NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

First Do No Harm – Medical Ethics vs Transgender Politics By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on February 22nd, 2018

http://politicalmavens.com/

The Mt Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery has induced lactation in a transgender woman who has not had sex-reassignment surgery or breast augmentation; in other words, a biologically correct man who was taking hormones and wanted to nurse the baby born to ze’s partner who is female but didn’t want to nurse. The staff at Mt. Sinai advised this couple on how to acquire and use domperidone, a drug that is not FDA approved, not available in the U.S. and one for which the FDA has issued warnings against serious cardiac problems including death. The team leaders who directed this experimental procedure are an endocrinologist who is committed to the health of the LGBT community and a nurse-practitioner who is an activist transgender woman herself.

After treatment, the patient was able to nurse the newborn infant for a period of six weeks. This “breakthrough” case was written up and published in Transgender Health which admits that it remains unclear whether this fluid is nutritionally equivalent to the milk produced by biological birth mothers. The NY Times (Feb 16) describes at length the advantages of breast feeding – including healthier babies with higher I.Q.’s , better bonding with the mother (in this case, a biological male) and even money-saving on formula. There is no mention of how much the transgender nursing woman spends on hormones compared with infant formula, but ze continues to use a testosterone blocker which is excreted in human milk.

Aside from noting that “some” called this experiment dangerous and disturbing, the Times does not elaborate on whether the “some” are medical professionals or simply ordinary people who may be astounded at the hospital’s sponsorship and supervision of an experiment using a drug considered unsafe and forbidden for sale in the U.S. Furthermore, the Times never questions whether a human infant is the right subject for such experimentation which may be toxic for adults. Do any of us still remember the outrage over testing mascara on innocent rabbits? Are some of us old enough to remember the consequences of using a popular drug prescribed by doctors for morning sickness in pregnant women – thalidomide? Or a drug used by pregnant women which resulted in ovarian cancer in their daughters decades later? Shouldn’t this controversial liquid have been fed to a lab animal for a significant period of time before contemplating feeding it to a human? Are researchers who are activists or medically committed to the needs and wants of the LGBT community the most objective people to weigh the potential harm to an infant versus the political gain to the transgender movement?

There is a world of difference between what adults choose to put into their bodies with questionable medical repercussions and the ethics of doctors supervising experiments which directly impact infants who are fragile and cannot give consent. We are not told what the Ethics Board of Mt. Sinai has to say – perhaps that will await the first lawsuit which is sure to come.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

GLAZOV GANG: THE MEDIA’S ROMANCE WITH NORTH KOREA JAMIE GLAZOV

Posted By on February 22nd, 2018

http://jamieglazov.com/2018/02/21/glazov-gang-the-medias-romance-with-north-korea/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center and editor of The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel discusses The Media’s Romance With North Korea,unveiling how the Left’s love affair with totalitarian monsters continues full speed ahead.

Don’t miss it!

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama’s Meddling in Foreign Elections: Six Examples By Steve Baldwin (June 2017)

Posted By on February 21st, 2018

Why such silence from the media that obsesses over alleged Russian interference in our elections?

While the media obsess over an alleged Russian conspiracy to collude with Donald Trump to affect America’s 2016 presidential election, what about Obama’s interference in the elections of other countries? Most Americans have no idea that President Obama meddled in elections all over the world. And apparently, the media decided there’s no reason for Americans to know about this illegal activity.

Indeed, in 2016, the Los Angeles Times did a story on how America has interfered with other nation’s elections in the past, but they stopped short of mentioning the various foreign elections Obama tried to influence. But the same article reports that Obama “slapped Russia with new penalties for meddling in the U.S. Presidential election… by hacking into Democratic and Republican computer networks and selectively releasing emails.” Hypocrisy check, anyone?

Since that article appeared last December, it has essentially become fake news. The Republican National Committee was never successfully hacked into and evidence is mounting that the DNC was not hacked by Russia. Not only has Wiki Leaks itself insisted Russia was not the source, but a number of cyber security experts, including McAfee antivirus developer John McAfee, disputes this. McAfee says the hack on the DNC “used a piece of malware a year and half old” and was “not an organized hack and certainly not a nation-state that did this.” Moreover, the DNC has never allowed the FBI or any government agency to analyze the computers in question.

Nevertheless, Obama, operating on unconfirmed evidence, abruptly imposed new sanctions on Russia. Many observers believe he did so in order to set the stage for the left to initiate its phony Russian-Trump collusion narrative to be used to remove Trump from office or to defeat him in 2020.

Meddling in other’s elections is a violation of international law. In 1965, the United Nations General Assembly reaffirmed this with a resolution stating: “No State has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal […] affairs of any other State.” And the International Court of Justice also considers such intervention to be illegal. More importantly, U.S. law prohibits the use of tax dollars to influence foreign elections.

Nevertheless, the violation of both American and international law did not stop Obama from intervening repeatedly in the elections of other nations. Moreover, most of Obama’s meddling was known by many foreign correspondents and if it was reported at all, it was downplayed. Most certainly, the media did not condemn it nor drop hints about impeaching Obama.

So let’s get this straight. The media is hysterical about a flimsy conspiracy theory that Russia colluded with Trump to steal the 2016 election but was mostly silent about Obama’s efforts to control the outcome of elections in at least six countries during his tenure. Media bias, anyone? Let’s review the examples we know about:

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UK: Max Hill, The Queen’s Counsel for Political Correctness by A. Z. Mohamed

Posted By on February 21st, 2018

Hill’s aim to ban the term “Islamist terrorism” indicates that political correctness is more important to him than strengthening Britain’s counter-terrorist efforts.

His recommendation comes despite the fact that Hill himself, whose official title is Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, referred to the “threats from Islamist terrorism” in his first report, released in January.

Britain’s terrorism watchdog, Max Hill QC (Queen’s Counsel), recently told a parliamentary committee that it is “fundamentally wrong to attach the word ‘terrorism’ to any of the world religions,” and suggested that the term “Daesh-inspired terrorism” should be used instead of “Islamist terrorism” to refer to attacks carried out by Muslims (“Daesh” is the Arabic acronym for ISIS). His recommendation comes despite the fact that Hill himself, whose official title is Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, referred to the “threats from Islamist terrorism” in his first report, released in January. In that first report, Hill also argued that “what [Islamic terrorists] claim to do in the name of religion is actually born from an absence of real understanding about the nature of the religion they claim to follow.” How impressive that he knows more about their religion than they do, despite the fact that the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, received a PhD in Koranic Studies from Saddam University for Islamic Studies in 2007.

Although Hill’s statements ostensibly put him at odds with Prime Minister Theresa May, she too has mystifyingly called terrorism “a perversion of Islam.”

There are two problems with this expression of political correctness. One is that although the Quran and Sunnah contain inherently contradictory texts, most jihadi leaders and ideologues follow and act upon the most extremist and violent interpretation of them. Therefore, constantly apologizing for the religion is worse than counter-productive: it is incorrect. The other, related, problem is that British policy is forged and implemented on the basis of ideas; so when those ideas stem from a fear of offending Muslims, the policy is necessarily flawed.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Britain: The Hijab as the Entry Point for Islam by Khadija Khan

Posted By on February 21st, 2018

Islamists seem to be influencing the British school system with ease: there is simply no solid opposition to them. The government even stays silent about the harassment and intimidation.

Islamists in Britain seem to be intent on establishing regressive requirements, such as the hijab for young girls, wife beating, making homosexuality illegal, death for apostates, halala rituals in divorce, and exploitation of women and children through Sharia courts as part and parcel of British culture.

That St. Stephen’s School allowed itself to be blackmailed in this way bodes ill for both Britain and its education system.

St. Stephen’s School in East London recently imposed a ban on hijabs (Islamic headscarves), but reversed its decision after administrators received hundreds of threats from enraged Muslims.

Among the targeted officials from the primary school was the head of governors, Arif Qawi, who had supported the ban on the grounds that the girls wearing hijabs were less likely to integrate socially with their peers. As a result of the outcry, Qawi submitted his resignation, saying that members of the staff were afraid to come to the school.

Head teacher Neena Lall, whose educational philosophy has turned St. Stephen’s into one of the best secular primary schools in Britain’s capital — in spite of its being in Newham, a poor neighborhood where English is spoken predominantly as a second language — was bombarded with e-mails calling her a “pedophile” who “deserved what she had coming.” Lall, of Punjabi origin, was even compared to Hitler in a video uploaded to YouTube.

It is not the first time that British educators have been intimidated by Muslim extremists. The head of Anderton Park School in Birmingham, Ms. Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson, received similar threats on social media.

Anderton Park School was inspected as part of the “Trojan Horse” scandal, in which the British government discovered that Muslim extremists had been trying to take over Britain’s secular school system.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Shame on Mayor Khan Douglas Murray

Posted By on February 21st, 2018

So it appears that there will be no state visit for Donald Trump. The US President will not travel down The Mall in a carriage with the Queen. More than that, it appears that the leader of our closest ally will not visit London at all. He may have gone to Paris already. He may have gone to Brussels. He may be able to travel to Hamburg with ease. But his feet will not darken the streets of London. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who had repeatedly campaigned against the President, chose to take some credit once the non-visit was announced: Trump had “got the message”. Londoners such as Mayor Khan did not want Trump to visit — ever.

There are a number of disconcerting aspects to all this. One is the fact that the American President will not be visiting Britain during a period when British relationship-building will everywhere be of unusual importance. Second, there is the fact that all this suggests that a small group of noisy activists on social media can decide who should and who should not visit the UK. That isn’t democracy, or even government, but rule by social media mob.

But most alarming is the pride with which those who have kept him away have responded. And Mayor Khan most of all. Londoners were used to their Mayor having a separate foreign policy when Ken Livingstone represented their city. But to consider the full awfulness of Khan’s intervention it is worth comparing him to his immediate predecessor. Imagine if Boris Johnson had insulted Angela Merkel. Imagine that it wasn’t even a gaffe — which would have been bad enough. Imagine if he had actually campaigned to stop her coming to London and suggested he would help to raise a crowd if she came. In such a situation, if the leader of an ally like Germany actually chose not to come as a result of something Boris Johnson had said, there would be an uproar. There would have been no way the Mayor could have remained in position, no way, indeed, he could ever have held public office again. Why can Mayor Khan help keep the US President out of London and escape similar censure?

***

Former Google engineer James Damore has just filed a class-action lawsuit against his erstwhile employer. The filing states that it aims to represent not only Damore but other employees of Google who have been discriminated against because of their “perceived conservative political views”, “their male gender” and “their Caucasian race”. Among the details in the suit is the allegation that the “presence of Caucasian males was mocked with ‘boos’ during company-wide weekly meetings”. This is remarkable stuff. If a bakery in Northern Ireland, say, was even once alleged to have organised weekly “boos” of any black or gay staff, then the company would be out of business before anyone had ascertained whether the charges were true or not.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Rupert Darwall Green Ideology’s Failed Experiment *****

Posted By on February 21st, 2018

The national grids of developed nations were masterpieces of design and function until eco-ideologues and professional warmists opened the powerhouse door to rent-seekers and wreckers. The result: blackouts, price-gouging and a modern world no longer quite so modern.

At a February 2000 press conference, the first man to walk on the moon announced the National Academy of Engineering’s twenty most significant engineering achievements of the twentieth century. The aeroplane took third place; the automobile second; in first, the vast networks of electricity that power the developed world. None of the other nineteen would have been possible without electricity, Neil Armstrong declared. “If anything shines as an example of how engineering changed the world during the twentieth century,” he said, “it is certainly the power we use in our homes and businesses.”[1]

The twentieth century’s bequest of cheap, reliable electrical energy is now being undone. For the past decade or so, Australia and other industrialised countries have been conducting a vast experiment on their electrical grids. Tried, tested and refined technologies — predominantly based on coal-fired generation — are being replaced by weather-dependent wind and solar farms. Western societies are moving from industrial means of generating their electricity, with the precision, reliability and economies of scale that implies, to intermittent sources that, like agriculture, depend on the weather, with all that implies for cost and reliability.

The green energy revolution – counter-revolution would be more accurate – did not come about because wind and solar are superior generating technologies. If they were, they wouldn’t have needed the plethora of costly political interventions. These have turned the electricity market into an Aladdin’s cave for rent-seekers while destroying the market’s function to allocate capital sensibly and serve customers efficiently. Instead, the origins of the renewable experiment lie in a deeply ideological reaction against the Industrial Revolution, which, in one of the most important developments of our age, almost imperceptibly became the boilerplate of elite opinion.

Now the results of that experiment are in and they’re not looking good. Australians formerly enjoyed one of the world’s lowest-cost energy markets. Not anymore. In nine years, retail prices in the National Electricity Market (NEM) are up 80-90%. In just two years, business electricity costs doubled, even tripled, resulting in staff lay-offs, relocations and industry closures.[2] ‘The requirement is for efficient prices and affordability for “a healthy NEM,” the Energy Security Board states in its first annual report.[3]

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mueller Comes Up Short – Again When they have nothing, prosecutors charge people with lying to the feds. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on February 21st, 2018

A Dutch lawyer unconnected to the unproven claim the Trump campaign somehow colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 election has pled guilty to lying to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.

This failure – yet again – to indict a Trump campaign official in connection with the campaign’s allegedly collusive behavior appears to constitute another tacit admission by Mueller that the Left’s electoral collusion conspiracy theory that he was commissioned to investigate is utter nonsense. Charging all these people with lying, instead of with anything related to collusion, is likely a prosecutorial tactic to pressure somebody somewhere into doing something. Mueller’s real target seems to be former Trump campaign manager Paul J. Manafort Jr.

This small-potatoes indictment comes a year after the outlines of a Watergate-like conspiracy emerged in which a term-limited Democrat president used the privacy-invading apparatus of the state to spy on a Republican presidential candidate. Watergate differed in that President Nixon didn’t get involved in the plot against the Democratic National Committee until later as an accomplice after the fact.

Mueller’s latest piñata is Alex van der Zwaan, a Russian-speaking, London-based attorney and the son-in-law of Russian oligarch German Borisovich Khan. Khan, who is worth more than $10 billion, was born in Kiev, Ukraine and is reportedly a citizen of Russia, Ukraine, and Israel. Van der Zwaan, 33, married Khan’s daughter, art critic Eva Khan, last year.

Van der Zwaan is the 19th person to be charged by Mueller. On Friday, 13 Russians on a so-called troll farm located in Russia were charged with interfering in the 2016 U.S. election by posing as Americans and organizing political rallies inside the U.S.

The attorney had worked for the international corporate law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, but the firm indicated it fired him last year and was cooperating with Mueller’s investigation.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Mattis: Service Members Need to be Deployable or Find Another Job By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on February 21st, 2018

Defense Secretary James Mattis said the new Pentagon policy that will remove service members who have not been deployable for a year or more is about fairly sharing the burden within the forces.

The deploy-or-leave policy includes exceptions for pregnancy and wounded warriors. Robert Wilkie, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee last week that “on any given day, about 13 to 14 percent of the force is medically unable to deploy.”

En route to Washington on Saturday, Mattis told reporters that there is a “higher expectation of deployability by our forces” and the policy isn’t “to make change for change’s sake,” as he vowed when coming into the department.

“The Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness about a week ago came out, having defined the problem that initially was brought to his attention by the U.S. Army, where they had many nondeployables on their rolls. You may say, what’s this? People who’ve been injured and not returned to duty. People who have — and I’m not talking about combat injured now. That’s a separate category. But people who are, just for one reason or another, are not able to deploy with their units. It was a significant number, and the Army brought their concerns forward. The other services also highlighted the concerns,” he said. “They’ve come out with a policy that if you’re not deployable for a year or more, you’re going to have to go somewhere else.”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Powell: ‘Pretty Shocking’ That So Many American Youths Lack Smarts, Fitness for Military By Nicholas Ballasy

Posted By on February 21st, 2018

WASHINGTON – Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said too many young people do not qualify for military service due in part to obesity and criminal records, which is reflective of many “scary” problems in local communities that must be addressed.

Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H. W. Bush and President Bill Clinton, was asked why he thinks more African-Americans should join the military.

“I’m very, very thankful that they do, and they join the military for a variety of reasons: a combination of patriotism, looking for a change in their life experience at that point, travel or serving their country, just serving their country. And many of them go in because, frankly, it’s a steady wage every month,” Powell said during a discussion at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Avoice Heritage Celebration recognizing African-American veterans.

“More importantly, the benefits when you come out are very significant, and so it’s good. One of the problems we’re having, and this is scary, it’s not just the African-American community, it’s all of our American young people,” he added.

According to Powell, only about 25 percent of Americans 18 to 25 years old are able to meet the qualifications for military service. He said the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) “timed multi-aptitude test” is not that hard to pass.

“They can’t get through the basic exam that we give them. Now, c’mon, it’s not that hard of a test, but even high school kids who graduated high school can’t get through this exam. Secondly, criminal records; third, drug use; and fourth, obesity. And if you are very obese the army doesn’t want that medical problem, rightly. So we still get the number we need but it is pretty shocking that only 25 percent of our young people are eligible for service,” he said. CONTINUE AT SITE