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June 2021

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Navy Heads to the Americas A pair of warships may be on the way to assist Venezuela

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irans-navy-heads-to-the-americas-11622586717?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Reports that two Iranian frigates may be steaming into the Atlantic toward Venezuela ought to concentrate minds in the Biden Administration. So much for Iranian goodwill amid President Biden’s determination to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal.

The vessels’ destination isn’t clear, and they could still turn back. But when asked by reporters on Monday about U.S. monitoring of the frigates, an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said “Iran has constant presence in international waters, is entitled to this right on the basis of international law, and can be present in international waters.” He added: “I warn that nobody should make a miscalculation. Those who live in glass houses must be cautious.”

Iran’s navy isn’t the U.S. Sixth Fleet, but the entry of warships into Caribbean waters would be a notable provocation. If it sails into these waters without resistance, a precedent will be set for adversarial navies operating in the region. Don’t be surprised if Russia and China decide to join the party in the future.

Iran is a long-time Cuban ally, and since Hugo Chávez turned Venezuela into a dictatorship 20 years ago, Tehran has nurtured an ever-closer relationship with Caracas. The two regimes have engaged in joint defense ventures in the Venezuelan state of Aragua, and Venezuela is known to supply fake identities to Iranian operatives to move around the region.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

All the WHO’s Dictators Taiwan is excluded while Syria and Belarus get leadership positions.

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-the-whos-dictators-11622586882?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

President Biden rejoined the World Health Organization as one of his first official acts, and his Administration has vowed to “strengthen and reform” it. That effort isn’t going well, as last week’s World Health Assembly shows.

The annual WHO confab started badly as China succeeded in blocking Taiwan’s participation—and embarrassing the U.S. in the process. The island democracy, which hoped to participate as an observer, has one of the world’s best records combatting Covid-19 and could spread its lessons to the world.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month that there is “no reasonable justification for Taiwan’s continued exclusion from this forum,” and the G-7 nations supported its participation. But China, which tries to block Taiwan from all international institutions, prevailed over the Western democracies.

Then on Friday the World Health Assembly voted to appoint Syria and Belarus to WHO’s executive board, which sets the governing body’s agenda and implements its policies. Video of the vote shows it proceeding with neither debate nor objections.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Anti-Semitism at Rutgers isn’t all academic Ruthie Blum

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/anti-semitism-at-rutgers-isnt-all-academic/

(June 1, 2021 / JNS) It’s a little hard to combat a phenomenon by kowtowing to its promoters, but leave it to academia to make a feeble attempt at doing so. Having spent the past few decades favoring sophistry over the imparting of knowledge, American institutions of higher learning are well-versed in double-speak.
Imagine their surprise, then, when even their best efforts at intellectual manipulation are met with derision by the very “woke” bullies whom they aim to please. Take the latest brouhaha at New Jersey-based Rutgers University as a case in point.

It all began on May 26, when the school’s chancellor, Christopher Molloy, and its provost, Francine Conway, issued a joint statement “against acts of anti-Semitism.”
In an e-mail addressed to the “Rutgers-New Brunswick Community,” Molloy and Conway wrote: “We are saddened by and greatly concerned about the sharp rise in hostile sentiments and anti-Semitic violence in the United States. Recent incidents of hate directed toward Jewish members of our community again remind us of what history has to teach us. Tragically, in the last century alone, acts of prejudice and hatred left unaddressed have served as the foundation for many atrocities against targeted groups around the world.”
Taking care to eliminate the particularity of anti-Semitism—a no-no in intersectional circles that consider the Jews to be born of “white privilege”—the two Rutgers honchos hastily turned their attention to George Floyd. His “murder” last year, they asserted, “brought into sharp focus the racial injustices that continue to plague our country, and over the past year there has [sic] been attacks on our Asian American Pacific Islander citizens, the spaces of Indigenous peoples defiled, and targeted oppression and other assaults against Hindus and Muslims.”
Patting themselves on the back for having paid required homage to any and all victims of “racial injustices,” they didn’t bother with something as banal as proofreading, but at least felt safe enough to return to their original subject.
“Although it has been nearly two decades since the U.S. Congress approved the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, the upward trend of anti-Semitism continues,” they stated. This was right before going on to equate the Jewish state with the terrorists bent on its annihilation.
“We have also been witnesses to the increasing violence between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Middle East leading to the deaths of children and adults and mass displacement of citizens in the Gaza region and the loss of lives in Israel,” they wrote.
They continued by mentioning the general, rather than specific, “death, destruction and ethnic strife” caused by the “ravages of the pandemic and proliferation of global conflict,” boasting that “the university stands as a beacon of hope for our community … a model for institutions that respect and value the dignity of every human being.”
You get the gist, which is that the Rutgers administration wanted to stress its denunciation of “acts of hate and prejudice against members of the Jewish community and any other targeted and oppressed groups on our campus and in our community.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Dirty Secret of ‘Clean’ Energy By Helen Raleigh

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-dirty-secret-of-clean-energy/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth

Many solar-energy panels and components from China, the world’s largest supplier, are built with forced labor.

President Biden pledged to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 50 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels. An estimate shows that to reach this ambitious goal, at least half of the U.S. power supply would have to come from clean energy such as solar and wind. However, one dirty secret that President Biden and his green allies don’t want to talk about is how “clean” solar energy is largely built on forced labor in Xinjiang, China, according to a new investigative report by U.K.’s Sheffield Hallam University.

China dominates the global supply chain for solar power and is the leading exporter of solar panels and critical components for making solar panels. For instance, about 95 percent of solar modules rely on one mineral — solar-grade polysilicon, and China produces 80 percent of the world supply of polysilicon. Xinjiang alone is responsible for 45 percent of the world’s supply of polysilicon. Such a high level of production requires a significant supply of labor.

The Sheffield Hallam University report, titled “In Broad Daylight: Uyghur Forced Labor and Global Solar Supply Chains,” shows how China’s booming solar industry has been tainted by the forced labor of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.

For example, U.K. researchers located an official Chinese government paper published in 2020 that acknowledged that the government had placed about 2.6 million minorities in farms and factories within Xinjiang and across China through state-sponsored “surplus labor” and “labor transfer” programs. Many minorities in these programs ended up working for Xinjiang’s growing solar industry. However, the Chinese government claims these labor-transfer programs comply with China’s laws and regulations, and workers’ participation in these programs is voluntary.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

The Rising Economic Cost of Cyberattacks By Cale Clingenpeel

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-rising-economic-cost-of-cyberattacks/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The Biden administration should build on the Trump administration’s strategy to confront the increasing security and economic threat of cyberattacks.

It was recently revealed that DarkSide raked in $90 million worth of Bitcoin — including $4.4 million in ransom from the Colonial Pipeline operator — from its cyberattacks stretching back to October 2020. The ransoms paid to DarkSide and similar organizations, however, do not capture the total economic cost of cyberattacks. Targeted firms acting in their individual interests may not fully account for the economic costs that spill over to consumers and to other firms. The result is underinvestment in cybersecurity from the private sector as a whole. While the Biden administration’s “private sector decision” remark helped define its Colonial Pipeline response, the federal government has an important role in closing this cybersecurity investment gap and limiting the future cost of cyberattacks.

Cyberattacks are perpetrated by numerous types of actors and stretch far beyond ransomware attacks such as the attack on the Colonial Pipeline. In fact, ransomware is on average a less costly form of cyberattack. While ransomware attacks on large firms tend to make headlines, according to one report, 70 percent of such attacks are directed at small- and medium-sized firms with fewer than 1,000 employees with 90 percent of the losses against these firms uninsured. The widespread nature of cyberattacks, their pervasiveness across industry and firm type, the varying components that make up the total cost, and the prevalence of underreporting all contribute to the difficulty in estimating the overall economic impact of these incidents, though some studies do exist.

In 2018, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) published a report evaluating the total costs associated with malicious cyberactivity by measuring the stock-price reaction of publicly traded firms to news of cyberattacks that had been made public. After taking into account firms’ underreporting of cyberattacks, spillover effects to other firms, and private costs incurred alongside the costs to publicly traded firms, the CEA estimated that the total cost posed by malicious cyberactivity to the U.S. economy in 2016 was as high as $109 billion (roughly 0.6 percent of 2016 GDP). These estimated costs are very likely to have increased since 2016.

According to annual studies by Accenture and the Ponemon Institute based on extensive surveys of firms and cybersecurity experts, between 2016 and 2018, the average total cost incurred by firms due to malicious cyber activity increased by 58 percent in the United States. Assuming that the total cost to the U.S. economy increased at the same rate as the average cost faced by those surveyed firms, the total cost of cyberattacks in 2018 would be as high as $172 billion (roughly 0.8 percent of 2018 GDP). This assumption likely serves as a lower-bound estimate, however, as the average number of cyberattacks faced by firms globally increased over this period, making it more than likely that the frequency of attacks against U.S. firms also increased. Since 2018 — the last year the study was conducted — the number of cyberattacks, the average cost of cyberattacks, and the total economic costs are likely to have risen even further.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The Media Finally Discover Antifa By David Harsanyi

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-media-finally-discover-antifa/

The media abdicated their responsibility last summer by minimizing the violence.

L ast summer, New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof headed to Portland to try to locate the “radical-left anarchists” then–president Donald Trump kept mentioning in his campaign speeches. “Help Me Find Trump’s ‘Anarchists’ in Portland” Kristof implored his readers, as he roamed the city, running into well-meaning musicians, activists, technicians, and doctors, but, alas, no anarchists. The masked “protesters” who had thrown mortars, M-80s, and bricks at cops guarding the federal courthouse in Portland only a few weeks earlier were nowhere to be found. The “protesters” who in the week before Kristof’s column was published had been involved in dozens of acts of vandalism, destruction, and violence, including assaults on cops with “flaming projectiles” and bricks, had disappeared. Kristof’s piece is the equivalent of writing a column about the January 6 riot and focusing on the protesters who didn’t go into the Capitol.

Kristof’s piece was one of the most ham-fisted efforts, but he wasn’t alone. The day before left-wing CNN pundit Josh Campbell flew into Portland to mock concerns about violence — “I also ate my breakfast burrito outside today and so far haven’t been attacked by shadowy gangs of Antifa commandos” — a pro-Trump marcher had been shot to death, allegedly by an Antifa member. There was a concerted effort by many in the national media to play down the extent and damage of protests that summer, which turned out to be the most expensive domestic upheaval in insurance history, with costs exceeding $1 billion. Minority neighborhoods and city centers were often left to looters at night, as elected officials were often paralyzed by the fear of offending Black Lives Matter protesters. Some pundits would even argue the property destruction wasn’t “violence” at all — from the comfort of their homes, of course.

Turns out, as the Washington Post reports today, that the extremism Kristof and Campbell couldn’t locate anywhere within Portland’s city limits has done great damage to the city’s poorest communities. It turns out that de-policing efforts — the Portland city council cut $15 million as a “defund” effort and now has a cop shortage — have left some of the most vulnerable neighborhoods open to spikes in violent crime. Anarchists, writes the Post, have hijacked Portland’s “social justice movement,” exacerbating the problems BLM protesters were supposedly trying to fix.

Not that this is surprising to anyone who wasn’t in the liberal bubble. Local stories about black leaders attempting to distance themselves from Antifa were already being written in the summer. A month after Kristof’s column, Mark Hemingway detailed the corrupt 50-year influence of hard-left radicalism in the city in the Wall Street Journal. None of this was useful at the time. An election was coming.

A few weeks before Kristof’s piece, Portland mayor Ted Wheeler had even asked Governor Kate Brown for National Guard troops. One imagines it was not to stop peaceful schoolteachers from being heard on criminal-justice reform. Soon, the feds sent agents to protect the courthouse, which was under nightly attack. Hysteric Charles Pierce claimed that cops had “softly Pinochet’ed in broad daylight.” In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg did him one better, writing that “Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun.” (No hyperbole was left on the table during the Trump years.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Woke Military Wouldn’t Have Won World War II David Deaval

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://amac.us/a-woke-military-wouldnt-have-won-world-war-ii/

Memorial Day traditionally marks the beginning of summer and a time for patriotic remembrance of our fallen war dead and, for many of us, fallen family members, many of whom were veterans. I have been thinking of the five sons of Victor Sowers, Sr., my mother’s brothers, all of whom served in World War II and returned, while pondering the parlous state of the military today.

The Sowers brothers would, no doubt, have joined a group of veterans and Republicans in Congress who are banding together to fight the imposition of left-wing ideology on the U. S. Armed Forces. Air Force Lt. General Rod Bishop (retired) began Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services (STARRS) last year when the Air Force Academy football team released a video endorsing both Black Lives Matter and “antiracist” education, reports the Washington Free Beacon. After complaining to no avail, the retired general heard from many other veterans and active duty members of the various branches who were experiencing the same kinds of indoctrination in Critical Race Theory and other progressive doctrines. After U. S. Space Force Lt. Colonel Matthew Lohmeier was fired for self-publishing Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest and the Unmaking of the American Military, a book detailing what he calls the “Neo-Marxist agenda” (and currently #4 among all books on Amazon), thirty members of STARRS sent an open letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin asking him to “take action to fight back against the creeping left-wing extremism in the U.S. military.” 

          The Free Beacon reports that there is no response to the STARRS letter from the Pentagon, but the signs are not good given Secretary Austin’s own confirmation testimony that he would work to rid the military of “racists and extremists,” a statement that is ominous given the recent history of reports and statements from various branches of the military, as well as comments such as that of retired Army General Thomas Kolditz, who said that the goal should be to purge “Trump loyalists.”  Mike Gonzalez and Dakota Wood of the Heritage Foundation reported that the Defense Department is “reportedly considering hiring a private company to monitor the free speech of military personal on social media, using key words or algorithms that by their very nature reflect the perspective of those who select the words and write the algorithms.” 

While my Sowers uncles made all the jokes about the foolishness of those running the Army and Navy in the 1940s and laughed about the military censors’ sometimes senseless clipping of passages from their letters, they would not have thought what was happening now is at all funny. They fought for a country they did not believe inherently racist or unjust. They fought for a country where the perfection of freedom was sought. 

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

US energy policy and the pursuit of failure…again By Peter Z. Grossman

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/556003-us-energy-policy-and-the-pursuit-of-failureagain

We’ve been here before.  

The development of the Biden administration’s energy and climate policies is following a path set by the energy policies of the 1970s. That is not a good model to follow. Failure followed failure. Essentially U.S. energy policy has been created by a four-step process: 

First, an energy crisis is declared. Presidents and legislators feel the pressure to “do something.” 

Second, policy proposals that supposedly will provide a solution are announced. 

Third, assuming the sense of crisis lingers, extreme measures are passed in Congress or initiated by executive action, or both. 

Fourth, the measures prove ineffective and, although billions are spent, the measures are either repealed or just forgotten. In the meantime, market forces end the “crisis.” 

Presidents Nixon and Ford went through steps one and two. The Arab oil embargo and the subsequent gasoline shortages made it necessary for officials to offer radical ideas. But the end of the lines at gas stations and the fall in oil prices meant the end of the sense of crisis. That made officials reluctant to pursue the radical measures that had been proposed.  

It took the energy crisis of 1979-80 to follow the path to its conclusion. The return of gasoline shortages and sky-high energy prices induced President Carter to devise a comprehensive energy plan.  

Carter and his energy secretary believed that the U.S. and most of rest of the world were rapidly running out of oil and natural gas. All remaining oil and the wealth it entailed would go to the oil exporters (especially the hated Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC), while we shivered in the dark.  

So drastic measures were needed. Carter’s policies, if enacted, were supposed to make the U.S. energy independent, but would have other virtues including protecting the American way of life. 

The major component of this plan was to replace two million barrels a day of oil imports with a substitute derived from processing American coal. These “synfuels” would cost $88 billion (inflation-adjusted $320 billion), a number then-Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger later admitted “came from nowhere.” Moreover, five different agencies of the government said that the synfuels goal wasn’t feasible.   

As distress at the pump (especially rising prices) continued, Congress passed most of Carter’s plan, including the creation of the Synfuels Corporation.  

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden administration suspends oil and gas leases in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Juliet Eilperin, Josh Partlow

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-administration-to-cancel-oil-and-gas-leases-in-arctic-national-wildlife-refuge/ar-AAKBBzA

The Biden administration on Tuesday suspended oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, targeting one of President Donald Trump’s most significant environmental acts during his last days in office.

The move by the Interior Department, which could spark a major legal battle, dims the prospect of oil drilling in a pristine and politically charged expanse of Alaskan wilderness that Republicans and Democrats have fought over for four decades. The Trump administration auctioned off the right to drill in the refuge’s coastal plain — home to hundreds of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl as well as the southern Beaufort Sea’s remaining polar bears — just two weeks before President Biden was inaugurated.

Now the Biden administration is taking steps to block those leases, citing problems with the environmental review process. In Tuesday’s Interior Department order, Secretary Deb Haaland said that a review of the Trump administration’s leasing program in the wildlife refuge found “multiple legal deficiencies” including “insufficient analysis” required by environmental laws and a failure to assess other alternatives. Haaland’s order calls for a temporary moratorium on all activities related to those leases in order to conduct “a new, comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts of the oil and gas program.”

The step, coming just days after the Justice Department defended another drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, underscores the balancing act the new administration aims to strike as it slows fossil fuel development on public lands. While Biden has paused new federal oil and gas leasing and pledged to drastically cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, he has taken a much more cautious approach toward most oil and gas operations approved under his predecessor.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The American Century  of Humiliation By: Kathleen Brush, Ph.D.

By on June 2nd, 2021

https://abyssum.org/2021/06/01/xi-is-surely-enjoying-the-humiliating-footage-of-neutered-police-and-uncontrolled-violence-on-americas-streets-uncontrolled-violence-is-the-marker-of-a-failed-state/

America’s Achilles heel is its disregard for history. Domestically, it leads to ill-informed decisions like centering American history on the historical fairy tale called Project 1619. Internationally, it is an endless source of comic relief. 

The latest fodder was American wrestler and Hollywood star, John Cena, groveling for forgiveness from the Chinese. His non-mistake? He called Taiwan a country. The Chinese response? More groveling from the American. 

China’s President Xi surely savored the show. He loves humiliating the American superpower. Xi is Mao’s protégé and he’s finishing his mission to seek retribution for China’s Century of Humiliation (1839-1949) at the hands of Western, Russian, and Japanese powers, by converting China into the humiliator. 

Historically specializing in psychological warfare, China is suited to the task. Humiliation and intimidation gave China a vast tributary empire in eastern Asia until the early 19th century. Today, China merges psychology with vast economic, cyber, and military assets to exert control over other nations.

To achieve Mao’s mission, the first step was unifying the Chinese population. The second was building economic strength. The disunity of the ethnically diverse Chinese population was a perennial source of endless conflict. Integrated populations had been a secret weapon of their humiliating adversaries. To level the playing field, China mandated assimilation and delivered Han Chinese ethnic homogeneity in record-breaking time – never to be altered.

  

Watching Leftist political leaders leverage the havoc created by rioting Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists to damage America’s once admired integrated population was priceless. China bombarded social media quoting officials like Kamala Harris: “racism is real in America. And it has always been. Xenophobia is real in America, and always has been. Sexism, too.” 

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