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March 2021

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Iran Deal’s Inevitable Sequel Barack Obama’s plan was never about stopping Iran from obtaining a bomb. It was about realigning American interests in the Middle East in order to remake the Democratic Party at home. Lee Smith

By on March 12th, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/iran-deal-inevitable-sequel

Joe Biden’s commitment to reenter the Iran nuclear deal from which Donald Trump withdrew might strike observers as bizarre. After all, Barack Obama’s July 2015 agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was an expensive and comprehensive failure whose underlying premises have been shown over the past six years to be false. By contrast, Trump’s policy of returning to traditional regional alliance structures—boosting allies and deterring enemies—was a success. The United States entered no new Middle East wars and Iran didn’t build a bomb, despite supposedly being “months” or “weeks” away from a nuclear breakout during Obama’s second term in the White House.

But facts- and results-based analysis misses the main purpose of the JCPOA, which had nothing to do with preventing Iran from building nuclear weapons. Rather, the agreement guaranteed Iran the money and technology it needs to build a bomb while putting Iran’s nuclear program under the protective umbrella of an international agreement guaranteed by the United States. The purpose of the JCPOA, in other words, was to put the nuclear issue in brackets by giving the Iranians a bomb that they were manifestly unable to build on their own—and, in doing so, to remove the obstacle that prevented Obama from realigning American regional interests with those of the revolutionary regime.

None of this should be remotely surprising to anyone who has read the plain text of the deal, and who understands it in its regional context rather than in the context of America’s domestic political wars. What I learned over the course of nearly a decade reporting on the deal, its causes and its effects was that all the elaborate technical talk that was endlessly bandied about by “experts”—centrifuge arrays and stockpiles of enriched uranium, etc.—was simple persiflage, intended to distract attention from the underlying purpose of these arrangements, which was to dump America’s current Middle East allies in favor of Iran.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Here Come Climate Reparations Democrats create a fund to offset the damage from their policies.

By on March 12th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/here-come-climate-reparations-11615506577?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Believe it or not, some Western Democrats are starting to push back against the Biden Administration’s climate assault on their constituents.

“We write to follow up on President Biden’s Executive Order 14008 addressing the climate crisis,” New Mexico Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján wrote last week to White House climate czar Gina McCarthy. That’s Mr. Biden’s order in January suspending new oil and gas leases on federal lands.

Although a short-term leasing “pause is fully appropriate in the new Biden administration, an extended and indefinite suspension would have significant impacts on our workforce and state funding for education,” the Senators explain, noting that oil and gas generate over $3 billon annually in revenue for their state and 40% of its budget.

The Democratic Senators urged the Biden Administration to resume leasing and, in a separate letter to Interior Acting Secretary Scott de la Vega, for career officials to be allowed to continue approving routine permits. They also asked that “states like New Mexico receive robust federal assistance in the ongoing transition to a zero-carbon economy.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Lessons of the Long Covid Year Lockdowns made the pandemic suffering far worse than necessary.

By on March 12th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-of-the-long-covid-year-11615506819?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“The pandemic is now easing thanks largely to the ingenuity of American drug and biotech companies. The Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed made the inspired decision last year to invest $20 billion developing six vaccine candidates. This is the best decision government made. Vaccines typically take a decade to develop, but years of private investment and innovation have paid off in advanced technologies that have cut the time to a year.”

When a SARS-like virus was reported spreading in Wuhan in late 2019, most Americans never imagined their own government would soon close schools, churches and businesses, order people to stay home, and spend more than $5 trillion to offset the damage. Yet a year later, here we are.

The anniversary is a moment to consider what the pandemic has wrought and how well the U.S. has responded. Healthcare workers have been courageous, drug companies ingenious, and average Americans resilient. The political class and health experts? Not so much.

*Start with China and the World Health Organization, which is supposed to patrol for global health threats. China lied and the WHO played along. After censoring doctors, Beijing denied there was evidence of human-to-human transmission until shortly before it locked down Hubei province with 60 million people. Many Chinese had already left the country for Lunar New Year.

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EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The U.K.’s Academic-Freedom Czar By Douglas Murray

By on March 12th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/03/22/the-u-k-s-academic-freedom-czar/?utm_source=recirc-

A new official will try to keep campus debates unfettered

Conservative governments in the West so rarely do anything actually conservative that, when they do, it is rightly considered headline news. So it was this past month when the U.K. government announced that it wanted to “strengthen freedom of speech and academic freedom in higher education.” In recent years Britain, like the United States, has had a spate of no-platforming incidents that have highlighted the increasingly leftward groupthink in the British higher-education sector. Nor has this halted during the era in which nobody can have an actual platform. In February the distinguished American professor of economics Gregory Clark had a virtual lecture canceled at the University of Glasgow because the proposed title of his talk made reference to Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s 1994 book The Bell Curve. To cancel a lecture over an allusion to the title of another person’s book seemed to many observers a new low.

What the British government announced in February was that it proposes to legislate to “widen and enhance academic freedom protections,” including the establishment of a “Free Speech and Academic Freedom Champion” who will have the right to “investigate infringements of free speech in higher education and recommend redress.” Other moves would include “the power to impose sanctions for breaches,” raising the pleasant image of embargoes on some of our more woke universities and their desperate efforts to sue for peace.

Of course, media reporting on the announcement was careful to confuse offensive and counteroffensive. “Plan for campus free speech post prompts autonomy warning” was the BBC’s alarming headline. The BBC went on to quote the always radical-left National Union of Students as saying that there is “no evidence” of a free-speech crisis on campus. Uninvited speakers such as Germaine Greer and fired academics such as Cambridge University’s Noah Carl might beg to differ. But the BBC did not linger over such facts. From much of the press coverage of the government’s new proposals, you might form the impression that British universities had hitherto been fair-playing grounds in which ideas and arguments could be aired without inhibition, only for the shadow of government legislation to now hover over them.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Sidney Powell Provides Updates on Judicial Challenges: “Constitutional Crisis”

By on March 12th, 2021

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2021/03/11/sidney-powell-provides-updates-on-judicial-challenges-constitutional-crisis/

Attorney Sidney Powell continues working with her team to coordinate legal challenges while providing evidence of corrupt election systems and processes.  In this interview with Pete Santilli, Powell discusses the current state of her efforts and the groups she is working with in state legislative offices.

The future of voting against the UniParty begins with first securing the processes of elections: paper ballots, limited election days, limited and controlled absentee ballots, no computer systems for electronic manipulation, voter ID requirements, and one citizen – one vote.

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