News of the Week for September 10^th, 2023

• Abortion
• Gun Rights
• Hide the Decline
• Obamacare
• War & Terror
• National News
• Economy & Taxes
• International News
• Opinion

 

Abortion

Dobbs Decision

 

Mexico decriminalizes abortion, extending Latin American trend of widening access to procedure
Mexico’s Supreme Court threw out all federal criminal penalties for abortion Wednesday, ruling that national laws prohibiting the procedure are unconstitutional and violate women’s rights in a sweeping decision that extended Latin American’s trend of widening abortion access.

Gun Rights

 

Over 60% of ‘active shooters’ stopped by ‘good guy with a gun’
A large percentage of “active shooter” incidents are thwarted by armed citizens who sometimes don’t even fire their weapons, but those cases are no longer counted under President Joe Biden’s pro-gun control policies.

NM Gov cancels 2nd Amendment in Albuquerque
We should rightly call what happened in New Mexico yesterday outrageous, but things like this are happening so often these days that some of us may have started to become numb to it. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham issued an executive order suspending the right of citizens to carry firearms across the City of Albuquerque and the surrounding county for thirty days. She claimed the ability to do this by declaring a state of emergency in the area and seizing emergency powers under that premise. The “emergency” in question was a spate of shootings in the city in recent weeks. The Governor plans to have the state police enforce the order, likely because the city’s Chief of Police has already refused to enforce it and the County Sheriff immediately said he was “uneasy” about the order.

The New Mexico Governor’s ‘Suspension’ of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Is Both Illegal and Stupid
The governor of New Mexico has decided to “suspend” the right to bear arms for 30 days

 

Hide the Decline

Environment &“Green Energy”

 

New Discoveries In Climate Science
Climate science is a wild and woolly multi-disciplinary field in which virtually every proposition is controversial. It is only the politics that is settled; the science is up for grabs.

I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published
I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.

How to Get Published on Climate
This story has been around for a couple of days, but I don’t think we have mentioned it. Dr. Patrick Brown, co-director of the climate and energy team at The Breakthrough Institute at Berkeley, got an article on California wildfires published in Nature magazine.

 

Obamacare

Government in Healthcare

 

Hospital Employee Leaks DEI Training Materials That Say Three Year-Olds Can be Transgender
“My name is Rose. I’m a transgender girl. I was born a boy, but I always knew that I was a girl”

Medical Journal: Affirmative Action as Health Care
“Expert” class imperialism over purely political issues continues apace. Now, the hyper-woke New England Journal of Medicine has published an advocacy article decrying the Supreme Case ruling against race-based criteria for admissions at Harvard and claiming that affirmative action is a necessary health measure. Yes, you guessed it, it is written by a bioethicist.

Belgian Doctor Euthanizes Patient with a Pillow
Euthanasia is not the practice of medicine. It just puts a “medical” patina on homicide.

Belgian doctor ‘euthanizes’ woman with pillow
Euthanasia is permitted in Belgium despite being illegal in the vast majority of EU countries.

 

War & Terror

 

Report: Chinese Nationals Posing as Tourists to Access U.S. Military Bases
“They range from Chinese nationals found crossing into a U.S. missile range in New Mexico to what appeared to be scuba divers swimming in murky waters near a U.S. government rocket-launch site in Florida.”

India-China Tensions Flair as Beijing Releases Map Claiming Indian Territories
India’s Foreign Minister Jaishankar: “Making absurd claims does not make other people’s territories yours.”

NATO’s Romania slams Russia for ‘serious violation’ over drone
‘Completely unacceptable’ says President Klaus Iohannis after debris found inside the NATO member’s border.

U.S. to Counter China’s Belt-and-Road with Trade Corridor Linking India to Europe via Israel
Prime Minister Netanyahu: “Israel will be a central junction in this economic corridor.”

Gunmen open fire on convoy crossing into Mexico from US, wounding 3
A group of gunmen attacked a convoy of vehicles traveling into Mexico from the United States, wounding three people, including some Americans.

 

National

 

Murders Are Up, and the Left Has Rediscovered Policing
There are few things more damaging to individuals and their interconnections, few things that more endanger community, than crime. And there’s little else more exhausting than the left-wing rediscovery of seemingly self-evident truths.

Rocky Mountain high: CO teachers union instructing members to destroy evidence
When I first saw this this weekend (and picked it up for our Headlines section) I thought, “No way would they be that bold.”

Opposing segregation makes you a racist
Is segregation a good thing or a bad thing? According to the modern Left, it all depends on who is doing the segregation.

California Community Colleges system sued for imposing DEI standards on profs
The plaintiffs are represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which alleges that such regulations violate the right to freedom of speech.

Videos Show Beverly Hills Becoming a Ghost Town During Los Angeles Crime Wave
“RIP Beverly Hills”

Over 60 Atlanta ‘Stop Cop City’ Activists Indicted on RICO Charges
Other charges include domestic terrorism, arson in the first degree, and money laundering.

Crime Wave Now Reaches Hospitals
Say hello to Reginald Kane Jackson, a/k/a PoniaX Kane Calles, and while you’re at it, go ahead and say good-bye, because Jackson/Calles shuffled off this mortal coil in July, shortly after he fatally shot a hospital security guard in Portland, Oregon. Jackson/Calles fled the scene, but cops eventually found him in nearby Gresham, where the suspect died in the proverbial hail of police gunfire. Incidents such as the one that killed security guard Bobby Smallwood at Portland’s Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center have proliferated in recent years, as the Associated Press detailed “a wave of gun violence sweeping through U.S. hospitals and medical centers” which “have helped make health care one of the nation’s most violent fields.”

Marxist American Library Association chief: ‘Libraries need to be sites of socialist organizing’
Remember Emily Drabinski, the self-proclaimed Marxist lesbian CUNY librarian who was elected president of the American Library Association?

Does Tenure Matter?
Conservative attempts to do away with the longstanding faculty protection may backfire.

Ignore the Senate? Julie Su Is ‘All In’
Joe Biden’s nominee for secretary of labor is the current deputy secretary of labor, Julie Su. She has been serving as acting secretary since Marty Walsh left the job in March. The Senate is unlikely to confirm her because every Republican, Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), most likely Krysten Sinema (I., Ariz.), and possibly a few other Democrats are opposed to her nomination. Rather than set up a vote that would fail, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer hasn’t scheduled one.

Ethics Scandals Rock Democratic Legislature, Gorelow Folds Under Pressure
Lombardo’s PAC accuses Democratic Assembly leader Steve Yeager of fostering a ‘culture of corruption’

Debunking Nevada GOP’s Claims in Caucus vs. Primary Battle
Grab another cup of coffee; this is gonna be a long one. But you won’t get this information anywhere else…

Law Firm Sued Over Diversity Fellowship Folds
Morrison & Foerster quietly allows whites to apply for diversity fellowship targeted by activist behind affirmative action cases

State worker union sues Lombardo over vetoed arbitration bill
SB440 became a political football during the legislative session, in part over whether lawmakers would honor a 2021 deal to fund pay increases.

Inside far-right Proud Boys – sick initiation, strict masturbation rules and violence
Meet the Proud Boys: a 6,000-strong army of Trump-loving ‘alpha males’ who follow a bizarre set of rules. The Daily Star takes a looks at its doctrine

NEA president vows to transform nation’s largest union, putting ‘social justice’ first
The leader of the nation’s largest labor union, the three million member National Education Association, visited the Chicago area Wednesday.

Burn After Reading: Colorado Teachers Told To Destroy Results of an Illegal Gender Survey
Not that many years ago, I ran across this little piece of fortune cookie/Bazooka Joe wisdom: “If you have to sneak to do it, lie to cover it up, or delete it to avoid being seen, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it.” And that is good advice. That is unless you are in a pitched battle against the heteronormative, white patriarchy. In that case, sneaking, lying, and deleting are not just permissible but admirable tactics. This is war, you know. Desperate times call for desperate measures. These are, after all, the times that try ze/zim/zir souls. In Jefferson County, Colorado, a number of parents are alleging that teachers broke state and federal laws and that the local teachers’ union, the Jefferson County Education Association (JCEA), is aiding and abetting the teachers in that effort.

Math disaster in college: Would-be STEM majors can’t add 1/2 + 1/3
After a year of remote algebra, Diego Fonseca struggled with advanced algebra. Despite a week at George Mason University’s Math Boot Camp, the would-be computer science major failed the math placement test to qualify for calculus four times. He didn’t know the basics.

Meet the New Principal of John Glenn Elementary School
Fox News reports that the Western Heights School District in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, has installed a drag queen as principal of the John Glenn Elementary School. Fox has confirmed that the new hire, Shane Murnan, is “a drag queen who goes by the name of Shantel Mandalay.” Although Mandalay’s Facebook account has since been deleted, the article provides screenshots of him in his full drag glory.

The Ivy League Elitism of . . . Student Clubs?
Earlier this week, Rachel Shin, a current junior at Yale College, published a piece in the Atlantic titled “Elite College Students Are Doing It to Themselves.” She provides an insider’s view into the humorously competitive world of clubs on campus.

Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions
3,000 years of overdetention, chief lickspittle, and the wrong side of the road.

Florida set to introduce Classic Learning Test as alternative to SAT, ACT
The State University of Florida will likely approve the CLT to be considered for college admissions, making it the first state to fully endorse the emerging classical education test.

Nevada” Five Assembly Democrats Won’t Seek Reelection, Two Vie For State Senate
As numerous ethics scandals plague the state Assembly, Gov Lombardo’s Better Nevada PAC continues to apply pressure on Assembly leader Steve Yeager for fostering a ‘culture of corruption’

Biden Administration Pushes “Indigenous Knowledge”
The Biden administration has released a “guidance” to federal agencies that calls on them to include “Indigenous Knowledge” in decision making

The ten most dangerous cities in the US ranked
Towns in Alabama, Louisiana and Michigan rank in the top three for crime. Rankings are based on stats from 18,000 agencies from FBI to local police. Analysis by Security Gauge has revealed America’s most crime-addled cities

The Technology Facebook and Google Didn’t Dare Release
One afternoon in early 2017, at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., an engineer named Tommer Leyvand sat in a conference room with a smartphone standing on the brim of his baseball cap. Rubber bands helped anchor it in place with the camera facing out. The absurd hat-phone, a particularly uncool version of the future, contained a secret tool known only to a small group of employees. What it could do was remarkable.

The war on merit in public schools continues and it’s blatantly racist
Last month, we learned that the public schools in Portland, Oregon were instituting a new set of “equitable grading practices.” Under these new guidelines, no student would ever receive a grade of zero or incomplete for anything. Homework would not be graded at all and no student would receive a failing grade for failing to complete their work or even cheating. Even behavioral issues or truancy would not be taken into account or result in a failing grade. And this isn’t the only progressive school district studying such policies.

Portland School District Institutes ‘Equitable’ Grading Policies
Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong, Chief Academic Officer of Portland Public Schools, is informed by “her own experiences as a low-income student with unstable housing and the ensuing impacts of that.” She is accordingly “passionate about cultivating a culture of learning, progressive programs, and sustainable intervention/preventative work.” In the DEI aficionado’s latest social engineering initiative, schoolchildren in the city would no longer be subject to most grading criteria — yet another relic of White Supremacy™ — under a proposed policy change.

Musk sues California over content moderation
Elon Musk is back in court again, or at least his attorneys are. But this time the case doesn’t involve someone suing Musk over whatever has annoyed the liberals this week. It’s Musk who is suing the state of California in an effort to block a new law known as AB587 from taking effect next year. The somewhat vague law would force social media outlets like Twitter (or “X” if you insist on using that dumb name) to publish their content moderation policies and define how they plan to keep “harmful content” off of their platforms. Musk is describing this as an invasion of privacy and a violation of the free speech rights of social media companies under both the federal and California state constitutions. Even after reading through this a couple of times, this lawsuit doesn’t look like a cut-and-dried, easy call to make.

The Crushing Costs of DEI on University Campuses
On Friday, the New York Times published a truly shocking piece that nevertheless slid by my transom unnoticed until last night. Entitled “D.E.I. Statements Stir Debate on College Campuses,” it begins with the depressing tale of University of Toronto psychology professor Yoel Inbar, who was recently denied a position at the University of California, Los Angeles despite having been already evaluated as highly qualified and mooted to join the faculty.

 

Economy & Taxes

 

EU targets Big Tech again by naming Apple, Meta, and Amazon as ‘gatekeepers’
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft will be governed by regulation that’s aimed at increasing competition and keeping companies from abusing their market power. But the tug-of-war between EU regulators and Big Tech is far from over.

American Exceptionalism: Work-from-Home Edition
Americans are working from home at much higher rates than Europeans or Asians. In July, office occupancy in Asia was 79 percent. Occupancy in Europe was 75 percent. In the U.S., it was 48 percent.

 

International

 

Scientists Say They’ve Found the Largest Asteroid Impact Crater Hiding in Plain Sight
Researchers believe they’ve discovered the world’s largest asteroid impact crater in New South Wales, Australia. They think the impact may have happened between 445 and 443 million years ago. It could have been part of the reason for the Hirnantian glaciation stage, a mass extinction event that eliminated about 85 percent of Earth’s species.

Rewriting history…it works more often than you think
It’s maddening, but true. If there is a choice between confronting a difficult truth and believing an obvious lie many people will choose the latter.

James Bond, Progressive
It’s been a long, long time since I read any of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, and I don’t think (I may have read Kingsley Amis’s Colonel Sun) that I have read any of the “continuation” Bonds written by other authors. I never quite saw the point. Fleming’s Bond was, well, Fleming’s Bond. Moreover, he was a creation rooted in a certain time and place, and like, say, Jeeves and Wooster, that is how 007 should stay, at least in print (with the films, that’s long been a lost cause).

Danger across the border: Nine Mexican cities place among the top 10 deadliest in the world
Nine Mexican municipalities ranked in the top 10 most dangerous cities in the world in 2022

Pope Francis praises Genghis Khan’s Mongol empire
Pope Francis has praised Genghis Khan’s 13th-century Mongol empire for respecting religious freedom and unifying cultures, bypassing Khan’s history of massacring enemies as he swept across Asia.

Scientists grow human embryo in a lab without sperm, egg or womb
Scientists report they have grown the early stages of a human embryo-like entity without using sperm, an egg or a womb.

‘Earth-like’ Planet Nine could be hiding in our solar system: research
There may be another world lurking between the orbital lines of our solar system.

So…industrial orders in Germany just fell thru the floor
Here is another in a line of inexorable “told you so’s.” At the beginning of August, I’d posted that the German Green dream was crashing more than just the Hofbräuhaus (tavern) budgets of burgermeisters’ rural citizens. It was coming for Germany’s vaunted industrial complex.

China Considers Law Banning Clothes That ‘Hurt Feelings’ of Others
China’s public is expressing concern about a potential legal change that would allow for fines and even jail time for people who offend the government’s sensibilities by wearing the wrong clothing.

Two Women to Compete for Mexico’s Presidency
Face-off between ruling party’s Claudia Sheinbaum and Xóchitl Gálvez of opposition coalition reflects country’s growing female representation

BBC: quantum physics shows the universe is Queer
Everything in the world exists to affirm the desires of the alphabet people.

Cannibal prison has lags forced to eat each other to survive and reeks of rotting flesh
Filthy and brutal conditions plague a Rwandan prison feared to be the most inhumane in the world as inmates who could be innocent eat rotting corpses to stay alive

Pierre Poilievre’s push to keep convention focused on economy falls to grassroots votes for social policies
The majority of party members voted to ban medical treatments to minors questioning gender identity, as well as supporting ‘women-only’ spaces like bathrooms.

 

Opinion

 

Something Feels Off
I acknowledge this is, perhaps, wishful thinking. I acknowledge that going in. But something feels off.

California Tries to Put the State Above Parents
Adults who keep secrets with other people’s children violate commonsense safeguards of minors and must be stopped. Shamefully, this is exactly the kind of behavior California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, seeks to enable.

The Destructive Force of ‘Equality’
Many Americans were shocked when it was recently reported that the principal of John Glenn Elementary School in Oklahoma City, Shane Murnan, is a drag queen who performs as “Shantel Mandalay.” Furthermore, the fact that Murnan had previously been arrested on child pornography charges might have been a red flag, even if the charges were dropped on the grounds that it could not be proved that the material depicted minors. We might have expected this in some left-wing bastion like San Francisco, but Oklahoma City? Shocking. The state school superintendent called it “outrageous” and “completely inappropriate.”

Mail-In Voting Is Here to Stay; GOP Must Adapt or Lose
In a perfect world, voters would be required to show up on Election Day to cast their ballots. Unfortunately, the pandemic handed Democrats a golden opportunity to implement mail-in voting and its close cousins, early voting and ballot harvesting, on an unprecedented scale. As dangerous and unpalatable as these activities may be, they are here to stay.