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Ruth King

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Adam Schiff’s Dirty Impeachment Tactics Coming to Light By Robyn Dolgin

By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/adam_schiffs_dirty_impeachment_tactics_coming_to_light.html

Rep. Adam Schiff spent months launching secret impeachment hearings, never thinking his conduct would be called into question.

He is now caught in the crosshairs of a formidable government agent, Mr. Brendan Carr, Federal Communication Commissioner. The impeachment may be over, but Mr. Carr is formally investigating Rep. Schiff for violating privacy laws — more like obliterating ethical boundaries — by setting up his own surveillance state to target the president’s allies.

Carr is currently uncovering the diabolical nature of the congressman’s “surveillance state.” At the time, Schiff resorted to such desperate measures because he didn’t have much of an impeachment case: Therefore, he issued secret subpoenas to phone carriers hoping to mine the private data of his political opponents, or in effect ransacking their private lives.

The objective was to obtain and publish the calls of Trump’s allies.

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Gunman Kills 16 in Rampage, Deadliest in Canadian History

By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/gunman-in-canadas-deadliest-mass-shooting-identified-16-dead_3318461.html

TORONTO—A man disguised as a police officer went on a shooting rampage in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, killing 16 people Sunday, in the deadliest such attack in the country’s history. Officials said the suspected shooter was also dead.

A police officer was among those killed. Several bodies were found inside and outside one home in the small, rural town of Portapique, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) north of Halifax—what police called the first scene. Bodies were also found at other locations.

Overnight, police began advising residents of the town—already on lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic—to lock their doors and stay in their basements. Several homes in the area were set on fire as well.

Police identified the man believed to be the shooter as Gabriel Wortman, 51, who was thought to live part-time in Portapique. Authorities said he wore a police uniform at one point and made his car look like a Royal Canadian Mounted Police cruiser. Authorities believe he may have targeted his first victims but then began attacking randomly.

Police first announced that they had arrested Wortman at a gas station in Enfield, outside Halifax, but later said he had died. It was not clear how, and they did not explain further.

“This is one of the most senseless acts of violence in our province’s history,” said Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil.

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A Visit to Europe’s Front With Russia Ukraine has held the line with separatists for six years. By Bernard-Henri Lévy

By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-visit-to-europes-front-with-russia-11587166080?mod=opinion_major_pos4

Mariupol, Ukraine

The huge troop-transport helicopter dates from the Soviet era. It flies just above the tree line, nose down, to avoid Russian radar. After two hours of flying over smooth ground, frozen lakes and ruined villages in the dark winter night, we arrive here at the headquarters of the Navy Guard, where we meet the officers who for six years have led the fight against pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region.

I didn’t wait for the briefing. The nearly deserted fish market in the center of town told the story. So did the empty shops on Lenin Avenue and the enormous blast furnaces of the Azovstal factory, running at half power and emitting thin clouds of dirty black smoke. This shutdown of a key industrial city wasn’t caused by a pandemic. The separatists, unable to take control of the city, imposed a blockade.

In Shyrokyne, a seaside resort half an hour’s drive east, all that remains of its 2,000 residents are a couple, Maxime and Tatiana, former innkeepers who’ve come in under the protection of a national guard unit to lay flowers at his father’s grave. The elegant houses that lined Shapotika and Pushkin streets are reduced to piles of rubble. Lt. Martha Shturma, our interpreter, says this was an ordinary resort with no strategic importance. Its remains to tell a story of gratuitous destruction: the church with the collapsed roof; the clinic reduced to concrete pillars and mined; the school pulverized by heavy artillery, where we find a section of blackboard, half-burned notebooks and a backpack, miraculously spared.

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Why I’m Running Against AOC The virus hit Queens hard. Those Amazon jobs could’ve helped. By Michelle Caruso-Cabrera

By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-im-running-against-aoc-11587317103?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Queens, N.Y.

The Covid-19 crisis is especially dire in this New York City borough. Our neighborhoods, many of them in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district, are called “the epicenter of the epicenter,” and our hospitals “hot zones.”

Dense neighborhoods with several generations living under the same roof suffered a rapid spread of the disease, producing 38,733 cases as of Sunday, the highest of the five boroughs.

The economy has also been devastated. Tens of thousands are out of work because their jobs can’t be done from home. Before the pandemic, roughly 120,000 residents in the 14th Congressional District—which covers northwest Queens and part of the Bronx—worked in food service, hotels, arts and entertainment, retail or construction. Now, most of them are out of work. That’s over one-third of the district’s working population of 350,000.

Restaurants and hotels had to shut down, but one massive employer has held on to staff and even is hiring tens of thousands more around the country: Amazon.

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Covid19 Lethality: Unhysterical Data Are Emerging Andrew Bostom

By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2020/04/covid19-lethality-unhysterical-data-are-emerging/

Multi-billionaire software savant, Bill Gates—hardly the infectious (or any other) disease expert he fancies himself—commented with acid hysteria, several weeks ago (3/24/20), on the mere prospect of lifting draconian “covid19”, Wuhan coronavirus-related shutdowns, to reduce the economic havoc they have wrought:

“It’s very tough to say to people, ‘Hey, keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner. We want you to keep spending because there’s maybe a politician who thinks [gross domestic product] GDP growth is what really counts.”

Mr. Gates’ self-righteous fulmination, notwithstanding, his morbid, grotesque exaggeration, captures a widely prevalent, critical ignorance of the actual SARS-Cov2  (Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 of the genus Betacoronavirus, which causes Covid19 disease) virus’ lethality embodied in what is known as the infection, or case-fatality ratio (CFR). 

Simply and accurately defined, the CFR is the ratio of the number dying from a severe infectious illness, the “numerator,” to the total number infected, the “denominator.” Clear evidence of infection, no matter how severe or mild (even unnoticed by the infected person), is determined, typically, by “immunoassay”, ablood “seroprevalence” test that measures the presence of so-called “antibodies” to an infectious agent such as SARS-Cov2. It is understandable, during the early throes of an outbreak like covid19 disease, that rapid tests which detect (ostensibly) “live virus antigen” (i.e., specific fragments of its genetic code “RNA”), in readily accessible body fluids (eg., from the throat, or mouth), among the most ill, are prioritized, often to the exclusion of blood seroprevalence antibody testing.

However, this viral antigen methodology, and testing scheme, overrepresenting the severe cases, introduces profound biases which may vastly underestimate the “denominator” of total cases, especially the mildest, required for determining an actual CFR. Accordingly, as of 4:30pm, Saturday, 4/18/20, accepting at face value the gross over-counting of covid19 fatalities, absent appropriate validation by Centers For Disease Control(CDC), and individual state (glaringly, out of hospital deaths in New York, and Massachusetts) “guidelines”, the widely referenced Johns Hopkins Corona Virus Resource Center (JHCRC) tallied 37,938 deaths. Applying the concurrent JHCRC enumeration of covid19 cases relying solely on selective “live virus” testing, i.e., 4,690,482, yielded 37,938 deaths/ 4,690,482 cases, a CFR of 1.03%.

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Falling into the Iranian Regime’s Coronavirus Trap by Majid Rafizadeh

By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15908/iran-coronavirus-trap

How on earth it is in the US “national interest” to allow a regime that is kidnapping and killing Americans and their allies, and planning to attack US diplomatic facilities, to receive billions of dollars in aid?

An additional problem, based on a pattern for which Iran has only itself to blame, is that there is no evidence that Iran has the slightest intention of using these funds to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic or to help Iran’s people. The Trump administration already offered to send medical help to Iran, but Iran has continued to turn it down. “Possibly,” Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei said, “your medicine is a way to spread the virus more.”

Moreover, there have also been suggestions that a secret Iranian fund of reportedly $200 billion, controlled by Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei, could perfectly well help Iran to fund its crisis.

While the Iranian regime has been killing Americans during the coronavirus crisis and planning to kill more, a group of American politicians are urging US President Donald J. Trump to loosen sanctions on Tehran regime and refrain from blocking the mullahs’ request for $5 billion in aid.

The former vice president and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, for instance, recently called on the Trump administration to loosen sanctions on Iran.

He pointed out that it is “bad enough that the Trump administration abandoned the Iran nuclear deal in favor of a strategy of ‘maximum pressure;” he added that “it makes no sense, in a global health crisis, to compound that failure with cruelty by inhibiting access to needed humanitarian assistance. Whatever our profound differences with the Iranian government, we should support the Iranian people.”

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The Palestinian Virus: Abbas’s Role Models by Bassam Tawil

By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15906/palestinian-virus-role-models

Abu Jihad was not assassinated by Israel because of any political activities or ideology. His assassination stopped him from masterminding more attacks and killing more Israelis.

Abbas and his Fatah officials, nonetheless, believe that Abu Jihad and other Palestinian terrorists are honorable and decent men who were fighting for the sake of their people. What contribution did these terrorists make to Palestinian society? Did they build a school or a hospital for their people?

When Abbas describes terrorists as heroes, he is actually telling young Palestinians that those who plan and carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis should serve as role models. Abbas evidently wants all Palestinians to be like Abu Jihad and the terrorists in Israeli prisons. For Abbas and other Palestinian leaders, the glorification of terrorists seems to be more important than the fight against a deadly virus.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has not been seen in public since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in the region last month. His absence, however, has not stopped Abbas from doing what he does best: praising and glorifying Palestinians who kill Jews.

On April 16, Palestinians marked the anniversary of the assassination of Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), a PLO leader and co-founder of the Palestinian ruling faction Fatah, which is today headed by Abbas. Before Abu Jihad was assassinated by Israeli commandos at his home in Tunis in 1988, he had planned several terror attacks inside Israel against both civilian and military targets.

Last week, Abbas, who is supposed to be busy helping his people curb the spread of the coronavirus, found the time to publish a statement describing Abu Jihad as “one of the historic leaders” of the Palestinians who “played an important role during an “historic, difficult and dangerous phase.”

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Thinking Beyond The Current Pandemic… by Gerald A. Honigman

By on April 19th, 2020

At some point, hopefully not long from now  the current nightmare will end. Things may never be quite the same again, but we will move forward.

The world’s obsession with creating a 22nd—if not 23rd—Arab state will once again return to the front burner of international politics and forums.

And the effects the above would have on the sole, minuscule, resurrected nation of the Jews will be of little concern to most people.

While scholars and rabble will both once again vilify and practice the double standard supreme regarding the national liberation of the Jewish people—Zionism—they will still ignore the plight of scores of millions of  truly stateless and largely Arab and other Arabized (from one degree or another) Muslim-oppressed peoples in the region.

One of the main issues surely to resurface in the Arab-Israeli debate will involve the settlements. With so much ignorance–innocent or otherwise–on the actual facts regarding this discussion, it’s thus useful, especially for the younger generation often subjected to higher indoctrination instead of education, to reexamine, in depth and detail, this important topic. So, let’s begin–yet again …

As I noted years earlier, when the subject of settlements comes up, most people associate the word these days with Jews wanting to return to lands–beyond Israel’s 1949 UN-imposed, 9 to 15 mile wide armistice line existence–which they have called home, lived on, and owned property in for millennia, but which much of the world declares must once again become Judenrein.

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Lockdown Theater Brings Hoopla and Amateur Epidemiologists Roger Kimball

By on April 19th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/lockdown-theater-brings-hoopla-and-amateur-epidemiologists_3318336.html#

I know that a lot of people are eagerly awaiting the roll-out of the new Netflix compilation of all the White House pressers from the Coronavirus Task Force. I’m told that, thanks to the sponsorship of Hermes scarves, all 876 hours will go on-line at once, so those of us under virtual house arrest can binge watch it for the next month or so. Those with a premium account can opt for an edition that omits any questions from Jim Acosta.

Speaking for myself, I hope it comes soon, for it looks as though we may soon be allowed out of our houses again. I’ll like that, though I expect that there will be a period of adjustment. When you are in a dark room for a while and then go out into brilliant sunlight, the light is dazzling.

That’s one reason coming out of a movie theater on a sunny summer afternoon is so disorienting. You get acclimated to the tenebrous environment. I suspect something similar and even more disorienting when the Lockdown ends.

I wonder when the critical reassessments will start. That will probably depend on the state of the economy, though I would like to find a more emollient word for the pulsing “élan vital” that sustains us. “Economy” sounds abstract and somehow in opposition to human things, whereas in fact it is part of what makes human things possible.

An acquaintance of mine made what I think is an astute observation when he wrote that “Politicians and bureaucracies tend to respond to crises with theater. After 9/11 it was airport security theater. Following Corona it was lockdown theater. There’s some utility to it, but only some, there is much more hoopla.”

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Suicide of the West Postponed Daryl McCann

By on April 19th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/04/suicide-of-the-west-postponed/

“Latter-day progressives recommend accommodation with all things non-Western and, more ominously, all things anti-Western. To take the contrary view, as Donald Trump has done, makes him the enemy of very powerful interests. Russiagate, the Ukraine impeachment farce and every other faux scandal laid at the White House door are the consequence of that.”

Donald Trump may have been too wilful and too much of a know-it-all to be indoctrinated by what James Burnham called, as early as 1964, “the ideology of Western suicide”. Trump-haters will loathe me saying so, but there is at least one connection between Trump and Churchill. The latter, despite the lengthening shadow of Nazi Germany, was himself too wilful and too much of a know-it-all to accept what others regarded as “inevitable”. His opposition to appeasement throughout the 1930s and his determination, as prime minister in 1940, to spurn Hitler’s overtures in the aftermath of the Battle of France might seem straightforward enough now, but that is with the benefit of hindsight. Equally, with Trump. Recall his decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, impose tariffs on goods imported from China, insist on a hard border with Mexico, call North Korea’s bluff, quit the Paris Agreement, ad infinitum. Like it or not, Trump’s aversion to mollification, which is just another word for appeasement, makes him in a sense Churchillian.

The ideology of civilisational suicide, argued Burnham in Suicide of the West (1964), had its origins in the Great War. The war was a calamity with consequences still playing out half-a-century later, and we could now say more than a century later. There was an observable decline in confidence about the merits of Western civilisation, from both internal and external points of view, during the inter-war period. This process only accelerated after the Second World War. James Burnham based his claim, partly at least, on the withdrawal of Western-sponsored governance in Africa, the greater Middle East and South Asia. As the West literally shrank during the decolonisation era, foreign policy experts had to come up with a new worldview, a new kind of liberalism, to account for this changing reality. Some of the military adventurism involved in the Cold War—for instance, the Korean War and America’s Vietnam War—disguised (and acerbated) a surge of unabashed anti-West creeds throughout the world. The Muslim Brotherhood, Maoism, Guevaraism, Khomeinism, Juche, Fanonism and so on are but a few examples. Edward Said’s Orientalism, as a radical form of liberal “broadmindedness”, has encouraged one generation after another to cast off their Westocentric and patriotic “biases” in order to accommodate themselves to a post-America global community.

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