MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Amazon Censored Books on COVID Vaccine After Pressure from Biden White House By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on February 8th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/07/report-amazon-censored-books-on-covid-vaccine-after-pressure-from-biden-white-house/

New internal emails from Amazon reveal that the tech giant ultimately censored books discussing the topic of Chinese Coronavirus vaccines after being pressured to do so by the Biden Administration.

As reported by the New York Post, the emails and other documents were released by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Monday in a series of posts on X, which Jordan referred to as “The Amazon Files.” The communications were obtained by a subpoena from the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which was established with the purpose of exposing abuse of federal powers to target political opponents, including collusion between the government and private sector entities such as Big Tech.

In an email dated March 2nd, 2021, Andrew Slavitt, a former senior advisor for COVID-19 in the Biden White House, asked “who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?”

“If you search for ‘vaccines’ under books, I see what comes up,” Slavitt said in a later email on the same day. “I haven’t looked beyond that but if that’s what’s on the surface, it’s concerning.”

In response, officials from Amazon expressed their hesitance at doing the White House’s bidding, saying “We will not be doing a manual intervention today. The team/PR feels very strongly that it is too visible, and will further compound the Harry/Sally narrative (which is getting the Fox News treatment today apparently), and won’t fix the problem long-term … because of customer behavior associates.”

The Amazon official later says that another company official “gave very direct guidance to the teams to be boring and not do anything that is visible and will draw more attention.” He then admitted that a tweak was in the works at the website which would redirect more customers’ search results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website.

IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Absurd Democrat Border Con It remains unclear why Biden and Homeland Security Chief Alejandro Mayorkas destroyed what Trump had achieved. Why would they ensure such misery for both Americans and millions of illegal migrants? Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on February 8th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/08/the-absurd-democrat-border-con/

In 2021, Joe Biden opened wide an inherited, secure southern border that had finally stopped mass illegal immigration.

When he overturned Donald Trump’s efforts, a planned flood of over 8 million illegal immigrants entered the U.S.

Almost all arrived without background checks, health screening, or vaccination certificates—but with massive needs for free housing, education, healthcare, and food entitlements and subsidies.

For four years, Donald Trump battled the courts, his Democratic opposition, and the open-border establishments within his own party to ensure legal-only immigration. Somehow, he rebuilt some of the old porous border fence. He had begun to build his long-promised new wall to the Gulf of Mexico. He had ended Obama-era catch-and-release.

Would-be refugees had to apply for asylum in their home country. Trump leveraged Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to police his own border and stop cynically transiting millions of illegal aliens into the U.S.

There was general Democratic Party opposition to all of Trump’s measures, both through Congress and via the courts.

For the last three years of Biden’s mass influx, the left has applauded open borders. That is, until late last year, when overwhelmed southern border state governors began busing and flying illegal immigrants en masse to northern sanctuary-city jurisdictions.

For years, these sanctuary zones had preened their liberality about open borders. They smeared as “racists” and “xenophobes” any who insisted on legal-only immigration.

But now they were subject to the real-life ramifications of their own destructive ideologies.

Major blue-state cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., became outraged that they were inundated with tens of thousands of immigrants, all without legality, veritable identification, or background checks.

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

CNN rearranges the deck chairs… again The network is attempting to put itself at the center of the anti-Trump universe Stephen L. Miller

Posted By on February 8th, 2024

https://thespectator.com/newsletter/cnn-rearranges-the-deck-chairs-again-bad-press-02-06-2024/

After CNN ousted Chris Licht, who attempted, at least, to moderate CNN’s biased news coverage, the floundering network has found itself in limbo, unsure of how much more it wanted to lean into a professional, “definitely not biased” news infotainment network.

Now, new boss Mark Thompson has signaled a clear direction for the network in this election year: All Donald Trump, All the Time, with changes once again to its morning and midday line-up. All CNN is really doing, though, is shuffling deck chairs around the network as ratings continue to languish behind networks like the History and Hallmark channels.

What Thompson and other CNN executives don’t seem to get is that the brand is the problem, the brand that has found itself in peril over the course of the past six years. CNN can reshuffle the same dishonest media news personalities while attempting to juice the last remaining drops of credibility it’s attempted to fashion over the last thirty years, but all that has gone out the window for a network that still insists on existing as a kind of zombie form of liberalism, that unlike MSNBC, refuses to admit its editorial leanings.

CNN will move Kasie Hunt to mornings now. Hunt (like most current new personalities) made her name as a correspondent during the 2016 presidential campaign, hounding various GOP candidates while ignoring Democrats, which is pretty much a standard résumé requirement to end up in a CNN chair these days.

CNN has also moved former White House grandstander Jim Acosta from a little-watched Sunday daytime show to a little-watched, weekly daytime slot. Acosta will presumably also offer live, breaking-news situations. Acosta famously made his reputation by making Trump administration White House press briefings about him and his questions about immigration and the Statue of Liberty — a topic he has somehow all but forgotten as the country faces a border crisis not seen in thirty-five years, and New York City threatens to deport criminal migrants.

Since Jim Acosta’s attention-seeking antics were rewarded with his own CNN show, his line-up has included a who’s who of Donald Trump’s circus cadre. His regular guest rotations have included George Conway, Adam Kinzinger, Mary Trump and others whose sole existence is to somehow remind everyone how very bad Trump is, and also how much they used to suck up to him personally and professionally.

But Thompson and CNN see an election year coming and are once again attempting to put CNN at the center of the anti-Trump universe, positioning itself as both a Donald Trump elevator network, while trying to maintain Jeff Zucker’s hires of #Resistance. Back then, it sacrificed mainstream cachet for the viewership of fierce partisans — and it’s hoping to repeat the trick eight years later.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Islamic Indoctrination 101 A personal testimony of what your kids are learning in College. by Cassandra Makarios

Posted By on February 8th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/islamic-indoctrination-101/

In the late 1990s, I was beginning the second semester of my freshman year at a small liberal arts college in Virginia. At this particular school, all first-year students were required to take a “freshman seminar.” This was a smaller class than the introductory “survey” classes that students typically took before declaring a major. Graded on the basis of in-class discussion and papers rather than exams, these were intended to provide students with an opportunity to focus in greater depth on a narrow topic and to hone their skills in research and writing. There weren’t too many options for such classes when I registered, but I managed to get a spot in a freshman seminar on the promising topic of “Music in Religion.” I wasn’t thinking of majoring in either field, but I’d been a Christian all my life and was interested in other religions. I’d also studied music theory and performance (voice and piano) for many years, so it seemed like a good fit.

There were six of us enrolled in the class. On the first day of class, we met the professor, an ethnomusicologist originally from Bosnia, and received the syllabus. We’d be studying music within two religious traditions – Islam, during the first half of the course, and then Christianity in the latter half. In addition to participation in class discussion, we would be graded on the basis of two papers: a text-based research paper that we would write at mid-term about music in Islam and a longer one making comparisons of the use of music in both traditions and drawing upon field-work that we’d do at a local Christian church of our choosing in addition to textual research that would be submitted at the end of the semester.

We were told to think of ourselves as “participant-observers” during our fieldwork, which is a methodological concept used within the field of anthropology. The idea was that we should be loosely participating in religious services in order simultaneously to make mental observations of those rituals and practices.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Why Is The Left Suddenly Talking About A ‘Coup’ At The Ballot Box?

Posted By on February 8th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/08/why-is-the-left-suddenly-talking-about-a-coup-at-the-ballot-box/

For the past three years, the left has claimed Donald Trump lied about the 2020 election and then attempted an insurrection on Jan. 6 to overturn the results. But now that Trump is leading in polls, the left is talking ominously about a “coup.” Pay attention, because if Trump wins in 2024, this will be how the left tries to stop him from getting anything done.

At a protest in Washington, D.C., a week ago – organized by a group that calls itself “Stop the Coup 2025” – Markus Batchelor, the national political director of People for the American Way, told the crowd that “Jan. 6 was just a dress rehearsal.”

So is this group predicting Trump will try to take over in 2025 even if Biden wins reelection?

Not exactly. He went on to say that coups “don’t need weapons to succeed.” He said that “coups can be committed by pen and paper,” “coups can be committed at the ballot,” and “coups can be committed by seemingly democratic processes.”

Come again?

The definition of “coup d’etat” in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary is “the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Don’t We Want a War with Iran? by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on February 8th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20382/war-with-iran

There are, of course, alternatives less than all-out war, and more than attacks on proxies. They involve the bombing of military targets inside Iran. These include sites used for Iran’s nuclear program, its naval bases and ships, its military drone production, its oil and gas facilities and its command centers. All of these could be accomplished from the air and sea without a ground invasion, and without the loss of American lives an invasion would risk.

One conclusion is clear: in the short term, a US attack on Iran itself would contribute to destabilization in the region. But in the longer term, it might well contribute to stability by reducing the power and influence of the most destabilizing entity in the Middle East, namely Iran.

Israel, too, is at war with Iran. Iranian operatives have targeted Israeli civilians and Jews around the world. Iran has effectively called Israel a “one bomb state” and has threatened to destroy it with nuclear weapons. Israel, too, has a perfect right to respond to these acts of war. Indeed, it may have no choice but to do so, to prevent Iran from carrying out its threats of nuclear annihilation.

The Middle East and the world would be a safer place without the current Iranian regime. It would be a far more dangerous place with a nuclear-weaponized Iran that could protect its surrogates under a nuclear umbrella.

So, Biden’s strategy should be given a chance to work. But if it fails — as history suggests it may— all options must be kept on the table. These include attacks within Iran, even if that means war. That may be the least worst among the many available options.

Every discussion about the current Middle East conflict begins with the mandatory mantra, “We don’t want war with Iran.” Why not? That question is rarely asked.

Iran has declared war on the United States — militarily, legally, diplomatically, morally and politically. They have engaged in repeated casus belli (legal causes for war) since the mullahs took Americans hostage in 1979. Since that time, they have used their surrogates to attack American targets. We are entitled to respond militarily, as we are doing. But we are also entitled to go much further and treat them as aggressors who have effectively declared war on us. We are entitled to destroy their capacity to continue to wage war against us and our allies. The policy question in not whether we have a right to wage war against Iran. It is whether it is in our interest to do so.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Asya Sigelman Academia’s Double Standard on Rape Why aren’t the students and professors who demand trigger warnings for discussions of rape in literature at the forefront of those denouncing Hamas’s atrocities?

Posted By on February 7th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/academias-double-standard-on-rape

About ten years ago, when I was a young assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College and new to academia, I was taken by surprise when one of my students complained about an assigned text—Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Specifically, her concern was about Ovid’s lack of sensitivity on the subject of rape. The Metamorphoses is a poetic compendium of ancient Greek and Roman myths; one of its common motifs is male gods erotically pursuing females. I was particularly surprised by the student’s comment because Ovid’s elegant and witty text is remarkably sympathetic to the female characters. But I knew that Mawrters are famous for the intensity of their beliefs; it makes sense for students at a women’s college to feel so strongly about violence against women.

In the years that followed, I discovered that in fact the Metamorphoses is a common prompt for virtue signaling, not only for students but also for professional scholars across American universities. It is typical for a public lecture on Ovid’s Metamorphoses to begin with a trigger warning for rape and an invitation to audience members to feel free to step out of the room.

I could never quite square how listeners could be traumatized by Ovidian descriptions of sexual violence. Here, for example, is one of the most famous ones: “while [the god Jupiter] spoke, [the nymph Io] fled, [ . . .] but the god called forth a heavy shadow which involved the wide extended earth and stopped her flight and ravished in that cloud her chastity.” But I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

When Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, they not only murdered hundreds of children, elderly, and women and kidnapped hundreds more, but also systematically perpetrated brutal mass gang-rapes, complete with mutilation and other forms of inhuman violence against women. In one witness account, after terrorists finished raping a woman—and while she was still alive—they chopped off one of her breasts and were kicking it to one another like a soccer ball in the dust. In another, a gang-raped woman pleaded with the terrorists to shoot her dead—which they did, once everyone in the group had a turn with her. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald The Decadence of Identity Politics Gender studies comes to policing.

Posted By on February 7th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-decadence-of-identity-politics

Among anti-cop legislators, “defund the police” may have lost some currency, but “demoralize the police” is doing just fine.

On January 30, the New York City Council passed the How Many Stops Act, over the veto of Mayor Eric Adams. The law requires New York police officers to fill out a form nearly every time they interact with a civilian. If, for example, an officer asks a potential bystander to a shooting if he had witnessed that shooting, the officer will have to complete a form listing the bystander’s race, sex, and age. Are there other potential witnesses in the area who urgently need to be contacted before they disperse? Too bad. Identity-based paperwork comes first.  (If an officer waits to the end of his shift to finish filling out the forms, he will still likely need to have made some contemporaneous record of his encounters.)

The department’s personnel will spend hundreds of hours a day cumulatively on this bureaucratic task—time diverted from bringing criminals to justice.

The rationale for this unnecessary bill, like almost everything encumbering policing today, is the council’s belief that the NYPD routinely harasses people of color, whether suspects or witnesses.  Never mind that civilians in these newly red-taped investigatory stops are free to ignore the officer’s questions, preserve their anonymity, and walk away.  The council still sees a bigoted purpose in an officer’s reaching out to the public for help in solving crime.

The How Many Stops Act is innocuous, however, compared with California’s data-collection requirements for police officers. New reporting obligations under the Racial & Identity Profiling Act require California officers to fill out an eight-page form (up from four pages last year) with nearly 200 fields when they make what is known as a custodial stop (meaning the civilian is not free to walk away).

The form, generated by the California Department of Justice, comes straight from race- and gender-studies classrooms. The officer first documents whether he, the officer, is a “cisgender man, cisgender woman, transgender man, transgender woman, or nonbinary person.” To avoid placing a retrogressive “gender” straitjacket on the state’s public servants, the form allows an officer to check both “Nonbinary person” and one of the other categories, such as “Cisgender woman.”  “N/A” is not an option; the officer must list a sexual identity. Naturally, there is also an extensive “Officer race or ethnicity” section, asking whether the officer is “Asian, Hispanic/Latine(X), Black/African, Native American, Middle Eastern or South Asian, Pacific Islander, White,” or a combination of the above.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

AI Is Coming for Your Job? John Stossel

Posted By on February 7th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/john-stossel/2024/02/07/ai-is-coming-for-your-job-n4926202

The media warn, “Artificial intelligence will replace millions of jobs.” 

In San Francisco, Teamsters protest, demanding the government “protect” their jobs. In my new video, they chant, “Do not have these self-driving vehicles on San Francisco streets, taking jobs!”

They’re complaining about the Waymo driverless taxis already in use in part of San Francisco (and Phoenix). 

The union is right to worry. Robot cars don’t get tired. They don’t take lunch breaks. They don’t drink or get distracted. Self-driving cars will replace many delivery-driver jobs, taxi jobs, Uber jobs and truck driver jobs. 

Texas is building a special highway with a lane just for self-driving trucks. 

The idea isn’t just to save money by having machines do what people do now, but to get human drivers off the road entirely.

Safety advocates want that, because despite publicity over occasional robot-car crashes, we humans make many more mistakes. Robo-cars will save thousands of lives.

But when I said that in this column last month, some of you said government officials will soon use “safety” as an excuse to outlaw human driving. 

“Regulators will try to ban traditional cars,” writes orangecrate26. “You’re not taking my Mustang, or my guns.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Genocide of ‘The Sunday People’: 365,000,000 Christians Persecuted Worldwide by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on February 7th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20368/christians-persecuted-worldwide

Overall, the global persecution of Christians remains higher than ever, with 365 million believers suffering “high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith.”

Christians suffer “extreme levels of persecution” in the top 13 of the 50 nations. They are: 1) North Korea, 2) Somalia, 3) Libya, 4) Eritrea, 5) Yemen, 6) Nigeria, 7) Pakistan, 8) Sudan, 9) Iran, 10) Afghanistan, 11) India, 12) Syria, 13) and Saudi Arabia.

In the worst of the Muslim nations, Christianity has been so stamped out over the years that there are no indigenous Christians to persecute, only converts—apostates, who, according to most interpretations of Islamic law, deserve death.

The wildly popular late Sunni cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi noted on television that if not for the apostasy law [proposing death], Islam would have died out long ago.

Afghanistan: “When the Taliban came to power, they did so with pledges to recognize more freedoms than in the past. But that hasn’t happened—if an Afghan’s Christian faith is discovered, it can be a death sentence, or they can be detained and tortured into giving information about fellow believers.” — World Watch List 2024, opendoors.org

In 2023, around the world, 4,998 Christians — on average, 13 a day — were “killed for faith related reasons.” Another 4,125 Christians were illegally detained or arrested, and 14,766 churches and other Christian institutions were attacked.

Overall, the global persecution of Christians remains higher than ever, with 365 million believers suffering “high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith.”