Served Its Purpose? CDC and FDA Recall Faulty COVID PCR Test By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/served_its_purpose_cdc_and_fda_recall_faulty_covid_pcr_test.html

The FDA recalled a faulty COVID test that provided both false-negative and false-positive results, each problematic in different ways.

Last week, big media was salivating over the COVID Delta variant and recommendations for indoor masking, even for the vaccinated, masking young children, and the possibility of a return to last year, with social distancing, capacity limits, and business closures.

There were also news stories that the media dutifully ignored, like ongoing election audits, Hunter Biden’s laptop, his father’s growing inability to think and speak coherently, and growing inflation and unemployment.

Also somehow missed by the investigative sleuths at CNN and MSNBC was the recall of a COVID rapid antigen test last month. This wasn’t just any recall but according to the FDA a serious one, “The FDA has identified this as a Class I recall, the most serious type of recall. Use of these devices may cause serious injuries or death.” That’s an understatement.

Specifically, this is the Innova SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Rapid Qualitative Test using a nasal swab and test strip, with a colored line appearing if the person has the Chinese coronavirus. None of these tests are FDA-approved, only being used under emergency use authorization, like the COVID vaccines.

Who used these tests? According to the FDA, these were used by health care providers and large testing programs such as on college campuses. The faulty test provided both false-negative and false-positive results, each problematic but in different ways.

The Incredible Lightness of Ibram X. Kendi’s ‘Anti-Racism’ By Rich Lowry He, too, is a racist according to his stupidly reductive premises. Rich Lowry

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/the-incredible-lightness-of-ibram-x-kendis-anti-racism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

E zra Klein of the New York Times doesn’t usually do brutal takedowns on his podcasts, but his conversation with “anti-racism” guru Ibram X. Kendi is an exception.

Rarely has a sympathetic interview, or at least an overtly friendly interview, done more to expose the shallowness and bankruptcy of the interviewee’s worldview.

Kendi, who has become an industry unto himself, famously contends that any policy that creates a racial inequity, no matter what the intentions, is racism. This is a sophomoric and indefensible view that Klein punctures with a series of “how is this supposed to work?” questions.

The crux of the conversation is an exchange about crime and policing, a topic that would seem relatively simple — let’s get good, robust policing to make black neighborhoods safer — but that presents insuperable problems for Kendi given the absurdity of his premises.

Klein asks Kendi whether support for defunding the police would be an anti-racist policy.

Kendi tries to get around the question. He says that some people have believed that the cause of crime in black neighbors is black people — “it’s their culture, it’s their behavior.” According to his hostile caricature, this is why people believe that “you need police, well-funded police, who can basically control those animals because they’re the cause of crime.”

Joe Manchin Just Blew Up Rationale for Republicans to Cut an Infrastructure Deal By Philip Klein

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-manchin-just-blew-up-rationale-for-republicans-to-cut-an-infrastructure-deal/

I’ve repeatedly written about how ridiculous and counterproductive it is for a group of Republicans to be negotiating a bipartisan deal on infrastructure with a Democratic Party that is racing to spend $4.1 trillion. But one argument that defenders of the negotiations have been making to conservatives is that if Republicans agree on a bipartisan deal, moderates such as Senator Joe Manchin will be more likely to oppose the larger Democrats-only $3.5 trillion bill crammed with liberal priorities. But now even that flimsy argument has blown up.

CNN’s Manu Raju reports the following on Manchin pushing for bipartisan talks to continue:

Get that? “If the bipartisan infrastructure bill falls apart, everything falls apart”

Far from supporting the theory that a bipartisan deal would dissuade Manchin from supporting the bigger bill, Manchin is making it clear that he thinks agreeing to a bipartisan deal is a critical part of passing the combined spending package. Were it to fall apart, instead of breaking the massive agenda into several smaller parts that may be digestible, moderates will have to consider swallowing a massive $4.1 trillion bill. Additionally, the process would no longer have any bipartisan cover.

Another Scheme To Enlarge An Already Bloated Federal Government

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/27/another-scheme-to-enlarge-an-already-bloated-federal-government/

If Democrats have their way, America will eventually form a Civilian Climate Corps that will hire and train people to save Earth from overheating. It’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from the party that is obsessed with being an unchallengeable ruling class rather than a participant in our republican style of government.

Last week, House and Senate Democrats celebrated “the newfound momentum behind establishing a formal successor to the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal-era initiative that put people to work building parks, paving roads and planting trees,” E&E News reported.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, promised to use the “power” of his position “to ensure that the Civilian Climate Corps will be included in the reconciliation package, and I will fight to get the biggest boldest CCC possible.”

As usual, the Democrats are having a mind-racing fever dream. In this one they are consumed by visions of spending billions of dollars that aren’t theirs, and sending out swarms of climate zealots to harass, lecture, and hector Americans over their use of fossil fuels. They’re likely seeing themselves solidifying a voter bloc so grateful for the party’s largess, and so indoctrinated by its growing socialist ideology, that it will help elect Democrats for generations. Never underestimate how power hungry the party is, nor how determined the progressive wing that’s driving its agenda is to transform the U.S. by perpetually adding layers of government control.

Simply put, the Democrats are looking to equip 1.5 million shock troops to enforce the Green New Deal.

Climate Corps advocates believe their agenda has a built-in appeal because it’s pulled right from the heart of the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps. But rather than establishing credibility, a comparison with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s governing should alert Americans to its inherent flaws. The New Deal was not a savior from the Great Depression but instead a constant piling up of government programs and private-sector interventions that extended the misery.

Communist China’s New Plan: Digital Currency by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17487/china-digital-currency

The real purpose of the new digital currency… seems to be… to challenge the long-standing global reign of the US dollar.

The new digital currency is part of the CCP’s ambition, as laid out in its new Five-Year Plan for the years 2021-2025, to digitalize China. The digitalization, in turn, is part of China’s ambition to become technologically independent of the West and to dominate global tech, and overtake the US as the world’s dominant power by 2049,” the 100th anniversary of China’s Communist Revolution.

Crucially, China’s new digital currency, in addition to increasing state control and surveillance in China.. .could affect the ability of the US, and other countries, to level sanctions at the Chinese government for its human rights abuses and other breaches of international law.

The US, on its part, does not appear ready for China’s challenge over the future of money.

“Not only are the American monetary authorities underestimating the threat posed to dollar dominance by China’s pioneering combination of digital currency and electronic payments. They are also treating the blockchain-based financial innovations that offer the best alternative to China’s e-yuan like gatecrashers at their own exclusive party.” — Niall Ferguson, historian, Bloomberg, April 4, 2021.

Communist China is adding another element to its toolbox of surveilling and controlling its population. Already known as the country in the world with the most pervasive surveillance and social credit system, China has now created a digital currency, the digital renminbi or yuan — also known as Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) — to ensure that hardly any transaction goes unregistered.

Unlike cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, which are not issued by governments and therefore cannot be used as means of payment in most daily transactions, China’s digital currency is issued and controlled by China’s central bank.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the currency “is expected to give China’s government vast new tools to monitor both its economy and its people. By design, the digital yuan will negate one of bitcoin’s major draws: anonymity for the user.”

“DCEP is the antithesis of Bitcoin. The ultimate goal of a cryptocurrency is the separation of money and state,” said Stewart Mackenzie, a cryptocurrency expert based in Hong Kong. “It’s easy for them to say that it’s like Bitcoin when it’s worlds apart.”

Can a Bangladeshi Visit Israel Now? by Mohshin Habib

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17580/bangladesh-passport-israel

Whatever the public perception and the explanations by cabinet members are regarding the passport issue, the government of Bangladesh has taken a big step forward by removing the clause. At least, from now on, the state will not be able to prosecute someone for visiting Israel. As an extra benefit, the country’s declared foreign policy of “friendship to all and malice towards none” will be more meaningful as well.

Recently, the government of Bangladesh dropped the infamous phrase “this passport is valid for all countries of the world except Israel” from its new passports. Those words had been prominently inscribed since the country’s independence from Pakistan in 1971. Six months ago, when Bangladeshi government introduced a new machine-readable passport with an electronic chip, the “except Israel” clause was quietly erased with no public announcement. The change was, in a sense, classified.

In early May, a man went to the passport department headquarters to collect the passports of his mother and brother, when he noticed that the clause had been omitted. Through social media, the news went viral. Now it has become a national issue of debate.

Having been informed of the news, the deputy Director-General for Asia and the Pacific with the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Gilad Cohen, joyfully tweeted: “Great news! #Bangladesh has removed travel ban to Israel. This is a welcome step & I call on the Bangladeshi government to move forward and establish diplomatic ties with #Israel so both our peoples could benefit & prosper.” The reactionary comments to his tweet from Muslims are notable.

The Jerusalem Post wrote: “Bangladesh has reportedly lifted its travel ban in an unexpected move….” In Bangladesh, however, several cabinet members, especially the home minister and the foreign minister, apparently felt pressure. The reaction had been enormous.

On May 30, the Islamic Movement Bangladesh, a religious party, demanded reinstatement of the clause and a judicial investigation against “the culprits involved in the misdeed”. The leftist parties’ alliance of Bangladesh insisted on revoking the decision. The Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to Dhaka, Yousef Ramadan, told local media that he was “saddened” by Bangladesh’s move not to single out Israel in its passport.

China’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere The current Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere is as dangerous—but also as vulnerable—as its failed Japanese predecessor. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/25/chinas-greater-east-asia-co-prosperity-sphere/

Stonewalling investigations into the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan? A hundred new hardened intercontinental nuclear missiles silos? Dressing down U.S. diplomats on purported American racism? 

Braggadocio about nuking non-nuclear and once-nuked Japan, if need be? Winks and nods that Taiwan will soon be Hong-Kongized?  

Hacking into Western institutions?  

No apologies for lying about the origins, nature, and transmissibility of the gain-of-function, virology-lab-engineered Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 virus? Or rather, an attitude of maybe/maybe not the virus leaked from a military-related lab, “So what are you going to do about it—this time or next”? 

Recently China has sought to ramp up its now accustomed bullying and intimidation of the Western world, still reeling from a Chinese-born coronavirus.  

Yet its new global badgering is as much predicated on its potential as it is on its actual power, at least in classical terms of a global hegemon. Even in our postmodern electronic age, the real stuff of an ascendant civilization remains constitutional stability, fuel, food, economic strength, defense, strategic security, and education. In all those areas, is China really on course to overtake us?

Beneath the Veneer of Strength 

A good indicator of the demographic advantage of large nations is not absolute numbers (otherwise India and China would have been sharing world power decades ago) but median age. Even in our increasing era of shrinking Western families, by 2050 the median age in America will be 44 years, but 56 in China. Indeed, China may already have 150 million residents over 65, nearly half the current population of the United States—at the very time the Chinese family is becoming Westernized, and the elderly increasingly dependent on the state. 

There are currently more smokers in China than there are people in the United States. And Beijing is on a collision course with all sorts of costly expenditures for a population that might be characterized as excessively elderly and unhealthy, and yet never more expectant of quality state health and long-term care.  

China’s population density is almost five times greater than that of the United States, in a country in which the effects on its cramped population from natural and man-made disasters—floods, draughts, earthquakes, unclean air, industrial waste, and polluted water—resemble more an early 20th-century than a 21st-century nation.  

Cleveland’s Baseball Team Dishonors the Indian It Was Named For One of the most idiotic of the Left’s assumptions is that sports team nicknames are intended to insult and demean. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/clevelands-baseball-team-dishonors-indian-it-was-robert-spencer/

Many, many years ago, long before any of you who are reading this were born, and long, long before Major League Baseball went woke, pulled the All-Star Game out of Atlanta for not toeing the Left’s line, and made race-baiting Communist agitprop a permanent feature of its website, I learned about a man named Louis Sockalexis. Sockalexis, a great baseball name if there ever was one (later announcers would have loved to report about how he “socked” one into the stands), is largely forgotten today, although he has made a few headlines in the last few days because the Cleveland Indians, a team that bore that name in his honor, has now dishonored him by changing its nickname, so as not to insult Indians. Yes, friends, it’s a topsy-turvy world, and it isn’t getting any saner.

Have you heard of Louis Sockalexis? Some of our great-grandfathers marveled at his feats. He was a Penobscot Indian from Maine who became a major league player in 1897, hitting .338 in 66 games for the old National League Cleveland Spiders. He generated a great deal of fan enthusiasm, but indifferent to or unable to overcome stereotypes, he succumbed to alcoholism and had washed out of the major leagues by 1899. The Spiders amassed the eye-watering record of twenty wins and 134 losses that year, and went out of business right after the season’s end, opening up an opportunity in 1901 for the new American League. It was not until 1915, however, that Cleveland’s American League team began calling itself the Indians in honor of Sockalexis. He hadn’t played in the major leagues in a decade and a half, but was newly recalled to fans when he died an untimely death from tuberculosis in 1913. The Society for American Baseball Research notes that in January 1915, Cleveland team owner Charles Somers, “perhaps recalling the all-too-brief period of excitement that Louis Sockalexis had brought to Cleveland in 1897, dubbed his team the Indians.”

And so Indians they were for 106 years, but when the 2022 season starts (if major league baseball hasn’t succumbed entirely to wokeness by then and decided to dispense with actually playing the games and instead award wins and losses on the number of players of color minus the number of Trump supporters), the Cleveland baseball team will be calling itself the “Guardians,” after a couple of statues on a nearby highway bridge. The statues are known as the Guardians of Traffic. If Cleveland’s baseball solons were so determined to rename the team after traffic markers, given their abject capitulation to wokeness, they should have gone with the Cleveland Yield Signs.

In any case, so much for Louis Sockalexis: he goes the way of Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and any and all non-white mascots and trademarks. But it is just another manifestation of our Age of Absurdity that anyone would think that team nicknames were designed to demean and insult, instead of honor, the person or thing from which the name is derived. Does Cleveland’s baseball team hate Cleveland’s Guardians of Traffic that have now replaced Sockalexis? Of course not. And the idea that they do is just as absurd as the claim that the old name degraded Native Americans.

Yet the claim is, of course, commonplace. Crystal Echo Hawk, executive director of a group called IllumiNative, which claims to be dedicated to fighting misrepresentations of Native Americans, hailed the name change: “It is a major step toward righting the wrongs committed against Native peoples and is one step toward justice.”

Teaching School Children the Evil of Whiteness School books that promote a hatred of white people and police. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/teaching-school-children-evil-whiteness-richard-l-cravatts/

In a 1963 interview with Louis Lomax, Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X, commenting on white people, said that “The white devil’s time is up . . ,” and that “Anybody who rapes, and plunders, and enslaves, and steals, and drops hell bombs on people . . . anybody who does these things is nothing but a devil.” NOI’s Louis Farrakhan has often repeated the same slur about white people being satanic, and such language has long been part of the organization’s radical, anti-white discourse and ideology.

What is surprising, however, is that this same view—of whiteness being linked to the devil in a satanic pact through which white people are given supremacy, power, and wealth—has made its way into a children’s book used in school districts all over the country.

Written by a white woman, Anastasia Higginbotham, Not my Idea: A Book About Whiteness (Ordinary Terrible Things), at first appears to be an innocuous picture book about race, but its not-so-subtle “anti-whiteness” message is part of the race indoctrination being promoted in public schools as part of critical race theory (CRT) and the ideology which teaches children that white people are irredeemable racist oppressors and blacks are perpetual victims of that oppressive white supremacy and racism. Not My Idea tells the story of a white family in which the white parents shelter their child from the reality of police violence against black people, the suggestion being that white people turn a blind eye to this form of racial injustice and, in not standing up against it and teaching their children to do so also, they are complicit in that injustice and in perpetuating white supremacy.

Higginbotham (pictured above) clearly was inspired by her self-loathing at being white and presents her assumptions as facts for the young readers in her book. “Whiteness is the reason these killings by police happen,” she said in an interview, “the white cultural mindset that tells us white is good and innocent, while Black is bad and dangerous.”

She also has apparently bought into the false and dangerous view, promoted most notably by the Black Lives Matter movement, that white police officers frequently and maliciously kill unarmed black people because of systemic and prevalent racism, a belief, however, that is not actually supported by facts or reality. “Whiteness is the reason cops make split-second decisions to fire their weapons into the body of an unarmed person who is Black,” Higginbotham suggested, “while not even reaching for their weapon during interactions with armed and violent criminals who are white.”

CRT clearly has as its guiding intention to change what Higginbotham referred to as “the white cultural mindset that tells us white is good and innocent, while Black is bad and dangerous.” In fact, CRT and books like this one have as their express purpose to flip this paradigm on its head, so that children are now being indoctrinated with the idea that whiteness is essentially bad, negative, oppressive, cruel, and racist, and that blackness, because of its victim status and as a result of its oppression, is virtuous and innocent. CRT does not teach tolerance by urging school children to be kind to each other and treat each other as equals, which it purports to do, but instead elevates blackness by degrading whiteness, making white people seem to be regressive, intolerant, hateful, and perennially racist as part of their very nature. Thus, CRT is condemned by its critics for branding white children in this way while at the same time telegraphing to black children that they are perpetual victims in a society dominated by whites who are morally defective as a result of their racist core.

RACIST ANTIRACISM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IS BACK Because to be black is to be poor. And the SAT is un-black. And because black people are “holistic.” You know. John McWhorter

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/racist-antiracism-at-the-university?token=

When I taught at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, it was an open secret that there was a two-tier undergraduate student body. Namely, black and Latino students tended to be considerably less prepared for the workload than white and Asian students.

No one talked about it openly, but plenty attested to it when they were sure the wall didn’t have ears, and to notice it was not racist – it was simple fact. Of course there were weak white and Asian students; of course there were excellent black and Latino students. But a tendency was unmistakable. It was painfully obvious that brown students were admitted according to very different standards than white and Asian ones.

Proposition 209 barred racial preferences of that kind in the UC system as of 1998, and of course, fewer brown students were admitted to the flagship schools Berkeley and UCLA after that. There were still plenty of brown students – the “resegregation” so many furiously predicted never happened. But not as many as before. And there has remained, for almost a quarter century now, a contingent who have never gotten over thinking UC would be better by going back to the way it was.

First there was the addition of a “hardship” bonus to the admissions procedure, with standards relaxed for applicants who could attest to having faced obstacles to achievement such as the death of a parent or serious illness. Formally this was supposed to apply to kids of all races. But immediately evaluators started weighting black and Latino hardship heavier than that suffered by white and Asian kids, as in rejecting an Asian applicant who had gone through the same kinds of hardship as a Latino one who was admitted.

I criticized this in the media, and will never forget when the suits assigned a kind, academically accomplished administrator to take me to lunch to “talk to me.” The poor man did his duty and … sat there lying to me. I genuinely felt sorry for him. But this showed how impenetrably committed to antiracism – or at least what they think is antiracism – these admissions officials are.

But even this kind of thing hasn’t been able to return Berkeley and UCLA to the good old days of having a “representative” number of brown students (apparently “representative” means in lockstep with their proportion of the state population). The problem is that pesky SAT, and at last, UC has gotten rid of it. The SAT will no longer be used to evaluate students for admission or even for scholarships.

A lot of people must have clinked their glasses of Pinot over this. But what they’ve done is not antiracist at all.