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July 2022

Sino-forming of Global South passes point of no return As Western nations question the benefits of globalization, China has become the world’s leading globalizer David Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/2022/07/sino-forming-of-global-south-passes-point-of-no-return/

China’s exports to the largest economies of the Global South have nearly doubled from pre-Covid levels to a seasonally-adjusted US$70 billion in June 2022 from $38 billion in June 2019.

Several factors have impelled the surge in Chinese exports, but the most important impulse comes from China’s strategic investment in digital and physical infrastructure, ranging from broadband networks in Indonesia and Brazil to power plants in Turkey and railways in Southeast Asia.

As Western nations question the benefits of globalization, China has become the world’s leading globalizer.

What I called “China’s plan to Sino-form the world” in a 2020 book has advanced so far that it is beyond the capacity of the United States and its allies to impede. Half a billion people in neighboring countries now depend on Chinese technology for communications, data processing and logistics, providing China with a nearly limitless source of young workers for its industries and an ever-expanding export market.

For China, economic outreach to the Global South is key to breaking through American efforts to contain China’s drive for economic predominance. China, wrote the influential “Observer” columnist Chen Feng on July 28, “has to solve the problem of generating its own independent growth momentum, after breaking through the critical point of the ‘Matthew Effect,’” the economic maxim that rich countries get richer and poor countries get poorer.

Court Rejects Google’s Attempt to Dismiss Rumble’s Antitrust Lawsuit, Ensuring Vast Discovery An unusual and significant court ruling entitles YouTube’s main competitor, Rumble, to obtain long-hidden internal documents on Google’s search engine manipulations. Glenn Greenwald

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/court-rejects-googles-attempt-to?utm_source=email

A federal district court in California on Friday denied Google’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that the Silicon Valley giant is violating federal antitrust laws by preventing fair competition against its YouTube video platform. The lawsuit against Google, which has owned YouTube since its 2006 purchase for $1.65 billion, was brought in early 2021 by Rumble, the free speech competitor to YouTube. Its central claim is that Google’s abuse of its monopolistic stranglehold on search engines to destroy all competitors to its various other platforms is illegal under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which makes it unlawful to “monopolize, or attempt to monopolize…any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations.”

It is rare for antitrust suits against the four Big Tech corporate giants (Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon) to avoid early motions to dismiss. Friday’s decision against Google ensures that the suit now proceeds to the discovery stage, where Rumble will have the right to obtain from Google a broad and sweeping range of information about its practices, including internal documents on Google’s algorithmic manipulation of its search engine and the onerous requirements it imposes on companies dependent upon its infrastructure to all but force customers to use YouTube.

Founded in 2013, Rumble began experiencing explosive growth in the run-up to the 2020 election. Americans were encountering escalating and aggressive Big Tech censorship of political content as the election approached. Conservative politicians, followed by a wide range of heterodox voices on the right and left, began migrating by the millions away from Google’s YouTube to Rumble, which has promised and provided far more permissive free speech rights. That was at the time when Google and other Big Tech platforms — at the urging of the Democratic-controlled Congress — began aggressively increasing its censorship of political video content on YouTube in the name of combatting “disinformation” and “hate speech.”

The explosive user growth which Rumble enjoyed in 2020 has continued to rapidly increase, as Big Tech generally, and Google specifically, clamped down further on dissident views in the name of the COVID pandemic, and now even more so with respect to the US/NATO role in the war in Ukraine. More and more prominent politicians, journalists and commentators, along with smaller content creators, have either been banned by YouTube or left on their own accord to join Rumble as Google’s crackdown on free speech intensifies. The ability to speak more freely on Rumble regarding the most contentious political debates has become one of the key drivers of the exodus of users from YouTube to Rumble.

The Beginning of the End of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’? Britain is closing the infamous Tavistock Centre. Finland and Sweden have radically revised their treatment guidelines. But American doctors are advertising surgeries to children on TikTok. Lisa Selin Davis

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-gender?utm_source=email

Over the past three decades, the Gender and Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic in London has seen thousands of British children for gender dysphoria, with a British minister noting a more than 4,000 percent increase of referrals for girls alone in the last decade. But on Thursday, Britain’s National Health Service announced that it was closing down Tavistock for good—and, in effect, rebuking the common American medical approach known as “gender-affirming care” for treating children with gender dysphoria. This can include a mix of puberty suppressants, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, interventions in minors that can lead to irreversible effects.

For years, whistleblowers have rang the alarm about shoddy care at Tavistock. Psychologists who worked there, like Sonia Appleby and Sue Evans, said that vulnerable children were being prematurely rushed to transition. Parents confronted the head of the clinic. A courageous detransitioned woman, Keira Bell, said that kids at Tavistock were unable to understand the ramifications of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. The National Institute for Care and Excellence, a governmental body that creates evidence-based guidelines, found that the link between transitioning and improved psychological function was, in fact, very weak. (The oft-cited justification for childhood transition is that if gender-dysphoric kids are not allowed to transition, they will commit suicide, despite the lack of evidence for this claim.)

And then, the coup de grace: The widely respected pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, in an independent study of Britain’s care for transgender children, found that Tavistock’s approach was unsustainable and children were receiving inadequate care. There was, Dr. Cass wrote in her report, “a lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response,” among many other issues.

The National Health Service is following Cass’s recommendation to shut down Tavistock and replace it with a series of centers in regional hospitals. The bottom line: There will be no more top-down, one-size-fits-all transitioning for kids with gender dysphoria in the UK.

The question is how Americans will react.

A tale of two women targeted by ‘dishonored’ ex-husbands Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/a-tale-of-two-women-targeted-by-dishonored-ex-husbands/
 When details emerged of the murder on Tuesday night of 30-year-old mother of three Rabab Abu Siam in the central Israeli city of Lod, the first instinct of all the pundits was to blame the police force for sleeping on the job.
Abu Siam, an Arab-Israeli elementary school teacher, was shot to death by masked gunmen in the yard of her home, while her youngest daughter was sitting on her lap and her parents and other two children were inside. Everyone in her orbit assumed that the culprit was her ex-husband, since he’d been harassing her since their recent divorce.
Her precarious situation was known to welfare services and law enforcement. Social workers and police offered her as much protection as they could provide, such as a panic button for emergency calls and patrols near her residence. They urged her to move to a shelter for battered women.

She refused, opting instead to stay temporarily with relatives in the south of the country. But the arrangement didn’t last, and she returned to Lod, where she met her tragic end—after crying to a friend a week earlier that she feared something bad was about to befall her.

Though it was clear to all concerned that this was a slaughter of revenge by a man “dishonored” by the spouse over whom he felt he had ownership and deserved complete control, the police do not yet have sufficient evidence to tie him to or charge him with the crime. This is because he went abroad the day before the evil deed was done.

The EU’s Shameful Total Appeasement of Iran’s Mullahs by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18755/eu-appeasement-iran

In 2015, the European powers — France, Germany and the United Kingdom — changed their Iran policy from imposing pressure to adopting diplomacy. The diplomatic route included lifting oil and gas sanctions on Iran as well as removing some Iranian individuals and entities from the list of countries to be sanctioned.

According to the preface of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action: “The JCPOA will produce the comprehensive lifting of all UN Security Council sanctions as well as multilateral and national sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear programme, including steps on access in areas of trade, technology, finance, and energy.”

The EU immediately allowed transfers of funds between Iranian and EU persons and entities, banking relationships between Iran’s banks and the EU financial institutions, financial support for trade with the Islamic Republic, financial assistance and concessional loans to the Iranian government, the import of Iranian oil, petroleum products, gas and petrochemical products, investment in the oil, gas and petrochemical sectors, as well as export of gold, precious metals and diamonds, among others.

The EU continued with this policy even though the Iranian regime was found to violate the JCPOA.

Just as Europe disregarded warnings that relying on gas from Russia would leave them open to Russian blackmail, they are again ignoring warnings that a nuclear Iran will leave them open to Iranian blackmail.

Iran will not even have to use any nuclear weapons to persuade the leaders of Europe to do whatever it likes; the threat alone should do the trick. The mullahs might even sell or give a few to their terrorist militias. The tea leaves are not that hard to imagine; one only need look at Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.

Thanks to the EU’s complete appeasement policy towards the Islamist mullahs, the Iranian regime is now capable of building a nuclear bomb.

The Unaffordable Costs of ‘Free’ Renewables Walter Starck

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2022/07/the-unaffordable-costs-of-free-renewables/

“There is simply no sound evidence for an imminent global threat from a catastrophic change in climate.  That is an idea based mainly on unvalidated computer modeling from some hundred-plus models no two of which agree and all of which incorporate multiple estimates, assumptions, and “adjustments”.  All but one of these have also predicted warming well above the subsequent record which actually occurred, and the one exception has simply been ignored.

In contrast, an abundance of clear, sound, uncontroversial evidence that refutes every major claim of a climate change crisis is readily accessible in thousands of scientific studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.  Unfortunately the sheer volume of relevant evidence, the technical language employed, and the submersion of sound evidence in a swill of pseudo-science from self-appointed climate “experts” has created such a morass of information and misinformation that several years of extensive reading plus a technical background are needed to begin to be able to sort what is sound confirmed scientific understanding from the hypothetical speculations, propaganda and outright fabrications of activists committed to a cause they deem to be more important than any sound evidence or reason.”

Throughout the 99.9 per cent of human existence before the recent widespread adoption of fossil fuels, almost every individual toiled at manual labour from mid-childhood until the end of life.  Even with the help of horses, mules, and oxen almost all of the population was needed in food production in order to sustain themselves and produce enough extra to support a small population of nobles and town dwellers. Today, in developed nations three-quarters or more of the population now live in large urban areas, and about half of the populace is no longer engaged in any productive activity.

As a group these overwhelmingly urban non-producers seem to be remarkably unfamiliar with even the most elementary understanding of the basic principles underlying the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fundamental to modern society. 

Nowhere is this more clearly displayed than in both the mainstream media and in government policies pertaining to renewable energy. Although the idea of cheap, clean, endlessly renewable energy is fantastically appealing, it is just that, a fantasy. 

That Other Watergate Scandal Tony Thomas

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2022/07/that-other-watergate-scandal/

When the Watergate movie All the President’s Men came to Canberra in 1977, I rushed to the cinema. Half an hour into this engrossing drama, a middle-aged man in the row in front of me turned around and cursed me, “Thanks to you, I can’t see any more of this and I’m going home.” I was upset by his outburst, but in my high tension, I’d been heedlessly kicking the back of his seat.

I’m sure all the Press Gallery tribe were equally engrossed. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (“Woodstein” for short) and the Washington Post broke the mould and won glory with their investigative journalism. They demonstrated the White House’s guilt for the Watergate burglary and forced the first-ever resignation of a US President, namely the Republican’s Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon. Forty or so members of his fiefdom were convicted. Journos ever since, including myself, have fantasised about ourselves making history and millions with exposures of high-ranking evil-doers.

There were actually two burglaries of the Democrat National Committee (DNC) offices in Watergate within three
weeks in mid-1972. The first involved some successful phone-bugging; the bungled second burglary was mainly to photograph a large volume of documents. Security guards caught the five-man team red-handed. A sixth burglar lurking nearby escaped detection, never to be officially identified but now named as CIA contractor Lou Russell.

They Can’t Let Him Back In Michael Anton

https://compactmag.com/article/they-can-t-let-him-back-in

The people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again. In fact, they made this clear in 2020, in a series of public statements. Simply for quoting their words in an essay for The American Mind, I was mercilessly mocked and attacked. But they were quite clear. Trump won’t be president at noon, Jan. 20, 2021, even if we have to use the military to drag him out of there.

“Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump.”

If the regime felt that strongly back then, imagine how they feel now. But you don’t have to imagine. They tell you every day. Liz Cheney, Trump’s personal Javert, has said that the 45th president is literally the greatest threat facing America today—greater than China, than our crashing economy, than our unraveling civil society.

That’s rhetoric, of course, but it isn’t merely that. It’s safer, and generally more accurate, to assume that your adversaries mean what they say. If you doubt this, ask yourself: When was the last time they acted more moderately than they talk?

Even if it is just rhetoric, the words nonetheless portend turbulence. “He who says A must say B.” The logic of statement A inevitably leads to action B, even if the speaker of A didn’t really mean it, or did mean it, but still didn’t want B. Her followers won’t get the irony and, enthused by A, will insist on B.

Take some time to listen to the mainstream media. It doesn’t have to be long; five minutes should do. Then spend another five or so reading the statements of prominent politicians other than Trump. To round it out, sacrifice another five on leading intellectuals. It should become abundantly clear: They all have said A and so must say—and do—B.

And B is that Trump absolutely must not be allowed to take office on Jan. 20, 2025.

Why? They say Jan. 6. But their determination began much earlier.

As New Trial Looms, Justice Department Silent on Whitmer Plot Among the many questions Americans deserve to have answered surrounding the FBI’s activities, the Whitmer kidnapping hoax is near the top of the list. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/29/as-new-trial-looms-justice-department-silent-on-whitmer-plot/

For the first time since the government failed to win a single conviction in the alleged criminal plot to “kidnap” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, a top Justice Department official was publicly confronted about the FBI’s primary role in concocting the hoax.

It was not a welcome line of inquiry, to say the least.

Matthew Olsen, head of the National Security Division, repeatedly rebuffed questions by U.S. Representative Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) about the case during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday. A Michigan jury in April acquitted two men charged with conspiring to kidnap Whitmer after defense attorneys successfully argued their clients had been entrapped by the FBI; the jury deadlocked on two other defendants. Shortly after the stunning verdicts were handed down in what the Justice Department considers one of its most prominent “domestic terror” investigations in recent history, prosecutors announced they would retry Barry Croft and Adam Fox, the alleged ringleader of the group.

The new trial involves Olsen’s division, but rather than take time to perform the usual self-indulgent back slapping and preening common among top law enforcement officials during public hearings, Olsen had little to say except to confirm the Whitmer case was a good example of how the Justice Department handles domestic terror threats. 

“I would include that case among many others that are part of our efforts to ensure that people who serve in public office are safe,” Olsen told the committee.

The Next Generation of Suicide Bombers is Being Trained at an Islamic School in Houston Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/07/next-generation-suicide-bombers-being-trained-daniel-greenfield/

Americans have gotten very comfortable thinking that 9/11 is in the rearview mirror and that after Afghanistan and Iraq, we’ve done enough and we don’t have to think about it anymore. Islamic terrorist plots keep happening and migration is changing the country’s demographics. Mehmet Oz’s GOP/MAGA Senate nomination in PA has been a political game changer that has mostly flown under the radar. Gitmo is being emptied. We think we’ve won when actually we’re losing. Badly.

Here’s a little preview of what’s coming.

The lines include, “I make an oath…one day when you need me, I will be your martyr.”

Here’s a little background.

The Islamic Education Center of Houston, Texas, is organizing a “group recitation” — sung by children as young as four — of a new Iranian anthem saluting Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.

“The song Salam Farmande is an expression of one’s love for the Imam of our age,” says the center.