Friday, December 10, 2021

(LENGHTY) TONY FAUCIi: JACKBOOTED THUG....and JOHN McWHORTER-LOSING THE RACE (2001)

 Submitted by: Int'l Interiors via P McMillan

TONY FAUCIi: JACKBOOTED THUG....and JOHN McWHORTER-LOSING THE RACE (2001)*****

 

 

 

Two days ago, when most were thinking about the joy of the upcoming holidays, Anthony Fauci, the country’s No. 1 public health enemy, had ruining Christmas on his mind. The man actually suggested Americans demand that their guests show them proof of vaccination before allowing them in their homes. If such a comment doesn’t set off a public campaign demanding he be fired, then this country is in deeper trouble than we thought.

Appearing Wednesday on a Washington Post Live interview, Fauci said Americans who invite others into their homes should “essentially ask and maybe require that people show evidence that they are vaccinated, or give their honest and good faith word that they have been vaccinated.”

Does the good doctor, whose name and authoritarian urges have inspired critics to coin the terms “Faucist” and “Faucism,” understand that he said, in effect, Americans should be demanding “your papers, please” of their friends and family? Was he unaware that signs saying ​​”Unvaccinated Not Welcome” now have been seen in Germany? Or was he inspired by them?

(To be fair, it appears the “signs” might be the work of someone making a political statement rather than a warning from the shopkeeper. But the fact is, Germany is locking the “unvaccinated out of public life.” If someone is making a point, it’s not an exaggeration.)

As dangerous as novel coronavirus has been, the response to the pandemic by elected and unelected officials has been worse. Lockdowns cost livelihoods – and lives. Delayed health screenings and surgeries have caused premature deaths, while the unemployment shock caused by shuttering the economy will eventually have a similar effect on mortality.

At the forefront of this rancid stew of public health policy has been Fauci. And not only has his performance as physician been miserable, he’s obfuscated, evaded and outright lied before Congress in his position as a U.S. government employee. He deserves to be fired for dishonesty as well as his incompetence. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky believes that Fauci should even be prosecuted and imprisoned for lying to Congress, which has “prosecuted other people” and “selectively gone after Republicans.”

Though he has a medical degree and a residency, Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he should not be honored with title of “Dr.” He’s a career bureaucrat with too much power, and too much influence, both of which have been imparted to him by Democrats and the media, not for his achievements but because he was willing contradict Donald Trump.

That he has positioned himself as the unchallengeable god of science is as chilling as his suggestion that Americans need to show their papers to freely move around the country. He’s a fearmonger without conscience, a petty tyrant who feels no guilt.

We don’t expect Fauci to ever get what he should have coming to him, though, so the best we can do is follow Paul’s advice.

“Let’s not live in fear because Dr. Fauci is promulgating things that are unscientific just to scare you,” Paul said last week. “If you’ve been vaccinated or if you’ve had the disease, live your life and ignore this man.

That’s a doctor’s recommendation we’ll be glad to take. ISSUESINSIGHTS

 

·         FOREIGN POLICY

·         BOOKS-JOHN McWHORTER-LOSING THE RACE (2001)*****

·         MOVIES AND TELEVISION -FAUCI

·         NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

 

BOOKS-----NOT NEW BUT SO TIMELY…..RSK

Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America Paperback – July 31, 2001 by John McWhorter

by John McWhorter

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Why do so many African Americans—even comfortably middle-class ones—continue to see racism as a defining factor in their lives?

Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter, born at the dawn of the post-Civil Rights era, spent years trying to make sense of this question. In this book he dared to say the unsayable: racism’s ugliest legacy is the disease of defeatism that has infected Black America. Losing the Race explores the three main components of this cultural virus: the cults of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism that are making Black people their own worst enemies in the struggle for success. With Losing the Race, a bold new voice rises among Black intellectuals.

 

Face it – Scotus Has Long Been Partisan When Deciding Political Cases by Alan M. Dershowitz

 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18022/supreme-court-political-cases

·         No one has a legitimate right to prevent people from making sexual and marital choices that do not involve other people.

·         The argument that a fetus is a person who is entitled to the right to life goes too far -- even for the justices, such as Neil Kavanaugh, who would have the Supreme Court be "neutral" on abortion and leave it to the states. Under that argument, no state would have the right to deny life to a fetus and abortions would be unconstitutional throughout America, regardless of state legislation.

·         But the public would never accept a national ban on all abortions. That's why pro-lifers want it left to the states, where they would get half a loaf.

Overruling or severally limiting Roe v. Wade would increase the likelihood that Democrats will try to pack the Supreme Court. It would be widely viewed as an unprincipled act of partisan power as distinguished from a proper exercise in legal judgment. The commission appointed by US President Joe Biden to explore this among other options did not make a recommendation regarding court packing, though some of members favored it. It would get more support from Democratic voters if a woman's right to choose abortion were severely curtailed. It would also diminish the standing of the High Court.

This fear was expressed by liberal members of the Court's minority and is almost certainly of deep concern to Chief Justice John Roberts. The High Court's standing in polls has dropped considerably since its transparently partisan decision in Bush v. Gore 21 years ago. Since that time, it has rendered controversial decisions, both increasing and undercutting fundamental rights such as gay marriage, and religious freedom. It has also dramatically expanded gun rights. During this period, the pendulum has swung quite narrowly. Justices appointed by Republican presidents have occasionally voted with those appointed by Democratic presidents and vice-versa.

 

Chaos and the Threat to Democracy By Abraham H. Miller

 

Among politics’ strangest alliances are those between the elite and the mob. They don’t happen often. The few times they have occurred produced devastating effects. The most notable of them was the rise of the Nazi party, which recruited its original and most loyal adherents from the outcasts of society.

When the Nazis became mainstream, Hitler himself remarked how he missed the passionate street fighters of old who had been replaced by political opportunists and office seekers.

There is a method to this odd partnership. It is built on mobilizing the periphery, creating chaos, and enhancing chaos where it already exists.

The Nazi example finds its parallel much earlier in the coup of Louis Bonaparte, the nephew and pretender, who overthrew the French Republic in 1852 and became the last emperor of France. Bonaparte created, from the dregs of the socio-economic system, the foundation of a mass movement. He called it the Society of December the 10th. He just as well could have called it the Brownshirts. Hitler would have easily recognized it.

Revolutionary mobilization of the periphery does not occur in a day. And, in a legitimate democratic society, it will most likely bring chaos, dislocation, and division, but it will not bring about major political change. Nonetheless, for those committed to an ideological view of the world where chaos is the paving stone to revolution, means are significant.

 

What Functional America wants An end to disorder and CRT-loving hustlers who fan the flames of hate by Gilbert Sewall

 

The United States is still rich enough to meet higher-order needs and call them entitlements. The decades-long response to race, class and gender proves the point. Americans can fixate on respect, status, self-esteem, hurt feelings and positive recognition because the essentials just happen.

Potable water, traffic lights, microwave ovens and freedom from fear. They are there, like magic. Because all Americans are fed, reasonably policed and more civil than not — this point cannot be overstressed — authorities can sidestep policy basics and empirical findings.

The radical left evidently wishes to dismantle much of what makes this plenty possible — and what many rely on for survival — in the name of social justice. Functional America notices. Yet any rebuke to equity is likely to trigger renewed disorder of the kind condoned by blasé blue-state officials and the Democratic Party in 2020. The state’s clients and their paid handlers intend to keep a catastrophic tribute system and flow of public resources intact, and in many states and localities have the political power to do so.

For seventy-five years, US wealth and surpluses have allowed the expansion of a welfare state that provides vital support — food, medical care, housing, utilities and, in some cases, spending cash — to perhaps 20 percent of the population. These do not include the unemployed or Social Security and Medicare recipients.

Clients of the state include indigent single mothers whose children are neglected. The fathers are elsewhere. Yet their hardship still compares well with global poverty. America’s welfare class possesses cars, cable televisions and air conditioning. But basic needs like safety, love and trust that governments cannot conjure go missing. So the charity and benevolence are not working. They are instead producing monsters like Darrell Brooks, the Waukesha parade killer, and the shock troops of the radical left.

 

‘Antiracist’ Hate Much of what passes for “antiracism” today is actually thinly veiled anti-white hate. By Alexander Zubatov

 

In a recent article for The Atlantic, Ibram X. Kendi argues that those of us who are calling out the increasingly blatant and barefaced anti-white bigotry of many powerful figures on the woke Left are merely echoing a long-standing white supremacist trope. 

“[T]hat anti-racism is harmful to white people is one of the basic mantras of white-supremacist ideology,” Kendi argues, and then proceeds to plunge readers into a historical mishmash in which decontextualized statements by actual white supremacists are juxtaposed and conflated with similarly decontextualized statements by entirely mainstream figures across the political spectrum to manufacture white supremacist guilt by association. 

Kendi, certainly no stranger to bad arguments, is one of America’s foremost racial extremists. Among other things, he has absurdly called for the establishment of a Chinese Cultural Revolution-style federal “Department of Antiracism” charged with investigating private racism and monitoring racist speech. He is part of a larger woke Left counteroffensive that aims to label as white supremacists all those who question the divisive poison injected into our collective bloodstream by critical race theory and its many knowing and unwitting adherents. 

The ruse undoubtedly has succeeded in gaslighting many well-meaning Americans, who have no desire to stand on the same side of history as white nationalists, segregationists, Nazis, neo-Nazis, and Klansmen. But, beyond all its other flaws, Kendi’s broad-brush painting fails insofar as it implicitly imagines that all the practitioners of what goes by the name of “antiracism” are either on the side of the devil or else, as he thinks, of the angels. As ever, the devil is in the details—and the details reveal lots of angry little devils at work. 

 

Omarova’s Failed Nomination Hints at the Left’s Long Game By Andrew C. McCarthy

 

While we ask why Biden would risk damaging Democrats’ electoral hopes by nominating Marxists for top jobs, progressives laugh . . . and transform our society.

C harles C. W. Cooke’s column on Wednesday compellingly noted all the reasons why it seems crazy for President Biden to have nominated Saule Omarova, an unreconstructed Marxist, to be comptroller of the currency. But I think there’s a rational calculation behind the apparent madness, which is why, as Charlie points out, only 10 percent of Senate Democrats voted Omarova’s nomination down. For the rest, as for Biden, supporting the inevitable loser was a solidarity-signaling freebie.

The problem is what Charlie aptly describes as “the lunatics and fabulists” in Biden’s party. The sad fact is that they represent the Left’s energy, its muscle, and a lot of its money. These Bolsheviks cede no ground to norms: doxing opponents, making mayhem at their homes, harassing their children, giving them no peace upon encountering them at a restaurant or a store, unabashedly defending allies who riot and perjure themselves, etc.

Funny thing about extortion: It works.

Biden and congressional Democrats are not going to be able to give these people the utopia they demand. But unfortunately, establishment Democrats are not just afraid of the Bolsheviks, they need them. The hard Left is less of a fringe than we’d like to think. It is a meaningful minority bloc of voters, and it is now powerful enough that, having thrashed the Democratic establishment in many elections, it runs several major American cities. It makes the blue states blue.

 

The Republican Party’s Multiethnic, Working-Class Coalition Is Taking Shape Republicans can and should aggressively fight the culture war with the aim of victory, but it must not lose sight of the economic issues that helped propel Trump’s insurgency.  By Josh Hammer

In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, and the party’s bicoastal “Anywhere” rulers. The foot-soldier Republican “Somewheres,” disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican “Anywheres.”

Donald Trump, lifelong conservative “outsider” and populist dissenter from bicoastal “Anywhere” orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration, and China, coasted to the GOP’s presidential nomination. He did so notwithstanding the all-hands-on-deck pushback from leading right-leaning “Anywhere” bastions, encapsulated by National Review magazine’s dedication of an entire issue to, “Against Trump.” Trump’s subsequent victory in the 2016 general election sent the conservative intellectual movement, as well as the Republican Party itself, into a deep state of introspection.

Trump’s victory was primarily propelled by a white working-class revolt, but the emergence during his presidency of a deeply censorious and anti-American left—epitomized by the Democrats’ outrageous conduct during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle and the destructive “1619 riots” last summer—opened the door for a broader working-class, pro-America political coalition. By Election Day 2020, that multiethnic, working-class conservative coalition had begun to take more definite shape. Trump lost a nail-biter of an election, but the GOP made massive inroads in crucial black and Hispanic communities, such as Florida’s Miami-Dade County and the heavily Mexican counties dotting Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.

 

Biden’s Federal Vaccine Mandate Wipeout The Administration ignored the law. It is getting crushed in court.

What legal sage advised President Biden to impose vaccine mandates? The adviser needs to have his law license pulled because the courts are repudiating the Administration’s mandates at an astonishing pace. A federal judge in Georgia was the latest on Tuesday when he blocked its vaccine requirement for employees of federal contractors—the fifth judicial rebuke in less than a month.

Judge R. Stan Baker ruled in a challenge brought by seven states that the Administration had exceeded its authority under the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act. The President claimed his executive order would “promote economy and efficiency in procurement” by contracting with sources “that provide adequate Covid-19 safeguards for their workforce.”

But the law does not give the President “the right to impose virtually any kind of requirement on businesses that wish to contract with the Government (and, thereby, on those businesses’ employees) so long as he determines it could lead to a healthier and thus more efficient workforce or it could reduce absenteeism,” Judge Baker wrote.

Last week federal Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove enjoined the Administration from enforcing the contractor mandate in Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. While conceding that Congress delegated broad power to the President, the judge noted that his “authority is not absolute” and the President’s overreach raises “several concerning statutory and constitutional implications.” The mandate “intrudes on an area that is traditionally reserved to the States,” Judge Tatenhove wrote, noting the Constitution grants the states general police powers to regulate public health and welfare.

 

The Unmitigated Gall of Ilhan Omar By David Harsanyi

It’s worth asking why Democrats consistently have the audacity to demand the other party enforce standards that they don’t themselves follow.

I lhan Omar is demanding that Congress censure a colleague over offensive remarks. This is a real demand happening right now, and reporters write about her demands without peppering their prose with incredulous exclamation marks.

House progressives, in fact, are reportedly planning to introduce a resolution that would strip Republican representative Lauren Boebert of committee assignments over her stupid and bigoted joke about Omar.

“I have had a conversation with the speaker, and I’m very confident that she will take decisive action next week,” Omar had the temerity to tell CNN’s Jake Tapper last weekend. The same congresswoman, who claimed criticism about her smear that Jews were brainwashing the world was “all about the Benjamins,” says it’s “important for us to say, this kind of language, this kind of hate cannot be condoned by the House of Representatives. And we should punish and sanction Boebert by stripping her of her committees, by rebuking her language, by doing everything that we can to send a clear and decisive message to the American public that, if the Republicans are not going to be adults and condone — condemn this, that we are going to do that.”

First of all, Democrats have already created a new norm — stripping Paul Gosar and the Rothschild-laser-curious Marjorie Taylor Greene of committee seats. They probably deserved this. And if Republicans have any spine, they will — perhaps as early as 2022 — begin throwing Jew-baiting progressives and conspiracy theorists such as Omar and Rashida Tlaib off their perches, as well. Democrats struggle to comprehend that they won’t be in perpetual power.

 

A new poll finds major warning signs for Biden and fellow Democrats Domenico Montanaro

 

Americans don’t feel the direct payments or expanded child tax credits doled out earlier this year helped them much, according to the latest NPR/Marist poll, and they don’t see Democrats’ signature legislation as addressing their top economic concern — inflation.

Additionally, they’re down on the job President Biden is doing, don’t give him much credit for the direct payments or tax credits, and have soured on the direction of the country.

The results, out Thursday, come as Democrats prepare a nationwide push to sell voters on their policies ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, when the party will defend its slim majorities in both the House and the Senate.

Americans do mostly endorse the new infrastructure law but are less supportive of Democrats’ Build Back Better bill that has passed the House. And while that legislation would expand the social safety net, survey respondents weren’t convinced that it would help people like them.

“They [Democrats] don’t have a unified message for what they’re doing, and that does not bode well for the party,” said Barbara Carvalho, director of the Marist Poll.

Views on direct payments and the child tax credit

More than 6 in 10 respondents said they received the onetime direct payment of up to $1,400 earlier this year. As of late April, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that more than 163 million people had received payments from that program.

However, 4 in 5 of those who received the payments said the money helped at least a little, but only a quarter said it helped a lot.

Democrats have called their agenda under Biden “transformative” for most Americans. They say policies like the direct payments and changes to the child tax credit are part of a broader plan for the federal government to provide needed services and support to people who have historically been disadvantaged in the economy.

 

Wealthy Leftists Demand Poor White Kids in Appalachia be Taught They’re Racist Maybe they can drive by in their limos and teach the hungry kids about their white privilege. Daniel Greenfield

 

The son of a bank vice president decided to teach about “white privilege” to his students in Sullivan County, Tennessee where the per capita income is $28,429.

After he was fired, the media decided to turn him into a victim.

“He Taught About White Privilege and Got Fired. Now He’s Fighting to Get His Job Back,” the headlines blared. A GoFundMe for Matthew Hawn by his sister, a principal in the Tennessee public school system, has already raised over $55,000 of its projected $85,000 goal.

That’s more money than a lot of the locals in Appalachia would be likely to earn in a year’s time.

Sullivan County is 95% white and 2% black. The rate of hungry children in the region is double the national rate and a third of those children live in Sullivan County.

At Sullivan Central High School, where Hawn decided to teach about white privilege, 96% of the students are white, 1% are Hispanic, another 1% are Asian, and the number of black students is too small to count.

41% of the students are eligible for the free lunch program. That means their parents meet federal poverty guidelines. Another 9% qualify for the reduced lunch program which indicates that their parents don’t earn very much.

Even though half the student body at Sullivan Central is low income, the graduation rate is 90% and the students rank in the top 20% for reading proficiency.

You can understand why Hawn, who had taught for 16 years, decided to introduce them to the concept of white privilege.

 

“Omicron” Means Enough! Michael Fumento

We don’t know much about it yet, but Omicron is already prompting many governments to reimpose travel bans – a useless gesture. By the time these bans are in place, the variant is likely already past national borders. Like most of what we’ve done in the “fight against Covid,” travel bans are theater.

The real issue here is how long will we allow variants to be exploited to maintain a permanent Covidocracy?

Omicron does appear to be highly unstable, which is bad. But instability is part and parcel to Covid, much more so than even flu, and vastly more so than most pathogenic viruses from smallpox to measles that appear never to mutate in any appreciable sense.

The apparent good news is that the pharmaceutical companies can deploy a new vaccine to deal with new variants in just 100 days. That’s a fantastic leap in medical science.

And it looks like 100 days is going to be enough for Omicron, and for pretty much any other variant that spreads worldwide. But keep in mind that after 11 months of vaccinating, far less than half the world’s population is fully covered. And many of the unvaccinated simply don’t trust their governments and Big Pharma, and see this as a way to control and jab them forever. Pfizer expects an incredible $36 billion this year alone in pre-tax revenue from its Covid vaccine. The unvaccinated will doubtlessly view further rounds of injections suspiciously.

 

When the Crime Wave Hits Your Family Our nanny’s living room in Oakland was sprayed with bullets. It didn’t even make the local news. Leighton Woodhouse

 

My wife and I are scrambling to find daycare for our 16-month-old son. We’ve had a “nanny share” up until now, which means we and another couple employ a nanny for both couples’ kids and split the cost. Our nanny is wonderful, and she lives just a few blocks from us. But a few weeks ago, someone walked up her street spraying bullets into random houses. One of the bullets found its way into her living room, as she and her family ducked for cover. At that moment, she and her husband decided they were moving their family out of Oakland.

The shooting didn’t even make the local news. Apparently, in the Bay Area right now, you can walk up a residential street firing your gun into houses, and you still won’t be able to compete for attention with all of the other sensational crimes. 

Perhaps you’ve heard about some of them or seen the videos.

Shoplifters casually walk into Walgreens stores in San Francisco filling garbage bags full of merchandise. They’ve spat on, bitten, assaulted, and thrown bottles of urine at employees. 

The flashmob-style “smash and grab” robberies that originated here—in places like Union Square in San Francisco and the shopping plaza in affluent Walnut Creek—have now spread across the country. 

Asian seniors are brazenly assaulted in the street; one octogenarian was body slammed to death. This week, an Afghan refugee—a father of three who had worked as a translator for the U.S. army—was shot dead near a playground in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood.

And now freeway shootings are a thing. A few weeks ago, at nine in the morning, a 29-year-old mom on her way from Oakland to San Francisco for a job interview with her fiancé and two kids was randomly shot and killed in her SUV at the Bay Bridge toll plaza. In an interview, the victim’s mother recalled being heartbroken after hearing the story of an earlier crime, in which Jasper Wu, a two year-old who was sleeping in his car seat, was shot and killed by a stray bullet fired from another car driving in the opposite direction. It was not even two weeks later when she lost her own daughter the same way.

I recently finished reading “San Fransicko,” by Michael Shellenberger. I recommend it. The subtitle is provocative: “Why Progressives Ruin Cities.” But, as Shellenberger explains, he does not mean to imply that progressives always ruin the cities they govern. He’s just interested in the specific phenomenon of when progressives do ruin cities, and explaining why that happens.

And progressives—I count myself as one of them—do ruin cities.

 

Biden Would Make Daycare Even More Expensive The Build Back Better bill would act like a $20,000 to $30,000 annual tax on middle-income families. By Casey Mulligan

 

Child care is already a major expense for parents, and President Biden pledges to reduce its cost with his multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better bill. Yet while some of those who receive government subsidies may see reduced costs, millions of other working parents could see their child-care costs double. The new program would act like a $20,000 to $30,000 annual tax on middle-income families.

The bill’s latest draft proposes to reinvent child care with a trifecta of cost-increasing forces. First, it would remove much of the incentive to offer lower-cost care. Millions of families would have their child-care expenses capped by statute, which means they’d pay the same at an expensive facility as at a cheaper one.

Providers would quickly discover that lower prices no longer are much of a competitive advantage. Moreover, the providers would be reimbursed extra for what Congress calls “quality,” which is a euphemism for having more staff per child. The history of rate regulation is that cost-plus schemes result in needless waste and higher prices for consumers without quality improvements.

 

Why does Pfizer want its vaccine research protected? By Matt Rowe

Go look at the VAERS COVID Vaccine Mortality Report to know why Pfizer wants FDA protection for its vaccine research along with 75 years of document secrecy. While there are all sorts of ways to interpret the VAERS data, and it’s entirely possible that the vaccine is safer than COVID, not only have many people probably died from the vaccine but there’s also still no way of knowing what the vaccine’s long-term effects are.

Some experts have calculated that only about 1% of adverse reactions are ever reported for various reasons in the US. This could be due to very minor symptoms, unfelt symptoms, or the amount of time and bureaucracy a doctor must go through to make a report. Some reasonable conservative estimates are that deaths due to the COVID vaccine in the US are around 140,000. Keep in mind that this analysis does not distinguish the factor that deaths are much more highly likely to be reported in VAERS than more minor symptoms.

If you assume that 80% of deaths are reported (80/20 rule) and that VAERS reports 19,552 deaths, then the number of COVID deaths due to vaccines is much more likely around 24,440 between 2020/21. The number of adverse deaths per prior years was about 400, or something over 5,200 deaths during the previous 30 years. At first look, these numbers are startling.

Consider, however, that ~100,000,000 million Americans were vaccinated in 2020-21, and if there were 24,440 deaths, then the probability of near-term death from the vaccine is very low. The Adverse Reaction Fatality Rate (ARFR) is about .0002% (2 in 10,000).

This is much lower than the general COVID Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of .013% (130 in 10,000). Using the VAERS reported 19,552 numbers, the probability is virtually the same as my number at .0002% of near-term death (2 in 10,000).

 

FOREIGN POLICY

Iran’s Increasingly Short Path to a Bomb The 2015 deal’s lax rules made it easy for Tehran to advance its program.

The U.S. and Europe are still begging Iran to return to the increasingly irrelevant 2015 nuclear deal. But a new report on Iranian nuclear advances shows how far Tehran’s program has come—and why President Biden should rethink his strategy.

Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear accord’s formal name, in 2018 and began his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign. The economic restrictions weakened the regime and gave the U.S. more leverage. Yet Tehran waited out Mr. Trump, betting that he would lose the election, as he did.

Meanwhile, Tehran activated advanced centrifuges, while stonewalling international nuclear inspectors, enriching uranium at higher concentrations and stockpiling more of it. Perhaps most troubling is how much the “breakout” time to a nuclear weapon has shrunk thanks to Iran’s better understanding of advanced centrifuges, which produce enriched uranium more efficiently.

“Unless compensatory steps are taken, such as destroying rather than mothballing advanced centrifuges, a renewed [nuclear deal] will not maintain a 12-month breakout timeline to produce enough weapon-grade uranium for a nuclear weapon,” David Albright and his colleagues at the Institute for Science and International Security write in a Dec. 2 report. “If Iran mothballs its advanced centrifuges, timelines of only five to six months are likely.”

 

MOVIES AND TELEVISION

Fauci on Film White coat supremacy in cinéma vérité. Lloyd Billingsley

 

EXCERPTS

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, claims that his critics are “really criticizing science because I represent science.” That was also the theme of Fauci, a hagiographical documentary released back on October 6.

According to Disney+ promotional materials, Fauci is “the ultimate public servant” facing attacks from adversaries, with “science increasingly caught in the crosshairs.” Fortunately, a more cinéma vérité portrayal has been around for some time.

Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Communist China, where gain-of-function research could be conducted in secret, with no accountability. In early 2020, Fauci praised China’s handling of the pandemic and initially opposed President Trump’s ban on travel from China. Like Ash, Fauci basically let the Covid virus come aboard.

In similar style in November, 2021, Fauci delayed a travel ban on Omicron-infected African countries and quickly announced that Omicron had arrived in the USA, just in time for the holidays. If some replicated scientific study supported these developments, it has yet to be made public.

With “this degree of transmissibility,” Omicron is going to be “all over,” proclaimed Dr. Fauci, who ought to know. The research NIAID funded at the WIV aimed to increase, not decrease, the transmissibility and lethality of viruses. For Fauci, the covid virus is the perfect organism. It can’t be killed and appears in endless variation. The virus empowers bureaucrats and politicians to impose restrictions, shut down sectors of the economy, demonize their critics, spend vast amounts of money, and portray themselves as heroes.

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