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Ruth King

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Democratic Bile Will Reelect Trump David Catron

By on October 5th, 2020

https://spectator.org/democratic-bile-will-reelect-trump/

The Democrats and their friends in the Fourth Estate could hardly believe their luck when the news broke that President Trump had contracted COVID-19. They clearly believe he is finished politically and that their Potemkin presidential candidate will now win the upcoming election in a walk. The following headline from Politico captures this collective delusion: “Biden looks to seal election after Trump’s week from hell.” This is precisely how they reacted to the Hollywood Access tape that was released at the same point in the 2016 presidential race. Most “experts” pronounced the Trump campaign dead, and Hillary Clinton began measuring the drapes for the Oval Office.
 

What none of these people bothered to do was calibrate the effect of the tape on Trump’s actual supporters. Consequently, we began to see headlines like this one published by CBS News on October 10, 2016: “Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 14 points nationally.” This story attributed Clinton’s illusory lead to the “lewd comments about women in 2005.” By October 18, the RealClearPolitics average indicated that Clinton’s alleged lead in the national polls had grown to 7.1 percent. In the end, of course, Trump voters ignored the Hollywood Access tape, and he had far more supporters in key battleground states than the pollsters and pundits imagined in their wildest nightmares.

Fast-forwarding to the present, Trump is arguably in a better position politically than he was after his 2016 “week from hell.” He is purportedly behind in the national polls again, but the most accurate 2016 poll again shows a closer race than its counterparts, and recent studies suggest his support could be significantly understated due to the shy Trump voter phenomenon. Moreover, the celebratory response of the Democrats and the media to Trump’s illness will almost certainly increase his support. On CNN, in the midst of a tedious discussion about “mixed signals” from the White House, New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen actually compared Trump’s condition to Stalin’s death:

There have been a lot of comparisons to the Soviet Union in the last couple of days. I think they are not unwarranted. The particular period I am thinking about is something I have written about a lot, which were the days of Stalin’s deathwatch.… When the foreign correspondents and the domestic correspondents, such as they were, all knew what was going on. Nobody was giving them any information.… Everybody was expecting the final call, right? And the planet filled with rumor.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on October 5th, 2020

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Five patients saved by new Covid-19 treatment. Israel’s Enlivex Therapeutics reported positive results in its clinical Covid-19 trial of its Allocetra treatment (reported here previously) Five seriously ill patients made complete recoveries, an average 8.5 days after receiving the treatment.at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/5-patients-leave-hadassah-coronavirus-free-after-clinical-trial-644071
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3852110,00.html
 
Israel’s largest Covid-19 treatment center. Haifa’s Rambam hospital has opened its fortified underground emergency hospital to accommodate the rise in Covid-19 patients in Northern Israel.  Its 770 beds include 170 for patients on ventilators – sufficient for almost the total of Covid-19 patients currently hospitalized in Israel.
https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/09/27/rambam-opens-the-largest-covid-19-facility-in-israel/
 
Monitoring pain in Covid-19 patients. (TY Rachel F) Israel’s Medasense (see here) assesses levels of pain in non-communicative patients using its PMD200 pain monitoring device. The technology is now being advanced on ventilated COVID-19 patients. Medtronic is distributing the tech in Europe and FDA approval is in progress.
https://nocamels.com/2020/09/israeli-pain-monitoring-firm-medasense-raises-18m/
 
Israel & UAE join in fighting Covid. (TY Sharon) Medical professionals from Israel and the UAE attended the JLM-BioCity sponsored IGTCloud Online Conference, “How Big Data & AI Can Fight the COVID-19 Crisis”.  UAE and Israeli medical experts then presented sessions in a webinar on the UAE Healthcare sector.
https://baltimorejewishlife.com/news/news-detail.php?SECTION_ID=37&ARTICLE_ID=136060
 
First joint Israeli-UAE tech product. Israel’s SURE Universal and UAE’s Hamad Bin Khalifa (HBK) have launched HBKiCare – the first joint UAE-Israeli tech product. The homecare kit monitors temperature, ECG, pulse, blood oxygen, blood pressure and detect falls. It is marketed for the UAE and Middle East markets.
https://www.israel21c.org/israeli-uae-health-tech-firms-launch-homecare-product/
https://www.sureuniversal.com/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51B-1fsAC4w
 
Understanding immune peptides. Scientists at Israel’s Technion Institute have uncovered the atomic structure of Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) in the immune system. It could lead to the design of similar artificial materials for technological and medical applications such as treating infections and even killing cancer cells.   
https://www.technion.ac.il/en/2020/08/diverse-utility-found-in-antimicrobial-peptides-fibril-structure/
 
A healthier future.  The student projects exhibited at Israel’s Technion Faculty of Biomedical Engineering included systems for predicting epileptic seizures, mood tracking in cancer patients, and prevention of sudden death in athletes. First prize went to Lidan Fridman for her new technology to diagnose hearing loss accurately.
https://www.technion.ac.il/en/2020/09/can-anyone-hear-me/
 
AI surgical platform for Tel Aviv hospital. Tel Aviv’s Ichilov (Sourasky) medical center is implementing the advanced AI surgical intelligence platform from US-Israel’s Theator (reported here previously). It extracts and annotates every key moment from a procedure to allow surgeons to review their work from every angle.
https://nocamels.com/2020/09/israels-largest-hospital-implements-ai-powered-surgical-intelligence-platform/
 
Treat sleep apnea and stop snoring.  Israel’s KeepMed is currently conducting clinical trials of its KeePAP device to help patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) open their airways and reduce snoring. The soft, lightweight, hose-less wearable is designed for comfort and to restore good-quality sleep.
https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2020/09/29/israels-keepmed-raises-15-2-million-to-fight-snoring/
https://keepap.com/   https://xenia.co.il/portfolio/ninox/
 
Predicting an epileptic seizure. Ben Gurion University’s Dr Oren Shriki has founded the Israeli startup NeuroHelp to develop the Epiness – a wearable device that combines EEG-based monitoring of brain activity plus machine-learning algorithms to generate a one-hour warning of an upcoming seizure.
https://www.israel21c.org/in-first-wearable-device-predicts-epileptic-seizures-one-hour-ahead/
https://in.bgu.ac.il/en/pages/news/neurohelp_epilepsy.aspx
 
Odor linked to repeat miscarriages. Researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have discovered that women who suffer repeated pregnancy loss (uRPL) process messages concerning male body odor in a different way than other women. Brain scans reveal they have smaller olfactory bulbs – the initial brain-relay for smell.
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/repeated-pregnancy-loss-may-be-tied-olfactory-system
 
Preventing premature births. (TY Hazel) Some 1 million preterm babies die each year and many more suffer severe disabilities. Israeli startup PregnanTech has developed a silicone ring which can help prevent preterm births. A clinical trial for pregnant women at risk is planned at King’s College Hospital London.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-pregnantech-creates-silicone-ring-to-help-halt-premature-births/
https://www.trendlines.com/company/pregnantech/
 
Medics save mother and baby. 36-year-old Liron was 39-weeks pregnant with her first child when she collapsed unconscious. Within seconds, three paramedics from Israel’s United Hatzalah arrived. With CPR and a defibrillator, they restored Liron’s heartbeat. Liron, husband Yaron and baby Lior are now a happy family.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvWvlp0iYP0
 
 

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

No Joe, You Didn’t Hand Trump A Booming Economy

By on October 5th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/05/no-joe-you-didnt-hand-trump-a-booming-economy/

Joe Biden – along with his amen chorus in the press – keeps insisting that he and President Barack Obama handed Donald Trump a booming economy when they left office in 2016.

“We left a booming economy, ” Biden said during the first presidential debate, “and he caused the recession.” Debate moderator Chris Wallace jumped in to help Biden, adding that job growth was faster in the last three years of Obama’s term than the first three of Trump’s.

One is a flat out lie, the other a clever deception.

After presiding over the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression, Obama and Biden left office with the economy stalling out, leading experts to warn that the nation was facing “secular stagnation.”

Look at the numbers. GDP growth sharply decelerated in 2016, falling from 3.1% the year before down 1.7% in 2016 – the second worst year under Obama/Biden after the recession ended and the third year of below 2% growth on their watch.

Other indicators were equally distressing. Small business optimism had been on the decline before the November 2016 election. Business investment was stagnant. The rate of growth in blue collar jobs was falling.

In Obama’s last year, unemployment rate remained basically unchanged — it was 4.9% in Jan 2016, and 4.8% when Trump took office in Jan. 2017.

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ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Full Crowley Whether these journalists know it or not, in the American mind they are already retired before they have even retired. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on October 5th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/04/the-full-crowley/

In the second presidential election debate between President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney on October 16, 2012, CNN moderator Candy Crowley sensed that Obama, coming off a dismal initial September 26 debate, was again floundering. 

Romney was driving home the valid point that the Obama Administration had inadequately prepared the American mission in Benghazi for likely terrorist attacks. And such laxity resulted in a horrific attack and the deaths of four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador. 

Yet in the wake of the attacks, Team Obama denied that the killing of four Americans was indeed an act of terror. Instead, it fed the public a transparently but politically correct false narrative of a spontaneous riot in reaction to a video posted by a purported right-wing Egyptian residing on American soil. 

Yet in the debate, Obama retorted: “The day after the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime.” 

Romney pounced: “You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration—is that what you’re saying? I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.”  

Romney was correct. Obama took two weeks before he eventually jettisoned his administration’s concocted “spontaneous demonstrations” party line that his subordinates—Susan Rice in particular, to her eternal embarrassment—had been peddling to the American people. 

Yet in the debate, Obama flailed with a weak, “Get the transcript.” 

In truth, Obama in his comments after the attack had simply offered, “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for”—a deliberate effort not to name Benghazi specifically in the context of a terrorist act.  

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump Floated Like A Butterfly And Stung Like A Bee Ilana Mercer

By on October 5th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/04/trump-floated-like-a-butterfly-and-stung-like-a-bee/

Civilized debate has been ruled out by the D.C. smart set, which considers the Trump agenda, endorsed by 60 million Americans in 2016, subversive and treasonous.

The first presidential debate on Tuesday was also the first bit of fun we’ve had in a while. 

True, President Trump failed to float his theory about that “big fat shot in the ass” Joe Biden likely got from his handlers, to allow the Democratic candidate to nimbly prance onto the debate stage and, “for two hours,” be “better than ever before.”

But, like Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight boxing legend, the president floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. A masculine force at full tilt, Trump provided plenty of energy and entertainment as he blattered Joe Biden, while being funny in the process. 

“If you didn’t enjoy that debate, you are a soy-boy, beta cuck,” a fun-loving fella tweeted out. Soy-boy Ben Shapiro was having none of the fun stuff. Glum and sanctimonious, Shapiro tweeted out: “I literally have no idea who won this debate. I just know we all lost.”

Deep, man. 

The self-styled philosopher-king’s funereal pronouncement received the benefit of a Michelle Malkin reenactment. Don’t miss that hilarity, 3:40 minutes into her post-debate podcast. 

In letting out a collective primal groan that was music to MAGA ears, Ben Shapiro was joined by every liberal and NeverTrumper on the left-wing game reserve. 

Dana Bash of CNN lamented a “shitshow,” in which “the American people lost.” “The debate was a disaster for democracy,” her shell-shocked colleagues yelped. (Well, good, because the founders of this republic didn’t think much of democracy.)

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Fifth War Won’t Do Turkey Any Good by Burak Bekdil

By on October 5th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16526/turkey-greece-fifth-war

On August 28, a former MP from Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party, Metin Külünk, published a map of “Greater Turkey” which illustrates the extent of Turkey’s revisionist ambitions. It includes areas of Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Syria, Iraq, Georgia and Armenia.

In a similarly threatening statement, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar provocatively advised Greece to remain silent “so as not to become a meze [snack] for the interests of others.”

Erdoğan’s fifth war would be one with no winners. But Erdoğan’s Turkey would be the bigger loser.

During the 20th century, the Turks and their traditional Aegean rivals, the Greeks, fought four conventional wars: The First Balkan War (1912-1913); the First World War (1914-1918); the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922); and the Cyprus War (1974). So it is not the first time during an expanse of peace that newspapers across the world are telling their readers that the Aegean Sea is on the brink of war. “Peace” across the Aegean has always been cold-to-very-cold except for brief periods of relative warmth. It looks as if Turks and Greeks live in neighboring homes built on a centuries-long blood feud.

Charles King, in his book Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, wrote about the early post-Ottoman years in Istanbul and the nation-building efforts of the infant Republic of Turkey:

“Istanbul’s non-Muslim minorities fell from an estimated 56 percent in 1900 to 35 percent by the late 1920s. Other cities had more dramatic decreases. Izmir, the former Smyrna, went from 62% non-Muslim to 14%… But the demographic revolution changed virtually everything in the old minority neighborhoods of Istanbul. In the rush to leave, Greeks, Armenians and Jews dumped the contents of their houses and apartments onto the secondhand market, hoping to gain at least a small amount of cash before boarding a ship or train…

“Turkey as a whole became more Muslim, and more Turkish, more homogeneous and more rural — because of the flight of non-Muslim minorities from cities — than it had ever been. Some of the families who would go on to become the mainstays of Istanbul’s economy emerged [by]… keeping an eye on changing fortunes and translating political connections into economic advantage once the Greek and other minority businesses went up for sale. There was nothing necessarily dishonest about their dealings, but they rested on a massive transfer of wealth whose origins lay in the republic’s preference for national purity over the old cosmopolitanism of the imperial capital.”

After three wars at the beginning of the century, Turkish-Greek tensions would next explode in Cyprus, where Turkish and Greek Cypriots lived side by side and in peace until after the 1950s, when they started to slaughter each other. Ethnic strife led to the Turkish military operation in July 1974 that ended with its occupation of the northern third of the island. Cyprus has remained divided along ethnic lines ever since.

In 1996, the Turkish and Greek militaries came close to a hot engagement over sovereignty claims over a tiny islet in the southern Aegean Sea. A few years after successful U.S. mediation averted war, few Turks or Greeks even remembered the name of that 9.9-acre, uninhabited islet: Imia (Kardak in Turkish).

Today’s tensions, stretching from the Aegean to the Eastern Mediterranean, look more serious than two teenagers in a tug-of-war over a piece of rock.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

CIA Director Haspel and the Anti-Trump Conspirators by Chris Farrell

By on October 5th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16597/gina-haspel-trump-conspirators

What is most interesting is the timing of Gina Haspel’s last tour as London Station Chief — from 2014 to early 2017. That is the same timeframe (specifically, the late summer of 2016) when the FBI approached foreign policy academic and “utility government operative” Stefan Halper to begin the operation targeting Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in an FBI-designed foreign counterintelligence operation, against Team Trump, to be launched in Cambridge, England.

The CIA Station Chief is the top intelligence official in any given country. The FBI must inform the Station Chief of what they planned to do and get Station Chief approval. The FBI hates that, but those are the rules. Because the various intelligence agencies are sensitive, they do not use the word “approved.” Instead, they use the word “coordinated.” Jargon aside, nothing would have happened without Haspel’s okay.

That carried forward to a more sophisticated and aggressive plan to carry out a soft coup against President Trump. People around President Trump were prosecuted and/or had their lives destroyed based on a scheme of U.S. government lies. Who appears to have been “in on it” from Day One? Gina Haspel.

The FBI is not allowed to penetrate and subvert a presidential campaign. Executive Order 12333, Section 2.9, “Undisclosed Participation in Organizations in the United States,” prohibits it in plain language… That legal prohibition is the reason the FBI felt the need to manufacture a “foreign counterintelligence threat” in the UK and then “import” the investigation back into the United States.

Gina Haspel is the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Haspel is the first career clandestine service officer to become director, and the first woman. She was the CIA Chief of Station in London — twice, and that repeat assignment is very unusual. What is most interesting is the timing of Haspel’s last tour as London Station Chief — from 2014 to early 2017. That is the same timeframe (specifically, the late summer of 2016) when the FBI approached foreign policy academic and “utility government operative” Stefan Halper to begin the operation targeting Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in an FBI-designed foreign counterintelligence operation, against Team Trump, to be launched in Cambridge, England.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pope Francis goes full communist By Andrea Widburg

By on October 5th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/pope_francis_goes_full_communist.html

In an encyclical published on Sunday, Pope Francis announced that he’d had an epiphany thanks to the Wuhan virus: It’s time to ditch capitalism. But that’s not all. He believes, too, that in a time of a serious infectious disease, we should focus even harder on open borders.  And he blithely upended almost two millennia of Church doctrine by doing away with St. Augustine’s “just war” theory.

These actions reflect Francis’s Catholic upbringing within the communist “liberation theology” of the Latin American church. They may also show the effects of his ongoing alliance with Chinese communists and with Muslims.

Fox Business sums up the gist of Francis’s communist dreams (emphasis mine):

“Aside from the differing ways that various countries responded to the crisis, their inability to work together became quite evident,” Francis wrote. “Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality.”

He cited the grave loss of millions of jobs as a result of the virus as evidence of the need for politicians to listen to popular movements, unions and marginalized groups and to craft more just social and economic policies.

“The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom,” he wrote. “It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at ‘promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity’ and makes it possible for jobs to be created, and not cut.”’

[snip]

As an outgrowth of that, Francis rejected the concept of an absolute right to property for individuals, stressing instead the “social purpose” and common good that must come from sharing the Earth’s resources. He repeated his criticism of the “perverse” global economic system, which he said consistently keeps the poor on the margins while enriching the few — an argument he made most fully in his 2015 landmark environmental encyclical “Laudato Sii” (Praised Be).

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Who Will Have Written Obama’s New Book? (Not Obama) By Jack Cashill

By on October 5th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/who_will_have_written_obamas_new_book_not_obama.html

When the first half of Barack Obama’s long overdue memoir, Promised Land, is published on November 17, I expect to receive calls like the one I received in the spring of 2011.  That call came from a fellow named Michael Cohen.  I did not recognize the name at the time.  Nor did I know how Cohen got my cell number.  He explained that he was the attorney for Donald Trump — I did recognize that name — and he wanted to know what I knew about Barack Obama’s origins.

Ever since I first started questioning the authorship of Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, I would occasionally get calls like this from people of a higher pay grade than mine.  Having followed the birth certificate issue only from a distance, I recommended instead that Trump focus on the authorship question.  As I explained to Cohen, although Obama claimed to have written both his books by himself, he definitely had help, much of it from terrorist turned educator Bill Ayers.  This I deduced from my literary forensic work in the summer and fall of 2008.

Mainstream biographer Christopher Andersen confirmed Ayers’s involvement in his Obama-friendly 2009 book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.  Andersen’s sources in Obama’s Hyde Park neighborhood told him that Obama found himself deeply in debt and “hopelessly blocked.”  At “Michelle’s urging,” Obama “sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.”

What attracted the Obamas were “Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer” as evident in his 1993 book To Teach.  Noting that Obama had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American, Andersen elaborates, “These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.”  Ayers himself took credit for Dreams on multiple occasions, usually, but not always, with a wink and a nod.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

How Socialism Will Trash Your Life A new book paints a sobering picture of the future for young fans of socialism. Mark Tapson

By on October 5th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/how-socialism-will-trash-your-life-mark-tapson/

Socialism is all the rage among young Americans these days. Not the kind of socialism that has never worked anywhere in history. Not the kind that drove Venezuela from South America’s most prosperous economy into a failed state in a mere two decades. Not the kind that wreaked essentially the same havoc upon once-thriving Cuba. Not those real-world examples, but the new-and-improved, democratic socialism, which, as MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle recently assured viewers, is “a lot different” from those other forms of socialism.

Those young Americans who are enamored of such icons of democratic socialism as lifelong communist Sen. Bernie Sanders and economics-challenged, radical Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez desperately need to read Paul H. Rubin’s short but vital book A Student’s Guide to Socialism: How It Will Trash Your Lives, a joint publication of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Bombardier Books, an imprint of Post Hill Press.

As the title indicates, the book is aimed at young readers and is thus a quick, easy read, tailored to their tragically short attention spans and tenuous grasp of economics. Its purpose is not simply to rehash abstract, theoretical points of contrast between socialism and capitalism, but to explain to those uninformed (or misinformed) young people exactly how socialism would impact them and affect their future if it were actually to be adopted here in the United States, as polls indicate an alarming percentage of young people would prefer. Put simply, it answers the question, “What will my life be like if I live under socialism?”

Mr. Rubin is Emeritus Dobbs Professor of Economics at Emory University and a former economic advisor in D.C., including for the Reagan administration as Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. The author of a dozen books and dozens of Wall St. Journal op-eds, Rubin not only knows whereof he speaks but knows how to communicate economic ideas in clear, jargon-free, unbiased language – a skill that eludes most academics and economists. In A Student’s Guide to Socialism, Rubin shrewdly chose not to speak down to, or talk over the heads of, the audience who most needs to absorb his message that life under socialism will not be the egalitarian utopia its adherents fantasize. On the contrary, as the book’s own subtitle bluntly tells readers, “it will trash your lives.”

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