Responding to Chinese Diplomatic and Economic Aggression: Why on Earth Is the U.S. Attacking Its Best Allies? by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18134/responding-to-chinese-diplomatic-and-economic

The UAE is a staunch ally of the U.S. as well as home to a major joint U.S./UAE military installation. The UAE, demonstrating extraordinary leadership by His Highness Mohammed bin Zayed Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and his outstanding advisors, was also the first Muslim country to sign on to the Abraham Accords, and to initiate a truly warm peace between Muslim states and Israel after years of disputes had destabilized the region. The UAE, in addition, was the first Arab country to send troops to Afghanistan alongside the U.S. and to provide significant assistance when the U.S. withdrew from there in 2021.

National security cannot be compromised and diplomatic relations must be defended…. The “Monitoring China-UAE Cooperation Act,” is, alas, a woefully misguided way to go about it. Congress may try to claim that it is trying to protect our national security against China’s espionage and influence operations, but triggering friction against strong allies can end up delivering them into the hands of our adversaries – as our adversaries doubtless wish.

Sadly, this Act is profoundly counterproductive….Most importantly, any new requirements would respect our friends and allies. Legislation highlighting a single specific country can only be perceived by that country as an insult, an affront. Whether it is in the economic or national security arena, the business of diplomacy is improving relationships, not damaging them.

This is a global problem, not unique to one country. China is trying to install its companies’ products all over the globe. Some might even call China’s aggressive push on 5G a pandemic.

Rather than assaulting allies, and instead of clinging to a one-size-fits-all solution, the U.S. might craft legislation that would require the Director of National Intelligence to adjust requirements based on the relationship that the U.S. has with various countries….The DNI would design a global system that is flexible enough to reflect the complex network of relationships that the U.S. has around the world. No two are exactly the same.

China is the threat, not our allies.

Legislation recently introduced in Congress purportedly seeks to confront China’s growing global aggression on a broad range of fronts. While that goal is certainly urgent and important goal, regrettably, in reality,this document appears largely a pretext for attacking one of America’s most impressive allies, the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Donald Trump, Magnificent Vulgarian Andrew Blyth

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/review/2022/01/donald-trump-magnificent-vulgarian/

The 2016 US election was a turning point for the republic. Having tolerated presidents Barack Obama (Democrat, 2009-17) and George W. Bush (Republican, 2001-2009), and with Hillary Clinton (Democrat) offering more of the same, large swathes of the voting American middle class were desperate for change. They wanted to see a it in the way politics was done, and to stop being ignored by their elected representatives in Washington DC.

The election was a contest between former First Lady, senator and ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (a Washington insider) and a trailblazing entertainment and construction businessman from New York with a fondness for disruption, Donald J. Trump. Voters, particularly those living in the Midwest, liked what Trump was offering: making America great again. Trump promised to be their agent for change. He was catering for the needs and aspirations of ordinary Americans, who felt they had been neglected for much too long. The ‘basket of deplorables’ (Clinton’s remark showing her disrespect for millions of hard-working Middle Americans), one in two women, and one in three Hispanics voted for the ultimate risk-taker. A new dawn was emerging in the United States. Trump was to embark on a program of reform – and he was in a hurry to ‘drain the swamp’ of the Washington insiders who looked after only themselves. Trump was soon to discover how entirely different it was campaigning from opposition to governing.

Political historians warn that commentary immediately after an event will never stand as the final word. Dispassionate historical analysis, it is often said, takes time. Written works explain and clarify decisions and events that the participants expect historians to consider when assessing political, economic, social or cultural events.

The rise and fall of the Trump presidency has been the subject of much commentary, mainly by a handful of active participants including academics, commentators, journalists, and Trump family members. Little has been written by those who have some perspective on the machinations of politics and government. To date, the Trump presidency has been the subject of terse political commentary more than measured historical assessment; but commentary is not history.

Donald Trump: The Ultimate Contrarian (Connor Court Publishing, 2021) is Richard Alston’s second foray in two years examining the principles and practice of public leadership, and he offers a scintillating read. Drawing on his time in politics, as a senator and senior minister in the Howard Government, and as a state and federal party leader, Alston ventures where others fear to tread – offering a critique of Trump’s presidency. With outstanding effect.

Evolution, Hyper-Novelty and Cultural Noise Michael Giffin

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/01/evolution-hyper-novelty-and-cultural-noise-2/

EXCERPTS

“Science occurs along a spectrum, sound on one end, unsound on the other. We live in an age where facts are scientific if they serve the narrative of whatever ideology is currently hegemonic and unscientific if they do not. One of the delusions of our age is the belief that sex and gender are functionally independent, from each other and from evolutionary biology too. Scientists now reinforce this delusion, because it bankrolls their research, controls government and education, and drives public policy. This is the backstory of the AMA recommendation against recording sex on birth certificates.

In their book, Bret and Heather discuss a common misunderstanding of our age, that because men and women work side by side, and are equal under the law, they are the same. To ignore their differences, to demand they be the same, is sexism of another kind. We were sexual beings long before we were human, and our desire to reproduce is hard-wired. It is a fool’s game to pretend, as our culture now pretends, “that sex equals gender, or that gender has no relationship to sex, or that either sex or gender is not wholly evolutionary”. Sexual differences can be valued without embracing the naturalistic fallacy.

Men and women have three possible reproductive strategies to choose from: first, “partner up and invest long term, reproductively, socially, and emotionally”; second, “force reproduction on an unwilling partner”; third, “force nobody, but also invest little beyond short-term sexual activity”. The first is best for men, women, children and society. The second is morally reprehensible and, historically, available to men rather than women. The third is now widely embraced by women in an age of sexual liberation, birth control and abortion on demand.

Yet sexual liberation has consequences—emotional, societal and evolutionary—the cost of which must be borne, ultimately, by some individuals or groups. Cheap sex has not empowered women in their negotiations with men. The non-judgmental, value-free welfare state was established to protect women, but its benefits are mixed; many women are disempowered, and what results is a class of self-perpetuating social disadvantage. Without monogamy, Bret and Heather believe sexuality is reduced to “females burdened with the entire chore of reproduction, and undiscerning males always on the make”.

Truth Leaks Out The COVID origins scandal was genuine, worthy of the world’s best investigative reporters—who ignored it.  By Alex Berenson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/14/truth-leaks-out/

The quest for truth-in-COVID did pick up some steam in late spring 2021. 

Not about the vaccine, though. 

About the origins of the virus. 

From the first days of the epidemic, strong circumstantial evidence suggested Sars-CoV-2 had leaked from a Chinese lab. Both the virus itself and the facts around its emergence pointed to human intervention. 

Wuhan, the city of 10 million people where the first cases were found, is home to China’s most important viral research laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute aggressively researched bat coronaviruses, which China had viewed as a serious risk since the original SARS outbreak in 2003. 

In 2017 the institute opened China’s first Biosafety Level 4 laboratory. Level 4 labs are the most secure available, designed to handle deadly pathogens such as Ebola. But just months after the lab opened, U.S. State Department officials visited and reported in a cable to Washington that the new facility was at risk of a serious accident. They found “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”

The troubled lab was located only miles from the first cluster of cases in central Wuhan. And it had worked with a virus very similar to Sars-CoV-2 known as RaTG13 (or RaBtCov/4991), which had been found in a cave in 2013 after several miners working there became seriously ill with pneumonia.

That cave—like other caves that had large numbers of the bats that were the original animal hosts for naturally occurring coronaviruses—was nowhere near Wuhan. It was located in southern China, several hundred miles away. And the Chinese couldn’t trace a chain of human transmission from that region to Wuhan. They had reported no early cases in the villages and cities around the caves, or between the caves and Wuhan. 

Early on, Chinese and international reports had offered a different potential explanation for the fact Sars-CoV-2 had emerged first in Wuhan. They linked the outbreak to a large “wet market” there. Wet markets, which are common in China, sell wild and domesticated live animals for slaughter. An NPR reporter visited a similar market in Hong Kong and reported that “it’s quite obvious why the term ‘wet’ is used. . . . The countertops of the stalls are red with blood as fish are gutted and filleted.”

But the theory was discounted within months, because Chinese researchers could not find Sars-CoV-2 in tissue samples of animals taken from the Wuhan wet market.

Meanwhile, from the start of the epidemic, Chinese authorities at every level behaved as if they had something to hide. Sending police to silence Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who in late December 2020 had first warned about the new pneumonia, was only the first step. 

Criminals Aren’t Just Stealing Packages, They’re Robbing Trucks and Trains Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/01/dem-crime-wave-criminals-arent-just-stealing-daniel-greenfield/

Under the rule of a party that has virtually legalized crime, that defunds police, and blames crime on social inequity, the criminals have hijacked entire cities, crime is escalating, and the criminals are becoming more ambitious.

New York and California, among other states, have effectively legalized robbing stores and porch piracy. But the gangs are moving beyond that to not just stealing packages, they’re hijacking trucks.

Instead of shoplifting from stores, some thieves are zeroing in on another target: Trains and delivery trucks full of packages on the way to customers’ doorsteps.

UPS Chief Executive Carol Tome said Friday that one of the company’s 18-wheeler trucks was robbed in Atlanta in the early hours of the morning. She said thieves hijacked the truck after the driver left one of the delivery company’s largest hubs.

It’s Atlanta. Why not? How is Soros DA Darius Pattillo working out?

“He was stopped at gunpoint. He was zip-tied, thrown into the back of his feeder car and they took the packages,” she said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” The robbery took place in late December, according to an NBC news report.

Transgenderism Destroys the Family By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/transgenderism_destroys_the_family.html

How is it that injecting cattle with hormones is evil, but injecting kids with hormones to obscure their true sex is the new frontier?

In March of 1970, Anne Bernays penned a piece titled “What Are You Supposed to Do if You Like Children?”[1]  Her target was the Women’s Liberation Movement that was ushering in ideas that “men are sexual vampires, [and] marriage is stunting and exploitative.”

In short, Bernays focused on “liberation’s” “paralyzing excesses” because at the root of  Liberation’s determination “to disintegrate the sexes is the disabling anxiety that different means the same thing as inferior.”  But “anybody can see that women are as valuable as men but they are not more the same than ears and eyes.”

Bernays railed against the idea that “[l]iberation insists that women be absolute ‘equals’ with men.”

Why?

Those women who are “willing to acknowledge the remotest emotional obligation to husband and children, especially to children during their fragile first five or six years of life … can’t summon the time, physical energy, and psychic equipment to do two jobs simultaneously.  You can’t split a woman’s life down the middle and expect each half, like a severed worm, to go happily crawling off, to survive and function in perfect health.”

Yet that is exactly what has been demanded of most women as they valiantly try to raise a family and work outside their homes.  Or they simply decide that children are not worth their time or effort, or some other agency is left to the care and development of their children.

Tulsi Gabbard Skewers Joe Biden As Being Even More Divisive Than Hillary Clinton By J.D. Rucker

https://thelibertydaily.com/tulsi-gabbard-skewers-joe-biden-as-being-even-more-divisive-than-another-hatemongering-democrat/

Tulsi Gabbard ran her presidential campaign against Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrat field by establishing she’s more willing to try to unite the country rather than bow to the radical progressives running her party today. It didn’t work out well for her politically, but her popularity has stayed relatively high even as she continues talking politics from outside the Beltway.

She hit Biden hard over his speech promoting the Democrats’ voter fraud legislation in Georgia. In fact, she hit him with the ultimate insult, saying that he’s even more divisive than the queen of party division, Hillary Clinton.

“Hillary’s calling tens of millions of Americans deplorables was divisive & disgusting. But Biden has gone further, calling those who disagree with his actions & policies domestic enemies, traitors, and racists. Biden promised to unite us, but he is doing all he can do divide us.”

Biden Crosses the Quinnipiac Did the president finally admit that his claims about states preventing people from voting are false? James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-crosses-the-quinnipiac-11642185888?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

As America approaches the end of the first year of the Biden presidency—or as Democrats describe it, the era of greed—the White House is arguing that Mr. Biden’s recent polling numbers aren’t as bad as they seem. More consequentially, the president appears to have just admitted that state voting laws aren’t as bad as he often claims.

As for the polling, the White House faces a tough sell in suggesting that public opinion surveys underrate his political strength, given that the industry famously overestimated his appeal and the popularity of congressional Democrats in the days before the 2020 election.

But the White House is now attacking the methodology behind a particular poll which this week delivered an especially harsh assessment of the president’s standing among Americans.

Hans Nichols of Axios reports:

White House deputy chief of staff Jennifer O’Malley Dillon is publicly attacking a new poll that gave President Biden a 33% approval rating, using the full weight of her office to call it an “outlier,” according to a memo shared with Axios…

Who You Calling ‘Dastardly,’ Mr. Schumer? Another tall tale about Georgia voting proves too good to check.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-you-calling-dastardly-chuck-schumer-georgia-voting-law-11642172418?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Sen. Chuck Schumer is the latest politician to cite Georgia’s election laws as a tool of voter suppression. “What motivated the insurrectionists” on Jan. 6, he told MSNBC, “is now motivating these state legislatures to do dastardly things.” But these claims don’t survive cursory inspection.

Changes to voting rules, Mr. Schumer claimed, are “aimed at Democratic constituencies,” including “people of color, young people, urban people.” He specifically cited “only one early voting place in an entire county, that you have to travel 23 miles.” This is an apparent reference to Lincoln County, Ga., which is considering a plan to consolidate seven polling sites into a central hub.

Lincoln County is a rural area where President Trump won 68% of the 4,641 votes. The county’s elections director, Lilvender Bolton, is unlikely to be conspiring to disenfranchise minorities. For one thing, she happens to be black. “The amazing thing about this is that the story is that I’m just after the black people, and I’m not going to let them vote,” Ms. Bolton says. “That’s what they’re actually going out telling the people, and you know, it’s crazy.”

David Goldman: Worst US inflation since ’82 is huge underestimate Government’s CPI says the cost of shelter rose 4% in the past year but home prices and rents are up nearly 20%

https://asiatimes.com/2022/01/worst-us-inflation-since-82-is-huge-underestimate/

Shelter accounts for about a third of American household expenditure, and the cost of buying or renting shelter is up nearly 20% over the past year. Yet the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for shelter reported Jan. 12 by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed an increase of just 4.2 over the past year.

Private surveys conducted by the big rental sites, Zillow and Apartmentlist.com, show increases of 13% to 18% during 2021, and the Case-Shiller Index of US home prices jumped 18% in the year through October.

Who are you going to believe, to paraphrase Groucho Marx – the US government or your own eyes?

Part of the discrepancy involves a simple time lag. The US government looks at the present cost of housing while the private rental surveys register the cost of a new rental. It takes a while for leases to expire and new, higher-cost leases to take effect.