Living off Insects in North Korea, Biden Denies Haiti's Request for Troops, Should Facebook Be Scared of the New Federal Trade Commission Chair?(The Five for 07/13/21)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
This is one of the heaviest issues in quite some time.
If you feel depressed:
That’s natural, there are some pretty terrible things going on in the world.
Consider making a donation to a nonprofit working to counteract these situations, like World Vision, which is doing great work feeding children in Haiti.
If you’re discovering The Five via a social media link, subscribe via email or come back on Friday, when we dive into much lighter (but still important) fare for Culture & Commentary.
With that being said, let’s get into the news.
[one]
Haitian citizens show passports and beg for asylum at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince.
Haiti is begging for military assistance after the tiny island nation has been thrown into functional anarchy with the assassination of Haitian President Jovenol Moise, which President Biden is denying.
Haiti has asked both the U.S. and the United Nations to send troops to help stabilize the country, but President Biden has so far shown little sign that he is ready to dispatch forces.
"There are no plans to provide U.S. military assistance at this time," a senior administration official told NPR.
However, it appears that the U.S. government is working to gauge what role it may be able to play in the aftermath of the assassination.
"In response to the Haitian government's request for security and investigative assistance, we will be sending senior FBI and [Department of Homeland Security] officials to Port-au-Prince as soon as possible to assess the situation and how we may be able to assist," the official said.
Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said the FBI and DHS officials would work to determine "what we can do to help them in the investigative process."
"I think that's really where our energies are best applied right now in helping them get their arms around investigating this incident and figuring out who's culpable, who's responsible and how best to hold them accountable going forward," Kirby said.
While the U.S. has a bad track record of getting into endless wars over the last 30 years, American hesitation to intervene in genocide has resulted in mass casualties in the Balkans (8,000 Muslims and Croats slaughtered in 1995, even though the U.S. and U.N. had warning as early as 1992 this could happen), Rwanda (1 million civilians slaughtered in 3 months in 1995), and likely Somalia (U.S. conflict was too little too l ate to prevent the likely ethnic cleaning carried out by warlord Mohamed Farrah Hassan Aidid, who’s alleged war crimes were never investigated by the U.N.)
There’s a big difference in launching into a full scale invasion of a country, and providing military aid to a country to prevent civilian casualties.
It’s very likely that short term U.S. military action could have prevented hundreds of thousands (or millions) of deaths in Eastern Europe and African over the course of two years from 1993-1995…and we just didn’t bother to do it.
My fear is the Biden Administration is about to make the same Clinton era foreign policy blunder, and the mistake will be paid for in the blood of Haitian bystanders.
[two]
You may or may not have come across the story of Yeonomi Park, a North Korean defector who made it to the United States through unbelievable circumstances.[
Evie Magazine has a good summary of her incredible journey to freedom, which details the living conditions in North Korea:
Park and her sister would catch dragonflies and grasshoppers and roast them with a lighter. This was their primary source of protein growing up. They would play a game talking about how much they could eat in gigantic proportions because they had no concept of how much they could eat or what being full felt like. Rice was a luxury that had to be portioned out throughout the day. Park recalls the constant hunger – how it prevents you from thinking about anything else.
Park draws comparisons between North Korea and the Hunger Games trilogy. In the story, the nation of Panem is divided into thirteen districts, and the Capitol. Citizens living in the Capitol are well fed, to the point of excess. Meanwhile, in remaining districts, citizens live in varying degrees of poverty, where some die of starvation..
It was in this environment that Park was born. She regularly saw dead bodies on the street, set out to be collected like garbage. For her, it was as normal as it is for us to see garbage trucks picking up bags or bins from the street curbs.
As she grew older, Park, along with other North Korean children, missed out on learning about love. For her, there was love for their “great leader,” but no concept of love for family, or for other people, in the way we recognize that in the West. Park had never heard her mother tell her she loved her.
Despite these living conditions in a Communist dictatorship and Marxist idealogy causing the deaths of more than 100 million people in the 20th century, 1/3 of American Millennials still approve of Communism.
[three]
San Francisco based venture capitalist Mike Sinola issued a strong rebuttal to California Governor Gavin Newsom’s recent comments on climate change, blaming bad state governance rather than carbon emissions for California’s massive uptick in wildfires and natural disasters.
From Governor Newsom:
Sinola responded via an essay on Medium:
Back in September, I challenged the notion there’s nothing California leadership can do to protect us from wildfire. Global warming is just our leadership’s excuse for their own committed incompetence. If you deny climate change is our foremost problem, you’re accused of not “believing science” (from the same people who banned going to the beach in the middle of the pandemic). But wildfire is native to California. Even if the average global temperature hadn’t risen for the past three hundred years, we would need a strategy to protect our towns from burning down.
Mostly, I argued, California needs a housing policy that facilitates an increase in urban density, and a well-funded strategy for controlled burning. There is presently broad aversion to such housing strategy among state leaders, and Gavin Newsom just cut 150 million dollars from our wildfire prevention budget.
Journalist and bestselling author Michael Shellenberger provided additional evidence via Twitter:
On September 14th, California residents will vote on whether or not to recall Governor Newsom.
[four]
Russian citizens have used Twitter to organize protests for the release of Alexei Navalny, a pro-democracy leader who has dared to challenge Putin’s iron grip on the country. Now, Russia is making moves to slow (and possibly block) the social network within it’s borders.
Russian authorities said Tuesday they would block Twitter in a month if it doesn’t take steps to remove banned content, a move that escalates the Russian government’s drawn-out standoff with social media platforms that have played a major role in amplifying dissent in Russia.
Russia’s state communications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, last week announced it was slowing down the speed of uploading photos and videos to Twitter over its alleged failure to remove content encouraging suicide among children and information about drugs and child pornography.
The agency said Twitter has failed to remove more than 3,000 posts with banned content, including more than 2,500 posts encouraging suicide among minors. The platform responded by emphasizing its policy of zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation, promotion of suicide and drug sales.
I’m as critical of big tech as anyone, but this is clearly B.S. Twitter has some huge issues, but allowing content encouraging teen suicide isn’t one of them.
While I’m a heavy Twitter user and was about to out-and-out defend them…the social media giant decided to downplay the pro-democracy protests happening right now in Cuba, by labeling the trend as being driven by “high COVID cases.”
Second generation Cuban expat Giancarlo Sopo pointed out the absurdity of this:
It’s incredible that Twitter is so pro-democracy and anti-democracy…within the span of 24 hours.
Maybe the house that Dorsey built will be broken up in the near future anyway (queue next story).
[five]
In a rare moment in Washington D.C., both sides of the aisle appear to be enthusiastic about Lina Khan, an anti-trust scholar who’s been confirmed as the Biden administration’s pick for the Federal Trade Commission.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Ms. Khan, a 32-year-old Columbia University law professor who has been a vocal critic of powerful technology companies, was confirmed on a 69-28 vote. With her confirmation secured, Mr. Biden immediately designated her as FTC chairwoman, a move that caps the ascendancy of a progressive camp that favors far-reaching changes to antitrust enforcement.
Ms. Khan has been the leader of that movement, which believes the current decadeslong approach has done too little to restrain corporate dominance and stop mergers that have eroded competition. She has argued in favor of blocking more mergers, aggressively attacking monopolistic practices and potentially breaking up some of America’s largest companies.
One of the rare points of agreement across the political spectrum in modern American politics is that big tech (Facebook, in particular, for these reasons and many more) wield power the founders of the nation couldn’t even have imagined in 1776.
If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I wouldn’t be sleeping too well in my mega mansion this month.
[epilogue]
In 1971, Soviet engineers in Turkministan decided to prevent the spread of gas by lighting a crater on fire, the result of a sink hole that had opened up in a mining operation.
The fire was expected to burn out in a few hours.
Fifty years later, the blaze is still going, being continuously fed by underground gas deposits.
The burning pit, known as “The Gates of Hell,” is currently under development as a tourist site.
Uhh, good luck with that one, guys.
Until the next one,
-sth