Month: August 2022

Chicago Public Schools’ Radical Agenda Gets Uglier: ‘Equity’ Video Promotes Looting & Burning

Chicago Public Schools’ Radical Agenda Gets Uglier: ‘Equity’ Video Promotes Looting & Burning

Authored by Matt Rosenberg via Wirepoints.org,

Looting and burning is a pathway to social justice. That’s the message from a video recently added by Chicago Public Schools to its website as a response to perceived economic injustice for blacks. The district calls the video an “equity tool,” but the reality is it promotes hopelessness. Titled “How Can We Win?,” the video’s message is clear: there is no way. Better to riot, loot, and burn. It sounds unbelievable, but in Chicago’s schools, it’s not.

Some CPS students have difficult lives. Too many face the possibility of violent crime and gang harassment, and loss of friends and family.

Schools, and CPS in particular, are meant to be places of hope and growth, where learning can be a ticket to a better life. CPS leadership and teachers are meant to push kids beyond where they are, to help them read and do math and to think and to succeed. There’s no question that’s a challenging objective. But there must be optimism, high expectations, and possibility running through it all.

Instead, with this video CPS is promoting a fatalistic, nihilistic message to kids. There is no hope in its message. 

And that message also lets CPS hide behind its failures. It’s easier to blame society than have the public scrutinize the district’s failed student outcomes. That’s what makes this video so destructive.

A closer look at the language of the video shows just how far CPS has fallen. Here is a school system where three quarters of students can’t demonstrate basic competency on reading and math on state tests and the SAT. Yet the district would have us believe – as enunciated in this “equity tool” – that either there is no winning at all or that “winning” comes from looting, arson, and property destruction.  

The video, added to the CPS website in late June, features black author and filmmaker Kimberly Jones. In the video, she is speaking days after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis by police. She begins with a robust defense of rioting and looting as an entitlement for those presently at the lower end of the economic spectrum.

“Wealthy black people (are) making the commentary…we should not be rioting, we should not be looting, we should not be tearing up our own communities. And then there’s been the argument…we should be hitting them in the pocket…where we don’t spend any money – but I feel like we should do both, and I support both.” 

Of looters who struck in Chicago and other cities: 

“their only hope and their only opportunity to get some of the things that we flaunt and flash in front of them all the time is to walk through a broken glass window and get it.” 

That’s bad enough. But then comes the endorsement of guerilla action and arson as a form of entitled social protest. Jones later in the video adds:

“If the social contract is broken why the f*** do I give a s*** about burning the f****** Football Hall of Fame, and burning the f******Target…f*** your Target, f***your Hall of Fame. As far as I’m concerned they can burn this b**** to the ground. And it still wouldn’t be enough.” 

Anger is destructive and encourages hopelessness and poor decisions. Chicago lives with the wreckage of poor personal decisions – often resulting in violent crime – every day. Yet CPS endorses the anger and discouragement and hopelessness evident in this video. “Yes. You should loot stores. You should steal. Light things on fire. You’ve got no other options, really.” That’s the message.

Endorsing theft, arson, and criminal damage to property cannot in any way advance either “equity” or academics. And there is little question that most CPS students are not getting educated. That is what opportunistic anger masks. A look at the official measures shows the depth of the miseducation of CPS students.

2019 Illinois Report Card data show that among all CPS K-12 students only 27 percent can read at grade level and only 24 percent can do math at grade level. For black CPS students just 17 percent and 13 percent are at grade level in reading and math, respectively. 

The video is a convenient distraction for CPS and its current overseer, Mayor Lori Lightfoot. She and CPS accent an appearance of progress while fostering a culture of grievance to dampen higher expectations. For example, Lightfoot and CPS trumpeted a 2020 high school graduation rate of 82.5 percent.

But there’s little to celebrate. On the SAT, typically taken by 11th graders, only 26 percent of all students tested could reach or exceed the achievement standard for reading. That was versus 14 percent for black students. Social promotion from one grade to the next is rampant in CPS if only one-quarter of all high schoolers – and even fewer among black students – can read at grade level.

The standard progressive definition of equity envisions equalized or “proportional” outcomes. This “equity tool” would achieve that through a race to the bottom where – with widespread destruction, looting and burning – everyone loses.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 17:00

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Hedge Funds Boosted Tech Holdings And Cut Leverage As Portfolio Concentration Hit All Time Highs, Goldman Finds

Hedge Funds Boosted Tech Holdings And Cut Leverage As Portfolio Concentration Hit All Time Highs, Goldman Finds

In addition to the previously discussed trends revealed by the latest batch of 13Fs, Goldman’s Ben Snider overnight published his quarterly hedge fund tracker report (available to professional subs in the usual place), summarizing the key trends in hedge fund holdings and ownership, and which confirms what we knew previously: in Q2, just when megacap tech stocks crashed as inflation exploded higher, hedge funds ramped up bets on megacap US tech stocks while trimming overall holdings to concentrate on favored names, with conviction growing to levels last seen before the pandemic.

Report highlights:

  • PERFORMANCE: US equity hedge funds have returned -9% YTD amid a challenging market environment.
  • LEVERAGE AND SHORT INTEREST: Hedge fund net leverage has stabilized since the recent market low in June but remains near the lowest levels since March 2020.
  • SECTORS: In a reversal from 1Q, hedge funds added to Info Tech and Consumer Discretionary while cutting tilts in Energy and Materials.
  • FACTORS: Factor rotations reflected a shift back towards Growth, but funds are still more overweight Value than average.

This Hedge Fund Trend Monitor, which analyzes 795 hedge funds with $2.4 trillion of gross equity positions ($1.7 trillion long and $764 billion short), found that funds boosted tech and consumer discretionary holdings, while cutting energy and materials wagers, a trade which once again backfired spectacularly as tech crashed and energy soared. Since then however, the story has changed as Nasdaq 100 valuations rose well above the average for the past decade as the index soared from its June lows. The gauge remains under pressure, however, as higher rates weigh on the present value of future profits, hurting growth sectors like tech.

The composition of hedge fund portfolios has made funds more sensitive to market beta than current below-average net leverage alone would signal. Tilts toward growth stocks and away from defensive “quality” factors have contributed to an exceptionally high recent correlation between the most popular hedge fund positions and the S&P 500. During the last three months, that correlation has registered 0.6 compared with an average of 0.3 during the past decade and 0.1 during the past 20 years.

Within the broader tech space, hedge funds lifted net exposures in industries where they are overweight, such as Application Software, and in underweight industries, including Tech Hardware and Semiconductors. Within Health Care, funds added to their overweight in Biotech but reduced the Pharma industry from overweight to underweight.

“Big Tech” accounted for much of the increased tilts to the Info Tech and Consumer Discretionary sectors. The increased length in Info Tech was driven in large part by NVDA, AAPL, and TEAM, while TSLA and AMZN helped drive the increase in hedge fund exposure to Consumer Discretionary. However, smaller stocks also contributed; of the 15 Info Tech stocks with the largest increases in popularity during 2Q, only ADBE has a market cap larger than $50 billion

Hammered tech stocks managed to stage a powerful bear market rally in mid-June, when traders reassessed bets on the number of future rate hikes by the Federal Reserve after the US economy showed signs of slowing and started pricing in the coming Fed pivot. A gauge of megacap tech stocks has risen 10% this quarter, compared to a 9% rise in the S&P 500 Index.

But the optimism has petered out heading into this week’s Jackson Hole conference on renewed hawkish concerns, with the market split on whether the Nasdaq 100’s near 13% jump in July was anything more than a bear market rally.

“There will likely be more pain ahead as markets are still under-pricing the Fed rate path,” said Charu Chanana, strategist at Saxo Capital Markets Pte.

With the average US hedge fund returning just -9% YTD amid chaos and confusion in the space, Goldman’s Snider wrote that “stymied by an uncertain market environment and poor recent returns, hedge funds have cut leverage, shifted back towards growth, and increased portfolio concentrations.” And while “performance has recently improved, matching the typical experience during correction rebounds”, Goldman found that “leverage has room to rise if the market remains resilient.”

The report also found that average weightings of top 10 holdings jumped to 70% in the three months ended June, the highest concentration since the first quarter of 2020.

In another sign of “conviction” (or perhaps just fear of over-trading), position turnover for the funds fell to a new record low as the average fund turned over 23% of distinct equity positions during 2Q, and 13% of the largest quartile of positions. Position turnover declined in all 11 sectors.

Indeed, unlike the start of 2022 when gross and net leverage collapsed, Goldman finds that hedge fund leverage no longer appears to be declining but remains low relative to the last few years. Aggregate hedge fund net leverage calculated based on publicly-available single-stock data registered 54% at the start of 3Q 2022, a substantial increase from earlier in the year. Higher-frequency exposures incorporating more assets calculated by Goldman Sachs Prime Services show hedge fund net leverage that has stabilized in recent weeks but still registers well below 1-, 3-, and 5-year averages.

While hedge fund net leverage declined substantially from its highs in early 2021, single stock short interest remains nearly  unchanged. The median S&P 500 stock carries short interest equivalent to 1.7% of market cap, only slightly above the recent record low of 1.5%. Every sector carries below-average short interest. Extremely depressed US equity futures positions and elevated short interest in ETFs suggest investors are reducing net length via macro products rather than through individual short stock positions.

The recent stabilization of hedge fund leverage and outperformance of the most popular hedge fund long positions are consistent with the typical patterns around previous equity market drawdown troughs. In five previous 10%+ S&P 500 corrections since 2011, hedge fund net leverage and the long/short performance of popular hedge fund positions have usually inflected higher around the market trough, just as they did near the recent S&P 500 low in mid-June. In these episodes, leverage continued to rise gradually and Hedge Fund VIPs continued to outperform modestly during the subsequent few months. This pattern would suggest further upside to hedge fund length and the outperformance of popular positions through the remainder of 2022 if the equity market remains stable or continues to climb, although clear downside risks remain especially if Powell decides to unleash the Hawk-ano on Friday.

In terms of absolute holdings, Amazon replaced Microsoft at the top of the Goldman Hedge Fund VIP list – the most popular long position – a timely call given that the former has rallied 26% this quarter versus an 8% climb in the latter. The funds also boosted bets on Nvidia, Apple, Atlassian and Tesla according to the report.

Much more in the full report available to pro subs.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 16:40

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More Billions To Ukraine As America Falls Apart

More Billions To Ukraine As America Falls Apart

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

There is a video clip making the rounds showing President Biden speaking at a recent NATO summit about the seven billion dollars the US government had – at that time – provided to Ukraine. Attached to that is another clip showing the horrific state of several US major cities, including in Pennsylvania, California, and Ohio. The video of American cities is shocking: endless landscapes of filth, trash, homelessness, open fires on the street, drug-addicted zombies. It doesn’t look like the America most of us remember.

Watching Biden bragging about sending billions of dollars to corrupt leaders overseas with American cities looking like bombed-out Iraq or Libya is US foreign policy in a nutshell.

The Washington elites tell the rest of America that they must “promote democracy” in some far-off land. Anyone who objects is considered in league with the appointed enemy of the day. Once it was Saddam, then Assad and Gaddafi. Now it’s Putin. The game is the same, only the names are changed.

What is seldom asked, is what is in this deal for those Americans who suffer to pay for our interventionist foreign policy. Do they really think a working American in Ohio or Pennsylvania is better off or safer because we are supposedly protecting Ukraine’s borders? I think most Americans would wonder why they aren’t bothering to protect our own borders.

A reported 200,000 illegals crossed the border into the US in July alone. You can believe they are learning quickly about the free money provided by the US government to illegals. They’ll probably get a voting card as well.

Last Friday the Pentagon announced that yet another $775 million would be sent to Ukraine. As Antiwar.com reported, it was the eighteenth weapons package to Ukraine in six months. Has there ever been a more idiotic US intervention in history?

Supporters of this proxy war may celebrate more aid to Ukraine, but the reality is that it is in no way aid to Ukraine. That’s not how the system works. It is money created out of thin air by the Fed and appropriated by Congress to be spent propping up the politically-connected military-industrial complex. It is a big check written by middle America to rich people who run Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Americans watch their budget being stretched to the limit while the Beltway fat-cats loosen their belts to continue enjoying the gravy train.

Bloomberg reported earlier this summer that inflation is costing the average American household more than $5,200 this year. Inflation is a tax on middle class and poor Americans. The wealthy – like those who run Raytheon and Lockheed Martin – always get the new money first, before prices go up.

The rest of us watch as the dollar buys less and less.

As Washington salivates over fighting Russia in Ukraine, the rest of America feels like we’re becoming Zimbabwe.

How long until it takes a trillion dollars for a loaf of bread? Will there be a run on wheelbarrows?

There is a way out. It’s called “non-interventionism.” The war in Ukraine was caused by the US regime change in 2014 and the neocon insistence that Ukraine join NATO. The State Department and CIA thought it was a great victory to overthrow the elected government, but meanwhile the rest of us get the bill.

No NATO and not one more penny for Ukraine!

Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 16:20

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/jHlnwhf Tyler Durden

The Babylon Bee’s Kyle Mann: ‘I’m No More Deserving of God’s Grace Than a Transgender Person Is’


Kyle Mann Babylon Bee

I’ve long found The Babylon Bee to be fantastically funny—all the more so because its editors and writers are hardcore born-again evangelical Christians who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That’s not a creed one usually associates with anything remotely funny, at least intentionally. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker aren’t people you seek out for the jokes.

Other comedy sites like The Onion don’t have to operate under such limiting, self-imposed strictures. The fact that the Bee is very funny, day in and day out, is almost enough to get me, a lapsed Catholic, to believe in divine intervention, if not a covenant of grace not works.

I caught up with Kyle Mann, the Bee‘s editor in chief, in July at FreedomFest, the annual gathering in Las Vegas. I was especially interested in talking about the site’s Twitter account getting frozen earlier this year. Back in March, Twitter suspended the account after it awarded “Man of the Year” honors to Rachel Levine, a trans woman serving in the Biden administration who had been named one of USA Today‘s “Women of the Year.”

The Bee‘s article struck me as mean-spirited, especially for Christians, and not particularly funny—ditto for recent trans joking by great standups like Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais, too. In today’s show, Mann tells me that the offending article was intended to satirize media treatment of identity politics, not demean trans people.

“We love trans people,” he says. “We don’t consider people like that beneath us. You know, the Christian worldview is that everybody has the opportunity to be saved and we can love everybody. I’m no more deserving of God’s grace than a transgender person is. But when the culture bows down and starts handing out trophies to people for stuff like this is when we say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, you know, we need to protect women in our society as well.'”

The Babylon Bee‘s Twitter account remains locked because the publication refuses to delete the tweet and acknowledge that it violated Twitter’s policy against hate speech. In response to the Twitter ban and what Mann says is persistent demonetization and minimizing of the reach of its content on Facebook, The Babylon Bee has created its own social network and subscription model, both of which are flourishing. The episode shines a light on how contemporary culture wars are waged online and illustrates the specific travails that evangelical Christians face in a country that is increasingly secular and socially liberal. It also shows one successful way of routing around platform-specific censorship.

Beyond that, we talk about why Mann saves his deepest burns for megachurch pastors such as Joel Osteen; why he believes that the left—and Gen Z—can’t deal with humor that makes fun of them; and why he loves “personal liberty and personal freedom” even if it creates a culture that is deeply hostile to his faith.

Video version here.

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The post <i>The Babylon Bee</i>'s Kyle Mann: 'I'm No More Deserving of God's Grace Than a Transgender Person Is' appeared first on Reason.com.

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Eleventh Circuit Finds FDA Treatment of Vaping Product Marketing Applications to be Arbitrary & Capricious


Vaping

Yesterday, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit concluded that the Food and Drug Administration was arbitrary and capricious when it rejected marketing applications from several vaping companies. Because the FDA has deemed vaping products to be “tobacco products” for purposes of federal law, FDA approval is necessary for such products to be sold. The Eleventh Circuit’s decision in Bidi Vapor LLC v. FDA, deepens a conflict among the circuit courts over how the FDA should evaluate marketing applications for vaping products and makes eventual Supreme Court review of the question more likely.

Chief Judge Bill Pryor wrote the opinion for the court, joined by Judge Brasher. Judge Rosenbaum dissented (in what is the first dissent I can recall that begins with an all-caps “SPOILER ALERT.”)

The basis for the Eleventh Circuit’s decision is fairly straight-forward: In rejecting the vaping product applications, the FDA expressly refused to consider the firms’ marketing and sales-access-restriction plans to reduce youth access to and consumption of their products. According to the FDA, such measures are not sufficient to reduce youth access, so they did not need to be considered, even though the relevant statute requires the agency to consider whether new tobacco products will attract consumers who do not currently use tobacco products and the FDA had issued prior guidance documents indicating that marketing and sales-access-restrictions were “factors” the FDA “intend[ed] to consider” when evaluating applications, and applicants relied upon the FDA’s guidance when preparing their applications.

While the FDA was free to conclude that the marketing and sales-access-restrictions proposed by the various applicants were insufficient, it was not free to simply disregard those parts of the applications. To do so would be to ignore a relevant aspect of the question before the agency, which is a textbook example of arbitrary and capricious decision-making.

The panel majority not only disagreed with their dissenting colleague. They also disagreed with recent decisions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and D.C. Circuit rejecting similar claims from vaping companies.  Among other things, the Eleventh Circuit disagreed with its sister circuits’ interpretation of the FDA’s 2020 guidance to concerning product applications. This, combined with the string of other decisions in which federal appellate courts have found fault with the FDA’s treatment of vaping product applications, makes me suspect this question could soon be ripe for Supreme Court review.

The post Eleventh Circuit Finds FDA Treatment of Vaping Product Marketing Applications to be Arbitrary & Capricious appeared first on Reason.com.

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Leana Wen Accused of ‘Unsafe, Ableist, Fatphobic, and Unethical Practices’ for Opposing COVID Mandates


Photo of Leana Wen overlaid on red and black and gray striped backgrounds

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, one character has ruffled more feathers than perhaps anyone else in the public health sphere. It’s not Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who recently declared himself the symbol of scientific “integrity and truth.” It’s Leana Wen, the medical doctor, pundit, and COVID hawk-turned-COVID normalizer. Once the target of conservative outrage over COVID mandates, Wen is now being targeted by left-leaning public health advocates who oppose her insistence that COVID is now endemic and we need to live with it.  

In response to to Wen’s advocacy, a petition is circulating online seeking to have her booted as a speaker from the 2022 American Public Health Association (APHA) Annual Meeting and likening her current public-health advice—she opposes mandates and emphasizes vaccines, personal risk reduction, and an attempt at cultivating normalcy—as one rooted in eugenics. “We are demanding our colleagues and fellow leaders in public health to reconsider and replace Dr. Wen with someone whose work is consistent with anti-racist, anti-eugenicist public health practices and community health,” the letter reads.

The ordeal is a perfect example of how difficult it has become to have a normal discussion in a public forum about anything. I empathize deeply with anyone still anxious about the threat that the coronavirus poses to them, a legitimate fear for many people who are elderly, disabled, or immunocompromised. This isn’t a hypothetical for me: I’m on a cocktail of immunosuppressants. COVID has been a weird and strange time. But Wen is not a eugenicist, and her ideas aren’t either.

Consider some of the claims made by the displeased AHPA attendees. “Through her platform on news outlets and social media, Dr. Wen has promoted unscientific, unsafe, ableist, fatphobic, and unethical practices during the COVID-19 pandemic,” reads the petition, which has been signed by over 600 public-health researchers, professors, students, and physicians. 

To support that claim that Wen subscribes to views that are “unscientific,” the petitioners point to a tweet from March of this year in which Wen noted that “everything has risk, and zero covid is not a viable strategy.” That benign assertion is arguably scientific fact, recently touted by the head of the World Health Organization. Yet in this instance it’s been deemed so unscientific and unsafe that it should preclude Wen from speaking in public.

That sort of weak reasoning pervades the rest of their claims. Wen is allegedly fatphobic because she suggests not eating a donut every day; she is ableist because she says people should make decisions based on personal risk tolerance; she is unethical because she agreed with the latest CDC guidelines. If someone is unfit for a public speaking engagement because she is in step with the nation’s top public health agency—the one not exactly known for throwing caution to the wind, the one that seeks to police everything from how much wine you drink to how much meat you eat—then who, exactly, is safe to speak?

“In a recent article, Dr. Wen suggested that infection should be accepted as a ‘new normal,'” the petition continues. This is meant to shock the conscience. In reality, it is, once again, the mainstream scientific consensus, repackaged as something that is not only unscientific but so nefarious as to be murderous. “The 2022 keynote is an opportunity for APHA, the foremost and largest public health organization in the United States, to reject the history of paternalism, eugenics, and racism and to begin rebuilding a relationship with the public we serve,” they write. “The start of a new relationship with the public can and should start with us.”

This is histrionic nonsense. Actual eugenicists in the U.S. sterilized racial minorities and the poor. California’s eugenics experiment—which lasted into the 21st century—provided inspiration for Nazi Germany’s program. The petitioners mock actual eugenics victims by comparing their abusers to someone who echoes the scientific consensus that COVID-19 is now endemic to the U.S. and cannot be fully eradicated.

It is hard to overstate just how benign Wen’s positions are. She has called cloth coverings “little more than facial decorations”—something that is indeed backed by science—and encourages people to wear high-quality masks (which protect the wearer) as they see fit. She also opposes mandates, arguing that they do not make sense in perpetuity. It’s widely accepted now that they never made sense at all. While N95 masks work to mitigate spread, the data show that mask mandates decidedly did not, perhaps because wearing one from the host stand to the restaurant table, then removing it, could never suppress a highly contagious airborne virus. Though the APHA dissidents imply that Wen’s stance is both unscientific and Darwinian, they do not reckon with the actual science nor do they lay out a scientific alternative to Wen’s positions.

Such is often the case with censorship attempts. Instead of presenting a better idea, the goal is to make someone a pariah. It’s easier. Who on earth wants to come to the table with a eugenicist?

Wen has been in the hot seat for the entirety of the pandemic. But it wasn’t always this hot seat. The Washington Post columnist and CNN contributor once favored the mandates she now opposes, sometimes remarking that the unvaccinated should have fewer privileges in public life. It’s a stance I very much disagree with. Now Wen does, too. What changed?

A panel she spoke on at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June provides a window. “How I think about risk has really evolved over the course of the pandemic,” she said. “If there’s one thing that I wish we had all done a better job of communicating right from the beginning, it’s that change is to be expected. As in, the same things that we did in 2020, with the knowledge that we had in 2020, the tools that we had in 2020, are different than the tools that we have now….We’re adapting to the circumstances.” Those circumstances, in her view, included the initial hope that COVID-19 could be contained. But that was a pipe dream.

Her shift solidified with the advent of Omicron in December 2021, she noted, with its mild symptoms and high contagiousness. “We’re all going to get COVID at some point,” Wen said. “What am I willing to do to not get COVID? What am I willing to have my family do—in terms of not traveling, my 4-year-old still masking in school, not going to indoor play dates, all these things—what is the price we’re willing to pay in order to avoid COVID?”

Put differently, she has been no stranger to backlash, some of it deserved and some of it not, though where those apply depends on the individual. Yet in a sort of cosmic irony, the APHA working group she is supposed to speak on is titled “Weathering the Storm: Countering Backlash Against Public Health.” True to its name, the section is slated to delve into how people in the field deal with backlash; a copy of the schedule obtained by Reason shows Wen sharing her time slot with another controversial figure, Thomas Dobbs, the progressive medical doctor and Mississippi state health officer who was named in the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

Wen will speak on “Harassment, bullying and death threats: Staying the course while under attack.” In other words, the petition seeks to generate enough backlash against Wen to prevent her from speaking about how to deal with backlash. The jokes write themselves.

“Leana Wen is not a keynote speaker and is not being paid any sort of fee to participate in the APHA Annual Meeting and Expo,” reads a statement from the APHA. In regards to Wen speaking on bullying, “this is something she and many other public health officials across the country have encountered at unprecedented levels in recent years, and that she is well-qualified to address.” Indeed, the petition makes a strong case for her appearance.

But this letter is not just about a single conference and a single speaker. It’s indicative of a larger trend, one where the loudest voices try to drown out opposition and speak on behalf of the collective. But being loud doesn’t mean you speak for anyone; it just means you’re loud. Consider a January Monmouth poll which found that 70 percent of Americans agree that “it’s time we accept Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives”—the sentiment Wen shares, which has been branded as too controversial for public consumption. Consider a more recent poll by Morning Consult, taken in July, found that just 14 percent of Americans see COVID-19 as a “severe health risk.” And consider APHA’s motto: that they “champion[] the health of all people and all communities,” not just a choice few.

The petitioners seeking to silence Wen don’t speak for the majority of the public. They also don’t speak for every vulnerable person mentioned in their letter, because they certainly don’t speak for me.

The post Leana Wen Accused of 'Unsafe, Ableist, Fatphobic, and Unethical Practices' for Opposing COVID Mandates appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Babylon Bee’s Kyle Mann: ‘I’m No More Deserving of God’s Grace Than a Transgender Person Is’


Kyle Mann Babylon Bee

I’ve long found The Babylon Bee to be fantastically funny—all the more so because its editors and writers are hardcore born-again evangelical Christians who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That’s not a creed one usually associates with anything remotely funny, at least intentionally. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker aren’t people you seek out for the jokes.

Other comedy sites like The Onion don’t have to operate under such limiting, self-imposed strictures. The fact that the Bee is very funny, day in and day out, is almost enough to get me, a lapsed Catholic, to believe in divine intervention, if not a covenant of grace not works.

I caught up with Kyle Mann, the Bee‘s editor in chief, in July at FreedomFest, the annual gathering in Las Vegas. I was especially interested in talking about the site’s Twitter account getting frozen earlier this year. Back in March, Twitter suspended the account after it awarded “Man of the Year” honors to Rachel Levine, a trans woman serving in the Biden administration who had been named one of USA Today‘s “Women of the Year.”

The Bee‘s article struck me as mean-spirited, especially for Christians, and not particularly funny—ditto for recent trans joking by great standups like Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais, too. In today’s show, Mann tells me that the offending article was intended to satirize media treatment of identity politics, not demean trans people.

“We love trans people,” he says. “We don’t consider people like that beneath us. You know, the Christian worldview is that everybody has the opportunity to be saved and we can love everybody. I’m no more deserving of God’s grace than a transgender person is. But when the culture bows down and starts handing out trophies to people for stuff like this is when we say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, you know, we need to protect women in our society as well.'”

The Babylon Bee‘s Twitter account remains locked because the publication refuses to delete the tweet and acknowledge that it violated Twitter’s policy against hate speech. In response to the Twitter ban and what Mann says is persistent demonetization and minimizing of the reach of its content on Facebook, The Babylon Bee has created its own social network and subscription model, both of which are flourishing. The episode shines a light on how contemporary culture wars are waged online and illustrates the specific travails that evangelical Christians face in a country that is increasingly secular and socially liberal. It also shows one successful way of routing around platform-specific censorship.

Beyond that, we talk about why Mann saves his deepest burns for megachurch pastors such as Joel Osteen; why he believes that the left—and Gen Z—can’t deal with humor that makes fun of them; and why he loves “personal liberty and personal freedom” even if it creates a culture that is deeply hostile to his faith.

Video version here.

Today’s sponsors:

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The post <i>The Babylon Bee</i>'s Kyle Mann: 'I'm No More Deserving of God's Grace Than a Transgender Person Is' appeared first on Reason.com.

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Eleventh Circuit Finds FDA Treatment of Vaping Product Marketing Applications to be Arbitrary & Capricious


Vaping

Yesterday, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit concluded that the Food and Drug Administration was arbitrary and capricious when it rejected marketing applications from several vaping companies. Because the FDA has deemed vaping products to be “tobacco products” for purposes of federal law, FDA approval is necessary for such products to be sold. The Eleventh Circuit’s decision in Bidi Vapor LLC v. FDA, deepens a conflict among the circuit courts over how the FDA should evaluate marketing applications for vaping products and makes eventual Supreme Court review of the question more likely.

Chief Judge Bill Pryor wrote the opinion for the court, joined by Judge Brasher. Judge Rosenbaum dissented (in what is the first dissent I can recall that begins with an all-caps “SPOILER ALERT.”)

The basis for the Eleventh Circuit’s decision is fairly straight-forward: In rejecting the vaping product applications, the FDA expressly refused to consider the firms’ marketing and sales-access-restriction plans to reduce youth access to and consumption of their products. According to the FDA, such measures are not sufficient to reduce youth access, so they did not need to be considered, even though the relevant statute requires the agency to consider whether new tobacco products will attract consumers who do not currently use tobacco products and the FDA had issued prior guidance documents indicating that marketing and sales-access-restrictions were “factors” the FDA “intend[ed] to consider” when evaluating applications, and applicants relied upon the FDA’s guidance when preparing their applications.

While the FDA was free to conclude that the marketing and sales-access-restrictions proposed by the various applicants were insufficient, it was not free to simply disregard those parts of the applications. To do so would be to ignore a relevant aspect of the question before the agency, which is a textbook example of arbitrary and capricious decision-making.

The panel majority not only disagreed with their dissenting colleague. They also disagreed with recent decisions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and D.C. Circuit rejecting similar claims from vaping companies.  Among other things, the Eleventh Circuit disagreed with its sister circuits’ interpretation of the FDA’s 2020 guidance to concerning product applications. This, combined with the string of other decisions in which federal appellate courts have found fault with the FDA’s treatment of vaping product applications, makes me suspect this question could soon be ripe for Supreme Court review.

The post Eleventh Circuit Finds FDA Treatment of Vaping Product Marketing Applications to be Arbitrary & Capricious appeared first on Reason.com.

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Leana Wen Accused of ‘Unsafe, Ableist, Fatphobic, and Unethical Practices’ for Opposing COVID Mandates


Photo of Leana Wen overlaid on red and black and gray striped backgrounds

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, one character has ruffled more feathers than perhaps anyone else in the public health sphere. It’s not Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who recently declared himself the symbol of scientific “integrity and truth.” It’s Leana Wen, the medical doctor, pundit, and COVID hawk-turned-COVID normalizer. Once the target of conservative outrage over COVID mandates, Wen is now being targeted by left-leaning public health advocates who oppose her insistence that COVID is now endemic and we need to live with it.  

In response to to Wen’s advocacy, a petition is circulating online seeking to have her booted as a speaker from the 2022 American Public Health Association (APHA) Annual Meeting and likening her current public-health advice—she opposes mandates and emphasizes vaccines, personal risk reduction, and an attempt at cultivating normalcy—as one rooted in eugenics. “We are demanding our colleagues and fellow leaders in public health to reconsider and replace Dr. Wen with someone whose work is consistent with anti-racist, anti-eugenicist public health practices and community health,” the letter reads.

The ordeal is a perfect example of how difficult it has become to have a normal discussion in a public forum about anything. I empathize deeply with anyone still anxious about the threat that the coronavirus poses to them, a legitimate fear for many people who are elderly, disabled, or immunocompromised. This isn’t a hypothetical for me: I’m on a cocktail of immunosuppressants. COVID has been a weird and strange time. But Wen is not a eugenicist, and her ideas aren’t either.

Consider some of the claims made by the displeased AHPA attendees. “Through her platform on news outlets and social media, Dr. Wen has promoted unscientific, unsafe, ableist, fatphobic, and unethical practices during the COVID-19 pandemic,” reads the petition, which has been signed by over 600 public-health researchers, professors, students, and physicians. 

To support that claim that Wen subscribes to views that are “unscientific,” the petitioners point to a tweet from March of this year in which Wen noted that “everything has risk, and zero covid is not a viable strategy.” That benign assertion is arguably scientific fact, recently touted by the head of the World Health Organization. Yet in this instance it’s been deemed so unscientific and unsafe that it should preclude Wen from speaking in public.

That sort of weak reasoning pervades the rest of their claims. Wen is allegedly fatphobic because she suggests not eating a donut every day; she is ableist because she says people should make decisions based on personal risk tolerance; she is unethical because she agreed with the latest CDC guidelines. If someone is unfit for a public speaking engagement because she is in step with the nation’s top public health agency—the one not exactly known for throwing caution to the wind, the one that seeks to police everything from how much wine you drink to how much meat you eat—then who, exactly, is safe to speak?

“In a recent article, Dr. Wen suggested that infection should be accepted as a ‘new normal,'” the petition continues. This is meant to shock the conscience. In reality, it is, once again, the mainstream scientific consensus, repackaged as something that is not only unscientific but so nefarious as to be murderous. “The 2022 keynote is an opportunity for APHA, the foremost and largest public health organization in the United States, to reject the history of paternalism, eugenics, and racism and to begin rebuilding a relationship with the public we serve,” they write. “The start of a new relationship with the public can and should start with us.”

This is histrionic nonsense. Actual eugenicists in the U.S. sterilized racial minorities and the poor. California’s eugenics experiment—which lasted into the 21st century—provided inspiration for Nazi Germany’s program. The petitioners mock actual eugenics victims by comparing their abusers to someone who echoes the scientific consensus that COVID-19 is now endemic to the U.S. and cannot be fully eradicated.

It is hard to overstate just how benign Wen’s positions are. She has called cloth coverings “little more than facial decorations”—something that is indeed backed by science—and encourages people to wear high-quality masks (which protect the wearer) as they see fit. She also opposes mandates, arguing that they do not make sense in perpetuity. It’s widely accepted now that they never made sense at all. While N95 masks work to mitigate spread, the data show that mask mandates decidedly did not, perhaps because wearing one from the host stand to the restaurant table, then removing it, could never suppress a highly contagious airborne virus. Though the APHA dissidents imply that Wen’s stance is both unscientific and Darwinian, they do not reckon with the actual science nor do they lay out a scientific alternative to Wen’s positions.

Such is often the case with censorship attempts. Instead of presenting a better idea, the goal is to make someone a pariah. It’s easier. Who on earth wants to come to the table with a eugenicist?

Wen has been in the hot seat for the entirety of the pandemic. But it wasn’t always this hot seat. The Washington Post columnist and CNN contributor once favored the mandates she now opposes, sometimes remarking that the unvaccinated should have fewer privileges in public life. It’s a stance I very much disagree with. Now Wen does, too. What changed?

A panel she spoke on at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June provides a window. “How I think about risk has really evolved over the course of the pandemic,” she said. “If there’s one thing that I wish we had all done a better job of communicating right from the beginning, it’s that change is to be expected. As in, the same things that we did in 2020, with the knowledge that we had in 2020, the tools that we had in 2020, are different than the tools that we have now….We’re adapting to the circumstances.” Those circumstances, in her view, included the initial hope that COVID-19 could be contained. But that was a pipe dream.

Her shift solidified with the advent of Omicron in December 2021, she noted, with its mild symptoms and high contagiousness. “We’re all going to get COVID at some point,” Wen said. “What am I willing to do to not get COVID? What am I willing to have my family do—in terms of not traveling, my 4-year-old still masking in school, not going to indoor play dates, all these things—what is the price we’re willing to pay in order to avoid COVID?”

Put differently, she has been no stranger to backlash, some of it deserved and some of it not, though where those apply depends on the individual. Yet in a sort of cosmic irony, the APHA working group she is supposed to speak on is titled “Weathering the Storm: Countering Backlash Against Public Health.” True to its name, the section is slated to delve into how people in the field deal with backlash; a copy of the schedule obtained by Reason shows Wen sharing her time slot with another controversial figure, Thomas Dobbs, the progressive medical doctor and Mississippi state health officer who was named in the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

Wen will speak on “Harassment, bullying and death threats: Staying the course while under attack.” In other words, the petition seeks to generate enough backlash against Wen to prevent her from speaking about how to deal with backlash. The jokes write themselves.

“Leana Wen is not a keynote speaker and is not being paid any sort of fee to participate in the APHA Annual Meeting and Expo,” reads a statement from the APHA. In regards to Wen speaking on bullying, “this is something she and many other public health officials across the country have encountered at unprecedented levels in recent years, and that she is well-qualified to address.” Indeed, the petition makes a strong case for her appearance.

But this letter is not just about a single conference and a single speaker. It’s indicative of a larger trend, one where the loudest voices try to drown out opposition and speak on behalf of the collective. But being loud doesn’t mean you speak for anyone; it just means you’re loud. Consider a January Monmouth poll which found that 70 percent of Americans agree that “it’s time we accept Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives”—the sentiment Wen shares, which has been branded as too controversial for public consumption. Consider a more recent poll by Morning Consult, taken in July, found that just 14 percent of Americans see COVID-19 as a “severe health risk.” And consider APHA’s motto: that they “champion[] the health of all people and all communities,” not just a choice few.

The petitioners seeking to silence Wen don’t speak for the majority of the public. They also don’t speak for every vulnerable person mentioned in their letter, because they certainly don’t speak for me.

The post Leana Wen Accused of 'Unsafe, Ableist, Fatphobic, and Unethical Practices' for Opposing COVID Mandates appeared first on Reason.com.

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Stocks & Bond Yields Jump As Hawknado Holds Ahead Of J-Hole

Stocks & Bond Yields Jump As Hawknado Holds Ahead Of J-Hole

More dismal data today (pending home sales and durable goods orders) sparked some ‘dovish’ moves in stocks BUT the hawkish un-pivot in STIRs was very evident again with both rate-hikes and the subsequent rate-cuts both shifting notably hawkish…

Source: Bloomberg

But stocks didn’t care as the algos bought the bad news (and gave it all back) before stabilizing and clinging to the green. The last hour saw the usual algo chaos with a quick buying-panic lifting The Dow green. Small Caps outperformed followed by Nasdaq and S&P…

Bonds saw more monkey-hammering with yields up 5-7bps across most of the curve but the 2Y underperforming (+10bps)…

Source: Bloomberg

10Y Yields are up 4 days in a row, pushing well above 3.00% to 2-month highs…

Source: Bloomberg

The 2Y yield rallied up to 3.40% – its highest since the FOMC meeting on June 15th…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar rallied today, retracing around half of yesterday’s weakness…

Source: Bloomberg

Cryptos ended higher on the day with Bitcoin bouncing back up to $21,800…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold was relatively volatile today but ended higher…

EU NatGas topped EUR300/mWh for the first time in history. For context that is equivalent to a $510 barrel of crude oil…

Source: Bloomberg

Oil was very choppy today amid various Iran deal headlines and the DOE Inventory/Demand data, but ended higher with WTI near $95…

Retail pump prices continue to slide but it is due to turn higher soon (Diesel prices ended their near record losing streak today)…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, we note that the US equity market’s term structure shows no signs of any expectations for excess volatility surrounding the Midterm elections…

Source: Goldman Sachs

We suspect that will change soon…

Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/24/2022 – 16:00

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