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.

https://spectator.us/want-joe-biden-attorney-general/

Whoever Joe Biden picks for attorney general is in a lose-lose situation. Why is that job so hard? At least three reasons stand out: 

The ongoing criminal investigations of Joe Biden’s family
A boiling cauldron of divisive legal questions facing the new administration, particularly immigration and gun control
Pressure to investigate everything the Trump administration ever did

All those will land in the attorney general’s lap. The first one, involving the Biden family, is especially vexing.

The probe into Biden’s grifting kin will face the AG immediately. The President-elect’s son Hunter and brother James both grew rich by trading on the family name. That, in itself, is not illegal. What they did to earn the money may be, though, and both Hunter and James are currently being investigated for serious crimes. Hunter, in particular, seems to be targeted for non-payment of taxes on foreign income, money laundering and more. Looming over the investigations is whether Joe Biden himself played a direct role, either as Barack Obama’s vice president or after leaving office. He has flatly stated he did not.

Hunter’s former partner in a Chinese energy venture, Anthony Bobulinski, has said Hunter and his father spoke frequently about business. More damning is Bobulinski’s statement that he met with Joe Biden twice, with Hunter and James present, to discuss their business projects. He has said the discussions were fairly general, but they were clearly about the Chinese business venture. (He has since spoken with the FBI and presumably told them the same thing.) President-elect Biden, for his part, has repeatedly denied discussing any business dealings with Hunter but has not said if he ever met Bobulinski. The press hasn’t bothered to ask.

Attorney General Barr has previously said that there were no investigations of either party’s presidential or vice presidential candidates. That means Joe Biden has not been implicated. If his name turns up later in the investigations of Hunter or James Biden, the DoJ’s standing rule is that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/cdcs-affirmative-action-eugenics-coronavirus-daniel-greenfield/

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the CDC was too busy fighting racism to do its job. As the vaccine rolls out, the CDC decided to build the vaccine waiting list around affirmative action

Who gets to live or die? Much like in Nazi Germany, it helps to be a member of the right race.

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has announced that the priorities for distributing vaccines are to prevent death, preserve society, and help those facing “disparities”, and then maybe, “increase the chance for everyone to enjoy health and well-being.”

Vaccine distribution is to be guided by four principles, one of which is to fight “health inequities” and another is to “promote justice”. It’s not the CDC’s job to fight for social justice, but to fight viruses. Having failed miserably at its one job, which it chose not to do, it’s instead pursuing racial equity eugenics by tackling “health inequities” for “racial and ethnic minority groups”.

The CDC and NIH had turned to the National Academies to produce A Framework for Equitable Allocation of Vaccine for the Novel Coronavirus which falsely claimed that “COVID-19 illnesses and deaths are strongly associated with race” due to “systemic racism” and that a “vaccine allocation framework” had to reduce these “health inequities” with affirmative action.

The report noted that the “committee anticipates that the criteria will, in practice, tend to give higher priority to lower-income individuals… and Black, Hispanic or Latin, American Indian and Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/soviet-politics-american-style-11608658685?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

On Christmas Day 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union, gave his farewell speech and more than seven decades of Russian revolutionary socialism came to an end. A generation later, the spirit of the Soviet Union has re-emerged with mass support in the U.S.

When I arrived in Moscow in 1976 to begin a six-year stint as a correspondent, I was struck by the red flags flying from government buildings and the somber streets devoid of advertising except for garish posters showing workers with clenched fists demanding an end to the arms race.

When the Soviet Union fell, it seemed the Soviet attempt to impose a deluded version of reality had died with it. Francis Fukuyama, in his 1989 essay “The End of History,” said that Marxism-Leninism was doomed as an alternative to liberal democracy. I argued at the time that the drive to make a religion out of politics had not disappeared.

For the past four years, potted histories have warned about the rise of fascism in the U.S. But the real danger is the transformation of “tolerance” into an ideology with its own courts, informers and punishments, all of them reminiscent of the Soviet Union.

One of the pillars of the Soviet Union was a controlled press in which all coverage was organized to confirm a mendacious ideology.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pork-city-here-are-most-ridiculous-pet-projects-900-billion-spending-package

As Congress prepares to pass a $900 billion COVID-19 stimulus bill rolled into a consolidated appropriations package – with funding for assistance for households and businesses, along with vaccine distribution and other pandemic-related measures, the bill also includes a ton of pork per usual.We already know about the $600 checks for each adult and dependent. This time, however, ‘mixed-status’ households where eligible citizens live with illegal immigrants, will not only receive payments – they can retroactively claim benefits after being left out of the last round.

The bill also includes $300 per week in enhanced unemployment benefits, and would extend unemployment to 50 weeks for both state and federal programs, vs. the standard 26 weeks.

And now, on to the pork… which includes billions to foreign countries, US military weapons purchases which go above and beyond their budgets, $40 million for the Kennedy Center, and nearly $200 million so that federal HIV/AIDS workers overseas can buy cars and car insurance, among other things.

FOREIGN HANDOUTS:

A minimum of $3.3 billion in grants to Israel.Also included is $453 million to Ukraine, on top of the $400 million Trump eventually released. No word on how much of that goes to the ‘big guy.’$10 million for “gender programs” in Pakistan. $1.3 billion to Egypt, and $700 million to Sudan. $135 million to Burma, $85.5 million to Cambodia, $1.4 billion for an “Asia Reassurance Initiative Act,” and $130 million to Nepal.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/23/trump-should-veto-the-2-3-tril-5593-page-covid-19-stimulus-2020s-biggest-fraud-of-all/

Passage of the enormous COVID-19 “stimulus” bill is being hailed as a landmark effort to help average Americans heal from the economic ravages of the Chinese virus. It is nothing of the sort. Passed in the dead of night, it’s a pork-filled nightmare that will lead to more debt, bigger government and a dimmer future for all Americans.

The redoubtable Stephen Green did the basic math. Based on a U.S. population of roughly 330 million, the $900 billion stimulus amounts to $2,727 in spending per person.

OK, but how much of that goes into people’s pockets? A pittance: $600.

Yet, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi committed the unforgivable sin of holding up those $600 checks for struggling American families in order to hurt President Donald Trump’s reelection chances. This is politics at its most cynical and is a prime example why average Americans today hold politicians in such low esteem.

All told, the bill for this sprawling legislation comes to $2.3 trillion — yes, that’s trillion with a “t”. Add that into Green’s earlier calculation, and the amount spent per household grows to $6,969.

Sure, but all that is going to COVID-19 relief for individuals and small businesses, right? No, not even close – $1.4 trillion from the Consolidated Appropriations Act is dedicated to the federal government’s fiscal 2021 budget.

It was all cobbled together in the last hours of closed-doornegotiations, focused on getting massive servings of pork spending and new, useless government programs added, not on COVID-19 relief. That was just the selling point to all us rubes.