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August 2021

How ‘Informed Consent’ Became ‘Coercion of the Uninformed’ By William Sullivan

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/coog30gmailcom_how_informed_consent_became_coercion_of_the_uninformed.html

There must be a lot of money to be made in peddling medical treatments and prescription drugs to Americans, or else there’d be no way the advertisements pitching these treatments and drugs to the public could be so plentiful.  But you may have noticed a feature of those ads that is conspicuously absent in the public pitch for COVID-19 vaccines.

Let’s consider that commercial (or any of the hundreds exactly like it) entreating you to get vaxxed as a means to “get back to life,” showing happy images of travel passports, college, family meals, and visiting grandparents.  But, we’re assured, “it’s okay to have questions,” like “how were the vaccines tested?” and “why should I get vaccinated?” 

How were they tested?  “In rigorous clinical trials among adults of diverse backgrounds,” we’re assured.  Oh, well that’s a relief. 

Why should I get vaccinated?  Because “protecting yourself also helps protect the people around you.”  You don’t say?  Hadn’t heard that.

“Back to life?” the commercial ends.  “It’s up to you.”

There are two things that the average American might notice here. 

The first is that this commercial, just like every COVID vaccine pitch ever created, treats us, the skeptical-yet-potential consumer, like a child being persuaded by a desperate parent to believe that Santa really showed up on Christmas Eve.  “I saw him on the Santa Tracker app.  Honest!”

The Shame of the Never Trumpers : Kurt Schlichter

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/08/26/the-shame-of-the-never-trumpers-n2594643

This is on them, those brave and bold MSNBCNN warriors who sold out the conservatives who once took their cruises until Trump exposed the grift; these True Conservatives™ then proceeded to help elect Grandpa Badfinger pseudo-president. Well, at least they are consistent – when they were nominally conservative, the GOP squishes they backed led us to disaster, and the Dem libs they back now are doing the same.

The Conservative, Inc., crew are the smart guys. The moral guys. The experts of expertise. Just ask them. The Never Trumpers are the adults in the room, even if adults aren’t the North American Man-Boy Lincoln Project’s usual target demo. 

This Afghanistan disaster, this utter abomination that will lead to tens of thousands of deaths of foreigners who trusted America, the humiliation of our country – country first, right guys? – and a possible hostage crisis to boot that will require us to thaw out and redeploy Ted Koppel, is on them.

But it’s not completely on them. Let’s face it, they don’t have that much influence anymore. Their purpose is solely to pretend that there is a conservative constituency for leftism. No one points to these doofuses and says, “Yeah, let’s harken back to the glory days when these geniuses were managing America’s decline – that was much better.” They failed then, and they are failing now, and when the Silicon Valley suckers funding these turncoat losers wise up and turn off the cash spigot, no one will listen to them at all.

It’s funny – you look at a toad like Bill Kristol and you wonder what bothers him most – the fact that a bunch of conservatives despise him, or the fact that most modern conservatives couldn’t pick him out of a line-up with LTC Bratwurst, Ana Navarro, and Brian Stelter, who is a potato.

You need to understand who these guys are. They are unaccomplished footnote people, whether it’s “Is a hot dog a sandwich or a taco?” dilemma pundit Jonah Goldberg (whose been coasting off his one good book for years), or drag queen story time advocate David French – whose name we once could have made fun of by citing the Gallic stereotype of military ineptness, except it turns out the frogs are courageously going out into Kabul to sweep up their citizens while the demented muppet the Ahoy Crew voted for has ordered our American forces to sit tight. 

They are co-owners of this fiasco. They wanted Biden. It was imperative to saving the Republic, or something, we were solemnly informed. Those mean tweets, those damnable mean tweets – we needed the calming, soothing normality of a steady statesman and got a senile cone-licker-in-chief instead.

If these guys weren’t wrong, they’d be nothing.

Anarchy in Portland Political leaders yawn as left and right battle with guns in the streets.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anarchy-in-portland-oregon-ted-wheeler-chuck-lovell-11630014195?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Cities that tolerate political violence invite more of it. Portland, Ore., has failed to learn this lesson, and it’s a miracle no one was killed amid recent clashes. On Sunday Antifa adherents squared off against demonstrators affiliated with the far right Proud Boys. Bloody confrontations have become routine in Portland, but this one was even more harrowing than usual. Social-media video appears to show participants exchanging gunfire, and Police Chief Chuck Lovell said one person was apprehended for firing a weapon.

“We are trying our best,” Mr. Lovell added, describing how “our critical staffing shortage, as well as legal restrictions, impacts our response.” Daryl Turner, executive director of the Portland Police Association, says police funding has been slashed by more than $25 million since George Floyd’s murder, and some 150 officers have resigned or retired since June 2020. That includes 50 officers who served on a crowd-control unit.

Mr. Lovell said the on day of the riot police responded to a fatal crash, a shooting that injured five people, and street racing that shut down the Fremont Bridge, among other crimes. Portland has seen 61 homicides this year, up from 32 in all of 2019.

Mayor Ted Wheeler, federal courts and Oregon lawmakers have severely restricted when police can use less-lethal force, even amid riots. Mr. Lovell said last week that the public “should not expect to see police officers standing in the middle of the crowd trying to keep people apart.”

The mayor still doesn’t get it. In a statement Monday he said the “Portland Police Bureau and I mitigated confrontation” and “minimized the impact of the weekend’s events to Portlanders.” He bragged that the “violence was contained to the groups of people who chose to engage in violence toward each other. The community at large was not harmed and the broader public was protected. Property damage was minimal.”

Message: Anarchy is tolerable as long as you’re merely shooting at each other. The chaos will continue until the city’s political leaders muster the will to stop it.

The Kabul Airport Massacre Jihadists kill 13 Americans, more than died in Afghanistan in all of 2020.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-kabul-airport-massacre-taliban-afghanistan-joe-biden-11630016714?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The jihadist attack on Kabul airport that everyone feared finally happened on Thursday, killing 13 American soldiers and wounding 15, as well as killing at least 90 Afghans and wounding dozens more. The suicide bomber is responsible for the deaths. President Biden spoke for the country Thursday in his expression of empathy and loss, but he can’t duck responsibility for the failure to provide enough force to execute a safe evacuation.

ISIS in Afghanistan claimed responsibility for the attack, which a spokesman for the Taliban condemned. But the Taliban were supposed to provide security outside the airport perimeter, and they failed if they tried at all. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of Central Command that is supervising the evacuation, said Thursday that the U.S. has depended on the Taliban for security screening outside the airport since mid-August.

“We thought this would happen sooner or later,” Gen. McKenzie added. He said the U.S. had no choice other than to interact with Afghans moving through the airport gate to be evacuated, and one of them was probably the suicide bomber who made it past whatever screening the Taliban did.

What a position for the U.S. to be in: Relying on the victorious enemy that has spent years trying to kill Americans to detect jihadists bent on killing Americans.

13 U.S. Troops, at Least 90 Afghans Killed in Kabul Blasts Pentagon blames ISIS affiliate for bombings, gunfire amid evacuation efforts; more than a dozen U.S. troops hurt

https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan-kabul-airport-explosion-11629976397

More than 100 people were killed, including at least 13 U.S. service members and 90 Afghans, at the Kabul airport Thursday when two blasts ripped through crowds trying to enter the American-controlled facility, disrupting the final push of the U.S.-led evacuation effort.

A suicide bomb attack at the airport’s Abbey Gate was followed by an assault by gunmen, officials said. Another bomb attack took place nearby, at a hotel outside the airport, officials said. Eighteen U.S. service members were injured, the Pentagon said.

The attack marked the deadliest day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan since 2011, and came just five days before the Biden administration’s deadline for the complete military withdrawal from the country. The military expects more attacks, Marine Corps Gen. Frank McKenzie told reporters.

President Biden on Thursday evening said he was heartbroken by the violence and vowed to retaliate for the attacks, while promising to continue evacuation efforts.

“We will hunt you down and make you pay,” Mr. Biden said in remarks at the White House. He said he had instructed his national security advisers to develop response plans to the attack.

U.S. officials attributed the violence to Islamic State’s regional offshoot. Islamic State claimed responsibility in a report posted by its Amaq news agency.

The Taliban are a sworn enemy of Islamic State, and shot dead one of the group’s top leaders in Afghanistan hours after taking over the Kabul prison where he was held. The two Islamist groups have fought each other in Afghanistan since 2015, particularly in the eastern part of the country. As recently as Tuesday, a Taliban spokesman told Iranian state media that Islamic State no longer existed in Afghanistan.

“We strongly condemn this gruesome incident and will take every step to bring the culprits to justice,” Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said.

Afghanistan: the graveyard of experts Western nation-builders thought they knew what was best for Afghanistan – they didn’t have a clue. Tim Black

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/08/25/afghanistan-the-graveyard-of-experts/

At the beginning of July, US president Joe Biden told the press it was ‘highly unlikely’ the Taliban would retake the whole of Afghanistan.

This was clearly a prediction based on what the experts had told him, from military strategists to intelligence agencies. But by 11 August, the experts had changed their tune. A US official told the press that Taliban fighters could be in a position to besiege Kabul within 30 days and possibly take it within 90.

Just four days later, on 15 August, the Taliban took control of Kabul, and with it, Afghanistan. In the end, it didn’t take 30 days, or 90 days – but four days.

So much for intelligence. So much for experts. So much for all those who claimed to know how things really were in Afghanistan. As the US joint chiefs of staff chair, General Mark Milley, told reporters last week, he and his colleagues had underestimated the speed of the Taliban’s advance. ‘There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days’, he said.

That a senior military official can admit that the US and its allies had no idea that a state they built was about to collapse is a spectacular admission. It tells us that all the intelligence gatherers, the planners and the nation-building technocrats – in short, the experts – had no idea what was actually happening in a country the US and its allies had been occupying for nearly two decades.

But this wasn’t an aberration. It wasn’t a catastrophic but momentary lapse in intelligence. The experts haven’t just got it wrong on Afghanistan over the past few months – exaggerating the resilience of the Afghan army and government and downplaying the Taliban’s resurgence.

No, the experts have been getting it wrong on Afghanistan throughout this 20-year-long tragedy. Indeed, the whole bloody debacle has been marked by a conspicuous expert failure to understand the dynamics of this still tribal country. And the result has been a fatally flawed attempt to impose a prefabricated political order on a recalcitrant society.

This was apparent right from the outset, when President George W Bush launched the war on Afghanistan in October 2001. At the time, expert failure was certainly evident at the level of intelligence gathering. An unnamed adviser to a US Army Special Forces team told interviewers in 2017 that he was repeatedly asked during the early stages of the conflict, ‘who are the bad guys, where are they?’. He didn’t know. It was a sentiment clearly shared by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who complained in September 2003, ‘I have no visibility into who the bad guys are. We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.’

The US and its allies were not just ‘woefully deficient in human intelligence’. This was a war waged in spite of the social and political realities of Afghanistan. It was the product of ignorance and technocratic hubris.

Why Do Media Fact Checkers Keep Ignoring This Biden Big Lie?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/26/why-do-media-fact-checkers-keep-ignoring-this-big-lie-of-bidens/

At a press briefing on Tuesday that was ostensibly about the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden opened his remarks by touting the $3.5 trillion spending disaster that Democrats are trying to ram through in Washington. Biden has spun a web of lies to defend both.

“Today, the House of Representatives has taken a significant step toward making a historic investment that’s going to transform America, cut taxes for working families, and position the American economy for long-term – long-term growth,” he began.

That phrase – “transform America” – ought to scare Americans. After all, what exactly does Biden want to transform the world’s biggest, most prosperous, most free nation into? An inflation-riddled, welfare-dependent, socialist basket case? That’s what the $3.5 trillion plan, which includes a massive expansion in federal entitlements and government meddling, is trying to achieve.

Then Biden went on to repeat the biggest of his Big Lies about the economy, one that media fact-checkers – too exhausted, apparently, from years spent fact-checking every utterance of President Donald Trump’s –  keep missing.

“When I became president,” he said, “it was clear that we had to confront an immediate economic crisis – the most significant recession we’ve had since the Depression, or at least since Johnson.”

Biden knows that’s not true. Reporters covering the White House ought to know that’s not true. The public deserves to know that it is a bald-faced lie.

‘Immediate economic crisis’?

As we now know, the “immediate economic crisis” Biden supposedly inherited had ended nine months before he took office. The National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the official judge of when recessions begin and end, says that the COVID recession ended in April. That’s April of 2020. After that date, Trump passed two huge economic stimulus bills, cleared away regulations, and spurred the amazingly fast development of three COVID vaccines.

In short, there was no crisis when Biden took office, much less an immediate one. Saying anything else is lying to the public.

Most significant recession since the Depression?

Biden Turns Afghanistan Into A Slaughterhouse, Taliban Into A Military Superpower

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/27/biden-turns-the-taliban-into-a-military-superpower/

A day after at least 13 U.S. soldiers were killed at the Kabul airport, it’s still unclear how many Americans will be abandoned in Afghanistan by the Biden administration. What we do know, though, is that most of the U.S. weaponry in the country will not be recovered. It’s as if Joe Biden himself was the military procurement chief for the Taliban.

Until Thursday, there had been no U.S. combat casualties in Afghanistan since February of last year. But a bloodbath that the entire world outside of the White House saw coming arrived, and it became the deadliest day in the country for American troops since 2011, when – yes, that’s right – Biden was vice president.

Homicide bombers and gunmen, reportedly from that brood of terrorist vipers called the Islamic State, killed at least 60 Afghans in addition to the American servicemen, and wounded more than 140. These horrific deaths and dismemberments are squarely on Biden, who rejected military leaders’ advice, has resorted to blaming the victims, and once again demonstrated that he has miserable, if not depraved, foreign-policy instincts.

Don’t bet Thursday’s deaths will be the last. The country is now a modern arms bazaar, overflowing with designed-to-kill equipment for the Taliban to use on Americans and anyone else they choose to murder, or sell to unsavory characters who want to massacre Westerners. Remaining in Afghanistan after the U.S. quits will be nearly 76,000 military vehicles, 208 American airplanes and helicopters, and almost 600,000 arms.

“We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said earlier this week. “And obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.”

The list of equipment, provided by Open The Books, a nonprofit determined to force transparency on governments at all level, includes: combat vehicles, armored personnel carriers, Black Hawk helicopters, aircraft that can fire Hellfire and anti-tank missiles, drones, rifles, machine guns, bombs, hand grenades, grenade launchers, rocket-propelled weapons, mortars, and howitzers.

And, we might add, uniforms, which the Taliban have already used to taunt the U.S. by wearing them last month while acting out the famous, and treasured, shot of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in World War II.

All told, the U.S. “provided an estimated $83 billion worth of training and equipment to Afghan security forces since 2001,” says Open The Books founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski.

At least this administration didn’t set up the Taliban with a navy and long-range bombers.

Even before the Biden Retreat, the Taliban had “a wealth of armaments,” says a January report from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. The military gear included “armored vehicles, night-vision devices, Western rifles, laser designators, and advanced optics.” We’ve also seen the Taliban firing rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds, and missiles out of the back of trucks.

Though the Russians denied it, there have been reports of Moscow arming the Taliban over the years. Gen. John Nicholson, at one time commander of the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan, said three years ago “we’ve had weapons brought to this headquarters and given to us by Afghan leaders and (they) said, ‘This was given by the Russians to the Taliban.’”

Israel joins world’s carbon-free bandwagon, but some wonder if it makes economic and scientific sense David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/israel-joins-worlds-carbon-free-bandwagon-but-some-wonder-if-it-makes-economic-and-scientific-sense/

Some praise the plan, saying Israel must act as the “science is in,” and the world faces an imminent global climate crisis. Others scoff at the “so-called science” and say there’s no justification for overhauling Israel’s economy—that it will be “all pain, no gain.”

Israel’s government unanimously agreed on July 25 to adopt a low-carbon economy, “part of its commitment to the global effort” to reduce greenhouse gases. It’s the first time that Israel has set a national goal to reduce carbon emissions. In doing so, it joins a host of countries that have made similar announcements over the last several years.

Some praise the plan, saying Israel must act as the “science is in,” and the world faces an imminent global climate crisis. Others scoff at the “so-called science” and say there’s no justification for overhauling Israel’s economy—that it will be “all pain, no gain.”

The plan calls for an 85 percent reduction in carbon emissions from 2015 levels by 2050 and sets an intermediate goal of a 27 percent reduction by 2030. To hit those targets, it calls for major changes to the transportation, manufacturing and energy sectors.

There already appears to be disagreement within the Ministry of Environmental Protection about the plan. As presented on the ministry’s website, the plan calls for natural gas to play an integral role. Natural gas has led to a “dramatic decline in local pollutant emissions,” it said. “Thanks to these measures, Israel already meets about 75 percent of the target required for reducing CO2 emissions within the framework of its obligations under the Paris Agreements.”

Yet the ministry’s head, Tamar Zandberg, criticized natural gas on June 29 during a climate change panel at an Israel Democracy Institute conference. “I want to correct a common mistake … natural gas is as natural as coal. It is fossil fuel,” she said, according to Israel Hayom.

Israel’s timing was meant to coincide with a new report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which will underpin the upcoming U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in November, where participating countries will likely undertake to curb their emissions more sharply.

“It was to show support of the IPCC and the U.N. in general and to say that we are concerned with climate change,” Gideon Behar, special envoy for climate change and sustainability at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told JNS.

The first installment of the IPCC’s Sixth Annual Assessment Report, released on Aug. 9, lays the blame for global warming squarely on man-made emissions and for the first time (on the basis of what it says are improved models) links extreme weather to climate change.

“The evidence is clear that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main driver of climate change,” the IPCC said in a press release about the report, painting a bleak future for the planet if global warming rises above pre-industrial levels by two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

U.S. officials provided Taliban with names of Americans, Afghan allies to evacuate

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/26/us-officials-provided-taliban-with-names-of-americans-afghan-allies-to-evacuate-506957

By LARA SELIGMAN, ALEXANDER WARD and ANDREW DESIDERIO

The White House contends that limited information sharing with the Taliban is saving lives; critics argue it’s putting Afghan allies in harm’s way.

U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that’s prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.

The move, detailed to POLITICO by three U.S. and congressional officials, was designed to expedite the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan as chaos erupted in Afghanistan’s capital city last week after the Taliban seized control of the country. It also came as the Biden administration has been relying on the Taliban for security outside the airport.

Since the fall of Kabul in mid-August, nearly 100,000 people have been evacuated, most of whom had to pass through the Taliban’s many checkpoints. But the decision to provide specific names to the Taliban, which has a history of brutally murdering Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the conflict, has angered lawmakers and military officials.

“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”

Asked about POLITICO’s reporting during a Thursday news conference, President Joe Biden said he wasn’t sure there were such lists, but also didn’t deny that sometimes the U.S. hands over names to the Taliban.