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Will Coronavirus Kill the European Union? Alberto Alesina Francesco Giavazzi

Posted By on March 28th, 2020

https://www.city-journal.org/covid-19-european-union

Covid-19 may tear apart the European Union. The new crisis arrives after years of populist pressure on the EU from around Europe, with many asking whether the idea of a union was wrong from the start. The virus will ratchet up the tension.

Europeans fought one another for centuries, with increasing cruelty, until 1945. At the end of the Second World War, most of Europe had been destroyed by aerial bombings, and populations had experienced suffering unimaginable to most people today. The project of a European Union was born of the motto: “No more wars among us.”

But there is a big leap from “peace” to a United States of Europe, which would require significant conditions, including minimum agreement about major social issues and a willingness to share resources. Europeans from the EU’s founding countries already share attitudes and moral preferences on topics of fundamental importance for communal living—freedom of thought and of religion; economic freedom; the role of the state vs. the role of the market; gender equality, gay rights, divorce and abortion rights; and attitudes about child-rearing.

But the second condition for a workable union is that its citizens agree to redistribute income across borders, and that, when one country is hit by a shock, the other countries share part of the risk and part of the pain. Moreover, when some common shock arises, the members of the union should agree to take coordinated action and to redistribute the costs. So far, these elements have been lacking, or have been imperfectly handled.

On one side, self-declared virtuous northern European countries refuse to use their savings to help their supposedly lazy southern European counterparts, in a continental version of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. It’s unfair to withhold aid from “grasshopper” countries now suffering from a pandemic that has nothing to do with their historically irresponsible fiscal behavior. Northern European countries tend to think that the “unethical” behavior of the South—accruing debt, tolerating corruption—is to blame for any problem. Symmetrically, southern European countries tend to downplay their own responsibilities and imperfections, while blaming northern Europeans for their self-centeredness and greed.

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The West Needs to Wake Up to China’s Duplicity by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on March 28th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15804/china-duplicity

In an article in Xinhua, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpieces, Beijing threatened to halt pharmaceutical exports, after which America would be “plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus… — Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health, Council on Foreign Relations, Twitter, March 4, 2020.

China’s leaders are probably hoping that you cannot challenge a powerhouse that is selling you most of your vital medications.

“Hidden behind declarations of solidarity, China plans to buy out our troubled companies and infrastructure” — Bild, March 19, 2020.

Italy, a country hit hard by China’s coronavirus pandemic, is now at the center of a strategic Chinese propaganda campaign. Beijing has sent doctors and supplies to Italy and is doing the same all over Europe. In Italy you can see posters saying, “Go, China!” China is trying to buy our silence and complicity. Sadly, that is already taking place.

China is not helping at this point out of “solidarity”. The Chinese regime is now seeking to portray itself as the world’s savior. Beijing, at the beginning of the pandemic, did not care about the lives of even its own people: it was busy censoring the news.

“The West is so tolerant, passive, accommodating and naive towards Beijing. Westerners… are seduced like an old man in front of a young girl…. Europe shows all its weakness. It does not realize that the Chinese offensive threatens its freedom and values”. — Liao Yiwu, Chinese writer exiled in Berlin, Le Point International, April 6, 2019.

The Chinese Communist Party is the “central threat of our times”, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo astutely said in January. Back then, coronavirus was already spreading throughout China and over the world; the Communist Party’s attempt to hide the epidemic proved that Pompeo was more than right. “My concern is that this cover-up, this disinformation that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in, is still denying the world the information it needs so that we can prevent further cases or something like this from recurring again”, Pompeo added this week.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, POLITICS Comments turned off

Joe Biden’s picks for the first female Veep Cockburn

Posted By on March 28th, 2020

https://spectator.us/joe-biden-picks-first-female-veep/

Cockburn attended Joe Biden’s virtual press conference on Wednesday afternoon. As he struggled to keep his eyes open, he noticed a small piece of paper by Biden’s elbow — a list of names, written in a shaky hand. So Cockburn screenshotted it, then turned his desktop upside down. Here’s Joe Biden’s shortlist for America’s first female vice president: 

Eleanor Roosevelt

Why sandbag the Senate when you can handbag it? Mrs Roosevelt is a rising star of the Democratic left’s woke wing. She’s never seen in public without her handbag, and it’s crammed with big plans for the post-COVID-19 bounce-back. The Whalemen’s Union has already endorsed her proposal to bring American industry back from China, starting with a WPA-style program to revive the corset-making industry. She’s also planning for an all-American 5G network made from hemp cables, and she’s working with Elon Musk on low-carbon public transport by horse and cart.

Nina Simone

Fiery folk and jazz piano-basher Simone was an early supporter of Biden’s bold plan to put a record player in the home of every Negro family. As president, Biden will resume the hallowed tradition, begun in the Obama years and sadly abandoned during the Trump interregnum, of tweeting out the presidential playlist on public holidays. Vice President Simone will bring youthful pep and classical chops to Biden’s list of favorite 78s. Goodbye Perry Como, hello Harry Belafonte!

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2020 Census Asks For Your Racial Identity, But Not If You’re A Citizen Ben Weingarten

Posted By on March 28th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/27/2020-census-asks-for-your-racial-identity-but-n

How can we square the government’s willingness to ask us about race and origin with its unwillingness to ask about something as fundamental as citizenship?

Your government cares about how you “identify,” but not whether you are a citizen. This asinine fact is illustrated by a single question in the 2020 U.S. census, just another sign of the administrative state run amok. As fellow Federalist contributor Kyle Sammin highlights in a recent article, question No. 9 of the census asks for respondents’ race and origin.

That a society that has at least strived for color-blindness abides the federal government asking about race is in and of itself troubling. It amounts to the enshrining and legitimizing of identity politics in our political system — not that it wasn’t already baked into the government cake in myriad ways.

But the identity-obsessed bureaucrats in the administrative state, buoyed by like-minded interest groups, go even further when they request “origin” in conjunction with race, in the sense of how respondents “identify,” — “Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese,” and so on, in the Census Bureau’s words.

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Sanctions in a time of Pandemic By Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on March 28th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/sanctions_in_a_time_of_pandemic.html

The Islamic Republic of Iran is fighting the Wuhan virus with its usual obfuscation, lies, denials, and accusations. Calling the virus a concerted effort by the U.S. and Israel to infect Iran, the government has demanded an end to Western sanctions – and money, lots of money — because, it says, American sanctions are preventing medical supplies from entering the country.

The first claim is nonsense and the second claim is nonsense.  

Sanctions are aimed at reducing the amount of money Iranian government officials and entities have to engage in nuclear weapons development and the sponsorship of terrorism. With limited resources, they are supposed to weigh malign behavior on the one hand, and the needs of the Iranian people on the other. Thus far, the Iranian government has chosen the first hand. Because sanctions are not aimed at the general Iranian public, there is, and has always been, a medical exemption — an existing EU importation mechanism was augmented in February with a Swiss channel.

The website Iran International was reported to have seen documents indicating that in mid-January, “Fardavar Azma (an) Iranian company, which is the exclusive representative of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, announced its readiness to import coronavirus test kits.” In early February, agents representing South Korean companies said they were prepared to “import test kits from South Korea.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Covid-19: a glimpse of the dystopia greens want us to live in This pandemic has shown us what life would be like if environmentalists got their way. Brendan O’Neill *****

Posted By on March 28th, 2020

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/03/25/covid-19-a-glimpse-of-the-dystopia-greens-want-us-to-live-in/

Greens just can’t help themselves. As the rest of us do what we can to tackle or withstand the Covid-19 crisis, they treat it as a sign, a warning from nature, a telling-off to hubristic, destructive mankind. The speed with which they have folded this pandemic into their misanthropic narrative about humanity being a pox on the planet has been shocking, but not surprising.

Right from the top of the UN, they have been promoting their backward belief that this virus is a reprimand from nature. Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, says ‘nature is sending us a message’ with this pandemic and other recent disasters, including bushfires in Australia and locust invasions in Kenya. Of course nature is doing no such thing, because nature is not a sentient being, however much the new religion of environmentalism might fantasise that it is.

The Guardian reports that Andersen thinks humanity’s ‘destruction of the natural world for farming, housing and mining’ is making pandemics more likely. In short, human growth, modern society itself, is now getting its comeuppance. We think we can farm and mine and, erm, build houses as we see fit, but here comes nature with her punishment: a terrible disease. This is positively Biblical. Gaia is God in this scenario, coming to punish us for our sins.

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Coronavirus may kill noxious classroom leftism By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 28th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/coronavirus_may_kill_noxious_classroom_leftism.html

“Because parents and taxpayers are paying for higher education, Kirk is right that they should have a chance to see what academics such as Bugden are doing. At a guess, roughly half the population, especially taxpayers, will find it illuminating to see where their money is going.”

Leftism started creeping into American colleges and universities beginning in the 1930s. In the 1960s, it blossomed into the Free Speech and Anti-War movements. By the 1990s, it had morphed into censorious political correctness. And in the 2000s, America’s institutions of higher education had turned into hard-left organizations with huge administrative staffs, most of whom seemingly were dedicated to ensuring that students graduated directly into the arms of the Democrat Party.

This post isn’t the place for “chapter and verse” evidence about the overall leftism in academia. The old Encyclopedia Britannica probably wouldn’t be long enough. However, here are a few data points to support the claim that there’s a leftist tilt in academia.

First, Republican are almost extinct on campuses:

An extensive study of 8,688 tenure-track professors at 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. published by the National Association of Scholars found that the ratio of faculty members registered as Democrats compared to those registered Republican is now a stunning 10.4 to 1. If two military colleges that are technically described as “liberal arts colleges” are removed from the calculations, the ratio is 12.7 to 1.

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Suffering from existential despair, the NYT found itself a new scapegoat By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 28th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/suffering_from_existential_despair_the_nyt_found_itself_a_new_scapegoat.html

One can feel the existential anguish oozing off of every page and pixel at The New York Times. That’s not because coronavirus is approaching apocalyptic proportions, with mass die-offs comparable to the year 1348 when the Black Death was at its apex. Instead, the Times is confronting a different problem: President Donald Trump’s poll numbers are doing very well. His recent town hall was the most-watched town hall in cable history. His daily press conferences enthrall so many people that the media are desperate to stop televising them.

Clearly, the Times had to bring out the big guns to ensure that Americans understand that, not only is Trump the ultimate “Orange Man Bad,” but also that his supporters must continue to be recognized as the “Deplorables” they are. To that end, the Times published one of the most vicious opinion pieces ever seen in its pages, and that’s saying a lot.

Katherine Stewart has a bee in her bonnet, and that bee is her hatred for Christianity. She’s written a book with the give-away title, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. That makes her the perfect person to write an opinion piece stating that “The Religious  Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response: Trump’s response to the pandemic has been haunted by the science denialism of  his ultraconservative religious allies.”

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The House Democrats’ Coronavirus Extortion Gambit Backfires By Dan McLaughlin

Posted By on March 28th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-house-democrats-coronavirus-extortion-gambit-backfires/?utm_source=

The House’s voice vote passing the Senate’s version of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill puts the final nail in the coffin of House Democrats’ deeply misguided effort to pass their own version of the bill, an effort that delayed the badly needed relief package by days. Taking a cue from Majority Whip James Clyburn’s argument that “This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision,” the 1,119-page House bill was larded with progressive policy priorities on topics with little or no connection to the pandemic: carbon emissions, corporate board diversity, federally imposed rules for early voting and voter registration, collective bargaining, a minimum wage hike, a Postal Service bailout, student loan forgiveness, permanent changes to Medicaid and Obamacare, minority-owned credit unions, funding for the arts, and many, many more.

 

Anyone who has followed Washington politics for any period of time knows that the habit of sticking unrelated goodies into big, must-pass bills is both longstanding and bipartisan. Every bill of this nature, especially one so massive and sprawling, will have a little gift here for some policy agenda, a payoff there for a favored constituency, and a giveaway, or several, for important donors. But what was striking here was the sheer piggishness of the grab. The House Democrats’ bill read less like an appropriation than like an entire presidential campaign platform, wedged into a bill that was supposed to pass a Senate and White House controlled by the opposite party. The point of cramming favors into a bill like this is to ensure passage of the favor, not sink the bill. And sink it did, like the soldiers of Hernán Cortés who drowned fleeing Tenochtitlan because they had loaded their armor with gold looted from its treasury.

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Goodbye, Green New Deal By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on March 28th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/goodbye-green-new-deal/

After a couple of weeks of great economic sacrifice, it’s already proving hard for Americans to take. No one will sign up for a lifetime of it.

What will happen next with the coronavirus epidemic is unknown, but it seems certain to claim one very high-profile victim: the so-called Green New Deal.

Good riddance.

The current crisis in the U.S. economy is, in miniature but concentrated form, precisely what the Left has in mind in response to climate change: shutting down large sectors of the domestic and global economies through official writ, social pressure, and indirect means, in response to a crisis with potentially devastating and wide-ranging consequences for human life and human flourishing.

What is under way right now in response to the epidemic is in substance much like the Green New Deal and lesser versions of the same climate-change agenda: massive new government spending, political control of critical industries, emergency protocols modeled on wartime practice, etc.

But the characters of the two crises are basically different.