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Ruth King

POLITICS Comments turned off

Michael Bloomberg Is a Condescending Jerk . . . . . who made a legitimate point about how jobs are changing. By Robert VerBruggen

By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/michael-bloomberg-is-a-condescending-jerk/

T he hunt is on for offensive clips of Michael Bloomberg talking off the cuff, and over the weekend a new one circulated. In the version passed around, Bloomberg nonchalantly tells his Oxford audience that he could teach anyone how to farm — “even people in this room”: “It’s a process; you dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.” He adds that modern “information economy” jobs require more “gray matter.”

The denunciations came quickly and furiously, many of them pointing out that farming these days is a pretty high-tech endeavor. There are three things to know about this episode.

First, the version of the clip that went around left out important context. Bloomberg was very explicitly not talking about modern farmers, but rather about “the agrarian society” that “lasted 3,000 years” before the industrial era, which lasted 300. His point was that the modern economy does not create good, reliable jobs for low-skilled workers the way that past economies did. You can see the full discussion starting around 41:30 here (though the actual query that prompted Bloomberg’s rambling answer starts at 37:30):

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Time Is Running Out: The U.S. Needs a High-Tech Manhattan Project By David P. Goldman

By on February 18th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/time-for-a-high-tech-manhattan-project/

We’re getting our heads handed to us. I don’t like to be the bearer of evil tidings, but I hate losing. The only I hate more than losing is trying to make ourselves feel better while we’re losing, rather than winning. We need to wrest the initiative in high tech from China and re-establish American dominance in telecommunications, computation, artificial intelligence, materials science, chip design and lithography, manufacturing, and other key fields. I don’t care how much it costs. If we don’t spend the money to ensure America’s number one position now, we’ll go broke in any case.

We sat on our hands while China’s Huawei took the lead in the game-changing technology that will usher in what the Chinese call the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 5G telecommunications (which we are rolling out at a snail’s pace while China surges ahead) make possible industrial robots that design production processes by themselves, driverless cars, virtual-reality controlled surgery at long distance, and a dozen other breakthroughs. China is getting the jump on us while we dither. Think Manhattan Project. Think Sputnik moment. Think JFK’s Moonshot. Think Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. We need a grand mobilization of material and human resources to meet the challenge of the 21st century.

You can’t stop something with nothing, and all of our attempts to slow Huawei down have failed miserably. Excepting Japan, Israel and Australia, every one of our allies has invited Huawei in to build 5G networks because the alternative would cost another two years and 50 percent more. Either they don’t believe what we’re saying about Huawei’s capacity to spy on them, or they don’t care. We shut down component sales to Huawei, and Huawei now builds smartphones and base stations with zero U.S. components. It now makes chipsets for smartphones and AI processers that rival the best America can produce.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A Campaign Against Bureaucratic Bloat in U.S. Foreign Policy Trump’s national security adviser has a plan of attack for a problem decades in the making. By John Lehman

By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-campaign-against-bureaucratic-bloat-in-u-s-foreign-policy-11581974339?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The press has been focused recently on Lt. Col Alexander Vindman’s departure from the National Security Council. But less noticed is the substantive overhaul of the council’s staffing practices, announced last fall by national security adviser Robert O’Brien. President Trump’s renovation of the White House’s top advisory body could help streamline American security for years to come.

The problems that plague the NSC trace to before its founding in 1947. The White House has long sought to centralize decision-making to overcome the political jockeying that often takes place within the national-security establishment. I have lived half of my professional life in the policy world of Washington and half in the financial world of New York. The former is much more Hobbesian and bitter than the latter—and always has bee

After securing victory in World War II, for example, federal policy makers were at each other’s throats over whether to share nuclear technology with the Soviet Union through the Baruch Plan. The branches of the armed services feuded over roles, missions and funding. President Truman and congressional leaders nonetheless produced a few lasting achievements, including the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

But the bitter postwar years also featured terrible blunders in China and Korea. Truman’s radical strategy to shrink the Navy, while declaring Korea outside America’s vital interest, led almost immediately to the Korean War. Journalist John Osborne told me that during those years he was run ragged between the White House and the Pentagon. Both were leaking classified information aimed at opponents in government.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europeans Try to Have It Both Ways They expect American protection but aren’t prepared to defend their own countries. By Walter Russell Mead

By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europeans-try-to-have-it-both-ways-11581974424?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

How solid is the West? At last weekend’s Munich Security Conference, the world’s largest gathering of security policy makers and officials, the theme was “Westlessness,” referring to the sense of disorientation that many Europeans feel in this age of America First.

Since the 1940s, U.S. leadership in the service of a united and secure Europe has been the one unchanging feature in the Continental landscape. For generations, the U.S. committed to protect Europe from Russia, maintain bases in Germany to prevent it from threatening its neighbors, and promote European integration. Now Europeans don’t know where they stand, and a mixture of bafflement, anger, disappointment and fear fills the atmosphere at conferences like the one in Munich.

There’s little doubt that Trump administration policies, ranging from trade wars to toughness on Iran, have tested trans-Atlantic relations to the breaking point. But to understand the growing weakness of the Western alliance, Europeans need to spend less time deploring Donald Trump and more time looking in the mirror. A good place to begin is with a Pew poll released earlier this month on the state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Superficially, the poll looks like good news. In 14 European countries plus Canada and the U.S., a median 53% of respondents said they had a favorable view of NATO, while only 27% saw the alliance unfavorably. Despite double-digit declines in NATO’s favorability among the French and the Germans, these numbers aren’t bad. Mr. Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are all less popular in their home countries than NATO is.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Spring 2020 Madness on College Campuses The Marxist indoctrination heats up. Jack Kerwick

By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/spring-2020-madness-college-campuses-jack-kerwick/

The first academic semester of 2020 has only recently gotten underway, and colleges and universities around the country seem to be competing with one another in a feverish race to prove which is most committed to advancing the prevailing leftist dogma of the day.

The College Fix, a student-led campus watchdog publication, is an excellent resource for anyone interested in keeping apprised of the current scene in academia. It’s a particularly invaluable source for parents who are considering investing tens of thousands of dollars into their children’s “education.”

Consider:

At Dartmouth College, an institution that charges $75,000 a year in tuition, students have recently had their classes interrupted by a “Green New Deal” activist. A young woman to whom, out of “courtesy,” The Dartmouth Review refers simply as “Katie,” has spent months disrupting lectures for the purpose of promoting the causes—like the Green New Deal, as well as “free” education and Medicare for all—advanced by the Sunrise Movement and the New Hampshire Youth Movement (NHYM) by which she’s employed.

The NHYM is affiliated with the Sunrise Movement. Unsurprisingly, both are doctrinaire left-wing organizations. “Katie” insists that students are to support only those politicians who “support our values.” As to the nature of those values, there is no doubt, to judge from the card that “Katie” disseminates to students.

There is space on the cards in which students are to supply not only their personal contact information, but, by way of checking off a series of boxes, indicate their political priorities. “I’m voting on February 11th for…” is listed at the top. Beneath that are the following issues: “Immigrant Justice;” “Racial Justice;” “Green New Deal;” “Free College for All;” “Voting Rights;” “Medicare for All;” “LGBTQIAP + Rights;” “Affordable Housing;” “Reproductive Rights;” and “Other.”

“Katie,” in other words, campaigns for the Democratic Party in both college classrooms and campus buildings. In doing so, she violates Dartmouth’s anti-solicitation policies. The latter demarcates a public space on campus for activism.  

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Criminalizing Dissent By Karen D. Hurvitz and Ilya I. Feoktistov

By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/criminalizing_dissent.html

DPS NOTE: Off the wall intolerable. The left has gone fascist: Cancel culture gets police powers and goes after Jewish student at UMass Amherst

Louis Shenker, a 21-year-old junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,  just wanted his MAGA hat back from the graduate student who ripped it off his head on campus. He wore the hat to a December 6, 2018 protest organized by the university’s graduate student union against Trump and local police. Video shows that when Louis, who is 5’6’’ and 140 pounds, arrived wearing the MAGA hat and holding a large sign, he was immediately surrounded by a hostile mob of older grad students cursing at him and calling him a white supremacist. A woman lunged from the mob and snatched Louis’s MAGA hat. Careful not to get caught on camera hitting Louis with their hands, they instead mobbed him like a colony of enraged penguins, using their bodies to push him from all sides, occasionally pecking at his head with their cardboard signs, and chanting in unison: “THE PEOPLE, UNITED, WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED.”

“Get the f**k out of here, you shouldn’t be in an anti-racist march!” screamed the hat thief. A soft-spoken professor in the crowd warned Louis: “It’s actually dangerous for you to come by yourself like that.” As the protesters began to march and Louis tried to keep up while pleading for his hat, many of them, including several graduate student union members dressed in United Auto Workers gear, elbowed Louis into walls, lampposts, and other obstacles. “You act like a Nazi, you’re going to get treated like a Nazi,” a female protester yelled at the Jewish grandson of Holocaust victims.  Louis left without his hat.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Political Trials Should Be Tried Outside of the Beltway Julie Kelly

By on February 18th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/17/political-trials-should-be-tried-outside-of-the-beltway/

The justice system situated in our nation’s capital is toxic, destructive, and demonstrably unfair. Barr should move any trial out of Washington—West Virginia or North Carolina, perhaps?—and at least give the accused a fighting chance.

Attorney General William Barr is enlisting U.S. attorneys outside the Beltway either to investigate or review several high-level cases related to President Trump, the Washington Post reported over the weekend. Barr has asked federal prosecutors from “far-flung offices,” as the Post described it, located in remote places such as Connecticut and Chicago, to handle these sensitive matters.

Barr’s legal shuffling of the deck includes the egregious prosecution of Lt. General Michael Flynn; the investigation into Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign; and new material collected by Rudy Giuliani detailing alleged corruption in Ukraine possibly tied to U.S. politicians.

Given the accusations from Trump foes that Barr is doing Trump’s bidding from his corner office at the Justice Department, this otherwise rational move prompted convulsions of panic in the nation’s capital. Some distraught observers grimly warn that transferring politically charged cases out of the most politically obsessed town in the world is just what Joseph Stalin would do.

David Laufman, a former Justice Department official and Obama donor involved in the agency’s 2016 exoneration of Hillary Clinton, claimed he was “baffled” as to why any federal lawyer would accept such an assignment. “‘Why would they be associating themselves with investigations that are evocative of the manner in which repressive regimes throughout history have behaved?’” Laufman told Post reporters.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

A REVIEW OF DIANE BEDERMAN’S “THE SERPENT AND THE RED THREAD-THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF EVIL” BY RSK

By on February 17th, 2020

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1927618134/

The late Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote “anti-Semitism is a light sleeper.”  Perhaps anti-Jewish sentiment dozed for a few years following the Holocaust, but it has awakened with fervor in Europe and in academia in America.

Most regrettably, in an election year anti-Semitism is manifestly ignored by the Democrat party which traditionally had resolutions condemning it in past decades.

Anti-Semitism is almost always ignited by a blood libel, a venal and false conspiracy theory, and more recently, the big lie that Jews occupied ancient Palestinian Arab lands exerting a brutal and oppressive “occupation.”

The big lie is fomented in academia by Arab funds, Moslem/Arab academics, and, alas, by preening and ignorant Jewish purveyors of blatant anti- Semitism and spurious history disguised as “social justice” initiatives.

In a highly readable and informative book “The Serpent and the Red Thread-The definitive Biography of Evil” Diane Weber Bederman traces the history of this ancient hatred and its resurgences from biblical times and the Garden of Eden, the Exile, inquisitions and crusades culminating in the Holocaust when one of every three Jews in the world was exterminated.

As Bederman remarks:

 ”What freezes the blood in one’s veins is the knowledge that the extermination of a people 3500 years old was calmly and meticulously planned over a period of time while the world watched.”

But the blood may well freeze with the blood curdling chants heard today:

”Khybar, Khaybar, O Zionists Hezbollah is coming soon! “

”Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Qur’an is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

”Death to Israel!” Death to the Jews!”

And again the world just watches and listens to this evil.

History, the bible and religious prophecy combine in this excellent book-a wake up message that silence and apathy are collusion.

Diane Weber Bederman is an author, chaplain, journalist, blogger and speaker who is passionate about religion, ethics, politics, and mental health. She has been published in many media outlets including Huffington Post Canada, Times of Israel, Arutz Sheva and Canada Free Press. She is the author of three books. Back to the Ethic:Reclaiming Western Values; Anatomy of Fake News in the Era of Donald Trump; and The Serpent and the Red Thread: The Definitive Biography of Evil, now included in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Library in Israel. RSK

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FBI Unlawfully Passed Classified Intel to Steele It’s like a playground game of telephone, only big players used each other to confirm bogus intel. Nate Jackson

By on February 17th, 2020

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68638-fbi-unlawfully-passed-classified-intel-to-steele-2020-02-17

Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer hired by Hillary Clinton and the DNC through GPS Fusion to dig make up dirt on Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, is back in the news, along with Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI. And the circular corruption just gets crazier.

“A month before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI met Christopher Steele in Rome and apparently unlawfully shared with the foreign opposition researcher some of the bureau’s most closely held secrets, according to unpublicized disclosures in the recent Justice Department Inspector General report on abuses of federal surveillance powers.” So begins the latest revelation of deep-state corruption, courtesy of Eric Felten and RealClearInvestigations.

Felten continues, “Much of the public reporting regarding this meeting has focused on the information Steele shared with the FBI — and the many reasons agents should have doubted its credibility. But largely neglected has been the opposite side of the equation — what the FBI told Steele. The Inspector General reports that the bureau revealed to him much of the highly classified information that it had gathered regarding alleged Trump-Russia links.” That included information on Trump campaign staffers Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn — information known only by a select few FBI officials.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DOJ Furor Latest Attempt To Help Democrats Hide Spygate, Undermine Elections By Joy Pullmann

By on February 17th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/17/doj-furor-latest-attempt-to-help-democrats-hide-spygate-undermine-elections/

When the cockroaches are all scurrying across the floor, you can be sure that somebody shone a light on their nest.

Another spin operation appears to be afoot to thwart Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the Russia collusion hoax and others perpetrated by high-ranking federal bureaucrats. The eye of the hurricane this weekend has focused on the Department of Justice, with news Friday that an assistant U.S. attorney declined to press charges against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for documented lying to federal investigators under oath.

Becket Adams explains that

In 2016, McCabe, who is now a paid CNN contributor, leaked sensitive details of the bureau’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation to the press. He then misled members of the FBI’s Inspection Division when they interviewed him about the leaks, according to a February 2018 Justice Department inspector general report. McCabe provided investigators with four misleading statements, three of which were while he was under oath.

Giving false statements to federal investigators is a crime. In fact, it is the same crime for which the Justice Department went after President Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

On Friday, news broke that Barr “has appointed the top federal prosecutor in St. Louis to review the criminal case against Michael Flynn – former national security adviser to President Donald Trump,” according to Reuters. This all occured in the same week an assistant U.S. attorney recommended up to nine years in prison for former Trump campaign associate Roger Stone on the grounds that he lied about gossiping about what WikiLeaks knew about Hillary Clinton’s emails.

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