Biden $2.3 tn boondoggle is no challenge to China David Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/biden-2-3-tn-boondoggle-is-no-challenge-to-chin

Democrats would hike corporate taxes without restoring the R&D incentives that the Trump tax cut eliminated.

President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.3 trillion spending package unveiled March 31 should have come a day later, as an April Fool’s exercise.

Labeled an infrastructure package, it offers just $447 billion for transportation infrastructure over eight years. That’s less than a quarter of the most widely accepted estimates for the US infrastructure deficit.

On February 21, Biden told a group of US senators, “If we don’t get moving, [the Chinese] are going to eat our lunch. They’re investing billions of dollars dealing with a whole range of issues that relate to transportation, the environment and a whole range of other things. We just have to step up.”

Biden might as well instruct Secretary of State Blinken to ask the Chinese if they want fries with that.

Most of the $2.3 trillion will buy votes rather than infrastructure, including $400 billion for “elder and disability care,” $213 billion for “green and affordable homes,” $174 billion for electric vehicles, $137 billion for “school and childcare infrastructure,” $100 billion for “job training” and so forth.

GovCon Expert Chuck Brooks: Strategic Paths of Cybersecurity

https://www.govconwire.com/2021/03/govcon-expert-chuck-brooks-strategic-paths

GovCon Expert Chuck Brooks, an invaluable member of Executive Mosaic’s GovCon Expert program, has published his latest feature detailing the essential understanding of cybersecurity, its capabilities, the best practices to get the most out of the technical concept and the awareness of cyber’s potential to find success.

“At its very core, the practice of cybersecurity is risk management. It requires being vigilant and encompasses educating employees, identifying gaps, assessing vulnerabilities, mitigating threats, and having updated resilience plans to respond to incidents.”

You can read Chuck Brooks’ latest GovCon Expert article below:

Strategic Paths of Cybersecurity

By GovCon Expert Chuck Brooks

Cybersecurity requires a plan and strategy.

At its very core, the practice of cybersecurity is risk management. It requires being vigilant and encompasses educating employees, identifying gaps, assessing vulnerabilities, mitigating threats, and having updated resilience plans to respond to incidents.

Government and industry leaders should have a working understanding of risk management (and risk exposure) and have context on the different array of threats and threat actors. They should also be knowledgeable on the guiding axiom of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Framework: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover.

Marxist Agenda Infiltrating Our Schools. Clare Lopez

https://jamieglazov.com/2021/03/30/clare-lopez-video-the-marxist-agenda-infiltrating-our-schools/

This new webinar features Clare Lopez, is the Founder/President of Lopez Liberty LLC, with a mission to alert and educate Americans on a range of national security threats, international as well as from the Islamic Movement/Muslim Brotherhood and collaborators among the ranks of Marxists/communists in this country.

Clare discusses The Marxist Agenda Infiltrating Our Schools, revealing how parents across America, some for the first time, are realizing what their children have been learning in school — and they’re horrified.

Don’t miss it!

Foster Parents Forced to Break Up Family after Non-Profit Takes Home to Accommodate Migrant Children By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/non-profit-orders-foster-parents-to-vacate-home-to-accommodate-migrant-children/

A foster family in Washington state was told to vacate their home by the non-profit organization that provided it, in order to make space for housing unaccompanied migrant children.

Friends of Youth, a non-profit that provides services to homeless and foster children, told Edmundo Serena Sanchez and his wife Paual to vacate their home in Renton, Wash., in a story first reported by King 5, a Seattle-area NBC affiliate. In an interview with National Review, Serena Sanchez said the couple was forced to send three of their foster children to other families because they were not able to find a suitable home by the time of their eviction.

A fourth teenager under their care ran away upon learning of the move, and has not returned as of Wednesday.

Edmundo, a driver for Uber and Lyft, and Paual are licensed therapeutic foster parents, who are trained to raise children with serious behavioral problems. They’ve raised more than 20 foster children in the home over the seven years they’ve lived there.Serena Sanchez said that Friends of Youth, which currently serves over 3,000 children in the Seattle area, sent him a notice on January 29 that his foster home contract “will be terminated,” and that the house would be used “to provide a different scope of services in support of unaccompanied youth.”

“Unaccompanied youth” is the federal term for unaccompanied migrant children, and the Biden administration is currently struggling with a major influx of migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Dawn of a New Age of Tyranny Is Upon Us Michael Walsh

http://www.theepochtimes.com/the-dawn-of-a-new-age-of-tyranny-is-upon-us_3755195.html

If you’re bewildered by the breakneck pace of “change” since the inauguration of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., on Jan. 20, you’re not alone.

Average Americans have been puzzled and, in many cases, chagrined by the flurry of executive orders, ukases, policy prescriptions, social proscriptions, vengeful rollbacks, and other government meddling in the lives of our citizens. Conservatives, meanwhile, understand that all this activity has one overarching purpose: to punish the bad Orange Man and the country that voted for him. And make sure he never happens again.

To that end, the string of top-down bossiness has been designed to look, and be, punitive. Every major Donald Trump initiative or accomplishment must be negated and anathematized. His supporters who unwisely marched on the Capitol on Jan. 6—what did they hope to accomplish?—shouldn’t just be deplored but hunted down by the FBI for “sedition”; there’s even a tip line for junior Stasis-in-training to rat out their friends and neighbors.

Woke hall monitors must screech like Donald Sutherland at the end of the 1978 version “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” whenever they see a constitutionally free and unmasked citizen daring to appear in public without a slave muzzle.

Meanwhile, “white supremacy” (which is just a leftist term for Western civilization) and rampant “bigotry” (disagreement over political processes and objectives) must be hunted down and eradicated, civil rights suspended, and core provisions of the Bill of Rights overthrown, including all or parts of the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and 10th amendments. It’s a mad scramble for a Year Zero to rival those of the French and Bolshevik revolutions—the dawn of a new age of tyranny masquerading as compassion.

Never Again

CDC Manipulated COVID Death Toll – Number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 radically inflated

https://nationalcenter.org/?utm_source=The%20National%20Center&utm_camp

A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States has a recorded death toll of over 525,000 people. National Center Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen, Ph.D. asks: “But is it accurate?”

The number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 may be radically inflated due to a change in policy by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that did not go through the proper channels and could be in violation of the law.

Bonner’s news analysis for The Heartland Institute’s Health Care News summarizes and explains the findings of a new peer-reviewed study of the CDC’s COVID-19 reporting procedures. These procedures “willfully violated several federal statutes, including the Data Quality Act, Paperwork Reduction Act and the Administrative Procedures Act,” Bonner writes.

According to Bonner’s analysis:

[T]he Centers for Disease Control and Prevention unilaterally altered the 17-year-old process by which it calculated disease-caused fatalities, creating a special procedure for tabulating COVID-19 deaths. This, the study says, enabled the CDC to produce inaccurate data which were widely disseminated by the media and served to justify a host of coercive measures to stem the spread of the disease.

China shows it too can play rough in the Middle East China is asserting its interests in Iran, Israel and elsewhere as the Biden administration bumbles in its first approaches to the region. David Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler-david-p-goldman/

American influence is fragile in several key Eurasian nodal points and China has the capacity to hurt the United States in retaliation for American efforts to build an alliance to contain it.

China’s rhetoric has been harsh in recent weeks and it appears ready to back up the rhetoric with tough actions.

On Saturday (March 28), China and Iran formally signed a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” agreement that promises to chart the two sides’ economic, political and trade relations over the next 25 years, Iranian state media reported.

“The document can elevate bilateral ties to a new strategic level,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said in a televised interview. The agreement, which had been in the works since 2016 and comes while both sides face US sanctions, will boost private sector ties including through China’s Belt and Road Initiative, he said.

When the proposed deal first was floated in August 2020, I wrote, “The prospect of a deal with Iran is a move on a global game board in response to American efforts to hinder China’s breakout as a technological superpower.”

A significant Sino-Iranian investment deal had long been rumored, and it is probably not a coincidence that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi arrived in Tehran to sign it a week after the acrimonious exchange at the Anchorage ministerial meeting between the US and China.

China has sent a clear signal to the Biden administration that its plans for reviving the Iran nuclear deal as well as its ability to put economic pressure on Iran depend on China’s cooperation.

Andy Ngo Unmasks the Real Threat to American Freedom David Lewis Schaefer

https://lawliberty.org/the-real-threat-to-americas-constitutional-institutions/

Unpunished violence in the streets does real harm to the rule of law, and yet the media looks away.

EXCERPTS:

More recently, a thoroughly anti-constitutional precedent was set by then-minority leader Chuck Schumer only last March, when he led a posse of about 75 members up the steps of the Supreme Court to warn recently appointed justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh that they had “released the whirlwind,” would “pay a price,” and would “not know what hit” them if they voted the “wrong” way on an abortion case. (Schumer’s act won a rare rebuke from the normally reserved Chief Justice Roberts, who denounced Schumer’s comments as “inappropriate” and “dangerous,” stressing, that “all members of the court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.” In a proto-Trumpian response, Schumer spokesman Justin Goodman explained that his boss’s words didn’t mean what they sounded like, and denied that. Schumer was threatening or encouraging violence.)

A decade ago, an even more direct and threatening, though ultimately (mostly) nonviolent, challenge to constitutional government was offered by Wisconsin public employee unions who invaded that state’s Capitol to protest and attempt to block Governor Scott Walker’s program of reforming public-employee contracts so as to balance the state budget without raising taxes, and also liberate public school administrations from rigid tenure rules (closely paralleled in school districts throughout the country) that prevented them from hiring teachers based on merit and adjusting their pay based on performance. Walker’s reforms even went so far as to require public employees to contribute to their health-insurance and pension costs—while still paying less for those benefits than the average Wisconsin citizen. (See Walker’s retrospective view of the “Capitol Siege,” with over 100,000 occupying the building and its surrounding square). Although nobody died in the Wisconsin protests, several legislators, both Republicans and Democrats, reported receiving death threats at the time. And one woman who emailed death threats to Republican lawmakers also pleaded guilty to making a bomb threat. Yet it would be difficult to find criticism of either Schumer’s warnings or the Wisconsin unions’ attempt to intimidate their state’s public institutions in most of the “mainstream” media.

If the woke have their way, soon we won’t have ANY culture to speak of By Bruce Bawer

https://nypost.com/2021/03/30/if-the-woke-have-their-way-soon-we-wont-have-any-culture-to-speak-of/

Now they’ve come for sheet music — “they” being the woke lunatics, and sheet music being just that, musical notation, now deemed a horrible racist transgression at Oxford University (of all places).

This weekend, The Daily Mail reported that Oxford University was considering “scrapping sheet music” because it’s “too colonial” — guilty of “complicity in white supremacy.”

Sheet music? Do they seriously mean they want to get rid of musical notation itself? Notes drawn on a five-line staff to indicate pitch and duration?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called music the universal language. Music alone, shorn of words, conveys something that can’t be paraphrased — and that is thus, by definition, incapable of political interpretation.

So how, one wonders, can it be complicit in white supremacy?

If we’re going to dispose of musical notation, then certainly we should also ban written language itself. Because if musical notation records sounds with no meaning beyond themselves, written language can be used to convey dangerous political ideas.

It only makes sense. 

Why Big Tech Censored Our Podcast Touching on 2020 Election Irregularities Ben Weingarten

https://www.newsweek.com/why-big-tech-censored-our-podcast-touching-2020-election-irregularities-opinion-1579647

Amid congressional Democrats’ push—via the dishonestly named “For the People Act”—to make universal and permanent the extraordinary election integrity-threatening measures of the 2020 election, while hypocritically unseating Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-2) after her duly certified November victory, their Big Tech adjuncts continue censoring speech that runs afoul of that election’s Official Narrative.

My colleagues at the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind publication found this out when they tried to publish a podcast on YouTube that my company helped script and produce—only for the Google-owned video platform to remove it outright.

Ironically, or perhaps not, the mini-audio documentary, titled “The Ruling Class Strikes Back,” chronicled the myriad ways in which our political establishment—and its sundry allies in Big Tech, woke capital, the corporate media and across the other commanding heights of society—worked relentlessly during the 2020 election to marginalize, silence and rout dissenters from their progressive orthodoxy.

Their tactics, of course, included suppressing news, information and opinion frowned upon by the Ruling Class.

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Such illiberal efforts are only accelerating and expanding in 2021—supercharged using the pretext of the Capitol Riot—manifesting in the Wokeification of the military, muzzling of contrarian media figures and the impending execution of a war on “domestic violent extremism” that could sweep up half the country.

What was so wrong about the American Mind podcast?

One portion of it scrutinized the dubious aspects of the 2020 election—that is, the podcast touched on what is now a quintessential third rail.

In a generic email to us, YouTube reminded that it is “a safe space for all.” By questioning aspects of the 2020 election, the podcast allegedly violated that space. Without pointing to precisely how it did so, the social media platform added: “Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election is not allowed on YouTube.”

Never mind that the podcast made no such claims.