The Omicron variant has fuelled a “worrying” surge in coronavirus cases in South Africa and is rapidly becoming the dominant strain, local health officials have said, as more countries including the US detected their first cases of the new strain.
The United Arab Emirates and South Korea – which is already battling a worsening outbreak and record daily infections – also confirmed cases of the Omicron variant.
Can we nuke China now?
The New York Times has identified another culprit in its war on “misinformation”, claiming that cute animals featuring in viral content help to spread right-wing propaganda and coronavirus conspiracies.
The mother of Waukesha attack suspect Darrell E. Brooks Jr. has penned a lengthy letter charging that the American legal system failed to provide her mentally ill son adequate resources throughout his life.
According to Dawn Woods, Brooks came from a “loving Christian family and is the grandson of ministers,” alleging that he has “suffered from mental health issues since he was very young.”
Will Thomas was a moderately successful swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania’s men’s swim team for three years. But then he took a year off, reemerged as transgender, and started dominating the women’s swim team.
Airbnb has reportedly listed more than a dozen properties on land owned by the Xinjiang paramilitary corporation, which has been sanctioned by the US over its alleged involvement in mass human rights abuses against Uyghurs by the Chinese government.
The American media outlet Axios reported on Wednesday that the short-term rental company was at risk of exposure to US regulations preventing business dealings with sanctioned entities. Airbnb, which is a major sponsor of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, said it was not required to vet the “underlying landowner” of properties it lists.
Understanding the sociology of organizations
America’s major institutions have gone woke the same way that someone goes bankrupt: slowly, then all at once. How is it that so many of us have had the experience of being in a diversity-training session divided into racially segregated “affinity groups” or reading yet another sackcloth-and-ashes statement from management and thinking: They can’t possibly believe this, right? Any answer should begin with the dominant theory from the sociology of organizations: neo-institutionalism and isomorphism. The theory explains that organizations go beyond their core competencies to imitate market leaders and to meet the demands of their trading partners, the regulatory state, and key employees.
Two American cities, San Francisco and Chicago, seem to be competing to see which one can descend farther into the dystopia of gang rule, with honest citizens held captive to anarchy in the streets, afraid to leave their homes and finding nowhere to buy life’s essentials if they do venture out. Master filmmaker John Carpenter got it wrong when he predicted which American cities would fail in his 1980s and ’90s dystopian fantasies Escape from New York and Escape from L.A.
The Waukesha killer’s allies are sitting in the White House.
Two years ago, Senator Kamala Harris, along with Senator Cory Booker and six other Democrat Senate members, attacked the Justice Department for monitoring black supremacists. The politicians signed a letter falsely claiming that black identity extremists was “a fabricated term based on a faulty assessment of a small number of isolated incidents”.
And they argued that monitoring black racists was racist.
There’s nothing principled about its rejection of the death penalty
The state of Oklahoma plans to execute Bigler Jobe Stouffer II on December 9, and officials there are hoping for an uneventful procedure. For the past decade, Oklahoma’s lethal injection program has attracted international scrutiny for its botched executions, including one in 2014 that lasted nearly 45 minutes and another this past October in which the prisoner convulsed and vomited over himself.
In June, I published a carefully researched and edited paper entitled “Net Zero 2050: Rhetoric and Realities” in the “policy brief” series of the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan, where at the time I was an adjunct professor.
The paper argues that net-zero rhetoric is wishful political thinking shaped by ideology instead of fact. The ultimate goal of net-zero politics is to impose a radical energy transition that demands a top-to-bottom physical and social-economic restructuring of society, with no credible road map in sight. Think of it as telling people to step out of a perfectly serviceable airplane without a parachute, with assurances that politicians will work out alternatives on the way down.
Just 64 days after I moved to Milwaukee, my apartment building’s security called to say that someone had been seen trying to steal my car. The thief had been interrupted, and the car wasn’t taken. But the passenger-side window was smashed, the glove compartment was ripped out, the base of the steering wheel was dismantled, and the ignition was toast.
Leftists try to flip the script on communism in Hollywood.
The other day, as part of my constant effort to find non-political content to vary my daily cultural diet, I started listening to a new series of YouTube podcasts about the life of Lucille Ball. Produced by Turner Classic Movies, it’s narrated by Ben Mankiewicz, the late Robert Osborne’s successor as TCM host. The series was pleasantly diverting — right up until Episode 7, “Red Scare,” which, having some familiarity with Lucy’s life story, I should have seen coming.
You see, Lucy’s maternal grandfather, Fred Hunt, was a communist. In biographies, he comes off as being rather like Arthur Spooner on King of Queens — a lovable eccentric with happy memories of socialist summer camp and of Broadway agitprop by Clifford Odets. At 24, at Fred’s urging, Lucy — who knew nothing about politics — registered to vote as a communist. It was the mid-1930s; Lucy wasn’t yet famous and communism wasn’t yet taken seriously in the corridors of power.
While many in the U.S. have attacked China for its role in allowing COVID-19 to spread across the globe, China is also the primary source of another plague that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in recent years: Fentanyl.
Opioid and drug overdose deaths skyrocketed 200% in the U.S. from 2000 to 2014, and haven’t stopped increasing since. The country hit a record 63,600 deaths in 2016 and we crossed the 100,000 death threshold for the 12-month period following April 2020, with the majority of those deaths coming from synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
Crashed British F-35 failed to take off, leaked video shows
Well thank God he is still with us! That’s all I can say. pic.twitter.com/YtL6f0BFAm
— Seb H (@sebh1981) November 29, 2021
Canada’s mini-Al Gore is up to his old tricks. Radical environmentalist David Suzuki, who transitioned from early fruit-fly expert to later doomsday prophet, is once more in the news, foretelling the eruption of violence against the construction of oil pipelines. “We’re in deep, deep doo-doo,” he said at an Extinction Rebellion event on Vancouver Island. “This is what we’re come to. The next stage after this, there are going to be pipelines blown up if our leaders don’t pay attention to what’s going on.”
