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Ruth King

COVID hysteria, vaccine passports: Where it’s all leading By Douglas Herz

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/covid_hysteria_vaccine_passports_where_its_all_leading.html

To those of you scratching your heads about what is going on in America today, what with violence in the streets aided by local politicians, quitters like Naomi Osaka treated as hero(ine)s, woke corporations insulting their customers, China apologists (like the NBA) hiding in plain sight, COVID hysteria fanned by politicians and the media, white-hatred (e.g., 1619/CRT) being promoted by liberal white women, and P.C. everywhere…we have to ask what it all means.

What it all means is getting illegals the vote.  The rest is head fakes.

Consider the following: if you were a liberal politician and your goal were permanent liberal big government, wouldn’t the quickest route be (aside from voter fraud) to get illegal aliens the vote?  With anywhere between 20 and 40 million illegals in the U.S. today, that goal is now in sight, using COVID as an excuse, while not letting this “crisis” go to waste (per Rahm Emanuel).

The first step toward this goal is to terrify everyone with COVID horror stories, cherry-picked data, and so-called “expert” guidance and testimony.  This gaslighting has already been accomplished by leftist politicians, the CDC, Big Media, and Big Tech.  Next, vaccine passports will be mandated to “protect” everyone and coerce the unvaccinated.  This step has already been floated by the Biden administration, which means that it is deep into vaccine passport polling and planning.  After the vaccine passports are distributed, someone (a leftist, of course) will naturally suggest that they be used for voter identification, using this to counter Republican accusations of rampant voter fraud that were engendered by the 2020 elections.  After vaccine passport distribution, tens of millions of new voters will magically appear in red and purple states to flip them blue.

My suggestion is to resist vaccine passports vigorously so this unhappy chain of events will never occur.  Luckily, many minorities feel the same way, which is why the Biden administration has created what could be called a Civilian COVID Corps (transforming into AOC’s Civilian Climate Corps later) to convince this important liberal voting bloc to vaccinate.

Trading with the Enemy is Wrong By William R. Hawkins

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/trading_with_the_enemy_is_wrong.html

The Navy and Marine Corps have kicked off their two-week Large Scale Exercise 2021, a massive effort that spans 17 time zones, to test their vision of how to conduct war on a global scale against peer competitors. Such an operation is reminiscent of the Cold War, but then we are in another Cold War facing a coalition of powers who want to dominate the international order. That coalition is lead by the People’s Republic of China with the strong support of a Russia seeking to recover from its defeat in the first Cold War. Both powers have been strengthening their ties with Iran at the intersection of Europe and the Indo-Pacific. In response, the U.S. has reenergized its alliances and expanded them, most importantly in partnership with India. The Trump administration recognized the danger of renewed Great Power competition, and the Biden administration is continuing many of its policies because the change in the White House has not changed what is going on in the outside world.

The most prominent flashpoint is the South China Sea, where China has created artificial island bases backed by a naval buildup to support its claim to imperial sovereignty over this vital maritime realm in defiance of international law. China and a U.S.-led coalition are both conducting rival air and naval exercises in this sea demonstrating their ability to defeat the other. Beijing has complained to the UN that “The US has been stirring up trouble out of nothing, arbitrarily sending advanced military vessels and aircraft into the South China Sea as provocations.” Washington is not acting “unilaterally.” Great Britain has sent is new Carrier Strike Group to the region. Dutch and German frigates are there, along with a French task force to show NATO unity. Beijing’s state media outlet Global Times made a direct threat “We advise US allies to be particularly cautious…They must be bluntly told that if their warships rampantly behave as the U.S. military does in the South China Sea, they will more likely become an example of China defending its sovereignty and territorial integrity — just as a popular Chinese phrase indicates: To execute one as a warning to a hundred.”

India has sent a task force into the South China Sea as part of the Quad, which includes Japan and Australia along with the U.S. China claims to have the largest fleet of warships in the world. Beijing’s full spectrum military buildup and militant rhetoric have been the real provocations that has brought forth a powerful response.

Yet, in the midst of this very evident confrontation that actually goes back to the Obama administration “pivot” to Asia which saw the escalation of naval exercises during 2010, corporate lobbyists in Washington are still pushing for closer commercial ties with the Beijing regime. On August 5, nearly three dozen business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the National Retail Federation, the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Semiconductor Industry Association sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, claiming Beijing had met “important benchmarks and commitments” in the so-called Phase One agreement negotiated by President Trump, including “opening markets to U.S. financial institutions and reducing some regulatory barriers to U.S. agricultural exports to China.” The aim of the letter was to cut tariffs and expand trade with China while ignoring its aggressive behavior in the larger context of world affairs.

The letter purposely missed the real point about the “trade war” with China, which is to correct past “public policy choices” which President Biden has accurately blamed for allowing American firms to create “fragile supply chains across a range of sectors and products. Unfair trade practices by competitor nations and private sector and public policy prioritization of low-cost labor, just-in-time production, consolidation, and private sector focus on short-term returns over long-term investment have hollowed out the U.S. industrial base, siphoned innovation from the United States, and stifled wage and productivity growth.”

Top Chicago prosecutor Kim Foxx’s office has dismissed more than 25,000 felony cases – including murders, shootings, sexual assaults and Jussie Smollett’s ‘hoax’ attack By Megan Sheets

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8612317/Cook-County-prosecutor-Kim-Foxx-dismissed-25-000-felony-cases-including-Jussie-Smollett.html?ito=amp_twitter_share-top

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx dropped charges against 29.9% of felony defendants during her first three years in office, the Chicago Tribune found
Foxx’s case dismissal rate is more than 35% higher than that of her predecessor
The state’s attorney told the Tribune that its analysis gave an ‘incomplete picture of her commitment to keeping the public safe’
She said she’s dropped cases against low-level, nonviolent offenders so prosecutors can focus on violent crimes
But data showed Foxx’s office has dismissed cases involving murder, shootings, sex crimes and serious drug offenses at a much higher rate than her predecessor
Foxx gained notoriety last year when her office dropped felony charges against Jussie Smollett, the actor accused of staging a racist, anti-gay attack on himself

Apocalypse porn The green movement is a doomsday cult. Progressives should have nothing to do with it. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/08/10/apocalypse-porn/

There’s a new trend online. Forget blacking out your Instagram page to show how much you care for black lives. Never mind bigging up your pronouns. That’s so last month. Right now it’s all about apocalypse porn. Across social media, the caring set are sharing images of the ‘hellfires’ in Greece and the aftermath of the floods in Europe and the wildfire currently raging in Northern California, all with the same message: this is climate change. This is the world our greedy, destructive species has created. This is the hell that awaits us all if we don’t stop taking cheap flights to Malaga and drinking from plastic straws. ‘Welcome to global warming!’, as one observer of the Greek fires quipped.

Apocalypse porn is everywhere. You can’t open a newspaper or switch on a tablet right now without being confronted with images of fire and floods. Plagues of locusts can’t be far behind. The front page of this morning’s Guardian is devoted to an image of an elderly Greek woman in a state of distress as an ‘inferno’ nears her home on the island of Evia. (Funny, I don’t remember the Guardian rallying behind the elderly Greeks who were pummelled by the distinctly manmade horror of EU austerity, but let’s not dwell on bygones.) Footage of Greeks sailing away from a raging fire has been shared hundreds of thousands of times. ‘Very apocalyptic’, said one journalist. Not just apocalyptic, but really apocalyptic. We’re beyond Revelations – this is worse.

The recent European floods are spoken of as warnings to mankind, as if Nature were a sentient force reprimanding us for our hubris and folly. Footage of flooded German and Belgian towns was marshalled by armies of virtue-signallers to the cause of ‘raising awareness’ about man’s self-made apocalypse. ‘How many dead will we accept [before we act]?’, asked one Belgian scientist. Change your ways or people will die. Images of flooded Tube stations in London were instantly held up as glimpses of the future, warnings from the generation of the 2050s who will live short, hot, suffering lives if we don’t achieve Net Zero in the next five years. It all echoed leading green thinker Mark Lynas’s medieval sermon several years back – that if humanity doesn’t change its ways, then ‘Poseidon [will be] angered… his wrath will know no bounds’.

Andrew Cuomo Is Gone, His Economic Mismanagement Not Forgotten He offered ‘startup’ tax breaks to General Electric, which started in 1892 and chose Boston anyway.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/governor-andrew-cuomo-resignation-economic-regulation-taxes-minimum-wage-fracking-nuclear-11628632159?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s resignation was memorable, but we shouldn’t forget his policy legacy. New York state was slowly emerging from the Great Recession when he was elected governor in 2010. Amid massive job losses and collapsing revenues, he took office in 2011 with a focus on rebuilding public finances and promoting economic growth.

During his first term, he positioned himself as a Clintonesque centrist with a pro-business tilt. He’s still often called a moderate, but the label has been inaccurate for years.

By the start of his second term, in 2015, Mr. Cuomo was promoting “economic justice” in the form of a $15 minimum wage, initially restricted to New York City. In his third term, starting in 2019, he sprinted to the left and loudly proclaimed his progressive credentials as a new generation of left-leaning Democrats assumed control of the formerly split Legislature.

Things were different a decade ago. “New York has no future as the tax capital of the nation,” he declared in his 2011 State of the State address. “Our young people will not stay. Our business will not come. This has to change.”

Within six months of taking office, Mr. Cuomo closed a $10 billion budget gap, drew a hard line in contract talks with state employee unions, and persuaded lawmakers to approve a strict 2% cap on annual growth in property taxes. The cap doesn’t apply to New York City, but it’s still among the most significant limited-government reforms ever enacted in the Empire State.

But Mr. Cuomo failed to back up the tax cap with the relief from state mandates that local governments need to manage efficiently. Instead, after a few months of tough talk, he consistently pandered to public-sector labor unions. He nurtured a close alliance with New York City’s overfed building-trades unions, whose generous contracts and inefficient work rules are largely responsible for New York’s excessive capital infrastructure construction costs.

Three Charts The Delta Variant Scaremongers Don’t Want You To See

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/11/three-charts-the-delta-variant-scaremongers-dont-want-you-to-see/

While the sharp rise in Delta-variant COVID cases has sparked a renewed push for mask mandates, lockdowns, and vaccine “passports,” there’s been little attention paid to just how dangerous this variant is. Perhaps that’s because the evidence suggests it is far less of a public health concern than previous outbreaks.

Just how much less of a threat isn’t precisely known. But there are ways to gauge the risk. One is to look at the number of COVID cases and the number of deaths happening right now, compared with what happened a year ago.

What do you find? First of all, there are fewer cases than last year. From June to August this year, there have been more than 2 million recorded COVID cases in the U.S.

Over the same days last year, the total number of COVID cases was above 3.1 million.

How about deaths? From June 1 through Aug. 9, the total number of COVID fatalities was 20,149. Last year, the death count was 62,287.

In other words, cases are 41% lower than during this time last year, and deaths are 66% lower.

China: Crisis-Testing US Presidents by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17630/china-crisis-testing-us-presidents

Trump’s adoption of a realistic relationship with China successfully slowed any CCP plans for military expansion in the South and East China Seas. What ended any possibility of a warming trend in US-China diplomatic ties was Beijing’s repeated lies that there was no human-to-human transmissibility of its Wuhan virus. Soon, Chinese propaganda organs were labeling America racist for closing US airports to flights from China, even as the CCP itself had already stopped all domestic flights out of Wuhan.

China’s deceit, and its continued refusal to help investigate the cause of the release of the Wuhan virus, not only killed more than 4.3 million people worldwide, but shattered countless economies. To date, there have been no reprisals and no accountability.

To date, Communist China has not been held accountable for any of its damage or duplicity, or for obstructing all investigations into the origins of the Wuhan virus, or for enslaving and torturing more than a million Uyghurs, or for destroying Tibet and Hong Kong. Instead, China is being rewarded for unspeakable behavior by being allowed to host the 2022 Winter Olympics.

This event presents Biden with an opportunity: there is still time to move the Olympics to a country more deserving — one that will not potentially use the DNA of the world’s greatest athletes to genetically-engineer its future newborns. Will the US finally stand up to Communist China’s provocations, let alone future ones — whether to Australia, Taiwan, Japan, India, Malaysia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Jamaica or the Bahamas — that are already on the way?

China has tested the mettle of all recent US presidents, usually early in their terms of office, and China’s Communist Party (CCP) has already certainly been testing President Joe Biden. Just four days into the Biden presidency, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fighter aircraft violated Taiwan’s Air Defense Zone. The provocation was a clear message to remind the new president of China’s “Red Line”: not to build upon the Trump administration’s increased military cooperation with Taiwan.

Beijing’s harsh rhetoric, accusing the US of hypocrisy on human rights at the March 2021 meeting in Alaska with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, was probably an indication that China is still calculating to what degree it can intimidate the Biden administration into settling for policies more accommodating to Chinese military, political, security and commercial interests.

Forced Conversions and Child Marriage in Pakistan: An Everyday Event by Nasir Saeed

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17621/forced-conversion-child-marriage-pakistan

Governmental and law enforcement agencies are aware of the problem, but they do not officially accept it. Instead, they claim that Islam has not set a minimum age for conversion, so if a girl wants to convert to Islam of her own free will, no one can do anything about it.

By stating this, they transfer all blame to the victims and discharge themselves of any responsibility. They also accuse minorities and NGOs of making it a problem and claim it is a false allegation to enhance their own prominence.

It is the responsibility of the state to stop this practice even if they have to introduce new laws to ensure that the rights of minorities and children are not being violated. It is also the responsibility of politicians, courts, civil society and the ulema [Islamic clergy] because failing, in the name of religion, to enforce the laws already in place cannot be justified.

Forced conversion to Islam of young Christian and Hindu girls, some under the age of 12, seems to be an everyday occurrence. To those who are in a position to stop this practice, it appears not to matter. Almost no day goes by without news of these events.

This major and growing problem in Pakistan affects religious minorities. Human rights organisations working on this issue estimate that every year 1,000 Hindu and Christian girls are forced to convert to Islam — an estimate that could be far higher as many cases remain unreported. Most of the time, these girls are lured by much older men by the promise of a better life and sometimes are pushed into prostitution or even sold.

The Cheap & Easy Sanctimony of Ben & Jerry Bret Stephens

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/opinion/israel-ben-and-jerry.html

Ben & Jerry’s last month announced to controversy and fanfare that it would no longer sell its ice cream in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, though it says it will continue selling it elsewhere in Israel. “Ending the sales of ice cream in the occupied territories is one of the most important decisions the company has made in its 43-year history,” Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the company’s founders and former owners, explained in a guest essay in this newspaper. “It was especially brave.”

To which my reaction, based on 21 years of reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was: Who the hell eats Peace Pops in Hebron? And just how big a hit to the global bottom line of Unilever, the consumer-goods giant that is Ben & Jerry’s corporate parent, will be the loss of sales in Jerusalem’s Old City?

We live in the era of “Woke, Inc.,” to borrow the title of Vivek Ramaswamy’s delightful new book on what he calls “corporate America’s social justice scam” — an era in which corporations adopt trendy causes to help shield them from criticism while pumping up their stock prices. There’s Gillette, trying to peddle razors by decrying toxic masculinity. There’s Nike, minting money off Colin Kaepernick’s protests. There’s BP, rebranding itself as “Beyond Petroleum” — and then spilling 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico.

But Cohen and Greenfield are the godfathers of Woke Inc., pioneers of a unique marketing magic that seeks to get people to believe that buying a high-fat, high-sugar product that contributes to diabetes and obesity also makes us more virtuous. I don’t want to overstate things here, since I’m as guilty as the next guy of scarfing down a half pint (OK, sometimes more) of New York Super Fudge Chunk. But at least I don’t pretend that I’m making the world a better place in the bargain.

Ruthie Blum: Iranian aggression and Israel’s fragile coalition

At the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett addressed the country’s security situation.

Referring to the Israel Defense Forces attack on Hamas targets in Gaza following the latest wave of incendiary balloons, he warned the terrorist organization that it will be held accountable for any such flareups, no matter which group is behind them.

“We’re not interested if they’re dissidents, or bored or whether they have any other excuse,” he said. “Hamas is responsible.”

Referring to Lebanon—without specifying the missile attacks on northern Israel on Saturday or Israel’s retaliatory strikes—Bennett pointed to the “very important awakening by many citizens [there] against Hezbollah and Iranian involvement.”

He added that “even during the severe economic and political crisis in Lebanon, Iran and Hezbollah are entangling [its] citizens in a front against Israel.”

The Israeli premier went on to caution “Lebanon and its army” that they “must take responsibility for what is happening in their backyard,” even if the perpetrators of the recent rocket launches hailed from a Palestinian organization, belonged to a dissident group or acted independently.

“The State of Israel will not accept firing at its territory,” he stressed.

Turning to Iran’s deadly suicide-drone assault on the Israeli-managed Mercer Street tanker on July 29, he commended the G-7 countries for having condemned the attack, which was proven by the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) to have been carried out by the Islamic Republic. While on that topic, he invoked Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, the “‘hangman of Tehran,’ a brutal extremist even for the Iranian regime,” and cited “Iranian aggression throughout the Middle East—on land, at sea and in the air.”