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November 2022

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Reason and Compassion on Gender Medicine Florida adopts the more cautious European model of pediatric care—and exposes American “gender-affirming” advocates as incompetent and dishonest. Leor Sapir

By on November 5th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/floridas-reason-and-compassion-on-gender-medicine

Florida has decided to regulate medical care for gender-dysphoric minors. The state’s Boards of Medicine and Osteopathic Medicine ruled that the standard treatment for gender-dysphoric youth under 18 will no longer be puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, but psychotherapy.

Contrary to the media frenzy that erupted, Florida is not planning to prevent minors already on the medical track from receiving hormones—what critics call “forcible detransition.” Instead, the new rule includes a grandfather clause, permitting these individuals to continue their medical transition. As for prospective cases, the Board of Medicine voted not to allow further pediatric procedures, while the Board of Osteopathic Medicine voted to allow them in exceptional cases under an Institutional Review Board-approved research protocol. If proponents of “gender-affirming” interventions want to assert that puberty suppression and cross-sex hormones are “medically necessary,” the onus should be on them to prove it using the standard techniques of scientific corroboration.

In short, Florida seems poised to adopt the Scandinavian—and, it appears, the British—model of caring for gender-dysphoric minors. Rather than imposing legislative actions that put politicians between the doctor and the patient, Florida decided to invoke the existing mechanism for the regulation of health practices, putting the decision in front of state medical boards. The Florida Medical Board’s five-hour televised discussion made it obvious that its practicing physicians are first and foremost professionals who understand the uncertainties of clinical care. Florida medical authorities’ nuanced decision is evidence of how reason and compassion can work in tandem.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

How Grim Is the Outlook for Incumbents Polling below 50 Percent?By Jim Geraghty

By on November 5th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-grim-is-the-outlook-for-incumbents-below-50-percent/

As Greg Corombos observed on Wednesday, we’ve reached that time of year when the moment many of us type the letter “R” in a web browser, we automatically load the URL for the RealClearPolitics list of the day’s latest polls.

But there’s a school of thought that argues that what polling aggregates really give us is a sense of the level of support the incumbent enjoys. Incumbency carries a lot of advantages in American politics — usually, strong name recognition, some degree of public application of what one has accomplished in office, and significant advantages in fundraising. Most years, between 91 and 98 percent of incumbents get reelected.

There’s a rule of thumb that an incumbent who is polling above 50 percent is safe, and an incumbent polling below 50 percent is in trouble. After all, the voters already know who the incumbent is and what they think of him. If they don’t like him, they’re usually, at minimum, looking for other options.

For what it’s worth, way back in 2010, Nate Silver argued that “the incumbent 50 percent rule” was an oversimplification. “It may be proper to focus more on the incumbent’s number than the opponent’s when evaluating such a poll — even though it is extremely improper to assume that the incumbent will not pick up any additional percentage of the vote.” But I think most of us can agree that an incumbent would rather be above 50 percent than below it, and the higher your support in late polling, the better your chance of reelection.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The media’s coverage of Kari Lake takes bias to new extremes By Andrea Widburg

By on November 5th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/the_medias_coverage_of_kari_lake_takes_bias_to_new_extremes.html

“What’s made Lake a national phenomenon is that, on the campaign trail, her instincts are extraordinary. She’s beautiful, intelligent, has tremendous presence and—perhaps most importantly—is unafraid of the media.”

When it comes to Kari Lake, the mainstream, drive-by, leftist media is in pants-wetting mode. In a fair world, as a candidate for the Arizona governorship, Lake would get admiring or, at least, objective coverage. But we don’t live in a fair world, so the media is attacking Lake with a savagery previously reserved only for Donald Trump (after he became a Republican candidate).

Until 2021, Lake was best known in the Phoenix area, where she worked for 22 years as a television news anchor at KSAZ-TV. Her political identity was kind of all over the place. She was originally a Republican, a registration she kept until 2006. That was when, because she was dismayed by George Dubya’s wars (which saw her voting for John Kerry in 2004), she switched to Independent. Then, in 2008, clearly dazzled by Obama, she registered as a Democrat and donated to several Democrat campaigns. However, in 2021, she launched her gubernatorial campaign as a Republican.

Despite being substantially outspent during the Republican primary, Lake won handily. Perhaps it was because she didn’t let Democrats bully her into hiding her suspicions that something was deeply wrong with the 2020 election results.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Can American Jewry Catch a Break?By Bobby Miller

By on November 5th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/can-american-jewry-catch-a-break/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fourth

The FBI has found the person responsible for the “broad threat” to New Jersey synagogues that the Bureau’s Newark office warned about via tweet. Thank God. After Kanye West’s psychosis-induced philippics against members of the tribe, this threat, albeit different in kind from Kanye’s ravings, was the last thing Jews in America needed.

Unfortunately, the broader problem of antisemitism isn’t going anywhere. Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets continues to show insufficient remorse for the antisemitic bile he propagated when he posted Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America, an antisemitic Black Hebrew Israelite documentary, on his Twitter and Instagram accounts. The Southern Poverty Law Center, though compromised in other ways, was not wrong to deem 144 Black Hebrew Israelite organizations black-separatist hate groups “because of their antisemitic and anti-white beliefs.” Black Hebrew Israelite sympathizers were responsible for the 2019 Jersey City shooting at a kosher grocery store. White-supremacist leader Tom Metzger once said, “They’re the black counterparts of us,” when referencing the group.

Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America itself promotes the conspiracy theory that African Americans are the true descendants of the biblical Israelites and that the Jews of today are impostors who culturally appropriated the religious heritage of black people to dominate and oppress people of color. In doing so, the film engages in Holocaust denialism, includes falsely attributed Hitler quotes, and declares that Jews were responsible for slavery in America. When asked this week for a yes-or-no answer to whether he held antisemitic beliefs, Irving responded, “I cannot be antisemitic if I know where I come from,” an evasive answer (is he referring to lessons from his own life story and ancestry, or does he believe he is one of the “real Jews”?). His apology on Instagram only came after being suspended from the Nets without pay late Thursday night.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The President Slowly Deteriorates Before Our Eyes By Jim Geraghty

By on November 5th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-president-slowly-deteriorates-before-our-eyes/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=native-evergreen&utm_term=first

n the past two weeks or so, President Biden has…

insisted that the economy is “strong as hell” (it isn’t; even the Nation is begging him to stop bragging about how great the economy is doing)
off-the-cuff claimed that the situation in Ukraine was headed toward “Armageddon” (so far, it hasn’t, and no one else in the U.S. government seemed to know what Biden was talking about)
insisted that his student-loan bailout was passed by Congress (it wasn’t)
claimed he had brought down the cost of energy (he hasn’t, by any measure or form, since the start of his presidency — electricity, natural gas, gasoline, diesel, heating oil)
exhibited a long, odd pause during an interview with MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart, and
declared that John Fetterman’s wife will make “a great lady in the Senate.”

Please stop telling me that this man, who turns 80 next month, is fine, that he’s sharp as a tack, that he’s not showing signs of old age in his ability to think and speak, and that he’s got so much energy, not even press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre can keep up with him. The president is old, and he’s tired no matter how little he travels and how light his schedule, and he struggles to get through mundane interviews and brief question-and-answer sessions with reporters. Either his staff is feeding him a line of unrealistic happy talk, or he can’t remember what he’s been briefed and just chooses to believe that everything is going fine. We can see this man, we remember what he was like as vice president, and he was not this doddering, this oblivious, this blank-eyed, this stubbornly in denial during the Obama years.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Hijacking of Middle East Studies Funded by the federal government to improve U.S. national security, Middle East studies centers have become hotbeds of anti-American and anti-Israel activism BY Asaf Romirowski & Alex Joffe *****

By on November 5th, 2022

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/hijacking-middle-east-studies-asaf-romirowsky-alexander-joffe

Few trends in academia are more depressing than the continued domination of Middle Eastern studies departments by postcolonial professors whose shtick involves recycling cliched attacks on the United States as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan.” The results of this trend are evident in faculty antipathy toward Israel, which is increasingly playing out in their support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

This reached a new pinnacle in March 2022 when the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) voted to formally support an academic boycott of Israeli universities. “Our members have cast a clear vote to answer the call for solidarity from Palestinian scholars and students experiencing violations of their right to education and other human rights,” MESA’s president, Eve Troutt Powell, wrote of the resolution. “MESA’s Board will work to honor the will of its members and ensure that the call for an academic boycott is upheld without undermining our commitment to the free exchange of ideas and scholarship.”

MESA, which has more than 2,800 members and more than 50 institutional members, describes itself as a “private, non-profit learned society that brings together scholars, educators and those interested in the study of the region from all over the world.” Academic Middle East studies departments are crucial in the development of American students’—and by extension the American public’s—views of the Middle East. It is also the mechanism that informs and helps shape U.S. policymakers, from the State Department to the military and intelligence communities. MESA’s vote to boycott Israeli academics and institutions puts scholars on notice that professional acceptance in the organization now demands that they discriminate against individuals on the basis of their national, ethnic, and religious origins.

Part of MESA’s decision to boycott Israel is explained in a new report from the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a conservative nonprofit organization that advocates for academic freedom, on the takeover of Middle East studies centers (MESCs). Established by the federal government in the 1950s in the interest of advancing U.S. national security, MESCs have been hijacked by Arab and Muslim states who donate generously to universities and departments, the report finds, and by activist professors who have “repurposed critical theory to galvanize activism on Middle East issues.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Change and the Lancet’s ‘Heat Death’ Deception With COP27 approaching, the journal claims rising temperatures have killed people but ignores that they appear to have saved far more. By Bjorn Lomborg

By on November 5th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lancets-heat-death-deception-united-nations-cop-27-cold-study-population-growth-technology-energy-climate-11667580996?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

As the United Nations’ annual global climate summit, COP27, nears, it’s important to look with skepticism at the academic reports many news outlets cite as evidence supporting radical climate policies. Too often, they use highly skewed data that seem to have been carefully selected to support aggressive environmental regulations. One recent and much-cited Lancet report appears deliberately deceptive.

The study offers a frightening statistic: Rapidly rising temperatures have increased annual global heat deaths among older people by 68% in less than two decades. That stark figure has been cited all over, from the BBC and Time to the Washington Post and the Times of India, the world’s largest-selling English-language daily. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres publicized the report, tweeting a link with a grave statement of his own, “The climate crisis is killing us. #COP27 must deliver a down-payment on climate solutions that match the scale of the problem.”

But while their model for heat deaths is based on solid academic research, the report commits an amateur statistical fallacy by blaming the increase in heat deaths on “rapidly increasing temperatures.”

Annual heat deaths have increased significantly among people 65 and older world-wide. The average deaths per year increased 68% from the early 2000s to the late 2010s. But that is almost entirely because there are so many more older people today than there were 20 years ago, in no small part thanks to medical innovations that keep us alive longer. Measured across the same time span the Lancet maps heat deaths, the number of people 65 and older has risen by 60%, or almost as much as heat deaths. When the increase in heat mortality is adjusted for this population growth, the actual rise that can be attributed to rising temperatures is only 5%.

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ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Kimmel vs. Laxalt: Jimmy Kimmel’s uninformed ad shows he’s just a partisan Democrat willing to get ugly. By Ramesh Ponnuru

By on November 5th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kimmel-vs-laxalt/

Jimmy Kimmel’s ad attacking Adam Laxalt, the Republican running for Senate in Nevada, is based on the idea that Laxalt is so “unbalanced” that even “his family” is opposing him. “Why? Because they know him.”

Fourteen Laxalt relatives endorsed the incumbent Democrat, Catherine Cortez Masto.

The opposition from some of his relatives isn’t new. In Laxalt’s 2018 race for governor, twelve relatives wrote an op-ed denouncing him. In that op-ed, the twelve said that they hardly knew Laxalt, a fact they tried to spin against him (saying he doesn’t count as a real Nevadan). They noted that they disagreed with him on abortion, same-sex marriage, and federal education funding.

At the time, 22 other relatives wrote an op-ed calling the initial one “vicious and entirely baseless.”

This year’s letter skipped the attacks on Laxalt and instead praised Cortez Masto.

I don’t think dueling op-eds from candidates’ relatives is something that we should encourage. But I’d note that Kimmel is wrong to say Laxalt’s “family” opposes him, to say the opposition is based on knowing him, and to insinuate that its opposition has something to do with the candidate’s being “unbalanced.” I doubt Kimmel has done enough homework to know that he is telling untruths. He’s just a partisan Democrat who’s willing to get ugly.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

‘The Big One Is Coming’ and the U.S. Military Isn’t Ready A U.S. flag officer talks candidly about the fading U.S. deterrent.

By on November 5th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-big-one-is-coming-china-russia-charles-richard-u-s-military-11667597291?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed the fading power of America’s military deterrent, a fact that too few of our leaders seem willing to admit in public. So it is encouraging to hear a senior flag officer acknowledge the danger in a way that we hope is the start of a campaign to educate the American public.

“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said this week at a conference. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested” for “a long time.”

How bad is it? Well, the admiral said, “As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking. It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are.” Sinking slowly is hardly a consolation. As “those curves keep going,” it won’t matter “how good our commanders are, or how good our horses are—we’re not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem.”

Note that modifier “near-term.” This is a more urgent vulnerability than most of the political class cares to recognize.

Adm. Richard noted that America retains an advantage in submarines—“maybe the only true asymmetric advantage we still have”—but even that may erode unless America picks up the pace “getting our maintenance problems fixed, getting new construction going.” Building three Virginia-class fast-attack submarines a year would be a good place to start.

The news last year that China tested a hypersonic missile that flew around the world and landed at home should have raised more alarms than it did. It means China can put any U.S. city or facility at risk and perhaps without being detected. The fact that the test took the U.S. by surprise and that it surpassed America’s hypersonic capabilities makes it worse. How we lost the hypersonic race to China and Russia deserves hearings in Congress.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

WISCONSIN:INCUMBENT RON JOHNSON (R) VS. MANDELA BARNES (D) FOR SENATE

By on November 5th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-taxes-that-must-not-be-named-11667581288?mod=hp_opin_pos_6#cxrecs_s
The Taxes That Must Not Be Named James Freeman

More than a decade after former Gov. Scott Walker signed into law reforms to protect Wisconsin taxpayers from the increasingly expensive burdens of government employee unions, Democrats still can’t stop talking about him—even if they can’t bring themselves to mention his name.

Mr. Walker left office almost four years ago and isn’t on the ballot this year. But at a Democratic rally in Milwaukee County’s West Allis on Thursday, several speakers angrily referred to “he who must not be named.” Mr. Walker’s signature law, Act 10, was described in tones one might reserve for a description of a heinous crime. After enacting this sensible 2011 reform that limited the collective bargaining power of government unions and made public employees cover more of the costs of their expensive benefit plans, Mr. Walker further enraged the left by making Wisconsin a right-to-work state. This also explains why he was a favorite villain on Thursday at the event hosted by the United Steelworkers at a local union hall.

***

As for the event’s headliner, Democratic Senate candidate Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, it seems there are also a few other things he isn’t eager to mention.

Mr. Barnes is challenging Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and there is no race in the country that offers a sharper philosophical contrast. The New York Times recently reported that helping Mr. Barnes get elected is the top priority of Vermont’s socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has generously assisted with fundraising. During the Democratic primary, Mr. Barnes received endorsements from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and other prominent advocates for government expansion.

Mr. Johnson, on the other hand, is perhaps the most spirited and effective defender of the taxpayer in Washington—a town where there aren’t many of them. An accountant who used to run a manufacturing company, Mr. Johnson habitually annoys his congressional colleagues by pointing out the destructiveness of their spending habits.

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