Hamburg 'caliphate' rally prompts calls for punishment
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A House subcommittee investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic urged a criminal investigation of EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak ahead of a Wednesday hearing, releasing a trove of documents about the Manhattan-based nonprofit’s controversial virus experiments in Wuhan, China.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, released a 59-page report and interview transcripts with half a dozen National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials and scientists linked to EcoHealth’s research — including Daszak himself.
EcoHealth has received millions in federal grants to conduct research around the globe — including more than $4 million for an NIH project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.
Beginning in 2014, the project conducted experiments at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that modified SARS-like viruses and made them 10 times more infectious — but “failed to report” that fact to the NIH.
NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak — who was interviewed by the House COVID subcommittee — disclosed to Congress in 2021 that EcoHealth had violated the terms of its grant in the Wuhan lab, leading to the grant’s suspension.
The same day that Tabak made the disclosure, the NIH scrubbed its website of the agency’s longstanding definition of gain-of-function research, which enhances the transmissibility of viruses.
The report also calls out former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci — who was also interviewed by the subcommittee in January — for having “played semantics” with the definition of gain-of-function research.
“EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak is not a good steward of US taxpayer dollars and should never again receive funding from the US taxpayer,” Wenstrup said in a statement.
California Democrats who pushed through the state’s punitive new minimum wage must be feeling mighty proud about now. Not only are fast-food joints closing or replacing low-end employees with overseas workers and robots, now the law is costing the very people it was supposed to help while decimating consumers’ wallets. Well done!
The $20-an-hour wage floor foisted on California’s fast-food restaurants, dubbed with the innocent-sounding moniker Assembly Bill 257, was signed into law last fall. It didn’t take long to become a disaster.
Hoover Institution senior fellow and economist Lee Ohanian showed just how quickly bad policies can wreck an economy. And the damage was done even before the law officially went into effect a month ago today.
“Between last fall and January,” Ohanian wrote, “California fast-food restaurants cut about 9,500 jobs, representing a 1.3% change from September 2023.” By comparison, overall employment in California during that period fell just 0.2%.
Those who are losing their jobs in this new higher-wage environment are those most easily replaced, with the lowest productivity — which usually means minority youths with minimal education and little or no work skills. In short, the most vulnerable among us.
“This includes losses at Pizza Hut and Round Table Pizza which are in the process of firing nearly 1,300 delivery drivers. El Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box announced that they will speed up the use of robotics, including robots that make salsa and cook fried foods,” Ohanian added.
Because of escalating costs, many restaurants are also adding “ordering kiosks,” basically firing workers and replacing them with user-friendly computer terminals.
And, to repeat, this was even before the law went into effect. In the coming weeks and months, expect more job devastation, business closures and sharply higher prices paid by consumers.
Indeed, that latter point — higher prices — is already slamming Cali consumers.
Wendy’s has already boosted prices 8%, Chipotle by 7.5%, Starbucks by 7%. “McDonald’s has announced it will be raising prices, and many other fast-food franchises have announced hiring freezes,” Ohanian observed. Since last September, prices have shot up 10% total.
A recent Washington Times headline put it best: “Fast food chains find a way around $20 minimum wage: Get rid of the workers.”
The same Washington Times story adds, “Rather than make less money, restaurant owners are exploring alternative strategies to maintain profitability. Reducing staff numbers appears to be their primary solution for lowering overheads.”
For consumers, there’s nowhere left to hide from the ravages of inflation. If you voted for the people who passed the bill in California’s legislature, and the person who signed it into law — that’s you, Gov. Gavin Newsom — you have no one to blame but yourself.
And it will get worse, much worse.
Part of the bill that has gotten little notice created a “Fast Food Council.” Sounds innocuous, but in fact it’s a non-elected council that will have near dictatorial powers over fast-food outlets’ labor policies, including pay.
In earlier, more-honest times, this used to be called “fascism.” But today the more fashionable term is “worker-friendly progressivism.”
Isn’t it just a noble idea gone bad? Nope. It’s a cynical deal between so-called progressive politicians, frightened food industry groups and unions to bleed consumers, workers and the fast-food industry, all at once.
“After fast food industry representatives tried to block the bill via a ballot measure, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) sat down with the International Franchise Association and California Restaurant Association to hammer out a deal,” wrote the now very left-wing Teen Vogue, which credits “organizing” for the victory.
Actually, it was blackmail. The California Restaurant Association sold out the national fast-food chains, which are the targets of this law. The SEIU, which had used “strikes” at 450 fast-food locations to show they mean business, basically extorted the fast-food chains.
No doubt, some of those who went on strike are now collecting unemployment. You’ll pay for that, too. “Would you like higher taxes with that burger?”
If you live in another state, this is still very relevant to you. The current national minimum wage is $7.25. But a move is afoot to raise it to $15 an hour or higher.
While $7.25 doesn’t sound like much, virtually no one other than short-term, part-time teenagers earns that amount. In California, for instance, the median hourly wage in fast-food enterprises was about $14 an hour (according to Salary.com), with essentially no workers earning the national minimum, which is almost half less. Same is true across the country.
So if raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour won’t hurt that many people, why care? Because it will hurt those who can least afford it.
Why?
“The consensus among economists is that 1% to 2% of entry-level jobs are lost for every 10% increase in the minimum wage,” writes David John Marotta at Forbes. “Raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 could mean a reduction in entry level jobs of 11% to 21%. These estimates would suggest between 1.8 and 3.5 million of jobs lost.”
That’s why.
Those are jobs for people who are the most disadvantaged in our society — mostly living in poor minority communities — who lack decent education, have few if any tradable work skills, might not know how to follow simple instructions or speak English fluently, and don’t yet understand the importance of showing up on time or finishing a job once started.
These are the very basic skills that get you a better job at higher pay. A future, in short. But you have to get that first job to learn them. Do the Democrats that passed this bill want a permanent underclass of unemployables that depends on government handouts? Sure looks that way.
Here’s a modest alternative proposal that would benefit everyone, but especially low-end workers: No minimum wage at all, neither in California nor in the rest of the U.S. Then, everyone who wants a job will have one, and businesses won’t have to hire robots instead of people.
The Democrat Mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, didn’t send police onto the campus of UCLA when pro-Hamas demonstrators took over parts of it and prevented Jews from entering, just as Nazis one blocked Jewish students from the University of Vienna. A Jewish girl being beaten unconscious and hospitalized also drew no police response to the state government-owned campus. But when non-student members of the Jewish community of Los Angeles entered the campus and began physically confronting the pro-Hamas demonstrators and videos of fights went out on internet, after two-plus hours of mayhem, the Mayor decided to send in the cops.
YouTube screengrab (cropped)
While I cannot condone outsiders coming onto a campus to fight, it needs to be stipulated that pro-Hamas outsiders were the first to enter UCLA turf, and that the non-student Jews who entered campus to fight were responding with the same tactic, to protect community members.
It is hard for me to avoid comparison to a little-remembered incident from the 1930s, when virulently antisemitic groups openly demonstrated and excoriated Jews along the same themes as the contemporary Nazis. The worst of it took place in Minneapolis, later characterized by prominent journalist Carey McWilliams as “the capitol (sic) the capitol of anti-Semitism in the United States."
A group called the Silver Shirts, self-consciously modeled on Mussolini’s Black Shirts, held a rally and:
In Minneapolis, William Dudley Pelley organized a Silver Shirt Legion to "rescue" America from an imaginary Jewish-Communist conspiracy. In Pelley’s own words, just as "Mussolini and his Black Shirts saved Italy and as Hitler and his Brown Shirts saved Germany," he would save America from Jewish communists. Minneapolis gambling czar David Berman confronted Pelley’s Silver Shirts on behalf of the Minneapolis Jewish community.
Berman learned that Silver Shirts were mounting a rally at a nearby Elks’ Lodge. When the Nazi leader called for all the "Jew bastards" in the city to be expelled, or worse, Berman and his associates burst in to the room and started cracking heads. After ten minutes, they had emptied the hall. His suit covered in blood, Berman took the microphone and announced, "This is a warning. Anybody who says anything against Jews gets the same treatment. Only next time it will be worse." After Berman broke up two more rallies, there were no more public Silver Shirt meetings in Minneapolis. (Via Jewish Virtual Library)
I don’t for a second believe that any of the Jewish outsiders at UCLA were gangsters. It may be a measure of our time that ordinary Americans of persecuted ethnicities taking violent measures to defend themselves has been lionized by the leftist cultural establishment when the persecuted minority was African American. Somehow, I doubt they will grant the same indulgence to Jews. After all, does anyone think that Mayor Karen Bass would have tolerated for days Blacks being excluded from parts of UCLA’s campus by KKK activists?
George Soros, who for decades has been funding progressive, neo-Marxist leftist groups, also poured money into groups and individuals that reject the existence of Israel. So, it is not surprising that his son, Alexander, who now runs the ironically named Open Society Foundations, is now funding, directly and indirectly, pro-Hamas demonstrations and Hamas-supporters’ encampments on university campuses across the United States.
The campus “occupations” are reminiscent of Kyiv’s Maidan Square encampment in the winter of 2004-2005, when Soros helped fund the Orange Revolution. He also supported the 2014 demonstrations of the Maidan Revolution, for which he was awarded Ukraine’s Order of Freedom by the Ukrainian president he helped elect, Petro Poroshenko.
Soros has been funding, directly and indirectly — and apparently with the acquiescence of U.S. administrations — Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Arab leftist groups, as well as media outlets, that oppose Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
That’s in addition to his generous funding of Palestinian-led groups, along with pro-Palestinian Jewish, Christian, and Muslim organizations that promote boycotts, divestments, and sanctions against Israel. Among the many groups Soros funds include Students for Justice in Palestine and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which are spearheading violent demonstrations on college and university campuses.
More than a few organizations backed by Soros' foundations have well-documented links with the U.S.-designated terrorist groups. All support the elections and appointments of anti-Israel activists to Congress, the administration, and international nonprofit organizations. Details of his decades-long crusade against the Jewish state are spelled out in “The Soros Agenda.”
Despite the evidence, the Open Society Foundations have repeatedly denied such funding. In 2019, Soros spokesman Michael Vachon made a feeble attempt at plausible deniability. While denying the foundations’ support of BDS groups, he admitted that at times they simply don’t know how their support is used. “The foundation[s] cannot track every project connected to every organization that ... [they have] supported over the decades,” he said.
The Open Society Foundations and their well-funded proxies never fail to condemn Israel for its effort to curb the activities of Palestinian terrorist groups masquerading as human rights charities. Like parrots, they repeat Hamas' lies about Israel. Their phrasing is then used by the United Nations, the European Union, and Biden’s State Department to further criticize Israel.
Just how many millions of dollars Soros has directed to pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, and anti-American groups is unclear. These are merely guesstimates because the Open Society Foundations are notoriously opaque.
What is certain, however, is that Soros is not only funding the pro-Hamas and anti-American demonstrations we see on campuses today. He has also been the prime mover behind a decades-long effort culminating with a tsunami of anti-Semitic attacks on Israel and Jews everywhere.
It costs around $90,000 a year to attend Columbia University.
Most undergraduates do four years of studying there, which means that if they’re not getting any subsidized grants, their parents are coughing up a total of $360,000 just for their tuition, housing, food and books.
Add in other expenses like travel, and Mommy and Daddy won’t be getting much change out of $400,000.
That’s a lot of money.
But those parents would doubtless consider it a price worth paying to give their child what is supposedly one of the best educations in the world at such a supposedly elite institution with a supposedly world-class reputation.
Terry Clark Hughes Jr. is the 39-year-old suspect who opened fire at the scene where four law enforcement officers in Charlotte, North Carolina, were shot and killed on April 29, according to Charlotte-Mecklenburg police.
Hughes was not the only shooter, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Johnny Jennings said in a news conference. “When they approached Hughes,” officers “were met by gunfire and returned the gunfire, striking” Hughes, who was found deceased in a yard, Jennings said.
"This was more than a slight. Aside from a calculated insult to the dignity of the United States, the move indicates Xi Jinping is making clear that the accepted norms of diplomacy will not be respected by China anymore." — Charles Burton, former Canadian diplomat who served in Beijing, to Gatestone Institute, April 27, 2024.
Blinken was in China to discuss the growing list of disagreements between Washington and Beijing. Not surprisingly, he did not accomplish anything there other than register America's complaints on matters such as Beijing's support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine and unfair treatment of U.S. companies. On every major issue, the U.S. and China take different sides, and the Chinese have clearly dug in. Blinken was reduced to begging.
America is resorting to the dialogue-is-progress narrative.... In substance, therefore, Blinken in Beijing continued talking about talking.
There is no question that AI is an important topic, especially when it comes to the control of nuclear weapons. Yet this does not mean the U.S. should seek an agreement with China on that topic.
Burton and Weichert point out that China never honors agreements, so any deal with Beijing is akin to a unilateral promise.
The risk now is that the Biden administration will trade away its restrictions for meaningless promises from China's Communists.
"China is deeply committed to the weaponization of AI and would be counting its lucky communist star if the Americans basically deterred themselves with such a protocol," Weichert, also author of Biohacked: China's Race to Control Life, added.
The secretary of state should never have gone to China in the first place.
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.