WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Coronavirus: How worried should we be? By James Gallagher

Posted By on January 27th, 2020

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51048366?utm_source=pocket-newtab

A virus – previously unknown to science – is causing severe lung disease in China and has also been detected in other countries.

More than 80 people are known to have died from the virus, which appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December.

There are already almost 3,000 confirmed cases, and experts expect the number will keep rising.

A new virus arriving on the scene, leaving patients with pneumonia, is always a worry and health officials around the world are on high alert.

Can this outbreak be contained or is this something far more dangerous?

Coronavirus: Your questions answered

Wuhan: The London-sized city where the virus began

China coronavirus: What we know so far

What is this virus?

Officials in China have confirmed the cases are caused by a coronavirus.

These are a broad family of viruses, but only six (the new one would make it seven) are known to infect people.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), which is caused by a coronavirus, killed 774 of the 8,098 people infected in an outbreak that started in China in 2002.

“There is a strong memory of Sars, that’s where a lot of fear comes from, but we’re a lot more prepared to deal with those types of diseases,” says Dr Josie Golding, from the Wellcome Trust.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘He Is a Dictator’ Nadler sums up the Democratic case for impeachment.

Posted By on January 27th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/he-is-a-dictator-11580075066?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Rep. Jerrold Nadler rarely disappoints, and the always over-the-top impeachment manager came through again Friday as he summed up the Democratic case to remove President Trump from office: “This is a determination by President Trump that he wants to be all powerful. He does not have to respect the Congress—he does not have to respect the representatives of the people. Only his will goes. He is a dictator. This must not stand. That is another reason he must be moved from office.”

Let’s count the ways in which Mr. Trump is “all powerful.” Does he control elections? His party lost two governorships in 2017, the House and a net six governorships in 2018, and another governorship and the Virginia Legislature in 2019.

How about the courts? Mr. Trump’s policies were subject to some 40 national judicial injunctions in its first 32 months, compared to 20 for the Obama Administration in eight years. Mr. Trump often wins on appeal, but until he does his policy agenda has been blocked in the courts. Mr. Trump has not defied a judicial order.

Does he control or censor the press? Nearly every major media outlet spent two years promoting a false story of his collusion with Russia. The press overwhelmingly supports impeachment and opposes his agenda. His plea to change the libel laws has gone nowhere.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s Censorship Helps Spread the Virus Consider the Spanish flu, which killed 50 million in 1918-19 as governments at war suppressed the news. By Paul Wolfowitz and Max Frost

Posted By on January 27th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-censorship-helps-spread-the-virus-11580071968?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Xi Jinping has acknowledged that the “accelerating spread” of a new coronavirus from the central Chinese city of Wuhan is a “grave situation.” To stop the virus’s spread, the Chinese government has barred residents of Wuhan and nearby cities from traveling and blocked outbound flights, trains, buses and ferries. But if this develops into a catastrophe, the cult of personality around Mr. Xi and the Communist regime’s efforts to control information will deserve much of the blame.

For a precedent, look back to 1918, when the Spanish flu broke out amid World War I. In the U.S., government officials and the press did all they could to play it down lest it hurt the war effort. While the Los Angeles health chief declared there was “no cause for alarm” and the Arkansas Gazette described the disease as the “same old fever and chills,” people were dying by the thousands.

The name “Spanish flu” was a misnomer. In the countries where it originally surfaced—France, China and the U.S.—the news was suppressed by censorship and self-censorship to maintain wartime morale. (China sent only civilian laborers to the battlefield, but it declared war on Germany in August 1917.) Not until King Alphonse XIII of neutral Spain fell ill did news of the virus spread widely.

Between the spring of 1918 and early 1919, three waves of Spanish flu tore across the planet, facilitated by censorship and secrecy. The results were catastrophic: 50 million people were killed world-wide, including nearly 700,000 Americans.

P.C.-CULTURE, POLITICS Comments turned off

Joe Biden ups the ante in the woke sweepstakes with his latest about transgenderism By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 27th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/joe_biden_ups_the_ante_in_the_woke_sweepstakes_with_his_latest_about_transgenderism.html

Anybody who says Joe Biden isn’t a follower is a stone-cold liar. At the macro level, Biden’s been disavowing his 47-year history in Congress and the White House by moving as hard to the Left as he can. At the macro level, it’s all pander, pander, pander. His latest attempt to out-do his fellow Democrats is his push for peak woke with the all-important transgender lobby, a group that, in a comprehensive 2016 study, was estimated to make up 0.6% of the American population.

To be fair to Joe as he competes in the “most woke on transgender issues” category, he’s already said that one of his top legislative priorities would be to pass the Equality Act which, among other things, forces schools to let biological males compete on girls’ sports teams. That’s woke but the competition has been getting tough.

Elizabeth Warren has long been sounding the transgender horn. Already back in 2017, she was sending out tweets on Transgender Day of Remembrance, something she was careful to do again in 2019 when the Democrat primary was heating up. Warren outdid herself, though, when she got endorsed by Black Womxn, an organization for “all black folks that do not claim male identity,” including “black trans & cis women, gender non-confirming folks and others.” Proving that she had read Black Womxn’s web page, Warren tweeted back, “Black trans and cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy.” Who knew?

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Obama-Clinton-induced mess in Libya continues to grow By Peter Skurkiss

Posted By on January 27th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/the_obamaclintoninduced_mess_in_libya_continues_to_grow.html

The chaos that the Obama-Clinton diplomacy unleashed in Libya continues to grow. It started when U.S.-French-NATO-led military intervention toppled Col. Moammar Qaddafi in 2011. After his government fell, Qaddafi was then beaten and sodomized with a bayonet by an irate mob of Libyans before being shot to death. This prompted our illustrious Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to show the class she is noted for by crowing, “We came, we saw, he died.”

Yes — Qaddafi, who was no threat to America, died. But so did any semblance of stability in Libya and the ensuing chaos still reverberates to this day. Due to the power vacuum created by Qaddafi’s abrupt removal, Libya has now become a battleground for proxies motivated by Libya’s oil wealth and fighting for geopolitical influence and over ideological differences. The country is a confusing mess. Here is a thumbnail sketch to sort out the parties currently involved.

Tripoli is the seat of the provisional government. It is backed by the United Nations and is supported by Turkey, which has over 1,000 troops there along with another 1,200 or so battle-hardened Syrian fighters. 

On the other side is the warlord Khalifa Hifter, a former Libyan army general. He is backed by Russia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It is reported that Russia has brought in about 1,500 mercenaries. These include skilled snipers and personnel to guide artillery and air support.  This situation is dangerous and could lead to a direct conflict between Turkey and Russia.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, MEDIA Comments turned off

Fake Atomic Scientists Warn Not Believing the Media Will Destroy the World The Doomsday Clock of fake news gets closer to midnight. Daniel Greenfield 6

Posted By on January 27th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/fake-atomic-scientists-warn-not-believing-media-daniel-greenfield/

Every year, Rachel Bronson, President and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who has a degree in political science from Columbia, gets up in front of a fake clock to announce that the world is doomed.

And the media eagerly covers the annual imminent warning of doom as if it came with an open bar.

Bronson is not an atomic scientist. Or any kind of scientist. Unless you believe politics is a science. And if politics is a science, then Bronson is the Lysenko of the field, predicting doom out of bias and ignorance.

This year, the Doomsday Clock had its hands set forward to 100 seconds to midnight. After setting the clock at 2 minutes to midnight in honor of President Trump two years ago, it’s all out of minutes.

Now it’s down to seconds. At this rate the fake clock will soon be down to negative numbers.

If you don’t believe Rachel, maybe you’ll listen to Jerry Brown, former California governor and executive chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Jerry is not an atomic scientist, but he did nuke California.

According to Jerry, “If there’s ever a time to wake up, it’s now.”

But Jerry doesn’t want people waking up. He wants them to go back to sleep. And stay that way.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Make Western Civilization Great Again Yale prioritizes diversity over Dead White Males. Mark Tapson

Posted By on January 27th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/make-western-civilization-great-again-mark-tapson/

Universities have been ceding ground to anti-Western activists for decades now (remember Jesse Jackson leading chants of “Hey ho, hey ho, Western civ has got to go” at Stanford back in the ‘80s?). So it should come as no surprise that Yale recently announced it would grant yet another concession to multiculturalist students who demand that diversity of skin color replace the oppressiveness and irrelevance of Dead White Males: this spring will see the end of one of the school’s previously most popular classes, a survey course called “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present.”

According to the Yale Daily News blog, in its final iteration the course will shift from transmitting to students a greater appreciation of their cultural heritage, to a more “woke” focus on subverting the canon of Western art itself. The course’s instructor, art history department chair Tim Barringer, has stated that the class will still cover Western art chronologically from 1300 to the present, but he intends to emphasize that other regions, genres and traditions are as “equally deserving of study” as Western art, because according it any special reverence is “problematic.”

As we are all reminded daily now in every cultural arena from academia to Hollywood, anything Western is “problematic” (to put it politely) because multiculturalist doctrine deems that all cultures must be revered equally – except for Western culture which, because of its association with the toxic privilege of “whiteness,” must be denigrated, deconstructed, and dismantled to heal the nonwhite victims of its oppression and exploitation. Thus, we must be careful not to elevate the great works of the greatest artists in world history over other, “equally deserving” genres and traditions.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

End the Impeachment Circus They sent in the clowns. Now send them packing. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on January 27th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/end-impeachment-circus-bruce-thornton/

Not since Caligula enrolled his horse Incitatus in the Roman Senate has a deliberative chamber of a great power seen such a display of undignified triviality and dishonest sophistry as the case for impeachment that the House Democrats delivered last week. Over and over the same flimsy arguments we’ve already heard for months were repeated, with all the same question-begging accusations gleaned from second- and third-hand office gossip, and the same fake “high crimes and misdemeanors” fabricated by the desperate Dems. Time for the Senate to restore its dignity, put an end to this taxpayer-funded political circus, and get back to doing its job.

The House Dems’ argument boils down to criminalizing the President’s Article 2 powers into made-up crimes like “abuse of power for corrupt purposes” and “obstruction of Congress.” Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a mundane example of the President conducting foreign policy in straightforward style, is an “abuse of power,” because he brought up the hinky behavior of the Bidens supposedly in order to benefit himself politically.

This sophistry is transparently specious. Ukraine’s government is notoriously corrupt, and our president was right to ask for some help in getting at the truth of the evidence that Ukrainians had been involved in meddling with the 2016 election, and that a U.S. vice-president had used his power to benefit a son who, with no record of expertise and experience, nonetheless was being paid $50K a month by a sketchy Ukrainian company. For Trump not to mention it just because Biden was running for office would have been a ridiculous application of the Caesar’s Wife standard, and made running for office a convenient defense against scrutiny.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

THE LAST FULL MEASURE- A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN

Posted By on January 27th, 2020

http://politicalmavens.com/

If you’re sick of being accused of racism, white privilege, toxic masculinity, insufficient attention to Climate Change, MeToo’ism and the LGB alphabet; if you’re exhausted by the long-winded House Managers’ vitriolic performances and if you’re depressed by the diminution of old-fashioned flag-waving, anthem-singing patriotism – run to see The Last Full Measure.

This is an old-fashioned movie written and directed by Todd Robinson, with big stars like Christopher Plummer, Diane Ladd, Ed Harris, Samuel Jackson, Peter Fonda and William Hurt who are all excellent. This is also a movie about heroes – dead and alive – and what they need and deserve. It concerns the failure of our government to award a posthumous Medal of Honor to a Vietnam war veteran who went above and beyond the call of duty to save lives, losing his own in this endeavor. It illustrates the long-term after effects on veterans who fought in an unpopular war and came home to a country that behaved disgracefully towards them. We have spent far more time worrying about the welfare of illegal immigrants than we did about rehabilitating our own veterans, and this movie illustrates their loneliness, isolation and continued dedication to each other. It also heralds their undaunted efforts, along with those of the government representative who worked so hard to get the medal issued.

When you see it, bring tissues and stay for the credits which feature some interviews with the real people represented in the film. In addition to all the emotional reactions you will have, you will be amazed to learn that only three members of the Air Force who were not officers have ever been awarded the Medal of Honor. If nothing else, it should serve to remind us about the importance of preserving and insisting on the merit system in many aspects of our lives.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING:JAMES SIMPSON FOR CONGRESS CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRAT- MARYLAND DISTRICT 2

Posted By on January 27th, 2020

https://www.jimsimpsonforcongress.com/

 State Sen. James C. Simpson, a fiscally conservative Democrat from Charles County,  is considering running against Representative Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md.-5th.

Why I’m Running

I have always had a public spirit — a passion for how public policy can affect our lives. That public spirit has grown to grave concern as I watch our nation being torn apart by a political system that tosses aside the fabric of our Constitution and the rule of law.As a student and instructor of economics in the 1980s, I was fascinated by the morbid attraction so many people have for socialism. Socialism’s fatal flaws can easily be identified by any half-decent, first year economics student. In my wildest dreams, I never thought that socialism would be mainstream in American politics… but here we are. 

James Simpson is an economist, investigative journalist, businessman and author. His most recent book is The Red Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America. His articles and research work have been published in Accuracy in Media, American Thinker, Breitbart, Capital Research Center, Center for Security Policy, Daily Caller, PJ Media, Washington Times, and elsewhere. Mr. Simpson is also featured in the documentaries The Enemies Within, AGENDA: Grinding America Down, AGENDA II: Masters of Deceit, and most recently, Sabotage, How the Islamists, Marxists and Their “Useful Idiots” Are Destroying America from Within. Follow Jim on Twitter & Facebook.