Tybee Pictures Reveal The America I Remember And Long For Again. What America Means To Me. Other Articles.

I had to return to bring more provisions back from the house.

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These are pictures from Tybee and our 43rd consecutive annual  vacation period.  The pictures are of our Son, Daniel, his wife Tamara, Stella and Max and our daughter, Abby, her husband Brian, Dagny and Blake and then Lynn and yours truly.

This is what America means to me and, unless you are a wild liberal, I am confident they mean the same to you..

 I deplore the pictures of riots and all the other sadness that has been allowed to creep into our society because progressives thought they knew better than the founders. Mayors of major cities have not only lost control of their cities but they have also lost their minds.

My essay below is from the heart and it saddens me that I constantly feel compelled to write these missives.
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In 2016 a large number of “deplorables,” as Hillary insultingly called them/us , were fed up with America’s direction. Obama’s transformatve society was not to their/our liking so we were willing to chance it with a successful non-politician  business man who promised to drain the swamp and put America First.

Hillary not only lost but Obama also apparently did everything he could,in the time he had left , to destroy the prospects of his successor. The defeated Democrats could not accept their lot  and on Tuesday, Bari Weiss , a friend, resigned her position in a scathing letter to her former employer, The New York Times newspaper.

I see a connection between the two and Bari is a far left liberal.  Neither Hillary or The NYT’s have insight into what America is, wants to be or wants to return to being. They are out of sync with America and the”deplorables” who do not like what the elite effete have done to their/our country. We believe we have a right to secure borders, America should come first, citizens have rights over those of illegals,the Constitution should be enforced not manipulated to suit the dictates of liberal Justices who think they know better than our founders and would rather legislate from the bench and you know the rest.

These “deplorables” are particularly distressed because the losers were unwilling to accept their defeat with grace as all other presidents and parties have done and are resentful our candidate was subjected to “trumped” up charges and illegal warrants all based on a dossier paid for by the opposing candidate. This is not the American way.

Those who were involved in this scurrilous undertaking have done everything in their power to besmeach the successor and have gone to great lengths to block everything he has tried to do and have leveled personal attacks both at him as well as his entire family.

The connection I referred to above links The New York Times because it has shielded Democrat renegades in their spurious efforts by twisting facts and reporting views dripping with venom and bias.  This is not the role of a newspaper that claims to be the voice of the nation.

Because the victorious candidate is often vulgar, unorthodox in his style and often unsuitable in his public comments his detractors believe they are justified in their Illegal efforts and have every right to undertake any measure that can bring him and the nation to its knees so he can’t prevail again in 2020, notwithstanding, a myriad of successful achievements in line with his campaign pledges.

Two events, totally beyond  Trump’s-control,  have occurred and given the newly radicalized Democrat Party and assorted anarchists, rioters and looters opportunities they could only have dreamed of and you know what they are, ie a Chinese virus and a police episode.

Again, The New York Times and their aligned mass media allies have taken advantage of these events and made their own contributions in order to defeat  the current occupier of The Oval Office. They have shielded the opposition candidate from his obvious deteriorated mental state and allow him to remain in his cavern beneath his home while continuing their nitpicking of the president who is dealing with tragedies that have come at him from all directions.

Obama’s efforts to transform America, by adhering to the rule book of  Saul Alinsky and other radicals who influenced his youth and heightened his antipathy toward America has resulted in a bi-furcated  nation which finds itself at a dangerous crossroad. 

We seem no longer to be the home of the brave but rather the home of the intimidated, those who are afraid to speak out, to resist ravaging of our nation by those who want to destroy our republic.

We are no longer The United States but the nation of dis- united renegades who have used a tragic police event to wander off the reservation under the guise of some questionable radical organization parading under a “compassionate” sounding title.  BLM has become BSM which “whitey” and assorted law abiders have been told they must eat because America is evil. If, in 2020, “deplorables” are willing to drop to their knees, eat what the radicals demand then you can kiss this republic goodbye.

Liberal hypocrites can make all the excuses they want, they can cite all the reasons Trump is illegitimate and unqualified and Biden is America’s true savior and you can embrace all the op Eds coming from The New York Times and their co-conspirators in the mass media but you will have taken the pin out of the political grenade with Obama’s name on it and which will truly transform America from a land of freedom, upward mobility and opportunistic capitalism to a land of violence, contempt for law and order, freedoms, racial discord and untold hell.

My liberal friends tell me I am the radical, I am to the right of Attila yet, everything I have predicted has come to pass and even gone beyond so I am comfortable in resting my case.  The voting jury will decide in 2020 and  I will make two other observations:

A) I would not be surprised if rioting is occurring to disrupt the election, and 

B) The voting will so infused with fraud whomever wins cannot claim legitimacy..

Honest elections remains the last sacred foundation on which our republic rests and when the anarchists, Trump And American Haters have effectively removed that post their goal will have been accomplished.

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A series of accumulated articles.

The Truth About the US-China Thucydides Trap
By: George Friedman

We remember Thucydides as a historian thanks to his documentation of the Peloponnesian War, but we often forget that he was also a philosopher. And like all great philosophers, he has many things to teach us, even if his teaching is inappropriately applied. Thousands of years after the war was fought between Sparta and Athens, observers argued that it showed that an authoritarian government would defeat a democracy. This was widely said in the early stages of World War II and repeated throughout the Cold War. In truth, what Thucydides said about democracies and oppressive regimes was far more sophisticated and complex than a simplistic slogan invoked by defeatists.

Jacek Bartosiak, who wrote of the Thucydides trap for us last week, is never simplistic, but I think he is wrong in some respects. The error is the idea that China is a rising power. He is certainly correct if by rising he means it has surged since Mao Zedong died. But he is implying more: that China is rising to the point that it can even challenge the United States. The argument that the U.S. may overreact is based on this error. The U.S. is choosing to press China hard, but the risk of doing so is low.

The most important thing to understand about China is that its domestic market cannot financially absorb the product of China’s industrial plant. Yes, China has grown, but its growth has made it a hostage to its foreign customers. Nearly 20 percent of China’s gross domestic product is generated from exports, 5 percent of which are bought by its largest customer, the United States. Anything that could reduce China’s economy for the long term by about 20 percent is a desperate vulnerability. COVID-19 has hurt and will continue to hurt many countries. But for China, if international trade collapsed, internal declines in consumption would come on top of the loss of foreign markets.

China faces a non-military threat from the United States, which relies on exports to China for about half of 1 percent of its GDP. If the U.S. simply bought fewer Chinese products, Washington would damage China without firing a shot. If China is a rising power, it is rising on a very slippery slope without recourse to warfare.

But the United States has even more devastating options. China must have access to global markets, which depends overwhelmingly on the ports of its east coast. The South China Sea is therefore a frontier of particular interest for Beijing. The military problem is simple. To access the ocean, China must control the sea lanes through at least one (and preferably more) outlet. The United States does not need to control these lanes; it just needs to deny them to China. The difference is massive. The Chinese have to force the U.S. into deep retreat to secure access. The United States needs only to remain in position to fire cruise missiles or lay mines.

The U.S. Navy controls the Pacific from the Aleutians to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia, giving Washington an old and sophisticated alliance system that China cannot match.

And though allies can drag a nation into conflicts it doesn’t want to be part of, having no allies deprives a nation of strategic options. If only one of China’s littoral nations allied with it, China’s strategic problem might be solved. The failure to recruit allies is an indicator of the regional appreciation of Chinese power and trustworthiness. Adding to China’s strategic problems is that it borders some countries such as Vietnam and India that are hostile to its interests.

Hypothetically, China could forge an alliance with Russia, a nearby power with which it shares some common competitors. The problem is that Russia’s focus must be on its west and on the Caucasus. It has no ground force it could lend to China, nor does it have a naval force that would be decisive in its Pacific operations. A simultaneous strike westward by Russia and eastward by China is superficially interesting, but it would not divide U.S. and allied forces enough to take the pressure off of China.

It’s true that China is a rising power, but as I said, it’s rising from the Maoist era. It has a significant military, but that military’s hands are tied until China eliminates its existential vulnerability: dependence on exports. Under these circumstances, the idea of initiating a war is far-fetched. More than perhaps any country in the world, China cannot risk a breakdown in the global trading system. Doing so might hurt the U.S. but not existentially.

The United States has no interest in a war in the Western Pacific. Its current situation is satisfactory, and nothing is to be gained from initiating a conflict. The United States is not giving up the Pacific – it fought wars in Korea and Vietnam as well as World War II to keep it.

The U.S. can’t invade mainland China or conquer it. It cannot expose its forces to massive Chinese ground forces. In this sense China is secure. China’s fear is maritime – isolation from world markets. And that possibility is there.

There is of course evidence of advanced Chinese systems being prepared and claims that the U.S. is losing its relative share of power.

But this is one of the great defects of military analysis: counting the hardware. In the U.S. military, I have noted people rolling their eyes when they hear about the super-weapons being produced. The closer you are to weapons development, the more you are aware of its shortcomings. Wars are won by experienced staff, brave and motivated forces, and factories that don’t screw up. Engineering is part of war but not its essence. The question for any military is not what equipment it has but how long it takes to jury-rig the breakdown.

Technology matters, of course, but it is only decisive in the hands of those with deep experience of the battle to be fought. China lacks that.

For all its hardware and technology, it has not fought a naval battle since 1895 (which it lost). China has no tradition of naval warfare to compare to its experience on land. And tradition and lessons passed down from generation to generation of admirals are extremely valuable. The United States has been in combat frequently, launching aircraft against land targets, conducting active anti-submarine searches and coordinating air defense systems for large fleets in combat conditions.

It's on this point that I disagree with Jacek. He submits that China is rising, with a particular focus on a technological prowess with which the U.S. is not keeping pace. Maybe that’s true. But the U.S. is still the superior power. It has an economic superiority, a geographic superiority, a political superiority in alliances, and a superiority of experience not only at sea but in air and space. Technology can only offset those deficiencies so much.

So I think the Thucydides concept, while valid, doesn’t apply to this case. China is not pressing the United States in any dimension, and for this reason, American rhetoric is not matched by the frenzied production the U.S. puts in motion when it is concerned.

And so Jacek and I will continue to duel.

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Economic slump: The 'China Dream' shattered

BY: JIANLI YANG AND LIANCHAO HAN

This year, for the first time since 1990, China did not announce a GDP growth target during the annual National People’s Congress in May.

Prior to that, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced on April 17 that the country’s economy had recorded a 6.8 percent contraction  in the first quarter of 2020. It was the first time since 1976 that China acknowledged economic shrinkage.

China’s extraordinary growth for nearly a half-century has ended because of the COVID-19 pandemic, right? No, that’s not entirely correct.

The fact is that the fiscal condition of the world’s second-largest economy was in dire straits even before the pandemic struck. The novel coronavirus only made it worse. The glitz and the swank that the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda machinery portrayed to the outside world was hollow and China’s economic superpower image was an illusion. In reality, the economy has been one of China’s major fault lines for some years now.  

China’s GDP recorded impressive growth rates from 2003, peaking in 2007 at 14.2 percent, but since has been sliding downward. It stood at 6.6 percent in 2018, and the 6.1 percent of 2019 marked the slowest pace of growth since 1990. The reasons for this sluggishness are structural issues that have been building for years — including over-investment, low industrial productivity, high debt, modest consumer spending and demographic changes.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, China was building wealth in a way that was appropriate then. Factories that produced competitive products mushroomed, and miles of bridges and roads connecting cities and towns were built. These investments created job and income opportunities for the people, while expanding the productive capacity of the economy. Even now China is trying to build wealth, albeit the wrong way. It is pursuing investments that do not raise the country’s productive capacity or growth potential. It is building bridges and roads to nowhere. Productivity has dropped consistently over the past decade.

In addition to overspending on infrastructure, China is boosting consumer and industrial spending by expanding available credit. The country has been piling up massive amounts of debt — by consumers and local governments in particular. In 2019, China’s total corporate, household and government debt rose to US $40 trillion — around 300 percent of its GDP. It is an irony that the country that has been laying debt traps for smaller countries itself is under such massive debt.

How would China repay its debt? An effective means would be to move from investment-led growth to consumption-led growth. But is that even feasible, considering the unemployment rate and declining purchasing power of the people of China? 

As the Chinese economy was going downhill, many industries and businesses closed, leading to massive layoffs and stunted wage growth. In mid-2019, the urban unemployment rate stood at 5.3 percent, the highest in two years. And in the post-COVID-19 scenario it has become worse, edging to unprecedented highs.

Consequently, the consumption capacity of the domestic Chinese market has been falling. A classic example is car sales, which were accustomed to a double-digit annual growth rate and accounted for 5 percent of China’s economic output. Car sales started slumping in 2018, along with real estate, indicating a fall in people’s purchasing power. Massive income disparity between the rich coastal areas and the country’s interior adds to the woes. 

Premier Li Keqiang recently acknowledged that more than 600 million people in China have monthly income of barely US $140 — not enough to rent even a room in Chinese cities. If the leader of a communist state, which always strives to cover its flaws and shortcomings, makes such an admission, we can safely presume that the real situation is much more grim.

China’s demographics do not favor economic growth. The working-age population has been shrinking since around 2012 — an inevitable result of the one-child policy enacted in 1979. Estimates suggest that retirees could account for more than 40 percent of China’s population by 2050. That aging population will test the CCP’s ability to provide for its people. 

The GDP growth target has been an indicator of the CCP’s economic confidence. Its absence this year is a clear signal that the economic environment is the most challenging that China has faced in decades. 



The key to the communist regime’s legitimacy is the guarantee of quality of life, employment and stability. This year was meant to be a pivotal part of Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” grand plan — the year of realizing a well-to-do society for all of China. By 2020 China had targeted to eliminate absolute poverty and raise the living standard of its people. 

But it appears the Dream has shattered — not just for Xi, but for billions of Chinese people who trust him and his administration’s ambitious plans. The economic crisis that China has experienced for some years now represents a huge failure on part of the CCP. Millions of young people may be deprived of achieving the success and prosperity that their parents’ generation enjoyed. Undoubtedly, they’ll have reasons to question the legitimacy and authority of the CCP leadership, and that poses a challenge to the social stability of the country.

Jianli Yang is founder and president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China, a Tiananmen Massacre survivor, and a former political prisoner in China.

Lianchao Han is vice president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China. After the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, he was one of the founders of the Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars. He worked in the U.S. Senate for 12 years, as legislative counsel and policy director for three senators.

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Joe Biden Believes America is Ready for “Systemic” and “Institutional” Changes - Read More

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  Here are some interesting points to think about prior to 2020, especially to my friends on the fence, like moderate Democrats, Libertarians and Independents and the never Trump Republicans and those thinking of "walking away" from the Democratic Party.

2--  Women are upset at Trump’s naughty words -- they also bought 80 million copies of 50 Shades of Gray.

3--  Not one feminist has defended Sarah Sanders. It seems women’s rights only matter if those women are liberal. 

4--  No Border Walls.   No voter ID laws.   Did you figure it out yet?   But wait.. there's more.

5--  Chelsea Clinton got out of college and got a job at NBC that paid $900,000 per year.   Her mom flies around the country speaking out about white privilege. 

6--  And just like that, they went from being against foreign interference in our elections to allowing non-citizens to vote in our elections.

7--  President Trump’s wall costs less than the Obamacare website. Let that sink in, America.

8--  We are one election away from open borders, socialism, gun confiscation, and full-term abortion nationally. We are fighting evil. 

9--  They sent more troops and armament to arrest Roger Stone than they sent to defend Benghazi.

10--  60 years ago, Venezuela was 4th on the world economic freedom index.  Today, they are 179th and their citizens are dying of starvation.  In only 10 years, Venezuela was destroyed by democratic socialism.

11--  Russia donated $0.00 to the Trump campaign.   Russia donated $145,600,000 to the Clinton Foundation.   But Trump was the one investigated!

12--  Nancy Pelosi invited illegal aliens to the State of the Union.   President Trump Invited victims of illegal aliens to the State of the Union.   Let that sink in.

13--  A socialist is basically a communist who doesn’t have the power to take everything from their citizens at gunpoint ... Yet!

14--  How do you walk 3000 miles across Mexico without food or support and show up at our border 100 pounds overweight and with a cellphone?

15--  Alexandria Ocasio Cortez wants to ban cars, ban planes, give out universal income, and thinks socialism works. She calls Donald Trump crazy.

16--  Bill Clinton paid $850,000 to Paula Jones to get her to go away.   I don’t remember the FBI raiding his lawyer’s office.

17--  The same media that told me Hillary Clinton had a 95% chance of winning now tells me Trump’s approval ratings are low.

18--  “The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money”— Margaret Thatcher

19--  Maxine Waters opposes voter ID laws; She thinks that they are racist.   You need to have a photo ID to attend her town hall meetings .

20--  President Trump said —  “They’re not after me. They’re after you.   I’m just in their way.”

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The bullying of Bari Weiss and the end of classic journalism

A woke mob’s attacks on a centrist Jewish writer at “The New York Times” illustrates what happens when illiberal new standards of behavior cancel contrary views.

JONATHAN S. TOBIN

(July 14, 2020 / JNS) For most observers of American journalism, The New York Times has long been regarded as the flagship of liberal thought and opinion. But after a woke mob essentially hounded Bari Weiss, a centrist Jewish writer who has been outspoken about anti-Semitism, to the point where she thought that her continued presence at the paper was untenable, it’s no longer possible to describe the Times as “liberal.”

It’s true that in the shorthand of American politics, the paper’s point of view can be described as left of center. But while the meaning of labels like liberal and conservative have shifted somewhat over the years, any organization that is as irredeemably hostile to a broad range of views as the Times can’t be described in that manner. The only way to describe the newspaper that is depicted in Weiss’s shocking and devastating resignation letter is “illiberal.”

The end of Weiss’s tenure at the Times is a watershed moment for the paper both in terms of its short-lived experiment at editorial diversity that her hiring represented, and the way it treats Jews and the issue of anti-Semitism.

Weiss and columnist Bret Stephens were recruited to the Times in 2017 from The Wall Street Journal, where both no longer felt comfortable because of their fervent opposition to President Donald Trump. Stephens, a past Pulitzer Prize winner for Commentary is a conservative on most issues, though cannot abide Trump. Weiss’s politics are less easily defined, but she while she is an opponent of Trump, she is also a reliable commentator on anti-Semitism, in addition to the effort to demonize Israel and its supporters.

As Weiss relates in her letter, the Times made a concerted effort after the 2016 presidential election to come to terms with the fact that its political tunnel vision had caused it to misread the electorate and the mood of the country. However, for the left-wingers who run the Times, the distance between that laudable intention and being able to actually abide having people on staff who challenge their assumptions and prejudices is a bridge too far. Unless Stephens and Weiss were prepared to assimilate into their new environment—as is the case with David Brooks, a former conservative at the paper’s opinion section—and discard their principles in order to be a comfortable fit, then they were headed for conflict.

It’s one thing for the paper’s overwhelmingly liberal staff not to welcome those who dissent from such a groupthink atmosphere. But the problem in contemporary journalism that has infected the newsroom there and other places is the widespread belief by many, if not most, young journalists is that traditional beliefs about fairness and objective reporting are outdated concepts. As illustrated in this insightful and frightening Times profile of Wesley Lowery, a former Washington Post reporter now at CBS News, the culture of contemporary journalism at legacy media outlets has shifted to the point where many reporters believe that their primary duty is to promote a particular point of view, and to denigrate and delegitimize those who disagree.

Whatever you may think of Trump, it’s painfully obvious that this is reflected in those publications’ coverage of the Trump administration, in which there is editorializing rather than reporting in every headline and news story. The same spirit of intolerance has infected the opinion section at these newspapers because the staff is simply unwilling to publish points of view that contradict their assumptions and biases. In such an environment, an independent thinker like Weiss was in trouble even if she agreed with her colleagues about Trump.

The turning point occurred the week after the George Floyd protests when peaceful demonstrations gave way to rioting and looting. Opinion editor James Bennet, who had hired Weiss, approved an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that called for the use of federal troops to stop the violence and looting (and not, as the article’s critics falsely claimed, to put down peaceful demonstrations or impose a fascist regime on the United States). Cotton’s article outraged the Times’s staff, and a newsroom revolt forced publisher A.G. Sulzburger and Bennet to disavow the piece even after they had rightly defended it as in keeping with their obligation to publish opposing views. But the woke mob at the Times no longer believes in free discourse and tolerance of opponents. They see all contrary opinions as a threat to be abolished, and their advocates to be canceled and shunned. As Weiss aptly states, Twitter (and the woke mobs of bullies who dominate that platform) has become “the ultimate editor” of the Times since not even its publisher is capable of standing up to it.

After Bennet was forced to resign over this debacle and he was replaced by Charlotte Greensit, a hardcore leftist from The Intercept—a radical rag that specializes in publishing conspiracy theories about American and Israeli perfidy—few believed that Weiss could survive at the paper.

But what she describes in her resignation letter is more than a difference over philosophy or politics. No one who reads it can really accept the paper’s commitment to a fair editorial process. Just as important, the intolerance shown her was stunning in its ferocity.

And it is her identity as a Jewish writer and outspoken commentator on anti-Semitism that is particularly disturbing. Weiss wasn’t attacked in spite of being Jewish, but in large measure because she was widely identified as a Jew willing to speak out against anti-Semitism.

As she points out, the tone of the constant bullying towards her was particularly troubling because it included calling her “a Nazi and a racist.” She said she “learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again.’ ” Can anyone imagine an African-American writer being denigrated for writing about their community, especially when, as in Weiss’s case, she grew up at the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where 11 Jewish worshippers were shot dead in the fall of 2018 during Shabbat-morning services?

Her willingness to take on anti-Semites on the left, rather than just white nationalists, outraged her colleagues. They never forgave her for activism as a student at Columbia University when she first made her name as someone determined to oppose the bullying of anti-Zionist professors determined to intimidate and silence Jewish students. In the eyes of the intolerant left, a willingness to stand up for Israel and Jewish rights is, in a classic case of projection, an act of repression.

As Weiss noted in her letter, at the Times, coverage of Israel is invariably negative while anti-Semites, like novelist Alice Walker, are treated with kid gloves and never confronted about their hate.

The picture Weiss paints is of a paper where deviation from ideological conformity is met with contempt, insults and threats. That it is a hostile environment for proud Jews like Weiss is hardly a surprise, given the paper’s long and troublesome history on Jewish issues.

The chilling nature of her account should be a sobering read for everyone. If many Americans no longer regard an outlet like the Times is reliable or objective, it’s not because they are brainwashed by conservative outlets or are racists. It’s because those now at the Times aren’t ashamed of their biased coverage and editorial judgment. To the contrary, they pride themselves on their illiberalism and regard tolerance of opposing conservative views as a heresy that must be stamped out.

That someone like Weiss cannot survive there is worrisome for the Jewish community. It also illustrates the end of American journalism as we once knew it.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate.  Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
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