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Ruth King

FOREIGN POLICY, HISTORY Comments turned off

Biden’s Deceptive Acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide Why his vow “never again” rings hollow. David Boyajian

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/what-lies-beneath-bidens-deceptive-acknowledgment-david-boyajian/

Joe Biden’s April 24 statement acknowledging the Armenian Genocide (1915–1923+) carried out by Turkey was welcome, but flawed. Indeed, “Turkey” appears nowhere in the document. Moreover, the State Department swiftly undermined Biden’s virtuous-sounding words.

American acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide isn’t even new. The U.S. House has passed several resolutions on the Genocide. And a nearly unanimous Congress did so in 2019.

Presidents going back to Woodrow Wilson have described the Armenian ordeals with language such as: an effort to exterminate all Armenians; terrible massacres; mass killings; death marches; and an ancient [Armenian] homeland was erased. If these don’t describe genocide, the word is meaningless.

In 1951, the State Department cited the Armenian “massacres [as a] crime of genocide” in a filing at the International Court of Justice. In 1981, President Reagan included “the genocide of Armenians” in a Holocaust proclamation.

Genocide acknowledgments should not — like car insurance — lapse if not renewed annually. Will the Holocaust become a non-genocide next year if the White House happens to overlook it?

Still, the president’s statement is noteworthy. It could even reinvigorate several Armenian American lawsuits against Turkey. But the statement has problems.

It tries to take the heat off today’s Republic of Turkey by blaming only “Ottoman-era … authorities” for the Genocide.

After the Allies defeated Ottoman Turkey in WWI (1918), Ottoman General Mustafa Kemal’s (Ataturk) forces continued to massacre Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. Kemal also ordered that Armenia be “politically and physically eliminated.” When he established the Turkish Republic in 1923, Kemal appointed Ottoman genocidists and continued to persecute Christians.

Thus, as President Erdogan himself has confirmed, his country is a “continuation” of Ottoman Turkey. Knowing this, the Turkish Republic has always tried to evade accountability for the Genocide.

Disgracefully, though, Biden tries to assist Turkey in that regard by writing, “We do this not to cast blame” [on Turkey].” The president has no right to hand Turkey a “Get Out of Jail Free card.”

Just two days later, American Ambassador to Armenia Lynne Tracy tried to help Turkey duck accountability. “The Armenian Genocide took place in 1915, the [UN] Genocide Convention did not come into force until 1951 … from the legal perspective the Convention is not being applied retroactively.”

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BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Most Important Book You Will Read This Year And once you’ve read it, spread the word. Or say goodbye to America.

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/most-important-book-you-will-read-year-bruce-bawer/

Rarely has an author been proven correct so quickly. Last month, Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier, the commander of a Colorado-based Space Force squadron, published a book entitled Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military. On May 7, podcaster L. Todd Wood (“Information Operation”) posted an interview with Lohmeier about the book.

In their 34-minute exchange, Lohmeier – a former Air Force fighter pilot and flight instructor who, at Space Force, was in charge of detecting ballistic missile launches – exuded decency, rectitude, and a deep respect for the uniformed services. He didn’t criticize anybody by name; he only made frankly undeniable statements about the Marxist nature of some of the ideas that are now being taught to U.S. servicepeople. It was crystal clear that in speaking out, he was convinced he was doing his patriotic duty.

A week to the day after the interview was posted, Lohmeier’s superiors abruptly relieved him of his command. A Space Force spokesperson announced that an investigation had been initiated into whether Lohmeier’s comments on the podcast “constituted prohibited partisan political activity.” In fact, the entire point of Lohmeier’s commentary was that members of the American military are today being brainwashed with hard-core Marxist ideas that not only constitute partisan political activity but seek to demonize the country the military is supposed to be defending. As for Lohmeier’s own comments, there was nothing remotely partisan or political about them – unless you consider it partisan or political to be a patriot.

On the one hand, Lohmeier’s dismissal is a disgrace. On the other hand, what better way to draw attention to the supremely urgent message of his book – a truly sensational exposé that should be read by everyone who cares about America’s fate in this perilous era of woke insanity.

Much of Lohmeier’s book consists of anecdotes about his encounters with the Marxist bilge now being endorsed by the Department of Defense in the name of “diversity and inclusion.” For example, last year, after the death of George Floyd, Lohmeier and other men and women stationed at his base were shown two videos. One of them depicted American history as, in the words of its director, “400 years of white supremacy.” It portrayed the Constitution as oppressive and stated that all whites are racists, whether they know it or not. The other video described America as a “system of oppression,” accused Donald Trump of fueling “systematic racism,” presented Obama and the Clintons as anti-racist heroes, and promoted ideas about America that, in Lohmeier’s view, seemed intended “to justify…violent riots.”

Lohmeier was disturbed. But those videos were only the tip of the iceberg. “As a commander of young military professionals, all of whom have taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” he writes, “I became concerned that race-based identity politics would erode the trust and confidence these young people have in their country and in the Constitution.” No kidding. He could justifiably have taken his criticism much further. To feed members of the military this kind of propaganda is to plunge them into utter cognitive dissonance – into Orwellian Doublethink. If you’re going to promote such ideas – which paint America as a racist republic that shouldn’t be defended but overthrown – why have a military at all, unless you’re planning to use it to stage a Communist revolution?

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s Attempt to Avoid the American Tech Monopoly Trap David Goldman

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/chinas-attempt-to-avoid-the-american-tech-monopoly-trap/

One of the great paradoxes of recent economic history is how little the information technology sector has contributed to overall productivity. Economist Raicho Bojilov examined total factor productivity across the major industrial economies from the 1970s to the present and observed:

Somewhat surprisingly, we do not witness, even with a lag, a major pickup in the productivity growth in other industries that are directly and indirectly connected to the IT industry. One would expect that if the IT industry were the engine of the US economy that generates the products, technologies, and techniques of the future, then the other industries would even­tually experience a jump in productivity rates to levels comparable to those of the IT industry. Thus, one may wonder why aggregate productivity in the US has not grown much more in accordance with the innovations and major productivity gains that have been achieved in the IT industry.1

Bojilov adds that “the annual rates of indigenous innovation in the US and the UK have made only a partial recovery during the IT revolution: while higher than the rates for the period 1970–1990, they are still lower relative to the rates witnessed in the postwar years until the late 1960s.”

Why have IT improvements failed to radiate through the broader economy? There are many possible explanations, but the transformation of once-disruptive tech companies into rent-seeking monopolies is surely an important one. The monopolization of information technology arises from the nature of the technology itself: so-called network effects make it convenient to have one venue on which to post political comments and cat pictures, one provider of office software that everyone uses, one giant internet retail marketplace, and so forth. But the fact that technological monopolies have their origin in network effects rather than in the nefarious manipulation of mar­kets does not eliminate the potential for abuse.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s Belt and Road Being Built with Forced Labor by Judith Bergman

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17403/china-belt-road-forced-labor

Almost all the workers had been deceptively recruited with promises of certain wages and legal work visas. Instead, their passports were confiscated right after they disembarked the plane, leaving them unable to leave unless they paid a heavy fine to the Chinese employer…. They were locked up in poor living and working conditions on the work premises, which were guarded by security guards…. They suffered excessive work hours of up to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week with no holiday allowance… Many workers were injured during work with no access to medical treatment…. After a worker from a Chinese mining company in Indonesia was diagnosed positive for Covid-19 in November 2020, he was put in isolation in an empty dormitory room for more than 20 days without any medical treatment. Later other workers found his dead body.

The Chinese embassy also seems to have actively worked to suppress… complaints…. “Several workers said they tried to call the Chinese Embassy to report that their passports were detained by their employing company. The embassy’s reply was that it had no right to intervene and the workers were told to file a report at the local police station. However, these workers, cannot even get out of the gate of the work site, and they also face language barriers. It is quite unrealistic for them to call the local police. — “Silent Victims of Labor Trafficking: China’s Belt and Road workers stranded overseas amid Covid-19 pandemic”, China Labor Watch, April 30, 2021.

Forced labor exists in two distinct forms in China. One form is modern slavery, not directly sanctioned by the state, as exemplified by the BRI workers mentioned above. According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, “on any given day in 2016 there were over 3.8 million people living in conditions of modern slavery in China…. This estimate does not include figures on organ trafficking.”

The other form of forced labor is systematic and legal under China’s penal system. Communist China has used forced labor and labor camps, citing “reeducation”, since the 1950s. In 2013, the CCP claimed that it was abolishing the practice, only to reinstate it again some years later to “reeducate” Uyghurs. A study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, published in September 2020, found that the Chinese government had built nearly 400 detention camps in Xinjiang.

“Tens of thousands of former detainees are likely to have been transferred into forced labour programmes…. They contaminate the supply chains of hundreds of multinational companies with forced labour, and they implicate not only Chinese authorities, but much of the rest of the world in a concerted campaign of ethnic replacement that credible reports suggest may well amount to genocide”. — Nathan Ruser, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, The Guardian, September 24, 2020.

[A] much less known fact is that China also subjects Tibetans to forced labor on a large and organized scale. In the first seven months of 2020, China drove more than half a million Tibetans into forced labor according to a 2020 report, “Xinjiang’s System of Militarized Vocational Training Comes to Tibet,” by the Jamestown Foundation.

“The entire Belt and Road initiative is based on forced labor,” according to Li Qiang, director of China Labor Watch. “Chinese authorities want the Belt and Road projects for political gain and need to use these workers.”

A new report, “Silent Victims of Labor Trafficking: China’s Belt and Road workers stranded overseas amid Covid-19 pandemic” by China Labor Watch, published on April 30, details the conditions of some of those overseas Chinese workers, who are building China’s Belt and Road infrastructure projects across the world. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) forms a crucial part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) foreign policy and is a key tool in China’s ambition to become a global superpower.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

George Soros Gets a COVID Loan by Chris Farrell

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17369/george-soros-covid-loan

We need to ask ourselves how “the system” — our government — facilitates this sort of racket without checks or oversight. Harvard University can be publicly shamed into returning COVID relief money, but a Soros group gets a pass? Why the disparity of treatment and accountability?

Those Americans would be repulsed at the idea [George Soros’s East-West Management Institute] getting a PPP “loan,” assuming they even knew about it — 99.9% probably had no idea

Think about it: a Soros-backed operation that manages a big chunk of the State Department’s international development operations, pretending it is like any other American “small business,” was seeking paycheck protection subsidies because of COVID. It is an insult. It is grotesque.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal on October 17, 2017, George Soros transferred $18 billion to his Open Society Foundations. EWMI is part of the greater Soros operation. Why are American taxpayers subsidizing any part of his operations?

In March, the Small Business Administration gave a $234,548 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) “loan” to George Soros’s East-West Management Institute (EWMI).

The official description of the transaction is “to aid small businesses in maintaining workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic”, but federal grants and contracts to EWMI (its primary source of revenue) rose from $9,185,194 in FY 2019 to $14,859,293 in 2020. EWMI previously received a $226,179 PPP loan in May of 2020. As a supposedly small business struggling through the pandemic, EWMI enjoys office space at 575 Madison Avenue in New York City and 1101 Connecticut Ave NW in Washington, DC.

In November 2018, Judicial Watch published a special report, “The Financial and Staffing Nexus Between the Open Society Foundations and the United States Government.” The 28-page report is scrupulously documented with 154 footnotes citing to primary source records. A key take-away from the report concerning the activities of EWMI is that the organization manages projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a nominally independent component of the U.S. State Department.

For those interested, EWMI maintains a web page with documentation concerning their non-profit status and their financial statements. You can also view their self-described “Donors and Partners” who, evidently, were not able or willing to “loan” money to EWMI for paycheck protection. The list of donors and partners is quite remarkable — from the World Bank to Romania’s Justice Ministry, among many others. It makes one wonder why American taxpayers had to cover the PPP “loan.” It reminds one of Senator William Proxmire’s (D-WI) “Golden Fleece Award” for squandering the American public’s money.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Navy Heads to the Americas A pair of warships may be on the way to assist Venezuela

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irans-navy-heads-to-the-americas-11622586717?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Reports that two Iranian frigates may be steaming into the Atlantic toward Venezuela ought to concentrate minds in the Biden Administration. So much for Iranian goodwill amid President Biden’s determination to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal.

The vessels’ destination isn’t clear, and they could still turn back. But when asked by reporters on Monday about U.S. monitoring of the frigates, an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said “Iran has constant presence in international waters, is entitled to this right on the basis of international law, and can be present in international waters.” He added: “I warn that nobody should make a miscalculation. Those who live in glass houses must be cautious.”

Iran’s navy isn’t the U.S. Sixth Fleet, but the entry of warships into Caribbean waters would be a notable provocation. If it sails into these waters without resistance, a precedent will be set for adversarial navies operating in the region. Don’t be surprised if Russia and China decide to join the party in the future.

Iran is a long-time Cuban ally, and since Hugo Chávez turned Venezuela into a dictatorship 20 years ago, Tehran has nurtured an ever-closer relationship with Caracas. The two regimes have engaged in joint defense ventures in the Venezuelan state of Aragua, and Venezuela is known to supply fake identities to Iranian operatives to move around the region.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

All the WHO’s Dictators Taiwan is excluded while Syria and Belarus get leadership positions.

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-the-whos-dictators-11622586882?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

President Biden rejoined the World Health Organization as one of his first official acts, and his Administration has vowed to “strengthen and reform” it. That effort isn’t going well, as last week’s World Health Assembly shows.

The annual WHO confab started badly as China succeeded in blocking Taiwan’s participation—and embarrassing the U.S. in the process. The island democracy, which hoped to participate as an observer, has one of the world’s best records combatting Covid-19 and could spread its lessons to the world.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month that there is “no reasonable justification for Taiwan’s continued exclusion from this forum,” and the G-7 nations supported its participation. But China, which tries to block Taiwan from all international institutions, prevailed over the Western democracies.

Then on Friday the World Health Assembly voted to appoint Syria and Belarus to WHO’s executive board, which sets the governing body’s agenda and implements its policies. Video of the vote shows it proceeding with neither debate nor objections.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Anti-Semitism at Rutgers isn’t all academic Ruthie Blum

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/anti-semitism-at-rutgers-isnt-all-academic/

(June 1, 2021 / JNS) It’s a little hard to combat a phenomenon by kowtowing to its promoters, but leave it to academia to make a feeble attempt at doing so. Having spent the past few decades favoring sophistry over the imparting of knowledge, American institutions of higher learning are well-versed in double-speak.
Imagine their surprise, then, when even their best efforts at intellectual manipulation are met with derision by the very “woke” bullies whom they aim to please. Take the latest brouhaha at New Jersey-based Rutgers University as a case in point.

It all began on May 26, when the school’s chancellor, Christopher Molloy, and its provost, Francine Conway, issued a joint statement “against acts of anti-Semitism.”
In an e-mail addressed to the “Rutgers-New Brunswick Community,” Molloy and Conway wrote: “We are saddened by and greatly concerned about the sharp rise in hostile sentiments and anti-Semitic violence in the United States. Recent incidents of hate directed toward Jewish members of our community again remind us of what history has to teach us. Tragically, in the last century alone, acts of prejudice and hatred left unaddressed have served as the foundation for many atrocities against targeted groups around the world.”
Taking care to eliminate the particularity of anti-Semitism—a no-no in intersectional circles that consider the Jews to be born of “white privilege”—the two Rutgers honchos hastily turned their attention to George Floyd. His “murder” last year, they asserted, “brought into sharp focus the racial injustices that continue to plague our country, and over the past year there has [sic] been attacks on our Asian American Pacific Islander citizens, the spaces of Indigenous peoples defiled, and targeted oppression and other assaults against Hindus and Muslims.”
Patting themselves on the back for having paid required homage to any and all victims of “racial injustices,” they didn’t bother with something as banal as proofreading, but at least felt safe enough to return to their original subject.
“Although it has been nearly two decades since the U.S. Congress approved the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, the upward trend of anti-Semitism continues,” they stated. This was right before going on to equate the Jewish state with the terrorists bent on its annihilation.
“We have also been witnesses to the increasing violence between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Middle East leading to the deaths of children and adults and mass displacement of citizens in the Gaza region and the loss of lives in Israel,” they wrote.
They continued by mentioning the general, rather than specific, “death, destruction and ethnic strife” caused by the “ravages of the pandemic and proliferation of global conflict,” boasting that “the university stands as a beacon of hope for our community … a model for institutions that respect and value the dignity of every human being.”
You get the gist, which is that the Rutgers administration wanted to stress its denunciation of “acts of hate and prejudice against members of the Jewish community and any other targeted and oppressed groups on our campus and in our community.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Dirty Secret of ‘Clean’ Energy By Helen Raleigh

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-dirty-secret-of-clean-energy/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth

Many solar-energy panels and components from China, the world’s largest supplier, are built with forced labor.

President Biden pledged to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 50 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels. An estimate shows that to reach this ambitious goal, at least half of the U.S. power supply would have to come from clean energy such as solar and wind. However, one dirty secret that President Biden and his green allies don’t want to talk about is how “clean” solar energy is largely built on forced labor in Xinjiang, China, according to a new investigative report by U.K.’s Sheffield Hallam University.

China dominates the global supply chain for solar power and is the leading exporter of solar panels and critical components for making solar panels. For instance, about 95 percent of solar modules rely on one mineral — solar-grade polysilicon, and China produces 80 percent of the world supply of polysilicon. Xinjiang alone is responsible for 45 percent of the world’s supply of polysilicon. Such a high level of production requires a significant supply of labor.

The Sheffield Hallam University report, titled “In Broad Daylight: Uyghur Forced Labor and Global Solar Supply Chains,” shows how China’s booming solar industry has been tainted by the forced labor of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.

For example, U.K. researchers located an official Chinese government paper published in 2020 that acknowledged that the government had placed about 2.6 million minorities in farms and factories within Xinjiang and across China through state-sponsored “surplus labor” and “labor transfer” programs. Many minorities in these programs ended up working for Xinjiang’s growing solar industry. However, the Chinese government claims these labor-transfer programs comply with China’s laws and regulations, and workers’ participation in these programs is voluntary.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

The Rising Economic Cost of Cyberattacks By Cale Clingenpeel

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-rising-economic-cost-of-cyberattacks/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The Biden administration should build on the Trump administration’s strategy to confront the increasing security and economic threat of cyberattacks.

It was recently revealed that DarkSide raked in $90 million worth of Bitcoin — including $4.4 million in ransom from the Colonial Pipeline operator — from its cyberattacks stretching back to October 2020. The ransoms paid to DarkSide and similar organizations, however, do not capture the total economic cost of cyberattacks. Targeted firms acting in their individual interests may not fully account for the economic costs that spill over to consumers and to other firms. The result is underinvestment in cybersecurity from the private sector as a whole. While the Biden administration’s “private sector decision” remark helped define its Colonial Pipeline response, the federal government has an important role in closing this cybersecurity investment gap and limiting the future cost of cyberattacks.

Cyberattacks are perpetrated by numerous types of actors and stretch far beyond ransomware attacks such as the attack on the Colonial Pipeline. In fact, ransomware is on average a less costly form of cyberattack. While ransomware attacks on large firms tend to make headlines, according to one report, 70 percent of such attacks are directed at small- and medium-sized firms with fewer than 1,000 employees with 90 percent of the losses against these firms uninsured. The widespread nature of cyberattacks, their pervasiveness across industry and firm type, the varying components that make up the total cost, and the prevalence of underreporting all contribute to the difficulty in estimating the overall economic impact of these incidents, though some studies do exist.

In 2018, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) published a report evaluating the total costs associated with malicious cyberactivity by measuring the stock-price reaction of publicly traded firms to news of cyberattacks that had been made public. After taking into account firms’ underreporting of cyberattacks, spillover effects to other firms, and private costs incurred alongside the costs to publicly traded firms, the CEA estimated that the total cost posed by malicious cyberactivity to the U.S. economy in 2016 was as high as $109 billion (roughly 0.6 percent of 2016 GDP). These estimated costs are very likely to have increased since 2016.

According to annual studies by Accenture and the Ponemon Institute based on extensive surveys of firms and cybersecurity experts, between 2016 and 2018, the average total cost incurred by firms due to malicious cyber activity increased by 58 percent in the United States. Assuming that the total cost to the U.S. economy increased at the same rate as the average cost faced by those surveyed firms, the total cost of cyberattacks in 2018 would be as high as $172 billion (roughly 0.8 percent of 2018 GDP). This assumption likely serves as a lower-bound estimate, however, as the average number of cyberattacks faced by firms globally increased over this period, making it more than likely that the frequency of attacks against U.S. firms also increased. Since 2018 — the last year the study was conducted — the number of cyberattacks, the average cost of cyberattacks, and the total economic costs are likely to have risen even further.

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