Jun 7, 2022 | World
From “Ontario school board ‘regrets’ burning books in the name of reconciliation as part of educational program“:
An Ontario school board has said that they now “regret” a 2019 educational program that saw books burned and used as fertilizer in the spirit of “reconciliation” — a program that was, in part, led by the co-chair of the Indigenous peoples’ commission of the Liberal Party of Canada, …
[…]
Titles such as Tintin in America, which was withdrawn for its negative portrayal of Indigenous peoples, alongside biographies of various geographers and explorers were discarded, burned, and used as fertilizer to aid in growing a tree on school property.
The program has been ongoing since 2019, but only recently drew criticism.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said personally, that he would not burn books, but he has no right “to tell Indigenous people how they should feel or act to advance reconciliation.” The Canadian fascist has no problem locking up his fellow Canadians who refuse to get vaccinated.
It’s quite apropos that the cover of the book shows “Indigenous peoples'” seeking to burn Tintin while tied to a stake; in Trudeau’s Canada, they simply resort to burning his creator’s books. – MDC
Jun 4, 2022 | World
“First broadcast 4 June 1989. Chinese troops opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on Saturday evening. The collection of students and labourers had been occupying the site for several weeks. Despite the outbreak of “unremitting gunfire”, the protesters refused to leave. The BBC’s Kate Adie reports from the scene.”
Mar 7, 2022 | World
According to Levin, “Isolationists believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine doesn’t affect us. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As Putin storms Ukraine, history teaches us that appeasement of madmen like Putin only encourages more genocide. And as Mark illustrates, evil exists in more places than just in Russia. And America’s security starts overseas.”
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore
Mar 5, 2022 | World
Writes veteran Daniel Duffy on how “American Appeasement of Russia Led to War in Ukraine” in The American Thinker:
In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia. Shortly after, President Obama announced a “reset” policy with Russia. This was consistent with President Bush, who found Putin “straightforward and trustworthy.” In 2014, Putin punished Ukraine for ousting its pro-Russian puppet president by annexing Crimea. The West responded with tepid sanctions. President Trump equated Putin’s killings of journalists and dissidents with the actions of the United States not once, but twice. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump told Bill O’Reilly in a 2017 interview. “You think our country’s so innocent?” In 2015, he said, “I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, so you know.” He continued to describe Putin as a leader and someone whom he respects.
No, the United States isn’t perfect. But the lack of moral clarity when equating a country that has representational government, freedom of speech, real elections, a mostly free economy, and a separation of church and state with the monstrosity of a dictator like Putin emboldens the Kremlin and does real damage. Putting Putin on an equal footing affects the way we think of our relations with him.
If someone were your moral equal, why would you hesitate to become largely dependent on him for natural gas? To Trump’s credit, he did in fact warn Europe that this was not a good idea. But the point is that the lack of moral clarity dilutes our thinking.
[…] So what’s wrong with the precedents set by all these administrations? The common denominator is that they negate the nature of Russia. The West views these events — the invasion of Georgia here, attacking American troops there — as episodic. Westerners haven’t connected the dots.
Read the rest.
Mar 5, 2022 | World
From “Hybrid Immunity Kept Omicron Deaths Low in Countries Where Millions Aren’t Fully Vaccinated” in the WSJ:
When the highly infectious Omicron variant reached Asia a few months ago, India and Indonesia had a major gap in their defenses: Two-thirds of their populations were yet to be fully vaccinated.
But the countries are emerging from their most recent Covid-19 waves with a fraction of the deaths they recorded during the onslaught of the earlier Delta variant. Their deaths per capita are even lower than more vaccinated places that have better healthcare systems such as South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong.
A big part of the reason, epidemiologists say, is that developing nations hit hard by the Delta wave last year acquired high levels of immunity through infection. And that protection appears to have endured. Studies in India, Indonesia and South Africa show widespread prevalence of Covid-19 antibodies, far outstripping their vaccination rates.
[…]
Natural immunity, which refers to antibodies acquired through infection, was widespread in Indonesia when Omicron arrived. One study from October to December of roughly 20,000 Indonesians found that 74% of unvaccinated Indonesians had protective antibodies, according to Pandu Riono, a University of Indonesia epidemiologist who worked with government researchers on the study.
[…]
Government serological surveys in India conducted last year have similarly shown that 97% of New Delhi residents and 87% of Mumbai residents have antibodies against Covid-19.
[…]
Some research suggests that immunity from infection lasts longer than immunity from vaccination. Dorry Segev, a professor of surgery and population health at NYU Langone Health, an academic medical center, led a team that published a research letter last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found that unvaccinated people maintained natural immunity up to 20 months after infection. He said that further research under review shows that this immunity was substantially protective against Omicron. Research from Israel and the U.K. show waning immunity from vaccination after a few months.
Mar 3, 2022 | World
Historian Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, speaking on Bari Weiss podcast on “Russia’s War on Ukraine: A Roundtable“:
In Russian literature, there is a great novel: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
Biden is the idiot.
The reason this happened is because the Biden administration slowed down deliveries of armaments to Ukraine, lifted the sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was supposed to bypass Ukraine, signaled to Russia that the U.S. would not support Ukraine militarily, and therefore made it clear to Putin that he had an opportunity to take military action with only sanctions to fear.
The administration’s strategy was to threaten the worst sanctions—as if sanctions were going to deter Putin. Then they tried something even crazier, which was to say, “You’re going to invade, and we know the date”—as if that was somehow going to stop him from invading. And the worst thing they tried was to get the Chinese to dissuade him from invading, when the Chinese had given him the green light on the condition that he didn’t go until after the Beijing Olympics.
This has been a debacle that has allowed a massive war to break out, one that could have been prevented had there not been such clear signs of weakness.
(Joe Biden apologist, Francis Fukuyama, disagrees.)
Ferguson later adds:
The problem is that we created the possibility of Ukraine’s joining NATO and joining the European Union. But our actual attitude was like that New Yorker cartoon of the guy on the phone who says, “No, I can’t do Thursday. How about never?” We never seriously meant for them to join NATO or the EU. We didn’t supply nearly enough armaments for them to deter Russia from attacking. And as a consequence, we have a massive geopolitical crisis that could have been avoided. Telling people that you saw it coming is not an act of strategic genius. It’s an act of strategic feebleness.
The consequences of this are far-reaching indeed. First of all, in the administration’s anxiety to avoid even higher inflation, they’re desperately trying to resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal and get Iranian oil back onto the world market in the process, making all kinds of concessions that I think will come back to haunt them. Meanwhile, in China, Xi Jinping is watching this fiasco and saying to himself, “Well, if the most I have to fear is the threat of sanctions, then if I decide to take control of Taiwan, I’m in good shape.” And when Putin took out his little nuclear saber and rattled it, we were immediately deterred. The Europeans were so terrified that they immediately canceled the plan to make fighter jets available to the Ukrainians, which they had offered in the early days after the invasion.
Listen to the podcast.
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As an aside:
From “
