Hamburg 'caliphate' rally prompts calls for punishment
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
House COVID panel urges criminal probe over gain-of-function virus research in Wuhan
House COVID panel urges criminal probe over gain-of-function virus research in Wuhan
Published May 1, 2024, 9:49 a.m. ET
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.
The cost of homeless crime
Homeless man who fatally shoved Michelle Go in NYC subway explodes in court as DA claims he’s now mentally fit for trial
The war with Islamo Nazis
Wife of convicted terrorist Sami Al-Arian was hanging out at Columbia encampment before dramatic raid
Raising the minimum wage is not economically free
Barely A Month Old, California’s $20-Hr. Fast-Food Minimum Wage Is Already An Economic Disaster
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.
Jews fight back at UCLA and then Mayor Karen Bass sends in the police
May 1, 2024
Jews fight back at UCLA and then Mayor Karen Bass sends in the police
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?
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Where the hell are the parents of these deluded Columbia students chanting about attacking Jews?
Where the hell are the parents of these deluded Columbia students chanting about attacking Jews?
The war for our streets
Terry Clark Hughes Jr. Is Suspect in Deaths of 4 Officers in Charlotte, Police Say
Mugshot/US MarshalsTerry Clark Hughes Jr.
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.
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