Displaying posts published in

June 2020

The Suicide of Expertise by Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/09/the-suicide-of-expertise/

After misleading Americans on a long list of consequential issues over the past few decades—from climate change to dietary guidelines and now the common cry of “systemic racism”—the body of expertise is twitching. In this case, I will even allow for coding its death as another coronavirus fatality.

In his 2017 book, The Death of Expertise, author Tom Nichols argued that know-it-all Americans were tuning out the credentialed class at great risk to the country. “We rely on delegating decisions to other people who we assume are going to have some better knowledge of these issues than we are,” he said in an April 2017 speech. “Our republic functions on delegating decisions to others who rely on expertise to help make the best decisions we can make.”

Nichols, a rabid NeverTrumper, often ridicules Trump and his supporters as ignorant rubes who recklessly disregard the advice of Our Betters with Letters. Blaming experts for disastrous foreign wars or lousy trade pacts, Nichols insists, is just a craven political strategy. It is inconceivable to him that disgust with the expert class could be rooted in legitimate gripes or clear evidence of failure.

But like so many assumptions made by his NeverTrump cohorts, Nichols is wrong. Again. Expertise did not die at the hands of deplorable Trumpkins or even web-surfing suburban moms. Expertise wasn’t killed; it has slowly committed suicide.

And we are watching the final death throes of the credentialed class as the last gasps of their credibility can be heard across social media and cable news outlets. The tension between two forms of pseudoscience—social distancing and social justice—snapped, and the experts who vehemently demanded the former now take a knee to defend the latter.

Israelis can’t mask a lack of anxiety Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/israelis-cant-mask-a-lack-of-anxiety/

Most Israelis are unlikely to accept another proverbial jail term, regardless of COVID-19 rates.

The reopening of the Israeli economy after nearly two months of COVID-19 closures was bound to lead to laxity on the part of the public. And it did, in spite of endless Health Ministry warnings that a release from lockdown bondage would require extra vigilance where social-distancing, mask-wearing and hand-washing were concerned.

This was inevitable.

Israelis’ initial anxiety about the contagiousness of the deadly virus—fed by predictions of mass casualties and other doomsday scenarios—made it relatively easy for the powers that be in Jerusalem to force the populace into weeks of virtual and actual quarantine.

In addition, the draconian measures appeared to pay off. The death toll and need for ventilators remained relatively low. The curve flattened. Life gradually began to resume a semblance of normalcy. Even some of the most stir-crazy among us felt, in retrospect, that perhaps the insanity had been worth the trouble.

Such people embraced their newfound freedom to stray as far from their residences as they pleased, meet with friends and visit family.

The millions of Israelis who lost their jobs, on the other hand, never really came to terms with having their places of employment shut down or businesses destroyed—all for a virus that killed fewer people than other diseases during the same period last year.

The Gaza They Do Not Want You to See by Bassam Tawil *****

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16100/gaza-luxury

How can Hamas and its supporters around the world continue to complain about poverty and misery when new shopping malls and supermarkets filled with clothes, and various types of luxury goods are being opened every few weeks in the Gaza Strip?

These images are also an embarrassment to anti-Israel propagandists seeking to portray a completely different reality of life in the Gaza Strip as part of their campaign to delegitimize Israel and demonize Jews by holding them fully responsible for the “suffering” of Palestinians.

Why are foreign correspondents and Palestinian journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dumping photographic documentation of these sunny, positive developments in the Gaza Strip into the dustbin? Is it because such images do not fit their anti-Israel narrative and agenda?

The Palestinian terror group Hamas has warned Palestinians in the Gaza Strip not to publish photos from the Gaza Strip on social media platforms.

In a June 9 statement, the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Interior claimed that “Israeli intelligence agencies have been asking residents of the Gaza Strip — through social media — to use their mobile phones to take pictures of various places in the Gaza Strip.”

Hamas warned Palestinians against complying with the alleged Israeli request and claimed that Israel was using social media accounts to “recruit collaborators and obtain information.”

Hamas added that its security forces were monitoring Israeli and Palestinian social media accounts and would take “legal measures” against Palestinians who interacted with the purported Israeli intelligence agencies.

China, under the Veil of Virus, the Schoolyard Bully. Will the US Please Stop It? by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16099/china-bullying

Beijing’s hostility is likely a message to New Delhi that China will aggressively target any attempt by an increasingly pro-Western India to establish a military alliance with the U.S and its allies and obstruct China’s far-reaching claims of sovereignty in the Western Pacific Ocean and beyond.

China apparently plans to deploy air, sea, and ground forces in an amphibious assault exercise on the Pratas Islands, an island chain also claimed by Taiwan.

The US needs urgently to develop a policy committed to countering China’s escalating aggression. The policy should ideally include no commerce with China whatsoever. Beijing clearly has no intention of honoring any deal to which it agrees and has already been caught trying to steal remedies for the virus it unleashed.

Just as the U.S. would not have tried to enrich the Third Reich or the former Soviet Union, the U.S. — and all countries hurt by China — should have no place enriching a China that has shown itself to have killed more than 100,000 Americans, more than 400,000 people worldwide, has thrown more than 40 million Americans out of work, cost the world trillions in crippled economies and is openly bent on dominating the planet.

While Western media is almost exclusively focusing on supposed “race riots” and the messy wake of the Covid-19 virus, China has quietly been going about consolidating recent gains in the South China Sea. It has, as dangerously, still been attempting to expand its influence throughout the entire Indo-Pacific Region and everywhere else the world will let it.

Beijing’s latest provocative stances — in addition to sparking recent incidents with mainland and archipelago states in Southeast Asia such as Vietnam and Malaysia — include generating a rock-throwing brawl with India’s mountain troops at a disputed border post in Northern Sikkim, raising tensions with Taiwan, and threatening the liberty of Hong Kong.

Iran’s Pre-Deal Deceptions Tehran denies U.N. inspectors access to two nuclear sites.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irans-pre-deal-deceptions-11591744764?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The Islamic Republic long has been deceitful about its nuclear ambitions, but for years the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has given the regime cover in public. Maybe not anymore.

“The Agency notes with serious concern that, for over four months, Iran has denied access to” two sites in the country, says an IAEA report sent to member states Friday and shown to the press. It adds that for nearly a year the Islamic Republic has failed to clarify “questions related to possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities.”

The IAEA is particularly concerned about the location of an undeclared metal disk made of uranium and the use of other undisclosed nuclear material for research in the early 2000s. The report notes Tehran’s habit of scrubbing or destroying facilities.

The foundation of Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal was ostensibly an honest accounting of Iran’s nuclear misdeeds. Yet the report, and Tehran’s intransigence, make clear the country has been hiding nuclear facilities and material. The evidence raises anew the suspicion that the regime’s plan was to reap the accord’s economic rewards, then—assisted by hidden materials and research—move to produce a weapon once the deal’s restrictions expire.

Life and Death in Chicago What happened on a single day in May with too few cops around.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-and-death-in-chicago-11591732693?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Do America’s cities need police? Some progressives want to replace police with social workers, but we doubt that includes the people in Chicago who witnessed or were victimized by a crime rampage on a recent single day in Murder City, U.S.A.

Eighteen people in Chicago were murdered on May 31, marking the city’s most violent day in at least 60 years. Over the span of that spring weekend, 85 people were shot, 24 fatally. As rioters ransacked businesses across the city, gangs exploited the chaos and the overstretched police force to steal and kill.

“We’ve never seen anything like it, at all,” Max Kapustin, the senior research director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “When [the police department] has to turn its attention elsewhere and there’s suddenly this vacuum that opens up, you also unfortunately see a picture like you saw with [last] weekend where you see an absurd amount of carnage, people getting injured and killed.”

Antifa – An Integral Part of the Dems’ 2020 Playbook It’s déjà vu all over again. Kenneth R. Timmerman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/antifa-just-part-democrats-2020-playbook-kenneth-r-timmerman/

When I see videos of Antifa thugs smashing and looting luxurious shopfronts on Fifth Avenue in New York, for me it’s déjà vu all over again.

I wrote those scenes in my new book, The Election Heist, which I sent to my publisher last November.

I’m not claiming to be a prophet, but I do believe that fiction precedes reality. By that, I mean that by using our imagination, we can apply patterns of observed behavior to future situations.

Let me give you a specific example. In one of the Antifa scenes in my new book, an NYPD officer guarding Trump Tower takes a call from the deputy police commissioner, even as the thugs start charging the Gucci store front next door.

The deputy commissioner tells him to stand down.

Two Days Behind the Lines with Black Lives Matter I moved with them as they surged across London – hell-bent on making something happen. Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/two-days-behind-lines-black-lives-matter-katie-hopkins/

I spent two days with the Black Lives Matters protestors in London, becoming one of them, moving with them as they surged across London hell-bent on making something happen; something, anything, unsure of what.

I watched on. The Churchill statue defaced, the Union flag vandalized atop the Cenotaph — a monument of respect for those who fell fighting for our freedoms, officers bloodied and bruised. One in hospital with a punctured lung and shattered bones, horses injured by fireworks, bricks and bikes thrown at the panicked beasts.

“27 officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London,” reported the BBC, repeated by rote across the rest of the legacy media in the UK as if joining the word peaceful with the word protest would make it all OK.

Assuming my new identity as a protestor, I helped them climb walls for a better vantage point when they struggled, accepted their masks and water, watched them swarm out of the tube stations at Westminster and Vauxhall like hungry flies, buzzing with excitement for the action ahead. 

They came in their thousands, young black men — cocky in their tight jeans — together with young black women, eyes made up and fiery atop their face masks, stance set to offense honed by years of being tough enough to get by. 

They belong here, they fit in. This is their moment.

Riots spurred by death of George Floyd take heavy toll on black lives, communities By Valerie Richardson

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/8/george-floyd-rioting-take-heavy-toll-black-lives-c/

Businesses owned and frequented by blacks have been wiped out; those killed in riots mostly black

The rioting on the heels of Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody has come at a high price for the black community.

Those killed amid the rioting over the black man’s death have been disproportionately black. Businesses owned and frequented by blacks have been wiped out in the looting and destruction, and a memorial to black Civil War soldiers has been defaced.

“The contradictions and the hypocrisy of these so-called social justice warriors — they are more concerned about their own virtue-signaling, even if it means the continued destruction of black Americans,” said Robert Woodson, a conservative civil rights leader and founder of the Woodson Center.

Open the schools without politics By Jeffrey I. Barke, M.D.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/open_the_schools_without_politics.html

As of June 3, 2020, the CDC reported that there have been 20 deaths in children in the U.S. due to COVID-19. In my home county of Orange in California, no child has died due to COVID-19. JAMA Pediatrics for May 11, 2020 had this to say: “Finally, it is important to emphasize that the overall burden of COVID-19 infection in children remains relatively low compared with seasonal influenza.”

We have never closed schools or forced children to wear masks during an influenza season. Yet, the CDC has issued guidelines recommending face coverings for elementary school-aged children, social distancing, reduced classroom populations, and other suggestions that make little scientific or common sense.

To put some of the COVID statistics into perspective: Motor vehicle injuries are a leading cause of death among children in the United States — in 2017, 675 children 12 years old and younger died as occupants in motor vehicle crashes, and nearly 116,000 were injured. In the same year according to the CDC, drownings claimed the lives of almost 1,000 U.S. children. That is 50 times greater than COVID-19! As a result, would you favor closing down all swimming pools in the United States?

The argument that children should wear face coverings to prevent the asymptomatic spread of the coronavirus to a high-risk teacher or administrator is also fallacious. First of all, there is little if any evidence that asymptomatic children are spreading COVID-19 to adults. Indeed, the World Health Organization issued a report on June 8th indicating little evidence of asymptomatic transmission of the virus.