RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
June 11 to June 17, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, John Murawski reports how progressive Christianity is moving beyond gay rights and transgender acceptance into the realm of “queer theology" -- in which monogamy, marriage and capitalism are “problematized” and queerness is deemed not only natural and healthy but biblically celebrated. Murawski reports: Such claims may seem offensive to the uninitiated, like the antics of the drag queen nun impersonators honored this week at a Los Angeles Dodgers’ “Pride Night.” But Queer Theology is a mature, established theological subject now in its third decade. Courses on queer theology are offered to training ministers at the leading progressive divinity schools, such as Harvard Divinity School. Key tenet: The presence of Jesus is found among the sexually marginalized, such as in a gay bathhouse or bondage dungeon. The United Methodist Church boasts the first drag queen in the world to become a certified candidate for ordination. At Duke University’s divinity school, pastors-in-training conduct a worship service in which they glorify the Great Queer One, Fluid and Ever-Becoming One. The Presbyterian News Service has offered online courses on “Queering the Bible” and “Queering the Prophets.” Advocate: “Jesus has been hijacked by ecclesial and political powers since the time of Constantine and right up to the present. … He subverts the prevailing heteropatriarchal, cis-gender ideologies, welcoming outsiders.” Dissenting scholar: Queering Jesus is like Gnosticism, a heretical strain of Christianity. Sidebar: Sodom Is Not About Gays, and Other Queer Takes on the Bible. Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books At $157K, Chicago Principals Unionize, RCI
NC Off to the Races With Pandemic Pork, RCI
SEC's $279M to Snitch Seems a Bit Much, RCI
Physicians Led the Way in Student Loan Reneging, RCI
At $10K a Pop, LA's Got It Made in the Shade, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway Grassley: Burisma Boss Said to Have Taped Hunter, Joe The Federalist
Inside the House GOP’s Push to Impeach Mayorkas Politico
Obama’s Investment Deals Mirror Tax Strategies He Once Criticized Lee Fang
Medicaid Spending for Illegal Immigrants Doubles to $7B Just the News Other Noteworthy Articles and Series The lab leak theory has gained its strongest evidence yet as “multiple U.S. government officials” have reportedly told reporters from the Substacks Public and Racket that the first people infected by the virus that causes COVID-19 included three researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology who were performing “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses. Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus. As such, not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019, but also that they were working with the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and inserting gain-of-function features unique to it. When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%.” While the claim directly challenges the scientific establishment’s long dismissal of the lab leak theory, it also has a long provenance. In 2021 the U.S. State Department stated: The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. That raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students by SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses. Scammers stole at least $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding, and another $123 billion was wasted or misspent, an AP investigation has found. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid. Fraudsters used the Social Security numbers of dead people and federal prisoners to get unemployment checks. Cheaters collected those benefits in multiple states. And federal loan applicants weren’t cross-checked against a Treasury Department database that would have raised red flags about sketchy borrowers. Criminals and gangs grabbed the money. But so did a U.S. soldier in Georgia, the pastors of a defunct church in Texas, a former state lawmaker in Missouri and a roofing contractor in Montana. All of it led to the greatest grift in U.S. history, with thieves plundering billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid intended to combat the worst pandemic in a century and to stabilize an economy in free fall. How could so much be stolen? Investigators and outside experts say the government, in seeking to quickly spend trillions in relief aid, conducted too little oversight during the pandemic’s early stages and instituted too few restrictions on applicants. In short, they say, the grift was just way too easy. In a separate article, the AP reports that the explosion of check fraud and mail theft, which began early in the pandemic as government relief checks became an attractive target for criminals, has only gotten worse. Postal authorities and bank officials are warning Americans to avoid mailing checks if possible, or at least to use a secure mail drop such as inside the post office. Meanwhile, as the cases of fraud increase, victims are waiting longer to recover their stolen money. “A surveillance state has been quietly growing in the legal system's cracks,” this article reports, as U.S. intelligence agencies skirt restrictions on the data they can collect by purchasing it from commercial enterprises. A 2021 report issued by one of the agencies scooping up private data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, notes that: The information being commercially sold about Americans today is “more revealing, available on more people (in bulk), less possible to avoid, and less well understood” than that which is traditionally thought of as being “publicly available.” Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device's location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge's sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information ‒ not only to the US government but to other companies as well ‒ the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.” Access to the most sensitive information about a person that was once usually obtained in the course of a “targeted” and “predicated” investigation, is now widely available through due to “location-tracking and other features of smartphones,” and the “advertising-based monetization model” that underlies much of the internet, the report says. Earlier this year, a Los Angeles Times investigation found that several Mexican pharmacies near the U.S. border were selling counterfeit pills over the counter, passing off powerful methamphetamine as Adderall and deadly fentanyl as Percocet and other opioid painkillers. An LA Times follow-up investigation reports the problem is much more extensive: It’s not just stray single pills that are laced with dangerous substances, but sometimes entire bottles that appear to be factory sealed. And the issue isn’t restricted to one area: It’s happening in tourist hot spots across the country, from the California border to the Yucatán Peninsula and from the southernmost edge of Texas to the Pacific Coast. During five trips to Mexico, Times reporters purchased and tested 55 pills from 29 pharmacies in eight cities. A little more than 50% ‒ 28 pills ‒ were counterfeit. … In most of those locations, the pills that tested positive came from independent pharmacies, where workers sold them over the counter, one tablet at a time. But in Puerto Vallarta, counterfeits were available even at one regional pharmacy chain — the sort of place where people might expect more quality control. The article reports that the death toll is unclear but that at least half a dozen Americans have overdosed or died after taking counterfeit pills purchased from Mexican pharmacies. Built on a West Virginia mountaintop, the Southern Regional Jail was one of the deadliest jails in America last year on a per capita basis. In 2022, this article reports, 13 inmates died at the facility, which regularly held about 700 men and women. By comparison, 19 detainees died last year in New York’s Rikers Island with a population of nearly 6,000. The high rate of violence in the jail occurred in an environment where inmates were crowded together, toilets often didn’t function, many locks on cell doors didn’t work and overworked officers were spread too thin, former officers and inmates say. … West Virginia’s correctional system, dealing with a staffing crisis, overcrowding and the long-term failure to maintain buildings, faces litigation and investigations. A Justice Department probe into one death at the Southern Regional Jail comes amid state investigations into other deaths there and a civil lawsuit about conditions at the jail brought on behalf of more than 1,000 current and former inmates. S&P Global made headlines this month when it gave Tesla, the world's largest manufacturer of electric cars, a lower environmental, social, and governance score than Philip Morris International and Altria, the makers of Marlboro cigarettes. This article asks the question: How could cigarettes, which kill over eight million people each year, be deemed a more ethical investment than electric cars? It may have something to do with the tobacco industry's embrace of corporate progressivism. Companies like Altria have gone out of their way to emphasize the diversity of their corporate boards and the breadth of their social justice initiatives, from funding minority businesses to promoting transgender women in sports. But Tesla, whose executives are overwhelmingly white men, has resisted that bandwagon, going so far as to fire its top LGBT diversity officer last year. The "S" in ESG typically includes diversity programs. Philip Morris International, which in 2021 advertised a partnership with "African data scientists," got a social score of 84 from S&P Global. Tesla got a measly 20. | 