NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Message America’s Future Doctors Need to Hear The University of Michigan medical students who walked out of their white coat ceremony missed a transcendent lecture about staying human in an age of machines. Vinay Prasad

Posted By on July 28th, 2022

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-message-americas-future-doctors?utm_source=email

Dr. Kristin Collier is an assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, where she has served on faculty for 17 years. She also is the director of the medical school’s Program on Health, Spirituality and Religion and has been published in publications including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Many describe her as a consummate physician and superb teacher—deeply liked and respected by her peers. That’s why, out of some 3,000 faculty at Michigan, Dr. Collier was chosen by students and her peers to be this year’s White Coat Ceremony speaker. The White Coat ceremony is one bookend of medical school (graduation is the other), where students put on their white coats for the first time, take a modified Hippocratic oath and begin the long path to becoming a doctor. 

The trouble is that Professor Collier has views on abortion that are out of step with many Michigan medical students—likely the majority of them. She has stated that she defines herself as pro-life, though she does not state the extent of her position (i.e. whether she allows exemptions for rape or incest). In that same interview, in which she talks about her personal transformation from a pro-choice atheist to a Christian, she laments the intolerance for religious people among medical colleagues. “When we consider diversity in the medical profession, religious diversity is not—should not—be exempt from this goal.”

After Michigan announced her speech, the university made it clear that Dr. Collier would not be addressing abortion in her talk. “The White Coat Ceremony is not a platform for discussion of controversial issues, and Dr. Collier never planned to address a divisive topic as part of her remarks,” the dean of the medical school, Marshall Runge, wrote to students and staff earlier this month.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Britain, the Tories, and Kemi Badenoch After Boris, what? Bruce Bawer

Posted By on July 28th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/britain-tories-and-kemi-badenoch-bruce-bawer/

“Briefly put, she’s incredibly smart, broadly knowledgeable, articulate, self-possessed, and gutsy – a no-nonsense expounder of good old-fashioned British common sense. In debate, she shines in a way that brings Mrs. Thatcher to mind. So, given that the Tory establishment is essentially Labour lite, nobody expected her to be the last person standing when the game of musical chairs was over. She fell out of the competition after the fourth vote, on July 19; the next day, happily, Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt, a slavish advocate of gender ideology, authoritarian hate-speech legislation, and other progressive rubbish, was voted off the island. ”

These days, Britain’s Tory Party is not unlike the neverTrump GOP in the U.S. The problem is that so far, at least, there’s no close British approximation to Trump. When Boris Johnson ascended to the prime ministership, to be sure, some of us who had read and admired his Spectator columns for years thought that, after being handed the reins of power, he might very well deliver the goods in a way not unlike The Donald. Alas, no. As it turned out, being a sharp, snappy political writer – even one who, thinking on his feet in front of a live audience, can put up a witty argument for the superiority of classical Greece to ancient Rome – doesn’t necessarily mean that one will be a first-rate head of government.

It’s still depressing to look back on it all. The Tories won the 2020 election by a landslide – giving them a clear mandate to take back Britain from the London-based progressives – but Boris, for all his power, did less with it, at least in that regard, than any of his admirers could ever have expected. Yes, he got Brexit done. But taxes went up anyway. So did rates of illegal immigration. He ordered a very strict lockdown (which he famously violated) and pursued an environmental policy that might have been cooked up by the EPA. As “woke” ideology spread – a far more dangerous virus than COVID-19 – he repeatedly resisted opportunities to score meaningful victories against it that would only have enhanced his level of public support. Perhaps most appalling, during his tenure, horrific revelations of mass grooming-gang rapes kept on coming even as the nation’s police, to their everlasting discredit, remained far more interested in locking up critics of Islam than in nabbing Muslim rapists. But B.J. just shrugged it all off, seeming strangely detached – perhaps, some wondered, uneasy with power.  

Which, of course, is why the Conservatives, taking advantage of a relatively trivial scandal or two, finally decided a few weeks back to give old Boris the heave-ho and find a new party leader.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Change Alarmists Ramp Up Their Rhetoric and Disruptive Tactics And a doomsday voice from the past is back. Joseph Klein

Posted By on July 28th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/climate-change-alarmists-ramp-their-rhetoric-and-joseph-klein/

Climate change alarmists are using increasingly strident rhetoric and confrontational tactics in an effort to accelerate an end to the fossil fuel industry. The climate change alarmists believe that the disruptive methods of “civil disobedience” they employ are necessary in order to call attention to what they claim is an imminent existential threat to humanity caused by continued dependence on fossil fuels. These activists accuse the fossil fuel industry of profiting from the suffering of everyday people caused by fossil fuel emissions that are said to be wreaking havoc with the global climate. And they accuse government officials of complicity by not doing enough to force a very rapid transition to total reliance on renewable sources of clean energy, whatever the resulting huge costs and disastrous economic fallout turn out to be.

The doomsday prophesies are sounding more and more like a broken record. Take former Vice President Al Gore’s pronouncements, for example. In 2008, before teaming up with former President Barack Obama, Gore predicted an ice-free Arctic by 2013, which he pushed out a year further in his updated 2009 prophecy. President Biden’s climate czar John Kerry made a similarly dire prediction back in 2009, citing the projections of “scientists.” Gore and Kerry were way off the mark as usual.

According to data compiled by the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC), as of mid-July 2022 there is still plenty of sea ice in the Arctic – extending 3.25 million square miles. “The decline rate of the extent through the first half of July was near the 1981 to 2010 average,” NSIDC reported, adding that the sea ice extent on July 17th was the highest since 2015.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Feds Drop Assault Charges Against Man Accused in Sicknick Attack By Julie Kelly

Posted By on July 28th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/27/feds-drop-assault-charges-against-man-accused-in-sicknick-attack/

Federal prosecutors today dropped felony assault charges against one of two men accused of attacking Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick on January 6, 2021. George Tanios of West Virginia was arrested in March 2021 and charged with numerous felonies including assault on federal officers with a dangerous or deadly weapon and obstruction of an official proceeding.

In an superseding indictment filed Wednesday morning by the office of Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia handling all January 6 prosecutions, Tanios now faces two misdemeanor counts: entering or remaining on restricted grounds and disorderly conduct.

Tanios and Julian Khater, his co-defendant in the alleged attack, have been portrayed by Joe Biden’s Justice Department and the national news media as the Trump supporters responsible for the death of Sicknick on January 7, 2021. After the New York Times in February 2021 retracted its initial account of what happened to Sicknick—that he was bludgeoned to death by Trump “loyalists” using a fire extinguisher—the media then suggested Sicknick died after suffering an allergic reaction to chemical spray. (Khater remains accused of using pepper spray against a line of officers, including Sicknick, outside that afternoon.)

In April 2021, the D.C. Medical Examiner ruled Sicknick died of natural causes and suffered no internal or external injuries during the Capitol protest.

After prosecutors sought pretrial detention for Tanios and Khater, D.C. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan, 83, denied their release. Both men were sent to the D.C. gulag set aside for January 6 defendants; in August 2021, the D.C. Circuit Court overturned Hogan’s order to keep Tanios behind bars and he was released on strict home detention orders. Khater remains incarcerated awaiting an October 5 trial.

In an interview with American Greatness last October, Tanios, father of three young children, explained how the false charges destroyed his life, including the loss of his sandwich restaurant. “In the court of public opinion, we’ve all been destroyed,” Tanios told me during a phone interview. “The truth is going to come out, though, it has to.”

Tanios is expected to plead guilty today to both misdemeanor counts in Judge Hogan’s courtroom.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Ukrainian Verdun The United States is nearing a gut-check on Ukraine. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 28th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/27/the-ukrainian-verdun/

Five months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the war is now reduced to one of attrition. The current dirty, grinding slog is fought mostly with artillery and rockets. Everything from Ukraine’s shopping centers to apartment buildings—and the civilians in them—are Russian targets. 

Most outsiders have already forgotten the heroic Ukrainian winter repulse of the botched Russian shock-and-awe effort to sweep into Kyiv, decapitate the government, and declare the eastern half of the country a Russian protectorate within mere days.

Months later, the long war devolves further into a contest of mass and weight—tons of explosives blowing up pathways for massed troops grabbing a few more charred miles of ruined landscape.

Vladimir Putin bets he can throw in more men and more shells than Ukraine and its Western suppliers can match. He is quite willing to “win” by laying waste to eastern Ukraine even if it means losing three Russian soldiers for every Ukrainian. 

When war becomes such gridlocked carnage, each side looks to new game-changing diplomacy, strategies, allies, or weapons to break the deadlock.

For Putin, such escalation means more flesh, steel, and explosives. His country is 28 times bigger than Ukraine, and over three times more populous, with an economy 15 times larger. 

As for Putin’s financial reserves, the Western oil boycott means increasingly little to him when 40 percent of the planet’s population in India and China are eager to secure near-limitless Russian energy. 

Another 750 million people in Europe once talked tough. But as a second winter nears, their gas and oil imports from Russia will further wither. Then their Churchillian rhetoric may chill. 

So, the Ukrainian war increasingly will depend on endless U.S. aid and escalation.

To stop the Russian steamroller, Ukraine demands sophisticated American missiles to sink Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Kyiv requests shipments of U.S. jet fighters to knock down Putin’s missiles and planes.

It asks for more rockets and artillery to ensure tit-for-tat retaliation for every incoming Russian shell and bomb. Kyiv negotiates for more Western intelligence to take out more Russian generals and more lift capacity to stage airborne raids into Mother Russia itself.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The National Tragedy of Hunter Biden’s Laptop How a country’s political corruption, institutional decay, and moral decline can be summed up in one sad family saga By Lee Smith

Posted By on July 28th, 2022

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-national-tragedy-of-hunter-bidens-laptop

The recent release of more gigabytes of images and information from Hunter Biden’s laptop adds to the evidence that the all-out elite effort to bury the scandal before the 2020 election wasn’t just to protect Joe Biden, the preferred candidate of the American oligarchy. Sure, the 50-plus senior U.S. intelligence professionals who signed a letter claiming the laptop’s contents were “Russian disinformation” wanted to stop Donald Trump from sending angry tweets at them, but the laptop suggests there was much more at stake.

The U.S. spy chiefs who signed that infamously misleading letter—including John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and James Clapper—had directed America’s foreign intelligence services while Biden was vice president and before that chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They knew what his son Hunter was doing abroad, because it was their job to know what foreign services know about leading U.S. officials and their families, and how it might affect U.S. national security.

But none of these powerful and experienced men, presumably dedicated to defending the national interest, lifted a finger to stop Hunter Biden—and really, how could they? He was Joe Biden’s son, after all. And by doing nothing about him, the pillars of America’s intelligence community became the curators of the Biden family’s scandal.

When Trump started asking questions in 2019 about Hunter and his father, prompted by Joe Biden’s public comments about protecting Hunter’s business associates abroad, it became clear that the only way to contain the mushrooming scandal involving key U.S. interests in Ukraine and China—a scandal whose magnitude they had known about for a decade—was to provide the former vice president with all the resources the U.S. government could muster. And that helped make him president.

There is so much data on Hunter Biden’s laptop that it’s hard to keep straight the sequence of images and information that have come from it since the New York Post started sourcing stories to the personal computer in October 2020. The most recent release includes 80,000 images that a Switzerland-based cyber expert recovered from deleted iPad and iPhone accounts backed up on the laptop.

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‘Deportation Defense’ is Big Business Left-wing group could get $1 billion from taxpayers to keep gang members here. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on July 28th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/deportation-defense-big-business-matthew-vadum/

As extremist Biden-Harris policies continue to swamp America with illegal aliens, the regime, which has already lavished millions of dollars on a radical George Soros-funded group, may give the so-called social justice outfit another billion taxpayer dollars to prevent illegal aliens from being deported.

The illegals benefiting from this largesse are unaccompanied alien children (UACs) who supposedly have no parents or legal guardians in the U.S. to take care of them.

Many UACs have ties to MS-13 or other gangs, then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, warned in 2017.

“It is well known that MS-13 actively targets and recruits children as young as eight years old,” the lawmaker said. “While their illegal status and Central American heritage are a key factor in MS-13’s targeting, without a doubt the failures of the current system for handling these children are also to blame.”

“With promises of a cultural community and an escape from often harrowing and isolating living conditions at home, MS-13 has become an attractive option for too many minors,” Grassley added.

This taxpayer-underwritten MS-13 import subsidy comes “amid an escalating border crisis that saw more than 239,000 migrant encounters in May alone — a historic high. There were 14,699 encounters of unaccompanied minors in May, an increase from the 12,180 encountered in April and slightly higher than the 14,052 encountered in May 2021,” Fox News reports.

“So far, there have been more than 100,000 unaccompanied minor encounters in fiscal year 2022, which started in October, compared to 147,925 for fiscal year 2021 and 33,239 in fiscal year 2020.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mrs. Zelenskyy Welcomes Vogue to the War Zone By Stacey Lennox

Posted By on July 28th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2022/07/27/mrs-zelenskyy-welcomes-vogue-to-the-war-zone-n1615998

Call it the war with the best production value. A propaganda war is being fought between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin. From the slick production of videos about a fighter pilot that never existed to the tall tale about the brave soldiers at Snake Island who all perished, it is easy to see why so many in the West have a Ukrainian flag somewhere in their social media profile.

But it was all garbage wrapped around a sliver of truth at best. Then there was the parade of global dignitaries visiting the war zone, seemingly carefree. First Lady Jill Biden went instead of her husband. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went. So did U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.  Even Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Ct.) made a bipartisan trip to get their pictures taken with Zelenskyy. The photo ops that say you were there. Of course, Graham and Blumenthal left with plaques after making profoundly concerning statements about an ongoing conflict:

Today we were treated to a glowing photo spread of Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Volodymyrivna Zelenska in Vogue. This spread follows glowing profiles in some lesser publications such as Today, People, and Parade.  These outlets compiled their pieces from Zelenska’s public statements and career profile. Vogue sent an interview crew into a war zone.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Pete Buttigieg Comes Out on Top in a New Hampshire Poll of 2024 Democrat Primary Voters By Stacey Lennox

Posted By on July 28th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2022/07/27/pete-buttigieg-comes-out-on-top-in-a-new-hampshire-poll-of-2024-democrat-primary-voters-n1616329

According to a poll of likely Democratic Primary voters in New Hampshire, President Joe Biden is not the leading candidate for 2024. The state holds the first primary in the nation, and several possible candidates have been swinging through from both parties. Trump-hating Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited the state in the fall of 2021. More recently, Illinois’s extra-large governor, J.D. Pritzker, made an appearance. However, when the University of New Hampshire polled likely 2024 Democratic Primary voters, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg came out on top.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

With More Green Energy, Plan For A Dark Future And Sheltering In Place Linnea Lueken

Posted By on July 28th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/27/with-more-green-energy-plan-for-a-dark-future-and-sheltering-in-place/

It is no great revelation that nearly every Western leader is fully on board with the idea of the so-called “climate emergency.” Accordingly, they uniformly push the kind of major policy upheaval that is currently helping to raise energy costs as well as food prices.

Climate change, according to the “experts,” is caused primarily by automobiles with internal combustion engines, planes (except private jets), eating animal protein, and generating grid-scale energy from fossil fuels.

What, if this emergency really exists, is the plan to stop it?

First on the list is changing the main energy source for generating electricity. This means no more oil or coal, and eventually no more natural gas. Wind and solar power are the primary favorite alternatives; nuclear and hydroelectric tend to be disliked by environmentalists.

These weather-dependent sources of power are not dispatchable, meaning they cannot be turned up or down based on electricity demand like nuclear or fossil fuel systems. Currently, the United States generates about 12% of our energy from wind and solar.