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March 2020

China’s Real Disease: Not Coronavirus by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15745/coronavirus-china-communism

Beijing has, according to President Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro, already nationalized one American factory making medical masks. Moreover, Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo on air repeatedly said the Chinese forced at least one ship carrying masks, gloves, and other protective gear to the United States to return to China.

Trump’s optimism is not shared in Beijing…. China, using the epidemic as an excuse, is now pushing to change the agreement by deferring its purchase obligations, the heart of the arrangement as far as the U.S. is concerned.

Xi Jinping, after all, knew about the coronavirus epidemic long before he signed the deal in the White House. In February, he said he had chaired a meeting of the Party’s Politburo Standing Committee on January 7 in which he issued orders to contain the epidemic. Xi’s knowledge of the outbreak on January 15 and his push for relief now, therefore, makes him look cynical. In all probability, he had no intention of honoring his side of the bargain from the beginning.

Americans — and the Chinese people, who are now demanding fundamental political change — realize that the real disease is communism.

Last July, five American analysts who have been consistently wrong told us “China is not an enemy.”

Actually, this time they were technically right. China’s communism is not an enemy. It is the enemy.

After the coronavirus pandemic subsides, Americans should not forget Beijing’s malicious campaign against their country.

For more than a month, the central government’s foreign ministry and the Communist Party’s Global Times have been trying to tar the Trump administration. The campaign culminated in a series of tweets from rising Beijing star Zhao Lijian, foreign ministry spokesman and deputy director general of the ministry’s Information Department.

Taiwan, China and the Coronavirus One treats it decisively, the other treats it ideologically. Don Feder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/taiwan-treats-coronavirus-decisively-china-don-feder/

Taiwan is 81 miles from China. There were 60,000 direct flights between the two nations last year, carrying over 10 million passengers.

As of March 16, the People’s Republic of China, where the coronavirus originated, had more than 80,880 diagnosed cases and close to 3,213 deaths. The Republic of China on Taiwan had 67 cases and one death.

Taiwan has treated the pandemic decisively. China has treated it ideologically, as one would expect from a totalitarian state.

On December 31st, China told the World Health Organization that it had several cases of pneumonia. On the same day, Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control began monitoring passengers who arrived from Wuhan. (The 2003 SARS epidemic made it skeptical of health data from China). Taiwan screened these passengers for 36 viruses. On January 26, it banned flights from Wuhan, making it the first country to do so.

Taiwan instituted 124 safety protocols for the virus. It distributed 6.5 million masks to primary and secondary schools, along with 84,000 liters of hand sanitizer and 25,000 forehead thermometers. Public and private buildings screened entrants for signs of fever. Apartment buildings have hand sanitizers in or near elevators.

After China finally admitted that it had a problem, it took another month for researchers from other countries to get in.

Major Islamic Conference on Reform Upholds Radicalism Exposing a large international conference attended by 42 Muslim nations. Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/major-islamic-conference-reform-upholds-radicalism-raymond-ibrahim/

Largely unknown to and unreported in the West, a large, two-day conference was recently hosted by Al Azhar University in Egypt and attendant by the leading clerics and politicians from 46 nations on January 27-28.  Titled, “Renewal in Islamic Thought,” it is currently the most significant response to Egyptian President Sisi’s calls for reform, which he forcibly made on January 1, 2015.

The conference focused on the most pressing topics affecting the Islamic—and in some cases non-Islamic—world, including women’s rights, government and society, and of course the question of “radicalization” and the emergence of jihadi terror groups such as the Islamic State, etc.

I’ve watched many of the panels with great interest, and in the coming weeks hope to remark on some of these, but for now I wish to discuss what can be learned from the closing remarks of the Grand Imam of Al Azhar (and Pope Francis’ good friend), Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb. 

First, in consensual agreement with the other clerics present, he closed the door on the possibility for reform on a great number of issues: “Renewal,” he announced, “is in no way possible concerning those texts which are irrefutable in their certainty and stability; as for those texts that are not entirely credible, they are subject to ijtihad [reinterpretation, especially based on changing circumstances].”

Jennifer Rubin’s death wish for Republicans is factually wrong — and the maps prove it By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/jennifer_rubins_death_wish_for_republicans_is_factually_wrong__and_the_maps_prove_it.html

Once upon a time, Jennifer Rubin was an intelligent woman. Things started to go downhill when she went to work for the Washington Post, but what really flipped the switch in her brain was seeing Donald Trump become president. Not only did she lose perspective, but she also lost intelligence, self-restraint, and decency. Her latest flight of NeverTrump nastiness has her speculate about possible Republican deaths during a time of coronavirus. Her speculation not only reveals an even further degradation of mind and soul, but she’s got things entirely bass-ackwards wrong – and a couple of maps prove it.

Maybe the seeds of Rubin’s decay were always there, considering that she attended U.C. Berkeley both as an undergraduate and at law school. Her downslide might also have come from spending twenty years in Hollywood, working as a Labor and Employment lawyer in Hollywood.

Or perhaps the problem was when she moved with her family to Virginia and started writing for The Weekly Standard and Commentary magazine. Her work there was excellent during the Bush and Obama years when these magazines were conservative stalwarts. As you may recall, though, both magazines went all-in for NeverTrumpism, which eventually killed The Weekly Standard.

By the time The Weekly Standard died, though, Rubin had already moved on to the Washington Post, ostensibly as a “conservative” commentator. At that point, the years at Berkeley, in Hollywood, and at two cocktail-party-circuit “conservative” magazines had already started to catch up with her. By the time Donald Trump came along, the term “conservative” when attached to her name was a misnomer. As with Bill Kristol, her hatred for Trump caused a seismic shift in her political ideology. Rubin’s fanatic hatred for Trump is such that she’d rather embrace a hard-left platform (for there’s little real difference between Bernie’s agenda and Biden’s other than the speed of change) than see Trump in the White House.

The American press’s entire energy is bent towards destroying Trump By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_american_presss_entire_energy_is_bent_towards_destroying_trump.html

The mainstream American media have abandoned journalism’s formerly-prized ethos of “who, what, where, why, when.” There is no pretense anymore that they serve a purpose other than maligning Donald Trump in the hope of destroying his presidency. The latest example comes from The New York Times, a once-respected institution that now would offend the birds whose cages it might line.

President Trump has recommended new, very stringent, social distancing guidelines as part of slowing coronavirus’s spread in the United States. Speaking of slowing the virus, keep in mind that, thanks in part to President Trump’s decision to close America’s borders to China in January, the spread here has already been slow. Currently, despite the virus having been present, but unidentified, in America for some time, only 0.00002 percent of the population has died (i.e., 68 people).)

The New York Times began its report on the new guidelines in a straightforward fashion:

The Trump administration released new guidelines on Monday to slow the spread of the coronavirus, including closing schools and avoiding groups of more than 10 people, discretionary travel, bars, restaurants and food courts.

Cuba Is an Academic Fraud Few educational stats are available, and they are highly suspect. By Paul E. Peterson

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuba-is-an-academic-fraud-11584380234?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Bernie Sanders has spent decades preparing to lose the Florida primary. In a 1985 interview, Vermont’s self-described socialist said of Fidel Castro that “he educated their kids.” He still praises the Communist regime’s “massive literacy program.”

Mr. Sanders is not alone in his admiration for Cuban education. In 2016 President Obama quoted himself as telling Raúl Castro, Fidel’s younger brother and successor: “You’ve made great progress in educating young people. Every child in Cuba gets a basic education.” Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, visited Havana in 2017 and exulted: “Cuba’s education system might as well be considered the ultimate wrap-around institution for children.” In 2007 Stanford’s Martin Carnoy published a book called “Cuba’s Academic Advantage.

It’s all bunk—though it’s hard to prove, because Cuba refuses to participate in international tests such as the respected Program for International Student Assessment. The only external tests in which Cuba did participate were the 1997 and 2006 waves of the Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education, sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and nicknamed Laboratorio. This was the main evidentiary basis for Mr. Carnoy’s book.

But the Cuban government supervised the administration of the Laboratorio tests, and the results strongly suggest it cheated. The median language-arts score for Cuban third-graders in 1997 was 343 points, compared with 264 in Argentina, 256 in Brazil and 229 in Mexico. If these scores are to be believed, the median child in Cuba learns by grade three what equivalent students elsewhere don’t learn until at least grade six.

Coronavirus Panic: An Opportunity To Hit ‘Reset’ With China Bob Maistros

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/16/coronavirus-panic-an-opportunity-to-hit-reset-with-china/

“In short, that America is going to stop lying down with depraved, despotic dogs and waking up fleeced — in every sense.”

It’s an old and familiar saying: “If you lie down with dogs, you’ll wake up with fleas.”

Not to mention:

Poisoned, fake-brand THC vapes killing our kids via the vaping lung illness outbreak of last summer. (Oh. You missed that foreign-sourced public health crisis?) Plus floods of counterfeit nicotine e-cigarette brands habitualizing high-schoolers and undermining heavy-handed efforts at home to keep the products away from kids.
Thousands of dangerous, fraudulent, mis- and wrongly-labeled, and even banned products swamping the world’s largest retail platform – and driven to the top of listings, claiming a coveted but misleading “Amazon Choice,” through lies, bogus sales and bribes.
Decades of systematic cheating on trade agreements hollowing out America’s industrial base.
Blatant and ubiquitous identity theft, cyberfraud and cyberattacks – including, ironically, unrelenting unleashing of computer “viruses.”
Sponsorship of rogue nations rushing headlong to develop nukes that can take out Los Angeles.
Of course, pandemics that, in flea-like fashion, rapidly infest the entire globe.
And resulting record stock-market crashes, free falls in energy and other commodity markets, plummeting bond yields, and maybe, a recession that could undo the unparalleled job gains of the last few years.

Hey, Wall Street! Ya maybe paying attention yet?

Panic Never Helped Any Pandemic And Won’t Start Now Michael Fumento

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/16/panic-never-helped-any-pandemic-and-wont-start-now/

CNN Business calls it “a pandemic unprecedented in modern times.” That would probably include the so-called “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918-19 that killed more than 500,000 Americans, and perhaps 20 million to 50 million worldwide. Coronavirus so far has killed fewer than 75 Americans, fewer than 7,000 people worldwide, and its growth internationally already is clearly slowing. But economic growth is another matter: We’re now in a bear market, with worldwide recession a serious possibility. For hysteria has now become the “conventional wisdom.”

Invoking the “Black Death,” which probably wiped out a third of Europe, both CNN and the Washington Post have reported that Iran is digging (per the Post) “Coronavirus Burial Pits So Vast They’re Visible From Space.” Never mind that Google can read your license plate from space, nor that on average more than 12,000 Iranians die daily and the country has reported less than 80 COVID-19 deaths since virus was detected there a month ago. For those without enough fingers, that’s a 0.02% increase in deaths per day. The cemeteries can handle it.

Then there’s that Peggy Noonan op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that unabashedly declared: “‘Don’t Panic’ Is Bad Advice.”

Ahem. Don’t panic.

Another Epidemic Of Hysteria

Canada Psychiatrists: Refusing Euthanasia for Mentally Ill Is ‘Discrimination’ By Wesley J. Smith !!!!???

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/canada-psychiatrists-refusing-euthanasia-for-mentally-ill-is-discrimination/

Dedicated psychiatrists are often the only defense between patients with serious mental illness and suicide. But legalizing euthanasia shifts thinking 180 degrees because suicide has been redefined as health care and a right. Hence, protections — such as barring administered death to the mentally ill — soon come to be seen as obstacles.

That has happened in Canada, where the government is erasing its weak provision that death must be “reasonably foreseeable” requirement to qualify for killing. Once that provision is repealed, psychiatric conditions diagnosed “irremediable” could qualify for death.

This is the context in which the Canadian Psychiatric Association has warned the government not to “discriminate” against the mentally ill by barring them from lethal jabs when the law is changed. From the Association’s Position Statement (my emphasis):

2. Patients with a psychiatric illness should not be discriminated against solely on the basis of their disability, and should have available the same options regarding MAiD [medical assistance in dying, i.e., euthanasia] as available to all patients.

White House Pushes Back on Reports of National Curfew By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/white-house-pushes-back-on-reports-of-national-curfew/

The White House on Monday pushed back on reports that the administration is considering imposing a national curfew.

“This is not true!” White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere wrote in response to a CNN report claiming that the administration was engaged in active discussions about encouraging a curfew across the country, meaning non-essential businesses would have to close by a designated time every evening.

“This is not correct,” Katie Miller, press secretary to Vice President Mike Pence tweeted about the same report.

“That’s not even in the realm of things we’re asking governors for,” Miller said. “There are a lot of rumors. I promise you, I’m sitting in every single meeting … so I can give you guys a yes or no.”

“Rumors of a national lockdown or national quarantine recently shared via text message are FAKE,” read a tweet from the official White House Twitter account.