Question 21

 Question 21

The group of developed nations agreed to a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15%. This protects the predatory high tax states from being undercut by the lower taxing states. But haven't we always been told that taxes don't inhibit commercial behavior? And should predatory taxes be protected?

Mookie Betts had only one assist this year. Does that mean he is not a good outfielder?

Jews and people of Jewish descent represent less than 0.20% of the world’s population, but they represent 24.5% of all Nobel laureates (231 out of 944). This year there are five Jewish Nobel laureates: David Julius (medicine) and Joshua Angrist (economics). Is that an example of discrimination?

Men have received 93.8% of all Nobel awards to individuals compared to a 6.2% share for women, which is a male-female Nobel Prize ratio of 15.1-to-1. Is that an example of discrimination?

Are we vaccinating the Taliban?

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This is the Tenth Amendment. Is it less important than, for example, the Fifth or the First?

The results from NYC show Black eighth-graders test proficiency 8% in math, 14% in reading. Yet they have cut the gifted program. Do they think achievement is the problem?

A new California law will ban the sale of all off-road, gas-powered engines, including generators, lawn equipment, pressure washers, chainsaws, weed trimmers, and golf carts. And California is requiring large retailers to provide gender-neutral toy sections. Not surprisingly, California is the first state to adopt such a law. LGBTQ advocates have pointed out that marketing methods using pink and blue hues "pressure children to conform to gender stereotypes." Micromanagement is really good, right?

Russia gained mightily --and Great Britain was hurt mightily--by Biden's approval of Nord 2. And by Biden's contraction of America's gas production. Has Biden been more of a friend to GB than Trump, who opposed Nord 2 and encouraged American gas production?



BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

Potemkin Village: Social media users ridiculed Biden on Wednesday after he once again used a fake White House set, this time featuring a digital monitor displaying the Rose Garden with flowers in full bloom. Human Events Senior Editor Jack Posobiec called it the “Truman Show Presidency.” When does mendacious artificial construction become manipulative?

Test scores from the first months of remote learning showed students falling months behind in reading and math. Are you a little surprised that teachers make a difference?

Some thinker named Rabb (D. Pa) has proposed forced vasectomies on the fathers of more than three children. This apparently is a stunt to ridicule the Texas anti-abortion bill. Do you think it wise for a politician in this political milieu to make joke legislation?

But the fact remains that in nearly all other ethnic groups in America, including Mexican Americans with higher levels of poverty than Afro-Americans, and in nearly all other known human societies, including India with its vast hordes of people in grinding urban poverty and unemployment, poverty does not lead to the large-scale paternal abandonment of children. In fact, the best available data show little correlation between job availability and the marriage rate.(Orlando Patterson) So Black American experience is unique?


In an article published by New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli on Wednesday, Times readers were told that “nearly 900,000 children have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since the pandemic began.”
A correction issued on Thursday notes that the correct number is 63,000 between August 2020 and October 2021, which means Mandavilli exaggerated the number of child hospitalizations by 837,000 cases. What can be done to separate the propaganda from the staggeringly stupid?

Has the rise of individual choice and the acceptance of peripheral behavior undercut the efforts to have uniform response to the Virus?

Conseil scolaire catholique Providence, a French-language school board for southwestern Ontario, launched an “educational program” in 2019 called Giving Back to Mother Earth. The goal was to replace library books “that had outdated content and carried negative stereotypes about First Nations, Métis and Inuit people.” More than 4,700 children’s books from 30 schools across CSC Providence were destroyed in a “flame purification” ceremony. A video for students explained the ritual: “We bury the ashes of racism, discrimination and stereotypes in the hope that we will grow up in an inclusive country where all can live in prosperity and security.”(wsj) It get worse as the bureaucrats turned upon each other over their indigenous credentials. Are there other elements in society that can be 'purified.'

In a 2017 study of over 2,000 doctors published in PLOS One, clinicians reported that over 20% of the care they administered—medication, tests, even procedures—was unnecessary. In almost 60% of cases, doctors said they did it because of patient pressure or request. But wasn't the idea to get rid of medical paternalism?

In an influential March 2020 paper in Nature Medicine, Kristian Andersen and co-authors implied that a host animal for SARS-CoV-2 would soon be found. If the virus had been cooked up in a lab, of course, there would be no host animal to find.
Chinese scientists searched for a host in early 2020, testing more than 80,000 animals from 209 species, including wild, domesticated and market animals. As the WHO investigation reported, not a single animal infected with SARS-CoV-2 was found. This finding strongly favors the lab-leak theory.

SARS-CoV-2 contains a key mutation: the “furin cleavage site,” or FCS. This mutation is sufficiently complex that it couldn’t have been the result of spontaneous changes triggered, for example, by a mutagen or radiation. It could, however, have been inserted by nature or by humans.
Now, is someone surprised? (Yes. The WHO. The WHO is launching yet another investigation.) (from wsj and don)

UCLA’s Anderson School of Management lecturer Gordon Klein got suspended, canceled, pilloried, and banned from campus in the summer of 2020 because he refused to change his standard race-neutral, non-discriminatory, color-blind grading policy at the request of one of his white students in June 2020 who requested racially preferential grading for black students in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis while in police custody. Aren't race-based decisions and preferences illegal?