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August 2020

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

6 Questions an Honest, Intelligent Reporter Would Ask Dr. Fauci About COVID-19 By Stacey Lennox,

By on August 9th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/stacey-lennox/2020/08/08/6-questions-an-honest-intelligent-reporter-would-ask-dr-fauci-about-covid-19-n760478

If you had been going down the rabbit hole of COVID-19 research for long enough, a few things would be astounding to you. First, how uninformed, uncurious, or deceptive reporters in the corporate media are on a matter of life and death. Second, how much publicly available information about COVID-19 is on the internet contradicts what is reported and said by Health Experts™on cable news. Finally, it is impossible to believe Dr. Anthony Fauci enjoys a 62% approval rating.

Of course, part of the reason Dr. Fauci enjoys this level of trust is that reporters who interview him put a sort of religious faith in every word he utters. Having worked with doctors for years, I don’t suffer from any such affliction. There are some great ones, some awful ones, and some who are great at one thing and not another.

It is also quite reasonable for doctors to disagree. Medicine is the art of applying science and it is rarely “settled.” This healthy tension is why patients get second opinions. Yet during the COVID-19 pandemic, only one doctor has had almost no pushback in any public interview. This is journalistic malpractice, but not surprising. Most of the corporate media agree with his recommendations or can use panic porn clicks.

However, if there were a courageous and intelligent reporter who could score an interview with Dr. Fauci, here is a list of questions I would suggest.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Defending ‘New Europe’ from Old Europe’s Woke In the name of “strengthening democracy” in Central Europe, Joe Biden’s clueless policies would undermine democracy and NATO, too. By Clark S. Judge

By on August 9th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/08/defending-new-europe-from-old-europes-woke/

All but ignored on this side of the Atlantic, Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán recently summed up one of the presidential campaign’s most critical and least-discussed issues—U.S. support for the frontline NATO states of Hungary and Poland against political assaults from their allies and ours in the European Union. Our national security is at stake in the outcome.

“American Democrats [and] the American Left, together with the elites of Western Europe,” Mr. Orbán observed, are working to impose their “world vision, choice of values and concepts—including . . . views on families . . . migration . . . work . . . unemployment—on countries that have a different thinking.” He meant Hungary and Poland. 

These countries, he continued, have been targets of the European Union’s “liberal [in the radical woke sense] imperialism,” that is, the EU’s hostility to what Americans would call socially conservative and economically populist governments that are, as Americans are, jealous of their sovereignty.

The strength of the NATO Alliance will turn on America’s choice on this question. Does the United States support the corrosive assault by what might be called “Big Europe” (Germany, France, and Eurocrats in Brussels) on “New Europe” (Hungary, Poland, and the continent’s other nation-state supporters)? Or should we help build up New Europe’s economic robustness and sovereign vitality, so these countries remain full and vibrant partners—for both the EU and us—in defending the still-challenged frontiers of freedom?

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The Covid Occupation Reflections on the recent lockdown in Paris Theodore Dalrymple

By on August 9th, 2020

https://www.city-journal.org/confinement-in-covid-era-paris

During the many years that I worked as a prison doctor, never a day went by when I did not ask myself how I would react to imprisonment. “There but for the grace of God go I,” was a constant refrain in my mind, or, alternatively, Hamlet’s question to Polonius: “Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” Surely everyone has done something in his life that might justify imprisonment. I never dreamed, however, that 15 years after my retirement, I should experience a type of imprisonment, admittedly of a lenient kind, in Paris, not being allowed out of my small apartment for more than one hour a day—and then only with a permit, or laissez-passer. In just one respect was my imprisonment harder than the real kind: I was to have no visitors and no casual social contact.

I was surprised, working in prison, to discover that the type of person who one might imagine would find prison particularly awful was able to endure it with comparative ease, if not with pleasure, exactly. I mean people like me: doctors, professionals, and academics, who occasionally (and to my great embarrassment) ended up incarcerated. Surely, prison would be an insupportable torture to them, humiliated by their loss of status; forced into social promiscuity with people with whom they would not normally associate; experiencing constant noise that made concentration impossible; deprived of the sense of agency that, until then, they took for granted; and with little choice now as to what to eat, read, or do, and subject to the favor of men much less educated than themselves. Yet they settled in without special difficulty. They were not, as so many first-time prisoners were, subject to suicidal thoughts. In the cant phrase used by old lags to advise younger convicts, they “got their head down and did their bird.” In other words, they did not make themselves conspicuous to the authorities, complained little, and did not stand on their dignity.

Why were they able to adapt so well? Whatever the advantages—as well as sometimes the disadvantages—that education and intelligence might confer outside prison, on the “in” (as prisoners call it), they permitted the prisoner to distance himself from his own situation and to take an interest in the foreign country around him: for like the past, prison is a foreign country; they do things differently there, and difference has an interest in itself, even when it represents a worsening.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Systemic Racism’ or Systemic Rubbish? Unlike systemic racism, intellectual indentureship could quickly become a reality in America. By Ilana Mercer

By on August 9th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/08/systemic-racism-or-systemic-rubbish/

The “systemic racism” refrain is a meaningless abstraction.

Operationalize the nebulous abstraction that is “systemic racism,” or get out of my face!

To concretize a variable, it must be cast in empirical, measurable terms—the opaque “racism” abstraction being one variable (to use statistical nomenclature).

Until you have meticulously applied research methodology to statistically operationalize this inchoate thing called “racism”—systemic or other—it remains nothing but thought crime.

That is to say, it is impolite and impolitic thoughts, spoken, written, or preached. Says you.  

Thought crimes are nobody’s business in a free society. (By logical extension, America is not a free society.)

The law already mandates that people of all races be treated equally under its protection. The law, then, is not the problem—logic is. In particular, the logical error of reasoning backward.

“Backward reasoning, expounded by mystery author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes,” writes Dr. Thomas Young, “applies with reasonable certainty when only one plausible explanation for the . . . evidence exists.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Man Who Wasn’t There Joe Biden doesn’t make gaffes. His is a gaffe. By Roger Kimball *******

By on August 9th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/08/the-man-who-wasnt-there/

Those things with which we are most familiar are often hardest to see. This is perhaps particularly true of such fraught subjects as politics. There we are every day staring at the same people, reading news stories that are virtually indistinguishable from one another, and what do we know?

Our situation is similar to Alice’s in Through the Looking Glass when she finds herself in a shop that seemed full of curious things. “[T]he oddest part of it all was, that whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty: though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.” 

I feel that way about Joe Biden. Gertrude Stein once quipped of her native Oakland, California, “there is no there there.” Isn’t that how it is with Joe Biden? He doesn’t make gaffes; he is a gaffe, poor thing. (I’ve expatiated on this elsewhere.) 

I suspect that most Americans, whatever side of the political aisle they occupy, do not really see Joe Biden—especially when, like Alice, they are looking directly at him. They need to manage a sidelong glance, a sudden shift of perspective to catch his drift (and I employ the word “drift” advisedly). 

This was brought home to me by an article that appeared a few days ago in Le Figaro, the biggest newspaper in France. The headline summed up its burden: “La stupéfiante indulgence des grands médias américains envers Joe Biden”—“The stupefying indulgence of big American media towards Joe Biden.”

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Teen Vogue calls for the abolishment of private property, capitalism By Eric Utter

By on August 9th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/teen_vogue_calls_for_the_abolishment_of_private_property_capitalism.html

Teen Vogue recently published an op-ed by columnist Kandist Mallett in which she declared that no one should have the right to own property. She called for the elimination of landlords while averring that “an eviction crisis is coming” due to the coronavirus pandemic’s heavy toll on the United States, which, she says, is evidence of “the failures of capitalism.”

Mallett noted that “The pandemic didn’t create this housing crisis, but it did further expose the cruelty of payment-based housing.” No, but she herself may have just exposed the futility of payment-based higher education.

She rambled on: “Instead of seeing housing as a right and something that should not be commodified, the state enlists its own armed forces—sheriffs and police—to remove occupants from residences if they cannot pay rent. The lack of protections for non-landowners should be to no surprise from a country founded on the genocide and colonization of indigenous peoples.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fear fatigue is more dangerous than COVID-19 By Jeffrey I. Barke, M.D.

By on August 9th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/fear_fatigue_is_more_dangerous_than_covid19.html

Our daily lives are filled with risks — lots of risks. Just look at these examples:

• Every year, 30,000 to 40,000 Americans die in automobile accidents, yet none of us is willing to give up cars to avoid the possibility of dying in a crash.

• Heart disease kills more than 600,000 of our fellow citizens annually, yet we continue to eat fast food and pack on extra pounds.

• Diabetes puts more than 80,000 Americans into their graves each year, yet we do not ban the use of sugar.

• Close to 50,000 Americans take their own lives annually, yet we have instituted COVID-19 policies that have increased the incidence of suicide to the highest levels seen since the Great Depression.

• Millions of children are infected with influenza each year, and hundreds die from the disease.  But we have never closed our schools or insisted on masking the population to prevent the spread of flu.

• Child abuse and child sex-trafficking are at record levels in this country, and many specialists believe that it is due, in part, to our schools being closed while adults are unable to go their normal daily routines.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Mark Kelly: Maybe a Good Astronaut, but Would Be a Terrible Senator By Elise Cooper

By on August 9th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/mark_kelly_maybe_a_good_astronaut_but_would_be_a_terrible_senator.html

Elections have consequences.  Whether voting for president or senator, Americans should be wary of those who avoid discussing their stands on the issues.  When Joe Biden and Mark Kelly do talk about the issues, it is obvious that their views are in line with the leftists.  Just because Mark Kelly’s name has the astronaut title, that does not mean that it should change to the title of senator.  Those who might think of voting for him should look at his stance or non-stance on the issues.  American Thinker interviewed some Arizonans who spoke about how Kelly is not right for Arizona.

David Eppihimer, the Pima County Republican Party chairman, strongly believes that “Mark Kelly tries to portray himself as an Arizonan, but he is not.  I believe he is a Texan and maintains a home there.  He wants to make himself out as an independent from Arizona.  This is how Kyrsten Sinema got elected to the Senate, by portraying herself effectively as a centrist, not as a hardline Democrat, which she is.  Kelly will vote straight down the Democratic/Chuck Schumer party line.”

Mark Kelly has also aligned himself with Joe Biden.  Kelly made his support known in a tweet: “Joe Biden understands the challenges Arizonans face and knows what it’s like to be knocked down, get back up, and keep serving others.  We need a president who will unite us and find common ground to get things done.  That’s why I’ll be voting for Joe Biden.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Half a million incorrect absentee ballot applications sent across Virginia, including to dead people “Approximately half a million applications sent to eligible voters in Virginia included incorrect information, and we are working diligently to address the issues,” says the Center for Voter Information.By Nicholas Ballasy

By on August 9th, 2020

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/virginia-absentee-ballot-applications-sent-dead-people-and-wrong

A non-profit group says more than a half-million inaccurate applications for absentee ballots were mistakenly sent across Virginia this week — including to dead voters, errant relatives and even a pet — in an unprecedented mailing flub that has heightened concerns about the integrity of expanding mail-in voting efforts.  

The mistakes raised alarms with recipients as diverse as election monitors, members of the League of Women Voters and a retired FBI agent. The Center for Voter Information, the nonprofit group that sent the mailers with pre-filled absentee ballots, is now apologizing.  

The Center for Voter Information said the absentee application mailings were sent to “eligible voters” in the state and “some of the mailers may have directed the return envelopes” for the absentee applications to the wrong election offices.

The counties impacted by inaccurate mailings included Fairfax City, Fairfax County, Franklin City, Franklin County, Richmond City, Richmond County, Roanoke City and Roanoke County. 

“Approximately half a million applications sent to eligible voters in Virginia included incorrect information, and we are working diligently to address the issues. Mistakes in our programming are very rare, but we take them seriously, and our methods overall are extraordinarily effective,” the center said in a statement.

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Invention of ‘Systemic Racism’ By Philip Carl Salzman

By on August 9th, 2020

https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2020/08/06/the-invention-of-systemic-racism/

It is now the official view in government, industry, and education that African Americans and certain other “people of color” perform poorly in schools and the workforce, but nonetheless must be treated as if they perform well. The statistically weak performance of African Americans, according to the official view, is not their fault; it is the fault of other people. Namely, as we have been told ad infinitum, it is the fault of American slavery. No less than the “newspaper of record,” The New York Times, has in its “The 1619 Project” advanced the thesis that slavery and only slavery is the foundation of America, and, as America’s “original sin,” has shaped and corrupted America through racism ever since. The alleged facts supporting the historical claims of The 1619 Project have been proven to be false by historians, and the lead author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, now admits that the Project is not history, but an attempt to change “the national narrative.”

Certainly slavery, while common around the world throughout most of history, is an evil institution. It has also not existed in the United States for one hundred and fifty years. No living African American has ever been a slave, nor were their parents; no living American has ever owned slaves, nor did their parents. Furthermore, millions upon millions of Americans descend from ancestors who immigrated to America long after slavery was abolished. Slavery is invoked because it has moral weight, which it should have, but it in no way explains the poor performance of African Americans a century and a half later.

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