CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The epidemic of non-compliance James Comey left behind still ails the FBI ‘A careless and negligent culture’ was allowed to fester under Comey’s leadership, former top FBI official says.By John Solomon

Posted By on April 2nd, 2020

https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/epidemic-non-compliance-james-comey-left-behind-still-ails-fbi

Often one to claim the high ground, ex-FBI Director James Comey lectured lawmakers in the aftermath of the bungled Russia collusion investigation, assuring them that the bureau’s procedures for securing a warrant to spy on Americans were top-notch and conscientiously followed.

The FBI’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act compliance is a “labor-intensive” and “top-tier” program that protects Americans civil liberties by ensuring evidence is “very, very carefully scrubbed” for accuracy, Comey told House members in a closed-door deposition back in December 2018.

Fifteen month later, the Justice Department’s inspector general blew a hole in Comey’s representation. His review of warrant applications in more than two dozen FISA cases over the last five years that found that every one of them failed to meet the requirements of the Woods Procedures, which mandate the compilation of documentary evidence in support of each fact in a warrant application.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Did China unleash COVID-19 malevolently or accidentally? By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on April 2nd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/did_china_unleash_covid19_malevolently_or_accidentally.html

The big takeaway is that there’s no evidence that the Chinese intended to weaponize COVID-19. Therefore, at a guess, the disease’s genesis was a research laboratory that didn’t have good safety protocols.

Tucker Carlson did a segment discussing COVID-19’s origins. While saying that the virus probably started in a laboratory, he was careful not to accuse China of deliberately creating or releasing the virus. China’s long history of shoddy products and disregard for human life makes it’s a good bet that China didn’t weaponize the virus. Instead, COVID-19 is probably just another shoddy Chinese product.

Back in the 1960s, Japan was synonymous with cheap, but not shoddy products. By the 1980s, though, Japanese people’s meticulous habits meant that, if it came from Japan, it was well-made and worth the price.

When China started selling cheap products in the West, most people assumed it would follow the same trajectory that Japan did. That never happened because China is not Japan (nor is it Korea, which also makes meticulous products). Unlike Japan or Korea, it’s neither clean nor orderly. From chaos comes garbage.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

As Long As Communist China Controls The World Health Organization, It’s Completely Unreliable Ben Weingarten

Posted By on April 1st, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/31/as-long-as-communist-china-controls-the-world

While the WHO gives China its imprimatur, evidence continues to mount of China’s malign role in every aspect of this pandemic.

With each passing day, it becomes clear that the world’s most prominent global health institution, the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO), has been capturedby communist China. This is particularly disastrous because in matters of life and limb, politicization of any kind can kill.

The WHO’s peddling of narratives from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the pandemic mushroomed — including denying human-to-human transmission and calling it racist to focus on the Chinese origin of the virus — undoubtedly contributed to the spread of the virus. It’s been mimicked by health officials, the media, and politicians.Yet this toxic relationship continues unabated.

WHO China Mission Leader Kowtows to the CCP

For the latest indicator of WHO fealty to the CCP, look no further than this breathtaking clip from an interview between Radio Television Hong Kong journalist Yvonne Tong and Dr. Bruce Aylward, leader of the WHO’s February 2020 joint international mission to China regarding coronavirus:

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Warning From A Cancel Culture Cassandra Scott Shepard

Posted By on April 1st, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/01/warning-from-a-cancel-culture-cassandra/

Modern traditional and social media, in all of their multiplying and increasingly malevolent forms, provide replete evidence of our collective failure in recent decades to raise children properly. The end of scoring and the efflorescence of “everybody’s awesome” trophies that praise mere participation in order to boost self-esteem have created a generation (and more) of young people who, though demonstrating few actual skills, think themselves excellent at everything. Helicopter parenting and the swaddling of the young straight up through college and beyond has left these same young people without sufficient coping strategies or knowledge of the world. 

The abandonment of college curricula and speakers’ lists to the strident demands of the most mulish among them has denied them the true value of education. Such education can only really proceed if all parties understand that the primary flow of knowledge must pass from the teachers and to the young people; too many students today make demands about what they will study, when they should instead shut up and gratefully learn the things that people with more wisdom and experience than they yet have think they should know.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Democrats Plan Star Chamber Investigation into Trump Response to Pandemic By Rick Moran

Posted By on April 1st, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/trending/democrats-plan-star-chamber-investigation-into-trump-response-to-pandemic/

People are still getting sick and dying from the coronavirus, but when did that ever stop a politician from trying to score points against the political opposition?

With the country on its knees, Democrats want to kneecap Trump and the Republicans by trying to blame the president for however many deaths result from the pandemic. They will investigate the administration response to the crisis — especially the earliest days of the outbreak when no one knew how bad things were going to get.

That won’t matter to Democrats who will say Trump should have known and spent billions of dollars preparing for something that might not have happened.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Free speech comes at a price In the age of microaggression, fighting words are ubiquitous David Goldman

Posted By on April 1st, 2020

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler/

“Thane Rosenbaum, a distinguished law professor and prolific writer, proposes to set limits to free speech in order to protect it. The matter is a minefield, and he wades into it fearlessly. But I am not convinced that he has found a solution.”

Saving Free Speech From Itself, by Thane Rosenbaum. Fig Tree Books; 305 pages, Hardbound. US$24.95

With some trepidation and the dissent of men like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the founders of the United States included in its Constitution a guarantee of free speech unlike any other in the world. The First Amendment bars restrictions on public expression. That does not include speech or writing that amounts to an act of violence.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes set the standard for prohibited speech with the celebrated dictum that one does not have the right to shout “fire” in a crowded theater. The case in question was Schenck vs. United States, in which the court ruled that a defendant did not have the right to oppose mandatory conscription during the First World War. That shows how difficult it is to define violent speech: By today’s standards, verbal opposition to a government’s policy in wartime surely would be protected.

For the past 80 years, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire has defined prohibited speech as “the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous and the insulting or ‘fighting’ words – those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”

EDUCATION, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

American Professors Whitewash Islamic Terror By Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on April 1st, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/american-professors-whitewash-islamic-terror/

Muslims have at times allied with Europeans, sometimes even against fellow Muslims; as such, why see any Muslim attacks on Europe as ideologically driven—as jihads (“holy wars”) against the infidel? Why not see them all as generic wars? Such is the academic world’s main apologia against the notion that Islam’s military expansion throughout history was driven by a theological mandate.

Thus, weeks before my recent lecture on the topic of my book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, at the U.S. Army War College, another speaker was brought in to present an “alternative view.” That speaker was John Voll,* professor emeritus of Islamic history and past associate director of the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. (This center was “gifted” 20 million dollars from Prince Alwaleed—a Wahhabi who suggested that the 9/11 attacks were based on America’s position “toward the Palestinian cause”—for the express purpose of improving Islam’s image in the West.)

According to the Army War College’s advertisement:

In contrast with the well-known story of Muslim-Christian military conflict, less well-known is the long history of Muslim-Christian alliances and cooperation, even in times of conflict. Voll will address risk of misunderstanding when the history of clashes between Islam and the West is viewed in broad generalizations. Voll will focus his discussion on alliances and conflicts in the modern era…

Weeks after he presented, Voll reasserted these themes in a less-than-honest Army Times report that depicted him as “a more mainstream speaker … who CAIR-Philadelphia did not object to” (as opposed to me):

Voll does not agree with Ibrahim’s view that Christians and Muslims are almost inevitably at odds. Extreme advocates of this “Clash of Civilizations” hypothesis tend to deal with only half of the historical record of relations between the West and Islam, he said in an email.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Excluding Taiwan from the WHO is a political and medical outrage by Jeff Jacoby

Posted By on April 1st, 2020

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/24003/excluding-taiwan-from-the-who-is-a-political

SECRETARY OF STATE Mike Pompeo on Monday endorsed observer status for Taiwan at the World Health Organization, pledging that he and the State Department will “do our best” to advocate Taiwan’s participation in WHO meetings. With the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic approaching 40,000 and climbing steeply, Taiwanese involvement in the world’s foremost public health agency ought to be a no-brainer — not just because the island is home to 24 million people, but also because it was one of the first to confront the new disease, and has been highly successful in fighting it.

But Taiwan doesn’t participate in the WHO. Virtually every country on earth is a member — some, like Nauru and Tuvalu, so tiny that their entire population wouldn’t fill half the seats in Fenway Park. Yet one of Asia’s most important population centers, a vibrant trading hub with a world-class health care system, is excluded, blackballed by China. The regime in Beijing insists that Taiwan is not a true country but merely a renegade Chinese province not entitled to membership in any international organization. In recent years, Beijing has demanded that Taiwan be denied even nonvoting status in the WHO.

The claim that Taiwan is part of China is ridiculous on its face. Taiwan has never been ruled by the communist government in Beijing. Its political and economic systems are utterly unlike those on the mainland. By every meaningful yardstick, Taiwan is an authentic, sovereign, independent, nation. Yet so aggressive is Beijing in asserting that Taiwan not be treated as a legitimate nation that most of the world’s governments choose not to press the issue. International bodies go along with the “one China” fiction, treating Taiwan and its people with profound disrespect. It’s a shameful situation in the best of times. Amid a global pandemic, it’s reckless.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

One Dozen Dissenting Second Opinions Geoffrey Luck

Posted By on April 1st, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/04/one-dozen-dissenting-second-opinions/

It spreads out invisibly. It spreads along the streets and train tracks, over the counters and tables, the packaging and surfaces. And it spreads above all about what makes us human: closeness to each other. Confidential conversations, joint efforts on the sports field, tender touches – all of this helps the new corona virus on its way through the world . Hands, nose, eyes, mouth: For SARS-COV-2, people are open wounds waiting to be infected. Some people simply cannot afford it.

The quote above is the translated opening paragraph of an editorial in Tagesspiegel (Daily Mirror), the main newspaper of Berlin, but could have been written anywhere in the world, especially in Australia. The message of fear, of an unknown and invisible killer, is designed to condition the citizens to accept unquestioningly the repressive measures prescribed for them by their betters. Measures imposed without justification.

Germany, surprisingly, turns out to be very similar to Australia, despite having more than three times the population and surrounded, not by water, but by other populous nations. It has gone onto the highest alert level under its Infection Protection Act, but more sensibly nuanced than Australia. Schools and daycare centres were closed, distancing of 1.5m was prescribed, and people were required to stay in their apartments and leave only with good reason and in no more than pairs, as for shopping or exercise. They are free to visit parents and old people and attend funerals. There are no fines for disobedience; Chancellor Merkel’s threat of severe punishment for ignoring the rules seems to be enough.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Pelosi Pitches a Blue-State Bailout She wants to use virus relief to aid progressive state governments.

Posted By on April 1st, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosi-pitches-a-blue-state-bailout-11585697310?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held up last week’s coronavirus relief bill with demands related to corporate diversity, carbon emissions and election reform. But Democrats are far from finished using the crisis to try to force through partisan priorities they couldn’t pass in normal times. Mrs. Pelosi is now hinting the price for further economic relief may include expanding a regressive tax deduction for high-earners in states run by Democrats.

On Monday Mrs. Pelosi told the New York Times she wanted Congress to “retroactively undo SALT.” In the 2017 tax reform, Republicans limited the state and local tax deduction to $10,000. That raised federal tax revenue mostly from high-tax parts of states like California, New York and New Jersey and helped pay for the rate cuts on corporate, small business and individual incomes. According to the Tax Foundation, the cap raised almost $33 billion in 2018 from those earning more than $1 million per year and had little impact for those earning less than $100,000.