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November 2021

Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks by Geoffrey Kabat

https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Risk-Right-Understanding-Science-ebook/dp/B01MAXIL21/ref=sr_1_3?crid=

Do cell phones cause brain cancer? Does BPA threaten our health? How safe are certain dietary supplements, especially those containing exotic herbs or small amounts of toxic substances? Is the HPV vaccine safe? We depend on science and medicine as never before, yet there is widespread misinformation and confusion, amplified by the media, regarding what influences our health. In Getting Risk Right, Geoffrey C. Kabat shows how science works—and sometimes doesn’t—and what separates these two very different outcomes.

Kabat seeks to help us distinguish between claims that are supported by solid science and those that are the result of poorly designed or misinterpreted studies. By exploring different examples, he explains why certain risks are worth worrying about, while others are not. He emphasizes the variable quality of research in contested areas of health risks, as well as the professional, political, and methodological factors that can distort the research process. Drawing on recent systematic critiques of biomedical research and on insights from behavioral psychology, Getting Risk Right examines factors both internal and external to the science that can influence what results get attention and how questionable results can be used to support a particular narrative concerning an alleged public health threat. In this book, Kabat provides a much-needed antidote to what has been called “an epidemic of false claims.”

Face to Face with the Auschwitz Memorial Twitter Project Geoffrey C. Kabat

https://quillette.com/2021/11/05/face-to-face-with-the-auschwitz-memorial-twitter-project/

The Nazi concentration camp system still remains a unicum, both in its extent and its quality. At no other place or time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex: never have so many human lives been extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism, and cruelty.

~Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

A girl of perhaps 11 years, with lush, braided hair and a beautiful face, sits alone in a classroom looking up from her book at the photographer. She is self-possessed and gives the most natural smile.

Another photo shows a girl of five or six intently studying something she holds in her hands, possibly a flower or a piece of white cloth. She has a white bow in her hair.

In a third photo, a handsome, well-dressed woman in her late teens is sitting in an armchair by an open window smiling, apparently engaged in conversation.

These are three of a succession of arresting photographs accompanying brief online biographies of people transported to Auschwitz and, with rare exceptions, killed there between 1941 and 1945.

The photographs are posted on the Auschwitz Memorial Twitter site, which is run by the Auschwitz‑Birkenau Memorial and State Museum in Poland.

Trickle-Down Bidenism This Biden socialist cadre who engineered these self-induced calamities has no clue about the damage they have done to America. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/07/trickle-down-bidenism/

Can 10 months really make a real difference in America? Not normally.

But weld together a hard-left socialist agenda with the control of the White House and Congress onto the combined forces of progressive woke media, Silicon Valley, the corporate boardrooms, the entertainment industry, academia, and the Wall Street borg—all in the age of instant and intrusive communications—and it’s no wonder a country, even a nation as resilient as the United States, can descend quite quickly in ways that make America almost unrecognizable.

In other words, 40 weeks of relentless Bidenism finally permeates most of the nation.

Fuel Prices, Inflation, and Border Chaos

Out in the California foothills and Central Valley, relatively “cheap” propane now has more than doubled to a rate of $3.91 a gallon.

At about the same time that I got the propane bill, I filled up the truck with diesel fuel. It was $4.87 a gallon with a credit card, up in price almost $2 a gallon from over a year ago. I thought myself lucky since the week prior in Palo Alto it was about $5.29 a gallon.

I spoke not long ago in Bakersfield to an oil man. He described impending California new rules on the horizon concerning almost every aspect of horizontal drilling and fracking—as part of his own larger fears that the entire industry is shrinking even as demands and profits soar, and consumers need more natural gas and gasoline than ever.

Has anyone ever heard of liberal Americans deliberately not pumping oil and gas, but still needing so much more output that they beg the illiberal Saudis and Russians to bail us out? At other times in our history, we have suffered plenty of fossil fuel scarcities due to war, embargoes, and declining reserves. But never has America deliberately created shortages amid a sea of our own gas and oil.

What has been the reaction from those who slashed natural gas and oil production by cancelling new federal leases and pipelines, and oil fields in Alaska, or warned frackers that new regulations and taxes were just the prerequisites to a rapid phase out of their existence altogether—on the pathway to a wind and solar nirvana?

When asked if the United States would at least increase (e.g., restore previous levels of) oil production, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm laughed, “That is hilarious.”

To whom is that comical? The guy with an older model pickup doing daily landscape work for his wealthy clients? The waitress who drives 20 miles to work? The broke student who commutes to campus?

I drove today along a rural avenue next to my farm. Both sides of the street were littered—far more than usually so—with trash. They were not just the usual garbage bags and tires, but washers, dryers, refrigerators, car seats, furniture—and mattresses of all shapes and sizes. It was an intensification of the now old story of rural California as an open dumping ground of refuse.

I stopped to inspect the flotsam and jetsam. The dumpers are careful to glean out their personal addresses. They rarely leave traceable material. But all the magazines, newspapers, and printed material were in Spanish. Note there are no green regulators out here who patrol rural avenues to stop the pollution and desecration of the natural landscape; in the hierarchy of wokeness, illegal immigration trumps the environment.

Federal Court Blocks Biden Vaccine Mandate A win for the people in the ongoing war against white coat supremacy Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/federal-court-blocks-biden-vaccine-mandate-lloyd-billingsley/

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Saturday blocked a Biden vaccine mandate that would have forced private companies with more than 100 employees to get workers vaccinated, submit to weekly tests, or face steep fines. 

Due to start on January 4 and affecting more than 80 million workers, the mandate was to be enforced through the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The appeal court cited “grave statutory and constitutional issues” with the Biden plan, which drew lawsuits from, among others, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton.

“WE WON,” Paxton tweeted after Saturday’s ruling. “The fight is not over and I will never stop resisting this Admin’s unconstitutional overreach!” Paxton told reporters the ruling “gives people hope that they aren’t going to lose their jobs and the president isn’t going to be able to ruin people’s careers and make their lives more difficult.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted. “Emergency hearings will take place soon. We will have our day in court to strike down Biden’s unconstitutional abuse of authority.”

A full 26 states had filed suit against the Biden mandate. Louisiana attorney general Jeff Landry called it “unlawful overreach,” adding that the administration “will not impose medical procedures on the American people without the checks and balances afforded by our Constitution.” For West Virginia attorney general Patrick Morrisey the ruling was “good news” and “Biden’s vaccine mandates are unlawful, unconstitutional and just wrong!”

Companies opposing the Biden mandate included the Daily Wire news website. As co-founder and  CEO Jeremy Boreing explained, “forcing Americans to choose between their livelihoods and their freedom is a grotesque abuse of power and we won’t be a party to it. We will not incur the cost of implementing this testing regime. We will not incur the liability of inserting ourselves into the private health decisions and information of our employees. Our company was founded to stand against tyranny, and we will.”

Biden charged that “the virus will not go away by itself, or because we wish it away. We have to act.” It had apparently escaped the Delaware Democrat’s notice that the vaccines currently being imposed have not exactly been trouble-free. For example, Finland, Sweden and Norway have paused the use of the Moderna vaccine, citing a risk of myocarditis.

Biden’s poll numbers continue to collapse By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/bidens_poll_numbers_continue_to_collapse.html

Thanks to relentless mainstream media propaganda, Joe Biden entered the Oval office with very good poll numbers. Despite the contentious campaign season and the even more contentious election, Americans were willing to give Biden the benefit of the doubt, with 57% of them expressing approval for him in the first weeks of his presidency. Since then, he’s had nowhere to go but down. The latest poll puts his approval at 38% and the slide shows no signs of stopping.

The most recent presidential approval poll comes from USA TODAY/Suffolk University and was taken between Wednesday and Friday last week. That means it caught the responses to the elections on Tuesday, including the way Virginia, which easily gave its Electoral College votes to Biden in 2020, has now turned red, with a Republican Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and State House.

USA TODAY sums up the most recent poll results:

A year before the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans hold a clear lead on the congressional ballot as President Joe Biden’s approval rating sinks to a new low of 38%.

A USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, taken Wednesday through Friday, found that Biden’s support cratered among the independent voters who delivered his margin of victory over President Donald Trump one year ago.

The Radical Illogic at the Heart of Trans Activism Rage against reality. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/rage-against-reality-bruce-bawer/

The other day, for the first time since the pandemic began, I was in a properly jam-packed watering hole. The establishment in question was my old Oslo hangout, a largish and rather legendary gay bar called London Pub. I was alone – in fact I seemed to be the only person who was alone in the whole place – and so I just sat there with my $12 glass of wine (welcome to Norway!) and, after a year and a half of living mostly like a hermit, took in the glorious sight of fellow human beings, maskless, enjoying one another’s company.

The patrons could hardly have been more varied, ranging from twenty-somethings to octogenarians, from tiny Asians to doorway-tall Norwegians, from rail-thin to massively obese. The attire was all over the place, from black tie to Lederhosen (Oktoberfest was underway), and there were more blacks than there would have been ten years ago, when I last lived in Oslo. And there was, as always, a sprinkling of women – even, for the first time in my experience, among the staff.

And what struck me was how mellow it all was. There was no tension in the air. Everybody was having a good time together.

My friend Frank, a straight American who used to tend bar at London Pub, wrote on Facebook just the other day that it’s better to work in a gay bar than a straight bar, because you never have to break up fights. A bit of an exaggeration, maybe – but just a bit.

I’ve always opposed the term “gay community,” because it rarely feels like a community. Some gay bars of my acquaintance have guys working the door who turn away the old and the unlovely.

Do Children Belong to the State? The struggle for the hearts and minds of children. William Kilpatrick

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/do-children-belong-state-william-kilpatrick/

Do children belong to their parents or to the state?  That was one of the central questions raised in the recent Virginia gubernatorial race.  Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic Party candidate started the debate when he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” 

The issue came to a head when parents in Loudoun County, Virginia loudly complained at school board meetings about the introduction of Critical Race Theory and transgender policies—policies that resulted in the rape of a 14-year-old girl by a boy wearing a skirt in the girl’s bathroom of a local high school.

In reaction, the left-leaning National School Board Association (NSBA) called such parents “domestic terrorists” and requested that the Department of Justice intervene to protect school boards from angry parents.  In turn, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to look into the NSBA complaint.

But the NSBA’s complaint seemed to be that unless parents are quiet and compliant, they should be viewed as right-wing extremists. Although the letter gives lip service to encouraging “varying viewpoints,” it’s written in a self-righteous tone that portrays educators and school boards as heroic defenders of children, while parents who challenge the schools are a threat to children. Reading between the lines, one gets the impression that for the NSBA, what goes on in schools is none of a parent’s business.

Biden straining relations with Israel over plans for East Jerusalem consulate By David Zukerman

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/biden_straining_relations_with_israel_over_plans_for_east_jerusalem_consulate_.html

President Biden’s announced intention to reopen a U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem for outreach to Palestinians looms as a significant point of contention between the administration and Israel.  A look at the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 1963, is a logical starting point to analyze the problem.  The Convention provides in Article 2.1.:   

“The establishment of consular relations between States takes place by mutual consent.” 

Article 4.1 provides:

“A consular post may be established in the territory of the receiving State only with that State’s consent.”

What, then, is the problem? President Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and relocated the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, later closing the consulate in East Jerusalem, merging it into the Embassy. 

It would seem clear, then, that as the U.S. recognizes undivided Jerusalem as part of the territory of Israel, a consulate in Jerusalem may be opened (or re-opened) only with the consent of Israel as the receiving State.

But thus far, Biden intends to proceed with reopening the Jerusalem consulate for outreach to the Palestinians.   Will he proceed over Israel’s objections?  If he does so, it seems to this observer that he could only justify such a move by declaring that the United States does not consider East Jerusalem (the apparent venue of a reopened Jerusalem consulate) Israeli territory.  And that would be a HUGE thorn in the side of the relationship between Biden administration and the Bennett government in Israel. 

On the other hand, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett could back down from opposition to a reopened U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, and give the Consular Convention’s Article 4.1 consent to the Biden move, consent that, from the Israel point of view, would still be consistent with Israel’s claim of sovereignty over an undivided Jerusalem.  Biden, of course, could go along with this face-saving approach to the issue, on Israel’s behalf.  

If Biden, or Secretary of State Antony Blinken, were to declare that Israel’s consent was not required, relations between the allies would suddenly become so frigid as to cause unsettling reverberations in the Middle East.  Why?  Because Biden establishing a consulate in East Jerusalem without Israel’s consent would be signaling that American no longer accepts Israel’s sovereignty over an undivided Jerusalem.

International law, however, is not the only factor in consideration of the question of reopening a U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem.   There is the matter of U.S. law to consider, specifically, the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 (Public Law 104-95) cited in the November 1, 2021 letter to the president signed by 200 House Republican members.  (Twelve GOP members did not sign, but the signers included such disparate Republicans as Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger, on the one hand, and Reps. Taylor Greene and Gosar, on the other.)

American Perfidy Against Jews Is Never A Good Thing By Barry Shaw

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/american_perfidy_against_jews_is_never_a_good_thing.html

The Balfour Declaration was signed on November 2, 1917, at a time when Britain and its allies were driving the Turks and Germans out of Palestine, a barren region of a decayed and defeated Ottoman Empire.

The Palestine Campaign turned the tide of World War One. It was won by allied troops, including a large fighting contingent of Palestine Jews. No Arabs fought on the west side of the Jordan River, part of which is called, by ignorant activists and politicians, “the West Bank.”

America remained neutral until April 1917 and didn’t get into the fight until the summer of 1918, by which time the Palestine Campaign was over. The Allied Powers met in San Remo in 1920 to decide the future of the defunct Ottoman Empire. The United States participated only as observers.

Arabs were rewarded with independence in Syria, Lebanon, and Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq). Jordan was created later as a reward for Arab participation in the Palestine Campaign on the East Bank of the Jordan River. This part of Palestine was given to the Hashemite tribe, a minority in Jordan. The majority of Jordanians are Palestinians, as is the queen.

This fact has been conveniently forgotten by those physically and verbally fighting against Israel. Those with an aversion to history have held back peace for decades with a two-state non-solution that demands Israel give up its ancient historic homeland and divide Jerusalem, its eternal capital.

The Allied Powers gave Britain the mandate for Palestine based on the principle of the Balfour Declaration, which had become official British policy: It called for establishing Palestine as the national home for the Jewish people while protecting the civil and religious rights of all its citizens, which Israel has diligently done.

This was reaffirmed at the 1922 League of Nations Conference on the Mandate for Palestine. (The League of Nations was the forerunner of the United Nation.)

The world celebrated the return of the Jews to their ancient biblical…and then things went wrong.

British officers arrived in Jerusalem to administer British policy but instead turned against their own government policy by encouraging a raging anti-Semitic Arab leader to incite the murder and expulsion of Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, and throughout pre-state Palestine.

The notorious Haj Amin al-Husseini was the architect of anti-Jewish terror that has lasted a century. After fleeing Jerusalem, he joined Adolph Hitler to plan the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem in the Middle East.

A Theater Professor Suggested Students Should Have Thicker Skins, So They Demanded He Be Fired By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/a-theatre-professor-suggested-students-should-have-thicker-skins-so-they-demanded-he-be-fired/?utm_

Coastal Carolina University (CCU) recently bowed to a woke mob of theater students who demanded professor Steven Earnest be ousted from his role after 16 years at the university — because he suggested that a misunderstanding on campus was not a big deal.

The controversy began with a September 16 incident in which students discovered a list of names on a classroom whiteboard. The students, realizing that the names all belonged to students of color, quickly assumed that racial foul play was behind the list, and they organized a protest.

However, a prompt investigation by the university revealed that the list had come out of a discussion between a visiting artist and two students of color who said they were hoping to connect with other non-white students on campus. The trio wrote down the names of other students of color who might wish to form a group to discuss their shared experiences.

The committee explained the misunderstanding in an email to campus but wanted to make clear that the investigation — which revealed the whole to-do had been over nothing — “in no way undermines the feelings that any of you feel about this incident.”

“It should have never happened and the DEI committee will be discussing with faculty and students the gravity of the situation and how to handle these requests in the future,” the email said.

Earnest dared to question that pandering attitude, writing back: “Sorry but I don’t think it’s a big deal.”