas recommends to a young woman what she should do instead of going to college next year.

Click here.

Read Time: 4 min.

By Percival Everett
320 pages
Published March 19, 2024

James – a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave – was The Mules book selection for June. And when I started reading it, I thought, “Oh boy! Here we go with another woke narrative.” Which is to say that, though the reviews were overwhelmingly laudatory (“Gripping!”… “Thrilling!”… “Genius!”… “Masterpiece!”… etc., etc.), I was prejudiced against it from the get-go.

There were sections of the novel that didn’t pass muster for me in terms of what T.S. Eliot called the “objective correlative” – a concept in literary criticism suggesting that the emotions of a character should be expressed through external objects, a situation, or a chain of events that can evoke those emotions in the reader. But as I moved through it, I was caught up in the plot itself, which is always the most important (and for the author the most difficult) part. Then I began to admire Percival Everett for his undeniably high marketing intelligence – i.e., creating a novel that would have Huckleberry Finn, one of the most loved and accomplished novels in American fiction, serve as a springboard for the success of this book – and his equally impressive literary skills.

James is a novel that aimed to be not just a bestseller but also a literary award winner, both of which lofty goals Everett achieved.

But here’s the thing… it had a remarkably divisive effect on The Mules, with half the group strongly liking it and the other half disgusted by it. We’ve had plenty of disagreements over books before, but I can’t remember the opinions being so neatly divided and so strongly felt on each side.

I liked more about James than I disliked – and since I consider my opinion the correct one, I can recommend it to you without qualification. But I found it interesting that 100% of those that hated the book had read it, while 100% of those that liked it had listened to it.

I thought about that later that night, and sent this email to the rest of the group:

I have, as some of you know, produced three movies. The first was terrible. The second was bad. And the third was “not bad.” (But not good.)

Despite the low quality of two of the three scripts (which I wrote), I did discover something about acting that surprised me. I noticed that most of the actors that tried out for a part somehow managed to emphasize the badness of my lines, but there were a few that somehow made them work.

I had been a devotee of the auteur view of cinema: that the director is the one and only person that can make a movie succeed or fail. But this experience taught me what a difference good acting can make.

So, it might be that the actor(s) on the audio version of James were good enough to make the lines that didn’t work for those of us who read the book believable to those of us that listened to it.

That’s my two cents…

What I learned about medical “meta studies” in this essay by Toby Rogers obliterated the naïve trust I’ve had in them.

“All people of good faith should be troubled by the information I lay out below,” he writes. “It took me eight years to figure out how to describe this problem and it’s massive – it threatens the very existence of humanity.”

Read on here.

In What World Is Gender-Transition Surgery Gender-Affirming Care?

A study from the University of Texas Medical Branch found that the risk of suicide increased 12 times following gender-transition surgery compared to those who did not undergo the procedure. Click here.

The Hemingway Stories 

A new collection selected and introduced by Tobias Wolff
Published March 2, 2021
320 pages

There’s a reason why so many writers of Hemingway’s generation are no longer read much, but he still is.

One of my most esteemed colleagues tells me that Hemingway’s work bores him. He’s also despised by some for being a misogynist – in his life and in his fiction. His literary style is sometimes mocked for its simplicity and run-on sentences. And yet, there is no doubt that Hemingway was perhaps the most important literary stylist of the second half of the 20th century.

I keep those thoughts in mind every time I pick up one of his books, usually to read it for the second or third time. And each time I do, I am enthralled by the stories themselves and humbled by what seem to me to be his impeccable sentences. (That is a distinction some poets-turned-fiction-writers have claimed. Hemingway’s poetry was not very good.)

This collection, which was put together by Tobias Wolff to showcase the stories featured in the six-part PBS documentary about Hemingway, includes many of my favorites (Out of Season, Indian Camp, The End of Something, Big Two-Hearted River, The Killers, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, Hills of White Elephants, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro), as well as additional stories that demonstrate Hemingway’s talent and range. As a bonus, each one is accompanied by insights from other important writers.

Here’s the thing. We all have authors that we admire and others that we consume like candy. And then we have a handful of authors that give us something more. Authors that, every time and however many times you go back to them, you can feel the pieces of your heart and bone that life has broken being put back together. Restoring you, page by page, to the way they were when you were at the height of your ambition and potential – young, brave, indefatigable, and undefeatable.

Hemingway has that effect on me.

An Exercise Program That Works Miracles 

“Butterbean” showing off his new-found mobility 

Sent in by BW:

In his 50s, long after he should have retired from boxing, Eric “Butterbean” Esch continued, even entering several mixed martial arts bouts. He was always considered a good puncher, but he was also obese, weighing over 300 pounds for most of his career. His age and his size put him into a “freak” category of fighters. He developed a large fan base because nobody that knew anything about the fight game could believe he could compete seriously against serious fighters. And yet he did. He knocked out 58 opponents, including some world champions. But as the years went by, he got heavier. Until, at age 58, he was no longer able to stand up straight, let alone fight. When he was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame, he didn’t show up because he was embarrassed by this size (more than 500) pounds and his mobility. (He could no longer walk.)

But then he heard about someone – a former athlete like himself – who had regained his health through a form of yoga. This is the story of how that practice brought him back to fighting shape at 58.