NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ron DeSantis Was Right about Monoclonal-Antibody Therapy By Charles C. W. Cooke

Posted By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/ron-desantis-was-right-about-monoclonal-antibody-therapy/

Florida’s governor was blasted by progressives for promoting Regeneron’s COVID treatment. Now, demand is so great the Biden administration is rationing it.

T wo months ago, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida was being roundly castigated for promoting the use of Regeneron’s monoclonal-antibody treatment as part of his state’s efforts to fight COVID-19. Desperate to find something sinister in the push, DeSantis’s critics threw out every charge they could dream up. At first, the line was that Regeneron’s treatment didn’t work. Then, it was that Regeneron’s treatment worked fine, but represented a dangerous distraction from the vaccine. And, finally, it was that Regeneron’s treatment was part of a corrupt plot to enrich DeSantis’s donors.

Today, we learn from the Washington Post that, actually, none of that was the problem. Instead, DeSantis’s sin is that he has been relying upon monoclonal-antibody treatment too much, and that this is unfair to other states that now need it.

What a difference eight weeks make.

The Post informs us that the Biden administration has been so impressed by the impact that Regeneron’s treatment has made that it is now seeking to “stave off shortages” of the drug by “purchasing 1.4 million additional doses” and tasking the Department of Health and Human Services with setting “the rules for distribution . . . instead of allowing states, medical facilities and doctors to order them directly.” In explaining this move, the Post submits that “soaring demand for the therapy represents a sharp turn from just two months ago, when monoclonal antibodies were widely available and awareness of them was low” — which . . . is certainly one way of admitting that the same people who relentlessly condemned DeSantis for trying to raise that “awareness” “just two months ago” are today coming around to his point of view.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Milley’s checkered history: China, Afghanistan withdrawal, and CRT by Sarah Westwood

Posted By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/milley-checkered-history-china-afghan-withdrawal-crt

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley faces intense scrutiny for phone calls he made to his Chinese counterparts about then-President Donald Trump. But it’s far from the first time Milley’s actions have sparked accusations of politicizing his role.

The pair of phone calls between Milley and Chinese defense officials emerged from a forthcoming book about the end of the Trump presidency. According to the book, Milley called the Chinese once in October 2020 to assure them the United States would not attack them and again in January 2021 to offer the same assurances. He also promised to give them a secret heads-up if Trump planned to launch an attack.

A spokesperson for Milley said Wednesday the phone calls, which the Pentagon did not deny, were part of the chairman’s regular “duties and responsibilities conveying reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability.”

Amid the demands for Milley’s termination, President Joe Biden said Wednesday he has “great confidence” in his top military adviser.

Republicans have demanded answers whether Milley circumvented the chain of command by communicating Pentagon plans to the Chinese without the president’s knowledge.

Critical race theory defense

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Reason to Fear a Vaccine Mandate David Solway

Posted By on September 16th, 2021

One does not wish to join the pandemic of viral fear whipped up by our political leaders, collusive medical “experts,” and the grossly irresponsible and programmatically ignorant media conglomerate. And yet, there is good reason to fear being inscribed in the category of “the unvaccinated”—the New Jews at risk of disenfranchisement and worse in the increasingly fascist temper of the times.
 

From my perspective, this is not a frivolous analogy. Growing up Jewish in a small town in the north of Quebec under the sway of an ultramontane clergy, I know what it is to be publicly mocked, prohibited as an undesirable from entering certain local establishments, and fighting my way out of ambushes when walking to school. I am familiar with epithets like maudit Juif (damned Jew), which I heard so frequently that for some time I thought it was one word, mauditjuif—which in effect it was.

Now, as a member of the tribe of the unvaccinated, I sense once again that primal fear of exclusion and imminent violence. As I wrote in an earlier article for PJ Media, my wife and I are under virtual house arrest, prevented from crossing our provincial borders, forbidden to attend a wide range of public activities and venues, including movie theaters, plays, sporting events, gyms, swimming pools, night clubs, concerts, conferences, and university seminars, or to dine in restaurants. I am back in the Quebec of my youth. We are still permitted to walk abroad and to visit the supermarket (masked), but how long these sparse exemptions will last is an open question.

Public intellectual and author Charles Eisenstein has written an extraordinary essay, Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed, in which he anatomizes the ancient narrative of blood libel, of removing pollution from the body social. “There can be little doubt,” he writes, “that some kind of totalitarian program is well underway,” shrewdly conscripting a public that wishes above everything to belong to a pervasive consensus while consigning a portion of the population to a social leprosarium.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A pandemic of the incompetent, not the unvaccinated Maker S. Mark

Posted By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/a_pandemic_of_the_incompetent_not_the_unvaccinated.html

Mr. Biden and other liberals are very upset with the unvaccinated.  They’ve laid the blame, with the claim that this is “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

I call BS.  This is a “pandemic of the incompetent.”

First, the CDC and NIH watched the virus ravage China and did nothing.

Next, they told President Trump that it was xenophobic to stop travel from China.

Next, they told us the virus was not transmitting human to human.

Next, they changed, without reasoning, the reporting requirements for potential deaths associated with the virus to guarantee a higher death total in the U.S.

Next, they misrepresented the data for the projected death toll in America with a completely incorrect model.

Next, they told us to shut down the country for two weeks to slow the spread.

Next, they told us a vaccine in less than a year was impossible.

Next, they pushed mask mandates with no science to back them up.  Excuse me — the high point on masking science is the study out of Hong Kong on hamsters that seems to have been the basis for the start of masking science.

Next, they supported crazy items like mandatory masking outdoors, no swimming in public pools, and wearing a mask in your own home.

Next, they continued to keep businesses closed past the two-month mark, and they fail to provide evidence that closing any business helped slow the spread.

Next, they started paying people extra unemployment benefits while removing all incentives to look for work.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Lawfare: ‘A Cynical Manipulation of the Rule of Law’ * Alex Grobman, PhD

Posted By on September 16th, 2021

https://jewishlink.news/features/46007-lawfare-a-cynical-manipulation-of-the-rule-of-law

Having failed to destroy Israel militarily, economically and through terrorism, the Palestinian Arabs have restored to using “political warfare and legal warfare,” said former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. “Today the trenches are in Geneva in the Council of Human Rights, or in New York in the General Assembly, or in the Security Council, or in The Hague, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to damage our foreign relations with other nations.”

Lawfare is a weapon in the political war used by NGOs to delegitimize the Jewish state, demonize her leaders and limit the dissemination of public information about radical Islam. Israel’s enemies exploit U.S. and European courts by initiating civil lawsuits and criminal investigations to thwart Israel’s ability to fight terror by accusing her of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity,” he affirmed.

Captured Al-Qaeda terrorists were ordered to file spurious claims of being abused and tortured in order for the media, the public and the courts to see them as the true victims. As attorney Brooke Goldstein, director of the Lawfare Project maintains, “The object is as much to win a public relations victory as a court case.” This has not stopped them from overtly ignoring basic human rights when they brainwash children to become homicide bombers or use them as human shields.

Anne Herzberg, legal adviser for NGO Monitor, points out the prominent role NGOs have assumed in this process, due to their resources and mostly unrestrained power. Political scientist James McGann explains: “NGOs or civil society organizations (CSOs) have moved from backstage to center stage in world politics and are exerting their power and influence in every aspect of international relations and policymaking … ”

Furthermore, NGOs are “not neutral on issues of policy formation.” This “dual role of providing information and acting as an agent of political pressure on the government, leading to potential conflicts of interest.” This becomes important with regards to the expansion of “universal jurisdiction” and the establishment of international legal institutions.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

What Progressives Wrought A concise new volume will help Americans make sense of the stark divisions that confront us. Mike Sabo

Posted By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/review-of-america-transformed-by-ronald-j-pestritto

America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism, by Ronald J. Pestritto (Encounter Books, 288 pp., $28.99)

It is no secret that American public life is fracturing. The fissures can be seen in our gladiatorial-like Supreme Court nomination hearings, the collapse of confidence in our institutions, and the mounting sense that many have that elections won’t change the country’s fundamental trajectory. These disputes are merely symptoms, however, of a broader problem, the roots of which extend back decades.

As Ronald J. Pestritto, graduate dean and professor of politics at Hillsdale College, argues in America Transformed, our present-day clashes reflect a fundamental “divide over first principles,” which he traces to the rise of the Progressive Movement in the late nineteenth century. Pestritto makes a convincing case that the Progressives—including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, and John Dewey—sought to “revolutionize both the theory and practice of American government.”

The Progressives had their differences and factions: consider the fierce 1912 presidential campaign between Wilson and Roosevelt. Yet they adhered to a “coherent set of principles, with a common purpose.” They unleashed a “direct assault on the core ideas of the American founding,” openly rejecting the natural rights teachings of the Declaration of Independence. Wilson once told an audience that “if you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface”—the same preface that contains the most concise articulation of the Founders’ political theory.

Pestritto argues that, for progressives like education reformer Dewey, the Founders’ “great sin” was to think that principles such as a natural human equality in rights and government by consent transcended “the particular circumstances of that day.” Influenced by Hegel’s philosophical idealism, they argued that historical progress had shown that what the Founders thought were universal truths were in fact simply ideas of their time. In fact, the principles of the American Founding, and the Constitution built to reflect them, actively prevented government from taking the swift action that the public now demanded.

Pestritto suggests that “native influences” had already compromised the American immune system by the time the Progressive Movement emerged. A toxic mix of Social Darwinism, pragmatism, and the rejection of social compact theory in New England and the antebellum South prepared American intellectuals and politicians to accept an alternative account of politics that seemed better able to meet the challenges of modern society. The Progressives claimed that historical progress necessitated a dynamic and perfectible human nature, an idea that the Founders rejected. James Madison’s claim in Federalist 10 that the prevention of majority tyranny would always be a problem in political life was simply false, they believed. Thus Woodrow Wilson and political scientist Frank Goodnow sharply criticized the Constitution’s separation of powers and the slow, methodical lawmaking process the Framers had put in place, which they saw as hopelessly out of step with the public will and too often stymied by a combination of political machines, big business, and other special interests.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UK: Record Number of Migrants Crossing English Channel by Soeren Kern

Posted By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17754/britain-migrants-english-channel

More than 14,500 migrants have crossed the Channel in around 600 small boats so far in 2021, surpassing the 8,713 arrivals (in 650 boats) during all of 2020, according to Migration Watch, which notes that the actual number of arrivals is probably far higher than what has been recorded in official statistics. Since the beginning of 2021, not a single migrant has been deported to the safe European countries they traveled through.

“The incentives are skewed so that they encourage, rather than discourage, illegal (and dangerous) trips that often lead to asylum abuse.” — Migration Watch UK.

“They want to go to England because they can expect better conditions on arrival there than anywhere else in Europe or even internationally. There are no ID cards. They can easily find work outside the formal economy, which is not really controlled.” — Mayor of Calais Natacha Bouchart.

“Both traffickers and migrants know that ‘no civilized country can allow people to drown at sea’; this is why people get on overcrowded vessels. ‘And this is why Britain is about to be plunged into a similar crisis to the one Italy faced three years ago, albeit on a reduced scale.'” — British news magazine, The Week, quoting James Forsyth in The Times.

“Instead of the United Kingdom being able to choose the children and families most in need, illegal immigration instead allows those who pay people smugglers, or who are strong, to push their way to the front of the queue…. Our legal system needs reform. It is open to abuse.” — Immigration Control Minister Chris Philip.

“First it was a few, then hundreds, and now 1,000 in a day, the French just waving them through with a cheery ‘Bon Voyage.’ If the French won’t stop the small boats then we need to by turning them back, making returns and taking firm control of our borders.” — Natalie Elphicke, Conservative MP for Dover.

Nearly a thousand migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East have attempted to cross the English Channel on small boats in just one day to illegally get into the United Kingdom. The record-breaking surge in illegal crossings is being facilitated by warm weather and calm seas.

The British government is struggling to stop the crossings — partly because of its need for cooperation from France. British authorities have repeatedly accused their French counterparts of not doing enough to stop small boats from leaving French territorial waters.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Deep Politics of Vaccine Mandates Charles Lipson

Posted By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/09/15/the_deep_politics_of_vaccine_mandates_146408.html

The debate over President Biden’s vaccine mandates has focused, understandably, on the tradeoff between individual rights to make medical choices and the potential harm the unvaccinated pose to others. That tradeoff is unavoidable. It is simply wrong for Biden to say, “It’s not about freedom.” It is. It is equally wrong for some Republican governors to say it is all about freedom. It’s also about the external effects of each person’s choice. To pretend that tradeoff doesn’t exist is demagoguery. But then, so is most American politics these days.

What’s missing or underappreciated in this debate?

The most important thing is that the Biden administration’s “mandate approach” is standard-issue progressivism. The pushback is equally standard. The mandates exemplify a dispute that has been at the heart of American politics for over a century, ever since Woodrow Wilson formulated it as a professor and then president. That agenda emphasizes deference to

Experts, not elected politicians,
Rational bureaucratic procedures,
Centralized power in the nation’s capital, not in the federal states, and
A modern, “living constitution,” which replaces the “old” Constitution of 1787 and severs the restraints it imposed on government power.

Implemented over several decades, this progressive agenda has gradually become a fait accompli, without ever formally amending the Constitution. The bureaucracies began their massive growth after World War II and especially after Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives of the mid-1960s (continued, with equal vigor, by Richard Nixon).

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Bad News for Human Rights by Judith Bergman

Posted By on September 16th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17735/china-belt-road-human-rights

Findings about BRI’s negative impact on human rights in Cambodia and Guinea raise the much wider issue of how China’s Belt and Road Initiative affects human rights worldwide. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, around 139 countries — more than half the countries in the world — have now joined BRI.

China has also invested in multiple large-scale BRI projects in Iran, which has reportedly been leasing out its territorial waters in the Persian Gulf to Chinese industrial ships for more than a decade. This arrangement has led to a situation… where Chinese fishing vessels are “illegally cleaning out fish resources in the Persian Gulf” while “Iranian fishermen are forced to pay ten thousand dollars in bribes to Somalian pirates to let them fish on the African shores”.

Such a compromise of locals’ food-and-income security is a measure of China’s influence in the country — and a practice coupled with the Iranian government’s disregard for the living conditions of its own citizens. Scant regard for human rights is presumably also one of the reasons why China prefers to deal with autocratic regimes.

A new report, “Underwater: Human Rights Impacts of a China Belt and Road Project in Cambodia,” has found that one of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in Cambodia — a hydroelectric dam known as the Lower Sesan 2, completed in 2018 — resulted in severe human rights violations. The project displaced nearly 5,000 mainly indigenous people and ethnic minorities, who had lived in villages along the Sesan and Srepok Rivers for generations, earning a living from fishing and agriculture. The project, the report estimates, negatively affected the lives of tens of thousands of other locals, who depend on fishing in the rivers for food and income. The project compromised locals’ food security, and their losses were either inadequately compensated or not compensated at all. The Lower Sesan 2 is just one out of seven BRI hydroelectric projects in Cambodia.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Science,’ They Said Science is dying; superstition disguised as morality is returning. And we all will soon become poorer, angrier and more divided.  By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 16th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/15/science-they-said/

The scientific method used to govern much of popular American thinking. 

In empirical fashion scientists advised us to examine evidence and data, and then by induction come to rational hypotheses. The enemies of “science” were politics, superstition, bias, and deduction. 

Yet we are now returning to our version of medieval alchemy and astrology in rejecting a millennium of the scientific method.  

Take the superstitions that now surround COVID-19. 

We now know from data that a prior case of COVID offers immunity as robust as vaccination—if not better. 

Why then are Joe Biden’s various proposed vaccination mandates ignoring that scientific fact? Dr. Anthony Fauci, when asked, seemed at a loss for words. 

Is this yet another of the scientific community’s Platonic “noble lies,” as when last year Fauci assured the public there was no need for masks? He later claimed he had lied so that medical professionals would not run out of needed supplies. 

Fauci also seemed to throw out all sorts of mythical percentages needed for herd immunity, apparently in an attempt to convince the public that it will never be safe until every American is protected from COVID by vaccination only.

And why was it that hard for the scientific community to postulate a likely origin of COVID-19? 

Instead, some of the very scientists engaged in gain of function research oversaw an investigation with Chinese authorities. They all confirmed the predetermined conclusion that the virus likely had little to do with gain of function engineering. And they saw little proof it was birthed in the Wuhan virology lab. 

Yet the preponderance of scientific opinion, emerging data and evidence, and basic logic have suggested just the opposite.  

How can the government hector citizens that they have a moral duty and soon a legal obligation to be vaccinated, when it does not ask vaccinations of unvetted refugees flying in from Afghanistan?