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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Biden Returns to Obama’s Feckless Foreign Policy No worse friend, no better enemy. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/joe-biden-returns-obamas-feckless-foreign-policy-bruce-thornton/

It was said of the Roman generalissimo Sulla that there was no better friend or worse enemy than he. This maxim of foreign policy––support and help your loyal allies, and damage and punish your enemies––was proven common sense for millennia. Then came the age of moralizing internationalism, the belief that a “new world order” had made that realist truth anachronistic and primitive, a reflection of our benighted past. Now diplomatic engagement, democracy promotion, foreign aid, and multinational institution see to global security, peace, and prosperity.

As a result, today there is no worse friend, and no better enemy than the West’s foreign policy and national security agencies.

Our foreign policy establishment has long clung tightly to these outworn “new world order”
narratives and paradigms despite the empirical evidence that such appeasing policies embolden and strengthen our enemies and convince them of our weakness. Exhibit number one is Obama’s involvement of the U.S. in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or Iran nuclear deal, a multinational compendium of empty promises, unenforceable conditions, and American danegeld. By the end of Obama’s second term it was obvious that Iran had no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons programs, its development of missiles to carry nuclear warheads, and its jihadist aggression in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen fomented by its proxies.

The last four years provide the evidence of that foreign policy failure. Donald Trump’s more realist Middle East policies signaled to the world that the U.S. was no long an indulgent, dotty Uncle Sam who would ignore provocations and assaults on our security and interests, or reward with foreign aid empty promises scrawled on “parchment barriers.” Instead of the wishful thinking of “diplomatic engagement,” Swiss-cheese agreements, and unreciprocated concessions, Trump took decisive action. He left the Iran nuclear agreement, imposed harsh sanctions on the regime, and punished its aggression with direct attacks on Iranian Republican Guard leaders, the most serious being the killing of Qassem Soleimani, head honcho of Iran’s imperialist Quds Forces abroad.

Fauci’s Failures Are Firing Offenses

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/02/faucis-failures-are-firing-offenses/

Dr. Anthony Fauci has impressive credentials and a lengthy tenure as a top-level government health official dating back to 1984. But his performance during the COVID-19 pandemic has been abysmal, with politicized non-science-based edicts and frequently reversed “medical advice” that have confused and frightened Americans.

Just a week ago, Fauci made what to some was a stunning admission: “We’ve done worse than most any country” in managing the outbreak, he said. We say “stunning” because Fauci, as head of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is the official most responsible for the U.S. response.

His 2019 pay of $417,608 makes him the nation’s highest paid federal official. As a scientist, he’s held in very high esteem by many, particularly those on the left, who see his sweeping powers – lockdowns, masking, social distancing – as a nifty means of social control. It’s control of 330 million people via social isolation and nonstop browbeating of those who dare to diverge from the oppressive “new normal” we all now experience on a daily basis.

The big problem has been Fauci’s pronunciamentos are often nonsensical, not supported by science or contradictory. “These are my principles,” Groucho Marx once said. “If you don’t like these, I have others.” That’s Fauci.

A New Crime Wave—and What to Do About It New York City rejected the policing lessons that led to its success, and violence is surging. Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/new-york-city-violence-surging

For two decades, many New Yorkers had assured themselves that a return to the crime and squalor of the early 1990s was unlikely. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who presided over a 62 percent drop in major felonies from 1994 through 2001, proved that violence was not an urban inevitability. His successor, Michael Bloomberg, drove crime down further, through the 2008 recession and beyond. Both mayors set a benchmark for what was possible, preemptively discrediting any future mayor’s excuse that crime was beyond his capacity to overcome.

That assumption about the permanence of the crime drop was wrong. New York City in 2020 experienced an unprecedented one-year increase in homicides and shootings. Through December 27, 2020, the number of murders was up 41 percent from 2019 and 53 percent from 2018. Shooting victims were up 103 percent from 2019 and 109 percent from 2018; shooting incidents rose 97 percent and 104 percent. In gang-ridden precincts, the spike was even more startling. In Brooklyn’s Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods, there were 170 percent more shooting victims in 2020 than in 2019 and 151 percent more shooting incidents. Murder was up 94 percent in these parts of Brooklyn.

It wasn’t just gang areas that were afflicted. On December 29, a roving pack of young bicyclists in midtown Manhattan attacked a BMW, smashing a bike on top of the car and jumping on its windshield. The same group went after a cab minutes later. Office workers in the area have been chased by similar flash mobs.

Bari Weiss:There Is No Such Thing as “White” Math: Sergiu Klainerman.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/there-is-no-such-thing-as-white-math?token=eyJ1c

I am not at all qualified to introduce today’s guest writer, Sergiu Klainerman.

I barely eked out a C+ in high school calculus, while Sergiu is a professor of mathematics at Princeton who specializes in the mathematical theory of black holes. He’s been a MacArthur fellow, a Guggenheim fellow and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences 

Mathematics allowed a young Sergiu, who came of age in Ceausescu’s Romania, to escape to a world where right and wrong couldn’t be fudged, and, ultimately, to a life of freedom in the United States. Without math, his life quite literally would not have been possible.

In the piece below he explains how activists are destroying his discipline in the name of progress. Worse, they are robbing poor children of the opportunity to raise themselves up by mastering it — with untold effects on all of us. Barri Weiss

……”In my position as a professor of mathematics at Princeton, I have witnessed the decline of universities and cultural institutions as they have embraced political ideology at the expense of rigorous scholarship. Until recently — this past summer, really — I had naively thought that the STEM disciplines would be spared from this ideological takeover.

I was wrong. Attempts to “deconstruct” mathematics, deny its objectivity, accuse it of racial bias, and infuse it with political ideology have become more and more common — perhaps, even, at your child’s elementary school.

More and more Americans are realizing that Dr. Fauci is not their friend Steve Deace

http://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/commentary-more-and-more-americans-are-realizing-that-dr-fauci-is-not-their-friend?utm_source=theblaze-breaking&utm

Increasing skepticism and even anger about the long-standing COVID-19 advisory role of Dr. Anthony Fauci have filled social media in recent days.

Sure, some of us have been pointing out the need to rid the White House and the nation of his presence for nearly a year now, but it turns out Fauci’s latest calls for double masking and remaining locked down even after getting vaccinated have pushed a new segment of Americans over the edge.

And to that I say, “Amen.”

More and more people simply want their damn country back and resent that the so-called “experts” seem to be addicted to either doubling down on failure or mandating increasingly hysterical and obtuse remedies that would make Rube Goldberg machines blush.

It’s a lot more than mere resentment, though. So many people have been hurt in mind, body, and soul by Fauci’s arrogant and inconsistent medical meanderings. Among the costs: Their ability to provide for themselves and their family. Their ability to worship and speak freely. Their ability to receive an education. Their ability to flourish in athletics and the arts. And perhaps most of all, their ability to trust one another as fellow citizens.

Biden Admin China Ties Reveal a Deeper Disturbing Truth Our elites have been captured by our worst adversary Benjamin Weingarten

https://www.newsweek.com/biden-administration-china-ties-reveal-deeper-disturbing-truth-opinion-1572589

The associations between members of the Joe Biden administration and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-linked individuals and entities are incredibly disturbing.

Personnel is policy. By dint of such ties, and past dutiful service to administrations that pursued the very policies of engagement and accommodation that enabled Communist China’s rise, we can surmise that the president, and the architects of his agenda, will likely be uniquely soft on China.

That the fledgling Biden presidency has, by political necessity, sought to create a veneer of toughness toward China with rhetoric—while from its earliest days, literally and figuratively bending over for it with a battery of weak policies—would seem to reinforce this view.But as disturbing as the backgrounds are of those Biden staffers who will be developing and executing this likely uniquely detrimental policy, what is perhaps even more disturbing is just how common such backgrounds are among those who would be tapped for such positions.

Any president from the bipartisan political establishment, though increasingly based on the Democratic side, would likely be selecting nominees for senior roles touching on China from a pool of candidates at best two degrees separated from the CCP—and more than likely positively predisposed to ever-greater interaction and integration with it. China exploits this.

Biden’s Emergencies by Chris Farrell

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17124/biden-emergencies

Often, the emergency is declared as a means of blocking targeted persons and governments from moving money, contraband, and property.

Most Americans probably have no idea that the United States is in the midst of ongoing “national emergencies” over matters in Nicaragua, Burundi, or the Central African Republic — but we are…

We are increasingly being subject to rule-by-decree…. President Biden just declared that the decades-long crisis on the Mexican border is not a problem. No debate, no vote, no ratification — just the stroke of a pen. Who objected? Any protests or marches? If organizations were to protest or march, would they be called “white supremacists” or “insurrectionists?”

Remember: with Mexico, everything — cartels, “coyotes,” smugglers, drugs, traffickers, sexual violence — is A-OK. Mexico = good. Libya = bad.

If you are against a Biden policy, does that mean you are against the government? Does that make you suspect in some way?

Some “emergency” decrees dropped down the Memory Hole; others manufactured, seemingly, from thin air.

President Joe Biden has reversed and cancelled the national emergency declared by President Donald Trump concerning the border security, humanitarian and COVID-19 crisis at the southern border of the United States. Nothing to see here. Move along.

In fact, on his very first day in office, Biden terminated that emergency, which he said had been a mistake from the get-go. Ironically, Biden has re-opened the exact same Texas facility the Trump administration used in order to detain the overflow of illegal aliens at the border. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticized Biden the same way she criticized Trump. At least she is consistent. Perhaps you remember the claims of children in cages and drinking from toilets? That must have all been a terrible misunderstanding.

Wikipedia’s leftist bias called out by its co-founder, who is leading the start-up of a rival to be truly unbiased By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/wikipedias_leftist_bias_called_out_by_its_cofounder_

The left’s capture of Wikipedia and its transformation into a progressive propaganda organ has had profound political consequences. Founded on the premise of “NPOV,” or neutral point of view, the free online encyclopedia now downplays now often omits entirely points unfavorable to the left, while pushing left wing tropes. It’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, is angry at the betrayal of its original promise. Carrie Sheffield writes at Just the News:

Last May, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger wrote an op-ed on his personal website titled “Wikipedia is Badly Biased” claiming that Wikipedia’s neutrality policy — known as  “NPOV,” or neutral point of view — “is dead.”

Now, when schoolchildren visit the Wikipedia website to look up answers to questions about the meaning of socialism, “they’re going to find an explanation that completely ignores any conservative, libertarian, or critical treatment of the subject,” Sanger told “Just the News AM” television program. “And that’s really problematic. That’s not education. That’s propaganda.” 

Sanger referred to a Fox News report last week by Maxim Lott, which noted, “The two main pages for ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ span a massive 28,000 words, and yet they contain no discussion of the genocides committed by socialist and communist regimes, in which tens of millions of people were murdered and starved.”

That’s poisonous, even if, as the article points out, some of the damaging information comes out in other sub-articles not found on the main page, where most children go to learn about a subject. Sanger traces the fall of Wikipedia, to the point today, where “Wikipedia started getting rid of citations from conservative sources, ‘even conservative sources that were cited in order to explain the conservative point of view.’” 

Garland Heralds Return of the Obama Justice Department — Radical as Ever By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/garland-heralds-return-of-the-obama-justice-department-radical-as-ever/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Biden is not so much presiding over Obama’s third term as he is the doddering passenger riding in first class while Obama’s faithful pilots navigate.

I t appears that the Justice Department under soon-to-be attorney general Merrick Garland will be the Biden administration in microcosm. Judge Garland, like President Biden, is the “pragmatic moderate” sign you hang on the front door, to give mainstream America confidence that the woke Left is not running the asylum. On paper, Garland, like Biden, has the right credentials for that job. When you observe him up close, though, as we had a chance to do during his confirmation hearing this week, that confidence takes a big hit.

Naturally, it’s important to set expectations accurately. This is a left-wing Democratic administration. Even if Garland were as advertised, you are out of luck if you were expecting a constitutionalist Justice Department, one that is solidly pro–law enforcement, deferential to individual liberty, and committed to equal protection under the law.

Biden is not so much presiding over Obama’s third term as he is the doddering passenger riding in first class while Obama’s faithful pilots navigate. Democrats did not yearn for a President Biden; they yearned to beat President Trump and restore the status quo ante. Biden’s job is to give his people what they want: Obama policy and practice.

Consequently, this Justice Department is going to be political and racialist. Garland may not strike you as either of those — in that stealthy way, he’s perfect for the job.

The judge emphasized that his top priority is domestic terrorism. But not all domestic terrorism. It is domestic terrorism as Democrats are defining it — viz., white supremacism, as instantiated by the rioting at the Capitol on January 6.

Was COVID-19 Our Neutron Bomb?By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/28/was-covid-19-our-neutron-bomb/

In the 1970s and 1980s, furor arose over our possible use of the “neutron bomb” that macabrely would “kill people, but not destroy property.” The logic of the perverse weapon was that on allied and friendly European ground, outnumbered defensive NATO troops might radiate and destroy invading masses of Soviet armored troops by periodic detonations of low-yield thermonuclear shells, rockets, and bombs. 

The ensuing blasts of heat would sear flesh, but would lack commensurate repercussion power to destroy most structures and buildings, and leave far smaller toxic radiation trails. In eerie Strangelovian terms, once the enemy was finished off, returning friendly troops and populations could sort their way among the mass dead to find their infrastructure intact—without “collateral” damage or fear of serious radiation sickness. 

In some ways, COVID-19 was our neutron bomb. When we reach the now politically incorrect, taboo term “herd immunity” through vaccinations and antibodies, and when the virus ceases to be a pandemic, the lethal tally may have exceeded 600,000 Americans. 

If so, the nation will have lost more countrymen than were killed in World War I and World War II combined—with thousands more suffering disabilities, from “long haul Covid” to stress and psychological impairment from losing livelihoods and lockdown cabin fever. 

Americans have additionally suffered likely over $15 trillion or so in economic damage from the lockdowns, lost labor, soaring healthcare costs, and the silent killers of substance, familial, and spousal abuse, along with missed medical procedures and surgeries, aborted K-12 schooling, depression, and suicides. It will take years and millions of hours of scholarship to tally all the losses and damage.