BOOKS, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Dr. Marty Makary’s ‘Blind Spots’ Book Is At Odds With Established Findings By Benjamin Rushe

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/03/dr_marty_makary_s_blind_spots_book_is_at_odds_with_established_findings.html

Marty Makary is well-known for writing informal autobiographical books critiquing medical practice in America. Given that he is poised to lead the FDA, it should concern people that his book, Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health, has some serious biased presentation of data inaccuracies. How can Dr. Makary claim he is qualified to run the FDA when he presents controversial data in such a biased style?

Blood pressure

In Blind Spots, Makary rhetorically asks: “Can we lower high blood pressure by improving sleep quality and reducing stress instead of throwing antihypertensive medications at people?”

While that sounds like a good idea to someone who doesn’t know any better, it leaves something out. According to the NIH, essential hypertension makes up 95% of hypertension cases and has no modifiable cause (i.e., it’s not sleep or stress-related, it’s genetic). In other words, it exists in people who already get plenty of sleep and are at a good weight, et cetera. That is fundamental knowledge known by medical students and non-degreed ancillary healthcare workers. To the extent Makary implies otherwise, he’s just wrong.

Blind Spots promotes using silicone and other breast implants for cosmetic surgery. Makary states in his book chapter titled “Silicone Valley” that “…evidence was never presented that silicone breast implants caused any woman to suffer lupus, cancer, or another condition” (emphasis added). That is a statement so outrageously wrong that suggests that he never actually reviewed the data, and/or raises the possibility that Makary’s book or chapter was ghostwritten by a nonscientist.

Here are the actual facts: The largest ever study performed (nearly 100,000 patients) at the University of Texas showed that silicone breast implants are associated with a higher risk of certain autoimmune disorders, as well as stillbirth, scleroderma and melanoma.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Jay Bhattacharya’s promise on vaccine safety By Matthew Williams

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/jay_bhattacharya_s_promise_on_vaccine_safety.html

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is best known for his dissent from the establishment during the pandemic response. He famously — some may say infamously — drafted, signed, and fervently supported the Great Barrington Declaration, which opposed Draconian-style lockdowns and mask mandates. Dr. Bhattacharya warned of the long-term consequences these policies would inflict on mental and physical health. He predicted a surge in cancer cases due to delayed diagnoses, as well as an economic downturn that would far outweigh any perceived benefits of quarantining the entire population. Instead, he advocated a more targeted approach: protecting high-risk individuals while allowing low-risk populations to sustain economic and social stability.

Unfortunately, his predictions proved correct. Cancer diagnoses surged post-lockdown, with many cases detected at later stages. The lockdowns and subsequent economic interventions, such as stimulus checks, have wreaked havoc on the economy.

Dr. Bhattacharya’s appointment to the National Institute of Health (NIH) has sparked controversy, particularly among those on the political Left. One of the most contentious aspects of his leadership is his call for additional studies on vaccine safety, including potential links to autism. The medical establishment has long dismissed this topic.

From a purely data-driven perspective, the case for new vaccine studies may seem unnecessary. Vaccines are among the most rigorously tested medical interventions, backed by not only decades of research but also historical accounts of their success. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell aptly pointed out, he witnessed the transformative power of the polio vaccine firsthand. Given the prevailing public distrust in scientific institutions, revisiting vaccine safety — if only to reaffirm their efficacy — could be crucial to restoring confidence.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Tariffs Are Good The claim that tariffs are inherently misguided and inevitably harmful does not stand up to scrutiny, especially when it comes to U.S. trade with China Michael Lind

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/tariffs-good-trump-china

Donald Trump is back—and so is the tariff. “It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it?” the president quipped before the joint session of Congress on Tuesday—so beautiful that he referenced tariffs 17 more times in his address. In the short time since his second inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump has imposed—and sometimes walked back or temporarily suspended—tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, and declared a policy of tit-for-tat “reciprocity” or retaliation for any foreign tariffs on American exports that are higher than U.S. tariffs on imports. And he has justified tariffs with multiple rationales, ranging from protecting or reshoring defense-critical American industries to pressuring America’s neighbors to take action to reduce the cross-border flow of illegal immigrants and drugs like fentanyl. In fact, he told members of Congress, tariffs were “about protecting the soul of our country.”

The chaotic and inconsistent nature of Trump’s second-term policy to date can be criticized. But when it comes to tariffs as a tool of economic statecraft in general, the gap between establishment rhetoric and actual government practice is big enough to drive a Chinese EV through.

The audiences of the dying legacy media are told that the tariff is a destructive policy revived by politicians like Trump who fail to understand elementary economics, which teaches that free trade benefits all sides all the time everywhere, with no exceptions. But from North America to Europe to Asia, developed countries are ignoring mainstream economists and their amen corner in the subsidized libertarian think tank world and slapping tariffs onto imports in favored industries like electric vehicles and renewable energy. Governments are resorting to tariffs and industrial policy, not because their prime ministers and presidents flunked Econ 101, but because they do not want their economies deindustrialized by a flood of low-priced, state-subsidized Chinese imports.

The Chinese import threat is why Canada has levied a 100% tariff on imported Chinese EVs, along with a 25% surtax on Chinese steel and Chinese aluminum. The European Union has slapped electric vehicles made in China with tariffs ranging from 7.8% to 35.3%, on top of the standard European tariff of 10% for imported automobiles. India imposes tariffs of 70%-100% on imported electric vehicles from China and other countries.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Syrian Blood on Obama’s Hands Augusto Zimmermann

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/middle-east/the-syrian-blood-on-obamas-hands/

Syria is presently controlled by al-Qaeda offshoot Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Christians and other religious minorities are being massacred in Syria by the same Islamist group that overthrew President Bashar al-Assad three months ago. More than 1000 people have been killed since last Thursday. The killings have targeted Alawites, Christians and other minorities in Syria’s coastal regions.[1]

On December 8, 2024, the Assad regime in Syria collapsed during a major offensive by Sunni Islamist militants. The Assad family, members of the minority Alawite sect, ruled Syria for over half a century. The capture of Damascus, the capital, in December marked the end of Assad’s rule. Bashar al-Assad fled the capital aboard a plane to Russia, where he joined his family, already in exile, and was granted asylum by the Kremlin.

This was the end of a long campaign by the West to overthrow the Assad regime which culminated in HTS delivering the coup de grace.

In 2011, the US and European Union called for President Assad to resign following the crackdown on Arab Spring protesters during the events that led to  Syria’s civil war. By 2022, around 580,000 people were dead, of whom at least 306,000 were non-combatants. On November 15, 2023, France issued an arrest warrant for Assad for the use of chemical weapons against civilians. Assad dsnied the allegations and accused his accusers, notably the US, of attempting to effect regime change.

The Arab Spring, just to refresh memory, were anti-government protests and army uprisings — promoted by the Obama administration, it should be noted — that in the early 2010s spread across the Middle East and North Africa. Over that period the US did much more than any religious extremist group ‘to permanently enshrine Sharia as the constitutional law of the land throughout the Muslim world.’[2] In Egypt, for example, the Arab Spring empowered Muslim extremists to initiate a bloody persecution that drove hundreds of thousands of Christian Copts to flee the nation. Egyptian political scholar Samuel Tadros writes: ‘The Copts can only wonder today whether, after 2,000 years, the time has come for them to pack their belongings and leave, as Egypt looks less hospitable to them than ever’.[3]

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

How Trump’s Anti-Semitism Crackdown Has Already Changed Education by Seth Mandel

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/how-trumps-anti-semitism-crackdown-has-already-changed-education/

The Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student active in the anti-Zionist tentifada movement, is getting most of the attention regarding the president’s fight against campus anti-Semitism. That’s understandable—put a human face on something and it becomes a lone streetlight around which every media moth will flutter.

But that attention should not crowd out coverage of the fact that university administrative culture is already changing in significant ways thanks to the White House’s focus on combating campus anti-Semitism. Khalil’s case will develop more this week as court hearings begin, so at the moment nobody really knows where it’ll lead. Such uncertainty no longer applies to the colleges themselves.

Last week, the administration cancelled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia and announced it was undertaking a review of billions more in grants. Finally, we had the answer to a lingering question: Would there be any tangible consequences for the schools that allowed their campuses to descend into prolonged bouts of anti-Semitic hysteria?

Universities clearly took President Biden’s passivity as a reason to bet against being held to account for their flagrant violations of Jewish students’ civil rights. If they were right, that meant that the only students they had to placate were the anti-Zionists: There was no reason to protect Jewish rights or Jewish safety on campus because the Jews would never cause anywhere near the same amount of trouble for them. In contrast, there were a thousand scrawny segregationists in keffiyehs with nothing to do but wait for orders from their Hamasnik organizers.

But now the playing field has changed entirely. A source at Columbia told the journalist Steve McGuire that the Trump Education Department’s threats weren’t empty: “Grant cancellation notices flowing in now. Labs shutting down. Layoffs imminent. Faculty apoplectic at Katrina Armstrong for letting it get to this point. She has to fix this fast.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

‘Jews defending other Jews is a revolutionary act’ David Christopher Kaufman on why the Jewish diaspora must stand up for Israel.

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/13/jews-defending-other-jews-is-a-revolutionary-act/

David Christopher Kaufman was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here:

When does anti-Zionism become outright anti-Semitism? Since 7 October 2023, it has become disturbingly commonplace for ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations to demand the total destruction of Israel, the world’s only Jewish State. Claims that Israel deliberately targets children have echoes of the ancient, anti-Semitic blood libel. Sympathy for Hamas, a terror group committed to the murder of Jews, is also disturbingly widespread in a protest movement that claims to stand for ‘peace’.

David Christopher Kaufman – editor and columnist at the New York Post – joined The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss why Jews need to be more vocal in standing up for Israel. What follows is an edited extract from that conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What’s your response to the claim that, in the aftermath of 7 October, people were marching against Israel, rather than against Jewish people?

David Christopher Kaufman: The horror of that statement is that, when people turn on Jews, the endgame is usually an attempt at mass extermination.

Jews have often been alright in history. They were alright in Weimar Germany. In many ways, Jews were alright in the court of Isabella and Ferdinand in late-15th-century Spain. But, suddenly, they weren’t alright. Millions of Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century, and millions of Jews were exterminated in concentration camps during the Second World War.

It pains me greatly to see so many Jewish people not speaking up. We had Adrien Brody winning an Oscar for playing a Holocaust victim for the second time in his career. Yet he said nothing about anti-Semitism, even while he was on the biggest stage in the world, benefiting from telling Jewish stories. In many ways, our own people are not doing their job. We’re allowing the bad guys to define the narrative.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hannah E. Meyers Mahmoud Khalil Doesn’t Deserve to Be in the U.S. The former Columbia University student has been a ringleader of anti-Semitic activity and pro-Hamas demonstrations.

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/mahmoud-khalil-arrest-columbia-deport-hamas

Manhattan is home to one less terror-supporter.

On Saturday, immigration enforcement agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian national with U.S. permanent resident status, and removed him to a detention facility in Louisiana. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson explained that Khalil’s arrest, in coordination with the State Department, was made “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism” and because Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” A hearing is set for Wednesday after a federal judge blocked Khalil’s deportation on Monday—but the White House has doubled down on its intent to deport him.

Khalil was arrested at his Columbia University-owned apartment, near the school where he’s spent much of the last year and a half as a student leading pro-Hamas demonstrations. He has been a ringleader of the anti-Semitic activity that has kept Columbia in lockdown, and has helped escalate disorder at its sister school, Barnard College.

Khalil’s removal offers a lesson that the free world has been reluctant to learn since the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel: sometimes expulsion is the best solution. This is especially true for those who commit the kinds of anonymous violence that have characterized the anti-Israel movement at Columbia and Barnard, and which Khalil, as a leader of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, has helped propel.

Khalil has been candid about his commitment to make Columbia uninhabitable until the university denounces Israel. “As long as Columbia continues to invest and to benefit from Israeli apartheid, the students will continue to resist,” he declared. At Columbia, that “resist[ance]” has involved everything from erecting encampments on school property to directing death wishes at Zionists to storming Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and taking maintenance staff hostage.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Greenland elections produce upset as party favoring gradual independence from Denmark wins

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/greenland-elections-upset-denmark-independence/

Nuuk, Greenland — The center-right Demokraatit Party won the most votes in Greenland’s parliamentary elections, a surprise result as the territory went to the polls in the shadow of President Trump’s stated goal of taking control of the island one way or another .

Both Demokraatit – the Democrats – and the second place party, Naleraq – “Point of Orientation” – favor independence from Denmark but differ on the pace of change.

Four of the five main parties in the race sought independence, but disagreed on when and how.

Naleraq is the most aggressively pro-independence, while Demokraatit favors a more moderate pace of change.

Demokraatit’s upset victory over parties that have governed the territory for years indicates that many in Greenland care just as much about health care, education, cultural heritage and other social policies.

“I think this is a historic result in Greenland’s political history,” Demokraatit party leader Jens-Frederik Nielsen said at the election party after the results.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Demowhigs’ Race to Extinction The Democratic Party’s radical stances and cultural missteps could doom it to the same fate as the Whigs. By William F. Marshall

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/13/the-demowhigs-race-to-extinction/

Once upon a time, there was an esteemed American political party called the Whig Party. It was one of the two great American political parties of its time. It stood alongside the Democratic Party in the mid-19th century and produced four U.S. presidents: William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore. It also enjoyed the membership of other eminent American political leaders, like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, William Seward, and John Quincy Adams. Notwithstanding these great achievements, however, the Whig Party managed to destroy itself and was dissolved in 1854, just 21 years after its founding. Could today’s Democratic Party be on the same path to extinction as the Whigs?

It certainly seems that today’s Democratic Party’s “brain trust,” such as it is, is either utterly hapless or has a conservative mole within its ranks deliberately engineering the destruction of the party through the incomprehensible stances it is taking. Given that political conservatives, of which I count myself, are historically terrible at devising Machiavellian tactics against their opponents, I’m guessing there is no mole. Democrats are simply foundering in the wake of a force of nature called Donald Trump, who is simply brilliant at tapping into the sentiments of the majority of the American people and turning his political opponents’ weaknesses against themselves.

To be fair, Trump is benefiting from Democratic policy positions that, on almost every issue, are 180 degrees out of phase with most of the American people and with common sense.

Beginning with the administration of Barack Hussein Obama—that inscrutable, rising-out-of-nowhere community organizer, whose background is still largely a mystery to most of us—the Democratic Party began to take positions on matters of public policy that were real head-scratchers.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Is the Jig Up for Elite Higher Education? Elite universities face a reckoning as public backlash and new legislation threaten their finances, admissions policies, and ideological excesses, forcing them to reform or risk irrelevance. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/13/is-the-jig-up-for-elite-higher-education/

Over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal—and suicidal.

They did so with impunity.

Apparently, confident administrators assumed that the brand of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite universities was so precious to the nation’s elite movers and shakers that they could always do almost anything they wished.

By the 1970s, non-profit universities had dropped pretenses that they were apolitical and non-partisan.

Instead, they customarily violated the corpus of iconic civil rights legislation by weighing race, gender, and sexual orientation in biased admissions, hiring, and promotions.

Graduation ceremonies became overtly racially and ethnically segregated. The same was true for dorms and “theme houses.”

So-called “safe spaces,” in the spirit of the Jim Crow South, reserved areas of campus solely for particular races.

Affluent foreign students often openly protested on behalf of designated terrorist groups like Hamas.

First-Amendment-protected free speech all but vanished on elite campuses. Any guest speaker who dared to critique abortion on demand, Middle East orthodoxy, biological males dominating women’s sports, or diversity/equity/inclusion dogmas was likely to be shouted down, or on occasion roughed up.

University administrators either ignored the violence done to the Bill of Rights or quietly approved when their rowdy students were turned loose on supposed conservatives.

But in their hubris, the universities began a series of blunders that may now end them as they once were.