Good morning, kids. Is this crap happening again?

Eerie footage shows hordes of masked children waiting inside crowded Chinese hospitals as a mystery pneumonia sweeps the country just three years after COVID emerged.

Beijing’s children’s hospital has admitted at least 7,000 patients daily, far exceeding capacity, while a pediatric hospital in Tianjin reportedly saw more than 13,000 children at its outpatient and emergency departments, Sky News reported.

A spokesperson from China’s National Health Commission said the infections are simply due to an overlapping of several viruses, according to Sky News. Other authorities said the rising causes are due to the “lifting of COVID-19 restrictions and the circulation of known pathogens,” according to Business Insider.

So, okay. Maybe it's just a worse than usual flu season combined with the effects of depressed immune function due to the lockdowns. But, this is China, who accidentally or accidentally on purpose unleashed Klassik KOVID on the world four years ago.

Theory No. 1: China is telling the truth when it says this is just a seasonal flu:

Beijing insists a new virus is not to blame for scenes of chaos, which have prompted officials to encourage residents to don coverings, socially distance and stay home if unwell.

Instead, health chiefs have pinned the rise on flu and other routine bugs, with China now battling its first full winter without a Covid-induced lockdown.

That’s entirely believable. The flu ebbs and flows, with some years being worse than others. This may just be a bad year. And because this is the first time children have been fully exposed to the flu virus without a lockdown, their immune systems may be inadequately developed, making them especially vulnerable. It probably doesn’t help that China has a socialized medicine system. Waiting rooms tend to be crowded when there’s no profit motive to move things along.

Of course, with COVID, China also engaged in the denial, denial, denial game, all while making sure that everyone knew it was responding to the worst plague since the Black Death, complete with people hauled away in vans and howling citizens locked in darkened cities. The effect on the West was powerful and destructive, which leads me to Theory No. 2.

Theory No. 2: What we are seeing is the first act in a replay of the COVID epidemic. This time, however, because China knows that it won’t be able to stir up the same level of panic with a virus that hits the general population, the new narrative is that this is a virus that targets children.

For all we know, the footage from Tianjin Hospital, while real, was manipulated because authorities told the city’s parents that only this one hospital would treat sick children. The other hospitals might have had empty emergency rooms.

Unlike four years ago, America is in a complete nosedive on every front while China, as far as can be determined, is on the upswing. Given the polling numbers and public sentiment here regarding Biden as well as the elections of Javier Milei and Geert Wilders, maybe they're getting a bit nervous that they won't have a puppet stooge in the White House come January 2025.

Meh, it wasn't that long ago when monkeypox was the next thing. I think too many people are sick and tired of COVID already as can be seen in the mass rejection of continued booster shots and masks. Yeah, there are of course the usual braindead "karens" and others but I don't think another scare will be so blindly accepted this time. At least I hope not.

And speaking of Geert Wilders, he sure knows how to make all the right heads explode:

Geert Wilders, leader of the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom (PVV), has proposed relocating Palestinians to neighboring Jordan. Multiple Arab states including Jordan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Yemen, as well as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, have condemned the populist, whose party just came first in the Dutch elections. The Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank, branded the suggestion “blatant interference in their affairs,” while Jordan’s officials claim would undermine the rights of the Palestinian people and their pursuit for an independent state.

Wilders’ position is that “Jordan is Palestine.” This refers to the fact its territory was administered by the British Mandate of Palestine before being established as the Emirate of Transjordan. “There has been an independent Palestinian state since 1946: the Kingdom of Jordan,” he wrote on X (Twitter) in October. “Jordan is Palestine. Palestinian people should be given the right to voluntarily settle in Jordan and freely elect their own government. Let the Hashemite Kingdom become a true democracy!” The King of Jordan has vowed he will not even take Gazan refugees, however. His allies in Egypt have suggested any Gazans displaced to Arab countries will be sent to Europe.

Aside from the fact that there is no such thing as "Palestine" or a people known as "Palestinian," Jordan itself is an artificial nation that was created by the British in the wake of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Good for Wilders in brining it into the public discourse and forcing people to address his position. Yet, these memes and myths were never challenged or allowed to be entered into the discourse. The problem is that we have an active fifth column in the west that is doing its utmost to destroy us from within. And Islam is its latest craze.

Islamic terrorism is not an indestructible monster. It exists for one reason alone. And the reason is that we tolerate it. Given a choice between two alternatives, doing whatever it takes to end the terror threat or tolerating some acceptable level of terrorism, governments always choose the latter. And when we accept terrorism as the new normal, we make the choice for them.

Big choices like these are not defined by absolutes, but by ‘gut’ feelings. They come down to asking politicians which option seems scarier, more disturbing, immoral or outrageous. We have spent generations suffering from Islamic terrorism because each time the answer is that destroying terrorists is the scarier option while letting them kill us is the least scary one.

As long as Gitmo or Muslim travel bans are scarier than the terrorist attacks, this will go on. Politicians know how to cope with the aftermath of a terrorist attack. It’s become a new normal for them too. There are flags, tearful songs and finally a call to get back to normal. Go shopping. Laugh. Eat out. And those are all good things to do. But the unspoken passenger on these trips is Islamic terrorism. Getting back to normal also normalizes a new level of terror.

Living with Islamic terrorism should never be normalized. The answer to an enemy trying to kill you is not going through the stages of grief, passing from anger to acceptance: it’s resistance.

The only acceptable answer to Islamic terrorism is to utterly destroy it while making the terrorist supporting populations pay the largest share of the price for that destruction. Any other answer normalizes terrorism. The failure to commit and then carry out anything short of total destruction perpetuates terrorism. The refusal to imagine that such a thing is possible makes it impossible to end terrorism. And the idea that there is any alternative to this is either a fantasy or a lie.

Refusing to accept terrorism as the new normal means confronting politicians, even those on our side, with the firm position that we will not accept anything from them short of a plan to win: not incrementally, not to establish deterrence, and not just to “show the terrorists we mean business”. We will live our lives, but we will not treat Islamic terror as business as usual.

The problem is not "Islamic terrorism." The problem is Islam, period. It is a system that is wholly incompatible with western pluralist societies. If we really wanted to deal with it, we would first have to recognize that Islam is at war with us and has been for the past 1,500 years. It does not seek peaceful coexistence, or two-state solutions or any of that garbage. It seeks our subjugation or death.

Even if we recognized this, we will never be unified enough to do what's necessary to defeat it. The rioting in Dublin and now in France are positive signs, but I fear it's too little and way too late.

NOTE: The opinions expressed in the links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.

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