NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Collins-Fauci axis against anti-lockdown scientists By Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on December 24th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/the_collinsfauci_axis_against_antilockdown_scientists.html

Francis Collins, the first appointed National Institutes of Health director to serve more than one president, stepped down on December 19, leaving behind a record open to question. For example, in an October 8, 2020 email, Collins told Dr. Anthony Fauci, “there needs to be a quick and devastating public takedown of its premises. I don’t see that on line yet. Is it underway?” 

Collins’ target was the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by more than 900,000 epidemiologists and public health scientists to show concern about the damaging physical and mental health impact of government COVID policies. Those policies, the signers contend, should focus on the most vulnerable while letting others continue normal lives. 

The Barrington signatories included biophysicist Mike Leavitt, professor of structural biology at Stanford and the 2013 winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Stanford Medical School professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya also signed on, joined by Dr. Martin Kulldorf, professor of medicine at Harvard. 

These experts are every bit as qualified, or more so, than Collins. Even so, the NIH boss called them “fringe epidemiologists” and wanted Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), to deliver a hit piece. 

On October 19, 2020, MedPage Today posted a piece headlined “Who Are the Scientists Behind the Great Barrington Declaration?” As the article noted, “All three have advocated against lockdown measures since the start of the pandemic.” This assumed that lockdowns were an unalloyed benefit for the people. 

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Remember Ronil ‘Ron’ Singh CA police officer, a legal immigrant from Fiji, was gunned down by a criminal illegal. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on December 24th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/remember-ronil-ron-singh-lloyd-billingsley/

On December 25, 2018, police officer Ronil Singh enjoyed a Christmas dinner in Newman, California. His wife Anamika wanted him to stay home Christmas night with their infant son, but the officer reported for duty because “his community needed him.” In the early morning hours, Singh pulled over a suspected drunk driver.

“Shots fired,” radioed Singh, his last words before dying from gunshot wounds. Shooter Gustavo Perez Arriaga, also known as Paulo Virgen Mendoza, an illegal immigrant, fled the scene with aid from other illegals. Last November Mendoza, who also had gang connections, was sentenced to life in prison.  Three years after the murder, crucial parts of the story may have been forgotten.

Ronil Singh was a legal immigrant from Fiji who came to the United States with the goal of becoming a police officer. Singh achieved his dream and by all accounts the seven-year veteran was a model officer. When he learned that a colleague had never flown on an airplane and never taken a vacation, Singh “literally threw his credit card on my desk and told me to book one. That was the embodiment of Ronil Singh.” His murder never should have happened.

The killer entered the United States illegally and in August, 2011, was arrested for a felony DUI that inflicted an injury. In June of 2014, the illegal was arrested on suspicion of a misdemeanor DUI. Mendoza never showed up for a five-day sentence and in January 2015 skipped a court date. A warrant was issued for his arrest, and in December of 2018, he was still a wanted man.

According to records, Mendoza’s illegal status was never raised in court, and federal immigration authorities had no contact with him before he murdered Ronil Singh. The Mexican was a beneficiary of California’s sanctuary law, under which false-documented illegals, even violent criminals, are a privileged and protected class.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Soviet Union, Thirty Years Later The moral struggle continues. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on December 24th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/soviet-union-thirty-years-later-bruce-bawer/

For years, if you opened the closet in the foyer of my Manhattan apartment, you’d encounter a pile of copies of the New York Times from the week in late December 1991 during which the Soviet Union breathed its last. I’ve never been in the habit of hanging on to old newspapers in which my byline didn’t appear, but that week, it seemed to me at the time, was the greatest historical turning point I’d ever experienced.

It was certainly the most astonishing. I remember a point, sometime in the late 1980s, when, during a visit to Washington, I expressed over lunch with American Spectator editor Wladyslaw Pleszczynski what was then an almost universal cynicism about talk of a post-Communist Europe. “No,” said Wlady, who was far more plugged into these developments than most of us, “it’s really happening.”

That was the moment when I started believing it. But you have to forgive my doubts. Throughout the postwar era, nearly everybody had taken the U.S.-Soviet standoff for granted. The division of the world into two parts, free and unfree, felt like a fact of nature. Mutual assured nuclear destruction made any major change in the world order inconceivable.

For virtually everybody, that is, except Ronald Reagan. My biggest professional regret of all time is that, as a snotty young grad student in the early 1980s, I penned a condescending screed about the Gipper that appeared on Newsweek’s “My Turn” page, which was reserved for contributions by amateurs. And boy, was I an amateur. Although I’d voted for Reagan in 1980, I’d since bought into the media clichés about him and, in my silly piece, spat them back out as if they were a product of original thought.  

Like every other detractor of Reagan, however, I learned soon enough that I’d been a fool. All the know-it-alls at the State Department had shivered with embarrassment when he’d shouted in his 1987 Berlin speech: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” But the wall did come down. I was there, in 1990, when parts of it were still being chipped away at. All around me, people were snapping up pieces to take home. But I couldn’t bring myself to pick one up. I didn’t feel I’d earned it.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s post-Covid new trade order David Goldman

Posted By on December 23rd, 2021

https://asiatimes.com/2021/12/chinas-post-covid-new-trade-order/

NEW YORK – China has become the dominant source of demand for Asian manufactures and the leading supplier of goods to the United States and Western Europe during the past two years, reshaping global trade patterns.

The sheer increase in China’s export volume is impressive, but just as important is the composition of trade. Asia has become tightly integrated as a Sinocentric trade zone, and the Western industrial nations have become more dependent on Chinese goods.

Some American strategists worry about China’s growing power in Asia. China’s enormous gains in Asian trade during the past two years at the expense of the US and Japan make that a moot point.

Elbridge Colby, a former Defense Department official who advocates a “strategy of denial” against China, tweeted on December 22: “Global peace isn’t our goal. Preserving Americans’ security, freedom and prosperity is. Not compatible with China dominating Asia, the world’s largest market area.”

In economic terms, that concern is two years late and a trillion dollars short.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Mansour Abbas’s ‘Jewish state’ bombshell By RUTHIE BLUM

Posted By on December 23rd, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-689633

 
For the second time since April, Ra’am (United Arab List) Party leader Mansour Abbas has caused the jaws of critics and supporters alike to drop in near disbelief, for a similar reason. The first followed his success in the last round of Knesset elections on March 23. The second occurred at the Globes Israel Business Conference on Tuesday.

In some ways, the former was more groundbreaking. In a speech broadcast live in Hebrew on all of Israel’s TV channels, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamist faction performed two major feats. One was to declare his intention to further the interests of his constituents through cooperation and coexistence with the Jews in the country of his citizenship. The other was to omit all mention of the Palestinians.

He delivered the address on April 1 in Nazareth, with the green banner of the Islamic Movement, not the Israeli flag, as a backdrop. But he quoted a conciliatory passage from the Koran, and announced: “I, Mansour Abbas, a man of the Islamic Movement, am a proud Arab and Muslim, a citizen of the state of Israel, who heads the leading, biggest political movement in Arab society, courageously champion a vision of peace, mutual security, partnership and tolerance between the peoples.”

His lack of customary lip service to the Palestinian struggle against the Jewish state was equally noteworthy for its novelty.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Christian community is growing, 84% satisfied with life here –

Posted By on December 23rd, 2021

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-christian-community-is-growing-84-satisfied-with-life-here-report/

Pre-Christmas study finds high education levels, contrasts with warnings from Church leaders that ‘radical’ Israeli groups are driving Christians from Holy Land

  More and more young Israeli Christians are joining the Israeli military and rejecting the Arab identity which was forced on them by the Muslims during the last few centuries. They now identify as Aramaic Christian Israelis, not Arabs.  And this report ignores the Aramaic Christians, labeling them as Arabs – a label they reject.)

According to the CBS, Christians make up about 1.9% of Israel’s population and grew by 1.4% in 2020.

Christians make up 7% of Israel’s Arab population, and 76.7% of Christians in Israel are Arab. The largest Arab Christian population centers in Israel are Nazareth (21,400), Haifa (16,500) and Jerusalem (12,900).

Among non-Arab Christians, the majority lived in the Tel Aviv area.

The statistics revealed that Arab Christian women had some of the highest education rates in the country.

northern city of Nazareth on December 18, 2021. (AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP)

Israel’s Christian community grew by 1.4 percent in 2020 and numbers some 182,000 people, with 84% saying they were satisfied with life in the country, the Central Bureau of Statistics said in a report released ahead of Christmas.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who’s afraid of Omicron? It appears Covid-19 has now mutated back into, like its cousins, an irritating, not-at-all scary bug Chadwick Moore

Posted By on December 23rd, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/everyone-america-omicron-christmas/

So, you got a cold. It happens around this time every year, to almost everyone. You got the sniffles, your head is a little foggy, you have an occasional sneeze, there’s some persistent phlegm lingering in the back of your throat. It’s mildly annoying, and you’re reminded this is bound to happen at least once every winter, and life goes on as normal but with a few more tissues in your pocket. Give it three days, a week max. Maybe you take some over-the-counter medicine, have chicken soup for lunch, sleep next to a humidifier. Upon greeting friends or coworkers, you politely decline a handshake or hug. “Sorry, I’ve got a cold,” you tell them — and they appreciate your consideration. “Oh, I just got over that,” one might say, “something’s going around.” No one panics, no one cares, you’re still invited to the party, you can still go to dinner, you still go to the office.

That’s Omicron. To date, one person in the US has died with Omicron — though, as with the flu during the winter months, that number will rise over the coming weeks. Note, that’s with Omicron, not from. “With” not “from” is how the germ fetishists in media, government and medicine came up with that apocalyptic number of 800,000 Covid-19 deaths in the US, reached this month. That number means nothing to anyone who’s been following the science, and is critical of the news. We knew back in 2020 that Covid-19 was about as lethal as a particularly nasty strain of flu, albeit this one was made by the Chinese in a lab, and the actual death toll was probably around 100,000, also on par with a very bad flu season.

The common cold is a coronavirus, and it appears Covid-19 has now mutated back into, like its cousins, an irritating, not-at-all scary bug. Yes, for a small number, Omicron may prove fatal — but deadlier than the flu? So far, the evidence suggests that’s unlikely. Variants were always going to be less deadly and more contagious — that’s how viruses survive. If you’re a virus and you’re too deadly, and kill all your hosts, you die too.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Can A Struggling America Afford Costly Climate Hysteria? Is climate religion worth the destruction of our society? By John D. O’Connor

Posted By on December 23rd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/22/can-a-struggling-america-afford-costly-climate-hysteria/

Spiraling inflation and COVID’s economic dislocations threaten America’s wobbly economy. Yet the Biden Administration, to fight “climate change,” has imposed significant new regulatory costs, committed itself to massive spending increases, and seeks even more spending and new taxes, which together could bring us to an economic tipping point.

But rather than acknowledge the irreparable damage that onerous climate policies will certainly wreak, the administration forecasts untold devastation if the country does not buy its prophecies of environmental cataclysm.

The public is left to choose between unsustainable costs or existential climate doom, supposedly proven certain by “science.” But what does noncontroversial “science” really prove?

First, there is no doubt that greatly increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, absent extreme amounts of negative feedback, will elevate temperatures. No reasonable scientist disputes this bland statement.

But three questions are generally avoided, or dishonestly addressed, by demagoguing politicians and the credulous media. First, how great a temperature increase will be caused by doubling CO2? Second, even if we accept massive, debilitating costs to fight CO2 increases, will bearing those costs actually help us avoid the environmental Armageddon predicted, or, will the status quo persist in any event? Third, are there significant benefits from increasing CO2 that will substantially improve life for billions of impoverished individuals worldwide, with negligible costs?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America Needs a Rebirth of Science By Scott W. Atlas , Jay Bhattacharya & Martin Kulldorff

Posted By on December 23rd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/america-needs-a-rebirth-of-science/

The nation’s experience during Covid has revealed that the scientific community is not giving Americans what they need, what they deserve, and what they pay for. We must do better.

A healthy and flourishing republic requires a social and political climate that respects true scientific inquiry and exploration. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the astonishing capacity of science to produce breakthroughs such as vaccines and other drugs for the public good. At the same time, we have seen the biggest public-health fiasco in history, and the marginalization and censoring of dissident scientists. The pandemic has exposed myriad long-standing problems facing science that go far beyond a single virus.

In science, centralization has created a harmful uniformity and herd thinking that hinders the free exchange of ideas. A de facto scientific cartel system determines who receives essential research funding; who ends up published in the most prestigious and influential journals; and who are promoted to more senior positions. In many scientific fields, a small group of senior scientists — who may have an interest in their ideas not being challenged — determines who will be published and who will get the research grants. Ultimately, this system creates a highly impenetrable and shielded sphere of thinking that crowds out new ideas and true scientific debate.

For instance, the majority of U.S. infectious-disease research is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). With Dr. Anthony Fauci as its director, infectious-disease scientists think twice before criticizing the pandemic policies advocated by Dr. Fauci. A similar situation exists in the United Kingdom, with Dr. Jeremy Farrar and the Wellcome Trust. It should not surprise us that some of the most important epidemiological research on the pandemic has come from smaller countries, including Israel, Qatar, Denmark, Sweden, and Iceland.

The solution to the current state of stifling scientific sclerosis is not an abandonment of science. Instead, science must be reformed, restored, and reinvigorated so all scientists can engage with independence and boldness in the pursuit of a never-ending horizon.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

No Critical Race Theory in Schools? Here’s the Abundant Evidence Saying Otherwise By John Murawski

Posted By on December 23rd, 2021

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/12/22/no_critical_race_theory_in_schools_heres_the_abundant_evidence_saying_otherwise_808528.html

Mary Nicely, who is now second-in-command at the California Department of Education, went on her personal Facebook page this summer to denounce conservatives who oppose teaching critical race theory in schools as “yet another White right and education reformer distraction.”

Nicely also reposted a newspaper column in July defining critical race theory as a key used in law schools to expose racism in the legal system: “It is taught, if at all, in law school — not high school.”

Randi Weingarten, teachers union leader: Her denial about critical race theory in schools is at odds with the evidence.

Her claim echoed other education experts, like Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who tweeted: “We could explain until our last breath that CRT is not taught in K-12, but the actual definition of CRT doesn’t matter anymore in these debates.”

These denials, which have been amplified by many news organizations, are at odds with overwhelming evidence – documented by class lessons, school curricula, focus groups, teacher surveys and public statements by educators – that CRT is not only taught in class, but is also heavily promoted by the K-12 education establishment.

Some high schools are already teaching lessons and units on CRT, where students write papers demonstrating their facility with applying the theory, while other schools are introducing CRT concepts, such as systemic racism, white privilege, microaggressions, implicit bias and intersectionality.