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Punished in Hong Kong for Texting the Press A pro-democracy lawmaker is denied bail for speaking to the WSJ.

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/punished-in-hong-kong-for-texting-the

China wants to silence Hong Kongers even as it persecutes them. A court judgment released Friday shows that a judge penalized former pro-democracy lawmaker and journalist Claudia Mo for speaking to Western journalists, including our own Jillian Melchior.

Police arrested Ms. Mo, along with nearly the entire opposition movement, in January. She and 46 others are charged with conspiracy to commit subversion under the national security law for organizing or participating in an informal pro-democracy primary election last July. Judge Esther Toh denied Ms. Mo bail in April, and the world learned why on Friday.

The national security law prohibits “collusion” with vaguely defined foreign forces and states that defendants may not receive bail “unless the judge has sufficient grounds” to believe that they “will not continue to commit acts endangering national security.” As a reason to keep Ms. Mo behind bars, prosecutor Maggie Yang described Ms. Mo’s WhatsApp correspondence with these pages, the New York Times, Bloomberg and the BBC.

In a court filing explaining her denial of bail, Judge Toh quotes from an Oct. 1, 2020, conversation Ms. Mo had with Ms. Melchior about 12 Hong Kongers who were captured after they tried to escape to Taiwan by boat.

Ms. Mo told Ms. Melchior: “The detention and treatment of the 12 Hong Kong protesters serve as the ultimate warning and threat to Hongkongers about what one can face if you’re caught. The new security law and the spate of arrests have worked as a scare tactic, probably fairly successfully—at sending a persistent political chill around the city.” Every word of that is true, and it was hardly a secret.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Soul of Black Conservatism Thomas Sowell has spent a lifetime challenging the orthodoxy on race, economics and more—and produced an impressive body of scholarship along the way. By Jason Riley

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-soul-of-black-conservatism-11622226565?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

“Mr. Riley is a Journal columnist, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and author of “Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell,” from which this article is adapted.”

Economist Thomas Sowell has grown accustomed to a certain type of media query, usually from white interviewers. They want to know how, as a black conservative, he has dealt with criticism from fellow blacks. Charlie Rose once asked: “How was it, though, for you . . . to be an African-American man respected by a cross-section of your peers and yet be so against the grain of fellow African-Americans?”

Mr. Sowell, 90, usually responds by challenging the premise. “I don’t know if we can say [that I go] ‘against the grain of fellow African-Americans,’ ” he told Mr. Rose. “You mean fellow African-American intellectuals. But I don’t think African-American intellectuals are any more typical of African-Americans than white intellectuals are of whites.”

In another interview, Mr. Sowell told C-Span’s Brian Lamb that black strangers regularly stop him in public and compliment his views: “When I checked out of my hotel this morning, the black security guard came over and said, ‘Are you Sowell?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and he shook my hand warmly and we walked—he walked me the length of the corridor and talked about this and about that. . . . So, it’s not Sowell versus blacks. It’s the black intellectuals.”

There is a long history of conflating the interests of black Americans with those of black organizations, black journalists, black academics and other elites. The media lazily continues to turn to these groups, from the NAACP to Black Lives Matter, as if they speak for all black people.

In December 1980, Mr. Sowell headlined the “Black Alternatives” conference in San Francisco. Its goal was to showcase the variety of perspectives among black politicians, intellectuals and civil-rights activists. “The people who were invited,” he began his keynote address, “are people who are seeking alternatives, people who have challenged the conventional wisdom on one or more issues, people who have thought for themselves instead of marching in step and chanting familiar refrains. . . . We have come through a historic phase of struggle for basic civil rights—a very necessary struggle, but not sufficient. The very success of that struggle has created new priorities and new urgencies. There are economic realities to confront and self-development to achieve, in the schools, at work, in our communities.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Nikole Hannah-Jones considering legal action against UNC following tenure flap: by By Kate Murphy and Lucille Sherman

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article251727288.html

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones is considering legal action against UNC-Chapel Hill and its Board of Trustees over the failure to give her tenure, according to a letter to state lawmakers obtained by The News & Observer on Thursday.

The potential lawsuit comes as Hannah-Jones has sparked national controversy over the past week. Some think conservative politicians may be behind the effort not to grant her tenure as UNC’s Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

Outraged faculty, students, alumni, professional journalists and scholars have tied the decision to Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer-Prize winning work on The 1619 Project, which explores the legacy and history of Black Americans and slavery.

Hannah-Jones is set to join the UNC-CH faculty this summer with a five-year, fixed-term contract that does not include tenure, even though previous Knight Chairs in the journalism school have been tenured.

In a letter informing North Carolina lawmakers of their duty to preserve records related to Hannah-Jones’s hiring, the attorneys from the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., Levy Ratner PC, and Ferguson, Chambers & Sumter, P.A. said they are representing Hannah-Jones “in connection with the failure of the Board of Trustees (the “Board”) to consider and approve her application for tenure,” the letter says.

“We are evaluating all available legal recourse to fully vindicate Ms. Hannah-Jones’s rights, including possibly initiating a federal action against UNC, the Board, and/or affiliated entities and individuals,” the letter says.

Lawmakers have a “legal duty to maintain, preserve, retain, protect, and not destroy, alter or manipulate any and all documents and data, both electronic and hard copy,” relevant to Hannah-Jones’s potential claims, the letter said.

UNC-Chapel Hill also received a letter from attorneys representing Hannah-Jones, but leaders had no additional comment, according to Joel Curran, vice chancellor for university communications.

‘I am obligated to fight back’

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Byron York Second thoughts about voting for Joe Biden by Byron York,

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-second-thoughts-about-voting-for-joe-biden

It was well known during the presidential campaign that many Biden voters were happier about voting against Donald Trump than voting for Joe Biden. A Monmouth University poll taken a couple of weeks after the election found that 57 percent of Biden voters reported being happy with his victory, while 73 percent said they were happy that Trump lost. So a significant number of them voted more against Trump than for Biden.

That sense of ambivalence about Biden has lasted into his presidency. A new Fox News poll asked the question, “Are you satisfied with how you voted in the 2020 presidential election, or do you wish you had voted differently?” Ninety-one percent of Biden voters said they were satisfied. Among Democrats, 89 percent said they were satisfied. Of people who call themselves liberals, 85 percent were satisfied. While those numbers are high, they are still lower than the last two winning candidates in the early months of their presidencies. In April 2017, 97 percent of Trump voters said they were satisfied with their vote, while in April 2009, 93 percent of Obama voters said they were satisfied.

There appears to be a growing concern among some voters that Biden is not governing the way he campaigned. During his run for the White House, Biden presented himself as a “centrist,” and much media coverage happily went along. But once in office, Biden has pushed massive spending proposals to remake America. He has not uttered a word of protest when admiring media commentators compared him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, Democrats who succeeded in passing massive proposals to remake America.

In short, Biden is pushing more change than some of his voters want. The change they wanted was to get rid of Trump, not elect a new FDR.

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

A Sinking Ship of State Drowns Everyone by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17415/sinking-ship-of-state

To be clear, the spending bill is actually the creation of a national debt so massive that it has the means to destabilize a democracy dependent on a functioning economy.

For the Chinese Communist Party, seeking to master the 21st Century as the one global superpower, it represents a strategic victory without so much as firing a single bullet. They know that an economically weakened America cannot possibly sustain its military leadership when it is burdened with paying down a massive debt. Our allies and unaligned nations recognize this threat as well, and will reinvent their relationship with China if they believe America’s best days are in the past.

What makes the Administration believe that Corporate America would not respond with massive restructuring to avoid a confiscatory tax bill — or passing the added cost on to the consumer, or moving the company’s headquarters offshore to a country with a lower corporate rate — to avoid the threat of losing its international competitive edge? Corporations have good accountants, too.

Few debate the idea that our nation’s infrastructure is in need of serious attention but the level of political dishonesty in characterizing the Biden plan as “infrastructure” has even made many in his own party queasy. Significant portions of the bill are earmarked for “environmental” agendas and seeming favors to campaign donors, such as billions in subsidies for electric vehicles. The proposed bill cries out for more sunlight and vast quantities of disinfectant.

This recipe for an economic apocalypse comes at a time when new job creation has stagnated and the specter of a serious inflation has begun to emerge…. As historians will tell you if we have the wisdom to listen, no one escapes the devastation of a debtor nation. No one.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden keeps rewarding the world’s villains

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://nypost.com/2021/05/28/biden-keeps-rewarding-the-worlds-villains/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=mail_app

President Joe Biden sure has a knack for rewarding the world’s . . . villains.

Take Hamas, which just agreed to a cease-fire for the faceoff it started by launching hundreds, eventually thousands, of rockets at Israeli civilians.

Even before that, Biden dropped the Trump policy of refusing aid to the Palestinian Authority until it ends its support of terrorism, promising $250 million in assistance — in potential violation of the Taylor Force Act, since the PA continues to pay “salaries” to imprisoned terrorists and the survivors of ones who died in the act.

This week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken promised more aid, upping the total to $360 million, theoretically to help rebuild in Gaza. Yet even State admits there’s “no guarantee” Hamas won’t divert the money to, for example, rebuilding its tunnels for terrorists to sneak into Israel.

And standing behind Hamas is Iran, which paid for most of the rockets launched from Gaza (and likely those launched from Lebanon and Syria during the 11-day flareup, as well). But Team Biden continues to try to restore the Obama nuclear deal with Tehran, ending sanctions and so giving the regime countless billions more to spend on sponsoring terror.

This when the deal’s better clauses — the ones that actually slow Iran’s drive to become a nuclear power — expire in just a few years, at which point the accord actually legitimizes Tehran’s nuclear work. And the International Atomic Energy Agency chief says Iran is enriching uranium up to purity levels that “only countries making bombs are reaching.”

Meanwhile, the president has seen fit to schedule a summit this summer with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, as well as waive sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will increase Germany’s dependenceon Russian natural gas and remove Ukraine’s ability to stop Russia’s gas sales to Europe the next time he decides to chop off a piece of that country.

Quite a favor for a guy whom Biden pointedly called a “killer” and whose interference (most Democrats believe) put Donald Trump in the White House. And soon after Russia-based hackers cyberattacked a US pipeline and created major gas shortages here — followed by new cyberassaults on federal agencies by hackers linked to Russian intelligence.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Oldest Hatred Now Fulminates and Flourishes at 1600 By Joan Swirsky,

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.thepostemail.com/2021/05/28/the-oldest-hatred-now-fulminates-and-flourishes-at-1600/

In February, not two weeks into the, ahem, presidency of Joe Biden, I described in my article, “Joe’s Jews,” the appointments he made of 11 longtime Jew haters and Israel loathers to key positions in his cabinet/regime.

A month later, in my article “More about Joe and the Jews,” I described 12 more Jew haters and Israel loathers that Joe appointed to key positions in his cabinet/regime.

There have been many other alarmingly similar appointments since then, making it clear to even the most casual observer that the Biden White House has a particularly hostile––even hateful––attitude toward Jews and their ancient homeland Israel, combined with a perverse infatuation with and allegiance to any group or individual intent on destroying the Jewish state.

There is no doubt that Biden’s presence in the Oval Office has been interpreted by these career haters and organized thugs as an unmistakable nod of approval to continue and even expand on the tsunami of anti-Semitism now sweeping the entire globe––from the contamination of most American colleges and universities to brutal physical assaults of Jews  in the streets of New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and around the world––a phenomenon writer Victor Rosenthal elaborates upon in chilling detail––to condemnation of Israel by the Irish parliament and other governments to the racist obscenities vomited out routinely by Democrat members of the U.S. Congress. 

AND THE BEAT GOES ON

In fact, Joe Biden and his entire coterie/staff/cabinet/appointees of left-wing, blatantly anti-Semitic radicals, demonstrate their noxious racism on a daily basis, notwithstanding his boilerplate pronouncements about support for Israel…at the exact same time he embraces, applauds and funds Israel’s mortal enemies. Want proof? Here is the very very short list:

MORE HEADLINES Comments turned off

MORE HEADLINES MAY 28, 2021

Posted By on May 28th, 2021

Biden State Dept: “No Guarantees” Gaza Aid Won’t Boost Hamas’s Terror Arsenal. https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/biden-state-dept-no-guarantees-gaza-aid-wont-boost-hamass-terror-arsenal/

Who Do Iranian American Advocacy Organizations Really Represent? https://thejewishvoice.com/2021/05/256470/

Xi Jinping: ‘China Supports Iran’s Reasonable Demands’ for Reviving Nuclear Deal https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2021/05/25/xi-jinping-china-supports-irans-reasonable-demands-reviving-nuclear-deal/

 

‘Tiktok intifada’: Videos Of Violent Mobs Attacking Jews Sweep The Internet https://www.dailywire.com/news/tiktok-intifada-videos-of-violent-mobs-attacking-jews-sweep-the-internet?

Hamas’s forever war against Israel has a glitch, and it isn’t Iron Dome https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamass-forever-war-against-israel-has-a-glitch-and-it-isnt-iron-dome/

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Coming Soon: China’s Navy Patrolling Off New York by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on May 28th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17414/coming-soon-china-navy-patrolling-off-new-york

Chinese planners are not only thinking of the continent [Africa], they are also eyeing islands in the Atlantic, specifically Terceira, one of the Azores.

On that island, part of Portugal, there is a port and, of even greater interest, Air Base No. 4. Better known as Lajes Field, the facility is jointly operated by the U.S. Air Force and its Portuguese counterpart.

If China controlled the base, the Atlantic would no longer be secure…. Chinese planes could patrol the northern and central portions of the Atlantic and thereby cut air and sea traffic between the U.S. and Europe. Beijing would also be able to deny access to the nearby Mediterranean Sea.

Pentagon budget cutters have been scaling back activities at Lajes, making it a “ghost base.” As a result, Lajes is ripe for China to take it over.

China could get a base even closer than [Lajes]. About 90 miles east of Palm Beach, on Grand Bahama Island, a Hong Kong-based business is spending about $3 billion on a deep-water container facility, the Freeport Container Port.

Sri Lanka is perhaps the model for China’s militarization of the Bahamas. In addition to the overly large facility in Freeport, there is a Chinese-funded port on Abaco Island, also part of the Bahamas. The port in Abaco is essentially useless from a commercial point of view and could fall into Beijing’s hands.

China, therefore, could have two naval bases close to Florida, unless the Biden administration moves fast to block Chinese penetration of the Bahamas.

At the moment, America is, with trade and investment, strengthening a hostile Chinese regime, which has declared the U.S. to be its enemy. Last year, America’s two-way trade with China totaled $560.1 billion.

China is scouting for a naval base on the west coast of Africa. In the near future, therefore, Chinese ships could be regularly patrolling off America’s East Coast.

In recent testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, General Stephen Townsend, commander of U.S. Africa Command, has been sounding the alarm.

At the moment, China’s only offshore military base is in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. The facility is near some of the world’s busiest shipping routes, including those going through the Suez Canal.

Townsend believes the People’s Liberation Army Navy is surveying locations on Africa’s west coast, from Mauritania in the north to Namibia in the south. “Now they’re casting their gaze to the Atlantic coast and wanting to get such a base there,” the general told the Associated Press.

Africa is important in its own right. “Located at the crossroads of the world, Africa watches over strategic choke points including the Strait of Gibraltar, the Strait of Sicily, the Red Sea, the Bab al Mandeb, and the Mozambique Channel,” General Townsend points out in a publicly released 2021 Posture Statement for Congress. “The land mass of Africa is larger than the United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe combined.”

The African continent is home to 11 of the 25 fast-growing economies and is the world’s most demographically vital region.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Just Who Made Obama’s Birth Certificate an Issue? By Jack Cashill

Posted By on May 28th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/just_who_made_obamas_birth_certificate_an_issue.html

In his controversial new book on the 2020 election, Battle For The Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump. Edward-Isaac Dovere repeats a canard that has become something of a staple of Democratic mythology.

According to Dovere, in November 2020, then-president Barack Obama had a hard time making sense out of Hillary Clinton’s loss “to a man he thought of as a moronic carnival barker.”  Dovere traced Obama’s grudge against Donald Trump to the birth certificate issue.

Obama, writes Dovere, “would never forgive [Trump] for turning a fringe obsession with his birth certificate into an issue he’d had to address from the White House briefing room in 2011.”

Dovere errs on several counts.  Trump was not the one who turned the birth certificate into an issue.  Obama was.  Nor did Obama have to address the issue from the White House.  He could have easily settled it in his attorney’s office three years earlier.  More importantly, perhaps, it was not the birth certificate that provoked Obama’s wrath.  It was Trump’s ability to see Obama the same way Obama saw himself — as a fraud.

In the way of background, a week prior to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, attorney Philip Berg filed a federal suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania challenging Obama’s constitutional eligibility to be president.  A Democrat and former deputy attorney general for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Berg expected to be taken seriously.  He wasn’t.  The media expressed zero interest in his suit.