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February 2022

Black History Month and the usable past Aggregate history washes away the details that represent an actual life lived : Peter Wood

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/black-history-month-usable-past-ancestry/

This is Black History Month when we are invited to think through a certain spectrum of the people who came before us. As it happens, I am very much interested in black history. I wrote a book about it, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, and several books about diversity, and I have been working for several years on a nearly completed documentary about the early days of black theater and film. But, lacking any black ancestors, I must make do with my own sketchy line of progenitors.

When I was growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, my father attempted to find his great-grandfather — GGF in anthropological parlance. GGF had an air of mystery since all anyone knew about him was his last name and GGM’s inveterate reply when asked about him: “He was lost at sea.” His name had been razored out of the family Bible. My father doubted the bit about his being “lost at sea.” The family haled from the far side of the Adirondacks, where few fathers were lost full fathom five. Dad wanted to know more. This led to detours on family vacations to rural cemeteries and county court houses in Upstate New York.

OUR WASTE OF THE WEEK: BIDEN ADMINISTRATION TO SEND MORE U.S. MONEY TO AFGHANISTAN

In this week’s “Waste Of The Week,” we spotlighted the Biden Administration’s plans to continue spending your hard-earned tax-dollars in Afghanistan.
 
Over the past 20 years, the United States spent nearly $2 trillion in Afghanistan – while we experienced 22,000 military casualties and lost 2,400 American soldiers.
 
If we move forward with the Administration’s plans to fund Afghanistan through the U.S. Department of Treasury – we run the risk of funding the world’s most dangerous foreign terrorist organization, The Taliban.

U.S. Senator Joni Ernst and other senate colleagues responded to these plans and sent a letter to Secretary of State, Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, sharing their concerns and inquiring as to whether U.S. taxpayer dollars have gone to Afghanistan since the withdrawal in August 2021.
 
Will the Administration respond to Ernst?
 https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/taxpayer-dollars-used-for-afghan-humanitarian-aid-says-watchdog-group-biden-afghanistan-military-taliban-treasury-joni-ernst-antony-blinken-iowa-haqqani

Inside the Woke Indoctrination Machine After watching 100 hours of leaked video, we now fully grasp the danger of this ideology in schools. By Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-woke-indoctrination-machine-diversity-equity-inclusion-bipoc-schools-conference-11644613908?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Last spring we exposed how two elite independent schools in New York had become corrupted by a divisive obsession with race, helping start the national movement against critical race theory. Schools apply this theory under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion programming. Until now, however, neither of us fully grasped the dangers of this ideology or the true motives of its practitioners. The goal of DEI isn’t only to teach students about slavery or encourage courageous conversations about race, it is to transform schools totally and reshape society radically.

Over the past month we have watched nearly 100 hours of leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies. The conference is NAIS’s flagship annual event for disseminating DEI practices, and more than 6,000 DEI practitioners, educators and administrators attended this year. Intended as professional development and not meant for the public, these workshops are honest, transparent and unfiltered—very different from how private schools typically communicate DEI initiatives. These leaked videos act as a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the DEI playbook.

The path to remake schools begins with the word “diversity,” which means much more than simply increasing the number of students and faculty of color—referred to in these workshops as “Bipoc,” which stands for “black, indigenous and people of color.” DEI experts urge schools to classify people by identities such as race, convince them that they are being harmed by their environment, and turn them into fervent advocates for institutional change.

The Pentagon’s Political Priorities Sleep well tonight. The U.S. Army has plans to defeat climate change.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pentagons-political-priorities-army-climate-change-11644614919

“But never fear, the Pentagon is also on high alert over identity politics. This week it pumped out a press release about the “need for diversity, equity and inclusion to be a consideration or part of all decisions in the military.”

The world looks more dangerous every day, so let’s check in on the folks responsible for defending America. The Biden Defense Department hasn’t released a National Defense Strategy and the Pentagon can’t adjust its priorities while it’s stuck in continuing budget resolutions from Congress. But the Army is devoting time and effort to trumpeting its new plan to fight the invisible enemy of climate change.

“Climate change endangers national and economic security, and the health and well-being of the American people,” the first-ever Army Climate Strategy says. Among the stated goals: a 50% reduction in Army net greenhouse gas pollution by 2030; installing a microgrid on every installation by 2035; and converting its nontactical fleet of vehicles (vans, for example) to all-electric by 2035.

The Army pitches this as a natural extension of its mission to plan and prosecute wars, though nothing about less reliable energy sources or more expensive logistics will make the Army a better fighting force. The Pentagon insists it can fight climate change while dealing with threats like Russia and China, but focus is a finite resource and the service has far more urgent priorities.

Science shows the vaccine mandates are no longer necessary Dr. Joel Zinberg

https://nypost.com/2022/02/11/science-shows-the-vaccine-mandates-are-no-longer-necessary/

State and local vaccine mandates might be legal — but are they necessary or advisable? The evolving science says no.

This is a particularly pressing question now as many unvaccinated workers have or are about to lose their jobs. Nearly 3,000 New York City employees — including essential workers such as police officers, firemen and teachers — face termination for refusing the shots.

The time has come for reconsideration. Whatever justifications once supported COVID-19 vaccine mandates have largely disappeared.

Mandates are typically justified as a way to protect the population from infection. The more people vaccinated, the less likely anyone is to become infected and to transmit the virus on to someone else.

Mandate advocates argue that even if people decide to endanger their own lives by remaining unvaccinated, their decision endangers others by exposing them to disease. Moreover, they claim failure to vaccinate could lead to large numbers of sick people, overwhelming the healthcare system and interfering with others ability to obtain care for COVID-19 and other medical needs.

Vaccines are safe and remain the most effective way of protecting oneself against serious COVID-19 illness and death, even with Omicron.Charles Krupa/AP

The evolution of the pandemic and the emergence of the Omicron variant have undermined these arguments. When they were first authorized, the COVID-19 vaccines were highly effective in protecting vaccine recipients from infection. But vaccines’ effectiveness against transmission has progressively declined with successive waves of viral variants. With the now predominant Omicron variant, full two-dose vaccination is roughly half as effective against infection as it was against the highly transmissible Delta variant. Breakthrough infections are now common and not the exception.

Authoritarian Science and the Case of Hydroxychloroquine The approach to medical information increasingly taken by authorities and the media is damaging to public health and scientific inquiry. Connor Harris

https://www.city-journal.org/hydroxychloroquine-and-authoritarian-science

Imperial County, California, a poor, largely Hispanic agricultural region in the southeastern corner of the state, has been hit hard by Covid-19. By the end of January, according to the New York Times’s Covid-19 database, Imperial County had suffered 845 Covid deaths, or 4.7 per thousand inhabitants—a rate almost 80 percent higher than the U.S. average. The case fatality rate in Imperial County is 1.44 percent, the second-highest in California—and was significantly higher, 2.10 percent, at the end of October 2021 before the Omicron wave.

Two doctors in Imperial County, though—George Fareed and Brian Tyson, who run the All Valley Urgent Care network of medical centers—claim to have done far better with their Covid-19 patients. In fact, they claim near-perfect success: in a book that they published last January, they claim to have seen more than 7,000 patients and had only three deaths, all among patients who began treatment in later disease stages. A statistical analysis of part of their results by the statistician Mathew Crawford, included in their book, counts only seven hospitalizations and three deaths among 4,376 patients seen up through March 13, 2021—a reduction in hospitalization risk of well over 90 percent from the county average, even after (admittedly imperfect) statistical adjustments for differences in age between Fareed and Tyson’s patients and the general population.

According to prevailing medical views, Fareed and Tyson’s claimed results should be impossible. The doctors’ first protocol was based around hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a repurposed anti-malarial drug, with other drugs such as ivermectin as more recent additions. Received opinion on the drugs is that ivermectin is at best unproven in treating Covid-19 (the Food and Drug Administration maintains an official webpage warning against using it as a treatment for the virus), and that HCQ has been actively disproved: early optimism from laboratory experiments and small clinical studies did not hold up in larger, more rigorous trials.

The Real War on Science: Identity Politics By Andrew Follett

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-real-war-on-science-identity-politics/

Emphasizing wokeness over true scientific inquiry will turn humanity’s pursuit of scientific truth into little more than an exercise in demagoguery.

T he best way to stop racial discrimination is to directly enshrine it into law via affirmative action in universities, according to the head of a major scientific journal.

“As science struggles to correct systemic racism in the laboratory and throughout academia in the United States, external forces press on, making it even more difficult to achieve equity on all fronts—including among scientists,” claimed an editorial in Science’s latest issue. It continued, “The dismantling of race-conscious admissions [to colleges] would deal another blow to equity in science.”

The editorial, titled “Science needs affirmative action,” was authored by none other than Science’s editor-in-chief: Washington University medicine and chemistry professor Herbert Holden Thorp.

Science is the most influential general-topic scientific journal, alongside its rival Nature. The prestigious peer-reviewed outlet boasts a weekly readership of almost 270,000 people and has been published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1880.

Thorp claims affirmative action “gives deserving students a chance that they might not otherwise have, adding excellence to the higher education system. It also acknowledges that not all students have an equal opportunity to excel at objective measures like standardized tests and grades, and it levels the playing field by giving students and universities the chance to spotlight other important attributes and factors in the admissions process.”

Down with Sabra? The Harvard Hummus Protests By Carine Hajjar

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/down-with-sabra-the-harvard-hummus-protests/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

That’s right, Harvard students are protesting . . . hummus.

Students in Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP) are demanding that the Mediterranean spread made by Sabra be taken out of dining halls because of ties to the Israel Defense Forces. This is merely one — albeit the creamiest — of many instances of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)-style protests against Israel on college campuses across the country.

The Harvard Crimson reported that on Tuesday, students gathered in Harvard Yard holding signs that say “Why does your hummus taste like apartheid?” and chanting “Don’t buy products laced with hate, Sabra funds a racist state.” Stickers on Sabra snack cups in dining halls say something similar (picture provided by a student at Harvard):

The QR code takes you to a document that states that Strauss Group, the company that co-owns Sabra with PepsiCo, has “openly and proudly admitted to funding the Israeli army.” Strauss Group is the largest food company in Israel. Sabra itself is headquartered in White Plains, N.Y. (I’ll quickly add that the linked document suggests “moral alternatives” to Sabra, including Cedar’s Hummus. Oh please, Cedar’s? Too much lemon if you ask me. I’ll also add that my Lebanese food snobbery leads me to look askance at Sabra too . . . but I digress.)

Strauss Group sends food and care packages to the Golani Brigade in the IDF. To pro-Palestine activists at Harvard, this amounts to the sponsorship of murder.

Dartmouth Republicans secure free speech — by fleeing campus By John Klar

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/dartmouth_republicans_secure_free_speech__by_fleeing_campus.html

In an ongoing embarrassment for Dartmouth College, the once-venerable institution has repeatedly demonstrated that it is unable — or more likely, ideologically opposed — to allow students the free speech that once breathed air on its “Live Free or Die” campus.

The school’s student Republican organization has found the Dartmouth doors increasingly closed to any effort to discuss the anti-American ideology with which Dartmouth has surreptitiously polluted every aspect of campus life and curricula.  Thugs and criminals rule Dartmouth now, so the Dartmouth Republicans wisely arranged for their latest speaker — nationally acclaimed author James Lindsay — to speak off campus, where free speech is not (yet) verboten.

Dartmouth bureaucrats claim they favor free speech, while they elevate the rights of permitless, foul-mouthed, speech-silencing protesters over those of a peaceful student organization with a permit.  The nation first watched this disgrace when Madison Cawthorn spoke at Dartmouth, and hateful children screamed anti-police epithets to intimidate attendees.  But at least that event went forward, under security reminiscent of inner-city or prison policing.  The college feigns concern over security but has clearly demonstrated it has no concern about assaults on speech liberties.

The Dartmouth Republicans tried yet again, with national speaker Andy Ngo.  This time Dartmouth College canceled the event, claiming vague threats by far-left criminals who appear to have organized with campus Antifa (and perhaps college professors who hate America) to stifle opinions that expose the filth of their hateful cult.  The college silenced Ngo just an hour prior to the event, claiming that students’ free speech rights were protected because they were allowed to proceed remotely by Zoom.  Dartmouth officials claim that this “separate but equal” discrimination was merited by the criminal threats: Dartmouth favors criminals over the tuition-paying students whose rights it throttles.

Dark Money Link to Democrats’ Climate Probes . By Susan Crabtree

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/11/dark_money_link_to_democrats_climate_probes_147172.html

It was Democrats who nearly a decade ago first labeled the opaque funneling of millions of dollars into various political influence operations “dark money” and railed against the then-GOP-dominated practice.

Over the past two election cycles, however, Democrats have not only caught up but surpassed Republicans in channeling unlimited sums of special interest and billionaire spending through nonprofits that do not disclose their donors’ identities.

Liberal groups and political operatives allied with the Democratic Party have also grown more creative in the types of political influence operations the funds support. A little-noticed dark-money entity created at least three years ago to help Democrats in Congress work more effectively is now drawing scrutiny.

During the final years of the Trump administration, a small but powerful group of former Democratic congressional aides and Obama administration appointees created an organization to help House and Senate Democrats exercise their oversight authority over the executive branch. The group is funded through the largest liberal dark-money channel in the country: Arabella Advisors.

Called “Co-Equal,” the group at first aimed to assist Congress in exercising its power as a branch of government equivalent to the executive, helping Democrats rebuild their oversight muscle to investigate the Trump administration.