Off to attend a funeral and then To Hiton Head. Have a great weekend.
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Obama goes to Africa to lecture us on what he failed to do. Typical double speak but always with a prompter. (See 1 below.)
And:
For better or worse what "deplorables" wanted they have gotten and for those who have watched elites take America down hill in a variety of ways it is refreshing.
For those who live in their cocoon, for those who never stop finding fault, for those who talk the talk but never actually walked the walk, for those whose theories never panned out because there was never enough money to solve the unsolvable, and for those who believed winning was everything, even if it divided us, Trump is and will always remain their enemy.
That said, neither will Trump prove to be America's greatest saviour. Anyone who challenges what has become acceptable, anyone who questions the effectiveness of what has proven no longer works or serves the interests it was intended to serve, anyone who has a lot of personal baggage cannot win the hearts of minds of a diverse nation.
Particularly is this so if the mass media is aligned against you.
What this person can do is cause us to question and from that positive change can occur and , in the end, long after he has left the scene, perhaps that will be Trump's enduring legacy, ie. he came, he saw, he disrupted and mostly for the better. Why? Because he made up look in the mirror and see reality and we forced ourselves to reason.(See 1a below.)
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China spreads it's claws. (See 2 below.)
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Is anti-Semitism against white's supplanting that against Jews?
Have elitists and intellectual snobs re-directed their aim as they look down their barrels? Is "whitey" soon to become an endangered species and the object of rising suppressed prejudice? (See 3 below.)
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I have not commented on the market in quite some time.
I personally believe a sector shift is starting to occur and that eventually government will have to restrain technology because the Fang's are getting more powerful and controlling. Politicians cannot allow their grits to be eaten by others.
I bot some KO several months ago on the premise it was a laggard and it has now begun to respond to increased interest and perhaps management will begin to address the structural problems and shifting demand away from sugar content etc. Not sure I will hold for longer term.
Still favor health care because breakthroughs that solve real health issues continue to be a good bet and the stocks are not outrageously expensive. Trump can talk their pricing down but the industry has the upper hand over the long term.
The market can still move higher if trade news improves, tariff issues are resolved, and we see some forward movement vis a vis N Korea and Iran.
I believe Trump will settle for a slice, maybe he will even get half a loaf in some instances and he will gloat total trade victory. His ego mixed with America's clout is still a decent bet.
Debt/deficit spending remain the biggest threat from a financial standpoint and China's appetite to commercially rule the world is our greatest diplomatic/foreign policy threat. Europe remains a basket case and will as long as Germany's tail wags the dog.
Furthermore, if we remain politically divided and adversarial leadership continuity versus our short term presidential structure is a constant reality we will continue potentially disadvantaged. The offset is we can change whereas our adversaries could be stuck. Man's desire to be free is a potent force in our favor but we are frittering this God given blessing away. Time will tell.
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Dick
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1) A Critique of Identity Politics—From Obama
If Democrats want to win back Congress and the White House, they’ll listen to the former president.
By Jason L. Riley
Meanwhile, conservative Never Trumpers who have spent entire careers advocating for deregulation, lower taxes, judicial restraint and colorblind public policies have abandoned those principles to make common cause with liberals and their media allies. These days, even Mr. Trump’s immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, doesn’t quite sound like his old self.
Mr. Obama traveled to Johannesburg last week to give a speech marking the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, and the choicest passages sounded like gentle digs at his fellow leftists back home. Mr. Obama didn’t mention the current president by name, but he did weigh in on some current controversies, including immigration.
Democrats in Congress are under the impression that voters want our nation’s porous international borders erased rather than fixed. To that end, they are calling to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that tracks down human traffickers, drug smugglers and other people who are in the country illegally.
But Mr. Obama, sounding a lot more like Mr. Trump than like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, told his South African audience that “it’s not wrong to insist that national borders matter, [that] whether you’re a citizen or not is going to matter to a government, that laws need to be followed.” He added that “newcomers should make an effort to adapt to the language and customs of their new home. Those are legitimate things, and we have to be able to engage people who do feel as if things are not orderly.” Wow!
But wait, there’s more. Since leaving office, Mr. Obama has become not only a stickler for border enforcement and cultural assimilation but also a critic of identity politics. To make democracy work, he told the crowd, we have to “engage with people not only who look different but who hold different views.” We should endeavor to “get inside the reality of people who are different than us,” he said. “And you can’t do this if you just out of hand disregard what your opponents have to say from the start. And you can’t do it if you insist that those who aren’t like you—because they’re white or because they’re male—that somehow there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.”
Regular readers of these pages don’t need to be reminded that President Obama rarely practiced what he’s now preaching. He made overt racial and ethnic appeals to voters. He embraced racial demagogues like Al Sharpton and movements like Black Lives Matter. The Obama Justice Department exploited racially charged police incidents in Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere. And when facing objections to his administration’s stance on everything from health-care reform to voter-identification laws to environmental protection, Mr. Obama seldom failed to ascribe the basest of motives to his critics.
Mr. Obama can take the high road now because he’s done running for elective office, but he shares as much blame as anyone for the political rancor and racial division we see today. In a sense, Donald Trump stole Barack Obama’s playbook and reminded the left that Democrats aren’t the only ones capable of successfully playing resentment politics.
If Mr. Obama’s advice to Democrats is disingenuous, however, that doesn’t make it unwise. The former president seems to understand better than most leaders in his party that simply calling President Trump a racist nincompoop as often as possible and dismissing his supporters may not be the best strategy for winning back Congress in the fall or taking the White House in 2020. If it were, Hillary Clinton would be president.
What we’re hearing from Mr. Obama isn’t entirely new or surprising. Before becoming president, he famously dismissed talk of separate “red” and “blue” and “liberal” and “conservative” and “black” and “white” Americas, and he campaigned as a unifier. Of course, Mr. Obama governed as a leftist ideologue, and Democrats today increasingly believe that moving still further left will bring political success.
Policy proposals that once placed you on the political fringe—single-payer health care, free college tuition, guaranteed jobs, drug legalization—are now considered mainstream Democratic positions. Mr. Obama remains the most popular Democrat on the planet, but the party now belongs to hard-core progressives who don’t pretend to be anything else on the campaign trail.
Mr. Obama believes that his party must win back those working-class whites in the Midwest who voted for him twice and then swung the 2016 election to Mr. Trump. Republicans should hope that Democrats continue to ignore him.
1a) Why Republicans Can’t Get Enough Trump
Despite unending controversies and fiascoes, he is keeping campaign promises.
By William A. Galston
Though no one would have called President Trump “restrained” during his first year in office, he has upped the ante in 2018 by challenging established arrangements at home and abroad. From immigration and trade to NATO, North Korea and Russia, the assumptions that have guided American policy in the postwar era have been cast aside.
Many of Mr. Trump’s initiatives lack public support. Despite his breathtaking embrace of Mr. Putin in Helsinki, a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that only 5% of Americans have a positive view of the Russian president. They disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of U.S.-Russian relations by a margin of 2 to 1. By a similar margin, Americans believe Mr. Trump’s tariffs will raise costs and hurt average citizens. About 6 in 10 Americans also believe that immigration helps rather than hurts the U.S., despite Mr. Trump’s hard-line policies. And Americans don’t share Mr. Trump’s contempt for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; they support the alliance by a 3-to-1 margin.
What’s more, Mr. Trump’s disruptive efforts haven’t yielded notable success. Despite his insistence that trade wars are easy to win, China is pushing back with tariffs of its own, and the lost agricultural sales are beginning to hurt America’s heartland. U.S. trading partners in the Europe and Asia are banding together in new multilateral agreements that leave the U.S. in the cold. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is resisting U.S. efforts to translate his vague promises at the Singapore summit into meaningful progress toward denuclearization. NATO members have pledged only marginal increases to their defense contributions. And the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” stance on immigration enforcement led to the cul-de-sac of family separations, drawing widespread condemnation at home and abroad.
On Mr. Trump’s most unpopular policies, there is a big gap between Republicans and the rest of the electorate. Whereas two-thirds of Americans opposed family separation as a method of immigration enforcement, 55% of Republicans supported it, according to a June 2018 Quinnipiac poll. While only 26% of Americans approve of the president’s handling of U.S. relations with Russia, 53% of Republicans do.
But these narrow majorities of support for specific policies are dwarfed by overwhelming Republican backing—among the highest levels ever recorded—for the president’s overall performance in office and for the president himself. Moreover, Mr. Trump has managed to increase the intensity of support he enjoys. Just three months ago, 22% of voters strongly approved of his job performance. Today, this figure stands at 29%. His personal favorability has also intensified: In April 21% of voters were “very positive” about him, compared with 28% today.
There are three reasons, I believe, why President Trump’s approval has remained rock-solid in the face of unending controversies and policy fiascoes. First, the economy has kicked into higher gear, spurred by tax cuts, deregulation and Republicans’ now-familiar willingness to enact large budget deficits into policy even as they denounce them in principle.
Second, President Trump has kept faith with the 46% of Americans who voted for him in 2016. He gave economic conservatives the tax cuts and deregulatory policies he advocated during the campaign. Social conservatives have gotten the judicial nominees they were promised, along with policy changes in areas from transgender bathrooms to abortion and religious liberty. And the populist conservatives who put Mr. Trump over the top in key Midwestern states have found an unswerving champion of the nationalist policies—on trade, immigration and putting America first—that energized them during the campaign.
The third reason transcends policy. In Donald Trump, dissatisfied Americans have found a man who resents cultural elites as much as they do, who is as dismissive of convention as they would like to be, and, above all, who fights constantly, retreats rarely, seldom apologizes, and takes every setback as an opportunity to renew the unending struggle.
In a speech at Madison Square Garden three days before the 1936 election, Franklin D. Roosevelt described the powerful interests arrayed against him. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he declared. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” Mr. Trump shares this view, I believe, and so do his supporters. It is thrilling to have a leader who not only promotes your interests but also validates your passions.
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2) How China Is Winning Over the Middle East
As President Xi Jinping impels China to take a more active role internationally, the Middle East is becoming one of its key staging grounds. At a gathering of 21 Arab nations in Beijing this month, Xi pledged billions pledged billions in loans and financial aid to support economic development in these countries. At this Arab Summit, well attended by foreign ministers from across the Arab speaking world, the Chinese government successfully elevated their relationship with the region to a “strategic partnership.” Also signaling the increased status of the Middle East’s role in Xi’s global strategy was his just-concluded visit to the Arab region — his first foreign trip since his re-election last March, and the first visit to the UAE by a Chinese head of state in almost 30 years.
Traditionally, China has looked to others – especially the United States – to act as the world’s policeman in political hot spots like the Middle East. But this is changing as China’s economic priorities are increasingly intertwined with its political interests. In announcing the visit, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson stated that this is part of “China’s major diplomatic move to target developing countries against the backdrop of profound changes in the context of the international situation.” As the United States and the European Union pressure China on trade and investment, China is looking elsewhere for opportunities.
Effectively, China is launching a mini-Marshall Plan for the Middle East and North Africa. A key message conveyed by the China-Arab State Cooperation Forum is that China sees economic development as key to resolving many of the security and humanitarian issues in the region. And China seeks to be a world model for combining successful economic growth with an authoritarian regime – a model that holds some appeal in this part of the world.
In the Middle East, demand is increasing for renewable energy, fintech, artificial intelligence, and electric cars – all sectors where China is playing a leading role. In fact, much of China’s financing will go toward supporting projects and sectors where China is a global leader. And the Arab region is welcoming it.China and the Middle East have mutual interests and their economic relationship is expanding beyond oil, which Arab nations have long supplied to China. Chinese companies are actively pursuing major infrastructure projects in the Arab region as part of Xi’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI) – with many more to come as economies in the region recover after the Arab Spring. The Chinese institutions created to support the BRI are gearing up to provide financing for much-needed infrastructure. In Egypt alone, the Chinese have already pledged almost $50 billion to help support development of the new administrative capital.
In addition to loans and financial aid for economic development, it was announced at the Arab Summit that a new financial consortium will be created. Arab and Chinese banks will establish a fund of over $3 billion to support “economic reconstruction” and “industrial revival.” Key areas of focus will be promoting cooperation on oil and gas, nuclear, and clean energy. The details are still being worked out, but economic cooperation is much needed in the region – especially as the United States is more focused on “America First” and not providing the same level of support or leadership to the region as in years past.
China is also using this financing – as well as access to its own market – to set key standards in the region. Take green finance, for instance. China is the global leader in this market, developing innovative models and definitions of green financing. China announced that it will “green” the Belt and Road: in order to receive financing, BRI projects must be in line with Chinese green lending standards. China is also establishing green pilot zones along BRI, which will require that those participating in the zone comply with Chinese standards on green development. While it is a positive model to use market mechanisms and markets for encouraging green development, it is also a subtle way of ensuring that the “Chinese way” is adopted in other countries.
Significantly, at the Arab Summit Xi called upon the Arab countries to “press ahead” with negotiations for a free trade agreement (FTA) between China and the 21 Arab countries. Negotiation of this type of regional agreement is part of Xi’s larger strategy of wielding its economic clout to negotiate “free trade” agreements with key regions around the world. If this Arab-Chinese agreement is successful, China could grant special trading privileges along with financing to the Arab world, further strengthening ties — and thus political relations — with these potentially volatile governments.
While it is no surprise that China’s political interests follow its global economic goals, it remains to be seen if its economic incentives result in the political ties that China seeks, particularly with the often fraught Middle East. For Xi, capturing the resource-rich Middle East is a core goal of the Belt and Road Initiative, so expect to see more developments in this new strategic partnership.
Deborah Lehr serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Basilinna, a strategic business consulting firm focused on China and the Middle East. In addition, she is the Vice Chairman of the Paulson Institute, a think tank founded by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson located at the University of Chicago.
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3) A Poisonous String of Thoughts: Is Anti-White Racism the New Anti-Semitism?
By Marcus Cato
When I was in the second grade, I met students who were shocked to learn that the word "Jew" was more than just a slur. Until they met me, they had only used the word in a derogatory or pejorative sense. For myself, I had been taught by my parents that there were some people in the world who looked down on Jews, but this was my first encounter with it.
A similar trend is occurring among the culturally liberal in this country – where I live and now make my home on the Left Coast of the United States. But the word I want to write about today isn't "Jewish"; it's "white." The basic ideas used to demonize Jews for centuries are now being wielded by cultural Marxists to do the same thing to white people in three ways: historical tropes, selective economic statistics, and sociological exaggerations.
Hatred of Jews has a long history, but the grievance against Jews was based on a commonly held history of victimization by later generations of Gentile Christians. To begin with, Jews were held collectively responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the martyrdom of early Christian saints. What made this, like almost every other historical grievance, especially pernicious is that unborn Jews were also made responsible for these events. Saint John Chrysostom, a doctor of the Church, wrote in the fourth century, "the Jews are always degenerate because of their odious assassination of Christ. For this, no expiation is possible, no indulgence, no pardon (no forgiveness)." In other words, this was a charge passed down from generation to generation for which no forgiveness could be attained. To be a Jew was, in short, to be guilty of murdering God Himself.
Similarly, modern leftist thought renders white people guilty of two unforgivable crimes: the enslavement and transport of Africans to the Western Hemisphere and the conquest of the Americas and the displacement of the indigenous people who came before. President Obama may have unwittingly stated this when he said in 2015, "what is also true is that the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives – you know, that casts a long shadow. And that's still part of our DNA that's passed on." Of course, what's in your DNA cannot be expunged. It gets passed on like a disease. Thus, Mother Jones can publish articles titled "America Has Never Truly Atoned For Slavery" without a hint of irony. Dead white bodies carry little meaning in the modern Social Justice War. That over 300,000 Northern white men died to end slavery means nothing to them; and that over 25% of the Southern white male population of military age died will never be a sacrifice that cleanses their descendants of their sins. I don't need to note the contrast between this never-to-be-forgiven viewpoint with that of President Lincoln, who said in 1865 that the Civil War was absolutely an expiation for the sin of slavery.
The history of distorted Jewish wealth and influence is almost as old as the deicide charge. Using cherry-picked data to accuse Jews of unjustly controlling the wealth of various nations or even the world was a tool used long before the Nazis rose to power. In Germany during the pre-Nazi period, it was common to point out that, "while Jews comprised only one percent of the German population, they accounted for 18 percent of bank owners[.] ... [O]f the 29 German families with fortunes over 50 million marks, 9 were Jewish[.] ... Jews made up 22% of employees in the Prussian banking and stock exchange[.] ... Jews were 18% of all doctors, 15% of dentists, and 25% of lawyers in the German state of Prussia." The fact that the Jews living in the Pale of Settlement (modern-day Poland, Ukraine, and Belorussia) were some of the poorest Europeans was ignored. Envy at Jewish success and wealth led time and again to monetary expropriation long before the Nazis levied a specific tax on Jewish wealth. European Christian and medieval Islamic rulers expelled and massacred their Jewish populations to either expropriate their wealth or to avoid paying debts which they had chosen to accumulate. Usually these moves were justified by saying that Jews had acquired their wealth using ill begotten means – usury being the most charged of the accusations.
Today, hardly a day goes by without some tirade about the racialized distribution of income and wealth in the United States., such as this one from the New York Times. The chief targets are whites. It is taken as a matter of course that these gaps are caused by white racism and exist because of the ill gotten wealth that the ancestors of white people stole from black slaves or conquered red bodies. The Washington Post trumpets that "White Families Have Nearly Ten Times The Net Wealth of Black Families"; the Guardian tells us that "The Median Wealth of Black Americans 'Will Fall to Zero by 2053." These claims are always couched so as to lay the majority of blame on white people and "white institutions." The implication being that only the income and wealth of white people can "fix" these problems by being expropriated and redistributed, like in one absurd article about a "White Equality Tax" to pay for the historical sins of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, etc.
And finally, Jews were accused of being disposed to privileging their own over non-Jews. This sociological lie says that Jews simply cannot help but be parasitic. That we have no culture of our own; that all we know how to do is to steal from others or profit from their work. Henry Ford published this "Jew as parasite" trope in 1920: "if this genius be described as parasitic, the term would seem to be justified by a certain fitness." Ford asserted that the New York Stock Exchange was run by Jews, as if Jews were consciously or even biologically disposed to pushing out non-Jewish stockbrokers. Similar arguments were raised by anti-Semites like Kevin MacDonald as regards the medical profession, law, and other trades.
The same arguments are leveled against whites today by people masquerading as academics. Take the apoplectic hysteria over the term gentrification. This is really a leftist dog whistle implying that gentrifiers – usually white – are parasites, and their victims are usually people of color. From the UMKC editorial "What Appropriation and Gentrification Have In Common": "A parasitic relationship, gentrification utilizes tactics like rent-hiking to drive out original tenants[.] ... [V]ictims of gentrification are often black and Hispanic. Cultural appropriation, black face and gentrification all benefit and profit from exploitation and pain of historically oppressed people." Another article describes current musical trends as being of white parasitism and black victimhood.
These concepts are commonly taught to K-12 students, who start learning about racialized wealth gaps as early as second grade and are made to watch videos depicting all social problems as being the result of historical sins. At university level, these concepts take a more elaborate turn as college students imbibe lessons on gentrification and cultural appropriation while learning of an all-encompassing boogeyman called "whiteness," in "Whiteness Studies" courses. What good can come of these intellectual pursuits but demonization? What end are the proponents of these issues aiming at? Are they conscious of the downsides to their rhetoric? Do they even care?
As Andrew Sullivan notes, the most terrifying possibility is that these rhetorical devices will be used against American Jews as the "apex" of the white hierarchy: "once you posit secret forces defined by race, and link these forces to human beings of that race, you are at risk of mimicking the very structure of anti-Semitic thought. And when Jews are understood as "white," and are indeed among the most prosperous and successful "whites," then "white supremacy" can easily segue into "Jewish supremacy." Fliers purporting to say just that were passed around at the University of Illinois back in 2017. The thought is not altogether impossible.
Perhaps these phenomena explain why, if you listen to almost any liberal on social media or mainstream media these days, the word "white" is, for them, a pejorative slur. It is a word they almost exclusively use to describe something they find abhorrent, distasteful, and negative. To the modern leftist, the word "white" is what the word "Jew" was to my elementary-school classmates. But for people who claim to be concerned with the meaning and use of words, they don't seem to care how cavalierly this word is misused. Ideas have consequences, especially bad ones
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