Some of the Chinese news/videos because they’re important. But this story I’m putting up because it’s so ridiculous.
There’s evidently a genre of China’s video of pretty women in rural China carrying massive logs.
I know you’ll be shocked, shocked to find out there aren’t really lots of attractive women in rural China wearing makeup and carrying heavy logs around. Naturally, the logs are hollow or made of balsa. Naturally, they’re scamming poor simps (including some in the west) out of sympathy money.
The one the girls struggling through the mud in her old fashioned revolutionary clothing is particularly risible.
I wonder what American internet fads are inexplicable to the Chinese. Maybe they’re completely baffled by Hammurabi memes or Rickrolls…
I haven’t been updating every twist and turn of the Evergrande collapse, but we’re going to look at it again because this Peter Zeihan video has a fairly staggering statistic. He asserts that there are 1.5 BILLION (with a B) unoccupied housing units in China. Even though we already knew about the ghost cities, that’s like an entire ghost nation for a China that was already headed down the economic crapper.
“A Hong Kong court has ruled that China’s largest property development group, Evergrande, is bankrupt and needs to be broken up. This is something that the Chinese government has spent a lot of effort on the last two years not happening.”
“There’s two big things that dominate the Chinese economy. The first is something I call hyperfinancialization: The idea that the government both de facto confiscates the savings of the citizen population so it can only go into projects funded by Chinese State Banks, as well as massively expanding the money supply to a tune of like almost triple what we have here in the United States.”
“It’s a public stability political control approach to finance. It’s not about profit, it’s about throughput, because throughput requires a lot of bodies.”
“Number one, you get companies like Evergrande, who gorge on all this bottomless supply of debt to build build, build, build, build, even if there’s no demand.”
“Second, you get a population who knows that their private savings is almost worthless, because the Chinese government is forcing them to keep it in the state banks, and they want to put it into a hard asset that preferably the state can’t control. And if they can’t get their money out of the country, then the next best thing is a hard asset in the country, which typically is property.”
“You have somewhere probably in the vicinity of 1.5 billion units in the country that have never been lived in, never will be lived in. So you’re talking about 100% overbuild, conservatively. Some estimates say it’s as high as three billion, which is just so far beyond stupid.”
“How many vacant homes are there now? Each expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme believing the current number of vacant homes are enough for 3 billion people,” said He Keng, 81, a former deputy head of the statistics bureau.
“That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can’t fill them,” He said at a forum in the southern Chinese city Dongguan, according to a video released by the official media China News Service.
That’s people, not homes. Still, even if you cut it in half, to 750 million vacant condos, that’s a huge number. That’s the equivalent of 30 empty Shanghais.
Back to Zeihan:
“Evergrande going down means that their debts aren’t going to be serviced anymore, and the physical assets they have are going to be parceled up and foreign investors are going to be coming in seeing what bits that they can get.” Any foreigners investing in Chinese real estate need their heads examined.
“These things are things that the Chinese Communist Party would not normally allow to happen, so there’s a couple ways that this can go, none of them are good.”
“Option number one is we follow a western style bankruptcy and restitution program where this system is broken up and a lot of their assets are sold at pennies, maybe dimes, on a dollar.”
“You can count on private citizens being up in arms. I mean, the best estimate I’ve seen out of China is at 70% of total private savings is wrapped up in real estate, and most of these assets are worth no more than 10 cents on the dollar.”
“You have a fire sale of the single largest player which controls one sixth of the market, holy shit, things are going to get real very, very, very quickly.”
“Option number two is that the Chinese step in and abrogate the Hong Kong ruling. Now legally this cannot happen, but the Chinese Communist party is not really big on legal details when it comes to Hong Kong in particular.”
“Then Evergrande goes on some sort of state drip and everything with the system just kind of limps on, with the understanding now that Hong Kong has no legal authority over its own holdings, which will start an exodus of what few international firms are still there.”
“Regardless how this goes, don’t expect anything in the market to get better.”
“Evergrande may be the biggest player in this market, but it is by far not the only one who’s been doing stupid things like this, building condos that have no demand or running it like a Ponzi scheme. Every development company in the country basically operates this this way, and the second and third largest players in the industry are state-owned.”
“Even if all of a sudden this place were run by a bunch of Austrian economists, it’s too late.” Because of the one-child policy, there simply aren’t enough people of home-buying age.”
“I don’t want to say anything overly dramatic as ‘This is where it all starts to fall apart,’ because we’ve had a lot of things like that go down in the last 18 months. But this cuts to the core of what enables the average [Chinese] citizen to actually support the government, and there’s no way we move forward from this without a lot of side damage.”
The Chinese economy is already sucking. If the housing oversupply is really as bad as Zeihan makes out, China is in for an economic upheaval that makes 1929 look like a mild case of the hiccups.
“Christine Lee she was named by the MI5 back in 2022 as an agent of influence…British Security Service issued an alert earlier this year stating that a UK-based lawyer had been engaged in political interference activities for the Chinese state.”
This marked a shift in approach “being taken against the security threat posed by China.”
“She has personally met with Xi Jinping back in Beijing.”
“This is a bunch of people in a conference room. This is called the political consultative conference. They invite a bunch of people living overseas back to China to get greeted by Xi Jinping for to thank them for their effort in conducting influence operations overseas.”
“It’s also possible that CH Lee doubles as somebody from one of the intelligence bureaus.”
“On the surface she’s a lawyer in the UK, and she is also a political influence campaign, specialist and also she could also be a secret agent doing something even worse.”
“The entire thing started because Christine Lee did not want her face to appear on camera, but she was not able to go up directly to confront Dr K [Brendan Kavanagh], being that she’s publicly known by the MI5 as an agent of influence.”
“I think Dr K needs to be aware that this was not just against a series of random CCP nationalists, he’s actually against a systematically planned out series of influence operations. And this, in my view,escalates the situation entirely. I think he should do something to protect himself, protect his family, and also be aware of who he dealing with. This is not a regular group of people.”
Meanwhile, the Chinese communists are threatening to sue Kavanagh for “defamation.”
The story started out looking like it was just “Little Pinks” acting like assholes in another country, but the truth appears to be stranger and more sinister.
In a followup to this post, I am happy to report that the St. Pancras station piano has now been freed from Chinese commie oppression.
And pianist Brendan Kavanagh had a few things to say about the CCP:
He displays a Winnie the Pooh doll and picture because “Pooh has been banned by the CCP as being subversive, and apparently if you have Winnie the Pooh, your videos won’t be shown in the Chinese Mainland. This shows the power of the arts to undermine authoritarianism.”
The original video has “taken particularly off in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, and anyone who suffered from oppression.”
“We all know who [the oppressors] are: They are living Western lifestyles, but having a Communist authoritarian ideology.”
“This piano has become a CCP free zone. Yesterday, there was people from Hong Kong here. God bless Hong Kong, glory be to Hong Kong, and the people who put on the Hong Kong video. Their YouTube channel was immediately deleted.”
“I completely support the arts to undermine authoritarianism.”
“Winnie the Pooh has the ability to undermine authoritarian cultures. It’s not just political activism it’s actually the arts which they are afraid of.
“XiXi is frightened of Winnie, can you believe it? The Red Army is frightened of Winnie the Pooh because what they were doing they were comparing XiXi to Winnie. They said he looked a bit similar. XiXi’s feelings were hurt, and so he banned Winnie the Pooh completely from mainland China. So Winnie the Pooh has also become a symbol of free artistic expression in the face of unjust authoritarians.”
“It it was the Streisand Effect effects par excellence, this video.”
“I totally support Taiwan, and I totally support artistic expression.”
“The little pinks tried to shut us down they failed miserably.”
“This piano has become a CCP little pink free zone! God bless you all, thank you for supporting the video!”
A tiny, technical correction: The Communist Chinese are totalitarians rather than authoritarians, as they seek to control every aspect of life, not just rule an existing social structure. See Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s Dictatorships and Double Standards.
And sometimes I post something just because it makes my blood boil. Such is the case with these Communist Chinese tourists traveling in the UK who think they have a right to tell others what they can and can’t do in public spaces.
Pianist and YouTuber Brendan Kavanagh is livestreaming himself playing in the London St. Pancreas Pancras tube station on a piano specifically given to the station by Elton John to promote live impromptu performances for the public, when Communist Chinese tourists imperiously demand he stop filming because they don’t want to be on camera.
Does any other nation’s tourists act with such entitlement toward the citizens of the country they’re traveling through? (Maybe French Parisians.)
But wait! It gets worse! UK police, rather than telling the Communist Chinese to suck lemons, have now cordoned off the piano with two guards to prevent the piano from being played. Because evidently the precious feels of Chinese Communist tourists trump the rights of the British public.
“You can’t make this stuff up.”
“Let’s keep ourselves able to play to make free music in the free world.”
Russia laid the groundwork for expanding its soft power across North America and Asia with a new executive order signed by Vladimir Putin last week.
The new order provides funds for the search, registration and legal protection of Russian properties abroad, including land and buildings located on the territory of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
Among the areas affected by the new decree is Alaska, which was sold to the United States in 1867 and still has communities with close ties to Russia.
Central and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and large parts of Asia were once part of the former empire.
However, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) notes that “it is not clear what Russia’s current or historical assets consist of.”
This first of what promises to be multiple Nelsons
A second Nelson, because one simply wasn’t enough.
Evidently Putin’s continuing inability to conquer Ukraine, a former vassal state laying right next door, wasn’t enough of a humiliation for him, and he needs to pretend he can go toe-to-toe with the world’s only hyperpower to reclaim the 49th state over a century-and-and half old case of buyer’s seller’s remorse.
Another Nelson, just because.
Let’s, for the moment, set aside the distinct possibility that this declaration of suzerainty over former Soviet states not only implicitly threatens the Baltic Nations, but also Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.
Basically, all the Stans.
Still, the “just wants to watch the world burn” part of me wants to see Pooty-Poot’s Russia try to conquer Alaska, if only because the American reaction to whatever half-assed misexpedition across the Bearing Strait Russia is able to launch might result in the complete seizure of the Kuril-Aleut oil fields in far eastern Siberia. Indeed, I imagine that it wouldn’t even be a week before American air power completely wrecked the fragile Transiberian Railway and Highway, making Russian forces in the far east completely SOL. At that point, an American air and sea bridge from Alaska would still provide more reliable logistical support than Russia’s long, primitive and fragile Transiberian transport network.
One wonders what purpose these vainglorious, unenforceable pronouncements are meant to serve. It’s like an eight year old building a pillow fort in the middle of the living, loudly proclaiming “Better not come in here! It’s my fort!” Only for his mother to ignore it and pick up the couch cushions because The Price Is Right is on.
Maybe no other reason than puffing up Putin’s fragile ego.
Perhaps Putin should limit himself to one unwinnable “Special Military Operation”” at a time…
When Russia launched its illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine in 2022, many Russian units were shocked by how badly supplied and equipped they were, with Putin cronies supplying expired food and lots of spare parts and equipment seemingly stolen or sold off. Dictatorships lack checks and balances, and without them, corruption tends to become endemic.
Now news has come to light that the same thing appear to have happened in China.
US intelligence indicates that President Xi Jinping’s sweeping military purge came after it emerged that widespread corruption undermined his efforts to modernize the armed forces and raised questions about China’s ability to fight a war, according to people familiar with the assessments.
The corruption inside China’s Rocket Force and throughout the nation’s defense industrial base is so extensive that US officials now believe Xi is less likely to contemplate major military action in the coming years than would otherwise have been the case, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing intelligence.
The US assessments cited several examples of the impact of graft, including missiles filled with water instead of fuel and vast fields of missile silos in western China with lids that don’t function in a way that would allow the missiles to launch effectively, one of the people said.
I’ve got to say, trying to get away with graft in your nation’s nuclear forces is a pretty bold move. On the other hand, if China ever tried to use them, there’s such a high chance all military leadership would be incinerated by America’s much better equipped and maintained nuclear forces, so maybe they figured they’d never be held to account.
The US assesses that corruption within the People’s Liberation Army has led to an erosion of confidence in its overall capabilities, particularly when it comes to the Rocket Force, and also set back some of Xi’s top modernization priorities, the people said. The graft probe has ensnared more than a dozen senior defense officials over the past six months, in what may be China’s largest crackdown on the country’s military in modern history.
One wonders what other areas of China’s military capabilities have been degraded thanks to corner-cutting and corruption. Looking at the rest of China: Maybe all of it?
All this leads me to a pretty on-point Habitual Linecrosser:
East Germany was widely cited as the most successful of the Warsaw Pact puppet states, the one whose industrious nature “made communism work.” That was never true, but East Germany did seem to function more efficiently than the rest of the bloc.
One reason: Coffee.
“In the fall of 1977 the Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, East Germany’s feared secret police, warned the government that the country was on the verge of revolt. The trust lost in this incident would never be restored.”
“From the beginning, East Germany did not have access to the same level of luxury goods as the non-Soviet bloc West. Immediately after the second World War and through the 1950s, the Soviet Union supplied most of the coffee in the German Democratic Republic.”
“As East Germany became more autarkic from the Soviet Union, so followed its need to supply coffee independently.”
“The average East German coffee household expenditure was twice the amount spent on shoes, and equal to the amount spent on furniture.”
“This accounted for 4% of all retail sales in the GDR. As the East German state attempted to gain coffee independence, they also pushed as a core part of East German identity. Coffee allowed workers to be more productive, which contributed to a more prosperous society while maintaining an aesthetic of an invigorated society.”
“There was a problem though: it was a scarce resource and it was expensive to import. But, because of its importance, the Socialist Unity Party (the SED, who were effectively the state) saw a bargain that could be had from it. By being able to provide a scarce resource, it gave them legitimacy. But to gain this legitimacy they were constantly fighting back against a black market.”
“Officially any interaction with the black market
was illegal. Unofficially everyone knew it existed, and the Socialist Unity Party wasn’t happy with it, but it offered a window into what scarce resources would engender support if they could provide them.”
“Even before the Cold War, coffee in Germany was scarce – the blends were often not real coffee but blends of varying quality. This continued on after the post-war division and a fight between the Socialist Unity Party and the people of East Germany. The SED wanted to be the ones to provide coffee – the public wanted more of it and at a better quality. Thus developed a black market that the SED was constantly trying to stay ahead of.”
“One of the reasons for the Berlin Wall was that the SED couldn’t regulate the black market. It allowed goods to flood in from the West they were trying to provide, while allowing goods from the East (with subsidized prices) to flow out.”
“But, by 1973, things in East Germany had stabilized and things were, well, good. At least according to the CIA.”
“The SED had achieved a Faustian bargain: A black market where people had to depend upon relationships with each other to get access to goods meant that the populace actively grew in solidarity with each other.”
“The average East German citizen was willing to deal with shortages because it was something everyone was enduring together. In short, East Germany had entered a period of political stability, with a relatively high standard of living, and the shortcomings of the system reinforced the ideals that the system preached.”
“Two events at the beginning of the 1970s shook the East German economy to its core: the 1973 oil shock, and a failed coffee crop in Brazil. These events compounded within the fragile East German economy: to import goods from the west (such as oil) they needed to use western currency. As the price of oil skyrocketed, so did the rate at which East Germany drained its reserves of Western currency.” This part I’m not so sure of. I believe that East Germany imported most (but not all) of its oil from the Soviet Union under the Comecon plan. Oil prices from that did increase, but not immediately.
“Luxury goods, like coffee, became prohibitively expensive in an economy planned out to the penny. Before the failed coffee crop, East Germany spent 150 million marks per year on coffee imports. After the crisis began, this number had skyrocketed to 700 million. The SED was faced with a dilemma: money for oil, or marks for mocha?”
“They attempted to split the difference. The only coffee imported would be the higher end blends that the party leadership used. Lower end brands were either eliminated completely, or the recipe adjusted to use less coffee. Further, certain blends would only be available in Intershops, which required the use of Western currency – which would help the state refill it’s currency coffers.”
“East Germans rejected the new coffee mixes in a way the state was not prepared for. In a report to SED leadership on September 1, 1977, the Ministry for State stated that, ‘the quality and price of [the new coffee mixes] are rejected by broad circles of the population.'”
“Complaints recorded by the Stasi included ‘critical indications of taste,’ and a first indication that the new mixes were unable to be processed to the ‘full filtering capability in household machines.’ The coffee mixes were breaking the machines.”
“The Stasi further expressed in this report that workers resented party officials requesting austerity for workers, while still importing ‘expensive Western cars for officials.'”
“Additionally, Stasi reports say that citizen did not believe the ‘information policy.’ Far from just rejecting the new coffee mixes, were rejecting the SED’s handling of the crisis.”
“By September 12, the frustration over austerity moved to unrest. A Stasi report stated that in discussions among workers, ‘skeptical, resigned, pessimistic and negative opinions up to aggressive arguments become clear.'”
“While blaming Western media for this development, the Stasi also states that there are rumors of ‘warning strikes.'” These strikes would demand wages be paid in Western currency so that they could shop at the Intershops.”
“In relation, the report states growing frustration with the expansion of Intershop stores, with the simultaneous ‘elimination of low-price coffees and the limited supply in restaurants.’
Workers also believed that the classless East German society was now stratified, with three distinct categories: those without western currency who would be forced to endure austerity, those with access to western currency who could shop at Intershops, and ‘privileged persons and high officials who…drove expensive Western cars and [weren’t] affected by austerity.'”
“These last two categories were contrasted with the common worker and pensioner who ‘have returned to the point where begging letters have been sent to [West Germany]’ for coffee.'”
They were even criticizing Party officials! “East Germany was on the precipice of a revolt.”
“The SED would finally act on 23 September to contain the growing unrest. The price of the lowest quality mixes was reduced, and a communication was published on the coffee shortage, explaining the reasoning behind austerity measures.”
East Germany also started sourcing coffee from Vietnam.
Eventually, of course, East Germany would cease to exist due to the “internal contradictions” of communism and because the Soviet Union could no longer afford to keep it’s foot on Eastern Europe’s neck.
Note: Bluehost has been dog slow for the last 24 hours. If this keeps up tomorrow I’ll try to go through the agonizing technical support process to do something about it…
Israel has begun the process of flooding the network of tunnels beneath Gaza in an effort to flush out the impacted Hamas assets lodged there, according to U.S. officials who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. The Israeli military operation has so far involved the installation of seven massive pumps and testing the process of flooding the Hamas holes with water from the Mediterranean Sea, and now the great enema has begun in earnest.
“Israeli officials say that Hamas’s underground system has been key to its operations on the battlefield,” explains WSJ. “The tunnel system, they say, is used by Hamas to maneuver fighters across the battlefield and store the group’s rockets and munitions, and enables the group’s leaders to command and control their forces. Israel also believes some hostages are being held inside tunnels.”
The tunnel system has been dug throughout much of Gaza and is also active at the Egyptian border, the crossing at which Hamas militants smuggle many of their weapons into Gaza. It is a critical infrastructure for the terrorists’ ability to continue to wage their bloody war against the only democracy in the region. Remove the network of tunnels from the table, and you severely cripple that ability.
Thanks to Home Alone and Irish we know that a particular cart of groceries went from $19.83 in 1990 to $77.28 today.
389.7% inflation over 33 years.
Annualized, that’s just 4.208% inflation, since the goal is 3%, that doesn’t seem so bad.
The problem is that cart of goods was $44.40 last year. That’s an annual inflation of 2.4755% from 1990 to 2022. Below the Fed’s desired rate, good for us, bad for the national debt.
That means we had 174% inflation in one fucking year.
A common problem, one that well pre-dates the invasion of Ukraine, is that we have shockingly well credentialed people of influence from both parties who have an inability to understand that Russians are not Westerners. They don’t think like Westerners, though they may look like them.
The Russians have a distinct culture, history, and view of themselves and their place in history. The underperforming political, military, and diplomatic elite in the West – with few exceptions outside the former Warsaw Pact nations now in NATO – expect Russians to react in the same way and to the same degree to the incentives and disincentives that move needles and preferences in DC and Brussels.
Time is always on the side of Russia, which is one of the reasons the slow rolling of weapons to Ukraine has been an exercise of malpractice of the highest degree. You are either in or out.
Two years on, “we” still are not sending a clear signal. It is amazing, really; in military might, GDP, demographics and a whole host of other reasons, Russia should not be as resilient as they are … which is why DC & Brussels are being played so hard. They still do not understand Russia.
Even after 1,000 years of experience, we have Western leaders who refuse to believe that the Russians are fundamentally different than the West is in the 21st Century. You can’t put the cultural ability to absorb damage and brutal patience you cannot see in some metric that can go on a PPT slide.
What the Russians lack in so many other places, they make up for here. As such, this critical part of understanding Russian motivation keeps being missed. Yes to their economy and apocalyptic demographics. Yes to all that.
For all the reasons Russia continues to fight, so too do their Ukrainian brothers – demonstrating greater resilience and endurance that Western expectations.
The time for leaving Ukraine to its fate is long past. Yes, the West has a short attention span and is suffering under the dead hand of entrenched leaders with a defeatist mindset – but none of this is written.
Ukraine can still win – or at least something that can be called a win. It would help if the Russians had some internal issues that required more attention that Ukraine, but even then – all is not worth shrugging over.
Yes, I’ve seen the math – the metrics – but war is informed by math, but not defined within it.
At a relatively modest cost in our treasure and almost none of our blood, we are wearing down Russia’s ability to project power for a generation, perhaps two. Perhaps many more generations should demographic instability mate with political instability. The Ukrainians – facing the same economic and demographic challenges as the Russians – are up for the fight. There is no reason for more comfortable nations who have supported them so far to go wobbly at half-time.
“FBI Official Who Helped Launch Trump-Russia Probe Sentenced to Four Years in Prison for Work with Russian Oligarch…In August, Charles McGonigal, a 22-year veteran of the bureau’s field office in New York, was found guilty of a count of conspiracy for working with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire with close ties to President Vladimir Putin.”
Jagged Little Pill is now 28 years old. I don’t think I’ve listened to it for the last 27.
Texas Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) has won a resounding victory over U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX-18) in a runoff election for mayor of Houston, carrying the race by 64 percentage points according to election results.
“Voters have spoken and I am humbly grateful to the people of Houston for electing me as their next mayor,” said Whitmire in a statement.
The election results largely mirrored the latest polling in the race where Whitmire maintained a lead over Jackson Lee, especially in runoff scenarios where negative perceptions of the congresswoman indicated many voters who had supported one of the other 18 candidates in the first round would likely move strongly towards Whitmire. Polls also indicated crime and public safety were among the top concerns for Houstonians — an issue on which Whitmire, as the longtime chair of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, held a distinct advantage over Jackson Lee.
I didn’t follow that race closely because it’s been obvious for a long time that Lee simply isn’t very bright, something even the lefty sorts at the Daily Beast noticed.
In the Democratic-leaning Houston, Republican-backed candidates have slightly increased their presence on the 16-member city council with the help of the local party, outreach efforts into minority communities, and campaign efforts from conservative organizations.
According to unofficial election results, candidates Julian Ramirez, Willie Davis, and Twila Carter all won runoff elections for At-Large Positions 1, 2, and 3, and incumbent Mary Nan Huffman handily fended off a challenge from attorney Tony Buzbee for District G. The victors will join incumbent Amy Peck, who ran unopposed for District A, and Fred Flickinger, who won the District E seat on Election Day last month.
Each of the five contested candidates have enjoyed the support of the Harris County Republican Party (HCRP), the Republican Party of Texas, and groups like the Kingwood Tea Party.
Pundits frequently forget that not so long ago, Houston was a Republican stronghold. Ted Cruz won Harris County (albeit it narrowly) in 2012, and Greg Abbott carried it in 2014.
“Elon Musk took another shot at Disney CEO Bob Iger Thursday, after the state of New Mexico sued Meta for allegedly enabling child sexual abuse and trafficking – yet Disney and other woke advertisers, who paused advertising on X in a kneejerk reaction to claims of antisemitism – apparently have no problem when it comes to the sexual exploitation of minors.”
A black scholar Harvard President Claudine Gay plagerized is plenty pissed off.
One of the academics who was plagiarized, former professor Carol Swain, is pissed after Harvard gave Gay a pass on what would have resulted in severe punishment and/or expulsion for anyone else, as Townhall’s Christopher Rufo reports.
“I rarely get angry, but I am angry,” Swain wrote on X. “[R]ight now about the racial double standards that are TEMPORARILY giving #ClaudineGay an opportunity to resign. White progressives created her and white progressives are protecting her. The rest of us have had to work our rear ends off to achieve success. Some get it handed to them.”
Rufo interviewed Swain, who said that the plagiarism went far beyond a few paragraphs – and that Gay’s “whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work.”
“She became president of Harvard and got recognition as being its first black president. I don’t believe her record warranted tenure, and I believe that I had to meet a much higher standard than she did,” she told Rufo, adding “Something changed in the mid-1990s, [when] we were having a big affirmative action debate.”
Rufo asked Swain what she thought would happen to a white person under these circumstances, to which she replied “A white male would probably already be gone.”
Harvard announced that Gay would keep her job after a week of calls for her ouster, first, regarding her refusal to condemn calls for violence against Jews on campus, and then, after the plagiarism accusations broke. Despite a donor revolt spearheaded by billionaire Bill Ackman, a petition signed by 700 faculty members on Gay’s behalf won in the end.
There are a lot of reasons to celebrate Javier Milei’s election as president of Argentina, the biggest of which is that he’s going to apply free market, limited government principles to reviving Argentina’s moribund economy.
“People are not free in China, they can’t do what they want and when they do it, they get killed,” he told Bloomberg News on Wednesday, referring to Beijing’s government. “Would you trade with an assassin?”
Milei shook Argentina’s political establishment last weekend after receiving more votes than a probusiness opposition bloc and the ruling Peronist coalition, putting him in the lead to be the country’s next president. His election in October would generate shock waves across a region largely ruled by leftist leaders.
In his blanket refusal to do any kind of business with “socialists,” he lumped Communist China in the same category as Argentina’s biggest trade partner, Brazil, led by leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. China is the second-largest buyer of Argentine exports and provides a crucial $18 billion swap line with the central bank that’s being used to pay the International Monetary Fund.
He described his foreign policy proposals as a global “fight against socialists and statists.”
Libertarians critical of communists? What are the odds?
It probably means that Argentina won’t be buying any of China’s crappy jet fighters, either.
