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Dr. Scott Barbour from America’s Frontline Doctors Has a Plan for Hydroxychloroquine By Stacey Lennox

Posted By on August 5th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2020/08/04/dr-scott-barbour-from-americas-frontline-doctors-has-a-plan-for-hydroxychloroquine-n749323

Dr. Scott Barbour participated in the forum with America’s Frontline Doctors in Washington, D.C., last week. Their video promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine, school reopenings, and ending lockdowns went viral in real-time. It was almost immediately censored by several big-tech companies, who said that the information shared violated guidance from the WHO, CDC, and FDA.

This assertion about hydroxychloroquine is kind of a smokescreen. While it is true that major studies were canceled after a study was published in The Lancet, which concluded that administering hydroxychloroquine is dangerous, in a stunning move, The Lancet issued a retraction, saying that the “veracity of the data underlying this observational study could not be assured by the study authors.”

HCQ Helps Contain COVID-19 Cases: New Evidence and a Major Retraction

Dr. Barbour has trouble articulating just how unprecedented this is. To have a peer-reviewed study retracted by respected journals is stunning and disturbing. He is afraid it indicates some level of corruption in the publication process. It is also strange that once these studies were retracted, the guidance from the health agencies did not change.

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Leftists go after two plus two equals four By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on August 5th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/leftists_go_after_two_plus_two_equals_four.html

Those on the left continues to believe that, if they can erase the line between real and imaginary, they can convince people that socialism will work.

In George Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, the concept that two plus two equals four had extraordinary symbolic weight. The State, as embodied in Big Brother, controlled everything that people could think or say.

Part of how the rebellious Winston Smith fought back against this totalitarianism was to remind himself that, no matter what the State said, two plus two did, in fact, equal four. To the all-powerful State, though, Smith’s belief in objective math was a threatening form of insanity. The State therefore used a mixture of torture and cajoling to force Smith to embrace a State-sanctioned “sanity” that denied reality:

“You are a slow learner, Winston.”

“How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”

“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

By the novel’s end, with the State’s torture having completely broken him, Smith readily conceded that, yes, if the State said that two plus two equals five, that would be the correct answer.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Beirut Explosion Caused by Fire Kills Dozens, Injures Thousands The blast occurred after a warehouse with highly explosive material caught fire

Posted By on August 5th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lebanon-struck-by-blast-at-beirut-port-11596556605?mod=hp_lead_pos5

BEIRUT—Dozens of people were confirmed dead and thousands more injured after a massive explosion caused by a warehouse fire rocked Lebanon’s capital city of Beirut.

The warehouse held highly explosive material, said an official with Lebanon’s army who added that the blast was likely caused by a fire and wasn’t an attack. President Trump, however, on Tuesday evening called it a “terrible attack” and said U.S. military leaders believe the explosion was caused by “a bomb of some kind.”

The explosive material, which Lebanese officials identified as ammonium nitrate, had been kept at the warehouse for the past six years, according to Prime Minister Hassan Diab. “All those responsible for this catastrophe will pay the price,” Mr. Diab said.

The explosion, which produced a giant orange mushroom cloud over the city, was yet another trauma for Beirut residents who have survived wars and numerous bombings in the past. They now face the challenge of rebuilding at a time of strained resources due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The blast is the latest blow for Lebanon, a country already reeling from multiple crises in recent months, ranging from large street protests over government corruption to an economy on the brink of collapse after years of mismanagement. Before the explosion, which shook the whole of Beirut, Lebanon’s economy was in free fall and ordinary Lebanese citizens were struggling with soaring prices of food and other goods, as well as long daily power cuts.

ELECTIONS, POLITICS Comments turned off

On New Voter Registration in Key States, Trump Is Blowing Biden Out of the Water Katie Pavlich

Posted By on August 5th, 2020

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/08/04/on-voter-registrations-in-key-

While polling continues to show President Trump behind Biden in key swing states, new voter registration numbers are telling a different story about his chances to win re-election in November.

According to Axios, the RNC continues to register more voters than the Democratic Party in places where it will matter most.

The Trump campaign and RNC have now registered 100,000 new voters in the 2020 cycle, more than doubling their numbers from 2016 and shrinking Democrats’ registration advantage in key swing states, according to new Trump Victory data provided exclusively to Axios.

The Trump campaign and RNC have now registered 100,000 new voters in the 2020 cycle, more than doubling their numbers from 2016 and shrinking Democrats’ registration advantage in key swing states, according to new Trump Victory data provided exclusively to Axios.

Democrats still have more active registered voters in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida, but Republicans have managed to narrow the margins in those states by tens of thousands of voters since 2016.

Republicans have narrowed the voter registration gap in key swing states, according to Axios’ reviews of those states records.

Republicans have lessened the margin by 133,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania and 87,000 voters in Florida.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Two Chinas By Therese Shaheen

Posted By on August 5th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/china-rising-superpower-crumbling-totalitarian-machine/

To the West, the country may appear to be a rising global superpower. In truth, it’s an aging, dysfunctional, slowly crumbling totalitarian machine.

 T he national-security law that the Chinese Communist Party is using to complete its takeover of democratic Hong Kong has pretty much everyone agreeing that the era of the “One Country, Two Systems” framework developed for Hong Kong’s handover from the British to the PRC is over. From the time of the 1997 handover until now, the framework has allowed Hong Kong to exist as a semi-autonomous administrative region that has its own economic and political system but is technically a part of the PRC. But since Beijing unilaterally imposed the national-security law in June, Hong Kong elections have been canceled, pro-freedom professors have been fired or arrested, and democrats have been banned from politics. For Hong Kong, “one country, two systems” is finished.

On the mainland, though, “one country, two systems” isn’t a framework so much as an accurate description of the status quo. Ironically, Beijing is all too happy for the world to focus on the demise of the official “one country, two systems” policy in Hong Kong if it distracts from the decay and systemic weakness that plague the mainland. The CCP’s crackdown on Hong Kong, its trade standoff with the U.S., its growing militarism in the Pacific, and other ostentatious public displays of Chinese strength are meant to hide the rot underneath.

For in truth, on the mainland today, there are two Chinas. There is the China of densely populated, modern urban centers such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chongqing, and there is the China of everywhere else. The China of everywhere else is dollars-a-day poor, uneducated, and aging. It is also vast, containing some 600–700 million people, or about half of the total Chinese population.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

SURRENDER: EDWARD CLINE

Posted By on August 5th, 2020

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/08/surrender.html

It was bound to happen sooner or later, given all the Defund the Police propaganda  in various states and cities. Minneapolis police, in its last hurray, have advised residents to just give criminals what they want tn and to offer no resistance. If there’s violence, the police – what’s left of them – will not respond or offer help. The announcement reads, in part with homilies about their being concerned with “your safety.”

.+ Be prepared to give up your cell phone and purse/wallet.

= Do as they say, Your safety to most important.. (but not your rights or the sanctity of your life and property).

Suppose the criminals wanted to assault your wife, or kidnap your daughter, and not merely take your purse or wallet? Would you be justified in fighting back?

Barely, If at all. I can see the headline now: Resident arrested and charged with harming and jeopardizing the lives of his “guests.” : Samuel Brown has been charged by the “Publidc Safety Committee” with resisting the desires of “peaceful”  citizens and making an unlawful citizen’s arrest, of brandishing a gun and a knife, and faces a  $199 fine and five years of community service.

BOOKS, KRD NEWS Comments turned off

The Roots Of Wokeness It’s time we looked more closely at the philosophy behind the movement. Andrew Sullivan

Posted By on August 5th, 2020

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-roots-of-wokeness?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIj

In the mid-2010s, a curious new vocabulary began to unspool itself in our media. A data site, storywrangling.org, which measures the frequency of words in news stories, revealed some remarkable shifts. Terms that had previously been almost entirely obscure suddenly became ubiquitous—and an analysis of the New York Times, using these tools, is a useful example. Looking at stories from 1970 to 2018, several terms came out of nowhere in the past few years to reach sudden new heights of repetition and frequency. Here’s a list of the most successful neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining. And here are a few that were rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years: triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes. 

Language changes, and we shouldn’t worry about that. Maybe some of these terms will stick around. But the linguistic changes have occurred so rapidly, and touched so many topics, that it has all the appearance of a top-down re-ordering of language, rather than a slow, organic evolution from below. While the New York Times once had a reputation for being a bit stodgy on linguistic matters, pedantic, precise and slow-to-change, as any paper of record might be, in the last few years, its pages have been flushed with so many neologisms that a reader from, say, a decade ago would have a hard time understanding large swathes of it. And for many of us regular readers, we’ve just gotten used to brand new words popping up suddenly to re-describe something we thought we knew already. We notice a new word, make a brief mental check, and move on with our lives. 

But we need to do more than that. We need to understand that all these words have one thing in common: they are products of an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education in the past few decades, and appears to have reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s. Most normal people have never heard of this theory—or rather an interlocking web of theories—that is nonetheless changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy.

What we have long needed is an intelligible, intelligent description of this theory which most people can grasp. And we’ve just gotten one: “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity,” by former math prof James Lindsay and British academic, Helen Pluckrose.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

American Troops Pulled From Germany As NATO Falters Shoshana Bryen and Stephen Bryen 

Posted By on August 5th, 2020

https://www.dailywire.com/news/bryen-american-troops-pulled-from-germany-as-nato-falters

The first troop reductions in Germany under President Donald Trump’s order have taken place, and many in the national security community are aghast, even The Wall Street Journal.

The President based his decision on Germany’s failure to contribute adequately to NATO defense, flouting an agreed on 2% (of GDP) threshold for national defense contributions, but the story – like the alliance – is more complicated.

NATO requires consensus. The validity of the alliance hangs on whether states would be willing to approve a military response to a Russian action against any NATO member. Without it, the U.S. would lack the ability to use NATO airfields in Germany, Italy, Turkey, and the UK.  It would not have permission for ground forces to transit much of western Europe.

Today, Germany’s military is a shambles.  It has few operational tanks, not very many aircraft, and a navy in serious decline.  But the Germans really don’t care. Because Germany is Russia’s biggest paying customer for natural gas, Berlin believes there is no incentive for the Russians to bother it.

If there is a threat to outliers such as Poland or the Baltic States, Germany is far from committed to responding. There is a strong likelihood that Germany would veto any NATO response to a (highly unlikely) Russian aggression outside of a direct attack on Germany itself. If Germany uses its veto, France and Italy will likely align with it.  So too would Turkey, increasingly estranged from NATO.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

An Effective COVID Treatment the Media Continues to Besmirch By Steven Hatfill

Posted By on August 4th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/04/an_effective_covid_treatment_the_media_continues_to_besmirch_143875.html

On Friday, July 31, in a column ostensibly dealing with health care “misinformation,” Washington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan opened by lambasting “fringe doctors spouting dangerous falsehoods about hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 wonder cure.”

Actually, it was Sullivan who was spouting dangerous falsehoods about this drug, something the Washington Post and much of the rest of the media have been doing for months. On May 15, the Post offered a stark warning to any Americans who may have taken hope in a possible therapy for COVID-19. In the newspaper’s telling, there was nothing unambiguous about the science — or the politics — of hydroxychloroquine: “Drug promoted by Trump as coronavirus game-changer increasingly linked to deaths,” blared the headline. Written by three Post staff writers, the story asserted that the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19 is scant and that the drug is inherently unsafe. This claim is nonsense.

Biased against the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 — and the Washington Post is hardly alone — the paper described an April 21, 2020, drug study on U.S. Veterans Affairs patients hospitalized with the illness. It found a high death rate in patients taking the drug hydroxychloroquine. But this was a flawed study with a small sample, the main flaw being that the drug was given to the sickest patients who were already dying because of their age and severe pre-existing conditions. This study was quickly debunked. It had been posted on a non-peer-reviewed medical archive that specifically warns that studies posted on its website should not be reported in the media as established information.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Sharyl Attkisson :Investigative Issues: The Troubling Fact Is That Media Fact-Checkers Tend to Lean ← Left

Posted By on August 4th, 2020

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/0/04/investigative_issues_the_troubling_fact_that_media_fact-checkers_lean_left_124663.html

A growing response to today’s chaotic information landscape sounds inviting and elegantly simple: appoint experts to “fact-check” news stories, blogs, speeches, studies, opinions, and political ads. Information they deem to be false is corrected or even removed from public view, in the name of the public good.

Since Donald Trump’s election these “fact-checkers” have gained increased prominence. Pressure has mounted for news outfits and big tech companies – including Google, Facebook, and Twitter – to police political discourse. At the same time, many people, notably conservatives, are demanding that the tech giants back off such perceived censorship. Tensions on both sides were on display last week as a House Judiciary subcommittee grilled top Silicon Valley executives. 

That discord is likely to persist because in large part the fact-checking solution is illusory. Many such efforts fail because they amount to a circular feedback loop of verification. The fact-checkers are like-minded journalists or often liberal Silicon Valley gatekeepers, who frequently rely on partisan news sources and political activists to control narratives on a wide variety of issues and controversies. This small group of players exerts an oversized influence, using fact checks to shape and censor information.

Twitter recently sparked controversy by taking the unprecedented step of adding a disapproving “fact-checking label” to some of President Trump’s tweets. The social media site publicly explained that Trump’s May 26 posts contained what its fact-checkers deemed to be “potentially misleading information about voting processes.”

Trump had said widespread mail-in ballots in the 2020 election would be “substantially fraudulent.” While the definition of “substantially” is in the eye of the beholder, the United States, in fact, has a long and ongoing history of ballot fraud.