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China Starting Next Global Crisis By Gobbling Up Sri Lanka by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on May 21st, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18545/sri-lanka-crisis-china

Sri Lanka is only the world’s opening act.

Events in Sri Lanka also highlight how China is going about dominating the world. Beijing is corrupting national leaders, drowning them in debt, and ultimately destabilizing their governments. Beijing, it appears, is particularly targeting democracies.

China is the world’s predatory lender, something evident from its Belt and Road Initiative, also known as BRI. Beijing’s grand infrastructure project specializes in roads, ports, and railroads that have, like the Sri Lankan projects, little or no commercial justification. So far, 146 countries have signed BRI memo agreements with Beijing.

The Chinese have established a pattern. “China extends debt on onerous terms, backs up authoritarian governments when there are financial collapses or civil disobedience, and then takes everything it can find,” Cleo Paskal of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Gatestone.

In December 2017, Beijing took control of the Hambantota port…. Now there are concerns that Hambantota will eventually become a Chinese naval base. China’s admirals have long eyed Sri Lanka…

A base in Sri Lanka would allow Chinese aircraft and surface combatants as well as submarines to cut sea lanes in the Indian Ocean and force next-door India to divert military assets to a threatening presence.

Sri Lanka is now looking for a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, but that is not necessarily a good idea. The international community should not be helping a voracious China gobble up small, vulnerable societies.

If the IMF bails out Sri Lanka without ensuring that it is no longer aligned with Beijing, it will have subsidized Chinese investment and politically reinforced a country that becomes a Chinese proxy.” – Cleo Paskal, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, to Gatestone, May, 2022.

On May 12, India confirmed that it would provide a desperate Sri Lankan government 65,000 metric tons of urea, pursuant to an existing $1 billion credit line. The sale, which overrides New Delhi’s ban on the exports of the commodity, relieves severe pressure on the government of Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Sri Lanka since the end of March has been wracked by violent protests. “Shoot-on-sight” orders have for the most part restored order, but the unrest has led to the replacement of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, once the country’s dominate political figure. His brother, the president, is unlikely to survive the tumult. The ongoing economic and financial crisis is Sri Lanka’s worst since independence from Britain in 1948.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Putin’s Useful Idiots: How U.S. Climate Extremists Are Funding Russia’s Agenda By: Victoria Coates and Jennifer Stefano

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/19/putins-useful-idiots-how-us-climate-extremists-are-funding-russias-agenda/

The desolation of U.S. energy security has bolstered Vladimir Putin’s dangerous geopolitical aims.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illuminating an ugly truth: the anti-fracking war on America’s energy security is being waged by well-funded, radical U.S. environmental groups, as well as interests tied directly to Vladimir Putin. For years, the U.S. government has investigated Russian financial ties to environmental groups that push for ending U.S. fossil fuel production and have successfully shut down fracking sites and pipelines, to the detriment of U.S. workers and consumers.

Who benefits? Putin, because the desolation of U.S. energy security has bolstered state-owned Gazprom and his dangerous geopolitical aims.

Before the war on Ukraine, the U.S. Congress began exposing connections between Russia and little-known foundations that donate to major environmental groups such as Sierra Club and National Resource Defense Council (NRDC). The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works released a 2014 report noting a small group of rich Americans was controlling environmental groups and collaborating with questionable offshore funders to maximize support. In 2017, two congressmen called for further investigation of the connection between these funders and Russia.

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America the Miserable Misery loves company. And unfortunately for America, the merchants of misery will be in charge for a long time. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/19/america-the-miserable/

My daughter’s college graduation last weekend was the first convocation held at the university since 2019. Although everyone was grateful for a return to normalcy, the pandemic still clouded the ceremonies; professors recounted the ways in which the students’ lives had been upended, commending them for soldiering on despite the unprecedented disruption. 

Their praise only acted as a cruel reminder of the time, friendships, and experiences needlessly and irretrievably lost.

Campus, of course, never really returned to anything close to normal. Remote classes stifled learning; mask mandates and social distancing rules stifled activity. Any mild bump in local cases prompted stern warnings from the dean that soul-crushing lockdowns could return. What should have been one of the most enjoyable periods in their lives will be remembered instead as a black hole of fear and isolation.

Visibly weary, her classmates gathered on Saturday afternoon to trudge across the finish line. But their torment was not yet over. The same adults who enforced Medieval disease policies under the guise of modernity and science and who stole a big chunk of their youth had to take one last swipe at their high-paying captives.

One speaker after another harangued the students about their duty to confront every societal ill, real or perceived. According to the Betters with Letters seated on the dais, life isn’t about pursuing individual passions or creating a vibrant social life, or—God forbid—raising a family. Personal fulfillment can only be attained by acting as one-man armies in the woke war against -isms and -phobes, the keynote speaker—a man who presumably hasn’t left a college campus in any professional capacity since his 18th birthday—admonished the crowd.

America quite literally took a back seat during the proceedings; one U.S. flag sat among an assortment of flags far behind the stage. When asked to rise for the national anthem, it took everyone a few moments to locate where Old Glory had been stashed. Few participated in singing along with the vocalist, and even fewer held their hands over their hearts.

After we exited the building, news spread of the horrific massacre that took place about 150 miles away. And several hours later, partygoers celebrating their last moments of college were fleeing for safety near the town’s two most popular bars as a gunman opened fire, shooting one employee in the stomach.

Make America Happy Again

Happiness is so central to the health of the nation that the founders wisely included a mention of it in the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence. And the right to the pursuit of happiness, they noted, isn’t something conferred by the state but is God-given and a right the government cannot legitimately take away. Seeking happiness isn’t just a self-serving endeavor but the basis of a free, functioning society. “The necessity of pursuing happiness is the foundation of liberty,” John Locke wrote in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

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Pumping Up Prices Blame the Russians says Biden, despite the facts pointing to him. John Stossel

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/pumping-prices-john-stossel/

The price of gas keeps rising.

“The reason for that is because of Putin’s war,” said President Joe Biden.

But that’s impossible. Most of the price rise came before Putin attacked Ukraine.

So some politicians simply blame “corporate greed.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse accuses the oil industry of collecting “excess profit.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren even introduced a bill to ban “price gouging.”

This is just economic ignorance, as my new video explains.

“If big oil could raise prices anytime they wanted and get away with it, then why were they so cheap in 2020, 2019, 2018?” asks the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ben Lieberman.

Lieberman points out that companies are always greedy. Greed didn’t just start now. They were just as greedy when gas prices fell in 2019 and early 2020.

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Forgetting the Genocide of the Yezidis While the international community hides behind virtue signalling. Zidan Ismail

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/genocide-yezidis-has-been-forgotten-zidan-ismail/

In the summer of 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) committed genocide of the Yezidis in their largest city in Iraq and the world, Sinjar.

The Yezidis are a religious minority in the Middle East; their main center is Iraq. At the time that the genocide began, their number was no more than 550,000 people, according to the United Nations when it was evaluating the crimes committed by ISIS against the Yezidis, which were classified as genocide and crimes against humanity.

It seems clear that what happened at the time had a goal, namely to wipe out the presence of the Yezidis. While it appeared initially that the world had grasped the significance of these crimes, now the Yezidi cause is largely being neglected amid the many crises and regional wars around the world.

Iraq historically has been an area of great religious diversity; the genocide of the Yezidis was one aspect of the Islamic State’s efforts to destroy that. The captivity and rape of Yezidi women, using them as commodities and even opening slave markets in the twenty-first century, was not just mass exploitation and sexual assault; this type of attack was used as a means of ethnic cleansing.

One of those who observed these events, “Salloum,” an iraqi researcher and writer living in Baghdad and working at a Baghdad university, explains: “It was the commitment of women in war with the aim of intimidating and humiliating a religious minority and taking away their dignity, and also with the aim of influencing the ethnic composition of this religious minority, and therefore this act is part of the efforts (genocide) that tried to change the Yezidis and their beliefs and to influence the ethnic and religious composition of the region.”

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Rashida Tlaib and the Making of her Second Blood Libel A vile anti-Semite and spreader of blood libels lurks the halls of Congress — while her own party remains silent. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/rashida-tlaib-and-making-her-second-blood-libel-ari-lieberman/

“Tlaib’s reckless and malevolent tweets, where she instinctively blames Jews for murder and other capital crimes belies a sinister intent. Even more troubling is that Tlaib is not just some foul-mouthed B-list actor or washed-out guitar player, she is a member of the U.S. legislative branch, and her words carry weight. Yet she continues to spew blood libels with near impunity and the deafening silence from her own party should sound alarm bells.”

In January 2020, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mi) retweeted an unverified tweet by professional agitator and former Palestinian Authority diplomat Hanan Ashrawi, in which she claimed that Jews had kidnapped and killed a Palestinian boy by throwing him into a pond where he drowned. As it turns out, the boy’s death was accidental and Israeli rescue teams resorted to superhuman efforts to retrieve the boy from the pond’s cold, murky waters and revive him.

Ashrawi deleted her tweet and surprisingly apologized for citing unverified sources. Tlaib on the other hand deleted the tweet but without apology. She was quick to accuse the Jews of committing barbaric acts but offered no contrition when those accusations proved unfounded. Even the ADL’s left-leaning head, Jonathan Greenblatt, pointed out that her lie was an “example of how a blood libel works in 2020; retweets [sic] a vicious lie steeped in centuries-old accusations used to demonize Jews, then says nothing when it’s disproven. An apology is overdue.” Of course, none was forthcoming.

It appears that Tlaib did not learn her lesson concerning her propensity to engage in hasty conclusions and antisemitic blood libels. On May 11, Israeli forces carrying out a counterterror operation in the Jenin vicinity encountered violent resistance from Palestinian gunman belonging to various terror entities. They came under heavy M-16 automatic fire. This is the weapon of choice for these gunmen, though some also carry AK-47 assault rifles and Carlo-type submachine guns.

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The Dumbest Generation Grows Up Is One Smart Book By Stanley Kurtz

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-dumbest-generation-grows-up-is-one-smart-book/

There is a sense abroad that generational change has placed the essentials of our constitutional system and its supporting culture at risk. Many Millennials — the generation now in their 20s and 30s — have soured, not only on fundamentals like freedom of speech, but on the American story as such. Various writers have tried to make sense of this disturbing cultural shift. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt highlight a certain style of parenting. Mary Eberstadt explores the implications of family decline. Now, Mark Bauerlein, in his new book, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, adds some crucial missing pieces to the puzzle. His focus — social media and education — may seem well-worn, but you’ve never seen them approached like this.

I’ll get to substance, but first I want to address the striking tone of the book. Although the work is well-documented and thoughtfully argued, the overall feel is singular and unconventional. There is something “prophetic” about this book. I don’t mean “prophetic” in the sense of “predicting the future,” although Bauerlein’s 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation, to which this is a follow-up, did in fact foresee, against the then-reigning idealization of the Millennials, many of the problems they’re experiencing today.

No, I mean that Bauerlein’s willingness to openly and uncompromisingly confront, and in a sense denounce face to face, America’s young — as well as the Boomer mentors who failed them — has the ring of the biblical prophets about it. After publishing The Dumbest Generation, Bauerlein was invited by many colleges and universities to address their students (and professors) in person. After taking his audiences to task for devoting more attention to selfies and “likes” than to serious history and art, Bauerlein would often find himself booed.

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The Clownish Disinfo Czar Got The Boot, But Biden’s ‘Ministry Of Truth’ Hired Monster Replacements Diana Glebova

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://dailycaller.com/2022/05/19/nina-jakowicz-jamie-gorelick-michael-chertoff-disinformation-governance-board-dhs-patriot-act/

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hired the co-author of the PATRIOT Act, arguably the harshest crackdown on civil liberties in modern American history, and an official under former President Bill Clinton to head the Disinformation Governance Board during its “pause.”

The DHS shut the board down Monday after just several weeks and its head, Nina Jankowicz, wrote a resignation letter Tuesday, according to The Washington Post. Jankowicz was scrutinized for pushing disinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the now-discredited Steele Dossier, which Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA officer, said was possibly “part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot.” She also called Republicans who criticize critical race theory (CRT) “disinformers.” Videos of her singing as the “Mary Poppins of disinformation,” “fucking her way to the top” and satirical, sexualized renditions of Harry Potter themes have also raised eyebrows.

The department announced Wednesday former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and former U.S. Deputy Secretary General Jamie Gorelick under Clinton “will lead a thorough review and assessment” of the board that was “grossly and intentionally mischaracterized.”

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Why Is Joe Biden Still President?

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/20/why-is-joe-biden-still-president/

The U.S. recently passed the 1 million mark for COVID-19 deaths, a grim milestone recognized with the lowering of flags to half staff around the country. More than 60% of those deaths have come during the bungling tenure of President Joe Biden, who said in a late-October 2020 debate with Donald Trump that the president should be kicked out of the White House because of how many had died from the virus on his watch. Based on his own standard, Biden should be back in his Delaware basement.

When asked at that debate how he’d “lead this country out of this crisis,” Biden responded with his usual “Big Guy” pomposity:

“220,000 Americans dead. You hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this. Anyone who … is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America.”

About three months later, Biden was inaugurated president. By early November 2021, Biden’s death toll had exceeded 332,000. The total for his 16 months in office is now about 600,000, even though vaccines have been available throughout his term and effective treatments arrived late last year.

Compare these numbers to the Trump presidency, during which 400,000 were killed by COVID in about a year, the majority before vaccines had been rolled out.

Though the Democrats and the press ghoulishly held Trump directly responsible for COVID deaths during his last year in office, we think it’s distasteful, and careless, to blame Biden for lives lost to the virus while he’s been president. There’s only so much a White House can do during a pandemic.

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Biden’s Strange Help for Cuba Why aid the struggling anti-American regime in Havana now?

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-strange-help-for-havana-cuba-sanctions-russia-11652909478?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Whatever the humanitarian impulse behind the Biden Administration’s Monday announcement that it will lift some sanctions on Cuba, the timing couldn’t be worse. The dictatorship is under stress, and it remains Russia’s closest ally in the Western Hemisphere. Why would Team Biden take the pressure off Havana now?

Cuba’s regime may be in the most precarious state of its 63 years in power. The economy has collapsed, and hero worship of Fidel Castro is as dead as he is. The July 11 uprising last year, when tens of thousands went to the streets and shouted for freedom, exposed the contempt Cubans have for their government.

Thousands of peaceful protesters were rounded up last summer by paramilitary and secret police, and some 750 are still in jail. This week Havana declared a new law criminalizing basic liberties. Insulting a government official is now punishable with up to five years in prison. A Cuban who engages with an international aid group not authorized by the state is headed for years behind bars.

The Biden Administration’s new policy removes the cap on dollar remittances that Americans may send to Cuba, reopens air travel to cities across the island, and restores travel by so-called educational groups. The practical effect will be to supply the regime, which controls all commerce, with hard currency to keep its repression going.