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Ruth King

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The Trump Administration’s Welcome Pushback against Chinese Communist Party–Affiliated Technology

By on August 10th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/trump-administration-measures-against-chinese-communist-party-affiliated-technology-welcome/

The Chinese Communist Party has been exporting its virtual panopticon to liberal democracies via WeChat, TikTok, and other online platforms. in its pursuit of more global influence. As part of a broader push against Chinese influence, the Trump administration in recent weeks has rolled out a number of measures to deal with the threat of Chinese technology. 

The White House forced TikTok into acquisition talks with Microsoft, following a U.S. government panel’s decision to force divestment from the app’s parent company ByteDance. Negotiators have until September 15 to reach a deal. After that, President Trump says he will ban the app. 

Building on this, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week announced the “Clean Network” program, a State Department initiative to certify trusted partners who have worked to rid their products and networks of malign foreign influence.  

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‘Unmasking Obama’ Also Exposes the Corrupt Media By Frank Miele

By on August 10th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/10/unmasking_obama_also_exposes_the_corrupt_media_143916.html

 

A slew of political books will be hitting bookshelves between now and Election Day, covering everything on the spectrum from communist propaganda to Trump hagiography.

Many of those books, such as Sean Hannity’s “Live Free or Die,” will make millions of dollars for their authors and publishers. Some have the potential to influence the election, such as disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok’s attempt at reputation rehabilitation titled “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump.” Yet in this onslaught of new titles, literally dozens of which will attempt to capitalize on the 2020 election frenzy, there will be a few small polished gems that may be lost in the fray. One such could be Jack Cashill’s “Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency” (Post Hill Press, 249 pages, available for pre-order now).

A slew of political books will be hitting bookshelves between now and Election Day, covering everything on the spectrum from communist propaganda to Trump hagiography.

Many of those books, such as Sean Hannity’s “Live Free or Die,” will make millions of dollars for their authors and publishers. Some have the potential to influence the election, such as disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok’s attempt at reputation rehabilitation titled “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump.” Yet in this onslaught of new titles, literally dozens of which will attempt to capitalize on the 2020 election frenzy, there will be a few small polished gems that may be lost in the fray. One such could be Jack Cashill’s “Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency” (Post Hill Press, 249 pages, available for pre-order now).

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Trump Won Last Week By Steve Cortes

By on August 10th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/10/trump_won_last_week_143919.html

Even in a volatile political year with endless crosscurrents, once voters actually start casting their ballots it seems reasonable to assume that one traditional factor will still motivate most voters: Which candidate can create more prosperity? On this score, President Trump had an impressive weekend, and his achievements shine in contrast to Joe Biden’s week of embarrassing stumbles.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the July jobs report, revealing that America added 1.8 million new hires and lowered the national unemployment rate to 10.2%. This report registers as the third-highest month ever, and the combined three-month total of new jobs created stands at 9.3 million. To be sure, much work remains to return our country to the thriving job market we enjoyed in early 2020 before our world was rocked by a new virus raging around the world, which threatened to crash the global economy. The damage remains real and widespread, but recent macro data also point to recovery, as green shoots abound. For example, last week’s ISM Manufacturing Index rose to the highest level in 1.5 years, as factories powered back up. On the consumer side, the most recent existing homes sales achieved the largest monthly increase ever, as historic low mortgage rates encouraged buyer confidence.

Predictably, much of the news media sought to downplay this encouraging trend of economic renewal. “July Jobs Report Could Show Losses as Coronavirus Spreads,” CNBC had warned its audience a week before. Instead of a correction, the network doubled down. On Friday, one CNBC anchor teed up market analyst Jim Cramer this way: “It’s less about what the numbers say today and more about how you extrapolate what you think they’re gonna mean next month and the month after and the month after. How do you see it?”

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Trump Heroically Defies a Lawless Supreme Court The court’s ruling on young illegals is an abomination that must not stand. Matthew Vadum

By on August 10th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/trump-heroically-defies-lawless-supreme-court-matthew-vadum/

President Donald Trump is quietly turning a stinging defeat at the Supreme Court over an illegal amnesty for hundreds of thousands of young illegal aliens into what could end up being a victory for the Constitution and the rule of law.

The Supreme Court, of course, has no authority to tell the president of the United States that he cannot rescind an illegal executive amnesty ordered by his predecessor in the same manner it was instituted.

Normally, presidents of both parties rush to raise their arms in surrender whenever the black-robed life-tenured politicians on the high court demand it.

Not Trump.

The president appears to be taking a stand against rampant judicial supremacism by drawing inspiration from President Andrew Jackson, whose portrait proudly hangs in the Oval Office.

After the chief justice of the day overreached in Jackson’s opinion, the 7th president allegedly uttered the following immortal words: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

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The Alarming Progress of the Hate America Left How they have invaded American minds. David Horowitz

By on August 10th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/alarming-progress-hate-america-left-david-horowitz/

On the Rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington is inscribed these words: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” This statement by Thomas Jefferson is the heart of the democracy in whose founding he played so central a role.  It is why the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights is the First Amendment and not the Second, or Fourth, or Fifth.

Today our nation is facing the most serious threat to establish such a tyranny in our entire history.  This threat comes from the political left, which deceptively calls its reactionary creed “progressive.” Its tyranny is advanced under the Orwellian names, “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” “wokeness” and “anti-racism,” which is a recently minted doctrine that condemns every deviation from the leftwing party line as “racist” and therefore worthy of suppression.

The gravity of this attempt to abolish our democracy can be seen in the attack on America’s founding – an attack led by America’s intellectual establishment. Under the rubric of “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times, the Pulitzer and MacArthur Foundations and other arbiters of the culture have promoted the monstrous libel that America was founded as slave state and that the American revolution was designed to preserve this hateful institution which had survived in countries all over the world for 3,000 years.

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BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

‘Apocalypse Never’ Takes Direct Aim at Consensus Climate Alarmism By Edward Ring

By on August 10th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/09/apocalypse-never-takes-direct-aim-at-consensus-climate-alarmism/

A review of “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” by Michael Shellenberger (Harper, 432 pages, $29.99)

This environmental humanist agenda that prioritizes love for humanity is a direct challenge to climate alarmists, who must now answer the question, as Michael Shellenberger writes “are they motivated by love for humanity or something closer to its opposite?”

An important new book by Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, attempts to counter the common belief that climate change poses an imminent and existential threat to humanity and the planet. At 285 pages, this is a relatively short and very readable book, but it covers a lot of ground. And with an additional 125 pages containing over 1,000 footnotes, Shellenberger’s arguments are well documented.

The book should be required reading for politicians. It should also be required reading for Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, and the handful of other online communications titans who exercise almost total control over what facts and opinions make their way into public discourse. This book also belongs in the hands of climate activist journalists, for whom a 16-year-old truant is an oracle with unassailable credibility, while contrarian scientists and economists are only targets for smear campaigns.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Who or What Exactly Is Running Against Trump? Victor Davis Hanson

By on August 10th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/09/who-or-what-exactly-is-running-against-trump/

The inner-Biden at 77 is turning out to be an unabashed bigot in the age of “cancel culture” and thought crimes that has apparently declared him immune from the opprobrium reserved for any such speech.

As we enter the final 90 days of the November presidential campaign, a few truths are crystalizing about the “Biden problem,” or the inability of a 77-year-old Joe Biden to conduct a “normal” campaign.

Biden’s cognitive challenges are increasing geometrically, whether as a result of months of relative inactivity and lack of stimulation or just consistent with the medical trajectory of his affliction. His lot is increasingly similar to historical figures such as 67-year-old President William Henry Harrison, William Gladstone’s last tenure as prime minister, Chancellor Hindenburg, or Franklin Roosevelt in late 1944—age and physical infirmities signaling to the concerned that a subordinate might assume power sooner than later.

In the past, it was to Biden’s advantage to postpone his selection of his female-mandated vice presidential running mate, given the lose-lose choice of either picking a woke young African American female who may polarize swing voters while spending the next three months being vetted in the fashion of California Representative Karen Bass’s Scientology and Fidel Castro issues, or selecting a vetted, but off-putting former National Security Advisor Susan Rice or Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who does not especially like Biden and would be seen as hovering and rummaging about as an impatient president-in-waiting.

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TikTok: China’s Trojan Horse to Indoctrinate America by Gordon G. Chang

By on August 10th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16330/tiktok-china

At the moment, ByteDance is in negotiations with Microsoft and Twitter to sell TikTok. Yet a sale will not by itself end the threat. Any new owner will have to go over line after line of code to insulate TikTok from Chinese interference.

Even an exhaustive review may not be sufficient, because Beijing will still know the general architecture of the software, thereby facilitating further manipulation of the app. As Dabrowa told Gatestone, “My team discovered that a foreign actor may come in the backdoor and change the feed.”

In the meantime, Trump’s 45-day period, plus the time needed to review software, give China plenty of opportunity to interfere in the upcoming American elections.

That means Trump last week with his executive order may have saved American democracy but maybe not his own presidency.

President Donald Trump on Thursday issued an executive order that just might save America’s democracy.

Using emergency powers, he prohibited, after the expiration of a 45-day period, Americans from any transaction with ByteDance Ltd., a privately owned Chinese company, or any of its subsidiaries. Prohibited transactions, the order states, will be those “identified” by the Secretary of Commerce.

The order effectively bans ByteDance’s TikTok, a video-sharing mobile application, from the United States at the end of 45 days.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Russia collusion, a decade of deceit and the advent of a new info war on Americans For the first time, we saw in the 2010s a systematic effort by players in institutions to knowingly and willfully promote falsehoods to achieve bureaucratic and political outcomes or, possibly, to foment division in America, the book Fallout argues.

By on August 10th, 2020

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/russia-collusion-hoax-decade-deceit-and-advent-new-info

Robert Mueller had been at the witness table several long hours when Rep. Will Hurd finally chimed in. Now in his mid-70s, Mueller, the Justice Department special counsel who oversaw the Trump-Russia probe was not quite the same crisp-speaking Marine whom Americans had come to know as their FBI director during the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks through his retirement in 2013.

But his experience still loomed as an asset, especially when it came to the art of refusing to bite on politically loaded questions. He had just finished a five-minute, rapid-fire round of questions from Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) that clearly had frustrated the Democrat’s effort to pin him down on questions about former Trump fixer Michael Cohen.

Mueller’s answers were classic dodges. “I can’t adopt your characterization,” he answered Castro at one moment. The next, he added: “I can’t speak to that.” A few seconds later he threw in “I’m not certain I could go that far,” and finished with, “I defer to you on that….I can’t get into details….I can’t speak to that.” Castro yielded back his time, unsatisfied by his effort to get Mueller to bite on his preferred story line.

Hurd, a Republican from Texas, was up next. A former CIA officer, he shared a common intelligence community experience with the former FBI director. But the odds that he would fare better than Castro in extracting new information from Mueller seemed equally long.

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I Take a Dim View of Today’s Lightbulbs Watts up with all these new terms like kelvins, lumens and ‘halogen puck’? By Stephen Miller

By on August 10th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-take-a-dim-view-of-todays-lightbulbs-11597006857?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

I like to think of myself as a smart shopper who knows what to look for when buying a car or a computer—or even a townhouse. But recently I was flummoxed looking at a display of lightbulbs: Which packet of four bulbs should I buy? Since this was a chain pharmacy, there was no one to ask for help. I decided to buy the cheapest pack, but I kept the sales slip. I thought I might want to return the packet after learning more about lightbulbs.

When I got home I found an article on the internet that explained what to look for in a lightbulb. Every writer admits that buying a lightbulb is not easy. There are so many types of bulbs: standard incandescent bulbs, fluorescent tubes, compact fluorescent swirls, halogen pucks and LEDs. Though I had no idea what a “halogen puck” is, I read on, in search of illumination.

I learned about lumens, which measure how bright the light is. Maybe all I need to know about lightbulbs is how many lumens is the equivalent of a 100-watt bulb, which is the lightbulb I used to buy. But I soon realized that I need to choose the kind of lightbulb I want before I check out the lumens. I ruled out fluorescent bulbs because I hate fluorescent light. LED bulbs are popular but they are expensive. They last much longer than other lightbulbs—11 years, according to one account, as opposed to roughly one year for an incandescent bulb. But I’m 79, so why should I spend twice as much money for lightbulbs that probably will outlast me?

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