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Ruth King

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

ITS TIME TO ASK: WERE ANY OF THE COVID LOCKDOWNS. MANDATES, CLOSURES WORTH IT?

By on February 11th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/11/its-time-to-ask-were-any-of-the-covid-mandates-closures-lockdowns-worth-it/

With COVID deaths now topping 910,000, the Biden administration and the rest of the Democratic left are deciding to ease up on their mandate regime. We need to learn to live with COVID, they say – repeating advice President Donald Trump issued back in October 2020.

We’re all for ditching the left’s COVID police state, even if Democrats’ reason is political, as we pointed out in this space yesterday.

But that leaves us with a question: Was any of it worth it? Did any of the guidelines, mandates, orders, shutdowns, cancelations, lockdowns do anything to alter the course of the disease, or change in any way the number of people who died from it?

Was it worth the massive disruption to our jobs and lives, the education losses suffered by our children, the trillions in debt piled up? Was it worth shutting down dissent by Tech Giants? Or the unleashing of mask scolds? Or vaccine passports? Or the divisiveness all of it fueled?

After all, even with all that in place, Centers for Disease Control data show that more than 77 million Americans have contracted COVID, and 910,373 deaths are linked to the disease.

What would have been different if we’d done nothing, other than encourage people to use common sense?

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Bankrolling terrorism and moral equivalence Ruthie Blum

By on February 11th, 2022

The refusal of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to stop bankrolling terrorists is well known. Nevertheless, it’s worth reiterating in light of the efforts by the administration in Washington and government in Jerusalem to give it a good gloss-over. 

The attempts by Washington to deny or obfuscate the PA’s true agenda is aimed at returning to the non-existent two-state solution to the literal and figurative table. To fulfill this goal, it assigns moral equivalence to both sides of the Palestinian war against the Jewish state.

As the target of the aggression, Jerusalem doesn’t unequivocally embrace such a tactic; however, the current coalition has been more open to providing excuses for Palestinian hostility than its predecessor. It does this by espousing the view that appeasing Ramallah is in Israel’s best interest.

That neither of the above has ever led to anything other than an uptick in anti-Zionist violence does not seem to register on the diplomatic-Richter-scale. The constant need to restate the obvious is astonishing, but it’s not as jaw-dropping as the chronological proximity of Western goodwill gestures to bloodcurdling Palestinian statements and the actions they spur.

Only examine the events of the last couple of months. On December 22, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan visited Ramallah, where he met with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to discuss strengthening the ties that the Palestinian leadership severed with America during the administration of former president Donald Trump.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What the Truckers Want I’ve spoken to 100 of the protestors gathered in the Canadian capital. What’s happening is far bigger than the vaccine mandates.Rupa Subramanya’

By on February 11th, 2022

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-the-truckers-want?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNDc5

For two weeks, the 18-wheelers, the semis, the tractors and the pick-up trucks streamed through the snow and ice into the center of Ottawa, the Canadian capital.

They came from across the country. Vaxxed, unvaxxed, white, black, Chinese, Sikh, Indian, alone or with their wives and kids. They huddled around campfires. They set up pop-up kitchens and tents with block captains doling out coffee and blankets. They honked (and honked and honked). They blasted “We Are the World.” And everywhere you looked, someone was waving the Maple Leaf.

It dipped to 4 degrees. The mayor declared a state of emergency. And they didn’t budge.

The truckers were scared of running out of gas—freezing to death in their little truck beds in the middle of the night. The city threatened to arrest anyone who brought it to them. In response, hundreds of Ottawans did just that. The truckers stayed put. 

They are a city inside a city whose inhabitants—there are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000—were outraged with a country that seemed to have forgotten they existed. This past Sunday, as if to confirm that suspicion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has yet to meet with Freedom Convoy leaders, took a personal day. On Monday, during an emergency debate at the House of Commons, he called them “a few people shouting and waving swastikas.” 

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Real Apartheid in the Middle East by Khaled Abu Toameh •

By on February 10th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18212/apartheid-middle-east

Where is the outcry from Amnesty International and other human rights organizations? When an Arab country subjects Palestinians to actual apartheid measures, the international community is too busy lying about Israel’s alleged abuses to take notice.

“It is estimated that 65% of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon live under the poverty line.” — UNRWA, October 2017.

Palestinians in Lebanon have long been prevented from practicing such professions as medicine and law, given that only the Lebanese could join professional syndicates.

Thirty-nine professions remain prohibited to Palestinians in the following fields: healthcare (general medicine, dentistry, nursing, midwifery, pharmacy) transport and fishing, services and daycare, engineering, law, tourism, and accounting.

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are at risk of food insecurity, electricity blackouts, increased health problems and complications amid the shortages of medicine and health-care interventions. — UNRWA, January 2022.

“My husband works as a driver and earns less than two dollars a day. We mainly eat vegetables and beans because that’s all we can afford. Meat and chicken have become a dream; we can’t buy them because prices have increased so sharply. We no longer eat three meals a day, and sometimes I send my kids to bed without dinner.” — Rihab Maajel, a 50-year-old Palestinian from Shabriha in southern Lebanon, UNRWA, January 2022.

“I fear that I may freeze to death this winter. I cannot afford to buy gas for heating.” — Nawal Kayed, 66, Palestinian in Lebanon, UNRWA, 2022.

The group also noted that Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who want to receive medical treatment in a Lebanese hospital have to wait for weeks to obtain a permit. — palhrw.org, January 20, 2022.

When Palestinians in Lebanon cannot feed their children this winter, chalk it up to the world’s unjust lethal obsession with Israel.

ive thousand homes belonging to Palestinians in Lebanon are at risk of collapsing and are in dire need of renovation, according to a report in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Stacey Abrams and Voter Suppression By Jim Daws

By on February 10th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/stacey_abrams_and_voter_suppression.html

The Democrat’s latest tactic is to accuse Republicans who dare secure the ballot box against illegal votes of engaging in voter suppression.

Most conservatives are well aware of the Democrat’s Alinsky tactic of accusing Republicans of whatever criminal, immoral, or unethical activities they themselves are engaged in. When Joe Biden was caught pressuring Ukraine to fire the state prosecutor who threatened to expose the Biden family protection racket, they impeached Trump for asking about it, accusing Trump of blackmail. After declaring for four years that Trump was an “illegitimate president” due to Russia collusion lies that she herself concocted, Hillary Clinton exhorted Joe Biden not to concede the 2020 election “under any circumstances.” Then when Trump challenged the manifestly rigged results in four battleground states, the Democrats accused Trump of undermining democracy. To this day, the Democrats’ January 6th Committee is busy trampling the civil rights of citizens who protested the election results after the Democrats themselves encouraged, justified, and funded many months of riots, arson, looting, and murder under the guise of legitimate protest. The instances of hypocritical Democrats using this cynical tactic have become all too obvious. 

But there’s a variation of Alinsky’s projection ploy that’s even more insidious: accuse Republicans who dare secure the ballot box against illegal votes of engaging in voter suppression. The Democrat’s field general this tactic is their former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Abrams lost a close 2018 election to Brian Kemp and promptly accused Kemp of suppressing the black vote despite the fact that blacks voted in significantly higher percentages than whites. She continues, without evidence, to insist that that election was stolen from her and the same Democrats who are now accusing Trump of threatening our democracy still claim she is the rightful governor of Georgia. 

Abrams, who was neck-deep in tax and credit card debt, has turned her voter suppression scam into a lucrative position as head of a non-profit, the ironically named Fair Fight Action, that raked in tens of millions from leftist billionaires and major corporations terrified of crossing the woke mob. In addition to her salary — her mountain of debt has been vaporized — critics accuse Abrams of using her coerced windfall to promote her own political profile and another run for governor.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The Next Pig Thing in Medicine A man is still alive a month after a pig heart transplant. By Sally Satel

By on February 10th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pig-medicine-organ-donation-kidney-heart-transplant-xenotransplantation-end-state-renal-disease-medicare-11644439815?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

I had my first kidney transplant in 2004. It gave out after 10 years. The replacement, which I received in 2016, functions well but won’t last forever. “May your organ outlive you,” older transplant patients tell each other. Otherwise, you may not survive the queue for a new one.

That’s why recent breakthroughs in xenotransplantation—the implantation of animal tissues and organs across species—have been exhilarating. In September, doctors at NYU Langone Medical Center attached a pig kidney to blood vessels in a dead woman’s leg (with her family’s permission). It produced urine and cleared waste products during the 54-hour observation period. Two months later, they repeated the procedure.

Also in September, a team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham implanted the first-ever genetically modified pig kidneys into the body of Jim Parsons, 57, of Huntsville, who had been left brain-dead by a motorcycle accident. The new kidneys turned “beautiful and pink,” the lead surgeon said. The experiment lasted 77 hours.

Then, on Jan. 7, surgeons at the University of Maryland transplanted a heart from a genetically modified pig into David Bennett Sr. , who doctors said had exhausted all other treatment options. Mr. Bennett, 57, is still alive.

More than 90,000 Americans are waiting for a kidney. In 2021 fewer than 25,000 received one, and some 41,000 were added to the national waiting list. On the average day, around a dozen people on the list die.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DHS:  American Thought Police  The transition from tracking terrorism to chasing thought crime has a major advantage. It exonerates U.S. counterterrorism officials from the meddlesome job of catching actual terrorists.  By Kyle Shideler

By on February 10th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/09/dhs-american-thought-police/

The Department of Homeland Security, which under the Biden Administration routinely lets watch-listed terrorists cross the southern border unmolested, and which approved entry to the United States for Colleyville Synagogue hostage-taker Malik Faisal Akram despite his being known to British authorities as a terror risk, has taken upon its broad bureaucratic shoulders an even more challenging job.

Stopping the flow of MDM.

MDM isn’t the latest flavor of fentanyl, produced by the Communist Chinese regime for sale to Mexican drug cartels, and now the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 to 45. No, MDM stands for mis- dis- and mal-information, the latest government acronym from which you must be protected.  

DHS’ latest “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” released Monday, has much to say about the dangers of American minds being polluted with MDM, and curiously little to say about actual terror threats.

MDM is a term developed by the DHS Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to replace the old-fashioned phrase “foreign influence.” Now let us caveat that the U.S. government does indeed have a responsibility to monitor and to identify foreign influence operations. This was the remit of the Reagan-era Active Measures Working Group, which worked tirelessly to identify Soviet lies being spread to undermine the United States’ global standing in the world, and then countered them with the truth.  

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Evil Ethnic Studies California’s unrelenting campaign to poison young minds is just getting started. Matthew Vadum

By on February 10th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/evil-ethnic-studies-matthew-vadum/

The good news is that California education authorities have agreed to drop part of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that encouraged public school students to pray to bloodthirsty Aztec deities. The quaint religious practices of Mesoamericans about 700 years ago included slicing out human hearts along with flaying victims and wearing their skin.

The ESMC is needed, the devoutest left-wingers insist, to help teach children about the systemic racism that supposedly defines America.

“We are reminded daily that racism is not only a legacy of the past but a clear and present danger,” said California State Board of Education president Linda Darling-Hammond, a leftist who headed the Biden-Harris regime’s education transition team. “We must understand this history if we are finally to end it.”

Worshiping these gods that belong in torture-porn horror movies will somehow advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism, the board of education must have reasoned when it approved the nearly 900-page ESMC in March 2021, making California “the first state in the nation to offer a statewide ethnic studies model for educators,” the board boasted at the time.

Under pressure from the Thomas More Society, a highly effective national public interest law firm that filed a lawsuit last year on behalf of angry parents and the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, the state agency agreed in January to nix the Aztec devotions.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Did a University Destroy an Archive Documenting Communist Terrorism? An archive documenting international terrorism mysteriously disappears at a woke university. Daniel Greenfield

By on February 10th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/did-university-destroy-archive-documenting-daniel-greenfield/

“I took a pack of Tarot cards. I had found out that they were very superstitious. On arrival at a commune I would ask for their astrological birth signs and tell them mine,” Jillian Becker described her process of investigating the Marxist terrorist Baader-Meinhof Gang.

Officially, the Red Army Faction, but popularly known for its two leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, the leftist terrorist group had carried out a string of attacks, including the killings of a number of American military personnel. Becker’s investigations of Soviet backed terrorism had taken her around the world, and now the South African Jewish journalist was in Berlin.

The Baader-Meinhof gang had come out of the communards. The Communards, even more degenerate and deadlier versions of American leftists who flirted with terrorism and terror trolling, embraced Mao and experimented with everything, were not easy targets for journalists.

“I would offer to read two or three fortunes with the cards, saying that for me the process was exhausting so I could not do more than that. They would decide who were to be the lucky ones, and I would go through a routine of getting them to shuffle and lay out the cards in a certain pattern. Then I would pick them up one by one and “tell their fortune”. Becker told me.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Virginia Senate Passes Bill Requiring Parental Notification of ‘Sexually-Explicit’ Content in Classrooms By Zachary Evans

By on February 10th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/virginia-senate-passes-bill-requiring-parental-notification-of-sexually-explicit-content-in-classrooms/

The Virginia Senate voted 20-18 on Wednesday to approve legislation that would require schools to notify parents before sexually-explicit materials are used in classrooms.

The bill, known as S.B. 656, would also give parents the right to review any such material and to request alternative, non-explicit materials for their child. While the Virginia Senate has a narrow Democratic majority, two Democrats voted with Republicans in favor of the legislation.

The bill will now head to Virginia’s GOP-controlled House of Delegates, where it is expected to pass.

Full passage by the Virginia legislature would give a victory to Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who campaigned in part on issues of parental control over their children’s educational material.

“What we’ve seen over the course of this last 20 months is our school systems refusing to engage with parents,” Youngkin said at a gubernatorial debate in September. “In fact, in Fairfax County this past week, we watched parents so upset because there was such sexually explicit material in the library they had never seen, it was shocking.”

Youngkin added that then-opponent Terry McAuliffe had vetoed “the bill that would have informed parents that they were there.”

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