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November 2018

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard Med School falls silent, won’t clarify why it opposes Trump admin’s definition of sex Sarah George –

By on November 29th, 2018

https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-med-school-

The medical school claims defining sex as an ‘immutable condition determined at birth’ is ‘medically inaccurate,’ but won’t say how.

Earlier this month, Harvard Medical School released a statement condemning the Trump Health and Human Services Department’s move to explicitly define sex “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” Yet since releasing the statement, the medical school has refused to clarify why specifically it opposes the proposed rule, and the school has also refused to divulge what it teaches its medical students about biological sex.

The College Fix acquired a copy of Harvard’s full statement via email wherein the school claims that defining sex as an immutable characteristic is, among other things, “medically inaccurate.”

“Harvard Medical School is staunchly opposed to any efforts by federal agencies to limit the definition of sex as an immutable condition determined at birth. This definition would be overly simplistic, medically inaccurate and antithetical to our values as healthcare providers.”

“Moreover, it demonstrates blatant disregard for federal civil law protections of transgender people,” the statement continues. It promises that the medical school “will be unwavering in safeguarding the rights of individuals regardless of sex, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation.”

Despite the strong stance taken in this statement, Harvard Medical School has been outright unwilling to answer any questions about its position on biological sex. Repeated emails asking if the medical school equates gender with sex and whether they instruct their obstetricians to not identify babies as male or female for fear of being “medically inaccurate” were ignored outright.

Gina Vild, a spokeswoman for the school, initially provided The Fix with the full statement, but she stopped responding to further emails seeking clarification on the school’s position.

The Fix proceeded to reach out to the medical school for a comment with further emails, phone calls, and online form submissions. Nobody from the school responded.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academia’s Case of Stockholm Syndrome written by Harry Crane and Ryan Martin

By on November 29th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/29/academias-case-of-stockholm

Earlier this year, we launched Researchers.One, a scholarly publication platform open to all researchers in all fields of study. Founded on the principles of academic freedom, researcher autonomy, and scholarly quality, Researchers.One features an innovative author-driven peer review model, which ensures the quality of published work through a self-organized process of public and non-anonymous pre- and post-publication peer review. Believing firmly that researchers can and do uphold the principles of good scholarship on their own, Researchers.One has no editorial boards, gatekeepers, or other barriers to interfere with scholarly discourse.

In its first few months, Researchers.One has garnered an overwhelmingly positive reception, both for its emphasis on core principles and its ability to attract high quality publications from a wide range of disciplines, including mathematics, physics, philosophy, probability, and statistics. Despite its promise, many academics worry that leaving peer review up to authors will grind the academic juggernaut to a halt. With nothing to stop authors from recruiting their friends as peer reviewers or from publishing a bunch of nonsense just to pad their CV, how should academic researchers be judged for hiring, tenure, or promotion? Without the signal of impact factor or journal prestige, how should readers assess the quality of published research? On their own, such questions are quite revealing of the predominant attitude toward academic publishing, which treats peer review as a means to an administrative end rather than an integral part of truth-seeking.

When done right, peer review is a rigorous process that fosters honest critique, lively discussion, and continual refinement of ideas for the mutual benefit of researchers and society. When done wrong, peer review plays to the worst instincts of human nature, devolving the pursuit of knowledge into a spectator sport in which the credibility of individual researchers, prestige of institutions, and legitimacy of scholarship as a whole are staked on the appearance of quality, objectivity, and novelty that the “peer review” label brings. As the above questions indicate, the prevailing mindset focuses on all that is wrong, and very little of what is right, with peer review.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Incorrigible Mr. Comey By Julie Kelly

By on November 29th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/29/the-incorrigible

As I wrote last week, the Republican Congress largely has failed to hold accountable the masterminds behind the biggest political scandal in U.S. history: The unprecedented weaponization of our law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to spy on a presidential campaign and sabotage an incoming administration.

The man primarily responsible for executing the scheme, former FBI Director James Comey, exited the Trump Administration as a martyr and a hero. Republican lawmakers blasted the president for his (totally justified) firing of the deceptive FBI director in May 2017, lauding his public service and reputation even as the disturbing details of the way his agency spied on the Trump campaign and hid the probe from Congress were coming into view.

After successfully escaping any accountability for his actions, it’s no surprise that Comey now is threatening to thwart Congress once again. On Thanksgiving morning, Comey responded on Twitter to a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee: “Got a subpoena from House Republicans. I’m still happy to sit in the light and answer all questions. But I will resist a ‘closed door’ thing because I’ve seen enough of their selective leaking and distortion. Let’s have a hearing and invite everyone to see.”

Now, it would take way too much space to mock the irony of Comey’s concerns about leaking and distortion. We know Comey’s top deputies were illegally leaking information to the press right up until the time he was fired. He also arranged for a friend to leak personal memos he wrote about his private interactions with the president to the press.

But here is the most galling part of Comey’s response: The man who once led the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world is threatening to defy a legally issued congressional subpoena unless the interview is conducted on his terms.

And the reason isn’t that Comey has nothing to hide—it’s that he has plenty to hide and he knows a public setting would provide him precisely the cover he needs.

He “Can’t Answer in an Open Setting”
During open testimony on Capitol Hill last year, Comey repeatedly invoked the defense, “it’s classified” as a way to avoid publicly disclosing crucial information about his agency’s conduct in 2016 and 2017. He dodged questions about the infamous Steele dossier, a thoroughly discredited political document produced by an opposition research firm that had been hired by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to dig up Russia-related dirt on Trump. Comey cited the dossier as key evidence on his October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain a warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Have a Very Intolerant Day Celebrate the International Day of Tolerance with intolerance to the UN. Daniel Greenfield

By on November 29th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272062/have-very-intolerant-day-daniel-greenfield

November 16 is National Button Day, National Fast Food Day and International Tolerance Day: if you’ve never heard of International Tolerance Day, that just shows how intolerant you are.

International Tolerance Day was celebrated at the World Tolerance Summit at the Armani Hotel in Dubai. A photo of the event shows three Arab Muslim men in burnooses sitting under the Summit’s subtitle, “Prospering from Pluralism: Embracing Diversity through Innovation and Collaboration.”

The UAE is an Arab Muslim entity. Good luck obtaining citizenship if you aren’t an Arab Muslim. Leaving Islam is forbidden, but the government has a special site encouraging infidels to convert to Islam.

Diversity is great. As long as it’s limited to Muslim men. Pluralism is fantastic. But you’re not allowed to leave Islam. And tolerance is applied equally to Muslim men and other Muslim men on Tolerance Day.

Like most terrible global ideas, International Tolerance Day was invented by the UN. Or specifically by UNESCO around the time that Bosnia and Herzegovina joined up before becoming enmeshed in a genocidal war. Because nothing says tolerance like genocidal ethnic conflicts at the United Nations.

Key conferences were held in Russia, Korea and Turkey: three countries in a permanent state of war.

The Turkey tolerance conference featured a renewal of Turkey’s emergency law after over 10,000 Kurds were killed by Turkish authorities. After the Korean tolerance conference, North Korea sent armed infiltrators across the border. And during the Moscow tolerance conference, Chechen Islamic terrorists attacked a hospital and took thousands of hostages. The 1995 score read: Intolerance 3, Tolerance 0.

But that’s always the way it is at the UN where tolerance is on the menu, but never on the plate.

International Tolerance Day led to the Year of Tolerance in 1995. It wasn’t very successful as the Bosnian War was still going on, the First Chechen War was underway, and the Taliban were wrapping up their takeover of Afghanistan. The Turks were tolerantly killing the Kurds, the Kurds in Iraq were killing each other, Bill Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs, and the United Nations retreated from Somalia.

And that was the last Year of Tolerance.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The West Shouldn’t Support A Nigerian Government That Enables Islamic Terrorism Against Christians By Dan DeCarlo

By on November 29th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/29/west-shouldnt-support-nigerian-government-enables-islamic-terrorism-christians/
Few Americans are aware of how Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, enables the mass ethnic cleansing of persecuted Christians.

Although it has occasionally made headlines due to the rise of the violent Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram in its northern hinterland, Nigeria is still largely misunderstood and major events in the country remain under-reported in the American media. There are significant U.S. values and strategic interests at stake in Nigeria’s forthcoming election, including questions about the persecution of Christians, the future of U.S. military cooperation in Nigeria, and the spread of Islamist terrorism.

Nigeria is Africa’s largest democracy, with approximately 200 million people and expected to grow to more than 300 million by 2050. The country has long had a history of religious tension and conflict between the mostly Muslim north and predominately Christian south.

This conflict has intensified over the past several decades, engendered by the rise of a new radical Islamism, which has preached a brutal campaign of international holy war against unbelievers. In recent months, Nigeria has witnessed shocking anti-Christian violence, resulting in thousands of deaths and maimings.
Americans Largely Ignorant About What’s Happening

Few Americans are aware that the United States is in the process of selling a dozen light attack aircraft to the government of current President Muhammadu Buhari––a government that has continually soft-peddled and enabled a campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing carried out by Islamic militants against Nigeria’s Christian population.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump and China’s Most Valuable Export One way or another, the President can win on intellectual property. By James Freeman

By on November 29th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-chinas-most-valuable-export-1543525958

Investors are still guessing whether and how the United States and China will settle their differences when President Trump sits down to dinner with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping this weekend. But even if Mr. Xi won’t agree to stop stealing U.S. technology, Mr. Trump can get Chinese help in enhancing American intellectual property.

A Reuters report today suggests that for now the White House is focused on playing defense:

The Trump administration is considering new background checks and other restrictions on Chinese students in the United States over growing espionage concerns, U.S. officials and congressional sources said.

In June, the U.S. State Department shortened the length of visas for Chinese graduate students studying aviation, robotics and advanced manufacturing to one year from five. U.S. officials said the goal was to curb the risk of spying and theft of intellectual property in areas vital to national security…

Every Chinese student who China sends here has to go through a party and government approval process,” one senior U.S. official told Reuters. “You may not be here for espionage purposes as traditionally defined, but no Chinese student who’s coming here is untethered from the state.”

Having practiced its surveillance techniques on associates of the Republican party in the U.S., perhaps America’s intelligence community can now gather important information about espionage directed by the Communist party in China.

But the U.S. can play offense, too, by untethering Chinese tech talent from the state. For Chinese students who don’t appear to pose any threat, the U.S. should seek to recruit more of them to study in the U.S. and ultimately to create new intellectual property here. Whether native or foreign-born, innovators are treated less well in China than they used to be.

The Chinese regime’s official publication People’s Daily says that billionaire Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma is a member of the Communist party. Li Yuan reports in the New York Times that for businesspeople in China calling themselves communists is “often a matter of expediency. Party membership provides a layer of protection in a country where private ownership protections are often haphazardly enforced or ignored entirely.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Here we go’: Stormy Daniels claims she really didn’t give Michael Avenatti permission to sue Trump for her By Monica Showalter

By on November 29th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/here_we_go_stormy_daniels_claims_she_really_didnt_give_michael_avenatti_permission_to_sue_trump_for_her.html

Obviously, she wants something.

Stormy Daniels is back in the news, following the ignominious loss of her court case against President Trump, where she was ordered to pay the latter’s legal costs. Now she says the actual lawsuit against Trump and the fundraising for her legal costs were all done without her permission. According to Fox News:

Adult-film actress Stormy Daniels claimed Wednesday that her attorney, Michael Avenatti, sued President Trump for defamation without her approval and launched a second fundraising campaign to raise money “without my permission or even my knowledge … and attributing words to me that I never wrote or said.”

In a statement to The Daily Beast, Daniels said that “Avenatti has been a great advocate in many ways,” but she added: “in other ways Michael has not treated me with the respect and deference an attorney should show to a client.”

“For months I’ve asked Michael Avenatti to give me accounting information about the fund my supporters so generously donated to for my safety and legal defense,” Daniels said. “He has repeatedly ignored those requests. Days ago I demanded again, repeatedly, that he tell me how the money was being spent and how much was left.”

Apparently, there wasn’t a problem with the fundraising to pay her legal bills (to Avenatti) before the judge’s ruling against her came down. And if she went along anyway, well, we have another instance of “here we go,” which is Daniels’s most defining quote. Apparently, she goes along with anything so long as she gets paid, and on this one, she gets to pay instead. Thus the woman the New York Times hails as a “new feminist hero.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Kremlin Surprised by Abrupt Cancellation of Trump–Putin Meeting By Mairead McArdle

By on November 29th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-meeting-cancelled-abruptly/

The Kremlin was caught off guard by President Trump’s sudden cancellation of a planned meeting between with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Russian state news agencies said Thursday.

Trump had planned to sit down with Putin at the G-20 summit in Argentina, but canceled the meeting in a tweet Thursday, citing Russia’s Sunday capture of three Ukrainian ships and 24 sailors.

“Based on the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine from Russia, I have decided it would be best for all parties concerned to cancel my previously scheduled meeting in Argentina with President Vladimir Putin,” Trump wrote.

On Sunday, Russian and Ukrainian forces clashed off the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. Russian border guards opened fire on three Ukrainian ships and captured their crews as they sailed in the Sea of Azov, which is shared by the two nations. Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has asked for NATO ships to be sent to the region to “provide security.”

“Foreign military ships entered Russia’s territorial waters without responding to any requests made by our border guards. Therefore, all actions were taken in strict compliance with the law,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said of the incident.

The cancellation means the Russian president will have “a couple of more hours” for “useful meetings” with other leaders, Peskov was quoted as saying Thursday.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Latest Climate Report Feeds into Alarmist Fearmongering By Nicolas Loris

By on November 29th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/national-climate-assessment-doomsday-scenarios-fearmongering/

The doomsday scenarios in the National Climate Assessment are close to impossible.

The latest National Climate Assessment, released just last week, aims to plant yet another seed of climate catastrophism into the mind of the public. Predictably, its worst-case scenarios got huge play in the media. After all, disaster sells.

But the doomsday scenarios that animated talking heads throughout the weekend aren’t just highly unlikely; they’re close to impossible. For example, the report speculated that climate “inaction” could result in as much as a 10 percent drop in U.S. gross domestic product by 2100. Admittedly, a lot can happen in 82 years. But a 10 percent drop in GDP is more than twice the loss suffered during the Great Recession.

How could things get so bad? Well, put garbage in, and you’ll get garbage out. The study, funded in part by climate warrior Tom Steyer, calculates these costs by assuming that the world will be 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2100. That mind-boggling assumption is even higher than the worst-case scenario predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In other words, it is completely unrealistic.

Other scary projections in the National Climate Assessment rely on a theoretical climate trajectory known as Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP 8.5) — one of four trajectories that climatologists use to estimate the effects of different greenhouse-gas concentrations.

To put it plainly, RCP 8.5 assumes a combination of extreme factors — all bad — that are not likely to all coincide. It assumes “the fastest population growth (a doubling of Earth’s population to 12 billion), the lowest rate of technology development, slow GDP growth, a massive increase in world poverty, plus high energy use and emissions.”

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MEDIA Comments turned off

CNN Refuses To Condemn CNN Pundit’s Anti-Semitism By David Harsanyi

By on November 29th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/29/cnn-refuses-to-condemn-cnn-pundits-anti-semitism/

A few years ago, I was admonished by a prominent CNN anchor upset that The Federalist had published an article he claimed was anti-Semitic. The column in question, written by an Orthodox Jew, warned that his co-religionists had become fixated on the largely powerless alt-right while allowing left-wing anti-Semitism to go unchecked in American institutions.

It didn’t hit me at the time to mention that a perfect example of this trend could be found on CNN. Marc Lamont Hill, allegedly “one of the leading intellectual voices in the country,” according to the network, already boasted a long history of using anti-Semitic rhetoric, not only defending terrorists abroad but praising Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan here at home.

On Wednesday, Hill gave speech in front of the United Nations, advocating for violence against the Jewish State and dropping the well-known eliminationist phrase, “from the river to the sea,” a favorite of Hamas and other Islamic terror groups, to the applause of representatives from theocrats and tyrannies around the world.

No one uses this phrase accidentally — certainly not in this context. Certainly not someone smart enough to be considered one of the nation’s leading intellectuals. As Hill pointed out in his ham-fisted attempts to walk back these statements, “from the river to the sea” predates Hamas by 50 years. It also predates the idea of “occupied territories.” The expression, which has existed in various forms since the inception of Israel, was adopted by Yasser Arafat in 1964, before the West Bank came under Israel’s control after repelling an attempt to destroy it.

During the Oslo negotiations, when he finally dropped the idea, Arafat openly admitted that the phrase connoted complete Arab control of the lands between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. It has nothing to do, as Hill laughably contends, with the emergence of a multi-ethnic liberal democratic state. Rather, it is about pushing Jews into the sea.

You’d think this kind of bigoted rhetoric would be highly upsetting to CNN’s sensitive journalists, who are able to ferret out anti-Semitic dog whistles, sometimes real and often imagined, all over the place.

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