SAAD: The Moral Hypocrisy of Seth Rogen.

In 2009, I authored an article titled The Narcissism and Grandiosity of Celebrities.  Continuing this tradition, this past week on my social media platforms, I critiqued the virtue signaling that members of the privileged classes engage in.  Here is what I wrote: “Let me explain yet again the source for all of the platitudinous virtue signaling. The truly privileged elites know that deep down they are frauds. They suffer from existential guilt. Hence, one of the ways by which they assuage the guilt albatross around their necks is to demonstrate to the world that they are truly compassionate, truly loving,

Greta Thunberg and the Rise of “Eco-Anxiety”

When I was a kid, my siblings pranked me by telling me there was a man living under the basement stairs. Anyone who would secretly live under the basement stairs had to be there for only one reason: to murder me. They probably only told me about a serial killer in the basement one time, but it stuck.  Now imagine being told on a daily basis you’re going to die in twelve years. That’s exactly what the Greta Thunbergs of the world have been listening to for as long as any of them can remember, and they are arguably one of the most

Dangerously Flawed “TeenScreen” Mental Health Program Returning to Schools

As the push for more school-based mental health intervention increases after recent high profile school shootings, one particularly controversial and inaccurate mental health screening instrument, “TeenScreen”, is starting to make a comeback. Developed by Dr. David Schaffer and other psychiatrists at Columbia University, TeenScreen is a 14-question computerized survey that was heavily used in as many as 40 states in the early 2000s. However, the vague and subjective questions used by Teen Screen yielded an astronomical false-positive rate of 84 percent, as admitted by Dr. Schaffer: The CSS’s positive predictive value of 16% (determined by a weighted prevalence of DISC

Texas School Safety “Action Plan” Contains More Problems than Solutions

After yet another tragic school shooting — this time in Santa Fe, Texas, resulting in the deaths of eight students and two teachers — Texas has followed the example of Florida and proposed a plan that vastly expands mental health screening and diagnosis in the state’s schools. The first element of the plan is to “provide mental health evaluations that identify students at risk of harming others and provide them with the help they need.” This is the Telemedicine Wellness Intervention Triage & Referral (TWITR) Project, one of the programs that I wrote about several weeks ago. This program sends

America Must Improve Its Horrible Psychiatric Care for Veterans

As Memorial Day approaches, it is incredibly important that we pause from our rhetorical and political battles on the education front to remember, honor, and teach the next generation the stories of our military men and women. These soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coast guardsmen fought and died to secure the heritage and blessings of our liberties. We are rapidly losing those who fought tyranny in World War II and the Korean conflict to age. The veterans of Vietnam are in middle age and are dealing both with the horrors of war and the poor treatment they received on their

Mental Health Assessments or Standardized Testing? Lines Are Blurring.

This piece was co-authored by Jane Robbins, an attorney and senior fellow at the American Principles Project. In The Wall Street Journal recently, New Hampshire physician Dr. Aida Cerundolo blew the whistle on faux mental-health assessment of public-school students in the Granite State. Some K-8 students are being subjected to blanket screening by untrained, unlicensed personnel, with serious questions about use or protection of the resulting records. And parents not only haven’t consented to this process, they haven’t even been told it’s happening. We have written about the disturbing conversion of public schools from places of learning into therapeutic institutions

Why Don’t Liberals Recognize Their Own Bias?

A pair of truly enterprising social scientists, Jussim and Crawford, have been investigating bias against science among conservatives and liberals. Jussim reports the results of their study published in a peer-reviewed journal that showed in this sample, liberals are “far more biased” than conservatives: Liberals viewed the articles reporting ‘liberal’ results (affirmative action and same sex relationships are good) as truer and reflecting less author bias than the articles reporting ‘conservative’ results.  Conservatives, in contrast, viewed the truthfulness and bias in the articles as nearly identical, regardless of their results. That is not the most interesting part however.  When they tried to