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Ruth King

After Destroying Hong Kong Democracy, China Turns Toward Taiwan By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/12/10/after-destroying-hong-kong-democracy-china-turns-toward-taiwan-n1202427

China took full advantage of the world’s preoccupation with the pandemic they caused to destroy democracy in Hong Kong. Now that they have one major domestic problem solved, they are turning their attention to their biggest unfinished business: bringing Taiwan to heel.

In more than 70 years, Beijing has never wavered an inch in its insistence that Taiwan is a province of China. This has made for an interesting diplomatic dance by the United States, which technically recognizes Taiwan as an independent state but rarely treats them like one. Donald Trump sought to change that by selling arms to Taipei and thumbing his nose at China by sending high-level representatives of the U.S. government to the island.

China fumed and raged but did little to retaliate. But with the Hong Kong “problem” solved, China will now turn its full attention and focus its power on crushing the resistance to its rule in Taiwan.

Reuters: 

It’s not the final, titanic clash that Taiwan has long feared, with Chinese troops storming the beaches. Instead, the People’s Liberation Army, China’s two-million-strong military, has launched a form of “gray zone” warfare. In this irregular type of conflict, which stops short of an actual shooting war, the aim is to subdue the foe through exhaustion.

‘The Big One’ Gets Bigger: 15 Michigan Legislators Join Texas Election Lawsuit By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/12/10/the-big-one-gets-bigger-15-michigan-legislators-join-texas-election-lawsuit-n1202994

On Thursday, 15 Republican legislators in Michigan filed a motion in support of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R-Texas) lawsuit challening the 2020 presidential election results in four key swing states, including Michigan. The legislators joined the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society in supporting the Texas lawsuit, which asks the Supreme Court to remand the election results to swing-state legislatures for review and potential reversal.

“The state legislature serves as an ‘insurance policy’ against election officials who abuse or misuse their power,” State Rep. Daire Rendon, one of the legislators who signed on to the brief, said in a statement. “And our election officials failed in their primary duty. They had one job — to follow Michigan election law as it is written, not as they wish it to be — and they failed it.”

In addition to Rendon, the Michigan legislators on the brief include: Julie Alexander, Matt Maddox, Beth Griffin, John Reilly, Gary Elsen, Joe Bellino, Bronna Kahle, Luke Meerman, Doug Wozniak, Michele Hoitenga, Brad Paquette, Greg Markkanen, Jack O’Malley, and Rodney Wakeman.

Seventeen other states have joined Texas in its lawsuit, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia. President Donald Trump himself filed a motion to intervene on Wednesday.

The Texas lawsuit accuses swing-state officials of breaking the law in three ways: changing election process in violation of laws duly passed by signed legislatures; giving voters more favorable treatment if they live in heavily Democratic areas; and the relaxation of ballot-integrity protections.

The Four Horsemen of the American Apocalypse By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/12/10/the-four-horsemen-of-the-american-apocalypse-n1202939

EXCERPTS

“In our “time and setting,” one might think that we are witnessing the last days of the American Republic, following massive electoral fraud, the suppression of facts by the media, the ubiquitous practice of censorship by the tech platforms, and the (so far) pusillanimous refusal of the courts to rectify the greatest electoral scandal, by several orders of magnitude, since the defeat of Andrew Jackson in the “corrupt bargain” of 1824.”

Given the cultural forces that have been at work undermining the joists and beams of the nation, the impending calamity comes as no surprise. The four horsemen are riding again, and their names are Feminism, Climate, COVID-19, and the Democratic Party.

Feminism sits astride the white horse, obviously, crowned in ostensible purity. This destructive and malicious ideology of spurious “equality” has dissolved the vigorous masculine spirit that has long sustained the greatest nation on the planet, and it shows no sign of relenting. A nation that has been radically feminized will not survive in the carnal jungle of politics and war. As Michael Ignatieff writes in The Lesser Evil, “liberal societies cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us.”

Climate, aka the red horse of Global Warming, is taking the peace of daily living from domestic assurances, depriving the country of reliable sources of energy, fouling the landscape, polluting the environment, empowering a class of robber barons profiting at the expense of the people, and establishing infrastructural control by a cadre of demagogues—it could also be called the green horse. (Watermelon environmentalism: green on the outside, red on the inside.)

The black horse of COVID—or, more accurately, the official response to the virus, replete with false information as the First Trust COVID-19 Tracker points out—has panicked the populace, led to misguided draconian measures, caused shortages of consumer goods, promoted the manifest injustice of elite immunity to law, inflicted disproportionate suffering and increased lethality, and facilitated mammoth economic collapse from which there may be no full recovery. The black horse has trampled the nation’s prospects for both the present and the future.

And the Democratic Party, charging on the pale horse of corruption, lies, calumny, hypocrisy, vandalism, corporate welfare, racial conflict, electoral treachery, the murder of innocents called “abortion on demand,” and totalitarian principles associated with socialism and communism, followed by the Hell of the Press, the academy, the jesters of Hollywood and social media, has plausibly ensured the ideological transformation of the Republic into the two-headed Babylon of secular idolatry and political control, or alternately, the Roman Empire of harassment and persecution. In any case, it signifies the Death of legitimate governance.

There’s a reason the media is suddenly reporting on Hunter Biden’s corruption By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/theres_a_reason_the_media_is_suddenly_reporting_on_hunter_bidens_corruption.html

“Joe served his purpose by being the bland front person for a full leftist assault on the White House. Now it’s time for him to go. And while his handlers may reward him for a job well done with the pleasure of the inauguration, you can be sure that they’ll pressure him to do what he promised to do, which is to invent a respectable disease and quit ASAP.”

In the world of Democrat politics, there are no coincidences. With that principle in mind, it’s possible to understand why Democrat media outlets are suddenly reporting about Hunter Biden’s corruption, a story that spills over onto his father. The first is to get ahead of potential breaking news about Hunter’s imminent arrest. The second theory is the one Monica Showalter advanced: The leftists used Biden to attain the White House (or so they believe) and are now ready to get rid of him. Having a criminal son may be just what the Obama/Harris camp needs to make that happen. And if there’s any doubt about this theory, an article in The New York Times seems to lay it to rest. 

We conservatives remember how, in October, the media and the tech tyrants conspired to block any reports about Hunter Biden, whether those reports were the Senate Intelligence Committee’s findings about the $3.5 million Hunter received from the wife of a Russian politician, or the shocking details of political corruption, drug addiction, and sexual debauchery contained on his hard drive.

Well, to ordinary people, these stories were shocking. To the media and the tech tyrants, these stories were potential dangers to Joe Biden’s candidacy. They had to be stopped – and stopped they were. Twitter and Facebook, the two biggest social media tech tyrants, refused to allow any reports to circulate and banned people, including President Trump’s press secretary, from their platforms when they refused to bow down to this censorship.

News outlets derided the reports about the Biden family’s corrupt dealings, all of which implicated Joe Biden as the man who pimped out his addled son for huge sums of money, as non-stories. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s explicitly what NPR’s public editor said:

Critical Race Theory: As ‘Pseudo’ as Pseudoscience Gets By Allen Gindler

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/critical_race_theory_as_pseudo_as_pseudoscience_gets.html

Racial relations are a complicated and controversial topic, so many are uncomfortable and even afraid to discuss it.  I consider myself an exception, given my “suitable background”: I am a European-American, based on my geographical place of birth; I am a Middle Eastern American, based on my historical homeland; and I am also an African-American, based on the origin of my species, Homo sapiens sapiens!  I came from a third-world country where I experienced racist hostility toward my ethnicity and fought back in various ways until I immigrated to the United States.  Therefore, the issue of race relations is not at all alien to me.

Recently, reading a seminal book on Critical Race Theory (CRT) gave me a long forgotten and unpleasant feeling from my student days in the ex–Soviet Union.  It was a feeling that I was wasting time and effort in studying inherently wrong subjects that were ideologically driven and lacking in any practical validation and usefulness.  (These subjects were scientific communism, Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and political economy of socialism).  Studying these subjects and experiencing firsthand their practical implementation had expanded my knowledge about the development of human society only to the extent that socialism is a dead end of societal evolution.

My first impression of the book was that CRT is a shining example of politically and ideologically driven yet illogical pseudoscience.  As the title suggests, the subject of this “critical” study is race and the relationship between people of different races, while at the same time, one of its pillars is the assertion that races are artificial, human-invented categories that do not have any biological and genetic basis.

This assertion does not constitute a fact since the question of the existence or non-existence of the biological nature of races has not yet been settled by science.  Instead, it reflects the penchant of some modern anthropologists, biologists, geneticists, and sociologists who question traditional race-based human taxonomy and propose to classify people by geographic origins or ethnic groups. 

The District of Corruption Has Overplayed Its Hand By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/the_district_of_corruption_has_overplayed_its_hand.html

This is just an observation (because I’m not looking forward to gulag life), but I think the only thing keeping Trump voters from burning the whole corrupt system down right now is that nobody knows whom or what to attack.  That should be a pretty sobering consideration for an establishment class that thinks it just stole the 2020 presidential election fair and square.  If there were a ship out in the harbor loaded up with all the Democrats’ fraudulent ballots from the election, there’s no doubt in my mind that a hundred million Americans would dress up as members of the Washington Football Club and sink that ship to the bottom of the sea.  If the politicians and journalists who call the District of Corruption home were wearing bright red coats, I suspect they’d find themselves tossed to the curb head-first by every small business–owner going belly-up right now due to political whims disguised as public health orders.  If there were a field of battle to defend or clearly demarcated enemy zones on the map, I’m guessing the powder keg ignited from mail-in ballot fraud this election cycle would have already gone boom!  

The truth is that Americans are mad, and they should be.  They have put up with four years of fake Russian collusion hoaxes and fake impeachments and fake judges using their powers to hamstring lawful executive orders from President Trump.  They have watched the CIA abuse its powers to spy on a Republican political campaign and the FBI abuse its powers to punish political allies of the president, and the only person facing any semblance of justice in the whole mess is some no-name young lawyer from deep in the bowels of the Deep State’s operations against Trump who lacked the judgment to understand that his own side would use him as a scapegoat.  Police officers have been totally thrown under the bus so that lawless Democrat mayors and district attorneys could send armies of Antifa thugs into the streets this election year as a show of strength.  Old and young veterans have been watching elected officials tear up the Constitution they took oaths to defend, and if fighting broke out tomorrow, I think 90% of those former soldiers would be at the front lines the day after next. 

Why Doesn’t The Covidocracy Care About Vitamin D Findings? Michael Fumento

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/10/why-doesnt-the-covidocracy-care-about-vitamin-d-findings/

There’s actually very limited evidence in favor of mass masking, but advocates argue it’s relatively inexpensive (true) and what’s the harm (none if your intent is to create division and distrust among “your” people). But what about something to reduce COVID-19 severity and mortality that’s cheap, easy, and has solid scientific evidence behind it?

Finally someone in official capacity is pushing this treatment. It’s called “vitamin D.” England has announced that more than 2.5 million of its more vulnerable people, namely those in long-term care facilities, will be offered free vitamin D supplements this winter.

Like all vitamins and some minerals, it seems vitamin D has been presented by various sources as a form of snake oil in a capsule – with the (possible) exception of growing hair on a bowling ball. You can find at least one study for practically everything. But we know it’s essential to human life and we know many people aren’t getting enough. That’s especially true among people with darker skin, the elderly, and those living at higher latitudes. Older age and darker skin have both clearly been associated with worse COVID-19 outcomes.

COVID-19 aside, vitamin D insufficiency affects almost 50% of the population worldwide, while an estimated 1 billion people, across all ethnicities and age groups, have vitamin D deficiency. Our ancestors didn’t sit behind monitors and TVs in caves all day long.

A shortage has long been associated with a host of problems. “Emerging research supports the possible role of vitamin D against cancer, heart disease, fractures and falls, autoimmune diseases, influenza, type-2 diabetes, and depression,” notes one paper.

Impeachment Should Start With Kamala Harris

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/11/impeachment-should-start-with-kamala-harris/

A few weeks back, we made the case for impeaching Joe Biden, should he become the next president. While we stacked up the evidence against him, we also acknowledged that removing him from office would elevate Kamala Harris to the presidency, an even worse alternative than the former Obama vice president. The way around this dilemma is to impeach Harris first. Then take down Biden.

The founders wisely intended for impeachment to be difficult, and removal from office an steeper even climb. But the Democrats changed the game, frivolously impeaching President Donald Trump on charges that he withheld aid to Ukraine for political reasons, which is what Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appears to have done with pandemic relief funds – blocked them to hurt a political rival.

The impeachment case against the California senator doesn’t line up as solidly as does for Biden. He’s had a nearly 35-year head start in “public service” – enough time to pile up a mountain of corruption. But it appears she’s not far behind, given that she seems to have some involvement in the Huntergate scandal. According to PJ Media, an email from Biden’s son Hunter, “Reportedly Names Kamala Harris, Others as Key Contacts for ‘Joint Venture’ With China Energy Co.”

So far, all we have there is suspicion. Yet some things about Harris are known. She was an abusive prosecutor in California. She was scolded by a superior court judge for violating defendants’ rights “by covering up detrimental information about a drug-lab technician,” says the New York Post, and was supportive of a jailhouse snitch program which “tainted more than a dozen criminal cases, several of them murder trials.” 

Then there were the moments when Harris simply failed to do her duty. She has been accused of refusing to prosecute some sexual abuse cases, possibly due to the involvement of powerful people who had donated to her San Francisco district attorney campaign.

The Bidens and Beijing Tax questions about Hunter’s income raise again the question of how he earned it.: James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bidens-and-beijing-11607627205?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

“Mr. Trump mentioned that he used to wonder why his Beltway adversaries always use Russia when advancing conspiracy theories about him. He chuckled as he recounted the moment he understood why and said, “They never use China. You know why? ’Cause they’re all getting rich on China.”

Hunter Biden may have wanted to hold 10% for the “big guy,” but did he forget to set aside 37% for Uncle Sam? A tax investigation focused on the Biden family’s highly questionable sources of income may finally force them to answer precisely how such income is generated in the first place.

The Journal’s Ken Thomas and Sabrina Siddiqui report:

Hunter Biden, the son of President-elect Joe Biden, said in a statement Wednesday that the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware is “investigating my tax affairs,” putting his financial dealings in the spotlight, as his father builds his administration.
Hunter Biden said he takes the matter “very seriously” and is “confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately.”
The Justice Department declined to comment on Wednesday.

Exactly one year ago, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and six Democrats chairing House committees unveiled their plan to charge President Donald Trump with impeachment articles which did not claim he had committed any crimes. Mr. Trump’s alleged offense was suggesting that a foreign government look into Hunter Biden dealings which any reasonable person would say deserved examination. A source now tells the Journal that the feds began investigating Biden taxes in 2018. One year ago today, did any of the congressional Democrats know that as they were accusing Mr. Trump of non-crimes, the subject of his scrutiny was already under U.S. criminal investigation?

No bail’ just part of it: LA’s new DA totally eviscerating basic law By Heather Mac Donald

https://nypost.com/2020/12/09/no-bail-just-part-of-it-las-new-da-totally-eviscerating-basic-law/

Los Angeles’ newly elected district attorney, George Gascon, has a plan for ensuring compliance with the county’s draconian stay-at-home orders: make the city so dangerous that Angelenos will be terrified to step outside.

Gascon belongs to a wave of well-funded left-wing prosecutors who have come to office promising to eliminate racial disparities in the criminal-justice system. They are doing so by eliminating key components of the criminal-justice system itself. Gascon’s office will no longer prosecute a wide range of misdemeanor offenses.

They include:

Trespass. Los Angeles streets, in all but its wealthiest neighborhoods, are already overrun by squalid encampments. Business owners who have managed so far to survive the lockdown regularly have to sweep vagrants off their property in the morning, along with ­feces and drug paraphernalia. The vagrant won’t leave? Don’t bother calling the police. Any arrest an officer makes will simply be dismissed. If a homeowner sees a ­vagrant climbing the fence to his house, he will have to deal with it himself.

Driving without a license or driving with a suspended license. The risk of being hit and possibly killed by a drunk driver or by someone who just can’t operate a car just went up, in a sop to the ­illegal-immigrant lobby.

Disturbing the peace. Los Angeles has seen a spate of shootings at rowdy illegal house parties. Too bad if such a party breaks out on your block. Just hope that no one feels dissed and pulls a gun.

Public intoxication and loitering to commit prostitution. These activities are the prelude to greater problems, as law-abiding residents of high-crime communities know too well. The sister of an assassinated Chicago cop warned in The Chicago Sun-Times this summer that illegal drug and alcohol use on residential streets easily escalates into ­fatal shootings, because the perpetrators “think no one cares.”