Elon Musk on Lockdowns: ‘Sweden Was Right’

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Instead of rebuking Sweden and states such as South Dakota who exposed the failure of lockdowns, we should be thanking them.

When people think of polarizing countries, Sweden rarely leaps to mind. At least that was the case before 2020.

Sweden’s decision to take a “lighter touch” to the coronavirus pandemic—foregoing strict lockdowns and relying primarily on social responsibility to encourage social distancing—has made it a lightning rod for criticism.

Many commentators claimed Sweden was behaving recklessly and selfishly by refusing to enforce an economic lockdown like most other nations around the world.

Though its per capita death rate remained well below European neighbors such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Spain—each of which enforced strict lockdowns—Sweden became, as one CBS report claimed, “an example of how not to handle COVID-19.”

As I previously observed, however, the fact that Sweden was coming under fire had less to do with the results of its policies than the nature of its policies. There were far better “cautionary tale” examples than Sweden—such as Belgium, a nation with a similar population whose per capita death toll is 50 percent higher than Sweden’s.

Unlike Sweden, however, Belgium had a strict lockdown that, as the BBC reported back in May, was enforced with “drones in parks and fines for anyone breaking social distancing rules.” But nobody cared about Belgium because they had followed the lockdown script.

Months later, Sweden’s decision to avoid lockdowns only looks better. While much of Europe is experiencing a second wave of the virus, Sweden’s numbers are a stark contrast. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization and thousands of physicians and public health officials are now arguing against the use of lockdowns as a method of taming the virus.

The reason for this is obvious. While the harms of lockdowns are clear—trillions of dollars in economic losses, widespread mental health deterioration, and social decay—there is no compelling evidence that lockdowns reduced COVID-19 deaths or the spread of the virus.

The results of Sweden’s strategy become clearer with every passing week. And more people are beginning to notice.

“Sweden was right,” Tesla founder Elon Musk recently tweeted.

Musk, of course, has been suspicious of the efficacy of lockdowns for months.

In May, he took the bold step of restarting production of Tesla’s car plant in Fremont, California, in defiance of orders from government officials that the plant remain closed.

“Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules,” Musk tweeted. “I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

Musk’s act of civil disobedience paid off. Alameda County health officials caved, reversing the shutdown order and providing provisional approval for the plant to reopen.

The toll of COVID-19 has been severe. As of mid October, nearly 1.1 million people worldwide have died, according to Johns Hopkins University data, including 216,000 Americans.

Unlike previous pandemics, however, the human costs have been accompanied by a global recession and an economic collapse unprecedented in modern history. (This would seem to confirm Musk’s early assessment that the danger of panic posed perhaps a greater threat than the virus itself.)

As Harvard economist David M. Cutler and former World Bank chief economist Lawrence H. Summers noted in a new study, the toll of the Pandemic of 2020 is unlike anything the modern world has seen before.

“Output losses of this magnitude are immense. The lost output in the Great Recession was only one-quarter as large,” the authors write. “The economic loss is more than twice the total monetary outlay for all the wars the US has fought since September 11, 2001, including those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.”

The economic results of the lockdown experiment are undeniable. Meanwhile, evidence is scant that they saved lives. In fact, new research suggests the lockdowns exacerbated the spread of the virus.

Unfortunately, many people still want to deny the data and the science. As one commentator recently put it in the Washington Examiner, the better Sweden’s numbers get, the angier people seem to become.

This is the danger of allowing a virus to become politicized. It obscures reality. Many seem intent on defending lockdowns because they were designed to help people (or perhaps because President Trump has resisted them), but such thinking should be avoided.

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously observed.

Instead of rebuking Sweden and states such as South Dakota who exposed the failure of lockdowns, we should be thanking them.

Without them, we may never have learned a truth that is becoming more obvious every day: the lockdowns failed.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

Sweden Now Has a Lower COVID-19 Death Rate Than the US. Here’s Why It Matters

Why Sweden Succeeded in “Flattening the Curve” and New York Failed

Sweden’s Actual COVID-19 Results Compared to What Modelers Predicted in April

BBC: Sweden’s Economy Is Doing Way Better Than the Rest of the EU During the COVID-19 Pandemic

5 Charts That Show Sweden’s Strategy Worked. The Lockdowns Failed

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Myth That the Polar Bear Population Is Declining

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The story of a resurgent polar bear population deserves to be told and applauded.

Many of us watched the viral video in horror. A starving polar bear scavenging for food on barren land, his ribs visible beneath a jaundiced white coat.

“This is what climate change looks like,” said National Geographic.

The magazine explained that because of melting sea ice, precipitated by climate change, more of these mammals are starving. They pointed to a new study in Science suggesting that polar bears require much greater caloric intake in their diet than previously believed.

The video, shot by photographers Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier on Somerset Island, sparked outcry over the decimation of polar bears due to global warming.

The footage was viewed by 2.5 billion people, National Geographic estimated. The video remains the most viewed on National Geographic’s website—ever.

While many remember the footage of the polar bear, fewer are aware of what followed.

As Michele Moses recently explained in The New Yorker, scientists accused National Geographic of “being loose with the facts.” There was no evidence, many pointed out, that the bear’s condition was the result of climate change. The bear simply could have been old, ill, or suffering from a degenerative disease.

Mittermeier admitted as much a year later.

“I can’t say that this bear was starving because of climate change,” she wrote in National Geographic.

Perhaps we made a mistake in not telling the full story—that we were looking for a picture that foretold the future and that we didn’t know what had happened to this particular polar bear.

Mittermeier was looking for visual evidence of the future she imagined, one ravaged by climate change. And she found it that day in a starving bear.

As Moses of The New Yorker points out, polar bears have become an “indisputable image of climate change.”

“The story of climate change has been told, in part, through pictures of polar bears,” Moses writes. “And no wonder: in their glittering icy habitat, they reflect the otherworldly beauty that rising temperatures threaten to destroy.”

That picture of a single starving bear arguably did more to advance the issue of climate change than any white paper or IPCC report could have. Unfortunately, the footage tells us relatively little about the actual state of the polar bear population.

While you’ll find no shortage of headlines declaring that polar bears face extinction, the numbers tell a different story.

Data from conservation groups and the government show that the polar bear population is roughly five times what it was in the 1950s and three or four times what it was in the 1970s when polar bears became protected under international treaty.

In fact, though polar bears were placed under the protection of the Endangered Species Act in 2008 over concerns that its Arctic hunting grounds were being reduced by a warming climate, the polar bear population has been stable for the last three decades.

In 1984, the polar bear population was estimated at 25,000. In 2008, when polar bears were designated a protected species, The New York Times noted that number remained unchanged: “There are more than 25,000 bears in the Arctic, 15,500 of which roam within Canada’s territory.”

New estimates from the International Union for Conservation of Nature show a mid-point estimate of 26,500 (range: 22,000 to 31,000) in 2015. In The State of the Polar Report 2018, zoologist Susan J. Crockford says updates to IUCN data put the new global mid-point estimate at more than 30,000.

Even accepting the lower figure, the estimate is the highest since the polar bear became internationally protected in 1973.

CLICK HERE FOR THE NYT INFOGRAPHIC POLAR BEAR POPULAITON ESTIMATES 1950-2015

The health of the polar bear population runs counter to predictions from scholars who have said two-thirds of polar bears will disappear in coming decades because of warming temperatures and melting sea ice in the Arctic.

The good news that polar bears are thriving is unlikely to draw as much attention as images of a starving polar bear scrounging for food on Somerset Island. Nevertheless, the story of a resurgent polar bear population deserves to be told and applauded.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

RELATED ARTICLE: Twitter: Ads that ‘contradict the scientific consensus’ on climate change now prohibited

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Why the Feds Are Clinging to Their Mask Mandate

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Airports have been the main stages for security and hygiene “theater.”

Bureaucrats cling to power. It’s their institutional predisposition.

So it was no surprise on Wednesday when the Department of Justice appealed the recent Federal court ruling that struck down the mask mandate imposed on mass transportation by the Centers for Disease Control.

As the appeal demonstrates, governments are especially reluctant to give up emergency powers. When they do, the relinquishment is grudging and only partial.

That is a big reason why big government keeps getting bigger. As economist Robert Higgs showed in his book Crisis and Leviathan, since the early 20th century, the US government has exploited every national emergency to seize emergency powers. After the crisis subsides, government power recedes, but never all the way back to pre-crisis levels. In this way, the federal government “ratchets up” its power, at the expense of our liberty, crisis after crisis.

This “ratchet effect,” as Higgs termed it, is on vivid display in airports especially. There, the travel mask mandate persisted long after the pandemic panic subsided and many other COVID policies were rolled back. And if the DOJ’s appeal succeeds, it may return and linger even longer.

The wretched ratchet effect is also manifest in the many post-9/11 airport security policies that the Transportation Security Administration continues to enforce more than two decades after the crisis that spawned them.

A curious aspect of many of these policies is how seemingly petty they are. Why is the government so adamant about travelers removing their shoes at security and wearing masks? The effectiveness of such measures has been shown to be highly dubious at best. Moreover, such compelled performances of “security theater” and “hygiene theater” don’t even seem to provide much material benefit to the government. What’s the point of ratcheting up that kind of power?

I suspect a major purpose of such petty policies is the mass inculcation of obedience. Security theater and hygiene theater are part and parcel of a broader “obedience theater.” Humiliating compulsory gestures like removing your shoes and wearing your mask are obeisances: symbolic ritual acts of self-abasement and submission.

It’s not about keeping you safe or healthy. It’s about showing you who’s boss.

AUTHOR

Dan Sanchez

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor-in chief of FEE.org.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Flow of Fentanyl into American Communities Quadruples Under Biden, Deaths Skyrocket

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Awful. The Biden Administration has opened up America’s Southern boarder to change the electorate of the United States. This is the result. And you ain’t seen nothing yet. Just wait until Title 42 is repealed next month.

If the Democrat regime cared half as much about our young as they do about Ukraine’s borders, they would halt the mass importation of drugs and human trafficking at the US/Mexico border.

“Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that more than 100,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in the prior 12 months. Nearly two-thirds of those deaths were linked to fentanyl.”

Flow of Fentanyl into American Communities Quadruples Under Biden

By Breitbart, April 20, 2022

RIVERSIDE COUNTY, California — Four times as much fentanyl is flowing across the United States-Mexico border under President Joe Biden compared to two years prior when former President Trump was in office.

During the launch of Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Ken Calvert’s (R-CA) congressional caucus dedicated to the fentanyl crisis, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Mark Dunbar of the Murrieta Station in southern California noted that the level of fentanyl seizures has skyrocketed in the last year.

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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VIDEO: Recording Of AstraZeneca CEO Saying How ‘Millions Of People’ Should Avoid COVID Shots

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The largest failed medical experiment in human history. Where are the indictments? Jail terms?

Project Veritas Drops Recording Of AstraZeneca CEO Saying How ‘Millions Of People’ Should Avoid COVID Shots [VIDEO]

So-called conspiracy theorists were right again…

By Gregory Hoyt, Red Voice Media, April 20, 2022

On April 19th, Project Veritas released a recording of the CEO of AstraZeneca claiming back in December of 2020 that certain individuals who are immunocompromised – which he said could be in the “millions” – should avoid getting the COVID shots.

A source from within AstraZeneca provided Project Veritas with the December 2020 recording where company CEO Pascal Soriot was discussing how the COVID shots could adversely impact the immunocompromised population.

“If you have an immune disease, lupus, or some other immune condition, you cannot – or multiple sclerosis, you can’t be vaccinated. So, there are millions of people in the world that will need a protection that cannot be coming from a vaccine. So, the long-acting antibody has enormous potential.”

Despite Soriot mentioning the aforementioned during a Zoom call in late 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) asserted that the AstraZeneca iteration of the COVID shots were safe for immunocompromised persons back in March of 2022……

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Quick note: We cannot do this without your support. Fact. Our work is made possible by you and only you. We receive no grants, government handouts, or major funding.

Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here.

Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.

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Coca-Cola Hosts Earth Day Event with D.C. Councilman who Claimed Jews Control the Weather

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The big corporations, including but by no means limited to Coca-Cola, believe they can partner with any Leftist, no matter how hate-filled, crazy or extreme, and there will be no consequences: no boycott, no adverse publicity. They wouldn’t dream, however, of partnering with any open American patriot, for then they know the charges of “racism” and boycotts would come from Left-fascists. This perception must change. Geico dropping Linda Sarsour was a good start, but why was she invited in the first place?

Meanwhile, events such as this one legitimize and mainstream White’s hateful views, while the fact that it would be inconceivable for Coke to partner with someone who spoke out for traditional values contributes to the marginalization of those values.

Coca-Cola Hosts Earth Day Event With Democrat Who Says Jews Control Weather

by Alana Goodman, Washington Free Beacon, April 20, 2022:

Coca-Cola Consolidated and Giant Food held an Earth Day environmental cleanup event with a Democratic Washington, D.C., councilman who has accused Jews of controlling the climate.

Ward 8 councilman Trayon White Sr., who is challenging incumbent mayor Muriel Bowser in the Democratic mayoral primary, teamed up with the Coke-bottling company and grocery chain last week to host the cleanup day for Oxon Run, a stream located in White’s ward.

White’s fraught relationship with the Jewish community dates back to at least 2018, when he claimed that wealthy Jews used “climate manipulation” to cause bad weather in D.C. and donated $500 in community funds to sponsor a conference by infamous Jew-hater Louis Farrakhan….

White drew controversy in 2018 for his statements about the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish family that has been the subject of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories for more than 200 years.

“Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man. Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation,” White said in a video he posted on Facebook in 2018. “And D.C. keep talking about, ‘We a resilient city,’ and that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.”

While attending a city council breakfast, White also claimed that the Rothschilds “pretty much control the federal government” and “control the World Bank, as we all know.”

After public backlash, White apologized for the remarks and agreed to attend a tour of the Holocaust Museum. But many Jewish community leaders questioned his sincerity after he walked out of the tour halfway through….

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PODCAST: Is Biden a Buffoon, Bolshevist or Both? Biden Should Release His Full, Corporate Tax Returns!

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GUESTS AND TOPICS

ELEANOR BARTOW

Eleanor Bartow is the features editor at The Federalist. She was an editor and investigative reporter at the Daily Caller, editor-in-chief of the American Enterprise Institute’s magazine, and a reporter for Congressional Quarterly. Her articles have been published with The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Real Clear Investigations, The American Spectator, and others. She has been interviewed on Fox News Radio, National Public Radio, and WABC. She received a Fulbright Professional Grant in Journalism and was a fellow with the Claremont Institute and National Review Institute.

TOPIC: Biden Should Release His Full, Corporate Tax Returns!

DR. RICH SWIER, LTC U.S. ARMY (RET.)

Dr. Rich Swier is a “conservative with a conscience who contests the uncontested absurdities.” Dr. Rich is a 23-year Army veteran who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his years of service. Additionally, he was awarded two Bronze Stars with “V” for Valor in ground combat, the Presidential Unit Citation, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry while serving with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam. Dr. Rich now publishes the the “DrRichSwier.com report” a daily review of news, issues and commentary!

TOPIC: Is Biden a Buffoon, Bolshevist or Both?

©Conservative Commandoes Radio. All rights reserved.

Obama To Keynote Disinformation Conference With High-Profile Allies Tied To Fake News Scandals

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Former President Barack Obama will deliver the keynote speech at a Stanford University forum Thursday on media disinformation.

The keynote speech is part of Obama’s crusade against disinformation in the digital world, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The former president allegedly joined the fight against “disinformation” after lengthy discussions with Apple heiress Lauren Powell Jobs, who reportedly funded a number of fake local news sites in Silicon Valley that push Democratic rhetoric and talking points.

Other panelists at the event include Color of Change president Rashad Robinson who consistently pushed the fake news story that Jussie Smollett was the victim of a hate crime, the outlet reported. Smollett was later convicted of staging the hate crime.

Stanford researcher Renee DiResta will moderate the panel, according to the report. DiResta was reportedly part of the advisory team that created fake Russian bots that helped influence a 2017 Alabama special election, according to the report. She admitted to working with the company but denied knowledge of their tactics when asked by The Washington Post.

Former national security advisor Obama Ben Rhodes will also attend the conference. Rhodes previously admitted he created “echo chambers” of spin that supported “largely manufactured” narratives about various topics, including the Iran nuclear deal, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Obama’s personal history earned the “Lie of the Year” award from PolitiFact in 2013 for his repeated use of the phrase, “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it.”

Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton called out Obama in a tweet Thursday for “lecturing” Americans on disinformation despite earning the “Lie of the Year.”

AUTHOR

KAY SMYTHE

Reporter.

RELATED TWEET:

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Will solid-state batteries bail out electric vehicles? Electric cars currently have rather combustible batteries!

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Recently, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a recall for electric-vehicle batteries made by LG Energy Solution of South Korea. Fires have been caused by some of these batteries, which are used in Mercedes, Hyundai, and General Motors products, among others.

The problem is that rare manufacturing defects can cause overheating and fires. An Associated Press article describing the recall notes that recalls made voluntarily by individual manufacturers for these batteries date back to February of 2020. In November of that year, GM began recalling over 140,000 Chevrolet Bolt EVs to replace possibly defective LG batteries, and LG paid GM $2 billion in compensation.

The insurance industry obviously has a stake in this matter, and a small survey conducted by its Highway Loss Data Institute showed that the rate of fires for electric cars is about the same as it is for gasoline-burners:  0.2 per 1,000 insured vehicle years.

If the best you can say about electric car fires is that they’re no worse than fires in gas-powered ones, that’s faint praise.

Combustible

The underlying problem in electric-car battery fires is the technology. You may not be aware that the liquid or gel electrolyte in the type of lithium battery used in electric vehicles cannot be exposed to air without catching fire. This is one reason that manufacturing such a battery is so tricky.

Back when photographic film was the only way to take pictures, manufacturers figured out how to make hundreds of square yards of sensitive film every day in total darkness. But it wasn’t easy, and the fact that film never got as cheap as, say, toilet paper, had an incalculable effect on the entire industry.

Unless the electric-car business manages to break free of liquid-electrolyte batteries, it may find itself stuck in a similar rut. Except for the battery, an electric car is markedly cheaper to make than a fossil-fuel one. The electronics and the motors are much simpler than the corresponding parts of a gas-powered car.

But right now, the cheapest electrics on the market are many thousands of dollars more costly than an average gas model because of the darned battery, and so the vision of replacing most of our gas-guzzlers with electrics remains just that: a vision.

Potential alternative

On the technological horizon is a development that could change all that:  the solid-state battery. Michael Faraday himself (1791-1867) discovered that solid materials such as silver sulfide could act as electrolytes, which means that ions can move about through them under the influence of electric fields. But up to now, truly solid electrolytes (as opposed to the liquid or gel-like products used in most batteries today) have resisted commercialization for a number of reasons.

A significant milestone in the development of solid-state batteries happened when John Goodenough, who was one of the original developers of current lithium-battery technology, announced in 2017 that he had made a solid-state battery with a glass electrolyte. According to some sources, solid-state batteries could have up to 2.5 times the energy density of current lithium batteries, although it is not clear whether this is a volume or mass energy density.  Either way, it would mean that for the same size or weight battery, a car using a solid-state battery might have a longer driving range than a gasoline car with a typical gas tank.

No one knows yet how to make solid-state batteries cheaply. Thin-film technologies such as vacuum deposition are sometimes used, and while there is concern that such technologies may be difficult to scale, vacuum deposition in other manufacturing areas has been applied to rolls of plastic and other large-scale manufactured goods.  So it’s more a question of investment and effort than fundamental technological obstacles, I suspect.

Tall order

Several automakers, notably Volkswagen and Toyota, are investing heavily in solid-state battery technology. But they have the obstacle shared by all automakers that any product engineered for automotive use has to be a lot more durable and reliable than anything used in the military or even aerospace fields.

Do you think military tank drivers go ten thousand miles without needing any service, or astronauts think they’ll be able to ride their rockets for ten thousand launches without having any problems? Yet we start a car several times a day for years and expect nothing to go wrong.

It’s that kind of standard that every electric-vehicle battery is expected to meet, and the wonder is that they have come this far.  Pardon an old technologist for making a statement that is more intuitive than fact-based, but when I look at a typical EV battery that consists of several thousand individually-manufactured, hermetically sealed, and electrically insulated cells, I see a technology that is fundamentally immature.

Digital computers remained the expensive province of a few wealthy institutions until manufacturers learned to take the many thousands of largely similar components and integrate them onto a chip.

Pricey

I suspect that electric cars will also remain in the realm of the wealthy until solid-state batteries bring the core cost down to the point that people will want to buy them, not because they’re afraid of global warming or want something to match their Patek Phillipe watch, but because they’re cheaper and easier to run than gas-powered ones.

In the meantime, we’re going to have to put up with recalls like the ones for the LG batteries that catch fire on rare occasions, because it seems to be the nature of liquid-electrolyte lithium cells to do that once in a while.

The best manufacturers can do is to watch their processes and inspections rigorously and hope that a better technology will come along that will let them make batteries more like people make computer chips these days, rather than like photographic film was once made, under difficult and unique conditions that are hard to maintain for long.

This article has been republished from Engineering Ethics with permission.

AUTHOR

Karl D. Stephan

Karl D. Stephan received the B. S. in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1976. Following a year of graduate study at Cornell, he received the Master of Engineering degree in 1977… More by Karl D. Stephan

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

BLM’s Newsome: NYC Mayor Eric Adams ‘a Coon’ and ‘White Man in Blackface’

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Thursday on FNC’s American Newsroom, Black Lives Matter (BLM) Greater New York co-founder Hawk Newsome denounced New York City’s black mayor Eric Adams as a “coon” and “white man in blackface.”

Newsome said, “This mayor who’s a Democrat, but he spews conservative and Republican talking points.”

By “conservative and Republican talking points,” Newsome means Adams talks tough on crime, whereas Democrats typically excuse criminal behavior and condemn law enforcement instead.

“At the end of the day, we have a name for someone like this,” Newsome continued. “And this is someone we’d call a coon, right?”

“Whoa!” said host Bill Hemmer, taken aback.

Newsome continued: “He is a black man – he’s a white man in blackface, and a very conservative-minded white man, at that. So what we have is a man with hundreds of people on the city’s payroll, billions of dollars in budget, and 40,000 police officers. He has 10 victims in one night. The night before, he had 16 shooting victims on the train, and they say what are you going to do about policing, and he says what about BLM? Is America not smart enough to see him deflecting?”

Speaking of deflecting, the perpetrator of the train shooting was a black racist and BLM supporter, but Newsome skimmed right past that inconvenient detail, and past the larger issues of black crime and black-on-black violence.

The problem that the angry racist Newsome has with Adams is that the NYC leader of the communist revolutionary movement Black Lives Matter believes the police themselves are the problem. Until Adams gets onboard with that, Newsome feels justified in smearing him in the ugliest racial terms.

Walter “Hawk” Newsome

6 Known Connections

In November 2021, Newsome warned that there would be “riots,” “fire,” and “bloodshed” if then-mayor-elect Eric Adams were to follow through on his previously stated plan to reinstate the NYPD’s controversial anti-gun units amid the historic surge in violent crime that New York City was experiencing at that time. “If they think they are going back to the old ways of policing, then we’re going to take to the streets again,” Newsome said outside Brooklyn Borough Hall immediately after having spoken with Adams. That same day, Newsome told followers of his Instagram account: “You and I both know that we are up against an evil and violent system.”

To learn more about Hawk Newsome, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

America must take care of its families, or go the way of the Roman Empire

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Time to turn away from materialism and imperialism.

One thing demographers have known all along is something you cannot deny: “Demography is destiny.” The phrase was coined by 19th century Frenchman Auguste Comte. Agree or not with his positivist philosophy, he nailed it about demography.

While clickbait comes at us with news of wars, markets and celebrity gossip, the bigger story, the backstory behind so much of everything, is demography.

Demography didn’t get much attention in legacy media until 2020 when the British medical journal The Lancet released the most comprehensive world fertility study to date. The study documented a mysterious, unprecedented earth-shattering trend: a 50% decline in world fertility over 50 years, with no end in sight. Even the study’s scholarly authors described their findings as “jaw-dropping.”

We are only beginning to realise the social, economic and political impact. Look no further than the United States. Trends in America are followed worldwide and tell quite a tale.

Rising cost of living

For decades, well into the 1960s, US pensions and retirement benefits proliferated. Why not? Back then, relatively few people lived beyond 80, and it was a given that there would be four or more workers to support every retiree.

But things have changed mightily since Social Security and elderly healthcare schemes came of age. The heady days of easy money are gone.

First, people live much longer and have fewer children. The US fertility rate is 1.7 children per female, 20% below replacement level.

Also, the dominant world reserve currency — the US dollar — has diminished in value. Back in the 1960s you could buy a Coke for a dime. Now it’s at least ten times that. Is the soda worth more, or your money worth less?

Today two incomes are necessary to support the average family. That wasn’t the case back when a Coke cost a dime. Women, mostly out of necessity, entered the workforce.  That meant less family time. In such a system, children become a financial liability.

Then there is the uniquely American higher education industry, a colossal con commanding exorbitant subsidies and insanely inflated fees for a ticket to upward mobility. For the average American family, the costs of college are their largest expenditure apart from the family home.

Covid, the economy and lower fertility are testing the diploma mills as never before.  Also, a growing number of Americans are beginning to push back against a pious professoriate that subordinates authentic education to woke indoctrination.

Today there are over 65 million Social Security beneficiaries and 132 million people who work full-time, just two workers kicking in for each beneficiary. And a lot of those full-time folks don’t make much. On top of that we have Medicare, Medicaid and a vast global imperial footprint, all financed by a fiat currency that is losing value. Without at least replacement fertility, these systems will see a slow-motion collapse.

Thus two troublesome trends confront American families: A diminishing currency (chronic inflation) and declining fertility. Each exacerbates the other.

Also in the mix is an American popular culture promoting consumerism and instant gratification, prioritising creature comforts over children. Hedonism is not family-friendly.

Stop-gap measures

Over time the powers-that-be have tried to fix things with:

  1. Immigration: For years, cheap labour flacks told us that importing vast numbers of unskilled low-wage workers would save Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Not true. Mass immigration does not generate sufficient revenue to offset social welfare costs. (Funny thing about immigration: moneyed interests privatise the profit [cheap labour] and socialise — via taxpayers — the costs). Mass immigration instead suppresses wages, making it harder to rear children. Not only that, recent immigrants and their descendants feel the squeeze like everyone else, and their fertility is now below replacement-level.
  2. Printing money: In order to finance the welfare/warfare state, the government just continues to spend. We’ve become accustomed to debt financing and printing money to prop up a broken system. This works for a time if your money is the dominant world reserve currency. Imagine if you maxxed out your credit and could print your own money to finance it. Works fine until creditors say your money is no good or worth much less than you think. Inflation hurts families.

The above short-term fixes have not worked. And let’s face it: the days of global dollar dominance are numbered. There is a disastrous disconnect between public policy and demographic reality. Try as we might, there is no substitute for children.

America has a large middle class that binds the social fabric and includes most intact families. What is good for the American middle class is good for the family. But the middle class — the establishment’s cash cow — is shrinking.

At the very least, supporting families and children should take priority over subsidies for the elderly. But the elderly vote, and politicians care more about the next election than the next generation. However, supporting parents and children is the solution to preserving retirement programs and the society at large.

Superpower status at the expense of family is a Faustian bargain. We need to hunker down and focus on the family instead of propping up the wastrel welfare/warfare state. Yes, it can be done, though it will require changing our ways, establishing new priorities and investing in the future of families.

If not, look no further than ancient Rome. They also dumped their Republic, became an Empire, spent like crazy and came to neglect the welfare of families.

Is there a lesson here?

AUTHOR

Louis T. March has a background in government, business and philanthropy. A former talk show host, author and public speaker, he is a dedicated student of history and genealogy. Louis lives with his family… More by Louis T. March

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Wokeness is stalking your kids. Here’s how to protect them

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Parents need Courage, Clarity, Compassion, and Communication to dialogue effectively with their children.

In recent weeks, the following incidents took place, all involving people I know personally who live near me.

  • A middle-schooler was unable to focus at school where a female student who identifies as a boy identifying as a dog kept barking in class. The teacher refused to say anything about it.
  • A girl refused to use the school washroom all day because she didn’t want to use the gender-neutral washroom with boys. Using the girls-only washroom, which is out of the way, would single her out among her peers.
  • A mother was baffled when her teen started spouting words like “colonialism” and “patriarchy” while dressing down her father for not clearing his plate from the table.
  • A grad-year student looking into post-secondary options found the first required course for the local college’s fine arts program is “Intro to Critical and Cultural Theory,” a Marxist-based philosophy that subtly encourages aggression and division.
  • An elementary student borrowed a library graphic novel of Little Women in which Jo comes out as a lesbian and shares a kiss with another girl.
  • A Catholic high school teacher asked students to introduce themselves using their preferred pronouns.

Examples of wokeism are also taking place in the workforce:

  • A new employee taking diversity/inclusivity training was required to answer Yes to the question, “Does refusing to use a person’s preferred pronouns constitute harassment?”
  • A hairdresser had two customers an hour apart tell her how they “can’t say anything” in the face of woke ideology such as these scenarios. They feel as if their opinions have been nullified.

Then there was an employee who decided to speak out after being required to attend a training session to make the organization more LGBT2SQ-friendly. She wrote a direct and charitable letter to her employer explaining her beliefs. The employer decided to make the training optional.

How radically different my childhood was compared to today’s, when words like colonialism, patriarchy, transgenderism, critical (race) theory, intersectionality, white privilege, and social justice are seeping into my home and into society’s everyday vocabulary. Along with these ideas comes a climate of anger and division. Ironically, all facets of woke ideology instil a victim mentality which ultimately disempowers its adherents.

Hence the anger.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that many woke “values” piggyback on Christian virtues. As Christians, we also want to put an end to racism and injustice. The difference is that in the woke framework there is no mercy, no forgiveness, and no hope.

It has taken me a while to understand the movement.

I started meeting monthly online with a group of moms to discuss the origins and issues facing our children. We studied Noelle Mering, a podcaster and the author of a new book Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology. We examined Catholic Voices resources and invited Peter Nation to present several talks. Having a clear picture of the historical facts behind the movement has helped us in our discussions with family and friends.

Mering exhorts us to have Courage, Clarity, and Compassion: courage for effecting change; clarity for understanding issues in order to dialogue; and compassion for everyone regardless of whether they are a woke fellow traveller or a woke ideologue.

For parents, I would add a fourth “C” – communication. This should be at the forefront of our minds at all times. A river can’t flow if it is blocked.

The teen years present a bigger challenge, so parents have to get creative. Even if a teen is intractable, flowers secretly placed on her desk, extra Rosaries prayed, and perseverance in saying, “Good night, honey” to someone who only grunts can soften the heart for eventual conversation. We work on what we can work on today.

Woke ideology particularly disdains three aspects of Christianity: that we need to forgive; that we need to be open to dialogue; and that we are children of God. Focusing on these positives will instil in children a love for the beauty and truth of the Christian faith.

Forgiving others and being forgiven produces a tangible peace that children easily recognize. This can be fostered in daily interactions and, importantly, for Catholics, in regular confession.

Teaching our children to dialogue with others who hold different views fosters self-confidence and contributes to a healthy society. Even our worst enemies have some good points. Similarly, we can relate to someone with woke values in many ways: all people are equal, whether white or black, woman or man. This can be a foundation to start a dialogue.

We can guide our children in learning about opposite viewpoints, figuring out how each perspective is different and which is most consistent with facts and logic.

Additionally, they need to see that regular dialogue with God is necessary to thrive in this life. For a Christian, the core of personal identity is the fact that we are sons and daughters of God. It is not the colour of our skin, our sex, our gender, our ethnic background, or our nationality. Children are amazed when they realize God planned on creating them specifically, with all their quirks and qualities, before the beginning of time.

These approaches, along with Mering’s constant advice to “have fun in the family,” constitute an effective inoculation against many harmful influences.

Parallel to the internal guidance of our children is keeping an eye on external factors.

Pay attention to what goes on in school. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson recommends that children whose teachers rely upon words like equity, diversity, inclusivity, white privilege leave the classroom. Why should they be indoctrinated with “radical leftist, neo-Marxist ideology”?

Erroneous ideas often come more from peers than teachers, so getting to know your children’s friends is important. Pay attention to their internet habits. Invest in a parental control or filtering device.

Read books and watch shows together that support your values. There’s a wealth of information available in an entertaining form on the internet – on topics ranging from preferred pronouns to same-sex attraction to social justice.

Helping children to remain loyal to noble human and Christian values has always been a challenge for parents. Imagine what it must have been like to be a parent in Nazi Germany when children were being courted by Hitler Youth groups, or in in the Soviet Union, when everyone was expected to join the Young Pioneers. Love your children, educate them, and entrust them to the Lord. He will open their eyes to the truth.

AUTHOR

Ida Gazzola is the mother of 6 girls and one boy and lives in British Columbia, Canada. Before embarking on the adventure of parenting, she studied and worked in the financial industry. Team Baby: Creating… More by Ida Gazzola

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Leadership in a time of crisis: Israel and America

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Israel is facing some potentially catastrophic challenges that require supporters of Israel to speak out as never before in support of the Jewish State. Its government is in crisis as well.

NOTE: This is part one of a two-part series, with the second one being entitled On Leaders and War: Ideological Transformation in the West After Ukraine.

Perhaps we have all been so focused on Covid 19 and then on the Russian war against Ukraine, that we have given insufficient attention to other important geopolitical events affecting America and Israel. Surely, the Western world is in a crisis and in times of crisis, good leadership is more important than ever.

One aspect of the crisis is inattention to critical matters. As Covid wanes, hopefully, there is the possibility that on an individual level we shall get preoccupied with all the activities we have missed during the lockdowns – attending movies and concerts, synagogue and public lectures, sporting events, and education. In the case of Israel, we see that Israel is facing some potentially catastrophic challenges that require supporters of Israel to speak out as never before in support of the Jewish State.

The seven most important problems facing Israel:

1. The Iran nuclear deal, otherwise known as the JCPOA-2, in which the major world powers believe it is appropriate that the world’s worst rogue state – that pledges destruction of Israel (and America) – should be awarded sanctions relief and enough money that it can finance more terrorism, even a war, against Israel. And how sad that the world powers think that it is not an issue of whether Iran gets nuclear weapons but when. It is sad that what appears to be delaying the deal is not the needed moral vision of America, but a Russian demand that its trade with Iran be exempted from sanctions.

2. The United Nations which seems to consider its main duty as criticizing every action by Israel to protect its rights under international law dating back to the San Remo declaration, has now gone even further than usual – its creation of an open-ended and permanent international investigation into Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, after Israel’s 11-day self-defense to Hamas firing missiles. The fraudulently named UN Human Rights Council voted to create the “Commission of Inquiry”investigation after the UN rights chief said Israeli forces may have committed war crimes. The resolution called for the creation of a permanent “Commission of Inquiry” to monitor and report on rights violations in Israel, the Gaza Strip and the ‘West Bank’. It would be the first such commission of inquiry with an “ongoing” mandate.

Israel’s representative at the meeting said the commission was “yet another example of a grossly discriminatory and fraudulent body that this distinguished forum should be working to abolish.”

I agree with calling the commission “fraudulent” but not with terming the Human Rights Council a “distinguished forum”. The Israeli representative said experts involved in the commission had made statements revealing a bias against Israel, and that the commission “pre-assumes Israeli violations of international law rather than presuming innocence as is required.” Israel’s UN envoy Gilad Erdan said in a statement: “The UN fell to a new low and approved a budget for a despicable and biased commission that has no right to exist.” He said the commission of inquiry ignores Hamas war crimes, including the 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilians.

Besides the Israel-Hamas conflict, the commission is also to investigate “all underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability, and protraction of conflict” including discrimination and repression.

The commission will no doubt ignore that the 11-day war last May, began with Hamas firing rockets at Jerusalem, followed by towns in south of Israel and the Tel Aviv area. Israeli airstrikes in response against targets in the Strip killed some 250 people, including minors, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not differentiate between terror group members and civilians. Twelve people were killed in Israel, all but one of them civilians, including a 5-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl. Israel has said the majority of those killed were terror operatives and insists it did everything to avoid civilian casualties while fighting armed groups deliberately embedded in populated areas.

3. The increasing anti-Israelism of the Biden administration, and its new ambassador to Israel, Thomas Nides. In fact, I believe that Nides’ opinions are so anti-Israel that his appointment should be viewed as a hostile act. Nides, a banker and former deputy Secretary of State under Obama, is Jewish but neither his wife nor children are. His wife will not join him in Israel as she is a Vice-President of CNN, hardly a pro-Israel media.

His anti-Israelism is most apparent when he is in the presence of others who he perceives correctly to be anti-Israel. Daniel Greenfield, writing in INN and also JNS, notes that Nides was featured in a webinar with the anti-Israel group, Americans for Peace Now, whose CEO has described Israel as an “oppressive regime”.

Greenfield asserts that Nides’s main qualification for the job had been yelling “You don’t want to f***ing defund UNESCO” at a former Israeli ambassador. He had also vocally opposed efforts to defund UNRWA and stop subsidizing the terror refugee industry. Early on, Nides announced that he wanted to open an occupation (!) consulate to the terrorists in Jerusalem, over the opposition of the Israeli government, and that he would not visit those parts of Israel wrongly described as “settlements” – because they’re claimed by Islamic terrorists. Many American Jews who made Aliyah live in Judea and Samari and you can imagine how they and their families who may still reside in America feel about the ambassador shunning them.

At the infamous APN webinar, Nides felt he was with the like-minded. APN opposes Jews living in Jerusalem, opposes anti-BDS legislation and opposes Jews defending themselves against Islamic terrorism. And so, Nides’ true feelings were expressed this way: “You have a clear agenda. I think your agenda is where my heart is,” Nides told APN.

Nides also told the webinar that he and Biden wanted to divide Jerusalem and that “my job is to knock down things that make that possibility impossible.” He also admitted that “the idea of settlement growth … infuriates me”. Nides wants to reverse Israel’s success in the 1967 war – he says that his priority is fighting to prevent Jews from living in those parts of Jerusalem that had been captured by invading Muslim armies in 1948 and liberated from their occupiers in 1967 during the Six-Day War.

“We can’t have the Israelis doing settlement growth, both in East Jerusalem or the West Bank.”

Finally, we note that rather than vocally condemning the PLO for subsidizing the murder of Americans and Jews, as they pay pensions to family members of dead terrorists, Nides only appears to be concerned that the terror payments were an “excuse” for Jewish “haters” to cut off funding to the terrorists.

Nides’ positions encourage more Israel hatred among American Jews and non-Jews.

4. The virtue signaling of admitting immigrants to Israel, who are Ukrainian non-Jews who practice Christianity (to a greater extent than most Christian countries) thus jeopardizing the role of Israel as a Jewish state.

5. The continuation in the world’s universities of hate speech and fraudulent antisemitic nonsense such as the so-called Israel Apartheid Week.

6.The practice by Biden of overturning almost everything good, domestically or in foreign policy, done by President Trump. If that practice extends to Trump’s Abraham Accords, this might destroy the best plan for Middle East peace in history. The adoption of the Oslo Accord, after the Six Day War, set Israel on a path that resulted in terrorism and naivete that a terrorist organization seeking ejection of Jews from all of our historic homeland could be a partner in a so-called “two-state” solution.

7. Perhaps most serious of all the problems facing Israel is the fading loyalty of its Arab Muslim citizens to the sovereignty and peacefulness of the nation of Israel. Israel is now facing a growing sector of people who not only do not contribute to the defense of Israel but are involved in terrorism and other violence in the “mixed” cities like Lod, Ramle, Jaffa, and Nazareth.

In recent days, at the end of March and the beginning of April, terrorist murders of Jewish Israelis occured in Hadera, Gush Etzion, and Bnai Brak. But the turning point happened some ten months’ earlier, during Operation Guardian of the Walls.:

On May 10, 2021, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), two Gaza-based Palestinian U.S.-designated terrorist organizations, with the excuse that they were “defending Al-Aqsa,” and citing a dispute over some disputed ownership of homes in East Jerusalem (where the courts ruled in favor of Jewish ownership, began launching rockets and missiles into Israel. For eleven days, over 4,300 rockets and missiles were fired from Gaza towards Israeli civilian centers, throughout the south and central parts of the country, including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Millions of Israelis were forced to take cover in bomb shelters. This was especially true in the south, including in cities such as Ashkelon, Ashdod and Beer Sheva, which were severely impacted by the rocket attacks.

In response, the Israeli military launched what it called “Operation Guardian of the Walls” targeting Hamas and PIJ sites and operatives throughout Gaza via airstrikes and artillery fire.

The shocking development was that during this war against Israel by Hamas, there was an alarming outbreak of Arab violence in a number of Israeli cities which have significant populations of both Jewish and Arab citizens. Arabs engaged in arson, looting and rioting. Jewish and Arab-owned businesses and vehicles were targeted and damaged. Synagogues came under attack and were burned and vandalized as well. There were also a number of incidents in which individuals were targeted.

These seven most important problems require great leadership and great policies to meet and overcome them. How are both America and Israel and their leaders poised to meet them?

The one overriding concern that I have in the face of such issues is that Israel and America are currently led by individuals who have so little support, in recent polls, that they may now realize that they have little chance of maintaining their governance in future elections. Thus, they may not govern with the usual moderation that is shown by leaders trying to maintain popular support from a large moderate majority; in fact, if such leaders face almost certain defeat in the next election, they may embrace policies espoused by the most radical of their electoral base.

Some six months since the formation of an eight-party ruling coalition led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, and containing everything from Leftists to an Arab party, a poll published by Channel 12 news in December showed that the current government is largely unpopular.

But the survey also showed that new elections would do little except continue the parliamentary deadlock that plagued Israel for some two years and four elections.

The poll showed that nearly twice as many Israelis prefer opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister to Bennett or Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid.

When asked what government they preferred, 43% said they preferred the previous government led by Netanyahu, while 36% preferred the current government led by Bennett and Lapid. Others had no clear answer.

But Netanyahu still lacked a viable path to forming a government if elections were held today, with only 57 seats to his bloc of right-wing and religious parties. Meanwhile the current coalition would lose four seats, sitting at 57 as well.

The Joint List, a smaller coalition of four predominantly Arab parties, would hold the other six.

A poll in February by Direct Polls showed that if elections were held then, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party would barely be able to cross the electoral threshold.

The 2021 Israeli legislative election saw Bennett’s Yamina party secure six seats. He partnered with Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, who won 17 seats, to oust them-PM Benjamin Netanyahu. While Likud had won 30 mandates in the election – and was the winning party in the three election campaigns that preceded it – Netanyahu was unable to form a government.

Bennett then managed to forge a power-sharing deal with Lapid that granted him the premiership. As part of the deal, Lapid is slated to become prime minister in August 2023.

The move sparked outrage among right-wing voters, pundits, and politicians, who continuously accuse Bennett of defrauding the public. It is indeed outrageous that Bennett’s government relies for power on the support of Arab Islamists.

Were elections held at this time, the poll found that the Likud would win 36 seats, followed by Yesh Atid (17), Blue and White (9), Sephardi ultra-Orthodox party Shas (9), the Religious Zionist Party (8), Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox party United Torah Judaism (7), Labor (7), Joint Arab List (7), Yisrael Beytenu (6), Meretz (5), the Islamist Ra’am party (5), and Yamina (4).

But with this week’s resignation by coalition whip and Yamina MK Idit Silman, all may change. Without brilliant leadership by Bennett, the coalition that many feared would not last and would lead to yet further elections, looks indeed to be falling apart.

The coalition, based as it is, and led by a party that actually received so few votes, is now facing a crisis. On Monday, Yamina MK and coalition whip Idit Silman decried Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz from Meretz for sending a letter to the heads of hospitals instructing them to abide by a 2020 High Court of Justice decision and let guests bring bread and other leavened products (chametz) into the hospitals during the upcoming Passover holiday.

Silman stated that this was a cardinal issue for her and threatened that it was something she could not tolerate. Accordingly she has quite the coalition and rejoined Lihud.

But the chametz issue may only be the proximate cause of a split that may always have been inevitable for a politician with a religious base, but trying to govern with radical leftists, secularists and Arabs. Bennett has been turning his attention to the possibility of mediating between Russia and Ukraine; meanwhile, he neglected the concerns of his own party, and these concerns may eventually cause an end to his government, if more members follow Silman’s lead.

Thus, one can say that Bennett’s leadership is perhaps too weak to hold together the disparate forces in his coalition.

Turning to the United States, we see a dangerous failure of leadership by President Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris. A sampling of recent polls show Biden with an approval rating between 39% and 45% and a disapproval rate of between 50% and 55%.

Biden has been seen to fumble policies on the economy, inflation, the southern border, crime and drugs, energy independence, China, Ukraine, and corrupt practices with his son Hunter. He often misspeaks and appears to be suffering from age-related mental confusion. His hurried pull out from Afghanistan, abandoning to the Taliban the Bagram Airfields, numerous Afghan interpreters and other American allies and billions of dollars of the most modern military equipment and vehicles, has done incalculable damage to America’s leadership position in the world. What leadership can he offer?

©Howard Rotberg. All rights reserved.

CNN+ To Shut Down Less Than 5 Weeks After Launching

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CNN+ is shutting down after its launching just three weeks ago, the network announced in a Wednesday statement.

The platform is set to end operations by April 30, the network said in a statement. Andrew Morse, CNN’s chief digital officer and head of the streaming platform, decided to step down from his position.

“As we become Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN will be strongest as part of WBD’s streaming strategy which envisions news as an important part of a compelling broader offering along with sports, entertainment, and nonfiction content,” said Chris Licht, Chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide.  “We have therefore made the decision to cease operations of CNN+ and focus our investment on CNN’s core news-gathering operations and in further building CNN Digital.”

“This is not a decision about quality; we appreciate all of the work, ambition and creativity that went into building CNN+, an organization with terrific talent and compelling programming. But our customers and CNN will be best served with a simpler streaming choice.”

Licht said CNN+ employees will continue to be paid and receive company benefits for the next 90 days, then be handed a six-month severance, he said.

The platform braced themselves for layoffs at the moment of its launching due to low subscription numbers, which caused the network’s parent company, WarnerMedia, to complete its merger with DiscoveryPlus, now known as Warner Bros. Discovery. The platform was slated to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in investments and projections.

Nearly $300 million had been spent on the service, Axios reported. It is unclear if CNN+ executives, including boss Andrew Morse, will stay with the service after investment cuts.

The platform had under 10,000 active daily users in its first month, though executives expected those numbers to reach near 2 million in the first year and 15-18 million in four years.

The platform hosted several of the network’s hosts, including Anderson Cooper, Poppy Harlow and Chris Wallace, who left Fox News in December to host a CNN+ show.

AUTHOR

NICOLE SILVERIO

Media reporter. Follow Nicole Silverio on Twitter @NicoleMSilverio.

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Elon Musk has secured a $46.5 billion financing commitment to acquire Twitter Inc.

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and  from the New York Post reported:

Elon Musk has secured $46.5 billion in financing to fund his Twitter takeover bid, according to a Thursday regulatory filing.

The Tesla tycoon is also considering mounting a tender offer — which would involve trying to buy up stock from existing shareholders at $54.20 per share — in order to grow his stake in Twitter, the filing shows.

Twitter rose 0.6% on the news to $46.98 but remain well below Musk’s proposed takeover price of $54.20, indicating that investors are still skeptical that the deal will go through.

“He’s making the offer and it’s not conditioned on financing or business due diligence,” a hedge fund manager reviewing the situation told The Post, adding that he was surprised at the speed Musk’s dealmaking team is moving.

Read more.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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