NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Landmark mass study finds vaccinated people 13 times more likely to catch Covid-19 than those who have recovered and have natural immunity By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on August 28th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/landmark_mass_study_finds_vaccinated_people_13_times_more_likely_to_catch_covid19_than_those_who_have_recovered_and_have_natural_immunity.html

A study of 800,000 people in Israel has found that natural immunity in people who have recovered from an earlier COVID-10 infection is vastly superior to the immunity acquired by vaccination using two of the major vaccines in use. The conclusion:

“This analysis demonstrated that natural immunity affords longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization due to the delta variant.”

Bloomberg summarizes:

People who recovered from a bout of Covid-19 during one of the earlier waves of the pandemic appear to have a lower risk of contracting the delta variant than those who got two doses of the vaccine from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE.

The largest real-world analysis comparing natural immunity — gained from an earlier infection — to the protection provided by one of the most potent vaccines currently in use showed that reinfections were much less common. The paper from researchers in Israel contrasts with earlier studies, which showed that immunizations offered better protection than an earlier infection, though those studies were not of the delta variant. (snip)

The analysis also showed that protection from an earlier infection wanes with time. The risk of a vaccine-breakthrough delta case was 13-fold higher than the risk of developing a second infection when the original illness occurred during January or February 2021. That’s significantly more than the risk for people who were ill earlier in the outbreak. 

Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor and do not offer medical advice to any reader.

Israel, with its very high vaccination rate, is currently dealing with a severe outbreak of the delta variant.

(source)

It would seem that the vaccines are no panacea when it comes to a rapidly-evolving virus.

Alex Berenson goes into some detail on the body’s natural immunity response and cites other studies as well indicating the effectiveness of natural immunity, a position that was contradicted by some earlier studies.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academia reaches its terminal stage of rot By Liam Brooks

Posted By on August 28th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/academia_reaches_its_terminal_stage_of_rot.html

“Those who can do; those who can’t teach.”

Most people who were born prior to the socialist infestation and eventual takeover of our education system probably remember that quote.  It was written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903, a line from his four-act drama Man and Superman.  It has been upsetting teachers and professors ever since, many of whom had a valid complaint about being included among the alleged non-achievers. 

Many fine teachers throughout history have helped positively shape young minds — there’s no doubt about that.  But some educators who whined about the quote were mediocrities who inspire few if any students; others are subversive ideologues who spend their entire careers indoctrinating impressionable kids in their relentless pursuit of a utopian fantasy.  The effort is ongoing, and the warning signs have been there for decades.  But anyone who sounded the alarm was ridiculed and called a conspiracy nut, a wacko, or a Nazi.  Some things never change…especially in the tried-and-true Marxist playbook.  Saul Alinsky would be proud!

Sadly, we are now on the cusp of seeing that twisted dream become a reality.  Orwellian doublespeak, a socialist staple, is a Democrat favorite: those who brazenly violate the Constitution accuse the opposition of violating the Constitution…those who loudly decry racism pound race-hatred into the minds of our children…tyrants who twice impeached President Trump without a scintilla of evidence support the delusional hack in the White House while he commits numerous impeachable offenses…apparatchiks rant “follow the science,” all the while encouraging troubled children to pretend they’re members of the opposite sex.  I could go on, but you get the point.

The federal government encourages and often mandates the indoctrination in our schools, the primary tool for destroying young minds.  There are myriad reasons why this cancer continues to metastasize, but even a cursory look at who controls the reins of power in the federal behemoth provides a good part of the answer.

– Janet Yellen, secretary of the Treasury, has had a lengthy career as a “public servant and educator,” according to her bio on Wikipedia.  In fact, it appears that she has done nothing except lecture at the academy and work for various bureaucracies.  She is lauded as a great economist but has never really worked in the private sector.  Yellen did serve as chair of the Federal Reserve, but the Fed is a quasi-government institution that manages currency supply and interest rates about as well as Congress manages the budget.  Hyper-inflation, anyone?

– Miguel Cardona, secretary of education, taught fourth grade through college, then worked as an appointed bureaucrat at the state and federal levels.  Period.  Apparently, he has never worked a day in the private sector.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who will take the fall for Afghanistan? By Jeffery Locke

Posted By on August 28th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/who_will_take_the_fall_for_afghanistan.html

One of the Marine Corps principles of leadership is to accept responsibility for your actions.  In most Western cultures, those who fail spectacularly then resign.  Traditional Japanese military culture demanded that those who failed commit suicide out of shame and honor.

In modern Democrat party political culture, there is no true individual responsibility for one’s own actions, either in public or private life.  Everything that goes wrong is either someone else’s fault or society’s fault.  It’s a victimology cult.  A hollow, ritualistic statement of “the buck stops here” is then usually accompanied by the non sequitur of blaming someone else.  This is what President Biden did yet again in recent days.

Not long ago, the U.S. military was the one branch of government that worked because of its culture of accountability.  There isn’t accountability in the civilian branches because of civil service rules and public employee unions.  President Obama began the aggressive politicization of flag officers, dismissing those who disagreed with his policies and promoting leftists.

 Now Secretary Austin and Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Milley aim to purge the entire officer corps and enlisted ranks of anyone who isn’t woke.  The results of their policies are on parade in Afghanistan.

A new and massive failure has entered the American Pantheon of Military Fiascos: “The Biden Blunder,” “The Kabul Katastrophe,” or “Stan Ran ’21,” take your pick.  It joins others in the Hall of Shame:

The Battle of Brooklyn, 1776
Custer’s Last Stand, 1876
Pearl Harbor, 1941
Bataan-Corregidor, 1941-42
The Yalu River, 1950
Saigon, 1975
9-11, 2001

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Gave Up More Than Bagram American blood now covers the hands of our disgraced president and his underlings. by Scott McKay

Posted By on August 28th, 2021

https://spectator.org/biden-american-gave-up-more-than-bagram/

Earlier this week, as covered in a previous column in the American Spectator, the Democrat National Committee bragged about the “achievement” of this alleged president in his “best-run evacuation” of Kabul. Chief among the DNC’s arguments for such ludicrous praise was the lack of American casualties.

The press flacks at the DNC, every one of whom would be fired if that organization had the slightest honor (its chairman, the failed U.S. Senate candidate Jaime Harrison, should similarly resign in disgrace before the weekend), were merely parroting statements the alleged president made about the absence of dead Americans at the time.

Every single credible person with either operational military experience or a knowledge of Afghanistan was warning that casualties were already inevitable by that point. Even the alleged president, in a fit of congratulatory onanism, qualified the alleged safety of the “best-run evacuation” with the proverbial knock on wood.

It was clear to anyone willing to see that an American president “knocking on wood” in hopes of avoiding an ironic national security cataclysm is only inviting such a disaster to our door. So on Thursday, when multiple suicide bombers attacked the Kabul airport and the Baron Hotel just outside its gates, killing an untold number of people (at last count before this column was turned in, the butcher’s bill was more than 90 dead, including 13 American military men: 12 Marines and one Navy Corpsman), absolutely no one should have been surprised.

In fact, an alert went out to any American left in Afghanistan shortly before the explosion that they should stay away from the Kabul airport because of a “security threat.”

Of course there was a security threat, and of course there would be a terrorist attack on the airport. By the very nature of waiting outside the airport for a chance to get on a plane and leave an Afghanistan governed by the Taliban, everyone there signaled themselves an enemy of fundamentalist Islam as practiced by the 7th century brutes now in control of that country. Of course they were terror targets.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The CCP’s COVID-19 Cover Up  The truth about the CCP’s culpability in the pandemic’s origin and spread would cost too many powerful elitists and institutions too much money; and endanger their self-anointed elite “status.” By Thaddeus G. McCotter

Posted By on August 28th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/27/the-ccps-covid-19-cover-up/

The Biden Administration’s intelligence community has completed its investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Two of three agencies believe the virus originated in animals and was naturally transmitted to humans, and one agency believes the virus originated in a Wuhan laboratory. Thus, as is the swamp’s wont, in an unsurprising denouement to this worldwide whodunit, the investigation’s conclusion was “inconclusive.”

This outcome was foreshadowed at the start by a statement from Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines: “We’re hoping to find a smoking gun . . . it’s challenging to do that. It might happen, but it might not.” Why indeed is it so “challenging” to find a “smoking gun” and forge a consensus? Given her criminal metaphor, it is clear she believed the CCP was going to continue its obstinate refusal to assist the investigations of the United States or any international agency, (including ones it dominates, such as the World Health Organization) into the pandemic’s origin. 

Just prior to the issuance of the IC’s “inconclusive” determination, Fu Cong, director-general of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Arms Control Department, spewed lies and threats: 

We will continue to cooperate with international organizations like the WHO in their research and in their search for the origins. ​​But we do not accept baseless and unfounded accusations that are politically motivated. And if they want to baselessly accuse China, so they better be prepared to accept the counterattack from China.

Curiously, Cong also claimed that the WHO should be permitted to investigate Fort Detrick in Maryland, which he alleged was “the center of the U.S. government’s darkest experiments.” Was this a shot across the bow of both the U.S. military and their collaborators in “gain of function” research? (That Cong might have such possible intelligence and can employ it against our nation is disturbing in and of itself.)  

Thus, the Beijing regime’s cover-up continues unabated.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Okla. Woman Took Credit for Rescuing the Afghan Girls Robotics Team—and Many in the Media Fell for Her Lies By Rick Moran

Posted By on August 28th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/08/27/okla-woman-took-credit-for-rescuing-the-afghan-girls-robotics-team-and-many-in-the-media-fell-for-her-lies-n1473472

It’s a story of bravery, courage, pluck, grit, and luck. It’s also a story of self-promotion and media manipulation for personal gain.

When the all-girl Afghan robotics team escaped the clutches of the Taliban earlier this week, most people saw it as a big win for the good guys. These girls were prime targets of the Taliban’s wrath for daring to not only learn how to read and write but excel in a difficult and challenging scholastic endeavor.

An American woman from Oklahoma supposedly played a large part in the daring rescue that someone in Hollywood is going to make into a movie one day. But as it turns out, Allyson Reneau played barely any role at all in the girls’ rescue. Now, a lawyer for the girls’ sponsoring organization, Digital Citizen Fund, has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Reneau, calling for her to stop her self-aggrandizing efforts to put herself in the middle of a story she had little to do with.

Washington Post:

“Continuingly recycling old pictures with the Afghan Girls Robotics Team, many of whom are minors, as validation that you had anything to do with their immensely stressful and dangerous escape not only impacts the safety of the girls but it also significantly affects the safety of the members of the team who still remain in Afghanistan,” wrote Kim Motley, a lawyer for the group and a Digital Citizen Fund board member, in a letter sent to Reneau just after midnight Wednesday. “It is highly unfortunate that you would use such a tragically horrible situation … for what appears to be your own personal gain.”

A spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry, which helped evacuate many Afghans, including the robotics team members, also accused Reneau of taking credit for a rescue she had little to do with — and lambasted the U.S. media for making her a “White savior.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Change and the Importance of Skepticism: Sydney Williams

Posted By on August 28th, 2021

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

We live in strange times. We don’t think through the consequences of ending “endless wars.” We don’t debate what it means for our children and grandchildren to add trillions of dollars to a national debt that already, as a percent of GDP, is the highest since the Second World War. We permit hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of whom are infected with COVID-19, to enter our country illegally through our southern border, while limiting the number of legal immigrants. We have replaced free-thinking skeptics with acolytes for big government. The dark arm of progressivism is aimed at increasing the power of government and decreasing the role of the individual. When it comes to climate change, progressives borrow from George W. Bush: Either you are with us, or you are against us. There is no room for debate.   

 

In part, this is because of the leisure time we have gained through economic success. The technological advances and the increased wealth of our nation and its people – results of free market capitalism operating under the rule of law – would be unimaginable to our grandparents. Included in our well-being is the environment, which is far healthier than it was twenty, fifty and a hundred years ago. It was individuals, not government agencies, that led that change – through eleemosynary organizations like the Sierra Club and Audubon Societies. New York City began to migrate from coal to oil in the 1930s and Los Angeles recognized the problem of smog in the 1940s, both long before the advent of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in December 1970. Government regulations have hastened the move to a healthier environment, but they were not the instigator. It is the wealth produced through capitalism, operating in a society that encourages individual initiative, which has afforded us the ability to focus on climate. It is ignorance of that past that helps feed the myth that it is government, not free market capitalism, that has been the principal force for the good of our environment. In seeking political power, progressives pander to the electorate on soft issues – “wokeness,” inclusion, identity, equity, critical race theory and hurtful words – while they fail to encourage those traits that historically led to success: merit, aspiration, competition, diligence and hard work.

On August 10, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on climate and projections for the future. How many people have read its 4,000 pages? Not many, I suspect. I, for one, have not. According to summaries, the Earth has experienced a two-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature since industrialization began about two hundred years ago. We know man has been responsible for some of that increase, but the exact level remains in question. Nevertheless, a recent lead editorial in my local paper, The Day, expressed no doubt as to the cause: “Humans have heated the planet about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the dawn of the industrial age.” The next day Steven Koonin, director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “As is now customary, the report emphasizes climate change in recent decades but obscures, or fails to mention, historical precedents that weaken the case that humanity’s influence on the climate has been catastrophic.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Insanity: The U.S. Reportedly Handed a List of Americans to the Taliban By David Harsanyi

Posted By on August 27th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/insanity-the-u-s-reportedly-handed-a-list-of-americans-to-the-taliban/

General Kenneth McKenzie told the press today that Americans “share a common purpose,” and counterterrorism intel, with the Taliban — a military group we were bombing only a few weeks ago. Politico now reports that U.S. officials had handed the Taliban a list of “American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies” so that they could be granted entry into the U.S.-controlled airport at Kabul.

Andrew McCarthy has already hit Joe Biden for his capitulation to the Islamic group earlier this week. Still, it’s worth noting that we just apparently provided this useful list of names to the same Taliban that says there’s no proof that bin Laden had anything to do with 9/11, that threatened Americans only days ago, and that is reportedly already hunting down and executing Afghans who partnered with the U.S. If Biden holds to his August 31 deadline and leaves hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans behind, the Taliban now have a list to work off of. “Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” an anonymous defense official said. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Who Will Trust Us after Afghanistan? By Bing West

Posted By on August 27th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/09/13/who-will-trust-us-after-afghanistan/#slide-1

Our disaster in brief:

Following 9/11, a bit of wreckage from the Twin Towers was buried at the American embassy in Kabul, with the inscription: “Never Again.” Now Again has come. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Taliban flag will fly over the abandoned American embassy and al-Qaeda will be operating inside Afghanistan. Fifty years from now, Americans will stare in sad disbelief at the photo of an American Marine plucking a baby to safety over barbed wire at Kabul airport. What a shameful, wretched way to quit a war.

The root cause was extreme partisanship in Congress. By default, this bequeathed to the presidency the powers of a medieval king. The Afghanistan tragedy unfolded in four phases, culminating in the whimsy of one man consigning millions to misery.

Phase One. 2001–2007. After 9/11, America unleashed a swift aerial blitzkrieg that shattered the Taliban forces. Inside three months, al-Qaeda’s core unit was trapped inside the Tora Bora caves in the snowbound Speen Ghar mountains. A force of American Marines and multinational special forces commanded by Brigadier General James Mattis (later secretary of defense) was poised to cut off the mountain passes and systematically destroy al-Qaeda. Instead, General Tommy Franks, the overall commander, sent in the undisciplined troops of Afghan warlords, who allowed al-Qaeda to escape into Pakistan. Thus was lost the golden opportunity to win a fast, decisive war and leave.

Acting upon his Evangelical beliefs, President George W. Bush then made the fateful decision to change the mission from killing terrorists to creating a democratic nation comprising 40 million mostly illiterate tribesmen. Nation-building was a White House decision made without gaining true congressional commitment. Worse, there was no strategy specifying the time horizon, resources, and security measures. This off-handed smugness was expressed by Vice President Dick Cheney early in 2002 when he remarked, “The Taliban is out of business, permanently.”

On the assumption that there was no threat, a scant 5,000 Afghan soldiers were trained each year. But the fractured Taliban could not be tracked down and defeated in detail because their sponsor, Pakistan, was sheltering them. Pakistan was also providing the U.S.–NATO supply line into landlocked Afghanistan, thus limiting our leverage to object to the sanctuary extended to the Taliban.

In 2003, the Bush administration, concerned about the threat of Saddam’s presumed weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq. This sparked a bitter insurgency, provoked by Islamist terrorists, that required heavy U.S. military resources. Iraq stabilized in 2007, but by that time the Taliban had regrouped inside Pakistan and were attacking in eastern Afghanistan, where the dominant tribe was Pashtun, their own.

Phase Two. 2008–2013. For years, the Democratic leadership had been battering the Republicans about the Iraq War, claiming that it was unnecessary. By default, Afghanistan became the “right war” for the Democrats. Once elected, President Obama, who said that Afghanistan was the war we could not afford to lose, had no way out. With manifest reluctance, in 2010 he ordered a “surge” of 30,000 U.S. troops, bringing the total to 100,000 U.S. soldiers plus 30,000 allied soldiers. The goal was to implement a counterinsurgency strategy, yet Obama pledged to begin withdrawing troops in 2011, an impossibly short time frame.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Shame The long term consequences, not just of the Biden Administration’s complete failure in Afghanistan but their obsession with January 6 and imaginary “domestic terrorists” will be deadly. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on August 27th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/26/shame/

As of midafternoon on Thursday, several hours after the killing of innocents began, Joe Biden still had not addressed the nation to mourn the devastating loss of life—including at least 12 American troops—from terror attacks near the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.

His lengthy absence on the deadliest day for the U.S. military in a decade was in sharp contrast to his conduct on January 6, 2021. Shortly after 4 p.m. that day, less than two hours after the start of the raucous protest, Biden gave a speech from his home in Delaware.

Fuming with rage, Biden spoke for more than eight minutes. “Our democracy is under unprecedented assault, unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times,” Biden ranted. “This is not dissent, it’s disorder. It’s chaos. It borders on sedition. It’s insurrection.” The words of a president, Biden said, can inspire. “They also can incite.” He demanded that President Trump “go on television now . . . and demand an end to this siege. Step up.”

“The world is watching,” Biden warned.

The world is watching now, too. The world has been watching as this fast-moving catastrophe reached its inevitable apex on Thursday when at least two suicide bombings took the lives of 11 Marines and one Navy corpsman, wounding at least a dozen more servicemembers. The situation undoubtedly will worsen while thousands of American troops remain in a country now run by terrorists ostensibly to defend a country now run by an incompetent, and largely AWOL, commander in chief. (Biden finally took the podium around 5:30 p.m.)

The difference between Biden’s MIA routine on Thursday versus his quick reaction on January 6 is representative of how his administration has handled the first eight months of his term. While legitimate terror threats fester overseas, Biden and his top military, intelligence, and law enforcement officials have fixated on the brief disturbance on Capitol Hill on January 6.

Instead of focusing on his job, Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has played politics since before Inauguration Day. He issued a statement on January 13 signed by the head of each branch of the U.S. military to condemn the Capitol protest: 

The violent riot in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 was a direct assault on the U.S. Congress, the Capitol building, and our Constitutional process. We witnessed actions inside the Capitol building that were inconsistent with the rule of law. The rights of freedom of speech and assembly do not give anyone the right to resort to violence, sedition and insurrection. On January 20, 2021, in accordance with the Constitution, confirmed by the states and the courts, and certified by Congress, President-elect Biden will be inaugurated and will become our 46th Commander in Chief.

Attorney General Merrick Garland compared January 6 to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people including more than a dozen children. He promised to make the Capitol breach probe his top priority as head of the U.S. Department of Justice. In June, Garland held a press conference to present the “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” an assessment that Biden ordered on his first day in office. “President Biden directed his national security team to lead a 100-day comprehensive review of U.S. Government efforts to address domestic terrorism, which has evolved into the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today,” the White House announced.