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How the Taliban Outlasted a Superpower: Tenacity and Carnage By Mujib Mashal

Posted By on May 27th, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/world/asia/taliban-afghanistan-war.html

The Taliban stand on the brink of realizing their most fervent desire: U.S. troops leaving Afghanistan. They have given up little of their extremist ideology to do it.

ALINGAR, Afghanistan – Under the shade of a mulberry tree, near grave sites dotted with Taliban flags, a top insurgent military leader in eastern Afghanistan acknowledged that the group had suffered devastating losses from American strikes and government operations over the past decade.

But those losses have changed little on the ground: The Taliban keep replacing their dead and wounded and delivering brutal violence.

“We see this fight as worship,” said Mawlawi Mohammed Qais, the head of the Taliban’s military commission in Laghman Province, as dozens of his fighters waited nearby on a hillside. “So if a brother is killed, the second brother won’t disappoint God’s wish – he’ll step into the brother’s shoes.”

It was March, and the Taliban had just signed a peace deal with the United States that now puts the movement on the brink of realizing its most fervent desire – the complete exit of American troops from Afghanistan.

They have outlasted a superpower through nearly 19 years of grinding war. And dozens of interviews with Taliban officials and fighters in three countries, as well as with Afghan and Western officials, illuminated the melding of old and new approaches and generations that helped them do it.

After 2001, the Taliban reorganized as a decentralized network of fighters and low-level commanders empowered to recruit and find resources locally while the senior leadership remained sheltered in neighboring Pakistan.

The insurgency came to embrace a system of terrorism planning and attacks that kept the Afghan government under withering pressure, and to expand an illicit funding engine built on crime and drugs despite its roots in austere Islamic ideology.

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Greta Thunberg Or Naomi Seibt — How They Enforce Official Orthodoxy Francis Menton ****

Posted By on May 27th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-5-26-greta-thunberg-or-naomi-seibt

Almost certainly, you have heard of Greta Thunberg.  Indeed, you undoubtedly know a lot about her.   She is the Swedish teenager who for more than a decade has suffered from various mental illnesses, including depression, Asperger’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and even something called “selective mutism.”  Apparently, in between bouts of mental illness, at some point she became interested in the issue of climate change.  In late December 2018, at the age of 15, Greta suddenly sprang on the world stage, when she got invited to speak at a UN climate conference in New York.  That’s when we first got to see her trademark anger — fury, even — about what she perceived to be the crisis of the climate.  In 2019 she spent the year playing hooky from school and leading climate “strikes” and demonstrations wherever she could get an audience.  On September 23, 2019 she was back at the UN in New York giving a barn-burning speech letting everyone know how deeply furious she is that anyone is enjoying their life.  Here is some text from that speech:

[Y]ou all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

And what exactly was it that anyone had done to her to “steal [her] dreams and [her] childhood”? I’m still trying to figure that one out. My own inclination is to feel very sorry for this young lady. As a high-school age girl who hasn’t even attended school much of the time and hasn’t yet studied these things at all, she obviously has no real idea about whether “entire ecosystems are collapsing” or whether we are “in the beginning of a mass extinction.” Clearly, before her unhinged anger takes over everything and destroys her life, she needs to get some professional help with her mental issues. But that’s just my view.

Then there’s Naomi Seibt. You may not even have heard of her. She’s a little older than Greta — 19 to Greta’s 17 — and hails from the German state of North Rhine Westphalia.

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Ca$hing In on Contact Tracing-Michelle Malkin see note by Janet Levy

Posted By on May 27th, 2020

$100 billion+ of your taxpayer dollars will be funding this behemoth effort – an army of contact tracers.Malkin (Jewish World Review) asks some poignant questions and makes a few astute observations:

1) What happens when “experts” get diagnoses and assessments wrong? 2) Is this an opt-in or opt-out intrusion into your life? 3) What about built-in privacy considerations?  MTX, the software company with a mega contract to monitor vaccinations, treatment and testing, has already expanded into monitoring jobless claims and childcare facilities.  What’s next?4) Big Pharma and other businesses now have access to your previously protected personal health care information.5) Texas governor, Greg Abbott failed to provide advanced notice to the state legislature of the almost $300 million MTX deal (funded by taxpayer dollars). Janet Levy,

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/27/cashing_in_on_contact_tracing_143298.html

Ca$hing In on Contact Tracing-Michelle Malkin

Look out. An “army of contact tracers” is about to be unleashed on America. Corporations, political lobbyists and government bureaucracies all win. Privacy, freedom and family autonomy all lose. Big time.

You may have already heard of the aptly named House Bill 6666, sponsored by Illinois Dem. Bobby Rush. Known as the Testing, Reaching and Contacting Everyone (TRACE) Act, the legislation would allocate $100 billion in public funding to “eligible entities” to “conduct diagnostic testing for COVID-19, and related activities such as contact tracing, through mobile health units and, as necessary, at individuals’ residences, and for other purposes.”

The cash could be used to hunt down infected individuals, quarantine them in their homes for undefined periods under unknown conditions and subsidize a hiring spree of untold thousands of trackers from nonprofits, schools and medical facilities.

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What the ‘Obamagate’ Scandals Mean and Why They Matter By Charles Lipson –

Posted By on May 27th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/27/what_the_obamagate_scandals_mean_and_why_they_matter.html

Amid the flurry of details about spying on Michael Flynn, lying to secret courts about Carter Page, leaking classified documents, and more, it’s easy to get lost in the muck. It’s important to stand back, identify the worst abuses, and explain why they matter for American democracy. These abuses didn’t simply follow each other; their targets, goals, and principal players overlapped. Taken together, they represent some of the gravest violations of constitutional norms and legal protections in American history. Whether you are Democrat or Republican, whether you like Donald Trump or loathe him, these violations matter.

Some call this debacle “Obamagate” since the key officials were his appointees and the White House was directly involved. But they got plenty of help. Some came from the permanent bureaucracy, especially in law enforcement and intelligence. Still more came from the mainstream media, which served as conduits for classified leaks aimed at Trump, his campaign, and then his presidency. For over three years, the media’s top story was “Trump colluded with Russia.” When that imploded after the Mueller Report, they moved on to impeachment.

 

The entrenched elites behind these scandals are the Swamp at its most sulfurous. They spied illegally on Americans and used powerful tools of government to damage the party-out-of-power, its outsider candidate, and then his new presidency. It’s worse than a single surveillance scandal. It’s three huge ones, intertwined. All were abuses of power. Some were crimes.

Scandal No. 1: Massive, illegal surveillance of American citizens, using the database of the National Security Agency

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Stopping Petty Tyrannies Is How We Beat the Serious Ones Jarrett Stepman

Posted By on May 27th, 2020

www.dailysignal.com/2020/05/26/stopping-petty-tyrannies-is-how-we-beat-the-serious-ones/?

As states across the country begin the process of reopening, Americans continue to battle over the methods governors and local authorities have used to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.

Unfortunately, many states and localities have set up arbitrary and, in many cases, absurd rules that do little more than aggravate citizens and almost nothing to stop the spread of the virus.

For instance, some Americans have been pulled over and ticketed for merely driving, hardly an activity that is likely to spread disease. 

One Pennsylvania woman received a $200 ticket for violating Gov. Tom Wolf’s statewide stay-at-home order when she said she had merely gone on a drive to relieve her quarantine restlessness, according to the York Dispatch. 

If anything, driving in your own car is a far better method to prevent spreading COVID-19 than, say, using public transportation. 

As former California state Rep. Chuck DeVore wrote for The Federalist, states with a higher amount of mass transit generally have had a higher number of COVID-19 cases than other states, even taking into consideration urban density. Perhaps we are lucky that the Green New Dealers didn’t get their wish to end car and air travel and force Americans to switch to rail. 

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Smoothing the Bumpy Road to Reopening By Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

Posted By on May 27th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/26/smoothing-the-bumpy-road-to-reopening/

It is clearly past time to rein in the baseless, arbitrary restrictions that have been imposed by some politicians, as they can only inspire disrespect and non-compliance.

Every day seems to bring some new, unexpected, unpleasant revelation about the SARS-CoV-2 and the illness it causes, COVID-19. 

The infection has a long, often asymptomatic incubation period, high transmissibility, the ability to infect many human tissues, and, frequently, rapid deterioration of the clinical course. Some curious aspects of the infection, such as long duration of symptoms, multi-organ involvement, blood clots, and patients’ ability to tolerate extremely low blood oxygen levels have put critical care doctors on a steep learning curve, trying to understand how best to keep patients from falling off a cliff.

If the clinical aspects of the disease have been difficult to catalog and manage, the public health considerations have been equally vexing. We know enough now, however, to offer improved guidance for setting public health policy. Rather than using projections of cases and fatalities to guide policy decisions, the focus should be on the granular level of how the virus physically spreads. It is time to relegate the COVID-19 epidemiological models primarily to projecting required hospital and ventilator capacity and supplies of personal protective equipment.  

Based on a survey recently in New York, it appears that a very high percentage of new cases can be traced to individuals’ homes and to care facilities such as nursing homes. The survey found that 83 percent of new cases came from unemployed or retired individuals who are largely sheltered in place, while almost a quarter (22 percent) of these cases originated in long term care facilities. In the nation overall, 11 percent of COVID-19 cases have occurred in long-term care facilities, while deaths from the infection in long-term care facilities account for more than one-third of the country’s pandemic fatalities.

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To Save Time, The Babylon Bee Will Now Just Republish Everything Biden Says Verbatim

Posted By on May 27th, 2020

https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-offered-position-as-staff-writer-at-the-babylon-bee

The Bible tells us to work smarter, not harder. Or, better yet, don’t work at all if you can help it. You can look it up. It’s in the Proverbs somewhere.

That’s why we’re announcing today that we will simply be republishing everything Joe Biden says word for word rather than spending a lot of time and effort writing satire.

We at The Babylon Bee realized we were spending all this time trying to satirize Joe Biden when, frankly, he just can’t be satirized. He’s doing all the hard work for us with statements like “You ain’t black!” and, of gun violence, that “150 million people have been killed since 2007.” 

Every day is a real grind when we arrive at the sprawling Babylon Bee headquarters, settle in on our throne of Chick-fil-A sandwiches, and boot up the ol’ PC to check what Biden said over the past 24 hours. We’re tired of trying to out-parody things like “I got hairy legs that turn blonde in the sun and the kids used to reach in the pool and rub my leg down and watch the hair come back up again” and “Corn Pop was a bad dude.”

Like, what do you do with that? Seriously. Go ahead. Try to satirize it. Anything you do just doesn’t have that perfect mix of absurdity and reality that makes satire work so effective at communicating truth. So we’re throwing in the towel.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Joe Biden for being such a great satirical performance artist. You’re the real hero, Joe. The people really need comedy in a time like this, and you’re doing a great job. Keep it up!

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Dems re-branding their plan to steal the election By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on May 27th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/dems_rebranding_their_plan_to_steal_the_election.html

Apparently “voting by mail” is not working well for Democrats in their focus group testing, as they push for changes that will make stealing the 2020 election easier.  Pretty much everyone has received mail destined for other people, so using the United States Postal Service as the brand name hinge for the scheme doesn’t test well.  There are too many associations with long lines, mistakes, delays, and the sort of results that come from a gigantic unionized federal bureaucracy.

Appearing last night in the safe environment of MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell show, where no uncomfortable questions would ever be raised, Nancy Pelosi rolled out the re-branding.  From now on, it will be called “voting at home.”  The entire three-and-a-half minute segment, with other verbal legerdemain, is below:

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From Speech To Consumer Choice, Democrats Believe Everything Must Be Policed

Posted By on May 27th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/27/from-speech-to-consumer-choice-democrats-believe-everything-must-be-policed/

Reading a weekend story in Campus Reform helped us see more clearly what we’ve been witnessing for decades. The political left is driven by an urge to supervise every aspect of our lives. It’s a corrosive impulse that shouldn’t be accepted anywhere in a free nation, let alone practiced. The backlash needs to begin now. If not, our liberty will eventually be overrun.

The story is from Michigan State University, which published an article claiming that video conferencing is full of “unconscious bias.” In it, MSU social science professor Amy Bonomi says:

Unconscious bias includes using language, symbolism and nonverbal cues that reinforce normative social identities with respect to gender, race, sexual preference, and socioeconomic status. For example, when the virtual background of a Zoom meeting attendee has pictures of his or her wedding, it unintentionally reinforces the idea that marriage is most fitting between opposite sexes.

In other words, when left alone, managers and coworkers will say things or show things that the speech police — who exist to ensure that only one side controls the narrative — don’t approve of.

Nothing in recent times illustrates the left’s inclination to control as does its response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Democrats want to keep people and businesses locked down while Republicans, with some exceptions, want to free people and unleash commerce.

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Palestinians: The Home Demolitions No One Talks About by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on May 27th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16065/palestinians-home-demolitions

While international human rights groups and the European Union have also been condemning Israel, they are ignoring home demolitions carried out by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

In February, Hamas notified 50 families… that their homes would be destroyed on the pretext that they were built without a license. The families were instructed to evacuate their homes within two weeks…. Last year, Hamas demolished another house in Khan Yunis belonging to Bassam Duhan, also on the pretext that it was built without a license. Duhan, a father of eight, set up a tent in front of the demolished house. He complained that relatives of senior Hamas officials had also built homes in the same area, but no one destroyed their homes.

Last year, a youth group in the Gaza Strip called on the Arab League and other Arab and Islamic parties to launch an investigation into Hamas’s crimes against Palestinians. Needless to say, the group has never received a reply from the Arab League or any other organization in the Arab and Islamic countries. The appeal came after Hamas militiamen used excessive force to prevent Palestinians from protesting economic hardship and Hamas corruption.

In the absence of an international response, Hamas continues to demolish homes in the Gaza Strip — and other crimes against its own people — with impunity, leaving hundreds of families without shelter.

Hamas, the Iranian-backed terrorist movement controlling the Gaza Strip, is often one of the first Palestinian groups to condemn Israel for demolishing homes of terrorists or Palestinian-owned houses built illegally in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

While international human rights groups and the European Union have also been condemning Israel, they are ignoring home demolitions carried out by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

In the past 10 years, Hamas has demolished not only houses, but also a mosque — a move that has received almost no attention from the international media and human rights organizations or the EU.