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Cackling Kamala by Kyle Smith

Posted By on November 1st, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/11/15/cackling-kamala/#slide-1

Observations on a political albatross

Mayday, Code Red, and SOS! As fires bust out everywhere on the Hindenburg of vice presidents, Democrats are sending out dire cries of emergency, not via radio but using their own signaling systems: Politico and Axios and the Washington Post. “How do you solve a problem like Kamala?” the Democrats who demanded a woman of color on the 2020 presidential ticket are asking themselves. Who would have guessed that, as a moss-brained 78-year-old president stumbles around aimlessly through half a dozen crises of his own making, the Halloween screams in the Democratic Party are mostly about the president’s heir apparent?

Kamala Harris is a heartbeat away from becoming the first woman president, the first Asian president, the first woman-of-color president. Big wins all around, right? So why are the Democrats so nervous? They appear to be on the verge of calling in the Henry Wallace treatment and dumping Harris before Joe Biden runs for president again, this time with the election weeks before his 82nd birthday, in 2024. “People think she’s f***ing up, maybe she shouldn’t be the heir apparent,” one Democratic operative told Axios. White House aides use earthy language like “sh**show” to describe Harris’s “poorly managed” office. It’s “an abusive environment,” a staffer “with direct knowledge” told Politico, adding, “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like sh**.”

What if Biden should decline to run for reelection as an octogenarian? Harris, as his lady in waiting, would almost have to be the party’s designated successor because she is black and female. To replace her, according to the party’s prevailing thought codes and its media enablers, would be racist and sexist. Yet the prospect of riding into battle behind Kamala Harris’s generalship has every Dem in D.C. reaching for the Maalox, if not the Ativan or maybe the hemlock.

Dems including “many current senior administration figures,” says Axios, do not think she could beat any potential foe, from Lord Voldemort to Ernst Stavro Blofeld to Donald Trump. If the options facing the American voter on a future ballot turn out to be “Kamala Harris” and “Literally Anyone Else,” Harris is going to be not just an underdog but a longshot. She’s a lady whose trademark gambit — the deranged cackle, which she Jokerishly emits anytime she can’t answer a question — makes Hillary Clinton seem as lovable as a litter of golden-retriever puppies. Unlike Hillary, Harris does not make people feel sorry for her for having been ritually humiliated in her marriage to an intern-abusing lech. Unlike Hillary, Harris doesn’t make people think “She earned it” or “She paid her dues.” Madam Cankles looks like a redoubtable candidate compared to Madam Cackles.

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Highly vaccinated Vermont has spiking COVID cases. What happened? Jazz Shaw

Posted By on November 1st, 2021

https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2021/10/31/highly-vaccinated-vermont-has-spiking-covid-cases-what-happened-n425959

When the vaccines first began to roll out on a national scale early this year, the state of Vermont was one of the earliest leaders in volunteering to be jabbed. The state quickly established itself as one of the early adopters and is now ranked as the most highly vaccinated in the nation. At this point, the state boasts a rate of just shy of 80% who have received at least one shot, with the majority of the remainder being made up of children who only just became eligible.

There are a variety of reasons they were able to do this, both anecdotal and statistically supportable. First, the state only has a population of 623,000, largely condensed into a few major population centers, so it wasn’t hard to set up pods for everyone. Also, no matter how controversial it may be to say this, Vermont is one of the whitest states in the nation (92.5% white, 1.32% Black, 1.3% Hispanic). Vaccine hesitancy in America has typically been highest among minorities, so they had less of that to contend with. On top of that, they tend to have a fairly socialist population that doesn’t mind having the government tell them what to do. (They keep electing Bernie Sanders to every imaginable office he likes, so what do you expect?)

So with such a high rate of supposedly immunized residents, why are they having a spike in COVID cases? Granted, it’s not much of a spike compared to more densely populated areas. On October 16 they recorded 342 new cases and two deaths. But still, their numbers are trending in the wrong direction as we make our way through autumn. What gives? According to a report this weekend from the Boston Globe, Vermont may be a “victim of its own success.” They rushed to get vaccinated early and now that may be coming back to bite them.

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Biden, Democrats failing to sell agenda to American people: POLL Roughly 7 in 10 Americans know little about the bills Democrats are negotiating. By Quinn Scanlan

Posted By on November 1st, 2021

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-democrats-failing-sell-agenda-american-people-poll/story?id=80877850

Negotiations on the infrastructure and social program bills have consumed Capitol Hill for months. Still, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll out Sunday finds Democrats are failing to sell the legislation to the public, who are broadly unaware of what is in the spending packages or skeptical they would help people like themselves, or the economy, if signed into law.

President Joe Biden was unable to secure a legislative win before departing on his second foreign trip since taking office, even after he laid out a framework for the package focused on social programs and climate change around which he believes Democrats can rally. He pitched that package, which no longer includes paid family and medical leave or free community college, as a “historic economic” opportunity on Thursday, but this poll reflects the continued confusion and intraparty mistrust over these bills.

Although a majority (55%) of the public is following news about the negotiations at least somewhat closely, about 7 in 10 (69%) Americans said they know just some or little to nothing about what’s in both bills. Fewer than half (31%) said they know a great deal or good amount. Despite Republicans having sat on the sidelines while the White House works exclusively with congressional Democrats to get both bills to the president’s desk, the lack of knowledge extends across all parties.

Americans also do not feel like these bills would help them or the U.S. economy if they become law.

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No, white people didn’t invent slavery and conquest by Becket Adams

Posted By on November 1st, 2021

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/no-white-people-didnt-invent-slavery-and-conquest

It’s unclear what, exactly, they’re teaching Africana studies professors these days, but it apparently isn’t world history.

Rutgers University Professor Brittney Cooper, whose area of expertise is in women’s and gender studies and Africana studies, believes subjugation and military conquest didn’t exist in the world between “brown and black” people until white people arrived on the scene with their colonialism and white supremacy.

“I think that white people are committed to being villains in the aggregate,” she said this week during an appearance at the Root Institute conference.

Cooper continued, launching into a wild, fact-free tirade about “white people,” saying, “It’s not that white people don’t know what they have done. They know. They fear that there is no other way to be human but the way in which they are human. So, you know, you talk to white people, and whenever you really want to have a reckoning about it, they say stuff like, you know, ‘It’s just human nature. If y’all had all of this power, you would have done the same thing, right?'”

“And it’s like, no, that’s what white humans did. White human beings thought, ‘there’s a world here and we own it.’ Prior to them, black and brown people have been sailing across oceans, interacting with each other, for centuries without total subjugation, domination, and colonialism,” Cooper added.

This is a lot to unpack.

For starters, to what oceans, exactly, is she referring? The Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, or Southern? If she believes “black and brown” people regularly sailed across these oceans for “centuries” before white colonialism, interacting peacefully with each other, this would come as a shock to a great number of historians and archaeologists.

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China: A Dicey Ideological Shift by Amir Taheri

Posted By on November 1st, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17906/china-ideological-shift

The Chinese economy has become subject to the classical rules of capitalism. This means cyclical boom and busts that do not coincide with the political needs of an ideology-based regime. It also means the emergence of a large middle class that, sooner or later, is bound to question the monopoly of power by a single party even if that party boasts some 80 million members.

Beijing uses various schemes to downgrade other ethnic identities. These include dividing larger ethnic groups into smaller and smaller communities. This is why the official statistics mention 56 different ethnic groups instead of the five broader ones accepted by most scholars.

In some notable cases, Beijing uses repressive measures to downgrade and, in time, eliminate ethnic identities.

The populist-nationalist ideological shift that Xi is seeking has another inevitable consequence: casting China as a conquering power. Putin showed the way by annexing Crimea….

In the case of China, we have already witnessed a number of similar moves, most notably the ditching of the “one-country two-system” scheme in Hong Kong and Macao and Xi’s pledge in the recent party conference to regain control of Taiwan.

Political systems based on ideology always face a challenge when they realize that real events have rendered their ideology obsolete.

This could happen at different moments in an ideology-based regime’s life.

The Nazi party in Germany realized that soon after sweeping to power and decided to script socialist pretensions out of its discourse and, with the Night of the Long Knives, to promote Hitler’s cult of personality as kerygma [proclamation].

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An Alarming Letter From January 6 Protester Nathan DeGrave, From His Jail Cell in Washington DC

Posted By on November 1st, 2021

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/30/an-alarming-letter-from-january-6-protester-nathan-degrave-from-his-jail-cell-in-washington-dc/

A twitter thread shared by Brad Geyer relays a letter presented by a jailed J6 detainee held inside the Washington DC Department of Corrections. [Twitter Link Here]  The content of the letter written by a detainee named Nathan DeGrave is very disturbing.  The allegations within the letter are alarming; however, they are supported by other detainees who have described similar conditions.

Dear fellow Americans:

I never thought I’d write a letter like this, but we’re living in very different times. This is my cry for help.

My name is Nathan DeGrave, and as a non violent participant at the Jan 6th rally, I’ve spent the last 9 months detained as a political prisoner in pod C2B at the DC Department of Corrections (DOC) otherwise known as DC’s Gitmo.

The conditions here for Jan 6ers have been inhumane. In fact, some inmates are even begging to be transferred to GUANTANAMO BAY, where even THEY have more acceptable standards.

Class action LAWSUITS are being filed against this prison; and even the ACLU has gotten involved. Senators Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene have since attempted to gain access to this facility and inspect the conditions of the jail, only to be denied.  The vile filth of what has become our daily life is being illegally HIDDEN from the members of OUR OWN CONGRESS.

So let me tell you about what me and many of the other Jan 6ers have been experiencing in DC’s Gitmo. It is my hope that with MEDIA EXPOSURE and the awareness of the American public, that SOMETHING may be done and this never happens to anyone ever again.

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Judicial Watch Sues on Behalf of OpenTheBooks.com for Fauci Financial Disclosure Records and Royalties Paid to NIH Employees

Posted By on November 1st, 2021

https://www.openthebooks.com/judicial-watch-sues-on-behalf-of-openthebookscom-for-fauci-financial-disclosure-records-and-royalties-paid-to-nih-employees/

Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of  OpenTheBooks.com against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for the employment contracts; financial, conflict of interest, and confidentiality disclosure documents; and job description of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., as well as royalties paid to NIH employees by outside entities (American Transparency, DBA OpenTheBooks.com v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 1:21-cv-02821)).

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is an agency of HHS, failed to comply fully with three FOIA requests filed between January 28, 2021, and September 2021, for the following records about Dr. Fauci:

All employment contracts, modifications and addendums since hiring as Director of National Institute for Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (January 28, 2021)
Daily calendar from 1/1/2019 to the present time. (January 28, 2021) (After a phone call in January with NIH, we agreed to narrow our request and took this calendar request out.)
Any confidentiality documents, conflict documents, and economic interest disclosure documents. (January 28, 2021)
Current job description. (January 28, 2021)
Any confidentiality agreements, conflict of interest documents, and economic interest disclosure documents pertaining to calendar year 2020 to the present. These include but are not limited to the OGE Form 278e and accompanying paperwork filed for 2020 with a May 2021 deadline. (May 27, 2021)
A complete list/database of all personal royalties paid (including, but not limited to, FY2020) to current and former National Institutes of Health employees for work done while they were federally employed. The list/database should include, but not be limited to, the royalty recipient’s name, the amount of the royalty, the reason for the royalty, the date the royalty was paid, and the name of the entity paying the royalty. (September 15, 2021)

“No one is above the law including Dr. Anthony Fauci. It shouldn’t take a subpoena or a lawsuit to force open basic employment documents that executive-level federal bureaucrats are required by law to file,” said Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and founder of OpenTheBooks.com. “We thank Judicial Watch for being a good friend and partner in this important matter.”

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The EU’s Dangerous Policy Towards Iran’s Mullahs by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on October 30th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17904/eu-policy-iran

The EU also made many concessions to Iran, such as agreeing to include in the nuclear deal sunset clauses enabling the mullahs soon to have as many nuclear weapons as they like.

Meanwhile, the EU, which never stops moralizing to other countries about how they should be conducting themselves, has turned a blind eye to credible reports regarding Iran’s continually violating the nuclear deal as well as pursuing clandestine nuclear activities. By February 2016, Iran had already exceeded its threshold for heavy water for the second time.

At the same time, when it comes to terrorism, members of the EU have been among the main targets of Iran’s terrorist plots. The Iranian regime has been implicated in a series of assassinations, seizing European hostages and other hostile acts across Europe….

The EU might also do well to see how Iran’s military adventurism in the region has escalated — and will continue to escalate unless it is stopped.

If Iran acquires nuclear capability, it will no longer even have to use terrorism or hostage-taking — or even its new bombs — to blackmail Europe: the mere threat of using one should be sufficient.

Will the EU please wake up in time and alter its dangerous policy towards Iran?

For almost six years since the 2015 “nuclear deal,” the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was reached, the European Union has been appeasing Iran’s ruling mullahs. What the EU fails to see is that that its soft policy towards the mullahs has been a total disaster and dangerous.

Right after the “nuclear deal” was reached — which by the way the Iranian regime never signed — the EU, alongside the Obama administration, lifted nearly all its economic sanctions. It was a gift that helped the Iranian regime to reintegrate into the global financial system. The EU also made many concessions to Iran, such as agreeing to include in the nuclear deal sunset clauses enabling the mullahs soon to have as many nuclear weapons as they like.

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‘It works! It works! It works!’: Jonas Salk and the Vaccine that Conquered Polio Paul A. Offit

Posted By on October 30th, 2021

https://quillette.com/2021/10/29/it-works-it-works-it-works-jonas-salk-and-the-vaccine-that-conquered-polio/

Excerpted, with permission, from You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, The Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation, by Paul A. Offit.

Jonas Salk was born on October 28th, 1914, in a tenement in East Harlem, New York—the first son of Russian immigrants and the eldest of three brothers. After finishing four years of high school in three, Salk entered the City College of New York and later won a scholarship to the medical school at New York University. In December 1941, after the United States entered World War II, Salk was given a choice. He could either be commissioned as a doctor in the armed forces or remain in the United States to pursue a scientific career. He chose science, working on an influenza vaccine in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Francis at the University of Michigan. Fifteen years later, Francis would supervise the critical test of Salk’s vaccine.

In 1943, while Salk was working on the influenza vaccine, 10,000 people, mostly children, contracted polio in the United States; in 1948, when Salk was first studying polioviruses at the University of Pittsburgh, 27,000 more people were affected; and in 1952, when Salk was first testing his polio vaccine in and around Pittsburgh, 59,000 more cases occurred. A national poll found that polio was second only to the atomic bomb as the thing Americans feared most. There was a desperate, growing desire to prevent polio.

Viruses, unlike bacteria, grow inside cells. To grow polioviruses in the 1930s, scientists John Kolmer and Maurice Brodie had used cells from monkey brains and monkey spinal cords. Salk, on the other hand, used cells from monkey testicles. Later, concerned that people would never accept a vaccine grown in monkey testicles, Salk switched to monkey kidney cells, which are still used to make polio vaccines today.

Because three different types of poliovirus cause disease, Salk knew that he would need to include representatives of all three types in his vaccine. For type 1, Salk chose the Mahoney strain—a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. The Mahoney strain was first recovered from a child in Akron, Ohio, whose last name was Mahoney. But the Mahoney strain wasn’t limited to the Mahoneys. The Klines, living next door, were also infected. Three of five Kline children were paralyzed and later died from the disease—an early clue to the unique horror of this particular strain. The other two strains of virus contained in Salk’s vaccine, representing types 2 and 3, weren’t controversial.

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Very Fine People These are the times that try men’s souls. Some will be found wanting. Others will come through with a pure and noble wrath. By Peter W. Wood

Posted By on October 30th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/29/very-fine-people/

An excerpt from Wrath: America Enraged (Encounter, 256 pages, $28.99)

Jacob Anthony Chansley, who also goes by the name Jake Angeli, was one of the people who made their way into the chamber of the U.S. Senate in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to protest the Senate’s impending certification of state electors who would install Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. His name may not register, but his image will: he was the fellow bizarrely attired in a coyote-fur hat sprouting black buffalo horns; shirtless, showing his muscular but heavily tattooed torso; sporting black gloves and a red knapsack; face painted in vertical red, white, and blue stripes; and carrying an American flag on a spear.

The disorderly intrusion of several hundred protesters into the Capitol was quickly characterized by the media, and by many politicians, as an “insurrection.” Moreover, the accusation of insurrection was applied to the many thousands of Trump supporters in Washington that day who had nothing to do with the intrusion into the Capitol. And that characterization became the basis for the House of Representatives to impeach President Trump for supposedly inciting the “insurrection” and the impetus for Joe Biden to order 26,000 National Guard troops to defend Washington during his inauguration on January 20.

As it happened, there was no insurrection.

Images of Chansley in his costume—arguing with a police officer; posing with other protesters in a foyer; standing behind the Senate dais with his fist raised in triumph; outside holding a sign that declared “Q Sent Me!” and speaking into a microphone while clutching the obverse of the sign, “Hold the Line Patriots God Wins”; and, in several shots, chin raised as he apparently sings—stand out among the handful of photos of the Capitol protest that have become iconic. They helped cement the reputation of the protesters as crazy extremists.