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May 2021

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Neurotic America: Masks Today, Masks Tomorrow, Masks Forever

By on May 17th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/17/neurotic-america-masks-today-masks-tomorrow-masks-forever/

A number of retail chains announced last week they are not requiring fully vaccinated customers to wears masks in their stores. Not everyone was happy to hear the liberating news, though. Our country, once a bulwark of the strong and daring, is becoming a land of the fainthearted.

Minutes after The Hill tweeted Friday that Trader Joe’s was no longer demanding that its customers self-suffocate, at least those who’ve been fully vaccinated, the scolds and skittish school marms took their shots before running to hide under their beds.

“Not good,” said one, without explaining why it’s not good.

Other responses included: “I’ve only been there once and it looks like it will be my only time for a while,” and “I will not be going to #TraderJoes 4 a long time.” Many concurred: They’ll also avoid Trader Joe’s. One commenter said he doesn’t know if he’ll ever go back again. All that was missing was Joe Biden calling Trader Joe’s executives Neanderthals and Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank claiming the stores are “America’s No. 1 Death Destination.”

Certainly everyone is free to express their opinions about masks, and everyone is also free to decide to shop elsewhere if they don’t like the Trader Joe’s policy. Yet the response concerns us. Will enough Nervous Nancies and Timorous Toms boycott Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Costco and others that have liberalized their mask policies to force the companies to backtrack on their decisions (which will help restore the humanity dignity that was ripped away by mask rules)? Will they actively picket in front of stores in an effort to bully executives into yielding to their neuroses, fixations, and superstitions? 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Can Freedom Survive the Narratives? We live in the age of supercharged story lines, most of which are demagogic nonsense. By Lance Morrow

By on May 17th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-freedom-survive-the-narratives-11621185599?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

EXCERPTS:

Yet more than 100 years later, in a decisively changed America, President Biden annulled the interval between 1903 and 2021 and pronounced Georgia’s new voting law to be “Jim Crow on steroids.” It was demagogic nonsense. The Georgia voting law bore no more resemblance to Jim Crow than Mr. Biden bears, let us say, to Neil Kinnock.

In all this, there’s the fallacy of stopped time. When fabulating Bidenites, reporters at the New York Times and others on the left refer to “systemic racism,” they mean to conjure the sum of all American white people’s badness going back four centuries to 1619; and, when all that meanness is assembled in one trope (slave owners Washington and Jefferson and Lee and Stonewall Jackson on their bronze horses) to lay it before white America as indictment.

There is no difference between 1619 and 2021. There was no Civil War, no civil-rights acts of 1964 and 1965, no President Obama. White guilt comes with the white skin; the evil is frozen in time—like the sin of Adam, like the woolly mammoth in the glacier. Race trauma is sanctified—permanent, outside time.

The left’s narrative now rules the land in the form of “critical race theory,” “antiracism” and invidious variations. Feelings of rage and indignation have coalesced as dogma and settled science, embedded in the house rules of almost every institution in the country. One questions them on pain of expulsion, excommunication. The Age of Information is the era of hysterical story lines. Twenty-first-century technology supercharges feelings, not thoughts, and registers them instantaneously on hundreds of millions of screens and minds.

Such narratives serve neither history nor justice. The New York Times’s “1619 Project,” now taught in schools all over the country, is, in its essence, racist propaganda. Its story lines are instruments for the consolidation of political power. Marxists discovered long ago that class doesn’t work as a great divider in America. But race does work.

Race is the McGuffin—the pretext. Our moral generals are fighting the last war. The struggle to which Americans, of whatever race, should be paying attention is the one that has to do with freedom. It has to do with privacy, mind control, individual liberties—with totalitarian systems of surveillance and manipulation perfecting themselves in an alliance of big tech, big government, global corporations and artificial intelligence. Wokeness—a politics that manages to be both prissy and vicious, a totalitarian social design that flies the flag of everything good and nice—fronts for the real problem of the 21st century: a sinister autocracy just around the corner.

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BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Facebook’s ‘Fact Checks’ Suppress Debate The social-media site seeks to discredit a review of my book on climate science. By Steven E. Koonin

By on May 17th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-fact-checks-suppress-debate-11621194172?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

This paper published Mark Mills’s review of “Unsettled,” my book on climate science, on April 25. Eight days later, 11 self-appointed “fact checkers” weighed in with a 4,500-word critique on the website ClimateFeedback.org. Facebook is waving that fact check as a giant red flag whenever the review appears in anyone’s feed.

By branding Mr. Mills’s review with “very low scientific credibility,” the company directs its billions of users to a website that claims to discredit the review and, by direct implication, my book. This action adds to the growing suppression of open discussion of climate complexities.

ClimateFeedback bills itself as “a worldwide network of scientists sorting fact from fiction in climate change media coverage.” Its modus operandi is to label necessarily brief media statements as misleading or inaccurate, often because they lack context. While acknowledging that “global crop yields are rising,” for instance, they add the untestable claim that yields might have been greater absent human-caused climate change. The gang of enforcers who “fact checked” Mr. Mills’s review included professors from Stanford, UCLA and MIT.

The oddest element of Facebook’s action is that the “fact check” doesn’t challenge anything I wrote in “Unsettled,” but rather provides “context” for Mr. Mills’s statements.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel, Hamas, Iran and Biden The U.S. needs to give Israel time to degrade the rocket threat.

By on May 17th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-iran-and-biden-11621195618?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

As the latest war between Hamas and Israel enters its second week, the narrative is following a familiar script. Hamas fires rockets at Israeli cities, Israel retaliates by bombing the source of the rockets in Gaza, Hamas plays up the civilian casualties, and the world leans on Israel to stop defending itself.

Let’s hope this isn’t the trap the Biden Administration falls into as the fighting continues. So far the White House has supported Israel’s right to self-defense. But the weekend bombing of a building in Gaza that housed media offices, including reporters from the Associated Press and Al Jazeera, has led to cries of outrage and an admonition from the State Department to Israel about protecting journalists in combat zones.

But who’s really endangering the journalists? Israel’s government says the multistory building was also used by Hamas for intelligence purposes. AP says it had no knowledge of this, but this wasn’t the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Using civilians and journalists as shields is a common Hamas tactic, and Hamas isn’t likely to have shared its plans with Western journalists.

Israel also warned the journalists and others in the building to clear out an hour before the attack. They did and there are no reports of casualties. This also let Hamas’s militants escape, but it shows how far Israel has gone in this conflict to avoid killing civilians. Inevitably there will be mistakes in war, and civilians will die, but it’s remarkable how discriminating Israel’s targeting has been.

The truth to keep in mind is that this conflict was started by Hamas and another radical outfit, Islamic Jihad. They are attempting to kill Israeli civilians with rockets supplied by Iran, or manufactured in Gaza with parts supplied by Iran. Hamas’s rocket arsenal is larger and more sophisticated than ever, and the Israel Defense Forces said that as of Sunday the Islamists had fired some 3,000 rockets into Israel. The miracle is that more Israelis haven’t died, and that’s due in large part to Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Rep. Young Kim (R-California 39): Biden’s immigration crisis – my Texas border trip showed cartels thriving, migrants at risk Biden admin policy changes are contributing to this crisis and hurting Americans

By on May 17th, 2021

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-immigration-crisis-texas-border-trip-cartels-migrants-young-kim

After visiting our southern border with a bipartisan delegation in South Texas and back home in California, it is clear that the situation continues to be a national security, public health and humanitarian crisis.  

It’s also clear that while we need to come together to address the root causes of mass migration, recent policy changes made by the Biden administration are contributing to this crisis and hurting Americans, straining our Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection officers on the front lines, endangering migrants who are making the perilous journey to the U.S. in search of a better life, and undermining legal immigrants.  

Meanwhile, drug cartels are taking advantage of this crisis, exploiting migrants to increase revenue and accelerate the smuggling of drugs and weapons and other illegal activity across our southern border.

President Biden said in his joint address to Congress that his policies as vice president “helped keep people in their own countries instead of being forced to leave” but “the last administration shut it down.” 

However, the Biden administration’s recent decisions to roll back policies from the last administration without thoughtful policy replacements are encouraging the opposite. The administration’s lack of a plan is exacerbating the border crisis, straining resources everywhere from the border to communities I represent in California’s 39th District.  

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