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August 2020

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The Two Chinas By Therese Shaheen

By on August 5th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/china-rising-superpower-crumbling-totalitarian-machine/

To the West, the country may appear to be a rising global superpower. In truth, it’s an aging, dysfunctional, slowly crumbling totalitarian machine.

 T he national-security law that the Chinese Communist Party is using to complete its takeover of democratic Hong Kong has pretty much everyone agreeing that the era of the “One Country, Two Systems” framework developed for Hong Kong’s handover from the British to the PRC is over. From the time of the 1997 handover until now, the framework has allowed Hong Kong to exist as a semi-autonomous administrative region that has its own economic and political system but is technically a part of the PRC. But since Beijing unilaterally imposed the national-security law in June, Hong Kong elections have been canceled, pro-freedom professors have been fired or arrested, and democrats have been banned from politics. For Hong Kong, “one country, two systems” is finished.

On the mainland, though, “one country, two systems” isn’t a framework so much as an accurate description of the status quo. Ironically, Beijing is all too happy for the world to focus on the demise of the official “one country, two systems” policy in Hong Kong if it distracts from the decay and systemic weakness that plague the mainland. The CCP’s crackdown on Hong Kong, its trade standoff with the U.S., its growing militarism in the Pacific, and other ostentatious public displays of Chinese strength are meant to hide the rot underneath.

For in truth, on the mainland today, there are two Chinas. There is the China of densely populated, modern urban centers such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chongqing, and there is the China of everywhere else. The China of everywhere else is dollars-a-day poor, uneducated, and aging. It is also vast, containing some 600–700 million people, or about half of the total Chinese population.

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SURRENDER: EDWARD CLINE

By on August 5th, 2020

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/08/surrender.html

It was bound to happen sooner or later, given all the Defund the Police propaganda  in various states and cities. Minneapolis police, in its last hurray, have advised residents to just give criminals what they want tn and to offer no resistance. If there’s violence, the police – what’s left of them – will not respond or offer help. The announcement reads, in part with homilies about their being concerned with “your safety.”

.+ Be prepared to give up your cell phone and purse/wallet.

= Do as they say, Your safety to most important.. (but not your rights or the sanctity of your life and property).

Suppose the criminals wanted to assault your wife, or kidnap your daughter, and not merely take your purse or wallet? Would you be justified in fighting back?

Barely, If at all. I can see the headline now: Resident arrested and charged with harming and jeopardizing the lives of his “guests.” : Samuel Brown has been charged by the “Publidc Safety Committee” with resisting the desires of “peaceful”  citizens and making an unlawful citizen’s arrest, of brandishing a gun and a knife, and faces a  $199 fine and five years of community service.

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The Roots Of Wokeness It’s time we looked more closely at the philosophy behind the movement. Andrew Sullivan

By on August 5th, 2020

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-roots-of-wokeness?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIj

In the mid-2010s, a curious new vocabulary began to unspool itself in our media. A data site, storywrangling.org, which measures the frequency of words in news stories, revealed some remarkable shifts. Terms that had previously been almost entirely obscure suddenly became ubiquitous—and an analysis of the New York Times, using these tools, is a useful example. Looking at stories from 1970 to 2018, several terms came out of nowhere in the past few years to reach sudden new heights of repetition and frequency. Here’s a list of the most successful neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining. And here are a few that were rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years: triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes. 

Language changes, and we shouldn’t worry about that. Maybe some of these terms will stick around. But the linguistic changes have occurred so rapidly, and touched so many topics, that it has all the appearance of a top-down re-ordering of language, rather than a slow, organic evolution from below. While the New York Times once had a reputation for being a bit stodgy on linguistic matters, pedantic, precise and slow-to-change, as any paper of record might be, in the last few years, its pages have been flushed with so many neologisms that a reader from, say, a decade ago would have a hard time understanding large swathes of it. And for many of us regular readers, we’ve just gotten used to brand new words popping up suddenly to re-describe something we thought we knew already. We notice a new word, make a brief mental check, and move on with our lives. 

But we need to do more than that. We need to understand that all these words have one thing in common: they are products of an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education in the past few decades, and appears to have reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s. Most normal people have never heard of this theory—or rather an interlocking web of theories—that is nonetheless changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy.

What we have long needed is an intelligible, intelligent description of this theory which most people can grasp. And we’ve just gotten one: “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity,” by former math prof James Lindsay and British academic, Helen Pluckrose.

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American Troops Pulled From Germany As NATO Falters Shoshana Bryen and Stephen Bryen 

By on August 5th, 2020

https://www.dailywire.com/news/bryen-american-troops-pulled-from-germany-as-nato-falters

The first troop reductions in Germany under President Donald Trump’s order have taken place, and many in the national security community are aghast, even The Wall Street Journal.

The President based his decision on Germany’s failure to contribute adequately to NATO defense, flouting an agreed on 2% (of GDP) threshold for national defense contributions, but the story – like the alliance – is more complicated.

NATO requires consensus. The validity of the alliance hangs on whether states would be willing to approve a military response to a Russian action against any NATO member. Without it, the U.S. would lack the ability to use NATO airfields in Germany, Italy, Turkey, and the UK.  It would not have permission for ground forces to transit much of western Europe.

Today, Germany’s military is a shambles.  It has few operational tanks, not very many aircraft, and a navy in serious decline.  But the Germans really don’t care. Because Germany is Russia’s biggest paying customer for natural gas, Berlin believes there is no incentive for the Russians to bother it.

If there is a threat to outliers such as Poland or the Baltic States, Germany is far from committed to responding. There is a strong likelihood that Germany would veto any NATO response to a (highly unlikely) Russian aggression outside of a direct attack on Germany itself. If Germany uses its veto, France and Italy will likely align with it.  So too would Turkey, increasingly estranged from NATO.

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An Effective COVID Treatment the Media Continues to Besmirch By Steven Hatfill

By on August 4th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/04/an_effective_covid_treatment_the_media_continues_to_besmirch_143875.html

On Friday, July 31, in a column ostensibly dealing with health care “misinformation,” Washington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan opened by lambasting “fringe doctors spouting dangerous falsehoods about hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 wonder cure.”

Actually, it was Sullivan who was spouting dangerous falsehoods about this drug, something the Washington Post and much of the rest of the media have been doing for months. On May 15, the Post offered a stark warning to any Americans who may have taken hope in a possible therapy for COVID-19. In the newspaper’s telling, there was nothing unambiguous about the science — or the politics — of hydroxychloroquine: “Drug promoted by Trump as coronavirus game-changer increasingly linked to deaths,” blared the headline. Written by three Post staff writers, the story asserted that the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19 is scant and that the drug is inherently unsafe. This claim is nonsense.

Biased against the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 — and the Washington Post is hardly alone — the paper described an April 21, 2020, drug study on U.S. Veterans Affairs patients hospitalized with the illness. It found a high death rate in patients taking the drug hydroxychloroquine. But this was a flawed study with a small sample, the main flaw being that the drug was given to the sickest patients who were already dying because of their age and severe pre-existing conditions. This study was quickly debunked. It had been posted on a non-peer-reviewed medical archive that specifically warns that studies posted on its website should not be reported in the media as established information.

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Sharyl Attkisson :Investigative Issues: The Troubling Fact Is That Media Fact-Checkers Tend to Lean ← Left

By on August 4th, 2020

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/0/04/investigative_issues_the_troubling_fact_that_media_fact-checkers_lean_left_124663.html

A growing response to today’s chaotic information landscape sounds inviting and elegantly simple: appoint experts to “fact-check” news stories, blogs, speeches, studies, opinions, and political ads. Information they deem to be false is corrected or even removed from public view, in the name of the public good.

Since Donald Trump’s election these “fact-checkers” have gained increased prominence. Pressure has mounted for news outfits and big tech companies – including Google, Facebook, and Twitter – to police political discourse. At the same time, many people, notably conservatives, are demanding that the tech giants back off such perceived censorship. Tensions on both sides were on display last week as a House Judiciary subcommittee grilled top Silicon Valley executives. 

That discord is likely to persist because in large part the fact-checking solution is illusory. Many such efforts fail because they amount to a circular feedback loop of verification. The fact-checkers are like-minded journalists or often liberal Silicon Valley gatekeepers, who frequently rely on partisan news sources and political activists to control narratives on a wide variety of issues and controversies. This small group of players exerts an oversized influence, using fact checks to shape and censor information.

Twitter recently sparked controversy by taking the unprecedented step of adding a disapproving “fact-checking label” to some of President Trump’s tweets. The social media site publicly explained that Trump’s May 26 posts contained what its fact-checkers deemed to be “potentially misleading information about voting processes.”

Trump had said widespread mail-in ballots in the 2020 election would be “substantially fraudulent.” While the definition of “substantially” is in the eye of the beholder, the United States, in fact, has a long and ongoing history of ballot fraud.

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8 Democrat Myths William Barr Debunked Between Deliberate Interruptions By Margot Cleveland

By on August 4th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/03/8-democrat-myths-william-barr-debunked-between-deliberate-interruptions/

Notwithstanding Democrats’ attempts to prevent William Barr from setting the record straight, the attorney general dismantled major fake news headlines over the last two months.

When Attorney General William Barr testified before the House Judiciary Committee last Tuesday, Democrats’ rhetorical questions reinforced eight falsehoods previously peddled by left-wing media. Notwithstanding these attempts to prevent Barr from setting the record straight, the attorney general dismantled much of the fake news that has made headlines over the last two months.

Here are the highlights of the media myths congressional Democrats paraded for the public during the hearing.

Myth 1: Barr overruled prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone because of a Donald Trump tweet.

Several of Democrats’ attacks focused on President Trump associate Roger Stone. Democrat committee Chair Jerry Nadler accused Barr of personally interfering “with ongoing criminal investigations to protect the president and his allies from the consequences of their actions,” and then “when career investigators and prosecutors resisted these brazen unprecedented actions, you replaced them with less qualified staff who appear to be singularly beholden to you.” Rep. Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat, drilled more specifically into the Stone case, misrepresenting the facts in the process.

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In 2nd Try, James Sees Different MI Challenge (and Outcome) . By Philip Wegmann

By on August 4th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/04/in_2nd_try_james_sees_different_mi_challenge_and_outcome_143870.html

Republicans know they could not draft a better candidate for a worse time. Luckily for them, John James was such a candidate before a pandemic ravaged its way around the globe, a recession cratered the world economy and racial strife erupted across America.

He turned heads when he ran and narrowly lost a race against Sen. Debbie Stabenow last cycle as an untested political rookie, then quietly and quickly started gathering strength for his current challenge against the other Democratic incumbent in Michigan, Sen. Gary Peters.

“It feels a lot different this time,” James told RealClearPolitics in a stark understatement less than 100 days from Nov. 3. And one of the many differences comes Tuesday. In the 2018 primary, he had to hurdle a self-funding fellow Republican who put $5 million into his bid. James will now breeze unchallenged to the party’s nomination, enjoying a takeoff that preserves precious resources for the general election race in a state critical to Republican self-preservation.

The Grand Old Party needs Michigan. It was the key to a Trump victory four years ago, and it could hold the fate of his second term. It also represents one of the rare opportunities for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to go on the offensive as Senate Republicans otherwise play defense across the board.

Enter James, who tells RCP during a brief phone interview that yes, his state is both those things. His race also represents, he believes, a contest for the soul of the GOP, if not the nation.

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Sydney Williams: on Anger

By on August 4th, 2020

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Anger has been a constant in American politics since the beginning. On July 11, 1804, a long and bitter feud between Vice President Aaron Burr and former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton ended in the latter’s death by gunshot on a field in Weehawken, New Jersey. On February 6, 1858, as the House of Representatives debated the Kansas Territory’s pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, Pennsylvania’s Republican Galusha Grow and South Carolina Democrat Laurence Keitt traded insults and then blows. On March 1, 1954 four Puerto Rican nationalists in the visitors’ gallery unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and opened fire on members of Congress, wounding five. When heated political dialogue becomes angry words (or worse), the nation loses. The 1960s were angry years, fed by opponents and proponents of Civil Rights and an unpopular war in Southeast Asia. We are living through another period where anger has become pervasive and political extremism has made the middle way a difficult passage.

We are in a summer of discontent, made inhospitable by Covid-19, an economic depression and unprecedented hatred for the President of the United States. Political extremism has always been around, but usually on the fringes. Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace and Lester Maddox once represented right-wing extremists, just as Henry Wallace and George McGovern did on the left. (George Wallace and Maddox were both Democrats, but extreme rightwing in their views). However, they were all marginalized by the far larger center-right and center-left parts of their respective Parties. That is no longer the case. Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist, is contributing to the Democrat platform. Like a mutating cell infected with a virus, the country has been dividing and separating, creating extremists on both ends.

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What We Know Now About Hydroxychloroquine to Treat COVID-19

By on August 4th, 2020

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/08/01/hydroxychloroquine-covid-19/?utm_source=rss&

The buzz surrounding the drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 began to die down until early July and the results of 2,500-person study. Pictured: A pharmacy employee displays a box of Plaqueni, a brand name for hydroxychloroquine, May 28 in Paris. (Photo: Marc Piasecki/Getty Images)

Early in health officials’ response to the pandemic, one drug offered hope of a safe, widely available, and cheap therapeutic that would break the death grip that COVID-19 held on the world.

However, after its promised efficacy didn’t materialize in large, statistically significant numbers, enthusiasm for the drug, hydroxychloroquine, quickly waned. Why, then, has it made its way back into the headlines?

When it was first suggested that hydroxychloroquine may be an effective antiviral against the new coronavirus, which scientists call SARS-CoV-2, the U.S. government purchased and delivered the drug by the millions of doses even before research could prove its efficacy.

At the time, what scarce data was available suggested it would work, and waiting much longer would’ve been unethical. After all, the drug has a decadeslong history of use to treat malaria.

But with those millions of doses being administered, clinicians found only mixed results. Some, as in the early French trial, found tremendous success, while many others found no clinical benefit.

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