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Ruth King

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Getting rid of the CDC would be a great start By Robert Curry

By on August 13th, 2021

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

Believe it or not, we owe the evil Dr. Fauci a debt of gratitude.  He has demonstrated for all time the costs and folly of allowing ourselves to be ruled by government experts.  In addition, he has even given us the perfect name for rule by government experts: fauciism.

Fauciism is fascism with a difference.  Fascist rulers favored military uniforms and attacked opposition to their rule as treason against the nation; Fauci wears the garb of the government bureaucrat and declares that opposition to his rule is an attack on science.  

Fauci and his minions were wrong on AIDS — Fauci caused an earlier panic when he told the American people and Congress that we could catch AIDS from casual, merely social contact with the infected — and he and his minions have been wrong so many ways on the Wuhan flu that it has been difficult to keep an accurate count.

The Germans and the Italians paid a terrible price for letting the fascists take over.  We can hope that the terrible price they paid inoculated them from trying that form of rule again, at least for a while.  May the terrible price we have paid for allowing Fauci to have his way with America and with the American economy awaken us to what must be done before it is too late.

What’s to be done?  Let’s begin to find our way to the answer by asking how we got here. 

How we got here is no mystery.  Putting government experts in charge has been the goal of the Progressives all along.  From the beginning, they understood that transforming America into a country ruled by experts would be an enormous undertaking.  Consequently, their plan was to do it step by step, progressively.  For over a century, the Progressives have been replacing rule by the people through their elected representatives with rule by government experts.  They created an ever-expanding administrative state composed of agencies like the CDC, and put credentialed experts in charge.  These experts were Progressives who immediately set to work expanding the reach of the agencies they were put in charge of.  This is known as government overreach.

We owe Fauci.  He has shown us how far America has traveled on the Progressive path. 

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BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Agenda for Serfdom in the Land of the Free By Janet Levy

By on August 13th, 2021

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

Conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s dystopic novel Agenda 21 opens with the chilling line: They took Mother away today.  Written in collaboration with Harriet Parke, the novel creates a regimented world in which people are relocated from the countryside to cities, where, under constant surveillance and threat of punishment, they can do nothing but what the authorities decide.  The aged mother is taken away because for two days she failed to generate her quota of electricity by walking her energy board.  The adult daughter has tried to make up the quota and get food for two but has apparently been found out.  It’s a world where animals, plants, and the wilderness take primacy over humans.  And there are no property rights — or any rights, for that matter.  The Authority, drawing on a law called Agenda 21, takes care of everything.

It’s no coincidence that the frightening novel — which could well become a reality should the leftist global strategy succeed — is named after the U.N.’s Agenda 21.  Here’s how Rosa Koire, a land use and development expert, described the U.N. document: “an inventory and control plan of all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production all food, all energy, all information, and all human beings in the world.”  Even from that brief description of the opening of the novel, it’s easy to visualize the parallels with Koire’s fears: a seemingly innocuous plan of “sustainable development” for the 21st century is in fact a social engineering program to achieve global governance.  With surveillance, individual liberties will go, and with individual liberties gone, representative governments will perish.  The erosion of government as we know it has already begun — with the slow strangling of local government.

Agenda 21 was introduced at the U.N. Earth Summit in 1992, along with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), as the “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society.”  Together, they toll the death knell for wealth creation and economic and personal liberty, based on the fallacious assumption that development will lead to the extinction of life on Earth.  With top-down controls, they aim to end local power and vest it in a global governance system.  Environment protection is the excuse and weapon for this draconian program to fundamentally transform human lives, force citizens to surrender their liberties, and enforce socialist global control.  The agenda is political.

The Convention on Biological Diversity was created under the pretense of restoring biodiversity in the U.S.  It was a proposal to set aside land in North America for “rewilding” — to protect biodiversity from human influence and reintroduce animals into areas of human habitation.  Anti–property rights directives that implemented a Wildlands agenda called for the eventual elimination of private property to use it for the “common good.”

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Fantasizes That It Has Israel On The Run The Mullahs’ delusions. Hugh Fitzgerald

By on August 13th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/iran-fantasizes-it-has-israel-run-hugh-fitzgerald/

Iranian leaders have a rich fantasy life. Possibly It has something to do with their deep belief in the Return of the Hidden Imam. Twelver Shi’ism may have its points, but a grasp of reality is not one of them. Iran has recently become convinced, despite all the evidence, that it has been outplaying Israel ever since its drone attack on the MV Mercer Street in the Gulf of Oman.

The report on this development is here: “Iran believes it has Israel on the run,” by Seth J. Frantzman, Jerusalem Post, August 7, 2021:

When tensions rose with the US, UK and Israel after the attack, Iran shifted the frontline to Lebanon and Gaza, targeting Israel with rockets last week. When Israel responded, Iranian-backed Hezbollah fired more than 10 rockets from southern Lebanon at Israel on Friday.

Was the Iranian attack on the MV Mercer Street a success? It turned out that the vessel was Japanese-owned, and had been for some months; Israel’s only connection was that it managed the ship for its owners. Iranian naval intelligence had not kept abreast of that recent change in ownership. Now Iran, embarrassed at its mistake, has denied that it was behind the attack, but the intelligence seen by Israel, the U.S., and the U.K. have convinced all three that Tehran is lying. It is the U.K., one of whose citizens was killed in the attack, that has introduced a resolution at the UN Security Council condemning Iran for the attack. Iran’s denial of responsibility has convinced no one, but made it look even more foolish than if it had simply remained silent. The attack on the MV Mercer Street, any way you look at it, has become for Iran a public relations fiasco.

In an attempt to deflect attention away from the MV Mercer Street, Iran instructed Hezbollah to launch rockets into Israel, a response, so it was claimed, to Israeli artillery fire on Hezbollah targets. In its largest attack, Hezbollah launched 19 rockets toward Israel. Not one did any damage to Israel. Ten of the rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system. Six were not intercepted because the Israelis, having calculated from their trajectories that they would fall harmlessly in open fields, didn’t need to shoot them down. The remaining three fell short, landing in Lebanon itself; the damage they may have done to Lebanese civilians is not known. This attack, like that on the MV Mercer Street, did no discernible damage to Israel or Israeli interests; the successful interceptions of all ten Hezbollah rockets that potentially could have caused harm showed how accurate are Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defenses.

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Biden Sends 3,000 Troops, Offers Taliban Bribes, As Afghanistan Disaster Looms Biden tried to negotiate with Islamic terrorists. He’s shocked they didn’t keep their word. Daniel Greenfield

By on August 13th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/biden-sends-3000-troops-offers-taliban-bribes-daniel-greenfield/

“The likelihood that there’s going to be a Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” Joe Biden claimed in July.

He denied an intelligence assessment that the Afghan government would fall in six months.

The current intelligence assessment is that the Taliban may take Afghanistan by September 11.

Biden has been reduced to bribing the Taliban with foreign aid in exchange for a promise not to attack the United States embassy in Kabul. The proposal to fund terrorists is criminally treasonous and since the ranks of the Taliban include any number of Jihadis, and their old Al Qaeda allies have a presence in Afghanistan, that’s setting up our diplomats to be killed.

Obama had his Benghazi, Biden is trying to have his own Saigon in dusty old Kabul.

After Biden announced the withdrawal, the Taliban swiftly began sweeping up territory, first the rural areas and then provincial capitals. There is no point in listing the numbers because by the time you read this the Taliban will hold more territory than they did when this was written.

When Biden announced with great fanfare that the United States was withdrawing, there were 2,500 American soldiers in Afghanistan. Despite falsely claiming that there was a complete withdrawal, he left behind 650 soldiers to provide security for American diplomats in Kabul.

Now 3,000 soldiers are heading back to Afghanistan to help evacuate Americans.

Another 3,500 soldiers will be on standby in case the situation continues to worsen.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Leverage Lost: U.S. Dangles Aid to Prevent Taliban Attack on Embassy in Kabul By Jimmy Quinn

By on August 13th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/u-s-will-withhold-aid-if-the-taliban-attacks-embassy-in-kabul/

The Biden administration is dangling the possibility of U.S. aid to a potential future Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan, in a last-ditch bid to prevent an assault on its embassy in Kabul.

The situation in the country is in free fall. Since the start of a blitz last week, Taliban fighters have now taken eleven provincial capitals, as U.S. efforts to negotiate a political solution and a desperate plea to the group to negotiate a power-sharing agreement founder. The deadline for the completion of the U.S. withdrawal is August 31, and the White House and Pentagon have demonstrated little interest in significantly higher levels of air strikes to stop the Taliban’s advance.

Washington is now placing its hopes in a diplomatic push, one feature of which is to convince the Taliban not to attack the U.S. embassy in Kabul, if the Afghan capital falls, the New York Times reported today.

As the Times reports, part of this push includes preventing a Taliban assault on the U.S. embassy by saying that keeping it open is the only way a government the group runs can possibly receive future financial assistance from Washington.

Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington’s Afghanistan envoy and a veteran of the Bush and Trump administrations, has spearheaded the U.S. diplomatic effort.

Earlier this week, as Khalilzad traveled to Doha to meet Taliban negotiators, he and other administration officials faced criticism for saying that the Taliban would fail to gain international legitimacy if it came to power by force.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Border Patrol Encountered 212,000 Migrants in July, Breaking 21-Year Record By Caroline Downey

By on August 13th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/number-of-migrant-encounters-at-border-surpasses-200000-for-first-time-in-21-years/

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced Thursday that border patrol agents apprehended over 212,000 undocumented migrants in July, breaking the 200,000 threshold for the first time in 21 years, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

During a stop at the border in Texas, Mayorkas commented that 212,672 migrants were encountered in July, a 13 percent increase over the influx of 188,000 migrants encountered in June. He acknowledged that the rapidly deteriorating situation at the border constitutes a crisis, calling it “one of the toughest challenges we face.”

He added that 95,788 of those detainees, mostly single adults rather than families, were expelled under Trump-era Title 42 authorizing border officials to deport migrants suspected of positive COVID infection who could pose a public health risk. This, however, represented a 10,000 person decrease in the number of migrants who removed under that measure in June.

While conceding that the statistics are daunting, Mayorkas offered that the border emergency is not a black and white issue, adding, “It is complicated, changing and involves vulnerable people at a time of a global pandemic.”

The administration previously predicted that the number of migrant encounters would drop off during the hot summer months, as is typical.

The secretary confirmed that the crisis has particularly escalated in recent months, with skyrocketing border apprehensions over the summer. While he suggested that the upticks in border crossings originated under former President Trump’s leadership, starting in April 2020, he recognized that “the increase is most certainly sharper over the last several months and greater than in June.”

Mayorkas’ statement lends credence to the assertions of many Republican lawmakers  that Biden’s negligence on border enforcement and revocation of rules implemented under Trump have created an unprecedented border disaster.

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Do Masks Work? A review of the evidence

By on August 13th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/do-masks-work-a-review-of-the-evidence

“Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS!” So tweeted then–surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Two days later, Adams said, “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.” Less than a week earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.” About a month later, on March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.” He added, “In fact there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite” because of the possibility of not “wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly” and of “taking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.”

Surgical masks were designed to keep medical personnel from inadvertently infecting patients’ wounds, not to prevent the spread of viruses. Public-health officials’ advice in the early days of Covid-19 was consistent with that understanding. Then, on April 3, 2020, Adams announced that the CDC was changing its guidance and that the general public should hereafter wear masks whenever sufficient social distancing could not be maintained.

Fast-forward 15 months. Rand Paul has been suspended from YouTube for a week for saying, “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work.” Many cities across the country, following new CDC guidance handed down amid a spike in cases nationally caused by the Delta variant, are once again mandating indoor mask-wearing for everyone, regardless of inoculation status. The CDC further recommends that all schoolchildren and teachers, even those who have had Covid-19 or have been vaccinated, should wear masks.

The CDC asserts this even though its own statistics show that Covid-19 is not much of a threat to schoolchildren. Its numbers show that more people under the age of 18 died of influenza during the 2018–19 flu season—a season of “moderate severity” that lasted eight months—than have died of Covid-19 across more than 18 months. What’s more, the CDC says that out of every 1,738 Covid-19-related deaths in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, just one has involved someone under 18 years of age; and out of every 150 deaths of someone under 18 years of age, just one has been Covid-related. Yet the CDC declares that schoolchildren, who learn in part from communication conveyed through facial expressions, should nevertheless hide their faces—and so should their teachers.

How did mask guidance change so profoundly? Did the medical research on the effectiveness of masks change—and in a remarkably short period of time—or just the guidance on wearing them?

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Bennett should beware of CIA director William Burns By Ruthie Blum

By on August 13th, 2021

In a tweet on Wednesday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that he had emerged from a productive meeting with CIA director William Burns.

“We discussed the strengthening of intelligence and security cooperation between Israel and the United States, the situation in the Middle East, the emphasis on Iran and the possibilities for expanding and deepening regional cooperation. We will continue to cooperate with our closest friend,” Bennett wrote, signing off with an icon of an American flag next to an Israeli one.

Obligatory positive pronouncements aside, Bennett would do well to view Burns’s trip this week to Israel and the Palestinian Authority with wariness.

“The visit shows that the Biden administration is serious about restoring Washington’s relations with the Palestinians and strengthening the Palestinian leadership under President Mahmoud Abbas,” a PA official told The Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh on Tuesday.
Noting the CIA chief’s scheduled rendezvous with Abbas and PA General Intelligence Service head Majed Faraj, the official pointed to the PA’s “sharp financial crisis” that requires “urgent [US] aid,” without which “Hamas will come to power in the West Bank.”

If Israel had a shekel for every time the PA whined to the West about its victimhood, the Jewish state’s coffers would be overflowing. In case the most recent example of this incredible chutzpah has escaped attention, a review of the events leading up to Operation Guardian of the Walls is in order.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Danger of Shrinking American Naval Power China may invade Taiwan within six years, admirals warn. Is the U.S. ready? By Seth Cropsey

By on August 13th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-navy-china-taiwan-military-spending-great-power-competition-war-combat-beijing-11628784300?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

The Chinese military will likely attack Taiwan within six years, Adm. Phil Davidson, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told Congress in March, just before retiring from the Navy. More generally, he said, Beijing’s long-term objective—supplanting the U.S. and remaking the global order to benefit the Chinese Communist Party—will feature confrontation.

Adm. Davidson’s assessment is the clearest articulation of contemporary strategic realities by a major government or military official in the past decade. China is showing its ambitions, increasing its assertiveness in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and ratcheting up military pressure against Taiwan. The Chinese strategic tradition prizes both patience and decisive action when the balance of forces appears favorable.

The implication of Adm. Davidson’s assessment—and a similar one offered this spring by his successor, Adm. John Aquilino —is that any major reduction in U.S. combat strength, particularly naval power, will tempt the Chinese Communist Party to strike.

This assessment should inform the Navy’s recently announced “divest to invest” plan. The Navy will “divest” from older, larger platforms such as the Ticonderoga-class cruiser and reduce its large surface combatant force, including Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, by around one-third.

In turn, the Navy will “invest” in smaller, more numerous platforms, specifically a new Constellation-class frigate and a variety of unmanned surface combatants and undersea vehicles. The Navy will also speed up production of its Virginia-class submarines, the most modern in the fleet, and develop a yet-to-be-defined new submarine class. The Navy hopes “divest to invest” will make the fleet more distributed, more survivable and more lethal.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Dumbing Oregon Down The soft bigotry of low progressive expectations for minority students.

By on August 13th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dumbing-oregon-down-kate-brown-proficiency-requirement-high-school-graduation-11628796270?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Why didn’t we think of that? Politicians and school officials in Oregon are embarrassed that too many minority children fail tests designed to confirm they’ve mastered the “essential skills” that high school is meant to teach. So in the name of racial equity, they’ve now done the progressive thing. Instead of lifting graduation rates by boosting student performance, they’re eliminating the proficiency requirement.

Gov. Kate Brown signed the bill on July 14, but the Oregonian reports her office never issued a press release and the bill was not entered into the legislative database until two weeks later—a “departure from the normal practice” of entering bills the same day they are signed.

The Secretary of the Senate blamed the delay on a staffer experiencing medical issues. But it’s hardly surprising that Gov. Brown and the Democratic Legislature would not wish to draw attention to this attempt to dumb the state down.

The new law extends until 2024 a temporary suspension of the state requirements that kids demonstrate proficiency in reading, writing, and math to graduate from high school. Previously, in addition to demonstrating proficiency via Oregon’s Assessments of Knowledge and Skills test, students had the option of taking other standardized tests or submitting a work project to teachers. The new legislation gives the state’s Department of Education until 2022 to write new standards.

The purpose of public education is to provide students with the skills they need to succeed in the world. It is a terrible disservice to issue a diploma that fools them into believing they’ve mastered basic skills they haven’t. It is particularly cruel for the minority students who will pay the highest price when the real world confirms that their high schools have defrauded them of a real education.

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