MITCH MCCONNELL warns the Chinese against using force in Hong Kong.
Archive for 2019
September 3, 2019
DEMOCRATS ALWAYS WANT TO SILENCE UNCOMFORTABLE ARGUMENTS: 1619: Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party’s “Principled” Opposition to “Hate Speech.”
THAT’S WHAT THEY ALL SAY: China’s Most Indebted Firm Is Too Big to Fail.
There’s a lot working against China’s most indebted property firm. China Evergrande Group is sitting on $113.7 billion in debt and its core profit fell 45% in the first half of the year. Real-estate growth is slowing, with banks under orders to curb home loans. President Xi Jinping’s refrain that houses are for living in, not speculation, has been cropping up more frequently.
Time to rein things in, right? Not Evergrande. The company, whose portfolio already includes theme parks and a football club, now wants to become the world’s biggest electric-vehicle maker in the next three to five years. It’s burning through precious cash – 160 billion yuan ($22 billion) – to build factories in Guangzhou.
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For anyone gawking at Evergrande’s improbably ballooning debt load, just waiting for the doomsday clock to strike midnight, there’s a valuable lesson: This firm is too big to fail. Evergrande is one of China’s biggest developers – with projects in 226 cities – and its billionaire founder, Hui Ka Yan, is the country’s third-richest man. With property accounting for about a quarter of China’s gross domestic product, any instability in the sector has proven too much for Beijing to stomach. Time and again, the government has reluctantly reopened the credit spigots to boost a flagging real-estate market. Just look at 2008, 2011 and 2014.
This will end well.
WELL, YES, AND THAT’S BY DESIGN, NOT BY ACCIDENT: Young Americans Prefer Socialism Because They Are Ignorant of the Past: Camille Paglia.
Trump announced in a radio interview last week, the plan would bring the level of U.S. forces down to 8,600 troops, which would would be mostly focused on the counterterrorism mission dubbed “Freedom’s Sentinel.”
That’s roughly the number of U.S. forces President Barack Obama left in Afghanistan after unilaterally declaring an end to combat operations in 2014. But Obama attempted to end the war without the benefit of a peace agreement with the Taliban, which then began to make a comeback.
In August 2017, Trump reluctantly agreed to send more troops to back up the struggling Afghan forces, along with authorizing offensive airstrikes against the Taliban.
Earlier: Robert Spencer: Lindsey Graham Is Wrong: It’s Long Past Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.
MEN WITHOUT HATS: When will men’s hats come back? “We could afford to clothe ourselves in the silks and satins of the court of Versailles, but we dress like the peasants in blue jeans, sneakers and grubby sweatshirts.”
TWITTER’S BLUE CHECKMARK OUTRAGE BRIGADE SELF-BECLOWNS ONCE MORE: Dem Congressman Claims It’s Easier to Buy an AR-15 Than Sudafed, Hilarity Ensues.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Boulder Cracks Down on Vaping, Tobacco Sales.
HMM: The Democrats’ Growing Threat of a Third-Party Run. “So many candidates, so many left-wing demands, someone is bound to take the Independent route.”
While a moderate Democrat threat is unlikely, with so few in the field, it is not out of the question. Four years ago, moderate Democrats still controlled the Party. They are still a group Democrats cannot afford to lose.
According to 2016 exit polling, Clinton received 52 percent of moderate votes. Presumably, many are still long-time Democrats. Once Bullock or Delaney drops out (and currently Real Clear Politics’ average of national polling has them at a combined 1.4 percent in the primary field), they could be a moderate landing space.
The Democrats’ far bigger Independent threat comes from their burgeoning left. According to Real Clear Politics’ latest national polling average, 59.9 percent of Democrats are currently supporting candidates on the left. For comparison, Sanders received just 43.2 percent of Democrat votes in 2016.
Such rapid expansion raises increased expectations. The Democrats’ crowded and competitive left-centric field will only stoke these. Inevitably, all will not be realized — particularly as the nominee tries to pivot to the center in the general election. This could open the door to any of many left candidates and supporters left out.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
TONY KRONMAN WRITES IN THE COLLEGE FIX: How the assault on American excellence at Yale–and all universities–threatens our democracy. The people launching this assault are not interested in democracy.
Kronman’s new book is The Assault on American Excellence.
AT AMAZON, Deal of the Day, Learn Spanish: Rosetta Stone Bonus Pack Bundle.
LUNATIC, INDEED: So much for the lunatic charge that Trump is ‘in Putin’s pocket.’ As Walter Russell Mead pointed out a couple of years ago, if Trump were Putin’s puppet, he’d be . . . doing the stuff Obama did.
ILHAN OMAR FEELS THE HEAT: “Of all the scandals in which Ilhan Omar is enmeshed, one might think the Daily Mail’s revelation this past July of her affair with political consultant Tim Mynett would be the least of them. The news last week of Beth Mynett’s divorce filing, however, has begun to disillusion a Somali community that has taken Omar at face value. Not cool — not cool at all, and it has thrown Omar off her game. Omar’s denial of the affair is a lie that is both obvious and bald-faced. She has therefore run from the tabloid newspapers and the local media as they have sought to report on the scandal.”
UPDATE: Link was bad. Fixed now. Sorry!
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The University Is a Ticking Time Bomb: Treating nearly 75 percent of the professoriate as disposable is not sustainable.
ON THIS DAY IN 1939: Britain and France declare war on Germany.
At 1115 BST the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced the British deadline for the withdrawal of German troops from Poland had expired.
He said the British ambassador to Berlin had handed a final note to the German government this morning saying unless it announced plans to withdraw from Poland by 1100, a state of war would exist between the two countries.
Mr Chamberlain continued: “I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and consequently this country is at war with Germany.”
Chamberlain would continue to serve as PM until May 10, 1940, the day the ill-fated Battle of France began.
THE MSM’S FALSE PICTURE OF THE 2020 ELECTION: Consider this: “Progressives bitterly clinging to the strong version of ’emerging Democratic majority’ theory are not fighting the last war; they’re fighting the war before the last war.” That’s the analysis of Warren Henry over at The Federalist.
Besides being an astute campaign analysis, Henry’s post is a reminder that the MSM narrative is not based in Trump-era political reality, a fact that is too easily forgotten in the crush of faux reportage and posturing. Put otherwise, everybody on a plummeting airliner insisting they are losing altitude due to pilot incompetence doesn’t change the fact a birdstrike took out all the engines.
IT’S ACTUALLY TO KEEP THEM FROM SLIPPING IN U.S. NEWS RANKINGS BECAUSE THEY’RE ADMITTING WORSE STUDENTS: College ditches SAT/ACT requirement to ‘increase the diversity’ of students.
THE CUSTOMER IS DEFINITELY RIGHT: The USAF brass now thinks highly of the A-10 Warthog.
Most air force leaders recognized that getting rid of the A-10 would not only anger and disappoint many of their army colleagues, but also the A-10 pilots and ground crews as well as the thousands of air force ground controllers who saw the success of the A-10 up close.
In late 2016 the senior leadership of the U.S. Air Force finally agreed that the A-10 was actually worth keeping. The air force leadership had learned that the A-10 was more than just a popular and effective ground support aircraft. Reserve squadrons revealed that they had quietly developed additional uses that were popular with all combat pilots.
Read the entire, detailed post.
RELATED: Worm’s eye view of an A-10 and two Hogs over Arizona.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Grande Order of Fake Outrage Edition.
Our friends on the left, alas, aren’t so carefree and fun-loving. We’ve discussed the permanently aggrieved nature of the modern progressives before. As I am often accused of never having anything nice to say about the other side, let me try something new here: I frequently find myself marveling at their ability to continue to surprise me, especially with their ability to concoct outrage and/or resentment in almost any given situation.
Take, for example, the young women’s rights writer for The Guardian, who finds the Starbucks policy of asking for people’s names a trigger for resentment.
Everything is problematical.
USAF STEALTH, RAF STEALTH: RAF F-35B Lightnings conduct integration flying training with USAF B-2 Spirit stealth bombers over the white cliffs. The B-2s are deployed to RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire, UK. This is a fine photo.
SALENA ZITO: Cancel culture isn’t real life — yet.
Maraffa worries what things would look like, though, if real life did become like Twitter. What if boycott lists were something people carried on their person or in their smartphone?
“It’s not beyond the realm of possibility,” he warns. “Performance wokeness is a plague, and we should do everything we can to avoid it from seeping into our daily lives.”
Indeed.
