NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Misidentifies the Crime Culprit President Biden does political damage control amid rising urban disorder.

Posted By on September 1st, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-misidentifies-the-crime-culprit-democrats-pennsylvania-defund-the-police-11661983065?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

President Biden is stumping for Democrats in Pennsylvania this week, and law and order was his theme Tuesday in Wilkes-Barre. He was joined by Rep. Matt Cartwright, who is in a tight race to keep his House seat, and gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro. Democrats are worried about public anxiety over rising crime, and they should be.

Statewide, murders and non-negligent manslaughters increased 46% last year compared to 2019, according to Pennsylvania’s Uniform Crime Reporting System. Pittsburgh recorded 53 homicides last year, a 43% increase over 2019. Nonfatal shootings there were up 25% in 2021 compared to two years prior.

Earlier this year Pew reported that only 44% of Philadelphia residents said they felt safe in their neighborhood at night, while 65% said they’d heard gunshots near their homes in the past year. Some 362 people have been slain in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year, compared to 226 in the first eight months of 2019.

Mr. Biden was at pains Tuesday to neutralize the perception that Democrats want to defund the police. “When it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer is not defund the police. It’s fund the police. Fund the police.” That’s a welcome line, but remember that in 2020 such sentiments were heresy in the Democratic Party.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Is Torturing Critics in Psychiatric Hospitals by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18843/china-torture-psychiatric-hospitals

In the ankang—”peace and health”—system, detainees are strapped onto beds, pumped full of drugs, receive electric-shock therapy, and left to lie in their own excrement.

Researchers Chi Yin and Jerome Cohen, writing on the Diplomat site, report that some Chinese are confined for their lifetimes.

The system also appears to be grounded in the Chinese Communist Party’s optimistic totalitarian notion that medical treatment can make people obedient.

Chinese medical personnel administered drugs that damaged the central nervous system of adherents of that faith, intentionally overdosed them, applied extreme-strength electroacupuncture, and brutally force-fed them.

The abuse of psychiatry has continued for seven decades in the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese Communist Party has changed the organizational structures and the methods of how it destroys people in psychiatric institutions, but the destruction of life continues.

Safeguard Defenders—and the international community—must finally acknowledge that the Party is inherently murderous. The only way to end the abuse of psychiatry in China as well as the Party’s other horrific crimes is to end its rule of China.

China’s regime is torturing and killing critics, petitioners, activists, dissidents, and religious adherents in psychiatric hospitals, thereby bypassing its horribly misdescribed criminal justice system. The “barbaric practice,” as a Madrid-based NGO termed it this month, is still widespread.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Yes, Some Universities Are Still Requiring the COVID Shot By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/yes_some_universities_are_emstillem_requiring_the_covid_shot.html

Rutgers University is one of many schools of higher education that will require masking and COVID vaccination for the coming school year.  Antonio M. Calcado, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Rutgers, has written that “face coverings are required in all indoor teaching spaces, libraries, and clinical settings.  Compliance is mandatory.”  And “all students and employees are required to be fully vaccinated, obtain a booster when eligible, and upload records to the university vaccine portal.”

In light of what has been learned about the COVID jab, for those parents who will be shelling out $133,828 in tuition for their Rutgers undergrads, this edict may come as an additional shock on top of the sticker price for an education.

Recently, Dr. Robert Malone cited an analysis titled “COVID-19 Vaccines and Informed Consent” by Mr. John Allison (J.D.).  Allison’s law practice was “devoted to the litigation of cases involving medical, toxicological, industrial hygiene and product safety issues.” He was “Assistant General Counsel in the legal department of a Fortune 100 company with overall responsibility for product liability, environmental and commercial litigation.”  In addition, he was also “the lawyer for the company’s Medical Department, including Corporate Toxicology, Epidemiology and Product Responsibility.”

Allison’s 53-page analysis should be mandatory reading when deciding to send a child to a university or college mandating the jab.  Below are some highlights of his analysis.

 1. Government misinformation about the safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines, censorship of credible scientific and medical information about the risks of death and serious adverse effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, and vaccination coercion are depriving people of their ability to give informed consent to vaccination.

2. Safe and effective drugs on the market for many years, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, have been proven by reputable doctors to be successful in the early treatment of COVID-19.  If those affordable drugs had been allowed to be more widely used in the United States before people needed to be hospitalized, many tens of thousands of people who died from COVID-19 would probably be alive today.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Reiner, Klobuchar and the Big Lie of January 6 By Jack Cashill

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/reiner_klobuchar_and_the_big_lie_of_january_6.html

Dismayed by the failure of the courts to charge any of the protestors with “insurrection” the media have grasped at every proverbial straw within reach. When eleven members of the Oath Keepers were charged with “seditious conspiracy” a year after the riot, the zealots trumpeted their vindication across the fruited plain. Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, no Trump fan, quickly rained on their noisy parade.

“The charging of a relatively small number of extremists in this large protest belies rather than supports the broader allegations of an actual insurrection,” wrote Turley. “This remains a protest that became a riot.” More than six months after the incident, an informed FBI source was telling Reuters, “Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases. Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”

To any fair minded observer, the incident at Capitol Hill was much closer to the on-air graphic—“fiery but largely peaceful protest”—that CNN used to euphemize scenes of a burning Kenosha. The difference between the Kenosha and Capitol Hill riots is that the rioters in Washington set no fires and destroyed about $50 million less property. Then, too, Kenosha was just one of scores of BLM-Antifa riots that summer that left as many as 30 people dead and caused some $2 billion in damage.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: THE SUMMER OF OUR DISCONTENT 2022

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

In 1964, in a speech entitled “The Summer of our Discontent” Martin Luther King, Jr. ended with a resolution and a plea to others to “remain “maladjusted” and refuse to adjust to discrimination, religious bigotry, militarism, and violence.

What would he say to a summer of violence, antisemitism, crime, homelessness, surveillance of citizens, inflation, a rogue FBI, a militarized IRS, obstruction of free speech and censorship of dissidence, and government curtailment of parental rights. And what would he think of a populace that has adjusted to the foregoing?  rsk

BOOKS Comments turned off

River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile by Candice Millard

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

Millard’s book is wonderful reading about the Spekes/Burton search for the source of the Nile. Burton is described as a swashbuckling, romantic hero, but he had a vicious side not documented in Millard’s book…..rsk

https://www.haaretz.com/2008-12-11/ty-article/musings-the-other-richard-burton/0000017f-dc0b-df9c-a17f-fe1bf0cd0000

“However, the manuscript with the most inflammatory content, a brand which, as it were, was a brand plucked from the flame, has been preserved to this day. It is entitled “Human Sacrifice among the Sephardine (sic) or Eastern Jews.” In it, Burton, one of the most educated men of his time, had given credence to that most ignorant of medieval prejudices: the blood libel. How he came to this is a story on its own. The Damascus Affair, about which he wrote, occurred in 1840. A Capuchin friar disappeared with his servant, never to be seen again. With the help of the fiercely anti-Semitic French consul, 13 Jews were arrested and confessed under torture to sacrificing the friar for religious purposes. The cause of the Jewish victims was taken up by the great and the good, and they were released and vindicated. By the time Burton wrote his inflammatory pamphlet, the Damascus Affair was history.”

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was one of the most intriguing of all Victorian adventurers. A truly extraordinary character, he was a spy, scholar, linguist, explorer, religious fanatic and pornographer. He was said to have learned 25 languages and 40 dialects. Burton spent much of his life as a soldier in India. With his excellent Hindustani, Persian, Gujarati, Urdu and Arabic, it was natural that he should be an active player in what became known as the “Great Game” – the espionage activity on the northwestern frontier of India popularized by Kipling in his novel “Kim.” To misquote the title of the old BBC adventure serial, he could well be described as “Dick Burton, special agent.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama-Era ‘Sisters’ Circle Trump Will the trio of Susan Rice, Avril Haines, and Lisa Monaco get their target or will their exaggerated sense of self finally catch up with them?  By Julie Kelly

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/30/obama-era-sisters-circle-trump/

Susan Rice describes the trio as family.

In her 2019 memoir, Rice, Barack Obama’s final national security advisor, wrote glowingly of the close bond she shared with two other women in Obama’s tight knit circle of confidants. “In my last two years as NSA, I was extremely fortunate to have the invaluable input, support, and counsel of my sisters, Avril Haines and Lisa Monaco,” Rice explained in her book, Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For. “Never before, I am sure, had such small packages wielded such national security punch. Confident in ourselves and each other, we wouldn’t let any outsider perceive, much less exploit, our differences. Woe unto anyone, especially any male counterpart, who tried to play one of us against another.”

Hard eye roll.

Rice’s self-aggrandizing flex notwithstanding, no one tried to “play” the little women off each other; to the contrary, Haines and Monaco—Obama’s deputy national security advisor and homeland security advisor, respectively—and Rice played the American people by helping engineer one of the biggest frauds in U.S. political history: the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax.

Their sisterhood presumably strengthened during secret huddles in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Working off alleged intelligence collected by CIA Director John Brennan, Haines’ former boss, indicating the Kremlin planned to sabotage America’s election, Rice, Monaco, and Haines “convened meetings in the Situation Room to weigh the mounting evidence of Russian interference and generate options for how to respond,” the Washington Post reported in June 2017.

Monaco accompanied then-FBI Director James Comey to Capitol Hill in September 2016 to “warn” top congressional leaders in both parties that Russia was up to no good. After the election, in a brazen attempt to sow doubt about its legitimacy, Monaco announced the intelligence community would conduct an assessment into how Russian “hacking” impacted the results. 

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Change Forecasts “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Larry Elder

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/climate-change-forecasts-larry-elder/

“‘The trouble with almost all environmental problems,’ says Paul R. Ehrlich, the population biologist, ‘is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead. … We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.'” — The New York Times, 1969.

“No real action has been taken to save the environment, (Ehrlich) maintains. And it does need saving. Ehrlich predicts that the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.” — Redlands Daily Facts, 1970.

“Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century: Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century. … If the current rate of increase in electric power generation continues, the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of continental United States. … By the next century ‘the consumption of oxygen in combustion processes, world-wide, will surpass all of the processes which return oxygen to the atmosphere.'” — The Boston Globe, 1970

“The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. … ‘In the next 50 years,’ the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees. If sustained ‘over several years’ –‘five to 10,’ he estimated — ‘such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!’ — Washington Post, Times Herald, 1971.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Trillion Dollar Bailout for the Idiot Machine College for everyone is making everyone dumber. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/trillion-dollar-bailout-idiot-machine-daniel-greenfield/

Government institutions are in the business of making things worse in order to collect more money to make them better. We declared war on poverty and impoverished ourselves. After promising to fix homelessness, the streets are covered in needles and human waste.

Nowhere is this truer than in education.

Education results are inversely proportional to the amount of money spent on them. New York has the highest per pupil spending at $25,645 and the second lowest literacy rate in the country. Utah has the lowest per pupil spending in the nation and a 90% literacy rate.

Good thing the education market is set to hit almost $2 trillion by 2025. At 10% of GDP, we will spend far more than China (4% of GDP) with much worse outcomes to show for it. But Educrats will claim that if we only spent 25% of our GDP, Johnny would finally be able to read. All that’s  holding him back is that Chicago public school teachers with an MA only make $89,083.

The American Federation of Teachers put out a study claiming that funding levels should cause New York school districts to “perform well above average on national fourth and eighth grade math and reading exams.” They did not. And no matter how much money is wasted, they never will. You can’t buy literacy with subsidies for a broken education system. At any level.

Ever since Bill Clinton told working class people that manufacturing jobs weren’t coming back, so they all better go to college and learn to write lesbian feminist poetry, the number of college enrollees and graduates has shot up. So have their illiteracy rates.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Norway’s Comeuppance After years of official anti-Semitism, Israel reacts. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/norways-comeuppance-bruce-bawer/

“The relationship between Norway and Israel,” wrote Trond Ellingsen the other day at Document, Norway’s leading alternative news website, “is now at a historically low level.” We’ll get around to the reason in a minute, but first let’s just note that that’s saying a lot, given that antisemitism on a very profound level goes back a long way in the exquisite land of the fjords.

The Norwegian Constitution, drafted in 1814, originally contained this sentence: “Jews are still excluded from admission to the kingdom.” Knut Hamsun, probably Norway’s most illustrious novelist, was a Nazi. During World War II, it was the Norwegian police who, obedient to the German occupiers, rounded up Jews to be sent to death camps; in neighboring Denmark, by contrast, the police played a key role in the valiant effort – in which virtually all Danish gentiles took part – to sequester Jews from the Nazis and then help smuggle them to safety in Sweden. As a result, while only thirty-eight of the 773 Norwegian Jews who were shipped to Auschwitz survived the war, most of Denmark’s 7800 or so Jews made it to Sweden; of the 464 who were captured and, in keeping with a special agreement with the Danish authorities, sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt instead of to death camps, 425 returned home alive. 

Yes, Norway was quick to recognize the state of Israel. But hatred for that country, and for Jews generally, has flourished in Norwegian politics ever since.