He pointed to protests in colleges and high schools after the Hamas assault and said: “Where are they being fed this propaganda? They’re finding it on TikTok.”
Who does this idiot think is putting this content on TikTok? "China"? It's the damn users and viewers themselves, dumbass!
xpressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officialsand Others
Countless statements of genocidal intent by government and military officials.
Imposing measures intended to prevent Palestinian births
This one might not have been true at the beginning, but is now.
On 16 November 2023, 15 United Nations Special Rapporteurs and 21 members of UnitedNations Working Groups, warning of a “genocide in the making” in Gaza, observed that the level ofdestruction that had by then taken place of “housing units, as well as hospitals, schools, mosques,bakeries, water pipes, sewage and electricity networks . . . threatens to make the continuation ofPalestinian life in Gaza impossible”
Level of destruction of means necessary to sustain Palestinian life. Details below.
Experts are beginning to warn that the numbers of Palestinians dying as a result of disease andhunger, could already be outstripping violent deaths caused by Israeli army assaults. 385 There havealready been over 360,000 documented cases of communicable diseases reported in UNRWA sheltersalone, brought on or exacerbated by unsanitary conditions, hunger and lack of clean water, with theactual numbers believed to be considerably higher
There could already be more people who have died of hunger or disease than have died due to the military assault (i.e., it's likely more than 30,000).
In addition to the war wounded, there are hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza whostill need routine medical care for conditions such as high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease ordiabetes
Impact of destruction of medical system on people with chronic medical conditions.
disinfectants370 –– have led not only to otherwise unnecessary amputations of limbs, 371 but also toamputations without anaesthesia, often undertaken by flashlight. 372 Pregnant women are also beingsubjected to caesareans without anaesthetic
Amputations and c-sections being carried out without anesthesia.
Other Palestinians have died as a direct result of Israel cutting off electricity and fuel tohospitals; they include five premature babies and 40 ICU and kidney patients at Al Shifa hospital. 355Other Palestinians have died as a direct result of Israel’s forced evacuation of hospitals, including atleast four babies in Al Nasr hospital, whose tiny bodies were found weeks later –– during a temporaryceasefire –– decomposing in their hospital beds
Cutoff of fuel and electricity has caused many of the hospital deaths.
Almost above all else, Israel’s military assault on Gaza has been an attack on Gaza’s medicalhealthcare system, indispensable to the life and survival of the Palestinians in Gaza
Total war on Gaza's healthcare system.
On 20 December 2023, the Director General of the World Health Organization warnedthat “Gaza is already experiencing soaring rates of infectious disease outbreaks. Diarrhoea cases amongchildren aged under 5 are 25 times what they were before the conflict. Such illnesses can be lethal formalnourished children, more so in the absence of functioning health services”
Soaring rates of infectious disease.
Today, as a result of Israel’s military operation, nearly 1.2 million civilians are sheltering inUNRWA premises. The Agency has become the primary platform for humanitarian assistanceto over 2.2 million people in Gaza — a platform on the verge of collapse
The majority of Gaza's population are in UNRWA shelters. Cutoffs of funding to UNRWA are obviously intended to augment the genocide. Western nations' complicity is clearer than ever.
Experts are now predicting that more Palestinians in Gaza may die from starvation and diseasethan airstrikes,308 and yet Israel is intensifying its bombing campaign, precluding the effective deliveryof humanitarian assistance to Palestinians. It is clear that Israel is through its actions and policies inGaza, deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about theirdestruction
Predictions that impact of starvation and disease will be worse than that of bombings.
This is all happening to a population that was already extremely vulnerable as a result of Israel’sprior actions against Gaza. Israel has long hindered the creation and repair of water installation anddesalinisation plants in Gaza, such that 95 per cent of water from Gaza’s sole aquifer was alreadyunsuitable for consumption prior to 7 October 2023.299 Through its 16-year blockade, Israel alsoseverely impacted water supply. 300 Its repeated attacks on Gaza and its restrictions on repairing thedegraded wastewater infrastructure damaged the soil, rendering agriculture challenging. 301 Israel alsorestricted access by Palestinians in Gaza to up to 35 per cent of agricultural land and up to 85 per centof Gaza’s fishing waters.302 Consequently, over 68 per cent of households (around 1.3 million people)were severely or moderately food insecure prior to 7 October 2023, with 58 per cent of the populationdependent on humanitarian aid. 303 7,685 children under five years of age in Gaza were suffering fromlife-threatening ‘wasting’, the deadliest form of child malnutrition.
There were already severe shortages of food and water due to Israel's actions prior to 10/7.
The lack of water is severely impacting lactating women, in particular, who, even if undertakingonly a moderate amount of exercise, require a supply of 7.5 litres of water a day for drinking, sanitationand hygiene to keep themselves and their babies healthy. 295 Young mothers — unable to breastfeed forlack of proper nutrition arising from the food scarcity — have been forced to use contaminated waterto prepare formula — where it is available — risking disease in vulnerable babies. In parallel, thechronic unavailability of formula is also risking the lives of newborn babies, who are already reportedlydying from avoidable causes due to the absence of medical care, food, water and adequate sanitation.
Impact of lack of water on postpartum women, who often can't breastfeed and must feed their babies formula made with contaminated water, if they can even get the water. Babies are already reportedly dying from malnutrition.
Water is also severely depleted. Israel continues to cut off piped water for the North of Gaza, 288and the North’s water desalination plant is non-functioning. 289 From 15 October 2023, Israel beganpiping a small amount of water to the South, in part to “push the civilian population to the southern[part of the] Strip”.290 The damage from Israeli airstrikes and shelling has also rendered most of thewater system inoperable.
Attack on and cutoff of water supply as well.
Hamas-led attacks that killed 1,139 IsraelisOpens in a new tab
Bias of your own here. Many of those people died as a result of Israeli fire.
Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on the territory after Hamas seized power in 2007
Egypt imposed a blockade?? Seriously??
Both are potential war crimes.
Potential war crimes?? Seriously??
srael’s war in Gaza has created a humanitarian catastrophe
I guess that's fairly honest, although precisely how this catastrophe happened is not discussed until later.
More than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war
Killed by whom?
To retaliate
Impression is given that they are retaliating against Hamas rather than directly targeting civilians.
The war began on Oct. 7 after Hamas attacked Israel and killed an estimated 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials.
No mention of the fact, admitted even in some Israeli media outlets and by some IDF officers, that Israel was responsible for a lot of those 1200 deaths.
Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, contended that Israel did not stand in the way of humanitarian assistance and blamed Hamas, the Palestinian group that rules Gaza, for any shortages. He accused Hamas of seizing some of the aid for its own uses. He did not provide evidence, but Western and Arab officials have said that Hamas is known to have a large stockpile of supplies, including food, fuel and medicine.
So they just let Israel off scot free in terms of responsibility. They say the Israeli official claimed Hamas seized some of this aid but didn't offer any evidence, and then quote "Western and Arab officials" to buttress the view that Hamas is to blame. The fact that Israel deliberately cut off food, water, medicine, etc. as completely as possible and is still doing so is not mentioned.
Two first responders said they found a dead woman tied to a tree, naked.
Who are these "first responders"? Are they from that Zaka group that concocted a lot of the atrocity propaganda?
One soldier peered through the window of the Bachars’ safe room — the same window through which the gunmen had, hours earlier, thrown several grenades.
It's implied that this plus the shooting of Bachar led to the deaths, but no direct info about cause of death of the mother and brother.
Minutes later, the militants launched a rocket-propelled grenade, according to the general and other witnesses who spoke to The Times.
Note that this is the same general who lied about all sorts of stuff, according to an EI article on Dec. 24.
Using the minibus driver as a translator, the captors explained that they intended to take the hostages back to Gaza. The Israeli security forces were beginning to regain control of Be’eri, so they asked Ms. Porat to help them negotiate safe passage. She set up a call between the Hamas commander and an Arabic-speaking police officer. “Hello, God give you health,” the Hamas commander told the officer in Arabic, in a call recorded by the police and obtained by The Times. “God give you health,” said the officer. “Who’s speaking with me? What’s your name?” “God bless you, I’m from the Qassam brigades,” the commander replied, referring to Hamas’s military wing. “If you cause us any trouble, I’ll kill one of the hostages with me.” “What’s the problem?” the officer asked. “Talk to me.”
Okay, so this first part flatly contradicts the claim from earlier about the captors' intentions.
Families had to choose between being burned alive or shot to death.
Odd that the third posibility, being kidnapped, isn't mentioned. And who was it that was shot to death? Only a handful are mentioned as having been shot to death.
The fear spread quickly in Be’eri, as scores of gunmen flowed into the village. The attackers almost immediately killed the head of the local emergency squad, a group of residents trained to help in moments of crisis. Their leader dead, the surviving volunteers could not unlock the community storeroom where many of their guns were kept. Some of them were left unarmed.
Just casually mentioning "emergency squade" "trained to help in moments of crisis" and "could not [get their guns" and "SOME of them were left unarmed." This is an armed security team they're talking about. Obviously that makes them targets.
Unseen by Mr. Bitton, the second gunman sneaked out from behind a tree, weapon raised, and fired into the car. Mr. Bitton twisted in his seat, twitched, before slumping motionless.
But who or what was this seen by? No mention of the source of this information is given.
On the eastern flank of Be’eri, another squad of attackers gathered 14 hostages inside a ransacked home and used them as human shields during a standoff with Israeli forces; some of the hostages were killed in the crossfire, during a delayed and chaotic military response.
All but two of them were, as well as all the Palestinian fighters, largely due to Israeli tank shells that incinerated them. And no indication that they were intentionally being used as human shields other than by the one fighter who surrendered.
“The negotiations are over,” General Hiram recalled telling the tank commander. “Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties.” The tank fired two light shells at the house. Shrapnel from the second shell hit Mr. Dagan in the neck, severing an artery and killing him, his wife said. During the melee, the kidnappers were also killed. Only two of the 14 hostages — Ms. Dagan and Ms. Porat — survived.
Okay, so all of them were killed by Israeli fire.
They positioned the hostages between the troops and the house, according to Ms. Dagan and Ms. Porat.
This is the only mention of Porat's and Dagat's comments about the incident.
Another medic begged for mercy. The gunmen shot her dead. Over the next few minutes, they killed three more people at the clinic, strafing its walls with gunfire.
According to whom? Very odd that no mention of any eyewitness who reported this, nor mention of a camera that recorded it.
They had all been shot dead.
By whom?
It would be another day before the soldiers regained full control over the neighborhood. By then, bodies lay strewn on sidewalks across the village. More than 120 homes stood smoldering or in ruins. Scores of cars had been burned to ashen husks
Does this sound like damage caused by lightly armed militia groups?
Until they ran out of ammunition, the volunteers from the emergency squad had slowed the attackers’ advance, fending them off for hours around the clinic. Two of them stood at the entrance to the clinic, opening fire on every gunman they saw.
"emergency squad"
After abandoning their clothes in the fire, the six of them were nearly naked.
So no indication that anyone deliberately stripped them.
Gazans who roamed the kibbutz
Who WERE these "Gazans who roamed the kibbutz"?
Residents were rounded up and taken at gunpoint to the terrorists’ vehicles. Footage showed one squad of militants corralling barefoot residents along a village street, and another group leading an 85-year-old woman through a garden.
So, kidnapping, but no mention of plundering or murdering.
Footage from the gate shows Israeli soldiers shooting at a car of militants, two of whom flee before the car catches fire.
Claim that it's a "car of militants" with no information regarding whether it contained Israelis.
By now, a small group of Israeli special forces had arrived by helicopter. They tried to fight their way through the kibbutz, but were heavily outnumbered. One soldier was shot dead, and another was wounded by a gunshot to the chest, according to two members of the unit and a civilian who accompanied them.
Okay, so two confirmed military casualties.
As the Bachars hid in their safe room, groups of men were rampaging across the kibbutz — killing, looting and burning, surveillance video shows. Some were uniformed militants from Hamas. Others appeared to be civilians from Gaza who had followed in their wake.
So this is an admission that people who weren't part of any of the armed groups were engaging in killing, looting and burning.
They spent a year together in New York, where she worked as a nanny and he as a mover, before deciding to build a life together back in Be’eri.
Living freely where they want, in New York or Be'eri.
Avida Bachar had lived in Be’eri all his life and managed the village farms, cultivating wheat, mangoes and avocados.
Yadda yadda hadda. Heartwarming story of settlers living on stolen land who was just there farming.
Overwhelmed and outmanned, the police fled. Once again, the village’s emergency squad was left to defend Be’eri alone.
"Emergency squad"
A small group of police officers managed to reach Be’eri at 7:37 a.m., driving an unmarked car.
So police officers were there within an hour.
Where is the army? How long could it take to send forces by helicopter? 11:37
In fact, IDF helicopters were already on the scene several hours prior to this, according to a report in an Israeli media outlet, Yedioth Ahronoth. https://new.thecradle.co/articles-id/11993
Yet in a country that had shifted to the right, Be’eri was also known as a left-wing stronghold, filled with those who still believed in peace with the Palestinians.
And yet they lived in a town forming part of the security zone around Gaza. Are we to conclude that these supposed left-wingers who supposedly believed in peace were just stupidly serving as human shields?
Residents were shot in their bedrooms, on the sidewalk, and under trees, where they lay like rag dolls in a heap. Others were trapped in burning buildings, their bodies found charred beyond recognition.
It's implied that all of this was due to Hamas et al., with no evidence provided.
The kibbutz was founded on the night of Oct. 5, 1946, one of 11 Jewish outposts established at the same time in an area largely populated by Arabs. In 1948, Arabs and Jews fought over the area during a war that forged the boundaries of the new state of Israel.
No mention of "Arabs" being forced to flee their homes, and '48 is just described as "Arabs and Jews fought over the area during a war that forged the boundaries..."
Ever since, Be’eri has been on the frontline of several wars between Israel and Hamas.
"Wars between Israel and Hamas" rather than Israel "mowing the lawn" in Gaza.
Israel occupied Gaza during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, withdrawing its troops in 2005 to allow Palestinians to run the territory. Hamas, an Islamist group opposed to Israel’s existence, seized power there in 2007, prompting Israel and Egypt to place Gaza under a crippling blockade.
"Opposed to Israel's existence" is a lie. "Israel occupied Gaza..." is stated in a completely neutral manner. And no mention is made of the fact that Hamas was fairly elected, or that the troop withdrawal occurred because Palestinians kicked their ass. Egypt is partially blamed for Israel's blockade, and the imposition of a blockade was described in a neutral manner.
They ransacked those neighborhoods house by house, systematically setting fire to scores of homes
It is simply asserted that they "systematically set fire to scores of homes." The possibility that homes were set on fire due to Israeli fire is not acknowledged.
Two veterans of the Israeli military’s elite tactical rescue squad Unit 669, who were volunteer rescuers on 7 October, told Kan earlier this month what they witnessed in Be’eri.
Specifically, as mentioned in the tweet, they said helicopter fired into Be'eri.
They lie relentlessly, shamelessly and so it didn’t seem like they actually deleted them out of shame
They deleted them because they eventually realized that it wasn't very plausible that damage on such a massive scale could have been caused by Hamas or other militants with RPGs, and looked instead like damage caused by Hellfire missiles, heavy-caliber machine gun fire, etc.
”
So how many thousands of words can you write about allegations without providing a single piece of evidence for them?
Samantha Pearson, the head of the University of Alberta’s sexual assault center, who claimed there was no proof that Hamas terrorists raped women during the terror attack. Following a determined public effort, in which Elkayam-Levy and her colleagues took part, the university president announced Pearson’s dismissal from her job. The next target is Reem Alsalem, a special rapporteur at the UN Human Rights Council, whose role is to monitor whether member states meet the international standards for protecting women against violence. “I received an email in which she demanded to see ‘proof’ for our accusations,” Elkayam-Levy says. “She is a rapporteur of Jordanian-Palestinian background who recently released a statement describing October 7 as the day Israel launched a genocide. Meaning, this isn’t just silence, it’s the appropriation of the events of October 7 to Palestinian suffering. It’s a totally insane move in my view.
So basically when people say they haven't seen evidence or ask for evidence, your response is to try to get them fired or otherwise punished? Again, this shoots your credibility to hell.
In the few cases in which someone else witnessed their suffering, I assume that then too questions will arise as to exactly what he saw and whether he is a reliable witness. I don’t intend to participate in that game
That's how judging whether someone committed a crime works. It's not a game, it's just basic fairness to the accused. Do you not believe in fair trials (or objective evaluation of evidence by the public)? #BelieveWomen doesn't mean accept any allegations, particularly not allegations by anonymous third parties, without question.
Am I the one who needs to provide the evidence for the terrorists’ deeds?
Someone does. Just calling them terrorists and claiming they committed mass rape without presenting the evidence you say you have really calls your credibility into question.
If there are survivors among those who were harmed, decades could go by before they gather the courage to talk about it.
That may be, and it's certainly a woman's prerogative not to give testimony about having been raped, but if that's the case, then there's no rape case.
Questions are asked like: Is there or isn’t there semen? Was there or wasn’t there a rape kit? Those same female jurists with international reputations who are conducting this discussion apparently do not have a basic understanding of international law.
They're just asking what evidence you have. What does that have to do with understanding international law?
In Elkayam-Levy’s view, this is a replication of those same denial mechanisms often applied concerning individual cases of rape. “When a woman is raped, the discourse immediately revolves around evidentiary questions – is there or is there not evidence of rape? Doubt is cast on the woman, her reliability is questioned, and a question mark is posed as to whether it did or did not happen. This casting of doubt is now directed against us at the collective level.
But what woman? There's not a single testimony from a woman here. No evidence has been presented here, just claims that this woman's commission has evidence.
Moreover, in an interview with CNN, President Isaac Herzog revealed a pamphlet that was found on the body of a terrorist that included a detailed checklist for the kidnapping of hostages
Why hasn't this pamphlet been shown? Why should we believe the President of Israel's claims? Why would a "terrorist" be carrying such a checklist/set of instructions with them?
She described a number of videos that Hamas distributed in which naked women are seen, with signs on them that leave little room for doubt. In one case, the victim was taken to Gaza with no clothes on and unconscious, and displayed before a cheering crowd. Pictures that had come into her hands showed other victims of sex crimes.
What signs? What does a picture of a victim of a sex crime look like?
She also read out several chilling descriptions by eyewitnesses of acts of rape.
Who are these eyewitnesses? Were any of them actually women who allege they had been raped?
directives received by the Hamas terrorists to carry out sex crimes
?
Elkayam-Levy, of the department of international relations at Hebrew University
Definitely not a source we would expect to be biased. [eye roll]
What caused Cochav Elkayam-Levy to break down this week was a brief phone conversation with Michal Herzog, the wife of Israel’s president.
Seriously??
Nor was it scrutiny of the pictures of women, the state of whose bodies leave no doubt as to the terrible things that had been done to them before they were murdered
You can tell if a woman has been sexually assaulted just by looking at her body?
Israeli policies in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and to explicitly condemn the mass murder committed by Hamas.
"Israeli policies in the Gaza Strip" vs. "mass murder committed by Hamas"
Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently met Israeli leaders to urge a humanitarian pause, but Israel’s bombing campaign has only intensified.
One of the speakers mentioned that so far only six of the 535 Members of Congress have come out in support of a ceasefire.
THE FIRST such challenge came in the 1840 presidential election, and the results were modest. Abolitionist James Birney, running as the candidate of the newly formed Liberty Party, won 0.3 percent of the popular vote. Undeterred, Birney ran again for the Liberty Party ticket in 1844--this time with Douglass a vocal supporter. He won only 2.3 percent of the popular vote, but the contest between the Whig candidate, Henry Clay, and the Democratic candidate, James Polk, was very close. Polk won the popular vote by less than 40,000 votes. Birney and the Liberty Party were accused of winning enough support in New York that would have otherwise to Clay to swing that state to Polk--and its 36 electoral votes at the time were the margin of victory for Polk in the Electoral College. Did that make the abolitionists election "spoilers"? There's no doubt that James Polk was one of the most rabidly pro-slavery Democratic presidents.
And note that James Birney had been a slaveowner up until 1834.
ndividuals should be allowed to protect/heal themselves in a manner that best supports their medical and spiritual beliefs.
Since when have public health policies been centered around catering to individuals' religious/spiritual beliefs, or the medical views of individuals who often lack any medical expertise? Should we adopt policy regarding climate change that caters to individuals' beliefs in a similar fashion? Ignore what scientific experts say, and just go with whatever members of the public feel like?
Under no circumstances shall any medical treatment or procedure — including psychotropic medications, vaccines and/or other injectable treatments — be mandated or coerced
So we should do away with mandated vaccines for schoolchildren, then?
Lockdowns, mandates and passports are the major issue of the day
But not climate change, poverty, war, lack of health care, etc.? Or the fact that so many people got severely ill from or died from Covid? You guys sound like a bunch of Libertarians!
Vaccine mandates and vaccine passports are among the most vile, unconstitutional, immoral, unscientific, discriminatory and outright criminal policies ever enforced upon the population and goes against everything the Green Party stands for under Social Justice.
Vaccine mandates have existed for over 100 years, and not once in its history in the US has the Green Party ever protested against vaccine mandates or claimed that they went against Greens' social justice values. Indeed, it's a social injustice to recklessly expose the most medically vulnerable people to a disease that could make them severely ill, disable them, or kill them. This is straight-up ableism by the GPBC.
This once again stereotypes trans activists as an angry, entitled, and vicious mob.
Pretty obvious that's exactly what you are.
but their bumbling inability to find their consciences under pressure in the first months of 2020 might end up having lasting consequences, for society and science.
You're the one who needs to find your conscience. You're using this "drama" as clickbait to drive revenue and have never once been willing to examine the actual evidence regarding where Covid came from (or indeed examine how the thought process of these scientists evolved as the evidence rolled in)--I don't know, maybe you think that would be boring? Wouldn't get you as many readers?
With everything on the line, and millions of lives at stake, they were not only unable in the end to say what they really thought, but as my partner Walter Kirn points out, they joined up with a mechanism that worked to suppress and stamp out the very thoughts they themselves first had.
No, they changed their minds in light of evidence that challenged their initial impression, you nitwit!
We now know the first three people to get COVID worked in the Wuhan lab: Will the US government act?
How do you know?
Public and Racket are the first publications to reveal the names of the three sick WIV workers and place them directly in the lab that collected and experimented with SARS-like viruses poised for human emergence.
But not the first publications to fail to even mention any of the evidence tying the initial outbreak of COVID to the Huanan market.
coauthor with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid19.
Which made her a shit-ton of money.
Is “woman” reducible to merely that?
The point of defining what a woman is is to state its essence. Women as individuals are obviously far more than just that, but regardless of what else they may be, what defines them as women is that they are adult human females.
Perhaps this is why What Is a Woman? struggles to answer its own question. Even as the film does an admirable job pointing out transgenderism’s utter inability to define womanhood
But that's the whole point!
But for a film that invokes “truth” as the ground of its argument, it seems odd to leave God out.
This is an odd reaction to me. What does "God" have to do with finding out the truth about gender.
Trans people are broken and lost, and our endgame should not be to rub their nose in their brokenness but to lift their eyes to the hope that can finally heal
It's not necessarily them we need to persuade, at least at first. Showing how ridiculous their views are is actually quite an important objective.
For Christians, the posture of mockery cannot be the way.
Sure it can.
At present, more and more clues from the international science community are pointing the origins of virus to sources around the world. Many have raised questions and concerns about US bio-military bases at Fort Detrick and around the world, according to Mao.
And now the Chinese official is herself putting politics before science. As she well knows, the WHO-China collaborative report as well as subsequent research overwhelmingly points to a zoonotic origin of the virus, with the initial major outbreak centered around the Huanan Market.
Moreover, in terms of the timing of the adjustment, it is done during the window of opportunity for a shift in response strategy. Doing it before or after this time window is undesirable.
Strongly disagree that mid-winter was a good time for this.
Global prevention and control practices have proven that Omicron cannot be eradicated.
WHAT "global" prevention and control practices? They have barely existed for the majority of the Omicron portion of the pandemic in most countries. Mask mandates have hardly existed anywhere for months, let alone quarantines, lockdowns, mass testing and contact tracing, etc. China is one of the few countries where serious efforts have been made to control Omicron. It may not be possible for currently available control measures to eradicate Omicron, but they could certainly have brought it down to China's previously low levels if they had been applied worldwide.
The symptoms of Omicron-infected patients are similar to those of influenza patients, and it's difficult to distinguish between the two infections.
They overlap, but there are symptoms people with COVID can get that people with flu NEVER get, such as loss of taste and smell. It's pretty easy to distinguish between them with tests. And even IF it were true that flu and Omicron were similar in average severity, Omicron impacts far more people because it spreads so easily.
The Omicron variant mainly invades the upper respiratory tract, and the infected people mostly have symptoms such as fever, dry or sore throat and cough, while the proportion of patients with serious illnesses such as pneumonia in the lower respiratory tract is low. Less than 10 percent of the patients develop pneumonia, and the share of patient suffering critical conditions is low, according to China's National Health Commission.
No mention of long COVID, which affects about 5% of those infected with Omicron according to a British study, and no mention of other possible long-term pathogenic outcomes.
Jiao said that winter is the season during which respiratory and other diseases interact often impacting the elderly, thus relatively large proportions of elderly people have been victims of the current wave of the epidemic. This reminds us to focus more on elderly patients and try our best to save lives.
So then why reopen during the winter? Given that winter is both the season when people are most likely to be in poorly ventilated indoor spaces (too cold to open windows) and a season when people travel a great deal, the timing of China's reopening could not have been worse.
Zeng Guang, a former researcher at the China CDC, observed that the COVID-19 infection has changed with time. While its transmissibility has increased, its ability to cause death has declined.
It hasn't changed as much as a lot of folks in China, including scientists, seem to think. Omicron has killed well over a million people, put millions more in the hospital, and causes roughly 5% of infected people to develop long COVID.
Wu said these policy adjustments were rolled out when the number of deaths per week globally had hit the lowest level and stayed below 10,000 for consecutive weeks.
But the ONLY time since March of 2020 when that was true was this past summer, when it dipped below that level for about 3 weeks in June. It's been ABOVE 10,000 per week (1428 per day) for the ENTIRE fall and winter. And now we've learned that China BY ITSELF has been above that level of deaths from December 8 through January 12 (about 60,000 deaths in a 5-week period).
"Around 10 to 30 percent of Chinese people will get infected this winter, and the fatality rate will range from 0.09 to 0.16 percent," he said.
This estimate puts the range of possible deaths at between 126,000 and 672,000. Although far below what Western sources are estimating, it would still constitute an increase of about 20 to 100 times the current death rate of 5200. I don't consider this acceptable, and hopefully this estimate will prove wrong in a good way and if necessary the Chinese public will pressure the government in the opposite direction from recently.
Russia has held plebiscites for annexation in four oblasts it controls: Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. They report percentages in the high 90s in favor of annexations in all four territories. No doubt many supporters of the Ukrainian government will have fled the area, chosen not to vote, or feared the consequences of voting against annexation, so these results can’t be regarded as very meaningful
I'm speechless at the ignorance here. First, Russia did not arrange the referendums, the governments of the four oblasts did. Second, this misstates the results--it was only in Donetsk and Luhansk that the vote was in the high 90s in favor of "annexation" (i.e., joining Russia), which is an unsurprising result given that 1) these are the most ethnically Russian provinces, 2) they've been getting attacked by Kiev for 8 years, and 3) they'd already voted for autonomy from Kiev by an overwhelming majority in 2014. The author needs to look at what people who actually live there have to say--why they voted overwhelmingly to leave Ukraine. Although it's true that some, probably disproportionately supporters of the Ukrainian government, have fled the region, there were high turnouts for these referendums and there were very good reasons for the overwhelming vote--first and foremost, that Ukraine is a repressive and violent place, particularly for ethnic Russians, and secondly Ukraine has been the poorest country in Europe for some time, whereas Russia has had tremendous economic growth for most of this century. Certainly the circumstances were less than ideal, but LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE there who are openly giving their reasons for their vote. Like the overwhelming national vote for Zelensky in 2019, it was a vote for peace! Zelensky of course did not deliver, but these people look at Crimea which has been at peace and prospered since it re-joined Russia in 2014 and long for the same for themselves. How can anyone not see that??
I was at the Socialism Conference in Chicago this September and was talking to some comrades from the Bolshevik Tendency, who are a split from a split from the Spartacist League, and they were bragging to me about how they were the biggest Left group that supported a Russian victory. Their membership is at most in the dozens worldwide.
So the sentiments of socialists in the global hegemon we live in are somehow representative of those in other countries? Are you fucking kidding me?
When the Paris Commune was declared in March 1871, Bebel and Liebknecht defended it in the Reichstag, telling the reactionary Junkers there that it was exactly what the workers’ party stood for. They suffered two years of imprisonment as a result.
And is there anyone in Congress right now who would in a million years take a position remotely comparable to that?
Let’s be sure to understand how far below that level of commitment and sacrifice DSA’s elected members in congress are right now when they vote for tens of billions of dollars to advance the US global strategy and expand the war economy.
Okay, I guess you do understand this. Had me worried.
Right now the socialist movement in Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and most of the rest of Europe is extremely weak.
They are hardly comparably weak. The CPRF is the #2 party in the Duma. The US has not elected any socialists to Congress in many decades. Calling the likes of AOC or Jamaal Bowman socialists is an absolute joke, and I question the sanity of anyone who thinks that Bowman's membership in DSA is anything other than utterly meaningless political posturing on his part. He's pro-capitalist and imperialist, full stop.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s possible to turn this war into a civil war in the United States.
No shit, really?
The Russian national project is motivated in large part by fear of the growing encirclement it has faced the past three decades, but there are also “big Russian” aspirations to become a great power again and re-subordinate former parts of the Russian empire.
Never mind that you've presented zero evidence of this. That doesn't mean it isn't true, but this is evidence-free speculation at this point.
What I hope to have gotten across here is that this war is reactionary on both sides, part of right-wing nation-building projects that run contrary to working-class internationalism
Would you also characterize World War II as "reactionary on both sides"? In that case we're talking about clearly imperialist nations on both sides, whereas in this case by your own admission Russia does not have the economic power or development (and I would add that it isn't dominated by finance capital, which is also very important). But personally I have no trouble saying that I would have supported the military defeat of open, genocidal fascists (given that no peaceful efforts to stop them had been successful) by the Allies even though they were brutal imperialists themselves. There's such a thing as a meaningfully lesser evil in this case, and if anything I even more strongly hold that opinion in the present case. Zelensky's is a neoliberal regime that is the puppet of both US imperialism and open fucking genocidal Nazis (something that is very much downplayed in this article); the Russian government, though capitalist, is nothing like that and isn't even (unlike the US and its allies in WWII) at this point imperialist. Fuck this false equivalency!
After that, it was both detected and recognized, but the vital reporting was suppressed by Chinese authorities, both local and national.
Evidence?
The Beijing government has insisted the virus came from somewhere abroad, perhaps imported on frozen food.
Completely untrue.
The moves to lift Zero-COVID are a reckless and pragmatic response by the CCP to the increasingly dire economic situation confronting China and the unrelenting pressures of global finance capital.
You've presented no evidence whatsoever that it's "reckless," and given no detailed comparison or analysis regarding how it differs from previous policies or what the likely impact will be. This article is an ideological rant and isn't based in any sort of in-depth scientific examination or explanation. Disappointing.
In Shanghai, only 71 percent of elderly people above 60 years old have been vaccinated, portending a monumental crisis in China’s most populous city.
Gee, I wonder if that had anything to do with why it took a 2-month lockdown to contain the virus back in the spring?
Despite these reassurances, it is clear that in response to a major surge of COVID-19 across the country, the Chinese government has lessened its aggressive approach towards containing the virus. There is no scientific justification for this move, which is based solely on political and economic considerations.
There's no scientific justification given for your analysis. Rather, it appears to be based solely on your political view of the Chinese government.
The 20 measures include the shortening of quarantine times for inbound travelers and close contacts of people infected in mainland China, a loosening of travel restrictions to and within China, the ending of tracking and tracing of secondary contacts, and other reductions of mitigations. Also included are measures clearly anticipating a coming surge of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, including accelerating vaccination programs for the elderly, building healthcare infrastructure and stockpiling medicines.
You don't explain the stated rationale for any of these measures, nor do you explain how they constitute an abandonment of zero COVID. And aren't vaccines supposed to help reduce infections? The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that they do.
While a lockdown has been in place in hard-hit Guangzhou since November 5, numerous other cities experiencing growing outbreaks have refused to implement this most effective measure proven to stop viral transmission.
But you don't say what they did.
In the last three weeks, the seven-day average of daily new cases has risen tenfold, jumping from 950 on October 23, at the conclusion of the 20th Congress of the CCP, to nearly 11,000 on November 14, according to the website Our World in Data. Placing this in context, during the spring surge of the Omicron BA.2 subvariant, the seven-day average peaked at 26,469 on April 14, a figure that will likely be reached in the coming days.
Is this supposed to be evidence that the "Chinese Communist Party" has abandoned zero COVID? It's not any such thing.
At the federal level, the fiscal year 2022 budget provided $76.4 billion to the Department of Education, less than 10 percent of the Pentagon budget. In 2022 alone, the United States has provided to Ukraine at least $50 billion in weapons and other financial assistance, two-thirds the total federal spending on education.
Federal spending on Ukraine this year is nearly as high as federal spending on US education.
Zaluzhnyi’s own account posted, he can be seen walking with a gun while wearing a bracelet adorned with far-right symbols, including one symbol resembling a Nazi swastika.
It WAS a Nazi swastika.
Ukraine’s Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, has been photographed several times in recent weeks while wearing or displaying photos and symbols associated with the far right and even neo-Nazism.
Not "far right," not "neo-Nazi," just straight up Nazi.
The US and its lackeys in NATO believe that they can achieve a military defeat of Russia
And you think that has nothing to do with Russia's motivation?
The dissolution of the USSR promoted a new outpouring of imperialist barbarism by the United States, leading to three decades of unending wars
For some reason the US's actions toward Russia since then don't make your list of acts of imperialist barbarism. Why is that?
Now, with Russian forces retreating in the face of the better armed and better supplied Ukrainian military
This is colossally ignorant! How did Russia manage to take 20% of Ukraine's territory with a less well-armed/supplied military? And, up until this point, with far fewer troops?
The Putin regime is not engaged in a war to defend the Russian population but to defend the interests of the capitalist oligarchy that came to power after the dissolution of the USSR.
Bullshit. You present no evidence either that defending the Russian population is not a motive or that defending the interests of the capitalists in Russia is a motive. Surely you're aware that US oligarchs/officials have the intention of overthrowing or weakening Russia.
Over the course of 2020, the official COVID-19 death toll in Sweden reached 9,706, a per capita rate over ten times higher than neighboring Norway and among the highest in the world. From March 2020 on, Sweden’s homicidal “herd immunity” strategy was adopted by the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, and other countries, based on eugenicist conceptions akin to “survival of the fittest.”
I don't agree that that applied to India to nearly the same extent at least. It wasn't until Delta hit that India's death stats became high. And India is now doing better than most Western countries. Even if we adjust for undercounting by, let's say, quadrupling India's death and adding 50% to the US's, the US's per-capita death count is still vastly higher overall than India's.
Studies indicate that well over half the world’s population has already been infected with SARS-CoV-2, while estimates of excess deaths attributable to the pandemic place the real global death toll at over twenty million people.
Well over half? I haven't seen that estimate.
This is the first of three volumes that cover the years 2020, 2021, and 2022.
, respectively
While attempting to cultivate a fatalistic and indifferent attitude in the population, the ruling elites and their pliant media continue to promote the “Wuhan Lab Lie,” as well as endless lies about the elimination strategy in China, above all the myth that it entails “endless lockdowns.” In reality, the example of China, where the elimination strategy has found mass popular support in the working class, is powerful proof of the viability of this strategy and shows the potential to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 worldwide in a matter of months through the global deployment of every available public health measure.
Would be good to explicitly contradict the claim about China's "endless lockdowns"--i.e., provide information that China has never had a nationwide lockdown, that in most Chinese cities there's never been a lockdown, and that overall China's population has been able to live normal lives with little worry about contracting the virus to a much greater extent than is the case elsewhere.
The COVID-19 pandemic is only the first plague of the twenty-first century. Climate change and the unplanned nature of capitalist development are creating the conditions for ever more infectious diseases to spill over from destabilized animal populations into urban centers, and to then rapidly spread worldwide via international travel and commerce.
Not just from wild animals. Factory farming has created a mass breeding ground for pathogens. Animal agriculture on the mass scale that it's occurring is an enormous threat to both the environment (e.g., some studies have found it to be the leading contributor to climate change, and it tops the list of causes of water pollution) and public health.
two fundamental strategies that have since dominated governments’ responses to the pandemic—elimination and “herd immunity”—emerged during this time. The central problem involved in public health and the control of infectious diseases, i.e., stopping viral transmission, was dealt with in two diametrically opposed manners.Within China, after initially bungling the response and faced with growing opposition within the working class, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) implemented the first successful elimination program to contain the coronavirus.
The Communist Party of China has 94 million members, and likely a large majority are working class, so I'm not sure where this distinction you're making is coming from. It also reacted far more quickly than most countries did. There were proportionately vastly fewer confirmed cases when China (639) implemented lockdown measures than when the UK (12,707), the US (127,417), or even New Zealand (209) did.
The new mantra for the back-to-work campaign, coined by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and immediately picked up by Trump, was that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease.” In essence, this phrase expressed the class interests of the financial oligarchy
Again, although lockdowns clearly were not in their interests or anyone's interests financially, financial reasons cannot be the only reason why there was so much ruling class opposition to measures that would have protected workers working in person, such as masking and ventilation/filtration, mass testing (which Trump opposed), etc. There's an ideological component, too. The ideology of individualism/libertarianism is strongly opposed to making people do anything, even if it's to protect their own & others' health & safety & even if the benefits to the ruling class ultimately outweigh the costs.
This remains the worst surge to have happened anywhere in the world during the pandemic.
On a per-capita basis, I question whether that's true. The UK, US, and Peru, for instance, all had higher surges of deaths during their peaks in 2021 than India did, and all three were also hit much harder by Omicron than India. Of course, India's response to the pandemic pales in comparison to China's or the first year and a half of New Zealand's, but India is not a terribly good example of bad national responses to the pandemic.
The mitigationist strategy was expressed most sharply in the full reopening of schools, which by early 2021 had been definitively proven to be centers of viral transmission. Extraordinary claims were made that if schools required masks, opened windows, improved ventilation, or some combination thereof, they would be safe havens from infection. In reality, reopening schools before the pandemic was contained proved disastrous throughout the world, including in districts with more stringent mitigation measures,
Schools with stringent masking requirements had far lower rates of transmission, and these weren't even requirements for good masks. In addition, efforts in terms of filtration or ventilation were few and far between, aside from opening windows.
Saving profits was prioritized over saving lives. Humanity is grappling with the consequences of the socially criminal response of governments to the pandemic.
it's hard to know whether there was economic benefit to "let 'er rip" policies, though. The countries that locked down "early and hard" in 2020 such as China and New Zealand wound up having the best overall economic performance. And if there were significant public investment in improved ventilation and filtration, and making high-quality masks available to all (with a decent public health campaign to demonstrate their benefits), the result would undoubtedly be less worker absence or disability & thus greater productivity. Promoting the illusion of normalcy by discouraging masking, etc. has illusory economic benefits as well. On the other hand, the mass death of the elderly that has resulted from "let 'er rip" has definitely reduced pension and social security payments, as you point out later.
though it has struggled to produce its own
How has it "struggled"? It's produced enough doses to fully vaccinate 91% of its 1.4 billion people AND be a huge exporter of vaccines. How is that struggling? It's also produced among the first nasal vaccines and is in the process of producing mRNA vaccines, too.
In late July, about 67 percent of people aged 60 and above had received a third shot, compared to 72 percent of the entire population.
As opposed to less than half of Americans aged 60 and above, and 33% of Americans overall? You do realize that 67% and 72% are higher than that, right?
Because of the high political stakes, local governments are likely to err on the side of overreaction to contain outbreaks, said Chen Xi, an associate professor of public health at Yale University. Scores of city officials have been fired or otherwise punished after cases emerged in their jurisdictions.
So, the Chinese government is doing everything it can to contain a potentially deadly disease and government officials are held accountable when they don't do a good job of it. Why is holding government officials accountable a bad thing?
Still, the question is how long China’s calculus will remain in favor of the current approach. Youth unemployment is soaring, small businesses are collapsing and overseas companies are shifting their supply chains elsewhere. A sustained slowdown would undermine the promise of economic growth, long the central pillar of the party’s legitimacy.
Nowhere does this article mention what the actual performance of the Chinese economy has been during the pandemic. It's been the best in the world.
some residents say they support the overarching goal.
By "some residents," do you mean more than 90% of them, as public opinion polls conducted by a US polling firm indicate? https://www.npr.org/2020/09/23/913650298/as-u-s-views-of-china-grow-more-negative-chinese-support-for-their-government-ri
Many Chinese have found ways to cope, even if reluctantly: putting in longer hours to scrape up more money, cutting back on spending.
This is sheer propaganda. China has been the only country in the world to have steady economic growth throughout all but the first 3 months of the pandemic.
feeding widespread stigma and a fear of infections even among the young and healthy.
If Chinese people are so afraid of the virus, how do you explain the fact that their vaccination rate among the elderly has lagged behind that in Western countries? It's because they correctly thought it unlikely that they would get COVID! And now the elderly vaccination rate is catching up and the society's overall vax rate is 91%, facts that this article neglects to mention.
Buoyed by its early success at containment, the party was slow at first to encourage vaccination
91% vaccination rate, you dummy! They've been higher than the US since summer of 2021.
At least 65 million Chinese are currently under some form of lockdown,
Let's see, what's 65 million divided by 1.4 billion?
The government has pushed propaganda depicting the virus as having devastated Western countries
Propaganda? It's true!
In 2017, Nature reported, “In a remote cave in Yunnan province, virologists have identified a single population of horseshoe bats that harbours virus strains with all the genetic building blocks of the one that jumped to humans in 2002, killing almost 800 people around the world.”
Whereas in the US, COVID is currently killing that many people every 2 days! Perspective is so different on a virus that is significantly deadlier on a case by case basis but not nearly as contagious.
Nicholas Wade, the advocate of racist pseudoscience whose claims about a “lab leak” were cited uncritically by every major US newspaper, claimed that the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 “seemed optimized for the human receptor,”
Not optimized at all.
Many pandemic viruses — Ebola, the 1918 flu — emerged this way.
Zoonotic
But there are two ideas.
Zoonotic origin or lab leak
As several virologists have explained, the WIV specializes in coronavirus research because many coronaviruses have been found in and around China (around 400 new strains of coronaviruses have been discovered in bats there, and zoonotic spillovers are more common than one might think), and the WIV’s proximity to the first detected Covid-19 outbreak is not inherently suspicious
Also, it's a curious double standard that lab leak proponents don't find the presence of numerous wet markets in Wuhan suspicious.