Category Archives: culture

Ya Think?

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The Just the News headline says it:

UN-backed Gaza City famine determination may be flawed by reliance on incomplete data

This fleshing out:

While the world is bombarded with heart-wrenching images—many of them fake or staged—of starving children, a review of the data shows that the IPC appears to have relied on incomplete survey results for the month of July to make its claim [of famine].

It also turns out that the UN’s IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) used carefully selected “sample” data from Gaza with which to manufacture its claim.

The IPC relied on a sample of 7,519 subjects in the Gaza Governorate to calculate the malnutrition rates.

However:

Nutrition Cluster published the full health data from the Gaza Governorate in July, which showed a sample size of 15,749 subjects.

This dishonesty was exacerbated by the intrinsically dishonest press’ bruiting about those inaccurate, incomplete, and openly falsified “data” as though they were factual and told the whole story.

Israel and its IDF is fighting a three-front war, not just the terrorists in Gaza.

When You Don’t Know the Difference between Man and Woman

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Be loud and proud about it. Minnesota Progressive-Democratic Party Senator Amy Klobuchar referred to the Minneapolis Annunciation Catholic School mass shooter as “he” in her remarks about the event. On this, Klobuchar was entirely correct.

Court records show [the shooter] legally changed names from Robert to Robin in 2019. A court form, filled by a person believed to be the shooter’s mother, Mary Grace Westman, said, “Minor child [redacted] identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”

That’s not stopping NPR from pushing its ignorance at the top of its lungs. NPR host Ailsa Chang:

And just a point of clarification, Senator Klobuchar referenced the shooter as “he.” Although police have identified a suspect, it’s still unclear at this time what that person’s gender is or how they identify.

The shooter is male because that’s how he started life, and that’s how his genetics identify him. Choosing to self-identify otherwise changes nothing about his biology; it affects only his chosen life style.

A side note, too, since Chang apparently has forgotten her grade school American English grammar lessons. There’s only one shooter in the present case. The grammatically correct pronoun here is not the plural “they,” but the singular “he.”

There’s a reason NPR is losing its Federal funding.

A Weakness in Good People

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A letter writer in Thursday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal is deeply along the right track.

The most reliable way to understand dictators’ thoughts is to read their own writing…. From Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?” (1902) to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (1925) and Mao’s “On New Democracy” (1940), the blueprints for conquest are there in black and white. So it is with Vladimir Putin’s essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (2021).

Add Stalin to that, and there are a host of others in recent and distant history. A weakness that good people have, though, is that having read those dictators’ words, as many of us (most of us, at least of some of them?) have, too many of us don’t believe they really mean it—they’re just exaggerating for effect, or they’re too mad to be taken seriously, or…any excuse to dismiss avert our eyes will do.

It is a serious weakness: good people have an extremely difficult—often fatal—time believing the depth of evil and depravity that exists in dictators and especially of their willingness and intent on acting on their written intensions.

It’s necessary to take them at their word. And then to take the necessary next step: hold them to their word and move sternly to preempt them. And where preemption fails, to counter them decisively and totally, as we finally did in eradicating Nazi Germany and fascist Japan and Italy, remaking those nations as friendly to and respective of their neighbors.

Bureaucrats Leaving

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This time from the CDC. Following Susan Monarez’ removal as CDC Director (which she was contesting as I wrote this, but my point remains the same), several top CDC officials resigned. This isn’t the chaotic mess that some pundits want us to believe, though.

Monarez is on her way out, one way or another, because she repeatedly

clashed with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr, and members of his staff….

Kennedy is her boss, and her insubordination was actively cheered by the Progressive-Democrats in Congress. Senator Patty Murray (D, WA):

I had serious doubts about CDC Director Monarez’s willingness to stand up against RFK Jr’s personal mission to destroy public health in America—I’m glad that I was wrong[.]

I’ll elide comment on the Progressive-Democrat’s cynically conclusory characterization of Kennedy’s “mission.” There are a couple of reasons why government bureaucrats these days leave beside wanting to move on after having been in such high pressure jobs for some time. One is that they’re disgruntled that they’re no longer in control of government policy (viz., Fiona Hill’s infamous “quite cross” testimony during Trump I’s first impeachment) and are instead relegated to their proper role of carrying out the directives of their bosses and of their bosses’ boss, the President. In frustration, they quit or are fired.

Another reason is that they disagree with those policies and they believe that they cannot in good conscience support them, so they resign. Of the latter two departure reasons, this is the honorable one.

In either case, the disagreements are good things to argue during the discussions at the heart of any decision process. Those discussions should necessarily be private, and once the boss has made his decision, the only honest thing to do is to carry them out, the bureaucrats’ disagreements no longer being relevant, or to resign. Continuing to resist, especially leaking their disagreements to the press, exposes such individuals for what they are: self-important bureaucrats who happen to have, in the present cases, medical or science degrees. They are, on net, no loss when they go.

In the end, a net benefit: the President—whomever he might be from administration to administration—gets a crop of bureaucrats who are on board with his policies rather than being saddled with self-important Know Betters believing themselves the government’s policy makers.

And then We the People can then make a more informed decision about whom to hire into the White House, more confident—or at least less unconfident—in the premise that the policies we’re voting up or down have been his and not those of that crop of bureaucrats.

It’s Not Morally Dubious

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Allysia Finley has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that talks about the arrogance and self-appointed moral superiority of scientists in our nation. One of her comments especially drew my attention, though. In the context of abortion and Roe v Wade, she wrote,

…the American Medical Association’s then-President Jack Resneck Jr asserted that states that restricted abortion would be “risking devastating consequences, including patients’ lives.” Why? Because “evidence and experience show us conclusively that the risk of death during or after childbirth is approximately 14 times greater than the risk of death from abortion-related complications.”
Comparing the risk of giving birth with that of terminating a pregnancy is morally dubious.

Including patients’ lives. Resnick doesn’t care a fig for the patients he so cynically ignores: those babies being killed by abortion. That’s the devasting consequence[] that Resnick ignores.

There only thing dubious about Resnick’s overt comparison is the comparison itself. What Resneck was comparing, and what Finley seems to have missed in his comparison, in fact was the certainty of the death of the baby from abortion with the mere, and empirically very small, risk of death from abortion-related complications and the empirically nearly as small (because 14 times nearly nothing still is very close to nothing) risk of death from childbirth complications. That comparison is not at all morally dubious. It’s clearly morally wrong, and it’s undisputedly morally abhorrent.