RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Feb. 16 to Feb. 22, 2020

Featured Investigation
Boys Will Be Girls
... and Feminists Will Be Furious

As transgender rights advance in much of the world, feminists have met the enemy and it is ... other feminists. So finds Richard Bernstein in RealClearInvestigations, exploring divisions among progressives over the idea that a man can truly become a woman, or vice versa. Bernstein reports that:

• Feminist stalwarts of the social justice left, worried about harm to women and kids, are pushing back against transgender advocates.
• But such women are being shouted down, from Seattle to Toronto to London.
• Cowed by criticism, the august New York Public Library actually canceled a gathering of “canceled women” from the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF.
• “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling and feminist icon Germaine Greer have both faced uproars for criticizing the trans awakening.
• Liberal women have lost their jobs for speaking out.
• New terms have emerged, including a new pejorative acronym: TERF, for trans exclusionary radical feminist.
• The dissenters face a swelling tide: Trans rights have gained wide acceptance in many elite institutions, including the media, Hollywood, the Democrat Party – even collegiate sports.
• There's a rich irony here: The feminist revolution of the past quarter-century deemed gender largely a social construct.

FBI Raids Business Tied to Biden Brother

FBI agents last month raided the home of the CEO of a bankrupt rural hospital venture and one of its hospitals in Pennsylvania in new signs of trouble for a company central to accusations of influence-peddling by James Biden, brother of former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Mark Hemingway reports for RealClearInvestigations:

• The federal investigation was disclosed in documents filed this month by the acting U.S. trustee overseeing the bankruptcy case of Florida-based Americore Holdings.
• It said the company's CEO, Grant White, had “grossly mismanaged” his business; “has not operated the hospitals in a manner that is consistent with public safety”; and “improperly siphoned money from the Debtors for his personal benefit.”
• A week later a Kentucky court granted a motion to remove White as CEO.
• This past summer, James Biden and White were named in a lawsuit alleging fraud, along with Biden’s partner, hedge fund manager Michael Lewitt.
• The suit by two Tennessee businessmen alleges that when their company and Americore were in talks to merge, Jim Biden promised to exploit his brother’s political influence as vice president to attract international investors and make the venture successful.
• One exhibit filed in the lawsuit is a photograph of an Americore business card that Biden reportedly handed out listing him as a “principal” in the company.

The Election Investigations: Top Articles

Intel Briefers: Russia's At It Again for 2020. Trump: So Is Schiff., New York Times
How Bloomberg Built an Empire of Influence, New York Times
Lining Up to Give Oral Sex? Sifting Old Lawsuits vs. Bloomberg, Washington Post
Why Wasn't Andrew McCabe Charged? National Review
Barr's Internal Reviews Feed Justice Dept. Resentment, Washington Post
Left-Wing Group Behind Ex-Prosecutors' Barr Attack, American Greatness 

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

How Florida Nonprofit Paid $7.5M to Bush-Tied CEO
Tampa Bay Times
Nonprofit work usually doesn’t pay as well as private sector jobs – unless you know how to work the system. That’s the takeaway from this article, which reports how Tiffany Carr received a $7.5 million compensation package for laboring three years as the head of the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The article details the gimmicks used by the group’s board to raise the compensation of Carr through paid time off: “The first checks were modest, then they became massive: $700,000 in 2017, $4.5 million in 2018 and $1.7 million last year.” This article suggests that Carr, who resigned last year, secured her whopping pay package partly as a result of her close relationship to former Gov. Jeb. Bush. However, Bush left office in 2007.   

Meth Is Back, Flooding the Streets – and It's Uglier Than Ever
Cincinnati Enquirer
After years of decline as opioids became the drug of choice among many addicts, crystal meth abuse is back, partly because of a much purer product coming directly from Mexico, not backyard cookeries or houses or sheds.  The Ohio High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, an agency funding 23 drug task forces, saw a 1,600% jump in methamphetamine seized from 2015 to 2019 -- and the 2019 numbers are incomplete. People addicted to opioids are helping fuel the resurgence because meth is cheaper and thought to be safer than synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. 

Leaked File Shows How Firms Buy Credit Card Data on Millions
Vice
Yodlee, the largest financial data broker in the U.S., sells data pulled from the bank and credit card transactions of tens of millions of Americans to investment and research firms, detailing where and when people shopped and how much they spent. The company claims the data is anonymous, but a confidential Yodlee document obtained by Motherboard indicates individual users could be unmasked. Yodlee's "data cleaning" involves removing names, email addresses, and other personally identifiable information (PII) from the transaction data. That includes masking patterns of numbers like account numbers, phone numbers, and SSNs and replacing them with "XXX" symbols, the document explains. An expert who says that “someone with access to the dataset and some information about you, e.g. shops you've been buying from and when, might be able to identify you." In a separate dispatch from the land of lost privacy, the Washington Post reports on the growing number of Americans who are using security cameras to create their own mini-police states where they secretly monitor their kids and house guests, and judge the performance of housekeepers, babysitters, and other domestic workers. 

The Google Employee Revolt, and Its Suppression
New York Times
From its earliest days, Google urged employees to “act like owners” and pipe up in all manner of forums, from mailing lists to open-ended question-and-answer sessions with top executives. Over the past year, however, not so much. Google has cut back on grill sessions for bosses and imposed guidelines that forbid “a raging debate over politics or the latest news story.” It has tried to prevent workers from discussing their labor rights with outsiders and even hired a consulting firm that specializes in blocking unions. This article discusses those changes in the context of the firing of the four employee activists in November. The escalation sent tremors through the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif., and its offices in cities like New York and Seattle, prompting many employees — whether or not they had openly supported the activists — to wonder if the company’s culture of friendly debate was now gone for good. As similar forms of worker activism have spread to other tech behemoths, including Amazon and Microsoft, this has raised deeper questions about the nature of the entire industry.

Community Churches Are Now Arming Themselves
Washington Post
Places of worship around the country are adding a new component to their services: armed parishioners. High-profile shootings, including at a church in Charleston and a synagogue in Pittsburgh, have highlighted the fact that churches, synagogues and mosques, with their typically welcoming environments and looser safety measures, can make for easier targets, especially as businesses and schools ramp up security. In response, this article reports, more places of worship are turning to surveillance equipment and armed guards, especially volunteers from the congregation, who blend in and save the parish money. In the first weeks of 2020, legislators, most of them Republicans, have introduced 13 bills allowing armed security in places of worship.

Heavier Trucks Force Struggle to Mend America's Rural Roads
New York Times
Patricia Cohen reports that the roads of rural Wisconsin “look like losers in a barroom brawl. Thick, jagged cracks run down the asphalt like scars, interrupted at points by bruised bumps. In some places, guardrails are tilted off their moorings like a pair of glasses knocked askew.” She reports that this is a national problem because there are too many aging, damaged roads and not enough money to fix them. This is a major problem because “two-thirds of the nation’s freight emanates from rural areas” which travels along damaged roads. The problem is getting worse because traffic volume has increased over the years while tractor-trailers and farm equipment have been supersized, ballooning in length, breadth and weight. A legally loaded semi-trailer truck can produce 5,000 to 10,000 times the road damage of one car, according to some estimates. Although just 19 percent of the country’s population lives in rural areas, those regions have 68 percent of the total lane and road miles, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. 

Street Medicine Grows, Along With Homeless Population
Los Angeles Times
Medical professionals will still make house calls – so long as you’re homeless. This article reports on teams of physician’s assistants who offer care to some of the sickest people in Los Angeles by meeting them where they live, on the street. The patients don’t have to schedule appointments, find transportation to the clinic, pick up prescriptions, or pay for their treatment. So-called street medicine teams are multiplying nationwide as well, with more than 90 across the country and some doctors weighing whether the practice should be taught in medical schools.

Professor Reviled as Pedophile for His Classics Scholarship
The Intercept
Thomas Hubbard is a leading scholar of pederasty in antiquity — love and sex between adults and adolescent boys in ancient times. Cue the #MeToo Movement. Now the University of Texas classics professor is under fire from some female students because of a paper he published in a journal and assigned in at least one of his courses. In “Sexual Consent and the Adolescent Male, or What Can We Learn From the Greeks,” Hubbard portrays pederasty in glowing terms and suggests that that history could be a model for thinking about current ages of consent. He argues that boys should be free to express their “natural and powerful sexual urges,” including with older partners. (Girls, on the other hand, need to be “protected” until 17 or 18, because they are “easily pressured” and might get pregnant.) This article focuses on the effort to punish Hubbard not because of what he has done but for what he thinks. This even extends to his colleagues: “Unlike other academics censured for their views,” the article reports, “Hubbard is out in the cold. Almost no one would speak on the record for this article, for or against him” because his work involves pedophilia. 

The Huge Airbnb Scam That’s Taking Over London
Wired UK
Leon now claims to be a 30-year-old dancer living in London, but in August 2012 he was a man called Christian living in Munich. The one thing that hasn’t changed is that Leon/Christian wants to rent you a place through Airnb. This article reports that as the short-term rental gold rush gathers pace, Airbnb empires are being rapidly scaled and monetized, with professional operators like Leon/Christian creating scores of fake accounts, fake listings, and fake reviews to run rings around Airbnb, local law enforcement and the guests who place their trust in the platform. To squeeze every penny out of these inner-city gold mines, scammers have started outsourcing property management to ill-equipped call centers in the Philippines. The scammers call it “systemizing,” a process of grabbing as many apartments as possible, filling them with identikit furniture, taking professional-looking photographs, and then using every trick in the book to turn them into lucrative investments.