Central-Illinoisand_beyond: June 2021

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

The truly scary China Virus variant

Just when it appears that life in the United States is returning to pre-pandemic condition (I hesitate to say "normal," because, in my opinion, very little in this country is "normal" anymore), the CDC issues yet another warning about a China Virus variant. As of Tuesday, the CDC lists four "notable" variants on its website, code named Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta. The CDC acknowledges that viruses "constantly change through mutation, and new variants of a virus are expected to occur." But don't get too comfortable with that fact, the CDC warns. "Sometimes new variants emerge and disappear. Other times, new variants persist."

Even though infection and death rates continue to decline, the bureaucrats at the CDC are very, very concerned. "These variants seem to spread more easily and quickly than other variants, which may [emphasis added] lead to more cases of COVID-19. An increase in the number of cases will put more strain on healthcare resources, lead to more hospitalizations, and potentially more deaths."

Scared yet? Well, don't be. It's the same old shtick from the same cast of dullards who have been using fear, ignorance, and intimidation to perpetuate their meaningless careers and destroy their political enemies for the past eighteen months or so. What you should really be afraid of is a variant of the most destructive China Virus of all...one that has been spreading in this country — virtually out of control — since well before the first confirmed case of COVID-19 was reported early last year.

The virus in question has definite connections to China, but it didn't originate in a virology lab or a "wet market" in Wuhan. It's actually been here for decades but has remained relatively dormant until the past few years. Concerned citizens who carefully watched the virus spread tried to warn the general public but were scoffed at and labeled conspiracy wackos and right-wing lunatics. More recently, as the infection rate rose, those who tried to battle the virus were viciously mocked and called racists; white supremacists; Oreo cookies; and a host of other vile, hateful names.

The symptoms vary but are becoming increasingly recognizable: uncontrollable cackling at questions that aren't funny; sleeping with Chinese spies; incoherently babbling to a national TV audience; identifying boys as girls and girls as boys; silently watching as criminals destroy our cities, while ordering the police to stand down; and, in the name of anti-racism, teaching people to hate an entire race based on the color of their skin. There are countless more examples, but you get the general idea.

This horrible disease is most evident in career politicians (usually, but not always, Democrats), bureaucrats, newscasters, and Silicon Valley tycoons. Sadly, the virus has now infected the military, as evidenced by the recent "woke" ramblings of an ignorant tool who sits as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the biggest threat to the general public comes from academics, who use the education system to infect youngsters from kindergarten through college. Students learn to hate their country and respect socialism, the slightly weaker variant of the real virus that threatens our Republic.

The China Virus to which I'm referring is Communism.

Other than the ballot box — which hasn't worked too well lately — there's no vaccine to cure this disease. Herd immunity will eventually prevail, as it always does, but it will be a long road back after the system collapses. Let's hope enough people wake up before that crash actually happens.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/the_truly_scary_china_virus_variant.html

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/delta-variant-like-nothing-seen-cnn-uses-doctor-scare-people-getting-covid-vaccine-video/

What Was California Thinking?

Back in 2014, the political leadership of California became alarmed at the rapidly rising prison population in the state. The state was also under court order to reduce the overcrowding in state prisons. The people of California set a grand objective to reduce the number of convicts in the state. Fewer people going to prison has to be a good thing -- right?

The first thing they did was pass Proposition 47 -- the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act. That sounds like something everyone would want. 58% of Californians voted in favor of the measure. There was just one problem. Reduced prison population was the objective -- not the outcome. Nothing in Prop 47 was designed to actually reduce crime. It redefined drug use and theft of property valued at under $950 as misdemeanors rather than felonies. Punishment would no longer be imprisonment, but a fine of $1,000. The objective of prison population reduction was achieved by not incarcerating criminals, rather than by eliminating criminal behavior. Perhaps the voters should have read past the title of the proposition.

Prop 47 also allows those imprisoned under previous guidelines to petition for early release. If a convict is in prison for stealing less than $950, he is now eligible for early release. As many as 10,000 state prisoners have been released. Thousands more have been released from country jails. An additional 15,000 are expected to be released with the closure of five correctional facilities. I can feel the neighborhoods getting safer already.

In a further demonstration of out-of-control liberalism, the voting public elected district attorneys who are more inclined to work as advocates for, rather than prosecutors of criminals. Even though he’s only been in office for six months, a recall effort is currently underway for Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, due to his soft-on-crime policies. He was even sued by his own prosecutors for restricting their ability to seek enhanced sentences. News flash: Gascón shouldn’t be recalled. He should have never been elected.

Los Angeles may have been unwise, but San Francisco was totally insane. The City by the Bay elected Chesa Boudin as its District Attorney. His parents were members of the Weather Underground and served time in prison for the murder of two police officers and an armored car guard. After his parents were incarcerated, Chesa was adopted and raised by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were also unrepentant terrorist members of the Weather Underground. If those names sound familiar, they’re the same Bill and Bernardine who are friends and supporters of the Obamas. Now that he’s in office, Boudin is more interested in social justice than criminal justice. It’s a real shocker, but it turns out a person raised by people determined to bring down our society is not particularly interested in defending it. He, like many of his fellow leftist DAs, simply chooses not to prosecute criminals that don’t fit the social justice narrative. The voters of California are getting what they asked for -- good and hard!

The end result of these changes was foreseeable to anyone who understands human nature -- which is clearly beyond the understanding of Democrats in general and California leftists in particular.

Drug use has skyrocketed in California. Sleeping, drugged-out junkies litter the floors of BART train stations. Fortunately, junkies do have an easy means to support their drug habits. They can simply steal stuff -- with no risk of jail time.

Theft has become a very simple business venture in California. On average, a shoplifter is caught once for every 48 times he steals. However, he’s only charged 50% of the time. Based upon the dollar value that qualifies as a misdemeanor, and the fine for getting caught, shoplifters will have to pay a $1,000 fine for every $91,200 that they steal. For them, the fine is simply the cost of doing business. Merchants are even reporting that shoplifters carry calculators to make sure they don’t exceed the $950 threshold. They may be strung out on heroin or fentanyl, but they’re clearly smarter than the people that passed Prop 47.

Thanks to Prop 47, the streets are now flooded with career criminals. Fortunately, they’re not committing felonies anymore. Now they’re committing misdemeanors that look remarkably similar to the felonies which formerly would have landed them in prison.

The police have stopped arresting all but the most violent criminals. The prosecutors will release them anyway. Declining to arrest people over and over again isn’t dereliction -- it’s a process improvement. Giving criminals a pass achieves the same outcome as catch and release -- at much less risk and expense. Why catch and release when you can just not catch?

Even though crime has skyrocketed, the prison population is down. So our neighborhoods must be safer, right? If things don’t feel safer in California, consider this: making it no longer a felony to steal stuff, doesn’t mean people aren’t still stealing stuff. They’re just not being arrested for it. But the felony numbers are down, so the neighborhoods and schools must be safer.

Here’s a novel idea to lower the prison population. Instead of eliminating the penalty for committing crimes, let’s start teaching our children that crime is wrong and socially unacceptable. Of course, we would also need to teach them personal accountability, but that’s anathema to liberal thinking. We can’t be accountable for our own actions and still be victims of systemic [insert your chosen ism].

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/what_was_california_thinking.html#ixzz6zJlSywqP

Day 139: Anything The Biden-Harris White House Doesn’t Like Is A “Republican Attack.”

Nothing new for the Scumbags on the Left!

On Day 139, Vice President Kamala Harris reckoned with “Republican attacks” that her portfolio has something to do with the border.

Biden Ends Infrastructure Talks with GOP.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden walked away from infrastructure talks with lead Senate Republican negotiator Shelley Moore Capito, turning instead to discussions with a new bipartisan group of ten Republican and ten Democrats senators, assembled in case talks between Biden and Capito fell apart.

The White House made clear that Biden is “pursuing multiple paths to get this done,” while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said to reporters Tuesday that “it may well be that part of the bill that is passed will be bipartisan, and part of it will be in reconciliation, but we’re not going to sacrifice bigness and boldness.”

From an official statement by press secretary Jen Psaki:

[Biden] informed Senator Capito today that the latest offer from her group did not, in his view, meet the essential needs of our country to restore our roads and bridges, prepare us for our clean energy future, and create jobs. He offered his gratitude to her for her efforts and good faith conversations, but expressed his disappointment that, while he was willing to reduce his plan by more than $1 trillion, the Republican group had increased their proposed new investments by only $150 billion.

Root Causes Tour Arrives in Mexico.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ bilateral meeting with Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador produced an announcement of plans to hold a high-level economic dialogue and cabinet-level security dialogue later in the year, invest $130 million in Mexican labor reform, launch youth empowerment programs, help U.S. and Mexican law enforcement share information on human trafficking and smuggling, strengthen “rural value chains such as cacao, coffee, and eco-tourism,” and help resolve disappearance cases in Mexico.

Facing criticism for not visiting the border and dismissing the push to do so, Harris told reporters after the meeting that she had “been to the border before and will go again,” but did not outline any specific plans. On the heels of that disastrous Lester Holt interview, the vice president’s team was reportedly “frustrated by what they perceive to be questioning driven by Republican attacks falsely painting her as the administration’s border czar, rather than focused on the root causes of migration.” That’s right, NBC Nightly News, best known for its “Republican attacks,” has attracted the ire of the White House for “falsely painting” Harris as the border czar.

In a strange case of mistaken identity, a woman thought to be “Maria Fernanda of Univision” stood up and gratuitously complimented Harris, mentioning that she had voted for Harris before asking what the VP would do for women “on both sides of the border.” While there is a Maria Fernanda Lopez of Univision—not in attendance—the woman asking the question was Maria Fernanda Reyes, who has no affiliation with the network. The president of Univision took to Twitter to clarify that “an individual which has no association with @Univision claimed to be a reporter for @UniNoticias in order to ask the @VP a question and to compliment @KamalaHarris. Let it be clear to everyone that Ms. Maria Fernanda Reyes is not part of this media organization.” The imposter, who is not a journalist but an entrepreneur and charity founder, was one of only five people called on by Harris press secretary Symone Sanders, while the actual correspondent sent by Univision was not able to ask a question.

Speaking Truth To Power in the Biden Era: A Tutorial.

Unlike the unfair, biased Lester Holt interrogation, Psaki on Tuesday engaged in what White House considers a productive exchange between the government and the press after Katie Rogers of the New York Times informed her that “Republicans and conservatives are, you know, going crazy on Twitter, sending pictures, sending videos of Harris’ interview with Lester Holt.”

WATCH:

https://thenationalpulse.com/exclusive/hunter-biden-invested-in-ecohealth-wuhan-partner/

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/muslim_wives_expose_dirty_secrets_of_cair_leaders.html

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/federal_judge_tosses_out_a_case_because_grand_jury_that_handed_down_the_indictment_wasnt_diverse_enough.html

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/kick_flashy_lips_gwen_berry_off_the_us_team.html

Leftists try to make Surfside condo collapse into 'climate change

A Bunch of Dumb Bastards we see here!

The dead and wounded have not even been found or cleared from the rubble of the terrible Surfside condo collapse in Florida, and already leftists are trying to use the tragedy to blame global warming.

The latest instance: Michigan's former governor, Jennifer Granholm, who's now serving as Joe Biden's energy secretary:

"Given what we know about the changing climate, given that you've seen an increase in so called extraordinary tides, and the impact that that can have in areas like south Florida, do you think that climate would have played a role in that building's collapse?" [CNN] anchor Erica Hill asked. The segment was accompanied by the chyron, "Could Climate Crisis Have Contributed to Building Collapse?"
"Well, obviously we don't know fully," Granholm replied.
"We know that we're losing inches and inches of beach — not just in Florida, but all around," Granholm said.
The secretary said she needed to wait to see the analysis of the current investigation into the building collapse, but said that we should "adapt" to and "protect ourselves" from the consequences of a changing climate. One possible solution, she suggested, was to pass President Biden's infrastructure bills.

This was disgusting political opportunism played off the backs of the150-plus people who still lie buried in the tons of rubble. You'd think Granholm might have some kind of compassion for task at hand and maybe talk about the rescue and recovery operation, but nooo, she's off spouting Joe's political priorities, touting his infrastructure plan, and talking about saving the Earth when it's Surfside's condo survivors who need saving, not the entire planet. She's basically using those Surfside deaths as a "news hook" to promote the political ends she wants to promote and too bad about condo.

That's not the only vile political opportunism, either.

Right after the collapse, the global warmers in the press got busy — like, immediately. Here's the Washington Post in a piece dated June 25:

Investigators are just beginning to try to unravel what caused the Champlain Towers South to collapse into a heap of rubble, leaving at least 159 people missing as of Friday. Experts on sea-level rise and climate change caution that it is too soon to speculate whether rising seas helped destabilize the oceanfront structure. The 40-year-old building was relatively new compared with others on its stretch of beach in the town of Surfside.
But it is already clear that South Florida has been on the front lines of sea-level rise and that the effects of climate change on the infrastructure of the region — from septic systems to aquifers to shoreline erosion — will be a management problem for years.

And they are still at it:

Did climate change play a role in the deadly collapse of a Miami-area condominium last week?
Experts say it's too soon to tell. At least one factor has come up as a possibility — the corrosive impact of rising sea levels — but other variables have little to do with global warming.
A more complete answer is expected in the next several months. That's when investigators plan to finish their inquiry into the Champlain Towers South disaster, which killed at least 11 people and left more than 150 missing.
In the meantime, scientists said the danger of climate change should not be underestimated. Between sea-level rise and the growing intensity of hurricanes, global warming looms as the biggest threat to Miami and other coastal communities.

These are far from the only examples of it. And notice that little couching self-protection in "it's too soon to tell" sold with every climate-change gong-beat. They all do that, because they know they don't know what they are talking about. The dreamy-beamy stuff about global warming is a complete nuisance factor to what the survivors are owed, amounting to political opportunism if not a quest for more government power.

The Surfside collapse of a huge tower of people in just seconds was a serious, sad, mass-casualty event that affected a single building in a mass of coastal condos. It had nothing to do with climate because if it did, all of the condos would have collapsed. It simply deserves serious answers.

The investigative work going on is uncovering genuine problems that deserve attention, yet all of this global warming claptrap is obscuring the issue.

Thus far, we have learned that there was a 2018 structural engineer's report warning of serious structural problems related to leaking water around the pool deck weakening the cement in the edifice.

There is evidence the steel sticks inside the cement were rusted and corroded. An even more recent inspection noted cracks in the cement on the lower levels.

There also was a condo association that apparently blanched at the size of the repair bill and quite possibly did nothing as a result.

There was an eyewitness report of sinkhole below the collapsed pool structure, suggesting that there may have been unknown or maybe ignored foundational problems.

The Miami Herald noted that much of the 1980s construction that went on in the Miami area during the 1980s was shoddy and substandard.

All of these things are worthy topics for investigators to investigate.

But this doesn't stop the left, which is trying to hang the whole incomprehensible thing on global warming in order to lobby voters into giving the government more money and power. That's what this nonsense is really about. Heaven help us if these people ever consolidate power.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/leftists_try_to_make_surfside_condo_collapse_into_climate_change_issue.html#ixzz6zJfO5u4c

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/clown-show-biden-secretary-energy-blames-climate-change-contributing-florida-condo-collapse-video/

WATCH: Pamela Karlan, The Ex-Zuckerberg Apparatchik Now Leading Biden’s Anti-Audit Push – Once Said Corporate-Backed Elections ‘Undermine Democracy’.

The most secure election ever????? If it was they should have no problem with audits??

The Department of Justice’s far-left legal mind at the forefront of stopping election audits and harming ballot integrity once railed against the very same kind of private election funding that her former employer Mark Zuckerberg engaged in during the 2020 election cycle.

Pamela Karlan – believed by many to be the brain behind the pro-election fraud, partisan operation inside the Department of Justice – once bemoaned big corporate spending on elections, The National Pulse can reveal.

Speaking in 2012 at Robert H. Jackson lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, Karlan declared: “If you allow unlimited spending on elections, money will be translated into votes. Over time that will undermine our democracy.”

She went on to describe a situation in Montana, where corporations spent money to buy political figures including judges – a practice commonly used by corporate billionaires such as Karlan’s own ally George Soros.

Robert H. Jackson was a Democrat Supreme Court Justice who failed – when the opportunity was given – to oppose racial segregation in America.

But Karlan also worked for the Facebook Oversight Board. The same Facebook that saw founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg plough hundreds of millions of dollars in private, corporate cash into districts around America with a view to increasing left-wing vote turnouts.

Virtually all of Zuckerberg’s money, which was funneled through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), worked to boost turnout for Biden.

Proving the partisan conflict of interest, leaders from the CTCL overpowered and overruled local election authorities and, through coercion, accessed mail-in ballots ahead of the election.

MUST READ: On Day 134, Biden Weakened Trump's Orders Protecting the U.S. from China, and the Press Asked if He Was Getting a Cat.

Now, Pamela Karlan is the lead operative inside the Department of Justice determining Biden’s response to election audits around the country.

This past week, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Karlan’s first operation: suing the state of Georgia for attempting to secure their elections.

Claiming racial justice, the former anti-Trump impeachment witness Karlan now asserts members of the African American communities would be aided by the big corporate cash she once decried.

In reality, Georgia’s new voting laws simply seek to limit partisan corruption that plagues elections around the Western world. Political activists will no longer be allowed to give free things to people in line to vote, and external and unaccountable processes for voting (such a “drop boxes”) will be restricted.

Watch:

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