THE HIGH COST OF RISING GAS PRICES AMERICANS FORCED TO CHANGE LIFESTYLES AS GAS PRICES REACH HISTORIC HIGH
By Nanette Holt
MARCH 18–24, 2022 | $6.95
NO. 11
Editor’s Note
Pain at the Pump with gas prices at a record high, Americans across the country are being forced to change their lifestyles. “I’ve had to cut back on everything,” Kelly Lundqvist said at a Speedway station in Vandalia, Ohio. Lundqvist, like many others interviewed, wishes for America to be energy independent again. After being a net exporter of oil in 2020 and 2021, the United States became a net importer of oil and liquid fuels again by 2022. Others worry about the ripple effects that higher gas prices will have. Bowling Green, Ohio, resident Richard Zulch, who owns a concession business, says he worries customers will buy fewer products because they're forced to spend more money on gas. “Those dollars won’t be there, because people will be spending all their extra money on gas,” he said. Most surveyed, however, say they won't be making changes to their summer travel plans. Some experts, in fact, worry that some gas stations might have trouble staying "fully wet"— meaning there might not be enough gasoline to keep their tanks full. Read this week's cover story for more on how Americans across the country are reacting to the pain at the pump. Jasper Fakkert Editor-in-chief
2 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
JASPER FAKKERT EDITOR-IN-CHIEF CHANNALY PHILIPP LIFE & TRADITION, TRAVEL EDITOR
ON THE COVER At an average of around $4.30 per gallon, gas prices have hit a record high. Read how Americans across the country are adjusting their lifestyles because of it. JONATHAN PETERSSON/UNSPLASH
CHRISY TRUDEAU MIND & BODY EDITOR CRYSTAL SHI HOME, FOOD EDITOR SHARON KILARSKI ARTS & CULTURE EDITOR BILL LINDSEY LUXURY EDITOR FEI MENG & BIBA KAJEVICH ILLUSTRATORS SHANSHAN HU PRODUCTION CONTACT US THE EPOCH TIMES ASSOCIATION INC. 229 W.28TH ST., FL.7 NEW YORK, NY 10001 ADVERTISING ADVERTISENOW@EPOCHTIMES.COM SUBSCRIPTIONS, GENERAL INQUIRIES, LETTERS TO THE EDITOR HELP.THEEPOCHTIMES.COM (USPS21-800)IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY THE EPOCH MEDIA GROUP, 9550 FLAIR DR. SUITE 411, EL MONTE, CA 91731-2922. PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT EL MONTE, CA, AND ADDITIONAL MAILING OFFICES. POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO THE EPOCH TIMES, 229 W. 28TH STREET, FLOOR 5, NEW YORK, NY 10001.
vol. 2 | no. 11 | march 18–24, 2022
26 | Policing Stops
50 | Society
After George Floyd protests, proactive policing sharply declined.
“We are made kind by being kind,” philosopher Eric Hoffer said.
51 | Animal Rescue
28 | Semiconductor
A Honolulu sanctuary works to foster cats and care for feral felines.
Industry The Russia–Ukraine brings more bad news for chipmakers.
52 | For the Chinese
People Congressman Chris Smith’s long war against human rights violations.
40 | Nurturing
Creativity Parents can protect their kids from the worst effects of Big Tech.
Features
44 | Judicial Activism
How Bidens’s Supreme Court nominee could diminish our freedoms.
45 | CCP Infiltration
China is hacking into state governments in the United States.
46 | Monetary System Will the U.S. dollar become a digital currency?
47 | Commodities
The war in Europe’s breadbasket is making food inflation worse.
48 | Inflation
Inflation is the result of money printing, not commodity price increases.
49 | Chinese Business
Some Chinese stocks are getting an unexpected boost from the Russia– Ukraine war.
12 | Vaccine Marketing Facebook is being criticized for violating ethical standards. 16 | Coping With Inflation How Americans are changing their lifestyles to deal with high gas prices.
THE LEAD
30 | Power Struggle The Ukraine war is deepening a factional war within the CCP. 34| Reading to Furry Friends A unique program encourages children to become avid readers. A girl holds her sibling in a temporary shelter for Ukrainian refugees at a school in Przemysl, Poland, on March 14. More than 2.8 million fled Ukraine from the start of the war on Feb. 24 to March 14. LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
56 | Hercules's
Weekend Home Enjoy a virtual tour of a breathtaking Greek isle estate.
58 | A Swiss Delight
Consider this charming hotel on your next trip to Switzerland.
60 | Happy Campers
If your game could be called divot-digging, head to golf camp.
63 | Electrifying Drives These electric vehicles are redefining fourwheeled luxury.
66 | Ensuring Future Crops John Coykendall preserves heirloom seeds for future generations.
67 | Be a Best Friend
True friends are rare, making it important to treasure them. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 3
T H G IL T O P S GLOBAL GAS SPIKES MOTORCYCLISTS LINE UP IN THE MORNING to try to get fuel for their day’s run at the only station in town that hasn’t raised its prices, in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, on March 16. Congolese households, around threequarters of which are below the poverty line, are worried about the economic consequences of the war in Ukraine. PHOTO BY GUERCHOM NDEBO/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
4 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 5
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Exclusive interviews, shows, documentaries, movies, and more.
Visit THEEPOCHTIMES.COM 6 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
NAT ION • WOR L D • W H AT H A P P E N E D T H I S W E E K
The Week
No.11
A police officer checks a suspicious vehicle without a plate, near the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis on March 9, 2021. PHOTO BY KEREM YUCEL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
A Dramatic Decline in Proactive Policing
26
Facebook Called Out for Vaccine Promotion
CCP Factional Wars Intensify
Reading Is ‘Going to the Dogs’
The tech giant has formed a marketing alliance for COVID-19 vaccines. 12
Russia’s war in Ukraine is deepening the factional war within the CCP. 30
A unique program is boosting kids’ confidence and motivation to read. 34
INSIDE I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 7
The Week in Short US
b o j y r a m i r p e h T“ t nem nre v o g lared f pe k ot yl aut ca si ” .e r f s u
$2
BILLION
The Federal Emergency Management Agency says its funeral assistance program has reimbursed more than $2 billion in funeral costs for more than 300,000 families of COVID-19 victims.
— Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas)
“China’s already on the wrong side of history when it comes to the Ukraine.” — Secretary of State Antony Blinken
Gold prices shot above $2,000 per ounce on March 10 as 40-year high inflation and the Ukraine-Russia conflict supported the precious metal.
TRILLION
U.S. consumer spending on e-commerce is expected to hit a record $1 trillion this year thanks to the pandemic-driven shift to online shopping, according to a report from Adobe Analytics.
71 PERCENT
Some 71 percent of American respondents support resuming work on the Keystone XL pipeline, which President Joe Biden blocked soon after taking office, according to a new poll.
852 INMATES
In New Jersey, 852 prisoners were released early over the weekend of March 12 under a law signed by Gov. Phil Murphy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
$50 MILLION— The Senate voted overwhelmingly to provide the long loss-making U.S. Postal Service with about $50 billion in financial relief over a decade and require its future retirees to enroll in a government health insurance plan. 8 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
THIS PAGE FROM TOP: KAY NIETFELD - POOL/GETTY IMAGES, COURTESY OF THE OFFICE OF MICHAEL CLOUD, SHUTTERSTOCK; RIGHT PAGE FROM TOP: KEVIN DIETSCH/GETTY IMAGES, MANDEL NGAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
$2,000 PER OUNCE
$1
The Week in Short US ELECTION INTEGRITY
2020 Election Nullification, Audit Bills Dead or Dying N I N E O F 10 B I L L S filed in six
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) speaks at a news conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Sept. 22, 2021. HOMELAND SECURITY
Rep. Roy to Seek Impeachment of DHS Head Mayorkas R E P. CHIP R OY (R-Texas) will attempt to bring impeachment proceedings
against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, documents obtained by Insight show. The move caps off a full year of Republican dissatisfaction with Mayorkas, who is in charge of border security. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show that about 2 million people illegally crossed the border in 2021, an unprecedented level of illegal immigration and a nearly fourfold increase from illegal crossings a year earlier. In addition, deportation rates have plunged under Mayorkas’s tenure. Responsibility for the situation, according to a letter penned by Roy’s office to GOP leadership, lies squarely with Mayorkas. CAPITOL HILL
Senate Votes to Make Daylight Savings Time Permanent IN A U NA N IMOUS VOIC E VOT E ,
the Senate passed a bill that would make daylight savings time permanent, potentially putting an end to twice-annual time changes. The U.S. Capitol in Washington on March 1. The measure, called the Sunlight Protection Act, will now go to the House. If passed, it will head to President Joe Biden’s desk for approval. Supporters of daylight savings time credit the time change with helping to reduce crime as it increases daylight hours, making it harder for criminals to go undetected. It has also been credited with helping to reduce traffic accidents, as drivers are better able to see. Supporters of the Sunlight Protection Act say that it would help Americans to avoid the psychological consequences of the time changes, which have been shown by some research to exacerbate seasonal depression.
states seeking to audit 2020 election results—including three that would have nullified Joe Biden’s victory— have fallen by the wayside as legislative sessions wind down. Seven bills seeking 2020 general election audits were filed in four states: Florida, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Only a New Hampshire measure remains on the docket. Lawmakers in New Hampshire, Arizona, and Wisconsin filed 2022 legislation demanding the nullification of 2020’s election results, with an audit to determine the winner. Only the embattled Wisconsin effort is showing signs of life, with the publication of a special counsel report on March 1 that gives an argument for post-certification challenges to election results. PANDEMIC
Cuomo’s Admin Undercounted Nursing Home COVID-19 Deaths: Audit
F O R M E R N E W Y O R K G O V.
Andrew Cuomo’s administration undercounted COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes by more than 4,000 during the pandemic, according to an audit released by New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli. The audit accuses the New York State Department of Health of having “misled the public” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and at certain points of having undercounted the number of nursing home deaths by more than 50 percent. The audit states that the lack of transparency was the result of a “deliberate decision” at certain periods during the pandemic. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 9
The Week in Short World UNITED NATIONS
UN Calls for End to Burmese Army’s ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ T HE U N IT E D NATIONS urged
Residents wait to receive COVID-19 nucleic acid tests in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China, on March 13. CHINA
Global Supply Chains Brace for Further Shocks From China’s COVID Lockdowns CHINA IS STRUGGLING to put down its purported worst COVID-19 outbreak in
two years, shutting factories and locking down some of its busiest manufacturing hubs to try to curb the spread of the illness. The latest wave has prompted lockdowns of 51 million people that affect major industrial and tech hubs such as the southern city of Shenzhen, which is known as China’s Silicon Valley. Companies including Intel, Apple, Toyota, and Volkswagen are among the latest companies forced to halt some production in China as products have piled up at warehouses while firms complied with stringent COVID policies.
the international community to take “immediate measures” to stop the Burmese military junta’s systematic human rights violations, which it said amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The military junta has shown “a flagrant disregard for human life” by launching airstrikes on populated areas and deliberately targeting civilians, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said in a report. Bachelet stated that many civilians have been shot, arbitrarily arrested, tortured, or used as human shields in Burma, also known as Myanmar, calling on the international community to take “meaningful action.” RUSSIA–UKRAINE WAR
OIL
Maduro Supports Return of US Oil Companies: Foreign Minister Felix Plasencia says leader Nicolas Maduro is willing to do business with U.S. enterprises again, following a visit by a U.S. delegation earlier this month. “We’ve never asked American companies to leave the country. ... President Nicolas Maduro said many times that we welcome American oil companies to invest and develop oil business in Venezuela,” Plasencia said during the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Turkey Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro speaks on March 11. at an event in Caracas, Venezuela, on June Plasencia said that Venezuela remains 22, 2020. a firm ally of Russia, and that the country plans to increase oil production up to 2 million barrels per day by the end of the year with the help of what he called “reliable partners” like China, Iran, and Russia. Some U.S. senators and representatives have criticized President Joe Biden’s proposed negotiations with Maduro, saying that his government is a “puppet regime” that creates a platform for autocratic governments. A high-level U.S. delegation visited Venezuela on March 5 to 6. 10 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT
Volodymyr Zelensky addressed members of the U.S. Congress, asking again for the United States and NATO to enforce a no-fly zone over his country and provide fighter planes weeks after Russia started its invasion. In asking for S-300 surface-toair missile systems and Polish MiG-29 fighter jets, Zelensky invoked the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that thrust the United States into World War II. “Remember Pearl Harbor,” he said via a translator. “Remember Sept. 11. ... Our country experiences the same every day.”
THIS PAGE FROM TOP: STR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, MIRAFLORES PALACE/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS; RIGHT PAGE FROM TOP: -/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, CHRIS MCGRATH/GETTY IMAGES, JOHN WESSELS/ AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, -/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
VENEZUELAN FOREIGN MINISTER
Zelensky Asks Congress for Fighter Jets and No-Fly Zone
World in Photos
1.
1. People celebrate Lathmar Holi, the Hindu spring festival of colors, in Nandgaon village, Uttar Pradesh state, India, on March 12. 2. A resident waits after she was rescued from her apartment by firefighters after it was hit by Russian shelling in the Sviatoshynskyi District of Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 15. 3. Women carry buckets of water collected out of makeshift water wells dug into a dried-up river bed on the outskirts of the village of Madina Torobe, Senegal, on March 12. 4. Police detain a man during a protest against Russian military action in Ukraine, in Moscow’s Manezhnaya Square on March 13.
2.
3.
4. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 11
Facebook has potentially placed itself in the legal role of “state actor” and could even be held liable for vaccine-related injuries by promoting the COVID-19 vaccines, an expert says. PHOTO BY DADO RUVIC/REUTERS
12 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
BIG TECH
FACEBOOK CALLED OUT FOR VACCINE PROMOTION The tech giant formed an alliance for marketing COVID-19 vaccines BY ALICE GIORDANO a health alliance formed by facebook in June 2021 has been funding research into “how best to use behavioral science, social media and digital platforms to build confidence in and access to vaccines,” according to the website of Facebook parent company Meta. The Facebook-led group, called the Alliance for Advancing Health Online, includes the World Health Organization (WHO), pharmaceutical giant Merck, and the CDC Foundation—which is the fundraising arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and has corporate partners that include Pfizer and other world giants in vaccine manufacturing. In an email sent June 15, 2021, to White House staffers announcing the formation of the alliance, Facebook described it as an initiative to “boost vaccination confidence through social media,” noting that a “vaccine confidence fund” had been created by the group to finance campaigns to diminish vaccine hesitancy. The email described the fund as a $40 million multi-year initiative. Facebook and Merck contributed $20 million each, according to Facebook.
“This is absolutely appalling,” Pierre Kory, president of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, a prominent advocate for alternative COVID-19 treatment, told Insight. “This doesn’t have a true, scientifically supported public health objective for getting people vaccinated. It’s more of a marketing aim with the sole goal of increasing vaccine rates.” The email shows that it was sent to Becca Siegel, senior adviser of the COVID-19 response at The White House; Tericka Lambert, director of digital engagement at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); and HHS staffer Monica Vines, who works in the agency’s ASPA digital division, which leads the development of HHS web and social media content and implements digital information policy. It was also sent to Georgeta Dragoiu, a White House presidential innovation fellow of the COVID-19 Vaccine Public Education Strategy and Media Campaign. The campaign runs the “We Can Do This” program. A current article on its website has the headline “Addressing Vaccine Misconceptions.” I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 13
In Focus COVID-19 Vaccine
2.9 BILLION Facebook recently reported that it had 2.9 billion users, which is nearly 40 percent of the world population.
“It’s difficult for me to understand this as anything other than a government propaganda campaign,” Stanford professor of medicine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told Insight. It’s unclear how The White House responded to the email. Multiple calls made by Insight to Meta for comment on the alliance were never returned. The White House press office and individual recipients of the Facebook email also didn’t respond to inquiries made by Insight. Amy Tolchinsky, communications director for the CDC Foundation, released a written statement to Insight in response to inquiries about its involvement in the Facebook-initiated alliance. “While we are not involved in its operations, received any funding for our involvement, or provided any funding, our association with the Alliance for Advancing Health Online, which was publicly announced in June of 2021, is a way to educate the public about the safety and efficacy of vaccines to a broader audience,” the statement reads. Tolchinsky also said the CDC Foundation has “formalized partnerships with many U.S. and international philan-
14 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
thropies, organizations, corporations, and individuals prior to, and since the beginning of the pandemic.” In the June email sent to White House staffers, Facebook’s then-public policy manager, Nkechi Payton Iheme, listed the foundation as one of several organizations that made up the alliance. In addition to Pfizer, the CDC Foundation’s corporate partner list includes several of the world’s largest vaccine makers, including AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Emergent BioSolutions, and Bavarian Nordic. Iheme, who has since left Facebook, also identified in the email Merck, the WHO, the World Bank, and several vaccine advocacy groups as members of the alliance.
Ethical Considerations Vaccine scientist Dr. Robert Malone, who was banned in December 2021 by Twitter after raising safety concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine, told Insight that he believes the alliance poses a direct violation of ethical responsibilities in medicine, which he said is to disclose the risks of any recommended treatment along with alternative treatment options. “If Facebook wants to play doctor, then
it has to fulfill the professional and ethical obligations of the profession,” he said. Malone, who played a key role in inventing the mRNA technology and used to make the experimental COVID-19 vaccine, told Insight that he doesn’t have a Facebook page.
Questions About Suppression of Alternative Treatments The June 2021 email was obtained by the conservative group Information Consent Action Network (ICAN) as part of its campaign to show how Facebook partnered with the federal government to suppress information about the proven efficacy of alternative treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. “It creates a dangerous precedent when social media outlets are carrying the government’s message while suppressing messaging that’s contrary to what the government is trying to promote,” ICAN attorney Aaron Siri told Insight. Siri said the social media, big pharma, and federal government-comprised alliance is “by the very least” a “mammoth campaign” to suppress First Amendment free speech rights.
FROM L: GEORGE FREY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, ERIC BARADAT/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, FRONT LINE COVID-19 CRITICAL CARE ALLIANCE
An email sent in June to the White House announcing the formation of the alliance describes the research fund as a $40 million multiyear initiative. Facebook and Merck contributed $20 million each.
(Above) Hydroxychloroquine pills at Rock Canyon Pharmacy in Provo, Utah, on May 20, 2020. Facebook partnered with the federal government to suppress from the public the proven efficacy of alternative treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, experts say. (Right) The Emergency Operations Center at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on March 19, 2021.
Facebook recently reported that it has 2.9 billion users, which is nearly 40 percent of the world population. Kory told Insight that he believes Facebook has potentially placed itself in the legal role of “state actor” and could even be held liable for vaccine-related injuries by promoting the COVID-19 vaccines. His group’s Facebook page remains active. It includes a video posted on March 3 of his appearance on the new webisode of The Digger. In its segment debut, Kory talks about the rapid recovery he witnessed in COVID-ill patients he treated with ivermectin. Iheme said in the email that the alliance’s first activity together would be to launch its vaccine confidence fund. She noted that Biden staffers could “join a follow-up conversation if desired.” The alliance was created on the heels of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s allegations in October 2021 that the social media giant wasn’t doing enough to rid Facebook of disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine. Haugen also accused Facebook of not doing enough to stop disinformation from climate change deniers. The accusations followed Facebook
“[The alliance] is more of a marketing aim with the sole goal of increasing vaccine rates.” Pierre Kory, president, Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance
founder Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress that social media platforms shouldn’t be held liable if they demonstrated that they’re employing the “best practices” to find the spread of alleged misinformation or what he called “harmful content.” Other members of the alliance identified by the Facebook email include the Bay Area Global Health Alliance. Mary Pittman, chairman of the Bay Area Global Health Alliance, is also the chief executive officer and president of the Public Health Institute. In February, it issued a press release announcing that it had been awarded $10 million from HHS for its “equity work” for promoting the COVID-19 vaccine. In addition to its partnership with the Pfizer-supported CDC Foundation, Facebook’s fact-checking arm also has ties to Pfizer. One of the lead trainers of Facebook’s Meta Journalism Project specifically charged with capturing alleged disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines is the International Center for Journalists, which also lists Pfizer among its corporate sponsors. Jan Jekielek contributed to this report. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 15
INFLATION
GAS PRICES FORCE LIFESTYLE CHANGES Americans plan to spend less time on the road if oil prices remain high By Nanette Holt
16 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
Gas prices hit over $6 per gallon at a station in Los Angeles on Feb. 23. PHOTO BY FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 17
The Lead Rising Fuel Costs
Uber driver Zephrin Green fills up at a Sam's Club in Gainesville, Fla., on March 10. If the price of gas goes higher, Green will have to stop driving and find different work to support his young daughter.
G
AINESVILLE, FLA.—AS IF THE PRICE
18 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
An oil pumpjack works in the Permian Basin oil field, the largest petroleumproducing basin in the United States, in Odessa, Texas, on March 13. President Joe Biden's ban on Russian oil may mean that oil producers in the Permian Basin will need to pump more oil to meet demand. senior manager of public affairs for AAA Northeast. “And now, here we are.” Driving less was the change 80 percent said they’d be forced to make. Almost a third of drivers between 18 and 34 said they’d start carpooling to save money on gas. But only 11 percent of those over 35 were willing to consider carpooling as a solution. Instead, 68 percent of the over-35 group said they’d get clever about combining errands on their commute to save on fuel costs. More than 53 percent of the older drivers said they would reduce shopping or dining out to cope. Changing summer travel plans was not an option, 42 percent of those surveyed said. When Kelly Lundqvist pulled up to a Speedway station in Vandalia, Ohio, on March 7 and saw the price at $4.09 per gallon for regular unleaded, her heart sank.
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of gas wasn’t enough, a line of impatient motorists waiting behind him with sullen faces and engines rumbling made Zephrin Green’s visit to a Sam’s Club gas pump even more stressful. As he prepared to fill the tank of his blue Subaru BRZ for an evening of Uber-driving, he tried to activate the pump as quickly as possible. Glancing at the price, he made quick calculations in his head. “It takes 9.9 gallons to fill the tank,” he said. “I already know it’s going to take $50.” Green used to make $140 to $180 per day ferrying Uber customers to their destinations around the college town of Gainesville in the middle of North Florida. Since gas prices surged, his profits have dwindled to between $100 and $130—not enough to cover his bills and help support his young daughter. If the price of gas goes higher, he’ll have to stop driving and find different work. Gas prices are now the highest that consumers have ever paid in the United States. The $4-per-gallon mark is the tipping point that will force 60 percent of drivers to make changes, according to a AAA survey released March 10. If gas hits $5 per gallon, 75 percent of U.S. drivers say they’ll be forced to change the way they live in order to keep up, the survey shows. “A significant portion of drivers just don’t have the elasticity in their family budgets to deal with fluctuating gas prices,” AAA spokesman Robert Sinclair Jr. told Insight. In 2018, when AAA asked drivers to reveal their “pain point for the price of gasoline,” 40 percent said they’d have to make major lifestyle changes if gas ever reached $3 per gallon,” said Sinclair, who is
The Lead Rising Fuel Costs
“We have to figure out a way to control the fuel prices. It’s going to affect trucking, farming, everything. We need to make ourselves energy independent again.” Richard Zulch, army veteran
“I was quite surprised, and frankly, quite sad,” she said. Lundqvist owns a home cleaning and downsizing business in Dayton. Driving to jobs has been costing her about $50 per week in gas. “Seeing that the price of gas keeps going up made me sick to my stomach and nauseated,” she said. “I’ve had to cut back on everything.” Lundqvist said she hopes President Joe Biden will do what’s necessary to boost American oil drilling and will restart the Keystone XL pipeline project he shut down shortly after taking office. The pipeline was designed to send 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada to refineries in Texas. Her wish for America to be energy independent again was echoed by people around the country, who told Insight they believe the problems began when the United States returned to a dependency on foreign oil after President Donald Trump left office in January 2021. Richard Zulch, of Bowling Green, Ohio, agreed that America’s lack of energy independence was the problem. The army veteran, who served as a combat engineer in Vietnam, worried that rising gas prices would crush his concession business again. In 2005, gas prices spiraled up after Hurricane Katrina blasted through oil-rich Louisiana. “When gas went up that time, our sales went down to zero,” Zulch said. If numbers on the pump keep ticking higher, his customers won’t have money for the food he sells, he said. “Those dollars won’t be there, because people will be spending all their extra money on gas.” He worries about the effects on critical industries as well. “We have to figure out a way to control the fuel prices,” Zulch said. “It’s going to affect trucking, farming, everything. We need to make ourselves energy independent again.” American energy independence is key to fixing the problem, said Tiffany Gorham, of Dalton, Georgia. Now that the cost to fill her tank has almost doubled, she’ll have to cut back on activities with her grandchildren. “I’m frustrated with the fact that the first thing that was done when our new president was in office was that they shut down our pipeline,” Gorham said. “So you take away our independence of gas, and I think that has a lot to do with it.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine plays a role, she said. “But when you take away our own independence that we had—that’s frustrating for me.” Robert Hart of Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, knows the energy business. He retired from work with the Knoxville-based Tennessee Valley Authority. The federally owned utility provides electricity for 153 local power companies serving 10 million people in Tennessee and parts of six surrounding states. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 19
The Lead Rising Fuel Costs
20 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
Some pumps at a gas station were out of gas in Alachua, Fla., on March 12. Experts are concerned that gas stations may not have enough supply as the weather warms and demand ramps up.
supply and too little demand. But by March 2021, crude oil prices bounced back up to $64.53 per 42-gallon barrel. By the end of 2021, crude oil was up to $75.21 a barrel. In January 2022, the surge intensified, eventually hitting $128 per barrel on March 8. On March 14, the price had ticked down to $101.38. Though gas prices typically drop at the beginning of each year, the price of crude oil started spiraling up in January when there was speculation that Russia might invade Ukraine, Sinclair said. Price hikes are typical when there’s instability, or even a threat of instability, in the world that could disrupt supply. Analysts call it a “fear tax,” he said. Gas prices will likely keep climbing, he said, partly because of the normal cycle of gasoline prices. After a drop in January or February, they usually creep up in March. That’s when refineries shut down temporarily—making for
CLOCKWISE FROM L: NANETTE HOLT/THE EPOCH TIMES, MICHAEL SAKAL/THE EPOCH TIMES, VASILY FEDOSENKO/REUTERS
The recent spike in what he’s paying at the pump means he’ll have to give up eating out, he said. If prices continue to climb, he’s not sure how he’ll make ends meet. “I am really stressing,” said Hart, who lives in a household with four other adult family members who drive. “I’m having to pay too much for gas and for getting around.” Prices at the gas pump reflect the trajectory of pricing for crude oil. At this time four years ago, crude was trading at $65.99 per barrel. A year later, the price was at $68.50. Two years ago, prices plummeted to $28.47, and by April 20, 2020, “we actually went negative on crude oil prices,” Sinclair said. “I think it was minus 32 a barrel. They would have paid you to take the stuff away back then.” That dip occurred just after the world started COVID-19 lockdowns, and few people were traveling, Sinclair said. There simply was too much
The Lead Rising Fuel Costs
60
PERCENT
THE $4-PER-GALLON mark will force 60 percent of drivers to change the way they live, according to a AAA survey. brief shortages—as they prepare to switch from making “winter blend” gasoline to making “summer blend” formulations that perform better in warm weather. Summer blends are more expensive to make “and more complicated to distribute, so that leads to higher prices,” he said. “And then the summer driving season starts and gasoline prices shoot up because of extra demand.” When it comes to summer travel, 85 percent to 95 percent of trips are taken in a motor vehicle, AAA research shows. “So we need a lot of fuel. Then prices peak sometime usually in June, July, or August. And then they started going down in September after Labor Day when driving cuts back a little bit,” Sinclair said. “People start going back to work, no more summer vacations, and prices keep going down. Then they fall during the fall, and bottom-out again sometime in January or February.” Crude oil is a smelly, sticky, black liquid pulled from deep under the earth’s surface in many places around the world. In the United States, the states with the most oil are Texas, Alaska, California, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Crude oil is refined to create gasoline and diesel fuel, and refining it is the costliest part of the process for fuel-makers. So as the price of oil fluctuates, those changes are reflected in the pricing signs outside gas stations. “When I was a kid, gas prices were 19 cents a gallon,” recalled 85-year-old Horace Turner, of Ringgold, Georgia. With the recent surge in gas prices, he said, “I’ve had to give up running around a little bit. I’m staying home more.” He blames the conflict in Ukraine. “We need to get rid of them Russians,” he said. “But if we do that, they’ll want to retaliate on us, and it’ll be Katie-bar-the-door.” He also believes political policies are to blame, and he hopes his fellow Americans will band
together when they head to the polls during the midterm elections. Teri Taylor, of Union, Ohio, doesn’t blame the Biden administration. “The world is a mess,” she said, as she added $10 in gas to the tank of her Ford Taurus. “I think Biden is dealing with what he’s been given. I never did like Donald Trump.” She lives about 15 minutes from her job at ODW, a distribution warehouse for children’s shoes. She’s considering moving closer to help keep her gas expenses affordable. “I don’t know what I’ll do yet,” she said. “When I started driving [in the late 1970s], gas was 75 cents a gallon. When it went up to a dollar a gallon, I threw a fit. Now I can’t go anywhere.” She’s had to cut back on groceries, and she’s started making some of her own clothes, “including the hat on my head,” she said. “I’ll be growing my vegetables, too.” Focusing on just one political party’s proposed solutions isn’t the answer, Gorham insists. She identifies more closely as a Republican and conservative.
Teri Taylor of Union, Ohio, speaks about the ways she's coping with rising gas prices as she fills up her tank on her way home from work.
An employee holds a sample of crude oil at the Yarakta oilfield, owned by Irkutsk Oil, in the Irkutsk region of Russia on March 11, 2019. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 21
The Lead Rising Fuel Costs
“I am really stressing. I’m having to pay too much for gas and for getting around.” Robert Hart, retired
22 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
Pete Falkenstern, president of Dump Truck Services in Murdock, Fla. Drivers of trucks, which practically slurp up diesel fuel, face even higher prices than the average commuter.
shelling out an average $5.74 per gallon for gasoline on March 14, AAA research showed. Across the country, people willing to pay climbing gas prices were increasingly finding stations with no gas to sell. That’s because of a shortage of truck drivers, especially drivers with the qualifications to drive a tanker truck, Sinclair said. “You have to have a higher level of certification to drive a gasoline tanker truck. And we lost a lot of them during the lockdowns in 2020 when fuel demand just plummeted,” he said. Many of those truckers took jobs driving for companies that saw business boom during lockdowns, such as Amazon and UPS, Sinclair said. “During the lockdowns, everybody was online ordering stuff. So that’s where [truckers] went. And I guess it’s working out for them, because they have not come back to driving long-haul, big rigs and tanker trucks,” he said. “Some analysts are worried that, especially as demand ramps up—with the weather warming and people wanting to take trips—that many gas stations will have problems staying ‘fully wet,’ as they say in the trade, which means that all their tanks might not be full and all their pumps might not be operational, because they
FROM L: JACKSON ELLIOTT/THE EPOCH TIMES, DUMP TRUCK SERVICES, JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
“I believe in voting for what’s right,” she said. “But honestly, there’s been times when I favored more of a Democrat than a Republican. I’m for who’s for us and what is best for us. “It’s not a matter of being Democrat or Republican. It’s a matter of voting for what’s right. And it’s hard to tell because you can be a great person when you get in office. And I think once you get in office, everything changes.” Taxes imposed by lawmakers account for about 15 percent of the price people pay at the pump, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Fuel-makers’ cost for crude oil accounts for about 56 percent of the price consumers pay for gasoline, and it makes up about 51 percent of what people pay for diesel, according to the EIA. U.S. refineries can make a little more than 19 gallons of gasoline and 10 gallons of diesel fuel from one barrel of crude, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. On March 14, the national average for regular gas prices was $4.33, up from $4.07 a week earlier, according to AAA. That broke the previous record high of $4.10 per gallon in 2008, according to data from fuel-saving app GasBuddy. The only states with average gas prices under $4 on March 14 were the 11 making a vertical swath down the center of the country. They were North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas. The country’s lowest average price for gas was $3.82 in Kansas. Californians were paying the highest prices,
The Lead Rising Fuel Costs
can’t get enough gasoline.” Drivers of diesel-fueled trucks face even higher prices. Across the country, they’re paying an average of $5.13 at the pump. Dump trucks practically slurp up diesel fuel, driving an average of five to six miles on every gallon of fuel. So business owner Pete Falkenstern, of Dump Truck Services in Murdock, Florida, raised his prices by about 20 percent recently. And he’s likely going to have to raise prices again soon. “Fuel’s still going up,” he said. And in 30 years of delivering dirt, asphalt, and other materials to commercial and residential customers, he’s never seen anything like it. “People are grumbling, but they have to get stuff done,” he said of customers, who need his services in order to complete a wide variety of construction projects. Some contractors have clauses in their job contracts allowing them to pass along price increases to customers who’ve hired them to construct buildings or fix roads. Builders who can’t do that likely will start walking off jobs soon, leaving projects unfinished, because they’re losing money, Falkenstern said.
Traffic moves along Interstate 80 in Berkeley, Calif., on Feb. 16. Currently, there is a shortage of fuel truck drivers because many took jobs driving for companies that saw business boom during lockdowns, AAA spokesman Robert Sinclair Jr. said.
But for now, customers needing dump trucks still call him. And that’s a relief, because Falkenstern’s business not only feeds his family but provides work for 12 employees as well. To keep his fleet on the road, he’s had to raise drivers’ pay by $2 per hour. They’ve been complaining they can barely afford to fill their own tanks to get to work. That will affect his ability to pay himself, he says. And the problem will only grow, he said, because he expects to see the price of a gallon of diesel hit $8 per gallon. “I’ll do what’s necessary to survive,” he said. “Who knows what the new normal’s going to be?” Jaret Davis rumbled up to a pump on March 11 in High Springs, Florida, in his black Ford F-150 and pulled on his vape as he considered whether rising gasoline prices would cause him to make changes. “I’m still going to go out and have a good time,” Davis, who works on air-conditioning units, said with a grin. “I’m going to go with it.” He paused, puffed again, then said, “And I’m still going to buy beer. It helps ease the pain.” Jackson Elliott and Michael Sakal contributed to this report. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 23
24 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
T H G IL T O P S COVID-19 OUTBREAK WORKERS MOVE THE BODY OF A deceased person from a truck into a refrigerated container, at the Fu Shan Public Mortuary in Hong Kong, on March 16. The city has seen its worst COVID-19 outbreak, with overflowing hospitals and morgues, and is rushing to build facilities for COVID-19 patients. PHOTO BY DALE DE LA REY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
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L AW E N F O R C E M E N T
A Dramatic Decline in Proactive Policing Data reveal the fallout from the George Floyd protests
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By Cara Ding
26 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
When officers feel unappreciated or that it is too risky to do their jobs, they withdraw, according to research. in June 2020. A Terry stop—a name derived from the landmark 1968 Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio—is where police can briefly detain a person on reasonable suspicion that they’ve been involved in a crime. The latest number, from February, stands at 274, which is less than half of the lowest point of the four years prior to the protests. Each police department names and categorizes police stops in different ways. Some lump all stops together, while others divide them into vehicle and pedestrian stops.
People jump on a Secret Service police car during a protest over the death of George Floyd, outside the White House on May 30, 2020.
FROM TOP: JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES
olice officers have significantly reduced their proactive policing efforts in the year and a half following the George Floyd protests. Key proactive policing activities, such as suspect stops, plummeted in the summer of 2020 and continue to trend at a historically low level, according to an Insight analysis. Insight reviewed police stop data from departments in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Seattle. In contrast to reactive policing, when police respond to crimes after the fact, proactive policing aims to prevent or interrupt crime. For example, a police officer stops a suspicious car (or person) and conducts a search, uncovers an illegal gun, and thus prevents a potential gun crime. These activities are often discretionary and hinge on officer morale. When officers feel unappreciated or that it’s too risky to do their jobs, they withdraw, according to research. In Minneapolis, the epicenter of the Floyd protests, the number of officer-initiated investigative and traffic stops dropped by 80 percent in June 2020. That month, “Defund the Police” protests had spread across the country, following the death of Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Since then, the number of officer-initiated stops has been on a largely downward trend. Aside from low morale, a shrinking police force has likely contributed to the sustained decline as well. In contrast, the number of citizen-initiated stops remained relatively steady during the same period. In Seattle, where a high-profile autonomous zone was set up following Floyd’s death, the number of Terry stops dropped by 60 percent
Nation Proactive Policing
At the Chicago Police Department, the second-largest department in the country, the number of investigative stops dropped by half at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and quickly climbed back up. Then came the Floyd protests, and the number of stops fell by 43 percent and has since lingered at that historic low level through the end of 2021. Los Angeles and Philadelphia, which have the third- and fifth-largest police departments in the country, respectively, both saw a similar pattern to that of Chicago. At the onset of the pandemic, the number of stops by Los Angeles police dipped, but quickly picked up until June 2020, when the number dropped by 43 percent. By January, the number remained low at 27,210, less than half of what it was two years ago. In contrast, the number of citizen 911 calls responded to by police officers remained rather steady during the same period. For Philadelphia, the number of vehicle and pedestrian stops rose occasionally after June
2020, but the high points were still thousands of stops below the lowest points of the four years prior to the protests. For February, the numbers were 5,943 and 444, respectively, with both being historic lows. The protests also fueled the movement to put more restrictions on police. At least 26 states have since approved police reform legislation, and many police departments have tightened their policing policies. In August 2021, then-Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo halted traffic stops for minor violations. In September 2021, the number of traffic stops dropped by 25 percent. This month, the Los Angeles Police Commission put out more restrictions on traffic stops, asking officers to record their reasoning on body-worn cameras before they search a car that has violated traffic rules. Police often conduct such searches during traffic stops to uncover potential illegal drugs or weapons. The new policy doesn’t specifically define the appropriate kind of reasoning for initiating a search. Officers that fail to comply with the policy will face disciplinary actions. Proactive policing can effectively reduce crime in the short term, especially in high-crime areas, according to a consensus study report by the National Academy of Sciences. The academy convened a panel of leading scholars to review decades of research on proactive policing and issued the report in 2017. Some experts, including University of Utah professor Paul Cassell and Michigan State University associate professor Scott Wolfe, say the decline of proactive policing in the past two years has contributed to the nationwide homicide spike. All the above-mentioned cities saw violent crime rise in 2021. Minneapolis recorded the city’s highest number of homicides in 20 years, Seattle’s violent crime rate rose to a 14-year-high, Chicago saw more than 800 homicides—the largest total in 25 years—Los Angeles’ homicide rate jumped by 12 percent, and Philadelphia logged 559 homicides—the most on record for the city.
CITIES WITH RISES IN HOMICIDES IN 2021 MINNEAPOLIS saw the highest number of homicides in 20 years. SEATTLE saw a rise to a 14-year-high. CHICAGO saw largest total in 25 years. LOS ANGELES saw homicides jump 12 percent. PHILADELPHIA saw the most on record.
The number of investigative stops by the Chicago Police Department has tanked by 43 percent since the George Floyd protests. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 27
International Semiconductor Shortage
BUSINESS
War Could Worsen Chip Crisis Ukraine is a crucial supplier of neon, a key component in chip production By Rachel Hartman
I
28 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
cess. Among other countries, Ukraine plays a role in purifying neon, and sends it out to semiconductor producers. Neon accounts for a critical part of the production process, which consists of a plethora of components that are collectively used to make semiconductors. Ingas and Cryoin, two Ukrainian companies that produce about 50 percent of the world’s semiconductor-grade neon,
0.1%
RUSSIA ACCOUNTS for less than 0.1 percent of global chip purchases, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.
have halted their operations recently, according to Reuters. For now, those that need neon may not encounter additional shortages and delays, according to Stacy Rasgon, managing director and senior analyst of U.S. semiconductors and semiconductor capital equipment at Bernstein Research. “It’s likely that with stockpiles producers have, we’ll be OK for a while,” he told Insight, although he said if the conflict in Ukraine carries on for another six months or a year, the supply chain for neon could get tight.
The Imbalance of Supply and Demand The semiconductor industry first crossed the $300 billion mark in 2010 and then hovered around that figure until 2017, when it surpassed $400 bil-
FROM L: JOSEP LAGO/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, CHRIS MCGRATH/GETTY IMAGES
n light of russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the semiconductor industry has joined the collective group of entities declaring they won’t do business with Russia. The PHLX Semiconductor Index (SOX) dipped after the announcement, although a look at recent reports makes it clear that Russia isn’t a huge player in the field. The Semiconductor Industry Association reported that Russia accounts for less than 0.1 percent of global chip purchases. In 2021, the broader Russian information and communications technologies market totaled around $50.3 billion, a mere fragment of the $4.47 trillion global market, per data from the International Data Corporation. For Ukraine’s part, one potential concern lies in neon, a gas that’s integral to the lasers used in the chip-making pro-
International Semiconductor Shortage
An employee works in the chip manufacturing process in a clean room of the Barcelona Institute for Microelectronics in Bellaterra, near Barcelona, Spain, on March 3.
Ingas and Cryoin, two Ukrainian companies that produce about 50 percent of the world’s semiconductorgrade neon, have halted their operations recently. lion. It remained in that ballpark for the following years. Then, in 2021, it skyrocketed to $583.5 billion, largely due to an influx in demand. In 2020, at the onset of COVID-19, disruptions led to upheaval in the semiconductor industry, and increased demand caused delays in filling orders. Automakers had to pause production as they waited for semiconductor shipments to arrive at their factory doors. Game consoles like Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S became hard to find. The same shortage story played out in other sectors dependent on semiconductors, including appliances, smartphones, and televisions. For manufacturers and consumers alike, it will be a waiting game to see when demand and supply return closer to an equilibrium. “Viewing the semiconductor industry as a pipeline of goods, the pipeline had been drained,” said Stavros Kalafatis, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Texas A&M University. “There will be a lag to fill in the pipeline before you have a productive and quick return on orders or increased offerings. We’re still in the process of filling that pipeline.”
Those steps take time, and while automakers are producing vehicles, the rate of production hasn’t reached pre-pandemic levels. Secondhand cars, an alternative for those looking for a new vehicle but are unable to find one, are still priced high. While semiconductor delays bring concern to some investors, there are other impacts related to the Russia–Ukraine war that could be felt at a higher scale. In addition to being a leading oil and gas supplier, Russia is the largest exporter of wheat in the world and accounts for more than 18 percent of international wheat exports. “The sanctions and ongoing conflict will make it exceptionally hard for U.S. and European Union investors and businesses to conduct transactions with those in Russia,” Schuyler “Rocky” Reidel, a Texas-based attorney and founder of the Reidel Law Firm, told Insight. “They likely are already finding that they are not permitted to send or collect funds to or from Russia given the U.S. and European Union sanctions and the counter-restrictions Russia has placed on foreign-owned securities and payments to the U.S. and European Union parties.” These difficulties impose various risks, including the potential impact that will come if Russian banks or busi-
nesses with loans from foreign investors or banks are unable to pay on that debt, making them contractually in default, according to Reidel. “They could risk losing access to international capital in the future or even insolvency proceedings on property or collateral located outside of Russia.” If the conflict continues, Russian businesses may look to restructure their supply chains and capital markets to avoid the United States and Western Europe, Reidel said. The process, however, could take several years and would involve many complexities. “It is likely that Russian businesses and markets will now pivot to Asia and Latin America for trade and capital, as most of Asia and Latin America have chosen to remain neutral and not impose sanctions on Russia at this time.” In the meantime, semiconductor companies and other industries are likely to pause interactions with Russia for an indefinite period as they watch to see what happens next. In addition to a withdrawal of investments and transactions, Reidel sees a very hesitant approach to investing or expanding in Russia in the future. “This will be to the unfortunate detriment to U.S. businesses and investors in Russia, Russian businesses, and the Russian people,” he said.
A woman shelters behind a building as smoke and flames rise from a chemical warehouse that was hit by Russian shelling, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 8. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 29
CCP FACTION WARS INTE U K R A I N E WA R FA L L O U T
Communist Party officials seize upon Putin’s bolster their bid for power, analysts By Venus Upadhayaya
30 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
China Party Politics
N
NAL NSIFY invasion to say
EW DELHI—RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has intensified factional conflicts within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as maneuvering for influence gathers pace ahead of an important Party meeting later this year, according to sinologists. The Chinese communist leadership recently gathered in Beijing for its annual “Two Sessions” meetings of the regime’s rubber-stamp legislature and top political advisory body. The meetings brought together more than 5,000 of the country’s political, business, and social elite, tasked with approving the Party’s policy priorities for the coming year, although the event was overshadowed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The annual meetings are also the last gathering before the CCP convenes its twice-a-decade National Party Congress this fall, when Chinese leader Xi Jinping is expected to bid for an unprecedented third term in power. The CCP’s seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the highest-level decision-making body of the Party, generally makes decisions on foreign policy issues by consensus, Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of Chinese studies in New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, told Insight. But on matters concerning Russia, Politburo meetings are characterized by vehement differences of opinion. “The CCP congresses do generally attract high-intensity factional struggles, but in the background of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China’s nationalists, globalists, militarists, conservatives, liberals, and others are all fanning out to mobilize influence in favor of their own factions,” Kondapalli said. While China is a one-party state and the CCP monopolizes power, Party leadership isn’t a unitary group, and members differ by ideology, political associations, socio-economic background, and policy preferences.
‘FACTIONAL WARS’
Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrives for the closing meeting of the National People’s Congress in Beijing on March 15, 2019. PHOTO BY KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY IMAGE
“Factional wars” have been going on inside the CCP for decades, and their complexity surpasses what most experts can express, according to Frank Lehberger, a Germany-based sinologist. The tumultuous Cultural Revolution during the 1970s to ‘80s, for instance, saw particularly heavy infighting, resulting in the purging of many high-ranked CCP members. Two warring factions have long existed within the CCP: The Shanghai Gang and the Chinese Communist Youth League. A third group, which began within the Shanghai Gang and eventually took over most of the key leadership posts in the Party and the central administration as well as I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 31
China Party Politics
the provincial level, is led by Xi Jinping, according to a 2021 research paper published in Observer Research Foundation. The Shanghai Gang, led by former CCP leader Jiang Zemin, has experienced heavy losses from Xi’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign, Kondapalli said. Scores of current and former officials have been purged over the years, as Xi has sought to eliminate the influence of factions that have undermined his authority since he took office in 2012, analysts say. In recent years, several former senior members of the public security apparatus tied to Jiang’s faction have been the focus of the campaign. Kondapalli pointed to two recent articles published in a Chinese publication aligned with the Jiang faction. Both reports appeared on Duowei News, a Beijing-based online news site that has
32 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
strong links to Jiang and his close ally, Zeng Qinghong, a former top CCP official, he said. One report dated Feb. 4 about India’s last-minute diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics was critical of Xi. Another report from Jan. 19, titled “An objective evaluation of Xi Jinping,” was also highly critical of Xi’s tenure, according to Kondapalli. Given the extremely tight censorship environment in China, content that strays from official narratives or is critical of the regime or certain officials may only be allowed if there is backing from powerful figures within the Party. Thus, analysts have noted that such coverage has been used by Party factions to undermine political rivals. The two reports, coupled with the spate of high-profile purges of former high-level officials, “have exposed fissures in the CCP,” Kondapalli said. “Xi’s support for Putin’s actions has further complicated CCP struggles,” he said. Lehberger says that Xi wants to stick with Putin, while Jiang’s faction doesn’t want China to be closely tied to the Russian leader. Media reports criticizing Xi’s policy decisions, however, are just one minor component among many com-
plex parts in the CCP factional warfare, he said. “More serious ones are assassination attempts of Xi, and silencing, imprisoning, or death sentencing (on bogus charges) of prominent members or minor stooges of the other factions,” he said. Beyond the Ukraine crisis, Xi already is under immense pressure because of various domestic and international concerns, Kondapalli said. They include the pandemic’s continuing effect on China’s economy, trade and technology restrictions imposed by the United States, and growing international scrutiny over the CCP’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. Xi’s emphasis on food security during the recent meeting of the regime’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), hinted at brewing domestic issues, Lehberger said. “Xi has been stressing during the NPC Congress food safety for the third time in two to three months ... [this] usually this means that famine is not far away,” he said. Meanwhile, developments in Ukraine have presented the regime with challenges as well as opportunities, he said. On the first day of Russia’s invasion,
FROM L: FENG LI/GETTY IMAGES, ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, ARIS MESSINIS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Surprised by the ferocity with which Western sanctions are ruining Russia, Beijing has offered no substantial help to Putin, according to an expert.
(Above Left) A screenshot of footage from the trial of then-Chinese official Bo Xilai (C) in Jinan, Shandong Province, China, on Aug. 22, 2013. Bo was charged with bribery, corruption, and abuse of power. He was one of the core members of a faction led by former Party leader Jiang Zemin, who has been competing with Xi Jinping and his faction. (Above Right) Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the Kremlin in Moscow on June 5, 2019.
China Party Politics
China lifted all wheat import restrictions on Russia, as Western nations swiftly imposed economic sanctions on Moscow. Lehberger characterized that as an opportunistic move by the regime to acquire Russian commodities on the cheap while tackling food shortage issues domestically. Yet the West’s vigorous response to Putin’s aggression has also served as a warning for Beijing. The CCP has actually been surprised by the ferocity with which Western sanctions are ruining Russia, Kondapalli said. As a result, while Beijing has condemned the West for the sanctions, it has offered no substantial help to Putin. “It must have given pause to any temptation to invade Taiwan,” Kondapalli said. “As a highly globalized economy, China cannot afford to attract similar sanctions, which could stall Beijing’s further rise.” So far, Chinese institutions appear to be adhering to Western sanctions. Two China-backed infrastructure banks, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank, have halted lending to Russia.
TIES THAT LAST
Factional wars within the CCP over how it deals with Russia are as old as Soviet Union’s relationship with the Party itself, which dates back a century. The Soviets helped create the CCP in 1921 and supported the Party for decades. According to Kondapalli, any matters concerning Russia have tended to spark acute disagreements within the CCP.
People cross a destroyed bridge as they evacuate during heavy shelling and bombing in Irpin, northwest of Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 5.
More serious [actions from CCP’s factional warfare] are assassination attempts of Xi, and silencing, imprisoning, or death sentencing (on bogus charges) of prominent members or minor stooges of the other factions.” Frank Lehberger, sinologist
“Much of it had to do with the lovehate relationship between the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties, their ideological agreements and differences,” he said, adding that in the early days, the Soviets had wanted to keep the CCP under their thumb. “The CCP took the Soviets’ help but resented their bid to control it.” After the CCP seized power, it adopted the Soviet model of development and used Moscow’s help in its campaign to modernize Chinese industries during the 1950s. But the cooperation with the USSR didn’t last, as the communist powers famously had a falling-out not long after. In the decades that followed, many CCP officials would be targeted for removal on the basis of real or imagined ties to Moscow. “The CCP also threw out Defense Minister Peng Dehuai in 1959 for being close to Moscow. Senior Politburo member Liu Shaoqi was accused of being a ‘Chinese Khrushchev’ and paraded on the streets [in the late 1960s]. In 1989, Zhao Ziyang, the Party’s general secretary, was accused of being the ‘Chinese Gorbachev’ for siding with students in the Tiananmen Square protests,” Kondapalli said. However, after becoming the Party’s paramount leader in 2012, Xi made his first foreign visit to Moscow, during which the Kremlin allowed him to peek into its most secretive military command and control center, he said. China’s ties with Russia today are “semi-alliance” in nature, according to Kondapalli, as a result of various agreements signed over the past few decades, including the 2001 Sino-Russian Treaty of Friendship. Most recently, Xi and Putin met in Beijing on the opening day of the Winter Olympics, during which the two announced a “no-limits” partnership. But as Putin’s invasion triggers a widening global backlash, the CCP and its political factions find themselves wrestling with how to manage the fallout. Russia is now crippled by the international financial and trade sanctions, and China’s economy will be deeply affected if Xi aligns too closely with Putin, Lehberger said. “Jiang and a few others do not want China to be tied too closely to Putin, because Putin could now sink China together with him.” I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 33
EDUCATION
Reading Is ‘Going to the Dogs’ A unique program for kids is boosting confidence, motivation to read By Jannis Falkenstern
Kaleb Gottfried, 2, reads to Georgia, a dog up for adoption at the Gulf Coast Humane Society, on March 12.
34 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
Nation Children and Youth
F
ort myers, fla.—melissa Meehan leads three children through the thick glass double doors of the kennels, where many furry bodies sit quietly, while some others are very vocal—but all are rife with anticipation. Clutching a book in one hand and a pillow in the other, Karl, 6, Karsen, 4, and Kaleb, 2, approach the enclosures and settle in to read to their friends at the Gulf Coast Humane Society (GCHS), where on any given Saturday, once a month, children and some adults can participate in a unique reading program. The “Reading to Dogs” hour encourages children, some of whom aren’t avid readers or may not yet know how to read, to sit on the floor near the dog of their choice, turn the pages of a book, and read, or, if they can’t read yet, tell
the story in their own words, with their parents nearby. “The dogs might not understand the words or comprehend what the children are saying, but they love that someone has stopped by to talk to them,” said GCHS manager Shannon Palzer. “Many of them will sit next to the gate and listen; it’s really cute to watch.” But who does it benefit—the people or the dogs? Meehan and Nate Turcotte, assistant professors of education at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU), spend one Saturday every month observing the interactions between the children and the dogs as they read and are being read to. They’re not only watching the social interaction of the children with the dogs, but monitoring their level of confidence with reading skills. “They don’t feel judged when read-
ing, and they also get to interact with animals they might not [have] at home. They also see other children reading and enjoying it,” Meehan told Insight during a recent visit to the Gulf Coast Humane Society. “I encourage this freedom,” she said pointing to the children sitting in front of the kennels reading to the dogs. “They read what they want, how they want, with which dog they want. It helps with motivation. We found that with the participants, they experience an increase in confidence and motivation to read.” Palzer pointed out other benefits of the program: “It is a great way for children to get an early start on community involvement.” “One of our older students built a bookshelf for the books the children read to the dogs,” she said. “It was a Girl Scout project, so the program sometimes
I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 35
Nation Children and Youth
(Above) Karl Gottfried III reads to a new friend. (Right) Four-year-old Karsen Gottfried reads to her “furry friend.” (Far Right) Cora High, 5, reads to the shelter dogs once a month as part of her homeschool reading program. FGCU researchers hope to gain more knowledge on emotional/social interactions, reading skills, and how attentive and engaged the children are from the program. turns into other projects which we support—that’s what I mean by community involvement.” Turcotte said that when children read to a certain dog one month and the next month it’s no longer there, they prepare the children in advance by telling them the dog has been adopted. “Most young children don’t understand the word ‘adopted,’” he said. “So we tell them they were chosen by people who are giving them forever homes.” By keeping it simple, it helps them understand where the dog is, he said. “THEY KNOW THE dogs need good loving
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cause dogs are great listeners.” “I thought that was just beautiful,” she said. Kelsey Gottfried brings her children— Karl, Karsen, and Kaleb—to the shelter so they can get a positive experience and, at the same time, enhance their love of books. “Karl is the only one who can truly read to the dogs,” she said. “The other two are telling the story they think the book says. I just enjoy the fact they are manipulating books and not tablets.” Gottfried said recently that 4-year-old Karsen had a “bad experience” with a dog while they were at the post office in Fort Myers. “It was supposed to be a service dog, and the dog ended up snapping at her because they were at eye level” with each other, she said, recalling the event. “I brought her here so she can see that not all dogs are like that, and overcome her fear of them.” At first, Karsen was apprehensive about sitting in front of the dogs and was clinging to her mother, but with a little encouragement, she sat down by
ALL PHOTOS BY JANN FALKENSTERN/THE EPOCH TIMES
homes,” Turcotte said. “You just keep the explanation simple to where they can understand, so they don’t become upset that the dog isn’t there anymore.” Call it doggy enrichment or a children’s social experiment, FGCU researchers hope to gain more knowledge on emotional/social interactions, reading skills, and how attentive and engaged the children are. The project began when Meehan was a teacher in Southwest Florida. While
teaching kindergarten, she was earning her doctoral degree at FGCU and thought it would be the “best research project.” Meehan is also the owner of a shelter dog. “I have three dogs myself—one of them I adopted from this facility—and I thought it was a good subject for a research project,” she said during the visit. “We can find out more about the successes, the challenges, and get more people aware of it. We can give them feedback on what worked for us and what didn’t. For me, it’s a very neat project. It’s kids and dogs—my two favorites.” The next step in the program was a Facebook page for parents to sign up their children to be a part of the oncea-month Saturday event, she said. “I’m hoping that this will catch on, and we can do it more than just once per month,” she said. Meehan said she usually fills two groups on a Saturday and hopes to expand the program to other shelters so more children and more pets have a chance to share the experience. Meehan recalled observing a little boy talking to a dog. She asked him why he liked to read to dogs, and he replied, “Be-
Nation Children and Youth
the gate and began to “tell her story” to a little black wire-haired dog. The dog sat contently while she “read” and showed him the pictures in her princess book. Soon she wanted to visit other dogs and read to them as well and, detaching from her mother, ventured out on her own to sit in front of other kennels. “It didn’t take long to overcome that fear,” her mother said, laughing. HELPING TO REMOVE the stigma about
shelter dogs—that there’s something wrong with them, and they wouldn’t make good pets—is yet another plus that Meehan says they have been able to show through their research. “They see firsthand that all kinds of dogs, even pit bulls, are really nice. And it supports an understanding of what shelters do,” she said. Tufts University research finds that for children, a pet can provide opportunities to practice positive social interaction as well as develop empathy and compassion. Their research finds that children who interact with pets can have positive results in that they’re “able to practice
positive social interactions and develop empathy and compassion.” Social capital is a concept that focuses on social relations that have productive benefits and a concept that Megan Mueller, an associate professor of human-animal interaction at Tufts University, says is important to understand and study. “Interestingly, pet owners have consistently reported higher levels of social capital in their communities than people without pets—both in the U.S. and internationally,” Mueller stated in her research. She also said there are health benefits from interacting with pets. “The trust inherent in these connections can lead to better health and well-being,” she wrote in her paper. Meehan agrees that the research is beneficial, and has proven her points in her own research. “Reading to the dogs helps to bring comfort to and reduce the anxiety of shelter dogs, and it nurtures empathy in children,” she said. “The pandemic also brought other issues to light.” During the pandemic, people were
isolated during the shutdowns, which brought many people’s mental health issues to the surface. However, pet owners were the exception, she said. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, dog owners were more likely than those without dogs to go for regular walks outdoors, providing an opportunity for community engagement during a period of extreme social isolation,” she said. ‘The presence of an animal has even been found to increase positive social interactions in the workplace.” Meehan is working with local schools and other shelters so their animals can benefit from the reading program. “My hope is that this program grows and becomes bigger,” she said. “I think this is so important—not just for the reading benefit, but the socialization benefit of both humans and animals.” The reading hour is open to “all ages through signing up for their Saturday session on Facebook,” Meehan said. During Insight’s visit, three of the dogs that were being read to were adopted, finding “forever homes,” Palzer said. “Now, that’s happiness.” I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 37
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T H G IL T O P S ‘I’M BATMAN’ A COSPLAYER DRESSED AS BATMAN poses on the Edge, the highest outdoor sky deck in the Western Hemisphere, at Hudson Yards in New York on March 10. PHOTO BY TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 39
C H I L D E D U CAT I O N
Keeping Kids Creative in a Tech World Screens often cited as a key factor in the loss of child creativity
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By Jackson Elliott oday, r a isi ng c r e at i v e k i d s won’t happen naturally. It has to be a choice. According to teachers and experts from across America, kids don’t innovate like they used to. In a world in which technology lets us live in other people’s ideas, life in school is increasingly regimented, and the past few years have made it challenging to have new in-person conversations, a decline in creativity is hardly a surprise. Even so, parents have often failed to fight the changes that most harm their children’s creativity, according to Dr. Leonard Sax, a psychologist. “American parents have abandoned their authority to an extent greater than any other country,” he said. According to the teachers, psychologists, and other experts who lead the struggle to keep kids creative, parents can do a lot to protect kids from the worst effects of technology. But to make things better, parents need to act, they say.
You Are Your Child’s Keeper
40 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
When children spend too much time online, they have trouble connecting with nature and their bodies, a schoolteacher says.
FROM L: LOUISE BEAUMONT/GETTY IMAGES, MASKOT/GETTY IMAGES
Screens often seem to be a key factor in the loss of child creativity, according to teachers. But one of the main reasons kids prize screens so highly is that their parents spend so much time online. According to Sax, kids notice when adults spend all day staring at screens. Often, they feel abandoned by their parents. Once when Sax was talking to a school assembly about child screen use, a boy asked him if his mom could install a screen time limitation app on her phone. “He then proceeded to tell the entire middle school how he comes home and wants to talk to his mom. But his mom is scrolling through her Instagram app, giving distracted one-word answers to his questions, not really listening to what her son is saying,” Sax said. Polls show that children tend to copy what parents do with screens. If parents manage screen time poorly, the children will do the same. But parents
who manage screen time well will usually have kids who spend less time on a screen. If moms and dads want their kids to be offscreen, they should get offscreen themselves, Sax said. When parents take a role in controlling child screen time, kids do better. According to Valleywise Health, kids should have two hours of screen time per day or less. “Children who spent more than two hours a day on electronic devices scored lower on thinking and language tests. Those with more than seven hours of screen 1. time experienced thinning of the brain’s cortex, which is related to critical thinking and reasoning,” the website said. Unfortunately, the average child today spends between four to six hours per day using a screen. The biggest mistake that parents make is believing they can’t set rules for their child’s screen time, Sax said. If parents do a good job with screens, they can teach that virtue to their children. “You cannot teach your children a virtue which you yourself do not possess. In order to become a better parent, you have to become a better person,” he said.
Nation Parenting
One of the main reasons kids prize screens so highly is because their parents spend so much time online. Polls show that children tend to copy what parents do with screens.
Kids don’t discover their own solutions if adults solve problems for them, according to Theresa, a New York teacher who grew up in Nigeria. Sometimes children need help, but they’re often more capable than adults give them credit for. If adults let kids struggle with problems, kids grow in perseverance and creativity, Theresa said.
When parents spend all day staring at screens, kids often feel abandoned, an expert says.
kids with situations where they may fail. Creativity happens when children don’t have help. According to Berkeley University’s Science Center, kids get more creative when they aren’t told what to do. “In one study, just demonstrating how to put together a model reduced the creative ways that kids accomplished this task,” the center said.
Let Kids Struggle
Brains Need Bodies
“Why would I put effort into anything when I can just go to the store to buy a solution?” she asked. According to Theresa, some of the difficulties of growing up in Nigeria taught her creativity. Her family was very poor, so she and her siblings learned to innovate. Theresa’s family made their own backpacks. Because they didn’t have a TV, her brother made his own TV signal antenna. Her siblings would build their own toy cars, too. Theresa still uses the sewing skills she learned as a child. “It made childhood fun. Because it wasn’t just like, ‘You got a brand-new gift.’ It was, ‘I created this with my own hands.’” For kids to succeed in creativity, parents must trust
One common problem for kids who spend too much time online is that they have trouble connecting with nature and their bodies, according to Page Park, a schoolteacher who also teaches yoga. “If they get frustrated with something, they don’t know how to deal with that within their body,” she said. Living in a physical world lets kids create in ways that don’t come from templates, according to Olivia Grace, a psychologist at The Mindful Gamer. In games or online, kids can be creative, although they often use software, rules, and systems that have been created by someone else. “An addiction to video games can contribute to this effect as children spend more time immersed I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 41
Nation Parenting
Children strengthen their creativity when they make their own fantasies in the real world rather than online, an expert says.
in fantasy worlds developed by game designers as opposed to something conjured by their own imagination,” she said. In the real world, children must make their own fantasies. The practice strengthens their creativity, Grace said. Park said that when extremely online kids learn to connect with their bodies through yoga, they often stop feeling stressed. When kids recognize and manage their bodily feelings of anxiety, they can reach a place of mental stability. In one case, an autistic boy was going to mental health therapy. But taking yoga lessons helped him so much with stress relief and with feeling connected to his body that it replaced his therapy. “His mom said that it has replaced any sort of counseling or mental health therapy that he might need, because of that mind-body connection,” Park said.
Americans today tend to undervalue sleep. Kids 6 to 12 years old need nine to 12 hours of sleep each night to function well. Teens need eight to 10 hours of sleep per night. But about six out of 10 middle-schoolers and seven out of 10 high-schoolers don’t get that much sleep. According to Titania Jordan, the chief parenting officer of online safety company Bark Technologies, the worst effect of too much screen time for kids is insufficient sleep. 42 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
THIS PAGE: CATHERINE FALLS COMMERCIAL/GETTY IMAGES
Give Them Dreams
“Especially when you’re a child, growing and adolescent, you’ve got to have consistent sleep,” she said. “There’s so much that happens in the time between you shutting your eyes and opening them again.” Children who sleep less well grow up differently, she said. They reach puberty later, have higher stress hormones, and grow up shorter. Often kids choose screens over sleep, Jordan said. Screens are exciting, and the blue light from them can trick the body into feeling like it’s still daytime. But when kids play games until late at night, it does a number on their mental development, she said. “Your body is affected in a variety of ways, including your mental health, growth, and development.” Childhood brain development can have massive effects on children over the rest of their lives, and a lot of it happens while kids are asleep, according to experts. Kids who don’t sleep well struggle to regulate their emotions, remember less, learn less, and are easily distracted. Studies suggest that kids who don’t sleep well in the first few years of life will be hyperactive, impulsive, and less developed years later. Parents should keep children’s bedrooms screen-free, and not let them take phones to bed, according to sleep experts. When kids and teenagers get to bed at a decent hour, they do better during the day.
For kids to succeed in creativity, parents must trust them with situations where they may fail. Creativity happens when children don’t have help.
P OL I T IC S • E C ONOM Y • OPI N ION T H AT M AT T E R S
Perspectives
No.11
Sacks of wheat grain at a sheep farm in Montejaque, Spain, on March 11. PHOTO BY JORGE GUERRERO/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
ACTIVIST JACKSON
CHINA HACKS AMERICA AGAIN
WAR HITS EUROPE’S BREADBASKET
Why Biden’s Supreme Court nominee would be an activist judge. 44
Government systems are vulnerable, particularly at the local level. 45
High wheat prices suggest more food inflation ahead.
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INSIDE I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 43
Thomas McArdle
THOMAS MCARDLE was a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush and writes for IssuesInsights.com.
Activist Jackson
Why Biden’s Supreme Court nominee would be an activist judge
P
resident joe biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year after being nominated for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, was asked by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) how she defined judicial activism. She replied: “I think judicial activism is when a judge is unable or unwilling to separate out their own personal views of a circumstance or a case and they view consistent with those views rather than the law, as they’re required to do.” We already know that Jackson is going to be an activist justice, no matter what clever verbal dance she performs before senators and the TV cameras. We know it from what she’s done, not what she’s said, and we know it from her personal background. Jackson’s nomination is historic, and a development for which every American can be proud. As this first woman of African descent has noted, “my ancestors were slaves on both sides.” Yet despite her inspiring life story, Jackson seems to be what one Sen. Barack Obama called Judge Janice Rogers Brown, the first black woman to sit on the California Supreme Court, during her nomination to the D.C. Circuit in 2005: “a political activist who happens to be a judge.” Biden touts Jackson’s qualifications. She graduated Harvard magna cum laude, and Harvard Law cum laude, but as Obama also said with regard to Brown, “There are a lot of real smart people out there whom you would not put in charge of stuff. The test of whether a judge is qualified to be a judge is not their intelligence. It is their judgment.” Jackson apparently considers disorderly conduct—like repeatedly
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screaming profanities in defiance of police warnings during a public gathering—to be free speech protected under the First Amendment. She also, in Brown v. Government of the District of Columbia in 2018, actually concluded that panhandling was free speech and that Washington panhandling laws were suppressing it. “Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that the panhandling provisions at issue are content-based laws that restrict protected speech in public forums,” she wrote in her decision.
If her confirmation slides through as smoothly as expected, the public may one day wonder why this woman who made history wasn’t scrutinized with a more critical eye. She would be the first federal public defender ever placed on the Supreme Court, having during her short tenure a decade and a half ago saved a drug dealer’s lawyer from jail time, gotten a convicted illegal handgun owner’s case dropped, and represented terrorists seeking release from incarceration in Guantánamo Bay, and so Republican senators have reasonable worries that she’ll be soft on crime. It’s in the economic realm, however, that Judge Jackson constitutes the greatest threat to liberty, and has displayed the most questionable judgment. When Jackson in 2018 insisted that her district court had jurisdiction when 17 federal worker unions tried to get three of President Donald Trump’s executive orders pertaining to collective bargaining declared unconstitutional, she was humiliated
by the D.C. Circuit when judges appointed by presidents of both parties struck it down. As the D.C. Circuit noted, Jackson had claimed that the Federal Labor Relations Authority’s expertise in addressing the workers’ grievances, which the law directs the agency to do, “was ‘potentially helpful’ but ‘not essential to resolving’ the unions’ claims.” Therefore the unions should be able to turn to Jackson’s court. “But,” as the appellate court pointed out, “that is not the law. The question we must ask is whether agency expertise may be ‘brought to bear on’ the claims, not whether the expertise is essential.” The decision overturning Jackson added that “many of the claims” of the 17 unions, with which Jackson agreed, “are not so grand” as they suggest, requiring resolution by the judicial branch rather than an executive agency, “but rather require interpreting the Federal Service Labor Management Relations Statute (FSLMRS)—the very law that the FLRA is charged with administering and interpreting. Regardless, the Supreme Court has ‘clarified’ that ‘an agency’s relative level of insight into the merits of a constitutional question is not determinative.’” The signs are that the nomination of Jackson will be historic not only in terms of her sex and ethnicity, but in what it may come to mean, if she is confirmed, in judicial intrusion affecting the individual freedom provided by safe communities, a government free of senseless regulations and union-imposed burdens, and employers’ ability to succeed free of labor harassment. If her confirmation slides through as smoothly as expected, the public may one day wonder why this woman who made history wasn’t scrutinized with a more critical eye.
ANDERS CORR is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk. He is an expert in political science and government.
Anders Corr
China Hacks America Again
Millions vulnerable, including states using agricultural software
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hina is hacking into state governments in the United States, stealing sensitive data, and propagandizing the world with disinformation that favors Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The regime most recently hit at the heart of America, in part by using an obscure livestock app called USAHERDS. Cowboys everywhere should wrap on their chaps, saddle up, and get ready to rumble. The most recent hacks could have targeted any state government in the United States e.g., Texas, Nebraska, California, or Alaska. Few know which states were breached, as Mandiant, the company that discovered the breaches, kept mum. Google is about to purchase the firm for $5.4 billion. We do know that the hackers left digital fingerprints that have APT41 written all over them. APT41 is China’s regime-backed hacking group, made infamous when the U.S. Justice Department indicted five of its members in 2020. APT41 hacks for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but also for criminal profit, across the United States, Europe, and Asia. France, Britain, Australia, and Chile are all targets. APT41 conducts cyberespionage, ransomware, and the theft of virtual currency. They insert code surreptitiously into automatic updates to software you may already have on your computer. Most recently, the hackers used vulnerabilities in normal programs that professionals use, including not only USAHERDS, used by 18 U.S. states, but Log4J, loaded on millions of computers worldwide that run online services. “It’s very unnerving to see this group everywhere,” Mandiant analyst Rufus Brown told Wired Magazine. “APT41 is going after any external-facing web application that can give them access to a network. Just
very persistent, very continuous targeting.” Naive users who didn’t take quick action after a Dec. 10 warning from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) likely got hijacked. The warning probably alerted some of the CCP’s hacker army as well. Within hours, they used the vulnerability for their own malign purposes, including “credential harvesting,” which steals passwords and “backdoor code” implantations that provide hackers with ongoing access to victims.
The latest APT41 hack should remind us that the bigger long-term danger emanates from Beijing. While much of the world focuses on Russia’s increased cyberthreats because of the invasion of Ukraine, the latest APT41 hack should remind us that the bigger long-term danger emanates from Beijing. The CCP buys its way into computers as well, most recently by purchasing 21 Facebook ads in Azerbaijan, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and likely, many other countries. These ads repeat Russian propaganda about the Ukraine war, including anti-NATO messaging. Another CCP campaign augments Russian conspiracy theories about “dangerous” U.S. biolabs in Ukraine. This propaganda could be part of a false flag operation to blame the United States for any future use, by Russia, of biological weapons. On March 9, the U.S. State Department denied the allegations. “The United States does not own or operate any chemical or biological
laboratories in Ukraine, it is in full compliance with its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention and Biological Weapons Convention, and it does not develop or possess such weapons anywhere. It is Russia that has active chemical and biological weapons programs and is in violation” of the two conventions. The U.S. public needs more transparency about not only the threat from Russia, which is increasingly serious, but from China as well. The U.S. State Department should denounce not only Russia, but China for its Ukraine-related propaganda against the United States. Google also should be more transparent, fully disclosing to the public the states that APT41 breached to put them on public notice: Improve cybersecurity or get voted out of office. The Chinese regime’s global hacking and propaganda campaigns make clear that its organizations are criminal actors coordinating with other rogue states against democracy. Their links to Russia, Iran, and North Korea—all of which use hacking and propaganda as tools of dictatorship— show that we need better protections of American and allied businesses and local governments. We should more effectively exclude these countries’ hackers from the global internet. The U.S. Justice Department’s indictment of the five APT41 hackers in 2020 was in absentia, meaning that none of them were around to actually be convicted and serve time. Clearly, such symbolic slaps on the wrist are ineffective. It’s time for the spirit of the American cowboy to bring out bigger guns: economic sanctions against the entire Chinese economy, only to be removed when the regime stops its hacking of America’s information privacy and ends its dangerous propagandizing once and for all. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 45
Milton Ezrati
MILTON EZRATI is chief economist for Vested, a contributing editor at The National Interest, and author of "Thirty Tomorrows" and "Bite-Sized Investing.”
Do We Need a Digital Dollar?
The Federal Reserve is ‘open’ to the idea
new presidential order touches on the matter of a digital dollar, and the Federal Reserve has at last released a promised study on the subject. The Fed reached no conclusion but made clear its openness to the matter; it has left 120 days for comment. Whatever the Fed or the White House eventually decides, a digital dollar would change little in the conduct of financial affairs—unless, that is, the Fed uses the arrangements to destroy banking as it currently exists. And that’s possible, if not especially probable. At base, digital dollar enthusiasts advance four arguments for it. They claim that a digital currency would make transactions easier and more efficient; that it would protect the dollar’s role as the premier global reserve currency, most especially from China’s digital yuan; that it would alleviate inequity by giving those who are presently “unbanked” an alternative; and that it would counter the ill effects of cryptocurrency adoption. Against these supposed benefits, two other considerations stand: a digital currency would greatly enhance the government’s surveillance powers, and it could give the government power over the allocation of financial capital throughout the economy. These two considerations may explain why China, seldom in the vanguard of financial innovation, has leaped ahead with its digital currency. On the first of the arguments in favor of a digital dollar, it’s worth noting that today’s dollar has long been digital. Paychecks are deposited directly into entirely digital bank accounts, as are tax refunds and “support checks” from Washington. All large transactions are wired. 46 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
Paper checks only authorize digital exchanges. People can manage their digital dollar accounts through the internet whenever they choose. Credit and debit cards allow digital exchanges on items large and small, as does an Apple wallet. While proponents remind the public ominously that about 140 million Chinese people already have digital wallets with the digital yuan, few seem to consider that millions of Americans have long had the practical equivalent of digital dollar wallets.
A digital dollar would likely increase the appeal of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Similarly, the dollar has well-developed digital arrangements globally. A keystroke can send billions anywhere in the world and simultaneously arrange an exchange to almost any other currency. An official digital arrangement wouldn’t make these arrangements any more convenient, easy, or instantaneous. The digital yuan hardly has an edge. There’s more to being a global reserve currency than simply the ease and speed of transactions. At the least, it requires the absence of the kinds of trading restrictions Beijing imposes on the yuan. Nor is it likely that a digital dollar will create equity for the “unbanked.” Since bank accounts are easy to open and are largely costless, those who refuse them are either wary of the institutions, ignorant of the advantages, or simply live in such a narrow world that paper currency suffices. On the first of these, it’s far from apparent that wariness would lift with a government
account, while the other two reasons why people remain “unbanked” would exist even with a Fed-administered digital dollar. A digital dollar would likely increase the appeal of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Aside from the desire to look “cool,” most people use these currencies because they offer anonymity. And since a digital dollar would give the authorities access to every transaction (except perhaps those done with paper currency), its appearance would only increase the appeal of that anonymity. To be sure, authorities can currently access the already existing digital networks, but legalities make it much less convenient than if a digital dollar left all of those transactions sitting conveniently on a government computer. The digital dollar also threatens financial disruption. Should a digital dollar gain ascendancy, Americans would presumably move their checking accounts to the new facility, taking from banks the deposit base from which they lend. In other words, the ability to allocate financial capital would migrate from banks to the Fed, where there would be a much greater risk that politics would intrude on the nation’s economic direction. That might appeal to the more authoritarian sorts in Washington, but otherwise, the political direction of national economic effort has a poor track record. Even in the absence of questions about surveillance and a government takeover of the nation’s financial resources, it’s hard to see how a digital dollar could benefit the lives of Americans or strengthen the dollar’s international role. The concept adds little except to conjure the magic that attaches itself to the word “digital” these days.
EMEL AKAN is a senior reporter for The Epoch Times in Washington, D.C. Previously she worked in the financial sector as an investment banker at JPMorgan.
Emel Akan
War Hits Europe’s Breadbasket High wheat prices suggest more food inflation ahead
TOLGA AKMEN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
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lobal wheat prices have skyrocketed since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. Russia and Ukraine together export 26 percent of the world’s wheat, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Because of the war, the three largest shipping companies in the world suspended bookings to and from Russia. In addition, most Black Sea ports— the points of departure for two-thirds of Ukrainian grain exports—have been shut down. Wheat prices around the world have increased sharply since the start of the conflict, as trade disruptions have raised fears of a wheat shortage. The war has caused extreme volatility in both cash and futures markets. Following the invasion of Ukraine, the wheat futures on the Chicago Board of Trade surged by more than 50 percent to $12.94 per bushel before it started to retreat this week. In Europe, wheat futures on Paris-based Euronext have also gone up sharply. Ukraine, often dubbed “the breadbasket of Europe,” has favorable conditions for the growth of agricultural crops and grain. Besides wheat, Ukraine and Russia combined account for about 16 percent of corn exports and 30 percent of barley exports. The wheat futures market in the United States has attracted “a phenomenal amount of outside speculative money,” according to Joe Vaclavik, founder and president of Standard Grain, a Tennessee-based commodity brokerage. This was because of the assumption that the war would cause a drastic surge in demand for wheat, he told Insight. “A lot of what we’ve seen to this point, in my opinion, is speculative buying in the market,” Vaclavik said.
While higher wheat prices might be good news for U.S. farmers, wheat supplies in the United States cannot be increased instantly. “It’s not because we’ve seen any drastic surge in actual demand for U.S. wheat.” Russia is the largest wheat exporter in the world, followed by the EU, Australia, the United States, and Ukraine. Vaclavik predicted that food inflation will get worse because of the surge in prices of agricultural commodities and farming input costs. The Black Sea region is a crucial supplier of grains and oilseed products for the world market. Sanctions against Belarus and Russia are also having a big effect on fertilizer supply chains, increasing input costs for farmers. “The impact of higher prices will mainly be felt by companies in the feed industry, the baking industry, brewers, and producers of vegetable oils and spreads due to their heavy reliance on grains and oilseeds,” reads a recent report by Thijs Geijer, a senior economist covering the food
and agriculture sector at ING Bank. The tension in the Black Sea region “also leads to more demand and higher prices for grains and vegetable oils from other regions,” according to Geijer. “For example, Asian palm oil producers and suppliers and Australian wheat producers and suppliers are experiencing additional last-minute demand,” he wrote. Rising energy prices are also putting more pressure on farmers and food manufacturers around the world. Industrial bakers and flour mills, especially, have relatively high energy costs compared to other food manufacturers, according to the ING report. While higher wheat prices might be good news for U.S. farmers, wheat supplies in the United States can’t be increased instantly. “Part of the problem is that our wheat crop in the U.S. is largely a winter wheat crop, which is planted in the fall and harvested in the summer,” Vaclavik said. “We won’t have a chance to plant another winter wheat crop until September or October of this year. So, it’s going to take a while until producers have an opportunity to expand acreage of wheat in the United States.” Besides the war, drought conditions across the Great Plains of the United States have been pushing wheat prices higher, according to Steven Burke, an economist at Spain-based FocusEconomics, provider of price forecasts for commodities. “This comes amid still-strong demand and ongoing supply woes in South America,” he told Insight. According to Burke, markets are likely to remain tight in the near term. However, he noted that stronger Australian and Indian exports in 2022 are expected to offset reduced exports from Ukraine and Russia. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 47
DANIEL LACALLE is chief economist at hedge fund Tressis and author of “Freedom or Equality,” “Escape from the Central Bank Trap,” and “Life in the Financial Markets.”
Daniel Lacalle
Commodities Do Not Cause Inflation
They’re a consequence, not a cause
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48 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
Some will blame wages; others will blame the Ukraine war; and others will blame the weak recovery. The fact is that currency destruction is at the heart of generalized price rises everywhere. now—in 2022—to overweight. This happened at the same time that central banks injected unprecedented quantities of money into the economy. Between 2020 and 2021, assets of the major central banks rose by more than $10 trillion. Furthermore, broad money supply growth rose at a double-digit rate in 2020 and 2021 in the major economies. Obviously, one or two prices may rise independently because of particular events. A war can cause that, but it can’t cause a generalized and widespread increase in all prices. Commodity and food prices were already rising to multiyear highs even before the Ukraine invasion was a rumor. Readers may believe that all this is because of trader speculation, but traders’ actions work both ways. Traders don’t
create prices; they trade on them. Traders can’t influence the marginal price of a commodity for long if the fundamentals, inflation, and money reality aren’t there. There are numerous reports from the CFTC proving that investing doesn’t affect commodity prices. Between 2013 and 2019, commodity prices weren’t rising. Why? Because broad money growth wasn’t rising above real money demand. Oil and gas have risen equally everywhere, yet consumer price index (CPI) inflation is vastly different in the euro area or the United States compared to countries where energy imports are much higher, such as Japan or Korea. Why is CPI inflation twice as high in the euro area or the United States relative to those Asian countries? Much higher broad money growth in 2020 and 2021. The Ukraine war has created another excuse to blame inflation on oil and natural gas. However, it seems that all those who blame commodities on inflationary pressures continue to ignore the massive rise in housing and shelter, health care, and education costs, as well as goods and services where there was evident overcapacity. Oil and gas will again be used as an excuse for inflation, while low interest rates and massive currency creation remain. But the reality is that when both deflate somehow, the problem of currency debasement will remain. The increase in broad money has translated into an explosion in all prices, energy-related or not. Some will blame wages, others will blame the Ukraine war, and others will blame the weak recovery. The fact is that currency destruction is at the heart of generalized price rises everywhere. The other reasons given are anecdotes or consequences, not causes. More units of currency going to scarce assets looking for protection against inflation—this isn’t speculation, but protection from currency debasement.
EVA HAMBACH/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
n this world of monetary insanity, defenders of central banks’ constant easing try every day to convince you that inflation is caused by numerous factors, rather than by currency printing. Many blame inflation on cost-push factors or even speculation, but ultimately those are all consequences, not causes. Rising prices are always caused by more units of currency being directed toward scarce or tangible assets. Commodities exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are a clear example. In 2022, investors have been purchasing these products to protect themselves from inflation and to generate real returns. They’re not a cause, they’re a consequence. With increased inflationary concerns, the likelihood of rising interest rates, and elevated geopolitical concerns, commodities-focused funds have seen record inflows in 2022. “Year to date through Feb. 25, commodities ETFs gathered $8.5 billion of net ETF inflows,” the website WealthManagement.com reads. This isn’t the full picture, however. Citing a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) report, the Centre for Economic Policy Research’s VoxEU.org stated that “the total value of various commodity index-related instruments purchased by institutional investors has increased from an estimated $15 billion in 2003 to at least $200 billion in mid-2008.” The global commodity services market size was estimated at $4 trillion in 2020, according to Market Research. In 2020, most investors were very underweight in energy and commodities. The surge in socially responsible investment, as well as the recent history of underperformance of commodities relative to bonds and equities, had created an enormous underweight. As concerns about inflation and geopolitical events unraveled, funds reallocated capital from underweight to equal-weight and
Fan Yu
FAN YU is an expert in finance and economics and has contributed analyses on China’s economy since 2015.
A Boost to Chinese Stocks?
China maintains its neutral relationship with Moscow
DALE DE LA REY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
S
o far in 2022, the Chinese stock market has outpaerformed expectations. After spending most of 2021 on the “uninvestable” list, Chinese stocks have been boosted by two external developments. The year 2021 was punishing for most investors with mainland Chinese exposure. Besides China’s uneven economic recovery because of its restrictive COVID-19 policies, regulators spent the majority of the year cracking down on China’s real estate and technology sectors. Heading into 2022, a few Wall Street analysts started recommending Chinese stocks, including bullish analysts at Credit Suisse and BlackRock. More than two months into the year, more support is coming from unlikely places. The first is policy-driven. After a busy regulatory year in 2021 as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) introduced new legislation restricting tech companies and forced the deleveraging of real estate developers, 2022 will likely be muted on the regulatory front. Policy uncertainty is expected to subside in 2022, as Beijing has been delivering a message of stability across the board. No major policy actions are expected heading into this fall’s all-important CCP National Congress, where Chinese leader Xi Jinping is expected to be named to an unprecedented third term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party—the country’s de facto leader. In addition, China’s sagging economy means that the People’s Bank of China (PBoC)—the country’s central bank—is likely to loosen monetary policy and increase liquidity. Compared to the U.S. Federal Reserve, which is expected to raise the U.S. benchmark interest rates a few times in 2022, the PBoC is expected to maintain a more supportive backdrop for mainland stocks.
Mom-and-pop retail investors in China are already betting that closer trade between China and Russia will benefit some Chinese companies. A more unexpected boost came from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. As more of the Western world sanctions Russia’s economy, its companies, and its people for the ongoing Ukraine conflict, trade and cooperation between Russia and China are expected to significantly expand going forward. Even as Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, have been condemned by countries in the west, China has been steadfast in maintaining its “neutral” relationship with Moscow. In February during the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, Xi and Putin agreed to increase bilateral trade to $250 billion. The two countries also unveiled a new energy supply deal that’s worth more than $120 billion. Now, are those amounts set to be shattered? Reuters reported that a Chinese state lender’s Moscow branch has seen a dramatic increase of interest
in opening new accounts by Russian businesses. Thus far there has only been anecdotal evidence, but it’s unsurprising that more Russian companies and individuals are seeking to do business with Chinese banks, given that they’re being increasingly shunned by the rest of the global economy. Some Russian companies may be forced to transact in Chinese yuan for all foreign trade, as major Russian banks were removed from the global, U.S.-dollar-driven SWIFT messaging system. This could turn out to be an unexpected boon for Chinese banks and industrial firms, as well as the yuan currency. Mom-and-pop retail investors in China are already betting that closer trade between China and Russia will benefit some Chinese companies. The Financial Times noted that amateur Chinese investors were speculating in so-called “Sino–Russian trade concept stocks.” The frenzied buying of certain little-known logistics companies has created isolated bubbles of industrial and commercial companies with valuation multiples rivaling tech firms. What kinds of companies were being bid up? An example is Jinzhou Port, which operates ports in China’s northern province of Liaoning. Its stock increased by more than 80 percent in the week following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The buying frenzy was so wild that Jinzhou Port had to issue stock exchange-mandated warnings against speculation, stating that the company hadn’t experienced material new business to warrant such massive increases. Clearly, this type of frenzy warrants caution. Retail investors in China—in a highly controlled media environment—are likely less familiar with the consequences of the effect of U.S. sanctions on Chinese companies. The future may not be as rosy as they believe. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 49
JEFF MINICK lives and writes in Front Royal, Va. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.”
Jeff Minick
Is Kindness Extinct? Not by a Long Shot It’s all around us, so long as we look around friend from new york recently asked, “Do we even remember what kindness is?” Our phone conversation was all over the ballpark, and we never got back to her question, but her remark kept bugging me, popping into my head at random times all week long. My friend’s work puts her in front of a screen for much of the day, and I suspect she also spends some time on social media. I dropped Facebook long ago, but like her, I too sit in front of my laptop for hours every day, writing and browsing various sites for news of the world and ideas for my work. And it’s true, the headlines and commentators I read rarely display the milk of human kindness. But what about the real world? The one made up of flesh-and-blood people rather than digital bells and whistles? Is kindness becoming extinct there as well? After giving that thought some consideration, I decided to put on my pith helmet, metaphorically speaking of course, and go in search of that supposedly rare creature. That trek quickly opened my eyes. I’m delighted to report that kindness is commonplace, alive, and well. In the public library, I saw a homeschooling mom surrounded by a tribe of kids holding the heavy glass door open for an elderly gentleman who was carrying an armload of books. In the coffee shop that I frequent is a young student who has made that place a sort of permanent study hall. He’s befriended the baristas, gives a smile to everyone who enters the cafe’s sitting area, and has on occasion offered his table—he likes the big one in the back of the room—to a family and moves his papers and books to a two-seater. 50 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
What are ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ if not tiny lightning bolts of goodwill? When I was making an appointment with a dermatologist, the receptionist kept calling me “Honey”—hey, I live in the South—and then she said, “Let me try and finagle for you for just a minute.” Finagle she did, for she set me up to see the doctor the following week rather than having to wait until May. My daughter’s family was visiting for the weekend, and at one point, one of my granddaughters sat for half an hour reading to her 5-year-old brother. No one told her to do this, and I’m pretty sure Maggie’s not a fan of the Asterix books. No—this was, pure and simple, an act of kindness. Everywhere I looked on this expedition, I also saw people practicing their manners, which is, after all, just another face of kindness. What are “please” and “thank you” if not tiny lightning bolts of goodwill? So here’s my theory: kindness is all
around us, but maybe we’ve forgotten to register it. Or maybe it’s so common we don’t even notice it. It’s like that sweat-stained, ragged ball cap some guy wears when he mows the lawn, so familiar to him that he doesn’t even feel it on his head. Some people may disagree with that conclusion. Maybe they don’t see the world as a kind place at all. Maybe to them, it’s even a jungle, where the ruling creed is “stick it to others before they stick it to you.” They might despise that jungle law, but believe that to survive in the workplace and in the world, kindness is best left at home. So here’s a suggestion, or if you prefer, an experiment you might attempt. Try bringing more kindness to work, to school, to the store or coffee shop, and even to your own home. Use those words “please” and “thank you.” Slip a buck into the barista’s tip jar. Compliment your fellow workers. Then see what happens. “Kindness can be its own motive,” longshoreman and philosopher Eric Hoffer once said. “We are made kind by being kind.” And when we are made kind, we also make the world a more civilized place.
Profile Animal Welfare
Rescuing Cats in Hawaii
Honolulu sanctuary works to foster cats as well as trap, neuter, and release feral felines
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COURTESY OF CARY MATSUSHIGE
By Patrick Butler ne day in hawaii, Christin Matsushige looked into the eyes of two abandoned newborn kittens and saw God’s creation—dependent, vulnerable and precious—resting in her hands. A friend had found the kitties and said, “Can you take care of these two? I already have several cats, and can’t.” That moment in 1993 would change her life until she died in 2021. For nearly 30 years, her award-winning nonprofit, Hawaii Cat Foundation of Honolulu, rescued, sheltered, and loved thousands of adoptable cats, and still operates in 2022. Cary Matsushige, an attorney, stood by his wife, helping to care for castoff pets that Christin rescued. He helped her start, maintain, and expand the foundation’s services, which today include a one-acre sanctuary. At its peak, the sanctuary housed more than 300 cats, readied for adoption. “For Christin, caring for cats was a spiritual experience, inspiring compassion, caring, and awesome commitment,” he said. “If cats were ill and had to be put down, she went through it with them to the end, talking to them, soothing them. For her, it was more than just loving on cats. It was a way to honor God for his creation.” In 1997, the Honolulu chapter of the American Red Cross selected Christin Matsushige to receive the “Everyday Heroes” award, presented by Elizabeth Dole, wife of former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole. The problem in Honolulu was a huge feral cat population. “Too many cats on the loose can create citywide tensions,” Matsushige said. “In 1993, few people had any solutions.” Christin decided to step up. “She volunteered with people working the ‘Trap, Neuter and Release’ program,” said Christin’s cousin, Janet Smith. “They went out with baited cat carriers and brought them back to be neutered,
Christin Matsushige, seen here in 2018, founded the Hawaii Cat Foundation in 1993. She was given the “Everyday Heroes” award in 1997 by the American Red Cross, presented by Elizabeth Dole, wife of Sen. Bob Dole. Matsushige passed away in 2019, but the cat sanctuary she founded with her husband, Cary, still operates in 2022. then released.” “There are two types of cats out there,” said Cary Matsushige, “feral and domesticated. If domesticated cats somehow survive, they have kittens and those become feral, not trusting people. If we found an abandoned domesticated kitty, we kept them for adoption.” Releasing a domesticated animal to the wild is cruel, he said. “The myth is that household cats will live on instinct in the wild, but that’s not so. They don’t have the survival skills. They often starve, get diseased and die a slow, cruel, and merciless death. It wasn’t responsible for us to return a sweet, domesticated pet to the wild.” The local Humane Society couldn’t keep up with finding homes for all the cats coming to them. “Christin said she couldn’t give cats she rescued to the Humane Society, because after nine days, they put them down if they weren’t adopted,” said Smith. “She said she’d rather house them herself.” “Loveable kitties with distinct personalities,” as Christin described them, began to pile up in their household, needing adoption, Cary Matsushige said.
“A woman representing a foundation came and saw all the cats we’d rescued, upstairs, downstairs, in the garden shed, and even in our garage. She was shocked and said, ‘We have to do something about this.’ She gave a generous donation, and that’s how we bought the land for the sanctuary.” For decades, Christin and Cary Matsushige acted as full-time unpaid volunteers. “One hundred percent of funds raised went to the cats,” he said. If veterinarians needed to be hired for medical tasks, they paid for it themselves. When Christin died in January of 2019, Cary was by her side and knew what to say. “Christin taught me how to speak soothing and loving words from her years with cats. That’s what I did for her, and it was actually quite beautiful. If you have to die, I’d say that was the way to do it. I carry on the work she started to honor her.” “Watching Christin, I learned how much a person could accomplish, and inspire others, if they gave it their all,” Smith said. “She was amazing.” I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 51
Nation Profile
THOUGHT LEADERS
‘The People of China Deserve Better’ Congressman Chris Smith’s long war against human rights violations
T
MELVIN SOTO-VÁZQUEZ/CONSERVATIVE PARTNERSHIP INSTITUTE
he Chinese Communists game the system,” Rep. Chris Smith said. “People are afraid to stand up to them.”
In this episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek discusses human rights and China with Smith, a representative of New Jersey’s 4th district. For the past four decades, Smith has been one of Congress’s most vocal critics of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as the U.S. policies that have enabled the regime’s abuses—from forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners to genocide of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. JAN JEKIELEK: I want to
talk to you about how we got to this place where the Chinese regime has hosted the 2022 Olympics and is kind of laughing at the world about the egregious genocides and human rights violations there. It wasn’t always like that. REP. CHRIS SMITH:
You’re absolutely right.
52 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
There was always an understanding of the human rights abuses, for example, by the Soviet Union. But with China, there’s a double standard, this inability to understand that the Party is vicious and cruel. It uses torture to make people compliant, to punish and kill them. They use it against the Falun Gong, Christians, Buddhists, Uyghurs—any political dissidents. And we’ve enabled them. On May 26, 1994, Bill Clinton de-linked human rights from trade. That’s when the
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.).
Nation Profile
Chinese Communist Party said, “These guys are bluffers. They’re fake.” MR . JEKIELEK: That’s an
important date you mentioned. Since 1994, the United States and others have helped build the world’s greatest dictatorship. REP. SMITH: Absolutely.
There was forced abortion on countless numbers of Chinese women, and now all the other human rights abuses—the crackdown on the Falun Gong, for example, and the organ harvesting. In 2014, I introduced the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, and all the big know-it-alls said, “Don’t do that. [Xi Jinping will] never go after the UK–Sino treaty. He won’t undermine the special nature of Hong Kong.” I said, “Yes, he will. You don’t understand Xi Jinping. He’s a dictator with few equals in the world.” And sure enough, they’ve crushed Hong Kong. It’s no longer a bastion of freedom. The Chinese communists game the system. People are afraid to stand up to them. MR . JEKIELEK: You often
hear that these are cultural differences, right? REP. SMITH: In a meeting
between Barrack Obama and the premier of China, Hu Jintao pretended to have some problems understanding a question about human rights. So Obama weighs in and says, “Oh, they have a different culture and different political system.” He was giving them cover for their horrific abuse. He enabled them. All too
often, American politicians, particularly Obama, Clinton, and now Joe Biden, come across as weak and feckless. I am the chief Republican sponsor of a bill that I hope the Biden administration implements. It says any products coming out of Xinjiang, the presumption will be they were made in concentration camps unless proven otherwise. We should do that with the rest of China. I’m going to introduce more legislation soon. It will support serious and sustained progress in the area of human rights and will apply to all goods coming out of China. We have leverage. They’re an export economy. Without that, the economy grinds to a halt. And if that’s what it takes to protect people from slave-like conditions, then we have to do it. MR . JEKIELEK: But with
the investments of wealthy Americans, corporations, and banks in China, can such legislation have teeth? REP. SMITH: For a while,
you could say people were naïve believing China would evolve, but the profit motive also elbowed out any concern about human rights. And we just keep misperceiving the Party’s true intent, which is always to consolidate and expand its power. Look at the Confucius Institutes in our country. The Chinese give money to a college and handpick the Chinese teachers for these institutes. It’s all about soft power. Years ago, Steven Mosher was a doctoral student at Stanford University who broke this story about the
“Organ harvesting [of Falun Gong adherents] became not just a means of repression, but also a way of making huge amounts of money by selling their organs.” use of forced abortion to implement China’s one-child policy. What did Stanford do? They cashiered Mosher out of the program because they wanted to keep their access to China. A lot of people always have a good word for the Chinese dictatorship. Let me be clear. I stand with the Chinese people who are being oppressed, not with the oppressor. The Chinese people deserve democracy. They deserve everything that’s embedded in the universal declaration of human rights. MR . JEKIELEK: You men-
tioned the regime’s hatred for Falun Gong. Why is that? REP. SMITH: They saw that
if a group like Falun Gong can organize, that group needs to be crushed. They want to crush independent thought as well. So there was a hatred toward the Falun Gong, demonstrated by the Party’s use of torture and murder. And of course, organ harvesting became not just a means of repression, but also a way of making huge amounts of money by selling their organs.
MR . JEKIELEK: We’re
definitely going to talk about organ harvesting because you have a bill up about that. But briefly let’s talk about the Olympics. We just finished the 2022 Olympics. In 2008, everyone said, “This is China’s opportunity to show it’s going to be good on human rights and join the world community.” And of course, that didn’t happen. Here we are again in 2022. How do you see that? REP. SMITH: In 2014, the
International Olympic Committee chose China for this year’s Winter Olympics. Xi Jinping’s government made some promises about human rights which they not only didn’t keep, but they were simultaneously planning the genocide against the Uyghurs. In 2018, Marco Rubio and I were co-chairs of the China Commission. We wrote to the IOC, saying, “Don’t go to China. Find a different venue. You can’t do this in a country that horrifically oppresses its own people and is committing genocide.” I mean, that’s the worst crime on the face of the
I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 53
Nation Profile
“[The Chinese Communist Party] uses torture to make people compliant, to punish and kill them. They use it against the Falun Gong, Christians, Buddhists, Uyghurs, any political dissidents.” earth, and they’re doing it. There’s Xi Jinping smiling for the cameras at the opening ceremonies while butchering people. One more thing: We had some corporate sponsors of the Olympics appear before our China commission. These people couldn’t say, “Yes, they’re committing genocide, and this has to stop.” They want to keep their market share. They want to make money. I’m a capitalist and believe in making money, but with
conditions. You shouldn’t make money on the backs of repressed people. MR . JEKIELEK: Let’s
talk about forced organ harvesting. REP. SMITH: In the mid-
1990s, Harry Wu made me aware of the killing of prisoners to take their organs. We actually got a Chinese policeman who defected to testify. He brought credible documentation that included pictures of how they
would shoot, but not kill, immediately take out organs, and then finish the job and even make the families pay for the executioner’s bullets. They were focused on prisoners in general, political prisoners mostly. And then the Party started going after the Falun Gong, and some others too, to take their organs. It’s very lucrative. Lots of money is made. And they just take their organs while the victims are still alive. They don’t execute them and then take them. They take them so that they’re as fresh as humanly possible. Then they sell them. People come from abroad and get these organs. It’s a nightmarish abuse. So I have a bill, and Sen. Tom Cotton [R-Ark.] has the companion bill. We’re working hand-inglove together. We want to hold to account all those who are part of this process.
Hong Kong has fallen. Is Taiwan next? Taiwan is a wonderful country where democracy is flourishing. Taiwan has its flaws. So do we. But it’s not a dictatorship, and that’s what the Party wants to impose on it. So we need to employ a robust diplomacy. Unfortunately, our horrific exodus out of Afghanistan sent precisely the wrong message to every dictatorship in the world, from North Korea to Iran, to Putin, to Xi Jinping. But if we were to reconnect human rights with trade and say, “We’re not kidding. Stop abusing your people. There needs to be serious efforts to protect the rights of your people,” I think some Chinese moderates might emerge. But right now, the direction is all wrong. Trade is our most potent means to get them to change.
MR . JEKIELEK: What
MR . JEKIELEK: Any final
happens now?
thoughts?
REP. SMITH: We need to
REP. SMITH: We need to
redouble our efforts to expose human rights abuse in China. We must also stand in solidarity with Taiwan.
pray for the people of China. They have suffered so much for so many decades. We also need to be wiser as policymakers and play more chess and less checkers. We should think about what the next moves of this dictatorship might be and not enable it or ignore it. The people of China deserve better. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
54 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
THIS PAGE: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) (C) and Chinese dissident Bob Fu (front L), the president of ChinaAid, listen during a hearing on human rights, on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 15, 2012.
T R AV E L • F O O D • L U X U R Y L I V I N G
Unwind
No.11
A stay at Switzerland’s Grand Hotel Kronenhof Pontresina is a multifaceted adventure. PHOTO BY TIM JOHNSON
A Rare, Enchanting Slice of Elegance SET ON THE PICTURESQUE Greek island of Paros where Hercules may have relaxed, this seafront estate instills a sense of tranquility and relaxation. 56
GOLF IS AN ENDEAVOR THAT can be pursued for a lifetime, constantly seeking improvement, so consider combining learning with a vacation by attending a golf camp. 60
58
JOHN COYKENDALL AND Blackberry Farms are working hard to ensure precious heirloom seeds will survive for future generations to enjoy. 66
INSIDE I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 55
AN AEGEAN OASIS Set on the sun-kissed island of Paros with beautiful beaches and charming villages, this is an Aegean slice of paradise By Phil Butler
It’s difficult to imagine a more sublime place for living the slow rhythms these Cyclades islands are famous for. 56 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
Lifestyle Real Estate
COURTESY OF GREECE SOTHEBY'S INTERNATIONAL REALTY
spectacular slice of cycladic island style, the Sappho Villa on the island of Paros is an attainable dream. Although the price is only available on request, the value of idyllic Aegean living is readily apparent in this magnificent property on one of Greece’s most beautiful islands. The 330-square-meter (3,552-squarefoot) villa is surrounded by 8,200 square meters (over 2 acres) of flawless seafront nature. The villa’s curved arches and framed architectural elements accentuate eight bedrooms, eight bathrooms, and airy living spaces. The designers melded natural materials and clean lines to create a sense of warm welcoming. In the main house, there are six bedrooms, and two in the guest house. To assist in enjoying the idyllic Greek lifestyle, there’s a professional country kitchen, open and airy entertaining spaces, numerous al fresco dining areas, and more. Ideal for entertaining and relaxed home life, the property features delightful terraces with spellbinding sea views, a private sandy
beach, an epic pool, and verdant nature that highlights the Cycladic architecture of the home. The adjacent Alcaeus property is also available, providing an additional 300 meters of stunning private shoreline that can be enjoyed by owner and guests. Paros was chosen as Travel + Leisure Magazine’s “Best Island in Europe 2018.” This medium-sized island has beautiful beaches, traditional little villages, and picture-perfect towns such as Naoussa, where there are wonderful bars, restaurants, and shopping haunts. This wonderful Cycladic settlement is a cobbled street wonder. The village’s tiny harbor is lined with famous traditional taverns and ouzeries. It’s a gastronomy lover’s heaven of culinary gems, such as Barbarossa, Mario Restaurant, and Le Sud. This is a place where living life takes on new meaning. Phil Butler is a publisher, editor, author, and analyst who is a widely cited expert on subjects ranging from digital and social media to travel technology.
SAPPHO VILLA PAROS, GREECE PRICE ON REQUEST • 8 BEDROOMS • 8 BATHROOMS • 3,552 SQUARE FEET INSIDE • 2 ACRES OUTSIDE KEY FEATURES • PRIVATE BEACH • CLOSE TO FAMOUS GASTRONOMY • STUNNING SEASIDE POOL AGENT GREECE SOTHEBY’S INTERNATIONAL REALTY DESPINA LAOU, HEAD OF PRIVATE OFFICE +30 695 169 0565
Dining al fresco is a part of the culture of these islands. Here, we see one of the covered terraces that overlook the grounds and the sea beyond. The classic Cycladic architecture of the villa is wrapped with meticulously kept nature that melts into the island’s landscape. Night or day, there’s a sense of belonging to the culture of these amazing islands.
The villa’s interiors are open and breezy, but warm and welcoming, too. Here, the generous use of warm wood and fabrics, fine art, and themed furnishings reflect the classy comfort the designers wanted to convey. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 57
Travel Switzerland
The Grand Hotel Kronenhof Pontresina.
A Trip Back in Time The lavish Grand Hotel Kronenhof Pontresina’s elegance harks to a more genteel era
By Tim Johnson
R
olling through the swiss Alpine splendor, the train seemed to balance on a rocky spine, valleys falling away in both directions, each one filled by a village—red roofs, tall steeples, and gilded clock towers—more charming than the last. Soon enough, we were on the other side and rolling up to the town of Pontresina, Switzerland, which, at least from a distance, seemed set in the Belle Époque. Grand hotels lined the ridge, each one signaling an era of luxury that felt almost forgotten.
Grand Hotel Kronenhof Pontresina I was staying at the Grand Hotel Kronenhof Pontresina, which has occupied a perch overlooking a broad valley and the surrounding snowcapped peaks, in the shadow of the expanse 58 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
of the Roseg Glacier, since 1848. Together with the nearby town of St. Moritz, this is one of Switzerland’s most stylish destinations. The area is also culturally unique, making up one of the only regions in the country where Romansh is spoken. Taking a tour of the hotel just after checking in, my guide told me that 19th-century residents, during the Little Ice Age, were actually afraid of the glacier. “They thought it would come down here and overwhelm them,” she said. Passing through a recently updated, Euro-chic smoker’s lounge, the rest of the spaces on the main floor maintained a bygone feel— painted ceilings, a grand piano, and antique furniture, as well as a dining room where a jacket is still required for dinner, a maître d’ in a tuxedo seats you, and servers in white uniforms plunk down silver trays on your table.
SWITZERLAND PONTRESINA ST. MORITZ
Pontresina and St. Moritz are only about four miles apart.
Travel Switzerland
“It feels like a long time ago,” my guide said. “You can almost see the women out there on the floor dancing in their ball gowns.” And then we came to the best part—the basement. First, we saw a one-lane bowling alley finished with natural stone. Then, winding a path that I could never retrace through a series of corridors, we finished in what looked to be a storage room. It held dozens of pairs of vintage wood-and-leather skis (“the hotel was owned by the same family for 140 years, and they never threw anything out,” my guide told me), but I quickly saw that it was actually a wine cellar, dominated by two massive wooden barrels, reaching all the way to the ceiling, that once held gallons of Veltliner wine. The guide said the original owners, the Gredig family, purchased a 10-room guesthouse in 1848 and steadily expanded it into the present hotel. But they faced lean times, especially during World War I, when most travelers stayed home. “But they were wine traders,” she said, pointing to a couple of old sleds on the wall that were originally used to transport the good stuff across mountain passes. “The locals and the soldiers kept this place alive, coming here to buy wine.”
St. Moritz
FROM TOP L: TIM JOHNSON, THE EPOCH TIMES, TIM JOHNSON, GRAND HOTEL KRONENHOF PONTRESINA
St. Moritz, host to two Winter Olympic Games— in 1928 and 1948—remains a wealthy and glamorous place, and it’s less than 10 minutes travel by local train from Pontresina. After I arrived, I set out on foot, touring some of the sites from those Games. Then boarding a funicular, then a gondola, I swooped over steep slopes, riding all the way to the 10,026-foot peak of Piz Nair. Back in town, wandering the winding streets, I stumbled upon the Engadine Museum, a place
The view from the peak of Piz Nair.
dedicated to preserving the culture of the region in a curious way—by showcasing its living rooms. A long-isolated valley in the far reaches of southeast Switzerland, the Engadine is guarded by massive peaks. There, Romansh is still spoken, a Latin language that traces its roots all the way back to the Roman empire. Walking through the museum, I encountered a number of “stuva,” where family and friends would gather around the stove to visit, work, and pass the time. I made one last stop—at the Devil’s Place, home to the world’s largest whisky collection. Sitting inside a small hotel at the far end of Lake St. Moritz, I met Claudio Bernasconi, owner of the Devil’s Place, who offered me a dram from one of his own personal casks—he has about 150, all over Scotland. As I admired some of his 2,500 bottles, which line every available space on the walls, he told me that he fell in love with the stuff after staying at a bad hotel where the water wasn’t potable and he had to brush his teeth with whisky—and I don’t quite believe him. I flipped through his five different tasting menus, all with whisky pairings (“it used to be wine and dine, now it’s whisky and dine,” Bernasconi said), and considered what it would be like to order his most expensive offering—Macallan 72, which goes for more than $20,000 per dram. Warmed by the whisky, I was soon back on the train. The sun was fading over the lake, and we chugged into the valley, the peaks, and glacier forbidding overhead. But it wouldn’t be a long ride—my room, with bubbling stream, was waiting for me, just 10 minutes up the track.
The Albula Railway traverses
55 bridges and 39 tunnels If You Go Accommodations: With 112 rooms and suites—no two the same—the Grand Hotel Kronenhof Pontresina transports guests back in time, to a more genteel era. Opt for the halfboard package, which includes daily breakfast and tasting-menu dinners in the ornate dining room. Getting Around: Train travel is the best way to see Switzerland, and the all-in-one Swiss Travel Pass offers unlimited rides by rail, bus, and boat, as well as free admission to more than 500 museums and local transportation in 90 communities.
Tim Johnson is based in Toronto. He has visited 140 countries across all seven continents.
Carriage rides are offered in a restored Grand Hotel Kronenhof coach. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 59
Camp on the
Greens!
Golf camps are fun any way you slice it; regardless of age or skill level, you can find a camp that will get you out of the office and among new friends. By Bill Lindsey
When you attend a golf camp, you get to spend time outdoors doing what you love. 60 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
Lifestyle Golf
The course is the classroom when you attend a golf camp, where you can learn new techniques in realworld conditions from pros.
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D
Gerald Ford once said, ‘I know I am getting better at golf because I am hitting fewer spectators.’ E S P I T E M A R K T WA I N
referring to it as “a good walk spoiled,” more people than ever are playing golf. In the U.S. in 2020, the National Golf Foundation says 24.8 million took to the greens, 2 million of whom were new to the game. Like all sports, it’s one in which, for most, improvements continue over years of practice and effort. There are many devices and systems designed to improve swings, putting, and all other facets of the game. Time spent on the greens, however, is critical to developing a better game, but there is a caveat, of course. All sports and pretty much all activities, from playing a musical instrument to mastering physics, have a few “naturals”—those who seem born to the activity. The rest of us need instruction, and becoming a good golfer is a great example. What can be learned from friends, family, books, and YouTube videos has its limits. Even Tiger Woods, who was taught the basics by his father, has taken lessons from Butch Harmon and others throughout his career.
If it worked for Tiger, chances are it will work for you, too. Total immersion techniques are a well-proven technique for learning new skills, which is where golf camps come in. In addition to private or group lessons on the weekend or after work, a camp dedicated to golf may be an ideal way to hone old skills and learn new ones. A side benefit is the chance to see a new part of the country or perhaps even a country you haven’t been to before. Before you go, you need to take an honest assessment of your physical condition. The very nature of the game, played outside in the hot sun, takes a toll even on exceptionally fit individuals. If there’s any doubt about your ability to spend an extended amount of time outside, consult your physician for an assessment. Assuming you get a clean bill of health or have begun a physical fitness regimen to get into shape, other considerations involve the camp’s location, such as at a higher altitude or in a drier environment compared to your home conditions. A wellrun camp will ensure plenty of water to I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 61
Lifestyle Golf
LIFESTYLE
TAKE A SWING
There are golf camps for all ages and levels of play
Learning the proper techniques at an early age is the best way to lay the foundation that allows a lifetime of enjoyment of this great sport.
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Arnold Palmer is considered to have been one of the game’s greatest players for his extremely consistent and effective swing as much as for his short game skills of putting, chipping, and pitching. Palmer was also highly regarded for his ability to “read” a course in order to choose the correct club and develop a strategy for the specific course and playing conditions. These skills are the basis of the curriculum taught at the Arnold Palmer Academy at Bay Hill Club & Lodge in Orlando, Florida, making it a strong contender for those who are accordingly seeking to improve their overall game, or who perhaps can relate too well to Gerald Ford’s quote, “I know I am getting better at golf because I am hitting fewer spectators.” If you have a junior player at home who’s eager to improve his or her game, PGA National Resort in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, offers camps for kids aged 7 to 12 as well as a program for advanced juniors aged 11 to 15. Many adult camps will accept players under the age of 18 if they’re accompanied by an adult, but check first to make sure. Golf is a game you can enjoy your entire life with family and friends as well as business associates. For your next vacation, consider going back to camp to enjoy the game and make new friends.
Why Go to Camp? Attending a golf camp is a great way to get away from the office, improve your game, and meet new friends from around the world.
2 What to Do Off the Greens Camps are available with curriculums that last a day or a week, so whether you attend alone or with family, leave time to explore local attractions.
3 Where to Go Golf camps are located all over the world, quite often in locations that are also ideal for other outdoor activities. Consider a camp somewhere you’ve always wanted to visit.
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avoid dehydration, but make sure to also bring clothing and sunblock to mitigate UV exposure. Choosing a golf camp is easy once you’ve determined why you want to attend. There are no wrong reasons; they range from learning the game as a beginner to developing skills that will allow you to play at a competitive level, or, subject to your age, make the cut to join a high school or college team. By knowing your goals, you can then begin to search for a camp that can help them come to fruition. Filtering them by reputation, focus, location, cost, determining whether you’ll attend on your own or with a spouse, family member, or a friend, and the length of training will quickly develop a shortlist to choose from. Many top camps are run by former pros or the instructors they turn to when they need to analyze a hitch in their swing or need to tweak their putting skills. Those serious about improving their game will do well to consider the Butch Harmon School of Golf. Located in Las Vegas, the school uses the Rio Secco Golf Course. The combination of instruction by Harmon, one of the world’s top instructors, and proximity to Las Vegas make this a great opportunity to work hard on the course and then adjourn to the Strip to relax.
1
Luxury Living A Collection of the Best New EVs
CHARGE IT! A COLLECTION OF EXCEPTIONAL ELECTRIC VEHICLES While Elon Musk’s Teslas are some of the best-known electric vehicles on this planet and in outer space, many well-established manufacturers and several new ones are also hard at work developing exciting, innovative offerings By Bill Lindsey
From the Racetrack to Your Driveway
The Sultan’s Sedan
LUCID AIR
MERCEDES BENZ EQS 450+
$77,400
$102,310
Using battery technology developed while racing electric vehicles (EV), this sedan has 520 miles of range and can be charged to 300 miles of range in just 20 minutes. The exterior is very aerodynamic for minimal drag while the interior is laid out for maximum luxury and connectivity. The topof-the-line 1,100-hp Air Dream edition has a top speed of 168 mph.
Mercedes’s flagship delivers innovation with sumptuous creature comforts. Rear-axle steering makes the car extremely nimble, with a smooth and quiet ride. The interior features leather, wood, and a 56-inch monitor to control vehicle and entertainment systems.
Super-Sized With a Side of Luxury
BMW IX M60
COURTESY OF BMW, FISKER, POLESTAR, LUCID, MERCEDES BENZ
$106,095
Tastefully Discrete
BMW’s flagship SUV delivers uncompromising performance and luxury. The spacious cabin is accented with wood and leather, and a huge display to control mechanical and entertainment systems. Two motors deliver 610-hp to all four wheels to a top speed of 155 mph.
POLESTAR 2 $45,900
This sleek hatchback features an interior available in sustainable vegan components or leather. A 12.3-inch tablet controls vehicle systems and a navigation system. A single motor powers it up to 270 miles between charges.
The Fun EV
FISKER OCEAN $37,499
Featuring roof-mounted solar panels to supplement charging, this compact SUV can find parking spaces and park itself. An optional 17.1inch touchscreen converts into an entertainment system with a 360-degree sound system. I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022 63
Epoch Booklist
RECOMMENDED READING FICTION
‘In Our Time’
By Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway’s First
This week’s selections range from a story of romance and heartbreak, to a Shakespearean tragedy, to the modern worries of socialized health care.
health care plan. With the government failing to meet its budget and its citizens’ medical needs, Lang and Hudson must fight the system to get her into surgery. A thriller with ramifications for this age of pandemics, quarantines, masks, and bureaucratic control of our medical care. WINGED VICTORY PRESS, 2012, 346 PAGES
Experience Ernest Hemingway where he started (sans the newspaper articles) with his initial published work. “In Our Time” is a collection of 15 short stories that was published in 1925. He transformed the art of modern writing with terse and realistic prose.
‘Far From the Madding Crowd’
SCRIBNER, 1996, 156 PAGES
By Thomas Hardy
Romance, Heartbreak, Romance
‘Noble Vision’
By Gen LaGreca
Chilling Medical Suspense Novel Ballerina Nicole Hudson’s life is shattered when an accident leaves her blind. Dr. David Lang believes that he can help her see again through experimental surgery, but New York has placed hospitals under Carefree, a socialized
The strong-willed and business-minded Bathsheeba Everdene inherits land. As she takes over and works the property, she’s sought by three suitors: the handsome soldier, the wealthy landowner, and the kind workman. Stubbornness and desire lead her to heartbreak, but resolve and love lead to her finding happiness. “Far From the Madding Crowd” is a wonderful story about finding and losing love, then finding it again. A classic tale with humor, romance, and memorable characters. WORDSWORTH CLASSICS, 1997, 362 PAGES
64 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
Are there books you’d recommend? We’d love to hear from you. Let us know at features@epochtimes.com
NONFICTION
‘The Soul of Politics’
By Glenn Ellmers
Exposition on How to Think If one planned to fight for America on the intellectual field, it would be prudent to learn just how to think intellectually and wisely. Glenn Ellmers’s new book follows the intellectual and philosophical growth of one of America’s top thinkers of the 20th century, Harry Jaffa. This book exemplifies what it takes to compete in the arena of ideas and how to stand firm when you’re right, as well as how to give way when you’re wrong. ENCOUNTER BOOKS, 2021, 416 PAGES
‘The Breakdown of Higher Education’
By John M. Ellis
How Education Was Brought Low Rioting and intimidation: These have become commonplace on U.S.
college campuses today. Professor John Ellis provides an insightful look into how higher education has been undermined. He discusses the liberal-to-conservative ratio of professors, the influx of Marxist teaching, and why college may not be worth attending anymore. ENCOUNTER BOOKS, 2021, 240 PAGES
CLASSICS
‘Macbeth’
By William Shakespeare
A Tale for Our Time Though many study “Macbeth” in school, now might be a perfect time to revisit this play. Driven by a prophecy that he would become the king of Scotland and goaded in that ambition by his wife, Macbeth kills King Duncan and assumes the throne. His guilt and fear of discovery lead him to murder and tyranny. Eventually, events lead to a civil war and to the deaths of Macbeth and his wife. Here, we find a powerful meditation on dangerous ambition and the terrible consequences that can ensue when arrogant desires wed evil designs. SIMON & SCHUSTER, 2003, 304 PAGES
FOR KIDS
‘D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths’ By Edgar and Ingri D’Aulaire
Art and Literature Join Hands In print for more than 50 years, this children’s classic introduces young readers to ancient myths, gods, and goddesses while at the same time enthralling them with beautiful art. The perfect book to blend education and entertainment. DELACORTE PRESS, REPRINT EDITION 1992, 208 PAGES
‘If I Never Forever Endeavor’ By Holly Meade
The Courage to Fly Meade’s beautifully illustrated, poetic depiction of a hesitant young bird perched at the edge of its cozy nest, cautiously considering whether to fledge and fly, is picture book perfection. Great for readers of every age. CANDLEWICK PRESS, 2011, 32 PAGES
Ian Kane is a U.S. Army veteran, filmmaker, and author. He enjoys the great outdoors and volunteering.
FILM REVIEWS
Epoch Watchlist
This week, we look at a hilarious comedy about two men who start a day care center, and one about a trucker who falls for a young singer.
NEW RELEASE
FAMILY PICK
‘Daddy Day Care’ (2003)
‘Panama’ (2022 )
ACTION | THRILLER
Former U.S. Marine James Becker (Cole Hauser) is tasked by his former commander, Stark (Mel Gibson), to carry out a shady arms deal in Panama. Against the backdrop of a civil war, Becker faces many obstacles. Will he be able to complete his mission and get back home in one piece? The real-life 1989 invasion of Panama (Operation Just Cause) is the stage for this decent—if uninspired—actioner. It doesn’t really do much to break the mold, and the mediocre performances and direction round out this overly long, pedestrian effort.
Release Date: March 18, 2022 Director: Mark Neveldine Starring: Cole Hauser, Mel Gibson, Charlie Weber Run Time: 2 hours, 36 minutes MPAA Rating: R Where to Watch: Theaters
that his daughter has finally grown up. Taylor is also excellent in this film about ordinary people dealing with real-life issues. COMEDY | ROMANCE
Middle-aged father Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracy) reminisces about the stressful events leading up to
performances by its lead actors. There are also cute kids who keep things buoyant and fun. COMEDY | FAMILY
Release Date: May 9, 2003 Director: Steve Carr Starring: Eddie Murphy, Jeff Garlin, Anjelica Huston Run Time: 1 hour, 32 minutes MPAA Rating: PG Where to Watch: Hoopla, TNT, HBO Max
FUNNY AND UNIQUE ’70S COMEDY
‘Every Which Way But Loose’ (1978)
FASCINATING SLICE OF LIFE
‘Father of the Bride’ (1950)
Charlie Hinton (Eddie Murphy) and Phil Ryerson (Jeff Garlin) are two fathers who lose their jobs and decide to open a day care. It’s a struggle at first, but as their business begins to bloom, they catch the ire of Mrs. Gwyneth Harridan (Anjelica Huston), who operates a snooty preschool. This film does have some repetitive jokes here and there and a storyline that isn’t very original, but these weak spots are offset by a good soundtrack and
his daughter Kay’s (Elizabeth Taylor) wedding. Tracy gives a brilliant performance as a doting father struggling to come to terms with the fact
Release Date: June 16, 1950 Director: Vincente Minnelli Starring: Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, Elizabeth Taylor Run Time: 1 hour, 32 minutes Not Rated Where to Watch: TCM, Redbox, DirecTV
Trucker Philo Beddoe (Clint Eastwood) also happens to be a bare-knuckle fighter. While traveling through California with his promoter Orville (Geoffrey Lewis) and pet orangutan Clyde, he runs afoul of both a biker gang and a pair of cops. In an era of gritty dramas, this film stands out because of its cartoonish action and the comedic chemistry among its cast. A romantic subplot also develops between Eastwood’s
character and a country singer, played by the star’s real-life love interest Sondra Locke. ACTION | COMEDY
Release Date: Dec. 20, 1978 Director: James Fargo Starring: Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Geoffrey Lewis Run Time: 1 hour, 54 minutes MPAA Rating: PG Where to Watch: HBO Max, Vudu, Redbox
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Food People
THE SEED WHISPERER OF BLACKBERRY FARM: JOHN COYKENDALL IS SAVING THE SEEDS OF THE PAST, FOR THE FUTURE The luxury country inn is the ultimate pastoral getaway. But in the gardens, there’s urgent work happening: a race against time to preserve heirloom seeds—and their stories—for generations to come. By Melanie Young
M
66 I N S I G H T March 18–24, 2022
Gardengrown produce is served at the inn’s restaurants, sometimes just feet away. Generous with his knowledge, Coykendall enjoys giving tours and lectures to visitors.
John Coykendall, renowned master gardener, seed saver, and classically trained artist.
JOHN COYKENDALL Age: 79 Born: Knoxville, Tenn. Hobbies: Landscape painting and growing old seed varieties Favorite Season: Autumn during harvest (“It’s when seeds become mature and can be collected and shelled out.”) Favorite Garden-toTable Foods: New potatoes and purple top turnips
seed swaps, and—when he’s able to—travels extensively to visit world-class gardens and conduct research. His legions of fans and the guests of Blackberry Farm also send him seeds. “Some of the most prized seeds are the ones that have ... a story with them,” he said. “Among my favorites is the Red Calico Butterbean, which dates to 1794 from an upper east Tennessee family. They can document that butterbean back to that year through diaries and other documents. It’s amazing to think that with that seed, you’re going back to when Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, our Founding Fathers were around. “It’s like a time capsule of living history, a chain with no links missing, coming down from that time to present day.”
Coykendall has a treasured 1888 Burpee seed catalog. “One of the beans in there is called the White Zulu. Snow white pods and jet-black seeds,” he said. “It’s a pole bean that’s always fascinated me. You could guess that it might be gone and no longer exists, but it could also be hiding somewhere in a foreign seed bank.” Now 79, Coykendall enjoys sharing his knowledge of seed heritage, heirloom crops, and preservation with younger team members, as well as giving farm tours and lectures to guests. In other words, he continues to sow his own seeds of wisdom for future generations. Melanie Young is a writer and host of the national radio shows “The Connected Table LIVE!” and “Fearless Fabulous You!” on iHeart.com
COURTESY OF BLACKBERRY FARM
any luxury resorts have a master chef in their restaurant kitchen, but how about an on-site master gardener and seed savior? At Blackberry Farm in Walland, Tennessee, at the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, John Coykendall has filled that role since 1999. An internationally renowned horticulturalist—and a classically trained artist—Coykendall oversees four acres of gardens, which provides produce used in the inn’s trademark “foothills cuisine,” a refined spin on traditional Southern cooking, alongside ingredients sourced from nearby Appalachian farmers and producers. Coykendall has also amassed a collection of 735 heirloom seeds, and he’s working to save several varieties from extinction. “Much of what we grow is for propagating and preserving; on average, we are working on 30 crop varieties [at a time],” he said. “Separately, we grow around 100 seed varieties for Blackberry’s kitchen each year.” Growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee, Coykendall learned to garden from his father. He visited Blackberry Farm with his grandfather, Congressman John Jennings, in 1953, when it was only a farmstead. In 1976, the Beall family acquired the farm, initially opening a six-room country inn, now considerably expanded within the property’s 4,200 acres. Coykendall was Blackberry Farm’s sole gardener for nearly four years. He now works with a team of six. Coykendall works with organizations such as Seed Savers Exchange to find and plant endangered varieties to help regenerate them. He scours seed catalogs, attends
Coykendall works with organizations such as Seed Savers Exchange to find and preserve near-extinct seeds.
How to Be a Great Friend The secret to longstanding friendships is to be a loyal, caring friend
As we age, friends come and go, with some attaining “family” status. To keep these special people in our lives, we need to not take them for granted, instead showing them in meaningful ways how important they are to us. By Bill Lindsey
4 Keep Promises
1 It Takes Effort Very often, good friendships just happen when people make a connection, not unlike true romance, but with a different dynamic. But if both sides don’t make an equal effort to maintain the relationship, it can wither and die. It’s not supposed to be easy or convenient to be a great friend, but the payoff makes it well worth the effort. Little things, such as remembering birthdays, sharing in their victories, and commiserating over disappointments, are the glue that holds a friendship together.
CSA IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
2 Listen We all love to tell our stories, but it can be difficult to be the one who doesn’t have a chance to tell theirs because you’re always talking, making it clear by your actions that you don’t care about their experiences or opinions. When a friend is talking, listen and pay attention to their gestures and expressions, which often speak louder than their words. Very often the person we think of as a great friend is also a great listener.
If you agree to meet a friend for dinner at 7 p.m., be there at 7 p.m., not 7:30 p.m. or 8 p.m. Similarly, if you promise to attend an event with a friend, don’t make plans at the last minute that prevent you from attending. Reliability isn’t a part-time thing. Consider how you would feel if your friend “forgot” that they had promised to be at your house early Saturday to help you move furniture, build a deck, play golf, or any other event.
3 Be There Whenever you see that your friend needs help, whether it’s moving furniture or dealing with a personal or career setback, jump in to provide your full attention and assistance. Don’t wait for them to ask for help. In some cases, it isn’t always easy to determine when help may be needed, and some people resist asking for help to an extreme degree. The job of a friend is to be there and know when to extend a helping hand.
5 Be Honest Sometimes friends make decisions based on emotions or transitory situations. It’s easier to simply agree, even if you have grave reservations. Friendships can and have come apart over disagreements. However, a real friend needs to offer an honest answer or assessment, even if it isn't well-received. Friends need to always look out for each other, resisting the temptation to steer the decision or plan in a direction that may benefit you more than them.
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