What Happened Today: August 08, 2022
Cease-fire after Israel’s three-day fight with Palestinian Islamic Jihad; China refreshes Taiwan drills; California warms to nuclear power
The Big Story
In less than three days of fighting over the weekend, Israel routed the leadership and operational capacity of the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad (IJ) while suffering no casualties, and minimal damages. Yet, while Israel emerges as the decisive tactical winner, the strategic and political implications of the skirmish are less clear. With an Egyptian-mediated cease-fire reached Sunday night still holding up on Monday, the Israelis have managed to avoid drawing Hamas into the conflict, leaving Gaza’s dominant power on the sidelines while its smaller and more disorganized Islamic Jihad was pummeled. Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad are funded by Iran, but in Gaza’s internal politics, the two are rivals. One former member of the Israeli military told The Scroll that Hamas stayed out of the fighting “because this is the biggest gift they could’ve received. [Hamas leader, Yahya] Sinwar in particular seems to benefit from this: His internal foes, the IJ, are crushed, and he can now tell Gazans that this is what happens when you attack the Zionists without planning first, which is why only responsible leaders like himself can be trusted to plan and execute the grand attack.”
Islamic Jihad launched 1,100 rockets at Israel over the conflict’s 66 hours. Of those, 380 were intercepted by the Iron Dome air defense system and roughly 160 failed to cross the border, instead landing inside Gaza, according to the Israel Defense Forces. The same IDF source said that of the 26 Palestinian civilians who Palestinian officials say were killed during the fighting, 15, or 58%, were killed by Islamic Jihad misfires. In one incident captured on video released by the IDF Saturday night and depicted in the tweet below, a rocket reportedly fired from the Jabalya residential area can be seen curving back around after its launch and detonating inside Gaza. Explosions caused by the rocket’s impact killed numerous people, including four children, according to the IDF. —JS
In the Back Pages: Deborah Birx’s Guide to Destroying America
The Rest
→ Before leaving for their August break, Democratic senators capped off a marathon voting session over the weekend to pass a sweeping $430 billion spending plan. The Inflation Reduction Act passed with a 51-50 party-line vote and serves as a smaller version of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan that had been largely scuttled in congress. The smaller package aims to reduce prescription drug costs, cut down carbon emissions with tax incentives for green energy, and install a 15% minimum tax on large corporations. Heralded by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as “the boldest clean energy package in American history” that will also reduce household bills despite rising inflation expenses, the legislation has been roundly criticized by Republicans who say it will hurt the labor market and could in fact worsen inflation. The bill is expected to pass when it next moves on to the Democrat-led House.
→ After initially announcing that it would wind down its military drills around Taiwan, China instead continued with a fresh round of military exercises on Monday, intensifying the pressure on the island. In his first public comments since U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan prompted China’s retaliatory military war games, President Joe Biden on Monday said the escalation was concerning, “but I don’t think they’re going to do anything more than they are.” The Taiwan defense ministry said in a statement that 13 Chinese naval ships and 39 fighter planes were detected near the Taiwan Strait. A spokesperson for Taiwan’s defense ministry said at a press briefing that Taiwan’s armed forces had “calmly” managed the Chinese war games. Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was less sanguine, saying that the new drills indicated that “around us, a storm is gathering.” In a televised address, Loong said, “U.S.-China relations are worsening, with intractable issues, deep suspicions, and limited engagement.”
→ The plans to shutter Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in 2025, California’s last functioning nuclear power plant, might be put on pause by one of the state’s leading green-energy advocates, Gov. Gavin Newsom, amid rising fears that the state’s electrical system would be too vulnerable without it. With a rolling blackout in August 2020 that left hundreds of thousands of residents without electricity still in recent memory, there’s an effort underway now by Gov. Newsom’s office “to take all possible actions to avoid any possibility that the lights go out in California,” Matthew Freedman, an energy analyst, told the Associated Press. While green energy remains the long-term goal to power the state’s electrical grid, green system inputs have struggled to deliver reliable service in California, particularly as temperatures rise with climate change. Adhering to 2016’s closure agreement for the Diablo Canyon power plant now might leave the California grid vulnerable, with 9% of the state’s electrical supply powered by the plant. State legislators would have to act fast, however, if the plant were to stay online: Patti Poppe, the official in charge of the state’s energy utility, said a law would have to pass before October to give the utility company enough time to order supplies and make arrangements to keep the plant going safely beyond the scheduled 2025 sunset.
→ As many as 1,000 Amazon warehouse workers in the United Kingdom have walked off the job in a growing protest over paltry pay increases. Workers had been expecting raises of roughly 9%—$1.20 USD an hour on average—but got 3%, or some 43 cents, instead. “After COVID, after risking our lives in such uncertain times, it’s like spit in the face,” said one employee at Amazon’s Tilbury facility. “We can see the company getting the profits.” It’s not only the uneven distribution of the profits that has upset the workers but also the rising cost of living in Europe, as inflation and Russia’s war in Ukraine sends up the price of almost everything. Managers at these Amazon facilities, meanwhile, have been doing their best to get their employees back to work. In one video, a facility manager addresses her angry workers and notes that the employee canteen is not hospitable to conversation, complaining that the room is too hot. “We’re used to it!” one employee shouts back over the boos.
→ Abuses in the Trade NAFTA (TN) visa program are leading to abysmal labor conditions for well-trained and educated Mexican workers, according to a new report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The TN visa program promises a job in the United States to Mexican or Canadian citizens who have training in fields such as law, accounting, and education and who have at least a bachelor’s degree. But Mexican applicants who are awarded these visas are increasingly finding that, once they get to the United States, the promised white-collar position doesn’t exist. Instead they are lured into manual labor jobs, including factories where they work for 12 hours a day. A class-action lawsuit filed in April against a labor recruiter in Georgia accuses the company of this practice, leading to worries that abuses of the TN visa program—which is growing in popularity, with 24,904 TN visas issued in 2021, up from 16,119 just four years prior—are more widespread than is currently known.
→ The Great Barrier Reef in Australia seems to be doing better than ever, despite decades of predictions about the coming collapse of the world’s largest coral system. From 1985 to 2012, the coral coverage of the reef halved, leading to peer-reviewed academic articles predicting that it would halve again in the near future, and to headlines in The Sydney Morning Herald mourning “the great reef catastrophe.” Australia’s government releases data about coral coverage annually, and the falling rate of coverage was widely noted in the press—less so, however, the recent rise, with this year’s government data showing the reef’s coral coverage is as good as it’s been in more than three decades of observation. Not everyone is so convinced about the reef’s rebounding health, the Morning Herald included. It noted that the “recent flush of coral growth was dominated by fast-growing acropora species that are particularly vulnerable to damage” caused by climate-change-induced weather patterns.
→ With prices on homes and cars still riding high because of inflation, consumers are charging more routine expenses to credit cards, particularly to cover soaring bills at the grocery store. According to a new report by the New York Federal Reserve Bank, credit card debt increased 13% this year compared to the year prior, the highest jump in 20 years, with a record-breaking $100 billion in debt charged to credit cards. The runaway credit card spending is one more factor in the complicated picture about the health of the American economy, as a strong labor market and rising wages compete against the rate of inflation driving up the prices of household staples. A new report from Wells Fargo found that some 45% of Americans are relying on their credit card points and rewards to “offset some of the cost of everyday purchases.”
→ An 80-year-old woman was banned from using her town’s YMCA swimming pool after asking a transgender woman in the locker room if she had a penis. According to local reporting, octogenarian Julie Jaman, a longtime resident of Port Townsend, Washington, and user of the Y’s pool, was showering when she heard the low voice of Clementine Adams.
“Do you have a penis?” Jaman asked Adams.
“None of your business,” Adams responded.
“Get out of here, right now,” Jaman then said, before going to report the incident to the YMCA aquatics manager, Rowen DeLuna.
“You’re discriminating, and you can’t use the pool anymore, and I’m calling the police,” DeLuna responded.
Jaman, who has since been picketing outside the pool, said she was concerned because Adams, an employee of a summer program at the YMCA, was with four young girls who were undressing.
→ Tweet of the Day:
This thread from John Sailer, a fellow at the National Association of Scholars, looks at the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (or DEI) hiring standards for dozens of U.S. colleges and universities—standards that used to decide not only who to hire as faculty members but also whether those hired make tenure. Would-be professors in the biological sciences at Texas Tech are expected to have “clear and detailed ideas about advancing equity and inclusion,” while engineers aspiring to join the faculty of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln must be able to describe “multiple instances of involvement with diversity/inclusion groups, programs, etc.,” and must do so “in depth.” After reviewing these DEI requirements, Sailer notes that “assessing faculty ‘values’ and mandating their adherence to the politically coded concepts is a pretty straightforward violation of academic freedom.”
Read More:
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
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In Today’s Back Pages, we excerpt Michael Senger’s essay published in Monday’s Tablet showing how former White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx’s new book exposes how the United States was forced into lockdowns.
Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator under President Donald Trump, was one of the “trifecta” of three leading public officials who successfully pushed COVID lockdowns in the United States. Virtually every page of Birx’s new book, Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It’s Too Late, reads like a how-to guide from the front lines of subverting a democratic superpower from within. It bears repeating, from the outset, that lockdowns were never part of any democratic country’s pandemic preparedness plan prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan, China.
The lockdowns that Xi pioneered and Birx so zealously advocated for reportedly led to over 170,000 non-COVID excess deaths among young Americans while failing to meaningfully slow the spread of COVID anywhere they were tried. It would have been impossible for an enemy agent armed with anything less than nuclear weapons to have inflicted so much damage to America’s economy, social fabric, and historical freedoms in such a short period of time.
Notably, though Birx’s memoir has earned relatively few reviews from human readers on Amazon, it’s earned rave reviews from Chinese state media, a feat not shared even by the far more popular pro-lockdown books of professional genuflectors to power like Lawrence Wright.
The glowing response from Chinese state media should come as no surprise. Nearly every sentence of Birx’s book faithfully parrots the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign and domestic propaganda, which helped facilitate Xi’s weaponization of the COVID response to eliminate the independence of the CCP’s private sector rivals.
Chapter 1 opens with what Birx claims was her first impression of the virus:
I can still see the words splashed across my computer screen in the early morning hours of January 3. Though we were barely into 2020, I was stuck in an old routine, waking well before dawn and scanning news headlines online. On the BBC’s site, one caught my attention: “China Pneumonia Outbreak: Mystery Virus Probed in Wuhan.”
Indeed, that BBC article, which was posted at approximately 9:00 a.m. EST on Jan. 3, 2020, was the first in a Western news organization to discuss the outbreak of a new virus in Wuhan. Apparently, Birx was scanning British news headlines just as it appeared. Birx then tells us where she got her philosophy of disease mitigation, recalling how she immediately believed Chinese citizens “knew what had worked” against SARS-1: masks and distancing:
Government officials and citizens across Asia knew both the pervasive fear and the personal response that had worked before to mitigate the loss of life and the economic damage wrought by SARS and MERS. They wore masks. They decreased the frequency and size of social gatherings. Crucially, based on their recent experience, the entire citizenry and local doctors were ringing alarm bells loudly and early. Lives were on the line—lots of them. They knew what had worked before, and they would do it again.
Birx spends several pages tut-tutting the CCP for its “cover-up” of the virus (which Chinese state media pointedly didn’t mind), then tells us:
On January 3, the same day the BBC piece ran, the Chinese government officially notified the United States of the outbreak. Bob Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was contacted by his Chinese counterpart, George F. Gao.
Note that Jan. 3 was also the same day that heroic Chinese whistleblower Li Wenliang was reportedly admonished by Chinese authorities for sending a WeChat message about a “cover-up” of the outbreak. In other words, on the same day Li was “admonished,” the head of China’s CDC personally called U.S. CDC Director Robert Redfield to share the same information Li supposedly shared. Some cover-up.
From here, it gets worse. One page later, Birx tells us how traumatized she still is from having watched videos of Wuhan residents collapsing and falling dead in January 2020, and praises the “courageous doctor” who shared them online:
The video showed a hallway crowded with patients slumped in chairs. Some of the masked people leaned against the wall for support. The camera didn’t pan so much as zigzag while the Chinese doctor maneuvered her smartphone up the narrow corridor. My eye was drawn to two bodies wrapped in sheets lying on the floor amid the cluster of patients and staff. The doctor’s colleagues, their face shields and other personal protective equipment in place, barely glanced at the lens as she captured the scene. They looked past her, as if at a harrowing future they could all see and hoped to survive. I tried to increase the volume, but there was no sound. My mind seamlessly filled that void, inserting the sounds from my past, sounds from other wards, other places of great sorrow. I had been here before. I had witnessed scenes like this across the globe, in HIV ravaged communities—when hospitals were full of people dying of AIDS before we had treatment or before we ensured treatment to those who needed it. I had lived this, and it was etched permanently in my brain: the unimaginable, devastating loss of mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, brothers, sisters.
Staring at my computer screen, I was horrified by the images from Wuhan, the suffering they portrayed, but also because they confirmed what I’d suspected for the last three weeks: Not only was the Chinese government underreporting the real numbers of the infected and dying in Wuhan and elsewhere, but the situation was definitely far more dire than most people outside that city realized. Up until now, I’d been only reading or hearing about the virus. Now it had been made visible by a courageous doctor sharing this video online.
Birx’s book was published in April 2022. The early videos she recounts as the source of her trauma were exposed as fake by the Associated Press and other outlets in February of 2020 …
Read the full article here.
What Happened Today: August 08, 2022
Read this essay and Atlas's book and you will conclude that Birkx copied the CCP playbook hook, line and sinker