Displaying posts published in

October 2021

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Educating Students about the Victims of Communism By Mike Sabo

By on October 16th, 2021

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/15/educating_students_about_the_victims_of_communism_110650.html

Many Americans today assume that the threat of Communism subsided with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But “We continue to see Communist and socialist regimes pop up and spread not only in Latin America – for example, in Venezuela and Nicaragua – but around the world,” says Ambassador Andrew Bremberg, president and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC). “These regimes regularly kill their own citizens and have a devastating effect on human rights and their national economies.” In fact, over 1.5 billion people – including those living in Laos, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and, of course, China – currently live under oppressive Communist and socialist governments.

Founded in 1993 by a bipartisan, unanimous Act of Congress, VOC is “devoted to commemorating the more than 100 million victims of communism around the world and to pursuing the freedom of those still living under totalitarian regimes.”

Before coming to VOC, Bremberg served as the Trump administration’s Representative of the United States to the Office of the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva. During his time there, which he describes as a “profound and life changing experience,” he “became aware of the challenge of China,” which was “far worse” than he had realized. He notes that the U.N. International Human Rights Council made investigating the United States’ record on racism during the summer of 2020 its highest priority – putting it above China’s appalling human rights violations against Uyghurs, among other ethnic groups within its borders.

“Communist countries by far have the worst record on human rights, past and present,” Bremberg argues. “Their brutality is only outdone by their lies and obfuscations.” Seeing this moral imbalance up close convinced him of the “need to educate Americans about the dangers of Communism today.”

American civic education, Bremberg states, entails not only understanding the structure of our form of government but also the world around us. Pointing to the competing claims of the 1619 Project and the 1776 Commission, he notes that while we should be willing to “be self-critical and examine our past,” we also need to view our nation in comparison to others, especially ones existing under Communism’s iron fist.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Lurching Between Crisis and Complacency’: Was This Our Last Covid Surge? Rising immunity and modest changes in behavior may explain why cases are declining, but much remains unknown, scientists say.By Emily Anthes

By on October 16th, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/health/coronavirus-delta-surge.html?referringSource=articleShare

“It’s a combination of immunity, but also people being careful,” said Joshua Salomon, an infectious disease expert and modeler at Stanford University.” “It’s not likely that it will be as deadly as the surge we had last winter, unless we get really unlucky with respect to a new variant,” Dr. Salomon said.”

After a brutal summer surge, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, the coronavirus is again in retreat.

The United States is recording roughly 90,000 new infections a day, down more than 40 percent since August. Hospitalizations and deaths are falling, too.

The crisis is not over everywhere — the situation in Alaska is particularly dire — but nationally, the trend is clear, and hopes are rising that the worst is finally behind us.

Again.

Over the past two years, the pandemic has crashed over the country in waves, inundating hospitals and then receding, only to return after Americans let their guard down.

It is difficult to tease apart the reasons that the virus ebbs and flows in this way, and harder still to predict the future.

But as winter looms, there are real reasons for optimism. Nearly 70 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, and many children under 12 are likely to be eligible for their shots in a matter of weeks. Federal regulators could soon authorize the first antiviral pill for Covid-19.

“We are definitely, without a doubt, hands-down in a better place this year than we were last year,” said Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research at Boston University.

But the pandemic is not over yet, scientists cautioned. Nearly 2,000 Americans are still dying every day, and another winter surge is plausible. Given how many Americans remain unvaccinated, and how much remains unknown, it is too soon to abandon basic precautions, they said.

“We’ve done this again and again, where we let the foot off the pedal too early,” Dr. Bhadelia said. “It behooves us to be a bit more cautious as we’re trying to get to that finish line.”

Crushing the curve

When the first wave of cases hit the United States in early 2020, there was no Covid vaccine, and essentially no one was immune to the virus. The only way to flatten the proverbial curve was to change individual behavior.

That is what the first round of stay-at-home orders, business closures, mask mandates and bans on large gatherings aimed to do. There is still debate over which of these measures were most effective, but numerous studies suggest that, collectively, they made a difference, keeping people at home and curbing the growth of case numbers.

These policies, combined with voluntary social distancing, most likely helped bring the early surges to an end, researchers said.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

John Durham and the Amazing Disappearing DNC Hack Evidence grows that the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC server in 2016 was an inside job by George Parry

By on October 16th, 2021

https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-amazing-disappearing-dnc-hack/

This is the fifth in a series of articles analyzing the 27-page federal grand jury indictment charging lawyer Michael Sussmann with making a false statement to the FBI.

As stated in the fourth article, when the FBI learned of the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee’s (“DNC”) emails,

it asked to examine the server.  In fact, at the same time as the alleged DNC hack, there were similar reports regarding the

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (“DCCC”) server as well as DNC Chairman John Podesta’s personal email devices.

In testimony before the Senate, FBI Director James Comey stated the following:

Question (by Senator Burr): Did the FBI request access to those devices [the servers and Podesta’s devices] to perform forensics on?

A: Yes, we did.

Q: And would that access have provided intelligence or information helpful to your investigation in possibly finding … including to the Intelligence Community Assessment?

A: Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that’s involved. So, it’s the best evidence.

Q: Were you given access to do the forensics on those servers?

A: We were not. We were … a highly respected private company eventually got access and shared with us what they saw there.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

COVID, lockdown and the retreat of scientific debate Error-strewn attacks in the British Medical Journal show what awaits academics who challenge prevailing views By Martin Kulldorff

By on October 16th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/covid-lockdown-retreat-scientific-debate-bmj-great-barrington-declaration/

Science is about rational disagreement, the questioning and testing of orthodoxy and the constant search for truth. With something like lockdown — an untested policy that affects millions — rigorous debate and the basics of verification/falsification are more important than ever. Academics backing lockdown (or any major theory) ought to welcome challenges, knowing — as scientists do — that robust challenge is the way to identify error, improve policy and save lives.

But with lockdown, science is in danger of being suppressed by politics. Lockdown moved instantly from untested theory to unchallengeable orthodoxy: where dissenters face personal attack. Understandable on social media perhaps, but it has now crept into the British Medical Journal in a recent article about the Great Barrington Declaration.

The GBD, which I wrote, together with Dr Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford and Dr Sunetra Gupta at Oxford, argues for focused protection. Rather than a blanket lockdown which inflicts so much harm on society, we wanted better protection of those most at risk – mindful that COVID typically poses only a mild risk to the young. For saying so, we are smeared as ‘the new merchants of doubt’ — as if skepticism and challenge is regarded by the BMJ as something to be condemned.

The error-strewn attacks in BMJ demonstrate what awaits academics who do challenge prevailing views.The BMJ article is full of errors that ought to have never found their way into any publication. Here are some examples:

My colleagues and I are described as ‘critics of public health measures to curb COVID-19’. On the contrary, throughout the pandemic we have strongly advocated better public health measures to curb Covid-19 — specifically protection of high-risk older people, with many ‘clearly defined’ proposals. The failure to implement such measures, in our view, has led to many unnecessary COVID deaths.

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden walks naked into a climate conference With Congress stalled, he likely won’t meet his own green commitmentsRupert Darwall

By on October 16th, 2021

Nye Bevan, the British socialist, famously denounced the nuclear unilateralists in his party for sending a future foreign secretary ‘naked into the conference chamber’. Unless Congress passes the stalled budget reconciliation bill, President Biden will fly to the COP26 Glasgow climate conference, which starts in less than three weeks’ time, in a similar state of undress.

Before the Paris agreement in 2015, UN climate change conferences were about hammering out the texts of binding climate treaties and agreeing to emissions reduction targets. All that has changed. Climate change targets are now decided in advance by individual countries in their Nationally Determined Contributions, draining climate conferences of drama and turning them into a giant show-and-tell. Unless, that is, the world’s self-styled climate leader turns up in Glasgow with nothing to show.

The Biden administration’s NDC is long on rhetoric, starting with climate change as an existential threat. Yet when it comes to the ‘bold action’ the threat demands, the cupboard is bare of bankable action. Interviewed in April, Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser, who put together the NDC, was asked what was the one piece of legislation she wanted Congress to pass. ‘To make sure that by 2035 we have a clean energy sector,’ McCarthy answered.

Much of what McCarthy wants is embedded in the gargantuan reconciliation Build Back Better package, including $300 billion of clean tax credits and a Clean Energy Standard to meet Biden’s goal of having a zero-greenhouse gas emitting grid by 2035, items that McCarthy describes as ‘non-negotiables’. There is a reason for this. The White House touts the falling cost of renewables, but its convoluted formulation that clean alternatives ‘may start looking like the cheap alternatives’ suggests cost competitiveness is still years away. Until recently, the rapid transition the White House wants ‘looked anything but cheap’, so it seeks to place the cost of decarbonizing electricity on taxpayers rather than in higher electricity bills. Doing this will require congressional approval.

McCarthy claims the administration has ‘lots of regulatory authority’ should the administration fail to get the reconciliation package through Congress. But she knows as well anyone that regulation is a distant second to legislation. Build Back Better’s Clean Energy Standard is a successor to the Clean Power Plan, which McCarthy oversaw when she was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the second Obama term. Challenged in the courts, the Supreme Court imposed a stay on the EPA implementing the plan. Would the Supreme Court’s decision slow down the transition to a low carbon future? ‘Absolutely not,’ McCarthy responded two weeks later. If so, what was the point of the plan?

Continue reading →