January 19, 2025

OUT ON A LIMB: You don’t have ADHD – you’re just annoying.

ADHD is the disorder du jour. It’s the most coveted diagnosis of our time. The middle classes in particular crave the ADHD label, because who wants to go to a dinner party these days without having some vogue ailment to boast about? There is now concern – finally! – that ADHD is being overdiagnosed. The Times reports that 278,000 people in England are on ‘central nervous system stimulants’ – yikes – to treat their ADHD. There was an 18 per cent hike in prescriptions for ADHD drugs between April 2023 and March 2024, and now nearly five in every thousand people in England are being treated for the condition. Man that’s a lot of annoying people.

The Economist is worried, too. Last year it got the fashionably disordered middle classes choking on their pills when it said ‘ADHD should not be treated as a disorder’. Its reasoning was solid: much of the stuff we bundle up as ‘ADHD’ is just ‘ordinary human traits’, it said. It’s so true. Who among us has not at some point felt impulsive, disorganised, agitated? We’re not sick, we’re having a bad week. No one benefits from the pathologisation of life’s ups and downs. Aside from Big Pharma, that is. As a writer for Scientific American said back in 2016, ADHD feels like a ‘manufactured epidemic’. Drug companies have ‘massive financial incentives’, he said, to convince people they’re unhinged and need drugs. One wonders if Scientific American would publish a piece like that today.

The ADHD epidemic, like all faux disorders, started in the US. They’ve been drugging kids there for years. Seven million American kids – that’s 11.4 per cent of them – are said to have ADHD. Many are being pumped with Ritalin and other calming drugs. The sedation of a generation – it’s crazy. As one sceptical psychiatrist wrote in the New York Times a few years back, this ‘drugging of children’ is the really scary ‘epidemic’. We are using stimulants to ‘[suppress] all spontaneous behavior in normal children’, he said. Aldous Huxley called – he wants his storyline back.

How striking that this explosion in the drugging of children coincided with the crisis of discipline in family and school life. It seems to me that medication was brought in to do what adults were increasingly reluctant to do: make kids sit still and shut up. And now these ill-disciplined brats have become ill-disciplined adults. As someone from Gen X (the last sane generation), I remember fidgeting and overtalking being severely reprimanded. At school, at the dinner table, at Mass, you twitched and chatted at your peril. Even random old men on the bus would tell us to shut the fuck up. No doubt millennials and Gen Z think this sounds tyrannical, but at least we don’t need drugs to get through a 20-minute work meeting. The West’s millions of ‘ADHD adults’ don’t need medication – they need a time machine so they can go back and beg their bourgeois parents to discipline them better.

Just make sure that time machine has got a digital, not analog clock: Schools are removing analogue clocks from exam halls as teenagers ‘cannot tell the time.’

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE JOY OF LOSING: Review: Kamala: Her Historic, Joyful, and Auspicious Sprint to the White House:

Some books are destined to be bestsellers. Others are destined to end up on a cargo plane to Africa next to pallets of T-shirts celebrating would-be Super Bowl champions and Hillary Clinton’s “herstoric” victory. Indeed, sometimes it all comes down to which candidate wins the big election. Consider the recently published book of photographs commemorating Kamala Harris and her relentlessly “joyful” campaign for president. Kamala: Her Historic, Joyful, and Auspicious Sprint to the White House was churned out in just six weeks (after extending the original deadline of four) by journalist Kevin Merida and photo historian Deborah Willis of New York University. It was never going to be a bestseller for a single reason: Harris was never going to win.

It was worth a shot. The word “auspicious” seems like an unfortunate choice in retrospect. The authors and their publisher, Simon & Schuster, presumably needed a title that would work in the highly unlikely (but theoretically possible) event that Harris was elected president. The brief introduction is sufficiently vague, applauding Harris for proving “the unthinkable could happen” and “with scant time to prepare for such an epic challenge, breath[ing] hope into a deeply divided America, and turning a moribund race for the presidency into a contest stocked with optimism and possibility.” She was “poised to win.”

The photos are fine to look at. For the obnoxious liberal, this book would make a serviceable addition to any coffee table or toilet tank. But it’s Merida’s formidable prose, though relatively scant, that shines through in this extraordinary (and at times utterly bonkers) work of political hagiography, and allows normal Americans to glimpse into a bizarre alternate reality that bears little resemblance to our own. “Over a lightning-swift 107 days, Kamala Harris completely rewrote the American political playbook,” Merida writes with unrelenting passion. “She took her perpetually underestimated self and sprinted across the 2024 presidential campaign landscape, giving voice to aspiration and ambition, bringing confidence to little girls, championing small businesses as part of her economic vision. … She even ordered a slice of chocolate caramel cake—caramel’s her favorite—at Dottie’s Market in Savannah along the way.”

Merida, the former executive editor of the Los Angeles Times*, commends Harris on her successful quest to “popularize joy: A simple, sweet, infectious noun that became a kind of campaign anthem to rally around. The antidote to fear and hopelessness, and just maybe the inception of a saner kind of politics. The politics of decency.”

Strength through joy! Speaking of which, the book makes an excellent double-feature with this (also real) relic of the 2020 campaign and the vigorous youthful muscular administration it foretold:

* The owner of the L.A. Times clearly has his work cut out for him if he wishes to clean out the El Segundo Augean Stables: Los Angeles Times Owner Now Deeply Regrets Paper’s Endorsement of Bass for Mayor.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

“EMPATHY” — YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: Adrien Brody hopes The Brutalist ‘reawakens empathy for immigrants.’

Adrien Brody said he hopes his new film The Brutalist can “reawaken” empathy for immigrants.

The Oscar-tipped drama focusses on Brody’s Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the United States.

Brody, 51, said he took inspiration for the role from his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, whose family emigrated to the United States from Budapest in 1958 after the Hungarian Revolution.

“I witnessed my own mother’s journey, how she and her parents fled terrible circumstances only to enter a harsh new reality of being foreigners,” he told the Sunday Times.

“They had the obstacles of assimilation. But most of us in the US have come from such a past – second generation, third generation. So it is incongruous that there can be apathy towards people’s yearning to come over and be a contributing part of my nation.

“I hope this reawakens empathy for immigrants.”

Judging by the reviews of the three hour, 35 minute film, it doesn’t sound like its screenwriters carry around much empathy for America itself in their hearts: The Brutalist: The Raw Concrete of America.

The story follows the fortunes of the Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) after he flees the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe to seek his freedom in the United States…Tóth settles with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a furniture-maker in Philadelphia, who is enslaved by his desire to assimilate: He marries a shiksa, he becomes Catholic, he even changes his Hungarian surname to Miller. Tóth regards him with contempt. Soon, he encounters the wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an ersatz Charles Foster Kane, who is of course enslaved to his own money, but also to a driving desire to be thought of as a serious, intellectual man. Van Buren, in turn, enslaves Tóth, all but forcing him to design and build a large, self-consciously modern community center in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. And of course, Tóth enslaves himself, first to drugs to numb his despair, and then to despair itself, as he comes to see his American experience as little more than an extension of his detainment in the concentration camps.

In case anyone in the audience isn’t tracking with the brutality of it all, Corbet helpfully includes a scene where Van Buren rapes a drunken Tóth while making antisemitic observations about the causes of the Holocaust. (Yes, yes, we get it—America has raped the world….) And in case that brainy symbol isn’t clear enough, shortly after, he restates the film’s thesis in the mouth of Erzsébet, who declares to her dejected husband, “You were right, this place is rotten. The landscape, the food we eat—this whole country is rotten.” And so it goes until the very end, when Corbet unveils his final exhibit: At the first Venice Biennale, Tóth’s niece reveals in a speech that his forced labor for Van Buren was really just an extension of his Holocaust experience, that what his patron has intended as a monument to a modern, forward-looking America was in fact a re-envisioning of the death houses at Buchenwald.

As Charlie Kirk was quoted as saying, “America is the only country where even those who hate it refuse to leave. That’s how you know you live in a great country.”

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN: The Six Key People Who Covered Up Biden’s Senility Have Been Unmasked.

“Six key people protected the president,” the New York Times revealed. “Jill Biden, the first lady, and Hunter Biden, his surviving son, fervently believed in his ability to win. Mr. Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, the counselor to Mr. Biden, knew when and how to deliver information, along with Annie Tomasini, the deputy chief of staff. She and Anthony Bernal, the first lady’s most senior aide, took tight control over the president’s public schedule.”

All of them are deeply devoted to Mr. Biden. All are adept at navigating his quick temper. All enjoy proximity to the most powerful office in American politics.

And all were convinced that he was the only one who could beat Mr. Trump.

Then there was Mr. Biden himself, whose pursuit of the White House had been the family’s project for nearly 40 years. Finally elected on his third try, Mr. Biden suggested that he would be a transition president. But his pride, plus a string of legislative accomplishments and a strong showing in the 2022 midterms, drove him to seek re-election and set out on a quixotic mission to prove his vitality.

Mr. Biden told USA Today that he could have defeated Mr. Trump if he had stayed in the race. But when he departs the White House on Monday, history will remember him as the man who beat Mr. Trump, then paved the way for his return.

Though the actual number is much bigger than six. From Larry Sabato on the left, to GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson on the right, to the virtually the entirety of the “cheap fake” DNC-MSM, a lot of people were apparently sufficiently scared of the Bad Orange Man to maintain their omerta and thus prop up Biden as a nominal figurehead for as long as possible.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

TIKTOK HAS CUT A DEAL WITH TRUMP AND IS RESTORING SERVICE.

Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SUGGESTION: While we have presidents deciding on their own what is and is not in the Constitution, may I suggest DJT think hard about whether the 16th Amendment is *really* part of the Constitution?

Posted at 12:49 pm by David Bernstein

GREAT MOMENTS IN MAGICAL THINKING: Law professor lauds Biden’s ‘carefully considered’ decision on Equal Rights Amendment.

As noted by CNN, the amendment was passed by Congress in 1972, but during the individual state ratification process (38 states need to approve), the amendment “sat stagnant for decades” and its deadline came and went.

During that time five states withdrew their ratifications.

Virginia was the final state to ratify the amendment in 2020, which occurred almost 40 years after the ratification deadline set by Congress.

According to the Associated Press, “Democrats and activists have long pressed to consider the amendment as ratified,” but President Biden waited until three days before he leaves office to act on it.

Georgetown Law School posted a congratulatory message Friday on X regarding Professor Victoria Nourse — for “her decades of hard work advocating on behalf of women’s rights and the Equal Rights Amendment which Pres. Biden this morning said should be considered the law of the land.”

In a letter dated January 16, Nourse (pictured) wrote “Throughout his career in public office, Joe Biden has honored his oath to uphold the Constitution and defend the rights of women. President Biden’s carefully considered decision to recognize the Equal Rights Amendment’s status as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution brings the White House in line with the legal academy and profession.”

Two questions: Will we ever know the name of the 25-year-old social media intern in the White House who tweeted that out under Biden’s name? And more importantly:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

WELL, SOMETHING IS PROPAGANDA:

Posted at 12:31 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN: An article in the Grauniad titled “An American tragedy: how Biden paved the way for Trump’s White House return” contains this anecdote about veteran Democrat pollster Larry Sabato and Biden’s declining health:

Dean Phillips, a Minnesota congressman, announced that he would challenge Biden in the party primary, citing poll numbers and the president’s age as reasons to pass on the torch to a new generation. He told the Washington Post newspaper: “We’re at grave risk of another Trump presidency. I’m doing this to prevent a return of Donald Trump to the White House.”

In public, Phillips was ridiculed. In private, others shared his concerns. Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, recalled receiving a call from a Democratic senator in late January or early February 2024.

“I said, ‘Is there any particular reason why you called me? I’d like to know.’ He said, ‘You do realise, off the record, that Joe Biden is not going to be our nominee?’ I was stunned. I said, ‘What, how, why?’ He said, ‘I just was at a meeting with him with several other senators and he couldn’t even function. We can’t run him.’”

Sabato added that the senator in question tried to raise the issue, which angered the White House. “He was punished, as several of them were. They gave him the cold shoulder for a while. The point is that a lot of people had figured it out but they didn’t care. I’m stunned that they got away with it and have produced term two for Trump and it’s going to be the longest four years of our life.”

Here’s what Sabato was tweeting in July of 2024 before Biden was yanked off the national stage:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S MILDLY IMPRESSIVE THAT THEY HAD THESE IN STORAGE AND COULD GET THEM WORKING:

But this is pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel, unless they’ve got a brigade of the Tsar’s Own Cavalry in cold storage somewhere.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DON’T FORGET, DON’T FORGIVE: Hamas has kept the war going for over a year, holding civilian hostages and overseeing massive death and destruction in Gaza, so it can win the “victory” of securing the release of some of the most vicious murderers on the planet. And this is what the Hamasnik students in the US were protesting in favor of.

Posted at 11:29 am by David Bernstein

ZOMBIE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT: Now that Biden thinks he has made the ERA part of the Constitution, here’s another zombie for you.  I wrote this essay in 2007 (published in 2008) after Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer announced a renewed effort to adopt the ERA, so it’s a little dated.  But its main point still comes through:  The last thing progressives should want is the ERA.  It will make preferential treatment for women and woman-owned businesses illegal.  “Feminist” organizations knocked themselves out to oppose Proposition 209 in 1996 and support the effort to repeal it (Proposition 16) in 2020.  If they wanted ban discrimination by sex, they should have supported 209.

By the way, the insane tv ad they did against Proposition 209 (described in the essay) still annoys me.

Posted at 8:17 am by Gail Heriot

DARK DAY OR JOYOUS CELEBRATION; Richard Pollock surveys the multiple groups on the Left planning demonstrations and disruptions for the Trump inaugural. Even before the weather went south, Pollock found evidence that the organizers of the protests knew turnout could be a problem.

But hanging over the whole event is the question of national security, as Pollock explains:

“The question dogging national security officials is the fear there are sleeper cells inside the city designed to assassinate Trump. As was reported by CNN in mid-November, ‘According to court documents, Iranian officials asked Farhad Shakeri, 51, in September to focus on surveilling and ultimately assassinating Trump. Shakeri is still at large in Iran, the Justice Department said.’

“Officials are concerned there could be a New Orleans copycat where a convert to Islam drove a car into revelers on New Year’s eve, killing 15 and wounding more than 30. This could be a celebratory weekend or a dark one. Stay tuned.”

Pollock’s column was filed before Trump announced the swearing-in will be inside the Capitol rather than outside due to weather. Even so, Pollock shows the national security concerns are immense and immediate.

Posted at 8:16 am by Mark Tapscott