April 25, 2024
LESSONS:
In the same month, the Fed missed its target for the consumer-price index; inflation registered 8.2%, some six percentage points higher than the 2% reading at which the central bank was taking aim. Behold physics—and behold economics."
— GRANT'S (@GrantsPub) April 24, 2024
IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING? ‘Pedagogical Malpractice:’ Inside UCLA Medical School’s Mandatory ‘Health Equity’ Class.
Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that “fatphobia is medicine’s status quo” and that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor.”
Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described “fat liberationist,” in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory “Structural Racism and Health Equity” class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.
The Washington Free Beacon has obtained the entire syllabus for the course, along with slide decks and lecture prep from some of its most explosive sessions. The materials offer the fullest picture to date of what students at the elite medical school are learning and have dismayed prominent physicians—including those sympathetic to the goals of the class—who say UCLA has traded medicine for Marxism.
Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, said the curriculum “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.”
UCLA “has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate,” said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. “As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.”
I don’t, after watching the healthcare industry flip on a dime in the spring of 2020 from “mandatory lockdowns” for all” to “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”
And as Mary Katharine Ham notes:
Katie Couric noted there is a lot of anti-intellectual/elite resentment in this country (driving MAGA). I agree w her in part. There is resentment of the intellectual elite bc they are neither intellectual nor elite but are very sure they should tell the rest of us what to do. https://t.co/n3Be0CDdY4
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) April 25, 2024
MARK JUDGE: ‘Risky Business’ As Conservative Morality Tale?
ANYTHING TO HURT AMERICAN MANUFACTURERS: War on Guns: Biden Commerce Dept. Will Make Small Arms Export Pause Permanent.
ICYMI, MY LATEST NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Jewish students, come here to the South — where you’ll be safe.
THE HAMAS/STUDENT PROTESTS AND MISNINFORMATION: Earlier this morning, I read Professor Glenn’s squib here about how press access to these encampments is being controlled by the little terrorist supporters.
It rang a bell for me, and I though I would share a commentary I wrote for The Daily Caller six years ago that touches on the same thing. In the interview with Judith Miller, she explained how the quality reporting there is challenged because you need permission from the IDF to get into Gaza, but Hamas demands that they control access (through “minders” tagging along at all your visits and interviews) and Hamas filters out as much negative news as they can.
Now please, don’t get lost in the weeds bickering about whether Miller was right or wrong or good or bad, or whether we should be in or support Gazans, Hamas, or Israel.
I think the salient — and timely — point here is that smarter people are beginning to ask about the college frenzies being coordinated both financially and strategically.
I’ve seen pictures of a few of these encampments and noticed that in one shot, at least 2 dozen of the tents are identical pop-up types. Who and how logistics could be very revealing.
READER FAVORITE: 10-Minute Strength Training Exercises for Seniors: Exercises and Routines to Build Muscle, Balance, and Stamina. #CommissionEarned
OUT ON A LIMB: Jerry Seinfeld Believes Hollywood Is Done, Movies Won’t Be As Important.
They say that the best type of joke is one that has some truth to it.
However, there’s nothing funny about Jerry Seinfeld’s latest take in which he declares that ‘Hollywood is Dead,’ and that the filmmakers and the upper echelon, holier-than-thou elites in charge pathetically refuse to acknowledge it.
“They’re so dead serious! They don’t have any idea that the movie business is over. They have no idea,” the 69-year-old Seinfeld told GQ Magazine “Film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social and cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives.”
“When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it,” Seinfeld continued, before adding, “We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, just trying to see.”
The fabled comedian does have a point. I can’t think of any significant pop culture trends that have come from movies in recent years – hell not even lame movie lines like Scary Movie’s “Wassssupppp?!” that teenagers were doing all over America when I was growing up!
That’s not to say that there haven’t been good movies – of course there have been, but Seinfeld says the significant impact of the modern film isn’t nearly what it once was.
“Depression? Malaise? I would say confusion. Disorientation replaced the movie business. Everyone I know in show business, every day, is going, ‘What’s going on? How do you do this? What are we supposed to do now?’”
Not having a unified “What are we supposed to do now plan” coming out of the pandemic, coupled with some pretty awful pre-pandemic product such as the last two of the Daisy Ridley Star Wars sequels, did nothing to restore the American public’s habit of seeing a new movie each weekend, particularly in the summertime.
As Steve noted on Tuesday, the formula for success, while expensive, isn’t especially difficult to write: “Give audiences flawed but admirable heroes they can identify with, and then put them through hell on the way to victory. It seems impossible that Hollywood can’t — or won’t — remember that simple lesson, but here we are.”
Hollywood went woke prior to 2020, and now risks going broke, instead of dialing all of that back with the simple goal of maximizing butts in seats to rebuild the industry by regaining the trust of viewers. Or as Samuel Goldwyn may or may not have actually told his directors, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”
TRUMP’S CLEVER UNDERGROUND PROGRAM TO GET RE-ELECTED WHILE DISCREDITING HIS ENEMIES PROCEEDS APACE: Pro-Palestinian students set up ‘liberation zone’ encampment in Harvard Yard.
HARVEY WEINSTEIN’S 2020 RAPE CONVICTION OVERTURNED BY NEW YORK APPEALS COURT:
On Thursday, the court found in a 4-3 ruling that the judge in Weinstein’s trial — a landmark moment in the #MeToo movement that the 2017 allegations against him started — had shown prejudice by allowing women to testify about allegations that were not part of the case. The court has now ordered a new trial.
Weinstein, the Oscar-winning producer of “Shakespeare in Love” and “Good Will Hunting,” is serving a 23-year sentence at the Mohawk Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in Rome, N.Y. He will remain imprisoned as he was also convicted of rape in Los Angeles in 2022 and sentenced to an additional 16 years in prison. However, Weinstein was acquitted in the Los Angeles trial on charges involving a woman who testified in his New York case.
Note though that, “In spite of Thursday’s decision, Weinstein will remain in prison because he was separately sentenced in February 2023 to 16 years in prison in a Los Angeles criminal case for raping an Italian model. She testified that he threw himself onto her after appearing uninvited outside her “hotel room during an Italian film festival there in 2013.”
THE WEST BANK COMES TO MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS: Columbia is issuing press passes, but the pro-Hamas occupiers are in charge of journalists’ access.
SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED: Thomas Jefferson High School Drops Out of Top Ten Nationwide After Adopting “Equity” Admissions Policy.
I WISH THIS WERE FUNNIER:
'Trump Will Receive A Fair And Impartial Trial,' Says Judge As Construction Crew Builds Gallows Outside Courtroom https://t.co/i9cZTi5EfQ pic.twitter.com/AwoFDTowQp
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 24, 2024
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Set of 2 Adjustable Steel Mesh Zero Gravity Lounge Chair Recliners. #CommissionEarned We bought these a few years ago and they held up fairly well and were pretty comfortable.
JOHN LUCAS: Negotiating with Uniformed and Well-Supplied Terrorists (not “Demonstrators”).
This “Bits and Pieces” will discuss three related matters surrounding the current take-overs of the Columbia University campus and other venues: (1) The perpetrators are terrorists, not “demonstrators,” (2) the uniforms they choose show their tribal affiliation with the Hamas butchers, and (3) the logistical support they are receiving from unidentified supporters and financiers. It will close with a modest proposal for action: Sue the bastards.
I agree.