Sunday, September 06, 2020




China buys more corn and soy as USTR praises ‘phase one’ cooperation

China at first put big tariffs on soy in retaliation for Trump's tariffs on them.  They aimed to hurt American farmers who are big Trump supporters.  Soybeans are a major cash crop in the Midwest.

And it did hurt for a while until Trump recompensed the farmers with subsidies.  Meanwhile China needed the soy too much to continue with big tariffs.  Soy is a major source of protein in China and their own farmers do not grow enough of it



The USDA announced Tuesday that Chinese importers contracted to buy hefty new amounts of U.S. corn and soybeans just hours after top U.S. and Chinese trade officials met Monday night to review progress of the “phase one” trade pact.

Chinese importers purchased 408,000 metric tons of U.S. corn and 204,000 tons of U.S. soybeans for delivery in the 2020-21 marketing year, according to a daily grain sale report released by USDA. The marketing year for corn and soybeans begins Sept. 1.

The sales come on the heels of a Trump administration statement Monday night confirming that U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin spoke over the phone with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He “in a regularly scheduled call.”

The corresponding statement released by USTR lauded “significant increases in purchases of U.S. products by China as well as future actions needed to implement the agreement. Both sides see progress and are committed to taking the steps necessary to ensure the success of the agreement.”

Tuesday marks the latest major corn and soybean purchase by China, continuing the country’s quick pace of new crop contracts. On Friday USDA announced sales of 405,000 tons of U.S. new crop corn and 400,000 tons of U.S. new crop soybeans to China, evoking optimism from USTR Chief Agricultural Negotiator Gregg Doud.

“I think with these sales today — the new market here begins Sept. 1 — I think it’s accurate to say … that when we turn the page to Sept. 1, we’ll have a record number of soybean sales on the books to ship to both China and to the world,” said Doud last week. “That’s already the case for corn … We’re going to be really busy loading boats come harvest time and that’s a really good thing.”

President Donald Trump is walking a fine line on China. On the one hand, he’s signaling that his hardball tactics with China over COVID-19 and other issues will be prominent in his bid for reelection. But he also continues to prioritize agricultural trade with China under the “phase one” pact.

“China will own our country if (Biden) gets elected,” Trump told GOP delegates at the Republican National Convention Monday in Charlotte, North Carolina.

But he also highlighted recent record-breaking corn purchases by China. The USDA reported sales of 1.937 million metric tons of corn to China on July 30 and 1.762 million tons on July 14. Both were record-breaking purchases in size.

SOURCE 







D.C. Mayor Considers Removing Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial

After the protests and riots following the death of George Floyd in police custody, Mayor Muriel Bowser (D-Washington, D.C.) brought together a commission to consider striking various alleged symbols of oppression from the nation’s capital city. The commission issued its recommendations on Tuesday and if Washington, D.C. acts upon them, Americans may see national landmarks like the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial removed completely.

“We believe strongly that all District of Columbia owned public spaces, facilities and commemorative works should only honor those individuals who exemplified those values such as equity, opportunity, and diversity that DC residents hold dear,” the committee’s chairs, Bowser advisor Beverly Perry and public library director Richard Reyes-Gavilan, wrote in a letter introducing the report.

The commission analyzed historical figures commemorated in public monuments according to eight “DC values”: accessibility, diversity, equity, livability, opportunity, prosperity, resilience, and safety. They examined whether such figures participated in slavery, supported “systemic racism,” supported the “oppression of persons of color and/or women,” was a member of “any supremacist organization,” or violated the D.C. Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on “age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and national origin.”

If commission members so desired, they could have suggested removing monuments to almost every political figure in American life until about 30 seconds ago. After all, many Democrats now condemn the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal tax dollars from funding abortion) as racist, so according to the ever-more-stringent standards of wokeness, a certain Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. may find himself #canceled. After all, a certain Barack Hussein Obama opposed “marriage equality” when he won the presidential election in 2008. Perhaps D.C. should prevent any monuments to America’s first black president because he violated the D.C. Human Rights Act.

Iconic D.C. Monuments Vandalized in Riots: ‘Do Black Vets Count?’
Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial among the damned
In any case, the commission decided that only 153 of the 1,330 individuals commemorated in the names of schools, parks, government buildings, and monuments are “problematic” enough to warrant excision from the public consciousness. How generous of them!

Among the damned are Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Woodrow Wilson; Declaration of Independence signers Benjamin Franklin and George Mason; inventor Alexander Graham Bell (he was a racist supporter of eugenics); and Francis Scott Key, author of the national anthem.

The commission suggested that the federal government “remove, relocate, or contextualize” statues of Christopher Columbus, Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Albert Pike, and George Washington; and to similarly remove memorials commemorating Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Francis Griffith Newlands, and George Washington. This list includes the iconic Washington Monument and the beautiful Jefferson Memorial — treasures of America’s capital city.

In 2017, President Donald Trump warned that the iconoclasm driving the removal of Confederate monuments would lead to the removal of monuments to America’s Founding Fathers.

“This week it’s Robert E. Lee, I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down,” he said at the time. “I wonder, is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

Commentators mocked Trump at the time, but now his remark seems prescient, if not prosaic.

Following the death of George Floyd, vandals defaced and toppled monuments celebrating George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. They also targeted Mahatma Gandhi, Union General Ulysses S. Grant, black Union soldiers, and freed slave Frederick Douglass. The iconoclasts also vandalized a monument to five firefighters who lost their lives trying to save lives at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

After all, who else will save America from those horrible racist firefighters?

Yes, the far Left does want to remove these statues, and now a Democratic mayor’s commission has recommended removing the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial from the nation’s capital city because racism.

Of course, the commission did not just recommend striking down the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. It also objected to 22 of the district’s public and charter school names, 78 street names, two of the ten public libraries, and 12 out of 75 parks and playgrounds named after historical figures.

In some cases, it may make sense to remove a name from a school, street, or monument as America’s culture changes. For example, the “Battle At Liberty Place” monument in New Orleans commemorated a Confederate uprising that took place after the Civil War. That monument literally celebrated the words “white supremacy.” That “monument” went too far by any standard, and Americans should celebrate its removal.

When activists begin to label America’s Founders, like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Frankin, and George Mason “persons of concern” whose monuments should be removed from public view, they have jumped the shark. Nay, they have identified themselves as opponents of America’s heritage.

SOURCE





The violence and hatred currently roiling this country—where does it come from?

For those of us who have been following the antics of the Left for nearly half a century, the answer is quite clear: from Germany, via the American educational system

When you’ve been raised to hate your country—to see it as historically illegitimate and in dire need of “fundamental transformation,” to quote Barack Obama—then in a time of relative international peace, there can be no moral crusade higher or more important than its destruction. Because, according to the Manichean logic of the American Left, the perfect must always and everywhere be the enemy of the good.

The source of this inhuman lie is the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist professorial refugees from Nazi Germany who in the wake of the Communists’ defeat by their fellow leftists of the National Socialist German Workers Party, established a secure beachhead at Columbia University, to which they transplanted something with the anodyne name of the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research, and in which they developed their doctrine of Critical Theory to be spread to educational institutions across the country.

As I wrote in my 2015 book, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,” a philosophical examination of the Frankfurters and the havoc they wrought on the nation that gave them a safe harbor from Hitler and National Socialism, Critical Theory “holds that there is no received tenet of civilization that should not either be questioned (the slogan “question authority” originated with the Frankfurt School) or attacked.

“Our cultural totems, shibboleths, and taboos are declared either completely arbitrary or the result of a long-ago ‘conspiracy,’ steadfastly maintained down through the ages… In its purest form, which is to say its most malevolent form, Critical Theory is the very essence of satanism: rebellion for the sake of rebellion against an established order that has obtained for eons, and with no greater promise for the future than destruction.”

What we’re seeing today on the streets of Portland, Kenosha, Seattle, and elsewhere is Critical Theory in practice: no longer simply the province of crabby old nihilists, some of them sexual deviants, with Dr. Strangelove accents and Communist malice in their corrupted souls, Critical Theory has gone mainstream.

One by one, the pillars of the American past and our Constitution—the cream of Enlightenment thought—are being knocked down, not to symbolically redress any real or imagined wrongs, but for the sake of destruction itself. Which, according to Frankfurt dogma, is the whole point. In answer to the question often asked by clueless conservatives—what do they propose to replace Western civilization with?—the answer is: nothing.

Critical Theory is therefore merely another name for vengeful anarchy, and in the Democratic Party it has found the ideal vehicle for its political expression. The process began in the 1960s when one of the most prominent Frankfurters, Herbert Marcuse, emerged as a kind of guru to American college radicals—the “love children”—of that era, preaching his doctrine of “repressive tolerance,” which might best be explained as “tolerance for me, but not for thee.”

Or, in Marcuse’s own words: “This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. … Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”

SOURCE





British Museum shows artefacts collected by explorer Captain Cook as part of ‘permanent British occupation’ of Australia

Australia is an independent multicultural nation. It has been independent since 1901. It is NOT under occupation by the British.  And Cook was NOT part of the settlement of Australia

But the whole idea is to deplore European settlement in Australia.  As such, it is clearly racist.  The systematic racists are on the Left, not the Right. The Left can't leave race alone.  They find racism under every bed when the place that they should be looking at is the mirror



The British Museum has been accused of rewriting history and hypocrisy after it relabelled Aboriginal artefacts collected by Captain Cook as being part of the “permanent British occupation” of Australia.

The relabelling of the artefacts is a response by the museum to the Black Lives Matter protests, linking Captain Cook’s charting of the east coast of Australia to the suffering of Aboriginal people following the arrival of the First Fleet 18 years later.

“James Cook sailed up the east coast in 1770, permanent British occupation began in 1788 with a ‘First Fleet’ of ships carrying convicts to establish a penal colony at present day Sydney,” a sign next to a Gweagal shield said.

“Some Aboriginal people in central Australia remained out of contact with Europeans until the 1980s,” another label states.

“The Eora people of the Sydney region suffered the first brunt of British colonisation from 1788.

“Despite loss of population due to disease and frontier violence as well as displacement, Aboriginal people continue to live in the Sydney region maintaining strong bonds with their traditional lands and culture.”

The British Museum would not officially answer questions about why the labels for the items had been changed but staff in the Enlightenment room, where the Indigenous items, were kept said The Black Lives Matter protests had “inspired” the change.

“They were inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement to finally address it,” a staff member said.

Another staff member said the signs were “explaining the history of the museum and how things got here”.

Despite the changes to the signs, the museum has refused to repatriate the items to Australia as requested by Indigenous Australian man Rodney Kelly, who says the Gweagal shield belonged to his ancestors.

Institute of Public Affairs Foundations of Western Civilisation Program director Dr Bella d’Abrera said the museum was reinventing history by conflating talented navigator Captain Cook with the suffering of the Aboriginal people.

“The British Museum is guilty of promoting the false narrative that Captain James Cook invaded and occupied Australia,” she said.

“Attributing genocide to the son of a Scottish farmer is both historically inaccurate and morally wrong … Captain Cook did not invade Australia.

“This is sheer hypocrisy. On the one hand they imply that the shield was stolen from the indigenous population, but on the other, they are not returning it to the descendants of its original owners.”

History Council of NSW president Dr Stephen Gapps also said the museum should return the items if that is what indigenous people wanted.

“I personally think that (relabelling) is a way of getting around the fact they still have those artifacts in their collections and are not willing to give a lot of those back,” he said.

“Ideally they wouldn’t have an object label on the shield and the spears and other objects, they would begin a process of repatriation.”

Exhibitions of Indigenous Australian artwork at the museum have also been given similar signs acknowledging their origins.

A statue of Cook located in The Mall near Buckingham Palace was defaced during the London Black Lives Matter protests, two statues of him were defaced in Sydney during protests in June, and there has been an online petition to have a statue of him removed in Cairns.

Australian National University history professor Ann McGrath said the myth of Captain Cook needed to be separated from the facts.

“I think that Cook the man is a different thing from Cook the myth and what he came to symbolise,” she said.

“It is logical that Aboriginal people see him as the beginning of their troubles and the loss of everything that they had — and in a way we have to separate that from the biography of the actual man.”

The official reason for Cook’s voyage to the Pacific was to observe the 1769 transit of Venus in Tahiti while the unofficial purpose discovered in a note from the King once the Endeavour set sail was to look for evidence of an ‘unknown southern land’ — a prize in a great race place between Britain and France at the end of the 18th Century.

His instructions from the King were “if he found a “continent or land of great extent” he should seek “with the consent of the natives to take possession of convenient situations in the country”.

Cook named the new land known as New South Wales and claimed it for Britain before sailing north towards Queensland.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here.
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