90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #525

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #523

UCSD med school trains doctors to use critical race theory in health care: report

UCSD med school’s racial justice curriculum aims to make medicine’s role a ‘mechanism of social engineering,’ according to report

The University of California San Diego’s top-rated medical school integrates progressive social justice and racial politics into its curriculum in an effort to “expand medicine’s role as a mechanism of social engineering,” argues a new report written by critics of critical race theory.

The 14-page report, released June 21 and titled “The Woke Invasion of Racial Politics into UCSD Medical Education,” was published by Do No Harm and details guest lectures, curricula, protests, events and academic programming that appear to prioritize politics over science.

Some of it originates with administration, the report stated, “while other aspects of it are fostered by student pressure and activism, primarily in the wake of George Floyd.”

“Dismantling racism” is a stated goal of the UC San Diego Health Strategic Framework. The medical school’s “Family Medicine Diversity and Anti-Racism Committee” has hosted talks on microaggressions, implicit bias, border health and “race in medicine,” the report noted.

The UCSD-SDSU General Preventive Medicine Residency put out a statement supporting Black Lives Matter in which the group called for physicians to “move beyond race neutrality to actively embracing anti-racist policies.”

A School of Medicine program called “Transforming Indigenous Doctor Education” that trains future doctors on “social, environmental, economic and political issues related to providing healthcare to tribal communities” is cited in the report. Coursework includes classes called “Environmental Racism” and “Medicine, Race, and the Global Politics of Inequality.”

Medical trainees are encouraged to read Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Anti-Racist.” The report also flags UCSD’s Department of Psychiatry’s anti-racism and diversity committee.

“Courses built around social justice narratives of injustice are increasingly offered and fused into existing medical education. Perhaps most disturbing is the growth of multiple internal institutes devoted to scientifically analyzing ‘empathy’ as a socially fungible metric,” the report stated.

Do No Harm describes itself as “a diverse group of physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients, and policymakers united by a moral mission: Protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology.”

“At least 23 of America’s top 25 medical schools have made anti-racism a core part of their curriculum, while other institutions are creating anti-racist curricula to be implemented at schools nationwide,” the nonprofit states on its website. “This divisive campaign will only lead to discrimination in healthcare, which is bad for patients.”

UCSD Health’s media team did not respond to a request from The College Fix seeking comment on the group’s report about UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Do No Harm’s chair, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, former associate dean for curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, told The College Fix in an email interview that by “adopting a curriculum studded with courses on advocacy, social determinants of health, and other such non-scientific topics, UCSD has committed to training physicians in roles traditionally assigned to social workers and public health officials.”

The report cites UCSD medical school’s goal to “reduce, and ultimately eliminate, health disparities in our community and their root causes, including the social determinants of health … [which] are non-medical factors (such as a person’s environment, employment and education) that influence a person’s health.”

Goldfarb, in his email to The Fix, said the medical school’s leaders “are asking physicians to involve themselves in such topics as improving housing, reducing gun violence, expanding food availability, and...

It appears that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and possibly one of her top advisors, were accomplices, not innocents, in a “foiled” kidnapping plot.

No one in national politics plays the role of victim better than Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

In a fawning 3,700-word puff piece published by the Washington Post over the weekend, reporter Ruby Cramer told the embattled governor’s self-described tale of woe: Whitmer isn’t really an ambitious political climber—the daughter of well-connected and wealthy parents, she started running for office in her 20s and was elected to the Michigan legislature at age 29—but rather a misunderstood and underappreciated champion of the people targeted because of her sex, looks, anti-Trump stance, lockdown orders, and pro-abortion views, among other unjustified reasons for “right-wing” derision.

That’s Whitmer’s story, anyway.

Interviewed at the official governor’s summer residence in Mackinac Island, Whitmer and her daughters detailed the horrors of growing up in Clarence Thomas’ America while enjoying a taxpayer-funded getaway. “I live on a college campus,” Whitmer’s oldest daughter, Sherry, told Cramer. (Both daughters attend the prestigious University of Michigan.) “There are people out there who would force me into conceiving. It’s a scary thought.” She then admitted she really doesn’t have to worry about an unwanted pregnancy since she is a lesbian.

But the FBI-concocted plot to abduct and assassinate Whitmer remains a source of great angst for the governor even though she knew about it weeks, if not months, before the “kidnappers” were arrested. At some point during the summer of 2020, Whitmer told her family “there was going to be a story coming out soon about ‘some people plotting to kidnap and kill me.’” That disclosure, according to Whitmer, happened a few months after an anti-lockdown protest at the Lansing Capitol building in late April 2020.

From there, Whitmer’s recollection of the timeline gets fuzzy, if not revelatory. “When the kidnapping plot was announced, it was summer. And people were blowing up your phone, right?” Whitmer asked her daughters during the interview. “Yeah,” replied her daughter, Sydney.

Except that’s not what happened. Law enforcement made the arrests on October 7, 2020—fall, not summer. Whitmer for her part was ready to go the next day with a distraught video message blaming Donald Trump for inciting right-wing “militias” to attack her. The shocking news produced wall-to-wall negative headlines for Trump as millions of Americans were voting for president; Joe Biden took full advantage of the FBI’s latest gift to the Democratic Party, ranting from the campaign trail about Trump’s “dog whistles” to extremist groups.

But three months after the Justice Department failed to win a single conviction in the kidnapping conspiracy, a case the government considers one of its biggest domestic terror investigations in decades, not one reporter has pushed Whitmer to explain what she knew and when she knew it. Further, her public comments and FBI testimony presented during the trial earlier this year indicate Whitmer and her family knew well before the public did and that she was never in danger. Plenty of evidence suggests Whitmer was in on the scheme for months.

Rather than act like a reporter digging for answers, Cramer instead allowed Whitmer to complain about the recent acquittal of two men and a mistrial for two other defendants amid a clear case of FBI entrapment—a key detail Cramer omitted from her story.

“It was awful,” Whitmer told Cramer about the verdicts reached by her own constituents in April. “We’re supposed to expect this now? People plot to kidnap and kill a governor?”

Whitmer also complained that the attack on her is described as a “kidnapping plot” instead of an “assasination plot,” as the media correctly describes the near-miss murder of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last month. “Does anyone think these kidnappers wanted to keep me or ransom me?” she whined to Cramer. “No. They were going to put me on trial and then execute me. It was an assassination plot, but no one talks about it that way. Even the way people talk about it has muted the seriousness of it.”

What has “muted” the “seriousness” of the plot isn’t Whitmer’s gender but the fact at least a dozen FBI undercover agents and informants working with FBI handlers at multiple FBI field offices in the eastern half of the country stitched together the random group of innocents who did not know each other before the government...

Visage à trois #356

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #522

Food Crisis Ahead: Ten Weeks of Wheat Left in Global Supply, World Leaders Warned

The world could have as little as 10 weeks left in its global stockpiles of wheat, according to one food expert.

Last week, Sara Menker, the CEO of Gro Intelligence, addressed the United Nations Security Council on the issue of global food insecurity. A transcript version of her comments was included on the agency’s website.

Menker said existing data shows that governments are overly optimistic about food supplies.

“Official government agency estimates from around the world put wheat inventories at 33 percent of annual consumption. Verifiable data from public and private sources that we as a company organize and then build statistical models to connect the dots between in our platform show that global wheat inventories are in fact closer to 20 percent, a level not seen since the financial and commodity crisis of 2007 and 2008,” she said.

“We currently only have 10 weeks of global consumption sitting in inventory around the world. Conditions today are worse than those experienced in 2007 and 2008.”

“Similar inventory concerns also apply to corn and other grains. Government estimates are not adding up,” she continued.

Menker noted that the issue runs deeper than Russia’s war with Ukraine.

“[T]he Russia-Ukraine war did not start the food security crisis. It simply added fuel to a fire that was long burning. A crisis we detected tremors from long before the COVID 19 pandemic exposed the fragility of our supply chains,” she said.

“I share this because we believe it’s important for you all to understand that even if the war were to end tomorrow, our food security problem isn’t going away anytime soon without concerted action.”

In separate comments last week, David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, said the world faces “an unprecedented crisis,” according to WMUR-TV.

Beasley said 49 million people in 43 nations are “knocking on famine’s door.”

Political destabilization often follows extreme hunger, he said.

“We are already seeing riots and protesting taking place as we speak — Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Pakistan, Peru,” he said. “We’ve seen destabilizing dynamics already in the Sahel from Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad. These are only signs of things to come.”

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey last week said “apocalyptic” food price increases could be...