P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Parent Coalition Urges Halt to $5.7 Million Taxpayer-Funded Transgender Study on Children By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on April 10th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/parent-coalition-urges-halt-transgender-study-children/

A group of hundreds of concerned parents is calling for an immediate halt to a taxpayer-funded study on transgender youth where the young participants are given powerful hormone blockers to stave off puberty and later a regimen of cross-sex hormones.

The Kelsey Coalition, a grassroots organization of parents whose children identify as transgender but who believe current transgender therapy has seriously harmed their children, sent a letter last week outlining their concerns to Dr. Jerry Menikoff, Director of the Office for Human Research Protections, which is part of Health and Human Services.

“The Kelsey Coalition contends this trial is unethical and violates laws protecting human subjects,” the group said in a statement.

The group said the OHRP confirmed Monday that it will “start a review” of the study.

Four pediatric gender clinics were awarded a $5.7 million grant in 2015 by the National Institutes of Health for the five-year study, “The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth,” which had 279 participants in the cross-sex hormone cohort and 71 participants in the puberty blocker cohort as of April 30, 2018.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Socialism Fails Every Time The best outcome is a reversion to capitalism. The worst? Hundreds of millions dead. By Joshua Muravchik

Posted By on April 10th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/socialism-fails-every-time-11554851786

Self-described socialist Bernie Sanders has become a favorite of young voters by posing as an apostle of daring new ideas. Socialism, however, is anything but new. It’s hard to think of another idea that has been tried and failed as many times in as many ways or at a steeper price in human suffering.

The term “socialism” was coined by followers of Robert Owen (1771-1858), whom Karl Marx would label a “utopian socialist.” In 1825 Owen founded New Harmony, an Indiana commune, to demonstrate the superiority of what was first called the “social system.” The same year, Owen explained his experiment to a joint session of Congress attended by Supreme Court justices, President James Monroe and President-elect John Quincy Adams. Although Owen poured his fortune into it, New Harmony collapsed in disarray and recrimination within two years.

Owen’s son Robert Dale Owen salvaged the community by implementing what he called “a policy the very reverse” of socialism: “giving each respectable citizen every facility and encouragement to become (what every adult ought to be) a landed proprietor.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Netanyahu celebrates ‘tremendous, tremendous victory’

Posted By on April 10th, 2019

https://worldisraelnews.com/netanyahu-celebrates-tremendous-tremendous

“The right-wing bloc led by Likud clearly won. I thank Israeli citizens for their trust,” Netanyahu stated at Likud headquarters Tuesday night.
It was a tense national election day on Tuesday, with the 10 p.m. exit polls showing the new Blue and White party in the lead or standing neck and neck with Likud.

Just after 3 a.m. Wednesday morning, however, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerged as the clear winner, with Likud leading 35 to 34 over Blue and White. They were followed by religious and right-wing parties – natural partners for Likud – putting Netanyahu in a strong position to form the next government.

“The right-wing bloc led by Likud clearly won,” Netanyahu told thousands of jubilant supporters at Likud headquarters. “I will begin forming a right-wing government with our natural partners already tonight… This is a night of tremendous, tremendous victory.”

“Already tonight, almost all of them declared publicly that they will recommend me to form the next government,” he said. “I intend to finish the job quickly in order to establish a nationalist, stable government.”

“It will be a right-wing government, but I intend to be the prime minister of all the citizens of Israel – right and left, Jews and non-Jews alike. All the citizens of Israel,” he declared.

Acknowledging the major hurdles facing Israel regarding security, economy, society and foreign relations, Netanyahu expressed confidence that “we will be able to meet all these challenges.”

Concerning the “path to peace with Arab nations,” for example, “even as we speak, it’s happening,” he said.

The Israeli leader tearfully thanked his wife and children for their support, noting “how much suffering my family has endured” during a particularly vicious election campaign fraught with mudslinging and defamation.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Congratulations to Texas Tech By Roger Clegg

Posted By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/texas-tech-eliminates-racial-preference-in-admissions/

As a result of a complaint that the Center for Equal Opportunity filed in 2004 against Texas Tech, the medical school there recently signed a Resolution Agreement (RA) with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, ending its use of racial preferences in admissions. As of March 1, “an applicant’s race and/or national origin are no longer to be considered.”

Kudos to Texas Tech: This is even more impressive than its run to the Final Four!

Our complaint was filed when, after the Supreme Court had issued its 2003 decisions narrowly upholding the use of racial-admission preferences in some circumstances, Texas Tech announced that it would begin considering race, notwithstanding the fact that it had not been doing so and had achieved plenty of racial and ethnic diversity nonetheless. In our view, since the Court made clear that race was not to be used except as a last resort, Texas Tech’s announced new policy was unjustifiable.

In the course of the 15-year investigation that followed, the university clarified or backed away from its 2005 pronouncement until, by last November, only the investigation of the five health-science schools remained. They, too, then clarified or backed away, so that by early this year the medical school was the only outlier. And on February 20 it came around, too. The relevant documents are posted on our website, here.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Pete Buttigieg and the Most Convenient Narrative By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pete-buttigieg-and-the-most-convenient-narrative/

Jim Treacher asks when Mike Pence has ever had a quarrel with Pete Buttigieg, pointing out that the vice president has never said anything negative about the South Bend mayor.

The “quarrel” between Pence and Buttigieg more or less begins and ends with Pence’s decision to support and sign the Religious Freedom Restoration Act back in 2015, which allowed individuals and companies to cite their religious beliefs and significant burdens upon those beliefs in legal proceedings. Opponents such as Buttigieg charged that the law would allow discrimination against gays and lesbians. The law was broadly popular; it passed the Indiana Senate 40 to 10 and the Indiana House 63-31. After Pence signed it into law, opponents vehemently denounced the law as “state-sanctioned discrimination.” Several large companies, sports leagues, and nonprofit institutions threatened to boycott the state. After about a week, Indiana lawmakers enacted an amendment that clarified that the RFRA could not be cited in certain discrimination cases.

In today’s Morning Jolt, I went through Buttigieg’s autobiography and noted that he describes his relationship with the then-governor as “complicated,” but that complication is mostly disagreeing on the RFRA. Buttigieg can never muster any examples of Pence being rude, hostile, or hateful, or ever making an issue out of Buttigieg’s sexual orientation, but the mayor laments “the complications of being openly gay in Mike Pence’s Indiana.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hyper-Modern, Hyper-Adaptive—and Deadly Transnational criminal networks have evolved with a complexity that outstrips current institutional capacities, investigative tools, and judicial systems. Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán

Posted By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/global-criminal-networks

Imagine that your son or brother has joined a protest against government corruption. During the demonstration, police arrive and force them onto a bus. You rush to the site of the event; you ask about him, but no one tells you anything. You keep searching, your anxiety mounting because you know the depth of the corruption in the city: police and the mayor often collaborate with local drug traffickers. You comfort yourself, remembering that your son or brother was with a large crowd. As the days pass, however, you realize that they weren’t taken into custody by the police; your son or brother has vanished. Two, then three, years pass, and you’re told that it’s too dangerous to keep looking, because “important” people were involved—the mayor, in fact, may have ordered local drug traffickers to kidnap the demonstrators.

What level of corruption is required for the kidnapping and disappearance of 43 students, as happened on September 26, 2014, at the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, State of Guerrero, Mexico—and getting away with it? It’s a corruption that goes beyond the traditional definitions that scholars advanced in the 1990s when defining administrative and systemic corruption, in which, say, a local political leader or police chief might receive kickbacks and bribes in exchange for going easy on crime. An international commission of experts investigating the Ayotzinapa events found something far more complex: the perpetrators “didn’t hide their identities,” and there had been possible coordination between the Guerreros Unidos crime syndicate, which was presumed to have killed the students, and at least 18 police patrol units from various municipalities, one state patrol unit, and government officials at various levels. Though some authorities received real-time information about the kidnapping, they didn’t act to protect the students. The commission also noted that Ayotzinapa is a hotspot for heroin trafficking to Chicago—but it is just one of 2,446 Mexican municipalities affected by the convergence of massive corruption and transnational criminal forces that traffic in drugs, arms, minerals, and human beings.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Income Inequality Comes Roaring Back Into The News Francis Menton

Posted By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-8-income-inequality-comes-roaring-back-into-the-news

With the demise of the Russian collusion hoax, you knew that something would have to emerge to fill the giant hole in the newspapers and the TV news shows. It looks like the old perennial of “income inequality,” after some time mostly off the front pages, is now the first mantra to be found rushing in to fill the vacuum.

So there we had Ray Dalio — serious mega-billionaire and Co-Chairman of the country’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates — showing up on CBS’s “60 Minutes” yesterday to proclaim that income inequality is a “national emergency”:

“If I was the president of the United States,” Dalio said, “what I would do is recognize that this is a national emergency. . . .” “The American dream is lost,” he said. “For the most part we don’t even talk about what is the American dream. And it’s very different from when I was growing up.”

Simultaneously, Mr. Progressive himself, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, turned up in Nevada (of all places) to promote his self-delusional presidential campaign, and chose income inequality as his theme. From today’s New York Post:

[T]here needs to be a “bigger discussion about income inequality and oppression of other groups including Latinos, Native Americans, Asian and women,” he said at the event organized by the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard’s Radical Uprising, 50 Years Later By Daniel Pipes

Posted By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/harvard-uprising-protests-1969-radicalism/

That takeover and bust culminated my political education.

Today marks 50 years of my political education. The events of April 9, 1969, helped make me who I am today and the university what it is.

I was a sophomore in college when my fellow students at Harvard University decided that politics, especially the war in Vietnam and the presence of a military-training program on campus, compelled them to take over the main administrative building, called University Hall.

Although opposed to this action, I joined the Communists of Students for a Democratic Society in University Hall to witness the uprising firsthand and take pictures. My photographs reveal about 250 students packed into the august President’s and Fellows’ Room, harangued as they disrespectfully stood and sat among its statues and under its portraits reaching high to the ceiling. The mood was triumphalist: Finally, students had taken matters into their own hands and showed those deans that they meant business! Flexing their muscles, the students escorted establishment lackeys out of the building, rifled through their files, and announced to humanity the dawning of a revolution.

Only, the revolution did not dawn. About 400 policemen entered University Hall at 3 a.m. and reminded the 500 students inside who the real boss was; that would be Harvard’s president. Letting off some righteous proletarian anger at the expense of pampered student radicals, the “pigs,” as they were then infelicitously dubbed, ignominiously beat and carted off the play-revolutionaries to jail.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The World Doesn’t Care About Groupthink By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/elites-share-common-interests-changes-conventional-wisdom/

Conventional wisdom may change in a flash (remember ‘peak oil’?), but elites remain elites, united by common interests.
“All things are in flux.” — Heraclitus

The adage “nothing last forever” is an understatement. Far more accurate is something like “nothing lasts until next week.”

Saint-to-Sinner Silicon Valley

A decade ago, even most Republicans admired the rugged entrepreneurialism of the high-tech Masters of the Universe who had built a multitrillion-dollar, world-dominating Internet, and the computer, mobile-phone, online-sales, and social-media industries, defined by marquee companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo.

In turn, Democrats gave up their suspicions of big money, as they canonized liberal Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Their wealth was okay, since the creators of it were progressives and dressed like Woodstock hipsters as they spread their billions freely among progressive think tanks, foundations, and political campaigns.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Rush to Judgment on the Newest Justice By Carrie Severino

Posted By on April 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/brett-kavanaugh-rush-to-judgment-on-newest-scotus-judge/

A piece by Richard Wolf that ran over the weekend in USA Today posits that the anticipated “conservative takeover of the Supreme Court . . . has been stalled by a budding bromance between” Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court’s newest member, Brett Kavanaugh. The author’s principal evidence: Their disagreement in only one of 25 cases that have been decided so far this term with Kavanaugh’s participation. (The newest justice has not participated in six other cases decided to date.) They parted ways in Stokeling v. United States. There Roberts joined Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in dissent from the majority’s holding that the Armed Career Criminal Act includes a robbery offense that requires a defendant to have overcome a victim’s resistance.

If that much agreement sounds remarkable, consider that most of those cases were decided unanimously and that no pair of justices disagreed with each other on the Court’s judgment over the course of those 25 cases more than nine times. For some perspective on just how early it still is, note that the Court’s previous term had 19 decisions in which the justices split 5–4. Most of this term’s decisions have yet to be issued, and the highest concentration of sharply divided ones tends to come later in the term.