Lucas Daniel Smith's blog

The NEW AMERICAN, by Bob Adelmann — September 12, 2019

Excerpts:

President Trump’s tweet that he was delaying by two weeks an increase of tariffs on some $250 billion of Chinese imports is right out of the Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation (PON). Tweeted the President: “At the request of Vice Premier of China, Liu He, and due to the fact that the People’s Republic of China will be celebrating their 70th Anniversary on October 1st, we have agreed, as gesture of good will, to move the increased Tariffs on 250 Billion Dollars worth of goods (25% to 30%), from October 1st to October 15th.”

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The PON rule? “Extreme demands followed up by small, slow concessions.” This strategy, according to Harvard Law, “protects dealmakers from making concessions too quickly.”

It’s not the only rule Trump is following. There’s the “delaying and stalling” technique, the “precondition” technique and the “withdrawn offer” technique, among others.

Consider: Delaying implementation of the increase gives negotiators on both sides time to come to terms before the new deadline. It provides additional incentive for the Chinese to hold serious conversations. It’s interesting to note that the Chinese negotiators are coming to Washington for those preliminary conversations, another tactic of making a minor concession in order to advance a major conversation.

China knows the rules. On Wednesday the communists published a short list of American products that would be exempt from its own tariffs (including shrimp, lubricants, alfalfa meal, and some other minor items) in response to Trump’s concession. Those tariffs were imposed by the communists last July as part of the “tit-for-tat” game being played out in the tariff war.

In addition the communists on Wednesday said they would be announcing more exemptions in coming weeks, provided that the United States continued negotiating in good faith.

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View the complete article including image, links and comments at:

https://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/asia/item/33390-tariff-wars-are-following-standard-negotiating-strategies

The NEW AMERICAN, by Selwyn Duke — September 14, 2019

Excerpt:

If you’re concerned about violence with guns, never fear, big “woke” corporate millionaires are here — to save you from yourself. The latest on this front is that 145 chief executives, reports CNBC, “wrote a letter to the Senate on Thursday, urging the legislative body to take action on gun safety,” with “gun safety” being a euphemism for removing freedom.

CNBC continues:

The letter notes recent gun violence in Chicago, Newport News, Virginia, and other places, calling it a “public health crisis.” But the leaders also say that gun violence is preventable, and lawmakers can step in to head off tragedies.

“That’s why we we [sic] urge the Senate to stand with the American public and take action on gun safety by passing a bill to require background checks on all gun sales and a strong Red Flag law that would allow courts to issue life-saving extreme risk protection orders,” they wrote in the letter.

Red flag laws, which are also known as extreme risk laws, allow family members or law enforcement to petition a court to prevent someone temporarily from obtaining firearms.

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... signatories include Edward Stack, CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods; several figures from Bain Capital, which was founded by Senator Mitt Romney; and Thrive Capital’s Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner, advisor and son-in-law of President Trump.

Other CEOs didn’t sign the letter, often for political reasons. Notably, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg refused; though he supports the gun laws in question, he was concerned that weighing in would intensify the federal scrutiny his company is already under. Google, Apple, and banks such as Citigroup and Bank of America didn’t join either, also for self-serving reasons.

Many find it ironic, and maddening, that super-rich people — who can afford bodyguards and life in a gated, ivory tower community — would try to make it more difficult for average people to defend themselves. It is, after all, easy to be idealistic when you don’t have to live with your ideals. The kicker here, however, is that these CEOs stated concerns are driven less by reason and more by passion, which, Ben Franklin warned, governs, but “never governs wisely.” And we can know they’re thus driven because their concerns have little relationship to reality.

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View the complete article including image, video, links and comments at:

https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/33408-the-worrying-145-big-business-now-wants-little-constitution-and-big-gun-control

BREITBART, by John Binder — September 13, 2019

Excerpt:

Columnist Michelle Malkin is calling on President Trump to “shut down” a Federal Reserve program that profits off remittances sent to foreign countries by illegal aliens.

During an interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Daily, Malkin detailed how the Federal Reserve actually aids illegal aliens living in the United States through a federal remittance program, included in her latest book, Open Borders, Inc: Who’s Funding America’s Destruction?

“I was working on a section in Chapter One which is on the caravan cartel called ‘Banking on Illegals’ and I’d reported on this all the way back from the late 1990s on Bank of America and Wells Fargo and private institutions that were profiting,” Malkin said. “And in the middle of that research, I discovered the Federal Reserve, itself, was trying to hone in on this segment of the market with its own program to have a remittance program that is specifically marketed to illegal aliens in America.”

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View the complete article including video, links and comments at:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/13/watch-exclusive-michelle-malkin-to-trump-shut-down-federal-reserve-remittance-program-for-illegal-aliens/utm_campaign=20190914

FOX NEWS, Jake Gibson, Alex Pappas | Fox News — September 13, 2019

Excerpt:

U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu has recommended moving forward with charges against Andrew McCabe, Fox News has learned, as the Justice Department rejects a last-ditch appeal from the former top FBI official and current CNN contributor.

McCabe — the former deputy and acting director of the FBI — appealed the decision of the U.S. attorney for Washington all the way up to Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general, but he rejected that request, according to a person familiar with the situation.

FEDS IN FINAL STAGES OF POSSIBLE PROSECUTION DECISION FOR MCCABE: ‘TARGET ON HIS BACK’

The potential charges relate to DOJ inspector general findings against him regarding misleading statements concerning a Hillary Clinton-related investigation.

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View the complete article including videos and links at:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/us-attorney-recommends-proceeding-with-charges-against-mccabe-as-doj-rejects-last-ditch-appeal

Activists bring the movement’s spirit and ideology into a growing number of secondary and even elementary schools.

CJ – (from the magazine), by Peter C. Myers, Summer 2019 , Education

Excerpts:

Black Lives Matter, though less prominent in the headlines of late, continues to be quite a growth story. What began in 2013 as a hashtag propagated by a few activists and academics rapidly grew into a nationwide protest movement and then into an institutional establishment, with local chapters around the U.S. and even a few abroad. With lavish funding and generally supportive media attention, the BLM network has become the progressive Left’s primary organ of antiracism activism. Now it seeks to sustain and expand upon that success. In its most ambitious venture yet, the group has moved beyond the streets and into the nation’s public schools.

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… Among BLM’s 13 principles, for instance, are various commitments to intersectionality—that is, the focus on overlapping categories of racial, gender, or sexual victimization. BLM dedicates itself to dismantling “cisgender privilege,” “freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” and “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.” The Starter Kit section on teaching young children declares: “Everybody has the right to choose their own gender by listening to their own heart and mind. Everybody gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else, and no one else gets to choose for them.”

BLM’s teaching about race is no less radical. The first sentence of the introduction to the Teaching for Black Lives textbook reads: “Black students’ minds and bodies are under attack.” Anecdotes of abusive treatment follow, preparing the central thrust of the BLM-at-school pedagogy: “The school-to-prison-pipeline is a major contributor to the overall epidemic of police violence and mass incarceration that functions as one of sharpest edges of structural racism in the United States.” The stoking of readers’ anger continues with this distorted characterization of the galvanizing event for BLM’s street protests: “In August of 2014, Michael Brown was killed in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, his body left in the streets for hours as a reminder to the Black residents in the neighborhood that their lives are meaningless to the American Empire.”

Instances of such incendiary rhetoric recur in the recommended instructional materials. The animating idea throughout is that African-Americans, intersecting with a familiar roster of other aggrieved identity groups, face systemic oppression, as they always have in America—even today, 50 years into the post–civil rights era. For all such groups and their “allies,” the proper relation to society must therefore be one of opposition, and a primary function of the education system must be to instruct students in the rationale, means, and ends of resistance—the more radical, the better.

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View the complete article including image, links and comments at:

https://www.city-journal.org/black-lives-matter-in-the-classroom

BREITBART, by Sean Moran — September 8, 2019

Excerpt:

State attorneys general will launch one of the largest bipartisan, multi-state antitrust investigations into Facebook and Google on Monday.

State attorneys general spanning across dozens of states will announce an antitrust investigation into Google and Facebook, and other technology companies at the Supreme Court at 2:00 p.m. ET Monday.

The investigation will investigate whether America’s largest technology companies have stifled competition, restricted access, and harmed consumers. A Wall Street Journal report suggested that New York Attorney General Letitia James will lead the investigation into Facebook, while Texas Attorney General Attorneys Ken Paxton will lead the investigation into Google.

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View the complete article including image, links and comments at:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/08/state-attorneys-general-launch-big-tech-antitrust-investigation-monday/

CNN, by Leah Asmelash — September 10, 2019

Excerpt:

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One of America’s most recognizable board games is getting an upgrade. Hasbro is debuting a new game celebrating women’s empowerment — Ms. Monopoly, marking the first time in Monopoly history when a new mascot will be featured on the cover of the game.The twist? In Ms. Monopoly, female players will get more money.Unlike the classic game, women will collect 240 Monopoly bucks when they pass “go,” while male players will collect the usual 200. The idea is to create a game where women make more than men, the first game to do so, according to Hasbro.

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View the complete article including image and links at:

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/10/us/hasbro-ms-monopoly-trnd/index.html