Greetings, and welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! This one will be huge, since I didn’t do one last week. Biden pardons his crackhead/bagman son, Holman is serious about deporting illegal aliens, Trump taps some Texans,
Did you hear that, after swearing up and down that he would never pardon his son Hunter Biden, Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden? “Joe Biden’s pardon covers the time period from January 1, 2014 to December 1, 2024, relieving his son of any crimes he “may have committed or taken part in” over an 11 year period.” Wow, it’s almost like Joe was running a pay-for-play foreign influence peddling operation and Hunter was his bagman…
Not only is Donald Trump returning to the White House, not only do Republicans have 53 Senate seats and about 220 seats to control the House of Representatives, but Republicans now control almost 55 percent of state legislative seats nationwide. Republicans won control of the Michigan state house of representatives, and the Minnesota state house of representatives shifted from a 70–64 Democratic advantage to a 67–67 tie. (Rough year for Tim Walz all around.) Twenty-three states have Republican governors and GOP-controlled state legislatures, just 15 states have the Democratic equivalent, and twelve states have divided governments.
If the election of Trump came as a shock to Democrats, it is perhaps even more shocking that, at least for now, a solid majority of Americans are giving the incoming president the benefit of the doubt. The latest Economist/YouGov poll found 51 percent of Americans have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of Trump, the highest level going back at least as far as the start of his first term as president. For a long, long stretch, that number was around 40 percent.
This weekend a CBS News poll found that 59 percent of Americans approve of how Trump is handling the transition. Perhaps this figure reflects that Trump’s announced cabinet picks have something for everyone. For hawks, there’s Marco Rubio. For doves and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, there’s Tulsi Gabbard. For those who see the Covid vaccines as “a gift from God,” there’s the surgeon general nominee, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat. For those who hate vaccines and erroneously believe they cause autism, there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. For those who love dogs, there’s attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, who adopted a dog abandoned during Hurricane Katrina. For those who hate dogs, there’s Kristi Noem.
That CBS poll also found that “there seems to be a sense of exhaustion, as fewer than half of Democrats feel motivated to oppose Trump right now.” And who can begrudge Democrats exhaustion after an election cycle that arguably started a week after the midterm elections? Saul Alinsky warned in Rules for Radicals, “A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.”
Evidently nine years of Trump Derangement Syndrome can be exhausting…
You’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table. I mean we’ve been looking for fugitives. There’s over a million illegal aliens in this country who got due process at great taxpayer expense, were ordered removed by a judge, and failed to leave.
We’ll be moving on to those who may not be a criminal, may not be a fugitive, but they entered this country illegally, which is a crime. And they’re here illegally and they’re not off the table.
Denver mayor Mayor Mike Johnston says he’s going to resist the enforcement of immigration law in his city. Homan: Get ready to go to jail.
Speaking of people who should be going to jail for blocking immigration enforcement: “California Allegedly Threatens Police Officers Over Deportation Compliance. CA mayor: The State of California “is threatening to take pensions and charge police officers with felonies if they comply with federal deportation laws.”
Bill Wells, the mayor of El Cajon, California, claimed in a Monday post on X that the State of California “is threatening to take pensions and charge police officers with felonies if they comply with federal deportation laws. While the Trump administration is working to enforce immigration laws, California seems intent on blocking these efforts.”
Wells makes it clear that El Cajon, a city of approximately 100,000 people located 17 miles east of San Diego, is not a sanctuary city and that his police officers “are being put in an impossible position.”
Maybe Homan can start preparing an indictment against Gavin Newsom.
It’s insulting when members of the working class, which the Democratic Party has lost entirely in our lifetimes, to insist the economy is doing great. A 12-pack of Bounty is $40. Rich folks don’t feel that…
I think telling them that the Nasdaq is gangbusters is further insulting. It’s insulting, the biggest unforced error of the Biden administration, by far, was the border. To tell people that it’s not a problem is insulting. For the working class to see incoming migrants getting welcome bags, debit cards, and motel rooms is probably insulting as well …
They handed out camo hats that said ‘Harris-Walz’ the Democrats were kind of charmed by that. Their party has gone quinoa and the rest of America is eating at Cracker Barrel … it was an ironic use of something that millions of Americans put on their heads to start their day every day.
Harvard University’s celebrated pollster John Della Volpe has a message for the new leader of the Democratic Party: Move fast with proven solutions for voters who are hurting, or the party is doomed.
“Millions of Americans aren’t shifting right — they’re walking away. They’re abandoning a Democratic Party and democratic system they believe abandoned them first. This isn’t realignment — it’s abandonment,” the pollster known for his surveys of the youth vote said.
In a memo to the incoming leader of the Democratic National Committee posted on his Substack, “JDV on Gen Z,” Della Volpe was blunt in his assessment of the nation and the 2024 election. The bottom line for the Democrats, he said, is that it needs a massive reinvention and focus on kitchen-table issues and less on wokeness.
“This post-election analysis should not start with the question about moving left or right. It must begin by filling the vacuum of unaddressed daily struggles before it gets filled with something else. The typical response will be to fill that vacuum with new policies, messages, or words. But that’s precisely backward. Before we can talk about solutions, we need to rebuild trust. Before we can restore trust, we need to listen. Really listen,” he wrote.
Corporate media outlets have buried, downplayed, or otherwise shelved a new study which reveals that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies cause people to become ‘hostile’ – essentially seeing racism where none exists.
The new study from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and Rutgers University found that people exposed to DEI talking points about race, religion and gender form integroup hostility and authoritarian attitudes towards others.
“What we did was we took a lot of these ideas that were found to still be very prominent in a lot of these DEI lectures and interventions and training,” said NCRI Chief Science Officer Joel Finkelstein, a co-author of the study. “And we said, ‘Well, how is this going to affect people?’ What we found is that when people are exposed to this ideology, what happens is they become hostile without any indication that anything racist has happened.”
Researchers exposed 324 participants to two sets of reading material; a racially-neutral text about corn, or the writings of race-baiters Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo. The participants were then exposed to a racially neutral scenario in which a student was rejected from college.
President Donald Trump’s return to power earlier this month was remarkable—among other reasons—for the breadth of the coalition that powered it. As Armin Rosen has documented for Tablet, by many measures Jews swung toward Trump, particularly in pivotal precincts. But they were just part of a minority-group wave: Exit polling and precinct analysis suggest large increases in the Black, Hispanic, and Asian vote for Trump.
Although Trump did not win outright majorities of any of these groups, Harris’ underperformance still marks a remarkable shift. The president slandered as a racist and antisemite outperformed prior Republicans among minorities of all types: Why?
One easy answer, of course, is the uniform rightward swing of the electorate, fueled by anger over inflation, an uncontrolled border, and Harris’ barely hidden far-left views. And future elections will probably see some bounce back.
But this argument misses the longer trend: Minority voters, once Democratic stalwarts, have been inching toward the GOP for decades. As the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch has showed, the GOP share of the nonwhite vote has been rising on and off since the 2000s. That mirrors trends among Jews: Over the past several elections, the Democratic share of the Jewish vote has shrunk, from around 80% in the 1990s and 2000s to around 70% in the 2010s and 2020s.
As the Jewish demographer Milton Himmelfarb famously wrote, Jews earn like Episcopalians, but vote like Puerto Ricans. If Puerto Ricans and Jews are both moving right, though, then maybe they’re moving right for similar reasons. Explanations that rely on Democratic antisemitism or affection for socialism are special pleading. The neater explanation is that the same social forces are pushing Black, Hispanic, Jewish, and other minority voters toward the Republicans.
Why are minority groups moving right? As a body of political science argues, the answer is the breakdown of the social institutions that kept them voting for group over ideology. Among Jews, a similar, albeit reversed, phenomenon might be happening: The collapse of Jewish communal life might be giving Jews permission to break from the old ideological consensus.
If that’s true, though, it has profound implications for the political future—of the Jews and everyone else.
In a sense, the question is not why minority voters are moving right, but why they have stayed left for so long. After all, Black and Hispanic Democrats are more moderate ideologically than their white Democrat peers. And the ideological gap between white and nonwhite Democrats has only grown in recent years—implying Black and Hispanic voters should be more willing to swing between parties. Yet in 2020, for example, 60% of Black voters who identified as conservative voted for Joe Biden, compared to 9% of white conservatives. Why?
The conventional explanation for this phenomenon is what political scientists call “linked fate,” the tendency of group members to see their individual well-being as linked to the overall well-being of the group, and so to consider group interest in making electoral decisions. Even if a Hispanic voter would prefer conservative policies, for example, she may still vote for the Democrats under the theory that Hispanic group interest is served by doing so. Such thinking is most common among Black Americans, but has been shown to explain Latino voting behavior as well.
The sense of linked fate, though, is in part socially constructed. Minority voters don’t consider their fates to be linked in a vacuum—they reach that conclusion thanks, in part, to the work of social institutions. In their recent book Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, political scientists Ismail White and Chryl Laird look specifically at Black political identification, including with the Democratic Party. They argue that Blacks’ lopsided support for Democrats is driven by social pressure from the broader Black community.
“The steady reality that Black Americans’ kinship and social networks tend to be populated by other Blacks,” White and Laird write, “means they persistently anticipate social costs for failing to choose Democratic politics and social benefits for compliance with these group expectations.” They show in survey evidence and experiments that Black voters change their behavior when around other Black people—a proxy for the effect of social pressure in general. This “social constraint” strategy helps ensure that Black voters vote their racial identity, even when doing so is apparently at odds with their ideology.
Though it may sound unusual, this is a perfectly rational political strategy for minority groups in a large, pluralistic democracy. Being able to deliver lopsided group margins is one way a minority group’s leaders can curry favor with a party. Indeed, White and Laird identify tendencies toward social constraint among “Southern whites, white evangelical Christians, trade union members, and certain localized racial and ethnic groups.” Social constraint is not necessarily an exception—to the extent that any group has its own political interests, it has a reason to suppress dissent in the ranks.
Can the “social constraint” model explain Jewish voting patterns? As I’ve argued previously, one way to understand Jews’ strong support of Democrats is our unusually strong ideological commitments. Since at least the 19th century, Jews in America have been more left wing than the general public. And they associate those values with their identity. When asked by Pew what things were most essential to being Jewish, a majority of respondents listed “working for justice/equality” as a key component of their identity, with an even larger majority among the non-Orthodox.
But ideology, like partisanship, can be socially constructed. Jews have a strong sense of in-group identity, with 85% saying they have “a great deal” or “some” sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Most Jews have at least some close friends who are Jewish; 29% say all or most of their close friends are Jewish. And Jews are highly concentrated geographically, with roughly half of American Jews living in the New York, Los Angeles, Miami, or Philadelphia metropolitan areas alone.
Collectively, those facts suggest that—like Blacks, and other ethnic minorities—Jews’ “kinship and social networks tend be populated by” other Jews. Even in the non-Orthodox world, a Jewish person’s interactions with both fellow Jews and Jewish institutions may serve to reinforce his ideological commitments. After all, what right-leaning Jew has not been once or twice told his views are a shanda?
If social pressures produce in-group conformity among minority voters, then it stands to reason that they produce ideological conformity among Jews, too. But what happens to that conformity when the social pressures start to break down?
If you wanted to pack the history of the 21st century thus far into a single sentence, you could do worse than “20th-century social institutions collapsed.” As political scientist Robert Putnam has repeatedly argued, Americans have seen a steady decline in “social capital,” the network of interpersonal relationships that provide them informal means of individual security and advancement. The families, churches, and community groups which sustained that capital are in more or less continuous decline. That decline, though, has meant not just a reduction in the available stock of social capital, but also in those institutions’ ability to shape behavior—in their ability to impose social constraint.
Decades of unwillingness to enforce immigration laws were driven by the desire of some for cheap, controllable labor, and of others for a new client class that would shift political power to the Democratic Party. The culmination of that process under Biden became entwined with the identity of the party and its ideological activists who sincerely believe that national borders are an expression of racism and that turning away foreigners who want to move here illegally is immoral. The belief in unlimited, lawless immigration has become a litmus-test issue for the activist left, like hostility to the existence of law enforcement itself.
And because most voters naturally consider that insane, we now see broad public support, including among first-generation migrants, for “mass deportation” and an electoral mandate for what the president-elect has promised will be the “largest deportation effort in American history.”
Restoring credibility after decades of deceit will take time, cost money, get tied up in courts, and inevitably involve an unfortunate measure of human suffering, the images of which will be ruthlessly exploited for political purposes by the media and the interests they serve. But it’s neither the Manhattan Project nor the D-Day landings—it’s simply a matter of enforcing existing law consistently and without apology, which is the legal and popular mandate the American people have given the incoming administration.
Herewith a look at what’s likely to be involved.
When your tub is overflowing, you first turn off the tap. Mass impunity at the border will be the first thing to stop, because there’s no point to deporting people if it’s easy for them to return.
What drove the crisis under Biden was a policy of catch-and-release—millions of border-jumpers were simply waved into the country by a Border Patrol that the current administration turned into the equivalent of Walmart greeters. The illegal migrants told their friends back home, and more came. Human-trafficking cartels turned it into a massive business.
There are two ways to end catch-and-release: 1) detain illegal border-crossers until they can be repatriated, or 2) if they make an asylum claim, ensure that they wait across the border in Mexico for their court dates.
Option 1 will require a significant increase in spending and logistical assistance from the U.S. military. The Biden administration has consistently reduced DHS’s detention capacity, closing government-owned facilities and canceling contracts with private firms and county jails. That pattern will have to be reversed.
Option 2 is cheaper and easier, but requires Mexico’s consent, because the country has no obligation to take back non-Mexican migrants, which account for the majority of attempted crossings. In late 2018, this option was instituted as the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (commonly known as “Remain in Mexico”); Mexico went along with it after President Trump threatened punishing tariffs on its exports to the U.S.
It was successful almost overnight. In January 2021, Biden canceled the program.
Despite the fact that Mexico’s new president is more of a conventional leftist than her predecessor, she is likely to be cooperative with the new Trump administration’s demands to restore Remain in Mexico, given that the U.S.-Mexico trade agreement is up for review in 2026. Access to the U.S. market is far more important to Mexico than any rhetorical solidarity with foreigners using its territory as a means of entering the U.S.
These and other measures (such as “safe third country” agreements requiring migrants to have applied for asylum in one of the countries they passed through before reaching the U.S. border) will succeed in stabilizing the border. But what about those already here? Sending back people who’ve just recently snuck across the border is one thing, but finding and removing those already in the interior is something else altogether.
The Biden administration has released into the country close to 6 million foreigners with no legal right to enter, and another 2 million are believed to have eluded the overwhelmed Border Patrol, the so-called gotaways.
They join a large illegal population already here, though because of constant churn in the illegal population (people returning home, dying, or obtaining a green card), these numbers can’t simply be added to prior estimates. Census Bureau data suggests there are now at least 14 million total illegal aliens—given the imprecision of such estimates, the real number could easily be 15 or 16 million, though higher numbers bandied about by some Republican politicians of 30 or 40 million are implausible.
The opponents of immigration enforcement want to make this seem like an insuperable problem. The American Immigration Council, the think tank of the immigration lawyers’ lobby, has estimated it would cost close to a trillion dollars over a decade to return the illegal population to their home countries.
Vice President-elect Vance addressed this counsel of resignation and surrender by likening the problem to “a really big sandwich. It’s 10 times the size of your mouth. How are you possibly going to eat the whole thing?”
His answer:
you take the first bite and then you take the second bite, and then you take the third bite. Let’s start with the first million who are the most violent criminals, who are the most aggressive. Get them out of here. First prioritize them, and then you see where you are, and you keep on taking bites of the problem, until you get illegal immigration to a serviceable point.
Starting the deportation effort by focusing on criminals is both politically astute and simplest to manage. The Biden administration has reduced deportations of criminals by 67% compared to Trump I, so there’s nowhere to go but up. Criminal aliens are picked up every day by police in the normal course of their duties for all manner of nonimmigration crimes. Taking them off the hands of local law enforcement—either as an alternative to prosecution or after they’ve completed their sentences—is a no-brainer.
Read the whole thing. The people who say it’s impossible are simply lying because they don’t want it done.
“California’s fast food industry shed more than 6,000 jobs after Democratic lawmakers passed a bill mandating a $20 minimum wage for most fast food and counter service restaurants in the state.”
President-elect Donald Trump has begun to fill out his cabinet with new names coming each week, and two recent nominations have strong ties to Texas.
Nominated to be Secretary of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Trump has tapped former member of the Texas Legislature, Scott Turner.
Turner served as a member of the Texas House from 2013 to 2017 — he challenged then-House Speaker Joe Straus, but ultimately lost his run for the gavel.
Trump in his first administration appointed Turner to head the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council.
The 2025 President’s Budget has requested $72.6 billion for HUD and $185 billion over 10 years for “affordable housing investments.”
Another recent Texan to be nominated for the upcoming Trump cabinet is President and CEO of America First Policy Institute Brooke Rollins.
A native of Glen Rose, Rollins has been chosen as the nominee to become the next Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
“Brooke’s commitment to support the American Farmer, defense of American Food Self-Sufficiency, and the restoration of Agriculture-dependent American Small Towns is second to none,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial.
Rollins held previous positions in the first Trump administration, as well as being president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
I like Turner’s starch in running against Straus, and Rollins helped turn TPPF into a think tank power house, so both seem like good picks for Trump. And you’ve got to balance out all the Floridians somehow…
Democrat megadonor John Morgan says Kamala was clueless and thought she was Obama. Plus: Barron Trump is smarter than Kamala’s entire team, because he urged his father to go on Joe Rogan.
Meanwhile, Russia abandoned its Tartus Naval base and its Khmeimim airbase in Syria.
And now Syrian rebels are on the outskirts of Homs, the last big city before Damascus itself. If they take it, it will essentially split Assad-controlled Syria into two parts.
Imagine there’s a link here to the Biden Administration strong-arming Israel into a ceasefire with Hezbollah, only for Hezbollah to start breaking the treaty in, what, an hour?
Russia’s been reduced to using Ladas to attack Ukrainian positions. For those unfamiliar with the name, that’s a brand of Soviet/Russian automobiles. So no armor and precious little reliability…
Dade Phelan bows out of the Texas House Speaker’s race. This was after he lost another House ally ahead of Saturday’s GOP caucus speaker vote. State Rep. Trent Ashby announced he was supporting State Rep. David Cook’s bid. “These endorsements bring Cook’s total public commitments to 48, giving him a majority within the 88-member Republican caucus.”
Sex trafficking busts in Montgomery county (immediately north of Harris County).
Montgomery County Constable Ryan Gable announced that a three-day operation this month resulted in numerous arrests associated with prostitution, child trafficking, and drug offenses.
The constable’s office collaborated with the Houston Police Department and received support from the Human Trafficking Rescue Alliance (HTRA) and the Houston Metro Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force to successfully carry out this operation.
During a Friday morning press conference, Gable explained working with ICAC was essential, as the internet has become a major platform for those who exploit children and traffic victims for sexual purposes. The partnership between HTRA and ICAC investigations enabled the use of digital forensics and online tracking to uncover trafficking networks. The three-day investigation, dubbed Operation Safe Haven, resulted in numerous arrests and the recovery of one victim.
The operation’s results include:
Seven arrests for prostitution.
Three arrests for promotion of prostitution.
Four arrests for online solicitation of a minor (including the capture of a registered sex offender).
One arrest for child trafficking.
One arrest for unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
One arrest for evading law enforcement.
One arrest for possession of a prohibited weapon.
Two arrests related to drug offenses.
One juvenile recovered.
“An illegal alien from Guatemala has been arrested in Massachusetts and charged with raping a child. Mynor Stiven De Paz-Munoz, 21, entered the country illegally in the Eagle Pass area in September 2020. He was arrested in Boston by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this month.”
“California assistant principal charged with molesting 8 elementary school children….David Lane Braff Jr., 42, was charged Friday with 17 counts of “lewd acts” on children under the age of 14. The alleged abuse occurred between 2015 and 2019 while Braff was employed as a counselor at McKevett Elementary School in Santa Paula. At the time of his arrest, Braff was serving as an assistant principal at Ingenium Charter Middle School in Los Angeles.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. “‘Defund The Police’ Activist Charged With Misusing Over $75,000 Donations On Vacations & Shopping Sprees…”Brandon Anderson misused charitable donations to fund lavish vacations and shopping sprees, and the Raheem AI board of directors let him get away with it.”
Progress: “Southwest Airlines Agrees To End DEI Employment Practices In Response To Lawsuit.”
Nothing of value was lost obit: Liberian rebel Prince Johnson, who (among other atrocities) cut off Samuel Doe’s ears, cooked them, and then served them to Doe. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
While other companies are running away from wokeness, Geico (which used to be a refuge from Progressive’s leftism) is forcing it down employees throats.
SCOOP: Employees at @Geico are being forced to complete mandatory training courses instructing them to provide their pronouns when engaging with customers and how to deal with being misgendered.
Yet another company pushing gender ideology nonsense. We the people want this… pic.twitter.com/rkBj7lJc63
This story has a little bit of everything: Fake identities, forged passports, human trafficking, shadowy gambling associates and communist infiltrators. But mostly it’s about small Philippines town mayor Alice Guo, who actually seems to be Guo Hua Ping, a Chinese national with ties to the CCP.
“A Philippino mayor may actually be a Chinese woman working for the CCP.”
The Philippines may be onto a Chinese conspiracy so intricate and wild you’d think it was the plot to some thriller flick. I would call it Dr. Filipi-No.”
“Small town Filipino mayor Alice Guo was accused of being a Chinese spy.”
“Guo drew national attention after the police raided Zun Yuan Technology Inc., a Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator, or POGO, in her constituency of Bamban back in March.”
I doubt this POGO is that cute.
“During the raid, police found several documents that tied Guo to the POGO’s operations. This led to a Senate hearing, where Guo was questioned about her involvement with the POGO and seemed unable to answer basic questions about her background.” Some of those clipped.
“Guo gave conflicting information about her father, Angelito Guo, whose business records identify him as Jian Zhong Guo, at one point saying he was Filipino, even though she had previously said he was Chinese.”
“For one, the birth certificates of Alice Guo and her two siblings show that her father, Angelito Guo, married her supposed mother, Amelia Leal, but the three certificates have three different marriage dates.” More of that sloppy CCP corner cutting on display.
“Buuuuut, there might not be an Amelia Leal. Investigators found no records of her birth. Leading one official from the Philippines Statistics Authority to say that it’s possible she doesn’t exist.”
“So who is Guo’s mother, if it’s not Amelia Leal? One candidate is a Chinese citizen named Lin Wenyi. She was listed as an incorporator of several registered companies of the mayor’s family.”
Guo not only listed Lin Wenyi as her mother in bank accounts, she “listed a whole bunch of names, such as ‘Winnie Leal,’ ‘Wenny Leal Lin,’ ‘Weny Lin Leal,’ ‘Winnie C. Leal’ and ‘Amelia Lim Leal.'”
“If Alice Guo’s real mother is Chinese, then this throws a pretty big wrench into Guo’s claim to Filipino citizenship, since the Philippines grants citizenship through the mother.”
“The mayor Alice Guo’s fingerprints matched that of a Chinese woman named Guo Hua Ping.”
“Records from the Board of Investments of the Guo family’s application for a Special Investors Resident Visa show Alice Guo, or shall I say, Guo Hua Ping, entered the Philippines on January 12, 2003 when she was 13 years old…According to those documents, rather than being born in Tarlac on July 12, 1986, Guo was actually born in Fujian, China on August 31, 1990.”
“According to Senator Risa Hontiveros, ‘This confirms what I have suspected all along. Mayor Alice is a fake Filipino—or should I say, Guo Hua Ping. She is a Chinese national masquerading as [a] Filipino citizen to facilitate crimes being committed by [Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators].'”
“The Senate probe also found that Guo allegedly faked her incorporators in the POGO Hongsheng Gaming Technology by stealing the identities of vendors at the public market in Tarlac.”
The Philippine’s Nationalist People’s Coalition expelled Guo from its roster. “Too much of a liar and too corrupt to be a politician? This is almost more impressive than it is nefarious.”
There’s also the human trafficking charges. “Guo was linked to an alleged ‘grand conspiracy to commit labor trafficking’ of around 500 foreign POGO workers who were rescued during a raid on the compound on March 13.”
“Now lots of POGO scam suspects are trying to flee the Philippines. Guo’s family is being subpoenaed. This includes Guo’s father, suspected biological mother, and her siblings Shiela, Seimen and Wesley Leal, along with the accountant in charge of filing documents for Guo family’s businesses.” Her business partners are also being sought.
One wonders how many Guo Hua Pings there are used assumed identities not just in the Philippines, but here in the U.S. How many of the Chinese nationals pouring over our southern border thanks to the Biden Administration’s open borders policies will be taking up fake American identities and positions in illegal gambling operations, fentanyl distribution, or marijuana grow operations?
I’m not sure I’ve mentioned Saudi Arabia’s Neom project before, the plan to build a 170km long, 500m tall linear city arcology in the northwest Saudi desert.
As this Patrick Boyle video shows, things aren’t going swimmingly.
Pitched in a mock “I think it’s a great idea, so please don’t Khashoggi me” tone, Boyle points out a few niggling problems with the entire concept.
“Neom The Line is a 170 km long city being built in the deserts of Saudi Arabia that was supposed to cost $200 billion to build. It’ll accommodate nine million people in a massive structure that is 200 meters wide and 500 meters tall. It’s conveniently located in an allegedly empty area of desert.”
It will have “all of the modern features that you would want, like an artificial moon, robot dinosaurs, flying cars, human gene editing and glow-in-the-dark sand.”
“The only abundant resources that a group of consultants could identify were sunlight and unlimited access to salt water.”
“Bloomberg reports that the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund cash reserves have fallen to $5 billion as of September, the lowest level since 2020, The Live City according to the latest reports, is now only expected to extend 2.4 km and house 300,000 people by the end of the decade. This is a 98.6% reduction from the initial plans. So it’s still going ahead, it’ll just be a little bit smaller than had been hoped for a while.”
“Building an unusually densely populated 170 kilometer long city that’s as tall as some of the tallest buildings in the world in what is described as a harsh dry desert with great temperature extremes strikes me as a great idea. Other people have not been as positive about these plans.”
Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) announced plans for Neom four months after being named Crown Prince successor to current king Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
“The project is being overseen and financed by the Saudi Arabian Sovereign wealth fun, which the Crown Prince also chairs. It was pitched as costing $200 billion, but upon reflection might cost a bit more than that.”
“Off the top of my head I can’t think of any other cities that are 170 kilometers long while only 200 meters wide and 500 meters tall. In fact, I struggle to think of any cities that are taller than they are wide.”
“Historically, skyscrapers have been built in very dense urban locations where the price of land is so high that it makes economic sense to build upwards to minimize the cost of the land per total floor area of a building.”
“I found a paper by Brinkley and Raj which explains that in open systems, perfusion guides form and growth. They explain that ecosystems grow as fractals, with new branches sprouting in order to maximize profusion and resource uptake. They go on to explain that most cities grow as fractals branching out maximizing the urban interface with available fuel and arable land.”
Of course, Neom has no fuel or arable land nearby. In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty, they argue that an arcology needs to be built near an existing city (in their case Los Angeles) to prosper.
“A long narrow city guarantees that inhabitants are always the maximum distance from wherever they need to go.”
Boyle examines the claim that you can travel from one end of Neom to the other in 20 minutes and has a little fun with math:
To travel 170 km in 20 minutes, you’d have to be traveling at 510kmph, which is a bit faster than and the world’s fastest train. Of course, 510kmph assumes no stops along the way, which might be a bit inconvenient for people who live near the middle of the city. London Underground stations and New York subway stations are usually about a quarter of a mile apart from each other. [I believe Boyle is mistaken here, and London tube stations are closer to an average of a mile apart. -LP] 170km is 105.6 miles, so the line would need 412 train stops along the way subway trains usually stop and open their doors for at least 30 seconds at each station so with 42 stations the train would be stopped for 206 minutes allowing people to get on and off the train at the stations. 206 minutes is of course a bit more than 20 minutes, so people would need to get on and off the trains a bit quicker than that. If the train stopped for just two seconds at each station, the train would only be stopped for 14 minutes leaving us with six minutes to travel 170 km, so we would just have to travel at 1,700km hour which is a bit over 1,000mph. 1,000mph would, of course, be an average speed. There would have to be a lot of extreme acceleration and deceleration going on, meaning that the top speed would have to be well over 1,000mph. You’d have two seconds to get on or off a train that would quickly accelerate up to, let’s say, three times the speed of sound before slamming on its brakes for the next station.
Enjoy the g-lock.
“The Line is going to be a fairly busy city. Nine million people will be living on a footprint of just 34 square kilometers, which is 13 square miles. Manila in the Philippines has the world’s highest population density with 119,600 people per square mile. Neom would have 686,000 people per square mile, which is almost six times the population density of Manila.”
“The Wall Street Journal reviewed 2300 pages of documents put together by Consultants at BCG McKenzie and Oliver Wyman, the consultants were directed by MBS to help turn his idea into a reality. And the documents highlight that the project is so ambitious that it incorporates many technologies that don’t yet exist.”
“The Line is going to be 500 meters tall, which is about the same height as Taipei 101, which was the tallest building in the world when it was built 20 years ago at a cost of just under $2 billion. Taipei 101 is 75 meters wide, so you would need to build 13.3 of these for each kilometer. 2,270 of these buildings would equal just one wall of The Line. For both city walls you would need 4,540 Taipei 101s.”
“And that’s just the external walls. There’s still all the inner buildings, the hyperloop, the floating gardens, the autonomous flying pods and the artificial moon. Let’s not forget power plants, water desalination plants, airport, sewage treatment, human gene editing facilities, and everything else needed for a modern city.”
“The Line will have about half of the population of New York City, and thus should require around 5,000 megawatts of power per day. It might need a lot more than that, as water desalination is very energy intensive, and being based in the desert, people might want to run their air conditioners most of the time.”
“New York City requires hundreds of power plants to run, but gets around one third of its power from four nuclear power plants. Let’s say The Line is a very energy efficient city and can get by on one third of the power consumed by New York City. You would then need to build four or five nuclear power plants to supply that power.”
“Each power plant would cost between $6 and $9 billion, so we’re looking at $30 to $40 billion just for the power plants to supply electricity.”
“The 4,500 140 Taipei 101 buildings needed just as the exterior walls for The Line would cost $9.1 trillion dollars, assuming that construction costs have not gone up in 20 years, which they probably have. MBS was initially going to build all of this for $200 billion, which is less than 2% of the cost I’ve estimated for just the walls.”
“Thunderf00t estimated the overall build cost of a city like this to be $100 trillion.” Thunderf00t also looked at the failure of all of Dubai’s land reclamation projects in the Persian gulf save the very first, none of which are remotely as ambitious as Neom.
I think you get the idea.
Murdering the occasional jihad-friendly journalist aside, MBS actually has carried out some significant reforms (like sidelining the hardline Wahabbist clerics), but his pet Neom project is clearly 95% delusional. Despite which, they’ve already done fairly ridiculous amounts of earthmoving on the project.
They are a few decent ideas among the delusions: It wouldn’t be a bad idea for the Saudis to incubate a tech sector, they get enough sun that getting into manufacturing solar panels to help plan for a post-oil future might be a viable option, and they probably should invest in desalinization plants to develop some agricultural self-sufficiency.
But the idea of building the full Line is a delusional fantasy.
This post was going to be on how China is still screwing around in the South China Sea (and we’ll get to that), but I want to talk about the difficulty of keeping up with current events, especially of events in foreign nations, especially those nations that don’t usually receive too many headlines. It’s easy to develop blind spots and areas of ignorance.
All of that is prelude to saying that until today, I had no idea that Ferdinand Marcos was President of the The Philippines.
The Marcos in question is not dictator kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos Sr., who died in 1989, but his son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Romualdez Marcos Jr.. (Note how obvious it is that his Wikipedia entry was written by his political enemies.) He was elected in May 2022 and assumed office June 20, 2022. How did I miss that?
One reason is that I don’t subscribe to a newspaper, because I don’t want a dime going to the Democrat Media Complex. (“If you don’t read a newspaper, you’re ill informed. If you do read a newspaper, you’re misinformed.” – Probably Not Mark Twain) Ditto watching any network newscasts, and I don’t have cable.
I checked my email, and evidently not one of the zillions of newsletters I get ever mentioned the Philippines election while they were going on. Which is odd, since it had a pretty compelling storyline: Marcos’ Vice Presidential running mate was Sara Duterte, the daughter of then President Rodrigo Duterte, in a sort of national unity ticket.
Maybe I’m just out of touch and everyone else already knew about Ferdinand II: The Marcosing, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
On Dec. 9, China Coast Guard vessels fired water cannons at Philippine supply ships in the Scarborough Shoal, where the Philippine ships had arrived to resupply fishermen. That’s just the latest skirmish in the disputed atoll, which is located near the Philippines but was seized by China in 2012. In fact, in recent months, China has markedly increased its maritime bullying in the waters off the Philippines. That trend is already beginning to spread nervousness among Western businesses interested in friendshoring some of their operations to the Philippines—which may be precisely what China is after.
The water-cannon attack on the Philippine supply ships, which resulted in one of the vessels suffering engine damage and having to be towed back to port, came only a few weeks after two other heavy-handed actions by Chinese vessels near the Philippine coast.
In late October, a Philippine supply vessel and a vessel from the Philippine Coast Guard were bumped, respectively, by a China Coast Guard vessel and a vessel belonging to China’s maritime militia. The incidents took place near the Second Thomas Shoal, in waters that both the Philippines and China consider their own. In 2016, the tribunal in charge of enforcing the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) sided with Manila over the Second Thomas Shoal, but that hasn’t stopped Beijing from claiming it is the rightful owner and underlining this point through various maritime provocations.
Indeed, for the past decade, there have been regular encounters between China and the Philippines in the desolate waters.
In recent months, China has been particularly keen to demonstrate its presence around the Scarborough and Second Thomas shoals. It has rammed Philippine Coast Guard vessels and boats resupplying fishermen. It has used water cannons against Philippine vessels and tried to chase them away. On just one day in November, 38 Chinese vessels were circling the Second Thomas Shoal’s waters, according to The Associated Press.
Snip.
[Ray Powell, the director of Stanford University’s SeaLight group,said Beijing’s objective] is to discourage any attempts by nearby countries to follow the Philippines’ example in asserting their rights to waters that China has unilaterally declared to belong to Beijing. “China wants to communicate that it has jurisdiction in the South China Sea and gets to decide over activities there,” he explained.
The aggression may be of the gray-zone kind—that is, not involving military violence—but it’s decidedly harmful, and not just to the Philippine and other vessels being targeted. “China’s harassment of civilian Philippine vessels carrying out humanitarian missions has a negative impact on shipping in the surrounding waters,” Amparo Pamela Fabe, a professor at the Philippines’ National Police College and a fellow of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Brute Krulak Center, told me. “It also heightens the geopolitical tensions in the South China Sea.”
Indeed, the harassment has so alarmed the U.S. Defense Department that the U.S. military is now making a point of showing its presence off the Philippine coast, including by sending aircraft to circle above altercations between Chinese and Philippine vessels. But in reality, there isn’t much the Pentagon can do to deter the vessels from the China Coast Guard or the maritime militia off the coast of the Philippines: The United States wouldn’t risk an armed conflict with China over the harassment of Philippine vessels.
I’m pretty sure that China wouldn’t be nearly so confident of that if Donald Trump were still President…
A whole lot more Biden Recession hits the economy—unexpectedly! The poor go hungry, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor confirms Biden corruption, people keep flocking to Texas and Florida, McConell’s brain blows up (again), and a whole lot of Texas laws take effect. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Poor people are buying less food because they can’t afford it. “Among households using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s boosted pandemic benefits, 42% skipped meals in August and 55% ate less because they couldn’t afford food, more than double last year’s share, according to a Wednesday report from Propel Inc., a benefits software developer.”(Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)
Victor Shokin, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Biden family corruption (that Donald Trump was impeached for asking about) has spoken out for the first time since 2019 – and says the Bidens did it.
To review – Shokin had an active and ongoing investigation into Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, according to a 2020 US Senate Committee report.
Zlochevsky, who hired Hunter Biden to sit on his board, granted his own company (Burisma) permits to drill for oil and gas in Ukraine while he was Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. Shokin stated in a 2019 deposition that there were five criminal cases against Zlochevesky, including money laundering, corruption, illegal funds transfers, and profiteering through shell corporations while he was a sitting minister.
Now, Shokin tells Fox News that be believes the Bidens were taking bribes.
“I do not want to deal in unproven facts. But my firm personal conviction is that yes, this was the case. They were being bribed,” Shokin told the outlet. “The fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal – my firing – isn’t that alone a case of corruption?” he asks in another clip.
“Young High Income Earners Are Flocking To Florida And Texas, New Study Shows…”To the surprise of likely no one, Florida and Texas are once again No. 1 and No. 2. Florida gained a total of 2,175 high earners aged 26 to 35 after accounting for both inflows and outflows, while Texas gained a net 1,909. Despite the losses, New York (-5,062) and California (-4,495) still have the highest count of young high earners of any state by a wide margin.
Katy ISD rejects the radical social justice agenda. “The agenda item included policy updates in regard to requiring sex-specific spaces to be ‘safeguarded,’ which include bathrooms and locker rooms. Policies were also updated on pronoun usage as teachers and staff will not be required to use student “preferred pronouns” and content prohibiting ‘gender fluidity’ instruction.”
Texas laws that take effect today, including a ban on child sexual mutilation (AKA “gender affirming care”), banning men from college women’s athletics, and banning DEI from public universities.
Relations between the coup junta in Niger (which observers want you to know is pronounced knee–J) and France gets spicier. The junta is trying to expel the French ambassador and he’s not going. The tiff might very well turn kinetic, and I doubt the Wagner Group mercs are up to taking on French regulars.
Also, investors are suing them over “Alleged Chapek Era “Cost-Shifting Scheme” to Hide Streaming Losses.” Maybe everyone lost the streaming wars. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
All across the world, supply chains that were disrupted by Flu Manchu lockdowns don’t seem to have fully recovered. Maybe it’s because some political entities are still doing lockdowns, or maybe it’s because vaccine mandates are making critical worker shortages worse. Here are a few data points:
Remember The Great Toilet Paper Panic of 2020? It’s back!
Costco warned customers this week about a toilet paper shortage as the wholesale retailer is having challenging time stocking shelves due to supply chain disruptions, according to Fox News.
Costco told Fox News via an email statement, “Due to increased volumes, you may see a slight delay in the processing of this order.” The retailer noted that the company is “working to fulfill everything as quickly as possible.”
Costco announced purchasing limits on some products but didn’t mention specific items, saying, “some warehouses may have temporary item limits on select items.”
Some shoppers have reported other items of Costco warehouses are either in short supply or there are purchase limits.
Bottled water seems another shortage item.
As for myself, I made sure to start picking up one of the giant megapacks of toilet paper every trip to Sam’s back when lumber prices started spiking, on the “wood = paper” theory, so I’m set for a while.
The semiconductor shortage is getting worse. “A wave of delta-variant cases in Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines is causing production delays at factories that cut and package semiconductors, creating new bottlenecks on top of those caused by soaring demand for chips.” Eh, the slice-and-dice portion of the business is some 20 orders of magnitude less demanding than the actual fabrication process, so I expect that hiccup to be overcome quickly. The fab capacity constraints are going to be with us until next year when more capacity starts coming online (or the Biden Recession starts driving the smaller fabless design houses out of business, freeing up foundry capacity). And Biden Administration threats to invoke the Defense Production Act over semiconductor shortages shows that they have no frigging clue how the semiconductor industry works. The auto manufacturers screwed up by cancelling foundry runs last year, which means they’re paying the price this year. No bureaucratic inquiry is going to result in expanded fab capacity, any more than nine women can get together to produce a healthy baby in one month, and there’s no “hoarding” going on.
Shortages are also reported of big rig and diesel parts:
Everyone's worried about computer chip shortage for graphics cards, personal vehicles, but they all forget… The supply line that runs it.
Big diesel trucks. The chips are so short handed now trucks are sitting for weeks. pic.twitter.com/LgTEm3cgtV
On the ammo shortage front, I’m hearing from friends that it’s still pricey, but can be found a bit more readily than last year. According to this report, handgun ammo is starting to be more available, but rifle ammo is still very scarce with hunting season looming.
Finally, from back in August, here’s a piece on how supply chain disruptions were going to get worse.
The demand for shipping containers greatly exceeds the supply, and this has pushed global shipping container rates to levels we have never seen before.
And once shipping containers are delivered to U.S. ports, there isn’t enough port workers to unload them all.
It can now literally take months for products that are made in China to get to the U.S. retailers that originally ordered them.
Some data points for your consideration rather than attempted prognostication on whether things are getting better or worse.
Death, taxes, and China’s communist government doing the world dirty are three unchanging verities in the modern world. Here’s a roundup of their recent misdeeds:
Last week in Anchorage, Alaska, Chinese diplomats dressed down Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Both seem stunned by the broadsides.
Not since newly elected President John Kennedy was humiliated at the Vienna summit in June 1961 by USSR strongman Nikita Khrushchev have American diplomats been so roughly manhandled by a communist government.
China’s defiant provocations are not just verbal. Nor are they aimed only at our high officials.
New York University students at a satellite campus in Shanghai were manhandled and jailed by Chinese authorities in two separate incidents earlier this month. Some U.S. diplomats in China were recently subjected to anal swab testing for COVID-19—supposedly “in error.”
These examples of humiliation and harassment could be multiplied. China has engaged in the insidious and systematic theft of U.S. patents and copyrights. It brazenly violates trade agreements, manipulates its currency, dumps products below cost on world markets, engages in cyberwarfare, expropriates Western technology, and stonewalls accurate information on the origins of COVID-19.
If China gives out money, it believes it owns the recipient. In the last five years, New York University has received some $47 million in gifts from China.
The U.S. Department of Education recently cited Stanford University for failing to report more than $64 million in donations from Chinese sources since 2010. It’s no surprise that China recently sent a visiting researcher to Stanford who turned out to be connected with the Chinese military.
About 220 Chinese fishing vessels, almost certainly part of China’s maritime militia, are now crowding around Whitsun Reef in the Spratly chain in the South China Sea in another attempt to break apart the Philippines.
Whitsun is where the United States and the region should confront an increasingly expansionist China. The failure of the Obama administration to defend the Philippines in early 2012, in a confrontation similar to today’s, emboldened China’s regime to adopt an even more aggressive posture in its peripheral waters.
Whitsun Reef is inside China’s infamous nine-dash line. The line on official maps defines an area informally known as the “cow’s tongue,” which includes about 85 percent of the South China Sea. Beijing maintains it has sovereignty over every feature there, including Whitsun, which Beijing has named Niue Jiao.
China claims all the waters inside the dashes are sovereign as well, terming them “blue national soil.” There is no legal basis for an assertion of sovereignty of this sort.
Whitsun, which Manila calls Julian Felipe Reef, is 175 nautical miles from Palawan, an island of the Philippines. The feature is within the Philippine “exclusive economic zone” (EEZ), the band of international water 12 to 200 nautical miles from a country’s shoreline.
Since December, large Chinese trawlers have lashed themselves together and parked in formations near Whitsun. Vessels come and go, but the numbers have gone up over time. They have not been engaged in fishing.
Beijing says the boats near Whitsun are sheltering from the weather, but they have not left in periods of sunny skies and calm seas.
Near Whitsun, retired U.S. Navy Capt. James Fanell tells Gatestone, China is building “two concentric rings of new artificial island bases.” The outer ring is defined by Fiery Cross, Subi, and Mischief Reefs. The inside one is defined by Gaven, Johnson, and Hughes Reefs. Whitsun, 10 nautical miles east of Hughes Reef, is inside China’s South China Sea fortress.
Beijing is employing the “Scarborough Model,” says Fanell, a former director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet. President Biden should be no stranger to Scarborough Shoal, also inside the “cow’s tongue.”
Chinese vessels swarmed Scarborough after the Philippines detained Chinese poachers in early 2012. The shoal, just rocks above the high-tide waterline, is strategic because it guards the approaches to Manila and Subic Bays. It is only 124 nautical miles from the main Philippine island of Luzon and about 550 nautical miles from China’s Hainan Island.
That spring, Washington brokered an agreement for both sides to withdraw their craft, but only Manila complied. Beijing has been in firm control of Scarborough Shoal ever since.
The Obama administration, despite the brazen Chinese seizure, decided not to enforce the agreement it had just arranged. As a “senior U.S. military official” told the Washington Post at the time, “I don’t think that we’d allow the U.S. to get dragged into a conflict over fish or over a rock.”
And a goodly number of the idiots running Obama’s foreign policy are now back running Biden’s. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Although the United States’ stated policy objective vis-à-vis China is to continue President Donald Trump’s tough stance, the actual performance by the hapless team was anything but tough. Its agenda items included climate change and nuclear nonproliferation. No mention was made, however, of Beijing’s harsh treatment of the Hong Kong democracy movement, its horrific human rights record, or its aggressive behavior against Taiwan and in the South China Sea. Given all of that, plus the CCP’s blatant and brazen interference in U.S. domestic matters, including the espionage and intellectual property theft that helped justify closing China’s Houston consulate last year, at least some of those key issues might have been mentioned.
Some of the reasons for the U.S. delegation’s reticence may have to do with just such Chinese influence operations, which have reached deeply into myriad U.S. institutions. According to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, the CCP directs an organization called the United Front Work Department (UFWD), which is under the authority of the CCP Central Committee. The China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), which, according to a December National Pulse report, operates under the authority of the UFWD, specifically targets U.S. media and journalists, often by sponsoring them for “familiarization trips” to China. The full list of outlets that reportedly gave “favorable coverage” to the CCP includes Fox News, the New York Times, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, The Hill, and many more. Additional mainstream outlets met with CUSEF officials in the United States.
Every one of them either knew or should have known that the mission of the UFWD is to coordinate influence operations—propaganda—both domestically and abroad that stifles all criticism and spreads only positive views of China. Influencing those who influence American perceptions about China and the CCP means special attention for the full spectrum of U.S. media.
In an October 2020 report, Newsweek identified hundreds of channels through which the CCP targeted “businesses, universities and think tanks, social and cultural groups, Chinese diaspora organizations, Chinese-language media and WeChat, the Chinese social media and messaging app.” Social media efforts to manipulate outcomes in the 2020 U.S. presidential election included hundreds of Facebook and Twitter accounts that pumped out divisive messaging.
Snip.
Let us conclude by returning to that Houston consulate, ordered closed in July 2020 by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. It wasn’t just about espionage and intellectual property or technology theft. Chinese cadres posted there also were involved in direct interference in the U.S. political process, including encouraging and supporting Antifa and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement street protests.
According to an August 2020 report in China Scope, which itself cited a Mandarin language report from Radio Free Asia in that same month, the Second Chief Directorate of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—its intelligence unit—sent staff members to the Houston consulate with a specific mission. That mission was to use data-mining technology to identify Americans who might be susceptible to messaging about participating in Antifa and BLM street protests. They then used the Tik Tok app to send those individuals videos on how to organize riots. Gordon Chang was right when he called CCP meddling ahead of the 2020 presidential election “an act of war.”
At the Anchorage talks, Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi had the unmitigated gall to throw Black Lives Matter directly into Blinken’s face, saying: “The challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep-seated. They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as ‘Black Lives Matter.’” Blinken and his team, likely clueless about what went on at Beijing’s Houston consulate, offered not a murmur of protest.
It’s worth mentioning that Alicia Garza, one of the three self-avowed Marxists who founded the Black Lives Matter movement, with a background in the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization, also runs a network of affiliated organizations. One of these is the Black Futures Lab. A click on the website’s “donate” button goes to a page that states: “Black Futures Lab is a fiscally sponsored project of the Chinese Progressive Association.” Despite group denials of any affiliation between the two, there is no question that the CPA is supportive of the People’s Republic of China.
For my last column I spoke with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. His important piece documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them. Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich.
A trade consultant told Friedman: “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”
In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.
Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and send millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?
Returning those jobs to America, along with ending foreign wars and illegal immigration, was the core policy promise of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the source of his surprise victory in 2016. Trump was hardly the first to make the case that the corporate and political establishment’s trade relationship with China had sold out ordinary Americans. Former Democratic congressman and 1988 presidential candidate Richard Gephardt was the leading voice in an important but finally not very influential group of elected Democratic Party officials and policy experts who warned that trading with a state that employed slave labor would cost American jobs and sacrifice American honor. The only people who took Trump seriously were the more than 60 million American voters who believed him when he said he’d fight the elites to get those jobs back.
What he called “The Swamp” appeared at first just to be a random assortment of industries, institutions, and personalities that seemed to have nothing in common, outside of the fact they were excoriated by the newly elected president. But Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite gave them collective self-awareness as well as a powerful motive for solidarity. Together, they saw that they represented a nexus of public and private sector interests that shared not only the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits but also the same center of gravity—the U.S.-China relationship. And so, the China Class was born.
Connections that might have once seemed tenuous or nonexistent now became lucid under the light of Trump’s scorn, and the reciprocal scorn of the elite that loathed him.
A decade ago, no one would’ve put NBA superstar LeBron James and Apple CEO Tim Cook in the same family album, but here they are now, linked by their fantastic wealth owing to cheap Chinese manufacturing (Nike sneakers, iPhones, etc.) and a growing Chinese consumer market. The NBA’s $1.5 billion contract with digital service provider Tencent made the Chinese firm the league’s biggest partner outside America. In gratitude, these two-way ambassadors shared the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party with their ignorant countrymen. After an an NBA executive tweeted in defense of Hong Kong dissidents, social justice activist King LeBron told Americans to watch their tongues. “Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech,” said James, “it can be a lot of negative that comes with it.”
Because of Trump’s pressure on the Americans who benefited extravagantly from the U.S.-China relationship, these strange bedfellows acquired what Marxists call class consciousness—and joined together to fight back, further cementing their relationships with their Chinese patrons. United now, these disparate American institutions lost any sense of circumspection or shame about cashing checks from the Chinese Communist Party, no matter what horrors the CCP visited on the prisoners of its slave labor camps and no matter what threat China’s spy services and the People’s Liberation Army might pose to national security. Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.
The billions that China gave to major American research universities, like $58 million to Stanford, alarmed U.S. law enforcement, which warned of Chinese counterintelligence efforts to steal sensitive research. But the schools and their name faculty were in fact in the business of selling that research, much of it paid for directly by the U.S. government—which is why Harvard and Yale among other big-name schools appear to have systematically underreported the large amounts that China had gifted them.
Indeed, many of academia’s pay-for-play deals with the CCP were not particularly subtle. In June 2020, a Harvard professor who received a research grant of $15 million in taxpayer money was indicted for lying about his $50,000 per month work on behalf of a CCP institution to “recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security.”
But if Donald Trump saw decoupling the United States from China as a way to dismantle the oligarchy that hated him and sent American jobs abroad, he couldn’t follow through on the vision. After correctly identifying the sources of corruption in our elite, the reasons for the impoverishment of the middle classes, and the threats foreign and domestic to our peace, he failed to staff and prepare to win the war he asked Americans to elect him to fight.
And because it was true that China was the source of the China Class’ power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.
Snip.
Even the Trump administration was split between hawks and accommodationists, caustically referred to by the former as “Panda Huggers.” The majority of Trump officials were in the latter camp, most notably Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former Hollywood producer. While the film industry was the first and loudest to complain that China was stealing its intellectual property, it eventually came to partner with, and appease, Beijing. Studios are not able to tap into China’s enormous market without observing CCP redlines. For example, in the upcoming sequel to Top Gun, Paramount offered to blur the Taiwan and Japan patches on Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” jacket for the Chinese release of the film, but CCP censors insisted the patches not be shown in any version anywhere in the world.
In the Trump administration, says former Trump adviser Spalding, “there was a very large push to continue unquestioned cooperation with China. On the other side was a smaller number of those who wanted to push back.”
Apple, Nike, and Coca Cola even lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. On Trump’s penultimate day in office, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.” That makes a number of major American brands that use forced Uyghur labor—including, according to a 2020 Australian study, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors—complicit in genocide.
Read the whole thing.
Some of those same businesses are finally hvaing second thoughts about China. “Clothier H&M [Hennes & Mauritz AB] and shoemakers Nike, New Balance, and Adidas have earned the ire of China’s Communist government. They did so by criticizing the regime’s abuse of Uyghurs and announcing that the companies would no longer get their cotton from Xinjiang, where Uyghur workers are forced to labor in slave-like conditions.” Good for them, though it still doesn’t make up for Nike’s wokeness. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Also objecting to China ties: Cornell students. “Cornell’s student assembly unanimously demanded that the university “halt” plans for a new joint degree program funded by the Chinese government, a further setback for administrators grappling with a faculty revolt over their close ties to the authoritarian country.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Blinken said in January that he agreed with a determination by his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, that China was committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, which China denies.
In addition to the “more than one million” Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minority groups it said were in extrajudicial internment camps, the report said there were “an additional two million subjected to daytime-only ‘re-education’ training”, a new reference not included in the previous year’s report.
Here’s another blow to the “China’s inevitable economic rise” narrative: “Owners give away flats around Beijing as falling values leave them with negative equity.”
Property owners in areas around Beijing have been giving away their flats rather than continue to pay their mortgages, after four straight years of dropping values have left their homes worth less than their outstanding loans, according to a report from Xinhua News Agency.
The report said Hebei province homeowners in the cities of Sanhe and Zhuozhou, as well as in Gu’an county, have been unable to sell their properties in the current market downturn. They have chosen to give away their properties, accepting the financial loss, because they can no longer afford to cover the debt.
Zhang Yumei, an economics professor at Hebei University, commented that such flats are not really free, because the new owners must pay the outstanding mortgage. It would actually be cheaper to buy a new flat if the price of a second-hand unit has dropped more than 30%, because such a drop would leave it in negative equity, she added. Besides, nobody will take a “free” flat unless they can get a discount from the mortgage issuer, Zhang said.
A Xinhua reporter found that the property business in the Hebei town of Yanjiao has been hard hit by the downturn in values. Many shops that housed property agents have turned to other kinds of businesses, the reporter said.
Tony, an Italian friend and business owner, asked his Chinese employee to clean up a document, add a vertical line on the left and have all text aligned with that line. When he was handed the document back, the requested line was there, some text was aligned with it but some still wasn’t.
When Tony pointed out to his employee that not everything lined up perfectly, she was genuinely surprised. From her perspective the alignment was “chabuduo”, good enough.
Hmmmm:
Reporter (1/25/2021): Biden "suspended a Trump Administration executive order that was aimed at keeping foreign countries, specifically China, from interfering in the U.S. Power grid… why did he do that?" pic.twitter.com/q6KamEMT41
We are fortunate indeed to have real world results that we can look at for how well or how poorly governing philosophies and agendas work. America’s major cities have been dominated by the Democratic Party for decades, and the results are in.
All but 3 of America’s largest cities are run by Democratic mayors. The 3 largest cities – New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, are losing population every year.
Several of the most violent cities in America, including Albuquerque, Memphis, Detroit, Chicago and Washington, DC are run by Democrats.
States that are bleeding population every year due to high taxation, over-regulation, decaying cities and failing public services including New York, Connecticut, California and others are all run by Democrats.
States that have low to no income taxes, are right-to-work and favor energy development do better economically than high tax, forced union and energy unfriendly states. According to the annual economic outlook rankings published by the American Legislative Exchange Council Center for State Fiscal Reform, in 2019 the bottom ten states were all run by Democrats and the top 10 states except two were run by Republicans.
Needless to say, the top 10 states all have higher GDP, better quality public services, and are experiencing net in-migration. Nevada is an outlier in that it recently flipped blue. However, they have no personal income taxes, a low corporate income tax and they are a right to work state.
Finally, all of the bottom ten states have net out-migration, high tax burdens, and lower quality of life.
The evidence couldn’t be more clear. Democrats are incapable of governing well, or in some cases, such as Seattle or Chicago, governing at all. Every single city that has problems with decaying infrastructure, gentrification, crime, violence, homelessness and other social pathologies are governed by Democrats. They promise a boundless cornucopia of “free” (i.e. taxpayer-funded) services and programs to meet every demand of the creeping socialism we’re seeing in America, at the cost of trampling people’s constitutional rights including property rights.
Critics assailing the Department of Homeland Security for “over-stepping their bounds” in Portland have it 100 percent wrong. The department is in the right.
Further, its actions thus far should just be the first step in disrupting the organized violence aimed at intimidating public officials, injuring law enforcement officers, destroying public and private property and making our streets less safe.
Let’s be clear. We are not talking about “peaceful protests.” What is going on in Portland, as well as Seattle and some other is an array of criminal activity: rioting, looting, arson, assaulting law enforcement officers and more. This is flat out criminal activity.
And it is not all spontaneous. This is organized criminal activity.
For starters, the rioters are targeting cities where public officials have created a more permissive environment. They have restricted the actions of local and state law enforcement. When rioters are arrested, they release them quickly, refusing to prosecute.
Moreover, these officials refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement. In sum, they have turned their cities into “soft targets” for criminals.
Violence has spiked in cities nationwide following weeks-long anti-police protests over the death of George Floyd, according to government statistics and media reports.
Residents in Minneapolis have created patrol groups to protect themselves after the city’s crime spike, and shootings in Atlanta rose 265% compared to last year during an almost month-long period. Seattle’s “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) led to a 525% increase in crime, including the death of two teenagers.
As crime rates rose, activists have called to abolish the police, an idea that’s gained traction among liberals. Former Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon, singer John Legend and women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe have all supported dismantling the police, and protesters have touted the idea during demonstrations.
The Minneapolis City Council unanimously voted to dismantle their police department next May, and a school board in Oakland, California, voted to ban the police from its schools.
Saturday’s protest activity was billed as the biggest yet, at least in part due to the shooting of Garrett Foster. Foster was the man who apparently pointed his AK-47 rifle at the car window of driver Daniel Perry while protesters surrounded and pounded on his car during an unpermitted protest and illegal taking of the public street just before 10 p.m. on July 25. Perry, an Army sergeant and licensed handgun carrier, fired his weapon after Foster had used his rifle to order Perry to roll his car window down. Pointing a gun at someone can, obviously, be read as hostile action. Texas’s castle law covers drivers in vehicles defending themselves, including the use of deadly force.
APD and the Texas Department of Public Safety were ready for Saturday’s action, making this post short.
Law enforcement officers were deployed and ready downtown. According to a source familiar with Saturday’s events, no officers were injured. Little force was used in shutting down the protest — which illegally blocked streets and was intended to bring violence to Austin. No property was damaged despite the protesters’ plan. They did take roads illegally, briefly including Interstate 35, the main highway that runs through downtown Austin. Protesters harassed innocent diners and others downtown.
These assholes, and the decision to let Austin become bumsville, is why so many downtown restaurants are in danger of closing. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The Democratic National Committee released a platform 180 degrees off from the spin. It’s so pro-Iran that the National Iranian-American Council, the de facto Iranian regime lobby in Washington, immediately “applauded” the DNC “for its forward-leaning platform commitments on issues of importance to the Iranian-American community.” It demonstrates that President Obama’s curious preference for the supremacists running the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than our traditional regional allies, has become mainstream Democratic ideology.
Trump administration policies have brought the bloody Islamic Republic to its knees. The Democrats seek to restore its vitality by ending sanctions and re-entering President Obama’s odious Iran deal. Every faction across Israel’s notoriously fractious political spectrum agreed that this deal was an existential threat. Biden and the 2020 Democrats take the opposing view: Regime change is wrong; diplomacy and economic engagement can restrain the mullahs.
Next up, the Gulf Arabs: A new generation of leaders have recently expanded women’s rights, confronted Islamism, acted to curb terrorism, deepened ties to the U.S. and moved towards ending the Arab/Israeli conflict. Biden and the 2020 Democrats prefer to “reset” those warm relations in order to keep America’s traditional Gulf allies at arms length.
“Five GOP lawmakers filed a lawsuit against Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott (R) over a contact-tracing contract signed with MTX Group in May. The Frisco-based private company agreed to a $295.3 million dollar deal after defeating several well-known corporations. But lawmakers argue that the bidding process bypassed constitutional requirements and voice concerns about the ability of MTX to mitigate privacy concerns.” The Republicans suing are State Reps Mike Lang, Kyle Biederman, William Zedler and Steve Toth, and state Senator Bob Hall. And the MTX contract does stink.
The mainstream media as a whole – especially the political news media in and around the DC/NYC/Beltway area – has two options: They can straighten up their acts and stop insulting the intelligence of their audiences or they can continue to show their (mostly left-wing) partisan stripes and turn audiences off.
If recent history is any indication, however, they’ll be going with option two – because they’ve shown over and over again that when it comes to demonstrating a commitment to objective reporting versus pushing biased political angles that help Democrats, they will choose those biased political angles nearly every time.
Nima “Rolex” Fazeli, a 22-year-old from Orlando, Fla., was charged in a criminal complaint in Northern California with aiding and abetting intentional access to a protected computer.
Mason “Chaewon” Sheppard, a 19-year-old from Bognor Regis, U.K., also was charged in California with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering and unauthorized access to a computer.
A U.S. Justice Department statement on the matter does not name the third defendant charged in the case, saying juvenile proceedings in federal court are sealed to protect the identity of the youth. But an NBC News affiliate in Tampa reported today that authorities had arrested 17-year-old Graham Clark as the alleged mastermind of the hack.
Wfla.com said Clark was hit with 30 felony charges, including organized fraud, communications fraud, one count of fraudulent use of personal information with over $100,000 or 30 or more victims, 10 counts of fraudulent use of personal information and one count of access to a computer or electronic device without authority. Clark’s arrest report is available here (PDF). A statement from prosecutors in Florida says Clark will be charged as an adult.
Social Justice Warrior Akilah Hughes sues Sargon of Akkad over his fair use of one of her videos, despite the judge telling her that was a bad idea, promptly gets her ass handed to her, and is ordered to pay $38,000 in attorney’s fees. Showing the same level of self-awareness that got her where she is, she attacks the judge and labels Sargon a “white supremacist.”
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.
Yesterday marked the 75th Anniversary of the start of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the last great naval battle of World War II, and arguably the largest naval battle in history. American naval forces (with help from Australia’s Task Force 74) decisively defeated the Japanese Imperial Navy, sinking four aircraft carriers, three battleships, six heavy cruisers and four light cruisers.
Leyte Gulf was a sprawling naval engagement that took place in roughly four areas around the Philippines October 23-26, 1944. The Battle of the Surigao Strait featured the last battleship-on-battleship engagement in history, where overwhelming American firepower sunk two Japanese battleships and caused the rest to turn back. One of the most decisive actions was The Battle Off Samar, in which two American ships, destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts (laid down in Houston shipyards) and destroyer USS Johnston, carried out some of the greatest badassery in American naval history, attacking a much larger and heavier armed force of Japanese battleships and cruisers in order to screen the retreat of six escort carriers.
Here’s a machinima recreation of The Battle Off Samar:
They sank three Japanese cruisers, disabled another three, and caused the Japanese battleships to turn tail and run, ensuring the successful American invasion of the Philippines and destruction of Japan’s access to vitally needed war materials.
After Leyte Gulf, the remainder of the Japanese fleet would stay in port bereft of fuel. It wouldn’t engage the American fleet directly again until one last suicidal attempt during the invasion of Okinawa.
(@d1rtydan) 
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