Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Trans
2. KBJ
3. Goolag
4. Legal
5. Ivermectin
6. 51 Liars
1. Trans. This one is going to be a bit of a rant aimed at our old political opponents, the feminists. Title IX of the Education Amendments was passed in 1972 and like a lot of other ugly legislation (Endangered Species Act), it was signed into law by Richard Nixon. Ostensibly it prohibited discrimination based on sex in any educational program or activity receiving any type of federal financial aid. Feminists were ecstatic when this was passed. The law was quickly seized upon by feminists to go after equality in college sports, particularly in the numbers of athletes participating and funding. They made great progress (if you choose to call it that) during the Carter and Clinton years. By the time O’Bama showed up, most of the damage was done. The problem the feminists had was that their sports never made any money. This is the same problem the men have, as the only sport that makes any money is collegiate football (men), and to a lesser extent men’s basketball, and on rare occasions, men’s baseball. Everything else is a money sink, including all women’s sports everywhere. The feminists had to be careful never to goad the federal courts into killing off the host they were attached to like so many leeches. The demand for equality quickly started killing off the lesser sports – tennis, swimming, wrestling, lacrosse, track and field, etc in a lot of colleges. The court-ordered demand by the feminists was for equal numbers of participants in all sports. Women typically don’t participate in equal numbers to men, so the solution was to eliminate vast numbers of minor men’s sports from colleges simply in order to make the participation numbers work out. Men’s sports athletes, supporters and parents pointed this out early and often, but nobody cared, least of all the feminists, courts, politicians or administrators. But things change as the years go by, and we are in a Brand-New Age of equality, where men pretending to be women (trans women – note that it never goes the other way, with women pretending to be men – trans men) are entering and dominating women’s sports, destroying them. Like the male athletes tossed aside like so much garbage when colleges were forced to equalize participation numbers, so too are female athletes today when forced to compete on an equal basis with trans women. And they are screaming bloody murder about the unfairness of it all. But fairness, like all childish arguments, is always in the eye of the beholder. Feminists have gone through society for the last century like a hot knife through butter. They won because their cause was viewed as politically useful, and democrats used both them and their demands successfully as weapons in the political wars for half a century. Today, with the rise of the latest victim group, trans women, feminists have been discarded, not unlike blacks, who were replaced by a tsunami of illegals democrats believe will vote for them for generations. There were never all that many feminists. But their political influence was far larger than their numbers and they used that influence gleefully, bullying all in their path into submission. Now they are crying foul, demanding help. I am torn. On one hand, they created this monster that is now consuming them and it serves them right. On the other hand, I do have daughters and granddaughters, some of whom play sports, so I do get the outrage. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the feminists, or their tacit supporters among suburban moms do what blacks and immigrants are doing in response today, turn toward Republicans and conservatives as political alternatives, solutions to the newly created problems, or to simply be left alone to live their lives? Stranger things have happened.
2. KBJ. Hearings for SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson (KBJ) were held in front of the Senate judiciary committee last week. The hearings did not disappoint, as she was every bit the dissembling wokester we all expected. She was both condescending and contemptuous of questions from those on the other side of the political aisle. She really didn’t answer anything relevant, but her answers did indicate that the law was what SHE thinks it is, regardless of what either congress or the executive may have actually voted on or signed. This makes her a fundamentally dangerous woman and the perfect democrat nominated judge. The only good news is that she will get to spend upwards of 30 years on the federal bench making things up as they go, and being on the SCOTUS, she will no longer be the most overturned federal judge on the DC Court of Appeals. Peter Principle in action, I guess. OTOH, her stunning ideological wokeness and incompetence will be on display for all who want to look. My prediction is that she will end up being a bigger idiot than the Wise Latina herself, Justice Sotomayor, and demonstrate it on a daily basis. My prediction is that she will also get bored at the lack of progress which will happen only during democrat administrations. Final thought, and this one makes me smile a bit, is that her confirmation will make Chief Justice Roberts’ job just bit harder and more uncomfortable. Roberts has decided that his most important duty is not to uphold the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Rather, he has decided his job is to protect and defend the integrity of the SCOTUS, which is gonna get a lot more interesting with a woman who thinks the Constitution is racist. That all by itself is going to be worth buying tickets to watch. And it couldn’t happen to a better SCOTUS Justice. For our part, I expect KBJ to issue a series of increasingly outrageous opinions that will position her nicely as the first SCOTUS Justice to be impeached and removed sometime in the not-so-distant future. In honor of her obsequious response to a question from Senator Blackburn that not being a biologist, she couldn’t possibly define what a woman is, a relevant scene from Monty Python’s Life of Bryan for your consideration:
3. Goolag. File this one under the heading: Too cute by half. An Ars Technica (hardly a right wing website) piece last week described how Google is actively obstructing investigations and discovery of their internal e-mail traffic. The program is called “Communicate with Care.” It trains and directs employees to routinely add an attorney e-mail addy as a ‘cc’, a privilege label, and a generic ‘request’ for counsel advice on every single piece of internal e-mail sent. This effectively shields all their internal traffic from discovery or release to investigators using attorney – client privilege. Things have gotten so bad that even the Merrick Garland Department of (In)Justice along with 14 state attorneys general have asked a federal court to sanction Google, compel release of requested documents unjustifiably claimed protected by attorney – client privilege. While internal lawyers are routinely ‘cc’d’ in corporate communications, Goolag has taken this to a whole new level of obstruction. E-mails requested are relevant to anti-trust suit filed by (In)Justice and 14 states in Oct 2020. It is a lawsuit aimed at breaking Goolag’s monopoly in the search engine and related advertising wars. Being Smart Guys, they knew what they were doing was wrong, and started their training as far back as 2016, four years before the anti-trust suit was filed.
4. Legal. A piece in Common Sense a week ago entitled The Takeover of America’s Legal System is perhaps the most sobering bit I have read in a month. Most of us are familiar with the Long March of leftism through institutions over the last half century. This piece documents its march through the legal establishment, with woke law schools turning out woke lawyers like so much popcorn. This started showing up in 2017 when newly minted young lawyers balked at the notion that all defendants needed equally vigorous representation in the legal system. The question at corporate retreat hosted by democrat power law firm Boies, Schiller and Flexner came from a young woman who took issue with the firm representing Harvey Weinstein. It has gotten worse since then, with legal representation for things that make leftists smile celebrated and defended to the hilt, while those of us on the political right have a very hard time find competent representation, apparently because we don’t deserve any. This is a big reason why the pogrom aimed at the Jan 6 participants has been so wildly successful and troubling. They have been unable to get competent legal representation. Even the Trump campaign had a difficult time fielding a legal team to fight the election wars in the runup to and following the Nov 2020 election. Worse, there is a very real effort to hunt down and disbar lawyers who participated on Trump’s side of the festivities. The new notion coming out of the law schools is that guilty people on the wrong side of the political divide, the wrong sex or wrong race shouldn’t have adequate representation is an attack on the very foundation of the legal system, turning it into a totalitarian nightmare. CRT has been recently in the center of this and its adherents seem to be driving this particular bus. And newly nominated SCOTUS Justice KBJ comes directly out of this new system, carrying with her every single bit of that belief system which she full-throatedly supports and celebrates.
5. Ivermectin. The wars against therapeutic treatments for COVID continued unabated last week with release of a massive study that concluded there is no indication that Ivermectin is clinically useful against CORONA. The trial took a look at nearly 1,400 people with CORONA. Half of them got placebos. Half got Ivermectin. Results for the next 28 days were monitored to see how quickly the virus left the bodies, how quickly symptoms were resolved, underlying co-morbidities, and differences in death rates. Media gleefully reported the results, as they completely supported the pro-vax worldview. Docs announcing their results pointed out that Ivermectin tends to work best in parts of the world where patients are also fighting parasitic infections. Not to be denied, Jo Nova took a look at how the study was set up and came to the conclusion that it was intentionally set up to fail. Note that the paper has not yet been published. Among other things, she found the following:
- The control group had a head start. It helps to collect data about a control group when there is a less deadly variant around as the control group does well.
- They gave ivermectin on an empty stomach, ensuring it was not absorbed well. While this works against worms, it lowers the effective antiviral does by a factor of 5.
- Limit the trial to just 3 days.
- Start the treatment late, sometimes as late as 8 days.
- Use the trial in a community that already knows how useful ivermectin is. Really sick people will rule themselves out of the trial because they don’t want the placebo.
- Some of the trial was done in nations with widespread use of ivermectin.
- Outcomes were vaguely defined.
- Sick people with expected stays of less than 5 days were ruled out of the trial.
- Protocol was tweaked in the middle of the trial, including a larger number of young people than oldsters.
6. 51 Liars. It is always nice when Swamp Creatures publicly self-identify as the lying political hacks they’ve become. Such is it with the 51 members of the intel community who signed a letter and then bellowed as loud and long as humanly possible calling the Hunter Biden laptop story printed by the New York Post a few weeks before the 2020 election fake news, false, fraudulent, likely Russian disinformation. It was their claims and positions as former government intel officials, picked up by the national media, led by the NYT that gave the media and Big Tech the top cover they needed to bury the story, censoring all online articles, comments and interest in the laptop and its contents, essentially tampering with the election during the campaign. Every single one of those who signed up for this knew their position was a lie. Every single one of them. Last week, in perhaps a preemptory salvo of an attempt to remove Biden from office before he breaks something even worse than he already has, the NYT decided that the Hunter Biden laptop story was actually real, and that it contained evidence of both Biden’s participation in corruption and profit from it. The NYP ran a blistering set of pieces complete with front page photos of the signatories of the 2020 letter. For some reason, these self-proclaimed patriots are completely silent or haven’t returned calls following the revelation. Happily, we now know their names and what they look like.
More later –
– AG