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January 2025

The National Institutes of Health Needs an Overhaul By John Early & Terence Kealey

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/01/the-national-institutes-of-health-needs-an-overhaul/

The agency is driven by activity, not results, and wastes money on pointless and counterproductive projects and DEI initiatives.

During the first 60 years of the 20th century, United States life expectancy rose, on average, by 0.37 years per year. After 1960, the rate of improvement suddenly dropped by more than half to 0.15 years per year before the Covid-19 effects.

A significant factor in this slowdown was rapid expansion of and mismanagement by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). During the first 60 years, NIH spending increased by $139 million per year in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars. After 1960, it increased by five times that amount — $703 million per year:

(NIH, CDC, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis)

The nomination of Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH, with his openness to change and dedication to rigorous science,  offers an opportunity to fix the agency’s failures. There are talented scientists funded by NIH grants achieving important breakthroughs. Unfortunately, the size and failures of NIH result in wasted money and too-slow progress toward improved health.

NIH applies a “pipeline” model to research where scientists pick their topics, often focusing on what they consider “basic” questions. Experience shows that pipeline research is less innovative and effective in delivering results than the alternative “mission” research model that begins with an objective such as “eliminate polio.” Most privately funded research follows the mission model, with better results.

The Rape Jihad Is Unmentionable Because It’s Doctrinal Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/01/the-rape-jihad-is-unmentionable-because-its-doctrinal/

Yet British officials knew what was happening on a rampant scale. It was impossible not to know.

In our pages, over a decade ago, I scoffed at a colleague who had suggested that ISIS — the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, which used to be the Iraqi franchise of its now rival al-Qaeda — might be concerned that Western nations were on to its rape jihad. Even if we indulged the fantasy that jihadists were possessed of the civilized sensibility that would trigger such a concern, I countered that “the shocking Rotherham rape jihad scandal” that had erupted in England would assure them that “the West is far more likely to look the other way than to mobilize against this signature sexual abuse.”

This is akin to a point so eloquently made by such fearless truth-tellers as John O’Sullivan, Douglas Murray, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Among the most heinous elements of the sudden interest in the rape jihad, catalyzed by Elon Musk’s admirable hounding of Britain’s oh-so-progressive government, is that the “grooming gangs” are a very old story. The rape jihad wasn’t hiding in plain sight; it was willfully covered up by Parliament, by Britain and its allies in Europe’s transnational progressive project, and by the American cognoscenti. Talking about it was a surer guarantee of pariah status than participating in it.

And then there’s the why. Why is it a signature sexual abuse that we’re not supposed to talk about? Well, because it’s deeply rooted in Islamic scripture. If you have the temerity to notice that, there looms the risk of admonition that the problem is not the rape jihad but your “Islamophobia.”

Back in that 2014 column, written when ISIS was conquering territory the size of Britain and reveling in the spoils, I quoted one of the jihadists who was gleefully anticipating “slave market day.” The Koran, he insisted, authorizes Muslims to sexually exploit “the (captives) whom their right hands possess.”

How Trump Plans To Take On Censors—and They Plan To Take On Trump The Trump administration’s push to end government censorship faces strong resistance, as efforts to dismantle the “Censorship Industrial Complex” encounter bureaucratic and global challenges. By Ben Weingarten

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/13/how-trump-plans-to-take-on-censors-and-they-plan-to-take-on-trump/

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
The incoming Trump administration scored an early but possibly illusory victory last month in its effort to reform government overreach when it successfully pressured Congress to eliminate what it termed “sweetheart provisions for government censors” from a measure to stave off a government shutdown.

Funding for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center – which Republicans had attacked as a tool of domestic censorship – was stripped from the final bill, and the center announced that it was closed for good on Dec. 23. Days later, however, reporting emerged that the State Department had devised plans to shift the center’s 51 employees and millions of dollars of funding to a separate hub purportedly to counter foreign “information manipulation and interference.”

President-elect Donald Trump has not said how he will respond to this maneuver. But in extensive public comments, he has said that targeting what critics have called the Censorship Industrial Complex will be a high priority in his new administration. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge to restore free expression on his platforms and join the Trump administration in its efforts to push back on global censorship, two weeks before inauguration day, indicates speech-policing forces like his may be disarming accordingly.

As the State Department’s move suggests, however, this push will likely face stiff resistance. “There will be a visceral reaction from the bureaucratic state in permanent Washington,” Sen. Eric Schmitt told RealClearInvestigations. As attorney general of Missouri, Schmitt launched the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit against federal government collusion with social media companies and nonprofits to target disfavored speech.

Woke DEI + Green Nihilism = Dresden in California California’s DEI “humanism” and Green New Deal environmentalism ensured the cruelest imaginable treatment of thousands of people and unrivaled destruction of the natural ecosystem. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/13/woke-dei-green-nihilism-dresden-in-california/

Firebombing on the Pacific

Over 25,000 acres are ablaze in Los Angeles in the Pacific Palisades fire, a veritable living hell.

Some 12,000-plus structures were incinerated. More than 250,000 souls have been evacuated and are in need of shelter.

No one has really taken charge yet. And now even the woke culprits for the catastrophe are blame-gaming each other to determine who was the more incompetent, which in this case translates to the most woke.

No one knows how many have died; all know the number will escalate in the next few days.

The eventual price tag of the ruin will exceed $200-300 billion and outstrip the billions of dollars given to Ukraine.

And there are still some fires that are completely uncontained.

The Los Angeles apocalypse was a multisystem, green-woke collapse—and a disastrous reminder that when Soviet-style, anti-meritocratic ideology permeates all aspects of modern life in California, disaster is inevitable.

First, note that the culprit of the catastrophe is not climate change; it is not Donald Trump. Those are excuses for arrogant incompetency and disdain for the public. And it is not racism or homophobia to fault those who paraded and virtue signaled their tribal identities so extraneous to their actual responsibilities for public safety.

Note that all California statewide officeholders are left-wing. The California left holds supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Only 17 percent of California’s huge congressional delegation of 52 seats is Republican. California’s judiciary is the most left-wing in the country. There is not a single Republican on the 15-member Los Angeles City Council.

Add it all up, and the woke socialist state has been eagerly deindustrializing, decivilizing, and retribalizing its way into what is now a veritable peacetime Dresden on the Pacific.

Again, there is no one else to blame, because California is one of those rare states in which Republicans have de facto zero political power. All the state media, the legacy newspapers, the Silicon Valley daily online news sites, the Bay Area-based Apple, Google, and Facebook monopolies, and the local news outlets are parrots of the woke-green mindset.

When the Democrats Went Mad The Democrats weren’t always the party of Big Government statism. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/when-the-democrats-went-mad/

Nowadays it is taken for granted that if you’re a “progressive,” you’re in favor of extensive federal control over the economy, under the guise of concern for common people. The idea that moving toward statism and ever more government control constitutes “progress” is a Marxist notion that is rooted in the idea that history is moving inevitably and inevitably toward the Communist state. In America, one of the public figures who was primarily responsible for the popularization of this idea was a charismatic and yet thrice-failed Democrat presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan.

In 1896, the Democrats were going through a revolution. The Republican platform committed the party to the gold standard, which prevented the production of so much currency as to lead to inflation. A minority of Republicans and a significant majority of Democrats, however, supported the free coinage of silver, which would lead to inflation and thereby make it easier for farmers to pay off their debts. That rapidly rising prices were rendering the life savings of Americans essentially worthless did not trouble the silver advocates, who cloaked their case in the language of support for the plight of the common man.

President Grover Cleveland supported the gold standard, but toward the end of his second term, he was deeply unpopular, and the silver forces among the Democrats were restive. At the Democratic National Convention, Bryan, a handsome and vigorous thirty-six-year-old congressman from Nebraska, electrified the delegates with a speech in favor of the free coinage of silver that is one of the most celebrated pieces of oratory in American history. “You come to us,” Bryan declared, “and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

Bryan sounded notes of class warfare that would become ever more common in American politics: “We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest; we are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!” In conclusion, he thundered: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

Biden Is Going To Destroy As Much As Possible On His Way Out The Door Ever see a drunk asked to leave a nice restaurant? by Derek Hunter

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-is-going-to-destroy-as-much-as-possible-on-his-way-out-the-door/

Ever see a drunk asked to leave a nice restaurant? It doesn’t have to have been in person, you’ve likely seen it in a movie or a TV show; something where the person is asked nicely, but forcefully, to leave and they cause a huge scene as they walk to the door – knocking over drinks, bumping into people, being very loud, etc. That guy is Joe Biden. The current President of the United States and his administration are going to go out like a destructive drunk and it should lead not only to the destruction of his legacy, but a dramatic change of the transition period in the future.

Remember when the Obama administration was ending and there were a whole bunch of political appointees – people whose jobs should have ended on January 20, 2017 – who moved to non-political jobs so they could stay in various departments and undermine the incoming Trump administration?

The Biden administration appears to be trying to do that with ideas, bad ideas. “The State Department has crafted plans to distribute staffers from a shuttered office accused of censoring conservatives to a new internal ‘hub’ that will coordinate its activities,” reports the Washington Examiner. “The Global Engagement Center, the office that Republicans accused of working with groups aiming to demonetize right-leaning media outlets in the United States, shut down in late 2024 upon lawmakers agreeing to no longer fund it. However, in a non-public letter to members of Congress on Dec. 6, the State Department outlined its plans to “realign” more than 50 GEC officials and tens of millions of dollars in funding to a hub purporting to counter foreign interference, documents show.”

There was an agreement to shut this censorship machine down and the people the deal was struck with simply started moving it around and calling it something else.

Maybe Biden doesn’t understand or know that this is happening, but he is still responsible for it.

Abigail Shrier Cabinet of the Canceled Trump has chosen people who understand the threat of government coercion—because they have experienced it firsthand.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/donald-trump-cabinet-picks-government

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently expressed what many felt at the reelection of Donald Trump: not triumph so much as relief. “I hope this last ten years increasingly is just going to feel like a bad dream,” he told podcast host Joe Rogan. “I can’t believe we tolerated the level of repression . . . and anger and . . . emotional incontinence and . . . cancellation campaigns.” Much of it was orchestrated or encouraged by our government.

One could say many things about Trump’s cabinet picks. At times, they seem to embody Government by Middle Finger. But they also, undeniably, represent Government by the Canceled: an assemblage that doesn’t need to be reminded of the administrative state’s ability to coerce the American public by calling in favors from Big Tech or pulling the levers of regulation, audit, or investigation. Many have experienced such treatment firsthand.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to lead the intelligence community, was briefly placed on a government watch list, she says, for criticizing Kamala Harris. The Biden White House and surgeon general pressured social-media companies to censor Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya’s attempts to warn the public that the Covid lockdowns were the biggest policy error in American history; Trump named Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health. And Elon Musk, appointed to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, knowingly overpaid for Twitter to give Americans a sphere for free speech. At takeover, Musk immediately released the Twitter Files, revealing a coordinated effort by the Biden administration to censor the speech of Americans whose views it disfavored. The Biden administration repaid Musk by targeting his businesses with unprecedented levels of regulatory harassment.

One wonderful thing about Americans: we despise being bullied by our government. Not even our Anglosphere allies share this aspect of our national character. Yet, over the last decade, for anyone with views departing from progressive orthodoxy, American life has become increasingly suffocating. Our posts have been censored on social media—or labeled “misinformation” by “fact-checkers”—as mine were, for criticizing Biden administration policy on boys participating in girls’ sports. We got booted from Twitter for opposing gender ideology or expressing skepticism about Covid vaccine safety.

Blaming ‘Climate Change’ For L.A. Fires Only Makes Newsom Look Criminally Incompetent

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/13/blaming-climate-change-for-la-fires-only-makes-newsom-look-even-more-incompetent/

“All these things are connected. This is a challenging time. But we’re up to this challenge.”

That was California Gov. Gavin Newsom back in 2020 when he was busy blaming “climate change” for the wildfires that erupted that year. “I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers,” he said.

Four years later, Newsom is again blaming “climate change” for the fires ravaging Los Angeles.

But wait. If climate change really is to blame, why was California so obviously, so woefully, so inexcusably unprepared?

Someone needs to ask Newsom why the state didn’t spend the last four years aggressively clearing out underbrush to minimize the chances of a catastrophic wildfire. Why didn’t it carve out large and effective buffer zones to keep fires from reaching populated areas? Why wasn’t there a Marshall Plan-scale effort to build reservoirs so firefighters could get water from hydrants?

It’s not as though the state didn’t have plenty of warning. For decades, environmentalists have been screaming about how “climate change” was going to make wildfires more frequent, more all-consuming, and more deadly.

Yet in the very state where environmentalists hold all the levers of power, they dawdled and delayed, let bureaucratic red tape and environmental groups stall efforts to prepare for the worst, and put other ridiculous and massively expensive projects (such as the “bullet” train) at the front of the line.

And in the process, California has wasted fantastic sums of money.

In 2018, former Gov. Jerry Brown signed a $1 billion bill that was supposed to “prevent catastrophic wildfires and protect Californians.” Where did that money go?

The Global Net Zero Financial Cartel, Falling Apart Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-1-11-the-global-net-zero-financial-cartel-falling-apart

Less than three weeks ago, on December 23, in a post on optimism about the potential demise of the green energy fantasy, I took note that two of the largest U.S. banks had just quit something called the “Net Zero Banking Alliance.” The two were Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo. These two banks, along with many others, including all of the biggest ones, had joined the NZBA as it was getting organized under auspices of the UN back in 2021. NZBA, together with other related groups organized around the same time, aspired to be cartels of financial institutions that would save the planet by starving hydrocarbon fuels of all investment capital, while re-directing the money to the “green” energy transition. Now, shortly after the re-election of Donald Trump, two of the biggest banking giants had decided to exit. Could this be a sign that the zero-carbon green energy fantasy was losing its grip?

In the short 19 days since that post, the trickle of resignations from the NZBA and related groups has turned into an avalanche. In the blink of an eye, what once seemed a serious threat that hydrocarbon fuels could be snuffed out by a group boycott of investors has almost entirely gone away.

More on the latest developments later in this post. But first, some history of NZBA and the related alphabet soup of do-gooders.

2021 was the year that the UN’s big climate confab, known as the “Conference of Parties” or “COP,” was to be held in Glasgow, Scotland. Although the COPs are normally held every year, there had not been one in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic. After the year hiatus, COP-26 was ultimately held from October 31 to November 13, 2021. Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the UK, who had converted from one-time climate skeptic to all-in alarmist, was determined to make this COP-26 the be-all and end-all of all COPs. The swarms of little aspiring tyrants in UN bureaucracies, just off their hugely successful Covid power grabs, were ready to flex their new muscles in the climate arena.

Child abuse fits right in with our Woke Ideology: Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in rape.Diane Bederman

https://dianebederman.com/child-abuse-fits-right-in-with-our-woke-ideology-diversity-inclusion-and-equity-in-rape/

What is it about men that they desire children for sex – boys and girls? From the beginning of time children have been used, abused and sacrificed. Muslim men. Caucasian men. Black men. I guess one can say that child abuse fits right in with our Woke Ideology: Diversity, Inclusion and Equity; in rape.

Today, thanks to Elon Musk, the horror of young white girls in Britain, raped by Muslim men, is finally being shared in Main Stream Media.

As Melanie Phillips recently wrote: “For at least 25 years, gangs of mostly Pakistani-heritage Muslim men have been grooming young white girls by luring them with gifts, alcohol and drugs in order to pimp, rape, imprison, torture, and in some cases, even murder them. In town after town, tens of thousands of girls—many of them young teenagers—have been subjected to debauched and depraved sexual violence, with many serially raped by multiple men in one night.”

Sadly, this behaviour is nothing new.

The Greeks and Romans had their boy toys, the pagans had Moloch, and the Muslim Afghanis have their “Bachi Bazi.” And don’t forget America has Epstein’s Island and P. Diddy.

Some of the Ancient Greeks and Romans regarded sex with children as a common practice and sometimes something to be celebrated. Pedophilia was common in Greek and Roman mythology and daily life. Ancient Romans and Greeks openly practiced forms of pedophilia. Forms of pedophilia were common among nobility and were often seen as rites of passage for the youth involved in them.

We have all read about Sodom and Gomorrah.

And Judaism tells us about the pagan sacrifice of children to Molech.

Today, in the Muslim world: In Afghanistan Bacha Bazi or dancing boys (from Persian: bacheh – “boy”, and bazi – “play, game”) is an expression used in certain parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It refers to a practice in Afghanistan engaging generally male children and male adults. This practice has turned into a centuries-long tradition and involves sexual abuse and slavery of young boys by older powerful men, often Pashtuns (New Line Institute, 2021). These preadolescent boys, called Bacha Bareesh or beardless boys come from impoverished families and serve as “entertainers” to influential Afghans. Dressed as girls and wearing makeup they dance for their masters who later take them in order to get involved in a sexual relationship Sexual “relationship?” This is no relationship!

Here, too, the officials are AWOL.