“Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elites Slept,” a new book by U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding (Ret.), confirms this assessment. Spalding served as the chief China strategist for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as senior U.S. Defense official and defense attaché to China in Beijing, and later in the Trump National Security Council (NSC), where he was the chief architect of the NSS’s framework for national competition.
According to Spalding, even organizations that would seem to have a vested interest in exposing China’s malign behavior remain mum. Spalding writes that upon his arrival at NSC:
I made it a personal mission to meet with many leading think tanks, nongovernmental organizations, and law, auditing, and public relations firms that dealt with China. I was eager to seek their help in exposing the Beijing government’s influencing operations and sanctioning of illegal behavior. Additionally, I hoped they would help me explore policy options to counter China’s economic malfeasance.
Time after time, I was rebuffed.
People at these organizations would talk with me, and many of them even said they agreed with my concerns, but they claimed they couldn’t help. Doing so, some of the more forthright people said, might anger their Chinese funders or business accounts. The list of organizations that refused to engage with me publicly in my official capacity was stunning. Top white-shoe New York law firms. Organizations with mandates to promote democracy, freedom, and human rights would refuse to support my mission.
…They were, in essence, being manipulated by a foreign power that is America’s greatest enemy.
The willingness of American organizations to remain silent about Chinese Communist tyranny can be seen against a correlative backdrop of our burgeoning cancel culture, the censorship of Big Tech, and general decline of devotion to First Amendment principles alongside the Long March of political correctness through our institutions.
China is not the cause of the general erosion of American fidelity to free speech, but it is a contributor and one of its chief beneficiaries. As China poses arguably the greatest threat of any foreign actor to our liberties of all, the corruption resulting from our commercial ties is particularly acute.
For President Xi to start a dynasty, his only daughter has to get married. At 27, she is of the age when she should get married. But it can’t be to someone of peasant stock. It has to be to one of China’s princelings — or “Revolutionary Successors,” as they prefer to be known. President Xi has stressed the need for “red genes” in China’s rulers. The problem is that all the princelings are all already very wealthy, so marrying into the Xi family wealth would be of no consequence. China’s princesses do well, too. The Huawei executive arrested in Canada, Meng Wanzhou, has a stepsister, Annabel Yeo, who had her debut into high society at Le Bal des Débutantes in Paris in November 2018.
For a princeling, if you married Xi’s daughter, you would become consort to the empress, but there would be a downside: you would be killed in any palace coup.
If Xi Mingze is at Harvard, that suggests that the project to get her married off has had pushback and that President Xi isn’t having things going all his way. Another problem with Xi establishing a dynasty is that all the other families living in the gated community in Beijing for China’s elite, Zhongnanhai, would become less than equal, something that would stick in their craw more than the president-for-life thing.
The communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe lasted about 70 years before they burned out, and it has been wondered if the 70-year rule will also apply to China. The communist party in China recently celebrated 70 years since its founding, and it looks as if burnout is happening on cue. The princelings are jealous of the fortunes made by China’s entrepreneurial class and have started to take their fortunes from them, starting with the likes of Jack Ma, who had founded Alibaba. Another Chinese billionaire, Miles Kwok, has predicted that Jack Ma will be either in prison or dead within a year. Once started, expropriation will work its way down through the economy, and it will be a profound productivity-killer.
A lot of China’s managerial class now has at least part of its fortune offshore and has sent its children, often only one child, to foreign universities. Some of those children have been told, “Never come back to China.”
Xi Mingze at Harvard means that a coup is possible in China.
Built at a cost of $2.2 billion, the Salesforce Transit Center and Park formed the cornerstone of the Bay Area’s ambitious regional transportation plan: a vast, clean, efficient web of trains, buses, and streetcars, running through a hub acclaimed as the Grand Central Station of the West.
Snip.
Earlier that day, workers installing panels in the STC’s ceiling beneath the rooftop park uncovered a jagged crack in a steel beam supporting the park and bus deck. “Out of an abundance of caution,” officials said, they closed the transit center, rerouting buses to a temporary terminal. Inspectors were summoned. They found a similar fracture in a second beam.
Structural steel is exceptionally strong, but given certain conditions—low temperatures, defects incurred during fabrication, heavy-load stress—it remains vulnerable to cracking. Two types of cracks occur in steel: ductile fractures, which occur after the steel has yielded and deformed, and brittle fractures, which generally happen before the steel yields. Ductile fractures develop over time, as the steel stretches during use, explains Michael Engelhardt, Ph.D., a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and chair of the peer-review committee overseeing the STC’s response to the cracked-beam crisis.
Engineers can predict ductile fracture and make adjustments during design, such as redistributing the load among various parts of the structure,” Engelhardt says. “Brittle fractures, by contrast, happen suddenly and release a great deal of energy. They’re concerning. They aren’t supposed to happen.”
Entire world: Good riddance!@AndrewFeinberg: We can’t celebrate the death of a genocidal jihadist deathcult’s leader because it might reflect well on Trump.
To understand the madness gripping American leftists, try to see the world through their eyes. Presto, you’re now part of the raging resistance.
Like the Palestinians who mark Israel’s birth as their nakba, or tragedy, you regard Donald Trump’s 2016 victory as a catastrophe. It’s the last thing you think of most nights, and the first thing most mornings.
You can’t shake it or escape it. Whatever you watch, listen to or read, there are reminders — Donald Trump really is president.
You actually believe the New York Times is too nice to him, so you understand why a Manhattan woman urged a reporter there to stop covering Trump to protest his presidency.
And where the hell is Robert Mueller? He was supposed to save us from this nightmare — that’s what Chuck Schumer banked on. Well?
You spend your tax cut even as you rail against the man who made it happen. And you are pleased that cousin Jimmy finally got a job, though you repeat the daily devotional that Barack Obama deserves credit for the roaring economy.
And now this — Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring, and Trump gets another Supreme Court pick. The court might tilt right for the rest of your life. He’s winning.
NOOOOOOOOO!!!
In a nutshell, our visit to the tortured mind of a Trump hater explains everything from Saturday’s mass marches to why a Virginia restaurant owner declared No Soup for Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Their loathing for Trump is bone-deep and all-consuming. This is war and they take no prisoners.
For most marchers, border policies offer a chance to vent. They didn’t make a peep when Obama did the same thing.
Last week was especially glorious not just because we rejected the latest GOPe amnesty scheme, not just because we defunded the left’s union cash extortion machine with the Janus decision, and not just because Justice Kennedy is leaving to be the swing vote on his retirement community HOA. It was especially glorious because these enormous victories – these latest enormous victories – were the direct result of normal Americans giving the gimps, grifters, and geebos of Never Trump the George Costanza treatment by doing precisely the opposite of our alleged betters’ political instincts.
Everything they told us was wrong. If we had done what they demanded, we would not be revelling in the joy of conserva-victory. We would be resigned to yet another defeat. “But Gorsuch” indeed, you never-been-kissed band of losers.
If we had listened to Never Trump, we’d have voted for Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit and we would not only have Merrick Garland (or worse) on the SCOTUS but now she’d be picking another pinko who agrees with the lib bloc that the First Amendment has hitherto unknown asterisks that prevent conservatives from using it, that a bunch of other rights that aren’t in the Constitution actually are, and that the Second Amendment stuff about not infringing on our right to keep and bear arms really means libs can totally infringe on our right to keep and bear arms. Let’s leave aside our booming economy and crushing ISIS and pulling out of the climate scam and maybe peace with North Korea. Just these two Supreme Court picks makes Trump the most important and successful conservative president since The Big R. And we wouldn’t have any of it if that nattering pack of insufferable sissies had had their way.
Snip.
The remaining rump of Never Trumpers is here to lose. That’s their goal. Team Muh Principles always intended to lose. Oh, they try to play off their objections to the president as purely one of style. It’s because Donald Trump is so…so…so…oh well I never. But their displeasure with Trump’s aesthetic deficiencies is not the sole, nor even the most significant, reason for their fury at the orange-y interloper. They are really mad because, under Trump, these dorks can’t get the White House to return their calls.
Trump threw the Fredocons out of the family business. They are nothing to us. They are not brothers-in-arms and they are not friends. We don’t want to know them or what they do. We’d take them out in a figurative row boat onto Lake Tahoe but we don’t want to be seen hanging around with them.
We ruined their scam. They miss the cruise ships, filled with marks handing over cash to mingle with second-tier scribes from magazines put out by lesser sons of greater fathers that we stopped reading when they stopped mattering. Never Trump wants to once stand on a sold-out cruise ship’s bridge, pale puny arms spread wide, shouting, “I’m a minor duke of the world!”
They’ve been stripped of their silly status, but that silly status – “Oh, I am an assistant fellow at the Institute to For Conservative Studies and Mailing List Compilation” – was all they had. In the DC milieu they want to return to, they were never kings, or even princes (though they sure dig the hereditary titles vibe), but just minor royalty jealously guarding their little, tiny fiefdoms. Sure, the liberal establishment ran things, but the Professional Cons had their own petty gigs pretending to resist, pretending to care, all the while treading water in a sea of mediocrity and ineffectuality.
My father always thought it was remarkable how, despite the bias against Jews in higher education, so many Jews of his generation, and the generation before his, still managed to go to college and become doctors and lawyers. Why did it happen? Because it was a cultural imperative imposed at the family level. If Harvard wouldn’t take you, try Yale. If Yale said no, try Cornell. If none of the Ivies wanted you, try the University of Michigan (my Dad’s alma mater). The stereotype of Jewish families placing an enormous emphasis on education is a stereotype for a reason.
Asian Americans have a similar stereotype, and it too has a basis in reality.
Anyway, here’s my theory. According to reports, Harvard discriminated against Asian applicants because they had “bad” personalities. Wesley Yang has a moving op-ed in the New York Times today on the subject. He recounts how Casey Pedrick, an assistant principal at (the ruthlessly meritocratic) Stuyvesant High School in New York City was brought to tears by the evidence that Harvard discriminated against high-scoring, high-achieving, Asian-American students. Yang writes:
Ms. Pedrick knows that her Asian students believe they have to earn their admission to Stuyvesant in the only way anyone has for more than four decades: by passing a rigorous entrance exam. Their parents will often invest a major share of the family income into test preparation courses to help them pass — this despite the fact that more Asians live in poverty than any other group in New York City.
Asian students come from families that put an enormous emphasis on education as a bulwark against poverty and as a ticket to economic prosperity (not always the same thing). Contrary to some reporting, this doesn’t mean they don’t spend time on extra-curricular activities. The Asian students had more extra-curricular activities than white applicants. But, I would bet that the Asian kids were more focused on education as high-end vocational training. The white kids come from a milieu where college is seen as a place for making social connections and a rite of passage. The Asian kids want careers, specifically careers in STEM professions.
So here’s my theory: It’s not that these kids don’t have good personalities, it’s that they don’t have fully “woke” personalities. They don’t speak the language of cosmopolitan, secular noblesse oblige that so often takes the form of political correctness — at least not with sufficient fluency. They don’t know the shibboleths that demonstrate they understand what higher education is really for.
Moreover, their inability or unwillingness to care enough about such stuff is an indication of what they want out of college. Perhaps there are a bunch of Asian-immigrant parents out there who would be perfectly happy to have their kids go to Harvard and major in gender theory or some such. But I suspect not.
As I recently recounted, my father-in-law had the kind of practicality that comes from being a refugee. His favorite response to self-indulgent ideas about what to do for a living was, “Yeah, but can you eat it?” What he meant was that careers, education, and business ideas should be grounded in something real, something useful. I suspect that there are many Asian-American Paul Gavoras out there.
If Harvard lifted its anti-Asian criteria, Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research said the share of Asian students at Harvard would more than double, from 19 percent to 43 percent. But that 43 percent wouldn’t be distributed equally among all courses and disciplines. It would be a boon for computer-science and biology classes, but even more seats would go empty in women’s history or poetry courses. And I can’t help but think that the faculties in the humanities and the softer social sciences have disproportionate sway on the cultural and political assumptions of the school’s administration. They are, after all, the talkers.
“The Left is turning against the First Amendment because absolute respect for freedom of speech is not consistent with tearing down capitalism.”
Merkel blinks, to set up immigration screening centers on border to keep her coalition together.
Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, and six of his followers were executed in Japan for their role in the sarin gas attacks against the Tokyo subway system in 1995 that killed 12, in addition to another 24 or so victims of other cult attacks. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Federal agents arrested a legal permanent resident from Mexico who bought 5,000 rounds of ammunition for smuggling into the Mexican border city of Matamoros — the scene of large-scale internecine Gulf Cartel gun battles.
The arrest took place over the weekend when 48-year-old Ruben Ramos Beltran went to a local gun store and bought 5,000 rounds of ammunition, a criminal complaint obtained by Breitbart Texas revealed. Authorities describe the man as a Mexican national who is a legal resident in Texas. Homeland Security Investigations was carrying out a surveillance operation at the local gun store and spotted Ramos pick up an order of 5,000 rounds of 7.62×39 ammunition, a type typically used in AK-47 type rifles which are heavily favored by cartel gunmen.
5,000 rounds is not a small amount, and at current prices that works out to a bit over a grand. On the other hand, if that’s your primary gun, and you’re a “100 rounds at the range every week” sort of guy, that’s not that far off the curve… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Rolling Stone writer gets trolled into wearing MAGA hat in search of an interview. “I directed Ms. Robb up the hill and to a pleasant location near the lake in the nearby State Park where I imagine that I might have waited, had I actually left my house, which I hadn’t.”
This has probably been my busiest February on record. Enjoy a complimentary Friday LinkSwarm, try the waitress and tip the veal:
“It’s doubtful you can find a more succinct example of TDS than a seemingly inebriated Democrat Senator asking the aggregate intelligence apparatus, during a public session of congress, to give specific details of U.S. covert intelligence efforts to thwart Russian, Chinese and North Korean cyber-warfare.” Democratic Senator Jack Reed continues to long, proud tradition of questionable Rhode Island political figures…
Asian student at Harvard discovers that identity politics is a dead end.
“Stop Trying To Shove Women Into STEM.” “There’s this big push to get girls into STEM — while there’s no commensurate push to get women into oil rig work, no complaints that there aren’t enough women hanging off the back of garbage trucks.” Also:
We’ve recently found that countries renowned for gender equality show some of the largest sex differences in interest in and pursuit of STEM degrees, which is not only inconsistent with an oppression narrative, it is positive evidence against it. Consider that Finland excels in gender equality, its adolescent girls outperform boys in science, and it ranks near the top in European educational performance. With these high levels of educational performance and overall gender equality, Finland is poised to close the sex differences gap in STEM. Yet, Finland has one of the world’s largest sex differences in college degrees in STEM fields. Norway and Sweden, also leading in gender equality rankings, are not far behind. This is only the tip of the iceberg, as this general pattern of increasing sex differences with national increases in gender equality is found throughout the world.
I ate German food Saturday, and ever since it’s like the Wehrmacht has been conducting field maneuvers in my lower intestine. Enjoy a short pre-Thanksgiving LinkSwarm:
The United States House of Representatives has paid out $15 million to secretly settle sexual harassment claims from a secret slush fund. 435 Harvey Weinsteins.
Kurt Schlichter is scathing in his assessment of the GOP congress’ apparent inability to do, well, anything:
My first priority, and yours, was always to give amnesty and citizenship to millions of illegal aliens, and the GOP caucus is chomping at the bit to do that. Apparently Dreamers’ dreams of taking advantage of violating our laws and eventually become loyal Democrat voters are much more important than our own conservative voters’ dreams of their mandatory crummy health insurance rates not doubling.
Snip.
What a mess. The Republican Party seems to have no interest in addressing its electile dysfunction. The Democrats are preparing for battle; the Professional Republicans are sulking because their voters won’t obey. They seem not just unable but unwilling to pass the agenda they promised the base. And whenever there’s a narrative damaging to the party to be hopped on, despite reasonable grounds for skepticism, hop on they do. If the GOP establishment wanted to lose, what would it do differently?
Funny how every Democratic Presidential candidate of the last quarter-century had connectons to pedophiles.
“Back Donald Trump’s plan or resign, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman tells Palestine.” In other news: Trump has a plan for Palestine? If so, the press doesn’t seem to have covered it…
Jaron Lanier frets about social media manipulation. “We’re living in this time of total opacity where you don’t know why you see the news you see. You don’t know if it’s the same news that someone else sees. You don’t know who made it be that way. You don’t know who’s paid to change what you see. Everything is totally obscure in a profound way that it never was before.” He has a point, but missing from this frame is the fact that before the Internet, the number of media outlets that could control your reality filter (including The New York Times, which published this profile and in whose pre-Trump reality bubble Lanier obviously wishes to dwell) was vastly smaller than it is now…. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A former State Department employee was arrested Thursday and charged with espionage for allegedly transmitting Top Secret and Secret documents to a Chinese government agent, according to an affidavit filed with the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, VA.
Kevin Mallory, 60, of Leesburg is a self-employed consultant who speaks fluent Chinese. Court filings show that Mallory was an Army veteran who worked as a special agent for U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service from 1987 to 1990. Since then, Mallory has worked for various government agencies and defense contractors, maintaining a Top Secret security clearance. The Washington Post reports that Mallory was also an employee of the CIA.
We do know that Wednesday’s congressional attacker, James Hodgkinson, shared a conspiracy-tinged Change.org link on March 22, accompanied by the caption, “Trump is a traitor.” Once again, it has to be stressed that this information is woefully insufficient to conclude that the perpetrator was motivated by Russia-oriented conspiracy theories. Motivations are multifaceted, and often political beliefs “intersect” with mental distress, causing people to act violently. But the sharing of the link does indicate that Hodgkinson has been affected by the frenzied climate Democrats have stoked around the Russia issue.
Once again, for extra emphasis: calling attention to the link Hodgkinson shared is not to say that Democrats are directly culpable for this shooting. That would be ridiculous. But the shared link does show that he was to some extent enmeshed in the conspiratorial paranoia that Democrats have knowingly fostered, at full-blast, for approaching an entire year. One ancillary consequence of fostering conspiratorial paranoia for a full year is that certain people with unstable mental predispositions may latch on and commit violent acts. But Democrats and liberals, in their self-assuredness, have been reticent to acknowledge this byproduct of their current political strategy. Proclaiming that the president engaged in treason — as many members of Congress and media figures have — is going to have an influence on the broader public, and included in that broader public are people who might be deranged and/or have violent inclinations.
If you deny that the kind of overblown rhetoric that Democrats have specialized in over the past months — warning about traitorous subterfuge and foreign infiltration — can have any trickle-down effect on regular people, you’re deluding yourself.
Democrats want a resistance. They want to impeach the President. They want full-blown socialism. They want to go further to the left than the tea party wanted to go right. A lot of activist Democrats are already interpreting Jon Ossoff’s loss as him not being aggressively anti-Trump enough.
The Democrat base has moved way further left than where the American public is and at a time we seem to be in a pendulum swing back to the right, that could hurt them. As they start challenging Democrat incumbents with more liberal activists and start winning primaries in swing seats with radical progressives, they risk their ability to win.
What makes this fun to watch is knowing they reject that idea and think the more radical and more militant the more likely their candidates will win. I cannot wait to watch their slate of moonbat crazy challengers.
All those “Ossoff’s loss was a moral victory” excuses? Vox says don’t believe it: “Don’t sugarcoat it — Ossoff’s loss is a big disappointment, and a bad sign, for Democrats. Democrats need to outperform Hillary Clinton to take back the House. Ossoff did worse than her.”
“A professor at a Connecticut college said he was forced to flee the state after he received death threats for appearing to endorse the idea that first responders to last week’s congressional shooting should have let the victims ‘f**king die’ instead of treating them.” Step right up, Trinity College Professor Johnny Eric Williams! You’re the next contestant on “Trump Derangement Syndrome Ruined My Life!”
“This May was the Democratic National Committee’s worst May of fundraising since 2003. The DNC raised $4.29 million in May of this year, according to data recently released by the Federal Election Commission. It is the weakest take for national Democrats since May of 2003, when the party raised a paltry $2.7 million.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
TPPF’s Chris Jacobs is not impressed with the Republican Senate ObamaCare replacement bill. TPPF’s Chip Roy said:
Simply put, the bill doubles down on the fundamentally flawed architecture of Obamacare and if implemented, will neither increase the actual care available to the people nor drive down the cost of care or insurance. It maintains Obamacare’s subsidy regime, retains almost the entirety of the regulatory architecture driving up people’s premiums and deductibles, continues the previous Administration’s unconstitutional bailouts to insurers, and maintains the Medicaid expansion for five more years before slowly attempting to reform the program.
Liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz states that Presidnet Trump’s tape bluff is perfectly legal. “What President Trump did was no different from what prosecutors, defense attorneys, policemen, FBI agents and others do every day in an effort to elicit truthful testimony from mendacious witnesses.” Also: “We must declare an armistice against using our criminal justice system as a political weapon in what has become a zero-sum bloodsport.”
“Trump Imposes New Sanctions on Russia Over Ukraine.” Insert record scratch sound over derailment of the “Trump is Putin’s stooge” narrative here. Oh, also, New York Times: When you invade, occupy and annex territory, it’s not an “incursion,” it’s an “invasion.”
Helmut Kohl, the chancellor who oversaw German reunification, dead at age 87. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“The amount of labor that once bought 54 minutes of light now buys 52 years of light. The cost has fallen by a factor of 500,000 and the quality of that light has transformed from unstable and risky to clean, safe, and controllable.”
“A mentally ill homeless woman in Florida is accused of vandalizing a policeman’s patrol car and smearing feces on a church where she left the walls defaced with nonsensical writings against ‘patriarchy.'”
The extraordinarily high prosecutorial burden of proof in any criminal trial is intentionally designed to heavily favor defendants, because we long ago embraced as a society Blackstone’s principle. Formulated in the seventeen-sixties by the English jurist William Blackstone, the presumption is that it is better to have ten guilty people go free than that one innocent person suffer. Hard as it is to stomach today, embracing that calculus means that we should even want ten rapists (not to mention terrorists and murderers) to go free in order to protect the one falsely accused. Unfortunately, Cosby is one of those to escape criminal punishment. And, to put a fine point on the over-all gendered impact of requiring proof “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the inevitable effect of the heavy tilt toward defendants is that in sexual-assault trials, which involve mostly male defendants and mostly female accusers, men are favored over women.
Let’s take a look at a small sideshow act to this year’s Electoral College circus: Lawrence Lessig’s Amazing Disappearing Faithless Electors.
The Harvard professor, Creative Commons founder, and all around political gadfly boldly declared a few days before the election that “at least 20 Republican members of the Electoral College may not cast their votes for President-elect Donald Trump.”
That’s just 18 more than the 2 that actually flipped. One wonders how Lessig arrived at his grossly inflated count, assuming it wasn’t plucked out of thin air or his nether regions.
Indeed, Lessig spent much of the 2016 election cycle making mystifying moves and puzzling pronouncements. In August 2015, he announced he was running for the Democratic nomination for President, raised $1 million to do so, pledged that if elected, he would pass a campaign finance “reform” (including a basket of liberal activist proposals, including limiting free speech by overturning Citizens United, eliminating Gerrymandering, introducing ranked voting, etc.) and then resign. Two months later he walked back the resignation promise, and shortly after that, after being excluded from the debates and unable to obtain any traction in the race, dropped out entirely.
“Donald Trump is the biggest gift to the movement for reform since the Supreme Court gave us Citizens United,” Lessig told Politico.com, referring to Trump’s boasts that he’s given big sums to candidates in both parties and then called in favors as needed. “What he’s saying is absolutely correct, the absolute truth. He has pulled back the curtain.”
“I’ll make a promise,” Lessig said in Politico’s report, after stating he would not “rule out a third-party run with Trump” should that offer be made. “If Trump said he was going to do one thing and fix this corrupted system, then go back to life as an entertainment figure, I absolutely would link up with Donald Trump.”
In light of all that, it’s strange that Lessig would not only throw his full weight behind Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of special interest money in politics, but lie about faithless electors in a last-ditch attempt to deny Donald Trump the presidency.
Then again, if I were to pick a locale for the most intense cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the Harvard University faculty lounge would probably rank near the top of the list…
