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June 2020

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Open the schools without politics By Jeffrey I. Barke, M.D.

By on June 10th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/open_the_schools_without_politics.html

As of June 3, 2020, the CDC reported that there have been 20 deaths in children in the U.S. due to COVID-19. In my home county of Orange in California, no child has died due to COVID-19. JAMA Pediatrics for May 11, 2020 had this to say: “Finally, it is important to emphasize that the overall burden of COVID-19 infection in children remains relatively low compared with seasonal influenza.”

We have never closed schools or forced children to wear masks during an influenza season. Yet, the CDC has issued guidelines recommending face coverings for elementary school-aged children, social distancing, reduced classroom populations, and other suggestions that make little scientific or common sense.

To put some of the COVID statistics into perspective: Motor vehicle injuries are a leading cause of death among children in the United States — in 2017, 675 children 12 years old and younger died as occupants in motor vehicle crashes, and nearly 116,000 were injured. In the same year according to the CDC, drownings claimed the lives of almost 1,000 U.S. children. That is 50 times greater than COVID-19! As a result, would you favor closing down all swimming pools in the United States?

The argument that children should wear face coverings to prevent the asymptomatic spread of the coronavirus to a high-risk teacher or administrator is also fallacious. First of all, there is little if any evidence that asymptomatic children are spreading COVID-19 to adults. Indeed, the World Health Organization issued a report on June 8th indicating little evidence of asymptomatic transmission of the virus.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liberal generals beclowning the military By Robert T. Smith

By on June 10th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/liberal_generals_beclowning_the_military.html

It appears fashionable among the liberal former military leaders in our country to speak out against President Trump’s offer to use the armed forces to put down the street violence that the liberal leaders of many cities allowed to continue.  Rioters, pillagers, looters, arsonists, murderers had overwhelmed the local law enforcement and were almost freely terrorizing the citizens of vast areas of our country, destroying public and private property, and killing or harming innocent citizens and peace officers — chaos.  Alleging that their public denunciations of President Trump are intended for the good, why do these former military leaders appear exclusively in the liberal media outlets, and how will their opinions help quell and not enhance the chaos?

Sufficient ink has been spilled for the “Mad Dog” Mattis mouth-foaming idiocy in the leftist thinkers’ publication the Atlantic.  Other former military leaders have also provided their shallow understanding of the president’s offer to quell the violence in places where the liberals would not.  Retired general Martin Dempsey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was interviewed on this topic by NPR and unsurprisingly shared the same houghts as the Mad Dog in his liberal media offering.

Let’s go back in time and remember General Dempsey, nominated as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by then-president Obama.  Let’s remember this fierce defender of our country from the Benghazi fiasco.  In a Senate hearing, Dempsey was asked by Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), why F-16s at Aviano Air Base in Italy weren’t deployed to Benghazi that night.  As recorded at the time, the General’s response was as follows:

This is the middle of the night now, these are not aircraft on strip alert[.] … They’re there as part of our commitment to NATO and Europe.  And so, as we looked at the time line, it was pretty clear that it would take up to 20 hours or so to get them there.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

What about Black Christian Lives? By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on June 10th, 2020

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

Where are the marches and the outrage regarding the deliberate and quite systematic murder by jihadist Muslims of Black Christians in Nigeria and other African countries?

At Genocide Watch (graphic pictures), one learns that Nigeria is “a killing field of defenseless Christians.”  Since June 2015, “over 11,500 Christians have been murdered and 2,000 churches were destroyed.”   The “statistics are based on careful records kept by church groups that include the names of victims and dates of their murders.”

Jihadist Fulani Herdsmen accounted for 7,400 murders of Christians.  Boko Haram committed 4,000 killings of Christians.  ‘Highway Bandits’ who separated Christians from Muslims on buses and then killed the Christians committed over 200 murders.  Fulani Jihadists are now the world’s deadliest terrorist group.  Five Nigerian Christians are massacred every day by Fulani and Boko Haram Jihadists.

One hundred percent of the 7,400 murders by Jihadist Fulani Herdsmen since June 2015 were Christians.  Fulani militias wipe out whole Christian villages, but they leave Muslim villages unharmed.  Four thousand  Christians were killed by Boko Haram, a majority of the 6000 civilians massacred by Boko Haram/Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP) since June 2015.  Boko Haram also murders Muslims who work with the Nigerian government, teach or attend schools, and anyone else who does not submit to Boko Haram’s deadly domination.  From 2009 to 2020, Boko Haram murdered at least 27,000 civilians, even more than ISIS in Syria and Iraq, making Boko Haram the world’s deadliest terrorist group.  That ‘distinction’ has now been claimed by Jihadist Fulani militias.

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ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How a Holocaust Museum scholar denounces Zionism Moshe Phillips

By on June 10th, 2020

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/281497

A scholar at the U.S. Holocaust Museum has denounced Israel in so many words as racist, colonialist, and a killer of innocents. Is this an appropriate use of American taxpayer dollars?

This attack on Zionism and Israel comes from the pen of an Israel-born historian, Amos Goldberg, who last year served as a Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, DC., which is funded in part by U.S. taxpayers.

Goldberg’s denunciation of Israel, which appeared in early June on “+972 Magazine” website (and was co-authored by Alon Confino), was titled “To Understand Zionism, We Must Listen to the Voices of its Victims.” The article was published, interestingly, just after several synagogues were graffitied with anti-Israel hate messages during the George Floyd riots.

According to Goldberg, Zionism is “a settler colonial movement.” The State of Israel is “based on segregation and discrimination.” Israel is “a wrongdoer, and an occupier” which carries out “crimes against the Palestinians” including “the plunder of land” and “the killing of innocents.” He also claims that the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who fled from Israel during the 1948 war “were in fact expelled.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Worst ‘Progressive’ Idea Yet: Hey, Let’s Get Rid Of The Police!

By on June 9th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/08/the-worst-progressive-idea-yet-hey-lets

Awful ideas have sprung up from the craziness of this annus horribilis like poison mushrooms after spring rain. But no idea is as bad as Big City mayors and their D.C. Democrat allies calling for the abolition of police departments. Do they not understand that, without enforcement, there can be no rule of law? Or is that the idea?

The left’s war on the very idea of the law now seemingly knows no bounds.

Politicians have all but declared open season on their police departments, even as they decry the mayhem, chaos, death and destruction from more than a week of violent protests nationwide following the tragic death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Unless you’ve been quarantined without access to the internet, you know that Floyd died while in the custody of the Minneapolis police as an officer kneeled on his neck.

There has been no trial, no official investigation of Floyd’s death, and yet the all-left Minneapolis city council has already proposed a solution: Defund the police department.

“We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” says a June 4 tweet from City Councilman Jeremiah Ellison. “We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response.”

Progressive Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey opposes the idea. He thought he might prevail when he addressed an abolish-the-police crowd in his city over the weekend. He was wrong. He was booed, jeered and taunted, and forced to endure what more than one media outlet referred to as a “walk of shame” as he departed.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

If Not For Lies They Would Be Mute Peter Smith

By on June 9th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/if-not-for-lies-they-would-be-mute/

Trump knows capitalism and nothing else is the key to prosperity. He knows a nation cannot stand without strong borders. He knows America cannot retain its place in the world without a peerless military. Unable to argue the point, the Left and its media auxiliary peddle the whole cloth of their daily fabrications, from Russiagate to blatant misquotation

This is part of a “news” item in The Telegraph (UK) on 6 June:

President Donald Trump has said that strong new jobs numbers marked a “great day” for George Floyd, the man whose killing last week sparked nationwide protests over police brutality against African-Americans.

Apparently referring to a surge in employment, Mr Trump said: “Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying, ‘This is a great thing that’s happening for our country.’ “This is a great day for him, it’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody.”

The reporters who wrote this, Josie Ensor and Gareth Davies, are either malicious liars or completely and utterly incompetent. And, when it comes to Trump, ditto for much of the MSM everywhere.

I saw the live press briefing on TV as it was happening. It could not have been misinterpreted. When Trump brought Floyd into the picture he was talking about civil rights and Floyd’s death bringing renewed focus and energy into seeing that everybody is treated equally by law enforcement. He was not at all referring to job numbers. And, to reiterate, no such interpretation could possibly have been inferred by any honest reporter. Below, Trump’s actual words in context:

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

An Endlessly Renewable Source of Green Agitprop Alan Moran

By on June 9th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/06/an-endlessly-renewable-source-of-green-agitprop/

Stoking the fires of renewable energy’s purported advantages is the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental outfit whose chief purpose is to serve as a spigot for endless propaganda. Its official message is that fossil fuel is an archaic source of electricity now being battered by upstart competitors wind and solar. Bear in mind that world electricity supply pans out at 38 per cent for coal, 23 per cent gas and 26 per cent hydro/nuclear. Wind/solar supply 10 per cent.

IRENA tirelessly advocates for renewables, saying they “could form a key component of economic stimulus packages in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.” And in the purple prose so common with these green-spruiking agencies it claims, “Scaling up renewables can boost struggling economies. It can save money for consumers, pique the appetites of investors and create numerous high-quality new jobs.” Investment in renewables is amplified by other benefits, the story goes, as it is alleged to bring “health, sustainability and inclusive prosperity.” When it comes to renewables, no snake-oil salesman of old could hold a carbon-neutral candle to the likes of their modern green-lipped urgers.

IRENA would have us see renewable power installations as a key component of economic stimulus packages in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming that replacing one quarter of the world’s existing coal capacity with wind and solar would, in addition to cutting electricity costs, bestow a stimulus worth US$940 billion, or around one per cent of global GDP.

All this is, of course, is super-heated hot air billowing from the deep pockets of IRENA’s multi-government funding. It rests upon the sort of spurious arithmetic swallowed whole by Australian governments which, having granted regulatory favours to wind/solar, cheer the dynamiting of low-cost, dependable coal plants and the consequent price escalation and network unreliability.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Sanders Dismisses Progressive Calls to Defund Police, Says Departments Need More Resources By Tobias Hoonhout

By on June 9th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/sanders-dismisses-progressive-calls-to-defund-police-says-departments-need-more-resources/

Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) broke from progressive counterparts in calls to defund the police, saying instead that the country needs “well-trained, well-educated, and well-paid professionals in police departments.”

Sanders addressed progressive critics who viewed him as an obstacle to growing calls for defunding the police in the wake of national unrest following the death of George Floyd in a New Yorker interview published Tuesday.

“Do I think we should not have police departments in America? No, I don’t. There’s no city in the world that does not have police departments,” He stated.

On Sunday, the Minneapolis City Council announced it had a veto-proof majority to “abolish the Minneapolis Police system as we know it,” and city council president Lisa Bender explained on Monday that fearing the repercussions of dismantling police forces “comes from a place of privilege.” Ilhan Omar, a former surrogate for Sanders’s presidential campaign, applauded the decision.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

John Daniel Davidson:If You Want To Know What Disbanding The Police Looks Like, Look At Mexico

By on June 9th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/09/if-you-want-to-know-what-disbanding-the-police-looks-like-look-at-mexico/

The rise of vigilante groups in Mexico offers a hint of what happens when institutions fail and civil society collapses. America should be paying attention.

One of the most visible and insistent demands of the Black Lives Matter movement is the abolition or disbandment of the police—or at the very least defunding them, which taken to the extreme would amount to the same thing. “Abolish the police” has become a rallying cry among protesters and a litmus test for elected officials seeking to ally with them.

What comes after the police have been abolished remains unclear. Protesters and politicians alike are hazy on details, preferring instead to talk about “reimagining public safety” and throwing around vague terms like “community policing.”

Of course, in concrete terms what would happen if a city actually disbanded its police department, as the Minneapolis City Council pledged to do over the weekend, is that the county sheriff’s office or the state police—or perhaps even federal law enforcement—would step into the vacuum and the city would have almost no say in how it was policed or what policies county and state law enforcement agencies adopted.

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

America Is In A Cultural Civil War : By Ben Domenech

By on June 9th, 2020

www.henrymarkholzer.blogspot.com

 

This is the week America woke up to a moment of clarity: we are in the midst of a great cultural civil war.

The country was largely unified when we all saw the terrible video of George Floyd’s tragic death – unified in anger and frustration, in wanting justice and punishment for a cop who, whatever his motivation, went too far and murdered a citizen for the crime of passing a counterfeit bill. Ever since then, we’ve been coming apart.

The cultural civil war that has been simmering underneath the surface is now boiling. Consider that as much as the protests can largely be described as peaceful, they have now led to more than a dozen deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and theft. Consider the image of Senator Tim Kaine, the former Vice Presidential nominee of his party, kneeling on the ground like he’s a hostage, as if only the penitent white man will pass. Consider the footage from the Minneapolis mayor being shouted down for refusing to defund the police.

It sets up a clash for the fall between the politics of revolutionary racial radicalism and defunding the police on the one hand, and law and order on the other. As Charles Murray noted yesterday, “The ‘abolish the police’ movement is the final piece needed to replicate the mentality of the New Left in the late 1960s–positions so crazy that only people completely out of touch with reality can advocate them with a straight face.” But farcical Maoism is still Maoist, and the struggle session doesn’t become less so just because it’s conducted by lunatics.

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