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September 2023

What Game is Hunter Biden Playing? Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/what-game-is-hunter-biden-playing/

What shameless act or felonious activity was not evidenced on Hunter Biden’s laptop? Racist attitudes toward Asians? Soliciting prostitution? Felonious use of drugs? Photographed nudity and perverse sex? Admissions to illicit foreign shakedowns?

Hunter all but accused his own father President Joe Biden of also being on the foreign take: “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family… Unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary.”

Hunter’s alleged felonies range from bribery to tax evasion. That he has not yet been prosecuted for anything is scandalous. His exemption is attributable only to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s likely weaponized directives to federal prosecutors to downgrade or forget altogether felony charges against Hunter.

So given such wild behavior, why would not Hunter tone it down, stop the global grifting, cease the reckless behavior—and quit redirecting attention to the likely illegal acts of his father, the President?

Why did not Hunter early on just settle the child support suit filed by his paramour Lundeen Roberts? Why haggle over money for his own daughter?

Hunter instead outrageously claimed near poverty. That excuse was hilarious given he flies on private jets and pays nearly $16,000 a month to rent a house in tony, celebrity-ridden Malibu.

Why did Hunter ever get involved with a performance stripper in the first place after his past widely publicized liaisons with prostitutes? Why also with his own widowed sister-in-law?

Given Hunter has little or no experience or training in high-stakes international finance and investment—and thus has no market value as an investor or broker. But he was infamous for translating that nothingness into millions in lucre due solely to his ability to monetize the influence of then Vice President Joe Biden.

Wokeness Has Infected the Mayo Clinic By Laura Morgan

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/09/wokeness-has-infected-the-mayo-clinic/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=second

A medical institution that has done so much good over the years is putting politics before health.

In 39 years as a practicing nurse, I urged hundreds if not thousands of patients to consider seeking additional care at the Mayo Clinic. The famous medical center, based in Minnesota and with major campuses in Florida and Arizona, is widely regarded as one of the best in the country. Yet I can no longer in good conscience recommend this once-prestigious institution. The Mayo Clinic is now fully and unashamedly woke, and worse, it’s aggressively pushing its divisive agenda on the rest of health care.

The Mayo Clinic’s descent is deeply troubling because it occupies a unique place in medicine. Its website is wildly popular with patients who want information about conditions; many travel to Mayo locations for care. Hospitals and health-care groups look to it for guidance on everything from treatment protocols to human resources to a thousand other things. As a nurse, I relied on Mayo’s professional-development tools, and physicians across the country depend on Mayo’s continuing-education courses, which cover an astounding 42 topics and specialties. It also offers conferences that draw physicians from around the world. When Mayo says, “We share our knowledge globally, impact policy, and partner with others to create lasting — and much-needed — change,” it’s understating its influence on medicine.

So it matters when the Mayo Clinic pledges a staggering $100 million to the woke agenda, as it did last fall. It’s devoting this money to “eliminate racism and advance equity and inclusion . . . and to improve health equity.” Practically, this money is going to conferences, courses, and communications that are designed to shape the entire medical field around divisive and discriminatory ideology.

I participated in one such event in early August: Mayo’s two-day “RISE for Equity” event, which offered in-person and virtual attendance for continuing-education credit. It was designed for professionals including hospital administrators, hiring managers, and health-care educators, with the goal of “advancing and directing policy, programs and institutional initiatives” across the medical landscape — i.e., every part of medicine. I encountered nothing but indoctrination.

Georgia Attorney General Indicts 61 Antifa Activists on RICO Charges by David Zimmerman

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/georgia-attorney-general-indicts-61-antifa-members-on-rico-charges/

Chris Carr, the Republican attorney general of Georgia, announced on Tuesday the indictment of 61 individuals allegedly involved in Antifa efforts to prevent the construction of a police training facility outside of Atlanta.

These activists, most of whom don’t live in Georgia, are accused of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a U.S. federal law that allows for the criminal prosecution of organized crime. Of the 61 defendants, some faced additional charges of domestic terrorism, attempted arson, and money laundering.

Carr said in a press release his office is primarily concerned with prosecuting violent acts in the state’s case.

“As this indictment shows, looking the other way when violence occurs is not an option in Georgia,” said Carr. “If you come to our state and shoot a police officer, throw Molotov cocktails at law enforcement, set fire to police vehicles, damage construction equipment, vandalize private homes and businesses, and terrorize their occupants, you can and will be held accountable.”

The indictment focuses on Defend the Atlanta Forest, an environmental group described by the attorney general’s office as an “anarchist, anti-police, and anti-business extremist organization.”

The indictment says the group’s purpose “is to occupy of parts or all of 381 forested acres in DeKalb County, Georgia,” land that is owned by the Atlanta Police Foundation and leased by the Atlanta government. By doing this, they would halt the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.

The Defend the Atlanta Forest movement started organizing in 2020 following the police murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. Both incidents occurred months before the training center was announced.

The Cop City Vote Coalition, which is trying to force a public vote on the public center, objected to the recent indictment. The group of organizers condemned the “blatantly authoritarian RICO charges” brought forward by Carr following his announcement.

The indictment alleged a total of 225 “overt acts” took place in the city, from July 5, 2020, up to about two weeks ago.

Instances of the reported violence during that time included throwing rocks, bricks, and Molotov cocktails at police vehicles, vandalizing private property, attacking private citizens and utility workers, and shooting state troopers. Police responded to the criminal actions by arresting protesters, and in one case, killed an Antifa member who shot at the cops.

I’m being professionally canceled for my moral stance on trans butchery By Jordan B. Peterson

https://nypost.com/2023/09/05/im-being-professionally-canceled-for-my-moral-stance-on-trans-butchery/

Recently, the College of Psychologists in Ontario ordered Jordan B. Peterson — a clinical psychologist, professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and best-selling author — to undergo “professional coaching.” His sin? Tweeting opinions the college deemed “unbecoming of a psychologist.” Here, Peterson explains to The Post what he said, why he was right — and why it was imperative he speak out.

I am likely to soon lose my license to practice as a clinical psychologist in my home province of Ontario, in the Canada whose historically prosaic internal politics should by all reasonable standards still be off the international radar.

Why? A variety of charges have been brought against me by the administrative board granted government mandate to protect the public from misbehavior on the part of the practitioners of my profession.

What are those charges — pertaining to attitudes and actions that have caused unproven harm to others and brought hypothetical disgrace upon the practice of psychotherapy itself — all brought forward, by the way, by individuals who were never my clients?

Two stem from criticisms I levied directly against the current leader of Canada, one Justin Trudeau, now recognized by a majority of the inhabitants of this frigid and sparsely inhabited land as the worst Prime Minister in this country’s history.

Psychologist Jordan Peterson was ordered to undergo “professional coaching” by the College of Psychologists in Ontario due to public statements that he has made.
Photo by Chris Williamson/Getty Images
The complaints against Peterson include tweets he wrote criticizing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Elliot Page’s “gender affirmation” surgery.
Photo by Romy Arroyo Fernandez/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Four were a consequence of other arguably political opinions: a judgemental comment I directed toward Trudeau’s former chief of staff, who resigned under a cloud of controversy some years ago; an ironic comment about the diverse “identity” claimed by an Ottawa city councillor whose attitude toward the Canadian Trucker Convoy raised my hackles; and the entire transcript (I kid you not) of a three-hour public discussion with podcaster Joe Rogan, where I criticized the unreliable climate and economic “models” upon which we are now predicating our increasingly tyrannical international order.

One indicated my refusal to accede to the hypocritical woke insistence that an obese cover model was in fact a fit and beautiful athlete.

Why Is the CDC No Longer Collecting Adverse Events Reports for COVID-19 Shots? By Ben Bartee

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/09/06/why-is-the-cdc-no-longer-collecting-adverse-events-reports-for-covid-19-shots-n1724876

For reasons unexplained, the CDC recently ceased its collection of adverse events reports via its “V-safe” reporting system regarding the COVID-19 mRNA injections deceptively marketed as “vaccines.”

Via Brownstone Institute (emphasis added):

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) V-safe website quietly stopped collecting adverse event reports with no reason or explanation…

VAERS and V-safe are mutually exclusive safety collection databases operated by the FDA and CDC, respectively. VAERS is an older way of collecting safety data where one can fill out a form online, or manually, or by calling a toll-free number, whereas V-safe is a device “app” which requires online registration. Both VAERS and V-safe collect personal information, lot numbers, dates and associated information, but V-safe was an active collection system geared towards a younger app-using demographic.

Here is what the V-safe website reads as of September 2:

Thank you for your participation.

Data collection for COVID-19 vaccines concluded on June 30, 2023.

If you have symptoms or health problems following your COVID-19 vaccination that concern you, please contact your healthcare provider.

You can also report to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

VAERS, as I have documented previously elsewhere, is notoriously unreliable as a gauge of the actual rate of adverse events. As few as 1% of adverse events from injections are reported to the system. There are several potential reasons for this deficiency:

It is a voluntary reporting system, so healthcare providers are not ethically or legally required to report incidents of adverse events among their patients. You can imagine, as many doctors/nurses work within large medical systems intertwined with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, what kind of institutional disincentives might exist to discourage their use of VAERS.
There is no governmental oversight of complaints levied by patients to doctors and/or pharmaceutical companies to ensure that verbal patient reports ever make it into the system.
Like any government program, the VAERS system is a labyrinthine clusterf*** of bureaucratic rigmarole, and navigating it as a layperson is difficult — particularly for a patient or his/her family already distressed by a vaccine injury.
Studies have shown that, in fact, many healthcare providers themselves don’t know how to file a VAERS report.

Actually, Joe Biden has doubled the deficit By Chris Talgo

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/actually_joe_biden_has_doubled_the_deficit.html

Over the past two years, President Joe Biden has made numerous statements suggesting that he is a deficit hawk on par with past presidents such as Calvin Coolidge or Andrew Jackson. For instance, earlier this year, Biden claimed, “In my first two years, I reduced the debt by $1.7 trillion. No President has ever done that.”

In reality, Biden was half right. No president, including Biden, has ever done anything close to reducing the national debt by such a gigantic amount in his first two years or any two-year period, for that matter.

Here are the facts. When Biden entered the White House, the national debt stood at $27.7 trillion. Two years later, the national debt stands at $32.9 trillion. Using simple arithmetic, the national debt has increased by $5.2 trillion under Biden. That is a big difference from a $1.7 trillion reduction.

However, I’ll do Joe a favor and give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was referring to the deficit, not the debt.

So, let’s take a peek at annual deficits under the Biden administration. In fiscal year 2021, the federal deficit registered at $2.8 trillion. In fiscal year 2022, the deficit was $1.4 trillion. And, in fiscal year 2023, the deficit is expected to surpass the $2 trillion threshold, again.

Before analyzing these figures, I must mention that fiscal years (FY) are different from calendar years because fiscal years encompass the period from October 1 through September 30. This matters quite a bit because fiscal year 2021 included a $920 billion COVID-19 relief package signed into law by President Donald Trump in late December of 2020. In other words, days before Biden entered the Oval Office, another $1 trillion was added to the deficit under the Trump administration, which basically accounts for the deficit reduction from FY 2021 to FY 2022 that Biden takes credit for.

Interestingly, as Biden takes victory laps for the deficit reduction that occurred from FY 2021 to FY 2022, we must not forget that this hollow triumph took place despite Biden, not because of him. By this, I am referring to the fact that immediately upon taking office, Biden signed into law the massive $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which completely obliterated any deficit reduction that would have come to fruition once the previous COVID-19 spending bills came off the books.

California Bills Would Remove Visitation Rights for Parents who Don’t ‘Affirm’ Child’s Gender Identity By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/06/california-bills-would-remove-visitation-rights-for-parents-who-dont-affirm-childs-gender-identity/

Democrats in the state of California continue to double down on their support for transgenderism, and have now introduced legislation that would forbid parents from even seeing their child if they do not support the child’s “gender identity.”

As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, Democrats in the state legislature have introduced two new bills, both of which would change California family law by making “gender affirmation” a part of children’s health, safety, and welfare. The first bill would grant judges the authority to take away custody from parents who do not “affirm” their child’s gender identity, while the second bill would force judges who are considering granting custody rights to take into consideration “a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity or gender expression.”

Neither bill provides any clear definition for the term “affirmation,” nor do they give a specific age by which a child’s identity should be “affirmed” by their parents. Both pieces of legislation will be up for approval by the State Assembly and State Senate by September 14th.

“In the unfortunate event that parents are negotiating visitation rights for their children in a custody dispute, it makes sense for a judge to consider if the children are in legitimate danger,” said Lance Christensen, a spokesman for the California Policy Center. “However, classifying a parent who does not affirm a child’s gender dysphoria should not be in the same category as an abuser.”

The bills were introduced by State Senator Anna Caballero (D-Calif.) and co-authored by State Senator Scott Wiener (D-Calif.), the latter of whom is notorious for introducing numerous pro-LGBT bills that have garnered widespread backlash; his legislation has included a bill that decriminalized the act of knowingly infecting someone with HIV, as well as a bill decriminalizing homosexual acts with minors.

Wiener has repeatedly defended his outlandish legislation, blaming the most recent backlash on “a pretty massive misinformation campaign about this bill by the right-wing media.”

Non-COVID deaths are still way higher than normal. Why? The increase in total deaths from all causes, not just COVID deaths, is up significantly By Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/06/unexplained-excess-deaths-persist-in-post-covid-era/

According to data reported weekly by the CDC, the death rate in America remains elevated. In the six years prior to the COVID era, deaths in the United States averaged between 2.6 and 2.8 million people per year. These averages are adjusted for population growth, and with a population as large as the U.S., the numbers should be, and are, remarkably stable. During the three years immediately preceding the 2020, for example, the population growth adjusted death rate from all causes varied by only 1.5 percent.

None of that is true today. The increase in total deaths – deaths from all causes, not just COVID deaths – is up significantly. If the period between October 2019 and June 2023 had adhered to predictable mortality rates, 10.5 million Americans would have died. Instead, during that period, 12.4 people died. This prolonged period of so-called excess deaths, 17 percent above normal, is only rivaled by the estimated 675,000 deaths from Spanish Flu in America in 1918-19 when the country had a much smaller population.

To illustrate how aberrant these grim statistics are, the chart below plots on a blue line the actual weekly deaths from all causes in the United States from the Fall of 2019 through the Spring of 2023. The grey line plots how many deaths would have occurred if mortality rates had adhered to predictable trends based on highly consistent statistics from the six prior years, 2013 through 2019. The data is indisputable, even if the causes remain mired in controversy. During the so-called COVID era, nearly 2.0 million people are dead who, if it had been normal times, would still be alive today.

There appears to be no end in sight, even though the horrific surges appear to be behind us. As shown on the right edges of the chart, going into the summer of 2023, weekly deaths from all causes remained persistently higher than normal. For example, during the last week of June, which is the most recent week for which there is reasonably complete reporting, 55,000 Americans died. Based on historical patterns, only 51,000 Americans would have died. Excess deaths in the U.S. are still about 7 percent above normal.

Is Biden ‘National Security Threat’? Majority Says Yes: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/07/is-biden-national-security-threat-majority-says-yes-ii-tipp-poll/

Across the globe, the U.S. faces a growing list of dangerous foreign policy challenges. But is the 80-year-old President Joe Biden, with growing signs of age-related mental issues, up to the task? A large majority of Americans, including Democrats, say no, according to the latest I&I/TIPP Poll.

Global dangers abound. China’s engaged in a massive military buildup and poised to attack Taiwan. Meanwhile, Russia wages a bloody war with U.S.-supported Ukraine. In the Mideast, Iran’s nuclear program nears completion, and the U.S.’ 2021 Afghanistan departure has left a power vacuum across the region. This is just a partial list of growing threats.

With these in mind and a looming presidential election, the online I&I/TIPP Poll asked 1,351 adults around the country: “How concerned are you that Biden’s age and mental capacity pose a national security threat?” The poll, taken from Aug. 30-Sept. 1, has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points.

The response was clear: After rounding the data, 70% of all respondents said they were either “very concerned” (44%) or “somewhat concerned” (25%). Just 15% answered “not very concerned,” while 13% said “not at all concerned,” for a total of 28%.

‘Even Hitler,’ Says the Palestinian President Abbas explains why his movement won’t accept peace with Israel.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mahmoud-abbas-palestine-israel-fatah-party-c131ddd9?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

It’s never a good sign when a dictator delivers a rambling historical lecture, in the style of Fidel Castro or Vladimir Putin. Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, proved the point on Aug. 24 before the Fatah Revolutionary Council. His subject? The Jews.

Most media will ignore his comments, which were translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. They don’t fit the liberal narrative that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a clash of two nationalisms that can be resolved in a “peace process” if Israelis make more concessions. The comments also don’t fit the narrative, gaining ground among Democrats, that the Israelis are extreme and the Palestinians progressive.

“The truth that we should clarify to the world,” Mr. Abbas began, “is that European Jews are not Semites. They have nothing to do with Semitism.” He cited the Khazar hypothesis, which speculates that Ashkenazi Jews aren’t descended from the Holy Land, hailing instead from the medieval Tatar kingdom.

This has been discredited by a century of scholarship; today, it’s a theory one expects to find only in online fever swamps. But its usefulness in denying the Jewish connection to the land of Israel has made it a mainstream claim among Palestinians.

Mr. Abbas kept going. “They say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true,” he averred. Europeans “fought against these people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money and so on.”

“Even Hitler,” he added, “said he fought the Jews because they were dealing with usury and money.” Yes, even for Hitler, “this was not about Semitism and anti-Semitism.”

Three days before Mr. Abbas’s speech, his Fatah party’s military wing competed with Hamas to take credit for the murder near Hebron of a Jewish preschool teacher, Batsheva Nigri, in front of her child. If you wonder why the Oslo peace process hit a dead end and stayed there, consider that Mr. Abbas and Fatah have been described for decades as “moderates.”