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June 2020

Should Jews Endorse Black Lives Matter? By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/should_jews_endorse_black_lives_matter.html

We are living in a maelstrom of hatred, ignorance, and virtue-signaling that is breathtaking to observe.  Jewish organizations and synagogues are marching in support of Black Lives Matter.  White people are prostrating themselves like slaves “bowing before black people and asking for forgiveness for their ‘white privilege’ and the ‘structural racism’ in the deplorable, irredeemable United States of America.”

Anyone who is appalled at these actions is beginning to wonder about the sanity of this country.

 Of particular concern is the apparent all-in capitulation by American Jewry as they engage in this feel-good liberal response.

An open letter calls on Jewish organizations to endorse Black Lives Matter.

The letter asks Jewish organizations, federations … to commit to fulfilling seven actions within three years.  They are endorsing Black Lives Matter; establishing racial justice as an organizational pillar; having a fifth of staff, senior leadership and board seats be filled by people of color; participating in anti-racist education; investing a fifth of all grants in organizations led by people of color; creating racial justice requirements for grant organizations, including ‘a commitment to replacing contracts with police departments with alternative structures of community safety’; and developing a five-year, $1.5 million ‘communal accountability’ initiative.

The letter was organized by Lindsey Newman, director of community engagement at the Jewish diversity organization Be’chol Lashon; Aaron Samuels, co-founder and COO of the black media company Blavity; and Rachel Sumekh, the founder and CEO of the hunger relief organization Swipe Out Hunger.  ‘We chose these proposals because we believe they are achievable and if put into practice would make significant inroads toward making the Jewish community anti-racist[.]’

Frankly, a burglar intent on doing well in property appropriation couldn’t ask for a better list of demands!

Another day, another bogus report from CDC seeking to entice the public to continue wearing masks By Jack Hellner

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

The CDC now says they have proof that wearing facemasks reduced COVID 19 cases in NYC by 66,000 from April 17th to May 9th.

Face masks reduce New York coronavirus cases by over 66,000, study deems it most effective way to check spread

Health experts have been advising people to wear face masks in public to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and now numbers indicate that it works. A new study shows that wearing a face mask dramatically decreases a person’s chances of being infected by the new coronavirus. Researchers found that using a face mask alone reduced the number of Covid-19 infections by more than 66,000 in New York City from April 17 to May 9.

There is no way they would know this, and it is as made up as the modeling numbers that CDC put out in March that showed that hundreds of millions would get the disease and millions would die. That is the study that destroyed the economy and caused governors throughout the country to require us to wear masks, social distance and avoid large groups for the first time in our lives. 

If they wanted a legitimate story, they would have looked at cases in states without the face mask requirement to see how many cases they had from April 17th to May 9th. Instead of doing that they just made numbers up and the media, like puppets, repeat the bogus numbers to indoctrinate people into wearing masks.

Here are more made up modeling reports, without scientific facts, that have destroyed the U.S economy and forced much of the public to wear facemasks, social distance and gather in small groups for the first time in most of our lives:

Here Are the Heroes Whose Statues Black Lives Matter Has Attacked War heroes, Founding Fathers, explorers, abolitionists, and a Scottish king. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/there-are-heroes-whose-statues-black-lives-matter-daniel-greenfield/

The statue of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, stands at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly in Los Angeles. When the racist mobs swept through the area, looting Jewish stores and defacing synagogues with “BLM” and “Free Palestine” graffiti, the statue of a man who risked his life to resist fascism and bigotry was one of their targets.

The racists and leftists vandalizing statues across the world claim that they’re fighting hate, but their targets have often been the men and women who courageously stood up to racism and hatred.

When the statue of Churchill was vandalized in London, the thugs who did it went after the one man who had done the most to wake up the world to the threat of fascism. In Philadelphia, the thugs scrawled “murderer” and “colonizer” on a statue of Philadelphia abolitionist Matthias Baldwin and in Boston, they vandalized the ‘Glory’ monument of the African-American 54th Regiment.

In Washington D.C., the Lincoln Memorial and the National WW2 Memorial were both defaced.

This is not the work of anti-racists, but of racists. It’s not the work of anti-fascists, but of fascists.

On Vote-By-Mail by J. Christian Adams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16117/vote-by-mail

Vote by mail might sound good, until you look at the data. The federal election assistance commission keeps tabs. Their data show that 28,000,000 million ballots mailed since 2012 simply vanished. They were sent out, but never came back and were counted. Some say they are in landfills, others figure they are in file cabinets.

It gets worse. Hundreds of thousands came back but had defects that prevented them from being counted. The voters who sent these ballots probably do not even know that their ballot was not counted after they sent it back.

Making all of this even worse are the hundreds of millions of dollars that leftist foundations dedicate to this process fight. There is money for media outlets to publish stories that voter fraud is a myth. They even lend struggling newspapers foundation-funded “reporters” to work for free, as long as they publish stories saying voter fraud is a myth.

Mail voting also destroys the transparency of our elections. Observers from each side are unable to watch the process. Mail ballots are uniquely vulnerable to fraud because they are voted behind closed doors where third parties regularly attempt to influence the process.

It surprises people to learn that in the middle of an Ebola epidemic in 2014, Liberia conducted an in person national election. Ebola had a fatality rate of 46%, yet people still came into polling places and voted in person. The solutions were simple – sanitization protocols, distancing, disinfectant on surfaces.

Never before in the history of the country has the election process system been under greater attack. In the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, heavily funded organizations and lawyers with fat trust deposits have been seeking to undo how we elect the President, Congress and state officials.

The World Health Organization’s truth-cleansing pandemic By Rupert Darwall

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/502718-the-world-health-organizations-truth-cleansing-pandemic

You thought the World Health Organization’s job was direct and coordinate authority on global pandemics? Forget it. Last month, the WHO produced its “Manifesto for a healthy recovery from COVID-19.” Far from addressing its own lamentable failure to halt the spread of the virus, the document is little more than a demand for a global Green New Deal dolled up in the garb of public health.

The pandemic, WHO’s director-general, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, tells us, is a reminder of “the intimate and delicate relationship between people and planet.” Efforts to make the world safer from another one are doomed unless they address “the critical interface between people and pathogens.” Human pressure on the environment, the WHO claims, increases the risk of new infectious diseases. Recovery plans from the pandemic should therefore “lessen our impact on the environment, so as to reduce the risk at source,” as if new deadly viruses are randomly transmitted from wild animals to people wandering through forests, rather than in Chinese wet markets or, in some instances, even cultivated in research labs. 

Arguing for a quick energy transition, the WHO says the costs of renewable energy are dropping. Exactly why, say, burning coal carries a higher risk of unleashing the next pandemic rather than cutting down forests from whence the COVID-19 virus supposedly came, in order to make way for wind farms, the WHO doesn’t say. As Michael Moore’s movie “Planet of the Humans” vividly shows, wind and solar require enormous land-takes and have huge environmental impacts.

But the WHO’s recovery manifesto isn’t about science and rationality. It’s the soul of Thomas Malthus entering public health. Restoring a pristine environment is the goal, humanity becomes the problem, and industrialization – by harnessing nature for the purpose of human flourishing – is the original sin. The WHO’s message that environmental degradation caused the pandemic is exactly what influential audiences in the West want to hear. 

.Black Lives Matter – in Lithuania? Grant Arthur Gochin

 https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/black-lives-matter-in-lithuania/

Lithuania is about the most ethnically pure country in the world. They have almost zero diversity. However, this past week, young Lithuanians showed they care about Black Lives. On June 5, approximately 1,000 youthful demonstrators took to Lithuanian streets to show their support. Their support for those racially different surprised people worldwide who never expected encouragement of diversity. After all, Lithuania is a country where members of Parliament are able to openly throw the Nazi salute without objection or consequence.

MP’s identified as Arūnas Gumuliauskas and Audrys Šimas throwing the Nazi Seig Heil salute in a Parliamentary meeting of the National Security and Defense Committee on May 20, 2020 (Photo from Lithuanian Government feed. Free for public use.)

At sporting events, some Lithuanians openly throw the Nazi Seig Heil salute

In the capital city, Nazis march openly and freely.

Neo-Nazi march in Vilnius on March 11, 2020. Banner is the ethnically purist racist rallying cry: “Lithuania for Lithuanians” – a goal already achieved
Multiple monuments for Holocaust perpetrators populate the country.

Newly installed monument for genocidal mass murderer Jonas Noreika on a government protected national heritage building

The government of Lithuania is deeply involved in Holocaust revisionism and considers Holocaust perpetrators as their national heroes.

Lithuania states they have banned Communist and Nazi displays, but if the demonstrations are pro-Nazi, they seem never to be prosecuted, or cause official concern.

Even the Lithuanian military glorifies the Nazi leader that first called for the elimination of Jews in Lithuania, Kazys Skirpa. The military showcased his photograph on the front cover of their national Lithuanian military magazine in 2020.

International court v. Trump: A case of politics, not justice Andrew McCarthy

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/502688-international-court-v-trump-a-case-

While he is in a pitched battle with the memoir John Bolton plans to publish next week, President Trump is fully on board with his former national security adviser’s hostility toward the International Criminal Court (ICC). 

On Thursday, the president followed through on the longstanding threats by his foreign policy team, issuing new sanctions against the ICC over its provocative effort to investigate and prosecute American military, intelligence, and perhaps even former political officials for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

Bolton was right, during his Trump administration days, to admonish the ICC when it was threatening to conduct this probe. With the tribunal now having pressed ahead, the president is right to both clobber ICC operatives with punitive measures and undermine the court’s dubious legitimacy. 

The United States is not a member of the ICC, a creation of the 1998 Rome Treaty. In this, we are no outlier. The court’s universalist pretensions notwithstanding, some 70 countries have declined membership. The non-members, for better or worse, are among the world’s most consequential nations — e.g., China, Russia, India and Israel. Moreover, as Bolton observed in a 2018 speech, non-members represent two-thirds of the world’s population and 70 percent of its national armed forces. 

In essence, the ICC is the plaything of the European left, post-sovereign technocrats, and progressive legal elites — one-worlders who won’t provide for their own security and dream up schemes to delegitimize actions that sovereign states, especially the United States, take in their national interests. The ICC is targeting the U.S. during Trump’s presidency in the expectation of support from “woke” America — you don’t find the tribunal tripping over itself to address, say, China’s persecution of the Uyghurs.

Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller: Pandemics, Pollution and Poppycock

http://www.henrymillermd.org/24264/pandemics-pollution-and-poppycock

Hindsight is, of course, 20-20. Many lessons about pandemics will be learned in retrospect—the most notable being the need for epidemiological surveillance, preparedness with stockpiles of medical supplies, and how not to handle the most vulnerable population during an infectious disease crisis (in this case, people in long-term care facilities). Other lessons, as expected, will be endlessly debated and reframed, often without due consideration of what was known or unknown at the time that specific actions were taken.With the world in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the short-term focus is now on how to avoid surges of infections and get the economy functioning so people can go back to work.

There is one critical lesson, however, that has nothing to do with epidemiology, viruses, ventilators, or personal protective equipment. In fact, it’s only peripherally related to COVID-19.

That is a case study of the cost and effectiveness of the panoply of “green” initiatives made prominent by the Green New Deal (GND) of 2018 and its most prominent advocate, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (D-NY). Since the sobriquet GND was first coined, many major presidential candidates and Democratic luminaries have proposed different iterations of the plan, costing multiple trillions of dollars.

What the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear is that, by wrecking the world’s economies, it is possible to temporarily reduce global emissions—by an average of about 17%, according to some studies. This equates to a return to 2006 levels.

Who Now Dares to Confront the Left? Peter Smith

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/who-now-dares-to-confront-the-left/

“Here’s a quick question: name an institution not now in the hands of the Left? Certainly not universities, the media or public service. And don’t dare cite the police as upholders of one-rule-for-all law and order, not when they’re fining petty violators of social-distance diktats while standing idle as protesters in their tens of thousands ignore the same rules.”

“It is past time to fight back. But where do the leaders come from? Not from senior clerics. Not from the pantywaists who occupy most of the centre-right parliamentary seats; whether here, in the US or elsewhere. We are left with Trump, I believe, as in 1940, when we had only Churchill. But, ignoring the Left, have a look at the way conservative commentators constantly snipe at Trump; white-anting his standing. They can’t give him any credit without including a sanctimonious personal insult, in order to establish their own moral credentials. Talk about cutting off your nose…”

The truth is the enemy of those who practice deceit and who find their anchor not in truth but in an agenda. Whether Christian or not, a decent person wants to live in truth. Personally, I define my conservatism as falling out of my own search for truth – the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Let the chips fall where they may.

Here are some truths, among a much longer list. Admittedly, not logical or tautological, but truths in the sense that they correspond with the facts on the ground as we know them or should know them. Some abiding, some more profound than others; some specific to the moment.

Aynsley Kellow: COVID-19 and the Problem with Official Science

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/06/covid-19-and-the-problem-with-official-science/

All models are wrong but some are useful, which cannot be said of the casualties projected for a disease that has proven about as lethal as a seasonal flu. Recall that 1969’s Hong Kong flu killed an estimated one million worldwide but did not stop the Woodstock festival. Yet driven by fear and folly we have trashed an entire economy.

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.  —Lord Salisbury, 1877

The desideratum in modern governance is evidence-based policy. It is not always achieved or, as we have seen with the coronavirus panic, possible. It is far preferable, however, to policy-based evidence, which was to be found with the rushed production of new evidence that had not met the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration quality assurance processes in a desire to influence Donald Trump’s deliberations over whether to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement (as I describe in my forthcoming essay in Climate Change: The Facts 2020).

In climate science the problem appears irrevocable. Scholars like Roger Pielke Jr in his book The Honest Broker have pointed out that there is no linear relationship between science and public policy: scientific findings rarely lead to single policy conclusions. Despite this, the epistemic community in climate science seems to think that even more scary model-driven scenarios will lead policy-makers to do “the right thing”.