RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
February 7 to February 13, 2021 A recent spate of high-profile arrests of top American academics illustrates Washington's growing alarm about Chinese technology theft, but the greater threat could be Chinese "grad students" in the U.S. stealing top secrets for the People's Liberation Army back home, Richard Bernstein reports for RealClearInvestigations. Highlights: - The FBI arrested four Chinese nationals in July posing as ordinary graduate researchers -- actually Chinese army officers.
- What happened next was even more revealing: Roughly 1,000 Chinese graduate researchers abruptly fled back to China - apparently afraid of also being caught concealing their ties to the Chinese military.
- What's more, U.S. taxpayers typically subsidize their education. They are paid by the labs where they work from grants by such federal agencies as the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health.
- It's a problem largely of America's own making, through its longstanding policy of "engagement" with China. One result is a Chinese symbiosis with American universities that encompasses both good and bad.
- "If you have 360,000 undergraduates, that's not much of a risk," says a top law enforcer. "The Chinese are trying to get the latest five percent of cutting-edge research, and only the most sophisticated researchers can do this."
- The heightened focus on academic ties to China is just one part of a far larger Department of Justice Task Force behind hundreds of investigations and dozens of arrests nationwide.
Biden, Trump and the Beltway Few Aware of Peril to VP's 'Nuke Football' Jan. 6 CNN
5 Times Biden Openly Urged Violence Against Foes The Federalist
How Anti-Trump Lincoln Project Ignored Its Crisis Associated Press
What Happened to Officer Brian Sicknick? American Greatness Other Noteworthy Articles and Series 'They Were Not Rigging the Election. They Were Fortifying it.'
Time
Molly Ball's important article reports that an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans - especially the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce - worked for more than a year to maximize voter turnout for Biden and snuff out questions about his victory. She writes: Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump's conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. "The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation," says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program. The Thriving Marketplace for Phony Carbon Offsets
Bloomberg Green
Corporate behemoths including JPMorgan, Disney, and BlackRock are going green the old fashioned-way - they're buying it. JPMorgan executives continue to jet around the globe, Disney's cruise ships still burn oil, and BlackRock's office buildings gobble up electricity. But rather than dramatically change their operations, the companies say they are funding the preservation of carbon-absorbing forests to offset the impact of their global operations. But in all of those cases, the land was never threatened; the trees were already part of well-preserved forests. Working through the Nature Conservancy, the world's largest environmental group, they are employing "far-fetched logic to help absolve them of their climate sins. By taking credit for saving well-protected land, these companies are reducing nowhere near the pollution that they claim." More broadly, this article reports, the market for these offset credits is booming. In the first 10 months of this year, companies used more than 55.1 million carbon credits to offset their emissions (equivalent to the pollution from 12 million cars), a 28% increase from the same period in 2019. Opposition to Funding 1619 Project in Schools
The 19th/USA Today
This article is activism posing as journalism. It reports that Republican lawmakers in several states are trying to prevent schools from using the New York Times' controversial 1619 Project - which views American history through the lens of slavery and "systemic racism." While many of the nation's leading historians have blasted the project for misrepresenting foundational aspects of the past, this article falsely suggests that just as many scholars support it: "While some historians have criticized parts of the project …other historians have praised the project's approach and rigor and treatment." It also suggests that the 1619 Project is a necessary correction to history lessons that glossed over slavery and race. This article takes sides, but that is probably not surprising given USA Today's reporting partner: the 19th. While USA Today describes The 19th as a "a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy," the group describes itself on its website as committed to results-oriented reporting: "Our goal is to empower those we serve — particularly women, people of color and the LGBTQ+ community — with the information, resources and community they need to be equal participants in our democracy." The Battery Is Ready to Power the World
Wall Street Journal
Fossil fuels are highly effective storage system for energy. You can store a barrel of oil for a long time and then use it when you need it. A stumbling block for solar, wind and other renewable sources is that their energy must be stored in other devices - usually a battery. But today's technology means they can hold only a limited amount of energy. This article reports that better, more affordable batteries are making it possible for companies to store electricity and harvest renewable power. In the auto industry, better batteries are set to challenge the gas-powered engine's century long domination. Costs have come down so far and so fast that most car makers expect that electric vehicles, which are currently more expensive than their gas-powered counterparts, will cost the same amount to build within the next five years. There is a downside: battery manufacturing is currently dominated by Asian countries and companies. Nearly 65% of lithium-ion batteries come from China. By comparison, no single country produces more than 20% of global crude oil output. Ammon Bundy Builds Militia Network on Pandemic Backlash
Los Angeles Times
Ammon Bundy, who is best known as the leader of the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon - a deadly, 41-day standoff between federal agents and militants who rejected the federal government's authority over public lands - has seized on the backlash against coronavirus restrictions as an opportunity to start a new movement. This article reports that in March he launched "People's Rights," which he describes as "neighborhood watch on steroids": The article reports organization has attracted at least 20,000 members in 16 states and sponsored more than 50 demonstrations across the county, "dispatching gun-toting activists to the homes of politicians, health agency managers and even a police officer who had arrested a protester." Coronavirus Investigations Cuomo Aide Admits Coverup of Nursing Home Debacle
New York Post
Gov. Andrew Cuomo's top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state's nursing home death toll from COVID-19 - telling them "we froze" out of fear that the true numbers would "be used against us" by federal prosecutors. This article reports that the governor's secretary, Melissa DeRosa, blamed President Trump for the coverup. At the time, she said, Trump was "Tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes," DeRosa said. "He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer." In addition to attacking Cuomo's fellow Democratic governors, DeRosa said, Trump "directs the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us." "And basically, we froze," she told the lawmakers on the call. After dropping the bombshell, DeRosa asked for "a little bit of appreciation of the context" and offered what appears to be the Cuomo administration's first apology for its handling of nursing homes amid the pandemic. But instead of a mea culpa to the grieving family members of more than 13,000 dead seniors, DeRosa tried to make amends with the fellow Democrats for the political inconvenience it caused them. "So we do apologize," she said. "I do understand the position that you were put in. I know that it is not fair. It was not our intention to put you in that political position with the Republicans." Other Coronavirus Investigations Looks Like Virus Here to Stay Wall Street Journal
The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired. New York Times
Tenant Activists Upend U.S. Eviction Courts Reuters |
