NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Admin Takes Steps to Offer Gender-Transition Surgery through VA Health Care: Report By Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on June 20th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-takes-steps-to-offer-gender-transition-surgery-through-va-health-care-report/

Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough is taking steps toward making gender transition surgery available to veterans through Veterans Affairs health-care coverage, according to a new report.

A VA department spokesperson reportedly told CNN that McDonough plans to announce the move at a Pride event at the Orlando Vet Center in Florida on Saturday.

“We are taking the first necessary steps to expand VA’s care to include gender confirmation surgery — thus allowing transgender vets to go through the full gender confirmation process with VA by their side,” McDonough is expected to say.

The VA Health Benefits package currently covers mental-health services and sex-change hormones, but does not cover gender-transition surgery. 

McDonough’s prepared remarks note that “there are several steps to take, which will take time.” Policy changes will need to be made and the process of creating a new federal regulation can take years.

A VA spokesperson told CNN the department plans to start the federal rulemaking process to make the change this summer.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Georgia’s Election Reform Makes It Easy to Vote & Hard to Cheat By Jonathan Bain

Posted By on June 20th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/06/18/georgias_election_reform_makes_it_easy_to_vote_and_hard_to_cheat_781903.html

Regardless of one’s political affiliation, it’s not difficult to find voters in Georgia who were discouraged by the messiness of the 2020 election process.

It’s one thing to be disappointed by the outcome. It’s entirely another to feel disenfranchised and frustrated by questions and uncertainties surrounding absentee ballot handling, unsecured drop boxes, and questionable third-party funding of local elections.

In evaluating federal, state, and local voting safeguards, these and other serious complications — glitches, missing votes, even water pipe breakages at polling locations or ballot drop boxes — raised legitimate concerns and weakened voter confidence in Georgia’s election integrity.

Such concerns ultimately weaken voter confidence and decrease participation in elections regardless of political persuasion and prompted Georgia lawmakers to modernize voting laws to make it easier to vote and harder to interfere with Georgia’s elections. 

As expected, a few partisan individuals and groups rushed to label Georgia’s new election reform law, the Georgia Election Integrity Act of 2021, (SB202) as an act of voter suppression. However, their claims are simply not true: reforms introduced in this legislation expand voting access for all Georgia voters while enhancing the security of the process.

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Why Has “Ivermectin” Become a Dirty Word? At the worst moment, Internet censorship has driven scientific debate itself underground Matt Taibbi

Posted By on June 20th, 2021

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/why-has-ivermectin-become-a-dirty

On December 8, 2020, when most of America was consumed with what The Guardian called Donald Trump’s “desperate, mendacious, frenzied and sometimes farcical” attempt to remain president, the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the “Medical Response to Covid-19.” One of the witnesses, a pulmonologist named Dr. Pierre Kory, insisted he had great news.

“We have a solution to this crisis,” he said unequivocally. “There is a drug that is proving to have a miraculous impact.”

Kory was referring to an FDA-approved medicine called ivermectin. A genuine wonder drug in other realms, ivermectin has all but eliminated parasitic diseases like river blindness and elephantiasis, helping discoverer Satoshi Ōmura win the Nobel Prize in 2015. As far as its uses in the pandemic went, however, research was still scant. Could it really be a magic Covid-19 bullet?

Kory had been trying to make such a case, but complained to the Senate that public efforts had been stifled, because “every time we mention ivermectin, we get put in Facebook jail.” A Catch-22 seemed to be ensnaring science. With the world desperate for news about an unprecedented disaster, Silicon Valley had essentially decided to disallow discussion of a potential solution — disallow calls for more research and more study — because not enough research and study had been done. Once, people weren’t allowed to take drugs before they got FDA approval. Now, they can’t talk about them.

“I want to try to be respectful because I think the intention is correct,” Kory told the committee. “They want to cut down on misinformation, and many doctors are claiming X, Y, and Z work in this disease. The challenge is, you’re also silencing those of us who are expert, reasoned, researched, and extremely knowledgeable.”

Eight million people watched Kory say that on the C-SPAN video of the hearing posted to YouTube, but YouTube, in what appears to be a first, removed video of the hearing, as even Senate testimony was now deemed too dangerous for public consumption. YouTube later suspended the Wisconsin Senator who’d invited Kory to the hearing, and when Kory went on podcasts to tell his story, YouTube took down those videos, too. Kory was like a ghost who floated through the Internet, leaving suspensions and blackened warning screens everywhere he went.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Is it racist to confront a suicide bomber? The inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing points to some serious problems in our society. Brendan O’ Neill

Posted By on June 20th, 2021

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/18/is-it-racist-to-confront-a-suicide-bomber/

The independent inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing of May 2017, in which 22 pop fans were killed by an Islamist extremist, has published the first volume of its report. It makes for chilling reading. The inquiry has found there were numerous ‘missed opportunities’ to confront Salman Abedi, the bomber, and potentially stop him from detonating the device in his rucksack. Most chilling of all is the reason given by one of the key security guards on patrol that evening as to why he failed to question Abedi. He was worried, he said, that asking a brown-skinned man why he was hanging around the arena might be construed as racist.

Take that in. There was a very shifty-looking young man around the foyer and mezzanine of the Manchester Arena towards the end of an Ariana Grande concert, carrying a ‘bulging’ rucksack so large he ‘struggled’ under the weight of it, and a security guard was reluctant to confront him lest he be accused of racism. In the words of the report, this was a significant ‘missed opportunity’. The ‘inadequacy’ of the security guard’s response to the presence of a highly suspicious individual was one of the many misjudgements made on that black, fateful night, the report says. Is it possible that the fear of being thought of as racist is screwing up everyday life, and even hindering sensible action in threatening situations?

To be clear, the security guard who was cagey about questioning Abedi is not responsible for the failure to stop Abedi from detonating his device. The first volume of the inquiry’s report – which covers security at and around the arena on the night of 22 May 2017 – criticises certain individuals, including the security guard, for not doing their jobs diligently enough. But it says that it was the organisations responsible for security at the arena – the arena’s own security firm and also the British Transport Police – that were ‘principally’ to blame for the ‘missed opportunities’. It also makes the reasonable point that it is impossible to know what would have happened if Abedi had been confronted. It proposes that there may still have been loss of life – if, for example, he had detonated his device while being questioned – but that it would have been less severe than the horrors that shortly unfolded.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Doctors for Progressive Conformity The AMA wants to police the speech of dissenting members.

Posted By on June 20th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/doctors-for-progressive-conformity-11624055333?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The American Medical Association is a lobby of doctors that’s supposed to promote policies that improve public health and medicine. But it seems to be evolving into another arm of progressive politics, like the teachers unions. See the AMA’s policy-making meeting this week.

Delegates spent much of the time discussing systemic racism in health care and adopted guidelines for workplaces to establish training requirements for explicit and implicit bias and microaggressions. AMA trustee Willarda Edwards called systemic racism “the most serious barrier to the advancement of health equity and appropriate medical care.”

Many doctors would disagree with that statement. But the AMA seems to want to enforce ideological conformity in its ranks, including on social media. Delegates also voted to encourage social-media platforms to “crack down on medical misinformation,” including by “altering underlying network dynamics or redesigning platform algorithms.”

Social-media platforms have been removing content by doctors who disagree with the progressive lockdown consensus or who suggest that the virus may have leaked from a Chinese lab. Many doctors say their videos recommending early treatment with repurposed antiviral drugs have been censored, including one from a Senate hearing.

Social-media censorship suppressed debate on important issues during the pandemic, and the AMA wants to extend the information control to other health subjects. The new AMA policy would ostensibly encourage Facebook, YouTube and others to remove posts by doctors who question progressive orthodoxy on race and identity politics.

AMA delegates also voted to endorse an intellectual property waiver that progressives have been pushing for Covid vaccines at the World Trade Organization. President Biden endorsed it last month. But even European leaders say it won’t increase global vaccine supply and will set a dangerous precedent that will retard innovation in new medicines.

None of these new AMA policy positions will help patients or physicians, and they risk eroding public trust in the medical profession. Whatever happened to “first, do no harm”?

BOOKS Comments turned off

Why Shutdowns and Masks Suit the Elite Covid restrictions seem less onerous from the standpoint of ‘expressive individualism,’ which defines the self in terms of ‘its will and not its body.’

Posted By on June 20th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-shutdowns-and-masks-suit-the-elite-11624038950?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A marvelous review in these pages last November inspired me to read a new book by O. Carter Snead, “What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Human Bioethics.” It was published by Harvard University Press on Oct. 13. Covid-19 had begun its transformation of American life a few months before, and of course the book made no mention of it.

Yet Mr. Snead’s volume helped explain the bizarre and at times perverse response of prosperous Western nations to the pandemic: the long discontinuation of economic life, the belief that pixelated screens can facilitate human relationships, the prohibitions on ordinary social interactions, the fetishization of masks. These policies and practices weren’t handed down from the ether by Reason and Science but bore the weight of contemporary assumptions about—to borrow Mr. Snead’s title—what it means to be human.

His book isn’t about public health but “public bioethics”—the effort to make humane laws and rules for biotechnology and medical care. Mr. Snead’s premise and theme is that humans are embodied creatures, not mere wills and intellects. That premise stands in contrast with the dominant modern worldview, which he calls “expressive individualism”: the belief that the human self “is not defined by its attachments or networks of relations, but rather by its capacity to choose a future pathway that is revealed by the investigation of its own inner depths of sentiment. . . . Because this self is defined by its capacity to choose, it is associated fundamentally with its will and not its body.”

Mr. Snead is a law professor at Notre Dame and director of its de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. On a recent trip to the Midwest, I drove to South Bend to ask what the pandemic year has revealed about our understanding of humanness.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mysterious Origins of COVID-19 Raise Alarming Possibilities Victor Davis Hanson, DailySignal.com

Posted By on June 20th, 2021

www.dailysignal.com/2021/06/18/mysterious-origins-of-covid-19-raise-alarming-possibilities-wuhan/?

For over a year, the American establishment and media have ostracized anyone who dared to connect the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Then, suddenly and without apologies for their past demagoguery, “journalists” and “experts” conceded that the Wuhan lab may well have been the most likely genesis.

Why the abrupt change?

For one thing, Donald Trump is no longer president.

There is now no need for progressives to declare everything that Trump once asserted as truth to be a lie. That includes Trump’s insistence that the Wuhan lab, not a wet market full of sliced-up bats, was the source of the outbreak.

The recent release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails, along with new information about the gain-of-function research by Dr. Peter Daszak, a zoologist and president of the EcoHealth Alliance, make it clear that U.S. taxpayer dollars were being funneled to the Chinese for coronavirus research in Wuhan.

So now what?

We are left with a number of lose-lose scenarios regarding China’s efforts to lie about the origins of COVID-19.

Will China continually deny what is appearing to be undeniable? Perhaps. We should remember that this is a country with a Communist Party hierarchy that once killed many millions of its own citizens under Mao Zedong, and with a current apparat that has put 1 million Muslim Uyghurs into internment camps.

A stonewalling China likely will conclude that the risk of appearing guilty for causing one of the greatest “natural” global disasters in a century is not nearly as destructive to its interests as admitting it.

Will China then wait us out, denying the obvious facts, until weary Americans move onto another of their media frenzies?

Or, could China confess that the virus was birthed in the Wuhan lab but claim its appearance was a “joint” effort with the United States? The Chinese could insist that combined efforts with the U.S. were aimed at finding a “cure” for coronavirus epidemics, and thus China should not be blamed—or at least not solely blamed.

MORE HEADLINES Comments turned off

MORE HEADLINES: JUNE 19, 2021

Posted By on June 19th, 2021

Mao’s Cultural Revolution Has Arrived in America https://www.theepochtimes.com/maos-cultural-revolution-has-arrived-in-america_3859956.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge

 

Admit it, Biden: Trump was Right on Cuba https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/admit-it-biden-trump-was-right-humberto-fontova/

 

Bernie Sanders Goes to Bat for Communist China https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/06/bernie-sanders-goes-bat-communist-china-daniel-greenfield/

20 Questions The Left Should Be Asked – But Will Never Answer https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/20-questions-left-should-be-asked-will-never-karen-kataline/

Russia jabs U.S. with largest Pacific military exercise since Cold War just before Biden-Putin summit https://www.wnd.com/2021/06/russia-jabs-us-largest-pacific-military-exercise-since-cold-war-just-biden-putin-summit/

Despite Arab Threats, Jerusalem Flag March Proceeds Peacefully https://unitedwithisrael.org/despite-arab-threats-jerusalem-flag-march-proceeds-peacefully/?

 

Scientist: We dismissed lab-leak theory because Trump promoted it https://www.wnd.com/2021/06/scientist-dismissed-lab-leak-theory-trump-promoted/

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

With Juneteenth, Federal Employees Now Get 44 Paid Days Off Each Year Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on June 19th, 2021

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/06/17/with-juneteenth-feder

With the stroke of his pen Thursday, President Joe Biden signed legislation giving millions of federal employees Friday off to celebrate Saturday’s new federal holiday, Juneteenth.

This makes 44 paid days off for the average federal employee annually, which is nearly nine full weeks of paid-time off each year.

Juneteenth is celebrated on June 19 to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. The Civil War was America’s bloodiest war, with between 752,000 and 861,000 soldiers dying on the battlefield. 49 states have already recognized Juneteenth as a holiday (South Dakota is the only holdout), though only a handful give it as a paid holiday to state employees.

On Wednesday, the U.S. House passed the bill to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, after the U.S. Senate passed it the day before.

Signing it into law on Thursday, Biden made Juneteenth – observed this year on Friday, June 18 — a federal holiday for which “most” federal employees will have off.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Grad Student Tried to Correct a Misleading COVID Narrative. Rebekah Jones Tried to Ruin His Career for It By Jack Crowe

Posted By on June 19th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/a-florida-graduate-student-wanted-to-correct-the-record-on-covid-deaths-rebekah-jones-tried-to-ruin-his-career-over-it/

Jon Taylor had a disagreement with Jones over COVID data, so she falsely accused him of sexual harassment.

Jon Taylor’s desire to help Floridians understand a pandemic that was remaking their lives nearly cost him his career.

Taylor, a 37-year-old Ph.D. candidate at the Florida Atlantic University College of Business, waded into the world of COVID data analysis last spring after being informed that he had been in contact with someone who tested positive for the virus. When he looked at the data for himself, what he found disturbed him: The way the Florida Department of Health was presenting the pandemic death toll was confusing members of the media who lacked a background in data analysis.

News outlets, local and national, were conflating the actual number of Floridians who had died of COVID on a given day with the number of COVID deaths that had been entered into the system on that day — a total that included deaths that had occurred days and sometimes weeks before the entry date.

The misunderstanding was a dream come true for news editors eager for attention-grabbing headlines detailing Florida’s “record-setting” daily COVID deaths.

Taylor, an affable and apolitical mathematician, thought he could clear things up by presenting the data in a more transparent way, so he and his academic adviser created their own COVID tracker, which relied on the state’s data but presented it on a timeline that accurately captured the number of deaths in the state each day.

Unbeknownst to Taylor, who studiously avoids political media, he had just stepped on a hornet’s nest.

By creating a tracker that showed the situation in Florida to be somewhat less dire than enemies of Governor DeSantis preferred to believe, he had left the staid world of academia and entered the world of politics, where facts are subordinated to the question of whom those facts might help and whom they might hurt.

And in Florida, the foremost enforcer of the dire COVID narrative was a woman named Rebekah Jones, the former COVID dashboard manager for the state health department.

“In the process of building the tracker, of course I found Rebekah Jones. You can’t do Florida COVID work without running into her,” Taylor told National Review.