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Ruth King

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As Biden Bumbles Abroad, Inflation Roars at Home Lew Uhler, Peter Ferrara, and Joe Yocca

By on June 26th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/25/as-biden-bumbles-abroad-inflation-roars-at-home/

While President Joe Biden was focused on being his best European/Russia-pleasing preener at the G-7 and Vice President Kamala Harris embarrassed herself in Central America, here at home Americans are suffering the beginning of wild inflationary conditions not seen since the 1970s.

Our country is in crisis. Adding to a dangerous rise in criminal behavior across the nation and especially at our southern border, our economy is adrift. As we move out from under the destructive lockdowns owed to the pandemic, this should be a time of optimism and hopefulness. Instead, many industries are sputtering to re-open as inflation is “stealing” from returning working American’s paychecks, trading economic joy for malaise. Even the stock markets are recognizing the dangers and are beginning to readjust the prices of assets.

Super-charged inflationary pressures continued to gain momentum according to a survey by the Philadelphia Fed this month, adding to alarming price jumps recorded in April.  Eighty-two percent of manufacturing companies in the recent Philly Fed’s survey reported paying higher prices for the inputs of their products, while just one percent said costs had fallen. As a result, the diffusion index (a metric of manufacturing activity and costs) moved up four points to 80.7, the highest reading since June 1979. 

But what if the Fed continues to incorrectly apply misguided inflationary policies at this critical moment? They typically get inflation “wrong” because they misdiagnose the cause for alarming increases in prices: printing too much money. The danger is revealed in the Fed’s policies to date which will exacerbate, not retard, inflation for the immediate and longer-range future.

Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman observed that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon and that even without the gold standard there were inherent limits to printing more money. The fundamental rule is the supply of money must be equal to the demand for money. But the demand for money is a slippery concept: it’s natural but dangerous to operate under the notion that the demand for money is endless. It’s anything but.

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Has the Military Gone ‘Woke’? Gen. Milley too easily dismisses the risks to recruitment and morale.

By on June 26th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/has-the-military-gone-woke-11624660049?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Army Gen. Mark Milley is getting kudos from the media for telling Congress that the military hasn’t become “woke,” even as its leadership urges soldiers and sailors to absorb woke ideas. The brass is trying to have it both ways on this issue, and that may ultimately undermine its core mission.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday that he “personally” found it “offensive” that Republicans have accused general officers of being “woke.” A pair of Florida Congressmen had been criticizing Gen. Milley over seminars at West Point about “white rage.” The Chief of Naval Operations has recommended “How to Be an Antiracist,” a book that proposes “future discrimination,” ostensibly against white people, on his professional reading list for sailors.

Gen. Milley has to be sensitive to the political realities in the White House, but he was clearly exercised about the criticism, saying it’s “important actually for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read.” He later added: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.” So, he asked, “what is wrong” with “having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?”

Of course sailors and Marines should read widely. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday said similarly last week that he was merely exposing sailors to new ideas. But one can still wonder why “How to Be an Antiracist,” a book promoting sectarian racism, is on the reading list as “foundational” material on par with Jim Hornfischer’s classic naval histories.

The Navy’s reading list for sailors also includes “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” and “Sexual Minorities and Politics.” Contrary to Gen. Milley and the Navy brass, it is not an assault on open-mindedness to ask whether an institution that requires esprit de corps and a common purpose can function if sailors are primed to view white shipmates as potential “oppressors.”

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Can Vivek Ramaswamy Put Wokeism Out of Business? Corporate America ‘makes money critiquing itself.’ The rest of us pay the price in diminished freedom.By Tunku Varadarajan

By on June 26th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-vivek-ramaswamy-put-wokeism-out-of-business-11624649588?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A self-made multimillionaire who founded a biotech company at 28, Vivek Ramaswamy is every inch the precocious overachiever. He tells me he attended law school while he was in sixth grade. He’s joking, in his own earnest manner. His father, an aircraft engineer at General Electric, had decided to get a law degree at night school. Vivek sat in on the classes with him, so he could keep his dad company on the long car rides to campus and back—a very Indian filial act.

“I was probably the only person my age who’d heard of Antonin Scalia, ” Mr. Ramaswamy, 35, says in a Zoom call from his home in West Chester, Ohio. His father, a political liberal, would often rage on the way home from class about “some Scalia opinion.” Mr. Ramaswamy reckons that this was when he began to form his own political ideas. A libertarian in high school, he switched to being conservative at Harvard in “an act of rebellion” against the politics he found there. That conservatism drove him to step down in January as CEO at Roivant Sciences—the drug-development company that made him rich—and write “Woke, Inc,” a book that takes a scathing look at “corporate America’s social-justice scam.” (It will be published in August.)

Mr. Ramaswamy recently watched the movie “Spotlight,” which tells the story of how reporters at the Boston Globe exposed misconduct (specifically, sexual abuse) by Catholic priests in the early 2000s. “My goal in ‘Woke, Inc.’ is to do the same thing with respect to the Church of Wokeism.” He defines “wokeism” as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the “moral vacuum” created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and “the identity we derived from hard work.” He argues that notions like “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion” and “sustainability” have come to take their place.

“Our collective moral insecurities,” Mr. Ramaswamy says, “have left us vulnerable” to the blandishments and propaganda of the new political and corporate elites, who are now locked in a cynical “arranged marriage, where each partner has contempt for the other.” Each side is getting out of the “trade” something it “could not have gotten alone.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Biden Lawsuit against Georgia Election Law Illustrates Radicalism of DOJ and Its Civil Rights Chief By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on June 25th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-lawsuit-against-georgia-election-law-illustrates-radicalism-of-doj-and-its-civil-rights-chief/

As our Caroline Downey reports, the Justice Department will today announce that it is suing Georgia over the latter’s election-integrity law. This is ridiculous. The law provides for voting far more extensive than the Constitution’s minimal standards, and well beyond what, about five minutes ago, were state-law norms. The lawsuit is yet another sign, as if we needed one, that the Biden Justice Department is the Obama DOJ 2.0, an activist tool that puts the awesome law-enforcement power of the federal government in the service of woke progressivism.

This is not a surprise, of course. The lawsuit will be brought by DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which Biden put in the radical hands of Kristen Clarke, for whose confirmation we can thank Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the lone Republican to assent. I wrote about Clarke when she was nominated:

At the all-important Civil Rights Division, Biden has appointed Kristen Clarke, a radical with a history of racist and anti-Semitic commentary. At Harvard, where she led the Black Students Association as an undergrad, Clarke publicly contended that blacks were superior to whites physically and mentally because their brains contain higher amounts of neuro-melanin. Blacks are also spiritually superior, she said, though she elaborated that this is not an attribute that can be “measured based on Eurocentric standards.”

Though she does not exactly come off like a career in stand-up was an option, Clarke would like us to believe that she was just joking — resorting to parody in her umbrage over the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve. People seemed to think she was pretty serious at the time, as she took pains to cite Richard King, a psychiatrist and melanin/pineal-gland scholar, as authority for the proposition that melanin is “the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites,” and the reason why “Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites.” (C’mon, you know you were wondering!) On a related subject, Clarke certainly seemed serious when she invited a notoriously anti-Semitic Trinidadian academic, Tony Martin, to expound on his theories about the racism of the Torah and the “Jewish monopoly over Blacks” — and when she later asserted, in his defense, “Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Attorney General Merrick Garland announces lawsuit against Georgia over its voting law By Clare Hymes

By on June 25th, 2021

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/attorney-general-merrick-garland-announces-lawsuit-against-georgia-over-its-voting-law/

The Justice Department is suing the state of Georgia over its voting law, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Civil Rights division chief Kristen Clarke announced Friday, arguing that the state is violating federal law by inhibiting voting rights on the basis of race.

“Recent changes to Georgia’s election laws were enacted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right of Black Georgians to vote on account of their race or color, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” Garland said Friday at the Justice Department.

Garland, flanked by other department leaders, including Clarke, Deputy Attorney General Monaco, and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, told reporters that the lawsuit “is the first of many steps we are taking to ensure that all eligible voters can cast a vote, that all lawful votes are counted and that every voter has access to accurate information.”

Georgia’s new election law, signed by GOP Governor Brian Kemp in March, outraged Democrats and voting rights groups with voter ID provisions and changes to mail-in voting that they say will make it more difficult for minorities and poorer voters to cast their ballots. While it adds new restrictions to absentee voting, the law also expands early voting opportunities, formalizing provisions that accommodated voters during the pandemic. It also codifies the use of drop boxes with strict rules on how they can be used and sets new rules for state and local election officials.

Kemp responded to the announcement via Twitter, saying, “This lawsuit is born out of the lies and misinformation the Biden administration has pushed against Georgia’s Election Integrity Act from the start. Joe Biden, Stacey Abrams, and their allies tried to force an unconstitutional elections power grab through Congress – and failed.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger responded similarly, adding, “It is no surprise that they would operationalize their lies with the full force of the federal government. I look forward to meeting them, and beating them, in court.”

In tandem with the announcement, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco issued a new memo Friday, directing the FBI and federal prosecutors across the country to identify, investigate and prosecute threats against election officials and poll workers, and announced the creation of a task force to address the spike in threats.

“A threat to any election official, worker, or volunteer is, at bottom, a threat to democracy,” Monaco said in the memo. “We will promptly and vigorously prosecute offenders to protect the rights of American voters, to punish those who engage in this criminal behavior, and to send the unmistakable message that such conduct will not be tolerated.”

“Several studies show that Georgia experienced record voter turnout and participation rates in the 2020 election cycle. Approximately two-thirds of eligible voters in the state cast a ballot in the November election, just over the national average. This is cause for celebration,” Garland said. “But then in March of 2021, Georgia’s legislature passed SB 202. Many of that law’s provisions make it harder for people to vote.”

“Laws adopted with a racially motivated purpose, like Georgia Senate Bill 202, simply have no place in democracy today,” Clarke said. She highlighted the prohibition on groups that are no longer allowed to hand out food and water to voters in order to make their wait in long lines at polling places more comfortable on election day. Clarke called that particular ban “needless” and alleged it proved “unlawful discriminatory intent.”

Garland’s announcement was expected, even if its timing was not. Two weeks ago, he delivered a speech promising to expand the Justice Department’s efforts to protect voting rights in response to the weakening of the federal Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 2013. He said then that the department would confront state and local efforts that “will make it harder to vote,” and examine election laws “to determine whether they discriminate against Black voters and other voters of color.”  

On Friday, Garland called on Congress to enact legislation, which the House is currently working on with the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, or H.R. 4, although it has yet to be introduced. The bill would restore Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a key provision that was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013. 

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Happy Birthday, Global Warming: Climate Change at 33 Global warming entered politics in June 1988. By Rupert Darwall

By on June 25th, 2021

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/06/24/happy_birthday_global_warming

This month, climate change celebrates its 33rd birthday. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified that the greenhouse effect had been detected. “Global Warming Has Begun,” The New York Times declared the next day. Indeed, it had. A year older than Alexander the Great when he died, climate change took less than one-third of a century to conquer the West.

Four days earlier, the Toronto G7 had agreed that global climate change required “priority attention.” Before the month was out, the Toronto climate conference declared that humanity was conducting an uncontrolled experiment “whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.” In September, Margaret Thatcher gave her famous speech to the Royal Society, warning of a global heat trap. “We are told,” although she didn’t say by whom, “that a warming of one degree centigrade per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope,” an estimate that turned out to be a wild exaggeration. Observed warming since then has been closer to one-tenth of one degree centigrade per decade. Two months later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) held its inaugural meeting in Geneva.

The tendency to catastrophism was present at the outset of global warming. The previous year, at a secretive meeting of scientists that included the IPCC’s first chair, it had been recognized that traditional cost-benefit analysis was inappropriate, on account of the “risk of major transformations of the world of future generations.” The logic of this argument requires that climate change be presented as potentially catastrophic—otherwise, the cure would appear worse than the putative disease.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Meet the Censored: Bret Weinstein Canceled on campus for speaking his mind, he’s now going through a sequel at the hands of Silicon Valley Matt Taibbi

By on June 25th, 2021

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-bret-weinstein

On May 23, 2017, not so long ago in real time but seemingly an eternity given the extraordinary history we’ve lived through since, a group of 50-odd students at Evergreen State College arrived at the classroom of a biology professor named Bret Weinstein, demanding his resignation. He stepped into the hall to talk, believing he could work things out.

He was wrong. Weinstein’s offense had been to come to work during an event called the “Days of Absence,” in which white students, staff, and faculty were asked to stay home. This was an inverted version of a longstanding Evergreen event of the same name that, based on a Douglas Turner Ward play, invited students of color to stay home voluntarily, to underscore their value to the community. As he would later explain in the Wall Street Journal, Weinstein thought this was a different and more negative message, and refused to comply. When that group of 50 students he’d never met arrived at his door and accused him of being a racist, he assumed he could find common ground, especially when his own students (including students of color) spoke on his behalf.

“I was one of Evergreen’s most popular professors,” he later testified to the House of Representatives. “I had Evergreen’s version of tenure. Did they really think they could force my resignation based on a meritless accusation? They did think that, and they were right.”

Weinstein was a Bernie Sanders supporter who described his politics as unabashedly liberal, even leftist. Like many, he’d grown up steeped in the imagery of sixties protest culture, probably imagined himself on its side, and therefore thought he could find solidarity with protesters. He didn’t realize was that he was the canary in a coal mine for a new movement that understood free speech as a stalking horse for the exercise of institutional power. When Weinstein opened his mouth to defend himself, what the crowd heard was him attempting to exercise authority, and they exercised theirs back.

They’d won over Evergreen’s new president, George Bridges, who refused to intercede in Weinstein’s behalf and later even asked college police to stand down, when protesters began stopping traffic and searching cars for someone, presumably Weinstein. The police told Weinstein they couldn’t guarantee his safety, and ultimately he was, in fact, forced to resign.

Frequently portrayed as the involuntary protagonist of the first of a series of campus free speech crises, in fact Weinstein was one of the first to understand that a rollback of “free speech” in cases like his was incidental to the larger aims of the movement.

“What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control. Speech is impeded as a last resort,” he told the House Oversight Committee.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Winston Marshall’s brilliant stand against cancel culture The former Mumford & Sons banjoist reminds us how important it is to speak freely and honestly. Brendan O’Neill

By on June 25th, 2021

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/25/winston-marshalls-brilliant-stand-against-cancel-culture/

There is something both stirring and sad about Winston Marshall’s goodbye letter to Mumford & Sons after he found himself in the eye of a Twitterstorm for praising the work of anti-Antifa journalist Andy Ngo.

It’s stirring because here we have a public figure making an enormous sacrifice – leaving the band he loves – in order that he might more freely express his political beliefs. That’s rare in this age in which celebs, columnists and politicians usually respond to Twittermobbing with abject apologies, mistakenly believing that public displays of atonement will appease the thoughtpolice. Of course it does the opposite. Apologies embolden the cancel-culture mob. They feast on retractions. The thrill of having successfully forced someone to recant deepens their lust for power.

So to see Marshall stand up for himself feels bracing. His ‘offence’ was that he tweeted favourably about Andy Ngo’s book, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. The woke left fantasises that Antifa’s Fisher-Price revolutionaries, its pampered TikTok vanguard, its masked middle-class activists who love beating up journalists and punching stupid working-class Trump supporters, are the 21st-century equivalent of the International Brigades. So anyone who takes the side of Mr Ngo – who recognises that Antifa is actually a bunch of dangerous arseholes – must be evil. And that includes Marshall.

The reaction to Marshall’s pro-Ngo tweet was, even by the standards of today’s viral inquisitions, deranged. He was branded scum, alt-right, a fascist. The cancelling fury was so intense that Marshall did apologise, initially, and then disappeared from public view. But now he’s back with his goodbye letter to his band.

He explains why his first response to the storm was to say sorry for having caused offence: ‘In the mania of the moment I was desperate to protect my bandmates. The hornets’ nest that I had unwittingly hit had unleashed a black-hearted swarm on them and their families.’ This is how ferocious and unforgiving digital witch-hunts have become. It isn’t only you, the speechcriminal, who will be hounded and libelled – so too will your friends, your family, your associates. Denounce yourself to save them and possibly save yourself – this is the unspoken creed of the modern mob that will harry for days anyone who deviates from its ideological narrative.

Now, Marshall is retracting his retraction. He has been ‘reflecting, reading and listening’, he says. He now feels that his previous apology ‘in a small way participates in the lie that [left-wing] extremism does not exist’. He strongly believes that Antifa extremism is as problematic as far-right extremism, and in order to be able to express this truth that he has arrived at through reflection and consideration he is leaving Mumford & Sons. ‘I could remain and continue to self-censor’, he writes, ‘but it will erode my sense of integrity. Gnaw my conscience.’

This is an incredibly important stand to take. Self-censorship is the most insidious form of censorship in the early 21st century. The knowledge that a witch-hunt can be formed in mere minutes on social media, and that its baying members will happily demonise, denounce and maybe even call for the sacking of any thoughtcriminal who questions transgenderism or refuses to genuflect to BLM or wonders out loud if Antifa might actually be a bit fa, has nurtured a culture of self-silencing, of keeping one’s opinions to oneself in order not to fall foul of the new self-selected guardians of correct thought.

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FOREIGN POLICY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The delusional faith in reason of the liberal intellectual As the west’s enemies ratchet up their aggression, the more determined the Biden administration becomes to appease them Melanie Phillips

By on June 25th, 2021

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-delusional-faith-in-reason-of?token

Anyone who imagines that the increasingly aggressive behaviour of the Iranian regime will force US President Joe Biden to abandon his attempted revival of the lethal 2015 nuclear deal is almost certainly in for a rude awakening.

The more Iran doubles down on its aggression, the more determined the Biden administration becomes to seal the deal.

Last week, Ebrahim Raisi was elected as Iran’s president. Raisi is a hardliner who is expected to resist any compromise over the deal and to go full steam ahead with the terrorist state’s ballistic-missile programme, its regional aggression and its development of nuclear weapons.

Yet as reported in The New York Times, the Bidenites say this makes the deal even more promising. This is because a) the six-week window before Raisi takes office enables the deal to be completed; b) if the ensuing sanctions relief doesn’t rescue the economy, Iran’s so-called moderates currently in power would take the blame; and c) if the economy recovers, Raisi can take the credit.

This all-purpose gibberish is designed to mask the obvious fact that the Biden administration has been gagging for this deal from the moment it took office and will allow absolutely nothing to derail it.

Indeed, the word this week from the chief of staff to the current Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, was that Washington has agreed to lift about 1,040 sanctions imposed during the Trump era. This is despite the fact that Iran has reportedly not budged by one iota from its demands. So the United States has simply capitulated.

Nor is this rush to appease those who continue to ramp up their aggression confined to Iran. In March, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, was humiliated by two of China’s top diplomats. When he unwisely met them in Anchorage, they took the opportunity to lecture and insult him.

Yet according to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the administration now wants to begin a new round of “engaging” China. This is also despite increasing suspicions that Covid-19 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that China has lied through its teeth about the pandemic calamity it has visited upon the world.

And then there are the Palestinians, with whom the Bidenites have now restored funding and diplomatic ties despite the Palestinian Authority’s continued incitement against Israel and “pay-for-slay” support for terrorism.

So what can explain the Biden administration’s increasingly lethal perversity?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

“The Man Who Isn’t There” Sydney Williams

By on June 25th, 2021

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

In a 2006 report, Jonathon R.T. Davidson, Professor (now Emeritus) of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University, utilizing biographical sources, wrote about the first thirty-seven U.S. Presidents (Washington through Nixon). His conclusion: eighteen of them had some form of mental illness, from depression and anxiety to bipolar disorders and alcohol abuse/dependence. Given the pressure under which Presidents operate, perhaps such findings are not surprising.

In 1964, in response to a group of psychiatrists claiming Barry Goldwater unfit for office the American Psychiatric Association issued a statement, which said in part: “…it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.” That caveat has not stopped “armchair psychiatrists” from offering unfavorable opinions about Presidents, especially Republican ones, including Ronald Reagan who was called an “idiot savant” and who some said showed signs of early onset Alzheimer’s, and George W. Bush who was called a “puppet of Dick Cheney” and who others said exhibited “deep feelings of inadequacy.”

But no President was ever mentally scrutinized as closely as was Donald Trump. Even before the election Representative Karen Bass (D-CA and without a medical degree) launched a petition to have Mr. Trump psychologically examined, claiming he exhibited signs of narcissistic personality disorder. In December 2017, more than a dozen members of Congress invited a Yale University psychiatry professor Dr. Bandy X. Lee to evaluate Trump’s behavior. Without ever meeting him, and in contravention of the 1964 statement issued by the American Psychiatric Association, she was quoted by Politico: “He’s going to unravel, and we are seeing the signs…Trump is going to get worse and will become uncontainable with the pressure of the presidency” In response to non-stop attacks on his fitness for office, Donald Trump, in 2020, took the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a brief test of about thirty questions. He claimed he “aced” it, though Canadian inventor of the test, Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, said Mr. Trump’s score showed “normal performance.”

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