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May 2022

Militarizing The Baby Formula Crisis Is Infantile Iain Murray and Michelle Minton

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/27/militarizing-the-baby-formula-crisis-is

A military cargo plane lands filled with vitally needed baby formula to be greeted by a top government official. A relief flight to a developing world country? A ray of hope for a war-ravaged Ukraine? A blockade broken? No, America in the year 2022.

Simultaneously, the president invoked the Defense Production Act to force American companies to produce more baby formula. Our response to a problem caused by domestic regulation and protectionism has been to militarize it.

I’m sorry, Mr. President, but this solution is infantile.

America is unique in having this problem because its regulatory state caused it. The proximate cause of the shortage was the February recall of products made at America’s largest manufacturer of baby formula, Abbott Labs’ facility in Michigan. The Food and Drug Administration was concerned about outbreaks of death and illness among infants fed with the formula but was slow to inspect the facility. Abbott has indeed announced that it will reopen the facility, as the FDA found no evidence of contamination. As 40% of America’s supply comes from that facility, the shortfall hit supplies hard.

Ordinarily, however, the market would respond to such a shock by two means – raising prices to signal a shortage and importing substitutes from abroad. However, regulation precludes those two responses. Much of the American market depends on price agreements with the country’s welfare agencies, which are there to stop poor mothers from having to face difficult choices for their pocketbooks. Higher prices could lead to mothers choosing to limit formula use, with nutritional detriments to the baby.

The White House’s Specious Gender Manifesto The White House is claiming that the debate about childhood gender medicine is settled—even as numerous international experts are coming forward to say it‘s not. Bernard Lane

https://quillette.com/2022/05/13/joe-bidens-faulty-gender-diktat/
“How will history judge gender-affirming care if professional groupthink has in fact served to improperly justify the medicalisation of vulnerable minors with no good evidence to confidently predict the effect on their welfare? ”

On March 31st, Joe Biden’s White House issued a lengthy “fact sheet” claiming that science has spoken in favour of medicalised gender change for young people. What used to be called “sex-reassignment” is now the more seductive “gender-affirming care” —from puberty-blocker drugs to interrupt natural development, on to lifelong synthetic hormones, even surgery. And now we have the leader of the free world boldly “confirming the positive impact of gender-affirming care on youth mental health” for children and teens who identify as transgender or non-binary.

“Confirming” is the new asserting, and the Biden-Harris administration is also “confirming that providing gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice.” It’s a small step from confirming to enforcing, and so the federal Justice Department has written to state attorneys-general warning them that if they deny minors the benefits of gender-affirming medical science, they will fall afoul of constitutional and statutory guarantees of equality, not to mention funding rules tied to grants from Washington. The first state under federal fire is Alabama, where a new law would impose up to 10 years’ prison time on clinicians taking anyone under 19 on a medicalised gender journey. The White House is even taking the fight offshore, pledging to uphold trans health rights with its foreign policy and overseas aid programs.

Biden’s blizzard of initiatives was unleashed on Transgender Day of Visibility. Timing matters in politics, and Biden’s may be a little off. Americans are starting to get their first glimpse of gender medicine as an intensely contested field; it’s nowhere near settled science. For several years, big left-leaning media outlets have told a simple story in which the medicalised gender-affirming approach is lifesaving, at least for those kids who say they can’t live without it. It follows, we’re told, that any restriction is a suicidally dangerous denial of health care, there being supposedly no alternative to hormonal and sometimes surgical interventions.

Please Don’t Go To College Higher education has become simpler and less effective as we have fetishized a modern misunderstanding of equality. By William M. Briggs

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/25/please-dont-go-to-college/

“If learning were profaned by being made available to all and sundry,” Cardinal Richelieu predicted in 1625, “it would be found that there were more people capable of creating doubts than of resolving them, and many would show themselves more apt in opposing truth than in defending it.”

Passing by, only for a moment, the shocking elitism, so appalling to our modern ears, how did the Red Eminence fare?

The answer is obvious, as is the answer to the growing madness which surrounds us: Less, not more, education. And more elitism.

You’ve heard the slogan: “We want our college to look like America.” They say it about college, about Congress, the bureaucracy, the bar, the professoriate, almost anything. The reply should be: “No, we don’t.” I don’t want my pilot looking “like America.” America looks like the furtive guy at the end of the bar who should have been arrested years ago. Or America looks like that nice old lady we just helped load groceries into her trunk. Pilots look nothing like that. I want my pilot looking like he has the skills, and the intelligence, to fly the marvel of engineering that is a jet aircraft. I also do not want those aeronautical engineers to look like America. I’m keen on them understanding differential equations, and what stress does to aluminum welds.

The exceptions to that “almost anything” were, until recently, things like combat soldiering and professional sports. Alas, even in those sanctuaries of reality, the cry of looking like America has taken hold. Because of a false understanding of equality.

If Only We Were More Reasonable: Christopher Akehurst

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2022/05/if-only-we-were-more-reasonable/

With the best will in the world there are times when one wonders about the sanity of many people. This is one of them.

We have just handed over control of our country, in dangerous and uncharted times, to a fractious horde of mathematical illiterates with no idea how to run an economy, lockdown-loving fascists scheming to control our lives by any means possible and now with all the apparatus in place, mad Greens with apocalyptic visions of planetary doom, obscurantist “teachers” who have turned the wide horizons of education into a crucible of noxious mendacity and sexual fantasists wanting to manipulate the self-understanding of children, all lumped in with an assortment of monomaniacs squeaking out their solipsistic obsessions in, to borrow a phrase from Browning, fifty different sharps and flats.

Then there’s the avalanche of hysterical panic that followed the suggestion that abortion in America might – might – become more restricted. We’ll be hearing much more of it any day now, shriller and louder – inarticulate rage, pure and simple. Where’s the rationality, the reasoned arguments amid the churning torrent of abuse and invective?

Florida IG Rejects Conspiracist Rebekah Jones’s ‘Unsubstantiated’ Covid Cover-up Claims By Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/florida-ig-rejects-conspiracist-rebekah-joness-unsubstantiated-covid-cover-up-claims/

A former dashboard manager at the Florida Department of Health made “unsubstantiated” claims that Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration fired her because she refused to obey her superiors’ instructions to fudge the state’s Covid-19 data, a new investigation has found.

The extensive report from the Health Department’s Office of Inspector General found “insufficient evidence” that Rebekah Jones was ordered to falsify, alter, or misrepresent Covid positivity rates on the state COVID-19 Data and Surveillance dashboard that she helped build.

In December 2020, Jones alleged that former Florida deputy secretary of health Dr. Shamarial Roberson, a reputable chronic-disease epidemiologist, pressured her to “delete cases and deaths” to sugarcoat the state’s handling of the Covid crisis. Jones later backtracked, arguing instead on her now-suspended Twitter account that Roberson “asked me to go into the raw data and manually alter figures.”

The report addressed Jones’s accusations that Roberson, as well as two other state health officials, directed her to restrict access to underlying data that supported what was presented on the dashboard, finding them “exonerated.” The three confirmed that they told Jones to temporarily remove the “data hub” before reactivating it after it was reviewed for accuracy, which the report determined “does not appear to violate law, rule, or policy since the ‘data hub’ was not required to be made available,” and since it was quickly restored unchanged. Another reason the officials took down the section was to prevent private individual health information prohibited from public disclosure from being released.

Meet The Billionaires’ Club Pumping Critical Race Theory Into Your Child’s Classroom By: Luke Rosiak

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/26/meet-the-billionaires-club-pumping-critical-race-theory-into-your-childs-classroom/

These groups have been sowing seeds of critical race theory in educational bureaucracies since long before you even heard the term.

A decade ago, when an Obama-era initiative called “Common Core” convinced 41 states to give up control of their education standards, it was infamously the result of a massive influence campaign by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Now, with America’s K-12 landscape being turned upside down by “equity” initiatives that divide children by ethnicity and devalue rigorous academics, the culprit is much the same: Gates and other philanthropic foundations.

That’s a takeaway from the two years I spent poring through educational and financial records for my new book, “Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.” These philanthropic foundations are perhaps the most powerful and least understood force in American politics — and a key node in moving critical race theory from academic papers to society. Pick any radical racial initiative in your child’s school, and it is likely to tie back to the Ford, Kellogg, Gates, Annie E. Casey, MacArthur, or Surdna foundations.

The high cost of Biden’s bitter partisanship: Inaction Liz Peek

The nation is paying a price for President Biden’s divisive leadership.

At a moment of national outrage, with every American sickened by the horrific killing of 19 school children in Texas, our country looks to our president for answers. These terrible events must stop; sick, isolated hostile young men like the alleged shooter, Salvador Ramos, must not be allowed to buy guns. Their bizarre, threatening behavior must trigger responses that keep our communities safe. Our schools must be protected.

Biden has no answers. His default response to such tragedies is to lambast Republicans for protecting the gun lobby, doubling down on the divide he has widened in our country. And, worse, foregoing any chance of “working across the aisle,” as he famously promised to do when campaigning for the Oval Office.

The tragedy is that there is room for compromise on gun restrictions, but Biden has so poisoned relations between our nation’s two political parties that he has no chance of bringing Republicans and Democrats together. According to the Washington Post, he isn’t even trying.

In the wake of the recent Buffalo shootings, where 10 people were killed, some expected the president to try to restart negotiations on a long-shelved gun control bill sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). The bipartisan legislation, which was modest but at least broke a decade-long stalemate, had been crafted after the Sandy Hook school massacre of 20 children and 6 adults.

At that time, President Obama had tasked his vice president with creating a plan to combat mass shootings; in 2013, after scores of meetings and conversations, Biden revealed his roadmap, which included mostly meaningless initiatives such as requiring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to research the causes of gun violence and proposing a national conversation about mental health.

More promising was the independent Manchin-Toomey bill, created soon thereafter, which would have expanded background checks to most gun sales and which also offered some concessions to the National Rifle Association (NRA) in order to win Republican support. People close to the negotiations claim that Biden had little to do with creating the legislation or selling it to members of his own party.

The Washington Post quotes a former Democratic senate aide saying, “The Biden role was a joke. He couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. Biden did not move one single person.”

California Republican Goes Full Ilhan Omar in Anti-Semitic Rant

https://thejewishvoice.com/2022/05/california-republican-goes-full-ilhan-omar-in-anti-semitic-rant/

California’s upcoming primary elections could deliver Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) an unlikely foreign policy ally—Republican Greg Raths, who last week said the “Jewish community” uses money to “control” U.S. politicians.

Raths’s anti-Semitic rant came during a May 20 Orange County Islamic Foundation candidate forum, which saw the Republican claim that U.S. support for Israel is bought and paid for by the “Jewish community.” Raths, who is running against Republican congresswoman Young Kim in California’s 40th Congressional District, also called to “rein in” U.S. foreign aid to Israel, a position he said he is able to support because he hasn’t taken “one dime” from Jewish sources.

“That’s the problem. Israeli PAC in Washington, they got money and they control a lot of these politicians. And the other side, the Palestinians, they don’t have the clout. So these politicians go where the money is, unfortunately,” Raths said. “The Jewish community is very well organized in the United States and they control a lot of politicians. That’s why the foreign aid is so large going to Israel. … The Jewish community has never given me one dime, so I’m not beholden to them at all.”

California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum is Hiding Its Anti-Jewish and Anti-Israel Teachings Our lawsuit seeks to expose the use in Los Angeles public schools of the same hateful teaching materials previously rejected by Governor Newsom. Lori Lowenthal Marcus

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/348817/californias-ethnic-studies-curriculum-is-hiding-its-anti-jewish-and-anti-israel-teachings/

As a lawyer who represents people who have been discriminated against in educational settings because they are Jewish or pro-Israel, I followed California’s ethnic studies saga for years. I remember the cheers and collective sighs of relief when the original version of California’s A.B. 101 was yanked, and Governor Newsom announced that the antisemitic and other biased material in the original version would “never see the light of day.” 

Those celebrations were premature. It appears now that the proponents of the earlier version, the folks peddling “liberated ethnic studies,” twisted the Governor’s words into a strategy for infiltrating the same anti-Jewish material into California’s public schools. They are injecting that material into the schools in a way that is hard to see by ordinary observers — by stealth. By going “below the radar,” they are shielding that material from “the light of day.”

This is what we at The Deborah Project, a public interest law firm, discovered through documentary research and interviews of dozens of parents, teachers and other education advocates.  We have now launched a legal challenge in federal court in Los Angeles: Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles v. Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, et al. 

Our lawsuit seeks to expose the use in Los Angeles public schools of the same hateful teaching materials previously rejected by Governor Newsom, materials that denounce Zionism as white supremacy and Israel as a “white,” “western” and “colonialist settler” state founded and defended through apartheid and the commission of genocide. This material also falsely instructs students that attacking the Jewish state is not antisemitic because Judaism and Zionism are completely ‘distinct.”

We do not intend to allow these educators to evade the law by counseling ideologically-aligned teachers to conceal what they’re doing, and so our case also seeks to enable Californians to learn what’s actually being taught by the proponents of these materials.

A Cabinency of Dunces The common denominator to these Biden appointees is ideological rigidity, nonchalance, and sheer incompetence.   By Victor Davis Hanson *****

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/25/a-cabinency-of-dunces/

As the nation sinks inexplicably into self-created crisis after crisis, debate rages whether Joe Biden is incompetent, mean-spirited, or an ideologue who feels the country’s mess is his success. 

A second national discussion revolves around who actually is overseeing the current national catastrophe, given Joe Biden’s frequent bewilderment and cognitive challenges. 

But one area of agreement is the sheer craziness of Biden’s cabinet appointments, who have translated his incoherent ideology into catastrophic governance. 

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has essentially nullified federal immigration law. Over 2 million foreign nationals have illegally crossed the southern border without audit—and without COVID vaccinations and tests during a pandemic. 

Mayorkas either cannot or will not follow federal law. 

But he did create a new Disinformation Governance Board. To head his new Orwellian Ministry of Truth, he appointed Nina Jankowicz—an arch disinformationist who helped peddle the Russian collusion, Steele dossier, and Alfa Bank hoaxes. 

While Jankowicz’s adolescent videos and past tweets finally forced her resignation, Mayorkas promises that his board will carry on.

In the days before the recent Virginia election, grassroots parent groups challenged critical race theory taught in the schools. 

In reaction and under prompts from teachers’ unions, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed both the FBI and the Justice Department to establish a special task force apparently to “investigate threats” from parents against school board members.