ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Last Voter Suppression Outrage Biden called voter ID an ‘assault’ on civil rights. What happened next?

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-last-voter-suppression-outrage-11623448789?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

With hyperbole swirling around voting reforms in Georgia, Florida, Texas, Iowa and beyond, it’s worth recalling what happened last time Democrats did this Chicken Little performance. In a 2014 speech, Vice President Joe Biden rang alarms about a “new assault on the most basic of civil rights, the right to vote.”

Mr. Biden took specific aim at voter-ID laws, calling them “an attempt to repress minority voting, masquerading as an attempt to end corruption.” The Associated Press reporter covering the speech added: “Biden said if the laws had been in effect during the 2012 election and only six percent of black voters who cast their ballots had been unable to vote, President Obama would have lost Florida.”

Today 36 states have voter-ID laws of some kind, and Mr. Biden’s dire story of politically motivated disenfranchisement hasn’t panned out. “Strict ID Laws Don’t Stop Voters”: That was the headline last month in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Earlier versions of this study have circulated for a while, but the latest one merits a look. The authors analyzed 10 years of data, from 2008 to 2018, precisely when Mr. Biden warned of voter suppression.

Even “strict” voter-ID laws, the authors said, “have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.” But the ID laws appeared to lift turnout slightly among nonwhite voters, relative to whites.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Demonization of Benjamin Netanyahu He’s simply an Israeli patriot, but detractors called him an enemy of peace, even a Republican. By Ron Dermer

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-demonization-of-benjamin-netanyahu-11623430571?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, have worked for more than a quarter-century to tarnish his image in the U.S. and around the world.

In 1996, when Israelis first elected him to put a brake on a dangerous Oslo process, Mr. Netanyahu was depicted as an enemy of peace. For three years, his opponents insisted that if only Israel were rid of Mr. Netanyahu, it could make peace with Yasser Arafat. They were wrong. Ehud Barak defeated Mr. Netanyahu in 1999 and offered Arafat sweeping concessions at Camp David a year later. Instead of peace, Israel got scores of suicide bombings and the worst wave of Palestinian terrorism in its history—the so-called second intifada in which more than 1,000 Israelis were murdered.

That was followed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 2005 decision to withdraw from Gaza. Just as Mr. Netanyahu predicted, Israel’s unilateral concession led only to further aggression. Hamas, a genocidal terror organization committed to Israel’s destruction, took over Gaza and turned it into a base from which thousands of missiles have been fired at Israeli cities.

Mr. Netanyahu returned to the premiership in 2009. The preceding bloody decade should have made it obvious to all that Palestinian leaders didn’t want peace. But Mr. Netanyahu was scapegoated again. Now Mahmoud Abbas was cast as a peacemaker instead of Arafat, who died in 2004. While few Israelis believed such nonsense any longer, many foreign policy makers did, including key officials in the Obama White House.

This time, another element was added to the demonization of Mr. Netanyahu: American partisan politics. Not only was he cast as an enemy of peace; he was accused of being a Republican. His critics portrayed his legitimate opposition to a Democratic president’s dangerous Middle East policies as an illegitimate effort to intervene in American politics.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

David Goldman “China can help US out of its inflation trap.” China appears to be offering a deal to Washington

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://asiatimes.com/2021/06/china-can-help-us-out-of-its-inflation-trap/

NEW YORK – “Goods produced by China’s hundreds of millions of workers are a strong anchor for stabilizing global inflation” read the banner headline at China’s “Observer” (guancha.cn) website June 10, quoting People’s Bank of China official Guo Shuqing, the Communist Party representative at the central bank.

The “Observer” site frequently floats trial balloons for China’s top policymakers.

Guo dismissed the reassurances of Western central bankers and offered an alarming assessment of inflation risk: “Inflation is coming as scheduled. Moreover, the magnitude is higher than the expectations of central bankers in the United States and Europe, and the duration of inflation does not seem to be as short as many experts predict.”

He added, “When fiscal expenditures are already largely supported by the central bank’s printing of money, it is like an airplane entering tailspin, and it is difficult to pull out of the dive. Before 2008, the Fed’s balance sheet was only more than US$800 billion, and now it is nearly $8 trillion, and the ratio of US federal debt to GDP has surpassed the highest record created during World War II.”

Nonetheless, Guo argued, China can help: “For a considerable period of time, China has supplied about half of the world’s finished goods, and on the whole has not increased export prices, laying a solid foundation for global epidemic prevention and control, and for economic recovery. If the large amounts of currency issued by the most developed countries have been the driving force for global inflation, then the goods produced by China’s hundreds of millions of workers are the anchor for stabilizing global inflation.”

Beijing is sending a message to Washington: You have a big problem with inflation, and we can help – in return for other consideration. China and the United States had a tacit deal during the 2000s: You buy our goods, and we invest the proceeds in US Treasury securities. That kept US interest rates artificially low during the housing bubble years.

BOOKS Comments turned off

DAVID GOLDMAN: A REVIEW OF JOSEPH JOHNSTON’S “THE DECLINE OF NATIONS”

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/but-thou-shalt-endure/

“In his indictment of America’s national decline, Johnston’s belief that America has the wherewithal to restore itself shines through.”

Joseph F. Johnston is an attorney and writer who has read widely in history and philosophy. His new book, The Decline of Nations: Lessons for Strengthening America at Home and in the World, is a deep meditation on the national condition, motivated by the hope that we will escape the almost universal fate of nations to rise and then decline. He believes that our problem began with the abandonment of moral certainty in favor of relativism. His survey of the damage to American culture and mores extends from the expansion of the welfare state and the enervation of private initiative to literary habits, sexual behavior, demographics, and high culture. Every college student in the country should be tied to a chair and made to read it (or, if needed, hear it read aloud).

In his conclusion, he offers a well-considered set of remedies. “Low rates of taxation, limited government, free markets, encouragement of private enterprise, fiscal responsibility, sound money, and the rule of law” are the foundation of economic strength. This in turn depends on educational excellence, by “providing parents with an alternative to public schooling.” Jurisprudence should return to “the objective truths of an acknowledged moral order.” America’s military strength must be rebuilt, focusing on defense against nuclear missiles, terrorism, cyberwar, and space technologies, without overextending our capacity to “protect countries that are unwilling to protect themselves.”

Demographics and Decline

In 2008, the United States was an outlier among the large industrial nations with a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That is the total number of births the average woman is expected to have during her lifetime. The US National Center for Health Statistics reported in May that the total fertility rate (TFR) had fallen to just 1.64, close to that of Europe or China. We have heard forecasts of demographic doom for years from the Old World and East Asia; a new study in The Lancet forecasts that the population of the European Union will fall by a third, to 308 million from 446 million, by the end of this century. It appears that the bell also tolls for us.

The long-term consequences of demographic winter will be devastating; in the United Nations’ low-fertility scenario, the US will have 71 citizens over the age of 65 for every 100 of working age (Europe would have 84, and Japan 120). The unfunded liabilities of the Social Security and Medicare systems now exceed $113 trillion by some estimates, and a smaller working-age population would struggle to support them.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s New Power Play: More Control of Tech Companies’ Troves of Data Beijing is calling on tech giants to share their information—and asserting its authority over data held by U.S. companies in China as well By Lingling Wei

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-new-power-play-more-control-of-tech-companies-troves-of-data-11623470478?mod=hp_lead_pos7

Shortly after rising to power in late 2012, Xi Jinping made his first company visit in his new job as China’s Communist Party chief, to Tencent Holdings Ltd. There, he raised a topic that has become both an opportunity and a challenge for his rule: the vast troves of personal data being gathered by the country’s technology companies.

Mr. Xi complimented Tencent’s founder, Pony Ma, on the way the company was accumulating information from millions of users, and harnessing that data to drive innovation. He also suggested that data would be useful to Beijing.

“You have the most sufficient data, then you can make the most objective and accurate analysis,” he told Mr. Ma, according to state media accounts. “The suggestions to the government in this regard are very valuable.”

More than eight years later, those suggestions are becoming demands. The government is now calling on big tech companies like Tencent, online retailing giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd. to open up the data they collect from social media, e-commerce and other businesses, according to official documents and interviews with people involved in policy-making.

The complex new web of laws and regulations around sharing digital records is being driven by the huge growth in data held by China’s tech giants—and a belief that the government should be able to access it. The efforts are also part of Mr. Xi’s quest to rein in the increasingly powerful tech sector, which has pushed back on some of Beijing’s previous data-sharing efforts. The most recent law, passed Thursday, will make it harder for companies to resist such requests.

China’s leaders worry that the country’s tech giants could be using their extensive personal and corporate digital records to build alternative power centers in the one-party state. That concern led Mr. Xi to halt a planned initial public offering by Jack Ma’s financial-technology behemoth Ant Group Co. late last year.

Chinese government entities involved in the effort to regulate data, including the State Council and the Cyberspace Administration of China, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Beijing is also intensifying the pressure on foreign firms operating in China to keep records gathered from local customers inside the country, so the government has more authority over the records. Western companies have long complained such “data-localization” requirements could stifle innovation in their global operations or enable Chinese authorities to steal their proprietary information.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hydroxychloroquine, a year later, 3 times higher survival rate. Trump was right.

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://joannenova.com.au/2021/06/hydroxychloroquine-a-year-later-3-times-higher-survival-rate-trump-was-right/

The world faced the greatest global health crisis in one hundred years, but it’s taken a whole year to write up a small study that shows hydroxychoroquine could improve the survival rate of people on ventilators by a factor of three, and that the dose matters.

If anyone says “but this is not a big study”, that’s exactly my point. Why is it so hard to get a large study of a drug that was already known to be useful against SARS-1 fifteen years before SARS-2 arrived. A drug that even the President of the US was talking about in the earliest days? In January 2020 we already knew that the three drugs that were “fairly effective” were  Remdesivir, Chloroquine and Ritonavir. On February 13, the South Koreans were already recommending hydroxychloroquine and telling us the anti-virals should be “started as soon as possible”. We had that head start, we threw it away.

Apparently the kings-of-compassion in the commentariat would rather see deaths than admit Donald Trump was right. And the experts in Pharmaceutical Giants only cared about the profit line.

And so it comes to pass, finally, that we find out what happened to 255 patients in May 2020 who were treated for Covid in a hospital in New Jersey. Sadly, 78% or 201 patients are described as “expired” — as if they reached their use-by dates. It was that bad. Just 54 survived. Only 3.5% “walked out of the hospital”. These were very sick people.

The research team hunted through the data to try to figure out what was different about the group that survived. But mostly the “alive group” and the “expired group” were similar. The research team considered many different risk factors like their blood pressure, weight, age, and conditions like diabetes. They trawled laboriously through all the medications they were given as well. Convalescent plasma (blood from survivors) was one of the few things that helped, boosting survival by a factor of two. But one drug combination finally stood out even more and that was Hydroxychloroquine and and Azithromycin. (Essentially very similar to The Zelenko protocol).

The WHO, funded by taxpayers in the West, long after these patients were saved, was working to stop HCQ from being used.

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

Biden to Harris: Disaster 1 to Disaster 2 Steve Feinstein

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/biden_to_harris_disaster_1_to_disaster_2.html

That “President” Biden is an unmitigated disaster as our chief executive is so painfully apparent to everyone that it hardly seems necessary to point it out.  Nonetheless, just briefly consider:

Catastrophic Governance

His policies — anti-energy, anti-business, anti-military, anti-America First — have wrecked the economy, driven gas to over $3.00/gallon, given us the absolute worst illegal immigration crisis in our history, and bankrupted the country. In a warped way, it’s kind of impressive that he’s done that in only a bit over four months.

Leadership Vacuum

No one believes Biden is calling the shots, He’s totally malleable to behind-the-scenes operatives, acting in a confused, unknowing fog, reading as best he can from the teleprompter, and hiding behind his weird “I’ll get in trouble if I answer any more of your questions” excuse.

Made America Weak Internationally

The ayatollahs from Iran, Russia’s Putin, and Xi Jinping of Communist China are licking their chops at the prospect of having their way with poor ‘ol Joe.

Family Corruption

Has there ever been a “First Family” with anywhere near the decades-long, indisputable record of dishonesty, financial misdealings, and outright graft that even approaches that of the Bidens?

Diminished Mental Capacity

For those among this readership who have a compromised older family member, it isn’t merely the grotesquely obvious signs of dementia that mark Biden as severely limited. It’s the more subtle behaviors that betray his overwhelming incapacity. A clear example occurred just recently when the ever-admiring and forever-excusing liberal media caught up with Biden as he was eating an ice cream cone. Breathlessly shouting out, “What flavor?” the media proceeded to float a softball his way, asking if there was any possibility that the Republicans might compromise with him on his infrastructure proposal.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden tries to erase Trump’s ‘America First’ on world stage By Alex Gangitano

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/558023-biden-tries-to-erase-trumps-america-first-on-world-stage

President Biden is seeking to erase former President Trump’s America First agenda from the international stage during his inaugural trip abroad for the Group of Seven (G-7) summit in England this week.

In words and deeds, Biden is sending the signal that America is back on the world stage and that it wants to work in partnership with Western allies on issues ranging from the rise of China and Russia to climate change and the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Biden’s taking a much less isolationist approach [that] will spur that good will and he needs to keep doing that,” said John Hudak, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution.

“This summit is the first big step in showing the world that America is back to the position it once held,” Hudak added.

Instead of demanding that other countries step up their defense spending and NATO commitments and warning that the United States is ready to go it alone, Biden’s first formal action of the trip was to announce an update to the Atlantic Charter with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The charter is a World War II-era document laying out shared commitments from the U.S. and United Kingdom, and the message was America Together, not America First.

“Our revitalized Atlantic Charter, building on the commitments and aspirations set out eighty years ago, affirms our ongoing commitment to sustaining our enduring values and defending them against new and old challenges,” the new joint document states. “We commit to working closely with all partners who share our democratic values and to encountering the efforts of those who seek to undermine our alliances and institutions.”

The new charter is a good example of the kind of change Biden wants to make from Trump, who in most ways is the opposite of his successor.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

DAVID WURMSER David Wurmser. Courtesy. Will an Arab party entering Israel’s government lead the region toward peace or war? David Wurmser

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/why-we-might-be-closer-to-war-than-we-think/

The success of Mansour Abbas represents a catastrophe for powerful interests everywhere. It is to be expected that interested parties with the power to act will work to sabotage him at all costs.

Over the last week, there have been increasing signs that Hamas may be preparing to re-initiate hostilities, starting along the border at a trickle, and then more as they go along. These signs should be taken seriously since the underlying tectonic forces that in part led to the last war are still in place.

And yet, in this particular situation, there is a new dimension that can further fuel the choice towards escalation by Hamas, as well as for the panoply of other actors that previously played a contributing role in detonating the region last month. It is likely that Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, the Joint Arab List in Israel, and Iran and Turkey outside Israel all have a strong common interest in sabotaging the new Israeli government taking shape.

This is most easily done via escalation, particularly because of the above-mentioned forces being threatened by Mansour Abbas and his United Arab List party (Ra’am). It is possible that even Jordan might harbor hostility, not because incoming Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is seen as a symbol of the settler movement, but because it cannot comfortably accept the success of Mansour Abbas.

Why? What does Mansour Abbas represent?

To answer, one must examine what he is not. He is not a dreamy peace processor. Nor is he given to grand theories of regional cooperation or of some contractual permanent change that would demand an alteration of his basic system of Islamic beliefs. No such leader would or could survive in any Arab society.

DAVID'S SLINGSHOT DPS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Over 850 Harvard Affiliates Denounce Antisemitism, ‘Demonization’ of Israel By Dion J. Pierre

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/06/11/over-850-harvard-affiliates-denounce-antisemitism-demonization-of-israel/

Over 850 students, faculty and other affiliates of Harvard University have signed a statement in support of Israel’s “right to self-defense” and the “right of the Jewish people to self-determination,” which also criticized what it called the rise of anti-Israel activism on campus.

The letter comes amid a nationwide spike in antisemitism that included two recent acts of vandalism involving the Harvard Hillel building.

“As members of the Harvard community we stand by the State of Israel in its right to self-defense and by the right of the Jewish people to self-determination,” the letter said.

Circulated on May 28 by the campus group the Harvard Israel Initiative (HII) — and signed by Harvard affiliates such as literature scholar Ruth Wisse, economist Kenneth Rogoff, and Harvard Chaplain and Executive Director of Harvard Hillel Jonah Steinberg — it denounced a rise in anti-Jewish hate crimes and encouraged “civil discourse” when discussing Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Other signatories included social psychologist Jennifer Lerner, attorney Alan Dershowitz, historian Niall Ferguson, and physician Jerome Groopman.

“We are tremendously saddened by the events of the last two weeks, starting with the tragic loss of innocent Israeli and Palestinian life, followed by a frightening spike in reported antisemitic attacks across the country and the globe, including cities such as New York and Los Angeles,” the letter said.