The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has concluded that Japan’s plans to release radioactive water from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean are consistent with international safety standards.
In a report published on July 4 (pdf), the IAEA, a United Nations body, said that the findings followed a comprehensive assessment and safety review of the treated water stored at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station (FDNPS).
Additionally, the IAEA said that “controlled, gradual discharges of the treated water to the sea” as currently planned by Japan’s government and the plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO), would have a “negligible radiological impact on people and the environment.”
The report is the result of a nearly two-year assessment conducted by an IAEA task force made up of top specialists from within the agency advised by “internationally recognized nuclear safety experts from eleven countries,” according to a press release.
Around 1.2 million cubic meters in volume of water used to cool the fuel rods of the Fukushima plant will be released under the plan over the next three to four decades in order to prevent accidental leaks and to allow for the plant’s decommissioning.
As part of the plan, the IAEA said it will conduct an independent and objective safety review during the discharge phase, with a continued on-site presence and live online monitoring throughout.
Japan has not specified a date for the water release.
The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster was triggered by a deadly 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami in the northern region of Japan which knocked out the plant’s cooling systems, triggering the meltdown of three reactors.
While the water stored at the FDNPS has been treated through an “Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS)” to remove “almost all” radioactivity, it still remains tainted by tritium, a rare and radioactive isotope of hydrogen which can bond with oxygen to make water, making it difficult to fully remove.
Tritium can increase the risk of cancer if consumed in extremely large quantities. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets a maximum contaminant level for tritium at 20,000 picoCuries per liter.
The World Health Organization sets its maximum concentration level much higher, at around 13 times the amount of the EPA’s recommendation.
Before the water is discharged into the Pacific Ocean, it will be diluted by Japanese authorities to bring the tritium to below regulatory standards, IAEA said. Multiple nuclear power plants throughout the world regularly release wastewater containing tritium above the concentration of TEPCO’s treated water, according to reports.
However, a string of nations including China and South Korea have opposed the release of the radioactive water, citing health and safety concerns. Local fishing groups have also raised concerns over the possibility that the move could severely impact business even if they catch uncontaminated fish, as have tourism companies, beach businesses, and tourism bodies.
In June Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called the plan “extremely selfish and irresponsible,” adding that the ocean is “humanity’s common good, not Japan’s private sewer.”
Wang cited reports stating that the radioactive element Caesium-137, or Cs-137, in black rockfish that were caught in the harbor surrounding the power plant in May far exceeded safety levels, reaching 18,000 Bq/kg, 180 times above the standard laid out in Japan’s food safety law.
“The Japanese government has repeatedly sought to whitewash its discharge of nuclear-contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, claiming the water to be harmless and the discharge to be justified and calling it the only option. Yet facts prove otherwise,” Wang said at the time.
The Pacific Islands Forum, an intergovernmental organization consisting of 18 nations including Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and Australia, has also criticized the proposed move, urging Japan to hold off on the release until definitive environmental and human health implications have been established.
Our national Fourth of July holiday – currently the nation’s 247th since the first in 1776 – marks the birth of the United States.
The iconic Declaration of Independence was published on the 4th and largely written by Thomas Jefferson. Its core sentence would become among the most famous words in American history:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Those aspirations at the outset pledged the new American nation to hold to its promises “that all men are created equal.”
In other words, so-called white males established a foundational document whose inherent logic was that the millions of Americans not yet born—who would not necessarily look like them, or share their ancestry—would become their political equals.
Most nation founders do not envision the future of their country in terms that might not privilege those of their own tribe.
In contrast, today it would be difficult for a foreign national to become a full-fledged Chinese, Mexican, or Iranian citizen, with full equal rights, who either did not look like, or embrace a religion different from, the majority population.
What followed from the Declaration was a constant demand from many quarters for America to live up to its own exalted words.
Eighty-five years later, that promise culminated in a horrific Civil War that cost 700,000 American lives to remove the stain of slavery, and to honor the promise of the Fourth.
“All men are created equal” further entailed another century of protest and reform, until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s finally enshrined into law equality of opportunity statutes.
But note what the Declaration was not.
There was no full embrace of all the later French Revolutionary slogans of Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Instead, the Declaration promised that all men should start out equally through guaranteed protections to live their lives as they please and ensure their liberty.
The new government made, then, no claims that all Americans must be egalitarian. There was no promise that Americans must be equal in all aspect of their lives—or else.
Such mandated sameness might threaten the idea of “liberty,” and the ability of each citizen to pursue one’s own version of happiness.
Nor did the Declaration pledge a common “fraternity.” Americans were under no compulsion to embrace some collective brotherhood or shared orthodox political sentiments.
So Americans would not be ensured an equality of result—or what we may know now as “equity.”
Unlike other revolutionary governments, the founders of America never promised to create utopian “new men” who would become alike in all aspects of their being.
The foundational date of our “new order” was canonized as 1776. Yet note it was not some pretentious Jacobin “Year 1”—as if everything in the past was to be erased.
Unlike revolutionary France’s 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” the American Declaration was far more modest in its confidence in what government could or should achieve.
Jefferson inserted no such French wording about government power concerning “social distinctions” or “disturbing the public order” or “in proportion to their means.”
Other republics birthed parliamentary systems.
They usually spawned multiple splinter parties. They were characterized by sudden creations and collapses of ruling governments, depending on volatile public mood swings.
Often backroom deals were common to appoint new presidents and prime ministers—or dismiss them.
Instead, our Constitution, in classical fashion, established a bicameral Congress, an executive president and a supreme court.
Their quite different powers were all checked and balanced by one another.
Then their prerogatives were further limited by a federal system of individual states’ rights to form their own laws not entailed by the Constitution.
Regularly scheduled elections, a formal Bill of Rights, a two-party system, and a single continuous Constitution naturally followed.
Few consensual governments have ever emulated the more difficult American model—and thus so far never achieved a 247-year continuity of a single republican system.
Certainly, Americans went through a variety of crises that challenged the viability of the Declaration—the Civil War, the Great Depression, two World Wars, the culture war of the 1960s, and the current woke revolution of the 2020s.
Terrible laws of discrimination were and are still sometimes passed contrary to both the Constitution and the Declaration.
But so far, the sparse wording of the Declaration has prevailed.
America’s Constitution was not hijacked by the likes of a French Napoleon.
There has been no Nazi take-over of our democracy as in 1930s Germany.
We have not been plagued by dozens of brief ad-hoc coalition governments akin to Italy’s volatility.
So on this Fourth let us cherish the Fourth of July for what it promised—and what it thankfully did not.
The android robot EveR 6 and conductor Soo-Yeoul Choi co-conducted a performance of six pieces with the Korean National Symphony Orchestra…
A robot graced the stage at the National Theatre of Korea to conduct the Korean National Symphony Orchestra on June 30, marking South Korea’s first robot-conductor public appearance.
EveR 6, the android that co-conducted the performance titled “Absence,“ is a design produced by the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH). The robot is equipped with a humanoid face and has a human-life form with a torso, two arms, a neck and a head.
KITECH trained EveR 6 through “motion capture” technology via sensor attachments that digitally record a conductor’s baton trajectory. The robot is also trained to keep track of the speed of the baton’s movements.
Before the performance, the theatre released a teaser video on its YouTube channel, showing glimpses into the rehearsal and training process.
The robot was joined on stage by conductor Soo-Yeoul Choi, who co-conducted the performance. Choi is reported to have said that one of the most challenging aspects for robots is “real-time interaction and communication,” particularly in the musical context.
He said EveR 6’s “critical weakness” is that it cannot listen. However, Choi also said that “the robot was able to present such detailed moves much better than I had imagined.“
예술과 기술의 만남
안드로이드 로봇 에버6 와
지휘자 최수열 이 함께하는 국악관현악,
국립국악관현악단 ‘부재’
Choi and EveR 6 both took turns conducting pieces, with the robot guiding three of five pieces and then performed one-piece side by side. After the concert, Choi said:
“It was a recital that showed that (robots and humans) can co-exist and complement each other, rather than one replacing the other.“
Cointelegraph reached out to the Korean National Symphony Orchestra for comments from the musicians who were conducted by the android but didn’t immediately get a response.
Audience members in attendance were mixed, with one concertgoer Lee Young-ji commenting on the robot’s skill to keep rhythm. The attendee said it lacked “breath” and that:
“It seemed there was some work to be done for the robot to do the job.”
Another audience member, Song In-ho, said the robot performed at a very basic level and would be able to do more if equipped with an artificial intelligence (AI) system that could help it understand and analyze the music.
Nonetheless, the performance was the first of its kind in South Korea. Previously, a robot created by Honda called Asimo guest-conducted a performance with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 2008.
In 2017, a robot named YuMi guest-conducted a performance in Switzerland. In 2020, a Japanese-designed robot named Alter 3 conducted a seven-minute piece of music deemed an “android opera” called Scary Beauty.
The high tech trade war between China and the US continues. China will start export controls on gallium and germanium, two minerals used in the production of semiconductors, and a range of related metals on August 1. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is preparing to restrict the access of Chinese companies to US cloud-computing services. Later this week, Treasury Secretary Yellen will visit China to improve relations.
Yesterday, the ISM manufacturing index fell to 46.0 in June, from 46.9 in May, The Bloomberg consensus expectation was a rebound to 47.1. The ISM manufacturing has been below the neutral level of 50, which distinguishes between expansion and contraction, since November, but has now reached its lowest level since May 2020, shortly after COVID-19 broke out in the US. The employment sub-index fell to 48.1 from 51.4, indicating a net loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector in June. The prices paid index fell to 41.8 from 44.2, well below the Bloomberg consensus expectation of 44.0. This underlines that inflation in goods has fallen back, with services being the main driver of elevated inflation at the moment. Note that the services PMIs are still consistent with expansion. The final estimate of S&P Global’s US manufacturing PMI remained at 46.3 in June, also well below the critical level. Note that we still expect the US recession to start in the second half of this year. The manufacturing PMIs, which are always the first to head south, are already flashing red. That is also why we have doubts about another Fed rate hike after July, if Powell insists on a more moderate pace that would skip the September meeting and leave November as the next hiking month.
Meanwhile, the civil unrest in France continues, after spreading to a couple of cities in Belgium and Switzerland. The role of social media should not be underestimated here, as Brussels and Lausanne are both largely French-speaking cities. While the police officer who killed the 17 year old during a traffic stop in Nanterre on June 27 has been arrested, the riots could not be prevented as frustrations about policy brutality have been brewing in the banlieues. In contrast to the US, where the middle class lives in the suburbs and the working class and poor in the inner cities, in France it’s the other way round: the middle class lives in the cities and the working class and poor in the suburbs (‘banlieues’). Don’t think of the banlieues as endless rows of detached houses with well-kept gardens, but rather as a collection of neglected high rise housing projects. Similar to the US, the geographical sorting has taken place along ethnic lines. And also similar to the US, the French police are often seen as occupying forces. The thin blue line of lower middle class officers, protecting the rest of the middle class from the working class and the poor.
Earlier, in a letter, the French police union called the rioters “vermin” and “savage hordes.” Violent confrontations between the police and the youth in the banlieues have taken place since the 1980s. More recently, in 2005, riots in the French banlieues lasted for three weeks, which would imply that we still have two weeks to go. This could take the riots to Le 14 Juillet, the French equivalent of the 4th of July.
Economists like to quantify opinions. How about this one? In recent days, there have been two crowdfunding efforts related to the reason for the riots. As of Monday, more than one million euro has been collected to support the police officer who shot the 17 year old, while 234,000 euro has been collected to support the mother of the dead kid. Bienvenue en banlieue.
Some U.S. senators have famously kept a pocket Constitution handy to use as a prop at political rallies; a few may have even read it. But at this point in American history it no longer matters whether they, or anyone else, can read the words of the Constitution because the words no longer mean what they say.
Take, for instance, the Supreme Court’s ruling last week that state legislatures do not have the sole discretion to determine how federal elections will be run in those states. Instead, state courts are given veto power over the decisions of the legislature.
The mainstream media (and of course their Democratic Party allies) celebrated the court’s decision in Moore v. Harper that rejected the so-called “independent state legislature” theory. The New York Times called the theory “dangerous.” Vox said the ruling was a “big victory for democracy.” Those who supported the independent state legislature “theory” were called extreme, fringe, radical, and worse. In other words, they were Trump supporters.
The only problem is that if the theory is extreme, then so is the U.S. Constitution, because no matter how much the 6-3 majority insists otherwise, it isn’t a theory at all. It is the plain language of the Constitution. Check it out for yourself.
Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution says specifically, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”
It is not the governor or the courts or even the people of the state which set election rules, according to the Constitution, but the legislatures. Mind you, the state legislatures are not entirely unchecked in their decision making, but it is the Congress of the United States that provides the checks and balances, not the courts.
And as for presidential elections, the matter is even more cut and dried. Article 2, Section 1, declares, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”
Notice again that the Constitution gives state legislatures the exclusive power to determine the manner in which electors are appointed to vote for president and vice president. In this case, even Congress does not have the authority to override the legislatures.
Yet now the Supreme Court has determined that the words of the Constitution do not mean what they say. This is pure revisionism, and plainly the result of judicial activism. The plenary power of the state legislatures to make the final decision about federal elections is settled conclusively by the fact that for many years after the adoption of the Constitution, it was common in many states for electors to be chosen directly by the legislature with no election at all. Not only did the courts have no say in the matter; neither did the people.
We don’t have to defend that practice in order to confirm that it is clearly constitutional, and having said so, we can also declare that the Supreme Court in Moore v. Harper has not interpreted the Constitution, but written a new one. If we the people decided that it was inappropriate for the state legislatures to make the rules for how to elect federal officials, we could have done what the Constitution calls for and sought to amend it. But instead, lawyers have waged war upon the English language and enlisted activist judges and justices to implement interpretations that are based more on sentiment than common sense.
If we are being honest, it is not just crazy liberals who twist the words of the Constitution to mean whatever they want. Not long ago, I wrote a column titled “Do Democrats Value Abortion More Than the Constitution?” It lambasted Biden and others who want to create a law to protect abortion.
As I explained then:
Congress has no such ability. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution enumerates the powers of Congress. They are remarkably straightforward – and limited. Raise taxes, borrow money, regulate international commerce and commerce among the states, establish a process for naturalizing citizens, coin money and punish counterfeiters, establish post offices, establish copyright and trademark laws, establish lower courts, regulate pirates, declare war, raise armies and a navy, provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions, and create and maintain a small district that shall be the seat of government.
Search as you will, you won’t find any congressional power to promote social justice or to impose a moral standard on the nation. Unfortunately for lovers of limited government, Republicans have proven to be just as willing to ride roughshod over the Constitution as their Democrat counterparts. Former Vice President Mike Pence, whom I defended in my prior column, has now publicly called for a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks. No matter how much you abhor abortion, it is impossible to find any words in the Constitution which give Congress the power to regulate such a medical procedure.
So regardless of how many members of Congress (or former vice presidents) tuck a Constitution in their pockets, it is also impossible to make them read it, let alone be guided by it.
As a final note, I should probably give credit to the Supreme Court for overturning the policy of affirmative action in college admissions in two separate cases last week. It turns out that all those references in the Constitution to equality and equal protection of the law actually mean something. At least they do today. But for 45 years since the court’s ruling in the Bakke case, students who were rejected for college admission because of the color of their skin were just supposed to grin and bear it. Sure, the 14th Amendment prohibits states or state agents from “deny[ing] to any person … the equal protection of the laws.” But once again the plain language of the Constitution was ignored until last week.
I would propose writing an amendment that forced elected and appointed officials of the United States to follow the Constitution as written, not the one with invisible asterisks and footnotes and a “social justice clause,” but chances are it would be found unconstitutional anyway – or at least inconvenient.
It wasn’t just in the United States where Tesla impressed with deliveries heading into the end of Q2 – the company also saw its output in China increase by a whopping 20%, according to Bloomberg.
Last month Tesla shipped 93,680 vehicles from its Shanghai plant, according to data from China’s Passenger Car Association. That number is up from 78,906 last year and 77,695 last month.
The company’s robust sales are still being helped along by price cuts it put into place at the beginning of the year, with Bloomberg noting that “after a price war leading into the Shanghai auto show in April, deliveries started to pick up again and the overall market for new-energy vehicles remained strong.”
Recall, Tesla stock rocketed higher on the shortened trading day on Monday, rising nearly 7% at its high of the day.
At the end of Q2 Tesla posted 466,140 deliveries for the quarter, ahead of Bloomberg’s consensus estimate of 448,351. The auto manufacturer produced 479,700 vehicles in the quarter, exceeding estimates of 456,617.
Tesla delivered 19,225 Model S/X vehicles in the quarter, beating expectations of 14,606.
The EV manufacturer also delivered 446,915 Model 3/Y vehicles in the quarter, exceeding estimates of 437,386.
We’ll be sure to keep an eye on this trend in future quarters, especially as Tesla continues to expand globally. For now, however, the market’s focus will likely remain on the headline numbers beating expectations.
Recall, over the last month, we have been covering how legacy automakers like Ford and GM, paired with new EV companies like Rivian, have adopted Tesla’s charging standard, allowing their vehicles to utilize Tesla’s nationwide network of Superchargers. As such, we have been documenting how Tesla’s charging standard is now quickly becoming the EV industry’s charging standard.
Hilariously, days ago, both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley downgraded Tesla. Despite the downgrade two weekends ago, shares held steady after their recent 3 month rally, up nearly 75% off their 52 week lows. Goldman, led by analyst Mark Delaney, noted that the stock price moving higher, in addition to a tougher pricing environment for autos, were two of the reasons for downgrading the name.
In the United States and Britain, ill-informed and poorly reasoned opinions about transgenderism, climate change, COVID-19, Islamic extremism, working-class political inclinations and voting patterns, race, sex, hate speech, and identity politics dominate progressive elites’ thinking and drive their policymaking. This alone would pose no special challenge to freedom and democracy. Misguided views, short-sighted laws, smug moralizing, and abuse of power leave their mark in the best of times. They will persist as long as human beings remain fallible, self-interested, subject to appetite and emotion, and desirous of wealth, status, and dominion.
The deeper concern is the determination on the part of journalists, professors and university administrators, K-12 educators, government bureaucrats, high-tech titans and social-media moguls, entertainment-industry movers and shakers, and corporate executives – a preponderance of what was once called “the establishment” – to silence dissent from progressive orthodoxy through law and popular opprobrium. That puts liberal democracy itself at risk, not least by prompting the right to injudiciously retaliate with bans of its own.
Censorship degrades the quality of information available to voters and officeholders. Flawed assumptions, bad ideas, and haughty attitudes can be rectified by confrontation with sounder assumptions, better ideas, and suppler attitudes. The suppression of speech, however, deprives error of illumination. It converts legitimate positions to suspect products of special pleading and coercion. And it insulates true opinions from that contact with alternative perspectives, messy realities, and fiercely held conflicting convictions that transforms inert knowledge into living wisdom.
Censorship also undercuts the respect for fellow citizens and the rights of others that sustain political cohesiveness in a liberal democracy. By designating some opinions as unquestionable and others as unutterable, an overbearing majority – or a crafty and resolute minority – can purge the public square of those citizens who harbor proscribed thoughts and refuse to genuflect to authoritative conclusions. The right to free speech, moreover, is indissolubly bound up with all the other basic rights and fundamental freedoms. I cannot vindicate my equal rights to religious liberty, assembly, petition of government, self-defense, property, and due process of law without the opportunity – unencumbered by fear of formal government sanction and of informal social ostracism – to advance my views publicly and, also of crucial importance, to hear others offer their perspectives.
In his short book, “A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable,” Brendan O’Neill shows himself a hero of free speech and a champion of the moral and political conditions in which it thrives. The chief political writer for the maverick British magazine “Spiked,” O’Neill argues “that the constant churn of political correctness – or cancel culture or wokeness or intolerance or whatever we’re calling it – represents not just an over-the-top clampdown on speech, but a crisis of Enlightenment.” The phrase “cancel culture,” he stresses, fails to capture the gravity of the threat. “Every enlightened idea – science is real, race is not, women should have rights, freedom is good, reason is the best tool for making sense of our world – risks being crushed under the forever spinning wheel of correct thought,” O’Neill writes. “Our curse is not just to bear witness to the intermittent silencing of controversial commentators, but to watch as liberty, objectivity, democracy, equality and the other great gains of the modern era are sacrificed one by one at the altar of new orthodoxies that pose, so falsely, as progressive thought.”
O’Neill is not content, though, to faithfully record the outrages against liberty and clear thinking. His sizzling essays, which draw effortlessly on history and maneuver deftly through contemporary political culture, summon readers to keep liberty alive. The censors “can cancel our speeches, our jobs, our respectability, sometimes even our rights,” he acknowledges, “but they cannot cancel this – the freedom of every person to think and believe as he sees fit.”
Take, for example, “Her Penis,” the essay with which O’Neill begins. “Nothing better captures the irrationalism of our age, and also the slippery authoritarianism of it, than the fact that this nonsensical phrase is frequently uttered, and as much in the respectable press as in the gender Bedlam of internet discussion forums,” he states. One can appreciate O’Neill’s indignation while affirming that all human beings are equal in rights, compassion and concern is due to those who suffer gender dysphoria, and respect is owed to those adults who have made an informed decision to bring their bodies in line with their gender. Nevertheless, his objection is simple. If you are a woman, you don’t possess XY chromosomes and male genitalia, and if you possess XY chromosomes and male genitalia, you are not a woman. Yet the phrase “her penis,” as he copiously documents, now appears routinely. In one egregious case, a British man convicted of rape and pedophilia who claimed to be a woman was sent to a woman’s prison where he sexually assaulted two inmates. At trial, O’Neill reports, “the prosecuting lawyer described White’s approach of one of the female inmates as follows: ‘Her penis was erect and sticking out the top of her trousers.’”
The casual coupling of “her” and “penis,” O’Neill contends, reflects not only the corruption of journalists and jurists but also a failure of judgment and reason. It shows that wokeness, contrary to progressive apologists, has sunk into official discourse. It demonstrates the willingness of experts and the authorities to deny nature on behalf of the new transgender orthodoxy. It confirms the power “of the cultural despotism plaguing Anglo-American society,” which erodes clarity of expression, common sense, and science. And it brings into focus how, instead of honoring individuals, the proliferation of pronouns and the coercive measures employed to spread their use – and penalize their misuse – induces subservience to “the religion of gender fluidity.” The amazing inroads in recent years – in schools, government bureaucracies, and corporations – made by the dogma that one’s gender is whatever one says it is illustrate George Orwell’s signature insight that control over language confers control over thought.
Progressive thought police, O’Neill argues in a chapter called “Islamocensorship,” also enforce the absurd view that the very notion of Islamic extremism expresses Islamophobia. One example is the charge made by British academics that criticism of the hijab – various head coverings worn in public by Muslim women – must reflect gendered hostility to Islam. It follows, O’Neill mordantly points out, that the Islamic Republic of Iran suffered a severe bout of Islamophobia last September when, following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the police who had arrested her for failing to wear her hijab properly, young people across the country rose to protest Tehran’s mandatory hijab laws.
Just as it is a crime in Iran to criticize Islam, so too is it an offense against intellectual orthodoxy in the English-speaking academic world to call attention to oppression and violence within Muslim communities and Muslim majority nation-states. The penalties differ: “Here you’ll find yourself accused not of blasphemy, but of Islamophobia. Here you’ll be subjected not to physical lashes, but to a tongue-lashing – ‘phobic’, ‘racist’, ‘bigot’, all of it. Here you won’t be locked up, but you might be locked out – exiled from polite society and blacklisted from campuses for your profane thoughts.” But the silencing is similar. Reminiscent of Iran’s ayatollahs, U.K. and U.S. professors and bureaucrats in effect enforce prohibitions on blasphemy against Islam.
Where blasphemy is barred, cursing of the impure, the unclean, and the vulgar is required. A favorite target for the West’s woke is older, white, male members of the working class.
In “Rise of the Pigs,” O’Neill explores the casual contempt with which British intellectual and political elites disparage white men who voted for Brexit as gammon – cured ham or bacon. “So widespread was the use of the gammon slur in liberal and leftish chatter post-Brexit that, in 2018,” writes O’Neill, “the Collins English Dictionary chose it as one of its words of the year.” The reduction of fellow citizens to pig meat signifies their unfitness for politics. The evidence? They voted against elite wishes. The elites’ solution? Limit public discussion by controlling the information that reaches the people. While the proffered justification for the new censorship – as for the old – is separating true from false, in practice the restriction of access to supposed “misinformation” or “disinformation” aims to conceal or delegitimize facts, considerations, and arguments that distract from or weaken the progressive narrative. At bottom, the progressive assault on free speech reflects anti-democratic ire. The educated must censor because otherwise the clash of opinions will confuse the ignorant and gullible masses or, worse, empower them to vote as they see fit.
O’Neill warns that in the struggle to preserve free speech it is a mistake to deny its enemies’ insistence that words wound: “It is precisely because words can wound, precisely because of their power to unsettle, that they should never be restricted.” Although not the goal, pain and perplexity are inseparable from the exploration from which we learn who we are as citizens and human beings. Only by risking the wounds and daring to be disoriented can we arrive at a responsible understanding of what in our political societies must be conserved and what must be improved.
Woke censorship renders heretics– especially those who defy the prejudices of the age by defending free speech – more vital than ever to liberal democracy.
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on Twitter @BerkowitzPeter.
Watch: Woke Demonstrators Protest Supreme Court Rulings With Bizarre Ritual
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that “woke” isn’t a religion. Activists at the Thurgood Marshall U.S. Courthouse in New York gathered in black garb, chanting and wailing in an unhinged procession following the Supreme Court’s recent decisions on Affirmative Action and student loan debt relief. The reversal of Affirmative Action policies in US colleges is supported by a majority of Americans, with many viewing the use of skin color and ethnicity in school admissions as a form of codified racism.
The political left argues that colleges should take into account the “adversity” that minority students have overcome as a factor in acceptance while ignoring their academic accomplishments (or lack thereof); the Supreme Court has essentially ruled that race is not a useful indicator of adversity. The SC is correct in this conclusion, but the political left has responded to the decision along with others that have not gone in their favor with abject rage and indignant shock.
Happening Now: Demonstrators gathered outside the Thurgood Marshall U.S. Courthouse in New York, following Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action in higher education and other recent court rulings pic.twitter.com/Zf6DVspJuf
— Brendan Gutenschwager (@BGOnTheScene) July 4, 2023
These kinds of performances are reminiscent of religious ceremony, or cult ceremony, and showcase a desperate need by activists for a form of spiritual redress – It’s not just performance art. What we are seeing are the early stages of the formation of what you might call an “anti-religion,” or a religion of the self that also deifies political ideology. As we have witnessed in recent months, they are even adopting repetitive mantras…
Normal people might view this behavior as mentally unstable, and it is. But it is also an attempt by leftists, who are often devoid of internal meaning, to slap together and fabricate their own religious identity. Why? Because subjective Apocalypse movements need more than oppression status, they need a metaphysical experience. They need the power and the horror of a righteous trance. Don’t be surprised to see many more public displays like these from woke activists going forward as the movement continues its regression into zealotry.
With an eye toward the upcoming presidential elections, the White House has launched a new public relations campaign called “Bidenomics,” to define President Joe Biden’s economic agenda.
“I don’t know what the hell that is, but it’s working,” Biden stated at a June 17 union rally in Philadelphia, begging the question: what is Bidenomics, and is it working?
According to a White House statement, Bidenomics rests on three pillars: massive “smart” government spending on renewable energy and semiconductors, support for unions and domestic manufacturing, and promoting competition. As a result, the White House states, “our economy has added more than 13 million jobs—including nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs—and we’ve unleashed a manufacturing and clean energy boom.”
“I would define it as trickle-down big government,” Jonathan Williams, chief economist at the American Legislative Exchange Council, told The Epoch Times. “The common thread of this administration has been growth and expansion of government power, and certainly big government spending.”
According to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, when Biden took office, “America’s industrial base had been hollowed out. The vision of public investment that had energized the American project in the postwar years—and indeed for much of our history—had faded.“
Sullivan, who, despite his focus on security issues, has become a spokesman for Bidenomics, has been highly critical of what has been called “Reaganomics,” or a platform of tax cuts, trade liberalization and deregulation.
“There was one assumption at the heart of all of this policy: that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently,” Sullivan said during an April speech at the Brookings Institution.
“President Biden … believes that building a twenty-first-century clean-energy economy is one of the most significant growth opportunities of the twenty-first century,” he stated. “But that to harness that opportunity, America needs a deliberate, hands-on investment strategy to pull forward innovation, drive down costs, and create good jobs.”
Despite the administration’s argument that government is best positioned to direct private industry, some critics say that waste and failure are the hallmarks of government industrial policy.
Political Investors
“The government is not in the business of making good investments,” economist Arthur Laffer, a former advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump as well as U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, told The Epoch Times. “That’s not what they should be doing,” he said.
“These guys are not good investors; they’re political investors,” Laffer said. The more the government seeks to influence the private sector, the more the private sector will orient itself toward producing what the government wants versus what consumers want.
“Bidenomics is nothing more than the application of government intervention to guide, direct and restructure the economy as the White House thinks it should be structured,” Steve Hanke, economics professor at Johns Hopkins University, told The Epoch Times.
“This type of interventionism flies under the rubric of ‘industrial policy.’ It’s where government picks winners and losers by using levers of government policy, like taxes subsidies, regulations, tariffs, quotas, and even outright bans.”
Recent examples of government ventures into private industry include Solyndra, a California maker of solar panels that received $535 million in federal loan guarantees from the Obama administration before going bankrupt.
Under Bidenomics, automakers are being pushed by a combination of consumer subsidies, manufacturing grants, and ever-tightening emissions regulations to switch their production from gasoline-powered cars and trucks to electric vehicles (EVs). However, there is scant evidence that enough consumers will switch to EVs to justify the investments or that carmakers will be able to source enough lithium, cobalt, and other minerals to build EV batteries in large quantities, or that the U.S. electric grid can build enough new generation capacity and connect enough charging stations to charge EVs at scale.
At the same time, the Biden administration is working to reduce domestic production of oil, gas, and coal in favor of wind and solar, with the same supply issues that automakers face. The required minerals for wind turbines and solar panels are typically mined in countries that may not be friendly to the United States, and it has created a heavy dependence on China, which controls most of the refining of these minerals.
According to Hanke, who served on Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors, “Bidenomics is nothing new. Advocates of industrial policy in the 1980s used to latch onto Japan as a model for industrial policy, arguing that it contributed to Japan’s emergence as an economic power after World War II.
“But since the last three lost decades in Japan, the industrial policy advocates have gone radio silent,” Hanke said. “It’s hard to imagine a more misguided way to make decisions than to put them in the hands of those who pay no price for being wrong.”
Trillions in New Spending
To date, the Biden administration has overseen more than $4 trillion in new spending, of which $1.6 trillion was passed by Congress on a partisan basis, $1.4 trillion was passed on a bipartisan basis, and another $1.1 trillion came from Biden’s executive actions. Despite this spending, the White House claimed in March that “the President’s Budget improves the fiscal outlook by reducing the deficit by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade.”
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) sees it differently, however.
“Under the President’s FY 2023 budget, the debt would grow be allowed to grow by $16 trillion over ten years, or $50,000 of debt per American citizen,” the CBO reported in March. “Under CBO’s current projections, the gross federal debt would increase from $31 trillion today (123 percent of GDP) to $52 trillion (132 percent of GDP) in 2033.”
“Probably the worst part of Bidenomics is the enormous increase in spending,” Laffer said. “I never could have guessed anyone would have overspent like that.
“If you look at the national debt-to-GDP or any other measure, it’s gone way, way up,” he said. “This is an egregious reversal of what would be good economics.”
Tax Policy Under Biden
“Forty years of handing out excessive tax cuts to the wealthy and big corporations had been a bust,” Biden stated. By contrast, Bidenomics “is about building an economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down.”
While most of the tax hikes that Biden called for have so far failed to get through Congress, critics argue that Americans have experienced significant tax hikes nonetheless, due to another economic phenomenon to carry the president’s name: “Bidenflation.”
“The inflation that has come in under Biden has pushed capital gains tax rates way up, because we have illusory capital gains that are now subject to capital gains taxation,” Laffer said. Because of inflation, he said, the nominal value of assets has increased dramatically, even though in terms of purchasing power “it’s the same thing.”
This results in a “tax on the illusory capital gains,” he said. Inflation has also pushed Americans into higher income tax brackets, despite the fact that wage gains often failed to keep up with rising prices, leaving Americans poorer but facing higher tax liabilities.
“If you look at the corporate rate, it’s still what it was when Trump left; and as you look at the personal income tax rates, 37 percent is still the highest,” Laffer said. “But if you look at all the inflation induced tax rate increases, they’ve been quite substantial.”
And this is in addition to the effective tax of inflation itself, which drives up the cost of goods and services as the dollar loses its value. Inflation was cited as the main reason why 76 percent of Americans polled in an Associated Press-University of Chicago survey in May had a negative view of Biden’s economic policies.
“There’s nothing that can bring the economy to its knees faster, and more damagingly, than an unhinged paper currency and high inflation,” Laffer said.
Judge Blocks “Egregious” Biden Officials, Academic Watchdogs From Manipulating Social Media Narratives
A federal judge on Tuesday made the patriotic decision to block the Biden administration from meeting and communicating with social media companies over “protected speech.”
In an extraordinary preliminary injunction, judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump-appointee, in aimed at halting government influence over public discourse prior to issuing a final ruling in the case which was brought by Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana, who allege that the federal government overstepped their bounds in their efforts to censor online posts that they worried would contribute to vaccine hesitancy, or undermine US elections (with facts?).
The judge’s order puts limits on a number of executive agencies with a wide range of responsibilities across the federal government, including the Department of Justice, State Department, Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It also names more than a dozen individual officials, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Jen Easterly, who leads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. -WaPo
What’s more, the order prohibits Biden officials from “collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with” key academic groups behind various censorship campaigns, including the Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of researchers led by the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public.
Over the past seven months, Twitter owner Elon Musk revealed a large-scale, organized government effort to censor opinions which diverge from establishment-approved narratives, under the guise of protecting the public from ‘misinformation.’
According to Stanford Law professor Evelyn Douek, “The injunction is strikingly broad and clearly intended to chill any kind of contact between government actors and social media platforms.“
In their lawsuit, the state attorneys general accused the Biden administration of enabling a “sprawling federal Censorship Enterprise” to compel social media giants to remove politically unfavorable viewpoints and voices, particularly conservatives who have accused the government of suppressing their speech, in what the plaintiffs described as “the most egregious violationsof the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.”
According to Judge Doughty, the AGs “have produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”
His order did carve out a few exceptions – including warning of national security threats, criminal activity or voter suppression, according to the Washington Post.
The White House gave a lame, generic response, as expected.
“This Administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” one official told the Post. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present.”
According to Missoury AG Andrew Bailey, “The deep state planted a seed of suppression of government censorship, but that seed was fertilized, germinated and grew rapidly once President Biden took office.”
“There are deep concerns here that the government’s unrepentant attitude demonstrates a willingness to continue to violate the First Amendment,” Bailey told the Post. “That’s why this wall of separation is so important, regardless of the steps that Big Tech is taking independent of our lawsuit.”
