MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Leor Sapir, Mungeri Lal HHS Has Misled on Gender Medicine The Department of Health and Human Services’ documented failures to hold gender medicine to scientific standards have happened under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Posted By on September 20th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/hhs-has-misled-on-gender-medicine

In 2015, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) accepted a formal request to initiate a national coverage analysis for “gender-reassignment surgery.” When making these coverage determinations, CMS is legally obligated to evaluate relevant clinical evidence and answer the question: Is the evidence sufficient to conclude that the application of the item or service under study will improve health outcomes for Medicare patients? In June 2016, CMS released its 109-page analysis, which it made open for public comment. The agency published its final decision memo two months later. The differences between the two documents were revealing—and disturbing.

At first sight, the summaries of both memos seemed similar. Each mentioned that the CMS was not issuing a national coverage determination on “gender-reassignment surgery” for Medicare beneficiaries with gender dysphoria. Such determinations, the CMS said, would continue to be made by local contractors on a case-by-case basis. On closer examination, however, the final document included substantial changes. These were not corrections. They amounted to a systematic effort to scrub any reference to the evidence of the harms associated with these surgeries.

The agency’s shifting analysis of gender surgery is glaring enough. But it is just one of several examples, between 2016 and the present day, of how key figures and agencies within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have misled the American public about the evidence for “gender-affirming care.”

Start with the tale of two memos. To conduct a proper analysis of the clinical evidence, CMS identified a large number of publications related to “gender-reassignment surgery.” As CMS explained:

Studies with robust study designs and larger, defined patient populations assessed with objective endpoints or validated test instruments were given greater weight than small, pilot studies. Reduced consideration was given to studies that were underpowered for the assessment of differences or changes known to be clinically important. Studies with fewer than 30 patients were reviewed and delineated, but excluded from the major analytic framework. Oral presentations, unpublished white papers, and case reports were excluded. Publications in languages other than English were excluded.

Thirty-three publications, ranging from 1979 to 2015, were eventually identified and included.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

James Burnham A Supremely Bad Idea The proposed “ethics code” for the justices is a misguided solution to a nonexistent problem.

Posted By on September 20th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ethics-proposal-would-undermine-the-supreme-court

Wielding “ethics” violations against one’s political foes is a Washington tradition. When it comes to ethics and the Supreme Court, observers should not be deceived. Current attacks on the justices’ ethics are bad-faith political barbs intended to undermine the Court—not expressions of genuine concern over actual transgressions. And the policy reforms being suggested to solve this nonexistent problem would do enormous damage to our most important legal institution while producing few, if any, countervailing benefits.

The latest proposal, which Justice Elena Kagan herself has championed, is to create an “enforceable” code for the justices. Details are sparse, but the basic idea is to empower lower court judges—whose work the Supreme Court reviews—to police the justices’ alleged ethical violations. Apparently, the chief justice would decide which lower court judges to endow with this extraordinary authority. Precisely what investigatory and enforcement tools those judges would wield remains unstated.

This proposal has several fundamental problems. For starters, it would give a future chief justice extraordinary power over his or her colleagues—power that some future, malevolent chief justice could easily abuse. By selecting the lower court judges who stand in judgment of the justices, the chief justice could put a thumb on the scale of those determinations. Gaining an upper hand on an intractable colleague would be as easy as stacking the ethics panel with that colleague’s antagonists. We can certainly hope no judge would abuse such authority. But to borrow from the old adage—if judges were angels, no ethics panel would be necessary.

And consider this dynamic in the context of a problem facing the Court right now: leaks of confidential information. Last weekend, the New York Times printed an exposé on the most recent Supreme Court term, replete with details of internal memos, the justices’ deliberations, and more. We have no idea who leaked this sensitive information to the Times—and particularly whether any justice was involved—but the leaks appear designed to undermine Chief Justice John Roberts and cast an unflattering light on the Court’s majority in certain important decisions. The judiciary’s ethical canons flatly prohibit politically motivated leaks of confidential judicial deliberations. Canon 4(D)(5) states: “A judge should not disclose or use nonpublic information acquired in a judicial capacity for any purpose unrelated to the judge’s official duties.” Presumably, a campaign to influence the chief justice and his colleagues by leaking “nonpublic information” to the New York Times would meet that description.

BOOKS, NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

H.R McMaster’s New Book Explains Why Trump Fired Him McMaster’s book proves that he is part of the foreign policy establishment and that this made it impossible for him to serve effectively as President Trump’s National Security Adviser. Fred Fleitz

Posted By on September 20th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/20/h-r-mcmasters-new-book-explains-why-trump-fired-him/

Just in time for the 2024 presidential election, a new tell-all memoir has been published by a former senior Trump administration official that regurgitates the usual never-Trump criticisms of the former president. Like former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s spiteful 2020 tell-all book, former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster’s tome, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, is dripping with derision because of Trump’s decision to fire him after just over a year on the job.

McMaster is a learned man with a distinguished record of military service. He holds a Ph.D. in military history and is the author of several noteworthy books on national security. He claims to be a historian and quotes ancient Roman and Greek philosophers in his book.

However, McMaster has also long been part of the foreign policy establishment, and this got him in trouble with President Trump because he constantly deferred to establishment positions on foreign policy questions and opposed Trump’s often unconventional approaches. McMaster clearly gravitates toward elitist foreign policy circles and is more comfortable associating with the Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard University’s JFK School of Government than he is with Trump, whom he looked down on.

It was not a surprise when the Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt of McMaster’s book as a feature article titled “I Cannot Understand Putin’s Hold on Trump.” Although McMaster said allegations that the 2016 Trump campaign colluded with Russia “were found to be false,” he tries to revive this narrative by suggesting that Putin had somehow coopted Trump and portrays himself as a heroic Trump aide who was “swimming upstream” trying to warn the president of this.

This claim reflects the frustration of McMaster and the foreign policy establishment that, despite years of trying to discredit Trump for his statements and policies on Russia, Trump’s approach to Russia was far more successful than President Biden’s.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Can Harris’s Cynical, Run-out-the Clock Campaign Succeed? Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 20th, 2024

https://victorhanson.com/can-harriss-cynical-run-out-the-clock-campaign-succeed/

Cynically running out the clock has been the overarching principle of the entire abbreviated 105-day presidential campaign of Kamala Harris—ever since Joe Biden, at the 11th-hour, dropped out in July.

Harris seems unwilling or unable to answer any impromptu question that she has not been previously prepped for. Her answers at the debate were memorized and canned. They never addressed the questions asked.

Her single, 11-minute post-debate Philadelphia interview was a shipwreck of dodging and dissimulating—even though the host was sympathetically left-wing.

Even socialist Bernie Sanders pointed out that for Harris to get elected, she must temporarily disown her lifelong leftist credentials.

As vice president, she must further deny co-ownership of the unpopular record of the Biden-Harris administration.

Left unstated is that whether she wins the presidency—or loses it and continues as vice president for another three months—nonetheless she will inevitably revert back to her hard-core, lifelong leftist beliefs.

In addition, Harris has reconstructed her privileged upbringing as a child of two PhDs, living in a posh Montreal neighborhood into a struggling, middle-class Oakland childhood.

How can she stage such a complete makeover—and contemptuously count on the voting public to be so easily deceived?

She avoids all news conferences, one-on-one nationally broadcast interviews, and town halls. And like Biden, she will debate only on leftist venues with impartial pro-Harris moderators.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

This Is Not the America We Were Promised Molding us into disarmed, disenfranchised serfs who obey in silence. by Kurt Schlichter

Posted By on September 20th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/this-is-not-the-america-we-were-promised/

The events of the last few years have confirmed that we are no longer a democracy in the sense that we once thought we were – and I know we’re a republic, but follow along with me. The premise of a democracy is that individual citizens can participate in the political process by making their positions known and voting for representatives who they understand will support their views. But those components are under attack here and throughout the West. They are under attack because our garbage elite considers our participation in our own governance to be both morally illegitimate and a practical nuisance. As a result, the elite is doing everything it can to prevent us from participating in our own governance. It’s intent to make us into serfs, disarmed, disenfranchised serfs who obey in silence.

After all, when citizens participate in their own governance, they may choose policies that the elite dislikes. And the elite doesn’t like the policies normal people prefer. Part of it is profit and power, and part of it is the elite’s moral grandstanding – don’t underestimate the power of politics to make spiritually empty people such as our trash ruling class feel good about themselves. The elite don’t like competition from the peasants. It cuts into their action and is generally inconvenient.

What does the elite want? Power. It wants unquestioned power over us that is not subject to any limitations by dissent or appeals to the law. Why do you think they hate the Supreme Court so much? SCOTUS gets in their way when it enforces our rights. Why do you think they hate the Electoral College so much? Because it makes it harder for them to leverage their kept constituencies to take the presidency.

The elite wants what we’re now getting: an administrative state where experts who just happen to share all the priorities and prejudices of the elite make all the decisions. Do you wonder why the left is so concerned about controlling academia? Because that’s where experts are made, and you don’t get expert certification unless you embrace the elite’s ideology. Do you think it’s a coincidence that they’re demanding DEI loyalty oaths from graduate students and professors? You must listen to experts, they tell us, and by the way, we get to decide who the experts are. Check out conservative stalwart Ned Ryun’s new book, “American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism,” which I read and gave him notes on in an early draft. Ned details exactly what’s going on here – the creation of an extra-constitutional fourth branch of government that effectively disintermediates citizens from any decision-making and controls every aspect of their lives without being subjected to any sort of accountability. That is the exact opposite of democracy, but it is part and parcel of Our Democracy that the ironically named Democrats embrace. Remember that when they say “Our Democracy,” they mean “ours,” as in “theirs.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

More on “Operation Grim Beeper” Steven Hayward

Posted By on September 20th, 2024

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/09/more-on-operation-grim-beeper.php

Major hat tip to Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute for coming up with “Operation Grim Beeper” for Hezbollah’s exploding devices, while pointing out that this is a modern version of a very old story:

This is one of the most astonishing intelligence operations in history. It is a reworking of the story of the Trojan Horse for the digital age, and it deserves to become nearly as legendary as its iconic predecessor.

It’s going to be a while—maybe years, if ever—before we learn the complete story. The Telegraph offers some thoughts on how it went down that may turn out to be correct, and this part in particular stands out:

“Everything starts with identifying an opportunity,” says one former officer in Unit 81, the secret Israeli weapons division.

“Here, that was Hezbollah’s request to purchase pagers because they wanted to avoid using cellular mobiles because they can all be hacked and traced. But the pager is a device that we can easily control – basically you know how to get into the network and transmit whatever you want to transmit. So when we saw the order for the pagers, they said: ‘OK, we now have an opportunity to put something that we want inside those pagers.’

“Operation-wise you need to think about how to control the whole process. And we know that those pagers came out of a factory in Hungary, but it might be that those pagers left the factory in their original condition. But then maybe the customs diverted it, a delay for a couple of days because of customs issues, and then the [operations team] took care of [inserting the boobytrapped devices]. It might be that the European company is an innocent company. . .

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Why Do Media Think Democrats Are Worth Cheating For?

Posted By on September 20th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/20/why-do-media-think-democrats-are-worth-cheating-for/

It would be helpful to voters to know that a “whistleblower” says ABC rigged last week’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But outside of conservative media, it’s being largely ignored, because the legacy press covers its own and as zealously as it does the Democratic Party. Whether the claims are true or not – the existence of the whistleblower remains unconfirmed – the mainstream media’s loyalty to Democrats is uncomfortably similar to the relationship Pravda had with the Central Committee of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.

To quickly recap, the unnamed whistleblower said ABC agreed to fact-check Trump while ensuring “Harris would not face comparable scrutiny.” The plan was so detailed that “various people were assigned to fact check observations it was perceived candidate Trump would make during the debate.”

“In fact,” says the whistleblower, the “Harris campaign required assurances that Donald Trump would be fact-checked.”

These agreements were reached on calls that the Trump campaign was not a part of although all discussions regarding the rules and negotiations were supposed to include both sides.

The affidavit also says Harris was provided with sample questions that, while not the exact questions that would be asked, nevertheless “covered similar topics that would appear during the debate.”

There were also issues that could not be raised – Joe Biden’s health; Harris’ performance as San Francisco’s district attorney; her brother-in-law and “key campaign adviser” Tony West, who allegedly “fleeced taxpayers for billions to give to left-wing groups and lawyers” – since they would reflect poorly on Harris.

“I have observed a pronounced bias against Donald Trump within ABC News,” the affiant continues, while also noting “many” ABC employees “questioned the clear bias that is well known throughout the company.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why Is Hamas So Confident That It’s Winning? by Jonathan S. Tobin

Posted By on September 19th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20947/hamas-confident-in-winning

O]ne of the key fronts in this war is not in the Middle East. It’s in the United States.

[T]he political battle over the war in Gaza has been going pretty much the way the terrorists wanted it to. That’s reflected in Mashaal’s confidence, as well as Hamas’s negotiating tactics and its strategy in Gaza. After Oct. 7, the terrorists have been doing nothing but playing for time. And they expected that the time they needed to outlast the Israeli offensive would be provided to them by Israel’s closest ally.

President Joe Biden’s initial response to the Oct. 7 massacre was to join Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in saying that the only proper response to this atrocious crime was for Hamas to be “eliminated.” But almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth, Biden began to slowly back away from that position.

Over the next several months, as Israel’s counter-offensive into Gaza began, the United States played a double game. On the one hand, Washington continued to supply Jerusalem with munitions badly needed by the IDF. Eventually, however, it was reported that the Pentagon slow-walked its delivery to maintain leverage over the Israelis.

While the public pressure on Israel was bad, even worse was the duress the administration was employing against Netanyahu behind the scenes as it sought to delay every Israeli effort at finishing off the terrorists.

Administration officials were soon parroting the defeatist line about Hamas being an “idea” that could not be defeated, rather than a terrorist force that could be eliminated. Plenty of “ideas” have been militarily defeated, such as Nazism, which didn’t survive the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s genocidal regime. But to Americans and Israeli liberals, Hamas is regarded as an eternal force. By adopting this position, the opportunity to convince Palestinians to give up their fantasies about Israel’s elimination was thrown away and their century-long war on Zionism prolonged.

As Mashaal told the Times, Hamas viewed all of this as encouragement for its plan to simply… hold out until U.S. and international pressure — heightened by the anti-Israel bias of the mainstream media — forced Israel to stand down and allow the Islamists to emerge as the victor in the war.

The families of the remaining hostages and Netanyahu’s political opposition now seek to pressure him to give up the war and sign a ceasefire agreement, even if it means essentially handing Gaza back to Hamas and ensuring a repeat of the horrors of Oct. 7…. Hamas is counting on that sentiment.

But above all, Hamas views American pressure on Israel as its ace in the hole. As Mashaal pointed out, the way that the hostage negotiations have been handled by Washington has amounted to American “recognition” of Hamas as a diplomatic partner as opposed to a despised and outlawed terrorist organization. He is right about that.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

This wasn’t a war crime – it was an audacious assault on anti-Semites The left’s crazy wailing over the exploding Hezbollah pagers shows that Israel can’t do right for doing wrong. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on September 19th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/18/this-wasnt-a-war-crime-it-was-an-audacious-assault-on-anti-semites/

Getting your balls blown off by a primed pager has got to be the most ‘f**k around, find out’ thing that has ever happened. It took place in Lebanon yesterday. To the approval of both supporters of Israel and meme-makers everywhere, thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah operatives suddenly exploded. The footage coming out of Lebanon is extraordinary. A man’s trouser pocket erupting in a supermarket, a man writhing in agony in the middle of the road after his trusted comms device turned on him. The battle of the pagers will surely be recorded as one of the most unusual and audacious acts in the entire history of human warfare.

All eyes are on Israel, naturally. Experts suspect Mossad intercepted a massive stash of pagers destined for Hezbollah militants and planted explosive material in the batteries. Then they sent a signal, from hundreds of miles away, that caused the batteries to overheat and eventually to blow up. The planning required for such a spectacular op blows the mind – no pun intended. I know Israelophobia is the default position of the influential classes, but surely even they will admit this was an ingenious way for the Jewish State to take out the adherents to a self-styled ‘army of god’ that has sworn itself to excising the ‘cancerous growth’ of Zionism from the Middle East. (They mean Jews.)

Much remains unclear about the operation. Israel has not claimed responsibility. It is reported that 12 people were killed. Tragically, two of them were children. The others included Hezbollah fighters. Around 3,000 were injured, including Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani. Of course, the West’s leftists are too busy slamming evil Israel to ask why an Iranian official was in such close proximity to a Hezbollah pager. But then, we all know why. Yet for all the questions that still hang over this techno-assault on medieval militants, some observers seem unshakeably certain about one thing: it was terrorism. It was a war crime. It was yet more proof of what a uniquely nasty nation Israel is.

Invective is flying and tears are flowing across social media. The demonic state strikes again, radicals wail.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Green Agenda Would Punish Lower-Income Households the Most, Environmentalists Admit By James Lynch

Posted By on September 19th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-green-agenda-would-punish-lower-income-households-the-most-experts-say/

The costs of rapidly transitioning the world economy from natural gas to green energy sources over the coming decades will fall onto lower-income households the most, a reality that even proponents of many of those environmental policies now acknowledge.

The governor of the Bank of Italy, Fabio Panetta, acknowledged the potential negative impacts of a transition to “net-zero” carbon emissions while addressing an international energy conference on Monday.

“In fact, most climate change mitigation policies, such as carbon pricing, put pressure on the energy bills of businesses and households,” said Panetta, a former member of the European Central Bank governing council. “The consumption baskets of less affluent households are heavily weighted toward energy goods. They will therefore be disproportionately affected by the gradual increase in energy costs required for the transition.”

European and American consumers felt the burden of higher energy costs when oil prices spiked two years ago during the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine and inflation reached levels not seen since the 1970s. Inflation remains a top issue for American and European voters, as incumbent parties across Europe face difficult election prospects because of populist backlash.

“It is quite telling that a [former] member of the European Central Bank Governing Council who believes all of the fictitious asserted benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions feels compelled to warn just how expensive and devastating to consumers — and especially lower income consumers — carbon dioxide reductions will be,” said James Taylor, president of the Heartland Institute, a free-market think-tank.