RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://asiatimes.com/2020/12/the-tech-war-that-isnt/

Washington last week added China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) to the “entity” list that requires US companies to get special permits to trade with it, rattling the Chinese chipmaker’s stock price. But China hawks in the US Senate complain that the wording of the new rules makes them easy to circumvent, and allege that the Commerce Department bowed to the “parochial commercial interest” of US companies trading with China.

The trouble is that China’s market for semiconductor technology is growing so fast that American firms fear for their long-term viability if they are not involved. The Trump Administration imposed controls on the export of key semiconductor technology six months ago, but American chip design companies’ China sales are booming. Cadence Design Systems, one of America’s top two makers of design software, reports a near-doubling of China sales during the third quarter – after the controls went into effect. Meanwhile, America’s top design firms are investing in the Chinese startups that are hiring away some of their best talent, in order to keep a foot in the door of the Chinese market if they are prevented from selling directly.

Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) complained Dec. 22 that the new controls announced on SMIC, China’s largest chip fabricator, have a big loophole: The new rules apply only to equipment that is “uniquely” required to produce the most advanced logic chips, with a transistor gate width of 10 nanometers or below. But there’s no clear definition of what “unique” means, so “the Department of Commerce seems to be allowing SMIC access to nearly all semiconductor manufacturing equipment – undercutting the effectiveness of its nominal intent.”

The two Republicans added, “In effect, SMIC will not face serious restrictions, because very few tools are “uniquely capable” of producing a certain chip size. Indeed, SMIC publicly stated that its designation has no material adverse effect on the company’s short-term operations.”

They’re right, but they miss the big picture. SMIC is a minor factor in the world semiconductor market and in China itself, while a myriad of other firms – including telecom giant Huawei – are building chip fabrication lines without restricted US equipment. 

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

In a recent article, I stated that the U.S. lacks an influential right-wing party, and our two major parties — Democrats and Republicans — are left and center-left, respectively.  That is, the perceived rightness of the GOP makes sense only relative to the Democratic party.  It is refuted if one considers the actual policy carried out by Republicans for the last one hundred years.

First of all, it is necessary to clarify what we understand by the left-right political spectrum.  A political spectrum is a system of qualitative comparisons of different political philosophies.  There are plenty of approaches in compiling the political spectrum based on various factors, dimensions, axes, and cardinal points.  Most often, political spectrograms differ significantly from each other, and it seems that each of them describes an entirely different reality.

Recent developments in the analysis of political philosophies, based on a multi-disciplinary approach utilizing set theory and mathematical logic in a framework of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), started to remove the ambiguity in understanding a political spectrum.  The study identifies three main factors that influence the political spectrum polarization: attitude to private property, degree of individual freedom, and the scale of wealth redistribution.

The political doctrine is left-wing if it assaults private property rights OR subjugates the individual to the collective OR imposes compulsory and scaled-wealth redistribution.  The “OR” operand means that these factors can be employed individually or in concert and can be considered unique paths to socialism.  Thus, Bolsheviks utilized all three ways to build communism, and Italian Fascists and German Nazis used coercive collectivization of consciousness and generous wealth redistribution as the main paths to socialism.  In contrast, evolutionary socialists funnel the effort to implement a massive wealth redistribution along with the gradual indoctrination of the population.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-made-the-vaccine-possible-not-who-11608744603?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

With the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, a light has appeared in the darkness. A hard winter lies ahead, but this pandemic will soon be over.

How can this be happening only 10 months after the first Covid death in the U.S., rather than the 10 years it took to develop a vaccine for measles? Nine months ago, Anthony Fauci stated unambiguously: “It will take at least a year and a half to have a vaccine we can use.” The public-health community dismissed that as a fantasy. A co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, Paul Offit, noted: “When Dr. Fauci said 12 to 18 months, I thought that was ridiculously optimistic.” A New York Times vaccine timeline went further, declaring: “The grim truth behind this rosy forecast is that a vaccine probably won’t arrive any time soon.”

Those naysayers have been proved wrong and it’s worth considering why. Let me invite the reader to answer a short quiz. When in the months ahead you are vaccinated, to whom should you be most thankful for making this possible?

• The initiative forwarded by the United Nations, Group of 20, World Health Organization and COVAX—an affiliate of WHO and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations—that called for “a ‘people’s vaccine’ available and affordable for everyone, everywhere,” in the words of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres ?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/white-coat-supremacy-christmas-lloyd-billingsley/

Dr. Anthony Fauci turns 80 tonight, on Christmas Eve, but by early December he was already gearing up for the occasion. Nobody wanted to modify or shut down the holiday season, Fauci told reporters,  but “we’re at a very critical time . . . we’ve got to not walk away from the facts and the data. This is tough going for all of us.”

Dr. Fauci did not recall his constantly shifting views on masks, social distancing and so forth. Nobody asked him about the dangerous “gain of function” research the longtime National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases boss had authorized, nor the funds NIAID channeled to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The longtime NIAID boss only addressed the holidays, and his Coronavirus Task Force colleague Dr. Deborah Birx also got in the act.

“We cannot go into the holiday season, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, with the same kind of attitude, that those gatherings don’t apply to me,” Birx told reporters. “They apply to everybody.” It had not yet emerged that Birx had violated her own guidelines with a post-Thanksgiving trip to a vacation home with family from two households. As Birx and Fauci locked down Christmas, another white-coat type was casting a darker shadow far beyond the holidays.

“Older populations are whiter. Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

That was Dr. Harald Schmidt of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Schmidt, who identifies as an “ethicist,” did not explain how, exactly, society had been structured in a way that makes “whiter” people live longer. By implication, blacker people do not live longer, which ignores some rather high-profile cases.