MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

France’s Academy of Medicine Urges ‘Great Medical Caution’ in Blocking Puberty

Posted By on April 6th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/frances-academy-of-medicine-urges-great-medical-caution-in-blocking-puberty/

The Biden administration acts as if “the science” supports “gender affirming care” — i.e., puberty blocking, hormone administration, and even mastectomies and genital surgeries — as clearly the best approaches to treating children and adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

But that isn’t true. The brakes are being put on this approach in the U.K., Sweden, and Finland. And now, France’s National Academy of Medicine is holding up a big “SLOW DOWN!” sign on joining the transgender moral panic. Specifically, it warns that these interventions might not be warranted and have potentially significant deleterious potentialities. Moreover, there has been a worrying explosive increase in the number of cases. From the translated press release:

While this condition has long been recognized, a sharp increase in demand for medical interventions has been observed first in North America, then in Northern Europe, and, more recently, in France, particularly among children and adolescents. A recent study of a number of high schools in Pittsburgh revealed a prevalence that is clearly higher than previously estimated in the United States: 10% of students declared themselves to be transgender or non-binary or were unsure of their gender. In 2003, the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne diagnosed only one child with gender dysphoria, whereas today it treats nearly 200.

It used to be infinitesimal! More:

Whatever the mechanisms involved in adolescents — excessive engagement with social media, greater social acceptability, or influence by those in one’s social circle — this epidemic-like phenomenon manifests itself in the emergence of cases or even clusters of cases in the adolescents’ immediate surroundings. This primarily social problem is due, in part, to the questioning of an overly dichotomous view of gender identity by some young people.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Parents Should Guide Their Children’s Civic Education Issue: American Civics By David Randall

Posted By on April 6th, 2022

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2022/04/06/parents_should_guide_their_childrens_civic_education_825557.html

What should parents look for in a K-12 civics curriculum for their children? I’ve been asked that question a lot since the release of “Learning for Self-Government: A K–12 Civics Report Card,” a report I wrote that surveys popular civics curricula. One short answer is the Curriculum Sketch. Another answer is Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum, which is the gold standard for civics in 2022. But here’s a longer answer – an answer that will help parents ask their own questions as they examine the civics curricula used in their children’s schools.

Parents should look for a civics curriculum that teaches the nuts and bolts of American government. Their children should learn what the Constitution is and how it works. They should learn how state and local government works. If they hear a politician say, “I’ll do this,” their children should know if he’d be breaking the law if he tried to do that.

Parents should look for a civics curriculum that teaches the moral beliefs of the American Founders, so their children can learn why and for what purposes the Founders created our government. The Founders believed in limited government, because they saw that individuals were fallible. They believed in free government, because they reasoned that people were best suited to choose their own happiness. Students need to know our republic’s moral foundations to be able to pass on the blessings of liberty to future generations.

Parents should look for a civics curriculum that gives students a vocabulary that accompanies being a free citizen. Their children shouldn’t rely on the paraphrases of teachers and textbooks. They should read the words themselves. They should study the Constitution and The Federalist, The Gettysburg Address and Brown v. Board of Education – all our documents of freedom. Children become citizens by reading the words of these key texts themselves, thinking about them, and acting on them.

Parents should look for a civics curriculum that instills pride in America without erasing Americans’ all-too-human faults. Our children should know that we are proud of our achievements – not least because we’ve struggled at times to follow our better angels.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Reality Cannot Penetrate Into The Fantasy World Of Climate Campaigners April 05, 2022/ Francis Menton

Posted By on April 6th, 2022

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-4-5-reality-cannot-penetrate-into-the-fantasy-world-of-climate-campaigners

It was only a few weeks ago when the UN’s International Energy Agency issued its Report on “CO2 Emissions in 2021.” (The Report does not bear a precise date, but only “March 2022.”) I covered the IEA’s Report in my previous post a few days ago. The Report gives detail as to the obvious fact that world CO2 emissions, after a downward blip in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic, have resumed their rapid increase, mostly attributable to massive deployment of coal-fired electricity generation resources in large-population developing countries like China and India.

In any rational world, this Report would have to have dashed any remaining dreams of climate campaigners that overall world CO2 emissions would see anything but large ongoing increases for the foreseeable future. The climate-obsessed jurisdictions in the U.S. and Europe already represent only a shrinking minority of world energy consumption, headed for insignificance as the large-population countries of the developing world join the fossil fuel age. For example, why would a small-population jurisdiction like New York — with about 20 million people, compared to about 2.8 billion for the combination of China and India, and with existing fossil-fuel electricity generation capacity of about 25 GW — struggle to reduce its fossil-fueled electricity generation by, say, one GW per year, when China alone is adding 38 GW of coal-fired power plants this year, and another 47 GW next year, with hundreds more gigawatts worth of coal plants already in the pipeline?

The answer is that reality just can’t penetrate into the fantasy world of the climate campaigners.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Great Russian Energy Scam Russian ‘Dark Money’ Funding ‘Green’ Groups in West by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on April 6th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18399/the-great-russian-energy-scam

Germany and several other European countries have largely banned fracking. This decision has transformed European leaders into the equivalent of 16th-century naval explorers, praying for favorable winds and weather as energy prices rise and fall depending on cloud cover and wind conditions.

In those days of autumn… the UN climate conference, was setting up its grotesque spectacle: a kind of ecological Versailles. The rich, powerful and virtuous of the planet gathered in Glasgow to pontificate to the rest of the West about how much we are harming the planet with our way of life. They arrived in their private jets to complain about the plague of air industry emissions. UK Chief Science Advisor Patrick Vallance said that everyone should eat less meat and fly less. Then came the news that 400 private jets would fly to the UN conference….

The British royal family has flown so long over the past five years that they have reached the moon and back.

While the Germans pontificated about the climate, the Washington Post informed us about their hypocrisy: “Germany presents itself as a climate leader. But it is razing villages for coal mines. The Garzweiler coal mine has already engulfed more than a dozen villages. Churches and family homes have been razed, agricultural land has disappeared and cemeteries have been emptied”. The Lützerath mine alone is twice the size of Manhattan. That is why Germany has been labelled as the most polluting country in Europe.

Thus, the progressive American pundits until October dreamed of an alliance between the West, Russia and China against global warming. Now that the West has isolated Russia, the largest energy supplier in Europe, no one is talking “green” anymore.

Russia, it turns out, has reportedly been promoting, often through “dark money” via Bermuda – which does not require countries to be named — “green” campaigns against nuclear power to ensure dependence by the West on Russia’s fossil fuel.

A German organization, The Climate and Environmental Protection Foundation, which received more than 17 million euros from Gazprom has also been accused of being a Moscow-funded “puppet.” — the Times revealed.

The Foundation for Climate and Environmental Protection was established last month in Mecklenburg-Pomerania by Manuela Schwesig… an ally of former German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder, president of Nord Stream II Russian gas pipeline. He is still serving on the boards of state-backed Russian energy companies.

“Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas”. — Former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen – Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2022

“We discovered that Gazprom financed environmental NGOs who acted as consultants to ministers to various governments, such as Belgium, which then supported the abandonment of nuclear power.” — Dominique Reynié, professor of political science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, in an interview with CNews.

China (now allied with Russia) is also funding Western environmentalists. – Unherd investigation, December 15, 2021

“With winter fast approaching, Europe finds itself in an energy crisis—and reliant on the tender mercies of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. It’s a self-induced disaster years in the making”.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ohio House Introduces Florida-Style Parental Rights Bill Landon Mion

Posted By on April 6th, 2022

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2022/04/05/ohio-house-introduces-floridastyle-parental-rights-bill-n2605518

Two Ohio state representatives introduced legislation that mirrors Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill and also prohibits Critical Race Theory-inspired instruction.

State GOP Reps. Mike Loychik and Jean Schmidt on Monday introduced House Bill 616, which would ban public educators teaching grades kindergarten through third grade from teaching, using or providing any instruction or material on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Educators for fourth through twelfth grades will not be allowed to teach age-inappropriate content in accordance with Ohio’s “state standards.”

This comes after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill into law last week that bans instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in grades kindergarten through third grade and would limit age-inappropriate discussions of sexuality in other grades.

Dubbed by critics as the “Don’t say gay” bill despite there being no mention of a ban on the word, Florida’s legislation also allows parents to access their children’s education and health records and requires schools to inform parents of changes to their child’s mental, physical or emotional well-being. The bill exempts schools from disclosing information to their parents if a “reasonably prudent person” would be concerned that doing so could result in abuse, abandonment or neglect.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Sends Nearly $1 Billion to Afghanistan Since Taliban Takeover by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on April 6th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18400/biden-afghanistan-aid

After Biden’s retreat, the Taliban have consolidated control over Afghanistan. And over all the hungry children, the girls deprived of an education, and all the other sob stories that kept a river of private charity and taxpayer money flowing into a hellhole in which nothing ever got better.

That’s on top of the $782 million in “humanitarian aid” allocated to Afghanistan last year since the Taliban took over. This year, Biden signed an executive order allocating $3.5 billion of the Afghan assets held in the Federal Reserve for the same purpose. But even not counting those funds, Biden has dedicated $986 million to Afghanistan since the Taliban took over.

That’s nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money and nearly $4.5 billion in total funds.

The Biden administration keeps insisting that the money won’t go to the Taliban. That’s as plausible as its previous claims that the Afghan government wouldn’t collapse, that if it did we would be ready, and that all Americans would be evacuated before Kabul fell to the enemy.

There’s no one with less credibility on Afghanistan than a member of the Biden administration.

The Taliban have been hungry to get their hands on foreign aid, but, likely guided by their Qatari backers, they’ve also been clever about it. They proposed a joint body with the international community to dispense aid. When that didn’t work, they went back to their usual strategy of pressuring NGOs to hire Taliban members to determine where the aid should go and who should distribute it. But that’s just a matter of cutting out the middleman for more direct control.

Since the NGOs rely heavily on local labor, all the Taliban have to do is intimidate Afghan employees into following their orders. And for a terror group that practices mutilation and beheading, that’s not hard. Does anyone really believe that an Afghan with a wife and children living under Taliban rule is going to follow our aid guidelines rather than those of the gunmen

The Taliban, like the Houthis in Yemen and other Islamic terror groups who both cause and profit from famines, have already been distributing and taking credit for humanitarian aid.

Portions of the nearly $1 billion in foreign aid stolen from the paychecks of American workers and the mouths of their children will be used to finance a new Jihad against Western nations.

A generation after 9/11, Americans are once again funding the terrorists who are out to kill them.

Over two decades, the United States and its international partners poured billions in humanitarian aid into Afghanistan. Much of that aid went into the pockets of the Taliban.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Laptop Dancing Show intel, it’s the game they play. By Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on April 6th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/05/laptop-dancing/

Establishment media now acknowledge that Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contains information about his dealings with China and connections to “the Big Guy,” has no existential problem. Before the 2020 election, some observers now recall, 51 former intelligence officials proclaimed the laptop was only “Russian disinformation,” and not a single one has now admitted that Biden’s laptop was, in fact, genuine. That refusal is the true bombshell revelation. 

The signatories to the October 19, 2020 statement suggesting it was disinformation include former CIA directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and Michael Hayden, as well as former acting CIA directors Mike Morell and John McLaughlin, a host of former CIA officers, National Security Agency officials, and former director of national intelligence James Clapper. The statement adds that “nine additional former IC officers who cannot be named publicly also support the arguments in this letter,” which closes out: “it is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.” 

For all but the willfully blind, this is a repetition of the Russia hoax, proclaimed by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and found false by Robert Mueller’s investigation. As this repetition shows, the vaunted “intelligence community,” like the upper reaches of the FBI and Justice Department, is now a partisan force for the Democrats. True to form, the CIA has also revealed itself as another woke bureaucracy that stands more for “Cisgender Intersectional Agitprop” than proven service on the intelligence front.   

HISTORY Comments turned off

Clausewitz, Russia, and Ukraine The Russians may have learned again what history teaches: that those who plan to win a short war often end up losing a long one. By Mackubin Owens

Posted By on April 6th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/05/clausewitz-russia-and-ukraine/

What can we learn about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine from a long-dead German who wrote during the time of the Napoleonic Wars? A great deal, it turns out. 

Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian “philosopher of war,” had much to say about the timeless nature of war. He contended that although the character of various wars may differ, the fundamental nature of war remains constant: a violent clash of opposing wills, with each side seeking to prevail over the other. Despite the claims of Clausewitz’s detractors, technology has not negated his insights. For confirmation, we need look no further than the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

While Clausewitz’s most famous aphorism is that “war is the continuation of policy by other means,” perhaps the observation most applicable to Putin’s decision to “roll the iron dice” against Ukraine is this from On War: “the first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish . . . the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.”

As the war drags on, it seems clear that Putin has failed on that count. He apparently envisioned a short war, characterized by a coup de main, the rapid seizure of Kyiv and the replacement of the Zelenskyy government with a Kremlin puppet. This was the model that the Soviets executed during the invasion of Afghanistan in 1978. For a number of reasons, also identified by Clausewitz, the current effort failed. 

As Clausewitz taught, war is not linear. It is not a predictable phenomenon occurring in a deterministic, mechanistic world. Rather, war is a highly complex interactive system characterized by chance, “friction,” unpredictability, disorder, and fluidity. As such, it cannot be subjected to precise, positive control or synchronized, centralized schemes.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Russian War Crimes Are Condemnable — but Not by the International Criminal Court By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on April 6th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/russian-war-crimes-are-condemnable-but-not-by-the-international-criminal-court/

The ICC is an enterprise antithetical to the Constitution and national defense, and our government should never facilitate its mission and operations.

In an editorial published Monday evening, the Wall Street Journal’s editors appear to echo President Biden’s call for war-crimes prosecutions over Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine. Tellingly, though, the Journal omits the little detail of who, exactly, should do the prosecuting.

Presumably, that’s because the Journal well knows it shouldn’t be the International Criminal Court — not if the United States has anything to say about it.

The scenes of mass graves in Bucha and other Ukrainian towns are sickening, as are the well-documented reports of brutal Russian attacks targeting civilians, rape as a weapon of war, the kidnapping and murder of elected officials and their families, and Moscow’s troops conducting themselves as marauders rather than as armed forces beholden to the laws and customs of civilized warfare. Against this gory background, the Journal points out that an investigation “is already underway at the U.S. State Department and the International Criminal Court at the Hague.” In context, this observation appears to endorse an ICC probe of Russia, supported by the U.S. government. But the Journal stops short of proposing that, and for good reasons.

The U.S. State Department is a diplomatic arm of the United States government. It has no authority to prosecute anyone. Prosecution is the Justice Department’s job. DOJ, however, has been confined to enforcing statutorily based sanctions imposed against Russian oligarchs, officials, and entities. That is because the United States is not a combatant in the Ukraine war. Provocative rhetoric and military aid notwithstanding, the president’s top priority since Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion has been to prevent the United States from becoming a combatant.

America’s lawyer-Left has mobilized for the better part of two decades against military tribunals against combatants who mass-murdered Americans and against whom the United States has actually been at war. There are not going to be American prosecutions against Russia for war crimes against Ukraine. That is not to say the Justice Department may not apply Magnitsky Act provisions that enable our government to sanction Russian human-rights offenders: Seize any assets of theirs within our jurisdiction, bar them from entering our country — the sorts of things already being done under existing sanctions. But U.S.-initiated war-crimes tribunals? No.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Apart from God, Only Trump Can Stop Trump Salvatore Babones

Posted By on April 6th, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/04/apart-from-god-only-trump-can-stop-trump/

“As America’s record voter turnout proved in 2020, it’s unpopularity that drives the race. Electioneering is a blood sport, and it’s blood the voters are out for. No one watches Squid Game for the victories. Democracy, too, is all about the losers. Nothing beats the satisfaction of stepping into the voting booth, pulling a lever, and whispering to the losing candidate: “You’re fired”.

The defeat of Donald Trump in 2020 saved American democracy. Not from Donald Trump: he never shut down websites, imprisoned protesters, or sicked the security services on his opponents. No, if anything, the 2020 election saved American democracy for Donald Trump. The four-year Trump pause that began on January 20, 2021, put the grown-ups back in charge in Washington—and the world. Like grown-ups everywhere, they immediately maxed out their credit cards, mortgaged the family home, stabbed their friends in the back, picked fights with the neighbours, gave stern speeches in their coronavirus masks while posing for unmasked selfies at the Superbowl, and offered nuclear weapons to Iran in exchange for promises to stop supporting terrorism and shift to nuclear blackmail instead. Thanks to the 2020 election, we all know what adult democracy looks like.

It’s a lucky thing, too. Had there been no coronavirus; had the major media not conspired to suppress the Hunter Biden story; had the election been run under the pre-Covid rules, we would now be blaming Trump—for everything. The phase “imagine if Trump had done that” might never have entered the political lexicon. Ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan? Blame the rank amateurism of Trump’s bumbling foreign policy team. Renewed North Korean missile tests? Blame Trump’s personal courting of “little rocket man” Kim Jong-un. Russian invasion of Ukraine? Trump was only waiting for his second term to repay his true master in the Kremlin. Inflation a problem? Impeach Trump under the “emoluments clause” for raising the rack rate at the Trump International Hotel. We would never have known how much better things might have been.