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A Califonia mom says continued “brainwashing” took her daughter’s life
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Mom Blames LGBT Club for Teen’s Suicide
A Califonia mom says continued ‘brainwashing’ took her daughter's life
BY BRAD JONES
As a child, Yaeli was a “girly girl” who liked to wear dresses. But by age 15, she told her mom she felt like she was trapped in the wrong body.
A GRIEVING CALIFORNIA mom says her severely depressed teen daughter was encouraged to leave her family, go into foster care, and begin taking cross-sex hormones, after which she developed unbearable pain and killed herself by lying down across the tracks in front of a train.
Abigail Martinez, 53, alleged that school staff at Arcadia High School—without her knowledge or consent—encouraged her daughter Yaeli to join an LGBT club that met at the school during lunchtime.
She blames a school psychologist and other school staff, as well as the Los Angeles County’s Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS), an older transgender student and her mother, and the LGBT club, for "brainwashing" and coaching Yaeli on how to get hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery instead of recommending treatment for her depression.
“They were doing all this secretly,” Martinez said. “I didn’t even realize that my daughter was going to this club because they don’t report to you what they’re doing at school, to keep them ‘safe’ from their parents, according to them.”
Martinez is not alone in her allegations. Parents at other school districts in California and other states have made similar accusations, which have led to legal battles over parental rights.
In Spreckels Union School District in Salinas, California, parent Jessica Konen accused staff at Buena Vista Middle School of indoctrinating her daughter through an LGBT club. The two teachers allegedly involved have been suspended, after an audio recording revealed them talking about how they had subverted parents and spied on middle-school students to help recruit them into the club.
Bullied at School
When Yaeli was 14, she was bullied by girls at Foothills Middle School. They tormented her about her looks and made fun of her eyes, Martinez said.
“Her eyes were beautiful to me,” she said. Since Yaeli was a baby, “everybody used to say, ‘Oh, you have beautiful eyes.’ In school, the girls were not even friends—just classmates. I told her, ‘They’re just jealous, sweetie.’”
But the bullying got worse, and Yaeli became depressed, so severely that one night she tried to overdose by ingesting an entire bottle of allergy pills. The next morning, Martinez noticed something was wrong. Yaeli wasn’t herself. She
Yaeli Martinez (R)
and her mother, Abigail Martinez.
Abigail Martinez, mother of Yaeli Martinez
appeared drowsy and dizzy, so Martinez rushed her to the hospital.
The Methodist Hospital in Arcadia called Child Protective Services (CPS) about the incident, and Yaeli was then transferred to a mental hospital. After three days, Martinez took her home, and a social worker started making weekly visits, she said.
Depression Deepens
As a child, Yaeli was a “girly girl” who liked to wear dresses. As a young teen, she liked boys, but by 15, just after she started high school, Yaeli was questioning her sexuality, Martinez said.
Martinez thought it was a normal teenage phase until Yaeli spiraled into a deeper depression and began to question her biological gender. She told her mom she felt like she was trapped in the wrong body.
Yaeli’s grades had plummeted, so Martinez called the school to arrange a meeting with the school psychologist, teachers, and other staff, she said.
The staff were aware Yaeli was attending the LGBT club, but none of them informed her, Martinez said.
Eventually, one of Yaeli’s older sisters told Martinez that Yaeli had been going to the LGBT club at school, and she discovered that an older girl at the school who was transitioning to male had befriended Yaeli and had also helped coax her to join the LGBT club. The mom of the trans student had accepted her own daughter’s new male identity and taken Yaeli under her wing, she said.
Yaeli came home from high school one day with a new extensive vocabulary of gender-related terms, and Martinez knew she had been coached.
She found out Yaeli had assumed the name “Jay,” which she later changed to “Andrew” because Jay sounded too close to her birth name—and was using male pronouns at school.
The older girl and her mom suggested Martinez call Yaeli “Jay” and use male pronouns, but Martinez told them she wasn’t ready for that, and avoided using any name or pronouns.
But the older trans student and her mother accused Martinez of being unsupportive of Yaeli’s new gender identity.
Yaeli attempted suicide a couple more times while living at home, prompting (Above) Yaeli Martinez (R) hugs her younger brother on her 17th birthday at the group home in 2017, when her mother surprised her by bringing her brother and sisters to visit. (Right) A group foster home where Yaeli Martinez lived.
a former principal at the school to go to the hospital and blame Martinez for not calling Yaeli by her “new name,” Martinez said.
“She was at the hospital, and then he came up to me, like kind of upset like, ‘Oh, is it too hard for you to call your child a new name?’” Martinez said. “He was like, ‘It’s just a new name!’
“They were pushing me.”
Martinez told the principal that a new name wasn’t going to change anything and that Yaeli needed to be treated properly for depression, she said.
And when a social worker suggested that Martinez hold a funeral for her daughter and adopt her son, Andrew, Martinez was shocked in disbelief.
“I was like, ‘What are you talking about? Did you hear what you just said?’ ... and I said, ‘How dare you tell me to bury my daughter!’” Martinez said.
When Yaeli was 16, she spent a day with her mom at a farmer’s market, and they’d made plans to watch a movie together that evening. But when they returned home from the market, Yaeli contacted her older trans friend online and disappeared, Martinez said.
She called Yaeli’s friends and neighbors searching for her. The mother of Yaeli’s older friend claimed she didn’t know Yaeli’s whereabouts, but a neighbors’ surveillance camera showed Yaeli’s trans friend and the friend’s mother waiting in a car outside the home for about five minutes before Yaeli left with them, Martinez said.
She claims the older trans girl and her mother coached Yaeli to go to court and accuse her mom of physical and emotional abuse and ask the judge to be placed in a foster home so the state would pay for her gender reassignment surgery.
On the advice of DCFS and the school psychologist, the judge ruled in Yaeli’s favor, and she was sent to a foster care group home. She left Arcadia High
School in June 2016 and attended schools in other districts.
Martinez was allowed to see her daughter for only one hour per week on supervised visits because she had been placed on a child abuse registry. But a letter obtained by Insight shows that more than two years later, on Aug. 2, 2019, DCFS removed her from the child abuse registry and dismissed the allegations of abuse as “inconclusive.”
She insisted throughout the ordeal that hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery wouldn’t help treat her daughter’s depression, but on DCFS’s recommendation, a judge ruled Yaeli could proceed with hormone therapy.
Martinez raised concerns with medical staff at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles about whether her daughter had received enough counseling about hormone therapy, but was assured that Yaeli had “watched a video” and was given information to keep educating herself.
The testosterone shots only made Yaeli’s depression worse, Martinez said.
“She suffered,” Martinez said. “She died in pain because all her bones started to hurt.”
“It was terrible. ... They were putting chemicals in her body that didn’t belong. It was making her little body to grow into this monster—a boy—and she died in pain,” Martinez said, her voice breaking. “She told me, ‘Mom, the pain is severe.’”
At the group home, Yaeli was introduced to the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Recognize Intervene Support Empower (RISE) program, and the “brainwashing” continued, Martinez said.
RISE states that its mission is to work with youth, parents, caregivers, and professionals “to prepare families, organizations, and systems to respond to the needs of LGBTQ+ youth and combat the heterosexism and anti-LGBTQ+ bias that leads to adverse health and mental health outcomes.”
“RISE was pushing my daughter,” Martinez said. She accused RISE of using Yaeli as a prop to raise funds for the group. “RISE—they are the ones who even took my daughter to these events ... to collect money from wealthy people to tell their story so the people can feel sorry for them and gave them more money.”
Yaeli legally changed her name to Andrew Martinez and moved into an independent living facility in Pomona when she was 19. However, she remained a biological woman until she died on the train tracks at a station in Pomona, California, on Sept. 4, 2019, Martinez said.
The Train
That night, Yaeli walked toward a moving freight train, knelt down on the tracks, raised her hands in the air, then laid down across the tracks, according to the police report, Martinez said.
When Martinez asked to see her daughter’s body, “the coroner’s office told me, ‘No honey, there is nothing that you can see,” she said. “I was not able to even see her hands.”
A former Marine at the funeral home told Martinez that he had emotional scars from the “bad stuff” he’d seen in the military, but he’d “never seen something like this.” He advised her to remember Yaeli the way she was the last time they had fun spending time together.
She took his advice and tried her best to recall the good times she had with her daughter.
Abigail Martinez, mother of Yaeli Martinez
“I have a picture where she’s holding the soccer ball with her uniform when she was maybe 5,” Martinez said.
Yaeli wanted to play soccer because her older sisters played, but she was afraid of the ball and the other girls running so fast, she said.
“She was trying—a little girl who didn’t want to get hurt. She didn’t like sports. She used to run around the field, and we used to yell, ‘Yaeli, get the ball! Kick
Yaeli Martinez holding a soccer ball when she was 5 years old. Martinez remembers that as a child, Yaeli didn't like being hurt, so she used to run away from playing sports.
the ball!’” Martinez said. “She was the one that used to run away.”
Child and Family Services
In 2020, Martinez sued Los Angeles County and its DCFS, claiming that the department had contributed to Yaeli’s death.
In a statement emailed to Insight on March 21, a DCFS spokesperson said the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation and is “legally bound from commenting on individual cases.”
“We extend our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Andrew M., as well as to the LGBTQIA community which advocates relentlessly to protect its youngest and most vulnerable members from such tragedies,” DCFS said in the statement.
DCFS stated it supports LGBTQ+ youth, who—according to national data—face increased physical and mental health risks, including higher rates of suicide, and their families.
“To buffer the impact of negative external factors, we have aggressively pursued the implementation of inclusive, gender-affirming laws, policies and supportive services for LGBTQ+ youth,” DCFS stated.
DCFS now has new contracts with the Los Angeles LGBT Center, Penny Lane Centers, The Help Group, and the Long Beach LGBTQ Center to provide services tailored to youth, according to the statement.
“Affirming services are intended to uplift a youth’s sexual orientation and gender identity. Therapy, leadership and mentorship programs, crisis intervention services, support groups, training and education also will be provided to youth, their families and caretakers through these organizations,” DCFS stated.
The School District
Ryan Foran, a spokesman for Arcadia Unified School District, told Insight in a March 22 email that the district doesn’t treat students for depression, nor push hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery. Instead, he said, students are referred to licensed mental health professionals for treatment.
“We share in the sorrow and grief of the Martinez family and continue to offer our sincerest condolences,” Foran said in the statement. “While we are unable to provide personal information or Yaeli Martinez (back C), her mother, Abigail Martinez (seated), and her brother and sisters, in this undated photo.
comment regarding a specific student due to state and federal laws protecting the privacy of student information, any claim or assertion that would suggest our school encouraged one of our students to take hormones and undergo gender reassignment surgery would be categorically false.
“Furthermore, a claim suggesting our school or a staff member did not properly treat a student’s severe depression is both completely inaccurate and troubling as our schools and staff would not be authorized or medically qualified to treat clinical depression. However, our staff works tirelessly to provide and suggest resources, when appropriate, to help connect students and families with licensed mental health professionals to treat conditions such as clinical depression.
“We have a very caring staff that is dedicated to providing a safe, nondiscriminatory school environment for all students. We also continually provide resources to promote the healthy mental, emotional, and social well-being of all students.”
Struggling to Cope
Martinez wonders how Yaeli’s two sisters and brother will cope with such a devastating loss. When she’s alone, she often cries out her daughter’s name, wishing she could ask Yaeli why she took her own life.
“Sometimes I’m driving, and all of a sudden I call her name, and I say, ‘Yaeli—Why, Yaeli? We miss you. I miss you.’ It’s hard,” she said, sobbing.
CPS never called Martinez after her daughter’s death, she said.
“I requested a meeting with all of the people who were involved in my daughter [going] through all this,” Martinez said.
But no one responded.
“Nobody. Nobody in over two years,” she said. “I feel like everybody wants to ... make it seem like it never happened, or it’s never going to happen to their kids.”
Martinezbelievesit’simportanttoshare Yaeli’s story and advocate for change so that others won’t suffer the way she did.
“We have to change,” she said. “It’s not fair if we continue in the same circle.”
A mom who goes by the pseudonym Charlotte Jacobs to protect the identity of her gender dysphoric daughter and her own, told Insight that she and her family have experienced similar problems with trans indoctrination at school and with CPS.
“There is no law in California that states using a child’s birth name is emotional child abuse, but Ms. Martinez lost custody of her child to just that. Her story was terrifying because it could have happened to us,” Jacobs said.
“My 13-year-old daughter wanted to run away to foster care so that she could control her new gender identity. We could easily have had our child taken away, too, because we refuse to use her male name.”
The Martinez family’s saga, Jacobs said, is “emblematic of what is happening across the U.S.”
“School counselors, teachers, advocacy groups, and ‘glitter’ families are instructing minors how to get removed from their homes by feigning abuse so that they can get purported ‘life-saving treatment,’ when, in reality, gender treatment only exacerbates their mental health issues,” she said.
“Once in a foster care system, the minor child can get cross-sex hormones without parental consent. The judge, Department of Family Services, school counselors, social workers, gender clinic, and RISE have to answer for Yaeli’s death, and they need to be held to account.”
Roger Severino, a career attorney who formerly worked with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and who helped Martinez with her case, told Insight that the school was part of the problem, but “the biggest culprit was DCFS” because it took custody of Yaeli away from her mother and, “via the court system,” put her on crosssex hormones.
In Yaeli’s case, the system “followed the LGBT playbook to a T,” he said. “Take away the child from a mother who is deemed insufficiently supportive of a full transition, even chemically, and then limit the contact, surround the child with support clubs and counselors that all point in one direction—[the] sole rejection of the child’s biological body, and acceptance of a new identity.
“Now you have all those forces, working in tandem, and not addressing the actual problem. It made things worse.”
Yaeli found no solace in the “LGBT playbook” and “ended up taking her own life as a result,” Severino said.
“The promise that the LGBT activists make is that if you don’t do a full transition, children will kill themselves, and that is a reckless charge used to deprive parents of custody of their own children,” he said.
“There is no state law that mandates that minors have to be medically or surgically transitioned. There are some state laws that are telling schools to do these social affirmations—so addressing a child by preferred pronouns, which was a thing that the Arcadia [Unified] School District was forced to do.”
Severino, also a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The Heritage Foundation, pointed out that the district was also forced to allow biological boys into girls’ locker rooms.
He suspects school district officials were eager to adopt transgender affirming policies or risk losing federal
When Yaeli attempted suicide, a former principal at the school blamed Martinez for not calling Yaeli by her ‘new [male] name,’ Martinez said.
funding because the Obama administration sued the district in 2013 for discriminating against a trans student.
The July 24, 2013, settlement between the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division required the district “to develop a comprehensive gender-based non-discrimination policy” that includes transgender students and inform them of “their right to request a support team of appropriate individuals to ensure that the student has equal access to and equal opportunity to participate in the District’s programs and activities.”
Yaeli Martinez as a young child. A former Marine at the funeral home advised her mother to remember Yaeli the way she was the last time they had had fun spending time together.
SPRING BLOSSOMS
A MAGNOLIA TREE IN BLOOM
despite freezing temperatures and a recent snowfall, near the Holy Trinity Catholic church in the Makartplatz square in Salzburg, Austria, on April 4.
PHOTO BY BARBARA GINDL/APA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
SOCIAL ISSUES Internet Forums Encourage Self-Harm
It’s becoming more common among young women and girls
BY JACKSON ELLIOTT
About 15 to 20 percent of young Americans have self-harmed at least once, according to a psychiatrist.
Dean, a 14-year-old girl, has a 3-inch by 8-inch scar on her hip.
IT’S USUALLY NUMB with nerve damage but when pressed, it sometimes flares up with shooting pain. Every time the weather gets warm enough to go to the beach, it makes her feel embarrassed.
Dean made this scar, one small act at a time. It’s not her only one.
“I would try to stay clean, and then relapse, and then try to stay clean, then relapse,” she said.
Dean, who prefers to remain anonymous, has struggled with selfharm in various ways since the age of 9, she told Insight.
Dean said she started to self-harm at a time when she felt stressed and lonely. Some of her friends had moved away, and self-harm felt like a way to exert control in a chaotic situation. Then, it became an addiction.
“About the time when I was 12, I started realizing it was kind of an addiction at that point,” Dean said.
Dean’s addiction to self-harm was bolstered by her time on the internet, she said. Websites she spent time on taught her that self-harm was normal.
“I was hearing, these kinds of people have done it. So it’s clearly not too horrible,” she said.
Social media pages that publicize self-harm have often inadvertently led vulnerable young people into self-harm, according to psychologists. Although many of these social media pages are officially against self-harm, some of the jokes, stories, and advice in them tend almost to celebrate it.
More Hurt Than Ever
Recent statistics suggest that among young women and girls, self-harm is an increasingly large trend that might affect up to 30 percent of teens. According to psychiatrist Dr. Jess Shatkin, about 15 to 20 percent of young Americans have self-harmed at least once.
“Most people who self-harm do it for a brief period of time and don’t continue,” he said. “There’s a lot of experimentation, and relatively less follow-through.”
However, these numbers aren’t a good estimate, he said. Most self-harm isn’t reported.
The rise in self-harm follows a general trend of increasing mental illness that has been true since the 1940s, Shatkin said. This trend isn’t because of changing medical definitions or diagnostic criteria.
“The criteria by which we diagnose, symptomatically, people with depression and anxiety have not changed dramatically since 1980. Yet we’ve seen rates go up and up,” he said.
This high number doesn’t mean selfharm is “normal,” according to psychiatrist Dr. Pamela Cantor. It means that young people today are in a place of terrible mental suffering.
“I have more phone calls now than I’ve ever had,” she said.
Not only are there more calls about self-harm, but the kids making the calls are also younger, Cantor said. She’s received calls about suicidal children as young as 6 and 7.
Cantor said that increased self-destructive behavior encompasses both social issues and psychological pain.
Into the Rabbit Hole
Dean got deeper into self-harm by going online. When she was struggling with suicidal thoughts, depression, and anxiety, she started researching these topics by looking on Reddit and Pinterest.
“I was going on to more of the forums
Ruth’s stuffed animal Panda is “a source of comfort” for her. Ruth struggles with self-harm. and seeing how people did it, how it ‘helped’ them. The poetry people write about how it feels: It seemed logical,” she said. “And it seemed like, ‘If I want to stave off suicide, this seems like a good way to do it.’”
Dean said that among friends her age, people often “try” self-harm to see if they can do it.
“It is pretty common for people to try it and experiment with it,” she said. “But I don’t know how many people latch on to it.”
If Dean’s friends see her scars, they tend not to tell the adults in her life, she said. Instead, they encourage her to look for support from hotlines or from people online.
“A few have said, ‘If you promise me you’re trying to get better, I won’t tell any adults. I won’t tell the counselor, or I won’t tell any teachers,’” Dean said. “But usually what they say is, ‘Reach out online, call a hotline if you need it.’”
Dean said that if she had known about the many long-term effects of self-harm scars, she wouldn’t have hurt herself. Her scars itch, sometimes sting, and other times feel numb. When people see them, they raise awkward questions and difficult conversations.
“I don’t think I would have done it,” she said. “There are just the little things you don’t think about.”
According to Cantor, teenagers like Dean are often more influenced by what their peers around them do than older adults are.
“Their identity is not as well-formed,” she said of young people.
Young people wear the same shoes, dress the same way, and all try to fit in because they often don’t know who they are yet, Cantor said.
When kids like Dean enter environments where self-harm is seen as normal, their perception of what they should do can shift dramatically, she said. Participating in online communities that celebrate self-harm can often cause problems for young people.
“Pages dedicated to self-harm can
promote copycat behavior, competitive behavior, and one-upmanship,” she said.
Competing to Be Worse
Ruth, 20, is a mechanical engineer, judo practitioner, avid reader, and committed Christian.
She has also been struggling with selfharm for about two years. It became the way she dealt with stress.
“I don’t remember why I initially did it the first time,” she said. “I wanted to see that I was able to do this. It was like a challenge.”
Ruth’s explanation for her behavior is complex, with a web of feelings that tend to conflict. In the moments before she hurts herself, she often finds that some part of her screams at her not to do it. But at the same time, she wants to do it anyway.
“Even when I’ve been the most into self-harm, it is still somewhat difficult to actually hurt yourself,” she said.
Ruth said that the most difficult part (Left) One can get deeper into self-harm by going online, where social media pages normalize and glorify it. (Above) In Reddit posts, people often try to outdo each other with stories of how much they’ve hurt themselves, as if it’s a competition.
of her self-harm addiction is that it has made her feel distant from God.
“My relationship with God is a holy thing that I wish I really hadn’t messed with,” she said. “And I kind of, I broke it all down, and I have to build it back up again.”
Ruth said she has long struggled with suicidal urges and self-harm, but social media has made her fight against self-destructive urges more difficult.
Some of Ruth’s struggle with self-harm comes from Reddit pages. She shouldn’t be on the self-harm page r/madeofstyrofoam, but she still is, she said. Three other popular Reddit pages on self-harm are r/selfharm_memes, r/selfharm and r/selfharmscars. Many posts on these pages normalize and glorify self-harm.
Many of these Reddit pages use a series of euphemisms that dehumanize the body. Lacerations are “yeeting,” the white flesh just beneath the skin is “styrofoam,” and “beans” are the bubbles of fat deeper underneath the skin.
“One of the rules on the subreddit is no glorification of self-harm,” she said of the subreddit r/madeofstyrofoam. “But there’s 100 percent glorification of selfharm. It’s like a competition,” Ruth said of her experience there.
In self-harm subreddits, people often try to outdo each other with stories of how much they’ve hurt themselves, Ruth said. It becomes a competition.
“We all want to have it worst. It’s a very human thing,” she said.
When Reddit users hear someone else’s story of greater suffering, they often feel like it takes away their right to feel hurt, Ruth said. To regain their feelings of justification, they sometimes hurt themselves in an even worse way.
The Hurt Leading the Hurt
The self-harm subreddits are something between a support group, a joke page, a hobby club, and a public performance. And some of the participants don’t want to get well.
“Personally, I don’t want to get better,” one Reddit user on r/selfharm_memes said.
Another post on r/selfharm_memes joked about bandaging self-harm wounds with socks rather than bandages. No one advised the original poster on how to quit.
On r/selfharm_memes, users are allowed to post photographs of selfharm weapons as long as they are part of a meme.
In one post on r/madeofstyrofoam, a Reddit user asks the subreddit for help on a problem. After harming himself at school enough for the injury to be obvious, the user learned that his dad was going to meet him in the next few minutes. The user asked the subreddit for advice on how to hide the injury so his dad wouldn’t find out.
Insteadofadvisingtheself-harmertotell his dad and get help, Reddit participants advised him on how to hide the injury.
“Maybe make a small cut on your finger and then ask for a bandaid, go to the bathroom, and try to cover as much as possible,” one commenter advised.
“Paper tissue is a bad idea since it can get stuck in the wound,” another commenter advised.
But no one told the user to open up to the people around him in his life about his self-harm problem.
The subreddit for r/madeofstyrofoam’s rules say, “What you write is your own business.”
The subreddit r/selfharmscars shows pictures of healed or partly healed selfharm scars. According to studies, images of self-harm scars can often tempt people to harm themselves.
“i like blooood,” a post on r/selfharm is titled.
“Stopppp you made me laugh out loud in class omfg,” a comment on the post reads.
The rules on r/selfharm prohibit “glorifying self harm.”
For someone such as Ruth, these jokes and images strengthen parts of herself that she wants to defeat.
“Some days, I’m very proud of my scars,” Ruth said. “Some days, I’m definitely not proud of my scars, because I’m 20, and these are going to be on my body probably my entire life.”
Insight contacted Reddit about its policy on pages that have people glorifying self-harm, but has yet to receive a response.
According to psychologist Dr. Terri Apter, if a community with the same problem isn’t working to get better, they tend to make each other worse.
“Self-harm, therefore, becomes a means of assuring them they fit into a group,” she said. “Therefore, they have a disincentive to learn new ways of managing their anxieties.”
Fighting to Recover
No matter the cause, when teens develop an addiction to self-harm, the addiction often remains long after the original reasons disappear.
Amy, a 19-year-old from Tennessee, started self-harming in middle school because she had a lot of friends who did it, she said.
“It later became pretty much an addiction,” she told Insight. “At first, it was mainly just a way of trying to be cool with my friends, and then I became reliant on it.”
Amy said that as a kid, she often felt like her feelings of depression weren’t valid. But actual physical wounds gave her a “reason” to feel bad.
Amy said that many of her friends who self-harmed also had their addiction start after they learned about self-harm One sign of potential self-harm is if someone always wears long sleeves, no matter the temperature.
from friends or online.
But after young people get addicted to self-harm, it’s not easy to stop. When Amy stopped being friends with the person she had originally tried to impress with self-harm, she said she realized self-harm wasn’t cool. It was horrible.
By then, however, she found that she couldn’t stop.
“Freshman year-ish would be when I was like, ‘Okay, this is not cool anymore. Stop!’” she said. “And then I realized I can’t stop.”
Amy stopped self-harming when she got a seasonal job that was so exhausting she didn’t have time to self-harm, she said. After the job ended, she chose to stay clean.
“I was like, I don’t really want to throw away this progress that I’ve made, and it kind of just went on from there,” Amy said.
Today, Amy is proud to be at about 450 days without self-harm, she said.
To help keep herself from selfharming, Amy has familiarized herself with the tools she once used for selfharm. This practice has helped her think of the objects as tools again, rather than as weapons.
“It made it a lot easier to associate it more with its intended use rather than what I would want to use it for,” she said.
How to Help
Internet forums aren’t the best way to help people who struggle with self-harm, psychologists say.
“People should take self-harm behavior seriously and should have the courage to ask questions if they’re suspecting a loved one is self-harming,” said Dr. John Bradley, president of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society.
People who self-harm have a high risk of committing suicide, he said. They aren’t harming themselves to get attention. They’re harming themselves because they don’t have good coping strategies for stress. Self-harm often worsens over time.
“It certainly can become addictive,” Bradley said. “Its effects can be reinforcing in their own right and create this addictive pattern.”
Parents and friends can watch for physical signs of self-harm like strange injuries or a tendency to hide a nonprivate body part, Bradley said. But these signs of selfharm can often be disguised.
It’s harder to disguise the anxiety, depression, or stress that usually accompany self-harm, he said. If someone is hurting, people around them should ask them what’s happening.
“There are many effective treatments for emotional dysregulation and selfharm behaviors that can help people a great deal,” Bradley said.
Perspectives
KNOW BLOOD FOR OIL
The green push in Europe is costing many lives in Ukraine. 44
WAPO ACCEPTS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY
Democrats are in disarray leading into the midterm and presidential elections.
Closing our economies won’t address the issues posed by 45 China or Russia.
The Castoro 10 pipelay vessel works on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project on the seabed of the Baltic Sea, near Lubmin, Germany, on Aug. 16, 2018. Germany halted the project on Feb. 22, one day after Moscow recognized the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine as independent states.
PHOTO BY SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF AUTARCHY
THOMAS MCARDLE was a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush and writes for IssuesInsights.com. Thomas McArdle
Know Blood For Oil
During president George H.W. Bush’s 1991 Persian Gulf War, protesters took up the slogan, “No Blood for Oil”—the filthy, lucrative, greenhouse gas-producing commodity being an obscene cause for anyone to die for.
But oil isn’t the devil’s venom all too many have been convinced it is.
The black gold pumped from deep underground has often been called the lifeblood of the world economy, but even celebrating it in that way doesn’t do it justice. Perhaps more than anything else, it’s a manifestation of the ingenuity that liberty fosters, whose benefits then spread to all humanity.
Petroleum was used in antiquity for some construction, heating, and even medicinal purposes, but before the Industrial Age, it was to almost everyone nothing more than a sludgy nuisance. Today, every day, it delivers the food that feeds billions, powers the vehicle that races to your home to take your loved one to the emergency room minutes after you call 911, allows billions to commute to jobs that wouldn’t exist were they not able to make the trip, and keeps them warm in the winter both at the workplace and in their homes with their families.
Serious disruptions in the global availability of this abundant liquid, second only on the planet to water, would cause economic collapse. Depression, mass unemployment, starvation, riots, political upheaval, and vulnerability to foreign aggression can all be expected if major shortages force the price of gasoline to become prohibitive.
Russian President Vladimir Putin wouldn’t today be bombing civilians in Ukraine in his quest to restore the territory of the Soviet Union had Europe—in particular, Germany—not allowed itself to become so dependent on Russian natural gas: oil’s sister fossil fuel. That dependence, in turn, wouldn’t exist if the nations of the free world hadn’t for decades been viewing the subject of petroleum through the most distorted ideological lens. Ukrainians’ blood is spilling because European governments hate oil.
At nearly 10 million barrels a day, Russia is second only to the United States in oil production; in continental Western Europe, only Italy makes the top 40 at barely 100,000 barrels per day. German dependence on Russian energy goes way back to the Cold War, a component of what was hailed at the time as an enlightened appeasement strategy toward the Soviet Union.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviets were providing about a third of West Germany’s natural gas, expanding from 1.1 billion cubic meters in 1973 to 25.7 billion cubic meters in 1993. The Nord Stream 1 pipeline, beginning operations in 2021, brought gas directly to Germany from Russia through the Baltic Sea.
The German chancellor behind the project, Gerhard Schröder, was so tight with Putin that he’s now reaping his personal financial reward as chairman of Russia’s Rosneft petroleum company since 2017, and in February becoming a director of Gazprom, owned by the Russian government.
Germany long ago went fanatical on green energy with its “Energiewende” (energy transition) policy, shunning fossil and nuclear, with former Chancellor Angela Merkel 11 years ago beginning a phase-out of all nuclear power plants, originally to be completed in 2022. Underlying the policies that have now left NATO countries in Europe disinclined to bite too hard the Russian hand that supplies so much of their energy is the false article of belief that fossil fuel depletion is around the corner.
The United States alone has nearly a century’s worth of natural gas left, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And from 2016 to 2018—a mere two years—the U.S. Geological Survey revised its estimate of recoverable crude oil in the Wolfcamp section of the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico to 46.3 billion barrels from 20 billion barrels, because of technological improvements in extraction methods; we may have far more than the nearly half-century of crude available in the world.
The war in Ukraine that has killed thousands so far and forced millions from their homes is the consequence of allowing environmentalist ideology to rule European energy policy, and being trapped for decades in a state of denial about Putin’s malevolent nature despite his invading Crimea in 2014, assassinating political critics, such as arranging the poisoning of journalist Alexander Litvinenko with a radioactive isotope in 2006, and the year before that stating that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
The war on fossil fuels has already shed a great deal of blood over the issue of oil, with further bloodshed to come from elsewhere if countries continue to allow green misconceptions to blur their vision.
ANDERS CORR is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk. He is an expert in political science and government. Anders Corr
Washington Post Accepts Hunter Biden Laptop Story
The hunter biden laptop story has just blown up from the New York Post, which broke the story to the mainstream liberal media.
Almost two years later, the media finally accessed a copy of the purported laptop and expertly verified the authenticity of much of its most important material, including evidence of millions of dollars in payments to the Biden family from a Chinese conglomerate and the apparent involvement of President Joe Biden himself in some of Hunter Biden’s foreign business maneuvers.
According to two March 30 Washington Post articles, which reported the verification of 22,000 emails on the laptop and newly discovered financial and government documents, CEFC China Energy and its executives “paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle [James Biden].”
The laptop only “purportedly” belonged to Hunter Biden because The Washington Post’s expert authenticators couldn’t verify all data on the laptop copy and claimed that some of it appeared irregular.
“In their examinations,” according to The Washington Post, the two experts “found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.”
Nevertheless, the New York Post is legitimately cross that The Washington Post and The New York Times took so long to access and verify the email data.
The closely fought presidential election was likely thrown to Joe Biden because these pro-Democratic outlets—plus Twitter, Facebook, and dozens of former intelligence officials—downplayed the original reporting, including calling it “Russian disinformation.”
Now, they are mostly admitting, one by one, to the legitimacy of the main outline of the story.
The NY Times buried its reporting of the authentication of the emails within a long story whose headline provides information that could bias jurors against any future conviction of Hunter Biden on tax-related criminal offenses.
That is, that after a reported failure to pay all his taxes, Hunter Biden did, in fact, pay—which wouldn’t change any actual fraud. Any competent prosecution of Hunter Biden would try to keep his later payment, likely seen as exculpatory by average citizens, from the jurors.
As noted by the New York Post on March 30, “The Times buried its verification of the emails in the 24th paragraph of a 38-paragraph story that said Hunter Biden had paid off a significant tax debt to the IRS, potentially making it harder for prosecutors to win a conviction or a long sentence against him for tax fraud.”
That the NY Times and Washington Post are addressing the issue at all, however, especially when the president had a record-low approval rating of just 40 percent on March 27, does not augur well for a second term.
Fifty-one percent of Democrats in a recent CNN poll would prefer a different candidate than Joe Biden for their party in 2024. Of those, 72 percent wanted anyone other than Joe Biden, while those potential candidates most frequently named were Bernie Sanders (5 percent), Michelle Obama (4 percent), Pete Buttigieg (2 percent), and Kamala Harris (2 percent).
The Democrats aren’t expected to do well during the midterms. They could easily lose the presidency in 2024 to Donald Trump if he decides to run or someone that Trump anoints during the 2024 Republican National Convention. Fifty percent of Republican respondents in the CNN poll preferred Trump as the presidential nominee for 2024, while 49 percent preferred someone else.
In the latter category, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis got the most support (21 percent), with most other potential candidates getting just 1 percent, including top-runners Donald Trump Jr., Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and Sen. Rand Paul.
While DeSantis has not been as tough on China as other leading Republicans, including Mike Pompeo and Sen. Marco Rubio, he has supported decoupling from China and reshoring American jobs.
On March 29, DeSantis counterattacked Disney, which criticized Florida’s new law against teaching sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom, by pointing out that the California-based company self-censors for China and hasn’t condemned the Uyghur genocide.
Democrats are finally recognizing the authenticity of the most important China-related parts of the Hunter Biden laptop story. We need better protection against the foreign influence of our highest politicians, including through their families. But we already knew that.
It also suggests that coming into the 2022 midterm elections and 2024 presidential elections, the Democrats are entirely disorganized. Based on what the presidential field looks like today, Trump and DeSantis both have a good shot at being our next American president.
MILTON EZRATI is chief economist for Vested, a contributing editor at The National Interest, and author of "Thirty Tomorrows" and "Bite-Sized Investing.” Milton Ezrati
Fed Moves to Check Inflation
Recent policy changes will do little to erase inflation fears
Federal reserve policymakers have made a change. Chairman Jerome Powell announced only days ago that the nation’s inflation problems impel a more restrictive monetary stance.
Accordingly, the Fed has ended its long-held practice of directly buying securities in financial markets—what the Fed calls “quantitative easing.” Policymakers have also raised the benchmark federal funds rate by 0.25 percentage points to 0.5 percent.
These changes were widely expected, as was the Fed’s warning of more rate hikes to come and a kind of reverse quantitative easing in which policy absorbs inflationary liquidity from the system by selling from the huge asset portfolio that the Fed amassed during the long period of quantitative easing.
All this is a relief for the inflationary concerns of Wall Street and Main Street. But still more helpful was something that few expected. The Fed’s public statement accompanying the policy shift described today’s inflation as the result of “broader price pressures” and not the war in Ukraine.
For obvious political reasons, President Joe Biden has blamed rising energy prices and, by implication, overall inflation on Russian President Vladimir Putin. Had the Fed gone along with that kind of reasoning, it would have left all fearing that monetary policymakers lacked the conviction needed to deal with inflationary pressures.
Given that Powell had for some time last year dismissed inflationary pressure as “transitory,” this new, more serious attitude should give people greater confidence that the Fed will diligently work to ease general price pressures.
Still, the Fed’s steps must seem inadequate for those who remember the great inflation of the 1970s and 1980s or have studied that time. These people are aware how a lack of forceful counter-inflationary moves then allowed inflation to embed itself into the economy and ultimately made relief much more difficult.
Since inflation has raged for more than a year and now stands at an 8 percent annual rate, the worst in 40 years, many see recent Fed actions as altogether too cautious, doing too little too late. That certainly was the judgment of Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard. He dissented from the Fed’s decision, pressing for a larger 0.5 percentage point increase in the federal funds rate.
No doubt monetary policymakers opted against an aggressive shift for fear that it would cause markets to crash and perhaps bring on a recession. Although that isn’t an unreasonable concern, it would be easy to overstate.
Markets certainly show no sign of crashing in the face of the Fed’s moves. At least initially, they seem to have responded with relief that the Fed was, at last, taking the inflationary threat seriously.
Nor does the risk of recession otherwise look serious. To be sure, the post-pandemic economic surge is slowing, but little points to outright recession or even the kinds of vulnerabilities that might give the Fed pause.
Besides, for all the drama of the Fed’s policy shift, what it’s doing is far from restrictive. Consider that 8 percent inflation enables someone to repay borrowed funds with dollars that are worth 8 percent less in real terms than the year before. If people borrow short-term at the federal funds rate of 0.5 percent, they enjoy using the money for a year and effectively pay the lender far less value than they earn from the interest charged.
Indeed, matters are such that the borrower is effectively paid in real terms to use the money, about 7.5 percent per year, in fact. In other words, a major incentive to borrow and spend remains—hardly a restrictive monetary environment.
Of course, these first moves are far from the end of the story. The Fed has pledged to be responsive to signs emerging from the economy. Making the judgment that the Fed so far has done too little hardly condemns the U.S. economy to suffer ongoing inflation on par with what befell it in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Rather, a recognition that the Fed hasn’t done enough makes clear that before too long, policymakers will have to accelerate interest rate increases and reverse the effects of past quantitative easing more dramatically than suggested by recent Fed statements. Circumstances likely will demand it.
Presently, consensus expectations look for the federal funds rate to rise to slightly less than 2 percent by year-end 2022 and to 2.75 percent by year-end 2023. The Fed will likely have to go a lot further a lot sooner.
EMEL AKAN is a senior reporter for The Epoch Times in Washington, D.C. Previously she worked in the financial sector as an investment banker at JPMorgan. Emel Akan
Trademark Infringement in Russia?
Dozens of trademark applications for famous US brands are filed in Russia
Russia’s trademark office is seeing a spike in applications for famous Western brands since the Russian government issued a decree early last month permitting the use of patents from “unfriendly countries” without pay or consent from the owner.
Opportunistic Russians, emboldened by the decree, have so far submitted more than 50 trademark applications for names and logos of well-known brands, including Starbucks, Nespresso, McDonald’s, Mercedes-Benz, Chanel, and Christian Dior.
This comes after hundreds of multinational companies announced they will pull out of Russia, closing stores or suspending operations in response to the war in Ukraine.
It’s unclear if Russia’s trademark authority will grant these applications for registration. Some trademark and patent attorneys have raised concerns when a Russian court in Kirov on March 3 determined that anybody can use the trademarks for Peppa Pig and Daddy Pig, British cartoon characters.
The court ruling cited “unfriendly actions of the United States of America and affiliated foreign countries” as part of the decision.
These actions increase the likelihood of patent infringement in Russia, according to Josh Gerben, a trademark lawyer in Washington.
“The Peppa Pig decision turned a lot of heads because it gave a signal that the courts have probably been ordered to start to allow the piracy of, and the infringement on, intellectual property owned by Western companies,” he wrote in a blog.
According to U.S. trademark attorneys, it takes months in Russia to process these applications.
In response to media reports, the Russian Patent Office (Rospatent) issued a statement on April 1 about recent trademark applications for Western logos and names.
Rospatent stated that these applications will be subjected to thorough examination before being approved and registered in Russia.
Applications for trademark registration don’t automatically provide legal protection under Russian law, the statement reads.
It also clarified the recent application for the “Uncle Vanya” trademark. Last month, a trademark application was filed for the McDonald’s logo, using the name “Uncle Vanya.” However, the application was withdrawn by the applicant two weeks after the filing, Rospatent stated.
Maksym Popov, an associate partner at Mentors Law Firm in Ukraine, who tracks the trademark applications by copycats on the Russian government website, found that most applications belong to two entities—the cosmetics company Smart Beauty and the pharmaceutical company Biotekfarm-M. Both firms together filed 37 applications for Western brands and logos.
“In regular times, I could agree with the argument that these are applications from trolls that can be filed in every country. But these are not regular times,” Popov told Insight.
“The Russian authorities are violating international agreements and are already canceling compensation for patents for owners from unfriendly countries. Russian politicians are calling for the nationalization of Western companies’ assets, and we already know that Russia has stolen 400 leased aircraft,” Popov said.
As a result, it’s possible that Russia may steal Western corporations’ intellectual property, such as trademarks and patents, he said.
According to U.S. trademark attorneys, if the Russian government chooses to infringe intellectual property rights in reaction to Western sanctions, it might have long-term consequences for investments in the country.
Victor Lisovenko, a Russian patent attorney, accused Western media outlets of attempting to make “BIG news” out of these applications in order to appeal to the general population.
“It is no surprise the number of such trolls has doubled or tripled, but the legislation has not been changed in this respect at all, and all of such lousy applications are very likely to be withdrawn by the trolls themselves or will be rejected by the Russian patent and trademark office as a result of examination,” he told Insight in an email.
He said the rationale applied by the judge in Kirov has been found “erroneous” by another court.
“Our courts continue to take decisions in favor of the U.S. companies who are the trademark owners in Russia, when it comes to clear infringement actions,” Lisovenko said.
A court in Russia ruled that anybody can use Peppa Pig and Daddy Pig trademarks.
DANIEL LACALLE is chief economist at hedge fund Tressis and author of “Freedom or Equality,” “Escape from the Central Bank Trap,” and “Life in the Financial Markets.” Daniel Lacalle
The Impossibility of Autarchy
Closing our economies won’t address the issues posed by China or Russia
The invasion of Ukraine, the spike in inflation, and the risks of supply shortages have made some politicians dust off some of the worst economic ideas in history: autarchy and protectionism.
Some believe that if our nation produced everything we needed, we would all be better off because we wouldn’t depend on others. The idea comes from a deep lack of understanding of economics. There’s no such thing as autarchy. There’s no such thing as covering all the needs of a population based on the limit of a politically defined border. It makes no sense.
If I told you I wanted to make my city self-sufficient, you would laugh about it, understanding that it’s impossible and that the reason why my city thrives is because of the interaction and commerce with other cities.
The other fallacy about autarchy that anyone can understand is that limiting the economy to the confinement of a random area of land is a poor way to develop, grow, and prosper. It’s almost laughable to read from politicians in the eurozone about how they want to achieve full independence and limit imports while at the same time they brag about the bloc’s enormous trade surplus.
We also forget that our progress also comes from the development of the nations we trade with. Our security of supply and our improvement is only a function of everyone else’s growth.
How can autarchy and protectionism be sold to citizens? By selling the false idea of a zero-sum game in the economy. If someone is selling oil to us, they win and we lose. We would win if we sold everything to ourselves. Really? Politicians selling a zero-sum game in the economy know it’s false, but they also know that protectionism and autarchic aspirations give power to them and make citizens more dependent on political power.
Productivity, technology, trade, and cooperation are essential factors for prosperity. Autarchy and protectionism are essential drivers of stagnation and poverty.
It may be true that some nations have taken advantage of an open economic system in order to sell more while making it more difficult for others, but the solution isn’t protectionism but more open trade. If a nation decides to harm itself by being protectionist, we’re reaping the benefits, not them, because we benefit from trade growth and prosperity while they end in stagnation. Even large economic giants such as the United States or China can’t survive with closed economies. Who are you going to sell your excess production to if you close your borders?
The current inflation and supply shortage problem hasn’t arrived because of the evils of globalization and the mistakes of free trade, but because of the trend toward interventionism and protectionist measures that have plagued the world for the past 20 years. There’s only one way in which countries can overcome the impact of a war in a country that sells a lot of cereals, oil, and gas to the world: more trade and better diversification of sources of supply, not autarchy and protectionism.
If the current crisis can tell us anything, it’s that we need more cooperation and trade with even more countries to avoid hunger, shortages, and lack of access to essential goods. The rise of protectionism in the past 10 years has proven to be a mistake. It’s time to reverse it.
The challenges presented by China or Russia aren’t solved by closing our economies and thinking everything will be good for us while the rest of the world collapses. Our nation would fall with the rest. The solution to the challenge presented by the polarization of the world is to develop even more trade and cooperation agreements with the world. Thankfully, technology and human action are dissolving what once seemed like impenetrable borders.
The world’s supply problems can’t be solved by adding massive overcapacity in every country. That leads to a collapse in productivity and, much worse, real wages. There are plenty of great nations that can cooperate with us to deliver prosperity to everyone. Trade is the blood of the economy. Autarchy only leads to zombification and, ultimately, decay.
FAN YU is an expert in finance and economics and has contributed analyses on China’s economy since 2015. Fan Yu
Investors Are Cutting China Exposure
Fund managers sell their Chinese stocks at an ‘unprecedented’ rate
re global investors rethinking their allocation to China? Initial data suggest just that—investors have been pulling money out of China at a dramatic pace since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.
The Institute of International Finance (IIF) noted in a recent report that investors cut their exposure to Chinese stocks and bonds at an “unprecedented” rate in February, even as flows into the rest of the emerging markets (excluding China) have held up.
“The timing of outflows—which built after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—suggests foreign investors may be looking at China in a new light, though it is premature to draw any definitive conclusions,” the IIF note reads.
It behooves institutional investors to examine not just what’s happening in the markets today, but what the global economic environment may look like years into the future.
Most Wall Street investment banks have announced that they’ll pull out of their Russian businesses. U.S. banks including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs announced that they’ll wind down their businesses in Russia. European banks such as Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas have followed suit. Credit Suisse, after some initial hesitation, has announced that it too will pull out of Russia— although not before catching the ire of U.S. regulators, which have begun a probe into whether it had followed U.S. sanctions.
Banking and investments are businesses centered mainly around trust. One can’t lose the trust of one’s clients by making head-scratching decisions.
Outside of a few intrepid hedge funds looking to snap up Russian investments on the cheap—making a gamble, effectively—most money managers are wise to follow the crowd and exit Russia. They won’t win the “idea of the year” award, but it also won’t jeopardize their jobs.
Then there’s China.
China is the world’s No. 2 economy and owns a massive—though largely untamed—financial market that Western investors have just recently begun to tap into.
Beijing is also Russia’s closest economic and ideological ally and is trying to thread an impossibly fine needle by refusing to criticize Russia’s actions, yet attempting to maintain normal trade relations with the United States and the West.
For now, this balancing act is ongoing. But the astute smart money may be looking a few steps ahead. We can see the broad construct of a new “global dichotomy” beginning to form, perhaps not as deep as during the Cold War, but certainly familiar enough.
It may seem far-fetched today, but if the Russia–China cohort doubles down on the invasion messaging and leverages this opportunity to create an alternative economic order away from the U.S. dollar hegemony—while prying away a few bystanders such as Saudi Arabia and India—will the United States look to truly decouple away from China?
There isn’t a definitive answer to that question today, but the last thing investment firms want is to be blindsided without a plan.
That’s exactly the topic of discussion I had recently with a high-level executive at a New York investment firm. His firm isn’t pulling out of China yet, but it’s seriously examining several future scenarios where it may need to, as well as how to execute it with minimal negative effect. In the meantime, it could reduce the size of its bets by cutting some China exposure.
This may be relatively easier to pull off for financial institutions where, besides solving for liquidity controls, the only physical assets may be its people. For a multinational corporation with real assets, manufacturing capacity, and logistics inside China, pulling out is a much more difficult calculus. That’s a costlier gamble, and such companies may be better off diversifying their investments (e.g. near-sourcing) to stay nimble.
Regardless of what the plans are, such plans appear to be in motion.
JEFF MINICK lives and writes in Front Royal, Va. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Jeff Minick
Seek the Occasional Adventure
Every once in a while, break out of your comfort zone
The movie “groundhog Day” tells the story of Phil Connors (Bill Murray), a man doomed to relive Feb. 2 over and over again. At one point, Phil says to two drinking buddies: “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?”
“That about sums it up for me,” one of the men replies.
That bleak view is extreme, of course, but it’s possible to fall into a daily regimen that dulls our thinking and our sensibilities. Like many readers, I suspect, I generally enjoy routine, following a roadway of customs and habits that, for better or worse, allow me to do a great deal of work and keep me in a comfort zone.
But sometimes that road can become a rut.
Recently, my good friend John invited me to go with him in a rental car to the NCAA Division III Final Four championship in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his beloved Randolph-Macon Yellow Jackets were the first-place seed. It’s a nine-hour drive from Virginia, and I have no interest in watching sports unless they involve my grandchildren, so I nearly turned him down.
Then I thought: Come on, old man, you need an adventure.
As I write these words, I’m sitting in the tiny lobby of a motel in Fort Wayne. We arrived last night, and in less than 24 hours, I’ve ridden for the first time in a car with a Utah license plate, I’ve witnessed a rising full moon above the sea of fields in Ohio, and I’ve made a new acquaintance, a Yellow Jackets fan John had invited along. This morning, I rose before dawn, slipped down to write in the lobby, briefly watched a young woman with hair the color of a raven’s wing wiping down her pickup with paper towels, listened to two men conversing in Russian, and just now greeted one of the proprietors of this rather rugged establishment, who appeared in the lobby in her pajamas.
There, I’ve done it. I’ve hung my routine in the closet and slipped on some new threads, and I feel like a different man.
Don’t get me wrong. As I said, I believe in the benefits of routine. Going to the gym on certain days keeps us fit. The 9-to-5 we spend at work are the rails to that horse race that bring satisfaction and accomplishment. All our daily habits—the morning coffee, walking the dog, lunch in a cafe, a book, and a glass of wine in the evening—provide comfort and ease by means of their familiarity.
Naturally, the unexpected can interrupt our ordered ways. Our threeyear-old develops a terrible cough. A toothache sends us from work to the dentist. A friend calls, tells us she has accepted her boyfriend’s proposal, and asks us to be one of her bridesmaids. These joys and inconveniences are the little sideshows of routine.
But adventures taken on a larger scale can rejuvenate us, shaking us and rousing our dormant senses. Some people make adventures of their vacations. They leave behind their daily routine by going on bird-watching expeditions in Central America, climbing through the ruins of Ancient Rome’s port city Ostia, or hiking the Appalachian Trail. Others parachute from airplanes, learn karate, or drive a thousand miles to surprise Grandma on her birthday.
And some of us become so mired in routine that a weekend trip to Fort Wayne, Indiana, becomes the odyssey that yanks us out of the slumber into which we’ve fallen.
For most of us, routine and habit are as necessary for sanity and success as vegetables and vitamins are for physical health, but every now and again we should treat ourselves to the dessert bar of novelty and adventure.
Profile Living Hope
By Patrick Butler
A pastor starts ‘aftercare’ for inmates, prepares them for a new life
Texas pastor joe Fauss has worked in prison ministries since 1974.
Fauss sat in the cell with Karla Faye Tucker who, in 1998, was the first woman put to death in Texas in the 20th century. He has stood at the bars of an inmate’s cell who would receive the death penalty the next day.
But most of the inmates he reaches will someday be released back into the country’s general population. His staff at the nonprofit Calvary Commission in Smith County, Texas, want to get them ready to live life right.
“We’re trying to reach them with a simple message,” Fauss told Insight on March 28. “If God has changed you in prison, the best thing you can do now is say ‘Thank you’ with your lives.”
His lifetime of work with prisoners—nearly 50 years—isn’t what Fauss originally set out to do.
“The first time I set foot into a Texas prison in 1974, I asked the warden what I could do,” Fauss said. “He said, ‘We already have a chaplain,’ and that seemed like the end of it.
“But an officer sitting in the corner said, ‘Preacher, if you really want to help them, do something for them when they get out.’”
That simple sentence resonated with Fauss. It would launch a career path still vital and growing in 2022, touching thousands of lives in the process.
Fauss was on the staff of Teen Challenge at the time, the nationwide ministry for troubled teens across the United States. It was founded by the Rev. David Wilkerson of “The Cross and the Switchblade” fame.
“I asked David what he thought of ‘aftercare’ for inmates. He said ‘I’ve never heard of anything like that,’ but released me from Teen Challenge to start it,” Fauss said.
“We believe God can take a prisoner and make him a preacher; he can take a murderer and make him a missionary, a prostitute and make her a woman of God, a spotless bride. How should you respond to God? With your life! You have a purpose now.
“We have produced pastors, missionaries, medical professionals, businesspeople, and those who started missions. We have a Bible College and permission from the State of Texas to give AA degrees in Bible at the end of our two-year program.”
Rev. David Herndon is an Assemblies of God pastor, leading the Church of the Living Hope in Tyler, Texas. Herndon was languishing in a cell as a drug addict 12 years ago when the Calvary Commission’s outreach to his jail changed the course of his life.
“It was a testimony by a guy who had drug addictions and life problems like mine that hit me,” Herndon said. “He told us we could be set free from it all and live a normal life. I thought, “This is it. This is real.”
After Herndon did his time, he went straight to Calvary Commission.
“I went through the entire program. I got straight. I had a purpose,” he said. “I met my wife, got married, had kids. My goodness, so many miracles happened. I was living that normal life I’d wanted so long ago.”
Four years ago, Herndon was ordained and put in charge of the Living Hope Church, started by Joe Fauss years previously. There’s now a place in East Texas where former prisoners can go that understands them.
“About 150 people attend regularly,” Herndon said. “I’d say almost a third of them are former inmates.”
Commitment works, Herndon said.
“If there isn’t a personal encounter with God, I don’t think lasting change is possible,” he said.
“I hate to be a pessimist, saying that’s true for every person in every situation. But from what I’ve seen, short of the intervention of God, people are repeatedly headed back to prison because of a myriad of life problems.
“I truly believe a strong commitment to God is what works.”
Rev. Dr. Joe Fauss,
international director, Calvary Commission
THOUGHT LEADERS
A Modern Form of Fascism
Democracy versus the new soft tyranny
e want the people who run the government to be the people we elect to run the government—not the managerial elites who pull the strings from behind the scenes,” says entrepreneur and commentator Vivek Ramaswamy.
IN A RECENT episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek discusses the undue influence of bureaucrats in government and the private sector over the workings of U.S. democracy with Vivek Ramaswamy, founder of a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company and author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.” Here Ramaswamy shares his ideas on ways Americans can ultimately force large corporations to abandon woke ideology and this merger of governmental and corporate power.
JAN JEKIELEK: It’s been about half a year since we talked about your book “Woke, Inc.” and what you describe as woke religion. How is this such an important part of what corporations are doing today?
VIVEK RAMASWAMY: I think woke capitalism represents a new currency. It’s a currency through which crony capitalism works.
Back in the early 2000s, companies exercised governmental influence to gain competitive advantages in return for dollars. They wrote checks for campaign contributions, hired lobbyists, and did it the old-fashioned way.
Then a new left emerged and said, “We’re skeptical of these donations and wielding influence that way,” so corporate America got smart. Instead of writing a check, they now declare, for example, that they won’t take a company public unless its board is sufficiently diverse.
It’s an arranged marriage between Big Business and the woke left. Big Business realized it could defang the left by bringing it along for the ride, which created a new mechanism for the left to institute its agenda. The left has recognized that corporations are a more effective vehicle for advancing its agenda than government.
This means the people we elect aren’t actually running the government. It’s a bunch of managerial people in the private and public sectors who are running the show. And people are beginning to wake up to it.
Truckers in Canada, for example, are waking up. They have counterparts in democracies like the United States.
MR. JEKIELEK: This reminds me a bit of Occupy Wall Street, which was a more leftist movement, but not entirely leftist. There were Tea Party types involved, people who were against massive corporate overreach, the kinds of people the corporations would be interested in nullifying. Is there any connection to this and how Occupy Wall Street got snuffed out?
MR. RAMASWAMY: It’s a great question. The Occupy Wall Street movement represented a threat to Wall Street. That’s why Wall Street used the corporate woke movement after 2008 to say that the real problem isn’t economic injustice, as Occupy Wall Street called it. It wasn’t those bankers who had made a ton of money
Vivek Ramaswamy, founder of a multibillion-dollar biopharmaceutical company and author.
during the good times and got bailed out by the public when times were bad.
Instead, it was systemic racism, misogyny, and bigotry, and we’ll talk about systemic racism all day long, as long as you don’t make us talk about systemic financial risk. That’s how you had woke millennials getting in bed with big banks. They blew woke smoke to deflect the accountability the Occupy Wall Street movement wanted.
Now that the woke smoke is clearing, people are seeing that the same managerial class is still in charge. This isn’t a left-wing or right-wing point. It’s a point about restoring the voices of everyday citizens around the world. They’re beginning to ask, “How are we represented as citizens in our governments?”
That’s the conversation we need to have.
MR. JEKIELEK: And so, all these companies now have the power to influence how everybody should be educated and who doesn’t get hired, if you might not be woke enough.
MR. RAMASWAMY: That’s true of most major companies, what I call deep corporate. It’s the counterpart to the deep state. And it’s this bureaucracy with its woke agenda that creates the rampant political discrimination we see in those institutions.
We need to make political beliefs a civil right in this country, just like race, sex, or religion. You can’t fire people or deplatform them because they’re black or white, Muslim or Christian. You shouldn’t be able to fire or deplatform those who are outspoken conservatives either.
We’ve created the conditions for political discrimination while leaving political beliefs unprotected.
MR. JEKIELEK: Diversity, equity, inclusion. Can you give us a quick overview of what this means?
MR. RAMASWAMY: It’s a secular religion that’s managed to do what Fyodor Dostoevsky demonstrated in his story “The Grand Inquisitor.” Christ comes back to earth during the Spanish inquisition, and The Grand Inquisitor has Christ arrested. He tells Christ, “The church doesn’t need you anymore. In fact, your presence here impedes our work, and that’s why we’re going to sentence you to death.” That’s what the church of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has done.
In the name of diversity, we’ve sentenced true diversity of thought to death. You can’t say certain things in a DEI environment. In the name of equity, we’ve sacrificed true equality of opportunity. In the name of inclusion, we’ve created this exclusive culture where certain points of view aren’t welcome.
It’s a religion in that it sentences these values to death, much as Dostoevsky envisioned.
But there’s an opportunity here for entrepreneurs who want to capture it. More than 100 million Americans today are put off by the places where they do business, who have had enough of this culture of exclusion in the name of inclusion.
They’re saying, “We want universalist alternatives that stand for the unapologetic pursuit of excellence. We want companies that tell us the American dream is alive and well, that capitalism is the best system known to mankind to lift people up from poverty. It’s not a racist system, and we won’t apologize for it with three-letter acronyms. And we should be free to speak our minds without fear.”
It’s an economy centered on the pursuit of excellence, and the customers who hear those messages from a company would be the best customers of any business.
I want to see a cultural and economic movement that reaches out to those consumers.
MR. JEKIELEK: Can that economy counter this corporate activity you’re describing?
MR. RAMASWAMY: Business leaders could offer a universalist vision, saying, “We don’t mix politics with business. We pursue excellence. That’s our agenda.” People are hungry for that message.
And once you steal customers from the other corporations, like Nike or American Express, they’re going to wake up. They’ll have to win back those
customers with a more depoliticized approach.
MR. JEKIELEK: You’ve mentioned ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and the Great Reset. Klaus Schwab’s state of vision.
MR. RAMASWAMY: Stakeholder capitalism, ESG, corporate social responsibility, call it what you want, it’s apologist capitalism that merges state power with corporate power to create a form of fascism.
MR. JEKIELEK: Lay it out for me.
MR. RAMASWAMY: Fascism is by definition the merger of governmental power with corporate power. I’ve never met Klaus Schwab. I reviewed his book for The Wall Street Journal last year. There was a certain naivete to it that led me to think he wasn’t some puppet master behind the scenes.
I think there are leaders running with his philosophies who are, but he’s a gentle elder man who has a worldview that’s off the mark and not terribly well-argued. I don’t think he’s a cynical world conqueror. He’s a man who offered an innocent, misguided philosophy that was coopted by cynical forces using it to achieve their own ends.
This movement is about using power to accomplish through the private sector what government can’t do. In return, companies use government to gain competitive advantages they wouldn’t have in a free market.
It’s the new form of crony capitalism, but people should call it out and demand change. It’s time to reset the Great Reset.
MR. JEKIELEK: There’s a lot of buzz about the Great Reset.
MR. RAMASWAMY: The Great Reset is about dissolving boundaries between education, the economy, and the government in democracies around the world. The opposition rejects the idea that a small group of managerial elites should decide behind closed doors what’s good for the rest of us.
A collision between these two forces is coming. There’s going to be a great realignment between November 2022 and probably November 2024 or January 2025 that determines which vision wins. Will it be the Great Reset or democracy? The two years after the 2022 election will answer that question.
MR. JEKIELEK: Are you suggesting that democracy will disappear with the Great Reset?
MR. RAMASWAMY: I think that’s the disappearance of democracy as we know it. There will be an institution of modern monarchy where we don’t have one king, but kings working together. That’s the Great Reset.
Or we return the power to the people. We want the people who run the government to be the people we elect to run the government—not the managerial elites pulling the strings from behind the scenes.
That’s the defining struggle of our time.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement lock arms and block access to the New York Stock Exchange on Nov. 17, 2011.
Unwind
We can never come close to adequately thanking our saint-like mothers for the never-ending job of raising us, but on this Mother's Day, we have a few suggestions for gifts to make her smile.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROLEX
Make Mom’s Day the Best! 60
THOUGH IT’S 100 YEARS OLD,
this iconic Marin County estate designed by John White has never looked better. 56
THE PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY
runs 1,687 outrageously scenic miles from San Juan Capistrano to Leggett in Mendocino County, making for an epic road trip. 58
MUSIC CAN SET THE MOOD
and calm the savage beast, but only with a good sound system, so here are several “sound” upgrades. 64
A formal dining room makes great use of ambient light and connects the residential wing to the outside terraces, the pool, and the gardens. EARLY 1900s GEM
Well-maintained and thoughtfully improved for over 100 years, this Marin County estate is an enclave of luxury
An epic estate originally designed by renowned Arts and Crafts Movement architect John White (1870–1941) was recently on the market for $24,995,000. Listed with Tracy McLaughlin’s firm, The Agency, the Northern California property has new owners enjoying its stunning 1.6-acre enclave of exclusive privacy. Recently upgraded and restored under the guidance of architect Steven Wisenbaker and landscape designer Todd Cole, the estate is a grand affair by anyone’s definition.
The estate at 32 Shady Lane consists of a main housethat’salmost8,000squarefeetinsize,featuringfourbedroomsandfourfullbaths.Theprimary residence is richly appointed in California’s classic traditional elegant style. Alarge, high-ceiling foyer at the entrance leads to a grand living room with twosittingareas,accentedbyawonderfulRumford wood-burning fireplace imported from France.
Also on the main level, a designer chef’s kitchen features Calacatta marble slabs, multiple seating areas, professional-grade appliances, and a pantry. This floor also has an additional private bedroom suite, two powder rooms, a laundry room, a great room, a family room, and a formal dining room. A 1,800-bottle wine cellar and an office/library overlooking the front yard further highlight this fabulously designed home.
The upstairs of the home has a sumptuous primary suite with its own bath and dressing areas.
A stunning, 60-foot swimming pool is the center of outside activity. There’s also a BBQ and outdoor fireplace, and myriad picnic and al fresco dining spots. Surrounded by woods, the estate is a literal hidden paradise. The open living room connects all the other spaces, and serves along with the gourmet kitchen as a hub for private life and entertaining. The rest of this floor is taken up by the other lavish bedrooms. Adjacent to the residential wing, there’s a 490-square-foot arts and crafts room with a large open space for painting, hobbies, and crafts overlookingthegardens.Alsoadjacenttotheresidenceis an885-square-footthree-cargaragewithworkshop, storage,andlivingspaces.A1,160-square-footprivate guesthouseandgymcompletethemainresidence.
Completedin1902,thisNorthernCaliforniaestate now features multigenerational design elements. The residences perfectly combine the old charm of traditional American design with state-of-theart amenities that you would expect in the most modern luxury estates.
Outside, guests are welcomed via private gates and a winding drive. A lively fountain at the front of the main residence sits beneath old-growth trees casting their shadow on annual flowers, stone walls, sweeping flagstone terraces, mature palms, old hydrangeas, and al fresco dining nooks galore. There’s an outdoor wood-burning fireplace, a barbeque, and a 60-foot swimming pool with underwater speakers.
The property also features a Crestron system that controls security, heating and cooling, and all sound, media, and lighting throughout the home.
Phil Butler is a publisher, editor, author, and analyst who is a widely cited expert on subjects ranging from digital and social media to travel technology.
32 SHADY LANE ROSS, CALIFORNIA $24,995,000 • 6 BEDROOMS • 9,125 SQUARE FEET • 1.6 ACRES
KEY FEATURES • EXCLUSIVE LOCATION
• FAMOUS ARCHITECTURE
• ULTIMATE PRIVACY
• FABULOUS GROUNDS
AGENT THE AGENCY TRACY MCLAUGHLIN 415-699-6680
Alpine meadows in bloom on the hillsides surrounding Mount Rainier.
Driving Out West
From towering redwood forests to sunny beach towns, there’s plenty to explore
By Tim Johnson
merica’s most storied journeys by road have usually been east to west, with the legacy of Route 66 still looming large in U.S. culture. But people have been traveling up the coast for a long time as well.
Promoted by transportation pioneer Sam Hill, who built the iconic Peace Arch on the border of Washington state and British Columbia, the Pacific Highway became the longest continuously paved road in the world by 1926, with almost 1,700 miles of hard-top. It was named U.S. Route 99 for the rest of the 1920s and several decades afterward, becoming the Main Street of California and the Golden State Highway.
Pacific Coast Highway
Head north out of sprawling Los Angeles, taking U.S. Route 101 to the northwest. Diverting onto California State Highway 1, begin your journey up the famous Pacific Coast Highway. The trip could be a whole weeklong vacation, with so many stops along the way.
In Morro Bay, California, and its 580-foot Gibraltar-like rock, visit with playful sea otters. At Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, marvel at the real-life Xanadu, where media mogul William Randolph Hearst hosted both actual and Hollywood royalty in his hillside 165-room palace, complete with a Roman-style swimming pool.
Further up the road, hike to the waterfall in Pfeiffer State Park and walk among the redwood forests in Big Sur. Take a signature selfie at the Bixby Bridge, perhaps the most distinctive landmark on the route, and once the highest single-span arch bridge in the world, stretching 700 feet over the canyon floor 280 feet below.
San Francisco
WhileSanFranciscoisabigcitywithplentyoftricky driving—especially on the steep and perilous hills downtown—it’s worth visiting for at least a day or
Seattle
Mount Rainier
National Park
Portland
Gold Beach
Redwoods
National Parks
San Francisco Los Angeles N o rt h P acif i c Ocean
The Pacific Coast Highway spans 1,650 miles.
two. Touristy but fun, Fisherman’s Wharf is a good place to duck into a small restaurant and enjoy a steaming bowl of cioppino (pronounced “chip-eeno,”localloresaysthenamecameaboutwhenlocal fishermen would finish the day at the dock and “chip in” whatever they had to a communal stew).
Redwoods National and State Parks
From San Francisco, head north on Interstate 5 and get to the forests faster. Spend time under the tallest trees on earth, reaching higher than a 30-story building. The canopy is so high above that the forest below feels a little like a fairy tale. Famously, you can drive your car right through one of the massive trees. Even better, you can rent a bike and navigate a series of trails that have been repurposed from old logging roads.
Gold Beach, Oregon
RatherthanreturningtoInterstate 5,headstraight north on Route 101, which winds along the edge of the ocean. The views are rugged and dramatic. At Pistol River, check out the ever-shifting dunes and massive, monolithic rocks that sit just off the crashingcoastline.InthesmalltownofGoldBeach, walk and swim at its long stretch of beach, check outthelocalshipwreck,andsnackonfishandchips.
Portland, Oregon
Portland often lives up to its famous, oft-repeated local slogan, “Keep Portland Weird.” Stay in a tiny-house hotel, where open-air jam sessions are a favorite evening activity. Dine at a multiple-course, all-vegan dinner that includes several types of locally grown edible flowers. Then grab a pint at the Breakside Brewery, one of the leaders in a city known for its craft beers.
Mount Rainier National Park
The most glaciated peak in the continental United States, the white summit of the 14,410-foottall Mount Rainier soars above the surrounding Washington valleys, visible for miles in all directions. It’s an active volcano and the source of five different rivers.
The national park covers more than 235,000 acres, with all sorts of ways to enjoy the outdoors. Hike through the subalpine meadows in the town of Paradise or the dense forest of Douglas firs and western red hemlocks, as well as cable bridges and roaring waterfalls at Ohanapecosh. And head to Sunrise, which sits at 6,400 feet, and has an extensive trail system, as well as the best views in the park—of Mount Rainier, but also of the Emmons Glacier and a variety of other volcanic peaks in the Cascade Range.
Seattle
The largest city in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle’s glassy skyline rises next to the waters of Puget Sound, and the signature Space Needle, built for the 1962 World’s Fair, stands out among the rest. Head to the top and walk the glass floor there for a vertiginous view. Nearby, Pike Place Fish Market pulsates with energy, and fishmongers toss the day’s catch to one another before wrapping it up for customers.
It’s been a long drive, but what if you’re not quite ready to reach the end of the line? Just keep driving—perhaps onto a ferry steaming out into the Sound, with an array of scenic islands awaiting your discovery.
Tim Johnson is based in Toronto. He has visited 140 countries across all seven continents.
ROUTE 99
was decommissioned in 1968. Much of it is now paved over by I-5.
If You Go
Planning: So many possibilities! First, outline a rough itinerary and decide your priorities. Without any stops, driving the length of the Pacific Coast Highway takes approximately 10 hours, but make sure to set aside at least six days to catch the sights, and for serendipitous exploration.
When to Go:
It’s possible to go any time of year, thanks to the mild weather along the coast. However, the best weather is usually spring through fall, while the busiest time is during July and August.
AN INSPIRED COLLECTION OF GIFTS SHE DESERVES Mother’s Day Gift Guide
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If it weren’t for our moms, we wouldn’t be here, so splurge on her to show how much you love and appreciate her.
By Bill Lindsey
2
WRAP HER IN LUXURY
1 FOUR SEASONS SPA ROBE
$249 at Shop.FourSeasons.com Pamper mom in luxurious softness with a genuine Four Seasons Spa Robe. The tailored fit will make her feel glamorous even when lounging around the house, while the plush microfiber terry lining is the height of snuggleability.
QUEEN MUM
2 TURN ME ROYAL PORTRAIT
$79.95 at TurnMeRoyal.com Show Mom your love with a custom-made portrait of “Her Majesty.” Pick the style you want and send in Mom’s photo, and the artists will get busy crafting a unique creation that showcases her beauty reimagined in a bygone era of elegance and sophistication.
GOOD MORNINGS
3 BARISIEUR COFFEE MAKER ALARM CLOCK
$392 at Design-Milk.com Let her wake up and smell the coffee, automatically freshbrewed exactly how she likes it. Mom will be tempted to snooze while enjoying the soothing sound of bubbling water as it flows from one vessel to the other via steam pressure, brewing a perfect cup.
GIVE HER A GREEN THUMB
4 PLANT PROPER HOUSEPLANTS
From $13.50 at PlantProper.com Plant Proper makes indoor gardening approachable. They’ll not only deliver gorgeous stressreducing, oxygen-producing houseplants to Mom’s door, but they’re also a go-to source for all things plants, providing those of us who may be a bit greenchallenged with all the tools we need to succeed.
NOT JUST HOT AIR
5 LG STYLER STEAM CLOSET
$999 at LG.com What’s better than having a personal assistant to pick up Mom’s dry cleaning? Giving her a system that does it at home with steam instead of nasty chemicals. The LG Styler Steam Closet also eliminates more than 99.9 percent of allergens, germs, and bacteria, even from stuffed animals.
PIZZA PERFECTION
6 OONI PIZZA OVENS
From $349 at Ooni.com The traditional way to make a great pizza requires very highheat ovens, which used to mean that they were only available in restaurants. Save the trip by giving Mom this oven that cooks at 950 degrees F to create a restaurant-worthy pie in 60 seconds. She’ll feel Italian, even if she’s Irish.
SPA IN A BOX
7 BOXFOX GIFT SETS
From $34 at ShopBoxFox.com Female-founded BoxFox offers a treasure trove of fun and feminine beauty products for Mom. Choose a curated box such as the Green Goddess, which provides her with a spa experience, or build her a customized box from the hundreds of items in the Marketplace section.
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4 5
THE QUEEN’S JEWELS
8 FOLIE DES PRES NECKLACE
$326,000 at VanCleefArpels.com Selected from the Classic High Jewelry collection, this stunning necklace crafted from round and pear-shaped gemstones is sure to let Mom know how much you love her. Based on historic creations, the collection also includes rings, bracelets, necklaces, earrings, clips, and watches.
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?
9 BOSE SOUNDCONTROL HEARING AIDS
If you’ve noticed that sometimes Mom doesn’t hear the phone ring or the doorbell, but otherwise has great hearing, maybe she only needs a little help. No prescription is required for these discrete, ready-to-use helpers that can even be focused in a specific direction.
BRUNCH, DELIVERED
10 RUSS & DAUGHTERS NEW YORK BRUNCH
$189 at GoldBelly.com What’s better than treating Mom to brunch? Having it delivered to her. Along with six assorted hand-rolled bagels, she’ll receive a pound of Nova smoked salmon,
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12 14
11 15
6 9
a pound of cream cheese, a pound of coffee, a chocolate babka, and a Russ & Daughters mug and insulated bag.
IT’S ABOUT TIME
11 ROLEX YELLOW GOLD LADY-DATEJUST
$37,250 at Rolex.com We count on Mom to get the kids to soccer practice, recitals, and more, making this elegant timepiece the perfect way to keep her right on time. Of all the Lady-Datejust models, the yellow gold one positively shouts “We love you!” 24 hours a day.
MOM’S TAXI
12 MERCEDES-AMG SL
$135,000 at MBUSA.com Created by Mercedes’ in-house custom car division, Mom will love this two-door, soft-top masterpiece that’s hand-crafted by detail-obsessed craftsmen using the latest technology to blend performance, luxury, and safety. They’re built to last forever, so next year you can just give her a coupon for an oil change.
HIT THE ROAD
13 SANTONI FOR AMG LUGGAGE
10 13
Now that she’s getting an AMG SL, Mom needs matching luggage. Each of these three pieces is hand-crafted using the same Nappa leather used in the AMG’s seats by the Italian leather goods artisans at Santoni, who have been providing custom luggage to AMG since 2005.
A HEAVEN-SENT SCENT
14 AMOREM ROSE PERFUME
$3,000 at BergdorfGoodman.com Mom will be entranced by this spellbinding scent in a Lalique crystal flacon. It combines the aromas of Bulgarian damask roses, saffron flowers, mahogany, and Baltic amber, with just a light hint of smoke to give it—and her—a sense of mystery.
PERFECT PENMANSHIP
15 MONTEGRAPPA BESPOKE PEN
Contact for Prices at Atelier.Montegrappa.com Mom will smile every time she takes notes or writes in her journal with her custom-made pen. The artisans at Montegrappa will start with an Extra Bespoke, Arte, or Amphora pen, painstakingly painting or engraving it to your precise specifications.
Epoch Booklist
Are there books you’d recommend?
We’d love to hear from you. Let us know at features@epochtimes.com
RECOMMENDED READING
This week’s selection includes a history of a treasure hunt, a celebration of poetry, and a novel about a daring escape from the Soviets.
FICTION
‘Pride and Prejudice’ By Jane Austen
Austen’s Most Famous Novel
After meeting at a country dance, independent-minded Elizabeth Bennet and wealthy Mr. Darcy must overcome their own flawed natures in order to find love. Written in 1813, this comedy of manners remains one of the most popular novels in the English language.
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, 1995, 272 PAGES
‘Last of the Breed’ By Louis L’Amour
Great Tale of Adventure and Grit
It’s the era of the Cold War, and U.S. Air Force Maj. Joe Makatozi (part Sioux, part Cheyenne) is a prisoner of the Soviets after his experimental aircraft is forced down. After he escapes a prison camp, he must travel through Siberia to the Bering Strait and across the sea to America. In pursuit is Alekhin, a Yakut native who knows the landscape like the back of his hand. Using skills he developed as a boy and in the Air Force, Joe must defeat both natural and human enemies if he is to evade capture.
BANTAM, REPRINT 2019, 496 PAGES
SCIENCE
‘Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces’ By Laurie Winkless
A Book You Will Stick With
What makes things stick together? Why is it useful and when is it a problem? Where does friction occur and how do you reduce it? Why are some things slippery and others not? This book answers those questions and more. It looks at tribology: the science of rubbing and scrubbing. Winkless has a gift for presenting complicated ideas in entertaining and understandable prose: You don’t have to be a rocket engineer to understand her explanations in this delightful romp through science.
HISTORY
‘The Tsarina’s Lost Treasure’ By Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees
A Multi-Level Treasure Hunt
In 1764, Catherine the Great spurred Europe’s crowned heads into a culture war to obtain and display works of art. A Dutch merchantman loaded with Dutch Masters’ paintings purchased for Catherine sank off the Finnish coast while traveling to St. Petersburg. In 1999, a Finnish wreck hunter discovered the ship. The authors tell an exciting story examining art history, the wreck, its cargo, the times, and the salvage attempts.
PEGASUS BOOKS, 2022, 400 PAGES
CLASSICS
‘The Call of the Wild’ By Jack London
A Dog’s Survival Story
One of Jack London’s most memorable literary triumphs follows the adventures of a dog named Buck. Stolen from his owners and shipped off to be a sled dog for the Gold Rush, Buck runs into cruel as well as loving owners, all the while feeling a call to return to his natural roots: the wolf pack. A thrilling story set in the Yukon.
READER’S LIBRARY CLASSICS, 2021, 106 PAGES
‘101 Great American Poems’ By the American Poetry & Literacy Project
A Bargain and a Blessing
April is National Poetry Month, so what better way to celebrate than by immersing ourselves in some verse! Here are great American poems from the last two centuries, among them Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” and Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat.” This inexpensive collection brings back those verses some of us learned in high school while also allowing us to share great poetry with our children.
FOR KIDS
‘Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo!’ By Rosetta Stone, illustrated by Michael Frith
It Starts With a Sneeze
Written under one of Dr. Seuss’s pseudonyms, “Because A Little Bug Went Ka-Choo!” is a hilarious delight as young readers follow the chain of events that begins with a little bug’s sneeze and leads to giant mayhem all around the town.
RANDOM HOUSE BOOKS, 1975, 48 PAGES
‘Madeline’ By Ludwig Bemelmans
In an Old House in Paris
Set in a girls’ boarding school in Paris, the “Madeline” stories have entranced children for more than 80 years. In this first book, Madeline is stricken by appendicitis and rushed to a hospital by the intrepid Miss Clavel. Ages 3 to 8.
Ian Kane
is a U.S. Army veteran, filmmaker, and author. He enjoys the great outdoors and volunteering.
Epoch Watchlist
MOVIE REVIEWS
This week, we look at a movie and a TV series based on martial arts, and a mystery that confirmed director Alfred Hitchcock’s mastery of filmmaking.
NEW RELEASE
‘Ambulance’ (2022)
Military Vet Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) needs money for his wife’s surgery. He seeks help from his adoptive brother Dan (Jake Gyllenhaal), a criminal who talks him into pulling a bank heist. But things soon take a turn for the worse.
This actioner is a bit too long and mainly consists of Michael Bay’s signature explosions and chase scenes, coupled with gratuitous shots of Gyllenhaal’s over-exaggerated manic expressions. People who dig mindless action with lots of jerky camerawork and choppy jump cuts may like this.
ACTION | CRIME | DRAMA Release Date:
April 8, 2022
Director:
Michael Bay
Starring:
Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza Gonzalez
Running Time:
2 hours, 16 minutes
MPAA Rating:
R
Where to Watch:
Theaters
INTRIGUING HITCHCOCK MYSTERY
‘Vertigo’ (1958)
Retired detective John Ferguson (James Stewart) becomes obsessed with a married woman: the stunning blond Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak). Her husband has hired Ferguson for an odd task that draws him into a tangled web of intrigue.
Novak is fantastic as a mysterious woman who Stewart’s character can’t quite figure out. It’s an expertly shot, haunting tale with twists and turns.
Teen Teen Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) is new to Los Angeles and doesn’t quite fit in. Soon he becomes the target of bullying by vicious black belt karate student Johnny (William Zabka) and his equally vile cohorts. Eventually, a kind and humble karate master (Pat Morita) offers to train Daniel to defend himself against the gang.
One of the greatest underdog movies of all time, it will have you rooting for the protagonist. An incredibly earthy performance by Morita is the icing on the cake for this tale of friendship and honor.
MYSTERY | ROMANCE | THRILLER
Release Date:
May 22, 1958
Director:
Alfred Hitchcock
Starring:
James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes
Running Time:
2 hours, 8 minutes
MPAA Rating:
PG
Where to Watch:
Redbox, DirecTV, Peacock
FAMILY PICK
(1984)
ACTION | DRAMA | FAMILY Release Date:
June 22, 1984
Director:
John G. Avildsen
Starring:
Ralph Macchio, Pat Morita, Elisabeth Shue
Running Time:
2 hours, 6 minutes
MPAA Rating:
PG
Where to Watch:
Vudu, Redbox, DirecTV
OUTSTANDING MULTIFACETED TV SERIES ‘Cobra Kai’ (2018)
It’s been 30 years since the dramatic showdown between Daniel (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny (William Zabka) at the All Valley Karate Tournament. Both men are now middle-aged and have taken different paths in life, but unusual circumstances pull them back into each other’s orbits.
Just Just when you thought “The Karate Kid” couldn’t be topped, this multifaceted TV series comes that’s filled with tense drama, humor, and amazing fight scenes. It also features wholesome messages about friendship and loyalty.
ACTION | COMEDY | DRAMA Release Date:
May 2, 2018
Creators:
Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg
Starring:
Ralph Macchio, William Zabka, Xolo Mariduena
Running Time:
30 minutes MPAA Rating: TV-14
Where to Watch:
Amazon Prime, Netflix
For a fast escape
from the stress of life, turn on your sound system and immerse yourself in music.
ENGLISH PLAYWRIGHT WILLIAM
Congreve was very insightful when he said, “Music soothes the soul.”
Music certainly can soothe, or it can suggest any other desired emotion, especially when the sound is lush and dynamic. For those seeking to upgrade their existing system, the recent Consumer Electronics Show featured several options that we recommend.
The first and simplest thing to consider adding is a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) that can simply be connected to your existing stereo receiver. Simply put, a DAC converts digital information— which is great for compression purposes but can limit the authentic range of the sound signals— into analog signals that allow for a sound that more authentically replicates the original source.
DACs are available in many shapes and sizes, from those suitable primarily for headphone use to those more appropriate for a home audio system. A DAC is an ideal way to unlock the full potential of music from CDs. For maximum flexibility, look for a DAC with a headphone jack, such as the Audiolabs’ M-DAC+ with 11 filters to create customized musical adventures.
While there are fans of big speakers, not everyone wants their audio system to use huge speakers more appropriate to the stage at a Rolling Stones concert. Those in the “smaller is better” camp will do well to consider Sony’s new SRS series RA5000 speakers. Utilizing proprietary technology, they fill the room in a way simply not possible with traditional forward-firing speakers.
The secret is using drivers that project sound up and away from the unit. Imagine a vase of three fresh long-stemmed roses, with the roses all pointing upward at just a very slight angle from straight up as the three up-firing drivers. These project sound upward while three mid-sized drivers project sound on a horizontal plane and a subwoofer delivers bass signals. The result fills the room with sound often compared to a 3D effect.
The wireless speakers can be placed anywhere in the room, and each can be calibrated to accommodate the room layout, controlled via an app downloaded to your phone. The RA5000 and the slightly smaller SA3000 speakers provide optimum enjoyment from any source, from overthe-air FM to vinyl records, but they’re particularly impressive when playing any of the nearly 1,000 spatial audio tracks currently available from streaming services.
But before you go shopping for new speakers, consider relocating your existing speakers. While most people simply place the speakers on either side of the stereo or TV, pointing straight back into the room, sound experts suggest placing speakers so they point at the listener in a V-shape. For optimal sound quality, set the speakers two to three feet away from the wall behind them and four feet apart from each other for bookshelf models or eight feet apart for floor-mounted speakers, with the tweeters at a height equal to that of the listeners’ ears.
Finally, ensure that there are no objects between the speakers and the listener that could create
Speaker size is no longer the main factor in sound quality, with many small speakers capable of pumping out big sound, but speaker placement is critical.
Those seeking a minimalist look that doesn’t compromise on audio quality would do well to consider a high-quality soundbar.
an inadvertent reflection of the sound. If you have a turntable and bookshelf speakers, don’t place the turntable on the same surface as the speakers.
Another option for audiophiles seeking a clean, uncluttered look is a soundbar; it’s the simplest, yet very effective way to provide dynamic sound without opting for traditional boxy speakers. They can either work in concert with existing speakers to direct sound toward the listener, or they can serve as the only sound source, “aiming” the sound so as to fill the room.
Sennheiser has been developing innovative ways to capture and project sound since 1945. The third-generation family-run business now offers the AMBEO soundbar, which provides what they describe as a studio-grade audio experience with a 5.1 3D sound. Three modes allow customization based on personal preferences and room layout from the 13 drivers, including five high-frequency tweeters linked to six long-throw woofers producing 30Hz of bass without the need for an additional, separate subwoofer.
Sennheiser says it uses visualization technology to maximize the acoustics of any room, effectively placing the listener at the epicenter of the sound signals, creating a 5.1 surround sound experience without the need for five (or more) individual speakers located around the room.
Many audiophiles equate big speakers with big sound; for them, we suggest the Bang & Olufsen (B&O) Beolab 90. These epic floor-standing speakers deliver an unprecedented 8,200 watts of sound per speaker delivered by a system that utilizes 18 premium drivers, 14 channels of B&O’s ICEpower, 300-watt amplifiers, and four channels of 1,000-watt class D Heliox amplifiers. To put it simply, these are loud!
Many also enjoy music via tablets or laptops, using speakers or headphones. The downside to speakers is they may disturb others in the room, while headphones can become uncomfortable over an extended period. A possible solution comes in the form of the innovative Noveto N1 system. Using AI facial recognition, it tracks the listener, beaming the sound toward them, so they hear it while others in the room don’t.
Great sound thrills the senses, so time spent upgrading your system is time well spent.
LIFESTYLE HEAR THE MUSIC
How to Make Your Home a Concert Hall
1
Improve Before Replacing
Start by adding a digital-to-analog converter to your existing receiver, then reposition your speakers for an almost instant sound system upgrade.
2
When to Upgrade?
If you want movie theater-quality audio at home, but don’t want to hang huge speakers in every corner of the room, consider a discrete soundbar such as Sennheiser’s AMBEO.
3
Is Bigger Better?
Bigger speakers do produce big sound, but they can dominate a small room. Consider new technology, like Sony’s compact SRS speakers, that is quite capable of filling the room.
Teach the Pooch Good Manners
You know you’re training your dog right when you’re both having fun
Proper manners aren’t just limited to the human in the family; dogs are very social and see us as the pack leader. They want us to lay down the rules, and they are eager to please.
By Bill Lindsey
1 Dogs Have Feelings
Anyone who doubts dogs have emotions has never been around one. These are sensitive creatures who want to please us. It becomes easy to determine their mood by paying attention to them; they will give cues in the forms of tail wags, happy yips or barks, and eye contact. If their humans are upset, the dogs will be, too, so be aware of their emotions and express confidence and love at every opportunity.
4 Puppies and Rescues
Puppies and rescues of all ages need lots of patience and love. Puppies must learn how to live with humans, while new surroundings and new people can be scary for rescues. In both cases, give them a lot of attention and positive reinforcement in the form of praise and treats. If the dog hides under a table, give it a toy or a treat and talk to it reassuringly. Don’t drag it out—it will eventually venture out on its own.
A runaway dog is a nightmare; it can happen if they’re distracted by another dog while off-leash, or if they escape from the house. If they do get loose and won’t come back, running after them and shouting may scare them, or they’ll think it’s a great game. Approach slowly, calling their name and “Come” while offering a favorite treat; with practice, they’ll zip right back to you every time. Practice in a secure, fenced area or with a very long leash.
2 Kid-Proof Them
Kids love dogs of all shapes and sizes, very often squealing with delight as they run up to pet them. To dogs, these can be scary monsters to run from, so you’ll need to train the kids to approach quietly, preferably with a favorite treat, and be gentle—no tail or ear tugs! With time and patience, the kids and dogs will be best friends.
3
Be Social
Dogs are very social, with most enjoying being around people and other dogs, but some may be shy. Start off slow, making sure your dog knows you will protect it, keeping it safe as it learns the other dogs aren’t a threat. This process takes time, so be patient. Be aware if your dog becomes nervous around people or other dogs, reassuring it that you’re right there. Keep over-eager dogs (and people) from getting too close. Never let a nervous or scared dog run off-leash at a dog park or anywhere else.
