September 19, 2024

HE’S NOT WRONG:

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

INDEED:

Posted at 4:53 pm by Stephen Green

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (MOSCOW EDITION):

A country in severe demographic decline is in a mafia war over corpses.

Posted at 3:51 pm by Stephen Green

FLASHBACK: Lifetime Pennsylvania Democrats are becoming Republicans.

Shirley Hall has always lived in this charming Blair County borough, located a few miles from the big city of Altoona and once the home of booming coal and paper mill industries. She has also been a Catholic all of her life and for most of it a registered Democrat, two attributes she says are, or at least were, a profound part of her identity.

She is still a Catholic, faithfully so, but last week when watching former President Donald Trump walk into the convention hall in Milwaukee just two days after being shot, she changed her voter registration on the spot.

In short, she is not just a Democrat voting for Trump come November, but she is now a Republican and will be voting so up and down the ballot. How solidly Democrat was Hall? The retired administrator for a local Catholic church voted for Barack Obama twice and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and did not vote for Donald Trump in 2020.

“I didn’t vote for Biden either. I just didn’t vote for either man that year,” Hall said.

Hall said a number of things led to her pivotal decision last week. “The last three years had really disheartened me in how my party had handled inflation, never recognizing that it is really impacting people’s lives, but also the border and how that has made accessing drugs even easier for people,” she said.

That’s a Salena Zito story from July.

Today:

I don’t like how needlessly close this race is — and I let it get me crabby yesterday — but there are unprecedented undercurrents in this race that I’m not sure pollsters have figured out how to account for.

Posted at 3:35 pm by Stephen Green

BECAUSE IT HELPED ESTABLISH A DESIRED NARRATIVE. NEXT QUESTION? Why did it take four years to debunk the black baby study?

A study published this week in a prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, makes a claim that’s almost unheard of on the pages of leading medical journals: systemic racism and implicit bias are not the self-evident explanations for a pervasive racial disparity. To be precise: black newborns aren’t dying at higher rates when they’re treated by white doctors.

The study, conducted by a Harvard economist and a Manhattan Institute researcher, purports to debunk a widely circulated 2020 study, also published in PNAS, which concluded that black newborns attended by a white physician suffer a “mortality penalty” and are twice as likely to die. That study garnered incriminating headlines in USA Today, CNN, Science News, NPR, and The Washington Post. It was also so influential that it was cited by Supreme Court Justice Brown Jackson in the high court’s 2023 affirmative action case, in which the American Medical Association and 44 other parties declared in their amicus brief: “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug.”

How could two teams of researchers look at the same data — 1.8 million childbirths in Florida between 1992 and 2015 — and reach diametrically opposite conclusions?

This time around, the researchers added one key variable that the 2020 researchers had overlooked — low birth weights — and the whole thing collapsed. The research design contained a fatal flaw, overlooking the fact that severely underweight babies, who have very high mortality rates to start with, tend to be treated by white doctors. Physicians who handle the most serious medical cases tend to see higher death rates.

No matter; the narrative is firmly established.

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green

TRUE:

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Chicago Public Schools teachers say they were told by administrators to give migrant students passing grades.”The teachers we spoke with work in CPS elementary schools and say they spoke no Spanish, while their migrant students spoke no English, making communication virtually impossible. They also added that because their schools were located in predominantly Black neighborhoods, they offered no English as a Second Language (ESL) support. Despite this, they say they were instructed by school administrators to give their migrant students a 70 percent in every subject and pass them on to the next grade.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE ‘BIONIC JEW’ THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE:

But it’s more difficult than you might think to talk sense into such folks because they believe strongly in the Bionic Jew theory of the universe. This goes beyond space lasers or even weather control: It’s a belief in the existence of the super-sabra. In this fantasy, Israel is a place where Jews go to have their software updated, not to learn to use weapons but to become weapons.

After all, if Israel can genetically engineer Egyptian attack sharks and radiation-sniffing Iranian lizards, imagine what can be done with human potential.

There is another, less amusing thought process at work here, however. And that is that the morality of Israel’s operations is inversely correlated with their level of success.

Israel’s critics insist the Jewish state carry out individually targeted attacks. Blowing up a terrorist’s personal pager, maiming him and him alone, is obviously in compliance with this demand. But what if Israel does exactly that to thousands of individual terrorists simultaneously? That’s no good, for reasons that are difficult to explain but which feel obvious to the public intellectuals keeping score.

You can see how this approach has been applied to Gaza for the duration of the ongoing war. If Israeli soldiers encounter an empty house rigged with explosives but which has an entrance to a subterranean tunnel system used only by the terrorist army and the hostages the IDF is trying to rescue, what can it do? The obvious answer is: it can detonate the explosives from a safe distance and then enter the tunnels. After all, the war crime here is Hamas’s, and such an approach allows the IDF to neutralize the threat without harming civilians.

But what if Hamas illegally rigs a house again? And again? “An aerial photo recovered by the Israeli military from a Hamas commander’s post shows three dozen hidden tunnel entrances marked with color-coded dots and arrows in one crowded neighborhood,” reports the New York Times. The underlying facts haven’t changed: Hamas has committed the crime, Israel is pursuing the approach most closely aligned with humanitarian concerns. But because Hamas has replicated its crime many times over, Israel will knock down many houses. Suddenly, the public criticism is of Israel’s conduct, its supposed “domicide,” its appetite for destruction.

In this upside-down world, the more war crimes Hamas carries out, the less Israel is morally permitted to do in self-defense. Hence, the problem in Lebanon is not that there are thousands of Iranian terrorists there but that Israel wants to take out all of them.

Read the whole thing.

Related: More on “Operation Grim Beeper.” “By the way, for an ideology that is rooted in a desire to return to the 8th century, hasn’t Israel helped them take one big step there by causing Hezbollah to abandon electronics?”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll