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Modelers Were ‘Astronomically Wrong’ in COVID-19 Predictions, Says Leading Epidemiologist—and the World Is Paying the Price Jon Miltimore*****

https://fee.org/articles/modelers-were-astronomically-wrong-in-covid-19-predictions-says-leading-epidemiologist-and-the-world-is-paying-the-price/

In a recent interview, Dr. John Ioannidis had a harsh assessment of modelers who predicted as many as 40 million people would die and the US healthcare system would be overrun because of COVID-19.

Dr. John Ioannidis became a world-leading scientist by exposing bad science. But the COVID-19 pandemic could prove to be his biggest challenge yet.

Ioannidis, the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, has come under fire in recent months for his opposition to state-ordered lockdowns, which he says could cause social harms well beyond their presumed benefits. But he doesn’t appear to be backing down.

In a wide-ranging interview with Greek Reporter published over the weekend, Ioannidis said emerging data support his prediction that lockdowns would have wide-ranging social consequences and that the mathematical models on which the lockdowns were based were horribly flawed.

Ioannidis also said a comprehensive review of the medical literature suggests that COVID-19 is far more widespread than most people realize.

“There are already more than 50 studies that have presented results on how many people in different countries and locations have developed antibodies to the virus,” Ioannidis, a Greek-American physician, told Greek Reporter. “Of course none of these studies are perfect, but cumulatively they provide useful composite evidence. A very crude estimate might suggest that about 150-300 million or more people have already been infected around the world, far more than the 10 million documented cases.”

Happy July 4: Tyranny Of The Woke Mob Might Be Worse Than Suffering Under British Rule

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/02/happy-july-4-tyranny-of-the-woke-mob-might-be-worse-than-abusive-british-rule/

When we celebrate Independence Day, we rejoice over the freedom won from the English crown. But there’s a new master gaining power in America. We need to shrug it off before it takes over.

Because we’re marking the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress, it would be instructive to see where we are today by comparing a few passages from our founding document with current events.

1776: King George III has “sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

2020: The cancel culture has cost people jobs, income, and social status.

1776: The king “has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”

2020: Rioters, looters, statue-topplers, and the criminals holed up in “autonomous zones” have killed and injured, stolen, burned, and destroyed.

1776: The crown imposed “taxes on us without our consent.”

2020: Black Lives Matter is at its core a marxist organization, while its “partner organization,” the Movement for Black Lives, “calls for a ‘progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local, state and federal levels to ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth.’”

1776: The king abolished “our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments.”

2020: Defund the police.

1776: Our Creator endowed us “with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

2020: Conform or else.

The Believer The ideology behind the lust to tear America down. Jamie Glazov

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/believer-jamie-glazov/

Editors’ note: As we witness the Marxist revolution currently transpiring right before our eyes in America, a vital question confronts us: what yearnings lie inside the members of groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa — and why do members of the Democrat Party and of the Establishment Media cheer them on? What inspires this violent hatred of America and the ferocious craving to tear it down? These are, without doubt, some of the most pertinent questions of our time. Frontpage Editors have therefore deemed it vital to run, below, an excerpt from Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror. The excerpt is the second chapter, titled ‘The Believer’s Diagnosis’; it explores the progressive believer’s secular faith – and unveils his heart of darkness. Don’t miss this essay. 

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The Believer’s Diagnosis
“Everything that exists deserves to perish.”
—Karl Marx, invoking a dictum of Goethe’s devil in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoléon

In the eyes of Joseph E. Davies, who served for several years as American ambassador to the Soviet Union before the Second World War, no human being merited greater respect than Joseph Stalin. The ambassador spent much time reflecting on why he believed the Soviet dictator deserved the world’s—and his own people’s—heartfelt veneration. He finally realized that the answer had always been staring him square in the face: it was that Stalin’s “brown eye is exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.”[i] Leading French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre discovered a similar truth about his own secular deity, Fidel Castro. “Castro,” he noted, “is at the same time the island, the men, the cattle, and the earth. He is the whole island.”[2] Father Daniel Berrigan, meanwhile,  contended that Hanoi’s prime minister Pham Van Dong was an individual “in whom complexity dwells, in whom daily issues of life and death resound; a face of great intelligence, and yet also of great reserves of compassion . . . he had dared to be a humanist in an inhuman time.”[3]

The objects of all this adoration, of course, were despotic mass murderers. One crucial question, therefore, surfaces: what exactly inspires a person, and an entire mass movement, to deify a monstrous tyrant as a father-god who transcends the singular and encompasses, as Sartre put it, all the people and their land? The answer to this question helps illuminate the contemporary Left’s romance with Islamist jihadists, just as it helps crystallize the Left’s alliance with the most vicious totalitarians of the twentieth century.

Is Hamilton Next? The hit musical, now a movie, celebrates the American Founding so unabashedly that it seems ripe for cancellation. Kay S. Hymowitz

https://www.city-journal.org/future-of-hamilton-musical

This Independence Day, Disney is giving America a big-ticket birthday gift: the musical Hamilton. After handing over a head-turning $75 million, the company will stream a filmed version of the Lin-Manuel Miranda Broadway megahit on its Disney+ channel. It could be just what the doctor ordered as an antidote to the nation’s gloomy mood, or it could be the opposite—another cultural touchstone swept up and spit out by the vortex of the Great Awokening.

That second scenario may sound absurd. After all, Hamilton is the beloved masterpiece of the diversity revolution, an ode to the country’s multiracial future and to “immigrants [who] get the job done!” Its cast was almost entirely nonwhite, with one notable exception: a campy, mincing King George III. Miranda himself, son of Puerto Rican parents, played the musical’s namesake hero, Alexander Hamilton. Audiences were swept up in the mischievous chutzpah of casting black actors as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the clever rap couplets evoking the thrill of youthful revolution. “Rap is the voice of the people of our generation, and of people of color,” Miranda, winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant, has proclaimed. Hamilton won a Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy, and 16 Tony Awards. The show has grossed well over $500 million. Beyoncé, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Stephen Sondheim, Jay Z, and a long list of other luminaries number among his fans. On social media, followers are counting the days and minutes until the television event. What could go wrong?

Democrats Now Stand For The Exact Opposite Of The Declaration Of Independence George Rasley

http://www.conservativehq.com/node/32819

Saturday marks Independence Day 2020, and as we always should on this commemoration of the American founding, we ought to take a look at where the country stands 244 years after the announcement that Americans would fight to live as free men and women, rather than remain the subjects of a despotic government.

The American Declaration of Independence is one of the most profound documents of western civilization.  Yet its measured case for humankind’s inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness might be as little known as the science of the Aztecs were it not for the feats of arms and sacrifices of America’s first veterans – the few thousand patriots who made-up the Continental Army.

For constitutional conservatives like us, the words of the Framers of the Constitution are so very important because they define the limits on government power.  However, we here at CHQ have a special admiration for those daring patriots who declared our independence and risked all to establish the first and only nation dedicated to preserving the sovereignty of the individual human spirit.

And it is important to remember that the patriots who fought our Revolution didn’t fight for the Constitution; they fought for the Declaration of Independence and a unique “pre-Constitution” revolutionary vision of individual liberty.

Trump’s Leaner White House 2020 Payroll Saved Taxpayers $23.5 Million Since 2017 Adam Andrzejewski

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/06/30/trump-further-hone

During President Trump’s first four-years, he spent $23.5 million less on White House payroll costs than Obama, adjusted for inflation.

Trump’s White House payroll has 413 employees – that’s 55 fewer staffers than Barack Obama (FY2012) at the same point in their presidencies.

There was 36-percent turnover in White House staff, year over year. This was the same percentage as the previous year.

Comparing First Lady staff headcount: Melania Trump (11 staffers) versus Michelle Obama (24 staffers).

Today, the Trump administration released its annual report to Congress on the White House Office Personnel. The payroll data includes employee name, status, salary, and position title for all 413 White House employees as of June 30, 2020. Search the recent Trump administration (2017, 2018, and 2019) payroll data posted at OpenTheBooks.com.

Over the past 12 months, Trump further reduced headcount at the already lean White House by five employees. Last year, the president employed 418 staffers which was 36 fewer than Obama at the same point in their presidencies.

Black Lives Matter in DC chant ‘Israel, we know you, you murder children, too’ —–“Death to America,” Love for North Korea and Hate for Israel at Brooklyn Rally

https://www-jta-org.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.jta.org/quick-reads/black-lives-matter-demonstrators-in-dc-chant-israel-we-know-you-you-murder-children-too/amp?

Yesterday I sent you a list of the 500 Jewish organizations and Rabbis who signed a profoundly pro-BLM letter. If you know any of them, maybe send this to them. They are idiots – dangerous idiots. DPS

The demonstration Wednesday was billed as an event in support of the Day of Rage called by the Palestinian Authority and other groups to protest Israel’s announced plan to annex up to 30% of the West Bank on or after July 1.
A staff writer for The Washington Examiner, Nicolas Rowan,posted a videoof some of the march on Twitter.
Chants also alternated between “Black lives matter!” and “Palestinian lives matter!”
The march, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol building, was led by a Harvard student, Christian Tabash, who read a poem about Israel’s crimes against Palestinian Muslims, according to the Examiner. The poem referred to Israel as “puppet master of continents,” an age-old conspiracy theory that Jews run the world.
Tabash, a rising senior, also noted several times that the Palestinian movement is “intrinsically tied to Black Lives Matter” and called to defund police departments.
The Republican Jewish Coalition in response said in a statement: “We are horrified by this vicious hatemongering by Black Lives Matter protesters. The Black Lives Matter charter is filled with anti-Israel and antisemitic lies. It is deeply disturbing, but not surprising, to hear those sentiments chanted in the streets of Washington, DC.”
The statement called on former Vice President Joe Biden, “as the standard bearer of the Democrat Party, to condemn these anti-Semitic chants by BLM protesters.”

Black Lives Matter: “We Are Trained Marxists” – Part I by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16181/black-lives-matter

Black Lives Matter is a Marxist revolutionary movement aimed at transforming the United States into a communist dystopia. BLM states that it wants to abolish the nuclear family, police, prisons and capitalism. BLM leaders have threatened to “burn down the system” if their demands are not met. They are also training militias.

“Cutting the LAPD budget means longer responses to 911 emergency calls, officers calling for backup won’t get it, and rape, murder and assault investigations won’t occur or will take forever to initiate, let alone complete.” — Los Angeles Police Protective League, the city’s police union.

“White people are so confused in America…. If there is systematic racism today it is a racism against white people, in the sense that white people are told that they are responsible for all the evils in the world….” — Dr. Carol M. Swain, university professor and advisory board member of Black Voices for Trump.

“We are all human beings in God’s image. Black Lives Matter and Antifa and organizations like that will not help us transcend racism and classism and the ‘isms’ that they are concerned with. There are things that can be done in the black community, but the most important thing is helping people realize to how important their own attitudes are…” — Dr. Carol M. Swain.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that more than two-thirds of Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement. The high level of backing raises the question of how much the public knows about BLM.

On the surface, BLM presents itself as a grassroots movement dedicated to the noble tasks of fighting racism and police brutality. A deeper dive shows that BLM is a Marxist revolutionary movement aimed at transforming the United States — and the entire world — into a communist dystopia.

This is the first of a two-part series, which reveals:

BLM’s founders openly admit to being Marxist ideologues. Their self-confessed mentors include former members of the Weather Underground, a radical “leftwing” terrorist group that sought to bring a communist revolution to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. BLM is friendly with Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, whose socialist policies have brought economic collapse and untold misery to millions of people there.

BLM states that it wants to abolish: the nuclear family; police and prisons; heteronormativity; and capitalism. BLM and groups associated with it are demanding a moratorium on rent, mortgages and utilities, and reparations for a long list of grievances. BLM leaders have threatened to “burn down the system” if their demands are not met. They are also training militias based on the militant Black Panther movement of the 1960s.

BLM, which is not registered as a non-profit organization for tax purposes, has raised tens of millions of dollars in donations. BLM’s finances are opaque. BLM’s donations are collected by ActBlue, a fundraising platform linked to the Democratic Party and causes associated with it. Indeed, BLM leaders have confirmed that their immediate goal is to remove U.S. President Donald J. Trump from office.

Exposing the Lies of Black Lives Matter Where black racism and Marxism are dressed up as “social justice.” John Perazzo

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/exposing-lies-black-lives-matter-john-perazzo/

Black Lives Matter (BLM) was established in 2013 by a trio of self-identified Marxist revolutionaries. Striving to make white Americans “uncomfortable about institutional racism” and the “structural oppression” that allegedly “prevents so many [black people] from realizing their dreams,” BLM contends that blacks living under America’s “white supremacist system” are routinely targeted for “extrajudicial killings … by police and vigilantes.” That claim has become an article of faith for the millions of American leftists who dutifully parrot BLM’s talking points. The remainder of this article is dedicated to providing hard data which exposes BLM’s worldview as nothing more than a mountain of malicious lies.

Debunking BLM’s Claims About Police Use of Force

A major Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report in 2001 examined incidents where police in the United States used deadly force to kill criminal suspects between 1976 and 1998. During that 23-year span, 42% of all suspects killed by police were black – a figure that comported precisely with the percentage of violent crimes committed by African Americans during that same period. This is enormously significant because we would expect that in police forces not plagued by systemic racism, officers would shoot suspects of various racial or ethnic backgrounds at rates closely resembling their respective involvement in the types of serious crimes most likely to elicit the use of force by police. And indeed, that is exactly what the evidence shows.

The same BJS report found that in nearly two-thirds of all justifiable homicides by police during 1976-98, the officer’s race and the suspect’s race were the same. When a white or Hispanic officer killed a suspect, that suspect was usually (63% of the time) white or Hispanic as well. And when a black officer killed a suspect, that suspect was usually black (81% of the time).

The BJS report also examined the rate at which officers killed suspects of other racial or ethnic backgrounds. In 1998, the “black-officer-kills-black-felon” rate was 32 per 100,000 black officers, more than double the rate at which white and Hispanic officers killed black felons (14 per 100,000). That same year, the rate at which white and Hispanic officers killed white or Hispanic felons (28 per 100,000) was much higher than the “black-officer-kills-white-or-Hispanic-felon” rate of 11 per 100,000.

The Huge Law Enforcement Scandal that Cries Out for Justice By Rael Jean Isaac

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/the_huge_law_enforcement_scandal_that_cries_out_for_justice.html

In the American Thinker (June 30), Jack Cashill offers an eloquent plea for an Atticus Finch to take up the cause of George Zimmerman in suing those responsible for perpetrating the Trayvon Hoax.  There is another case, also in Florida, awaiting its Atticus Finch, the product of an earlier moral panic, the now largely forgotten “mass sex abuse in daycare” hysteria.  These cases, replete with lurid charges the media mindlessly and breathlessly disseminated in the 1980s and ’90s, are today widely recognized as a modern version of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, down to allegations of Satanic rituals by caregivers.  Despite this, one victim remains incarcerated.  Frank Fuster has now served thirty-five years in prison for a crime not only that he did not commit, but that never happened.  His first parole hearing is scheduled an unbelievable 114 years from now — in March 2134.

Why is Fuster alone still in prison when the dozens of other victims of the daycare hysteria were all released, most of them long ago?  That includes— just to cite a sample — the Edenton 7 in North Carolina, whose plight was brilliantly set forth by Ofra Bikel on PBS; the Amiraults in Massachusetts, for whose defense, in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz won a Pulitzer; Kelly Michaels, the young aspiring actress sentenced to 47 years for supposedly sexually molesting virtually all the three- to five-year-old children at Wee Care Day Nursery in New Jersey; and the 43 adults charged with close to 30,000 crimes against young children in Wenatchee, Washington.  Sometimes justice was wickedly slow, as in the case of Fran and Dan Keller, who served 21 years in prison before they were finally released in 2013 and their conviction set aside.  The couple, who ran a daycare center out of their Texas home, had each been sentenced to 48 years on absurd testimony that included accusations that they had drowned and dismembered babies in front of other children, transported the children to Mexico to be sexually abused by soldiers in the Mexican army, dressed as pumpkins and shot children in the arms and legs, and so on.