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August 2021

Does Climate Change Cause Extreme Weather Now? Here’s a Scorcher of a Reality Check By Eric Felten

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/08/17/does_climate_change_cause_extreme_weather_now_heres_a_scorcher_of_a_reality_check_789878.html

The Pacific Northwest was hit with a record-shattering heat wave in June, with temperatures over 35 degrees higher than normal in some places. On June 28, Portland, Ore., reached 116 degrees. Late last week the region suffered another blast of hot weather, with a high in Portland of 103 degrees. The New York Times didn’t hesitate to pronounce the region’s bouts of extreme weather proof that the climate wasn’t just changing, but catastrophically so.

To make that claim, the Times relied on a “consortium of climate experts” that calls itself World Weather Attribution, a group organized not just to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, but to do so quickly. Within days of the June heat wave, the researchers released an analysis, declaring that the torrid spell “was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”

World Weather Attribution and its alarming report were trumpeted by Time magazine, touted by the NOAA website  Climate.gov , and featured by CBS News, CNBC, Scientific American, CNN, the Washington Post, USAToday, and the New York Times, among others.

The group’s claim that global warming was to blame was perhaps less significant than the speed with which that conclusion was provided to the media. Previous efforts to tie extreme weather events to climate change hadn’t had the impact scientists had hoped for, according to Time, because it “wasn’t producing results fast enough to get attention from people outside the climate science world.”

“Being able to confidently say that a given weather disaster was caused by climate change while said event still has the world’s attention,” Time explained, approvingly, “can be an enormously useful tool to convince leaders, lawmakers and others that climate change is a threat that must be addressed.” In other words, the value of rapid attribution is primarily political, not scientific.

Suspected terrorists crossing border ‘at a level we have never seen before,’ outgoing Border Patrol chief says by Anna Giaritelli

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/border-patrol-chief-suspected-terrorists-coming-across-southern-border

Unprecedented numbers of known or suspected terrorists have crossed the southern border in recent months, the outgoing Border Patrol chief said.

The head of the Border Patrol, Rodney Scott, told his 19,000 agents before retiring on Aug. 14 that their national security mission is paramount right now despite the Biden administration’s focus on migrant families and children who are coming across the United States-Mexico boundary at record rates.

“Over and over again, I see other people talk about our mission, your mission, and the context of it being immigration or the current crisis today being an immigration crisis,” Scott said in a video message to agents, obtained by the Washington Examiner. “I firmly believe that it is a national security crisis. Immigration is just a subcomponent of it, and right now, it’s just a cover for massive amounts of smuggling going across the southwest border — to include TSDBs at a level we have never seen before. That’s a real threat.”

TSDB refers to known or suspected terrorists, as identified in the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database.

“Your peers or you are taking criminals, pedophiles, rapists, murderers, and like I said before, even TSDB alerts off the streets and keeping them safe from America,” Scott said. “Even if we processed several thousand migrants that day and even if thousands of them were allowed into the U.S., you still took those threats off the street, and I think that’s worth it. So please don’t ever undersell how important your mission is.”

The surge of migrants from mostly Central American countries has prompted Border Patrol to pull more than 40% of agents from the field to help transport, process, and care for people in custody, meaning fewer agents are able to patrol for national security threats. Often, smugglers send over large groups of families and children to divert agents to one area and then run other contraband or people over the border where agents are not present.

Shortly after taking office in January, CBP told members of Congress that federal law enforcement had stopped four people on the terror watchlist. A CBP news release about these specific encounters was taken down from the government agency’s website hours after going up, prompting complaints from Republicans about the Department of Homeland Security’s transparency.

The congressional briefing confirmed what House Republicans had said during a border tour in Texas in March. House Homeland Security Committee ranking member John Katko, a former federal prosecutor who was based in El Paso, Texas, during his time as a lawyer, said the international cartels were “masterfully” exploiting the border due to an easing of Trump-era border restrictions.

“People they’ve caught in the last few days [in Border Patrol’s El Paso sector] have been under the terror watchlist,” Katko said. “Individuals that they have on the watchlist for terrorism are now starting to exploit the southern border.”

The four terror watchlist matches represented a greater number than the average total seen in recent years. Although several thousand people are denied entry to the U.S. at airports each year as a result of being on the list, it is unusual for people to be encountered trying to get into the U.S. between land border crossings. The four matches were citizens of Serbia and Yemen.

How Did We Go From Energy Dominance To Energy Begging In Just 8 Months?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/18/how-did-we-go-from-energy-dominance-to-energy-begging-in-8-months/

In his first day in office, President Joe Biden embarked on a campaign to rein in domestic oil and gas production. On his 204th day in office, he was pleading with OPEC to increase its production to stem the sharp rise in gasoline prices, to which OPEC said no dice.

Virtually overnight, the nation has gone from Trump-era “energy dominance” to a Carter-era energy crisis.

But unlike Jimmy Carter, who blundered his way into gasoline shortages, Biden is intentionally creating the current situation to pay homage to climate “crisis” environmentalists.

During his presidential campaign, Biden promised to “get rid of fossil fuels.” Since taking office, he’s been busy trying to carry out that pledge.

One of the first things he did in office was to call a halt on oil and gas leases on federal lands and off our coastlines, and has yet to resume allowing them even after a federal judge ordered the administration to do so. He shut down construction of the Keystone Pipeline. He blocked energy development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He directed federal agencies to “eliminate fossil fuel subsidies as consistent with applicable law.” He’s promised to add some $90 billion to the industry’s tax burden by eliminating what he calls tax “subsidies.”

Even now, the administration “is preparing to release a blueprint for limiting sales of U.S. drilling rights as rising oil and gasoline prices highlight the risks of curtailing domestic crude production,” reports Bloomberg. “The Interior Department also is expected to limit new leases in some sensitive coastal and Western areas and begin a broad study of the climate effects of oil and gas development on federal property.”

Iran’s Renewed ‘Promise’ to the Palestinians by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17648/iran-promise-palestinians

[T]he leaders of various Palestinian factions are seeking Iran’s support for their jihad (holy war) against Israel.

This means that Iran under Raisi will continue to provide the Palestinian terrorist groups in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip with financial and military aid.

Iran did not promise to contribute to the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of last May’s 11-day war between Hamas and Israel. Iran did not promise to build new hospitals and schools in the Gaza Strip. Iran did not promise to help the two million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip cope with the rising number of Covid-19 infections.

Iran’s renewed promise to help the Palestinians in their fight against Israel shows that the mullahs in Tehran feel emboldened by the perceived weakness of the Biden administration and other Western powers in dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat.

The silence of the US and the rest of the international community towards the latest threats from Iran and its Palestinian proxies signals that it is only a matter of time before the Palestinian terror groups’ jihad toward Israel, most likely enthusiastically assisted by Iran, resurges in a way that is entirely expectable.

As the Biden administration continues to talk about the need for confidence-building measures between Israel and the Palestinians to create an environment to reach a two-state solution, the leaders of various Palestinian factions are seeking Iran’s support for their jihad (holy war) against Israel.

Leaders of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other factions who visited Iran recently to attend the inauguration of President Ebrahim Raisi, seem to be satisfied with the promise they received from the mullahs in Tehran.

The Biden administration wants to advance confidence-building measures between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinian terrorist groups and their supporters, however, want confidence-building measures with any country that is willing to support them in realizing their dream of destroying Israel.

The Biden administration can probably promote some form of confidence-building measures between Israel and the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas. There is no way, however, that the Biden administration would be able to advance such measures between Israel and Iran’s Palestinian proxies.

Two Intelligence Failures by America’s Leaders by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17656/america-intelligence-failures

Just as the most optimistic among our leaders believed that Afghanistan had the potential to become a fledgling democracy, our leadership insisted that…. China would become a “stakeholder in the international order” and a trusted trading partner. Increased political freedom would follow economic growth, and a huge new marketplace would be opened to the West.

Now, though, China’s role in the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has revealed undeniably just how hostile China is to the West, and how dismissive it is even of its supposed allies in the developing world…. Apparently, more than four million lives worldwide were a small price to pay for increasing China’s power at the expense of the U.S. and its allies. When will our leaders open their eyes to that fact and act decisively to counter China’s ever more obvious attempts to achieve dominance over the West?

For years, it has been evident for anyone to see that our Afghanistan and China policies were not only ineffective, but that we were courting disaster by our lack of effective response. Our leaders have refused to acknowledge the increasing, and increasingly compelling, signs that our policies toward Afghanistan and China were failing. That is the true intelligence failure.

Let us hope and pray–and demand–that our leaders respond more effectively against the emerging China fiasco. The horrific scenes of the last few days will pale in comparison to what the world will experience if we stand aside and watch while China succeeds in its goal of becoming the world’s preeminent superpower.

One major intelligence failure by our leaders every twenty years is already one too many.

The U.S. and the West are experiencing two unfolding intelligence disasters. Oxford Languages succinctly defines the two possible meanings of the word “intelligence:” (1) the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, or (2) the collection of information of military or political value. What we are experiencing today is not chiefly a failure to collect information, but the ever more tangible inability of our leaders to apply the information they have acquired.

The two debacles began to unfold around the turn of the millennium, within twelve months of each other. We are now seeing the fruits of the first failure play out 24/7 before our very eyes: the stunningly rapid fall of Afghanistan despite twenty years of sacrifice and investment. The second, the failure to understand and counter the growing threat posed by China, is set soon to prove itself just as disastrous as the first. In responding to each of these two challenges, our leadership has demonstrated a profound lack of insight and skill: a true failure of intelligence.

Biden’s disgraceful retreat By Jeffrey James Higgins

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/bidens_disgraceful_retreat.html

By abandoning Afghanistan, the U.S. has given Islamic radicals a base to train, plan, and project terrorism.

For more than a decade, I hunted terrorists as a supervisory special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, and I believe the United States’ abandonment of Afghanistan is a disgraceful, immoral, and short-sighted foreign-policy disaster. 

On September 11, 2001, I was one of the first rescuers to reach the World Trade Center after it collapsed. I stood in the rubble and swore an oath to seek vengeance against the Islamists who targeted the U.S. I pushed my agency to investigate narco-terrorism and spent the next 14 years pursing terrorists across the globe. I helped open DEA’s office in Kabul, wrestled a suicide bomber, fought Taliban in combat, and chased terrorists across five continents. I achieved the first precedent-setting narco-terrorism arrest and convicted the world’s most prolific heroin trafficker.  

For days, I’ve been receiving frantic messages from Afghan allies who are trapped in Afghanistan or have families still in grave danger. The U.S. has a moral obligation to protect Afghan citizens who fought side-by-side with Americans against the Taliban, Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Haqqani Network, and other terror groups. Right now, Islamists are going house-to-house raping and murdering American allies. The rapid abandonment of the Afghan military and our other allies is unconscionable, but there is still time to expand the beachhead at Kabul International Airport and evacuate tens of thousands of Afghans who will be murdered for believing in democracy and human rights.

Despite problems with reconstruction, the war in Afghanistan has been successful. The purpose of the invasion was to depose the Taliban regime that provided a haven for al-Qaeda, and to combat terrorism. The U.S. achieved those goals by pushing the Taliban into Pakistan and denying the country to terrorists for almost twenty years. Southwest Asia has the highest concentration of terror groups in the world, and it is the epicenter of radical Islamic terrorism. A strong military presence in Afghanistan has facilitated intelligence, law enforcement, and military operations against Islamists who want to destroy the West. The advantage of maintaining a military presence in Afghanistan has been obvious.

A new COVID treatment? By James Stansbury

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/a_new_covid_treatment.html

Is REGEN-COV the answer to COVID?

Nearly a year and a half has passed and over 618,000 COVID-19 related deaths were recorded in the U.S. alone and finally the FDA released an emergency use authorization for REGEN-COV; a new drug that was undergoing testing in 2020 (pre-Biden).  It is now an early treatment option for primary care physicians.  Until this point, the only authorized COVID-19 treatment my family doctor had per the July 2021 update to NIH guidelines  was recommend quarantine, wait until symptoms go away or report to a hospital if they get worse.  It is noteworthy that these updated guidelines continue to name hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a prohibited drug, but should be no surprise considering a war on HCQ began soon after President Trump dared to recommend it.    

However, REGEN-COV is no simple take-home medicine like the familiar Tamiflu frequently prescribed for the seasonal flu.  For example, (in the ‘old days’ that ended in March 2020), my wife and I both caught the seasonal flu.  Our doctor immediately prescribed Tamiflu and azithromycin because he knew a delay of even a few days would make Tamiflu less effective. REGEN-COV is similarly recommended only for early use before severe symptoms can develop.  

Once the initial surge of COVID-19 cases and deaths started in March-April 2020, the seasonal flu magically vanished along with Tamiflu despite some early indications that it works on COVID. 

According to the FDA fact sheet on REGEN-COV, the intravenous infusion process it requires appears time-consuming (can take 20 to 50 minutes or more with a one-hour monitoring period immediately after).  For now, it is recommended for use only on confirmed COVID-19 patients over the age of 12 who are at high risk of developing severe symptoms, but permits some flexibility to be given as a preventative to especially high-risk patients.   It sounds so promising the FDA was careful to say it is not a substitute for the vaccines. 

The FDA has known from the beginning that early treatment of COVID-19 is essential yet chose to ignore India’s great success with its initial early treatment protocol that initially included HCQ.  However, when the delta variant arrived it appeared more resistant to HCQ, so India immediately approved and widely distributed a new more potent outpatient COVID kit consisting of Ivermectin, Doxcycline, and Zinc.  This less than $3 kit quickly reversed the delta variant death trend there.  Finding the true cost per-dose of REGEN-COV proved more elusive; ranging from $10 to $2,100 per dose.  Grab your ‘Good Rx’ card just in case.   

The ‘Endless Wars’ Fallacy There are many options between nation building and giving up, and we had found a good one in Afghanistan before President Biden abandoned it. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX-district 2)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/endless-wars-neocon-biden-afghanistan-withdrawal-kabu

Daniel  Crenshaw is a  United States Representative for Texas’s 2nd congressional district since 2019.He was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012 as a member of the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team 3.

Almost everyone agrees that what’s happening in Afghanistan is an unmitigated disaster. There is no way to whitewash it, and few are trying. The scenes from Kabul speak for themselves, casting shame and embarrassment on the world’s greatest superpower. There is plenty of blame being passed around, including to the “neocons,” the generals and the Afghans themselves. But what got us here was the widespread belief that American foreign policy should be dictated by a simple slogan: “No more endless wars.” The current spokesman for that belief is President Biden.

The argument for bringing the troops home is an emotional one, arising from exhaustion with overseas conflict. Most people don’t understand the situation in Afghanistan, and that causes distrust and anger. Few deny we needed to take action after 9/11, but few understood what our strategy would be after we got there. Leaders failed to explain that simply leaving would allow the Taliban to re-emerge and again provide safe haven for terrorists. Americans felt stuck and became exhausted over the years with the vast sums of money spent and lives lost, seemingly in a futile attempt to build democracy.

With this growing impatience, the case for cutting our losses grew stronger. But it fails to acknowledge trade-offs—and this simple question: If we evacuate Afghanistan, what will happen? The “no more endless wars” crowd always refused to answer. They prefer to live in a dream world rather than face the reality that our enemies are ideologically opposed to Western civilization and will gladly stage another 9/11 if they have the opportunity and means. They are at war with us whether or not we are at war with them. Leaving Afghanistan would inevitably create a terrorist safe haven.

That simple reality was never properly explained to the public. When Quinnipiac asked in a May survey, “Should we leave Afghanistan?” 62% of respondents said yes. But what if the question was framed more completely: “Should we leave Afghanistan even if it means an increased threat of terrorism to the homeland?”

China’s Afghanistan Taunt Beijing’s propagandists suggest Taipei will face Kabul’s fate.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-afghanistan-taunt-joe-biden-withdrawal-11629236906?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

It’s too early to know the wider strategic fallout from America’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal. But there’s strong reason to doubt convenient claims that the retreat will help the U.S. balance a revisionist China. Beijing is more likely to see the display of fecklessness as an opening to exploit.

“Our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely,” said President Biden in his defiant Monday speech.

Put aside that, because of the Taliban triumph, the U.S. now has more attention and troops devoted to Afghanistan than it did before the exit. Beijing is already using the debacle to taunt Taiwan and the U.S.

“Is this some kind of omen of Taiwan’s future fate?” said an editorial in the Global Times, a Communist Party organ. “Once a cross-Straits war breaks out while the mainland seizes the island with forces,” the paper added, “the US would have to have a much greater determination than it had for Afghanistan, Syria, and Vietnam if it wants to interfere.”

China’s Foreign Ministry also took a victory lap in a press briefing Tuesday. Its spokeswoman said the Afghanistan war shows that the U.S. shouldn’t “interfere in other countries’ internal affairs,” pointedly using the same language Beijing uses to object to America’s support of Taiwan’s independence. China says Taiwan’s status is an “internal” issue, though the self-governing democracy is a linchpin of security for Pacific states including Japan.

An Abbreviated History of Anti-Zionism* Alex Grobman, PhD

 For more than 20 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, anti-Zionism was a regional phenomenon—a clash between Arab and Jewish national movements in the Middle East. In the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe the Soviets exploited antisemitism for political purposes, but it was rarely part of international debate until after the Six-Day War in 1967. By the end of the 1960s, and since 1975, anti-Zionism became international in scope. It first appeared in the universities in the West where the New Left, in cooperation with the Arab student associations, attacked Israeli policy. [1]

 When the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 on November 10, 1975 and declared “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” it significantly expanded anti-Zionism into the sphere international non-governmental organizations and therefore into the Third World countries. This was done by an alliance of the Arabs and the Soviet Union. They endowed anti-Zionism with legitimacy and official recognition. [2]  

 After the First World War, the Arabs expected Greater Syria—which included Palestine and Lebanon—to become a vast united and sovereign Arab empire. Instead the French and the British divided the area into what the Arabs considered “irrationally carved out” entities that became the present-day states of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Trans-Jordan (later Jordan), Iraq and Israel. They were outraged that a “non-Arab embryo state in Palestine” had been inserted into an area where they would never be accepted. They claimed that this shattered their dreams of unification and impeded their search for a common identity.  [3]  

 The Fight for “Dignity and Independence”

The fight against a Jewish homeland became an integral part of their struggle “for dignity and independence.” Israel’s existence, they claimed, “implied that not only a part of the Arab patrimony, but also parts of Islam had been stolen. For a Moslem there was no greater shame than for that to happen.” The only way to eliminate this deeply felt affront—this “symbol of everything that had dominated them in the past”—was to rid the area of “imperialist domination.” [4]  

Zionists were the official enemy of the Arab national movement, but Arab governments have long been accused of using the Arab Israeli confrontation to divert attention from their own critical domestic social and economic problems. When confronted, they respond that if this were not a real concern, it would not resonate so strongly among the Arab masses. [5]

The late Bernard Lewis, the dean of Middle Eastern scholars, said Arab preoccupation with Israel is the licensed grievance. In countries where people are becoming increasingly angry and frustrated at all the difficulties under which they live—the poverty, unemployment, oppression—having a grievance which they can express freely is an enormous psychological advantage.” [6]