BlackRock Chief Says Ukraine War Marks End to Globalization
This is a quick about-turn for Davos man Larry Fink, formerly a great supporter of globalization. It seems that he is quick to embrace whatever is fashionable. He is right this time, though. Both the economic war on Russia and global supply chain breakdowns have hit hard at globalization thinking. It has been thoroughly overtaken by reality.
It reminds me of a saying attributed to the aristocatic former British PM Harold Macmillan, who was known for his pragmatism, wit and unflappability. A journalist once asked him what could throw his government off-course in the next two weeks. He replied: "Events, dear boy, events"
Larry Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, said that the war in Ukraine will put an end to globalization as governments and businesses cut ties with Russia, while warning that a large-scale reorienting of supply chains will be inflationary.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades,” Fink wrote in a March 24 letter to shareholders, in which he noted that the Russian offensive in Ukraine had catalyzed nations to sever financial and business ties with Moscow.
“United in their steadfast commitment to support the Ukrainian people, they launched an ‘economic war’ against Russia,” Fink wrote.
Russia has been hit with crippling sanctions over what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine. The measures have targeted Russian banks and wealthy oligarchs, there’s been a closure of airspace to Russian planes, and the export of key technologies has been banned.
The sanctions also include a freeze on around $300 billion of Russia’s central bank hard currency reserves, an unprecedented move that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov denounced on March 23 as “theft.”
Fink noted in his letter that capital markets, financial institutions, and companies have gone beyond government-imposed sanctions, moving quickly to terminate longstanding business and investment relationships.
He predicted that Russia’s decoupling from the global economy will prompt governments and companies to re-evaluate their manufacturing and assembly footprints more generally and reconsider their dependency on other nations.
“This may lead companies to onshore or nearshore more of their operations, resulting in a faster pull back from some countries,” Fink wrote.
There will be challenges for firms as they seek to rejig supply chains, he said.
“This decoupling will inevitably create challenges for companies, including higher costs and margin pressures.”
“While companies’ and consumers’ balance sheets are strong today, giving them more of a cushion to weather these difficulties, a large-scale reorientation of supply chains will inherently be inflationary,” he added.
Fink said central banks find themselves in a challenging moment, weighing how fast to raise rates in a bid to curb surging inflation, which has been exacerbated by the conflict in Ukraine and the associated energy price shocks.
“Central banks must choose whether to live with higher inflation or slow economic activity and employment to lower inflation quickly,” he said.
The Federal Reserve last week hiked rates for the first time since 2018 and Fed chair Jerome Powell said on Monday that the U.S. central bank must move “expeditiously” to raise rates and possibly “more aggressively” to keep an upward price spiral from becoming entrenched.
Annual inflation in Russia accelerated to 14.5 percent as of March 18, the fastest pace since 2015, the economy ministry said on Wednesday, as the battered rouble sent prices soaring amid biting Western sanctions.
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Utah bans transgender athletes from competing in girls sports despite governors veto
GOP lawmakers in Utah pushed through a ban on transgender youth athletes playing on girls teams Friday, overriding a veto and joining 11 other states with similar laws amid a nationwide culture war.
The ban previously received support from a majority of Utah lawmakers, but fell short of the two-thirds needed to override it.
Its sponsors on Friday flipped 10 Republicans in the House and five in the Senate who had previously voted against the proposal.
A dozen states now have some sort of ban on transgender kids in school sports. Utah's law takes effect July 1.
Republican sponsor Rep. Kera Birkeland, who is also a basketball coach, welcomed the decision and said conversations with female student athletes compelled her to act.
'When we say, `This isn´t a problem in our state,´ what we say to those girls is, `Sit down, be quiet and make nice,'' she said.
Lawmakers anticipate court challenges similar to blocked bans in Idaho and West Virginia, where athletes have said the policies violate their civil rights. They´ve argued the bans violate their privacy rights, due to tests required if an athlete´s gender is challenged. The ACLU of Utah said on Friday that a lawsuit was inevitable.
The bill overrides a veto letter from Gov. Spencer Cox, who stalled the bill after he argued it would target vulnerable transgender kids already at high suicide risk.
Cox was the second GOP governor this week to overrule lawmakers on a sports-participation ban, but the proposal won support from a vocal conservative base that has particular sway in Utah´s state primary season. Even with those contests looming, however, some Republicans stood with Cox to reject the ban.
'I cannot support this bill. I cannot support the veto override and if it costs me my seat so be it. I will do the right thing, as I always do,' said Republican Sen. Daniel Thatcher.
Business leaders also sounded the alarm that the ban could have a multimillion-dollar economic impact on Utah, including the possible loss of the NBA All-Star Game next year. The Utah Jazz called the ban 'discriminatory legislation' and opposed it.
Not long ago efforts to regulate transgender kids´ participation in sports failed to gain traction in statehouses, but in the past two years groups like the American Principles Project began a well-coordinated effort to promote the legislation throughout the country. Since last year, bans have been introduced in at least 25 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. This week, lawmakers in Arizona and Oklahoma passed bans.
'You start these fights and inject them into politics,' said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project. 'You pass them in a few states and it starts to take on a life of its own and becomes organic. We helped start this fight and we´re helping carry it through, but a lot of this is coming from the local level.'
Leaders in the deeply conservative Utah say they need the law to protect women´s sports. The lawmakers argue that more transgender athletes with possible physical advantages could eventually dominate the field and change the nature of women´s sports without legal intervention
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Mental illness and the Left
Emil O. W. Kirkegaard
Abstract
It has been claimed that left-wingers or liberals (US sense) tend to be more mentally ill than right-wingers or conservatives. This potential link was investigated using the General Social Survey. A search found 5 items measuring one's own mental illness in different ways (e.g."Do you have any emotional or mental disability?"). All of these items were associated with left-wing political ideology as measured by self-report. These results held up mostly in regressions that adjusted for age, sex, and race. For the variable with the most data, the difference in mental illness between "extremely liberal" and "extremely conservative" was 0.39 d. This finding is congruent with numerous findings based on related constructs.
Introduction
It has been claimed that left-wingers or liberals (US sense) tend to more often suffer from mental illness than right-wingers or conservatives. This potential link was investigated using the General Social Survey cumulative cross-sectional dataset (1972-2018). A search of the available variables resulted in 5 items measuring one's own mental illness (e.g., ”Do youhave any emotional or mental disability?”).
All of these items were weakly associated withleft-wing political ideology as measured by self-report, with especially high rates seen for the“extremely liberal” group. These results mostly held up in regressions that adjusted for age,sex, and race.
For the variable with the most data (n = 11,338), the difference in the mentalillness measure between “extremely liberal” and “extremely conservative” was 0.39 d.Temporal analysis showed that the relationship between mental illness, happiness, andpolitical ideology has existed in the GSS data since the 1970s and still existed in the 2010s.
Within-study meta-analysis of all the results found that extreme liberals had a 150%increased rate of mental illness compared to moderates.
The finding of increased mentalillness among left-wingers is congruent with numerous findings based on related constructs,such as positive relationships between conservatism, religiousness and health in general.
It has been reported that left-wingers or liberals (US sense) tend to more often suffer from mentalillness than right-wingers or conservatives (Bullenkamp & Voges, 2004; Duckworth et al., 1994;Guhname, 2007; Howard & Anthony, 1977; Kelly, 2014; Unorthodox Theory, 2020). This suggestion is consistent with other research showing that religiosity predicts both mental andphysical health (AbdAleati et al., 2016; Cotton et al., 2006; Dutton et al., 2018; Moreira-Almeida etal., 2006; Seeman et al., 2003; VanderWeele, 2017), given the known strong relationship betweenpolitical conservatism and religiousness (Koenig & Bouchard Jr., 2006; Ludeke et al., 2013).
Furthermore, political conservatism has been found to be associated with longevity (Kannan et al.,2019).In a recent series of tweets, Lemoine (2020) analyzed data from the Slate Star Codex (SSC)2020 reader survey2 (n = 8,043; Alexander, 2020), and showed that self-rated political ideologicalposition (1-10 scale) and self-rated far-left labels were related to mental health.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339541044_Mental_illness_and_the_left
*******************************************America’s most powerful, elite institutions now cooperate to misinform the public and suppress dissent
It’s hard to think otherwise during the arc of the Hunter Biden laptop story that turned out to be true.
Last week, The New York Times reporters wrote that they authenticated email “obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. [Hunter] Biden in a Delaware repair shop.”
This is in reference to a story the New York Post broke in 2020, shortly before the presidential election, about emails sent from the laptop of the president’s son, Hunter. The emails suggest that Hunter was using his father’s name and office to enrich himself. It raised serious questions about whether now-President Joe Biden was involved in any way.
Don’t go celebrating The New York Times’ sudden commitment to truth and accuracy. The paper buried the lede and put the acknowledgment that the emails were real on the 24th paragraph of its story.
No grand mea culpa here, just a little acknowledgment that it got things wrong a year late and a dollar short.
When the story initially broke, the Times and most of the legacy media dismissed it entirely. They called it a non-story and promoted the idea that it was likely Russian disinformation.
NPR explained that it just couldn’t cover the story because its “assertions don’t amount to much.”
This is the same publicly funded media network that found time to air a segment about “decolonizing fitness,” and how exercising is white supremacy or something.
It wasn’t just the legacy media that went radio silent about the story, refusing to even investigate the issue. Big Tech swung into action to ruthlessly suppress the Post exposé from being disseminated. Twitter outright prevented people from posting it on the website, and Facebook used its internal algorithm to prevent people from seeing it.
Jack Dorsey, who was the Twitter CEO when the Hunter laptop story was suppressed, said that blocking the story was a “total mistake,” but never explained how the mistake was made and was replaced shortly thereafter by a man who is even less enamored with free speech.
As my colleague Katrina Trinko pointed out, the Hunter Biden story certainly demonstrates the sham of Big Tech’s war on “misinformation.”
Is Big Tech conducting a genuine effort to stop misinformation, or is this really just a smoke screen to justify the suppression of information or ideas that interfere with the Democrat Party’s agenda?
To top this whole mess off, when the Post initially broke the Hunter laptop story, a group of former senior “intelligence experts” put their name to a statement saying that the Hunter Biden story has all the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
They had no actual evidence besides their claims to expertise.
Trust the experts! Isn’t that what we are told all the time these days?
“If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this,” the former intelligence officials said.
Biden even used this letter in a debate with former President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential campaign to prove it was all just Republican misinformation.
Well, they were wrong. It appears that it was actually politicized former senior intelligence operatives who were trying to influence our elections. Americans need to be aware of this.
Has there been any accountability for all these people and institutions that got this wrong? Not at all.
Of the 51 former senior officials, so far none have apologized or demonstrated any kind of accountability for what they did. Some even doubled down.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper only said that he stands by the statement they made “AT THE TIME.” No explanation for why it was bogus or contrition for misleading the American public.
Andy Liepman, former National Counterterrorism Center deputy director, said in his statement to the Post, “As far as I know I do [stand by the statement] but I’m kind of busy right now.”
It seems some in our intelligence services have forgotten that they serve us rather than the other way around.
The former intelligence officials didn’t just get the facts wrong, as the New York Post pointed out. They actively tried to turn a story about potential Biden family corruption into a story about how Russian election interference was victimizing the Bidens.
They used their positions, or former positions, as a pedestal of authority when they were engaging in what now appears to be political hackery.
When you put this all together, the Hunter Biden laptop story is about much more than media malpractice and political hackery in the intelligence services.
It’s about even more than just Big Tech censorship.
The bigger story is about how all the above, in unison, work together to suppress information that hurts an ideological and political cause that they value most and amplify favored narratives regardless of merit.
They are now in lockstep promoting the “narrative” over the truth.
Elite institutions once thought to be nonpartisan, bipartisan, or at least somewhat objective are becoming ruthlessly ideological and perfectly willing to use their power to crush dissent.
In the case of the Hunter Biden story, there were clear implications for what looked like a closely matched presidential election.
A Media Research Center poll of Biden voters in key 2020 election swing states found that not only were many of these voters unaware of the Hunter Biden story, but about 10% also said that its revelation would have changed their vote.
Think about this for a moment. For years, this same nexus of institutions promoted the Russia collusion story about Trump. The New York Times and Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage, which led indirectly to Trump’s impeachment.
As the Russia collusion story was winding down, the Biden laptop reporting broke and was ruthlessly suppressed on the eve of a presidential election. The story was dismissed as based on nothing but preposterous, pernicious Russian disinformation. It was also true.
If they got these things so wildly wrong and were willing to use all their power to project ultimately false information to the public, what else have they been wrong about and what other things are they willing to suppress to produce favorable political outcomes?
Again, there has been effectively no acknowledgment of failure from the institutions themselves, no explanation for what happened.
Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker called this America’s crisis of accountability. He wrote that the way people in power can be kept in check is through the ballot box.
“But how can that even work when the people we want to hold accountable decide what information the voters are allowed to see?” Baker asked.
That’s a fair and chilling question. That’s why the Hunter Biden story is a big deal.
The possibility that the president’s son used his father’s official position to enrich himself is bad enough. But it’s nowhere near as threatening to our free society than the institutional corruption that suppressed and manipulated the story to suit political ends from the beginning.
This story, at its heart, is about a willful distortion and suppression of truth and reality by those who believe they will never be held accountable.
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The Left Strikes Again at Freedom of Speech in Akron, Ohio
Recently, the Akron Roundtable of Ohio invited me to give a presentation on the issue of election integrity as part of a recurring series it calls “Point/Counterpoint.”
As I told the audience, the sponsors of the Roundtable, which includes the Kiwanis Club, the Greater Akron Chamber, and the Akron Beacon Journal, were to be applauded for upholding the great American tradition of having civil, even vigorous discussions on important issues from individuals with differing points of view, a tradition that has virtually disappeared in our communities and college campuses.
The progressive, radical left, however, has no interest in upholding this tradition, protected by the First Amendment, which is vital to a functioning democracy.
I experienced a shameful example of this before arriving in Akron: the League of Women Voters lodged a protest with the Roundtable for allowing me to speak. The minions of the left want to silence anyone who disagrees with them or questions what they assert is the only acceptable “truth.”
The Akron Roundtable is one of the diminishing number of organizations that is still committed to open and civil discourse. As its website says, it is dedicated to promoting “community dialog and networking by presenting speakers who inform and educate listeners on diverse topics of importance to the region, the nation and the world.”
True to that mission, the organization has invited guests as disparate as Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio; Center for Immigration Studies Director Mark Krikorian; and Paul Helmke of the Brady Center. I was just the latest speaker to join this long list of more than 400 guests who have spoken to the Akron Roundtable, which is made up of a very diverse group of individuals, many of whom have different points of views on everything from politics to culture.
The League of Women Voters took issue with the Roundtable inviting me to speak. Its local chapter president, Rosanne Winter, sent the Roundtable a letter expressing the group’s “strong disappointment,” and protesting my choice as a speaker. The Roundtable should select “respected speakers,” said the League, by which it clearly means only those who don’t disagree with the League.
Winter was upset that I actually talk about examples of election fraud in our country, which, as the Supreme Court itself said, has “been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected journalists and historians.” Apparently, they believe that speaking about that, or telling the public about The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database, which is now up to 1,349 proven cases of fraud, should not be allowed in a public forum.
What is particularly ironic about this letter is that the League of Women Voters had already spoken to the Roundtable about this issue. Remember, this is a “Point/Counterpoint” series. I spoke on March 17, but in February, the members of the Roundtable heard from Jessica Jones Capparell, the director of government affairs for the League of Women Voters of the United States.
The League’s shameful protest graphically illustrates how much the League of Women Voters and too many others no longer believe in the First Amendment, and want to chill the speech of anyone who disagrees with them.
There was also a letter to the editor from Sherry McMillen that was published in the Akron Beacon Journal (approvingly cited by the League) protesting my being allowed to speak, saying that giving me a “platform” would be a “disservice to our community and our nation.” Apparently, Ms. McMillen believes that allowing anyone to speak who disagrees with her view of the world is a “disservice.”
She would have fit in very well in the countries my mother and father grew up in before they immigrated to the U.S. to get away from governments, societies, and cultures that did not allow dissent or countering views on the accepted political orthodoxy.
According to the League and the letter writer, they are the sole and unequivocal arbiters of truth and morality, so any dissent must be silenced for the common good.
Fortunately, the Akron Roundtable doesn’t agree. And neither do other citizens in Akron, like Robert E. Williams II, a Vietnam veteran who wrote his own letter to the editor criticizing such censorship efforts and those individuals who apparently believe that free speech is only “for those you agree with.”
I have no doubt there were individuals in the room who disagreed with my views and opinions. But they allowed me to speak and everyone there was extremely cordial, polite, and civil—which is the same way they treated the speaker from the League of Women Voters.
I vehemently disagree with the League’s uninformed views on election integrity, its dishonest claims of “voter suppression,” and its unfair attacks on efforts to reform the election process to improve its fairness and honesty. But the difference is that it would never occur to me to send a letter to the Roundtable protesting its choice of a speaker from the League.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/03/24/the-left-strikes-again-at-freedom-of-speech-in-akron-ohio
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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