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April 2024

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Greta’s class war The green ideology is the enemy of working people. Brendan O’Neill

By on April 9th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/08/gretas-class-war/

It was like a case study in indifference. There was privileged Gen Zer Greta Thunberg and other Euro eco-brats smiling and flicking peace signs as they called on the Dutch government to stop subsidising fossil-fuel companies. Meanwhile, the Dutch people, very few of whom are the offspring of opera singers with the ear of the world media, are suffering one of the largest spikes in energy prices in all of Europe. Their bills are through the roof. They’re reeling from the ‘pain of high energy costs’, as some in the media describe it. And yet in sweeps giggling Greta and her barmy eco-army to agitate for less government backing for energy production, which would likely hike the price even more.

Rarely has the blinkered vanity, the sheer social apathy, of the green movement been so starkly illustrated. It was on Saturday that Greta and chums made their haughty demands of the Dutch government. In a protest at The Hague, hundreds of supporters of the upper-class death cult Extinction Rebellion marched behind a banner saying ‘STOP FOSSIL SUBSIDIES’. Some of the more spirited of these marchers against modernity, including Greta, broke away from the protest and headed to the A12 highway with the intention of blocking it. Because apparently it’s not enough to hit the pockets of the good people of the Netherlands – no, you have to ruin their weekend travel plans, too. Cops intervened and Greta and others were arrested for the crime of impeding a highway.

The press is full of gushing reports of Greta’s arrest. The BBC features an image of its favourite prophetess of doom yelling something as ticked-off cops drag her away. Our heroine only wanted to ‘block… a main road’ in protest against the ‘Dutch government’s tax concessions for companies connected to the fossil-fuel industry’, the Beeb says. What a turnaround from its reporting on the revolting Dutch farmers who also blocked highways, though in their case in opposition to lunatic Net Zero policies rather than in favour of them. Back then, the BBC said farmers had ‘clogged up’ roads and ‘snarled up motorways’ and created an ‘unsafe situation’. So when workers hold up highways, it’s horrifying, yet when time-rich right-on youths do it, it’s heroic? We see you, BBC.

The truth is there was nothing admirable about Greta’s latest temper tantrum over fossil fuels.

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EDUCATION, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The Poisoning of Medical School Education How DEI and Critical Race Theory are replacing the Hippocratic Oath. by Joseph Klein

By on April 9th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-poisoning-of-medical-school-education/

UCLA’s first-year medical students were required late last month to sit through a two-hour lecture on the subject of “Housing (In)Justice” that was part of a mandatory course on “structural racism” at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. UCLA’s guest lecturer was a left-wing homeless advocate, Lisa Gray-Garcia (pictured above), who told her captive audience of aspiring doctors that modern medicine is “white science.” Her pagan prayers to “Mama Earth,” which were part of Ms. Gray-Garcia’s presentation, included a blessing for “black,” “brown,” and “houseless people” who, she claimed, die because of the “crapatalist lie” of “private property.”

Wearing a Palestinian scarf, Ms. Gray-Garcia, a Hamas sympathizer who once posted on X that “Israel is Amerikkklan,” led UCLA’s medical students in chants of “Free, free Palestine.”

UCLA’s medical school has declared on its website that its fundamental mission is to champion “Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” In pursuit of achieving “equity,” the website states, “We have a collective commitment to combat structural racism.” Its “anti-racism roadmap” includes developing “an advisory committee to include experts in critical race theory, social justice, bias, and health disparities.”

The school’s reading list includes books by leading critical race theorists. They include Robin DiAngelo’s “White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to be an antiracist.”

UCLA is not an outlier. Indoctrination in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) and Critical Race Theory dogmas is being force fed to medical school students and faculty across the country.

The Oregon Health and Science University’s “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism Strategic Action Plan,” for example, requires “ongoing training and learning opportunities related to DEI and anti-racism for learners, staff, faculty and administrative leaders.” There will be “consequences for individuals who are not compliant with the required training,” the strategic action plan warns. This includes incorporating “DEI, anti-racism and social justice core competencies in performance appraisals of faculty and staff.”

Harvard Medical School states as one of its anti-racism initiatives the development of classes to “acknowledge the ways in which racism is embedded in science and scientific culture and work to redress these longstanding issues.” In other words, Harvard Medical School is on board with the outrageous claim that medicine is “white science.”

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

New Study Pours Cold Water on the Media’s Maternal-Mortality Hyperventilating Brittany Bernstein

By on April 9th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-study-pours-cold-water-on-the-medias-maternal-mortality-hyperventilating/

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we compare the results of a recent study on maternal mortality with the available media reporting on the topic, look at an absurd headline from The Independent, and cover more media misses.

New Study Upends Prevailing Narratives on U.S. Maternal Mortality

Dr. Ingrid Skop, an ob-gyn and vice president and director of medical affairs for the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, regularly has women in her office who have read news reports on the so-called maternal health-care crisis in the U.S., which is said to have the highest rate of maternal mortality of any high-income country.

“What I tell [them] is that we have had troubles with our data, and we’ve put some systems in place that have helped to detect more deaths. When it looks like the rates are rising, it is probably because we are doing a better job of detecting as opposed to actually having more deaths,” she said, adding “the good news is the death that you’re worried about, a catastrophic event at the time of birth, those rates are improving dramatically.”

“You do not need to be afraid of childbirth,” she said.

So she wasn’t surprised by a new study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology last month that found the national U.S. maternal mortality rate is much lower than has been reported by the CDC, which has reported a rate of 32.9 deaths per 100,000 births.

The new study instead finds a rate of 10.4 deaths per 100,000 births and also shows a rate that remained largely stable between 1999 and 2021.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Naomi Schaefer Riley Child Abandonment in the Name of Compassion To fight “systemic racism,” Boston’s Mass General Brigham will discourage medical professionals from reporting mothers who test positive for drugs to child-welfare authorities.

By on April 9th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/mass-general-brighams-misguided-drug-policy

A self-described libertarian friend once described to me the feeling she had when it was time to leave the hospital with her newborn baby. She remembered looking at the nurse and thinking, “You’re just going to let me take this thing home? I have no idea what I’m doing.” Even those of us who are very skeptical of government intervention know instinctively that a lot can go wrong with an infant. They might not be eating enough. They might catch a virus. They might be injured by a well-meaning toddler.

The constant attention required of new parents is hard enough when you’re sober. Now imagine trying to do it when you’re high—or suffering withdrawal. Surely, if any parent needs a nurse or doctor to check up on them before taking a baby home, it is parents using drugs. But a new policy enacted at Mass General Brigham in Boston last week will discourage medical professionals from reporting mothers who test positive for illegal substances to the state’s child welfare agency.

Why would the hospital system adopt such a policy? You guessed it: to avoid perpetuating “systemic racism.” Representatives of the Mass General Brigham administration’s “United Against Racism” initiative found that “Black pregnant people are more likely to be drug tested and to be reported to child welfare systems than white pregnant people.” As a result, the hospital will “update policies that automatically trigger mandatory filings with child welfare agencies when a pregnant individual is engaged in treatment for substance use disorder, absent any other concerns for potential abuse or neglect.”

Let’s start from the top. Racial disparities are not prima facie evidence of racism. Black children are three times as likely to die from maltreatment as white children, so it is not unreasonable to assume that they are at higher risk. It’s also not unreasonable to assume that black mothers would get reported to child protective services more often than white mothers.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Here’s Why Nobody Believes Biden On The Economy Anymore

By on April 9th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/09/heres-why-nobody-believes-biden-on-the-economy-anymore/

Friday’s jobs report has everyone excited. Everyone, that is, who is pulling for Joe Biden to win reelection. Outside that blinkered lot, the pain of Bidenomics is still very real.

“Today’s report marks a milestone in America’s comeback,” he said. “Three years ago, I inherited an economy on the brink” – a lie we’ve repeatedly exposed – “With today’s report of 303,000 new jobs in March, we have passed the milestone of 15 million jobs created since I took office” – another lie; as we noted last week, the economy has created only 5 million net new jobs under Biden, which is less than the number of jobs created during President Donald Trump’s first three years in office.

Biden goes on: “That’s 15 million more people who have the dignity and respect that comes with a paycheck.”

But wait. Even if that 15 million number was legitimate, does it mean that 15 million people got jobs?

Turns out, it doesn’t not by a long shot.

In a series of posts on X, Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni explains what these numbers really mean. The picture is far from rosy.

Antoni dug into the jobs data and discovered that all the new jobs created in March were part-time. The number of full-time jobs actually declined a little. This trend has been going on for a while, which is why the average number of hours worked each week has been trending down for three years.

Why the surge in part-time employment?

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BOOKS Comments turned off

CHAPTER 13: Fomenting Race Wars Begins in Kindergarten Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is [forthcoming release May 2024] by Linda Goudsmit

By on April 9th, 2024

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27686/chapter-13-fomenting-race-wars-begins-in

goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

National sovereignty is to a country what individual sovereignty is to a human being. In The Collapsing American Family: From Bonding to Bondage,[i] I describe the globalist strategy of using reformulated Marxism in American schools in order to replace American individualism with collectivism. The goal is to persuade the individual to stop being an individual:

The Left had a new marketing, lobbying, and advertising strategy that targeted first American universities and then K–12. American education was chosen as the vulnerable soft target for revolution—no bullets required. The long-term strategy was that two generations of leftist educational indoctrination would transform America from a capitalist constitutional republic into the socialist state required for internationalized one-world government.

The radical leftists on campus in the ’60s did not go quietly into the night after Woodstock. They graduated and became the teachers, professors, textbook writers, psychologists, sociologists, politicians, doctors, lawyers, and decision makers in charge of public education, including curriculum content, that reflected their anti-American bias and globalist views. Gradually the individualism and critical-thinking skills that had created the vibrant, independent, upwardly mobile middle class and supported the American dream were deliberately dumbed down to encourage dependence, collectivism, groupthink, and a victim mentality.

In a sweeping effort that eventually transformed public education, collectivism was repackaged, marketed, lobbied, advertised, and sold to an unsuspecting American public. The former pro-American curricula that proudly promoted individualism, meritocracy, capitalism, and the middle class was replaced. The revised curricula teach American students to be anti-American, self-loathing, dependent, fragile collectivists, unapologetically preaching global citizenship in a New World Order. (The Collapsing American Family: From Bonding to Bondage, pp. 123–124)

Collectivism is the core of John Dewey’s infamous progressive education, discussed in Chapter 8. Progressivist instructional methods focus on group work and group projects, and promote the experience-centered focus of the progressive philosophy. Progressivism defines itself as a contrast to Perennialism. Perennialism,[ii] the foundation of American education established in Colonial America, emphasizes objective reality, universal truths, and an educational curriculum that cultivates students’ individual intellectual skills with the “three R’s”—reading, writing, and arithmetic.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The only deal on Hamas’s table is defeat of the Jewish state By Ruthie Blum

By on April 9th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/the-only-deal-on-hamass-table-is-defeat-of-the-jewish-state/

In a monologue on Friday during Israeli Channel 12’s current-affairs program “Ofira and Levinson,” the mother of one of the remaining 133 hostages in Gaza called on Benjamin Netanyahu to resign.

“Mr. Prime Minister, you are running out of time,” said Einav Zangauker, whose 24-year-old son was abducted on Oct. 7 by Hamas terrorists. “You’re not returning Matan; you’re not accepting the hostage-release deal that’s on the table. Go home.”

Zangauker has been expressing this sentiment with increasing frequency. And it’s hard not to shudder sympathetically at what she and the rest of the devastated families have been going through for the past six months.

But where do they get the idea that there’s a “deal on the table” being prevented by Netanyahu? And what do they imagine would happen if he were to “step aside”?

Do they actually believe that a different leader or government in Jerusalem would spur Hamas to soften its stance? Can’t they see that every crack in Israel’s societal armor serves to stiffen the terrorists’ intransigence?

A review of recent history is in order here.

Israel, headed by Netanyahu, agreed in November to a pause in the war and the release from Israeli jails of three Palestinian terrorists per hostage held in Gaza. The exchange, brokered by Qatar and Egypt, took place over the course of a week. It would have continued if Hamas hadn’t violated the deal by refusing to provide a list of the remaining women and children in captivity and blitzing Israel with renewed rocket barrages.

In response, the Israel Defense Forces resumed fighting on Dec. 1. Less than three weeks later, Netanyahu offered another weeklong pause in the fighting and additional humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, in exchange for 40 hostages, including all the women, children and elderly men in urgent need of medical treatment.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who Should Compete in Women’s Sports? Charles Lipson

By on April 9th, 2024

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/08/who_should_compete_in_womens_sports_150762.html

“What is a woman?” “Can a man get pregnant?” Questions like those are frequently raised at Senate hearings for progressive nominees to the federal bench or Cabinet positions. Republicans pose them for a reason. They know the witnesses will fumble the answers.

Some try to wriggle out with circumlocutions, offering only convoluted mumbling. That works brilliantly for French academic articles but not so well for U.S. Senate hearings. Other witnesses, mostly judicial nominees, claim they cannot answer because the questions might come before them in future cases. They breathe a sigh of relief since their real motto is “Loose lips sink ships.”

Often, Republicans discover the witnesses have already proclaimed their views in opinion pieces, social media posts, or academic articles when they were appealing to like-minded audiences on the left. When the audience is more skeptical, however, they are less eager to repeat those answers or to defend them.

Progressive witnesses may not have answers, but ordinary voters certainly do. They tell pollsters that men cannot get pregnant. Shocking, I know. They think it is ludicrous to place tampons in men’s bathrooms, which some universities and elite high schools do now.

The question of “who is a woman?” is more vexed. The reason is that common sense and cultural tradition point in one direction (“he was born a male and that’s what he is”) but those are opposed by another tradition: our respect for human autonomy. The Western values of human autonomy and deference for individual choices mean we normally acknowledge an adult’s self-identification. (Here is a hard question, though. If my autonomy is to be respected on issues of self-identification, why can’t I simply identify myself as an African American or Native American, even if there is no DNA evidence of that identity? Why shouldn’t that be my choice, just like gender? Yet self-identification as a racial minority without that bloodline is fiercely condemned as a malicious fraud. Just ask Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal, or Ward Churchill.)

These issues are far from settled politically. If an adult male identifies as a woman, many people say, “So be it. Live and let live.” Others are more dubious. Still others reject it outright.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times vs. RealClearPolitics THE 1735 PROJECT, PART 5 Carl Cannon

By on April 9th, 2024

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/04/the_new_york_times_vs_realclearpolitics_150733.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Ten days after the 2020 election, Tom Bevan, co-founder and president of RealClearPolitics, received an email from a New York Times reporter who covers the media. The reporter, Jeremy W. Peters, advised Bevan that his newspaper was working on a story about RCP and asked for responses to various questions and accusations. Four days later, Peters’ critique was published under the headline “A Popular Political Site Made a Sharp Right Turn. What Steered It.”

The sleight-of-hand was right there in the headline. The New York Times simply declared that RCP “made a sharp right turn,” and suggested it will document how this happened.

The Times’ story asserted that during the period of counting absentee and late-arriving mail-in ballots, RCP took three days longer than other news organizations to call Pennsylvania for Joe Biden. It noted disapprovingly that we aggregated stories from other news outlets quoting Trump supporters who questioned the election results. It suggested that the RCP Poll Averages were manipulated to be favorable to Donald Trump. Peters focused on RCP staff layoffs in September 2017, and claimed we’d hired partisan Republicans to replace them. He reported that the RealClear Foundation, a nonprofit that supports our journalism, receives contributions from conservative donors. He also called into question a RealClear Investigations exposé naming the whistleblower whose complaints led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Jeremy Peters declined to be interviewed for this rebuttal, though he was courteous about it. Nor did he reach out to me in 2020, beyond contacting Tom Bevan. It didn’t hurt my pride, but I’m the most experienced newsman at RCP; I oversee our original content, I direct our reporters, and I have written more words for RealClear than anyone else.

Nor was there any bad blood between me and the “paper of record.” In the 1980s, the Times credited my groundbreaking coverage of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. In the 1990s, Howell Raines tried to hire me. Three books I’ve co-authored have been positively reviewed by the Times. When I covered the White House for National Journal, the Times’ book editor asked me to review a book about Dick Cheney. I have had friends at that newspaper. Although I’m not famous, I’m not unknown in Washington journalism. What I’m best known for is being relentlessly nonpartisan. If someone is writing about bias at my organization, calling me would have been the obvious place to start.

I shouldn’t have waited three years to respond to the Times but will do so now.

‘Rightward Turn’ and Post-Election Coverage

The thrust of the Nov. 17, 2020, Times article was that RCP had “taken a rightward, aggressively pro-Trump turn over the last four years.”

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