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Latin America: ‘China’s Backyard’ China in Latin America – Part 2 by Judith Bergman

Posted By on November 22nd, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19130/latin-america-china-backyard

In the next two years, between 2022 and 2024, China, according to its joint plan with Latin American and Caribbean states, and as part of its quest to become the world’s global tech leader, envisages providing states in the region with 5,000 government scholarships and 3,000 training places in education and research in the Chinese homeland.

This cooperation also extends to space, as well as nuclear energy and nuclear technology. The plan also aims to strengthen cooperation in 5G telecommunications equipment and artificial intelligence.

Significantly, the action plan also mentions building networks of sister cities and sister provinces between Latin American/Caribbean countries and China.

“Under the administration of Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, the association [for sister-cities] has been revitalized as China seeks to groom local business, political, and media leaders in countries around the world…” — “China’s Influence & American Interests,” a 2018 report by the Working Group on Chinese Influence Activities in the United States, Hoover Institution Press, November 29, 2018.

China’s trade with Latin America reached $450 billion last year, up from $180 billion in 2010. The World Economic Forum has estimated that trade with the region will exceed $700 billion by 2035, more than double what it was in 2000.

Crucially, 21 out of the 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have joined the Belt and Road Initiative. The BRI seeks dramatically to enhance China’s global influence… by making countries worldwide increasingly dependent on China.

Latin America, as one headline noted recently, is fast “becoming China’s backyard.”

China is deepening its involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean, as Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Ma Zhaoxu made clear last year at a summit between China and Latin American and Caribbean states.

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Ctrl+Alt+Delete the Totalitarian State By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on November 22nd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/ctrlaltdelete_the_totalitarian_state.html

There are three government narratives pushed today that are not real: (1) fraud-free elections, (2) a looming climate apocalypse, and (3) a COVID health emergency requiring total government control.  If you see through only one, then you’re not looking hard enough.  Or as Bill Engvall might say, “If you now believe COVID is mostly a hoax but are still terrified of global warming, here’s your sign.”  Conversely, if you do see through them, you’re likely being censored for expressing those points of view.  

Here’s our impasse: when governments claim to have a monopoly on truth, then citizens are expected to accept preposterous fantasies, no matter how much opposing evidence they might see.  The narrative is absolute.  Dissent is forbidden.  Total obedience is the objective.  Last century, free Westerners understood these features as telltale signs of totalitarianism.  Today, much less free Westerners have been taught to embrace — without scrutiny or wisdom — the government’s fairy tales as part of our required, if not sacred, deference to the bureaucratic State’s cult of expertise.  Whether citizens grasp this shift in individual freedom or not, the general rule handed down from governments is stark yet succinct: ask us no questions, and we will tell you no lies!

Westerners desperately need to reboot their systems of government before those systems of government delete the public’s power to make changes ever again.  It is not possible for political leaders to claim that their countries support personal freedom when they snatch that freedom away at the first sneeze, cow fart, or unapproved tweet.  It is not logical for governments to claim that they protect “democracy” when armies of unelected permanent bureaucrats run the modern State.  It is not reasonable for Western nations to claim that they cherish “free thinking” and “free expression” when their technocratic surveillance arms actively censor speech and promote State-approved points of view over all others.

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The gods of diversity are killing the ‘golden age’ of medicine By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on November 22nd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/the_gods_of_diversity_are_killing_the_golden_age_of_medicine.html

Those who came of age in the second half of the 20th century or later, have been blessed to witness a time of extraordinary medical progress. Now, though, thanks to academia’s mindless push for diversity, we are almost certainly on the precipice of a steep decline in the quality of medical care in America.

Beginning in the late 19th century, modern medicine brought us anesthetics and sophisticated germ theory that allowed safe surgeries, antibiotics, the understanding and treatment of chronic diseases, organ transplants, dramatically decreased maternal and child mortality, unimaginably successful treatments for cancer, vision-correcting surgery, and so much more. In the first world, the human life span roughly doubled compared to the lifespan people could expect just 150 years ago. It truly was a time of wonders and miracles.

As medicine grew more sophisticated, doctors’ standing in society increased. Medicine ceased to be an apprentice-type trade and became a high-cachet profession, with gratifying financial awards. By the middle of the 20th century and for several decades thereafter, medical schools were able to limit themselves to the best of the best from every college class. Sure, there were bad doctors, but even if they were bad, they were still smart. (Small consolation, of course, when you’re on the receiving end of malpractice.)

We conservatives knew that socialized medicine threatened all of this and we fought against it for decades. The moment the government takes over medicine, killing the profit motive, it begins rationing care. People have access to doctors; they just don’t have access to treatments that save or improve their lives.

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Jen Psaki: Investigations for Thee But Not for Me By Julie Kelly

Posted By on November 22nd, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/21/jen-psaki-investigations-for-thee-but-not-for-me/

It’s beyond ironic that the mouthpiece for a regime proceeding with yet another punitive and vengeful investigation into Donald Trump wants to be shielded from an inquiry into her own misdeeds.

Former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, much like her old boss, is a big fan of investigations.

From her perch at the podium in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, Psaki routinely endorsed criminal, civil, and congressional inquiries into the events of January 6 and warned the individuals targeted—including Donald Trump and his former aides—that they must comply with the legal process. 

A reporter asked Psaki during her first briefing whether Joe Biden believed Trump should “be held accountable for the Capitol insurrection” on January 6. Calling the four-hour disturbance that afternoon an “horrific event,” Psaki said Joe Biden had spoken with lawmakers about how to proceed. “He is going to leave it to members of Congress to carry out their constitutional duty and determine what the path forward is,” Psaki announced on January 21, 2021.

Psaki later announced that Biden would not extend executive privilege to his predecessor related to the January 6 select committee’s inquisition, giving investigators carte blanche access to all of Trump’s records for most of 2020—most of which had nothing to do with January 6. “We are, we have been working closely with congressional committees and others as they work to get to the bottom of what happened on January 6th, an incredibly dark day in our democracy,” Psaki said in September 2021.

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The Same Old, Same Old Deja Vu By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 22nd, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/columns/victor-davis-hanson/2022/11/22/the-same-old-same-old-deja-vu-n1647817

Attorney General Merrick Garland has just announced the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith. But Smith’s team will not look into the Biden family quid pro quo syndicate nor its incriminating confessionals on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Instead, it will further investigate Donald Trump’s possession of presidential records that were hauled off from Mar-a-Lago, as well as his purported role in the January 6 “insurrection.”

We know the script that will follow because we suffered through it for 22 months and spent $40 million for it under Robert Mueller’s special counsel team.

First, the Smith investigation will bear no resemblance to special counsel John Durham’s probes. The media ignored Durham. His team did not leak to the press. And neither a Washington, D.C. nor northern Virginia jury was ever likely to convict any perceived enemy of Trump.

Second, upon the announcement of Smith’s legal staffers, the media will grow giddy that their resumes portend another “dream team,” “all-stars,” or “a hunter-killer team.”

Puff pieces will blanket the media. They will attest, just like “good Ol’ Bob Mueller,” that the former Obama Justice Department public integrity unit lawyer Smith is “an old hand,” “tough but fair,” “nonpartisan,” and a “prosecutor’s prosecutor.”

Weeks into the investigation, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, or MSNBC will darkly inform their audiences that “unnamed sources close to the investigation tell us that “a bombshell” is about to go off.

Perhaps the “stunning development” will be similar to the fake “walls are closing in” scoop about the conspiratorial pinging in Trump tower from the Alfa Bank in Russia, or the “game-changer” Christopher Steele-fed, pee-pee, Moscow hotel room fable.

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Attorney General Merrick Garland Is Attempting to Obstruct a Congressional Investigation By Greg Byrnes

Posted By on November 22nd, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/columns/gregbyrnes/2022/11/21/attorney-general-merrick-garland-is-attempting-to-obstruct-a-congressional-investigation-n1647697

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint Jack Smith as a special counsel to investigate President Trump’s handling of government documents at Mar-a-Lago as well as January 6 needs to be thoroughly investigated and countered by the incoming GOP House of Representatives. They must study if this rogue Attorney General has committed impeachable offenses and, if so, act quickly to impeach him.

President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s loss of a 100% Democrat-controlled January 6th Committee to Republicans now has all the makings of a Constitutional crisis.

Rather than accepting that the other party is now in charge and allowing a peaceful transfer of investigative powers to the Republicans, the Democrats and the Justice Department have opted to break all norms to stop that. This is about more than Democrats losing control of their beloved “narrative.” The appointment of a special counsel will block the newly installed Republican House from investigating uncomfortable questions about the Justice Department and FBI’s behavior concerning the Capitol riot on January 6.

If there were embedded agents in some of the groups of bad actors responsible for the riot, why was no one warned of the impending attack? Or if they were warned, why did they fail to act? Why were law enforcement and the Justice Department so badly surprised by events? Why, despite President Trump’s offer of 10,000 troops in the weeks before the event, were law enforcement officials not pushing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mayor Muriel Bowser to be forearmed and prepared? Or if they were warned, why did they fail to act?

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Magic Cars The inconvenient facts about electric cars. by John Stossel

Posted By on November 22nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/magic-cars/

Politicians praise electric cars. If everyone buys them, they say, solar and wind power will replace our need for oil.

But that’s absurd.

Here is the rest of my list of “inconvenient facts” about electric cars.

“The future of the auto industry is electric,” says President Joe Biden. He assumes a vast improvement in batteries. Better batteries are crucial because both power plants and cars need to store lots of electric power.

But here’s inconvenient fact 3: Batteries are lousy at storing large amounts of energy.

“Batteries leak, and they don’t hold a lot,” says physicist Mark Mills.

Mills thinks electric cars are great but explains that “oil begins with a huge advantage: 5,000% more energy in it per pound. Electric car batteries weigh 1,000 pounds. Those 1,000 pounds replace just 80 pounds of gasoline.”

But future batteries will be better, I point out.

“Engineers are really good at making things better,” Mills responds, “but they can’t make them better than the laws of physics permit.”

That’s inconvenient fact 4. Miracle batteries powerful enough to replace fossil fuels are a fantasy.

“Because nature is not nice to humans,” explains Mills, “we store energy for when it’s cold or really hot. People who imagine an energy transition want to build windmills and solar panels and store all that energy in batteries. But if you do the arithmetic, you find you’d need to build about a hundred trillion dollars’ worth of batteries to store the same amount of energy that Europe has in storage now for this winter. It would take the world’s battery factories 400 years to manufacture that many batteries.”

Politicians don’t mention that when they promise every car will be electric. They also don’t mention that the electric grid is limited.

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The Misuses of a Colorado Atrocity Redefining decency. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on November 22nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-misuses-of-a-colorado-atrocity/

When the news broke that an armed man had entered Club Q, an “LGBTQ” nightclub in Colorado Springs, at about midnight on Saturday, on the eve of something called the “Transgender Day of Remembrance,” and had proceeded to kill five people and wound at least twenty-five, one thing seemed all but certain. It was too early to know what had motivated the perpetrator, Anderson Lee Aldrich (who apparently was arrested last year, after a “brief standoff with law enforcement,” for making a bomb threat against his mother). But it seemed a safe enough prediction that the usual “LGBTQ” activists and their allies in the media would soon be spinning this atrocity to their advantage.

Sure enough, within a few hours, Colorado’s largest daily, the Denver Post, had posted an article in which one Elizabeth Hernandez linked the murders to “hateful rhetoric directed toward transgender people and the broader LGBTQ community.” The recently re-elected Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, stated Hernandez, “has been vocal against LGBTQ and transgender issues, including in a June tweet saying ‘Take your children to CHURCH, not drag bars’ and a 2021 speech on the House floor during which she warned of ‘young girls across America who will have to look behind their backs as they change in their school locker rooms just to make sure there isn’t a confused man trying to catch a peek.’” Hernandez also noted the controversy surrounding “all-ages drag shows at public libraries and other locations” and a Colorado librarian who was “fired from her job for planning LGBTQ youth programming.”

What do all of these specifics cited by Hernandez have in common? Simple: not a single one of them is about hatred for transgender people or anybody else. They’re all about legitimate questions of public policy.

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The Inflation Reduction Act Comes for Medicare It will cut benefits and increase premiums, upsetting millions of elderly voters. By Casey B. Mulligan and Tomas J. Philipson

Posted By on November 22nd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-inflation-reduction-act-comes-for-medicare-ira-elderly-voters-payments-benefits-cuts-revenue-losses-subsidies-11669060307?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

President Biden has accused Republicans of scheming to cut Medicare. In fact it is his signature legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, that will lead to benefit cuts and premium increases for seniors. Medicare’s popular drug-coverage program is headed for a painful amputation.

The private plans participating in Medicare’s prescription-drug program, known as Part D, currently draw on three sources of revenue to finance prescriptions: out-of-pocket payments from patients, premium payments made by plan members, and subsidies from the federal government. In 2025, under the Inflation Reduction Act, both government subsidies and out-of-pocket payments by patients are scheduled to be cut sharply. The difference will have to be made up by premiums. But the statute inhibits this third revenue source, which is also subsidized, from increasing more than 6%. That’s hardly enough to cover inflation, let alone compensate for the other two revenue losses.

We estimate that beginning in 2025, plan subsidies—specifically, the reinsurance subsidies for the beneficiaries with the most drug spending—will be cut $30 billion, out of revenue that currently totals about $110 billion. With $30 billion less to finance prescription benefits, something will have to give. Plans currently have far too little profit to span the chasm that the Inflation Reduction Act opens between expenses and revenue.

Existing plans have room to cut benefits, although the original Part D statute limits their ability to do so. As plans are under no obligation to take a loss, their other choice is to exit the market, which from the patient’s perspective means that all the benefits disappear. In essence, the Inflation Reduction Act statute may prohibit Part D plans from being economically viable, even if it doesn’t explicitly ban them.

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The Progressive Paradox on Marijuana Tobacco, bad. Vaping, bad. Marijuana, good, for some strange reason.

Posted By on November 22nd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-progressive-paradox-on-marijuana-new-york-weed-kathy-hochul-john-hickenlooper-11669072860?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

New York state’s Cannabis Control Board voted Monday to approve its first 36 licenses to run marijuana dispensaries. It’s another big step toward legal pot sales, though the black market isn’t struggling to meet demand, as every nose in Manhattan can attest. Meantime, the paradox in progressive attitudes toward marijuana continues to grow like skunk weed.

A study published last week in the journal Radiology finds that smokers who used marijuana (often in addition to tobacco), instead of tobacco alone, had higher rates of emphysema, airway inflammation, and other conditions. “There is a public perception that marijuana is safe and people think that it’s safer than cigarettes,” one radiologist told the Journal. “This study raises concerns that might not be true.”

Where might people have gotten the idea that marijuana is safe? To blame politicians for this would vastly overstate their persuasive powers. Yet it’s remarkable how liberal politicians have tried to take a rhetorical puff to fit in with the cultural cool kids. On April 20, which is cannabis culture slang, Twitter was a veritable haze.

“Happy 4/20 Colorado! You’re my best bud,” said Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper.