Health beat: Greenpeace’s War on Kids
“A Philippines court made the decision to block the growing of Golden Rice,” grumbles Zion Lights at Spiked, “following campaigns led by Greenpeace” to discredit the genetically modified grain. “Widespread” vitamin A deficiency in Africa and south-east Asia is “the leading preventable cause of childhood blindness”; Golden Rice has “groundbreaking” potential to combat childhood blindness and its associated risks (including death). But “Greenpeace and other green activists” argue “that the rice would contaminate other crops and that GMOs” are harmful in general. A “third of living Nobel laureates signed an open letter calling Greenpeace’s scare campaigns a ‘crime against humanity’,” yet the greens persist. Now “these so-called environmentalists will have an entirely avoidable tragedy on their conscience.”
Woke watch: Terrorism for Tots
“The irruption of Hamas terrorism in Israel has provided Portland’s public school revolutionaries with another cause du jour,” snarks City Journal’s Christopher F. Rufo. “They’ve ditched the raised fist of Black Lives Matter and traded it in for the black-and-white keffiyeh of Palestinian militants,” with lesson plans demonizing Israel while “teaching the principles of ‘decolonization’ to students as young as four and five.” Teachers are “encouraged to share ‘keffiyehs, flags, and protest signs’ with the children, and have them create their own agitprop.” There’s also open endorsement of terror like “We salute all our martyrs!” And, reports Rufo, the teachers union “has assembled a legal guide for how teachers can keep promoting the lessons under the guise of meeting state curriculum standards.”
Conservative: Joe’s Slip-Sliding Away
“You don’t need” that Wall Street Journal expose “to tell you that Biden is diminished,” snipes Matthew Continetti at the Washington Free Beacon. “You need only to open your eyes.” Just “watch Biden try to sit at a D-Day commemoration in France on Thursday.” Or consider the Time interview, “where Biden says — twice — that Russia invaded Russia,” and “says that the 19 percent increase in prices since he became president is due to ‘shrinkflation’ and that he could ‘take’ the Time reporter who asks about his advanced age.” Asked about his second-term agenda, he babbles with no mention “of inflation, home prices, nor interest rates. Neither the border nor achieving positive outcomes in Ukraine and Gaza makes his second-term list.”
Science desk: Fauci Killed Science’s Authority
Anthony Fauci, thunders Steve Krakauer at The Hill, has “remained defiant and indignant” despite being proved “outright wrong.” Like on social distancing, which he admitted was based on nothing but blamed the CDC for, and which was a “a key factor in why so many schools remained closed for so long — unnecessarily and irreparably harming young kids.” He and other experts “embarrassed themselves over masking, like when the CDC massively changed the guidance on how vaccinated people could mask in just two weeks after public pressure.” Our scientific elite “had a choice at the height of the pandemic”: Be honest that “many of the mitigation methods they were suggesting were just their best guesses.” But “they chose a different route” using “lies, obfuscation, condescension and gaslighting.”
From the right: UC’s Absurd Grad-Student Strike
Graduate students and teaching assistants in the University of California system are on a “wildcat strike,” but the state just “got what it deserves,” sniff The Wall Street Journal’s editors. Yes, “48,000 or so academic worker members are refusing to teach undergraduate classes” and intentionally fomenting chaos in a “show of ideological loyalty to students demonstrating” against the war in Gaza. But “this is what the university gets for admitting grad students who care more about leftwing activism than learning.” UC can expect no help from pro-labor Gov. Gavin Newsom. In fact, it already “asked the state Public Employment Relations Board — run by Mr. Newsom’s appointees” to help end the strike. Predictably, “the board refused. Californians can thank the progressive leaders they elect.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board