NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fauci’s COVID-19 Folly By David Archibald

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/faucis_covid19_folly.html

According to Australian researchers, the Wuhan COVID-19 virus likely is artificial, created in the lab — in China. According to Chinese virologist Li Meng Yan, it was intentionally created and spread by the Chinese government.  

Let’s start from the beginning, the physical construction of the place where the virus was created, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was funded by the French government in 2004 in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese communist dictatorship. Upon completion, the Chinese let only one French national into the building. What went on in that building was solely the work of the Chinese state.

As that was going on, events that led to the making of the virus occurred in the West. Those started decades before with the founding of The Wildlife Trust in 1971 by English wildlife lover Gerald Durrell.

Its headquarters eventually moved to New York. Then in 1997, the Wildlife Trust spun out The Consortium for Conservation Medicine. This organization has been described as a “unique collaborative institution that strives to understand the link between anthropogenic environmental change, the health of all species, and the conservation of biodiversity.” In other words, it is a spiritual home for health academics worried about global warming.

The Wildlife Trust and the Consortium for Conservation Medicine merged in 2010 to form the EcoHealth Alliance. One benefit from the name change was to enable government health bodies to give it money.

Dr. Anthony Fauci and his offsider at the National Institutes of Health, David Morens, have been publishing papers like this one since 2004.  In that paper they list ‘Intent to harm’ as a contributing factor in the emergence of infectious diseases. 

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump’s Middle East Metamorphosis Arab leaders fear a President Biden may spurn Israel and cozy up to Turkey and Iran. By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-middle-east-metamorphosis-11603148243?mod=opinion_major_pos7

George W. Bush and Barack Obama both tried to transform the Middle East. Neither found the kind of success he sought.

But as the U.S. has reduced its regional footprint and ambitions, the Middle East has begun to change on its own. One of the most recent signs of its metamorphosis was Saudi Prince Bandar’s blistering criticism of Palestinian leaders for their decades of poor decision-making. His words are underscored by his kingdom’s decision to open its airspace to commercial flights from Tel Aviv to Dubai. Taken with the United Arab Emirates shifting from not recognizing the Jewish state to building a warm peace and economic partnerships with Israel, it’s clear the region is moving away from the predictable sterility of the past toward something genuinely new.

In the new Middle East, the younger generation is turning its back on religious radicalism, and Arab public opinion is moving to accept the presence of a Jewish state. The Palestinians have lost their position at the center of Middle East politics, and it is Turkey and Iran, not Israel, that Arab rulers are most concerned to oppose.

Last week I asked U.A.E. Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba to explain what was happening, and the first thing he did was point me to recent polls by the Zogby organization and 12th annual ASDA’A BCW Arab Youth Survey, which interviewed 4,000 young Arabs (18 to 24) in 17 countries.

President Trump’s peace plan, which many longtime Middle East experts dismissed as a ghastly blunder that would destroy the American role in Middle East peace negotiations, has turned out to be relatively popular on the Arab street. The Zogby survey found majorities in favor of the “Deal of the Century” in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

A Debate Downgrade for Foreign Policy The candidates will have 15 minutes to talk about a dangerous world.*****

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-debate-downgrade-for-foreign-policy-11603236203?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The 2020 presidential election won’t be remembered for its lucid debate and elevated discourse. The candidates themselves bear part of the blame, but the Commission on Presidential Debates hasn’t helped.

We argued on Oct. 17 that the commission has outlived its usefulness (see the response nearby from commission board member Newton Minow). Debate moderators’ longwinded and leftward-slating questions make the show about the moderators themselves and leave viewers none the wiser.

The next debate, scheduled for Thursday night at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., also isn’t promising based on the subjects the commission says will be covered: fighting Covid-19, race in America, climate change, American families, national security, leadership. The first two were part of the first presidential and vice presidential debates. Climate change is loaded with progressive assumptions (how will you raise taxes, further empower the federal government, and generally do what Democrats want to do anyway?).

We’re not sure what “American families” and “leadership” might entail, but why should a commission get to decide what subjects are crucial to debate and the public to hear?It’s especially outrageous to limit national security—we assume that means foreign policy—to one sixth of one debate. President Trump has a reasonable case that his Administration has achieved a major breakthrough between Gulf Arab nations and Israel, brought about by rejecting the foreign-policy establishment’s consensus opinions. The Trump Administration defenestrated consensus opinion by moving the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and leaving the Iran nuclear deal. The dire consequences predicted by think-tank poobahs never came about.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Bidens and China Business The story won’t go away without explanation, even if the Veep wins.

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bidens-and-china-business-11603236651?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Most of the media is ignoring the emails found in Hunter Biden’s laptop, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t news. Joe Biden has an obligation to answer questions about his son’s influence-peddling and his own financial dealings—notably regarding China.

The New York Post last week obtainedthe contents of a laptop purported to belong to Hunter. The Post has been transparent that it obtained its copy of the hard drive from Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who says he received it from the owner of a Delaware computer-repair shop, where it was abandoned in 2019. Mr. Biden derides this as a “smear campaign,” while House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff calls it without evidence “Russian disinformation.”

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe says the government has no intelligence to support the disinformation claim. A repair-shop order from April 2019 contains Hunter’s name and what appears to be his signature. The shop owner supplied a subpoena showing the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December 2019. And the Biden campaign hasn’t said the emails are phony.

The emails regarding Hunter’s business in Ukraine have been widely reported. But as intriguing is a May 2017 email thread that includes a discussion about “remuneration packages” for six people as part of a business deal with a now-defunct Chinese energy titan, CEFC China Energy. The Chinese company was international news a few years ago, after the U.S. government charged a CEFC-funded organization with money laundering, and its CEO was detained by Chinese authorities. CNN reported in 2018 that “at its height” CEFC was “hard to distinguish” from the Chinese government.

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes—or Joe Biden’s Big Mouth by Lee Smith

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/hunter-biden-twitter-facebook

In an ugly display of Big Tech’s monopoly power, Twitter and Facebook censor the White House, U.S. senators, and the ‘New York Post’ for saying things that were reported in ‘The New York Times’ five years ago—and that the Democratic candidate has publicly boasted about.

The move by Facebook and Twitter to censor a New York Post story about Joe Biden was Silicon Valley’s version of an October surprise. Since publication of a story last week alleging that Hunter Biden was introducing foreign business colleagues to his father, Twitter has kept locked the account of the 200-year-old newspaper until it deletes its tweets about its Biden reporting. By removing the story from news feeds, locking the accounts of the Trump campaign and White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany, and prohibiting editors of the newspaper from sharing the piece even from their own accounts—actions taken without evidence anything in the story was false—the tech oligarchy signaled it was throwing its weight behind what it believes to be the coming Democratic order in Washington.

It also provided Americans with an authentically shocking snapshot of the type of “managed” society that we now inhabit. In the new American system, large Silicon Valley corporations use their government-sanctioned and immensely profitable monopoly status to routinely censor information and libel anyone they please at the behest of unelected partisan verticals that have colonized large segments of the federal bureaucracy and security agencies. As each corrupted interest rubber stamps each other’s actions, power is removed from public hands and public view.

The idea that the Post story about Hunter Biden’s apparent bribery, and cocaine and sexual habits, was some form of dangerous “Russian disinformation” was teed up nearly a year ago by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the press, and cybersecurity professionals. According to Biden aides and other surrogates, any implication that the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate—who took his son to Beijing for business meetings on his vice presidential airplane—was aware of Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine was necessarily part of an evil Russian scheme to interfere in an American election, again. It was on that basis that the social media giants justified their actions, while a practiced political and intelligence infrastructure surfaced to protect its favored candidate.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Uniquely Bad—But Not Uniquely American For much of history, slavery was as fundamental to society as agriculture. Kay S. Hymowitz

Posted By on October 20th, 2020

https://www.city-journal.org/slavery-failure-of-1619-project

The 1619 Project has not been having an easy time of it. Ever since the Pulitzer Prize-winning essays first appeared in the New York Times in August 2019, historians have been chipping away at some of the central claims. No, they’ve shown, protecting slavery was not the primary motive of the American revolutionaries when they broke away from Britain in 1776. No, the arrival of 20 African slaves at Jamestown was not when the country “began.”

The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, was at first boldly dismissive of the attacks, but she has more recently been going through contortions to insist that she didn’t say what she demonstrably said; she has even erased her Twitter feed. The New York Times has likewise done some stealth editing of its own, altering some of the more controversial assertions in the online edition. A few weeks ago, President Trump himself went on the attack.

I’d like to propose adding another reason to close the book on the 1619 Project: it is based on a twisted notion of American exceptionalism. America’s “brutal system of slavery [was] unlike anything that had existed in the world before,” Hannah-Jones writes. “Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.” Brutal? Yes. Unlike anything that existed in the world before? Seeing how far this is from the truth is the only way to make sense of the contradictions and perplexing compromises of the American Founding that trouble us so much today.

In fact, slavery was a mundane fact in most human civilizations, neither questioned nor much thought about. It appeared in the earliest settlements of Sumer, Babylonia, China, and Egypt, and it continues in many parts of the world to this day. Far from grappling with whether slavery should be legal, the code of Hammurabi, civilization’s first known legal text, simply defines appropriate punishments for recalcitrant slaves (cutting off their ears) or those who help them escape (death). Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament take for granted the existence of slaves. Slavery was so firmly established in ancient Greece that Plato could not imagine his ideal Republic without them, though he rejected the idea of individual ownership in favor of state control. As for Rome, well, Spartacus, anyone?

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Coming Post-COVID Global Order by Joel Kotkin and Hügo Krüger

Posted By on October 20th, 2020

https://quillette.com/2020/10/19/the-coming-post-covid-global-order/

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated economics in the West, but the harshest impacts may yet be felt in the developing world. After decades of improvement in poorer countries, a regression threatens that could usher in, both economically and politically, a neo-feudal future, leaving billions stranded permanently in poverty. If this threat is not addressed, these conditions could threaten not just the world economy, but prospects for democracy worldwide.

In its most recent analysis, the World Bank predicted that the global economy will shrink by 5.2 percent in 2020, with developing countries overall seeing their incomes fall for the first time in 60 years. The United Nations predicts that the pandemic recession could plunge as many as 420 million people into extreme poverty, defined as earning less than $2 a day. The disruption will be particularly notable in the poorest countries. The UN has forecast that Africa could have 30 million more people in poverty. A study by the International Growth Centre spoke of “staggering” implications with 9.1 percent of the population descending into extreme poverty as savings are drained, with two-thirds of this due to lockdown. The loss of remittances has cost developing economies billions more income.

Latin America had seen its poverty rate drop from 45 to 30 percent over the past two decades, but now nearly 45 million, according to the UN, are being plunged into destitution as a result of the novel coronavirus pandemic. In Mexico alone, COVID-19 has caused at least 16 million more people to fall into extreme poverty, according to a study by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Climate Cult’s Brat Brigade Tony Thomas

Posted By on October 20th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/10/the-climate-cults-brat-brigade/

In the Iraq-Iran wars of the 1980s, Ayatollah Khomeini sent 12-year-old Iranian schoolchildren swarming into no-man’s-land to detonate the mines. The keen kids wore devotional slogans on red headbands and each carried a small metal key to open the gates of Paradise.

The analogy with enrolling Australian kids as zero-emission fanatics is not perfect. The kids’ task is not to blow themselves up but to blow up 130 years of Western progress based on reliable electricity. Still, climate cult leaders love throwing indoctrinated children into the front lines of the climate wars. These kids’ keys to the promised Green Paradise are ruinous wind and solar energy.

Right now, School Strike 4 Climate is launching a campaign called ‘Action Your Adults’ (AYA). In the words of the official email circular from someone called “Bubble”, it is “all about getting the adults in your life involved with the fight for climate justice!” Pulling the strings as usual are the zealots of GetUp!, the Youth Climate Coalition [of adults], Stop Adani and, of course, Greens organisers. The prose, meant to sound like kids’ talk, is straight out of Balmain advertising agency-speak. We learn:

An adult can mean your parent or guardian, a grandparent, an auntie or uncle, or any other person in your life that isn’t in school. It’s all about connecting with them and talking about the current crisis!

AYA [Action Your Adults] is a great way to express your concerns about the climate crisis to people in your life. It is important to keep talking about what is going on and not let the government’s destructive schemes go unnoticed.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

After Seeing Biden’s Tax Plan, Rapper 50 Cent Hops On The Trump Train: Evita Duffy

Posted By on October 20th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/20/after-seeing-bidens-tax-plan-rapper-50-cent-hops-on-the-trump-train/

Rap icon 50 Cent, also known as Fif, announced he is endorsing President Trump in the upcoming 2020 election after a look at Joe Biden’s tax plan. The Grammy award-winning musician shared a photo on Instagram of the top tax rates by state under the new Biden tax plan.

The rapper, who lives in New York, where the top tax bracket will be 62 percent under a Biden presidency, wrote in his caption: “👀WHAT THE F**K! (VOTE ForTRUMP) IM OUT, 🏃‍♂️💨F**K NEW YORK The KNICKS never win anyway. 🤷🏽‍♂️I don’t care Trump doesn’t like black people 62% are you out of ya fucking mind. 😤”

The post is a big turn-around from 2016, when Fif endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Until now, Fif has expressed a distaste for Trump’s policies. This April, he said of President Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, “You wanted a reality show host as president, well now you’re on ‘Survivor.’”

Fif has said many times that Trump has the “attitude of a rapper.” What is a rapper attitude? Fif explained in 2018 when he went on Conan O’Brian’s late-night talk show.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How to Put a Stop to Twitter’s Game-Playing on Censorship Congress does not need to repeal Section 230 to do it. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on October 20th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/washington-can-put-a-stop-to-twitters-game-playing-on-censorship/

T he much-misunderstood Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act is in the spotlight again. Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Facebook, suppressed reporting that Joe Biden abetted his son Hunter’s cashing in on the then-vice president’s political influence. Since there are plenty of alternatives to these social-media platforms, their actions merely drew more attention to the story while calling into question their qualification for Section 230 immunity from lawsuits.

The Biden news was broken by the New York Post, the nation’s fourth-largest daily by circulation, whose Twitter account (with 1.8 million followers) remains suspended as of this writing — irrationally so, given that the social-media site is no longer blocking other users from sharing links to the reports that prompted the Post’s account to be locked. Twitter also locked the account of Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, as well as that of the Trump reelection campaign.

Twitter’s bogus rationale for the suspensions was the claim that the Biden information had been “hacked” from a laptop computer that appears to have belonged to Hunter. In fact, there is no evidence that the emails, photographs, videos, and other materials on the laptop were hacked or otherwise misappropriated. Hunter suffers from drug addiction and is notoriously erratic. The laptop was brought to a repair shop in Delaware and never reclaimed. The shop owner, in addition to being given consensual access to the data, reported it to the FBI. Plus, Fox News reports that the work order prepared when the computer was dropped off appears to bear Hunter Biden’s signature.