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THE LAST KINGS OF SHANGHAI BY JONATHAN KAUFMAN

Posted By on July 18th, 2022

“In vivid detail… examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties.”–The Boston Globe

“Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China’s past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China’s modern history.”–LA Review of Books

An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country’s deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.

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Death for “Blasphemers” in Pakistan by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on July 18th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18716/death-blasphemers-pakistan

“Muhammad Irfan came to my shop for wheel balancing for his motorbike. I balanced the wheel and demanded my amount of labour as settled between us. Muhammad Irfan refused to give me money and said, ‘I am a follower of Peer Fakhir [a Muslim ascetic] and don’t ask for money from me.'” — Ashfaq Masih, Christian falsely accused of “blasphemy” and sentenced to death by hanging, chuchinchains.ie, July 7, 2022.

“They both made conspiracy against me and lodged a false FIR [First Incident Report] against me. I told the real story to a police officer but he did not record my version but conducted investigation ex-parte. I neither uttered any derogatory word against Prophet Muhammad nor can think about it.” — Ashfaq Masih, chuchinchains.ie, July 7, 2022.

The Muslim judge, Khalid Wazir, presiding over the case, went so far as to state that “it could not be believed that a Muslim will spin a story in this regard,” while simultaneously describing the evidence presented by Masih’s defense team as “not believable. ”

“I don’t remember any case where the lower court decided to grant bail or freed anyone accused of the blasphemy law. The judges are aware that such cases are made to punish and settle personal grudges with the opponents, especially against the Christians…. Masih’s case was very clear—the shop owner wanted him out and Naveed was a business rival who implicated him in a false blasphemy case. He is innocent and has already spent five years in prison for a crime he never committed.” — Nasir Saeed, Director of the Centre for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement, claas.org.uk, July 7, 2002.

Masih’s case is now at least the third death sentencing of its kind since the start of this year.

In February 2022, Zafar Bhatti, 58 — another Christian man who had been serving a life sentence under a false accusation of blaspheming Muhammad in a text — was given a death sentence.

In January 2022, Aneeqa Atteeq, a Muslim woman, was sentenced to death after a Pakistani court pronounced her guilty of insulting Muhammad in text messages she had sent to a man via WhatsApp. She had offered a more plausible if not prosaic explanation: the man who reported her was getting “revenge” on her because she had refused his advances.

Horrific as it is to be accused of blasphemy in a Pakistani courtroom, it is even far worse to fall into the hands of a Pakistani mob. A decade-old report found that in Pakistan, between just 1990 and 2012 alone, “fifty-two people have been extra-judicially murdered on charges of blasphemy.”

“Anyone Who Touches the Prophet, No Punishment—Just Kill!” — Yello Babo, Muslim cleric in Nigeria, Persecution.org, May 16, 2022.

On July 4, 2022, a Christian mechanic who had been imprisoned for the last five years, awaiting trial under a false accusation of “blasphemy” for allegedly insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad, was sentenced to death by hanging in a Pakistani court.

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Britain’s New PM Must Get Real on Iran by Con Coughlin

Posted By on July 18th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18707/britain-pm-iran

[U]nder [Boris Johnson’s] premiership, Britain backed attempts by other Western signatories to the deal — the US, France and Germany — to revive the JCPOA in the face of mounting evidence that Tehran has absolutely no interest in abiding by its commitments.

In the latest indication that Iran is in breach of its JCPOA commitments, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN-sponsored body responsible for monitoring Tehran’s nuclear activities, has reported that Iran has recently escalated its uranium enrichment activities at its underground Fordow facility.

Experts say this will enable Iran to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels without being detected by IAEA inspection teams.

Consequently, with Mr Johnson soon to depart from Downing Street, there is a golden opportunity for his successor to adopt a new, more robust policy towards Tehran, one that clearly identifies the ayatollahs as posing a clear and present danger to the security of Britain and its allies.

The scale of the Iranian threat is reflected in last week’s statement by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan that Iran had agreed to supply Russia with hundreds of drones to support its war effort in Ukraine.

The revelations concerning Iran’s deepening involvement in the Ukraine conflict should certainly concern the British government….

The recent upsurge in Iranian military activity, both in the Arabian Gulf and Ukraine, provides incontrovertible evidence that, far from trying to reach an agreement with the West, Iran appears determined to intensify hostilities.

Britain, together with other signatories to the JCPOA, must base its policy on the assumption that Iran is a hostile regime, not one that has any interest in reaching a peaceful accommodation with the West.

Boris Johnson’s dramatic removal from office gives Britain a superb opportunity to adopt a new policy towards Iran, one that takes proper account of the deadly threat the Iranian regime poses to Britain and its allies.

From his time as foreign secretary to his more recent tenure as prime minister, Mr Johnson’s attitude towards Iran and its illicit nuclear activities can most charitably be described as equivocal.

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For Democrats, Better To Import Rapists Than Be Called Racist An illegal immigrant raped the 10-year-old girl in Ohio who got an abortion. Build the wall. By Josiah Lippincott

Posted By on July 18th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/17/for-democrats-better-to-import-rapists-than-be-called-racist/

The story was a perfect liberal talking point. Just days after Roe v. Wade was overturned, news media breathlessly reported that a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio was forced to leave the state to seek an abortion.

It was catnip for MSNBC Boomers and liberal white women. The story spread like wildfire; Joe Biden referenced the case in public remarks, asking Americans to “imagine being that little girl.” I myself even overheard one large middle-aged woman loudly yelling about the case while on speakerphone here in rural Hillsdale, Michigan. 

But the actual initial reports about the case were so extreme and so devoid of details that many wondered if it had even happened. U.S. Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost were publicly skeptical. It fit the narrative too perfectly. The activists pumping the case up had plenty of reason to lie. It wasn’t as if journalists were going to start asking any skeptical questions.

As it turns out, the incident did happen, but it isn’t the narrative blockbuster abortion advocates wanted.

A case that was meant to show the evils of America’s white male patriarchy and its burgeoning post-Roe theocratic “Handmaid’s Tale”-style dictatorship ended up being a story about the insanity and brutality of America’s immigration policies. 

The 10-year-old’s rapist wasn’t—as liberals no doubt secretly hoped—a blond-haired, blue eyed, Trump-supporting redneck but a 27-year-old Guatemalan illegal alien by the name of Gerson Fuentes. The girl’s mother is also an immigrant, who by all accounts does not speak English.

It gets worse. When Telemundo interviewed the mother, she defended Fuentes saying that the media had lied about him. When the abortion initially occurred, Fuentes was listed as a minor, in an apparent attempt to prevent prosecution for child rape. 

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Biden and The Destruction of Wisdom The Biden regime is decoupled from both the past and reality, and quite capable of destroying Americans’ lives as they have known them. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 18th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/17/biden-and-the-destruction-of-wisdom/

There used to be an agreed-on body of wisdom, which both Left and Right, Republicans and Democrats, generally accepted. Heated arguments and invective centered on implementations and methods of solving problems, which at least both sides agreed were problems. Both ideologies accepted a common core of wisdom, despite their radical differences in interpreting it.

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and especially Biden’s strange cabinet of loud Jacobin amateurs, reject the very hallowed knowledge upon which civilization is based. In that sense the public has begun to recognize them as nihilist and anarchist. Nearly two out of three Americans in some polls hold unfavorable views of the Biden Administration. They fear that it is decoupled from both the past and reality, and quite capable of destroying their lives as they have known them.

Nuke Nuttiness

Since late August 1949, a consensus emerged that nuclear powers, for good or evil, were treated differently in matters of global tensions than non-nuclear powers, given the chance of a nuclear conflagration. Arcane rules, but rules, nonetheless, grew up in the Cold War between the Soviet Union, China, the United States, Britain, France and a few other nuclear states about the trip wires surrounding conventional conflicts. 

The agreed upon wisdom from the Hungarian Revolution and Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Middle East wars was to ensure such confrontations did not escalate to nuclear exchanges.

No longer. In the last five months, there has been more idle talk and threats about nuclear warfare than in the 73 years since the Soviet Union got the bomb. In a rational world, there would be two Western agendas amid the Ukraine war: first, how to aid the Ukrainians to resist Russian aggression without destroying their entire country; second, how to do so without either provoking or allowing Russia to use a nuclear weapon, or to encourage other powers like China to consider such alternatives.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Wake up, America! Climate change hysteria will change our country By Alison Nichols

Posted By on July 18th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/wake_up_america_climate_change_hysteria_will_change_our_country.html

Who are the domestic terrorists living in America?

Are they the moms and dads sparring with the teachers’ unions over critical race theory and vaccine mandates? Are they the countless patriotic citizens slowly rising from their sleep to protest that they have had enough Marxist authoritarian rule? Of course not. These people are mere foils for the Marxists currently running America.

American Marxists who are toying with our domestic security lurk in all branches of our government: legislative (Democrats and Republicans,) executive, and judicial. They are also in education, the military, Silicon Valley, the “legacy” media, and corporations such as Blackrock. While we fondly refer to these people as the “elites,” they are power-hungry corrupt globalists whom freedom-loving Americans must confront.  

And there is much to confront: the Howard Zinn rendition of American history taught in the American classroom, the degradation of law enforcement, the military, the Constitution (reviled by the left), the media, and our southern border. However, the perfect place to begin is to confront the insanity of climate change.

It is malignant and destroying America. And that is the plan; tear America down and “build back better.”

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Fighting back against COVID and Climate Change tyranny By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on July 18th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/fighting_back_against_covid_and_climate_change_tyranny.html

The phrase “New World Order” (“NWO”) is a loaded term. For starters, the people who are pushing for a single world government prefer to call it “The Great Reset.” Additionally, NWO sounds like the ultimate conspiracy theory, complete with indivisible dots, imaginary lines, and tin foil hats. And yet there’s no doubt that the self-anointed elites across the world have coalesced around a single vision that involves ending fossil fuel and achieving total control over individuals to “protect” them from COVID. Still, people across the globe are pushing back and one group has a global vision of what this pushback can look like.

During COVID’s first two years, we learned that most First World governments happily embraced tyranny. Even in the face of mountains of evidence that the lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates did nothing to improve the situation, governments not only didn’t stop, but they also dug in deeper, systematically taking away people’s rights.

No person embodied this more than Canada’s Justin Trudeau, who went from fuzzy tree hugger to steely-eyed tyrant overnight. Canada is still in deep lockdown mode, right there with China, with millions of gleeful fascist apparatchiks happily imposing the government’s diktats:

With COVID losing its power to frighten people, the world’s budding dictators are reverting to Climate Change to clamp down on power. The most recent outburst of this madness was in Holland, where the government announced that it was shutting down farmland (i.e., the place where food is grown) essentially to stop fertilizer and cow farts. (I simplify a bit but you know what I mean.) The farmers pushed back hard.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Children Die When ‘Eco-Lies’ Disrupt the War Against Mosquitoes The devastating legacy of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.”Vijay Jayaraj

Posted By on July 18th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/children-die-when-eco-lies-disrupt-war-against-vijay-jayaraj/

I am glad to be alive after a bout with dengue fever. But many across the world are not so fortunate. More than 4000 die each year due to dengue, a severe mosquito-borne disease.

It all began 10 days ago with intense fever. My body consistently clocked above 102 degrees Fahrenheit for 48 hours. Then followed severe pain in every part of the body. Once the fever and aching subsided, the second phase of the struggle began, with the blood platelet count falling dramatically.

Often, as in my case, the blood platelet count recovers on its own slowly. But in case of mismanagement, as the World Health Organization (WHO) reports, some people develop “complications associated with severe bleeding, organ impairment and/or plasma leakage.” In the worst cases, it results in death.

Contrary to expectation, the prevalence and incidence of Dengue has increased in recent decades.

WHO says, “the number of dengue cases reported to WHO increased over 8 fold over the last two decades, from 505,430 cases in 2000, to over 2.4 million in 2010, and 5.2 million in 2019. Reported deaths between the year 2000 and 2015 increased from 960 to 4032, affecting mostly younger age group.”

“Before 1970,” the report went on, “only 9 countries had experienced severe dengue epidemics. The disease is now endemic in more than 100 countries in the WHO regions of Africa, the Americas, the Eastern Mediterranean, South-East Asia and the Western Pacific.”

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Where Self-Defense Turns into a Charge of Murder A progressive tale in NYC.Joseph Klein

Posted By on July 18th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/progressive-policies-make-new-york-city-criminal-joseph-klein/

New York City has become a haven for mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless people who live on the streets and in the subways, free to menace the general public. Dangerous criminals are released repeatedly after their arrest with no bail requirement, free to resume preying on innocent victims. There are less police officers available to protect public safety, thanks to reckless cuts in the New York Police Department budget and the departure of police officers in droves who were tired of working in a hostile environment. And New Yorkers have to walk on eggshells when it comes to defending themselves against a criminal attack. Manhattan’s radical progressive pro-criminal district attorney believes that self-defense can be charged as murder.

Just recently, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged a bodega worker with murder for defending himself with a knife against an unprovoked attack by an ex-con that resulted in the assailant’s death. Meanwhile, the assailant’s girlfriend has escaped all charges whatsoever for stabbing the bodega worker because, prosecutors said, she was only trying to help her boyfriend fight back against the bodega worker.

Bragg may be backtracking on the murder charge after speaking on July 12th with city bodega owners who are pressuring him to reverse course. However, the fact that Bragg would even consider filing a murder charge in the first place speaks volumes about his perverse priorities. The radical progressive district attorney has sent New Yorkers the message that they should think twice before fighting back in self-defense. Bragg has compounded this message by supporting efforts in New York to continue limiting law-abiding residents from carrying guns outside their homes for self-defense because “more guns in our communities make us less safe.”

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Progressives’ Carpet Bombing Of America Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

Posted By on July 18th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/18/progressives-carpet-bombing-of-america/

Russia has changed its war strategy in Ukraine from direct confrontation to simply reducing cities to rubble, often killing civilians. Avoiding indiscriminate death, destruction, and misery no longer matters to the Russians so long as it facilitates their conquest. Sadly, progressives here have adopted a similar approach to imposing their policies and ideologies.

A civil society must be willing to confront disagreement head-on, issue by issue, even though it can be challenging. The goal should be to reconcile different perspectives constructively without unnecessary collateral damage. But progressives seem willing to die on every hill, with their desired ends seeming to justify any means and any pain along the way.

Overreach is everywhere. Progressive climate policy may be the most egregious. Even without knowing the extent of climate change or humans’ impact, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) has become a widely accepted goal. But progressives are like children who want what they want now. They demand immediate, indiscriminate controls on fossil fuels, or even their abolition. They oversell renewables and conceal their true costs and environmental impact. Promoting electric vehicles, they harbor delusions of unlimited natural resources and magically appearing infrastructure. They pay no heed to the limitations of the power grid. They ignore other countries’ non-cooperation, and on and on. The American public pays a steep price for all this, now and for the foreseeable future.

Congress provides munitions in the form of trillion-dollar programs too large to allow for proper monitoring. Pet causes are slipped in – as if a small percentage of trillions of dollars is inconsequential – by hiding them in the fog of war. The resulting inflation lays waste to many businesses and lives.