Prominent black Accused of Killing 3-Year-Old Adopted White Daughter
Victoria Smith
Given the propensity to violence among blacks, this surely calls into question any practice of putting young white children into the care of blacks. I think the story below makes the case for a hanging
Ariel Robinson -- a former teacher, stand-up comedian, and winner on the Food Network show "Worst Cooks in America -- is accused of killing her three-year-old, white adopted daughter.
Robinson and her husband are facing homicide charges following the death of their adopted three-year-old daughter, Victoria Smith. According to reports, the black couple allegedly inflicted a "series of blunt force injuries" upon the child.
The Simpsonville Police Department in South Carolina said in a statement, reported by the Los Angeles Times, that Victoria Smith was admitted to Prisma Health Richland Hospital earlier this month after authorities found the three-year-old child unresponsive. A subsequent investigation concluded the victim’s death had been "the direct result of physical abuse." The couple is currently being held without bond and, if convicted, face prison sentences of 20 years up to life.
Journalist Andy Ngo described Ariel Robinson as a BLM advocate and found a tweet by Robinson published earlier this month in which the accused mother claimed her "white children get treated the same as my black children." Let's hope that isn't true.
Recalibrating the Use of Race in Medical Research
Ioannidis is a distinguished medical commentator so his article (with colleagues) below carries some weight. But he is working against a lot of bias so his conclusuion that race does have some role in medical research is very cautiously stated
Race was originally introduced in US medical curricula in 1790 by Benjamin Rush, who asserted that blackness was a particular kind of leprosy. In 1857 Josh Nott characterized slaves as a biologically appropriate phenotype for hard labor under trying conditions. In the 1870s, the Jim Crow era of race exclusion from most societal venues reinforced medical segregation. This sordid history, although painful to recite, is the underpinnings of race in medicine, including its use in medical research.
Race as a variable in medical research has long been a contentious issue.1 It is widely accepted that race is an indistinct construct that is not always measured accurately and standardized. In 1999, the Human Genome Project emphasized race as nonbiological with no basis in the genetic code. What, then, does race define?
Race is a poor surrogate of social constructs and even more so, if not abjectly, of biology. Differences observed in research studies between “races” may result from the multifarious consequences of long-entrenched and continuously transformed racism. As the crisis of coronavirus disease 2019 has revealed once again, long-standing effects of racism have tremendous effects on the propagation of inequalities and injustice at all levels, including health and health care. Racism, tragically, remains a chronic and acute problem of modern societies, and the use of race in medical research and practice is now being brandished as a surrogate for racism. Eradicating racism should be a moral imperative in medicine.
However, is any progress addressing inequities possible if race as a measure is banned? Is there still some room for using race variables? How much would be lost if these variables were eliminated? Is there a better tool in research and policy efforts? Are there some situations in which race variables remain valuable? What strategy would generate research that diminishes rather than increases inequalities and injustice? The time has come to recalibrate the use of race in medical research.
The call to entirely abandon race from medical research endeavors began several decades ago but is a simplistic solution to a complex set of concerns.2,3 Dislodgement of race from research may hide still-evident and often egregious episodes of health disparities. If for no other reason than the further exposition of health inequities and systemic racism, the use of race should for now persist in medical research. But the imperfectness of race as a tool is problematic.
One school of thought asserts that because race (and ethnicity) is so weakly measured and even more poorly analyzed and reported, efforts should focus on trying to strengthen measurement, analysis, and reporting. A series of initiatives, including self-identification, especially in clinical trials and registries and in specifications of requirements for publicly funded research, ensured that more attention would be given toward obtaining more data on racial minority populations. However, empirical evaluations show that race information can be fragmented, inconsistent, and eventually not very usable.
The medical literature that uses or discusses race is vast, but is it really informative? On December 21, 2020, a search of PubMed with “race OR ethnicity” yielded 518 842 items, whereas one with focused terms such as “African American” and “Hispanic OR Latino” yielded 44 674 and 61 933 items, respectively. However, a recent evaluation4 of a random sample of 1000 Cochrane systematic reviews on various medical interventions showed that only 14 (1.4%) had proposed to perform race- or ethnicity-based subgroup analyses for treatment effects. Only 1 of those 14 analyses was completed but yielded noninformative results.4 Despite the poor performance of race as a measure, numerous passionate, burgeoning health professionals, many of whom are underrepresented in medicine, have been attracted to biomedical research, lured by life experiences to study with enthusiasm the interrelation of race and ethnicity with social and biological factors. Their work should go forward.
A second school of thought argues that race is a painful historical relic and lost cause. With this approach, race as a measure should be abandoned, and efforts should be diverted toward finding variables that are more robust and informative, both for the biological constructs (eg, genetic ancestry) and the sociologic ones (eg, discrimination, deprivation, socioeconomic status) for which race has failed to provide useful, reproducible insights. Does scientific theory support this approach?
On the frontiers of biology, the rapid advent of genetics has transformed the concept of ancestry. A spectrum of genetic granularity through whole-genome sequencing makes the surrogate of traditional races potentially obsolete. However, genetics, despite its tremendous accuracy of measurement and massive information, has been sluggish in making much progress in yielding useful medical tools for everyday practice and for improving patient and population outcomes that matter to many. If anything, genetics may be contributing to worsening inequalities, especially when most genetic architecture databases overrepresent people of European ancestry (88% of genome-wide data had European ancestry as of 2018),5 when genomic tools are too expensive to use for race-based research, and when both biological scientists and social scientists default to White as a reference standard to which others are normalized.6
Race may well be a surrogate, albeit imperfect, for sociologic constructs. However, the most important sociologic variables (eg, social determinants of health) and, in particular, differential opportunities (eg, good access to and quality of care) fail to associate with sufficient precision when race is used as the placeholder. A long list of variables has emerged that try to capture socioeconomic aspects, access to care, health insurance, discrimination, deprivation, geography and place, perceived identity, opportunities, social interactions, financial mobility, health behaviors, and more. Although many of these variables probably come closer to causal relationships than race, they too are still largely nonstandardized, are often crudely measured, and unfortunately do not fully explain differences by race. Limited translational potential and transferability ensue.
Perhaps it is possible to find a middle ground between these 2 schools of thought, improvement vs elimination, in navigating this conundrum. The research corpus can be separated into 2 components: past research investigations in which race has been incorporated in medical textbooks, clinical algorithms, guidelines, recommendations, and other evidence that may or may not be applied in practice; and future research investigations.
For past investigations, a large amount of research involving race variables has been, in hindsight, pedestrian and arguably lies among the greater waste of spurious, nonusable biomedical evidence. However, there are examples for which race variables have become part of the norm of accepted medical knowledge and practice. This applies to both therapeutics (incorporation of race to identify clinically meaningful treatment effect modification for various interventions, as in hypertension or heart failure)7-9 and other clinical tools (incorporation of race to improve diagnosis or prognosis in, for example, calculation of kidney function or pulmonary function).10 Expert specialty medical societies and methodologists should jointly systematically reexamine evidence involving race that is already accepted as core knowledge. For some applications, race may continue to be the best variable to capture the influence on health; quick dismissal or normalization of values to the majority group may worsen outcomes, especially for the most disadvantaged populations. For other situations, it may be realized that these race variables have become obsolete: what they were supposed to presage when they were first proposed may no longer be relevant in the current social and biological science landscape. Alternatively, perhaps some race variables continue to offer incremental, useful information, including the further elucidation of health disparities. However, other, better variables should be developed to replace race per se. Such replacements need to proceed with rigorous validation practices, ensuring the generalizability of the results and solidifying that whatever changes are made will help reduce, rather than exacerbate, existing inequalities.
For future investigations, it is important to think carefully about the fundamental question. Why should race variables be used, if at all? Consider 4 steps: (1) execute a systematic review of prior research because race may have been exhausted as a tool and is futile to study again, or may offer insight for how a new study may best leverage past work, or create novel hypotheses; (2) if race measurements are deemed appropriate, carefully consider collateral, explanatory biological and sociologic variables appropriate to include in the same investigation, and how standardization, accuracy, and relevance may be enhanced in explaining race-based signals; (3) in any comparative analyses, investigators should consider whether White race should be the reference standard because normative values are reasonable, but normal designations that characterize some humans as aberrant are problematic; and (4) carefully consider the potency of any race-related research and gauge a holistic portfolio of clinical and social consequences, including the amelioration or aggravation of existing inequalities.
In a volatile social landscape, it may not be possible to determine exactly how race-specific research efforts may lead to a better, more fair world. At a minimum, however, medical research should not aggravate already embedded gaps between the privileged and the disadvantaged. Just as the lens of science was used to establish a flawed premise of biological race-based differences, so should science now focus on illuminating that which is represented by race and become a trailblazer toward better health equity.
Why Biden’s Immigration Policy Will Harm Americans and Migrants Alike
Joe Biden says he’ll “advance racial equity” by making “bold investments” in “Affordable Housing,” aiding “businesses owned by Black and Brown people,” establishing an “Equity Commission,” etc.
Gosh, that’ll do it.
Others demand reparations for slavery, more social programs, and defunding the police.
Yet, economist Thomas Sowell says, “I haven’t been able to find a single country in the world where policies advocated for Blacks in the United States lifted any people out of poverty.”
Sowell’s a black man who grew up in poverty. His father died before he was born, and his mother died soon after.
“We were much poorer than the people in Harlem and most anywhere else today,” he reflects. “But in the sense of things you need to get ahead, I was enormously more fortunate than most Black kids today.”
That’s because he discovered the public library. “When you start getting in the habit of reading when you’re 8 years old, it’s a different ballgame.”
Exploring Manhattan, he saw disparities in wealth. “Nothing in the schools or most of the books seemed to deal with that. Marx dealt with that,” says Sowell. He then became a Marxist.
What began to change his beliefs was his first job at the U.S. Department of Labor. He was told to focus on the minimum wage.
At first, he thought the minimum wage was good: “All these people are poor, and they’ll get a little higher income. That’ll be helpful,” he reasoned. But then he realized: “There’s a downside. They may lose their jobs.”
His colleagues at the Labor Department didn’t want to think about that. “I came up with how we might test this. I was waiting to hear ‘congratulations!’ [but] I could see these people were stunned. They’d say, ‘Oh, this idiot has stumbled on something that would ruin us all.'”
Once he saw how government workers often cared more about preserving their turf than actually solving problems, Sowell rethought his assumptions.
He turned away from Marxism and became a free market economist, writing great books like “Basic Economics,” “Race and Culture,” and my favorite title, “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.”
Today’s self-anointed leaders talk constantly about how America’s “systemic racism” holds black people back.
“Propaganda,” Sowell calls it. “If you go back into the ’20s, you find that married-couple families were much more prevalent among Blacks. As late as 1930, Blacks have lower unemployment rates than whites.”
But if systemic racism was the cause of inequality, he says, “All these things that we complain about, and attribute to the era of slavery, should’ve been worse in the past than in the present.”
Sowell says the bigger cause of black Americans’ problems today is government welfare initiated in the 1960s. The programs encouraged people to become dependent on handouts. “You began to have the mindset that goes with the welfare state,” Sowell says. “No stigma any longer attached to being on relief.”
Sowell concludes that government programs that are supposed to help minorities do more harm than good. Affirmative action, for example.
In 1965, he took a teaching position at Cornell. The college, he said, had lowered admission standards to diversify the student body, and most students admitted under affirmative action did not do well.
“Half of the Black students were on academic probation,” he wrote, later adding, “Something like one-fourth of all the Black students going to MIT do not graduate. [There is] a pool of people whom you are artificially turning into failures by mismatching them with the school.”
Saying such things makes Sowell an outcast in academia, and now most everywhere.
Sowell writes, “If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules … that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/01/22/what-thomas-sowell-can-teach-us-about-standing-up-to-the-mob
Federal Court Upholds Conscience Protections for DoctorsAmid a flurry of activity and controversy with the incoming Biden administration, there was still a major victory for religious freedom and conscience protection last week.
On Jan. 19, a federal court, citing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, upheld conscience protections for physicians and struck down the transgender mandate that ordered doctors to perform transgender interventions when doing so violated the provider’s sincerely held religious beliefs.
The case, Sisters of Mercy v. Azar, is hardly well-known, but no less newsworthy. The plaintiffs are an order of Catholic nuns, a Catholic university, and Catholic health care organizations. They sued the government, challenging Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which forced doctors to perform transgender interventions against their sincerely held religious beliefs or even sound, medical advice.
The U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota ruled that: “Absent an injunction, [the religious plaintiffs] will either be ‘forced to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs’ by performing and covering gender-transition procedures ‘or to incur severe monetary penalties for refusing to comply.’”
The court also said: “An injunction will also advance the public interest because the protection of constitutional rights is ‘always in the public interest.’”
The legal organization Becket represented the plaintiffs and successfully argued, according to its press release, “that sensitive medical decisions should be kept between patients and their doctors without government interference, and that no one should be required by law to disregard their conscience or their professional medical judgment.”
In a statement, Luke Goodrich, senior counsel at Becket, underscored the importance of religious freedom within the medical community: “The court’s decision recognizes our medical heroes’ right to practice medicine in line with their conscience and without politically motivated interference from government bureaucrats.”
While this ruling should be applauded, this lawsuit should not have been necessary in the first place. Under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment, religious providers should not have to give care in a way that violates their beliefs, but lawsuits suggesting otherwise challenged that concept.
In 2017, for example, Evan Minton sued Dignity Health, which operates dozens of Catholic hospitals. These include the one that refused to perform a hysterectomy sought by Minton after learning that Minton scheduled the treatment as a transgender intervention, not for health purposes. Minton is a biological female who now lives as a transgender male.
“I was denied health care because I am transgender. The justification, according to the hospital, was that religious doctrine permits them to refuse transgender patients, just because of who we are,” Minton says on the American Civil Liberties Union’s website.
Minton, the ACLU, and other similar organizations often argue that conservatives perpetuate LGBTQ discrimination under the guise of religious liberty.
Minton’s case, and the Sisters of Mercy v. Azar decision, demonstrate this is not exactly the case. In fact, it’s often the opposite.
The plaintiffs in the case are “devoted to works of mercy and purposely work at religious-based hospitals whose missions are to help the underserved,” according to the court’s ruling. Yet they are told that despite beliefs that motivate them to serve others, they must also provide care that violates those very mores.
This issue—discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity—will be one of the most controversial and important issues with which the Biden administration and conservatives will tangle. It is now present in every major sphere of public life: from schools and bathrooms to sports and hospitals.
While the Trump administration issued the “refusal of care” rule through the Department of Health and Human Services to aid religious people in abiding by their conscience, the Biden administration has already started to unravel such measures.
Given this federal court’s ruling in Sisters of Mercy, it’s clear the new administration and the judiciary will be addressing discrimination and religious liberty.
For now, doctors in at least one district court jurisdiction can continue to lawfully practice medicine while maintaining their beliefs.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/01/25/federal-court-upholds-conscience-protections-for-doctors
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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