NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

CDC Punishes ‘Superstar’ Scientist For COVID Vaccine Recommendation The CDC Followed 4 Days Later By Joy Pullmann

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/28/cdc-punishes-superstar-scientist-for-covid-vaccine-recommendation-the-cdc-followed-4-days-later/

Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff invented key parts of the U.S. vaccine safety system. But the CDC doesn’t want his expertise on COVID vaccines. Why? Looks like politics.

The Centers for Disease Control pulled a world-renowned expert off a vaccine safety advisory committee after he publicly disagreed with the agency’s pause of the Johnson and Johnson COVID vaccine.

In an email, the CDC’s Dr. Amanda Cohn said Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School was being removed for communicating to the public his expert opinion, which differed from what the CDC was saying publicly at the time. Four days later, however, the CDC reinstated the use of the vaccine, effectively adopting Kulldorff’s recommendation after punishing him for publicly communicating it.

“It has been brought to CDC and ACIPs attention recent public statements you’ve made regarding policy opinions that appear to be pre-determined prior to complete review of data,” Cohn wrote Kulldorff in an April 19 email. “We understand and appreciate that VaST members have personal opinions and we do not object to the expression of those opinions. However, we expect members to be objective and devoid of any appearance of bias… Therefore, CDC is respectfully ending your membership on VaST effective today.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s Border by Chris Farrell

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17319/biden-border

The surge of unaccompanied children and families to the southern border – as well as the surge of non-marijuana drug trafficking across the border – is a humanitarian crisis, a health crisis and a national security crisis.

The Biden administration has ordered the termination of all work. Construction sites and crews are, essentially, idle – at the reported cost of more than $1 million dollars per day in Cochise County, AZ alone. It is costing $1 million taxpayer dollars per day — meaning more than $100 million so far for just one site — to figure out how, exactly, to unwind the half-completed construction project …..

While you are considering the human and dollar costs of Biden’s “children in cages,” consider the construction sites and equipment staged in remote areas, or the drug loads packed into Chevy Suburbans, stripped of everything in the interior but the driver’s seat, and painted matte black for their 2AM runs north through the dry arroyo beds into the United States.

Some of that equipment was looking for people other than illegal aliens – other people (terrorists) bearing ill-will towards the United States – so the radiological detection devices? Gone. The license plate readers and recorders? Gone.

Mexico is an utterly corrupt, failed, narco-state. The “best” thing Mexico has going for it is the “efficiency” of the Cartels…. Perhaps Biden’s border legacy will be another type of 9/11 attack, launched across his now virtually non-existent border with Mexico?

The surge of unaccompanied children and families to the southern border — as well as the surge of non-marijuana drug trafficking across the border — is a humanitarian crisis, a health crisis and a national security crisis. It all belongs — 100% — to President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

The illegal alien surge has been promoted and advertised for since June 28, 2019, when every single one of the Democratic presidential primary candidates raised their hands and said they would support free health care to all illegal immigrants in the United States. That was the first step in a cynical political ploy to permanently replace a segment of the American electorate with “more obedient voters from the Third World” — while masquerading as compassion and care.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: How Erdogan’s Pledge for Reform Collapsed in Five Months by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17301/erdogan-reform-collapse

“We don’t see ourselves elsewhere but in Europe,” Erdoğan said on November 21. “We envisage building our future together with Europe.”

According to Turkish news site Gazete Duvar, a total of 128,872 people have been indicted in the past six years for insulting Erdoğan. Of those, 27,824 had to stand trial and 9,556 were convicted.

Apparently, Erdoğan wants a democratic system without opposition.

But who cares about the Constitution in a country where the governing bloc is proposing to close down even the Constitutional Court, in addition to banning opposition parties? All these autocratic measures occurred in the less than half-year since Erdoğan pledged democratic reforms.

A few years ago, then Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu had vehemently refuted claims that Turkey was a second-class democracy. He was right. Turkey has since remained a third-class democracy.

His critics often joke that when President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pledges democratic reforms, one should run away immediately. His latest charm offensive in November, aimed at repairing Turkey’s badly-strained ties with the West and Western institutions, has proven that the joke still holds value.

“We don’t see ourselves elsewhere but in Europe,” Erdoğan said on November 21. “We envisage building our future together with Europe.” Two days later, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar described NATO as the “cornerstone of our defense and security policy” and said that Turkey was looking forward to cooperating with the incoming administration under Joe Biden in the United States. Erdoğan also promised a bold package of democratic reforms.

Less than five months later, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi had to call Erdoğan a “dictator.” That was not because an experienced European politician wanted to insult a Muslim head of state.

According to Turkish news site Gazete Duvar, a total of 128,872 people have been indicted in the past six years for insulting Erdoğan. Of those, 27,824 had to stand trial and 9,556 were convicted. By comparison, only 11 Turks had been convicted for insulting Ahmet Necdet Sezer, president between 2000 and 2007.

After Erdoğan’s latest reform pledge, on March 21, Turkish authorities arrested a pro-Kurdish opposition MP who had refused to leave parliament for several days after his seat was revoked. Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu “was brought out by force while he was in pyjamas and slippers” by “nearly 100 police officers,” the leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said in a statement.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Peculiar Institution of Higher Education Just as a sermonizing Hollywood grates when it no longer can make good movies, so does a once hallowed but now self-righteous university seem hollow when it charges so much for increasingly so little.

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/28/the-peculiar-institution-of-higher-education/

Nothing is now stranger than the contemporary college campus. 

Not too long ago, Americans used to idolize their universities. Indeed, in science, math, engineering, medicine and business, these meritocratic departments and schools often still remain the world’s top-ranked. 

Certainly, top-notch higher education explains much of the current scientific, technological, and commercial excellence of the United States. 

After World War II—won in part due to superior American scientific research, production, and logistics—the college degree became the prerequisite for a successful career. The GI Bill enabled 8 million returning vets to go to college. Most graduated to good jobs. 

The university from the late 1940s to 1960 was a rich resource of continuing education. It introduced the world’s great literature, from Homer to Tolstoy, to the American middle classes. 

But today’s universities and colleges bear little if any resemblance to postwar education. Even during the tumultuous 1960s, when campuses were plagued by radical protests and periodic violence, there was still institutionalized free speech. An empirical college curriculum mostly survived the chaos of the 1960s.

But it is gone now.

Instead, imagine a place where the certification of educational excellence, the B.A. degree, is no guarantee that a graduate can speak, write, or communicate coherently or think inductively.

Imagine a place that requires applicants to submit high-school diplomas, grade-point averages, and standardized tests, but rejects any requirement that its own graduates upon completion of college do the same by passing a basic uniform competency test. 

Imagine a place where after an initial trial period, a minority of elite employees alone receive lifetime job guarantees. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

First thoughts about Biden’s address to Congress By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/first_thoughts_about_bidens_address_to_congress.html

Biden spoke for over an hour to roughly 200 masked, vaccinated Congresspeople in a mostly empty House chamber. Showing the manic energy of a grasshopper on amphetamines, he did much better than I expected. Barring a few verbal slips, Biden managed to stay on point the whole time. Really, the only problem with the speech was that it was a lie from beginning to end.

The biggest lie was Biden’s relentless calls for togetherness. “And my fellow Americans, we must come together to heal the soul of this nation.” “My fellow Americans, we have to come together.” “We need to work together to find a consensus.” “We came together.” “There is nothing – nothing – beyond our capacity – nothing we can’t do – if we do it together.”

That’s a lovely sentiment – and Biden uttered it with a straight face on the same day that his Department of Justice sent the FBI with an open-ended search warrant to conduct a pre-dawn raid on Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer. This is a terrifying descent into practices common in dictatorships:

The next biggest lie was how Biden framed the events of January 6, when a few hundred unarmed people, egged on by leftist provocateurs, pushed their way into Congress, just as leftists have done since George W. Bush became president. They did so, not to overturn the government, but to ask for an honest certification vote.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War!’ Can Biden really be this dumb? By Patricia McCarthy

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/worst_attack_on_our_democracy_since_the_civil_war_can_biden_really_be_this_dumb.html

Whoa!  Joe Biden thinks that that relatively mild, wholly unarmed breach of the Capitol was the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War!”  How historically ignorant are his speechwriters?  They seem to have forgotten about the assassination of Lincoln, WWI, Pearl Harbor and WWII, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11!  Did they really think that line would resonate with anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge?  

While the entire speech was banal, this was the most egregious spoken line.  That an American president would utter such an unspeakable lie is the measure of this man.  He is a fool.  Surely, he knows better but he and his handlers believe that most Americans are so dumb, so uninformed, they will accept such a lie as true.

That one line tells us everything we need to know about who Biden and the cabal running him are; they absolutely believe the American people are not only simpleminded but virtual toddlers who will believe anything they say.  

The rest of his not-SOTU speech only confirmed that Joe is the puppet of some thoroughly ridiculous people.  No wonder Jen Psaki, when asked about vaccine hesitancy among “white, Republican men,” replied that they are placing ads on country music stations and NASCAR sites!  Yeah, that’s right Jen.  The only people not submitting to the jab are rubes too dumb to know what’s good for them.  In fact, no vaccine for covid was necessary since there are effective treatments and a 99% recovery rate.  It’s perhaps just a greedy grab for big bucks by big pharma.  Biden is in their pocket too. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Top Ten Most Racist Colleges and Universities: #3 University of Southern California Kowtowing to the woke mob.

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-3-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/

#3: University of Southern California

The website of the University of Southern California proudly lists a multitude of “Student Equity and Inclusion Programs” which are designed to create “a sense of belonging” for the diverse array of students at USC.  But when a Communications Professor at the university attempted to educate his students about Chinese linguistic patterns, explaining the meaning of a Chinese word that—to the uneducated ear of American students sounded similar to the N-word—he was reported as a racist and suspended from teaching the class.

Greg Patton is a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business and an “expert in communication, interpersonal and leadership effectiveness.” During the fall 2020 semester, Patton taught an online class during which he spoke about the use of “filler words” in the speech of various languages.

“If you have a lot of ‘ums and errs,’ this is culturally specific, so based on your native language,” the professor explained. “Like in China, the common word is ‘that, that, that.’ So in China it might be ‘nèi ge, nèi ge, nèi ge.’”

To a native Chinese speaker, the word sounds nothing like the American racial slur. Patton himself has worked in China although is not a fluent speaker of Chinese. Despite the crystal-clear context of Patton’s example, and his status as an expert in communications, a number of African-American students were so offended by his example that they sent a letter to the Marshall School of Business Dean Geoffrey Garrett accusing Patton of racial insensitivity and stating that he was unfit to teach the class.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Confused Elderly Dictator Delivers Rambling Speech Demanding Money

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/04/confused-elderly-dictator-delivers-rambling-speech-daniel-greenfield/

Biden finally got around to delivering his State of the Union address and is was almost as worth the wait as the Oscars.

Sometimes the pills work and sometimes they don’t.

They really didn’t work this time around. The same identity politics theatrics were there as at the Oscars. And just as at the Oscars, the man of the hour turned out to be an elderly man who wasn’t there. Except Anthony Hopkins wasn’t there physically. Joe Biden wasn’t there mentally.

Instead, Americans got something closer to Biden unfiltered, squinting in bafflement, turning his head from side to side like a wind-up doll, and delivering a long tedious series of demands for money, empty promises, and even more hollow talking points.

 The set was empty. And so many empty seats only highlighted the utter emptiness of this administration. 

The demands for money have gone from the billions to the trillions. The promises are even more ridiculous and astronomical. But the figure at the center of it could barely sell ice on a hot summer day to a man dying of thirst. 

Even in his basement, Biden performed better than this. Maybe it was the big stage. Maybe it was the people. Or maybe he didn’t nap hard enough. 

Or maybe it’s hard to sell nothing. And nothing is all that Biden has.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Macron’s Folly Is he serious about fixing France’s Islam problem? Bruce Bawer

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/macrons-folly-bruce-bawer/

Last October I reported here that French president Emmanuel Macron had just “delivered what, on the face of it, seemed to be a remarkable speech on Islam.” Having previously been wishy-washy on the topic, he now promised a new program “intended to defend French laïcité, or official secularism, from ‘Islamist separatism,’” which he explicitly characterized as an existential threat to the Republic. Acknowledging that “one reason why ‘Islamist separatism’ had been allowed to fester was the ‘cowardice’ of French authorities,” Macron proclaimed that a new day had dawned.

In public services, in cultural and athletic associations, in schools and universities, and in other sectors of society, Islamic indoctrination would be officially, firmly, and comprehensively resisted, and Islam itself modernized into an “Islam of the Enlightenment.” My comment at the time was that a great deal of Macron’s scheme, on close examination, “starts to look not like a program for the secularizing of Islam but, rather, like a blueprint for propping up public laïcité while actively promoting private Islamic observance – a blueprint born, one imagines, of pie-in-the-sky hopes that, when the Muslims take over, they won’t replace the Napoleonic Code with sharia law.” In any event, given the decades of French government inaction on the Islam issue, it was hard to take Macron’s vows any more seriously than a boeuf bourguignon prepared with a Beaujolais. 

Two weeks after Macron’s speech, a Muslim named Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch Anzorov beheaded a history teacher named Samuel Paty, who’d shown his students some cartoons of Muhammed as part of a lesson on freedom of expression. The French took to the streets in outrage (which soon subsided). The government expelled a couple of hundred immigrants who’d been identified as potential terrorists (leaving heaven knows how many hundreds of thousands of others). A mosque was closed (and has since been reopened). Macron praised Paty while also making the usual nice, empty noises about Islam, but admitted that he hadn’t done enough about the problem so far and again promised action. Again I was dubious. “What guarantee is there,” I wrote, “that Macron will keep his eye on the ball after the furor over Paty’s murder dies down – let alone that he will take action that is sweeping enough to make a real difference in this long-term civilizational war?”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Another Prestigious School Pummeled by Critical Race Theory By Jack Fowler

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/another-prestigious-school-pummeled-by-critical-race-theory/

Regis High School seems ashamed of its legacy and purpose.

There is a lot of trouble afoot at my alma mater, and it seems worth sharing.

Maybe that should be “more trouble,” because prestigious Regis High School has been in the news of late, with its president being fired over charges of sexual misconduct.

A Jesuit-run institution, and yes, the high school of one Anthony Fauci, Regis is not “prestigious” because of my particular alumnus status (nor that of my colleague, Daniel Tenreiro), nor because of cost (actually, it’s tuition-free per its founding in 1914). Simply, it is regularly ranked as the best Catholic high school in America.

It got that status because it was a determined fire hose of classical education that graduated young men who were put to many a test so they could think and analyze as adults, for God and country, as the blunt school motto stated.

But now, Regis — like many a school — seems ashamed of its legacy and purpose, maybe even of Deo et patria, and has become quick to genuflect and lie prostrate before the gods of Critical Race Theory. More on that shortly.

Back in the day, when Abe Beame was still mayor: Every year, Regis took around 120 Catholic boys (parochial-schoolers from classes low to high, and having a silver spoon in your mouth at birth was not a condition of acceptance) from New York and the surrounding area — through competitive exam and ensuing interview — into the freshman class. A goodly amount fell away through the ensuing four years (a grade of 75 was failing) of grueling and unrelenting work (learning Latin, self-taught physics among the heavier stones to push uphill). There was many a big brain among my classmates, but how I survived to graduate with the remaining 100 remains a mystery.

All being in this together, close quarters for four years, you could not help but notice the black classmate was black, the Puerto Rican senior was Puerto Rican, the gay freshman was gay. (We noticed the musical one was musical too, the artistic one artistic too — but such things are of no use in our times of pigmentary politics and cultural ethics.) My experience and perception was that we were all young guys who regarded each other as comrades. We were caught up in some worthwhile academic marathon. Ours was a brotherhood that transcended the facts of the Sharks vs. Jets neighborhood characteristics that still held forth. Able to walk in only my own shoes, I look back and find Regis to have been a place of e pluribus unum, of sanctuary, a haven, of true camaraderie — a thing set against the backdrop of a New York choked by unrelenting racial tensions. I feel blessed to have gone there, to have run the race, to have crossed the finish line, no matter how distant from most of my classmates.