After Beijing officials have repeatedly charged Washington with violating the decades-long status quo “One China policy”, and amid ratcheting tensions over Taiwan given the highest-level meeting between Washington and the self-ruled island in decades is currently taking place with Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar meeting government officials in Taipei Monday, the region is on edge after satellite images showing a significant Chinese military build-up near the island have reportedly emerged.
The New Zealand Herald reports the alarming development that “satellite images reportedly show amphibious armored vehicles and mobile missile launchers massing at military bases near the island nation.”
Specifically, according to the report, the images show “the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) moving the military vehicles into the Eastern Theatre Command on China’s coastal cities across the strait from Taiwan, with missile launchers well within range to hit any targets in Taiwan.”
It comes after threats and counter-threats of military build-up between the two, with regional analysts cited in the report saying there’s currently high risk for military clash or incident.
While it’s unclear where the newly published image featured in the New Zealand Herald is ultimately sourced from (the satellite images first appeared in Kanwa Defence Review – a Canadian military magazine focused on East Asian affairs and diplomacy), many are convinced that Beijing is sending a clear signal to Washington and Taipei. However, the satellite image could also simply reveal a military base vehicle storage depot, common at most any nation’s military bases.
I’ve covered the slow motion Chinese-Indian War before, but that’s not going away any time soon. Both side continue their military build-up along the Line of Actual Control.
Tensions are also high between Greece and Turkey, with Turkey sending a military escort along with an oil exploration ship into (disputed) Greek waters.
Tension remained high Tuesday between Greece and Turkey, both of which have warships in the eastern Mediterranean after Turkey sent a research vessel to carry out seismic research for energy resources in an area Greece says is on its continental shelf.
Greece will be requesting an emergency meeting of the European Union’s Foreign Affairs Council, the prime minister’s office announced following a meeting between Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias.
Ankara announced on Monday that its research vessel Oruc Reis and two support vessels would be operating in the Mediterranean Sea between Cyprus and Greece until Aug. 23. The vessel arrived in the area Monday morning, escorted by Turkish warships.
Greece slammed the decision as an illegal act that infringed on its sovereign rights, saying the Turkish research vessel was inside an area covered by the Greek continental shelf. Greek warships were in the area and were monitoring the Oruc Reis, and the military was on alert, officials said.
NATO allies and neighbors Greece and Turkey have traditionally had testy relations and have been at odds for decades over a wide variety of issues. The two have come to the brink of war three times since the mid-1970s, including once over drilling exploration rights. Recent discoveries of natural gas and drilling plans across the east Mediterranean have led to renewed tension.
Yeah, but Greek-Turkish enmity goes back much farther than that, almost a millennium back, to when the Turkic Islamic Seljuk Empire started their conquest of the Hellenized Byzantine Empire’s Anatolia, up through the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the Ottoman conquest of almost all of Greece over the next hundred years. There then followed many unsuccessful Greek revolts, until Greece threw off the Ottoman yoke with the Greek War of independence (1821-1830). The two have fought each other several times since then, until the breakup of the Ottoman Empire led to the creation of the modern state of Turkey and the Grecco-Turkish War (1919-1922), where a Greek attempt to seize back Anatolian land led to a disasterous defeat culminating in the Great Fire of Smyrna. And don’t forget the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, resulting in the effective division of the island.
Are any of these actually going to blossom into full-blown war? I suspect China is just sabre-rattling over Taiwan. Their best play would seem to be to wait for the possibility of a Biden Presidency to escape the vice that President Trump’s sanctions have put them into. And China thinks it can continue to eat away at Indian territory if it just bides its time.
As far as a new Greek-Turkish War, that’s a more likely possibility, because the two really do hate each other. But one wonders whether Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ploy of another military adventure to distract Turkish voters from the quagmire of his current military adventures in Syria (yes, two, if you count the Afrin-Idlib incursion separate from the Kurdish buffer zone) will play well with Turkish voters.
The post title is not an invocation, but a reference to pioneering punk band Fear’s song of the same name from their album The Record
Guns are flying off the shelf, India isn’t rolling over for China’s aggression, and things just keep mysteriously blowing up in Iran. Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!
The media have claimed over the past three months: 1. Cuomo was great; 2. Seattle's CHOP and Portland were paradisical; 3. Mass riots were no biggie; 4. Enormous BLM protests provided no health risk in the midst of a pandemic. I can't imagine why they have a credibility gap.
Gun sales are up big. “A record 10.3 million firearms were purchased in the first half of 2020, according to NSSF’s adjusted NICS data. They report, ‘The highest overall firearm sales increase comes from Black men and women who show a 58.2 percent increase in purchases during the first six months of 2020 versus the same period last year.'” Makes sense, since they disproportionately live in Democrat-controlled cities where they’ve let rioters, arsonists and looters run rampant…
“Trump Task Force to Dismantle MS-13 Takes Down Gang’s Key Leaders.”
Thanks to Barack Obama’s open border policies, MS-13 was energized with new recruits provided by a steady flow of illegal immigrant minors. When the Obama administration started welcoming a barrage of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) in 2014, Homeland Security sources told Judicial Watch that the nation’s most violent street gangs—including MS-13 and the 18th Street gang—were actively recruiting new members at U.S. shelters housing the minors. The Texas Department of Public Safety subsequently confirmed that the MS-13 is a top tier gang thanks to the influx of illegal alien gang members that crossed into the state under Obama’s disastrous program, which saw over 60,000 illegal immigrants—many with criminal histories—storm into the U.S. in a matter of months. Tens of thousands more have entered since then.
Snip.
The cases announced this week include an indictment against a high-ranking MS-13 operative, Melgar Diaz, in Virginia. Diaz is charged with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, conspiring to kill or maim persons overseas, conspiring to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries, conspiring to finance terrorism, and; conspiring to engage in narco-terrorism, in addition to racketeering conspiracy and drug trafficking. In another case eight MS-13 members were indicted in New York for committing six murders, two attempted murders, kidnapping, narcotics felonies and related firearms offenses. In Nevada 13 MS-13 gang bangers, including leaders of the “Hollywood Locos” clique and “Los Angeles Program” were charged with multiple counts of narcotics distribution and weapons crimes. The task force is also responsible for the indictment in New York of Alexi Saenz, an MS-13 leader accused of committing seven murders, including two high school students with a machete and baseball bat. “MS-13 is a violent transnational criminal organization, whose criminal activities respect no boundaries,” said [Joint Task Force Vulcan (JTFV) director John Durham]. “The only way to defeat MS-13 is by targeting the organization as a whole, focusing on the leadership structure, and deploying a whole-of-government approach against a common enemy.”
China may be a powerful adversary to India, but its bluffs can be called. And that is what India has done in the last two weeks, making a host of decisions that, seen in the perspective of the stand-off with China, represent its resolve and constitute a sustained effort on several fronts — military, diplomatic, economic, social — to make China pay.
Previously, India had never taken sides with or against China on the Hong Kong protests. But this time around, it took a strong stand on the passage of the new security law, which is an attempt to stifle the city’s pro-democracy movement.
It has also blocked Chinese firms from investing in India under the free FDA route, taken several initiatives to force a global probe into the source and origin of COVID-19, and, as mentioned above, banned a host of Chinese apps.
That’s not all. India’s railways ministry has canceled a signals and telecom contract with a Chinese company for a mammoth freight corridor project in Uttar Pradesh. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) have decided to exclude Chinese firms from providing telecom equipment and cancelled their plans for upgrading 4G services. The roads department has announced that no highway projects will be awarded to China. The power ministry is looking to curtail imports from adversarial nations, including China. The move is aimed also at reducing the ability of adversarial nations to cripple India’s power infrastructure through cyber attacks.
Several Indian states have followed up on the national government’s moves. A push to deny a Chinese firm, Shanghai Tunnel Engineering Co Ltd, a contract for the construction of a critical section of the Delhi-Meerut RRTS corridor, is ongoing. The state of Maharashtra is on the verge of cancelling three agreements with Chinese firms. It includes an agreement with China’s Great Wall Motors (GWM) to set up an automobile plant near Pune and produce electric vehicles there. However, the state is going ahead with nine other agreements signed with the U.S., Singapore, and South Korea, indicating to China what’s to come.
Next was a heavily fortified, highly restricted, underground nuclear enrichment facility. Then power stations, a port, a health clinic and a petrochemical plant.
For weeks, things have been blowing up or catching fire in Iran.
The two most significant incidents were a June 26 explosion at Khojir, near Tehran — a liquid fuel production site for the country’s missile program — and more recently, a blast deep underground at the Natanz nuclear facility on July 2.
Red Bull decides that they don’t want to go broke, refuses to get woke. “Red Bull has fired two ‘diversity directors’ who tried to force the company into virtue signaling about Black Lives Matter while also dissolving several ‘culture teams’ who were pressuring Red Bull to take a more aggressive ‘woke’ political stance.” Good for them.
Gerald Walpin had been investigating Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a former NBA basketball star and Obama supporter, for misusing federal grant money from AmeriCorps. The program was created by the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993 and grew to over 80,000 members. Program participants received benefits such as student loan deferment, living allowances, health benefits, career opportunities and training, and so forth. The program has done some good but has also been plagued by waste and corruption.
He found that Johnson gave $850,000 of AmeriCorps grant money to a nonprofit organization he founded called St. HOPE Academy. In addition to being improperly used to pay AmeriCorps volunteers for political activity, to wash his car, and to run his personal errands, Walpin also discovered that Johnson had used AmeriCorps grant money to pay hush money to underage girls, who were students at St. HOPE Academy, that he had sexually assaulted and then staged a cover-up.
Walpin called for Johnson to be criminally prosecuted. Instead, Johnson was able to get a sweetheart deal avoiding prosecution if he paid back the money. This deal was approved by Alan Solomont, a major Democratic fundraiser who was also the chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS).
Walpin was furious about the deal and made it known, prompting his illegal firing. Following the firing, the Obama White House waged a smear campaign against Walpin, making bogus allegations that he appeared “confused, disoriented and unable to answer questions,” and exhibited “behavior that led the [CNCS] board to question his capacity to serve.”
If there were no police, if the police were defunded, wealthy people would hire private security guards, but the people who cannot afford private guards need to have a well‑funded police force. I am in favor of extra funding for the police. Give them better training. Teach them how to subdue people without using lethal force.
The problem with the UN is not that it passes too many resolutions, but too few. It never attacks its favorite countries. It applies a double standard of injustice. It has devoted more time to condemning Israel than all the other countries of the world combined. Let us see what it says about recent reports concerning murders in Iran of gay people, for instance the recent murder of a 14‑year‑old by her father as an honor killing. Let us see what it says about so many of the violations of human rights around the world. Well, do not hold your breath. It will say nothing. It will focus only on Israel and the United States. There is a case to be made for the United States withdrawing and defunding…
Plus some observations on recent Social Justice Warrior/Cancel Culture issues. Not in agreement with everything (he opposed elected judges), but worth reading. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
During the height of the coronavirus lockdown, with a substantial portion of the world’s population in quarantine and the global economy sliding toward a deep economic recession, most of us still ate our fill every evening. We should rejoice in this miracle. Hunger, which has accompanied humanity from our beginnings, has practically disappeared. Isolated cases of malnutrition—but not of famine—remain, due to local conflict and extreme forms of poverty, themselves on their way to remission.
Since 1970, world population has doubled—but food production has tripled. In 1970, India was known as “the famine continent,” and the economic literature was uniformly pessimist, an echo of the writings of Thomas Malthus, who proclaimed 170 years earlier an inevitable contradiction between demographic growth and agricultural growth. Humanity escapes this proclaimed fate, thanks to science and commerce—the two foundations of progress, including agricultural progress.
Snip.
What saved us from famine was the 1970s Green Revolution: a combination of species selection, hybridization, and the application of farming techniques such as irrigation and fertilization. When these techniques were applied to wheat and rice, average yields tripled, especially in India, China, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The leaders of this revolution, which we do not celebrate enough, were two agronomists: Norman Borlaug, a Texan who transformed wheat cultivation in his laboratory near Mexico City; and M. S. Swaminathan, an Indian from Chennai who applied Borlaug’s method to rice in a laboratory near Manila. Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 (Swaminathan was overlooked). Never was the Nobel Peace Prize more deserved—or so soon forgotten.
Progress is seldom, if ever, unanimously welcomed. Activist groups in India and the United States have blamed Borlaug and the Green Revolution for creating new inequalities. It’s true that all Indian peasants were equally poor and hungry before the Green Revolution. Those who applied Borlaug’s recommendations became more prosperous than those who stuck to the old methods. It’s easy to achieve equality when there is nothing to distribute; leftists seem to prefer scarcity to plenty if plenty implies unequal portions. The same people who condemned the Green Revolution now oppose GMOs. Their ancestors, in the early nineteenth century, justified destroying new textile machines using the same arguments. Science progresses; ideologies spin their wheels.
Kanye West explains why he’s against abortion. Man says a lot of wacky things, but he sounds truly sincere about this and his faith.
Small engine maker Briggs & Stratton declares bankruptcy. The very last paragraph mentions seeking a new deal from United Steelworkers of America. (Hat tip: ASM826 at Borepatch.)
James Lileks goes to town on that stupid “Classical music is white supremacy” essay.
Dawn breaks in the crowded prison cell. Not everyone is asleep — conditions are so cramped in the 70-square-yard space that 15 of the 60 inmates have to stand to give others their turn to lie down.
The lack of privacy is absolute. Toilet breaks are rationed — two minutes at a time — and in full gaze of the others.
Glass walls, cameras and microphones mean that every word and deed is recorded.
Informants placed in each cell even note down what people say in their sleep and pass it on to guards.
As with every other day, the morning begins with compulsory singing of Communist Party songs, praising the glorious motherland and its wise leader, Xi Jinping.
Then their only meal of the day arrives. Watery cabbage soup, served with a small lump of steamed dough. If they’re lucky, they may get a few grains of rice as well.
Snip.
Morning is indoctrination. Inmates — hundreds of them, all shaven-headed — sit in a vast echoing room, listening to hours of lectures on the evils of religion
The monotony of the lessons is mental torture. At the end of the class, inmates are asked ‘is there a God?’ The only permitted answer is ‘no’.
Every waking moment is an onslaught on their cherished beliefs and traditions. The half-starved inmates are even forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, in defiance of their Muslim faith.
Afternoon brings interrogations. To break their mental resistance, inmates are forced to watch others being tortured before their own sessions of questioning.
They are made to denounce friends and family, to confess to fictitious crimes such as bomb-making and espionage, and to express abject contrition — even for such harmless acts as having a copy of the Koran. Any resistance brings beatings, electric shocks and sleep deprivation.
Nakedness is another dehumanising tactic. Nudity is taboo in Islam, but prisoners of all ages are made to parade before each other and in view of the guards.
For women, humiliating gynaecological inspections are mandatory. Rape is routine.
(Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.) Previous posts on China’s concentration camp system for Uighers can be found here and here.
This is pretty horrifying: “China cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abortion, sterilization.”
The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.
While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”
The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.
The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.
Last week, drone footage, verified by Western intelligence agencies, emerged from Northern China. It showed Uighur Muslims bound and blindfolded, with shaven heads, being loaded onto trains that were likely headed for detention camps. In a BBC interview, British journalist Andrew Marr demanded answers from Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom. Xiaoming accused “so-called Western intelligence agencies” of making “false accusations against China.” The population of Xinjiang had doubled in 40 years, he said, which clearly proved that “ethnic cleansing” and “so-called forced abortions” had not occurred. Marr, unconvinced, retorted, “According to your own local government statistics, the population growth in Uighur jurisdictions in that area has fallen by 84 percent between 2015 and 2018. 84 percent.”
How can that be so? A recent report by the Associated Press, compiling “government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor” gives an idea.
Over the past four years, the Chinese government has spent tens of millions of dollars to violently hijack the functioning reproductive systems of minority women. In 2017, according to official directives uncovered by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, government officials backed by armed law-enforcement officers were instructed to “leave no blind spots,” “contain illegal births and lower fertility rates,” “test all who need to be tested,” and “detect and deal with those who violate policies early.”
The AP report found that “having too many children” is a “major reason people are sent to detention camps,” that “parents of three or more [children] are ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines,” and that “police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.” The report also contains shocking witness testimony:
“Tursunay Ziyawudun said she was injected until she stopped having her period, and kicked repeatedly in the lower stomach during interrogations. She now can’t have children and often doubles over in pain, bleeding from her womb.”
“Gulbahar Jelilova confirmed that detainees in her camp were forced to abort their children. She also saw a new mother, still leaking breast milk, who did not know what had happened to her infant. And she met doctors and medical students who were detained for helping Uighurs dodge the system and give birth at home.”
Gulzia Mogdia was also forced to have an abortion when she became pregnant with her third child. “Medics inserted an electric vacuum into her womb and sucked her fetus out of her body,” after which she was “taken home and told to rest, as [officials] planned to take her to a camp.”
What does the “reproductive freedom” crowd have to say about this outrage? We all know what: Exactly nothing.
The United States champions a free and open Indo-Pacific. Today we are strengthening U.S. policy in a vital, contentious part of that region – the South China Sea. We are making clear: Beijing’s claims to offshore resources across most of the South China Sea are completely unlawful, as is its campaign of bullying to control them.
In the South China Sea, we seek to preserve peace and stability, uphold freedom of the seas in a manner consistent with international law, maintain the unimpeded flow of commerce, and oppose any attempt to use coercion or force to settle disputes. We share these deep and abiding interests with our many allies and partners who have long endorsed a rules-based international order.
These shared interests have come under unprecedented threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Beijing uses intimidation to undermine the sovereign rights of Southeast Asian coastal states in the South China Sea, bully them out of offshore resources, assert unilateral dominion, and replace international law with “might makes right.”
Beijing’s approach has been clear for years. In 2010, then-PRC Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told his ASEAN counterparts that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact.” The PRC’s predatory world view has no place in the 21st century.
The PRC has no legal grounds to unilaterally impose its will on the region. Beijing has offered no coherent legal basis for its “Nine-Dashed Line” claim in the South China Sea since formally announcing it in 2009. In a unanimous decision on July 12, 2016, an Arbitral Tribunal constituted under the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention – to which the PRC is a state party – rejected the PRC’s maritime claims as having no basis in international law. The Tribunal sided squarely with the Philippines, which brought the arbitration case, on almost all claims.
As the United States has previously stated, and as specifically provided in the Convention, the Arbitral Tribunal’s decision is final and legally binding on both parties. Today we are aligning the U.S. position on the PRC’s maritime claims in the SCS with the Tribunal’s decision. Specifically:
The PRC cannot lawfully assert a maritime claim – including any Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claims derived from Scarborough Reef and the Spratly Islands – vis-a-vis the Philippines in areas that the Tribunal found to be in the Philippines’ EEZ or on its continental shelf.
Beijing’s harassment of Philippine fisheries and offshore energy development within those areas is unlawful, as are any unilateral PRC actions to exploit those resources. In line with the Tribunal’s legally binding decision, the PRC has no lawful territorial or maritime claim to Mischief Reef or Second Thomas Shoal, both of which fall fully under the Philippines’ sovereign rights and jurisdiction, nor does Beijing have any territorial or maritime claims generated from these features.
The Chinese long ago borrowed the concept of the political officer (“Zampolit”) from the Soviet Union. The political officer represents the Communist Party and has the authority to overrule any order a military commander gives. In reality, the political officer usually acts as a combined morale and special events officer. The political officers are primarily responsible for preventing anything happening in their unit that would embarrass the party. For naval zampolits that meant watching out for signs of mutiny or sailors planning to seek asylum in a foreign port.
Unlike the Russian naval zampolit, the Chinese counterpart, called a political commissar is considered the equal of the regular naval commander and his superior when it comes to a “special mission”, like deliberately harassing foreign warships or opening fire on anyone. The political commissar is the same rank as the ship captain and can overrule the ship commander at any time and in any situation. It was not always that way.
An important change took place in 2018 when naval political commissars were given equal authority with the captain as “mission commander” and is expected to replace the captain if the captain is disabled by injury or sickness. The normal second-in-command (the XO or executive officer) becomes the XO for the political commissar and the captain and third, not second, in command. The practical problem with this is that the captain and XO have spent their entire careers (fifteen or more years) learning how to run a ship and supervise the crew. In contrast, the political commissar learned enough tech stuff to be more annoying. The political commissar was a professional busybody, scold and snitch. The political commissar can end the career of the captain, XO or any other officer by simply making a series of uncomplimentary reports.
The 2018 change was part of a program that began in 2016 throughout the military as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) sought to improve its control over the military. In the navy that meant the political commissar had the ultimate responsibility for achieving goals assigned to a ship. The captain is not the true commander of the ship in the Western sense. He is there to see that technical details are well taken care of and that would include taking change during very bad weather or some kind of technical (fire, explosion) problem aboard ship. The political commissar is expected to personally undertake particularly dangerous leadership missions, although only those he is qualified to deal with. That means political commissars have led boarding parties in dangerous situations but not entrusted with command during damage control situations.
The full impact of the 2016-18 “reforms” to improve CCP control of the military are still working themselves out in the navy. Western, especially American, captains are being warned that their Chinese counterparts will probably not react as quickly to an emergency or unexpected situation that that should be taken into account, or taken advantage of.
Another reason for the 2016-18 reforms was to reduce corruption in the military. In theory, political officers are supposed to prevent their commanders from getting involved in fiscal corruption, but often it’s the other way around, with the political commissars getting involved in illegal money-making schemes first. The CCP is trying to purge the political officer ranks of dishonest and unreliable elements. It is slow going. This has caused more friction between commanders and their political officers. That tends to reduce the effectiveness of the unit these two officers are in charge of. There is no easy solution to this problem.
Snip.
There’s another leadership problem China has to deal with, a problem similar to the one that seriously hurt Japan’s effort against the United States during World War II. This is the fact that the Japanese Army then, like the Chinese Army now, is the senior service to the extent that generals can overrule admirals and generally interfere in navy matters that the army generals really know little about. This is already causing China problems and there is no solution in sight. This is particularly true when it comes to joint training. In wartime, this “army runs the show” sort of thing is a serious problem, just read any history that covers the Japanese army and navy relationships during World War II.
An offshoot of the army domination problem is that there is little real joint (all services working together) planning. Currently, the Chinese army tells the navy and air force what it wants done and that is the end of that. The Chinese understand that their next war will likely be in the Pacific, not mainland China. The navy should be in the lead here but it isn’t. Worse, naval officers who spend their entire careers learning how to run a ship, eventually as captain, have to accept being second-guessed or overruled by a less experienced (in running a ship) political officer.
“US House of Representatives passes NDAA amendment slamming Chinese aggression against India.” (From Hindustan Times. Judging from Google News, there’s precious little coverage of this resolution in American sources.)
“LA Times Publishes Beijing-Funded Propaganda.” “The eight-page advertorial, called “China Watch,” was tucked towards the back of the paper’s 61-page Sunday edition. With articles designed to look like legitimate newspaper columns, the insert presents a rosy view of the Chinese economy and its businesses.”
Sobering:
If you combine Chinese Fentanyl overdose deaths with coronavirus deaths, China has already killed more Americans than World War 2.
China buys Pakistan, the Supreme Court gives Oklahoma back to the Indians, another cartel shootout in Nuevo Laredo, and cancel culture comes for everyone! Enjoy another Friday LinkSwarm!
“In a major Supreme Court decision Thursday, justices decided that a large swath of [Oklahoma], including part of Tulsa, is still an American Indian reservation. Tribal members can no longer be prosecuted by the state for crimes that happen in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.” I have not had time to read the decision, but my impression is that it’s somewhat less sweeping than the MSM is making it out to be.
China has become the ultimate fiscal lifeline for Pakistan. Decades of deficits, growing corruption, excessive defense spending and military domination have left Pakistan broke and few willing to give or lend enough cash to keep Pakistan solvent. A recent example of how this works was seen when despite economic recession and a public debt crisis (no one will lend to Pakistan anymore), the Pakistani defense budget was increased twelve percent for 2020, with annual spending now $7.85 billion. Spending on dealing with covid19 has averaged about $100 million a month and by the end of the year military spending will be at least five times what was spent on covid19. The India defense budget is also up (13.6 percent more) in 2020 to $66 billion.
The only economic relief available to Pakistan is China and CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic corridor). CPEC is a vast Chinese investment and construction effort that depends on vigorous support of the Pakistani military to succeed. China needs the Pakistani military to keep Islamic terrorists and tribal separatists from attacking the Chinese construction projects. Pakistan also helps China by keeping Indian forces occupied in Kashmir and the northwest Indian portion of the Pakistani border.
Northwest India (Ladakh State) is the current a hot spot because India has been building roads to the border and threatening to take back the portion of Kashmir Pakistan illegally, according to the agreement that established the India-Pakistan border after the British left in 1947, seized from India. Pakistan signed that agreement but had second thoughts as it was being implemented. Pakistan urged Pakistani Pushtun tribes in the area to “liberate” Kashmir from the Hindus and managed to grab about half of the disputed area. This dispute has remained unresolved ever since and led to several wars with India. Pakistan always lost but India never sent troops into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The current Indian leader is openly questioning the wisdom of that policy.
India controlling all of Kashmir is a major economic threat to China, which has invested over $10 billion to build a highway and rail line from China to the Pakistani coast and it goes through Pakistani occupied Kashmir. This link is part of the Chinese OBOR/BRI (belt and road project) which aims to revive the ancient Silk Road that for thousands of years was the main economic link between East Asia and the rest of Eurasia. The Pakistani portion is called CPEC and is costing China at least $62 billion (so far). The Indian threats to the Kashmir road-rail link are minor compared to the problems China is having with Islamic terrorist and tribal violence against CPEC projects as well as the high levels of corruption in Pakistan which are also damaging CPEC projects. This is driving up costs while lowering quality and slowing progress. But China also claims ownership of much Indian territory so helping Pakistani keep what they have grabbed is considered something of a professional courtesy. At the same time the Pakistani military have gained an ally they cannot abandon or say no to.
In June China revived the border war over Pangong Lake, which is largely in Tibet and patrolled by a small Chinese naval force. This is the longest lake in Asia and part of the 134-kilometer long lake extends 45 kilometers into the Indian Ladakh region. China is using its usual “sneak, grab and stay” tactics to slowly move the border into territory long occupied by India. The portion of the lake shore in dispute has no native population. The only people who visit the area are soldiers from India or China.
Given this newly declared foreign threat China has, since 2019, sent new Type928D Patrol Boats to guard the lake. This fast (70 kilometers an hour) boat is armed with an RWS (Remote Weapons System) using a 12.7mm machine-gun plus two or more smaller (7.62mm) machine-guns that can be outed elsewhere on the boat and operated by one of the ten sailors on board. There is also seating below deck for up to twenty troops. India has smaller boats patrolling it portion of the 4,200-meter high lake, except for the few months when the entire lake is frozen over.
In the last decade China has been building roads into remote and formerly inaccessible (via vehicle) portions of the lake coastline. China has built some of these roads into areas claimed by India but not regularly patrolled because special mountain troops must be employed to get into these areas without coming in by boat or on foot over the ice.
India admits that the Chinese aggression along its northern border is active again and the Chinese are now actually taking control of Indian territory and apparently plan to continue doing so. Despite Indian nuclear weapons China believes it can get away with gradually gaining control over more than 100,000 square kilometers of Indian territory it claims. This will be done by grabbing a few square kilometers at a time without triggering a nuclear exchange. Fortune favors the bold, even in slow motion.
The dead were allegedly members of the Tropa del Infierno, or Hell’s Army, the armed wing of the Northeast Cartel, who attacked soldiers while they were patrolling the highway to the airport. No military personnel were reported injured in the shoot-out.
Investigators at the scene recovered two of the squad’s vehicles that were reported stolen in the United States, as well as 12 guns including two Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles and eight AR-15s.
The Northeast Cartel, a faction of Los Zetas, is headed by Juan Gerardo Treviño Chávez, alias El Huevo. A reward of 2 million pesos (US $89,000) has been offered for information leading to his arrest. Treviño is the nephew of the former leader of Los Zetas who was arrested in Houston in 2016.
Nuevo Laredo, which is right across the Mexican border from Texas, was also the scene of two previous massive cartel shootouts, in 2012 and 2018.
Her business, first and foremost, was keeping Jeffrey Epstein happy. He shared much with her father: a humble origin, a vast fortune derived by mysterious means, even rumors of ties to the Mossad and other intelligence agencies. Like Robert Maxwell, Epstein also attached himself to a woman of higher status. In those days, Manhattan was party central, a place where connections were made at night, person to person. “Ghislaine was at the epicenter of all that,” says Euan Rellie, a British investment banker who knew Maxwell in both London and New York. “She befriended everybody and had a massive Rolodex of influential people.”
Those connections proved pivotal to Epstein. “I always say that Ghislaine helped Jeffrey become who he became,” says one of Epstein’s victims. “He had the money, but he didn’t know what to do with it. She showed him.” Epstein built a 21,000-square-foot mansion on a 10,000-acre ranch in New Mexico, which he boasted made his New York town house “look like a shack,” and named it the Zorro Ranch. He also acquired a 72-acre island in the Virgin Islands and an 8,600-square-foot home in Paris, which is said to have featured a specially built massage room. Maxwell is said to have shared Epstein’s bed in each of the residences, as his girlfriend, before moving on to become his “best friend,” as he called her in Vanity Fair. (“When a relationship is over, the girlfriend ‘moves up, not down’ to friendship status.”)
Maxwell soon had a bed of her own in a five-story town house on the Upper East Side, tended by a live-in couple who served as her housekeeper and driver, two secretaries (one for her and a second for Jeffrey), and an immense budget for the six properties she was managing for Epstein. She had found a path back to the lifestyle she’d lost when her father died. “She was used to living very well,” says a friend who knew her then. “She didn’t want to go back to where she was.”
She wore a large diamond ring Epstein had given her, which she called her engagement ring, according to one of Epstein’s victims. “She would say things like she was the only one who Jeffrey slept with,” the woman says. “I know that she would have died to marry him. She would have done anything for him. He trumped everybody and everything.”
There is, of course, a big difference in saying you believe black lives matter versus saying you agree with the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a very important, key distinction to make in this debate. Unfortunately, “woke” reporters here in the U.S. often deliberately blur the lines by conflating the two as if they mean the same thing, so they can play the exact type of word games they did with [White House press secretary Kayleigh] McEnany over Trump’s tweets.
Across the pond in the UK, however, there’s been an unexpected development on this front. Unlike the mainstream media here that routinely fails to make the distinction between saying “black lives matter” (blm) versus saying you support Black Lives Matter (BLM), a growing number of media outlets there have started distancing themselves from the political group because of their calls to defund the police and after a series of anti-Israel, anti-Semitical tweets posted by BLM-UK were recently posted.
Is it too much to ask for our own MSM to start waking up as well?
Cancel cultures comes for Steven Pinker. “This transparently idiotic diatribe, previously dissected by folks such as Jerry Coyne and Barbara Partee — the latter of whom notes Pinker’s role in recruiting female and minority linguists to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — can’t possibly succeed. Can it?” I wouldn’t want to bet money on that proposition. Reason and logic play no role in cancel culture.
On the other hand, Kurt Schlichter sees an opportunity to kill off academia as we know it. “Academia today is a pack of rabid reds, and we need to put it down like Old Yeller. And academia itself has loaded up the 12 gauge.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
I think I have successfully blocked enough #MAGAts for this to work now. Take this seriously, it's going to be used as part of my champaign advertisement. Thank you.
I would, first, urge future generations of Europeans to remember my generation as we really were, not as they may wish us to have been. We had all the same vices and weaknesses as today’s young people do: most of us were neither heroes nor monsters.
Snip.
Second, just as there is no such thing as a “heroic generation”, there is no such thing as a “heroic nation” – or indeed an inherently malign or evil nation either.
Snip.
Third, do not underestimate the destructive power of lies. When the war broke out in 1939, my family fled east and settled for a couple of years in Soviet-occupied Lwów (now Lviv in western Ukraine). The city was full of refugees, and rumours were swirling about mass deportations to gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan. To calm the situation, a Soviet official gave a speech declaring that the rumours were false – nowadays they would be called “fake news” – and that anyone spreading them would be arrested. Two days later, the deportations to the gulags began, with thousands sent to their deaths.
Those people and millions of others, including my immediate family, were killed by lies. My country and much of the continent was destroyed by lies. And now lies threaten not only the memory of those times, but also the achievements that have been made since. Today’s generation doesn’t have the luxury of being able to argue that it was never warned or did not understand the consequences of where lies will take you.
Confronting lies sometimes means confronting difficult truths about one’s self and one’s own country. It is much easier to forgive yourself and condemn another, than the other way round.
Couple plot to ambush the wife’s ex-husband and new wife, drive from North Carolina to Ohio to murder them. Big mistake:
According to the transcript of his Feb. 12 interview with sheriff’s deputies, Lindsey said he owns a gun, but had left it in the house earlier, and so he asked Molly if her gun was in the car. Both Duncans have Ohio conceal carry permits, which they told investigators they had obtained out of fear that Cheryl Sanders wanted to do them harm. They obtained the permits when they moved about four years ago to the area, where Molly has family nearby.
With Molly’s gun in hand, Lindsey said he exchanged fire with the man later identified as Reed Sanders. Lindsey said his ex-wife then pulled up in a vehicle, got out and also threatened them with a gun before being shot by Duncan.
The Greene County coroner said in February that the apparent cause of death for the Sanderses was multiple gunshot wounds. Investigators reported finding three weapons at the scene and multiple shell casings. The Duncans were not physically hurt in the altercation.
The ambush took place in February, but due to coronavirus-related court closures, the grand jury didn’t no-bill them until recently.
Job numbers boom! Ghislaine Maxwell captured! CHOP chopped! It’s your Friday before Independence Day LinkSwarm!
4.8 million jobs added in June, blowing away all estimates. This is what keeps Democratic strategists up at night: Between lockdowns and riots, they’ve done everything they can to kill the Trump economy, and the Trump economy refuses to die.
Hillary Clinton today after hearing of the news that Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, there is a reason Epsteined is trending right now. pic.twitter.com/SrGorHPigu
Speaking of the intelligence community, here’s why that Russian bounty story was crap. And all your liberal Facebook friends shared it because they don’t care whether a story is true or not, as long as it hurts Trump. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
It is not transcendentally stupid for the alleged anti-racism rioters to destroy a Lincoln statue, though, to normal people, it looks like the act of drooling morons. Now, a good number of these cesspeople are drooling morons, but that does not change the fact that trashing POTUS #16’s statuary is brilliant.
They have confused their targets – us – by casting off the constraints of coherence.
Oh wait, you thought that these folks were trying to make a point about racism being bad. And you thought, because that’s how those of us who weren’t raised on Instatwitbook, soy, and critical race theory, that if you point out that something is unreasonable then that will cause the person you were instructing to rethink it. After all, trashing some Honest Abe totem in order to illustrate how racism is double-plus-ungood is about a “12” on the 1-10 scale of unreasonability. And yet, you can point that out all day and they don’t care.
In fact, they laugh at you for doing so.
It’s not about making sense. It never was. It’s about making you kneel.
If you look at everything that is going on, the one common denominator is that every action the woke insurgents take is designed to strip you of your ability to defend your interests, or property, or rights, or life. The idea is to leave you utterly vulnerable, totally exposed, at which point they can do with you as they see fit. The nicer ones will merely reeducate you then demand humiliating submission and tribute. History (and their social media feed) teach that others will happily murder you. Doubt me? Just ask your local kulak.
Stripping you of defenses takes many forms. One form is defunding and abolishing the police. Oh, someone will be wielding force in society. It just won’t be people accountable to or inclined to protect you. Another form is literally stripping you of your defenses. Why is gun control such a fetish for these creeps? Because you with a gun have the ability to not just say “no” but to exact a price from those who wish to compel a “yes.” So, of course, they want to eliminate your ability to have weapons, but they also want to eliminate, as a practical matter, your ability to use them to protect yourself.
Look at what happened when the pink polo shirt gun guy quite reasonably grabbed his AR-15 as the savages descended on his property and the cops were AWOL. St. Louis’s Soros-bought DA – who last month released all the arrested rioters – threatened to prosecute him. The media is slandering him too. A pack of jackals threatened his property, his family, and even his dog, and he’s the bad guy for not showing his belly? You see the same fake furor every time some citizen has his car surrounded by a feeding frenzy of scumbags and plows through them to escape. Ignore that the slime are now shooting people they try to trap. The idea is to make you give up instead of fight back because if you fight back, the law comes down on you instead of the criminals.
Soros really is a shrewd investor.
The law – and the law generally says you can reasonably defend your life and property (please consult your local laws for specifics and get proper training) – means nothing if corrupt Democrats ignore the crimes of leftists and prosecute normals who dare resist the Blue Terror, which is kind of the point. You thought you could rely on the law and on the government to protect you. Nope. And now you can’t protect yourself either.
And then there’s reason. That’s a defense too. You can use reason, make arguments, present evidence, and convince people. Not if making sense is beside the point.
You cannot reason with these people. Forget trying to convince them. You are not going to talk them out of their quest for power over you by deploying bourgeois conceits like “facts” and “evidence.” Yet so many of us see what’s happening and still take to Twitter or (increasingly) Parler to point out the sheer ridiculousness of the enemy’s latest antics. But these actions are not ridiculous. They are tactically genius. Instead of confronting an impenetrable defense, they just scuttle around it and attack into our rear.
Forget the bizarre and evil concept of national original sin that is the malignant idea that America is built upon “systemic racism.” America’s true systemic flaw, arising at the time of those miserable progressives of yesteryear and continuing up through the miserable progressives of this rotten year, is what we now call “liberalism.”
Oh, it’s not classical liberalism, with its concern for expanding economic and personal rights – you know, individual liberty. The current inverted mutation of liberalism is all about constricting economic and personal rights and forcing individuals into collective boxes where their individuality is subsumed into an easily exploited and manipulated conformist whole. Want to test out this hypothesis? Look through the endless woke tweets of your favorite hack journalist, pinko pol, or Hollywood half-wit, or even go up to some self-described liberal in your own life, and see if you can find one iota of deviation from any of the approved liberal dogma. Good luck. You won’t find a smidgeon of nonconformity. You won’t detect a molecule of dissent. These people are the Borg, if the Borg worked in a giant space coffee house, had Bernie stickers on their spaceships, and could not do a push-up. You can’t reason with them – appealing to reason is futile.
Systemic liberalism is the real poison in America’s veins, not the fanciful notion pushed by bigots, charlatans, and demagogues, that the American enterprise is dedicated to invidious discrimination on the basis of race.
Left-wing activist and former Bernie Sanders surrogate Shaun King is among the most visible faces of the Black Lives Matter movement. The former Daily Kos blogger is also one of its prominent fundraisers: In 2017, King founded a political action committee—the Real Justice PAC—with an eye toward driving criminal-justice reform across the country using the same mass mobilization techniques employed by the Sanders campaign.
But over the past 15 months, the Real Justice PAC, staffed by a number of left-wing activists, has funneled a quarter of the money it has brought in back to companies linked to PAC leaders.
Since January of 2019, the PAC has cut dozens of checks totaling more than $460,000 to three political consultancy firms linked to PAC employees. The PAC’s data strategist, Jin Ding, and its treasurer, Becky Bond, manage two of them: Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC. The third—Middle Seat Consulting—was cofounded by one of the PAC’s original leaders, Hector Sigala.
“There are legal and ethical ways to have people in leadership positions at an organization also serve as vendors to the same organization,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, a money-in-politics watchdog, told the Washington Free Beacon. “But these relationships properly raise questions, especially for a group whose leaders include someone like Shaun King, who has repeatedly been accused of enriching himself improperly.”
“For 501(c)(3) charities, the IRS actually prohibits what’s called ‘private inurement’ or excessive benefit to an individual from the organization’s coffers,” Walter said. “Real Justice PAC isn’t a nonprofit overseen by the IRS but a PAC overseen by the Federal Election Commission, which so far as I know doesn’t have such a strict regulation. Still, groups like Real Justice that routinely criticize their opponents for things like ‘dark money’ influence—should be prepared to defend practices that let leaders write checks to their own for-profit consultancies.”
Ding, the PAC’s technology strategist, is registered as the manager for the California-based Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC in the firms’ state filings. Social Practice received nearly $250,000 from Real Justice PAC this cycle for campaign consulting and digital services. Bernal Alto, which dissolved earlier this year, was paid $20,000 for consulting and organizing services. Bond, a cofounder of the PAC and former senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, is also listed as a manager for both companies. Progressive digital firm Middle Seat Consulting, which was cofounded by Sigala, received $193,000 from the PAC for advertising services.
Seattle’s lawless CHAZ/CHOP zone finally demolished not due to all the murders, but because the scumbag protestors approached the mayor’s house. We can’t have the rabble bothering the more equal pigs!
Slowly but surely, all the Social Justice rioters are being brought to actual justice: 44 scumbags arrested in Scottsdale.
The antifa ringleader of the attempt to pull over the Andrew jackson statue was also arrested. “Jason Charter was arrested at his home by the FBI and U.S. Park Police on Thursday morning and charged with destruction of federal property.”
Our ruling class: “Peter Newell was the former co-ordinator of the Association for the Protection of All Children charity. The 77-year-old from Wood Green, north London, was sentenced last month at Blackfriars Crown Court. He admitted five indecent and serious sexual assaults on a child under 16.”
Wary of closer Indo-American ties, the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece Global Times news outlet published editorials cautioning India from involving itself in U.S.-China tensions and serving as an American pawn against China. Picking up on this notion, Brookings scholar Tanvi Madan believes closer India-U.S. ties triggered the border standoff, with Beijing intending to show India its rightful place.
Instead, China’s deadly actions might have achieved exactly the opposite—cementing New Delhi’s strategic tilt towards Washington.
Hey @tiktok_us, why do you paste from my clipboard every time I type a LETTER in your comment box? Shout out to iOS 14 for shining a light on this HUGE invasion of privacy. inb4 they say it was a "bug" pic.twitter.com/MHv10PmzZS
And it’s not just Tik-Tok! “Other news apps caught red-handed: ABC News, Al Jazeera English, CBC News, CBS News, CNBC, Fox News, News Break, NPR, ntv Nachrichten, Reuters, Russia Today, Stern Nachrichten, The Economist, and Vice News.”
“Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows.” Absent other corroborative samples from that timeframe, I would guess it’s a case of sample contamination or a false positive. Still: a data point.
She seems nice: “Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead essayist on New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, wrote a letter to the editor in Notre Dame’s The Observer stating that ‘the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.'” (Hat tip: Sean Davis.)
Theoretical phsyicist Dr. Stephen Hsu forced to resign VP position after bogus accusations of sexism and racism:
“The attacks attempt to depict me as a racist and sexist, using short video clips out of context, and also by misrepresenting the content of some of my blog posts. A cursory inspection reveals bad faith in their presentation,” Hsu posted on June 12. “The accusations are entirely false — I am neither racist or sexist.”
“The Twitter mobs want to suppress scientific work that they find objectionable. What is really at stake: academic freedom, open discussion of important ideas, scientific inquiry. All are imperiled and all must be defended.”
Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) and the first black billionaire, mocked Cancel Culture and the “borderline anarchists” who topple statues and monuments, claiming that black people “laugh” at the white people engaging in such violence. Even when white liberals topple a Confederate statue, Johnson insisted, “black people don’t give a damn.”
“Look, the people who are basically tearing down statues, trying to make a statement are basically borderline anarchists, the way I look at it,” Johnson told Fox News on Wednesday. “They really have no agenda other than the idea we’re going to topple a statue.”
The first black billionaire, who has called for $14 trillion in reparations payments to descendants of slavery, argued that vandalism and attacks on statues do not help the black community.
“It’s not going to give a kid whose parents can’t afford college money to go to college. It’s not going to close the labor gap between what white workers are paid and what black workers are paid. And it’s not going to take people off welfare or food stamps,” Johnson insisted.
He insisted that the rioters tearing down statues “have the mistaken assumption that black people are sitting around cheering for them saying, ‘Oh, my God, look at these white people. They’re doing something so important to us. They’re taking down the statue of a Civil War general who fought for the South.’”
“You know, black people, in my opinion, black people laugh at white people who do this the same way we laugh at white people who say we got to take off the TV shows,” Johnson added. He said these attempts to purge American culture of supposedly offensive monuments and media are “tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on a racial Titanic.”
“It absolutely means nothing,” the BET founder insisted.
“White Americans seem to think that if they just do sort of emotionally or drastic things that black people are going to say, ‘Oh my God, white people love us because they took down a statue of Stonewall Jackson.’ Frankly, black people don’t give a damn,” he quipped.
Know who else isn’t impressed with Social Justice Warriors? Muhammad Ali’s son.
“Don’t bust up s**t, don’t trash the place,” Ali Jr. told the Post. “You can peacefully protest. My father would have said, ‘They ain’t nothing but devils.’ My father said, ‘all lives matter.'”
With regard to the Black Lives Matter movement specifically, Ali Jr. said he believes BLM is “racist” — and his father would have, too.
“I think it’s racist,” he said. “It’s not just black lives matter, white lives matter, Chinese lives matter, all lives matter, everybody’s life matters. God loves everyone — he never singled anyone out. Killing is wrong no matter who it is.”
“It’s pitting black people against everyone else. It starts racial things to happen; I hate that,” he added of the BLM movement.
Communist China has decided it must crush Hong Kong because it knows the city presents an information-streaming ethnic, geographic, political and ideological alternative to the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian police state.
The CCP police state promises China’s citizens prosperity’s material goodies — cellphones, electric cars — in exchange for silently accepting communist dictates no matter how harsh and malign. Hong Kong, however, is not a promise. It is an existing democratic example of 21st-century Chinese prosperity.
Why add “information streaming”? Despite the best efforts of the CCP’s censors, cyberbullies, digital surveillance brigades and police threats, what happens in Hong Kong doesn’t stay in Hong Kong. Information about Hong Kong’s political, economic, social and cultural vitality manages to spread throughout mainland China.
The Chinese people also know Beijing lied about the COVID-19/Wuhan virus. The virus originated in China. Only former Obama administration media flacks argue otherwise. The CCP may have tried, but it failed to control human-to-human stories of mourning families. In February and March, the Chinese people knew why demand for funeral urns had spiked in the Hubei province.
The preceding four paragraphs sketch the domestic political threat the CCP confronts. Tiananmen Square proves the CCP sees this threat as a war.
The CCP cannot answer this question: How long can the prosperous tyranny continue to survive trading smartphones and quality American pork for political subservience by the roughly 400 million people in China’s quasi-middle class?
Snip.
Recent economic news suggests China is teetering. A China-EU investment and trade deal has snagged. Bloomberg reported defaults “in all sectors” of China’s offshore bond market have exceeded $4 billion, double that during the same period of 2019. First-quarter 2020 percentage profits, capital expenditures and retail sales may be the lowest since the 1990s.
Big Picture: The goodie-producing economic engine that braces the CCP’s domestic political strategy needs international markets. China’s domestic economy can’t sustain it.
CCP international aggression magnifies the vulnerabilities. Recent vile aggression abounds.
States with the least restrictions on their citizens’ movements and businesses due to the CCP Virus pandemic have the lowest death rates on average from the disease that prompted a national lockdown beginning in mid-March, according to a new study.
Conversely, the most restrictive states show higher death rates on average from the disease known as COVID-19 caused by the CCP virus and originating in late 2019 in China.
You know all that “Wuhan Coronavirus is overwhelming Houston hospitals!” panic? Yeah, not so much. (Hat tip: Aaron Glenn.)
More on the subject:
Here's what's going on with plenty of availability of general beds, too.#Texas has 2nd most recoveries in nation & 2nd lowest case fatality rate. @DavidBalatHC#Texas is responsibly phasing out shutdown, but some are spreading fear & wanting people locked down. #txlegepic.twitter.com/VeuSm3fM3W
Tesla is said to be in negotiation with Travis County, Texas, home to the state capital, Austin, for property tax abatements on what is said to be up to a $25 billion investment bringing up to 30,000 jobs to the region. Since Texas collects most of its taxes through property taxes, abatements are often offered as an incentive for industry to locate in the state and can be worth millions.
The proposed Tesla gigafactory in Austin would build the company’s new Cybertruck electric pickup and serve as a second site to build the Model Y SUV.
I’d never heard of Wirecard before last week, but evidently CEO Markus Braun resigned over some massive financial shenanigans that involved missing billions.
A few writers you’ve never heard of: “How dare J. K. Rowling question the sacred trans movement by saying there are two sexes! You must drop her immediately and send your staff for ‘reeducation!'” Literary agency: “Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! That’s funny! There’s the door!”
So what did it take to turn spineless lefty Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler into a law-and-order guy? Trying to create an “autonomous zone” on his own street. “By 1 a.m., elaborate barricades had been erected. But in the early hours of Thursday morning, police moved into the area, declaring it an unlawful assembly. Portland Police estimated about 50 people were in the area when they dispersed the autonomous zone.”
It’s certainly frustrating to watch a pack of reeking leftist scumbags declare a portion of an American city an “autonomous zone” – what is it with Democrats and their secession fetish? – but do not get frustrated because Donald Trump has not sent the 101st Airborne in to powerwash the human grunge from Seattle’s feces-bedecked streets.
That’s what the Democrats want. And Trump – a better strategic thinker than all the media geniuses, hack politicians, and Afghan War-losing generals who cry about him – is not only not going to give them the victory they crave. He’s going to jam their cheesy plan down their throats.
The libs’ plan to win in November corresponds to Trump’s plan to crush them yet again. Skeptical? Consider this. In the five years since he rode down that escalator bringin’ hell with him, how many times have they come at Trump and won? Zero. He’s spent half a decade on the edge of doom and he’s still here. Why would you think that the walls are suddenly closing in now? You shouldn’t.
Let’s understand the strategic scenario. The long-term strategic objective of the leftists is to turn the United States into Venezuela, and they want to be Maduro. The major strategic objective that will put them in position to do so is victory in the November elections. Everything happening right now is part of their overall strategy to achieve that objective. But what kind of operation are they using to achieve that objective? There are two types of operations relevant here – kinetic and information. A kinetic operation is actual warfare. It’s violence designed to defeat the enemy and cause his surrender by either physically destroying him or occupying his territory and compelling surrender. An information operation is designed to affect the perceptions, and thereby the actions, of the target. Kinetic ops tend to do something to the enemy; and info op tends to get the target to do something to himself.
Elections are usually information operations. They attempt to build a narrative and play on perceptions and cause the target to take the action that will lead to victory. That is, get the target (the electorate) vote for the candidate the info operator wants elected.
Okay, so what is the 2020 elections, with the rioting, vandalism, violence and occupations?
This still an information operation, not a kinetic one.
They want to convince us we are powerless, that everyone else supports their commie agenda, that we cannot win. Their tactics are designed to create that impression and crush our morale. These include the 24/7 media hype, the outright media lies, the movie stars with their dumb PSAs, the staged statue attacks, the corporate solidarity proclamations, the social media cancellations, and the craven kneeling by people who are supposed to stand up for us. But another tactic, familiar to any student of insurgencies, is to provoke an overreaction by those in power in order to undermine its moral authority. They want is to make us (including the president) think this is a kinetic operation, and get our side to make fundamental strategic errors by failing to recognize the true nature of the threat. They hope that such a mismatch between perception and reality will then lead to gravely damaging blunders. One of those would be Trump succumbing to his legit frustration and sending in a bunch of federal troops to crack skulls in Seattle.
Defining this insurgency as a kinetic operation supports the leftists’ information operation goal of making Americans perceive the situation as out of control, of there being chaos, and of making the election of Grandpa Badfinger being the only thing that will resolve the situation. But there is no kinetic situation to resolve – at least none that is strategically significant in a kinetic sense. Despite the hype, the protests may have involved a peak of 2 million people across the country – out of 330 million. That’s nothing kinetically; it’s significant informationally because it is pushed by so many cultural influencers. The scurvy scumbags of Antifa hold essentially no ground except the turf they are physically standing on at the moment, and that is minuscule. Even the hilarious Road Warrior Republic of Seattle is not even a rounding error of a rounding error in terms of US territory. It’s significant only in the context of an information operation.
Many of us cons are furious that Trump is “doing nothing.” This is the wrong thing to think. Trump is only doing nothing if this is a kinetic operation; because this is an information operation, not going kinetic (sending in the troops) is doing something. And in fact, Trump is employing the law enforcement component of his kinetic assets by having the feds wait and arrest Antifa types after the protests end, and hitting them with hardcore federal rioting-related charges. Previously, they would get ticketed and released; now, looking at a five-to-ten stretch, the lawyers their daddies hired to get these sunshine anarchists out of their beefs are going to be advising them to roll over so they can start back up at Cornell in September and not at Leavenworth.
Who benefits then from our national nervous breakdown that never seems to end?
It is the globalist elites who still govern most of our society today, despite the invasion of Donald Trump.
And those elites wish to continue that rule through what they fervently hope will come as the outcome of these demonstrations—more government control, particularly government control that helps them.
They have seen it done elsewhere with results they might want to emulate, at least until recently.
Call it China Envy.
The Chinese Communist Party has, over the years, found a way to regulate their society to an extraordinary degree via a form of communism that maximizes profits and power for those (party) elites while holding the masses largely at bay.
No wonder our elites are jealous.
People call ours “globalists” but they’re not really global. They’re selectively global, but actually just greedy and power-hungry, like the ChiComs.
Whether planned or not, or partially planned, the current confluence of catastrophes has offered them an opportunity to advance their cause against their natural adversary, Mr. Trump.
In macro, that is the landscape of election 2020—the globalist elites represented, for the moment anyway, by Joe Biden versus the American people, represented by Donald Trump.
Many of those American people, heavily influenced by the media and repelled by the president’s rhetoric, do not realize that he is representing them, but he is. Ignorant, often willfully, they oppose him tooth and nail.
An equal number, or possibly larger, as the one million plus requesting tickets to his Tulsa rally indicates, supports Mr. Trump.
We are in the midst of a Battle Royale for the soul of our nation, whether it remains more or less the democratic republic the Founders envisioned or becomes an Americanized version of what has been evolved by the CCP.
If the latter, ironically, then such groups as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa will be kicked to the curb once victory has been achieved and secured.
It’s always the same thing: Our newspapers are full of intense interest in Harvard’s admissions standards but have very little to say about New York City’s dropout rate. People can’t help being fascinated with themselves and their peers. If you want to know what is on the minds of the leaders of the American ruling class, it’s no secret. They’ll tell you, if you ask — and if you don’t.
George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.
Oh, but they got James Bennet, the opinion editor at the New York Times. And surely that is something? It is, indeed, a very useful illustration of the E-Class vs. S-Class divide. Bennet was fired after purportedly endangering the lives of black Times staffers — a charge no mentally normal adult actually takes seriously — by publishing a guest column about the riots and the Insurrection Act by Senator Tom Cotton. The campaign to end Bennet did not come from America’s poor black communities as the workers of the world looked up, stunned, from page A24 of the New York Times — the venom came straight and undiluted from 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y., with Bennet’s underlings and juniors more or less putting him on an ice floe and pushing him out to sea.
Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants. (“The real price of inexpensive menu items,” the Pulitzer people summarized.) Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. Big Caitlyn is getting paid. Affluent white women are the main E-Class beneficiaries of the current headhunting project to clear a little room at the top, just as they have historically been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs, contracting set-asides, and other programs to help out the poor disenfranchised Georgetown alumni out there in the cold and dark.
“Police, Fire Reportedly Refused to Respond to Crime in Progress in Seattle’s Breakaway CHOP.” “This is where ‘defund the police’ will lead not just in Seattle, but wherever it’s thoughtlessly implemented. Probably not all the way to the segregationist, secessionist CHOP, but to crime-ridden streets into which police and fire are more circumspect about intervening.”
these riots and their associated melodrama might most accurately be called the Nov. 3 riots. It’s the prospect of the election, especially the possibility that President Donald Trump will be reelected, which provides the fuel for the current hysteria.
But Simon is right. A solid majority of voters are disgusted by what they see. There is a large overdraft on the country’s budget of white guilt. Expect a foreclosure on the account Nov. 3. Yes, yes, the situation is fluid and a week, as Harold Wilson once observed, is a long time in politics. But a biopsy of the body politic in mid-June 2020 doesn’t bode well for the old man in the basement or scriptwriters Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
The longer this madness continues, the more likely it is that the president will enjoy a victory of historic proportions.
Another caveat about all those “Oh my God, Wuhan coronavirus cases are spiking in Florida,” etc. stories, take a look at these statistics. Assuming they’re accurate (a big assumption), new cases are going up (not spiking per se), but deaths are going down. It really looks like cases aren’t spiking, we’re just detecting milder and milder cases of it thanks to widespread testing.
Instead of #BlackLivesMatters, how about actually defending black lives? “National African American Gun Association (NAAGA) Membership Grows as Members Purchase Ammo in Record Numbers.” Good. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
Good news in a sea of bad: Austin Police Chief Brian Manley is not getting the axe. Finally, a scalp the radical left didn’t take.
Antifa members arrested in Austin for looting. “Lisa Hogan, Samuel Miller, and Skye Elder were arrested last week and charged with various state jail felonies after they smashed into a boarded-up Target, destroyed and ripped out surveillance cameras, and looted the store, stealing and damaging over $20,000 in property.” The mugshot:
Exactly the sort of Antifa winners you would expect to loot a Target
Chuck-E-Cheese files for bankruptcy. When they had to make it on the quality of their food, they were doomed…
Also filing for bankruptcy: 24 Hour Fitness. Hard to make a living when the government outlaws your business model. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Rocket fuel storage facility explosion in #China, the air catches fire before the explosion, the orange smoke is a clear indication of rocket fuel. The Shockwave shatters the glass of the nearby textile mill. You will not find this story on Chinese "news"
Well, not all of them. No blog is big enough for all China’s lies. But here’s an update on the lies being told, and crimes being committed, by China’s ruling Communist Party.
There are plenty of direct ways the new national security law could backfire on economic freedom in Hong Kong.
For example, it criminalizes “foreign interference” without specifying who the measure targets or where the boundaries lie. Might a Goldman Sachs report out of Hong Kong questioning China’s gross domestic product data put its business charter at risk? What about Nomura Holdings downgrading a key China Inc. company?
International news organizations might feel paranoid about reporting on fraud at Hong Hong-listed companies or China corralling more than 1 million ethnic minority residents in Xinjiang province into “indoctrination camps.” It is hard to see how short sellers like Muddy Waters Research maintain Hong Kong offices when they spotlight alleged fraud at mainland companies, most recently Nasdaq-listed Luckin Coffee.
The extradition bill that helped fuel the 2019 protests, which allowed people to be moved from Hong Kong to the mainland, could return, perhaps imposed by fiat from Beijing. What multinational corporate board or startup team eying an IPO wants to have that worry in the backs of their minds? Or the specter of the Chinese Communist Party remaking Hong Kong’s judiciary and banking system in its image?
The more Xi damages China’s liberal financial zone, the more the foreign companies generating millions of jobs in Hong Kong will question why they should stay.
The Trump administration said it could no longer certify Hong Kong’s political autonomy from China, a move that could trigger sanctions and have far-reaching consequences on the former British colony’s special trading status with the U.S.
Secretary of State Michael Pompeo announced the decision Wednesday, a week after the government in Beijing declared its intention to pass a national security law curtailing the rights and freedoms of Hong Kong citizens.
“Hong Kong does not continue to warrant treatment under United States laws in the same manner as U.S. laws were applied to Hong Kong before July 1997,” Pompeo said in a statement. “No reasonable person can assert today that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy from China, given facts on the ground.”
Snip.
A finding on Hong Kong’s autonomy was compelled by last year’s Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. The law signed by Trump requires such a certification each year.
Pompeo’s decision opens the door for a range of options, from visa restrictions and asset freezes for top officials to possibly imposing tariffs on goods coming from the former colony.
“The United States stands with the people of Hong Kong as they struggle against the CCP’s increasing denial of the autonomy that they were promised,” Pompeo said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
As with Berlin, how the U.S., Western Europe and, more importantly, the key nations in the Indo-Pacific region react to the events in Hong Kong will end up determining the geopolitical course of this century.
That Hong Kong is no more is a fact. The form of Hong Kong, with its culture forged by the productive union of British rule of law and individual rights with Chinese entrepreneurship and diligence, may last another year or two. But the idea of Hong Kong is dead, killed by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) insatiable quest for total control.
The proximate cause of Hong Kong’s demise is the CCP’s demand to use extrajudicial kidnappings, torture and executions to terrorize its 7.5 million people into submission—in short, to rule Hong Kong as it rules Turkestan (Xinjiang), Tibet and, someday soon it hopes, Taiwan.
The people of Hong Kong saw this day coming, but they were powerless to stop it. Hong Kong’s Basic Law agreement, the contract acknowledging Hong Kongese’ human rights, was always subject to termination whenever the CCP felt powerful enough to do so. It is, as with any agreement the CCP signs, worthless.
In the meantime, China’s communist leaders ramp up their paranoid rantings, claiming foreign “black hands” are behind the unrest in Hong Kong. Concurrently, China’s propaganda mouthpieces continue to press the absurd notion that America started the coronavirus pandemic.
Thus, crushing Hong Kong’s spirit while murdering a few thousand student democracy activists will only embolden Beijing. How can it be otherwise, as it perceives fewer consequences than the slap on the wrist it received after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989?
The problem with bombastic propagandistic lies is that they are sometimes believed. And the CCP appears predisposed to believing its own lies. To “defend” itself, the CCP may soon order its modernized armed forces into action along the first island chain, from the southern tip of Japan to the coast of Vietnam, with Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines.
The urgent task before our generation is to prevent a monstrous darkness from snuffing out freedom’s flame. We must deter the PRC from expanding its horizon to the first island chain while setting the conditions for victory—removing the CCP, as it exists today, from power. We win, they lose.
This task has already started, when the Trump administration, for the first time since the Reagan-era effort to win the Cold War, declared that the U.S. will engage a “whole-of-government” strategic approach to the challenge presented by the PRC. This approach acknowledges that the CCP doesn’t merely present an economic threat, with its unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft, as well as a military threat—but that it also seeks to supplant our values.
Just this morning Instapundit offered up this flashback to 2018: “As Biden and Kerry Went Soft on China, Sons Made Nuclear, Military Business Deals with Chinese Gov’t.”
Over the past month, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has reportedly moved at least 5,000 troops to the “Line of Actual Control,” which demarcates the border between China and India. The mobilization of troops to the Galwan River valley, on the westernmost border between the two countries, led to a clash on May 5, when Chinese and Indian forces engaged in fisticuffs and stone-throwing. In keeping with Sino–Indian border protocols, both sides were unarmed, but the skirmish — and another in the Naku La region near Tibet on May 12 — left several troops injured.
Though the facts on the ground in the remote Himalayan border region are unclear, satellite imagery of the area confirms a rapid military buildup by Chinese forces since April. India has responded in kind, mobilizing troops and artillery to the area in recent days, according to Bloomberg News. An Indian policy analyst who requested anonymity adds that there is also evidence that the two sides have moved aircraft closer to the region.
The apparent trigger for China’s military buildup is the completion of an Indian road in the Galwan River valley up to the Line of Actual Control, according to Indian national-security analyst Nitin Gokhale. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has long held a superior position in this frontier region, with roads and electricity lines that far surpass those on the Indian side. However, “in the last few years, India has been playing catch-up, and has finally built roads up to the LAC,” according to Dhruva Jaishankar, the director of the Observer Research Foundation’s U.S. Initiative. India’s Border Roads Organization, which is currently constructing 61 roads, has now developed the infrastructure to compete with the PLA in the disputed territory. In turn, China has attempted to preserve its advantage by pushing back Indian development, leading to intermittent confrontations. Most recently, in 2017, China’s construction of a road through Doklam, near Bhutan, an ally of India, set off two months of brinkmanship, ending with a Chinese retreat but heightening caution on both sides.
The border dispute pertains primarily to two contested territories: the Aksai Chin plateau to the west and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh to the east. Chinese offensives in the two areas ignited the 1962 Sino–Indian War, ending with an informal ceasefire as the two sides agreed to the loosely demarcated Line of Actual Control. To Beijing, the LAC granted territory claimed by Delhi on the western side of the border, which contains a strategically crucial road between Tibet and Xinjiang. In the eastern portion of the LAC, however, the PRC effectively ceded what it calls “South Tibet,” retreating to the McMahon Line, the Tibetan–Indian border drawn by British colonial officials in the early 20th century. But PRC officials still consider the McMahon Line a vestige of imperialism, and continue to lay claim to Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state of 2 million people with strong cultural ties to Tibet.
India PM Narendra Modi doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who willingly backs down…
Speaking of confronting China: “U.S. to Expel Chinese Graduate Students With Ties to China’s Military Schools.” “The Trump administration plans to cancel the visas of thousands of Chinese graduate students and researchers in the United States who have direct ties to universities affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army.”
“Chinese Yuan Suddenly Tumbling.” Wow, it’s almost as if cracking down on Hong Kong has negative repercussions for China’s economy…
YouTube deleting comments with two phrases that insult the Chinese communist party.” Comments left under videos or in live streams that contain the words “共匪” (“communist bandit”) or “五毛” (“50-cent party”) are automatically deleted in around 15 seconds, though their English language translations and Romanized Pinyin equivalents are not.”
Of course: “Twitter Fact Checks President Trump – But Not Communist China.” (Update: Evidently Twitter started to fact-check ChiCom statements literally this morning.)
GQ “reporter” Julia Ioffe seems really unclear on the concept that Pompeo’s declarations triggers sanctions. So naturally she got schooled. And naturally, she deleted her tweet rather than issuing a correction… (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! If you’re reading this, you haven’t died from the Coronavirus yet, despite China’s best efforts! And so many Babylon Bee slams of CNN that I couldn’t just pick one:
This morning’s contarvirus totals:
Total Infected: 9,776 (up from 2116 Sunday)
Total Deaths: 213
Total Recovered: 187
Number of Countries Where Cases Have Been Confirmed (new in bold): 22 (China (including Hong Kong), Thailand, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Macau, South Korea, United States of America, France, Germany, United Areb Emirates, Canada, Italy, Vietnam, Cambodia, Finland, India, Napal, Philippines, Sri Lanka)
Thoughts: If that’s not quite exponential growth it’s a pretty good first cousin. A case in Mumbai is scary. 11 cases in Japan is scary for the opposite reason, in that the Japanese take hygiene very seriously and have been unable to prevent spread there. No confirmed cases in Indonesia, which is probably only a matter of time.
The Cornoavirus is the demon bedeviling Xi Jinping: “Yes, ‘demon’ is a metaphor for a pathogen capable of killing millions. However, it is a demon the dictatorship’s repressive policies animate and tolerate in lieu of free communication.”
2019-nCoV, however, is beyond Xi’s dictatorial control. China’s dictatorship may awe Free World idiots, but it cannot intimidate a pathogen.
The coronavirus and its potential consequences of mass death expose the dictatorship’s brittleness. If you prefer, substitute “incompetence masked by police intimidation and lack of free expression” for “brittleness.”
Brutal authoritarian political control exacts overt and covert systemic costs. Western commentators — The New York Times’ Tom Friedman is a particularly smarmy example — admire authoritarian China’s alleged skill at solving major problems that dithering Western democracies cannot. What really dazzles Friedman and his ilk is the regime’s one-command-solves-it pose. Information control, especially control of dissent, bolsters this fraud.
Since 1980, China has made extraordinary economic progress, but its government’s destructive decisions are telling. The notorious one-child policy produced a demographic devil. What Western admirers touted as a farsighted plan to promote zero population growth killed millions of baby girls, skewed female-male sex ratios and, as of 2010, began creating a worker shortage.
Doctors in China and several Asian countries — the virus is on the verge of savaging Thailand — advocate isolating infected patients. The Great Firewall of China isolates the Chinese people from global information access and sharing. Beijing demands its citizens use state-sponsored social media in lieu of global alternatives. Isolation from information sharing hinders angry citizens from criticizing the communist leaders.
But this system isolates Chinese leaders from bad news — like mass illness — that caring human beings must share….As the party bigwigs dither, a deadly pathogen kills.
It was an example of ‘No Borders’ but not in a good way. The pathogen got on a plane abetted by a delay in acknowledgement. “The Chinese government failed to act quickly enough to curb the spread of the Wuhan virus, risking further outbreaks,” Guan Yi, the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Hong Kong told the Asia Times. The Chinese government’s own data, hosted on Wikipedia, confirms this. It shows how at the beginning the numbers were small, the infection still all in one place. After a week it blew up.
This illustrates how giant totalitarian governments like China’s can be at a disadvantage in dealing with emergent events. What it gains in ruthless response cannot always make up for lost response time caused by the official denial of embarrassing facts. That explains why establishments are often surprised by events like Brexit and Hillary Clinton’s shock loss. They are unexpected because they were not in the 5 year plan. They arrive like a bolt from the blue.
When the unexpected happens the official Narrative often increases the reaction time of the system. While events are slow moving there may be no penalty but in the fast moving global world threats like the coronavirus may hit the public even before institutions admit it exists. The old model of globalization has paradoxically both speeded up the rate at which events occur and slowed the rate at which behemoth transnational institutions can respond.
The result is a mismatch and failure of institutions is the theme which unites Brexit, the US impeachment and the repeated viral threats from China.
Back on January 1st, eight Chinese doctors tried to warn people about a “viral pneumonia” going around. Want to guess what happened? That’s right. They were punished for spreading rumors.
Kurt Schlichter thinks that President Donald Trump needs to get ahead of the coronavirus curve by communicating with the public, lest the impeachment-thwarted Democrats and media (but I repeat myself) make it into his “Katrina.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Meet Dr. Peng Zhou a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Leader of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunization Group. You know, the same institute that posted a “help-wanted” ad to research Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats just before the local coronavirus outbreak there. What are the odds?
Speaking of China, I meant to blog this and forgot until Dwight reminded me: Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, “a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, has not been accused of sharing sensitive information with Chinese officials, but rather of hiding — from Harvard, from the National Institutes of Health and from the Defense Department — the amount of money that Chinese funders were paying him.”
Dr. Lieber was one of three scientists to be charged with crimes on Tuesday.
Zaosong Zheng, a Harvard-affiliated cancer researcher was caught leaving the country with 21 vials of cells stolen from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, according to the authorities. They said he had admitted that he had planned to turbocharge his career by publishing the research in China under his own name. He was charged with smuggling goods from the United States and with making false statements, and was being held without bail in Massachusetts after a judge determined that he was a flight risk. His lawyer has not responded to a request for comment.
The third was Yanqing Ye, who had been conducting research at Boston University’s department of physics, chemistry and biomedical engineering until last spring, when she returned to China. Prosecutors said she hid the fact that she was a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army, and continued to carry out assignments from Chinese military officers while at B.U.
Know how the MSM keeps harping on President Donald Trump’s “unpopularity?” A deep dive into various poll metrics suggests “not so much.”
This is pretty interesting:
BREAKING: Eric Ciaramella,the CIA operative believed to be the "whistleblower," is captured in this 2015 photo taking notes b/t Biden adviser Michael Carpenter & NSC's Liz Zentos in WH meeting w Ukrainian officials.Carpenter later appeared w Biden in infamous "son of a bitch" vid pic.twitter.com/nq4JNgCsJq
63 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Are they all slack-jawed yokels motivated by hostility to geography, and facts? Do they all — or even most — have strong Southern accents? And, irrespective, is a Southern accent a predictor of stupidity? Many of my neighbors have strong southern accents. One of them is a surgeon. Whither nuance?
This particular clip has landed with such a bump because it also serves as an example of how inaccurately mediocrities tend to see themselves. Rick Wilson’s joke was second-rate and obviously pre-written, and yet Don Lemon reacted as if Wilson was Dave Chappelle — even going so far as to say he “needed” it. This behavior is learned. Since Donald Trump was elected, a certain set of political “strategists” — many of whom aren’t actually strategists, Ana Navarro — have come to see CNN as a clearing house for their bad one-liners, each sitting at home preparing zingers that they hope, once delivered, will go viral. This one has gone viral, of course, but for the opposite reason than its architects hoped: Because it is pathetic.
It’s about squishy prosecutors and judges who let repeat offenders walk free. It is about a city council that has designed this because anarchy will allow them to rebuild the city in a socialist image.
Today, a woman is dead and seven others are injured. A 9-year-old remains in the hospital. It is shameful but unfortunately predictable, given who we have running things around here.
Snip.
We do not let the cops do their jobs. The cops know who the gang members and drug dealers are. They also know that if they see a drug transaction and write it up for the prosecutor’s office, it’s going to get kicked because it’s not a serious enough crime. And when prosecutors pursue criminals, judges let them walk free.
The two suspects in this downtown shooting have been arrested 44 times with 20 convictions and 21 times with 15 convictions. Marquise Tolbert, the one with 20 convictions, had three felonies last year alone. You tell me how someone with three felonies in 2019 is walking around free and able to engage in a shootout that kills a woman and injures a bunch of other people, including a 9-year-old kid. Both Tolbert and William Tolliver, the other suspect, are just 24 years old. They both have previously been arrested and charged with drive-by shootings and unlawful possession of a firearm in 2018. So the courts knew full well that these were gun-toting gang members. Why did our justice system let them walk free? Why do we place criminals above law-abiding citizens?
Never Trump Republicans looked even more ridiculous at the end of the March for Life than they did that morning.
Trump was embraced by the largest gathering of pro-life Americans and Trump embraced them. Trump at the March for Life:
Sadly, the far-left is actively working to erase our God-given rights, shut down faith-based charities, ban religious believers from the public square, and silence Americans who believe in the sanctity of life. They are coming after me because I am fighting for you and we are fighting for those who have no voice.
Never Trump Republicans can’t imagine a man like Trump attending the March for Life.
Never Trumpism is built on a foundation of sanctimony.
These sanctimonious few don’t like how Trump speaks. They don’t like his bombast. They don’t like his past. He’s not George Bush.
Get over it. He’s winning.
That he is not George Bush might be Trump’s greatest transgression to Never Trumpers. Much of the hatred is mercenary, as so many have suffered financially from the end of their consultancy gravy train.
But Trump actually attended the March for Life. If you don’t think that matters to the 100,000+ who marched, then you can’t judge prevailing winds.
Snip.
What’s also striking about the Never Trumpers is how their hatred resembles a pathology, like some deep raw childhood memory. Trump is their aunt’s cat who used to viciously scratch them each visit. Trump is the playground bully who threw the football at their face. Trump is the twisted cousin who made you look at his dead animals in jars hidden in the back shed. He’s the bogeyman of their nightmares.
It all wells up in them, decades later, in outbursts, fears, and rage. It’s unhinged.
“Trump Derangement Syndrome is burning out the core audiences that made the media profitable. The Impeachment Eve rallies failed miserably with turnouts in the hundreds in Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. A month later, turnout at the Women’s March had declined from the hundreds of thousands to the thousands. Even as impeachment was underway, the audience wasn’t there.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Chip Roy produce a proposal to fix health care.
James Younger case ends with joint custody and crazy mom not allowed to inflict hormone therapy on her eight-year old.
Border agents find longest smuggling tunnel yet discovered in San Diego, over three-quarters of a mile. “It includes an extensive rail/cart system, forced air ventilation, high voltage electrical cables and panels, an elevator at the tunnel entrance, and a complex drainage system.” (Hat tip: CutJibNews at Ace of Spades HQ.)
IBM replaces longtime CEO Virginia Rometty with Arvind Krishna. Probably a good move. The few people I knew who worked at IBM under her tenure had little good to say about the company, whose longterm trend has been offshoring and outsourcing rather than hiring fulltime U.S. employees. But every group in IBM seems like its own little fiefdom.
Dwight offers a moderately deepish dive into two fraud cases, including a celebrated social scientist and a celebrated organic farmer.
Congrats to Republican Gary Gates for winning the Texas House District 28 special election runoff over Democrat Eliz Markowitz. This is Gates’ first successful race in eight tries, and he supposedly threw a ton of money into it.
Although I know much of the Midwest has already been blessed with several feet of global warming, winter doesn’t officially start until tomorrow. In the meantime, finish up your Christmas shopping (if you haven’t already) and enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm!
Brexit bill passes by huge majority. Britain is set to leave the EU by January 31, 2020. I’m putting this first because Brexit is far more important in the long run than the impeachment farce.
The amazing psychic powers of Instapundit. From 2017: “Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait. They’re taking the bait because they think he’s dumb, and impulsive, and lacking self-control — but he’s the one causing them to act in ways that are dumb and impulsive, and demonstrate lack of self-control.”
But then again, no president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.
Do we remember the effort to subvert the Electoral College to prevent Trump from assuming office?
The first impeachment try during his initial week in office?
Attempts to remove Trump using the ossified Logan Act or the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution?
The idea of declaring Trump unhinged, subject to removal by invoking the 25th Amendment?
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $35 million investigation, which failed to find Trump guilty of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election and failed to find actionable obstruction of justice pertaining to the non-crime of collusion?
The constant endeavors to subpoena Trump’s tax returns and to investigate his family, lawyers and friends?
Now, frustrated Democrats plan to impeach Trump, even as they are scrambling to find the exact reasons why and how.
Most presidents might seem angry after three years of that. Yet in paradoxical fashion, Trump suddenly appears more composed than at any other time in his volatile presidency.
Ironically, Trump’s opponents and enemies are the ones who have become publicly unhinged.
If you want to know how it’s playing out in America, check out this tweet from PolitiBunny, who was so hardcore #NeverTrump she voted for Egg McMuffin in 2016:
No amount of persuasion, begging, or even outright harassment could convince me to vote for Trump in 2016.
Democrats not only made me a Trump voter last night, but I’m officially ready to do what I can to help him get re-elected.
The House passes the USMCA free trade deal, and I expect senate approval to be quick. USMCA will have longer and more lasting consequences than the silly theater the Democrats put on Wednesday.
Of the 65 deadliest cities in America, over 90% have Democratic mayors, and over 70% have not had Republican mayors in a long, long time. The last Republican mayor of New Orleans left office in 1872… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Clearly Greta Thunberg is being exploited by her cynical puppetmasters, but equally clearly she’s a tiresome, bizarre Marxist scold whose exploitation of the hapless dummies who buy into the climate change hoax is part of what is an increasingly violent plot to undermine capitalism and freedom. Recently, the cretins at TIME, which shockingly still exists in 2019, named her “Person of the Year.” That’s appropriate, since 2019 has been a very annoying year.
In 2029, after the world hasn’t ended but her usefulness has, she’ll be a Jeopardy question and probably shacked up with an unemployed performance artist named Björn in an Oslo suburb. Fun fact: “Greta Thunberg” is Swedish for “Cindy Sheenhan.”
But today, we’re all supposed to fall over ourselves over Pippi Longnagging – at least that’s what our betters command – yet it’s unclear why. Teenagers are notoriously ignorant, and ones spewing recycled Marxism are the worst of all. But the idea is not that this tiresome truant is some visionary thinker. The idea is to leverage her youth and awkwardness to keep you from speaking the indisputable truth that she’s a weird brat who presses for an ideology that butchered 100 million people in the last century. And now, she is hinting she wants to run up that score.
Snip.
The other day, this malignant muppet “told cheering protesters … ‘we will make sure we put world leaders against the wall’ if they fail to take urgent action on climate change.” Now, maybe her English is bad, or maybe she’s just ignorant, but then again the murder of opponents is the Marxist way. Marxist? St. Greta? Well, let’s take a look at what was carved on the tablets she recently brought down from Mount Socialism:
“Schoolchildren, young people, and adults all over the world will stand together, demanding that our leaders take action, not because we want them to, but because the science demands it,” she said. “That action must be powerful and wide-ranging. After all, the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all. Our political leaders can no longer shirk their responsibilities.”
Wait, “the science demands” that we “dismantle” all our “[c]olonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression?” Now, what science exactly is that? Is it geology? Physics? Phrenology maybe?
How stupid do they think people are? Very. And to judge by the judges at TIME, they’re often right. Maybe Greta never heard of Siberia or Cambodia, but we have. Screw that – if she wants to impose her masters’ Marxist fantasies on us, she’ll need to be packing something deadlier than “How dare you!”
Muslims across India staged angry protests over new legislation that grants citizenship rights for refugees fleeing Islamist persecution in the neighboring countries.
The Citizenship Amendment Bill, passed by the Lower House of the Indian parliament by 293 to 82 votes, opens the path to naturalization for the followers of six faiths, including Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians, but excludes Muslims.
Muslim mobs took to streets in several Indian cities, setting fire to vehicles, throwing stones, and hurling home-made bombs at security forces called in to restore order, Indian newspapers report. Left-wing student groups joined the protesters. They blockaded campuses in India’s capital New Delhi.
On the one hand, 95% of the time it is in fact Muslims who are persecuting the members of other religions. On the other, the trend in India under Modi has been toward a Hindu religious-ethno state, and things there could turn very bad, very quickly for the Muslim minority there. Muslims constitute only 14% or so of India’s population, but 14% of 1.3 billion is still some 182 million people. And by “very bad” I mean “possibly Rwanda-level bad,” only at 10 times the scale…
“Poland may have to leave EU, Supreme Court warns.” Hey, I bet I know at least a couple of countries who would be happy to sign free trade deals if they did…
I do not think it is a secret that Vox Media’s employment model has long been unsustainable. They use “contractor” designations to avoid all sorts of labor laws, including providing minimum wage and benefits — and they well exceed the intended use of “contractor.” I’ve published 1,304 articles in 8 years at Clips Nation. That’s not contract work. When I am on the site every day and have day-to-day oversight from corporate, that’s not contract work. Everyone, including SB Nation, has known that this model is unsustainable. While I won’t publicly disclose the numbers, and SB Nation limits our access to a lot of data, I am certain that Clips Nation generates enough revenue to support multiple employees, even when you account for the money that needs to support other aspects of the site (marketing, software, etc).
The state of California is cracking down on companies like SB Nation who are exploiting the “contractor” loophole, as it well should. Unfortunately, Vox Media is predictably unwilling to cease being greedy. In order to attempt to protect their disproportionate and exploitative revenue share from team sites, Vox has decided to eliminate about 200 of these contractor positions — every contractor in California, including myself, Robert, and our staff writers, editors, and podcasters in paid roles — and replace them with a handful of full-time employees who are going to work as a team to run SB Nation’s 25 team sites in California.
I doubt he knows how profitable Vox is. It’s entirely possible it loses money, like many online “media empires.” But I sincerely doubt Vox held a gun to his head those eight years. If he feels exploited for work he voluntarily agreed to do at the wages offered, he only has himself to blame. This is not to say that Vox doesn’t suck; it does. But this situation sucks not due to Vox, but due to the California state laws of which this freelancer so obviously approves.
Here’s an interview with Burt Ward, Robin on the 1960’s Batman TV show, about some of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Nowadays he and his wife run a dog rescue center, where they’ve eventuality saved the lives of more than 15,000. Good on you, Burt.
