Awake you un-woke students. (See 1 below.)
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Timeline tells an uncomfortable story. (See 2 below.)
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Decoupling from China. (See 2 below.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++. Macron is a short version of De Gaulle. His comment about NATO being brain dead did not sit well with other NATO nations who continue to sit on their own heads.
Everyone criticized Trump for being up front with NATO nations, telling them to cough up and quit relying on America to be the patsy. They have responded a bit and now Trump is defending NATO against Macron's typical French attitude of unjustified "grandeur."
Trump is a breath of cold fresh air and is outspoken, defends America's interests and tells our allies what they do not want to hear because they have been allowed to hide behind their feckless stupidity for decades. Their contribution has been woefully short because they know they can always lean on America. Hopefully those days are over and NATO members will stand tall and thus the alliance will be more unified and stronger.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Some op ed's of interest:
Forget ‘Michelle for President’
“Bring Back Barack” is not a winning campaign theme. More
Pelosi Chooses Climate Change over USMCA JobsPelosi and the Democrats are putting climate mythology and impeachment ahead of jobs for the American people. MoreTrump-Hating Democrats are the Real Cult
The fact that liberal elites cannot understand why Americans support the president shows that they are severed from reality, normalcy, and common sense. MoreA Word to Democrats About Democratic Principles
We need some liberal notable to write that there is nothing more honorable than conceding elections. MoreBarr Disputes IG Finding About FBI Russia Probe Barrett & Demirjian, Washington Post+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Salena sounds off again. (See 3 below.)+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Demands upon future presidents seems to have changed. This is one of the many reasons why 62 plus million were willing to take a chance on an un-orthodox New York real-estate mogul rather than an orthodox politician. However,what was lost is being such in New York, requires a lot of political skills.
As Trump said: "what have you got to lose?"
Earlier, Democrats made the same mistake underestimating Reagan, a "second grade" movie actor who was Governor of America's most populous state and, as a union head, negotiated contracts with louie B. Mayer
Democrats became blinded by the fact they lost to a man they hated and thought totally unsuited to be president and believed they could field a platoon of baboons. There are no top bananas among the current crop and weekly another drops out calling it quits. Kamala Harris is the latest to bite the dust to the dismay of staff geniuses at MSNBC and CNN who were sure she possessed "gravitas." Graveness would be a more suitable description.
Consequently, the biggest thing now going for the Democrats is impeachment. That too will eventually prove their undoing. Why? Because Bernie wants America to embrace socialism, Warren wants to eliminate the electoral vote so New Yorker's and Californian's can rule America, Bloomberg wants to purchase the nomination and Steyer wants to waste some of his billions. Finally, Biden remains a front runner because Obama thought enough of him to pick him as his VP, notwithstanding the fact he has seldom been right about anything significant since vacating the crib.
Buttigieg is bright, young, very creative and totally inexperienced. Can you picture him negotiating with leaders of adversarial nations like China, Russia, N Korea or going to the Pentagon and telling the presiding General Officers what to do?
And finally we get to Klobuchar. She is tough, more sensible than most and also totally inexperienced. The best thing going for her is she still considers herself a straight women.
Worst of all Democrats are now down to all white participants and running candidates in a party that hates whites.
Perhaps we have so cheapened the Oval Office anyone who seeks to sit behind the desk is easily acceptable and subsequently impeachable. A sad commentary on the state of American politics.
If you really want to be depressed, I repeat, Read Amity Shlaes' new book: "Great Society."+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++DORIS
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++As Trump said: "what have you got to lose?"
Earlier, Democrats made the same mistake underestimating Reagan, a "second grade" movie actor who was Governor of America's most populous state and, as a union head, negotiated contracts with louie B. Mayer
Democrats became blinded by the fact they lost to a man they hated and thought totally unsuited to be president and believed they could field a platoon of baboons. There are no top bananas among the current crop and weekly another drops out calling it quits. Kamala Harris is the latest to bite the dust to the dismay of staff geniuses at MSNBC and CNN who were sure she possessed "gravitas." Graveness would be a more suitable description.
Consequently, the biggest thing now going for the Democrats is impeachment. That too will eventually prove their undoing. Why? Because Bernie wants America to embrace socialism, Warren wants to eliminate the electoral vote so New Yorker's and Californian's can rule America, Bloomberg wants to purchase the nomination and Steyer wants to waste some of his billions. Finally, Biden remains a front runner because Obama thought enough of him to pick him as his VP, notwithstanding the fact he has seldom been right about anything significant since vacating the crib.
Buttigieg is bright, young, very creative and totally inexperienced. Can you picture him negotiating with leaders of adversarial nations like China, Russia, N Korea or going to the Pentagon and telling the presiding General Officers what to do?
And finally we get to Klobuchar. She is tough, more sensible than most and also totally inexperienced. The best thing going for her is she still considers herself a straight women.
Worst of all Democrats are now down to all white participants and running candidates in a party that hates whites.
Perhaps we have so cheapened the Oval Office anyone who seeks to sit behind the desk is easily acceptable and subsequently impeachable. A sad commentary on the state of American politics.
If you really want to be depressed, I repeat, Read Amity Shlaes' new book: "Great Society."+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++DORIS
1)How America’s Students Need to Get ‘Woke’
The progressive campus project is a mere veneer. It is a scab of sorts, overlaying a wound beneath of progressive exploitation and class privileges and hierarchies.
Today’s university students want to “wake” the nation to problems that they and their professors have identified as threatening our very existence. And they issue these periodic alarms in hyperbolic terms: we have just 10, 20—fill in the blanks—years to end fossil fuel use or else die from global warming.
They warn us that there is a veritable war waged on American women who have been limited to a mere 800,000 abortions on average per year. Sexism must explain why only 56 percent of college students are women.
The woke university lectures us that ubiquitous racism, white privilege, sexism, homophobia, transgender hatred, Islamophobia, nativism, and xenophobia supposedly make life deadly for people of color, gays, immigrants, the transgendered, and women. Apparently, such endemic hatred explains why the United States is the most tolerant, freest, most leisurely and affluent country in history for racial, religious, and gender minorities.
To address these supposedly existential concerns and agendas, the university has radically reinvented itself over the last 30 years. The relative and absolute number of tenured and tenure-track professors on campus has nosedived. In their places, the legions of noninstructional employees and part-time lecturers have soared. The former are mostly highly paid race, class, and gender diversity and inclusion provosts, deans, and czars. The latter are low-paid and largely exploited temporary teachers.
Student aid packages have been front loaded with federally-guaranteed debt, as tuition in response has naturally soared over the last few decades above the rate of inflation. All sorts of “studies” majors have blossomed—ethnic studies, peace studies, environmental studies, black studies, Latino studies, Asian studies, feminist studies.
The curricula now expand into popular culture, as if comic books, Hollywood movies, hip-hop music, and cartoons need academic study, professional scholarship, and professorial guidance.
In the university’s zero-sum game, something was lost to provide the needed space for these therapeutic new classes. And what was tossed were precisely those traditional courses in English grammar, composition, literature, foreign languages, philosophy, and history that sharpened reasoning, honed written and oral expression, developed an aesthetic sense of art and music, and provided the student with the facts-based architecture central to fundamental education.
It was once agreed that reading Sophocles’ Antigone was more valuable for young minds than deconstructing “The X-Men,” and that Dante’s Inferno offered students more insight than did “To Pimp a Butterfly.” Might our 20-year-olds become less self-absorbed, and less ignorant if they knew what Shiloh, Normandy, and Iwo Jima were? Do any think that they could have survived the Oregon Trail, the Meuse–Argonne offensive, or the Schweinfurt raid?
In addition, the university went through one of the most bizarre cultural transformations of any institution in our society—albeit in a completely paradoxical way.
Students were no longer considered young, independent adults—at least sort of. They instead were apparently no longer always mature enough to make their own social and cultural decisions—and live with the consequences, good and bad.
Instead, students were recalibrated as episodic pre-teens who could not hear speakers, read texts, or listen to professors if they challenged their safe spaces and status quo beliefs. Independent thinking apparently could harm such fragile souls and therefore had to be carefully restricted and rationed.
The First Amendment, as we have known it, really no longer exists on college campuses. Speech codes predominate and supersede it, citing the need for censorship as a protection from “hate speech,” a tool that can be used to smear almost any form of expression.
Visiting speakers know that if they are deemed unapologetically conservative, they either will need guards to speak or are likely to be shouted down, or both—usually with the wink and nod of approval from careerist and itinerant administrators who no sooner arrive on campus than they virtue signal in hopes of advancing to higher paying billets elsewhere.
The public is bewildered by masked and hooded campus protesters breaking the law, storming barricades and trying to disrupt politically incorrect speakers. They suspect that if the police would actually arrest—and district attorneys indict—these barricade braggadocios, the latter would likely curl up into fetal position, crying about “getting an arrest record” and how that might impair their later privileged trajectories.
Who Are the Snowflakes?
“Snowflakes” arose as a term for sheltered students who regressed to needing puppies, coloring books, milk, and cookies to comfort them even before Donald Trump won the 2016 election. But just when we thought colleges were nursery schools of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and racially segregated dorms, we saw that, in fact, they are incubators also of edgy adult sex, alcohol and drug use. Courses, lectures, and symposia openly discuss the need for sexual awakening and experimentation, while the university has become a safe space for the use of particular recreational drugs.
So the public has become baffled at the result of these promiscuous Victorians, drunken prohibitionists, and zero-tolerance drug users—not to mention supposedly tolerant intolerant disruptors and social justice warriors fighting for the injustice of denying free expression.
The only possible common-denominator explanation of these radical disconnects is the gratification of the appetites and the paths of least resistance: students still like sex and parties and especially courses that are therapeutic, require less work, and confirm status quo pieties.
In other words, protesting and organizing are preferable to memorizing Latin declensions and physics theorems. Students as adults certainly like to drink, but so often after getting drunk and sickened do not like those who fostered that permissive atmosphere and allowed these sudden adolescents to drink in the first place.
Sexual hook-ups are supposedly transformative and cosmopolitan—but only if later shielded from the age-old crass and unfortunate emotional consequences that result when the male is given free rein to indulge his sexual appetites without commitment or honor or love.
The University House of Cards
But hypocrisy is not the most dangerous paradox of the university. Its entire financial structure is far more hypocritical. And the fix goes something like this: 18-year-olds enter college after being sold a bill of goods that an undergraduate degree is so invaluable that it will more than justify tens of thousands of dollars in aggregate long-term debt.
Often “aid packages” brim with showy fellowships, grants, and tuition waivers to disguise the reality that the discounted, rock-bottom, bargain-based, final total cost of a year at college is still exorbitant.
Students are reminded that at least a B.A. or B.S. degree will provide status that will aid upward economic and social mobility. Sometimes that is true, but when it is not, the results wreck lives.
Woke majors centering on social justice are lauded and promoted on campus as the spear of resistance culture. Yet years later, such campus veterans don’t impress employers. The now indentured serf graduate is left to fend for himself, far away the previous reverie and energy of progressive protests and inculcation.
In other words, the next time you see a chanting crowd of woke students shouting down a speaker with a faculty member cheering them on, imagine such protestors five years from now, solitary without good jobs, but with lots of their own private debt and plenty of bitterness and angst.
Who then pays for the tenured full professor who indoctrinates students for 32 weeks of the year? Who pays for the assistant provost for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” who teaches no classes but monitors those who do? Who helps to subsidize a costly campus that is increasingly disconnected from learning?
Is it not the part-time lecturer driving between campus gigs without job security, retirement or good, if any, benefits?
Is it not the student carrying $100,000 in 6 percent loans, majoring in environmental studies?
If students were really “woke” to the abject exploitation in their own landscapes, they would march on the president’s office to protest the lack of transparency in student loaning, the bureaucratic fat that does not contribute to learning or academic excellence, and the disparity between helot part-time lecturers and full-professor overlords. They would demand to know how much they are paying for each class, for office hours, for much on campus that ultimately is leveraged by their own government guaranteed student debt that will be an albatross around their collective necks into their thirties.
Viewed through these lenses, the progressive campus project is a mere veneer. It is a scab of sorts, overlaying a wound beneath of progressive exploitation and class privileges and hierarchies of the exploiters and exploited.
The results spill over from campus and are deleterious for the entire nation, ranging from prolonging adolescence and infantilizing young adulthood, delaying marriage, child-rearing, and home ownership to radicalizing the Democratic Party to the point of near irrelevance—not to mention the cost of defaulted government loans. Many of those indebted who actually graduate will gravitate into low-paying jobs.
And the professors and administrators who damned capitalism to them will be doing the same to each successive generation of naïfs, but always play-acting as radical mentors from tenured and six-figure salary billets.
In sum, today’s students are the most unaware, naïve—and unwoke—generation in our nation’s history. They pose as all-knowing and all-caring. But in the end, they are proving unwoken to the full dimensions of those who have channeled them into a decade or more of crushing debt, left them with unmarketable degrees, nourished both their ignorance of the world, past and present, and their political arrogance—and called it all success.
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2) The Ukraine scandal timeline Democrats and their media allies don’t want America to see
For weeks now, Democratic members of Congress, career State Department and National Security Council experts and their allies in the media suggest questions about Joe Biden and a Ukrainian gas company and Ukraine meddling in the 2016 election were nothing more than debunked conspiracy theories.
In reality, the facts on both these issues are clearly substantiated. And as I pointed out last week, many of the witnesses that House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff called during the impeachment proceedings confirmed concerns about both.
Here is a detailed timeline of key events in the Ukraine scandal, complete with the corroborating evidence. You make your own judgement as to what happened.
February 2014.
Vice President Joe Biden named by President Obama to be U.S. point man on Ukrainian crisis after Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity leads to ouster of Viktor Yanukovych as Ukrainian president.
February 21, 2014
George Soros’ Open Society Foundation publishes anticorruption strategy for Ukraine identifying the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, a nonprofit that Soros’ foundation and the U.S. State Department jointly fund, as the leading edge of the foundation’s strategy for Ukraine.
March 2014
New Ukrainian elections set for May 2014 and Petro Poroshenko emerges as top Western-friendly candidate for president.
April 13, 2014:
Devon Archer, the business partner of Hunter Biden, son of the VP, and Christopher Heinz, stepson of Secretary of State John Kerry, is named an independent director of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.
April 15, 2014:
Burisma Holdings makes two payments to the Morgan Stanley account of Devon Archer’s and Hunter Biden’s firm Rosemont Seneca Bohai in the amounts of $83,333.33 and $29,424.82, according to financial records obtained by Ukrainian authorities and the FBI.
Validation: Burisma Holdings financial records obtained by Ukraine Prosecutor General’s Office. https://www.scribd.com/
FBI records obtained from Rosemont Seneca Bohai: https://www.scribd.com/
April 15, 2014:
Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s partner in Rosemont Seneca Bohai and Burisma Holdings, checks into White House for meeting with Vice President Joe Biden, according to the Secret Service’s official WAVES entry logs for the Obama White House.
April 22, 2014:
VP Joe Biden meets with Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and urges Ukraine to ramp up energy production to free itself from its Russian natural gas dependence. Biden boasts that “an American team is currently in the region working with Ukraine and its neighbors to increase Ukraine’s short-term energy supply.” Yatsenyuk welcomes help from American “investors” in modernizing natural gas supply lines in Ukraine.
April 24, 2014:
Joe Biden meets with candidate Poroshenko.
April 28, 2014:
Britain’s Serious Fraud Office freezes $23 million in assets kept in London by Burisma Holdings and its founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, on grounds it was fraudulently transferred from Ukraine. Zlochevsky and Burisma deny wrongdoing.
May 13, 2014
Hunter Biden announced as a board member for Ukraine’s largest natural gas company Burisma Holdings, which is run by Mykola Zlochevsky, a former Cabinet official for ousted president Victor Yanukovych.
Validation: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/05/
May 13, 2014
Christopher Heinz, business partner to Devon Archer and Hunter Biden and stepson to John Kerry, sends email to Secretary of State’s top aides distancing himself from Archer, Biden appointments to Burisma Holdings board, according to FOIA released to Citizens United.
May 15, 2014
Burisma Holdings makes two equal $83,333.33 payments totaling $166,666.66 to the Morgan Stanley account of Hunter Biden’s and Devon Archer’s firm Rosemont Seneca Bohai, according to the company’s official ledger and Rosemont Seneca Bohais bank records obtained by the FBI. Similar payments are made every month for more than a year.
Validation: Burisma Holdings financial records released by Ukraine Prosecutor General’s Office: https://www.scribd.com/
Rosemont Seneca records seized by FBI: https://www.scribd.com/
May 20, 2014
David Leiter, former chief of staff to John Kerry, hired as a lobbyist for Burisma Holdings, Senate lobbying records show. The firm is paid $90,000 in 2014 to lobby Congress and the State Department.
May 25, 2014
Poroshenko wins the Ukraine presidential election
July 5, 2014:
Burisma Holdings pays $250,000 retainer to Boies Schiller law firm where board member Hunter Biden also works.
Validation: Burisma Holdings financial records released by Ukraine Prosecutor General’s Office: https://www.scribd.com/
Aug. 20, 2014
Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s office opens criminal investigation of Burisma Holdings and Mykola Zlochevsky for alleged corrupt award of gas exploration permits and eventual looting of company, according to Ukrainian prosecutor general’s case file.
Sept. 16, 2014
Burisma Holdings makes $33,039.77 payment to Boies Schiller law firm, according to company records.
Validation: Burisma Holdings accounting ledger obtained by Ukraine Prosecutor General’s Office https://www.scribd.com/
December 16, 2014
Former deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken, a longtime Joe Biden adviser, confirmed by Senate as Deputy Secretary of State under John Kerry.
Jan. 18, 2015:
Prosecutor General’s office in Ukraine declares Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky a fugitive “wanted in Ukraine.”
Jan. 29, 2015:
British Serious Fraud Office announces it is closing down investigation into Burisma and Zlochevsky for insufficient evidence.
March 18, 2015
VP Biden has phone call with President Poroshenko.
Validation: https://ua.
March 30, 2015:
George Soros announces plans to invest $1 billion in Ukrainian energy and technology sectors.
April 15, 2015
VP Joe Biden speaks in Ukraine, praising the decision to appoint a new head of the NABU, the new Ukrainian law enforcement investigative arm set up by United States.
March 22, 2015:
Hunter Biden emails his father’s longtime trusted aide, Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, with the following message: “Have a few minutes next week to grab a cup of coffee? I know you are impossibly busy, but would like to get your advice on a couple of things, Best, Hunter.”
Blinken responds the same day with an “absolutely” and added, “Look forward to seeing you.”
The records indicate the two men were scheduled to meet the afternoon of May 27, 2015.
June 11, 2015
Burisma Holdings makes $20,000 donation to the Delaware Community Foundation in the name of Beau Biden, the vice president’s oldest son who died of cancer, according to the company’s financial records released by Ukraine prosecutor general’s office.
June 12, 2015
VP Biden calls President Poroshenko.
Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/
July 15, 2015
VP Biden and Commerce Secretary Pritzker attend first ever US-Ukraine Chamber of Business meeting.
July 22, 2015:
Hunter Biden meets with Deputy Secretary Tony Blinken for lunch at State Department, according to State Department memos.
July 24, 2015:
VP Biden calls President Poroshenko, raises concerns about anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine.
Validation: https://ua.
Aug. 16, 2015
Devon Archer throws a $10,000 a plate fund-raiser in New York for the Seed Global Health charity founded by Secretary of State Kerry’s daughter, Dr. Vanessa Kerry, according to official invite.
Aug. 28, 2015
VP Biden calls President Poroshenko
Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/
Sept. 25, 2015:
U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt gives speech imploring Ukrainian prosecutors to do more to bring Burisma’s Zlochevsky to justice.
Validation: https://www.rferl.org/a/us-
Sept. 29, 2015
VP Biden meets with President Poroshenko in Ukraine.
Validation: https://ua.
Nov. 5, 2015
VP Biden calls President Poroshenko.
Validation: https://ua.
Nov. 18, 2015
Burisma Holdings makes $60,000 payment to the American legal, lobbying and communications firm Blue Star Strategies for consulting work, according to company’s official ledger.
Dec. 7, 2015
VP Biden meets with President Poroshenko and demands the president make “hard decisions” to eliminate “the cancer of corruption” in his country.
Dec. 8, 2015
The New York Times publishes article stating Prosecutor General Shokin’s office is investigating Burisma Holdings and its founder Zlochecvsky, and that Hunter Biden’s participation on Burisma board is undercutting Joe Biden’s anticorruption message in Ukraine. VP Biden office quoted in story.
Validation: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/
Jan. 21-24, 2016:
Obama White House invites leaders of Ukraine’s general prosecutor office to Washington for a hastily arranged set of meetings to discuss anticorruption cases, including Burisma and Party of Regions case involving Paul Manafort..
Feb. 4, 2016
Ukraine general prosecutor’s office under the direction of Viktor Shokin announces the seizure of assets from Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky under a continuing criminal investigation. The seizure occurred on Feb. 2, 2016, according to the announcement.
Feb. 4, 2016
Burisma board member Hunter Biden sends a Twitter notification to Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, a longtime adviser to Joe Biden, indicating he is following Blinken on Twitter.
Feb. 11, 18, 19, 2016
VP Biden holds series of phone calls with President Poroshenko to check on status of pending items from their December 2015 meeting.
Feb. 24-March 1, 2016:
An American representative for Burisma Holdings, Karen Tramontano of Blue Star Strategies, seeks meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine A. Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the Ukrainian gas firm. Hunter Biden’s name was specifically invoked by the Burisma representative as a reason the State Department should help. “Per our conversation, Karen Tramontano of Blue Star Strategies requested a meeting to discuss with U/S Novelli USG remarks alleging Burisma (Ukrainian energy company) of corruption.”
March 2, 2016:
Devon Archer, a business partner of Hunter Biden and fellow American board member on Burisma Holdings, secures meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry, State Department memos say.
March 15, 2016
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland demands Ukraine “appoint and confirm a new, clean Prosecutor General, who is committed to rebuilding the integrity of the PGO, and investigate, indict and successfully prosecute corruption and asset recovery cases – including locking up dirty personnel in the PGO itself.”
Validation: https://ua.
March 22, 2016
VP Joe Biden engages in phone call from Washington DC with Ukrainian president Poroshenko about U.S. loan guarantees. It is believed in this call that Biden renews his demands that the president fire Prosecutor General Shokin, who is overseeing the Burisma prosecution, or risk losing the next $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees.
Validation: https://ua.
March 29, 2016
Ukraine parliament fires Prosecutor General Shokin at urging of President Poroshenko.
March 29, 2016:
John Buretta, an American lawyer hired by Burisma Holdings, seeks to contact the Acting Prosecutor General Sevruk seeking a meeting about the Burisma investigation just hours after his boss, Prosecutor General Shokin, was fired under pressure from VP Joe Biden, according to email Buretta’s legal team sent the Ukraine embassy in Washington.
March 30, 2016:
Burisma Holdings’ U.S. legal team seeks help of Ukrainian embassy official Andrii Telizhenko in Washington seeking urgent meeting with new Acting Prosecutor General of Ukraine, according to legal team’s email to embassy.
March 31, 2016
VP Joe Biden arrives in Ukraine and announces $1 billion in loan guarantees, ending threat to withhold aid and force Ukraine into debt default, and also delivers $239 million more in promised aid.
Validation: https://ua.
April 4, 2016:
George Kent, a senior US official at the American embassy in Ukraine, writes a letter asking Ukrainian general prosecutor’s office to stand down their investigation of the Soros-funded group the Anti-Corruption Action Centre.
April 6, 2016
Burisma Holdings’ U.S. legal team of John Buretta, Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano meets with Ukraine’s Acting Prosecutor General Sevruk to seek resolution of Burisma criminal investigation. American lawyers apologize for “false information” spread by U.S. government to force the firing of Shokin and offer Prosecutor General’s office an olive branch of arranging a meeting in Washington to clear the air.
Validation: Official Prosecutor General’s memo of meeting: https://www.scribd.com/
English translation: https://www.scribd.com/
April 14, 2016
VP Biden calls President Poroshenko and “stressed the urgency of putting in place a new Prosecutor General who would bolster the agency’s anti-corruption efforts.
Validation: https://ua.
May 4, 2016:
DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa writes email to bosses at party headquarters derailing her work to get dirt on Trump and Manafort from Ukraine.
Validation: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-
May 12, 2016
Yurii Lutsenko named the new Prosecutor General of Ukraine, taking over investigations that include Burisma Holdings. VP Joe Biden later praises Lutsenko as a “solid guy” during 2018 speech at Atlantic Counsel.
Validation: : https://www.cfr.org/event/
May 25, 2016:
Senior George Soros adviser provides private briefing to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland about Russian bond market, according to official State Department memo of briefing.
May 27, 2016
VP Biden holds phone call with President Poroshenko.
Validation: https://ua.
June 1, 2016:
George Soros seeks and receives a telephonic meeting with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland to discuss Ukraine, according to the official State Department record of call
Aug. 4, 2016:
Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington, Valeriy Chaly, takes extraordinary step of writing an OpEd in The Hill intervening in the US presidential election, slamming Trump’s policies and comments on Russia.
Aug. 12, 2016
Phone call between VP Biden and President Poroshenko
Sept. 20, 2016
VP Biden meets President Poroshenko on sidelines of UN meeting. Confirms $1 billion in loan guarantees has been made.
Validation: https://ua.usembassy.gov/
Nov. 8, 2016
Donald Trump wins election to become 45th president of United States, ending eight years of Democratic control of the White House.
Dec. 15, 2016
VP Biden holds phone call with Ukraine president and prime minister, praises work of NABU.
Jan. 11, 2017:
Politico reports possible effort by DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa to seek Russia dirt on Trump and Manafort from Ukraine embassy in Washington during 2016 election.
Jan. 17-18, 2017
Biden makes final appearance in Ukraine with President Poroshenko.
February 1, 2017:
John Buretta, the American lawyer for Burisma Holdings, gives interview in Kiev confirming there were criminal cases open in 2016 in Ukraine but all have been settled, the last with a penalty for tax violations.
Jan. 25, 2018
Former VP Biden boasts at Council of Foreign Relations events in Washington that he strong-armed Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko into firing Prosecutor General Shokin, using loan guarantees as leverage. He also calls Shokin’s replacement, Yuriy Lutsenko, “solid.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2) The Moral Case for Decoupling from China
One of the first people to see that the infatuation with China would end in tears was Robert Kaplan. In 2005 he wrote an article entitled “How We Would Fight China”, though he didn’t say when or why we will be doing that fighting, or even the how as per the title.
Well the tears are flowing now as the relationship is mostly over. China’s share of world exports peaked just shy of 15% in 2015 and is now contracting. China’s share of world GDP is also about 15% and that too will contract.
In Carroll Quigley’s ‘Tragedy and Hope’ first published in 1966, he wrote that the Chinese Communist regime in the first years after its founding was “insanely aggressive.” The Chicoms reverted to type about ten years ago and went back to ‘snarl diplomacy.’ Only being poor had kept them from trying to impose their will on others.
The corporate retreat from China is proceeding as fast as factory production can be relocated. But even if China wasn’t in breach of its WTO obligations to have a free market economy and a convertible currency, didn’t steal intellectual property, and wasn’t bullying its neighbours, there is another reason why we should completely decouple from China and it is a reason that is overarching and critical to our self-worth as a civilisation.
Dr Arthur Waldron, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying China for over 50 years. He married a Chinese lady so his views are not those of an inherent Sinophobe. In an online interview he provides interesting detail on the mistakes made in our relationship with China, starting with Nixon.
YouTube screen grab
Dr Waldron starts the interview by reminding us that:
China is the most evil regime the world has seen since the Third Reich, setting aside the Soviet Union.
The whole 68-minute interview is interesting but where he is a thought leader is in his parable of the delicatessen, transcribed below:
Suppose you lived on 86th st and at the local delicatessen with fine produce, at the front of the shop were all these goodies.But if you went to the very back of the shop there were sort of vats which were kept just above freezing which had freshly harvested kidneys and livers and hearts and all the things which are used at this moment. …People are being killed so their organs can be used for transplants. Many of which go to the very elderly Chinese leadership or their children. The son of one of the recent leaders of China has had cancer and he has had many organs replaced.Well, what would you say about this shop. Would you say, well, I think I’ll just shop in the front of the shop and I won’t pay any attention to the fact that there are all these living human organs, God knows where they came from, that are in the back.What you would say is ‘What the heck is this shop doing in America?’You can’t decouple these things. This is one integral system.And that is one of the reasons we have to quarantine China economically.A rationalisation for saying ‘Well yes it’s true that there is some question with what Hitler is doing with the gypsies and the Jews but Leica still makes a hell of a good camera.”
In the late 1930s when it was quite evident that Hitler was persecuting and killing minorities, would you have bought any German goods, knowing that in doing so you were an enabler of that evil regime? It is no different today. Every Chinese plastic toy or Christmas decoration plucked off the shelves at Walmart contributes to a future U.S. combat death, but beyond that there are also metaphorical vats of human organs at the back of the Walmart store that the buyer is enabling.
Thankfully killing people for their organs is repugnant to us and that needs to continue if we are to remain a good and kind civilisation. But trading with, speaking with, interacting with people who kill people for their organs debases us.
If we continue trading with such people that makes us morally complicit in their barbarism. For our souls, for our self-respect at least, we must stop trading with such people, and training them in our universities, and letting them into the country.
Dr Waldron’s view is that without our trade the Chinese polity will disintegrate; their state-owned enterprises aren’t enough to sustain their economy. The Chinese people’s best chance of liberation is if we nudge things in that direction.
Thank-you Dr Waldron for your insights.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.
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