Tag Archives: culture

Apologies

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Elliot Kaufman had an op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that talked about the utility of apologies from Stanford University and the various failures of that school in its serial mistreatment of Jews along with the several machinations the school used to push that mistreatment.

I’m less interested in apologies from schools like Stanford than I am in changes in the schools’ behavior.

Such changes, though, won’t be possible without a complete turnover in school management, from the President/Chancellor/what-have-you on down through middle management, along with removal/replacement of Department Chairs and their seconds, and elimination of frivolous departments like the plethora of DEI and related claptrap.

Absent that—all of that—words of apology will only be, can only be, empty chit-chat and cynical distraction from the problem.

Why We Can’t Trust the CDC

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s primary advisory panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, has voted unanimously to recommend routine Wuhan Virus (my term) vaccinations for children via the Vaccines for Children program, which pays for ACIP-recommended vaccines for children in low-income families. This likely will lead to green-lighting schools—especially teachers union-controlled schools—to require the vaccinations as a condition of enrolling.

It doesn’t matter that the vaccines aren’t FDA-approved for children under 12.

It doesn’t matter that children well into junior high age aren’t at risk from the virus beyond—perhaps—getting mildly ill and recovering in a day or two.

It doesn’t matter that the risk from the virus is extremely tiny for any healthy person up through adulthood and into old age.

Here are some hard numbers illustrating the degree of “risk” from the virus, based on work by John Ioannidis, who has routinely studied Wuhan Virus infection fatality rates (IFR) since early in the pandemic:

…median IFRs of 0.0003% for 0-19 years, 0.003% for 20-29 and 0.011% for 30-39, according to the preprint, which has not been peer-reviewed.
The IFR jumps substantially between ages 50-59 (0.129%) and 60-69 (0.501%).

Even that “substantial jump” is from a risk of nearly zero to a level still right next door to zero.

But the CDC takes seriously an advisory panel that insists on vaccination because…”we say so.”

The CDC could walk well down the path back toward trustworthiness if it rejects the ACIP’s recommendation and then gets rid of the ACIP altogether.

Indentured Servitude

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The Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West wants to force unionization on companies and their employees whether those employees want it or not. The SEIU-UHW’s proximate target is California’s dialysis industry. California’s Proposition 29 is the union’s latest (after two prior ballot failures in the two prior election cycles) effort targeting dialysis.

The measure, which would require dialysis clinics to have a physician, nurse practitioner or physician assistant “on-site during all patient treatment hours, would cost dialysis clinics $376,000 to $731,000 per year—per clinic. That would drive many into bankruptcy closure because they can’t afford those costs.

That’s bad enough. Here, though, is the enforcement mechanism the union has included in its ballot measure.

[T]he language of Prop 29 says it would prohibit “clinics from closing or substantially reducing services without state approval.”

That’s naked indentured servitude. That’s what unions want. Recall unions’ prior and long-standing drive to force non-union workers in any company to pay union dues under the guise that the union is working for them as well as their actual members.

Now unions want to reduce businesses and their employees to the status of serfs, permanently tied to the land/permanently tied to operation.

Credibility

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CNN‘s ex-boss Jeff Zucker and MSNBC‘s ex-boss Phil Griffin defended their decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop news in the runup to the 2020 Presidential election.

Griffin:

The Justice Department was looking into it, never reported it until he [Hunter Biden] is the son of a candidate. I don’t think it’s a main story until that happens.

The son of a major candidate for office misbehaving badly isn’t news. Never mind that Joe Biden had been making Hunter part of his campaign all along, seeking sympathy for his drug-abusing son for having overcome his addiction. Never mind that Hunter Biden already was news for his use of his diseased brother’s widow, his business dealings, and his use of his familial relationships in furthering his deals.

But his laptop and its contents weren’t news?

Zucker:

He was the son of the candidate; he wasn’t the candidate.

And, he said, as cited by Just the News:

CNN “did not know enough about” the story to cover it and “the problem” was that former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was the first to come forward with materials from the laptop….

So the news wasn’t news because one of the early sources regarding the laptop was a man Zucker didn’t like.

This is the editorial “judgment” of the journalism guild.

Still only Chit-Chat

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Now ex-President Barack Obama (D) thinks it was a mistake to essentially ignore the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009, the Iranian people’s uprising against the tyrannical Ayatollah regime.

That’s awfully … of him to say so, now, 13 years too late for it to matter for the Iranian people or for him to suffer any consequences, even as it comes amid the current protests by Iranian women against that same tyrannical Ayatollah regime.

Now he’s saying,

Every time we see a flash, a glimmer of hope, of people longing for freedom, I think we have to point it out.
We have to shine a spotlight on it. We have to express some solidarity about it[.]

Chit-chat. Obama, and his BFF President Joe Biden (D), still are interested in limiting themselves to yakking about the Iranian people’s efforts. Talk is cheap; what concrete action would today’s Obama or Biden be willing to take?

They’re not quite being silent.