Doctors Are Losing Their Calling The sanctity of the medical profession has been lost to corporate centralization and burnout. By Michael P.H. Stanley

https://www.wsj.com/articles/doctors-are-losing-their-calling-union-mass-general-brigham-resident-suicide-depression-representation-burnout-7f72ab6?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Physician-trainees at Mass General Brigham are attempting to unionize. If they succeed, the union would be the largest of its kind in the country with more than 2,500 members, joining the estimated 15% of U.S. medical trainees who’ve assembled under the Committee of Interns and Residents in recent years. At the center of the doctors’ unionization efforts is a desire to reclaim their identity as service-driven providers and to fight for the autonomy and fair working conditions that they’ve lost as their profession becomes more commercialized and centralized.

Doctors are proud of their occupation’s mixture of sacrament and science in service to society. Urbanely trained at universities, these learned professionals once left the city to settle into solo practices or small partnerships in the towns they served. This autonomy allowed them to charge patients what they could afford—some more, some less and some not at all. Meanwhile, their authority allowed them to advocate effectively on behalf of their patients, even on nonmedical matters. Their familiarity with their neighbor-patients encouraged participation in the community, both economically and socially.

But as teaching hospitals were subsumed into larger corporate systems, and healthcare grew more expensive from the mid-20th century onward, hospital systems lobbied for policies that created a regulatory environment too thick and expensive for private practitioners to remain solvent. For doctors, hospital-acquired practices held the promise that as employees they could forget about red tape and bottom lines because the hospital would handle it. Doctors would purportedly get to focus on practice instead of administrative tasks.

Joe Biden’s Weak Defenses His budget isn’t close to adequate to meet the world’s growing threats.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-defense-budget-fiscal-2024-pentagon-army-navy-air-force-china-russia-573e4bea?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

China’s Xi Jinping traveled to Moscow this week to commune with Vladimir Putin, cementing the new axis against the U.S. Compare that scene to President Biden’s proposed fiscal 2024 defense budget, which isn’t serious about matching American military power to growing threats.

To the extent the press is covering Mr. Biden’s $842 billion Pentagon budget, it is to note the number is large. Yet defense spending at 3% of the economy is low by historical standards. The Pentagon says the proposal is a 0.8% real increase over fiscal 2023, but that is based on an inflation fantasy. This is a defense cut, and not from an epiphany of fiscal restraint. Mr. Biden is choosing to put welfare entitlements over national security. The risks of his choice are worth examining:

• A Navy in shoal waters. The U.S. Navy is the beat cop for deterring bad behavior in the Pacific, but the U.S. fleet would shrink to 291 ships by 2028 from 297 now. The Biden Pentagon wants to retire ships prematurely, such as the cruiser USS Vicksburg, which taxpayers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade for longer service.

The Navy is also telling the U.S. Marines to find another ride to work, declining to buy any San Antonio-class amphibious warships. This will wreak havoc on the production line and make it harder to grow the Navy to 355 ships, as Congress says it wants.

The Navy failed to submit a shipbuilding plan, and an institution that can’t articulate its strategy or reason for existing won’t command public support to grow. The Navy is already struggling to buy and maintain enough of the best platforms for deterring China, such as the Virginia-class attack submarine.

• An under-powered Air Force. The Air Force deserves points for buying 72 fighters, which is the minimum needed to keep inventory stable. Meanwhile, the service asks to retire 310 aircraft, and some of this is inevitable. The F-15C/Ds leaving Okinawa with no permanent replacement are structurally exhausted; the A-10 is 40 years old and too rudimentary to operate against adversaries like China.

Israeli researchers discover breakthrough in pancreatic cancer treatment: Team of scientists led by researchers from Hebrew University discover way to prevent pancreatic cancers from metastasizing.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/369093?utm_source=activetrail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

In a new study published today in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem discovered that changes in the processing of RNA molecules – and not genetic changes in the DNA – drive pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA) tumors to become metastatic.

This multinational study was conducted in collaboration with Sheba Medical Center and Bar Ilan University in Israel, Cornell University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the United States, and Toronto University in Canada. The study was led by doctoral student Amina Jbara of Professor Rotem Karni’s research group at the Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine.

Evaluating roughly four hundred PDA tumor samples, both non-metastatic and metastatic, the researchers discovered that a central protein that controls RNA processing, RBFOX2, is degraded and present in much lower levels in metastases.

“Our unique findings demonstrate that the disappearance of RBFOX2 protein causes hundreds of genes to produce RNAs and proteins in a different way, which contributes to the invasive capabilities of the cancer cells,” Professor Rotem Karni explained. “We found that restoring RBFOX2 to PDA metastatic cells inhibits the formation of metastases, while the elimination of RBFOX2 in non-metastatic PDA cells stimulates the formation of pancreatic cancer metastases.”

Anti-reform protests reveal police double standards The force responds differently depending on who is demonstrating, analysts tell JNS. By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/anti-reform-protests-reveal-police-double-standards/

What began as Saturday evening mass protests against the government’s judicial reform program have morphed into “days of disruption” and increasingly extreme behavior as demonstrators block highways, clash with police, blockade Knesset members in their homes, refuse to show up for reserve duty, and, in one instance, barricade the prime minister’s wife in a hair salon.

This has raised questions about the limits of protest and eyebrows about how the police deal with the lawbreakers, suggesting different sets of rules apply for different citizens.

Itzhak Bam, an Israeli attorney specializing in freedom of expression, told JNS: “What is interesting in this case is the extreme tolerance of the police. From my experience as a criminal defense lawyer in cases of illegal assembly, and we have had a lot of such cases here in Jerusalem, I am pretty sure that if they were right-wing protesters, or haredim [ultra-Orthodox Jews], or Arabs—any of these groups—the police would be much more assertive, or maybe aggressive, in preventing them from blocking highways.

“Why softer tactics are being used now is a good question to ask the police,” Bam said, adding that rather than one rule for everyone, there are “good” and “bad” protests with the police taking a different tack depending on who is doing the protesting.

It’s not always about politics, said Bam, noting that police were tolerant of protests in 2021 by disability rights groups seeking more state benefits. Though few in number, they blocked major highways and even railroads.

The courts’ perspective

Ran Baratz, former head of public diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s Office and founder of MIDA, an online daily conservative magazine in Hebrew, echoed the view that police are acting less aggressively than they did against protesters who blocked roads during the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

Democrats’ attitudes towards Israel reach a tipping point The rise of the intersectional left is the primary reason why, for the first time, Gallup says Democrats sympathize more with the Palestinians than with the Jewish state. Jonathan Tobin

https://www.jns.org/opinion/democrats-attitudes-towards-israel-reach-a-tipping-point/?utm_source=sendinblue&utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%2003-21-2023&utm_medium=email

The history of the pro-Israel movement in the United States was always predicated on one goal: creating a bipartisan consensus in favor of support for the Jewish state. And for many years, it succeeded in doing just that. There is a strong tradition of support for the ideas of a Jewish state that dates back to the earliest days of the American republic so Zionism is baked deep into the nation’s DNA.

AIPAC activists, therefore, had little trouble cultivating rising politicians from both major parties. The result was that in the last half-century, the ranks of Congress were filled with politicians who could be counted on to support Israel, even if they had few Jewish constituents.

But it’s time to acknowledge that the era of bipartisan support for Israel is over.

As the latest Gallup tracking poll of attitudes towards Israel and the Middle East conflict indicate, when broken down by party affiliation, Democrats now sympathize more with the Palestinians than with Israel. Currently, 49% of Democrats favor the Palestinians with only 38% backing Israel.  By contrast, Republicans now back the Jewish state by a staggering 78-11% margin.

That’s the culmination of a trend decades in the making as the two parties have largely swapped identities when it comes to Israel in the last 60 years. In the first years of the Jewish state in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Democrats were overwhelmingly sympathetic to Israel and took pride in President Harry S. Truman’s recognition of the fledgling nation on its first day of existence.

SEE THIS GREAT VIDEO OF FAUCI GETTING TOLD OFF!!!!

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/epic_video_informed_black_guy_on_dc_street_destroys_fauci_to_his_face.html

Epic video: Informed black guy on DC street destroys Fauci to his face By Ben Bartee

I don’t know how this clip slipped past me, but a video has resurfaced of Anthony Fauci and Washington, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser canvassing the streets to encourage the urban population to get vaxxed and filming it for propaganda purposes.

First, some background, via East of the River:

Fairlawn residents answered their door Saturday morning to find some surprise guests on the front stoop: Dr. Anthony Fauci and Mayor Muriel Bowser (D).

The two spent an hour and a half canvassing the neighborhood as part of the DC COVID-19 Community Corps Day of Action.

“Oh my god, it’s Dr. Fauci!” one woman screamed as she opened the door. “I’d come give you a kiss, but I’ve got a cold on.” The woman, who was already vaccinated, blew him a kiss from the top of the stairs instead. “Y’all see Dr. Fauci over here?” she called to her neighbors.

Another woman told Dr. Fauci that she hadn’t gotten the vaccine because she was worried she would contract the virus and then convey it to her children, who are not yet eligible to get the vaccine.

“You should get it then, because not only would it protect you, but then you’d protect your whole family,” Fauci said. “If you were to get infected, you could pass it on to them, but if you get vaccinated, you’re not going to get infected. Want to do it today?”

Their photo op was totally ruined by a poorly-conceived interaction with one resident, who not only expressed no interest in getting injected but destroyed the entire narrative right to Fauci’s face with a tenacity never duplicated in any media interview that I’ve ever seen (the handpicked “journalists” permitted to interview Fauci being heavily vetted beforehand).

Philosophy Professor: ‘Don’t go to College! Become an Electrician.’ By Richard McDonough

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/philosophy_professor_dont_go_to_college_become_an_electrician.html

I don’t think you should send your kids to any universities.  [I told] my daughter, “Don’t go to college.  Become an electrician.”  I never would have imagined 10 years ago that I would [say] that. … It’s better to stare at a wall … [or] do nothing than to learn things that are false.  — Peter Boghossian, former Philosophy Professor Portland State University, Feb. 28, 2023

It is astonishing when a liberal philosophy professor tells people, including his own daughter, not to go to university because they have become “indoctrination mills.”  Many other types of professors can make a living outside universities.  However, there is no real market for specialists in Kant’s transcendental deductions outside the university.  With slight exceptions, philosophers have little choice but to work in universities.  So, when Prof. Boghossian tells his own daughter not to go to university, he must believe that universities have become dangerously unhealthy.  Although Boghossian cites Harvard, Yale and Oberlin as “non-starters”, he says that all universities have been destroyed by “woke” nonsense and should be defunded.  University people, Boghossian says, “live in make-believe land.”

Boghossian was one of the professors who exposed the lack of academic standards in a set of “woke” journals in the 2017-2018 “Grievance Studies affair,” also referred to as the “Sokal Squared” scandal (referring to a similar case in 1996 perpetrated by NYU physics professor Alan Sokal). James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, using pseudonyms or borrowed identities, submitted absurd papers to journals in culture, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to test the integrity of their editorial peer review process. 

The World Economic Forum and the West’s Next Act? by J.B. Shurk

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19512/world-economic-forum-crap

[E]conomic writer Charles Hugh Smith has repeatedly warned [about] the “crapification” of the U.S. economy…. customers with scant other buying options are forced to accept that few purchases will last.

Politicians seem to be heading in a similar direction…. Western governments are filled to the brim with people entirely lacking in real-world experience or specialized knowledge.

In recent decades, a noticeable trend in the West has been to elevate politicians, as young and inexperienced as possible, into offices as high as possible…. Such a system — in which those who have proven themselves the least are given responsibilities that would test even those who have proven themselves time and again — hardly looks ideal.

If Western politicians seem just as second-rate these days as what customers all too often find in stores, there may be a simple reason why: International financial titans make, sell, and own both… and may be planning to own you, too.

If you are a consumer today, inflation is only one of the problems harming you. As prices go up, quality continues to go down. What most stores have to offer you might crassly be called “cheap crap.” In fact, economic writer Charles Hugh Smith has repeatedly warned that the “crapification” of the U.S. economy is the natural result of a “neoliberal-hyper-financialization-hyper-globalization model,” in which quasi-monopolist manufacturers mass-produce goods with the cheapest possible components, while customers with scant other buying options are forced to accept that few purchases will last.

The Legally and Morally Flawed Case Against Trump A twisted perversion of the justice process. by Philip Holloway

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-legally-and-morally-flawed-case-against-trump/

Although we don’t yet know entirely how it will be structured, enough of the Manhattan District Attorney’s case against Trump has found its way into the public domain so that we know the general parameters. The centerpiece of the case is a misdemeanor charge under Section 175 for supposedly falsifying his business records. The theory is that Trump paid his former lawyer $130,000.00 in a series of reimbursements to Cohen and labeled them as legal expenses to conceal that the money was really to pay Adult Film Actress, Stormy Daniels for a nondisclosure agreement and that somehow this scheme violated federal election laws.

From a legal perspective, this bizarre wielding of State prosecutorial power in pursuit of what is essentially an alleged federal crime is seriously flawed.

For starters, it is not a crime to be a philanderer, if in fact Trump did have an affair with Ms. Daniels. She has claimed publicly that there was no affair – but who knows. It is not a crime for Trump to pay so-called “hush money” either. I hate it when people call it that. It is a legal contract called a “nondisclosure agreement” and it is not in the least uncommon. Particularly for a celebrity who is a married man with many business interests. There are myriad reasons – unrelated to his Presidential Campaign – for Trump to pay the money to Ms. Daniels.

The case is legally flawed for a second major reason. Specifically the Manhattan DA has a major Statute of Limitations problem.

It’s worth noting that the Federal Elections Commission and the Department of Justice have already looked at all this and took no action back when it was fresh. Nevertheless DA Bragg is essentially trying to stuff a federal campaign finance crime into a state law business records charge. The business records case under Section 175 is a misdemeanor and the statute of limitations is two years. If DA Bragg manages to shoehorn an alleged violation of the federal campaign finance laws into the Section 175 charge – despite being a state DA and not a US Attorney – then the business records case becomes a felony and has a five-year statute of limitations. My iPhone tells me this is 2023 – nearly seven years after any such Section 175 business record crime would have occurred. So, the statute of limitations has clearly run. Nevertheless, I wait on pins and needles to see what whackado legal theory DA Bragg pulls out of his…..hat to claim the statute of limitations has somehow not expired.

The Gulf War: 20 Years Later Was the war worth the blood and treasure we spent on it? Here’s whom to ask. by Kenneth R. Timmerman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-gulf-war-20-years-later/

Monday marked the twentieth anniversary of the second Gulf war, which detractors call the invasion of Iraq. I have always looked at it as the liberation, as do many Iraqis.

But most Americans have been taught a history of lies, a history forged by left-wing political activists and their allies in the media and rarely contradicted by those who knew the truth.

Even Britannica, the once authoritative encyclopedia, has bowed to the political orthodoxy, referring to Saddam Hussein’s “alleged” possession and manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.

That is the founding myth of the “Bush lied, people died” Democrats and the media.

So were there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion?

Absolutely. We know that because the United States and its coalition partners assembled a team of over 1,400 special forces operators, scientists and intelligence analysts to scour Iraq for the evidence. And what they reported has been wildly mischaracterized – at times, even by the leaders of that very effort.

David Kay, a former IAEA inspector who became famous for his parking lot “standoff” with Saddam’s goons, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 23, 2004, that WMD stockpiles would not be found in Iraq. “I don’t think they existed,” Kay said.

“Stockpiles” quickly became the defining term. But in Kay’s interim report to the House intelligence committee, just four months earlier, he painted a very different picture. “We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002,” he said.

This included:

*  A prison laboratory complex that may have been used for human testing of BW agents and “that Iraqi officials working to prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N.” Why was Saddam interested in testing biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn’t have a biological weapons program?

*    New research on BW agents, brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin that were not declared to the United Nations.