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Ruth King

Scared, Stupid, And Easily Manipulated: What COVID Has Revealed About The Nation’s Young

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/27/scared-stupid-and-easily-manipulated-what-covid-has-revealed-about-the-nations-young/

The saying goes that crises reveal your true nature. If that’s the case, we are in big trouble, because what COVID has revealed about young people in America is not good.

A new Morning Consult poll out this week finds that young people are the most worried about getting COVID of any age group — even though their risk from the disease is negligible.

At the other end of the spectrum, the elderly are much less worried, even though they are at the highest risk of death.

The poll found that 23% of those between ages 18-34 are “very worried about getting sick from COVID-19 within the next year.” That’s the highest of any of the age groups broken out by the survey. Another 35% are “somewhat” worried. Just 38% say they aren’t worried.

Among those 65 and older, in contrast, only 17% are “very worried,” while 39% aren’t worried.

Why in the world are young people so terrified of COVID?

USA TODAY Opinion Why are Americans confused about COVID? Blame it on poor communication. James Davis

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2022/01/26/cdc-covid-messaging-problems-fauci-rochelle-walensky/6563468001/?gnt-cfr=1

CDC chief Rochelle Walensky seeks professional coaching, but public needs more than sleek image. Not hyping threats or demonizing skeptics is a start

Americans don’t trust their public health experts, a serious problem in the best of times but downright dangerous amid a pandemic. Just 44% of Americans trust in the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, while only 40% trust Dr. Anthony Fauci (the nation’s point man on all things COVID) according to an NBC News survey conducted this month. Trust in politicians is even lower.

It’s perfectly understandable why Americans feel this way. At all levels, our public health agencies have been using contradicting claims and supposition masquerading as fact. And it’s not hard to diagnose the root of the problem. To quote the Captain’s speech in “Cool Hand Luke,” “what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

Trust and public health

Biden’s Criteria for Replacing Stephen Breyer His promise to appoint only a black woman is the kind of quota the justices rejected in Bakke. By Jonathan Turley

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-college-couldnt-get-away-bidens-high-court-criteria-supreme-court-racial-preferences-justice-breyer-11643236096?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The announcement of Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement has whistled the start of that Washington blood sport known as a Supreme Court confirmation. While the filibuster-free process guarantees President Joe Biden that he has the votes to pick anyone acceptable to all Senate Democrats, this fight is different from any in history in one respect. As a candidate, Mr. Biden pledged to select the next justice first and foremost on race and sex.

“I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a black woman on the Supreme Court, to make sure we, in fact, get every representation,” he said in a South Carolina debate. This reportedly helped win him the key endorsement of Rep. Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip.

With the court set to rule on racial preferences in college admissions, it raises the question of whether it is appropriate for a politician to use a criterion that the court itself has found unconstitutional for public educational institutions and unlawful for businesses.

It also means Mr. Biden’s short list will be much shorter than usual. The three leading candidates are Justice Leondra Krueger of the California Supreme Court, U.S. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and U.S. District Judge Michelle Childs. These are all worthy candidates who could have been considered for any vacancy without declaring that they were qualified by virtue of filling a quota—an unfortunate implication for the ultimate nominee.

The problem with Holocaust trivialization by Lawrence J. Haas

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-problem-with-holocaust-trivialization

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could … cross the Alps into Switzerland,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a Washington rally this week to protest vaccine mandates. “You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did.”

Kennedy’s suggestion that people suffer more from vaccine mandates than the victims of Adolf Hitler’s reign is particularly disturbing. Holocaust “trivialization,” comparing other events to the Holocaust and thereby minimizing its significance, is not just morally reprehensible — it also complicates U.S. efforts to confront such global challenges as making peace, promoting human rights, and eradicating a pandemic.

Holocaust trivialization is inherently polarizing. Once one side of an issue accuses its opponents of a Holocaust-like action, the two sides retreat to their corners, far more inclined to fight than seek common ground. When protesters in London, Paris, and elsewhere last May compared Israel to Nazi Germany and suggested that it was conducting a Holocaust against the Palestinians, that further complicated efforts to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Over-the-top disparagement of the Jewish state also diverts global attention from the truly despicable human rights abuses by, for instance, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, which holds hundreds of thousands of people in internment camps; Xi Jinping’s China, which holds more than a million Muslim Uyghurs in prisons and “reeducation” camps; Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which stamps out any serious political or grassroots challenge to his rule; and Ali Khamenei’s Iran, which imprisons dissidents and treats women and minorities as second-class citizens.

Words That Forbid Us from Looking Away from Genocide by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18176/genocide-looking-away

The words are haunting, as if a mourner’s lament and offered prayers for the dead. “They Fell,” written by Herbert Kretzmer, Charles Aznavour, and George Garvarentz, is a song that remembers the victims of the Armenian genocide, where as many as 1.2 million living under Ottoman rule died during World War I.

But the lyrics speak to every bloody ravine that was turned into a mass grave. The words speak to the terror all genocide victims must have experienced in their final moments. The emotion of Aznavour’s voice reveals the despair of viewing the incomprehensible inhumanity inflicted on those targeted for extinction.

Tomorrow, as we observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is more important than ever to memorialize the six million Jews who were put to death and all those who have been targeted for genocide. It is equally important to understand how mass murder on an industrial scale can be repeated time and again as loving human beings are reduced into something subhuman by a regime that deems them worthy of destruction. Equally chilling is how, who, and why there are co-conspirators in the heinous act of genocide.

How “Never again!” became “never mind” To the fashionably woke, Uyghur lives don’t matter by Clifford May

https://cliffordmay.org/25966/uyghur-lives-matter

Chamath Palihapitiya is a household name – at least in the kind of houses featured in the Wall Street Journal’s weekly “Mansion” section.

Born in Sri Lanka in 1976, his family immigrated to Canada when he was five. At the tender age of 28, he became an AOL vice president in California. One year later he moved on to a promising new startup called Facebook. Today, he’s a billionaire venture capitalist who shares his home with an Italian heiress and model.

Good for him. And good for us to be reminded that America remains a land of opportunity, not least for people of color and immigrants. But he’s in the news this month for a different reason.

On a podcast he co-hosts, he commented on what the U.S. government and others (e.g., Britain, and the French parliament just a few days ago) have recognized as the “genocide” of the Uyghurs, a Turkic and Muslim people in Xinjiang, a Central Asian land ruled by Beijing.

“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, OK?” Mr. Palihapitiya told his co-host. “You bring it up because you really care, and I think it’s nice that you really care. The rest of us don’t care.”

MY SAY: ON ELECTIONS 2024

First: I think that Donald Trump was the best President since Ronald Reagan and I also believe that serious election irregularities occasioned his “defeat” in 2020.
However, despite his perseveration on his many accomplishments, events will come to haunt him. His legal problems will continue and January 6 libels will pummel him. Furthermore, his initial clumsy handling of the pandemic-instead of appointing a panel of distinguished virologists and epidemiologists, he brought Fauci and Birx out of mothballs and conducted boring and disjointed press conferences- will be fodder for his opponents.
The future for the conservative agenda rests with younger and principled possible candidates who defy the disastrous policies of the Biden administration.
They are in the mold of Senator Tom Cotton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Ric Grenell-former US ambassador to Germany, Governors de Santis of Florida, Youngkin of Virginia, and Abbott of Texas, Winsome Sears Lt. Governor of Virginia, Alexander Acosta, Former Secretary of Labor, Young Kim- Korean-American Representative California District 39, Geraldo Cadava, Hispanic historian and professor at Northwestern University, John James, West Point graduate and candidate for Senate in Michigan.
These are just a handful of possibilities if Donald Trump has the probity to step aside…..rsk

Democrats in 2020 Wrote the Book on Voter Suppression and Election Subversion Joe Biden is right in saying that voter suppression and election subversion must be stopped. The problem for Democrats is that they have seen the enemy in the mirror. By William Doyle

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/25/democrats-in-2020-wrote-the-book-on-voter-suppression-and-election-subversion/

At his recent press conference last week  about “voting rights,” Biden further dialed up his scurrilous “Jim Crow 2.0” imputations when he asserted the 2022 midterm elections would be “illegitimate” if federal voting legislation is not passed forbidding states from preventing many of the practices—such as a lack of voter ID requirements and legal ballot harvesting—that led to all of the chaos, confusion, and distrust of the 2020 election. 

You can always count on leftists to relentlessly accuse you of every nefarious thing that they themselves are doing.  

In order to understand what Biden is really talking about, you have to understand that voter suppression and election subversion were what Democrats themselves were up to during the 2020 election, mainly conducted under the auspices of the now-notorious Center for Technology and Civic Life and funded by $350 million of Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s money.

Promoting Illegitimate Votes Suppresses Legitimate Votes

When the politicians want to obtain your resources, but are reluctant to harm their electoral prospects by raising your taxes, the time honored “work around” is to increase the money supply. If the money supply is $1 and GDP consists of one donut, your $1 is worth one donut. If the government wants half of that donut, they could increase your taxes by 50 percent, thereby leaving you with half a donut. 

But if it is not politically expedient to raise taxes, the government can obtain your half a donut anyway, by doubling the money supply to $2. Now the government has $1 and you have $1 but GDP still only consists of one donut. Just like if your taxes were raised, now you only get half of the overall number of donuts and the government gets the other half. 

Donald Trump and the Future of MAGA Trump’s electoral success in blowing up the old model has inspired a whole new younger generation of MAGA advocates. Is it time for one of them to step up? By Thelonious

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/25/donald-trump-and-the-future-of-maga/

In 2016, Donald Trump pulled off an extraordinary political feat only he could have achieved. As the army of highly compensated professional political consultants in Washington, D.C., watched aghast, Trump single-handedly wrested the Republican nomination from the grip of a GOP establishment that had long enjoyed complete control of national and state party hierarchies, fundraising structures, and think tanks that determine policy priorities. As Trump’s rogue campaign trounced establishment candidates in state after state in the GOP primaries—despite the unified opposition of Conservatism, Inc.—he not only defeated that establishment’s lockstep institutional opposition, he defeated their agenda in a way that permanently shifted the debate on the Right and throughout the country.

On his signature issues of immigration, trade, and foreign policy, Trump blew up the two-party orthodoxy that had reigned in Washington for decades. Despite a lack of any discernible popular support, the GOP and Democratic establishments had settled into a broad, corporate-backed consensus in favor of virtually unrestricted immigration, “trade agreements” that subsidized the mass movement of U.S. manufacturing overseas and the mass importation of cheap foreign goods (often the products of slave labor), and interventionist adventurism abroad. Any dissent from this consensus was marginalized swiftly and aggressively by the establishment enforcers of both major parties, with heretics labeled as extremists, lunatics, or both.

Exposing the Rot

Within a matter of months, Donald Trump demonstrated that this seemingly unassailable establishment consensus was, in reality, a paper tiger. Outside of the Washington Beltway, the agenda of open borders, “free trade” with an increasingly dominant and aggressive Communist China, and endless wars abroad, enjoys virtually no popular support. While the D.C.-centric constituencies promoting these policies—deep state bureaucrats, special interest lobbyists, and defense contractors—profited enormously from this general agreement among the ruling class that brooked no dissent, the interests of average Americans oppressed and abused by the elite agenda went almost entirely unrepresented in Washington. Trump’s meteoric rise demonstrated that all that was lacking was a champion independent enough of the major party structures to buck the false consensus.

Israel’s ill-fated powwows with the Palestinian Authority Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/israels-ill-fated-powwows-with-the-palestinian-authority/

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid didn’t boast on social media about his meeting on Sunday with Palestinian Authority honcho Hussein al-Sheikh. The latter did so immediately, however.
“I met this evening with … Lapid, and we discussed several political and bilateral issues,” tweeted al-Sheikh, head of the P.A.’s “General Authority of Civil Affairs” and member of the Fatah Central Committee. “I have highlighted the need for a political horizon between the two parties based on international legitimacy.”
The last two words of the post reveal just what kind of “political and bilateral issues” were the focus of the talk between the powerful figure considered a possible successor to P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas and the man slated to replace Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett next year. The false P.A. claim and commonly heard mantra that Israel violates international law as an “occupying power”—chanted in anti-Zionist circles around the world—is nothing new.
Nor is the often-obfuscated fact that it’s not only Hamas that refers to the illegitimacy of the Jewish state within any borders.
Speaking of which, Abbas prefaced his address to the 76th session of the U.N. General Assembly three months ago by stating: “This year marks the 73rd anniversary of the nakba,” the so-called “catastrophe” of Israel’s establishment in 1948.
The opening reference merely scratched the surface of the rest of his hate-filled speech, in which he reiterated, among other lies and threats, that “this colonial regime [Israel] has established on our land will disappear, regardless of how long it takes. We will not allow them to hijack our lives and kill our people’s dreams, hopes and aspirations to realize freedom and independence.”