FOREIGN POLICY, HISTORY Comments turned off

Nixon and Kissinger: Bringing China in from the Cold Daryl McCann

Posted By on September 24th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/09/nixon-and-kissinger-bringing-china-in-from-the-cold/

Henry Kissinger celebrated his hundredth birthday on May 27 this year. Xie Feng, China’s new ambassador to the United States, helped the former Secretary of State—described by Xie as an “old friend” of China—to mark the big day by personally congratulating Kissinger at his home in Connecticut. A few weeks later it was the centenarian Kissinger calling on the Chinese—with Chairman Xi no less—at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, the very place he had met Premier Zhou Enlai in 1971 to jumpstart the normalisation of relations between the US and China. The symbolism of 2023 was not lost on Beijing’s top officials, who emphasised the need for “peaceful co-existence” between the two superpowers. Kissinger, who claims to have made 101 trips to China since 1969, worries that all the good work he and Richard Nixon did back in 1971-72 to lay the foundations for an effective long-term relationship between Washington and Beijing is being undone, and that we are headed for a Sino-US war. A naysayer might counter that the work he and Nixon did is why we might be heading for war.

President Nixon’s state visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), from February 22 to 28, 1972, really was “the week that changed the world”—as Nixon proclaimed after numerous Mao-tai toasts on the final night of his stay. Kissinger, with his formidable intellect, played a crucial role in delivering Nixon’s pro-Beijing gambit. Twice he went behind the Bamboo Curtain to prepare the way for the historic assignation between his boss and Mao Zedong. Nevertheless, it is commonly accepted, even by Kissinger, that Nixon was first to articulate the advantages of conciliation with Communist China. From a pragmatic point of view, always an important aspect of Nixon’s political thinking, there were a multitude of reasons why such conciliation might be timely, many of them concerning the Vietnam War. When running for office in 1968, Nixon promised the American people he would seek “an honourable peace” in Vietnam. Not that he was alone in this. By the end of his time in office, even President Johnson was positioning himself as a prospective peacemaker, if only to help Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, in the 1968 election. In fact, John A. Farrell, in his well-documented and mostly non-jaundiced biography, Richard Nixon: The Life (2017), provides convincing evidence that Nixon “threw a monkey wrench” into Johnson’s attempt to spur negotiations with Hanoi in October 1968. Nixon, allegedly, convinced South Vietnam’s President Thieu to delay peace talks until after the election. Farrell comments: “Given the lives and human suffering at stake, and the internal discord that was ripping the United States apart, it is hard not to conclude that, of all Richard Nixon’s actions in a lifetime of politics, this was the most reprehensible.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Age and the Passing of the Torch: Sydney Williams

Posted By on September 24th, 2023

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

For Queen Elizabeth, 1992 was her annus horribilis. I had my own – far less significant – diem horribilis last Sunday. Unlike Elizabeth’s year, some of what happened to me was, surely, age related. I had tested positive for Covid that morning. Then, feeling groggy and with slurred speech, I fell twice. Apart from a bumped head, bruised hip and ego, no damage was done. Nevertheless after the second fall, we called health services. Shortly thereafter I was taken by ambulance to a clinic and later to Middlesex Hospital. Tests showed no signs of a stroke or brain injury, and on Tuesday I came home, with a cane but that was because of the bruised hip.

The effects of age are not necessarily chronological, and they differ greatly from one individual to another. My father died at 58, while his father died one day shy of 90 and his mother at 92. While they became physically frail, both had their wits until they died. Cancer, heart disease, and senility are more common as one ages. Muscles lose tone and bones become brittle. But there are those like Henry Kissinger who are physically able and mentally alert at 100. Many people don’t let age stop them.  The Wall Street Journal, last June 25th, published an article, “Why High-Powered People are Working in Their 80s.” In it they quoted data from the Census Bureau that roughly 650,000 Americans over 80 were working last year. My younger brother who turns 81 in October continues to work as a partner in an investment firm. My father-in-law went to work most every day as an admiralty lawyer, until he died at 77. Old age, mental acuity, and employment are not incompatible. For some, but not for all.

While Republicans have been vocal about the President’s physical and mental failings – based on visible evidence of dementia – the question of age has now been raised by Independents and Democrats. An August CNN poll conducted by SSRS found that “roughly three-quarters of Americans say they’re seriously concerned that Biden’s age might negatively affect his current level of physical and mental competence…” On the other hand, Alex Keyssar of the Harvard Kennedy School takes a more nuanced view. According to the July 17, 2023 issue of the Harvard Gazette, he “believes Democrats who cite age as a major election concern are probably really expressing ‘a desire for energetic leadership, a force for new ideas, new spirit, and new energy.’” Perhaps. But it seems more likely that the Democrat leadership is concerned that fibs, gaffes, and stumbles now define Mr. Biden – not good for his re-election chances, especially when his Vice President’s approval numbers are lower than his.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why Did Taxpayers Fund Antisemitic Hatefest at Penn? Where is the demand that the taxpayer funds be returned and an investigation launched into how a Pennsylvania agency was deceived? Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Posted By on September 24th, 2023

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/363150/why-did-taxpayers-fund-antisemitic-hatefest-at-penn/

Despite a sea of protests, the “Palestine Writes” festival at the University of Pennsylvania, which features a parade of convicted Palestinian terrorists, terrorism apologists and antisemites such as Roger Waters, whose concerts feature inflatable pigs marked with a Star of David and Waters dressed as a Nazi, will proceed as planned. 

That has been widely covered. What has received little attention, however, is that the anti-Jewish hatefest is funded in part by Pennsylvania taxpayers through a grant issued by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In other words, Pennsylvania taxpayers are helping fund this river of hate. 

After public opposition rose about the event, the Council claimed its support was merely for an “anthology” of Palestinian writers. Now, backed by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, the Council has demanded that its insignia be removed from the festival’s website and promotional materials. 

Removing a state logo, however, is hardly enough while the money remains in the pockets of the celebrators of Jew hatred and government defrauders. Where is the demand that the taxpayer funds be returned and an investigation launched into how a Pennsylvania agency was deceived? 

Just to recap the reason for all this, here’s a list of some of the speakers at this hatefest disguised as literary festival: 

Mays a/k/a Mayss Abu Ghosh, a convicted terrorist, works with the terrorist groups Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and explicitly supports violence as the “only road to Palestine.” 

BOOKS Comments turned off

Corbin K. Barthold Chronicler of the Realm With his History of England, Peter Ackroyd has produced the work of a lifetime.

Posted By on September 24th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/chronicler-of-the-realm

The English rarely maintain intensity in political matters,” writes Peter Ackroyd in the sixth and final volume of his History of England. “Sooner or later, their instinct is to wipe the sweat from the demagogue’s collar and propose a soothing cup of tea.” The English “still live deep in the past,” and “[c]ontinuity, rather than change, is the measure of the country.” Yet a country’s history is a tale that its people tell themselves. “Everything grows out of the soil of contingent circumstance,” and “the writing of history is often another way of defining chaos,” Ackroyd observes. We choose what goes on the list.

How we choose is an increasingly contested issue. Almost 70 years ago, Clement Attlee mockingly proposed that Winston Churchill rename his History of the English-Speaking Peoples “Things in History That Interested Me.” Today, grand-sweep narrative history is even more out of style. But if anyone is still allowed to chronicle a nation, that chronicler is Ackroyd, and the nation his native England. He has produced acclaimed works on Chaucer and Shakespeare, Newton and More, Blake and Dickens. He has written books about English ghosts, English rivers, English imagination, and, naturally, London, the great English city. The History of England, whose entries appeared between 2011 and 2021, is the work of a lifetime.

The basic outline of English history is quickly told. Hunter-gatherers and tribal peoples occupied what is now the island of Great Britain for hundreds of thousands of years. Little is known about them. They are “races without a history,” Ackroyd says; before the coming of the Romans, “all lies in mist and twilight.” Not for nothing did Churchill begin his history with his famous line about the proconsul of Gaul, Gaius Julius Caesar, turning his gaze upon Britain. Yet we know surprisingly little about the Roman period, either. “The Roman governance of England lasted for 350 years,” Ackroyd reflects, “and yet it is the least-known phase in the country’s history.” The only famous figure of the era was not Roman. Boudica, queen of the Iceni, burned Londinium to the ground in A.D. 61. A layer of oxidized iron—the residue of Boudica’s rage—can still be found under the city’s streets.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Youngkin and the Reconciliation Monument By Carole Hornsby Haynes

Posted By on September 24th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/youngkin_and_the_reconciliation_monument.html

Though he never claimed to be a populist, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has ridden the wave of public anger against hostile school boards pushing radical race and gender ideologies.  As I noted in a previous commentary, Youngkin’s selection of leftist advisers and personnel for his gubernatorial team sent up warning signs of danger ahead for Virginians.  Now his actions concerning the removal of the 109-year-old Reconciliation Monument in Arlington National Cemetery confirm that Youngkin is no conservative.

The now disbanded Congressional Naming Commission targeted for removal the Reconciliation Monument that was conceived and built with the sole purpose of healing the wounds of the Civil War and restoring national harmony.  Moses Ezekiel, a world-renowned American sculptor and first Jewish cadet at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), was chosen to create the memorial to mark Section 16, the burial plot for the reinterred graves championed by President William McKinley, and to commemorate the reunification of North and South.  The memorial became the grave marker for Ezekiel, who is buried at its foot.  Some historians question whether the removal of the monument is the first step in a larger, more sinister plan that begins with the removal of the centerpiece of the Confederate Circle with eventual mass exhumation.

Numerous articles by historians Scott S. Powell and Ann H. McLean, as well as former senator Jim Webb’s recent WSJ piece, illuminate the importance of this memorial in healing North and South divisions. On a basic level, the indecency of removing a headstone in our foremost cemetery calls to mind the Nazi’s destruction of Jewish graves in Czechoslovakia in World War II and gives one pause about Youngkin’s fitness for high office. What American leader ignores previous presidential customs in honoring crucial healing of the nation, allowing Marxist revisionism to prevail?

A Freedom of Information Act document reveals that Youngkin pre-negotiated with Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin to move the monument to state property in Virginia. 

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

GOP Rep: Chinese Spy Operations Against U.S. Soar Under Biden By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on September 24th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/22/gop-rep-chinese-spy-operations-against-u-s-soar-under-biden/

A Republican congressman and committee chairman has said that Chinese spying operations on U.S. soil have increased dramatically since Joe Biden took office.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.), Chairman of the House Select Committee on China, said that such operations include a rise in espionage and surveillance operations focusing on American military bases.

“It is worrying that the Biden administration continues to be unable to protect the United States from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) espionage,” said Gallagher in an interview. “The CCP flew a spy balloon across the U.S., hacked senior U.S. cabinet officials, and sent spies to our most sensitive military sites, yet the Biden administration remains committed to failed diplomatic and economic engagement.”

Gallagher also expressed his concerns in a letter sent to the FBI and the Pentagon earlier this week, saying that “there is a growing trend of persons working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party to obtain sensitive information about America’s military, economic, and technological secrets.”

The most infamous example was in January, when a Chinese spy balloon floated across the entirety of the continental United States; the Biden Administration repeatedly refused to shoot it down, even as American citizens could plainly see the balloon from the ground. It was finally taken down once it reached the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of South Carolina. The balloon’s movements were meant to deliberately take it right over several military bases for intelligence-gathering purposes.

Other incidents in recent years have included efforts by Chinese businessmen and corporations to buy large plots of land in the United States, often located near military bases and other strategic assets. This trend has led to several states passing laws cracking down on the practice, forbidding the purchase of such land by China and other foreign entities.

MEDIA Comments turned off

ProPublica Buries Its Clarence Thomas News The outlet’s latest hit piece unwittingly debunks its own political narrative about the Supreme Court justice.Ira Stoll

Posted By on September 24th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/propublica-buries-its-clarence-thomas-news-media-bias-political-ethics-de06903d?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Justice Clarence Thomas has been attending private events with fierce critics of Donald Trump. That’s the only real news in the latest hit piece from ProPublica, which describes itself “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.” But you have to read between the lines to find it.

The outlet obtained a photograph of Justice Thomas with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. It said Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, was at an event Justice Thomas attended. It presents photographic evidence of that too, though it doesn’t note Mr. Bloomberg’s presence in the caption. And it said Justice Thomas had attended a 2018 event of Stand Together, a network founded by libertarian businessman Charles Koch.

What ProPublica doesn’t say in its 4,500-word piece is that Mr. Burns has described Mr. Trump as “Hitleresque” and “the greatest threat to American democracy since the Second World War.” It doesn’t say that Mr. Bloomberg has called Mr. Trump a “carnival barking clown” and sought the nomination to challenge him in 2020. It doesn’t say that the Koch network is reportedly spending tens of millions to defeat Mr. Trump in 2024.

Why leave all that out? Because ProPublica wants you to think Justice Thomas is in the tank for Mr. Trump. In April it complained: “Thomas’ approach to ethics has already attracted public attention. Last year, Thomas didn’t recuse himself from cases that touched on the involvement of his wife, Ginni, in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”

The site misleads its readers by omitting the anti-Trump material from its latest attack on Justice Thomas. Mr. Burns is identified as someone “whose films Koch has financially supported.” The Koch network is described as having “spent over $65 million supporting Republican candidates in the last election cycle.” The piece omits Mr. Bloomberg’s liberal views on the environment but mentions that at California’s Bohemian Grove with him and Justice Thomas was the author Bjorn Lomborg, who “has for years argued the threat of global warming is overstated.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

KIPP Gets Children Into College More evidence that charter schools lift student performance.

Posted By on September 24th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kipp-study-college-graduation-enrollment-mathematica-charter-schools-5f22e610?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

From pandemic learning loss to racial achievement gaps, many U.S. education ailments can be addressed by schools outside the traditional, union-dominated system. More evidence comes from a new report showing that the largest charter school network in the country helps students get into college, and then to get a degree.

Students who attended schools in the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) for both middle and high school were 18.9 percentage points more likely to graduate from a four-year college five years after finishing high school than students who didn’t attend KIPP, according to a Mathematica study published last week.

“An effect of this size, extrapolated nationwide, would be large enough to nearly close the degree-completion gap for Hispanic students or entirely close the degree-completion gap for Black students in the United States,” the authors write.

The study compared students who enrolled in more than a dozen KIPP schools in 2008, 2009 and 2011 with similar students who had applied for the charter schools but weren’t selected in KIPP’s lottery admission system.

KIPP students were also more likely to enroll in college—and stick with it—than non-KIPP peers. Seventy-seven percent of KIPP students enrolled in a four-year college compared to 46% of non-KIPP students. Forty-one percent of KIPP students stayed in college through the first six semesters compared to 22% of non-KIPP students.

“These findings may be driven by the college preparatory culture at network high schools,” the report notes. “KIPP provides access to rigorous, college preparatory coursework (including Advanced Placement courses), as well as counseling and other college and career-related supports.”

KIPP students also tend to do better on standardized tests. The nearly 30-year-old network enrolls roughly 120,000 students across 280 schools, and most are low-income and black or Hispanic. The best way to help disadvantaged kids is by giving them the choice of schools that provide a quality education and practical guidance for college and career.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Thanks to the Policies of the Obama and Biden Administrations, the New Axis of Evil – Russia, China, North Korea, Iran – Posing a Worldwide Existential Threat by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on September 24th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19982/axis-of-evil-russia-china-north-korea-iran

The Biden administration… is also financing the ruling mullahs of Iran with billions of dollars to put the finishing touches on the country’s nuclear program and for delivering more weapons to Russia with which to attack Ukraine.

“We’re sitting still, and the Chinese, the Russians, Iran, North Korea, and several others, are moving to shore up their relations and threaten us in a lot of different places.” — Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton, The Hill, March 12, 2023.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the Biden administration seems to be allowing Iran’s ruling mullahs to prosper from the war and emerge as the winners.

“I have a question for you – how does Russia pay Iran for this, in your opinion? Is Iran just interested in money? Probably not money at all, but Russian assistance to the Iranian nuclear program. Probably, this is exactly the meaning of their alliance” — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Jerusalem Post, November 4, 2022.

“Today, China, Russia, North Korea and Iran continue to invest in technologies to expand their capabilities to hit the United States with nuclear weapons. All four countries have also escalated their threatening rhetoric, indicating their willingness to use nuclear weapons in a military conflict. By expanding their nuclear programs, each has made clear that our nuclear arsenal is no longer a deterrent to their potential use of nuclear weapons.” — U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, Fox News, May 4, 2023.

Thanks to the Obama and Biden administrations’ monumental capitulations to Iran’s regime — and the refusal of both administrations not only to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program but also to prevent anyone else from stopping it — the Russian-Iranian-Chinese-North Korean alliance now poses a global existential threat.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Accepts RealClear’s Samizdat Prize: Government Should Not Censor And Smear Scientists Tim Hains

Posted By on September 24th, 2023

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/09/22/dr_jay_bhattacharya_accepts_rcps_samizdat_prize_government_should_not_censor_and_smear_scientists.html

Real Clear Foundation president David DesRosiers explains: “What does Samizdat mean? It translates as ‘self-published’ in Russian. Samizdat was the underground literary network in the Soviet Union that distributed Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Are we suggesting the American mind and society are closing and becoming more Orwellian and Soviet? Yes, we are. This is why we inaugurated the Samizdat prize, to celebrate those great few who stand for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of science, even at great personal cost.”

Read Dr. Bhattacharya’s remarks:

DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA, HEALTH POLICY PROFESSOR AT STANDFORD UNIVERSITY: I’m overwhelmed, you guys, thank you… In 1970, I looked this up before I got here, the New York Times Albert Parry published an article about the Soviet dissident intellectuals who would covertly pass around ideas to each other in the form of handcrafted, typed written documents called Samizdat. There are people in this room, scientists in this room, that I passed Samizdat to. David mentioned one, Scott Atlas. From the earliest days of the pandemic, we would pass papers to each other. My colleague Yaron Ben David, we’d secretly talk to each other in whispers in the corridors of Stanford…

We would tell each other, “Here’s what the data are showing,” “Why aren’t people seeing this?” And if you tried to share it, God forbid that happened.

Let me read to you from this New York Times piece:

“Censorship existed even before literature, says the Russians. And, we may add, censorship being older, literature has to be craftier. Hence, the new and remarkably viable underground press in the Soviet Union called samizdat.

Samizdat – translates as: “We publish ourselves” – that is, not the state, but we, the people.