Image: Afghan Girl: Steve McCurry, National Geographic, 2002
A personal note—
I am outraged and heartbroken today by Biden’s abandonment of the 40 million Afghans to the murderous and evil Taliban.
His horrifying act exhibits and verifies his total incompetence.
He promised our withdrawal would be well organized and that, if the Taliban harmed a single American, our response would be “strong and swift.”
Biden is a nice old man who has never done anything strong or swift in his life.
Back in the years after 9-11 when the Afghan people welcomed American helpers, I volunteered for a years-long mission to help them build roads, homes and sanitary facilities. To this day I am very sorry that mission did not work out and I was never privileged to go and help them.
I love those beautiful people!
Beyond the current situation, for the first time in many years, I am now concerned for the future of the United States—whether we can make it through to the end of this administration.
We are now so weak and bereft of able leadership that another disaster could bring us, the United States of America, only nineteen months after being the strongest nation in history, to our knees. Biden has thrown our nation, our flag, our honor, even tens of thousands of us US citizens, to the Afghanistan dust before the Taliban!
We must pray fervently that no additional disaster befalls us– no new virus, no major hurricane or earthquake, no cyber-attack by a foreign nation.
Dave Bunting, Aug. 16, 2021
Yakima’s new COVID surge
Yakima County is one of the counties with the highest transmission rate in Washington state.
Most of Yakima County’s new cases are coming from the community when people are getting together, socializing, hanging out doing what we like to do in summer. Localized outbreaks don’t represent a significant portion of the cases that are being found.
The virus has evolved. It got smarter and it’s much more infectious than we’ve seen it before. It doesn’t cause more hospitalizations and deaths, just more infections.
There are still a few people that are vaccinated that do get infected– always with few or no symptoms. But these still represent a tiny percentage of the cases. People in many occupations, most of whom are vaccinated, are required to be tested frequently to protect their customers. Much of the “surge” in infections among vaccinated people is being found by these repetitious mandatory tests. If the testing were being applied equally across all people, the “surge” among vaccinated people would not be noticeable.
Over 94% of new infections in Yakima County are from unvaccinated individuals.
So that’s where we just ask community members that aren’t vaccinated to please ask questions. Call your provider, call the health district, call whoever your trusted source for information is — accurate, reliable information — with your questions. Because we know that the vaccine is effective. It’s safe.
Happily, 70 to 100 Yakima County people get vaccinated every day and when the vaccine is fully approved, anticipated within days, polls find that about 30% of the unwilling will instantly become willing and will quickly be vaccinated.
Includes excerpts from the Yakima Herald.
Info: shpr.fyi/yaksurge
The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Hide COVID-19’s Origins
Following are excerpts from the Aug. 13, 2021, issue of Vanity Fair, a very liberal publication. It is astounding that such a liberal publication would publish such facts exposing the wrongness of the basic strong liberal assertion that the Trump suggestion that COVID came from the Wuhan Lab was based on his xenophobic (anti-Chinese) racism. Not surprisingly, the article has already been taken down from the web.
From Vanity Fair:
Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits or even brutally obstructed.
On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone…”
Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was phony, not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself.
David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry. He said it soon became clear that “there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy” inside the U.S. federal government that has acted in every possible way to protect their gain-of-function involvements and funding.
Former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield even received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab.
Article above includes many excerpts from Vanity Fair.
Info: shpr.fyi/covidchina
My opinion: That many considered Trump’s effort to learn whether COVID came from the Wuhan Lab was based on his xenophobic (anti-foreigner, anti-Chinese) prejudice is preposterous.
I’ve never met or heard of a person who was prejudiced against Chinese people—and Trump was not xenophobic.
Instead, the effort to learn the origin of COVID is from the reasonable curiosity and desire of all intelligent people who sincerely want to know the origin of COVID so we can avoid such a virus in the future.
Again- My opinion: I have long concluded the COVID virus originated in the Wuhan lab and escaped from there through a mistake by a lab worker. The Chinese government, simply not recognizing its seriousness and hampered by confusion in its awkard-to-unworkable top-down “socialist” system, allowed it to spread through China and the world. China did not and, I believe, would not intentionally allow it to spread to and injure the U.S. or the world.
We all make mistakes. The Chinese should be blamed and held liable for the mistake and injurious mishandling of COVID but not for using it to intentionally injure us.
Dave Bunting, Aug. 16, 2021