Another attempt by the Democrats to heal the Nation's divide

 From the news.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for President Trump's immediate removal from office by way of the 25th Amendment for inciting a violent riot at the Capitol Wednesday in an attempt to stop the certification of President-elect Joe Biden's win.

She joins with Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in urging Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet to remove Trump from office immediately, calling him "a very dangerous person" who committed an "act of sedition."

Pelosi said if Pence won't act, the House is prepared to impeach Trump again.

Conspiracy theories are a disease of both the Left and the Right

 Larry Elder gets it right at townhall.com.

Both the Left and the Right have come up with some notable conspiracy theories.  Conspiracy theories are to be expected when there is insufficient transparency and obvious corruption.  What is unfortunate is the inability of much of the populace to discuss them calmly and refrain from name-calling.

---------------------------------------------

Democrats and much of the Republican-hating media call the Republicans' election challenge dead on arrival and say the effort hurt Republicans in Georgia. If so, why the outrage protestations from the left?

Many of the election fraud allegations made by team Trump have been ignored or downplayed by media sources from which much of America gets their "news." So many Americans know nothing about the legal challenges that raise questions about voter irregularities, mathematical improbabilities, questionable extensions of ballot deadlines and unsolicited ballots apparently illegally sent in Michigan, among other factual and legal issues raised.

Yes, the President Donald Trump-hating cable TV hosts, pundits, column writers, newspaper editorials and legal scholars prattle on about how these GOP congresspersons "undermine the integrity of our republic." But many of these same critics said little about the integrity of our republic when, for the entirety of Trump's presidency, critics made baseless charges, including but not limited to: that Trump's relationship with Vladimir Putin turned the president into a Russia asset fraudulently elected to do Moscow's bidding; that under the 25th Amendment, Trump's mental state required him to step down; that Trump's violations of the emoluments clause make him a "grifter"; and that our democratically elected president is a "fascist," a "Nazi" and, of course, a "racist."

Democrats and the media realize that much of the country knows nothing about the concerns raised by attorney Alan Dershowitz, who campaigned for Barack Obama, and George Washington Law School's professor Jonathan Turley, who says he does not support Trump and he voted for Bill Clinton and Obama, and former independent counsel Ken Starr. All raised questions about the election, especially regarding Pennsylvania and how its deadlines were extended.

Critics hammer Trump for embracing election "conspiracy theories." But many who now call Trump "delusional" for questioning the election have embraced some of the most outrageous conspiracy theories, without the believers being held up to public ridicule. These conspiracies include:

Seventy-eight percent of Democrats, according to an August 2018 Gallup poll, believed not only that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election but also that this interference put Trump in office. Our intelligence community reached no such conclusion.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., falsely blames President Ronald Reagan's CIA for playing a major role in the urban crack-cocaine epidemic. Waters even wrote a foreword for a book called "Dark Alliance," that made this sensational claim. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, despite their contempt for Reagan, all disputed Waters' assertion. The San Jose Mercury News, the newspaper that published the CIA-crack cocaine allegation, issued a retraction of the most serious claims. The reporter resigned, and later, at age 49, committed suicide.

Prominent Black entertainers accused the American government scientists of inventing HIV/AIDS. Comedian/activist Dick Gregory said the virus "was not passed from chimpanzees to mankind, but was probably knowingly developed by doctors and scientists working for the U.S. government." Bill Cosby said AIDS "was started by human beings to get after certain people they don't like." Will Smith claimed, "AIDS was created as a result of biological-warfare testing." Director Spike Lee said, "I'm convinced AIDS is a government-engineered disease."

Lee also speculated that the U.S. government, under President George W. Bush, blew up levees during Hurricane Katrina to force Blacks out of New Orleans. "It's not far-fetched," Lee said, "and also I would like to say it's not necessarily blow it up. But, the residents of that ward, they believe it, there was a Hurricane Betsy in '65, the same that happened where a choice had to be made, one neighborhood got to save another neighborhood and flood another 'hood, flood another neighborhood."

So, spare us the concern about irresponsible "conspiracy theories" given the left's embrace of several, including the damnable lie that the police engage in "systemic" racism against Blacks. For four years, Democrats like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Rep. John Lewis called Trump "illegitimate." Democrats and the media do not want a Biden presidency similarly handicapped.

Jonathan Turley: A voice of reason on the election

Jonathan Turley gets it right on what is needed to restore some sense of validity about our elections.

---------------------------------------------------

I hate federal commissions. I have always hated federal commissions. Federal commissions are Washington’s way of managing scandals. They work like placebos for political fevers, convincing voters that answers and change are on the way. That is why it is so difficult for me to utter these words: We need a federal election commission. Not the one proposed by some Senate Republicans. And not like past placebo commissions. An honest-to-God, no-holds-barred federal commission to look into the 2020 presidential election.

With the challenge to the certification of election votes, some Republican members of Congress are calling to delay the proceedings for 10 days and impanel a commission to “audit” the results. There is precedent for such a commission. Just not good precedent. Indeed, citing the Electoral Commission of 1877 as a model of good constitutional process is like citing the Titanic as a model of good maritime navigation. The commission was an utter disaster.
The 1876 election commission

The commission was formed after the contested 1876 presidential election of Democrat Samuel Tilden and Rutherford Hayes. Tilden won the popular vote and was just one vote short of the electoral votes needed to win the White House. The election was marred by open fraud, including South Carolina certifying a vote of 101% of the eligible voters.

As a compromise, the commission was formed and consisted of 15 members: five Supreme Court justices and five members from each chamber of Congress. The key was that it was supposed to be composed of seven Democrats, seven Republicans and one independent. However, in a move that seemed calculated to secure his vote for Tilden, the Illinois legislature then moved to appoint the independent, Justice David Davis, to the Senate. If they wanted to buy his vote, it was a colossal failure when Davis decided to take the seat and leave the commission. He was replaced by a Republican, and the commission voted along strictly partisan lines to install Hayes, not Tilden.

In many ways, the Electoral Commission was a model for most federal commissions, which are designed for good politics and not good government.

An example is the 9/11 Commission, which was stacked with reliable allies to guarantee that no one — and no party — would be blamed for the negligence leading to up to the attacks.

The commission spent two years and millions of dollars. It went to almost a dozen countries, interviewed more than 1,000 people and archived over 2.5 million pages of documents. The result was a report that blamed no one specifically and since concluded that Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were “not well served,” in the words of the commission’s chairman, by the FBI and CIA.

You see, if everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. Despite showing that the attacks could have been prevented under existing laws and powers, the budgets and powers of both agencies were then massively increased.

That is not what we need. There are three reasons why the need for a real commission is needed:

►First, and most important, this was an unprecedented election in the reliance of mail-in voting and the use of new voting systems and procedures. We need to review how that worked down to the smallest precincts and hamlets.

►Second, possibly tens of millions of voters believe that this election was rigged and stolen. I am not one of them. However, the integrity of our elections depends on the faith of the electorate.

Roughly 40% of that electorate have lingering doubts about whether their votes actually matter. Most of the cases challenging the election were not decided on the merits. Indeed, it seems they haven’t even been allowed for discovery. Instead, they were largely dismissed on jurisdictional or standing groups or under the “laches” doctrine that they were brought too late. Those allegations need to be conclusively proven or disproven in the interests of the country.

►Third, there were problems. There was not proof of systemic fraud or irregularities, but there were problems of uncounted votes, loss of key custodial information and key differences in the rules governing voting and tabulations.

We have spent billions to achieve greater security and reliability after prior election controversies. Indeed, we had a prior election commission that failed to achieve those fundamental goals.
The importance of having a commission

A real commission will take a couple years to fully address these allegations. It will be meaningless if it’s stacked by the same reliable political cutouts used historically in federal commissions. It should be formed on a commitment of absolute transparency with public hearings and public archiving of underlying material before the issuance of any final report. That way, the public at large can analyze and contribute to the review of this evidence.

There is one other task for Congress. It should rescind and replace the Electoral Count Act passed after the Hayes-Tilden election. It is one of the worst conceived and crafted federal laws on the books. The constitutionality of that act has long been challenged, including some who argue that Congress has nothing but a purely ceremonial role in opening state certifications and counting them.

Courts are likely to recognize that Congress has a more substantive role, particularly when rivaling sets of electors are presented or there is clear evidence of fraud. However, the validity of such electoral votes should be left largely to the courts in challenges in the given states. That is why the current challenge is unwarranted. There is no serious basis to challenge the validity of the electoral votes certified by the states.

Reality check for Trump’s fantasies:Judges aren’t his pawns on election lawsuits.

The main challenge, however, remains the same: Whether Congress can appoint a real federal commission without rigging the result by appointing partisan members. In 1877, to quote from a speech of Ohio Sen. Allen Granberry Thurman, “It was perfectly clear that any bill that gave the least advantage, ay, the weight of the dust in the balance, to either party, could not become the law of the land.”

Nothing has changed. The stakes are too high to allow even a dust particle to tip the difference on the ultimate findings. The dust-free option requires a dependent, not independent, commission. Otherwise, the public will be the loser.

So, let’s have a commission, but let’s make it a real one.

Another example of how Government favors the few at the expense of freedom for all

George Will gets it right at the Washington Post.

All too often, Government laws and regulations are designed to enable a favored few to take advantage of the rest of us.  These laws and regulations typically are named so as to indicate that they are fostering safety, fairness, or economic efficiency - when in fact they do the opposite.

I predict that we will see more of this under the Biden Administration.

-------------------------------------------------

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has risen to the challenge of making one of the Supreme Court’s worst precedents worse. On Friday, however, the Supreme Court will consider whether to hear the case the 9th Circuit botched.

It concerns whether Jim and Cliff Courtney have a right to run a boat service on a lake in Washington state, or whether the brothers have only such rights as the state government acknowledges. The case implicates a decision the Supreme Court made 148 years ago, and that it made worse with a decision 83 years ago.

Since 1997, the Courtney brothers have been trying to get state permission to conduct a boat service to bring mostly vacationers to their ranch and their tiny town, which is accessible only by boat or chartered plane at one end of a narrow, 55-mile long lake. The brothers’ marathon trek through thickets of red tape has included the state’s denying them a “certificate of public convenience and necessity,” which is required before anyone can challenge the existing ferry providers. At least 17 states have such anti-competitive laws to protect certain entrenched businesses by forcing potential competitors to demonstrate that those businesses are inadequate.

On Friday, the Courtneys — represented by the Institute for Justice, a David that regularly slays governmental Goliaths — will wield the Constitution as a cudgel against Washington state and the 9th Circuit. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, stipulates: “No state shall . . . abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” This was written to protect freed slaves in the post-Civil War South by guaranteeing the panoply of rights (“privileges or immunities”) deriving from national citizenship rather than state residency. These should have included the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, and those unenumerated in the Constitution but (in the Ninth Amendment’s language) “retained by the people.

Five years later, however, the Supreme Court eviscerated this guarantee. It ruled against persons challenging, in the name of economic liberty, a Louisiana law requiring that all butchering of animals in New Orleans must be done by one politically favored slaughterhouse. The court held, 5 to 4, that, contrary to the clear intent of its framers, the privileges or immunities clause protects only a few rights of national citizenship that were already protected before the 14th Amendment’s ratification. One of those was the “right to use the navigable waters of the United States.”

In the Slaughterhouse Cases, the court narrowed the privileges or immunity clause into a near nullity. In ruling against the Courtney brothers in 2020, the 9th Circuit narrowed it further, holding that it protects only the right to use navigable waters in interstate — not intrastate — transportation. According to the 9th Circuit, the 14th Amendment stipulation that “no state” shall deny a citizen’s privileges or immunities means no state except the citizen’s own state.

An amicus brief submitted by some historians makes mincemeat of the 9th Circuit’s idea that the amendment intended this. The historians demonstrate that denying African Americans the right to use intrastate waterways was a widespread practice adopted to protect White boatmen from competition from African American boatmen, part of a program to lock African Americans into post-Civil War peonage.

The Courtney brothers are not attempting to re-litigate the court’s 1873 vandalism against the 14th Amendment. Today’s court would flinch from recognizing that the privileges or immunities clause requires the court to take seriously the Ninth Amendment’s affirmation of “rights retained by the people.” The Courtney brothers are attempting only to secure enforcement of a portion of the shrunken remnant of the privileges or immunities clause, the affirmation of rights pertaining to navigable waters.

And the brothers are not challenging the spurious dichotomy that the Supreme Court concocted in 1938. Without citing any supportive constitutional text, there being none, the court held that economic liberty should be accorded protections markedly weaker than those given to “fundamental” rights. The court did not explain — how could it? — what is more fundamental to the core American values of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency than the right freely to apply one’s talents to earning a living.

What the Supreme Court did in 1938 enabled the 9th Circuit to tell the Courtney brothers that economic rights are not generally protected by the privileges or immunities clause. By hearing and affirming the Courtney brothers’ argument, the Supreme Court can place a minor limit on the major damage it caused in 1873 and 1938.

How Bureaucracy Killed Americans

 Ben Shapiro is on target at townhall.com.

Government is the problem, not the solution.

-----------------------------------------

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the media have spilled barrels of ink over mistakes by the federal government. We've heard endlessly about the failure to quickly ramp up testing, the confusion over mask-wearing and the debates over proper lockdown policy. But when the history of this time is written, the fundamental mistake made by the United States government won't be rhetorical excesses by the president or conflicting public health advice. It will be the same mistake the government always makes: trusting the bureaucracy.

We now know that the miraculous Moderna vaccine for COVID-19 had been designed by Jan. 13, 2020. That was just two days after the sequencing of the virus had been made public. As David Wallace-Wells writes for New York magazine, "the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend. ... By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial." Meanwhile, for six weeks, Dr. Anthony Fauci assured Americans that there was little to worry about with COVID-19.

Fast-forward to the end of 2021. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died. Tens of thousands of Americans continue to die every week. The Food and Drug Administration has still not cleared the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which costs a fraction of the other vaccines (about $4 per dose, as opposed to $15 to $25 per dose for Moderna's vaccine or $20 per dose for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine). The FDA approval process cost us critical months, with thousands of Americans dying each day. As Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University told me this week, "Safety is their eternal excuse. They are entirely a broken federal bureaucracy...Why did we not have a combined Phase I-Phase II clinical trial for these vaccines?"

This is an excellent question, of course. Phase I trials involve small numbers of participants, who are then monitored. Phase II trials involve larger numbers. Huge numbers of Americans would have volunteered for a combined Phase I-Phase II trial. And even after we knew the vaccines were effective, the FDA delayed. Data was collected by late October that suggested Phase II/III trials had been successful. The FDA quickly requested more results, which it did not receive until November. It then took until Dec. 11 for the FDA to issue emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine. The Moderna vaccine wasn't cleared until Dec. 18, nearly a year after it had first been produced.

The disgrace continues. The government continues to hold back secondary doses of the vaccine, despite the fact that the first doses provide a significant effect. As Makary says, "We're in a war. The first dose gives immunity that may be as high as 80 to 90 percent protection, and we can probably give half the dose, as Dr. Moncef Slaoui suggested ... We can quadruple our supply overnight."

Meanwhile, states continue to be confused by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance on how to tranche out the vaccines. It took until nine days after the FDA authorized the Pfizer vaccine for the CDC to release its recommendations. Those recommendations were still complex and confusing and often rife with self-defeating standards -- even though it was perfectly obvious from the start that the solution ought to be based on age.

Americans have relied on the government -- a government supposedly comprised of well-meaning experts -- to get us through a pandemic. The government not only failed with conflicting information and incoherent lockdown policy but also actively obstructed the chief mechanism for ending the pandemic thanks to bureaucratic bloat. If Americans' takeaway from the COVID-19 pandemic is that centralized government is the all-purpose solution, they're taking precisely the lesson most likely to end in mass death in the future.

How to prevent black children from obtaining a good education

 Thomas Sowell gets it right again at the Jewish World Review.

A Senate win by the Democrats will not be good news for what is right, just, and fair.

---------------------------------------------------

What makes the special election vote in Georgia historic is not just the specific issues or the specific candidates for the Senate who are on the ballot. As a nation, we are at a crossroads in the history of America. And if we take the wrong road, we may never get back again.

If Georgia voters send two Democrats to the closely divided U.S. Senate, that will give the Democrats control of both houses of Congress, as well as the White House.

Senate Democrats' leader, Senator Charles Schumer, has already announced what he has in store, if the Democrats get a majority in the Senate. So has President-elect Joe Biden. And it goes way beyond specific policies. It includes institutional changes that can be permanent, and almost guarantee one-party rule in this country, as far out as the eye can see.

If more than 10 million people who are in this country illegally are given the right to vote — and most of those votes are almost certain to go to Democrats — that is a major new political reality that will be with us for generations.

In a democracy, a majority of the voters can change the government. But, by giving millions of illegal immigrants a vote, the government can create enough voters to get a majority. That is the opposite of democracy.

More important, it is irreversible. Nor is that the only irreversible institutional change the Democrats have on their agenda.

The Democrats' agenda, if they get a majority in the Senate, includes turning a city — Washington — into a state, with two Senators. It is no coincidence that Washington voters have been voting overwhelmingly for Democrats for decades. If the city of Washington gets the same power in the Senate as the state of Georgia or Texas, that is another major institutional change that is irreversible.

Among the groups likely to be hurt most by Democrats' dominance of both houses of Congress and the White House is the black population that has been the most loyal to the Democrats for many generations.

In some fields, loyalty brings rewards. But, in politics, any group whose votes can be taken for granted by one party may not have their interests taken seriously by either party. One party doesn't have to work for their vote and the other party sees little chance of getting it.

There is no more vital interest of black Americans than the education of black children. The whole future of the race depends on the quality of that education, more than on any other single factor.

In many public schools in low-income minority neighborhoods, most of the students cannot pass tests in mathematics or English. In some ghetto schools, nobody passed either test.

But data from New York and Washington show that most of the students in charter schools in these very same neighborhoods pass these tests — often at a rate several times that in the local public schools.

You can get the data for New York City from the Internet web site of the New York State Education Department. Parents and others who care about the education of black children should check out how they do in regular public schools compared to how they do in charter schools.

When charter schools succeed where traditional public schools fail, that is welcome news to everyone to whom black education matters. But it is bad news to failing public school bureaucrats and to teachers unions, since charter schools attract students from unionized public schools.

There are more than 50,000 public school students on waiting lists to get into charter schools, in New York City alone. The education establishment is using every dirty trick in the book to keep those students from actually transferring into charter schools.

It is the same story in other cities across the country.

Another tactic is that, instead of trying to bring the other schools up to the charter school level, many politicians — seeking teachers union support — have been imposing laws and policies to bring charter schools down to the other schools' levels.

These politicians are almost all Democrats. President-elect Biden has already assured teachers unions that there will be no more federal money for charter schools. The Trump administration gave more than $9 million to a charter school network in New York's ghettos. Do not look for that to happen in a Biden administration.

Georgia voters have a lot of responsibility, not just for Georgia but for America, and not just for now but for future generations.

Climate perspective from The Energy Advocate -existential threat or not

 Here are some links that provide perspective on the climate change debate.  My take is that there is not good evidence to accept the hypothesis that climate change is an existential threat and that there is good evidence to accept the hypothesis that that those who think it is are wrong.

IPPC's Confidence Grows as Models Get Worse

The opening chart shows that the climate models the IPPC uses to predict temperature changes wildly overestimate them.  These are the predictions used by many to conclude that climate change is an existential threat.

Doing The Obvious Linearizing

Go to the plots.  The actual data suggests that temperature sensitivity to CO2 is substantially below what the climate models suggest.  Which is right - models with predictions that don't match what happens  or the data?

A conspectus on US Energy

A short paper on the practicality of alternate energy sources vs. what you hear from the media, politicians, and climate extremists.

The Science Is Settled

The science does not appear to be settled.

A comment on the Scientific American climate change article

Gee, you can't even trust the Scientific American anymore.

Deception and Suppression: A Year of Beijing’s Virus Coverup

 From Nicole Hao and Annie Wu at the Epoch Times.

---------------------------------------------

Around this time last year, Chinese authorities acknowledged that an “unknown” form of pneumonia was spreading in the city of Wuhan.

But it was already too late. What we now know as COVID-19 had already broken out across the city and possibly beyond.

In the months that followed, authorities bungled prevention measures and covered up the number of infections. They enacted travel restrictions weeks too late—as Chinese travelers seeded outbreaks around the world—and prevented international researchers from visiting the country to investigate the origin of the virus that causes COVID-19.

A global pandemic ensued that has claimed more than a million of lives, brought economies to a halt, and disrupted people’s livelihoods.

As the virus spread around the world, the regime in Beijing began an aggressive campaign to spread disinformation claiming that the virus didn’t originate in China; that propaganda offensive continues today.

Meanwhile, the regime punished citizens who dared to publicize information that didn’t fit its narrative: that authoritarian control had succeeded in containing the disease.

But in interviews with The Epoch Times, citizens tell of a different reality: draconian lockdown measures have deprived them of basic rights, while authorities continue to suppress information about new clusters around the country.

As a new wave now hits Beijing and parts of northeastern China, locals are once again kept in the dark as authorities seal off neighborhood after neighborhood.

China’s initial response was rife with missteps.

Wuhan health authorities only confirmed the outbreak on Dec. 31, 2019, after whistleblower doctors had shared information on social media.

Government documents leaked to The Epoch Times have since revealed that COVID-19 cases may have surfaced months earlier. Wuhan hospital data shows that patients were hospitalized with symptoms similar to COVID-19 as early as September 2019, while several people died in October 2019 from pneumonia, lung infections, and other COVID-19-like conditions.

In the early weeks of the epidemic, the Chinese regime continually downplayed the crisis and denied that the disease could be transmitted among humans. The World Health Organization repeated Beijing’s claims, and would wait until Jan. 30 to declare the outbreak a global health emergency.

Chinese authorities didn’t implement containment measures until Jan. 23, with a lockdown on Wuhan. However, by then, 5 million people had already left Wuhan, amid a typical peak season for domestic and international travel for the Lunar New Year holiday.

Chinese authorities soon adopted a so-called “fire blanket style” procedure to contain the disease domestically.

Once a person is diagnosed with COVID-19, the local government detects the patient’s recent close contacts and the places he has recently visited, via China’s ubiquitous surveillance camera system. One internal Chinese government document obtained by The Epoch Times shows that more than a million people nationwide were being closely monitored for their risk of contracting COVID-19 during the month of May.

During lockdowns, people are prevented from leaving their homes. Usually, authorities mandate that only one person per household can go outside every two to three days, and can only spend an hour or two to shop for basic necessities.

Suspected patients are isolated at government-designated quarantine centers, including some that reportedly had unsanitary conditions and a lack of medical care.

In areas with serious outbreaks, such as Wuhan, Suifenhe, Beijing, and Shanghai, authorities created makeshift hospitals with only wall partitions separating one patient from another. Some complained that the hospitals were “like death camps.”

Despite the containment measures, new clusters continue to emerge throughout China.

Authorities usually require mass nucleic acid testing soon after. During an outbreak in October in the eastern city of Qingdao, authorities claimed that after testing all 11 million residents, they found zero new infections.

International experts and local residents view such glowing accounts with skepticism. A day after authorities made that announcement, some residents told The Epoch Times that they hadn’t yet received their test results.

Local governments also continued to cover up the scale of new outbreaks. The Epoch Times has on several occasions obtained internal government data that revealed figures much higher than what had been publicly reported, such as in Beijing, and Shandong, Jilin, and Heilongjiang provinces.

Governments typically shared little information with citizens. In one classified document issued in February, Chinese authorities explicitly stated that epidemic-related documents were to be treated as top secret.

“During the time period of combating the virus, all types of urgent documents, urgent notices, urgent events… internally shared sensitive information, and any information that the [government] leaders haven’t approved to disclose to the public” would be considered state secrets, the document said.

The Chinese regime switched tactics around March, as countries around the world were responding to their own outbreaks.

On March 12, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, Zhao Lijian, claimed in a Twitter post that the CCP virus was brought to Wuhan by the U.S. Army. His baseless claim, and other similar accusations by Chinese diplomats, sparked widespread condemnation by Western officials.

On Nov. 29, the Chinese state-run Global Times published an article suggesting that the virus originated on the Indian subcontinent. Recently, Chinese state-run media misquoted scientists’ research to claim that the virus originated in Italy.

The Chinese regime and its media have also been promoting the theory that local COVID-19 outbreaks stemmed from frozen food supply chains. Authorities claim they detected virus strains on imported frozen salmon, shrimp, pork, beef, and other foods from a range of countries, such as Norway, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and Germany.

The WHO states that the possibility of infection from contact with food and food packaging is slim. Disease experts also say it’s unlikely the virus can spread through frozen food.

From the beginning, Wuhan authorities silenced whistleblower doctors such as Ai Fen and Li Wenliang, who were first to note on social media that their hospitals were admitting patients with a new, potentially contagious, pneumonia-like disease. They were summoned by police and reprimanded.

Li, who later died of the disease himself, has been described as a martyr.

Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi, and other citizen journalists who documented the Wuhan outbreak, including visits to local hospitals and funeral homes, have gone missing. Fang and Chen’s whereabouts remain unknown.

On Dec. 28, Zhang Zhan was sentenced to four years in prison, becoming the first known citizen journalist to be sentenced for providing first-hand information about the epidemic in China.

Netizens also reported being detained by local police after they posted outbreak-related information on social media.

Internal documents obtained by The Epoch Times showed that propaganda authorities heavily suppressed information about the pandemic that didn’t align with official narratives.

The populace is getting fed up with the way local authorities are handling the situation.

In March, residents under lockdown in Wuhan heckled a group of Chinese officials touring the area, shouting complaints from their apartments, such as, “It’s fake, everything’s fake!”

Recently in the northeastern city of Dalian, college students were barred from leaving campus as the city reported new COVID-19 cases. They complained about the suddenly imposed quarantine.

“I believe if the Dalian government continues to insist on not allowing students to leave, students could become restless. They could even join together to resist,” one student said.

Voting fraud analysis

Here is a link to a video presentation on possible voting fraud in Georgia.

Myths: Coronavirus, political, and more

 James Bovard gets it right at the American Institute for Economic Research.

------------------------------------------

Thanks in large part to Covid lockdowns, this year has left vast wreckage in its wake, with ten million jobs lost, more than 100,000 businesses and dozens of national chains bankrupted or closed. Up to 40 million people could face eviction in the coming months for failing to pay rent, and Americans report that their mental health is at record low levels. But the casualty list for 2020 must also include many of the political myths that shape Americans’ lives.

Perhaps the biggest myth to die this year was that Americans’ constitutional rights are safeguarded by the Bill of Rights. After the Covid-19 pandemic began, governors in state after state effectively placed scores of millions of citizens under house arrest – dictates that former Attorney General Bill Barr aptly compared to “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since the end of slavery. Politicians and government officials merely had to issue decrees, which were endlessly amended, in order to destroy citizens’ freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of choice in daily life. Los Angeles earlier this month banned almost all walking and bicycling in the city, ordering four million people to “to remain in their homes” in a futile effort to banish a virus.

The Rule of Law is another myth impaled by 2020’s dire developments. Courts have repeatedly struck down sweeping restrictions. Federal judge William Stickman IV invalidated some of Pennsylvania’s restrictions in a September ruling: “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” After the Michigan Supreme Court effectively labeled Governor Gretchen Whitmer a lawless dictator, she responded by issuing “new COVID-19 emergency orders that are nearly identical to her invalidated emergency orders,” as the Mackinac Center noted. How many governors and mayors have you seen on the television news being led away in handcuffs after their arrest for violating citizens’ rights this year? None.

Another myth that 2020 obliterated was the notion that politicians spending more than a hundred billion dollars every year for science and public health would keep Americans safe.

The Centers for Disease Control utterly botched the initial testing regime, sending out bogus tests to state and local health departments and taking a month and a half to do what the Thai government achieved in one day. The Food and Drug Administration helped turn the coronavirus from a deadly peril into a national catastrophe. Long after foreign nations had been ravaged and many cases had been detected in America, the FDA continued blocking private testing. The FDA continued forcing the nation’s most innovative firms to submit to its command-and-control approach, notwithstanding the pandemic.

The benevolence and compassion of public school teachers was another myth that 2020 obliterated. Teacher unions helped barricade school doors the same way that segregationist governors in the 1950s and 1960s refused to obey federal court orders to admit black students. The Chicago Teachers Union proclaimed: “The push to reopen schools is based in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”

Black and Hispanic students suffered much larger learning losses due to school shutdowns, leading former Education Secretary John King to warn of a “lost generation of students.” Despite a deluge of studies that showed that schools posed little risk of fueling the pandemic, teachers insisted that they were entitled to both their salaries and to stay at home as long as they considered necessary.

This was part of the collapse of the broader myth that the rulers and ruled have common interests. Among other splits, the response to the pandemic divided Americans into those who work for a living, and those who “work” for the government. Government employees in most states and at the federal level have been the Untouchables, continuing to draw full pay even when they were no longer even required to show up for work. One exception to this trend is government tax collectors, who continue commandeering as much as ever from citizens and property owners regardless of the collapse in public services in many places this year.

Another myth that perished in 2020 was that social media and the Internet could be a powerful propellant of free information. Instead, the biggest players pulled the most strings to suppress criticisms or dissent from the latest Covid policies promulgated by officialdom. On March 18, Twitter announced that, in response to Covid-19, it would ban tweets guilty of “denial of expert guidance” or “misleading content purporting to be from experts or authorities.”

The World Health Organization initially overestimated the Covid fatality rate by 50-fold but they remain Twitter-approved. Facebook recently launched far more aggressive policies, including directly contacting anyone who liked or commented on a piece that was later ruled erroneous by Facebook guardians and is refusing any ads that discourages people from getting vaccinations. Will they ban WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan for declaring on Monday that there was “no evidence to be confident [vaccine] shots prevent transmission” of Covid? Google sought to suppress any doubts about lockdowns: “Most users in English-speaking countries, when they google ‘Great Barrington Declaration’, will not be directed to the declaration itself but to articles that are critical of the declaration,” a Spiked-Online analysis noted.

This year’s presidential election put a helluva dent in the credo that politicians rule with the “consent of the governed.” The pandemic provided the pretext to radically change voting procedures, spurring 65 million mostly unverified mail-in ballots. The New York Times warned in 2012 that “fraud in voting by mail is… vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention.” Many states solved that problem by “defining down fraud” and expunging the verification procedures previously used to routinely invalidate 20% or more of mailed-in ballots. The controversies around mail-in ballots, questionable software, ballot harvesting and other practices mean that a record number of Americans will doubt Joe Biden’s legitimacy even before he takes his oath of office.

Perhaps the saddest casualty of 2020 is the myth that average Americans cherish their personal freedom. Politicians continually shifted the rationale for lockdowns – from flattening the curve, to ending “community spread,” to reducing cases to near zero. Regardless of the proclaimed rationale, most people submitted without a fight, and usually without even a whimper. Politicians and bureaucrats fanned mass fears which quickly ripened into hatred of anyone who did not comply with the latest edict.

States and cities across the country set up snitch lines that were soon deluged with complaints of people outside without a mask, meeting friends, or having more visitors in their homes than could fit in a phone booth. Many, if not most, people quickly acquiesced to the “new normal” where any government hack who recited the phrase “science and data” became entitled to rule their lives with an iron fist.

As the Harvard International Review warned, “The very methods that liberal democracies are currently using to effectively fight the virus are the same tactics that authoritarian leaders use to dominate their people. The tools that have been temporarily deployed in the fight against a once-in-a-lifetime disease may become permanent.” That was written on May 23, more than 15 million Covid cases ago – proof of the failure of lockdowns and pervasive restrictions to make Covid-19 vanish. But the miserable batting average of officialdom will vanish into the Memory Hole if politicians launch a campaign to make Covid vaccinations mandatory, complete with boundless vilification of anyone who balks at the injection.

Perhaps it has long been a myth that we live in a self-governing republic rather than a Leviathan Democracy where citizens merely make cameo appearances every few years at the voting booth. It is still possible that the catastrophic and pointless losses imposed by Covid crackdowns will finally awaken enough people to their growing subjugation. But the most dangerous myth is that Americans will finally become safe after they cease making any efforts to leash their rulers.