Displaying posts published in

December 2023

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

How Far Will The Climate Cult Go? All the Way to Tyranny

By on December 15th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/15/how-far-will-the-climate-cult-go/

The answer to the question in our headline is: All the way to full tyranny. Don’t think so? Take a look at where the warming alarmists have already gone.

Carbon passports are catching among the climate clergy. “Personal carbon allowances could help curb carbon emissions and lower travel’s overall footprint. These allowances will manifest as passports that force people to ration their carbon in line with the global carbon budget,” says a report from a ​​small group adventure travel company. “By 2040, we can expect to see limitations imposed on the amount of travel that is permitted each year.” CNN reports that “several laws and restrictions have been put in place over the past year that suggest our travel habits may already be on the verge of change.”
In Great Britain, “property owners who fail to comply with new energy rules could face jail time as the government pushes ahead with net zero measures,” according to media reports.
Ann Carlson, the White House’s acting National Highway Traffic Safety Administration administrator, “has long stressed the need to force Americans to live climate-friendly lives,” according to the Washington Free Beacon. While an academic at UCLA, she insisted the federal government is duty-bound to “induce behavioral change” by enacting policies that “make the bad behavior more expensive.” She has also said we “could benefit from a simpler life” but doesn’t believe “most people will engage in dramatic behavioral change” unless they are “forced” to. 
Meat will be off the menu if the climatistas get their way.
United Nations researchers recently told the Guardian “that scientists should be given the right to make policy prescriptions and, potentially, to oversee their implementation by the 195 states signed up to the U.N. framework convention on climate change.” Journalist Alex Newman – correctly – says doing so “would undermine self-governance while ushering in an ‘insane’ totalitarian technocratic form of government.”

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald The Academy at the Crossroads Pro-Hamas protests have exposed anti-Western ideology as the prevailing belief system on college campuses. The question: whether disgruntled donors and alumni can overcome decades of intellectual misdirection.

By on December 15th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-academy-at-the-crossroads

University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill would not have been forced to resign last weekend had Penn’s donors and alumni not been organizing against her for two months.

The Penn rebels have now upped the ante. They have drafted a new constitution for the school that makes merit the sole criterion for student admissions and faculty hiring. The new charter requires the university to embrace institutional neutrality with regard to politics and faculty research. The rebels want candidates for Penn’s presidency to embrace the new charter as a precondition for employment.

With this latest twist in the battle over university leadership, the academy stands at a crossroads. For decades, Wall Street titans funneled billions of dollars into their alma maters, even as those universities promoted ideas inimical to civilizational excellence and economic success. When students started celebrating the October 7 Hamas attacks, however, the mega-donors took note. They did not recognize their campuses, they said, though the pro-Hamas rhetoric came straight from the ethnic- and postcolonial-studies courses that had been a staple of university curricula since the 1980s. Some donors, at Penn and elsewhere, initiated funding boycotts and sought board shake-ups, hoping to pressure their alma maters to correct the anti-Semitism that they deemed responsible for the terror celebrations.

The pro-Hamas protests have exposed the anti-Western ideology that is the sole unifying belief system on college campuses. The question now is whether disgruntled donors and alumni can overcome decades of intellectual misdirection. To do so, they first must define the problem correctly—and avoid the temptation to adopt, for their own purposes, the intersectional Left’s rhetoric about “safety” and “protection” from speech. The proposed new Penn charter is a promising start.

The donor revolt could have broken out at any number of campuses, all of which featured ignorant students cheering on the deliberate massacre of civilians, those students’ faculty enablers and bureaucratic fellow travelers, and feckless presidents. But it first erupted at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, perhaps because of the organization and self-confidence of their alumni.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Three Blind Mice of the University Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 15th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/the-three-blind-mice-of-the-university/

I wrote on X about the three blind mice college presidents (Gay of Harvard, Kornbluth of MIT, and Magill of University of Pennsylvania).

Recently, one blind mouse has tentatively resigned under pressure, Liz Magill, former dean of the Stanford Law School and lately president of the University of Pennsylvania.

An introductory note and warning: Long gone is the old university practice of appointing the most distinguished teachers and most accomplished scholars as deans, provosts, and presidents, on the theory that they would thus be uniquely qualified to evaluate faculty performance and the university’s intellectual tempo.

In the olden days, such esteemed faculty had to be coaxed from their departments for three to five years to “do administration” as a sort of campus public service. Not so Magill and Gay, (although Kornbluth has a record of medical and biological research).

In the long ago past, there was no ethos of young faculty jumping into junior administrative posts (e.g., “special assistant to the provost,” or “associate dean of Humanities for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) as the stepping stones in their administrative cursus honorum, which prove to be soon exclusive of teaching or research.

The end result is a Harvard President Claudine Gay, whose meager and undistinguished record of publication as an untenured Stanford political science professor should not have merited tenure at any UC or perhaps even a CSU campus (I served on retention, promotion, and tenure committees at CSU Fresno).

The result is that Gay was never in any position to evaluate the relative scholarly merits of her own faculty, or due to long tenure in administration and long absence from research and tenure, intellectually or temperamentally equipped to handle some brilliant House member interrogators (most of whom lacked extensive graduate degrees but knew far more from the real arena outside of the campus).

Watch videos of their lengthy House of Representatives testimonies. They did not really listen to the Representatives’ questions. Instead, they simply gave scripted, canned, and prepped boilerplate answers about “context”—even when asked about eliminationist speech calling for the erasure of Jews. Much less were they aware of how they sounded to those without experience in the gobbledygook gibberish of the campus.

Continue reading →
MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Most ‘Transgender’ Kids Turn Out to Be Gay Subjecting them to medical interventions is the modern-day version of ‘conversion therapy.’ By Roy Eappen

By on December 15th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/most-transgender-kids-turn-out-to-be-gay-gender-affirming-care-conversion-therapy-58111b2e?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

As a medical professional who happens to be gay, I’ll be celebrating Dec. 15, the 50th anniversary of the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. The longstanding designation was based on prejudice, not medical research, and the revision marked the beginning of the end for so-called conversion therapy, which sought to “cure” gays and lesbians of a nonexistent malady.

Half a century later, the medical establishment is pushing a new kind of conversion therapy under the guise of transgender identity. No one is suffering more than gay kids. In Canada, where I practice, and in the U.S., physicians provide what’s euphemistically known as “gender-affirming care” to patients as young as 8, and the leading transgender health association has opened the door to interventions at even earlier ages. Under this framework, those who feel uncomfortable with their bodies may receive a medical regimen including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries. These interventions typically stunt, remove or irreversibly modify a patient’s sexual development, genitals and secondary sex characteristics. Any endocrinologist or other physician who rejects this approach is alleged to be endangering the health and even the life of his patients.

But are these patients really “transgender”? Research shows that some 80% of children with “gender dysphoria” eventually come to terms with their sex without surgical or pharmaceutical intervention. Multiple studies have found that most kids who are confused or distressed about their sex end up realizing they’re gay—nearly two-thirds in a 2021 study of boys. This makes sense: Gay kids often don’t conform to traditional sex roles. But gender ideology holds that feminine boys and masculine girls may be “born in the wrong body.”

In this light, “gender-affirming care” looks a lot like conversion therapy. In the past, it took the form of electroshock therapy, chemical castration and even lobotomy. Now it takes the form of rendering teenagers sterile and sexually dysfunctional for life. Clinicians from the main U.K. transgender service referred to prescribing puberty blockers as “transing the gay away”—a play on the description of old-fashioned conversion-therapy as “praying the gay away.” A clinician who resigned from the U.K. service accused it of “institutional homophobia.” Clinicians at the service had a “dark joke” that “there would be no gay people left at the rate Gids”—the Gender Identity Service—“was going.”

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden’s Rising Tension With Israel The IDF takes grave risks to satisfy the U.S. President’s demands on how to fight in Gaza.

By on December 15th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-israel-palestinian-authority-hamas-benjamin-netanyahu-4628ede4?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden made headlines by declaring on Tuesday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has to change.” As is typical with the President, his subsequent remarks were hard to follow, but many heard them as a call for a new Israeli government coalition willing to jump-start a two-state solution.

It isn’t Mr. Biden’s place to pick Israel’s leaders. Instead, he could try listening to Israelis about the risks of empowering a Palestinian Authority (PA) that has refused to condemn the Hamas massacre. Or he could listen to Palestinians, 72% of whom believe Hamas was right to launch its Oct. 7 attack, according to a new poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. That figure rises to 82% among West Bank Palestinians, who are ruled by the PA, not Hamas.

Mohammad Shtayyeh, the prime minister of the PA, said Sunday that “Hamas is an integral part of the Palestinian mosaic.” The problem is that this is true. That’s why no one in his right mind in Israel thinks of creating a Palestinian state today. Hamas doesn’t want a two-state solution; it wants the final solution.

Israelis are focused on defeating Hamas, a goal the U.S. shares. Mr. Biden was right to say Tuesday that “nobody on God’s green Earth can justify what Hamas did. They’re a brutal, ugly, inhumane people, and they have to be eliminated.” He was also right to stand up for Israel at the United Nations, where the international herd demands a cease-fire.

Israel fights on because it has no other choice if it wants to survive as a state. But many nations see these U.N. votes as consequence-free gestures for peace or solidarity. That a cease-fire now would mean a Hamas victory and the death of Israeli deterrence, bringing on the next massacre and the next war, doesn’t concern them.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Civilization Versus the New Nihilists Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 15th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/civilization-versus-the-new-nihilists/

Nihilism is the religion of the Left. Anarchy is now at the core of the new Democratic Party.

If the Left wished radically to alter the demography of the U.S., it could have expanded legal immigration through legislation or the courts.

Instead, it simply erased the border and dynamited federal immigration law.

By fiat, nihilists ended the wall, and stopped detaining and deporting illegal aliens altogether.

Or was it worse than that when candidate Joe Biden in September 2019 urged would-be illegal aliens to “surge” the border?

As a result, through laxity and entitlement incentives, eight-million illegal entrants have swarmed the southern border under the Biden administration.

They are swamping border towns, bankrupting big-city budgets, and infuriating even Democratic constituencies.

The same nihilism applies to crime.

In the old days liberals gave light sentences to criminals or reduced bail. But today leftist prosecutors do not even seek bail. They hardly prosecute theft or random assaults.

Criminals are arrested and released the same day. Is the nihilist plan to destroy the entire body of American jurisprudence, and to ensure “equity” in being victimized?

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The ‘Biden Border Crisis’ Comes to the Big Apple by Lawrence Kadish

By on December 15th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20219/border-crisis-new-york

You could not blame Democrat New York City Mayor Eric Adams, or anyone else, if — as they remember the economic boom and global calm of the pre-Covid America of President Donald Trump — they were to cast their secret ballot in November for more of the “Trump Boom.”

US President Joe Biden’s disastrous Open Border policy has turned “sanctuary cities” into unrecognizable migrant camps, and New York City is at ground zero of this crisis. More than 110,000 migrants have been left off on Manhattan streets, more than twice as many as cities such as Los Angeles and Houston.

Remember when self-proclaimed “Sanctuary Martha’s Vineyard” would not accept even 50?

Not surprisingly, the New York mayor’s poll numbers have plunged as New Yorkers of all stripes looked at what the city has become, reportedly finding his management of the issue pathetic. The problem is twofold. It was not Adams who created the problem, and when he looked to Washington for financial help, he came away with the warning, “the cavalry isn’t coming.”

The impact on New York City from the “Biden border crisis” is, on one hand, incalculable regarding the destruction of its quality of life. On the other hand, you can calculate down to the dollar what it is costing New York. Adams has told every city department commissioner that there will be the need for $4 billion in budget cuts over the next 18 months to close an even larger $7.1 billion gap expected in 2024. Every agency, from the police department to the parks, will be impacted. These cuts harm the very fabric of the city’s ability to function, yet the Biden administration does not seem to have any intention of providing economic aid for a crisis of its making.

Although we are a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of laws. Virtually every one of us is the descendant of immigrants who risked everything to come to this country. Most came with a handful of currency and the name of some distant relative who would vouch for them. We recognize the enormous power that came from the collective energies of so many wishing to call themselves Americans, but that did not come about from an “open border” policy that now leaves our nation’s cities picking up the tab and, worse, that potentially leaves the country open to terrorism from migrants who are not able to be checked or from the 1.6 million “gotaways” — that we know about. It took only 19 terrorists on 9/11 to bring down the World Trade Center, in an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Woke Cowardice: Wrong University Presidents at the Wrong Time by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on December 13th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20216/woke-cowardice-university-presidents

As Ecclesiastes observed “to everything there is a season”. This seems to be the season for woke cowardice

[These administrators] are also insensitive to civil liberties and the rights of those with whom they disagree.

It creates divisiveness on campuses that makes Jewish students and faculty fearful for their safety when their university president seems unwilling to apply the same standard to those who advocate genocide against Jews as they surely would against anyone who advocated genocide against Blacks or the raping of women or the shooting of gay and transgender people.

What these universities need now are principled advocates of a single standard, rather than leaders who base their decisions on outside pressures and the need to pander to extremist students, faculty and administrators.

One thing is clear: [university presidents] should be selected on the basis of relevant, individual meritocratic criteria— not the cookie cutter criteria of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” bureaucracies.

The forced resignation of the president of the University of Pennsylvania is a good first step in dealing with a far more pervasive problem in higher education.

The three university presidents who disgraced themselves and their universities by their abysmal testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce represent a far larger concern.

In recent years, many universities have selected as their presidents woke, progressive cowards who pander to the most extreme and most vocal left-wing students and professors. They are the wrong people, at the wrong time, to be leading American educational institutions.

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Go green, go bankrupt? Germany’s promise of a ‘green economic miracle’ has turned into a devastating budget crisis. Sabine Spahl

By on December 13th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/13/go-green-go-bankrupt/

The German government’s green agenda could be in serious trouble.

In November, Germany’s supreme court declared that it would be unlawful for the government to use emergency Covid-19 funds to pay for its transition to Net Zero. This prompted the coalition to announce last week that it may not be able to produce a 2024 budget by the end of this year. Public spending for the rest of 2023 has been frozen.

There is now a chance that the 2024 budget may indeed be ready this week. But the fiasco has nonetheless been deeply embarrassing for chancellor Olaf Scholz. The supreme court ruling has made a mockery of Scholz’s promise to spend billions on new ecological projects to support Germany’s flailing economy. Earlier this year, Scholz was claiming that Germany would experience an economic miracle fuelled by investment in new wind turbines, electricity grids, hydrogen power and subsidies for chip and battery production. That has now been exposed as just so much hot air.

This budget crisis poses huge problems for the government and its Net Zero agenda. Back in 2022, the coalition had intended to plug a €60 billion gap in the budget with funds that had been set aside to deal with the cost of the Covid pandemic and lockdowns. This €60 billion was to be repurposed to cover part of the immense costs of its green-energy transition plan. Doing so would have allowed the government to pretend that the Net Zero transition would place no additional burden on the taxpayer, and therefore dodge any parliamentary and public debate about its green policies.

It’s hardly surprising that the government’s budgetary trick has now been ruled unconstitutional. One reason the court gave is that emergency funds must be used for the purpose they were set up for. Another is that the ‘special budget’ is incompatible with Germany’s ‘debt brake rule’ (Schuldenbremse), which caps fiscal deficits at 0.35 per cent of GDP per year.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

We Need An Immediate Ceasefire In Ukraine, Not Israel By: John Daniel Davidson

By on December 13th, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/12/we-need-an-immediate-ceasefire-in-ukraine-not-israel/

It’s time to acknowledge that the U.S. isn’t going to risk World War III to maintain Ukraine’s 1991 borders.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Washington this week, once again pressuring U.S. lawmakers to dole out tens of billions of taxpayer dollars for his war effort. At issue is a $110 billion national security supplemental the Biden administration has requested that includes about $61 billion for Ukraine, as well as more funding for Israel, humanitarian aid for Gaza, and money to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.

Senate Republicans last week sensibly blocked a vote to advance the bill because it doesn’t include changes to border policy, which is the only thing that would actually secure the border. But the border isn’t the only good reason to block the funding package. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the war in Ukraine is an unwinnable quagmire, and that for all the calls we hear for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict, what’s really needed is a ceasefire in Ukraine, where the solution today is more or less what it was before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022: a negotiated settlement.

Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio hinted at this in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper over the weekend, saying there’s no reason to think $61 billion will accomplish what $100 billion hasn’t. “The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 borders was preposterous. Nobody actually believed it. So what we’re saying to the president and really to the entire world is, you need to articulate what the ambition is.”

So far, neither the Biden White House nor any neocon Ukraine hawk in Washington has been able to articulate what the endgame strategy in Ukraine should be. Instead, we get platitudes about the need to shovel more money into a bloody war of attrition from the likes of Mike Pompeo, who of course doesn’t bother to elaborate on what he means by “end the war.”

Continue reading →