PREDICTING US/CHINA BACKING AWAY FROM WAR DAVID GOLDMAN

Washington and Beijing appear to have stepped back from the brink of tech war, and a breakthrough in US-China relations now seems possible after four years of trade and military tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

Chinese official sources told journalists Tuesday that Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Xi Jinping’s foreign policy advisor Yang Jiechi might meet with their American counterparts in Anchorage, Alaska, to reopen high-level communications with the United States.

The proposed Anchorage meeting was first reported by the South China Morning Post. There was no formal confirmation, but neither was the report denied. Global Times editor Hu Xijin tweeted that he hoped the news was true.

The report of a prospective reset of Sino-American relations follows a week of worry over a possible tech war between the United States and China, after Microsoft accused Chinese hackers with ties to the government of infiltrating tens of thousands of US email servers.

The hacker group dubbed “Hafnium” by Microsoft is “assessed to be state-sponsored and operating out of China, based on observed victimology, tactics and procedures,” the software giant wrote in a blog post. The US National Security Council formed a task force under Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger to counter the threat.

Ruthie Blum:Israeli voters are weary, not stupid

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/israel-elections-voters-are-weary-not-stupid-opinion-661754

Stories of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intention to fly on Thursday to the United Arab Emirates for a meeting with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ) spurred the press to highlight the event’s proximity to the March 23 Knesset elections. The predictable swipe went beyond mere innuendo, however.

Barak Ravid of Beltway-area website Axios supposedly reported, yet in reality opined, that Netanyahu meant to use the occasion – that would be the first-ever official trip by an Israeli prime minister to the UAE and Netanyahu’s first since the signing of the Abraham Accords in September – “to rally his base and stress his foreign-policy advantage over his less experienced rivals.”

Aside from attributing a cynical motive to the move (which was delayed at the last minute, due to his wife’s hospitalization with appendicitis and Jordan’s blocking of his flight from entering its airspace), Ravid went on to explain that “Netanyahu is in need of a boost [as] his right-wing bloc is short of the 61 seats needed for a majority in the latest polls.”

Ravid further claimed that for 10 days, Netanyahu basically begged the hesitant Emiratis to receive him on their soil, and even had Mossad chief Yossi Cohen do his bidding. According to Ravid, they weren’t keen on being perceived as having “interfered” in the Israeli election. In other words, the UAE sheikhs wouldn’t want to give Netanyahu’s campaign some kind of unfair edge.

Fauci blames ‘mixed messages’ for Covid death toll: see note pleas

https://www.aol.com/news/fauci-death-toll-pandemic-anniversary-132621394.html

All the mixed messages, conflicting statistics and predictions and suggestions came from Dr. Fauxi himself….rsk

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday that had he known a year ago what the death toll from Covid-19 would be, “it would have shocked me completely,” and blamed the politicization of safety measures and “mixed messages” out of Washington for the high number of fatalities.

In an interview on NBC’s “TODAY” show on the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus outbreak being declared a global pandemic, host Savannah Guthrie noted that Fauci said exactly one year ago that 27 people in the U.S. had died from Covid-19 and asked what he would have thought then of today’s death toll of more than 531,000.

“I have to tell you quite honestly, Savannah, it would have shocked me completely,” said Fauci, who recounted that he warned at a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing that day that things would get much worse before they get better.

“It was March 11, 2020, that I said that, but I did not in my mind think that ‘much worse’ was going to be 525,000 deaths,” he said.

Asked what went wrong, Fauci pointed to the “divisiveness in our country.”

John McWhorter: You are Probably Not a Racist

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-the-threat-to-a-progressive-755

THE ELECT: THE THREAT TO A PROGRESSIVE AMERICA FROM ANTI-BLACK ANTIRACISTS
Serial excerpt No. 4: They will object that they are “dismantling structures” – while enjoying making people cry and dismantling nothing.

DISMANTLING HEGEMONIC STRUCTURES?

To tar The Elect as crazy is lazy. Dumb, even. It recalls Hungarian physician Max Nordau who deemed Wagner, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Schopenhauer as degenerates seized by hysteria and self-involvement. While Die Walküre and War and Peace are hardly grape soda, none of us would join Nordau today. He wasn’t up to the challenge of his times.

I want us to be. But this will require understanding The Elect in an initially counterintuitive way, just as getting Schopenhauer meant letting go of the easier pleasures of Ruskin. The “advanced” way of getting the Elect is to understand that they are a religion. To see them this way is not to wallow in derision, but to genuinely grasp what they are.

One thing that will discourage a general perception of them in this way is that they themselves will resist the charge so heartily. This is understandable. For one, it will feel unwelcome to them because they do not bill themselves as such, and often associate devout religiosity with backwardness. Then, it also implies that they are not thinking for themselves. However understandable their objections, though, we must not let them distract us, as we roll up our sleeves and fashion a way of living among people devoted permanently to this new, yes, religion.

For one, The Elect will insist that what they are doing is not founding a replacement for Protestantism, but acting upon what I have seen phrased as “an enduring white responsibility for deconstructing our own privilege and the systemic pervasiveness of white supremacy.”

Maybe a Biden hologram can handle his public speeches By Sharyl Attkisson

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/542300-maybe-a-biden-hologram-can-handle-his-public-speeches

Joe Biden isn’t a hologram. But the relative absence from the public stage of a newly elected U.S. president and leader of the free world is sparking no small amount of speculation and chatter about the brave new world of possibilities offered by technological advancements and the unprecedented control over information on the internet.

So far, under Biden, there have been none of the extended press availabilities to which we got accustomed under President Trump. No impromptu sessions with the media where he fields questions and attacks, dealing with dozens of wide-ranging topics. President Biden even skipped the traditional live, in-person February address to Congress. We’ve only seen him primarily in the form of various “proof of life”-like video clips distributed on the internet, where he reads scripted remarks from a teleprompter. 

Even some officials who work in the Biden administration told me they can’t help but wonder why. And it has them mulling over farfetched speculation that, upon further examination, starts to look almost like it is not completely outside the realm of the possible.

In June 2019 I published a story on “deep fake” technology. It explored how artificial intelligence (AI) computer technology has put special effects, once reserved as expensive and time-consuming accomplishments of Hollywood films, in the hands of most anybody with a computer and the desire to use it.

Predictable Train Wrecks on Crime and Immigration Charles Lipson

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/11/predictable_train_wrecks_on_crime_and_immigration__145383.html

If you think really hard, perhaps you can imagine more disastrous policies than throwing open our country’s southern border and abandoning criminal-law enforcement in city after city. The consequences are already emerging, and they are grim. It is important to examine them without ideological blinders so we can change course before more damage is done.

Our border policies are national fiats handed down by the Biden administration. The abandonment of criminal enforcement, by contrast, is a local decision, made by supine city councils and district attorneys, many of them “social justice Democrats” backed by progressive elites and Black Lives Matter.

The problem with these policies is not their moral motivation. Helping the poor from Central America is a worthy cause. So is reducing the incarceration rate of young males from minority communities. The problem lies in their practical effects. It is those effects, not sugarplum dreams, that matter in judging public policy.

The most consequential effect of open immigration and lax criminal enforcement is to undermine the safe, stable environment law-abiding citizens need to go about their lives, free from predation. Providing that environment — and signaling clearly that you intend to provide it — is the first responsibility of government.

That means punishing crimes. The goal is not vengeance. Nor is it solely to provide justice for the victims, important as that is. It is also to send a strong message to would-be criminals: Don’t do it. It’s not worth it. Right now, we are sending the wrong message and, by doing so, we are encouraging law breaking on a massive scale.

Covid Prescription: Get the Vaccine, Wait a Month, Return to Normal The CDC claims to be ‘following the science,’ but its advice suggests it’s still paralyzed by fear. By Marty Makary M.D.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-prescription-get-the-vaccine-wait-a-month-return-to-normal-11615401516?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is chief medical advisor to Sesame Care and author of “The Price We Pay.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has lost a lot of credibility during the Covid-19 pandemic by being late or wrong on testing, masks, vaccine allocation and school reopening. Staying consistent with that pattern, this week—three months after the vaccine rollout began—the CDC finally started telling vaccinated people that they can have normal interactions with other vaccinated people—but only in highly limited circumstances. Given the impressive effectiveness of the vaccine, that should have been immediately obvious by applying scientific inference and common sense.

Parts of the new guidelines are absurdly restrictive. For example, the CDC didn’t withdraw its advice to avoid air travel after vaccination. A year of prevaccine experience has demonstrated that airplanes aren’t a source of spread. A study conducted for the defense department found that commercial planes have HEPA filtration and airflow that exceed the standards of a hospital operating room.

The guidelines do approve of vaccinated people meeting with low-risk unvaccinated ones—but only with people from the same household and in a small private setting. So much for restaurants, birthday parties and weddings.

An unpublished study conducted by the Israeli Health Ministry and Pfizer showed that vaccination reduced transmission by 89% to 94% and almost totally prevented hospitalization and death, according to press reports. Immunity kicks in fully about four weeks after the first vaccine dose, and then you are essentially bulletproof. With the added safety of wearing a mask indoors for a few more weeks or months—a practical necessity in public places even if not a medical one, since you can’t tell on sight if someone’s immune—there is little a vaccinated person should be discouraged from doing.

Against Court and Constitution: A Never-Before-Translated Speech by David Ben-Gurion Israel famously has no constitution. It turns out that’s no accident but rather the will of its first prime minister, who explains his thinking here.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2021/03/against-court-and-constitution-a-never-before-translated-speech-by-david-ben-gurion

“Idon’t think it’s possible to delegate authority to the court to decide whether the laws are kosher or not.” These incendiary words were not uttered by a contemporary right-wing critic of the power of the Israeli Supreme Court. They were made, rather, by Israel’s founding father, first prime minister, final editor and ultimate author of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, and promoter of liberty and rights for all: David Ben-Gurion. And he spoke them not in off-the-cuff remarks to a journalist but in a prepared speech to the committee charged with drafting a constitution in Israel’s first Knesset.

Delivered on the morning of July 13, 1949, Ben-Gurion’s address to the members of the Knesset’s committee on “Constitution, Law, and Justice” expresses his forthright opposition to “judicial review”—a possibility still rather abstract in the Israel of 1949. Ben-Gurion’s opposition was vociferous and fierce, and he uses the occasion to present a resounding case for the supremacy of the parliamentary process as well as popular authority, and utter rejection of the possibility of investing judges with the power to throw out laws duly passed by the Knesset.

As followers of its politics perhaps know, Israel today is embroiled in a bitter battle over the proper role of judges and the Supreme Court within the political system. Since the 1990s, the Supreme Court has arrogated to itself broad prerogatives to strike down laws. The Israeli right has in response become fiercely critical of the court, and seeks to rein it in both through changing its composition and through passing legislation—such as the controversial nation-state law—that would constrain it. The court has responded with an attempt to expand its remit even further, while many on the left insist that curtailing the prerogatives of the judiciary will undermine democracy itself.

Turkey: Erdoğan’s War on Peace by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17149/erdogan-war-kurds

The margin of victory [by the opposition candidate Ekrem İmamoglu in the 2019 Istanbul mayoral election] shocked Erdoğan and his party establishment. That night marked an unforgettable defeat for the invincible Erdoğan. It also marked a new, advanced phase in Islamists’ war on Kurds.

Erdoğan advocates more subtle ways to intimidate opposition. He has been jailing HDP’s democratically elected leaders, MPs and mayors, and appointing trustees in their place.

Erdoğan does not have to shut down the HDP when he has de facto crippled it. The party’s two co-chairmen, Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, have been in jail since 2016.

In February, the crackdown took a new ugly turn. Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, a former Islamist, human rights activist and HDP MP, retweeted a post in 2016, advocating peace in the Kurdish dispute. A Turkish court sentenced him to 2½ years in jail for the retweet — although, ironically, the original tweet source had not been indicted. In February the Supreme Court of Appeals upheld Gergerlioglu’s sentence for “spreading terrorist propaganda” — five years after the retweet.

Erdogan’s Kurdish problem, however, has the potential to cost him more than just Istanbul. Research found that the fertility rate in the Kurdish-speaking, eastern part of Turkey was 3.41, as opposed to an average of 2.09 in the Turkish-speaking, non-eastern areas. Kurdish votes in the presidential election year 2023 may reach seven million: Kurds could be the kingmakers.

The race for the Istanbul election on March 31, 2019 went full steam ahead. Islamist parties had controlled Turkey’s biggest city since 1994 – a full 25 years. Istanbul was not just another city to win for any party. Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had put it: “Who wins Istanbul, wins Turkey.”

In the run-up to the 2019 election, Erdoğan realized that his Justice and Development Party (AKP) might lose if Istanbul’s two million or so Kurds voted for the opposition candidate, Ekrem İmamoglu. What to do? State broadcaster TRT read a statement from Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a terrorist organization. Öcalan’s letter called on Kurds to remain neutral between the government and opposition candidates. That would result in de facto support for the AKP candidate, former Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım.

The vote count on March 31, however, proved to be a political fiasco. İmamoglu had won by a narrow margin of 13,000 votes (in a city of 18 million) but the AKP-controlled Supreme Election Board ruled for a rerun on June 23. This time İmamoglu won by a margin of 800,000 votes. The margin of victory shocked Erdoğan and his party establishment. That night marked an unforgettable defeat for the invincible Erdoğan. It also marked a new, advanced phase in Islamists’ war on Kurds. Apparently the Kurds, ignoring Ocalan’s letter, voted for İmamoglu.

Erdoğan’s staunch ultranationalist ally, Devlet Bahçeli, has been persistently calling for a permanent ban by a Constitutional Court of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the third-largest party in the Turkish parliament. Erdoğan advocates more subtle ways to intimidate the opposition. He has been jailing HDP’s democratically elected leaders, MPs and mayors, and appointing trustees in their place.

Middle East: The Ghosts of Sovereigns Past by Naomi Linder Kahn

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17130/middle-east-sovereigns-past

The State of Israel continues to enforce Jordanian law [in the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria] — despite its clearly racist and backward underpinnings.

No matter what side of the political divide you view it from, a legislative and legal time-warp has trapped the residents of these territories – Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians – in amber for more than five decades. The result: legal chaos, injustice and incessant conflict.

Ironically, Israel’s legal reticence continues to fuel the endless conflict over the land itself… that could be avoided by simply completing the process of land survey and registration initiated by the Ottoman Empire and continued by the British Mandatory and Jordanian governments in turn.

Surveying and registering land ownership was not perceived as an act of sovereignty when the British caretakers undertook it; there seems no reason why it should be regarded that way now.

This same vacuum has made it impossible to formulate forward-thinking policy for land use, environmental protection, settlement policy, and perhaps most critically, a negotiated resolution of the status of the territory. Without establishing who owns what, it is impossible to proceed toward a just division of resources or a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

The time has come to banish the antiquated ghosts of Ottoman, Jordanian and British Mandatory rule, and to fill the legal void in Judea and Samaria with a modern, humanist, democratic system of law for everyone.

Now that the debate surrounding the extension of Israeli sovereignty to the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria has abated somewhat in light of the Abraham Accords, the time may be ripe to take a closer look at the legal status of these territories.

The picture that emerges might be surprising. More than a century after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the empire’s ghost continues to reign. More than 50 years after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, more than 30 years after King Hussein of Jordan publicly relinquished all legal and administrative ties to this territory, and more than 25 years after Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel, officially relinquishing all territorial claims, the State of Israel continues to enforce Jordanian law — despite its clearly racist and backward underpinnings.