RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
July 31 to August 6, 2022

Featured Investigation:
Electric Car Drivers: Why You Might Not Be Pumped
Over Privacy-Jolting Mileage Taxes

In RealClearInvestigations, Eric Felten reports on a big consequence of America’s transition to battery-powered cars that likely few have thought about: The need for a new way of taxing drivers to pay for highways -- and the privacy-threatening alternatives under consideration.

• With roads and bridges largely funded by federal and state taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel, lawmakers are anticipating budget shortfalls as consumers increasingly shift to electric vehicles.
• Proposed fixes involve charging drivers for the miles they travel by tracking their movements.
• President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law authorizes testing all manner of data collection methods.
• They range from tapping into on-vehicle diagnostic devices and smart phone applications, to obtaining data from fueling stations, to “any other method that the Secretary [of Transportation] considers appropriate.”
• Not answered: Which authorities will track drivers; how drivers’ data will be protected; and whether destinations will be recorded along with mileage – for example, trips to abortion clinics or political rallies.
• The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that tracking devices like bugs can’t be installed on cars without a warrant. But it hasn’t resolved the issue of such data collection required by law.
• A Government Accountability Office report on user-fee pilot programs, which states have been testing for years, found that “public acceptance of mileage fee systems remains limited by concerns about protecting privacy.”
• Nevertheless, privacy advocates expect that sooner or later, highway funding will move to user fees.

Biden, Trump and the Beltway

Hunter's Chinese Allies, Not Trump Team, Tied to Russian Deal
Daily Wire

We’d say you can’t make this up – except they did. A central plank of Hillary Clinton’s Russiagate conspiracy theory was that Trump adviser Carter Page had been offered a multi-billion-dollar stake in a Russian oil company, Rosneft, if he could get a future President Trump to lift sanctions that had been placed on the country. That was false. This article reports that “it was a Chinese firm paying the Biden family that ultimately tried to buy” the shares in Rosneft.

In September 2017, the Chinese energy firm that Hunter Biden referred to as his “client,” CEFC, made arrangements to buy a 14% stake in the company.  That deal fell apart after one of the company’s leaders, Patrick Ho, was arrested in New York on corruption charges. The company’s chairman, Ye Jianming, was imprisoned in China at the time. Two days after the New York Times’ Dec. 12, 2018 article about Hunter Biden’s relationship with CFEC, Hunter ...

... texted his sister-in-law-turned-girlfriend Hallie Biden that he was “dealing with the aftermath of the abduction and likely assassination (that’s what NYT’s suspects) of my business partner the richest man in the world, the arrest and conviction of my client the chief of intelligence of the people’s republic of China by the U.S. government, the retaliation of the Chinese in the ouster and arrest of US suspected CIA operatives inside China, my suspected involvement in brokering a deal with Vladimir Putin directly for the largest sale of oil gas assets inside Russia to China… And Dads running for president.”

Nevertheless, Trump and his circle remained the focus of the investigation! Although Joe Biden claims he never discussed his son’s foreign business dealings with him, he left his son a voicemail in the response to the Times article, assuring him: “I thought the article released online, it’s going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good. I think you’re clear.”

Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway

'Moneyshot:' FBI Withholds Key Footage of Jan. 6 Pipe Bomber Revolver News
Pentagon Also Deleted Jan. 6 Text Messages CNN
FBI's Jan. 6 Failures Are Coming into Focus NBC News
Unconstitutional? Capitol Cops Seek to Hire a Prosecutor Daily Wire
FBI Tags Ashli Babbitt, Betsy Ross Flag as Terror Symbols  Project Veritas

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Myanmar Military Planned Rohingya Purge 
Reuters

Myanmar’s military claims that its brutal crackdown against the mostly Muslim ethnic group, the Rohingya, fleeing to Bangladesh was a legitimate counter-terrorism campaign sparked by militant attacks. New documents collected by war crimes prosecutors in the Hague suggest its true goal was to vastly reduce a minority population. The documents ...

... reveal discussions and planning around the purges of the Rohingya population and efforts to hide military operations from the international community. The documents show how the military systematically demonized the Muslim minority, created militias that would ultimately take part in operations against the Rohingya, and coordinated their actions with ultranationalist Buddhist monks. … The August 2017 pogrom was carried out with a ferocity that stunned the world. Refugees described massacres, gang rapes and children thrown into raging fires. The nonprofit Médecins Sans Frontières estimated at least 10,000 people died. [An estimated 700,000 other Rohingya fled to Bangladesh]. Hundreds of Rohingya villages were burned to the ground. In March this year, the United States formally declared that the military’s actions amounted to genocide. Many in Myanmar, where about 90% of people are Buddhist, supported the military, which denied committing atrocities and said the Rohingya had burned their own homes. 

U.S. Gave China Breakthrough Battery Tech
NPR

A decade ago, engineers and researchers in Washington state were building a breakthrough battery based on a design created by two dozen U.S. scientists at a government lab. The batteries, which could be powered by solar panels, were about the size of a refrigerator, held enough energy to power a house, and could be used for decades:

Instead of the batteries becoming the next great American success story, the [Washington] warehouse is now shuttered and empty. All the employees who worked there were laid off. And more than 5,200 miles away, a Chinese company is hard at work making the batteries in Dalian, China. The Chinese company didn't steal this technology. It was given to them – by the U.S. Department of Energy. … Now, China has forged ahead, investing millions into the cutting-edge green technology that was supposed to help keep the U.S. and its economy out front.

Department of Energy officials declined NPR's request for an interview to explain how the technology that cost U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars ended up in China. 

Nashville Sics Metro Codes on 'Undesirable’ Neighbors
Radley Balko, Scene

Nashville, long famed as Music City, may have a new nickname: Snitch City. This article reports that Nashville allows its residents to make anonymous complaints about their “eyesore” neighbors – including those with tall grass, unregistered vehicles, cars parked on grass or houses in need of new paint or siding. Over the past three years, the Metro Codes Department has fielded more than 95,000 complaints. An academic researcher who examined data for this article found a compelling link between the number of complaints and gentrification.

While the average Nashville ZIP code generates about six Codes complaints per 100 residents, in gentrifying ZIP codes the figure nearly doubles – to 11. (Economists have specific criteria a ZIP code must meet to qualify as “gentrifying.”) ... In my own 37206 ZIP code — which includes fast-gentrifying neighborhoods Edgefield, Lockeland Springs and Shelby Bottoms — homes assessed at less than $200,000 had 120 percent more complaints on average than homes valued higher than $500,000. 

The researcher also found a clear racial disparity: For every 10 percent increase in a Nashville ZIP code’s Black population, the number of Codes complaints increases by 50 percent.

Just Plane Wrong:
Celebs With Highest Private Jet Co2 Emissions
Yard

This clever article tries to find out which celebrities have spewed out the most carbon emissions from private jet travel since the beginning of 2022 by scraping data from the flight-tracking Twitter account, Celebrity Jets:

• Our data reveals that the celebs have emitted an average of 3376.64 tonnes of CO2 emissions in just their private jet usage in 2022 so far.

• That's 482.37 times more than the average person’s annual emissions.

• Average flight times came in at just 71.77 minutes with an average of 66.92 miles travelled per flight.

• Some of the biggest offenders include Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Kim Kardashian and Travis Scott

Coronavirus Investigations

The Health of Americans Has Cratered During COVID
Wall Street Journal

COVID-19 has killed more than one million people in the U.S., a toll mounting by some 350 people a day. But its lethal impact is far greater, this article reports, because of the range of chronic diseases that have worsened in its wake:

Overall deaths and the death rates from heart disease and stroke rose sharply during the pandemic, setting back progress against two of the nation’s leading killers, according to a report published in JAMA Network Open in March. Many people missed visits to doctors or avoided hospitals early in the pandemic. Some later died at home, or reached the hospital too late. Covid-19 infection also increases the risk for stroke and heart attack, studies suggest. People also have been under more stress in the past few years or haven’t been as active as before. Some gained weight or struggled to manage chronic conditions, said Donald Lloyd-Jones, a former president of the American Heart Association.

In addition, this article reports, drug-overdose deaths, rising before the pandemic, jumped to a record of more than 107,000 in 2021, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The potent synthetic opioid fentanyl is driving the crisis, officials have said.

Is Pfizer's Paxlovid Being Over-Prescribed? 
The Atlantic

More than 3 million COVID-sufferers have taken Pfizer’s antiviral drug Paxlovid – including Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Joe Biden, who got a second case of the virus just after testing negative. And yet, this article reports, even after clinical trials and dozens of independent studies of the medicine ... 

... doctors remain unsure of: who might benefit from Paxlovid and in what ways; who really needs it; why and how often rebound infections such as Biden’s and Fauci’s occur; whether the drug reduces patients’ risk of developing long COVID; and whether the virus will slowly develop resistance to the drug.

A key issue is whether this routinely prescribed drug provides much benefit to two large groups – the young and the vaccinated. “COVID hospitalization rates for those younger than 60 are currently less than two per 100,000,” this article reports. “Given those numbers, Paxlovid – or any other drug, for that matter – isn’t likely to provide much benefit.”