THE NEW COLONIALISM: How China Exports Repression to Africa. “China’s ‘techno-dystopian expansionism’ is undermining democracy in African countries.”

In the past two years, China has not only continued to develop its internal censorship network but has also begun exporting the model across the world.

In 2017, President Xi Jinping outlined his ambition of transforming China into a “cyber superpower” and presented the country as “a new option for other countries and nations that want to speed up their development while preserving their independence.”

By providing a mixture of training, technological infrastructure, and applying pressure to international companies, China is extending its control of information beyond its national borders.

The results have been far-reaching and, with a dramatic reduction in digital freedoms across the continent, several emerging democracies have been placed under threat.

As part of the trillion-dollar international development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Chinese companies have been instrumental in providing artificial intelligence and facial recognition systems to African governments.

If it were a Western country oppressing poor Africans in this way, we’d be hearing a lot more about it. But Asians can’t be colonialists, because reasons.

UPDATE: Link was missing. Fixed now — sorry!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Court blasts university that expelled student after his ex doctored evidence: Determining a student’s future based on ‘wildly incomplete factual records.’

JIM TREACHER: Six Ways to Strike Back Posthumously at John Wayne’s Racism.

Or, you could just… y’know… not care. John Wayne can’t hurt you. You’re alive and he’s dead. Getting angry about stuff he said half a century ago is dumb. Lots of people said lots of things decades ago that wouldn’t be acceptable today. Fortunately for you… it’s today!

Enjoy your superiority. Clearly, it’s the most interesting thing about you.

Read the whole thing, pilgrim.

VIDEO: Fight to free 6 Citgo executives held in Venezuela intensifies amid new turmoil in the country.

Detaining oil executives when your ruined country needs every oil dollar it can muster is at least a new and creative way of eating your seed corn.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CULTURE OF RACISM EDITION: Ivy League offers ‘free’ ski trip…but not for whites.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Academy Awards, Mueller, Schiff and Much, Much More. “This self-absorbed clown, Adam Schiff. Schiff has threatened to bring Mueller to testify before the House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) to spill all the damning Trump secrets if the DOJ doesn’t release the entire report from the Mueller witch hunt.”

TRADE WARS ARE FUN AND EASY TO WIN: China January soybean imports from U.S. nearly double vs. December: customs.

FACT FILES ETHICS COMPLAINT AGAINST GILLIBRAND: It’s received virtually no coverage in the Mainstream Media, but the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) has filed a complaint with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).

“On February 5th, 2019, Senator Gillibrand posted a political fundraising tweet requesting readers ‘chip in $5 so we can put an end to this’ using a video of her on the House floor during the State of the Union address,” FACT told the committee in a letter earlier this month.

“Presumably Senator Gillibrand is aware of her ethics violation because she later removed the tweet after raising funds in violation of ethics rules, all of which should be returned,” FACT continued.

I have no doubt that, since this matter has now been brought to their attention, The New York Times, Washington Post, et. al. will even today remedy this serious oversight in their 2020 Democratic presidential nomination campaign coverage. Oh, and I will surely see a couple of pigs flying over my backyard tomorrow, too!

ENDGAME: After Venezuelan troops block aid, Maduro faces ‘diplomatic siege.’

Troops loyal to Maduro violently drove back aid convoys seeking to enter Venezuela on Saturday, leaving almost 300 wounded in clashes with security forces and at least three protesters dead near the Brazilian border.

Juan Guaido, recognized by most Western nations as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, urged foreign powers to consider “all options” in ousting Maduro, ahead of a meeting of the regional Lima Group of nations in Bogota on Monday that will be attended by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.

Pence is set to announce “concrete steps” and “clear actions” at the meeting to address the crisis, a senior U.S. administration official said on Sunday, declining to provide details.

“What happened yesterday is not going to deter us from getting humanitarian aid into Venezuela,” the official said, speaking with reporters on condition of anonymity.

Socialism in a nutshell: You can get shot for trying to help people whose lives were ruined by socialists.

I GUESS GAIA NEEDS HER CHAKRA RELEASED: Snow In Malibu.

POTEMKIN FLEET: Despite Putin’s swagger, Russia struggles to modernize its navy.

President Vladimir Putin calls improving the Russian navy’s combat capabilities a priority.

The unfinished husks of three guided-missile frigates that have languished for three years at a Baltic shipyard show that is easier said than done.

Earmarked for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the frigates fell victim to sanctions imposed by Ukraine in 2014 after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, prompting Kiev to ban the sale of the Ukrainian-made engines needed to propel them.

With Moscow unable to quickly build replacement engines for the Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates, construction stopped. Russia is now cutting its losses and selling the three ships to India without engines.

Invading Ukraine was worse than just wrong; it was stupid.

THE FUTURE OF WOMEN’S SPORTS? Transgender sprinters finish 1st, 2nd at Connecticut girls indoor track championships.

IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Giant Tortoise Feared Extinct Reappears After 113 Years. “As well as the Fernandina tortoise, another ‘giant’ species thought to be possibly extinct showed up this year—Wallace’s giant bee.”

I like tortoises, but those giant bees should be driven right back into extinction.

ON THE TURNING AWAY: Roger Waters gets shredded after slamming Bernie Sanders for supporting humanitarian aid to Venezuela.

Speaking of “perfect stooges for the 1 percent,” the anti-Semitic Waters’ net worth is estimated at $310 million. Though the real buried lede here is that a rock superstar has finally discovered a humanitarian aid project he won’t back — because doing so would shine a light to the causes of all that “bad luck” that Venezuela has had over the past couple of decades.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “Smollett has shown that the most absurd narratives imaginable will continue to gain credence because they fill a deep psychological, cultural—and, yes, careerist—need for millions in the country to believe that hate crimes are epidemic, that they are the currency of the Right, and that they can only be addressed by more government scrutiny of a particular class of victimizers such as the Duke Lacrosse team, the Covington kids, or Smollett’s mythic red-hatted Trump racists.”

CORN, POPPED: Will 2020 Democrats Help Trump By Destroying Each Other?

Ed Kilgore in this piece repeats a bit of advice to the candidates from Steve Rosenthal: “Don’t try to stifle new ideas, new opinions, or new plans.” That’s encouragement to pitch the Green New Deal and other absurdities — not that this year’s crop of far-left candidates needs much prodding to do just that. Which might be exactly how to get more Trump.

But there’s also this: Trump’s Secret to Victory in 2020: Hispanic Voters.

Trump is making an aggressive play for Hispanic-American votes in Florida and beyond. Meanwhile, polls suggest Marist might have been onto something—and that Democrats should be worried that Hispanic voters could help reelect Trump and keep the Senate in Republican control. If so, it would be a cosmic twist of fate: A party that has staked its future on a belief that America’s demographic picture is changing decidedly in its favor could find itself losing to a man whose politics of fear should be driving precisely those voters into the Democrats’ waiting arms.

The second half of that graf is just silly. Illegals can’t vote (“Well…”), and legal immigrants are some of the fiercest critics of illegal immigration. And a big feature of Trump’s SOTU address was a push for less of the latter but more of the former. If Trump can continue to deliver on jobs and wages for legal immigrants, then it’s still “the economy, stupid.”

Going back to 2016, Trump won the White House largely by “stealing” white, blue-collar voters from Hillary Clinton in the Rust Belt. Since then, he’s pursued Hispanic and black voters more aggressively than any Republican since Reagan, and it isn’t even close.

The further left the Democrats push next year — and it looks like they’ll push very hard, indeed — the more secure the GOP base will become, aside from a very few remaining NeverTrump dead-enders. That would give Trump the liberty to spend more time and resources pursing voters which the Democrat nominee simply can’t afford to lose.

2020 is shaping up to be a fun, scrappy fight.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Seven Ugly Lessons About the Media From Jussie Smollett’s Debacle.

GIDDY UP, TRIGGER, LET’S GET OUT OF THIS CRAZY PLACE:  Student in cowboy outfit causes Wake Forest University to go bonkers.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Harris on Green New Deal Price Tag: ‘It’s Not About a Cost.’

She isn’t wrong. It’s about control.

BYRON YORK: Is Trump especially vulnerable to primary challenge?

It’s become a common talking point for “Never Trump” Republicans seeking to defeat President Trump in the 2020 GOP primaries: Polls have found that a substantial number, maybe 40 percent, of Republican voters say they would be open to a primary challenge to the president. Those surveys, the “Never Trumpers” argue, show that Trump is particularly weak and vulnerable to a serious primary challenge.

The problem is that it is common for voters to say they are open to a primary challenge to the president of their own party. It happened to former President Barack Obama in 2010-2011, before Obama went on to win re-election. It also happened to Bill Clinton in 1992-1993, before Clinton went on to win re-election. It did not happen to George W. Bush in 2002-2003, but that was because of strong Republican support for a wartime president.

In other words, today’s poll results about President Trump are not at all unusual.

But where’s the pundit-fun in that?

DAVID HARSANYI: The Devolution Of Man. “Of course, it’s not Kaepernick’s fault that our culture is transforming virtue signalers into heroes. These are the same forces, after all, that pummel us with insufferable harangues about appropriate gender roles. Men are acting too masculine while women aren’t acting masculine enough, it seems, and the nation is in the midst of a crisis. So perhaps it’s my pathological masculinity speaking, but it’s all become quite insufferable.”

They can’t help yammering and virtue-signaling, apparently, but there’s no reason you have to listen, or pretend to respect their twaddle.

WOMEN AND CHILDREN MOST AFFECTED:  Earth facing ‘global warming Armageddon’ in less than 150 years.  Also can someone tell Occasional Cortex?  Maybe she’ll relax a little and her eyes will pop in a bit? (I’m afraid we can’t do anything about the teeth, except maybe file them down.)