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November 2021

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joel Zinberg, M.D. Mandating Trouble Mayor de Blasio’s needlessly inflexible requirement that city workers be vaccinated will endanger New York.

By on November 5th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/the-dangers-of-nyc-vaccine-mandate?wallit_nosession=1

Thanks to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate for city workers, New York faces the prospect of slower ambulance- and fire-response times, fewer cops on the street to battle rising crime rates, and accumulations of uncollected trash. It didn’t have to be this way.

The mandate, imposed two weeks ago, excludes the alternative option of undergoing regular Covid-19 testing, putting unvaccinated city workers without religious or medical exemptions on unpaid leave as of November 1. A last-minute surge in vaccinations brought the rate for city employees up to 90 percent, but significant numbers of the essential workers remain unvaccinated. As of November 1, vaccination rates were 84 percent for the police, 82 percent for the Department of Sanitation, and 80 percent for the Fire Department (which includes 75 percent of firefighters and 87 percent of EMTs).

Nine thousand city workers, including as many as 2,500 NYPD employees and 1,000 firefighters, are now on unpaid leave. Another 12,000 city workers, including 1,000 FDNY members and 6,500 NYPD officers, have applied for religious or medical exemptions. If, as expected, most of these exemptions are denied, thousands more essential workers could end up on leave.

Workable alternatives exist to this assault on essential services.

Applicants for exemptions to the vaccine mandate will be permitted to work and be tested weekly while their requests are being processed. If it is safe for exemption-seekers to continue working with weekly tests, then why not offer this same accommodation to any worker who continues to refuse vaccination? This is the same alternative provided for in President Biden’s proposed OSHA vaccine mandate.

Another option would be to exempt from the mandate anyone who can provide proof of natural immunity, resulting from prior Covid-19 infection and recovery. Prior infection with SARS-CoV-2 can be readily documented with a previous positive PCR test or antigen test, a positive antibody test, or a T-cell test.

By May 31, 2020, during the first of several Covid-19 waves in the city, 40.7 percent of EMS responders and 34.5 percent of firefighters had already been on medical leave for suspected or confirmed Covid-19. Now, more than a year and a half later, even higher numbers of essential workers have likely been infected.

The CDC has long suggested that previously infected people get vaccinated to strengthen their immunity. This would amount to a booster, in the same way that fully vaccinated people can improve their immunity with an additional shot. But the relevant question is: Does natural immunity without vaccination protect as well as full vaccination without booster?

Experts generally say that natural infection almost always causes better immunity than vaccines. While the evidence is mixed, it seems clear that both natural and vaccine-provided Covid-19 immunity provide effective protection.

A new CDC review shows that infection with SARS-CoV-2 and vaccination each result in a low risk of subsequent infection for six months or more. This finding holds true for both the Delta and pre-Delta variants. In addition, both prior infection and vaccination confer high levels of protection against symptomatic Covid-19 illness.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Palestinian Authority Campaign Against Palestinian NGOs by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on November 4th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17913/the-palestinian-authority-campaign-against

The six Palestinian NGOs were classified by Israel as terrorist organizations because of their affiliation with the PLO’s Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by both the United States and the European Union.

The PFLP, which has carried out many attacks against Israelis, including civilians, is one of 11 groups that form the PLO, headed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Each group receives monthly allocations of up to $70,000 from the PLO’s unofficial finance ministry.

Yet while Israel has come under attack for its move against the six NGOs, there is almost no mention that the Palestinian Authority (PA), which joined the bandwagon of anti-Israel criticism, has also been targeting Palestinian NGOs for quite some time.

[T]he PA has been targeting hundreds of Palestinian NGOs… as part of an effort to control them and take their funds. Unlike Israel, the PA is not targeting the NGOs because of their affiliation with terrorism. Many of the NGOs have been critical of the PA leadership: that is why Abbas wants to silence them.

Al-Haq, one of the six organizations labeled by Israel as a terrorist organization… pointed out that this was not the first time the PA leadership had targeted Palestinian NGOs.

When Al-Haq complained about the PA decree targeting Palestinian NGOs, the mainstream media in the West, as well as several human rights organizations self-righteously chose to look the other way…. The international community did not demand clarifications from the PA leadership about his “assault” on Palestinian NGOs.

Palestinian legal expert Majed al-Arouri…. said that more than 20,000 Palestinian employees would lose their jobs as a result of the restrictions imposed by the PA on the work of Palestinian NGOs and charitable organizations.

As far as many in the international community are concerned, it is fine if Abbas takes punitive measures against the PFLP, but it is outrageous if Israel does it.

Those who are ignoring Abbas’s crackdown on the Palestinian NGOs are depriving the Palestinians of democracy and freedom of speech.

The international community’s obsession with Israel… proves that it is more interested in condemning and delegitimizing Israel than improving the status of human rights and democracy under the PA.

Israel’s recent decision to designate six Palestinian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as terrorist organizations sparked a wave of protests and condemnations from many parties around the world, including human rights groups and political activists. Israel is being accused of cracking down on Palestinian civil society organizations not because of their affiliation with a terrorist group, but because of their political activities, which are often not that different.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” Sydney Williams

By on November 4th, 2021

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The moral of Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf is that false cries for help mean real calls for help will be ignored. A climate apocalypse has been forecast for years, sometimes by the well-intentioned but naïve looking to do good, but often by the cynical seeking political or personal advantage.

Two years ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recognizing that global temperatures are indeed rising, compiled a list of dire climate predictions that did not happen. Here is a sample: In 1969, the Nobel winning German scientist, Paul Ehrlich predicted that everybody would “disappear in a cloud of blue steam.” In 1974 Time Magazine warned that “space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.” The New York Times in 1978 reported that an “international team of specialists” feared the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” Over the next ten years, Cassandras changed their forecasts from cooling to warming: An Associated Press headline from 1989 read, quoting UN officials: “Rising seas could obliterate nations.” And who could forget Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth, in which he predicted that Artic ice would be gone in seven years. Today, doomsayers blame every forest fire, drought and hurricane on anthropological-caused climate change.

I am not a climate change denier. In fact, I know of no one who is. The term is used by climate disciples to belittle heretics who dare question the dogma that man alone is at fault for a warming planet. They are ruthless in their treatment of those skeptical of their professed causes of a changing climate. In National Geographic’s film Before the Flood, Bjørn Lomborg is listed as one of the ten most prominent “climate deniers.” Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and, in my opinion, the most reasonable voice on the subject. He begins every interview by repeating that he believes the Earth is warming. His sin is that he uses empirical evidence, logic and common sense to demonstrate that claimed apocalyptic consequences are more hyperbole than factual, which he explains in his 2020 book False Alarm. Fostering panic over climate change gets Progressives elected, sells books and movies and abets corporate welfare for renewable sources of energy. But for the rest of us, it does more harm than good.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Not A Joke: Taliban Asks for International Aid to Help It Fight…Climate Change By Robert Spencer

By on November 4th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/11/02/not-a-joke-taliban-asks-for-international-aid-to-help-it-fightclimate-change-n1529075

Kyle Shideler, the Director/Senior Analyst for Homeland Security & Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, said it best: “They may have a 7th-century law code, but they grift with the best of the 21st century.” The Taliban does indeed appear to have caught on to one of the most lucrative gravy trains of the first part of the 21st century and are eager to get in on the loot; the jihad terror group has issued a call for aid from international organizations to help it fight the scourge of climate change.

Apparently, the Taliban would have us believe that in between executing allies of the United States, confiscating guns, setting women on fire and making sure they don’t work or go to school, and persecuting Shi’ite Hazaras, their jihadis just really want to spend some time working on clean energy programs and making Afghanistan green.

Showing a fine grasp of how the game is played, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen explained: “Afghanistan has a fragile climate. There is need for tremendous work.” Accordingly, “some climate change projects which have already been approved and were funded by Green Climate Fund, UNDP, Afghan Aid, should fully resume work.”

Would environmentalists be safe working in Afghanistan? Why, sure! The Taliban, said Shaheen, would make sure of that: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is committed to providing security and a safe environment for the work of NGOs and charity organizations.”

Of course. This is the group, mind you, that abducted and murdered five aid workers from Save the Children in April 2015. In May 2019, Taliban jihadis murdered five aid workers from the American organization Counterpart International because, they said, Counterpart was promoting women being in the proximity of men in public. Then in June 2020, the UN accused the Taliban of “deliberate attacks” against health care workers.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Nearing the Crossroads As 2024 approaches, what will Trump do? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on November 4th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/03/trump-nearing-the-crossroads/

“Or will Trump redo 2016, bulldoze to the nomination, go for the jugular of the now hard-left Democratic Party, clobbering his way to a 2016-like Electoral College victory—or a defeat that others who copied his agendas might have avoided?”
The Left may not wish to admit it, but the fortunes of a once moribund Donald Trump of January 2021 have now largely recovered—even before the stunning gubernatorial victory of Republican Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. 

How and why? 

One, Joe Biden did not, as dishonestly advertised, prove to be good Ol’ “Lunch bucket” Joe. He was no moderate from Scranton. Instead, Biden has served as the clueless gun barrel through which hard-core leftists fired off the most unpopular agenda in memory. 

Open borders, huge deficits, the Afghanistan catastrophe, looming stagflation, empty shelves, bottlenecked ports, soaring energy prices, toxic critical race theory, the disastrous previews of the Green New Deal, a weaponized federal government, and the addled decline of Biden himself have done more than just collapse support for the president and his policies.  

More importantly, Biden’s string of catastrophes endangers the very stuff of life, from the ability to afford gas to finding goods on the shelves. 

Two, for 10 months, Donald Trump has been stripped of all his social network outlets. The progressive Silicon monopolies thought they had silenced the once omnipresent Trump. 

But their muzzles had unintended consequences. The less Trump was on social media, the more the public remembered his good policies rather than his controversial tweets. 

Three, Donald Trump was as responsible or not responsible for COVID-19 deaths as is Joe Biden. On Biden’s watch, more have died each day on average from the disease than during Trump’s tenure from the start of the pandemic. 

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s Border Agenda Has Now Reached Peak Derangement The administration’s policies are not compassionate. They are part of a deranged agenda meant to slowly erode this nation’s resources by importing much of the world’s poverty problem.  By Brian Lonergan

By on November 4th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/03/bidens-border-agenda-has-now-reached-peak-derangement/

Those who supported the ascension of Joe Biden to the White House could be forgiven for acting out of weariness and naïveté. They were tired of the political bloodsport from the previous four years and were promised a return to “normalcy” and competence. On the border issue alone, however, this administration has created buyers’ remorse on a grand scale as it implements hard-Left, radical policies that are permanently changing the country for the worse.

The most recent initiative to derail American exceptionalism is the move to terminate the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which include the “Remain in Mexico” policy. In a memo announcing his intent to terminate the program, Department of Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas included among the verbiage in his four-page document a clause saying that “I recognize that MPP likely contributed to reduced migratory flows.”

Talk about burying the lead! 

For any other DHS secretary, reducing migratory flows and preventing the kind of chaos we saw recently with the Haitian migrants under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, would be a good thing. It would suggest a plan to maintain stability in our country and deter others from making the perilous journey.

In Bidenworld, however, Mayorkas got his job specifically because establishing border security is not on his radar. He operates more like the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, not the individual responsible for the federal agency in charge of protecting the homeland of the United States. His tattered credibility continues to sink with his bizarre dedication to repeating the lie that “the border is closed,” when all visual and statistical evidence points to the opposite conclusion. Will Biden fire him for gross incompetence? Of course not, because Mayorkas is doing exactly what he was put in place to do.

If Biden’s purported compassion for the world’s huddled masses were applied unconditionally, he could at least be credited with consistency. Alas, his Albert Schweitzer shtick ends when his party’s political interests are not served. It is the only explanation for the contrast between his “save the children” talk when it comes to Central America and Mayorkas slamming the door shut on oppressed Cubans.

The difference? Refugees from the Northern Triangle are considered more likely to vote with Democrats. Cubans have been living under the boot of a hardline Communist dictatorship for generations and are wise to the progressive lure of cradle-to-grave benefits. Sorry Cubans, the lofty rhetoric about saving the impoverished and persecuted children of the world does not apply to you.  

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Has No Interest in Climate Change by Con Coughlin

By on November 4th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17912/china-climate-change

Beijing remains committed to opening hundreds more coal-fired power plants in the coming years, with the result that China’s new coal plants will more than offset all the closures of other coal-fired stations that have taken place in the rest of the world during the past year.

Beijing’s unwillingness to make any significant contribution to attempts at the COP26 conference to reduce global emissions has raised legitimate concerns that China is seeking to gain an economic advantage over its Western rivals as they struggle with the challenge of meeting net zero targets.

There is a growing body opinion on both sides of the Atlantic that dramatic reductions in carbon omission could wreak economic havoc for Western economies if the pursuit of “green” economies is pursued at the expense of maintaining energy supplies. In Europe, for example, the race to abandon traditional fossil fuels as a major source of energy has led to increased reliance on energy supplies from Russia through its controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Mr Xi’s refusal to engage seriously with the COP26 climate change agenda also makes a mockery of the Biden administration’s contention that the best way to improve Beijing’s conduct is through deeper diplomatic cooperation.

Beijing’s main motivation is to undermine Western capitalism, not support it, which is why he has no intention of supporting the West’s ill-considered dash for net zero carbon emissions.

Nothing better summarises Chinese President Xi Jinping’s attitude to the West’s obsession with tackling climate change than the old Chinese saying, “Hide a knife behind a smile.”

As world leaders gathered for the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Western leaders were desperately trying to reach a deal on cutting carbon emissions, which United Nations climate experts claim is a major cause of climate change.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Public Education Has Always Been About Indoctrination It didn’t start with CRT and transgenderism. Don Feder

By on November 4th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/public-education-has-always-been-about-don-feder/

Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in the Virginia governor’s race shows the power of parents who are furious about public school indoctrination.

Education became a central part of Youngkin’s campaign. Without it, he would not have mobilized millions of concerned parents across the Commonwealth and sailed to victory against an ex-governor in a blue state.

Election night coverage included an interview with a woman who survived Mao’s Cultural Revolution, who said she stood in a cold rain for 8 hours that day handing out ballots. With laser-like focus, Xi Van Fleet said the contest in Virginia came down to Marxism versus Americanism.

The most important part of Youngkin’s victory speech was when he emphatically voiced his commitment to choice in education. Ban Critical Race theory? Absolutely. Listen to families? Of course. But, ultimately, public education can’t be reformed.

Public schools were created not to educate, but to indoctrinate. From Marx to Dewey to the current leadership of the Democrat Party and the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, revolutionaries have always targeted youth and seen schools as the spearhead of the revolution.

When he was governor of Virginia in 2015, Terry McAuliffe (who was deservedly defeated in this election) was pushing Critical Race Theory in the schools, something he claimed did not exist in his 2021 campaign for governor.

When McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” he was articulating a first principle of public education going back to its beginnings in the early 19th century: “Give us your money. Give us your kids. Then close your eyes. Shut your mouth. And let us do our job of transforming society.”

Today, the cutting edge is Critical Race Theory (whites are inherently evil), the 1619 Project (America is inherently evil) and what one proponent called the Queering Up of public education.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Glasgow Festival of Globalist Virtue-Signaling Lots of moral preening and apocalyptic rhetoric on the agenda. Bruce Thornton

By on November 4th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/glasgow-festival-globalist-virtue-signaling-bruce-thornton/

The Biden administration is attending the UN’s 26th “Conference of Parties,” the annual summit on what used to be called “Global Warming,” but is now dubbed “Climate Change.” Thirty thousand government officials, including heads of state posing for photo-ops, and government clerks enjoying taxpayer funded junkets, along with noisy activists, NGOs, and “green energy” corporate grifters hunting for more subsidies––all are spewing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere to attend the summit, leaving behind a King Kong-sized carbon footprint.

As with the other COP meetings, however, there will be lots of moral preening, apocalyptic rhetoric, and grand promises, but little of practical utility will be accomplished.

American progressives love such climate pow-wows, which indulge their various ideological shibboleths and demonstrate their superior morality and dedication to “science.” Leftist “Greens,” or “watermelons”––Green on the outside, Red on the inside–– find environmentalism in general a convenient weapon for discrediting free-market capitalism and especially the U.S. for daring to kick a communist superpower into the dustbin of history. Democrats, who like socialists “never let a good crisis go to waste,” find the lurid apocalyptic fantasies of “global warming” a good pretext for redistributing more taxpayer money to political clients. Thus the corporate clean-energy rackets and race-baiters will get money from programs like those in the proposed $550 billion “climate reform” legislation for researching and mitigating the “disparate impact” of climate change on “communities of color.”

And of course, Dems find anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming (ACGW) an opportunity for smearing their political enemies as “deniers,” “kooks,” and disbelievers in science who “cling to guns and religion” and, don’t forget, are “racists” and “xenophobes” to boot. Then there’s the hated Donald Trump, who pulled out of the Paris Accords that grew out of a previous COP agreement. This for the Dems was a heinous act of blasphemy that besmirched Barack Obama’s globalist triumph in signing the agreement, and is yet another sign of their enemies’ stubborn resistance to the global ruling class’s “rules-based international order.”

Speaking of Obama, Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation recalled in an interview that at the 2009 COP Obama “pledged that the world’s wealthiest nations would give $100 billion per year by 2020 to the world’s poorest counties to help them fight climate change.” Groves continued, ‘“Here we are in 2021, [and] there has never been $100 billion put together, much less $100 billion per year,’” adding that there is ‘“not $100 billion in any green climate fund, nor any real prospect of there being $100 billion.’” And even if there were such a fund, what nation would hold dead-beats accountable when they refused to contribute?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Royal Marines defeat the U.S. Marines at the ‘Battle of the Mojave Desert’ By Andrea Widburg

By on November 4th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/the_royal_marines_defeat_the_us_marines_at_the_battle_of_the_mojave_desert.html

The battle was a training exercising but the ramifications of the loss, which reveals the damage progressives have inflicted on the military, are extremely serious.

For many Americans, the Marines occupy an almost mythic place in their minds as an invincible force that runs to the guns and fights no matter what. That’s why it was so shocking to learn that, during a joint training exercise in the Mojave Desert, Britain’s Royal Marines inflicted such a shellacking on the Americans that the latter had to surrender halfway through the exercise. This is a direct result of the Pentagon having gone woke under Obama—something that Trump failed to undo—followed by Biden doubling down on Obama’s policies.

Marines used to be synonymous with dogged determination. Tripoli (1805), the Halls of Montezuma (1847), Belleau Wood (1918), Guadalcanal (1943), Iwo Jima (1945), Inchon (1950), Chosin Reservoir (1950), Khe Sanh (1968), Hue (1968), Fallujah (2004)—each of these names brings to us visions of Marines running to the gun, marching through the woods, slogging through the snow, fighting over volcanic islands, and never retreating, never stopping.

But the Marines have been in war non-stop since 2001 and that’s a long time for a fighting force. At a certain point, rather than experience building them up and strengthening them, non-stop war wears men down. They lose their edge and their fire.

The American military has had another force bearing down on it that may be an even greater enemy than Islamists the world over. That force has been wokeism. Beginning with Obama, the American left has been using the military as a social justice experiment. According to James Hasson, author of Stand Down:  How Social Justice Warriors Are Sabotaging America’s Military, Obama purged the officer class of old-timers and brought in progressive ideologues.

Under their aegis, Navy ships went green (when they were just meant to be mean) and bore the names of well-known leftists (gay-rights advocate and pederast Harvey Milk and socialist activist Cesar Chavez, who happened to hate illegal immigrants).

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