Category Archives: Uncategorized

What’s up with Biden’s transsexual?

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If you want to be part of Joe Biden’s administration, you need to be a “first.”

I don’t mean “first” like first in your college graduation class. Heck, Biden himself was only in the top 50% of his law school class according to Biden and only in the top 85% according to the school records.  

No, not that kind of first. After all, this is a Democrat administration and so we’re not talking about dead white patriarchal European so-called merit.

What we’re talking about is that you need to be a “first” in your skin color or sexuality. Such as “first Asian Director of the Office of Management and Budget” or “first black woman vice president” or “first gay cabinet member” or “first Native American cabinet secretary.”

Or the subject of this column. Biden boasts that he has nominated the first transsexual Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services.  

I have nothing against transsexuals. In fact, I wrote a column a few years ago expressing admiration for the former Bruce and now Caitlin Jenner. So long as they don’t prey on children or molest me or the other wildlife, I don’t care a fig about what a person does sexually in private with consenting people, animals or inanimate objects. (On second thought, let’s leave innocent animals out of this.)

But the left does care. If a person is gay or lesbian or bisexual or multi-gendered or transsexual, that’s to be celebrated almost as much as if they identify as one of the racial minorities on whom the left chooses to condescendingly smile and from whom they harvest votes.

And not just celebrated, but heroized. And not just heroized, but promoted.

So this particular individual who a few years ago had his male organ detached, turned inside out and inserted into his abdomen to make it into something like a female sex organ, gets celebrated, heroized and promoted to a cabinet under-secretary position.

When we ask about his qualifications for this job, they tell us that he’s the first transsexual to get promoted to such a position. When we repeat the same question, they repeat the same answer. When we repeat the question yet again, they say something like, “Shut up, you bigot!”

But I won’t shut up, because there’s a children’s medical issue here.

The medical issue is whether the surgery to which this nominee voluntarily subjected himself should be performed on children. That issue is within the purview of the job for which Biden has nominated him.

Yes, this surgery does get performed on children. There are 40+ clinics in the United States doing that. The largest transgender youth clinic in Los Angeles, for example, saw 1,000 patients last year. The youngest was a four-year-old.  

Many youngsters who undergo gender-reassignment surgery later regret it, as people often regret irreversible things they do before adulthood. Whether such surgery should be performed on children is hotly debated among physicians and psychiatrists.

Surprisingly, sometimes such irreversible surgery is performed on children contrary to the wishes of their parents. Physicians sometimes carve up the sex organs of boys and girls and fabricate them into organs of the opposite sex (can we still say “opposite sex”?) without the consent and indeed against the express wishes of the boys’ and girls’ parents.         

At his senate confirmation hearing, Biden’s transsexual nominee was asked by Senator Rand Paul, who is a physician, whether he endorsed this practice. Paul’s exact question is worth quoting:

“Do you support the government’s intervening to override the parent’s consent to give a child puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or amputation surgery of breasts and genitalia?” 

Here is the nominee’s exact answer:

“Transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field with robust research and standards of care that have been developed. If I am fortunate enough to be confirmed as the assistant secretary of health, I will look forward to working with you and your office and coming to your office and discussing the particulars of the standards of care for transgender medicine.”   

In short, the nominee under oath refused to answer the question.

The media in their reports on this testimony predictably did what they do to Republicans in these situations. They called Senator Paul a bigot and told him to shut up. Most media reports failed to quote either Senator Paul’s question or the nominee’s answer, but instead paraphrased and mischaracterized the exchange.

Whichever side you come down on (I happen to come down on Senator Paul’s side) the question was legitimate and the answer was evasive.  For that reason alone, this nominee should not be confirmed.

I don’t care about his sexuality and I don’t care about his “first-ness.” But I do care that he lacks the courage and honesty to give a forthright answer to an important question concerning medical care for children.

Is Europe seeking herd immunity, or just culling the herd?

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The first vaccine against the Wuhan virus was developed by a German biotech company, BioNTech, in partnership with American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.

So why is the vaccination rate in Germany stuck at 4% while the American vaccination rate is now quadruple that? Throughout Europe, it’s much the same story. The vaccination rate is 4% in France, Spain, Sweden and Italy, and 5% in Finland, Greece, Poland and Norway.

Only the UK, now separate from the EU, is doing well with a vaccination rate of 27% after approving the vaccine weeks before the FDA did in the U.S. (with the same data that the FDA ultimately based its approval on, it should be noted).

Unsurprisingly, this dawdling on the Continent has an effect: death. While the death rates have come down from January’s peak wave, daily new cases and daily deaths in the EU remain stubbornly high. In contrast, in the UK where the vaccine is really rolling, daily new cases are down by three-quarters and daily deaths are down two-thirds.

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People are getting stupider, it’s a scientific fact

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The “Flynn Effect” is the phenomenon identified by intelligence researcher James Flynn. He found that average intelligence quotients, or IQ’s, as measured by standardized tests were steadily increasing through the course of the 20th century.

That sounds quite natural because, after all, each generation gets better nurturing. They get better health, improved medical care, more nutritious food and greater schooling.

But IQ is supposed to be mainly about nature, not nurture. Nurturing can certainly affect a person’s well-being, but in theory it doesn’t change a person’s IQ much (except of course when the nurturing is so bad that it produces negative neurological effects).

Flynn and other scientists puzzled for years over the reasons we kept getting smarter. Even as scientists themselves along with everyone else got smarter and smarter, they still never managed to figure out why.

Now they have a reverse Flynn Effect to figure out. In recent decades, average IQ’s have gone down, not up. For those of you who are personally experiencing this reverse effect, I’ll put it in simple terms: People are getting stupider.

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Media “news” is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

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Senator Ted Cruz noted that the Democrats’ latest impeachment of Donald Trump even though Mr. Trump has duly departed from the White House is, “like Shakespeare, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Long-time NBC journalist Andrea Mitchell purported to correct Senator Cruz. On Twitter she sniped, “No, that’s Faulkner.”

But of course, Cruz was right. It’s Shakespeare. Faulkner centuries later wrote a book entitled “The Sound and the Fury” which consciously and famously borrowed Shakespeare’s line, as every high schooler knows (or used to).

The Twitter-verse went wild correcting Mitchell’s erroneous correction. She finally issued an apology of sorts: “I clearly studied too much American literature and not enough Macbeth. My apologies to Sen. Cruz.”

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Masks are killing us

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The bulk of seniors who are at risk from COVID have either died of the disease, survived the disease or been vaccinated against the disease. New cases are dropping quickly.

Over ten percent of the overall American population has been vaccinated – over 40 million of them – and that figure is increasing at the rate of about 11 million a week. It looks like nearly everyone who wants to be vaccinated will be vaccinated by late spring. Meanwhile, drug treatments have proved increasingly effective. Most recently, the FDA approved a drug cocktail from Eli Lilly.

There will come a time when COVID masks are no longer necessary.

The implicit assumption in that statement is that masks were necessary before. The science is not clear in that regard, but it seems logical that they helped to some degree. The virus seems to be transmitted by airborne particles like microdroplets of sputum. The virus is far too small to be intercepted by a mask, but many of those microdroplets are not.

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Who is Elon Musk and what is he selling?

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Elon Musk wants to go to Mars.  More precisely, he wants you or me to go. It’s a bad idea.

Apart from provisioning and energy problems that are potentially solvable, there are three big problems with a Mars mission: Getting there, getting back and being there. All three problems center around an insolvable radiation problem.

On Earth, molten material under the mantle slowly circles a solid iron core. This produces a dynamo effect generating an electrical current and a corresponding magnetic field. This magnetic field is well known, and is the basis for the simple magnetic compass that has been used for centuries.

This magnetic field also serves to divert away from the earth 99.9% of the radiation and cosmic rays that bathe the universe. The remaining tiny amount that is not diverted is largely blocked by the earth’s atmosphere. Our atmosphere blocks radiation as effectively as a slab of steel three feet thick.

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Be a tribe of one

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Suppose you’re a die-hard Democrat. What do you do about such issues as:

Transgenderism in women’s sports. Do you side with persons having male chromosomes but identify as women when they want to compete in sports against women, simply because such persons are overwhelmingly Democrats? Or do you side with genetic women – who are also predominately Democrats – who are concerned that subjecting genetic women to competition from persons who’ve spent most of their lives developing height, girth and muscle mass as a man with male chromosomes and testosterone levels will destroy women’s sports?

Environmentalism and immigration versus unions. Do you side with trade unions – which are overwhelmingly Democrats – who understandably want good jobs for workers? Or do you side with environmentalists – who are also overwhelmingly Democrats – who want to eliminate the oil and gas industry and the millions of jobs that accompany it, and illegal immigration advocates – who are overwhelmingly Democrats – who want to flood America with low-paid immigrants that may eventually vote Democrat but will drive down America’s worker wages even further?

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Vaccinating anti-vaxxers’ children is associated with autism in their parents

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Regular Beatniks know that since last summer I’ve been enrolled in the clinical trials for the Pfizer COVID vaccine. Because it’s a “blinded” study, I never really knew whether I’d received the vaccine or a placebo.

The clinic called me last week to tell me that Pfizer was unblinding the study for people in my demographic (translation: old farts) if we wished. Moreover, Pfizer was offering to administer the vaccine to those whom the unblinding revealed had received the placebo.

I accepted Pfizer’s offer. They then told me I’d received the placebo. I suspected as much based on the complete absence of any side effects, as well as the antibody test that I took a week after getting the injection which told me I had no COVID antibodies. (Getting the antibody test was not prohibited by the paperwork I signed.)

Pfizer then offered me the vaccine. I accepted their offer, and received the vaccine this morning. 

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Pharma performed a miracle, but government’s botched rollout killed tens of thousands

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Although they aren’t exactly scientists, the media said that COVID vaccines would take years or even decades to develop and test and that they would probably be only about 50-60% effective.

It’s not clear whether the media really believed their own dire predictions, or whether they were just rooting for the virus because they thought it hurt Trump and hurt America, both of which they like to see hurt. Although (or perhaps because) they’re not scientists and not very smart, they are Democrats after all.

In any event, the pharmaceutical industry proved them wrong. They developed new vaccines with new technology in a few months, then finished testing them in a few more months. The effectiveness is about 95%.

Expect media reports that in the 5% of the population where the vaccine seems not to work, it’s all Trump’s fault. The headline will read something like, “Although impeached and out of office, Trump is still killing people.”

Now that the scientists, physicians and businessmen at pharmaceutical companies have performed scientific, medical and business miracles, we can conquer the pandemic and get back to watching proper football in sports bars by simply taking the vaccine. Right?

No, not right. Because the simple distribution of the vaccines wound up the responsibility of the people who brought you the Obamacare website and VA Hospitals.

The first act in their comedy of errors was to suggest that the first people to get the vaccine should not be the people over 70 who are dying, but the people who have the darkest skin. Because social justice.

Imagine the vaccination center. Would they have a light meter to measure a person’s pigmentation, or would they just take the person’s word for it? What if they were white, color-wise, but identified as very black, at least on that day?

Ironically, or perhaps intentionally, but probably just carelessly, the effect of this scheme would be more deaths among both older whites and older blacks because the vaccine supplies would be used instead on not-at-risk younger blacks.

But no matter. The point was not to reduce white deaths or even black deaths. It was to feel very, very woke. After a suitable outcry from doctors – the kind with patients, not the kind jockeying for government grants – the government quietly backed off that racist plan.

The FDA finally approved the vaccine in mid-December. That was weeks after Great Britain already had. In the interim, another ten thousand died. The government boasted that we’d get 20 million doses administered by the end of the year. As it turned out, they administered only about 10% of that.

Happy New Year!

What happened? Intra-governmental squabbling between the bureaucratic Center for Disease Control and military brass heading up Operation Warp Speed (why military brass for that task?) consumed months. Eventually, they decided that the vaccinations should proceed in phases.

Fine. But they decided that we cannot go onto a new phase until the prior phase is finished. They never specified what “finished” means. Does it mean 100.00% of the people in the prior phase have been injected? What if less than 100.00% of those people actually want to be injected? Is 90% enough? Or 70%?

They never said. Meanwhile, millions of vaccine does were, and are, sitting in freezers while people continue dying at the rate of about 4,000 a day.

The vaccines are administered in two shots about three weeks apart. The government decided they couldn’t proceed to a new phase until they had in-hand enough of the vaccine to administer the second shot to people who’d gotten the first shot in the prior phase.

But the pharmaceutical companies had already told the government that their manufacturing capabilities are sufficient to manufacture those second shots on-the-fly. The government didn’t need to keep the second shots on ice. But the government did anyway, and still more people died.

Moreover, the data indicates that just a first shot is highly efficacious, so if somehow a person doesn’t get his second shot he’s very likely protected anyway. No matter, the government insisted on reserving a second shot for a person who’d taken the first shot rather than administering it as the first shot to another patient. Meanwhile, thousands more died.

Finally, the government relented and decided to administer that shot to new patients rather than reserving it to be the second shot for earlier patients.

Now we’re assured that the vaccination program is “on track” but we’re not given any metrics as to how it’s really going in comparison to the plan (assuming there really is a plan this time). In reality, over half the New York allotment of vaccine is still on ice.

This Keystone Kops routine has literally cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of lives. More Americans have now died of COVID than American soldiers died in WWII. But the government types don’t care because as “essential workers” they personally have gotten the vaccine.

Call me cynical, but are these lazy, selfish and inept government types the people we want running the health care system? Or anything else?

Unfriend the social media monsters for two reasons – them and us

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As for them:

Twitter and Facebook candidly play political favorites. They censor ideas and content on the right while permitting countervailing ideas and thought on the left

Events of last week compared to events of last summer drive this home. Social media has been clamping down on complaints about a stolen election, to the point now that Facebook says it will censor all references to “Stop the Steal.”

Meanwhile, Twitter has altogether banned the President of the United States from its platform.  Their justification for this is that his tweets threaten our country.

In contrast, neither Twitter nor Facebook banned Antifa or Black Lives Matter last summer when they were actively advocating the overthrow of the government. They chanted “No USA at all” and “Burn it Down” as they attempted to do precisely that. They failed, so far, but they did kill and maim a number of people and destroy billions of dollars in property.

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