NOW OUT FROM KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: The Biden Malaise: How America Bounces Back from Joe Biden’s Dismal Repeat of the Jimmy Carter Years.
Calling it a reprise of the Carter years is honestly too charitable. Carter was not stunningly corrupt.
UPDATE: From the comments: “Carter didn’t give a speech soon after his (honest) election in front of a national monument back-lit blood red with two Marines flanking either side describing his political opponents as traitors.”
HIGHER EDUCATION IN AMERICA: ‘I am a Black woman in America. I am always in the right.’
ECONOMIC WARFARE: China’s chipmaking export curbs ‘just a start’, Beijing adviser warns before Yellen visit. “Germanium is used in high-speed computer chips, plastics and in military applications such as night-vision devices, as well as satellite imagery sensors. Gallium is used in radar and radio communication devices, satellites and LEDs. China’s abrupt announcement of controls from Aug. 1 on exports of some gallium and germanium products, also used in electric vehicles (EVs) and fibre optic cables, has sent companies scrambling to secure supplies and bumped up prices.”
Related: EU industry chief: We need to switch to ‘war economy mode.’
Also: Pentagon has strategic germanium stockpile but no gallium reserves. “The (Defense) Department is proactively taking steps using Defense Production Act Title III authorities to increase domestic mining and processing of critical materials for the microelectronics and space supply chain, including gallium and germanium.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed huge shortfalls in Western defense-industry capacity and organization. The U.S. and its allies aren’t prepared to fight a protracted war in the Pacific, and would struggle with a long European conflict.
As Adm. Rob Bauer, a top military officer at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, puts it: “Every war, after about five or six days, becomes about logistics.”
If the U.S. clashed head-on with Russia or China, stocks of precision weaponry could be used up in hours or days. Other vital supplies would run out soon after.
Do tell.
CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Oregon’s Castration Machine.
The gender surgery program at Oregon Health & Science University, a public teaching hospital in downtown Portland, provides a productive tableau for analysis. The program is led by Blair Peters, a self-described “queer surgeon” who sports neon-pink hair, uses “he/they” pronouns, and specializes in vaginoplasty (the creation of an artificial vagina), phalloplasty (the creation of an artificial penis), and “non-binary” surgeries, which nullify the genitals altogether. Peters and his colleagues have pioneered the use of a vaginoplasty robot, which helps efficiently castrate male patients and turn their flesh into a “neo-vagina.”
Business is booming. According to Peters, OHSU’s gender surgery clinic has “the highest volume on the West Coast,” and his robot-assisted vaginoplasty program can accommodate two patients per day. His colleague Jens Berli, who specializes in phalloplasty, boasts a 12- to-18-month waiting list for a consultation and an additional three- to six-month waiting list for a surgical appointment.
This openness marks a revolution in manners and morals. In the past, transgender theorists acknowledged that their surgical transformations were disturbing and anti-normative. “I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” wrote the male-to-female transgender theorist Susan Stryker in 1994. “I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster.”
Such views no longer prevail. Today’s transgender medical providers conceal the barbarity of their practices in euphemisms. They are not postmodern Dr. Frankensteins but providers of “life-saving, gender-affirming care.” The model patient is no longer the middle-aged autogynephile but the troubled teenager, sold a new identity, mediated through technology, that promises to resolve deep-seated sexual anxieties—and advance the political cause of transgender activists.
Read the whole thing.
FINANCIAL TIMES: The Moral Bankruptcy of Ivy League America.
If Rome’s oligarchs could have travelled to the future, they might have learned a trick or two from the US Ivy League. It is hard to think of a better system of elite perpetuation than that practised by America’s top universities. Last week the US Supreme Court ended affirmative action in US higher education — a ruling mourned by the heads of each of the eight Ivy League schools. Dartmouth even offered counselling to traumatised students. An ancient Roman might have thought something radical had changed. Little could be further from the truth.
Of the 31mn Americans aged between 18 and 24, just 68,000 are Ivy League schools undergraduates — about a fifth of a per cent. Of these, a varying ratio are non-white beneficiaries of affirmative action. Many of those are from privileged black or Hispanic backgrounds, as opposed to Chicago’s South Side or the wastelands of Detroit. That is the basis on which the Ivy League lays claim to being a deliverer of social change. It is an optical illusion. In that respect the Supreme Court has done America a favour. Any disruption to this status quo is a plus.
But it is unlikely to trigger the soul-searching America needs. The US debate remains stubbornly monopolised by the ethnic breakdown of the tiny number of students who win the Ivy League lottery. The 19mn or so of those 31mn young Americans who do not progress beyond high school, and the roughly 12mn who go to less elite colleges, barely feature. Whatever tweaks the Ivy League has to make to keep its diversity ratios after last week’s ruling are thus largely irrelevant to the 99.8 per cent that will never get there.
The genuinely radical Ivy League option — spending their vast endowments to sharply increase student numbers — is unlikely to be entertained. The key to the Ivy League is exclusivity; a big expansion in intake would dilute that premium. We are thus likely to continue with a situation in which universities such as Harvard, with a $53bn endowment, or Princeton with $36bn, continue to get richer. Each of these fortunes could revolutionise financial aid at dozens of public universities. . . .
Taken together, the Ivy League could as easily be construed as an affirmative action plan for wealthy white people, which is very far from the progressive brand it has cultivated.
Its chief victims are Asian. The historic irony is rich. Affirmative action was conceived in the 1960s as a form of reparation for the descendants of slaves. It quickly morphed into a system of race-based gaming for many ethnicities. The group that has lost out the most, Asian-Americans, are immigrants from countries that had nothing to do with US slavery. The chief beneficiaries have been elite whites, rather than African-Americans. The latter supply window dressing for a system that remains substantially unchanged.
Perhaps the biggest cost to US society is the elite’s obsession with race. Having benefited from a system they want their children to inherit, it is little wonder they were outraged by last week’s ruling. The US media is dominated by Ivy League graduates. It is a life experience that moulds people to see colour over class.
The only change that would qualify as radical in a society that claims to be meritocratic is one that would boost life chances for the rest. That would mean starting at the beginning of a child’s life with better childcare, good pre-school education, and so on. It would entail dramatically increasing the pipeline of students who might have the chance to win the educational lottery. Until that changes — and unless it becomes America’s focus — the current debate is a big red herring.
Opening access will never happen voluntarily, because the point of the Ivy League is exclusivity. The value of an Ivy League education is its scarcity, not its intellectual content.
SPEAKING OF ERRORS IN RECENT SUPREME COURT OPINIONS: Justice Sotomayor wrote in her SFFA affirmative action dissent that during the Jim Crow era, University of North Carolina excluded “all people of color.” In fact, only black Americans were excluded.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Pinkos, Stinkos, and Puerto Ricos: Damn it Feels Good to Be a Gangsta. “I spent the weekend at a Bud-Light-free celebration of American Independence in the great state of Michigan. I spoke to many patriotic revelers, while eating walleye, about the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) plan to enslave us in 6.5 years. NO ONE knew what I was talking about.”
Kevin Downey Jr is filling in for Kruiser today.
IT WAS MY UNDERSTANDING THAT THERE WOULD BE NO MATH: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s glaring error. “The survival rate of 99.6839% is not double 99.5549%. The claim that survival rates for black newborns double when they have black physicians is just plain false. The fact that neither the Association of American Medical Colleges nor Jackson’s clerks could read and properly understand a medical study is an alarming indication for the current state of both medical and legal education.”
Plus: “This wasn’t the only obvious error in progressive dissents. Justice Sotomayor also made at least one in her dissent on the 303 Creative case.” The Pulse nightclub shooting was apparently an Islamic terrorist act aimed at Americans, not an anti-gay terrorist act. But even if it were an Islamic terrorist act aimed at gays, Islamic terrorist Omar Mateen makes a poor example of American homophobia.
HMM: SpaceX Starlink satellites had to make 25,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers in just 6 months — and it will only get worse. “Data compiled by Lewis shows that, in the first half of 2021, Starlink satellites conducted 2,219 collision-avoidance maneuvers. The number grew to 3,333 in the following six-month period ending in December 2021 and then doubled to 6,873 between December 2021 and June 2022. In the second half of 2022, SpaceX had to alter the paths of its satellites 13,612 times to avoid potential collisions. In the latest report to the FCC, the company declared 25,299 collision-avoidance maneuvers over the past six months, with every satellite having been made to move an average of 12 times. “
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: AI robots could play future role as companions in care homes.
Nadine, a social robot powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) with human-like gestures and expressions, could have an important future role to play in tending to the sick and elderly, according to a professor who helped invent it.
Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, a robot expert from the University of Geneva, who served as the model for Nadine’s dark brown eyes and auburn hair, said Nadine and robots like it could prove more effective than human carers.
“She (Nadine) has time 24 hours a day. The others have no time,” Thalmann said.
She was speaking on the sidelines of a conference organised by the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva to make the case for AI and robots helping to reach global goals, such as health.
Global competition for nurses and carers is heating up, especially after COVID-19 and some countries are experiencing a staffing crisis in care homes which some think humanoid robots could one day ease.
Turning Japanese? I really think so: Inside Japan’s long experiment in automating elder care.
DON SURBER: What’s The Case for Chris Christie?
To ask the question is to answer it.
I COULDA TOLD THEM THAT: Pennsylvania Republicans Learn Life Lesson Number One: Don’t Be So Eager To Work With The Left. “That knowledge came the hard way for Keystone State Republicans after Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro went back on his word that he would sign a new school choice program into law. It should not come as any surprise that a Democrat politician put some of his biggest donors, the teachers unions, ahead of students. Yet for some reason, it was a wake-up call for those in Pennsylvania.”
BIDEN CORRUPTION RUNS DEEP INTO DHS BUREAUCRACY: Back in 1995, the early days of the Gingrich Revolution when Republicans took the House majority for the first time in more than 40 years, talk of “defunding the Left” was widespread. And then it wasn’t. And the Left’s legions of non-profit activist groups have received hundreds of billions of tax dollars in the decades since.
Had Republicans not lost their nerve on defunding the Left in 1995, Andrew Kerr of the Washington Free Beacon would not be reporting today that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has completely lost track of nearly 100,000 migrant children brought illegally into this country since 2021, all the while doubling the government’s spending on migrant care contracts going to left-wing non-profits:
“The massive increase in grants is attributed primarily to more than $5 billion in no-bid contracts doled out to three companies, a practice Democrats such as Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D.) and Vice President Kamala Harris decried during the Trump administration. Among the companies that benefited from the Biden administration’s largesse: the San Antonio-based nonprofit Family Endeavors, which inked a $579 million no-bid contract with the Office of Refugee Resettlement in March 2021.
“That just so happens to be two months after the charity hired Biden transition adviser Andrew Lorenzen-Strait. Family Endeavors received the funds to provide housing for migrant children at a facility in Pecos, Texas, though the group lacked any prior experience caring for immigrants, the Washington Examiner reported. The Office of Refugee Resettlement doled out an additional $1.34 billion to Family Endeavors in 2022.
“Family Endeavors also received an $87 million contract from Immigration and Customs Enforcement in March 2021 to provide temporary shelter for immigrant families. The Department of Homeland Security Inspector General later found that the charity had wasted $17 million of those funds on unused hotel rooms.”
If you want to know the likely fate of many of those 100,000 lost migrant kids, check out “The Sound of Freedom,” the most watched movie of the July 4 holiday, besting even the latest Indiana Jones sequel.
BLACK LIVES MATTER FLASHBACK: Snipers Shoot at Police in Dallas During Protests, Killing Four, Injuring Eight.
Related: Dallas sniper who gunned down 5 cops ‘wanted to kill white people,’ chief says.
You never hear about this story anymore.
OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND:
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has the flip-side of the equation: ‘This is a hit to Hollywood’s gatekeeping model:’ Faith-based producers of Sound of Freedom laud conservative backers for movie about one man’s quest to save children from sex-traffickers — as it beats Indiana Jones at box office.
IS THIS A GREAT COUNTRY, OR WHAT? Think the WH Cocaine Was Hunter’s? You Can Place Your Bets for That Online.
BIDEN’S ’70S SHOW: Bond Market Faces Reckoning From Inflation Boomerang.
Inflation can be thought of as a play in three acts. The 1970s are considered an imperfect analogy for today, but it in fact captures much of the essence of inflationary episodes.
In that period, we had the initial burst of inflation due to overly loose fiscal and monetary policy in the late 1960s. Then there were rate rises and a recession leading to a fall inflation, and a premature belief the worst was over. This was followed by a resurgence in CPI in the mid-1970s, ultimately requiring the Volcker rate sledgehammer to pacify it.
Today, however, that time period could be considerably compressed – with inflation beginning to rise again in as little as six months.
Much more at the link.
I’d add that there’s more inflationary pressure built into Biden’s “infrastructure” spending that hasn’t really kicked in yet. Worse, much of that will prove to be malinvestment that destroys the productivity gains the economy needs to catch up to Washington’s obscene money growth.
PRIME DEAL: Chicago Cutlery Fusion 6 Piece Forged Premium Steak Knife Set. #CommissionEarned
WHOOPI GOLDBERG IS CONFUSED: She apparently said that the Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard case would “lead to no women in colleges.” The truth is a little closer to the opposite. These days a very large number of (non-STEM oriented) colleges and universities put a thumb on the scale against women and in favor of men, on the ground that women are already a majority on their campuses. In some cases, it’s legal under Title IX and in other cases it’s not. If anything, the Court’s decision could, by analogy, benefit women. But who cares about the facts if your goal is to get people riled up?
SCREW THOSE PEOPLE: The anti-human end game of Just Stop Oil.
Unlike some, I don’t agree with the cause or how they express it. The cause is stupid and evil and so are they. They don’t deserve the moral benefit of the doubt because there’s no room for doubt if you actually pay attention.
QUESTION ASKED: Is Al Franken trying to dunk on the Supreme Court’s gay marriage website decision?
So… we are pretty sure he is dunking on the decision and probably Ms. Smith herself. But there are several problems. First, Ms. Smith has not, to our knowledge, said anything bad about Jews. Second, she had a web design business, she was merely talking about expanding it to create wedding websites, so we don’t know where the “non-existent” comment comes from.
But third, and most basically, is he arguing that he the law should force him to ‘write homophobic & anti-Semitic jokes to express her hostility to gay-marriage & Jews in general’? Is that the outcome he prefers?
Or here’s a fourth option: He is a moron who thinks in a remarkably shallow manner.
Buried lede: Accidentally (of course), Al actually got something right!
WELL:
So they’re going with “we’re not saying it was Kamala but…”. Wow. https://t.co/aminGKifkh
— Adele Scalia (@AdeleScalia) July 6, 2023
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