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January 2021

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

‘Lawyer up, and get out’: FBI first spurned Hunter Biden laptop, says Delaware tech repairman John Solomon

By on January 27th, 2021

http://stupidfrogs.org/articles/lawyer_up_and_get_out.html

John Paul Mac Isaac, the Delaware computer shop owner who unwittingly came into possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop, says an FBI agent initially gave a stern warning to his family when first offered a copy of the explosive evidence about Joe Biden’s son: “You better lawyer up and get out of my office.”

In a wide-ranging interview Monday with Just the News, Isaac described what concerned him most about the contents on the laptop, his extensive efforts to get authorities in law enforcement and Congress to pay attention to it and his anger at the news media, Democrats and even security officials who initially accused him of carrying out a Russian disinformation campaign or trying to make money off the discovery.

U.S. intelligence has determined the laptop contents — now in the hands of the FBI and Congress and part of a criminal tax case — were not Russian disinformation. Isaac said he never took a dime for providing the materials to the FBI, Congress and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, not even when offered reimbursement for the hard drive equipment he used to make copies.

“Well, for somebody who’s not very political, I assume what happened to me was the quintessential political hit job, to have that many people come out, without even talking to me, or having a conversation without doing a single background check,” he told the John Solomon Reports podcast.

“I still feel a little bit upset about that,” he added. “I have people that I’ve known for a long time, they’re convinced that I’m a tool, or I’ve been a pawn or I got huge payout. And it’s completely decimated my business. I had to leave town.”

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China is Winning the Artificial Intelligence Race David Goldman and Handel Jones

By on January 27th, 2021

https://www.newsweek.com/china-winning-artificial-intelligence-race-opinion-1564169

Not only is China growing faster than any other big economy; it’s poised to take the lead in artificial intelligence applications to manufacturing, health care and transportation, leapfrogging the West in key new technologies. President Joe Biden’s chief Asia advisor Kurt Campbell says the U.S. should “balance between cooperation and competition” with China. We’re already far behind on the competition for leadership in a wide range of AI applications—an issue with urgent implications for American policy.

China is well on its way to building a planned 10 million 5G mobile base stations by 2024, wiring virtually the whole country for game-changing technologies. It has already deployed some of them in its response to COVID-19. Sensors connected to smartphones and linked to centralized databases monitor the vital signs of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens and visitors in real time. Three-dimensional facial imaging allows these systems to monitor the mobility of people and contact with others. Artificial intelligence algorithms extract information from these data to identify potential viral hotspots and guide forensic testing and preventive quarantines. China’s effective control over the virus—despite some localized outbreaks—provides further impetus to speed up the adoption of digital heath technology.

The 3D facial recognition component of China’s public health initiatives have drawn international concern. U.S. commentators focus on its implications for social control, but the technology has already been incorporated into a wide range of remote services. With 3D facial recognition, people in China can board trains, buy produce and obtain medical services without physical contact. The majority of the Chinese population is willing to accept the possibility of invasions of privacy provided the benefits are clear.

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

No Impeachment Surprise — Just Dirt Dov Fischer

By on January 27th, 2021

https://spectator.org/trump-impeachment-democrats/

Nancy Pelosi delivered her annual impeachment to the Senate, and the result was exactly as I had predicted in The American Spectator two full weeks ago on January 13: dead on arrival.

There are not two-thirds of the Senate to convict. There never were going to be two-thirds of the Senate to convict. Rather, it all is a sham and a fraud on the American public, who, frankly, are getting exactly what the fools who voted for this House of Representatives and Senate deserve. With people dying of COVID, vaccinations running way behind schedule, shortages in vaccine supplies, a befuddled Joe Biden now telling his voters that his plan to combat COVID basically is the same as Donald Trump’s plan, the focus in Washington is on … an impeachment that is dead on arrival.

Congressional representatives and U.S. senators are paid to do the people’s business. They are paid very well. Taxpayers also pay for the Democrat women in Congress to all buy new white dresses for the State of the Union. Taxpayers pay for their meals, their platinum health care, their air travel around the country and around the world. In return, taxpayers would expect that the people’s needs would be front and center. The current crop of American voters have no one to blame but themselves for the Congress they have — a myopic assemblage of mediocrities driven only by pure hate: hate for conservatives, hate for White people, contempt for the intelligence of Black people, hate for the only cable television station that has a modicum of conservative semblance, hate for talk radio. Just hate.

We saw this Congress’s inaction in action when Pelosi took the gavel from Paul Ryan two years ago. It became a House of cards, that is a House of low-caliber characters. A bunch of jokers in a deck that, to call a spade a spade, has few hearts, fewer diamonds, just insiders in private clubs who consume billions and trillions of tax dollars on nonsense, waste, and silliness. It all is about wasting the day every day, spending other people’s money without fear of an accounting, and making speeches and television appearances for egotistical self-aggrandizement until one day they finally are defeated at the polls and instantly are forgotten.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Dismounting the COVID Tiger The oligarchy’s chosen method of “reopening” after the pandemic shows that it intends to attempt to validate the harm it did over the previous year. Will it work? By Angelo Codevilla

By on January 27th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/26/dismounting-the-covid-tiger/

Riding fear of COVID-19, our oligarchs persuaded millions of Americans to join in masked pantomime, to deliver themselves to something like house arrest, and to blame Donald Trump for their troubles. But as much as the oligarchs enjoyed COVID powers and dreamt of segueing them into a “new normal,” they knew that America could not be locked down forever.

They especially knew, were they to unseat Trump and become responsible for the country, their charges that he had failed to stop the pandemic would come back to haunt them. “Why can’t you stop it?” would be the natural question they would have to face as the virus did what airborne viruses do: spread. Hence, after January 20, dismounting the COVID tiger, albeit gingerly, became the order of the day.

And so it happened, on January 22, Joe Biden spoke the truth: nothing that anyone could do can alter the trajectory of the virus’ spread. 

A few grumbles notwithstanding, there was silence from very same media and “experts” who had accused Trump of responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths because he had not implemented a nationwide test-trace-and-quarantine system. The futility of such measures in preventing an infectious disease from running its course once it has entered a population was as obvious in 2020 as in 2021. But then, denying it served the oligarchy’s prosecution. Affirming it now serves its defense.

Already on January 16, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that his state could not wait to reopen until herd immunity had been reached naturally or through a vaccine, because “If we wait, there will be nothing left to open.” 

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Global warming: Facts vs. media misrepresentation By Jack Hellner

By on January 27th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/global_warming_facts_vs_media_misrepresentation.html

With Joe Biden ramping up the greenie ideology, the history of global warming is worth another look.

All you need to know to understand that the conspiracy is false is to see that the Earth had a substantial, lengthy cooling period from 1945 to 1975.

On the first Earth Day in 1970, after 25 years of cooling, people were scared to death about dire forecasts by “experts,” without any scientific data supporting their predictions, that billions would soon freeze and die of starvation because of a new ice age. The media participated in scaring the public. The predictions were 100% wrong because a little warming resumed as it always does. .

By 1970, there had been around 100 years of exponential growth in oil and coal consumption, the population had risen by several hundred percent and CO2 content had increased substantially. Cars, trucks, planes, combines, tractors, TVs, air conditioners, furnaces and computers had been invented. Most houses now had electricity.

Yet the Earth was cooling so much that billions would die because of cooling despite all these inventions that supposedly cause warming. A child could understand that if a significant period of cooling occurred that oil and humans did not cause warming. But the cultists don’t care about facts or science when they are pushing their radical leftist agenda to destroy jobs and America.  

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Buyer’s Remorse? Let’s Blame the Press By John Green

By on January 27th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/buyers_remorse_lets_blame_the_press.html

In his first week in office President Asterisk has done his old boss proud.  In just six days, lunch bucket Joe has signed 36 executive orders and put tens of thousands of jobs at risk.  He’s cancelled major construction projects like the Keystone XL pipeline and the border wall — resulting in lost jobs for the very unions who endorsed him.  He is reestablishing a moratorium on energy exploration on federal lands and rejoined the Paris Agreement on climate change.  These orders will cause further job losses in the energy sector and lost revenue in states that supported him.  If that were not enough, his relaxation of border control and immigration enforcement will result in an influx of illegal immigrants competing for the remaining jobs.  Luckily, Joe has also thoughtfully issued and order expanding food assistance programs.  Thousands of unemployed workers may need it.

Even though the Harris/Biden administration is in its infancy, it has already triggered a flood of complaints of “buyer’s remorse.”  It seems many who voted for Joe weren’t expecting this.  In the immortal words of Rahm Emanuel, “never let a good crisis go to waste.”  I say we help those with “buyer’s remorse” get over it.  We should give them a scapegoat.  Let’s blame the press.  It wasn’t the voter’s fault — they were misled.

Biden voters were victims of a four-year propaganda campaign to smear Donald Trump and drag the Democrat nominee  — any nominee — across the finish line, truth be damned.

Mark Twain once said, “If you don’t read the papers you’re uninformed.  If you do read the papers you’re misinformed.”  I submit that in this case, the voters have been subjected to both.  Evidence of legacy news media propaganda during the four years of the Trump administration are legion.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany: Meet Angela Merkel’s Second Successor by Soeren Kern

By on January 27th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17000/germany-armin-laschet-merkel

“You get the impression that Armin Laschet still believes in a partnership with Putin’s Russia. He ignores the fact that there simultaneously is both a geopolitical and a value conflict with Moscow. This conflict requires a certain degree of severity, a policy of deterrence and also a policy of sanctions. It is wishful thinking that all foreign policy conflicts can be resolved through dialogue and goodwill.” — Ralf Fücks, former Green Party politician and head of the think tank, Center for Liberal Modernity.

“Mr Laschet’s first priority will be uniting the party. It will not be easy. He beat Mr Merz by 53 to 47 per cent of the vote. There is a large minority in the party who want it to take a clearer conservative direction. When he lost the 2018 leadership contest, Mr Merz retreated. This time, he seems determined to weigh on the party’s future.” — Editorial Board, Financial Times.

“The new CDU chairman faces a difficult task of maintaining coherence in a party that is struggling to find its identity while simultaneously trying to lure voters from the environmentalist Green Party and the right-wing AfD.” — Oliver Hackel, senior financial strategist, Kaiser Partner Privatbank.

“German politics is drifting away from Mrs. Merkel’s breed of consensus. Despite winning a leadership election among delegates to the CDU party conference, Mr. Laschet’s soft foreign-policy views are increasingly at odds with prominent CDU figures who advocate a sterner approach to Russia and China. The Greens are on the rise as a mainstream center-left party on the back of their foreign-policy hawkishness and hostility to crony capitalism at home.” — Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal.

Armin Laschet, premier of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, has been chosen as the new leader of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He is now in a position to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor after general elections this September.

Laschet, a Merkel loyalist and continuity candidate, narrowly beat conservative Friedrich Merz by 521 to 466 votes in a run-off vote by party delegates on January 16. The CDU had previously chosen Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to succeed Merkel, but she stepped down as party leader in January 2020 after a series of regional electoral defeats cast doubt on her ability to retain the chancellorship.

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Turkey and Greece: Still More Peace Talks by Burak Bekdil

By on January 27th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17001/turkey-greece-peace-talks

Ankara and Athens, starting in 2002, held 60 rounds of talks before their exploratory efforts came to a halt in 2016. After a five-year-long pause the rivals agreed to resume talks on January 25, starting the 61st round.

“The idea that a strategic — so-called strategic — partner of ours would actually be in line with one of our biggest strategic competitors in Russia is not acceptable.” — Antony Blinken, President Joe Biden’s then-nominee for Secretary of State, Arab News, January 26, 2021.

“Turkey has adopted a strongly militaristic approach, making efforts toward conflict resolution increasingly unlikely.” — Dimitris Tsarouhas, a professor of international relations, a Scientific Council member of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies in Brussels, and a World Bank consultant, Arab News, January 26, 2021.

When traditional Aegean rivals, Turkey and Greece, agreed to launch “exploratory talks” to resolve their disputes, Iraq’s president was Saddam Hussein, U.S. President George W. Bush called for a regime change in Iraq, 9/11 was only months in the past, the euro had just become the official currency of 12 of the European Union’s members, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the Mars Odyssey had found signs of water ice deposits on Mars.

Ankara and Athens, starting in 2002, held 60 rounds of talks before their exploratory efforts came to a halt in 2016. After a five-year-long pause, the rivals agreed to resume talks on January 25, starting the 61st round. Rounds 61 and onward will probably be the most fragile of all peace talks for a number of reasons.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

To Hell With Unity It is not good for the country to pretend that the Left will respect your rights as Americans if you just let them have their way with the law. By Dan Gelernter

By on January 27th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/26/to-hell-with-unity/

The recent betrayal by Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is a reminder that the ruling class in Washington, D.C. values nothing so highly as being the ruling class in Washington, D.C. Offer them a choice between maintaining a “good working relationship with their colleagues across the aisle” on the one hand, and democracy on the other, and they’ll stick with their colleagues: Their daily lives change little no matter who is in power. 

Their priority is that they be able to chat amicably at parties with people who just called them liars on cable TV. It’s just politics, after all. It’s just a game. They don’t feel the effects of their policies because they live in the one city in America that gets wealthier when the economy gets worse.

But ordinary people will feel the effects. Joe Biden has already rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement. He has rejoined the World Health Organization. He has suspended federal oil and gas permitting and canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. He has stopped work on the border wall, suspended deportations for 100 days, and announced his intention of a path to legalization (i.e., a path to ballooning the Democratic Party’s voter rolls) for millions of illegals in the country. He signed a mandate requiring masks on federal land. He signed a bizarre executive order forcing schools to accept biological men on women’s sports teams. He reversed Trump’s ban on Chinese involvement in the U.S. power grid. And he also reversed Trump’s order mandating lower prices for insulin and epinephrine pens. Biden will also be raising your taxes—but that takes time. Everything above is just executive action. 

Imagine how great it will be once the Democratic House and Senate start pumping out unopposed legislation. But, you know, Mitch and Lindsey will still be okay hanging out with the Democrats after work because they were able to close ranks over the issue of people being angry at them about the election. Unity is wonderful. 

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Judge Slaps Down Biden’s Deportation Freeze Katie Pavlich

By on January 27th, 2021

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/01/26/judge-slaps-down-bidens-deportation-freeze-n2583742

A federal judge has slapped down President Biden’s 100 day deportation freeze for illegal aliens, ruling in favor of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sued against the measure. “A federal judge on Tuesday barred the U.S. government from enforcing a 100-day deportation moratorium that is a key immigration priority of President Joe Biden,” the Associated Press reports. “U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton issued a temporary restraining order sought by Texas, which sued on Friday against a Department of Homeland Security memo that instructed immigration agencies to pause most deportations. Tipton said the Biden administration had failed ‘to provide any concrete, reasonable justification for a 100-day pause on deportations.'”

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