WASHINGTON — The U.S. gave full approval to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine on Monday, a milestone that may help lift public confidence in the shots as the nation battles the most contagious coronavirus mutant yet.
The vaccine made by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech now carries the strongest endorsement from the Food and Drug Administration, which has never before had so much evidence to judge a shot’s safety. More than 200 million Pfizer doses already have been administered in the U.S. — and hundreds of millions more worldwide — since emergency use began in December.
“The public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product,” said acting FDA Commissioner…
Two Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are requesting the Pentagon detail its plans to recover or destroy billions of dollars worth of U.S weapons now in the hands of Taliban fighters following the fall of Afghan national security forces.
“As a direct result of the Biden Administration’s poorly planned and executed U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban is now armed with a significant arsenal of U.S.-made weaponry. Worse, it would appear the Biden Administration has no clue what or how many weapon platforms are now owned and operated by the Taliban,” the GOP lawmakers wrote in a letter shared exclusively with The Hill on Monday.
UN agencies have warned of food shortages to Afghanistan as early as September without urgent aid funding, as it emerged first aid supplies, including surgical equipment and severe malnutrition kits, were stuck due to restrictions at Kabul airport.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday the closure of the airport to commercial flights has held up key deliveries.
The World Food Programme (WFP), which brings in supplies by road, said it was getting food through via four different supply routes for the moment, but could start running out of food by next month.
Andrew Patterson, the WFP’s deputy country director in Afghanistan, said they were transporting food through humanitarian crossings, including from Uzbekistan, though which 50% of supplies arrived, as well as via Pakistan and Turkmenistan.
“Winter is coming. We are going into the lean season and many Afghan roads will be covered in snow. We need to get the food into our warehouses where it needs to be distributed,”…
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt joined a 20-state coalition led by West Virginia and Arizona in arguing against the Biden administration’s proposed regulation of firearm parts. In addition to joining the coalition’s comment letter, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office filed a separate, but similar, comment letter.
The attorneys general contend a proposed rule set forth by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (“ATF”) exceeds authority granted to the bureau under the Gun Control Act of 1968.
…
Talk about revolution, civil war, and upheaval is so strong that around 60% of Americans think it is possible to likely to occur soon. But while it may be true we need to rethink and reinvent society in a revolutionary manner, to reverse the war on freedom by the corrupt ruling class, the violence, coercion, and alienation that attend most revolutions aren’t worth the achievement of their goals.
If we juxtapose our concept of a peaceful revolution within, based on the UPDR Ideals (Unity in diversity, Popular sovereignty, Democratic equality, and Rule of law) with most ideological revolutions we see on one hand, the Upadarian (UPDRian), peace and harmony with tolerance and love, and, on the other hand, oppression, fear, and upheaval.
The Upadarian (UPDR) Revolution is peaceful change from within through freewill participation, it has little to do with politics beyond demanding politics remove its coercive control from the realms of faith, family, culture, and freewill participatory community.
The Upadarian Revolution envisions the devolution of political and corporate power and wealth from the center and top of society to private and local structures and institutions based mostly or wholly on freewill participation. In that regard, while adherents of this Revolution will gather and connect based on its shared ideals and principles, its effects could extend way beyond its practitioners.
What we call “The Upadarian Revolution” is itself a bold departure from what most people think of when they talk about revolution. Most revolutions tend toward three things: violence, compulsion, and alienation. They are conducted in violence. People who are in lockstep are compelled to adhere to their edicts. Everyone who opposes their underlying ideology is alienated from the group conducting the revolution. But the whole concept of the Upadarian Revolution is itself revolutionary: it does not in any way use violence, no compulsion is applied to anyone, and those who don’t agree with its ideas are not considered alienated from those who do.
If this kind of revolution is successful, there will be large-scale structures and global institutions that meet people’s needs, but everyone who participates in and benefits from this revolution will do so willingly and through informed consent. The chief problem with most ideologies is that they try to create structures and institutions based on coercion and force and they alienate people who don’t agree with their principles or goals. They almost claim that in order to acheive their aims, usually bogeyman fears addressed or utopian promises provided, they must be followed by everyone, without exception.
The effects of the Upadarian Revolution would be unilaterally created alternative sociocultural and socioeconomic structures and institutions, perhaps even whole private distributed cities and safe havens, that reflect shared ideals, principles, and practices based on Christian beliefs, values, and convictions. Beyond participants and adherents, such a revolution would also result in a more formal recognition and accommodation of private alternative forms of sociocultural and socioeconomic autonomy for groups of people who are drawn together through mutual consensus and freewill participation alone.
Too many “revolutions” have no value unless and until they dominate a landscape and create their own political, sociocultural, and socioeconomic hierarchies that dominate the lives of everyone. In other words, they don’t offer much of anything until everyone within a given land is under their rule. But, at the same time, even when they gain dominance, they tend to fail miserably: they don’t succeed in ending the bogeyman fears nor in fulfilling any of their utopian promises.
Our revolution is unilateral and peaceful. It is something one practices, it isn’t something one imposes. Even within unfree and dysfunctional societies, people who start with our four core ideals and use the other principles and practices will tend toward being more free and prosperous than their neighbors, all without needing the permission, much less the submission, of their neighbors. To be able to create positive and beneficial change without worrying about the opinions of others or who wins an election is a truly revolutionary idea whose time is now.
We cannot emphasize enough how our concept of revolution is such a departure from the previous concepts of revolution as a forceful change of rules and rulers over everyone, whether they like it or not. Being jingoistic, divisive, and hateful toward the “other” who doesn’t meet your expectations will not solve our problems in a just manner that honors the laws and nature of God!
People who come to embrace this new way of conducting a revolution within their own lives, relationships, associations, and communities on the basis of freewill participation alone will experience the benefits of such a revolution even if society around them continues its spiritual and moral decline into depraved corruption.
There is no “otherfying” your neighbors, no division or intolerance, and no hatred of others within our concept of revolution as we are seeing emerge on the left and right. If your version of society demands you demonize dissenters or otherfy your neighbors, then it’s more of the same top-down centralized control by the few over the many. We simply aren’t interested in otherying our neighbors or assuming everyone who doesn’t embrace our ideals and the such is somehow not as good as us. We reject the “us versus them” narrative.
One chooses the Upadarian Revolution as a pathway to fulfillment, to freedom and prosperity, and to actualizing God’s scroll of destiny and purpose for their lives, that which is God’s best for their lives. Beyond sharing this and urging others to consider this, the practitioners of our revolution don’t otherfy their neighbors or in any way pursue a path of coercion or control over anyone else.
We don’t need these top-down, coercive revolutions that use violence and that alienate people from each other.
Mark Clouse- It seems President Joe Biden’s approval numbers have headed south as the Taliban have taken over Afghanistan. The President is now polling at 46 percent, which is 7 points lower than where he was before the collapse of Afghanistan began, at 53 percent.
The polling was completed by Reuters/Ipsos, which has consistently shown Biden’s approval numbers to be higher than the poll of polls average, so it’s an important bellweather poll when assessing the full reality on the ground opinion-wise for the American people. A dip in this poll is signficant and could portend more bad news for Biden on approval polls in the very near future.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden’s approval rating dropped by 7 percentage points and hit its lowest level so far as the U.S.-backed Afghan government collapsed over the weekend in an upheaval that sent thousands of civilians and Afghan military advisers fleeing for their safety, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The national opinion poll, conducted on Monday, found that 46% of American adults approved of Biden’s performance in office, the lowest recorded in weekly polls that started when Biden took office in January.
It is also down from the 53% who felt the same way in a similar Reuters/Ipsos poll that ran on Friday.
Biden’s popularity dropped as the Taliban brushed aside Afghan forces and entered the capital, Kabul, wiping away two decades of…
PGC – The bloom of the Middle and Near East in the 20th Century that has become the spectacular urban expansion of the 21st century may be built on sand that is running out water beneath it. As populations have expanded, growing states in this region have been relying on pumping water from underground to match the rain shortfalls the region is now experiencing as far as sustaning human life at this expanded populated level.
The nations are choosing to keep pumping from below, but the waters are running out as rain fails to replenish what was taken out. The added concern for this region comes from the potential for climate change to drive the temperatures up even higher, and also what would be the expected prolonged droughts from such a change. It could well be that these regions simply will not be able to provide for the amount of humans that live here, with our best technology, and our best planning factored in.
Such problems are familiar in many parts of the Middle East — where water is simply running out.
The region has witnessed persistent drought and temperatures so high that they are barely fit for human life. Add climate change to water mismanagement and overuse, and projections for the future of water here are grim.
Some Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Iraq and Jordan, are pumping huge amounts of water from the ground for irrigation as they seek to improve their food self-sufficiency, Charles Iceland, the global director of water at the World Resources Institute (WRI), told CNN. That’s happening as they experience a decrease in rainfall.
“They’re using more water than is available routinely through rain. And so groundwater levels are consequently falling because you’re taking water out faster than it’s being replenished by the rainfall,” he said.
That’s what’s happening in Iran, where a vast network of dams sustains an agricultural sector that drinks up about 90% of the water…
PGC – A last remnant of Taliban resistance in Afghanistan remains in the Panjshir Valley, in the Northeastern regiion of the embattled country. A legend in his own right, Ahmad Massoud, the leader of what the Taliban themselves refer to as the Panjshir state, is also the son of a legendary mujahideen Fighter and Commando Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated just before the successful 9/11 assault on America led by Osama Bin Laden.
The American military appears not to be a factor in the fate of this holdout area within Afghaanistan that has managed to muster a resistance force of some 9.000 fighters peppered throughout the mountains that catacomb the valley the Taliban must walk into and claim.
Afghanistan Crisis: Panjshir, north of Kabul, is long known as an anti-Taliban bastion.
Dubai:
The Taliban said on Sunday that “hundreds” of its fighters were heading to the Panjshir Valley, one of the few parts of Afghanistan not yet controlled by the group.
Since the Taliban overran Afghanistan, flickers of resistance have begun to emerge with some ex-government troops gathering in the Panjshir, north of Kabul, long known as an anti-Taliban bastion.
“Hundreds of Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate are heading towards the state of Panjshir to control it, after local state officials refused to hand it over peacefully,” the group wrote on its Arabic Twitter account.
Since the Taliban took control of the country following a lightning charge into the capital Kabul, thousands of people have made their way to Panjshir, according to a spokesman for anti-Taliban forces.
In Panjshir, Ahmad Massoud, the son of legendary mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud who was assassinated by Al-Qaeda two days before the September 11, 2001 attacks, has sought to assemble a force of around 9,000 people to counter the terrorists, the spokesman, Ali Maisam Nazary, told AFP.
PGC – China’s state news media outlets are clearly dedicated to spreading misinformation on a daily basis that serves the interests of one man, Chairman Xi, the absolute fascistic dictator of China and head of the Chinese Communist Party, the big brother of the American Democrat National Committee. These organizations are given free reigh on American social media platforms, operated, owned, and run by human beings who openly hate America, the Bill of Rights, and liberty in general. These platforms regularly remove American citizens from their platforms for allegedly spreading misinformation while they continue to allow an enemy of the American people, the CCP (DNC ally and inspiration), to spread disinformation on their platform designed to destroy the American democratic republic limited by a bill-of-rights-based constitution.
They win because they have allies in our boardrooms, not because they’re clever. They’re jsut really good at offering bribes, like access to a massive money-making market in exchange for acting more in line with the CCP than our own Bill of Rights.
Author’s Note:This is the second part of a two-part article series in China Brief exploring methods by which Xinhua and other Chinese state-owned media organizations are seeking greater presence and influence for their propaganda material in English-language online media. The first article examined recent examples of “advertorial” advertising, in which Xinhua content has been hosted on the websites and promoted in the e-mail advertising of prominent English-language news and foreign affairs publications (China Brief, April 12).
Introduction
Xinhua, the state news agency of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), serves a role very different from that of its nominal counterparts in democratic states, such as Britain’s BBC, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, or Taiwan’s Central News Agency. Xinhua (新华 or “New China”) functions as the official mouthpiece of China’s ruling party: Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping, reinforcing a long-standing…
PGC – The United States State Deparment has made it clear it is attempting to delete from the Internet the history of the Afghan War in the name of protecting the Afghanis who stood with the US against the Taliban. The move could be on its face just what it says it is, but given the nature of an emboldened state that now has the full coopreation of the massive corpostates that support and enable it, and even move coervcively against its opponents in ways the state itself can’t, one should be paying close attention to attempts by this government to gaslight Americans into being whatever the state wants to believe about what actually happened in Afganistan.
America’s war in Afghanistan is vanishing from the internet. Federal agencies are wiping websites of videos, articles, and photos and saying it must be done to protect the lives of the Afghans left behind who may face retaliation from the Taliban.
State Department Spokesperson Ned Price told the Associated Press that the process of scrubbing online evidence of Afghans working with coalition forces “is of the utmost importance” and that State’s policy is “only to remove content in exceptional situations like this one. In doing so, department personnel are following records retention requirements.”
The United States Agency for International Development—the agency in charge of much of the more than $100 billion America spent reconstructing Afghanistan—is also purging records. “Given the security situation in Afghanistan, and out of an abundance of caution for the safety of our staff, partners, and beneficiaries, we are reviewing USAID public websites and social media…
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