TWITTER PERMANENTLY BANS M.D. WHO IS MANDATE CRITIC: Twitter’s censorship axe fell on Dr. Robert Malone today. “The thought police said ‘looks like you have too much to think.'”
Archive for 2021
December 29, 2021
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DECOUPLING: China’s rising cost of business is prompting some companies to leave.
China’s personal information protection law, implemented this month, is the latest factor adding to a challenging political environment for businesses operating in the country and altering the cost-benefit analysis. While the untapped business potential of 1.4 billion consumers was once an irresistible draw, this is increasingly changing.
James Zimmerman, a Beijing-based American lawyer, said that the China market had become “less and less palatable for Western companies” because of “reputational risks of operating in an environment with extreme content censorship, and tighter regulatory conditions.”
The trade war brought politics into U.S.-China business to a much greater degree, with Beijing and Washington wielding tariffs and consumer product boycotts in their power struggle. Domestically, Beijing has launched a populist campaign against big business, effectively making the market less profitable for many companies under stricter new regulations.
Previously: China Is Becoming The Soviet Union.
HOW INCOGNITO? COLOR ME SKEPTICAL. How to go incognito on YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, and more.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Princeton historian mugged by Princeton.
Graeme Wood profiled Xiyue Wang for the Atlantic earlier this year in “The Princeton Historian Mugged by Reality.” Last week the Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross updated the story in “Historian Says Princeton Left Him To ‘Rot’ in Iranian Prison.” Adapting the heading of Wood’s Atlantic profile, the update might be titled “The Princeton Historian Mugged by Princeton.” That is more or less the story told by Wang in the lawsuit he filed against Princeton last month in New Jersey state court (the subject of Ross’s story). I have embedded the complaint below.
Working toward a Ph.D. under the supervision of the eminent Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin, Wang traveled to Tehran for archival research. Wood’s enraging profile tells the story of Wang’s arrest and imprisonment by Iranian authorities in the course of his research. Tortured by the Iranians, Wang “confessed” to being a spy. After 40 months in Evin Prison, he was sprung by the Trump administration.
Wood’s profile captures Wang’s awakening from the falsehoods and illusions about Iran disseminated on campus at Princeton and elsewhere in the United States. He refers to his time in prison as “involuntary fieldwork.” The torture to which he was subjected is a disgusting trademark of the regime, although the time in prison was not entirely wasted. He perfected his Farsi and learned French. French must be something like the tenth language he has learned in the course of his studies.
Reflecting on his long stay in Iran prior to his arrest, Wang told Wood that that he met no supporters of the regime — unlike his time in the United States. Princeton professors talking with him about his imprisonment wanted to blame it on Trump, even though it occurred under Obama and Trump secured his release. Wood quotes Wang: “What are they teaching their students? The facts just don’t matter.”
There’s really only one way to visit Iran properly: As part of a New York Times’ sponsored vacation.
COLLUSION: Why Is the World Still Accepting China’s Dishonest COVID-19 Numbers? “While the numbers in America aren’t totally accurate — folks with positive at-home tests don’t always notify health authorities, and many asymptomatic people are unaware they have the virus — official Chinese statistics are preposterous.”
A FRIEND ALL THE WAY IN DARWIN, AUSTRALIA REPORTS THAT HER HOUSE SHOOK ENOUGH TO WAKE HER FROM A SOUND SLEEP: Giant 7.5 Earthquake in the Banda Sea Indonesia. “It’s not clear if a tsunami was triggered.”
PROGRESSIVES HATE PRIVATE VEHICLES BECAUSE THEY BREED INDEPENDENCE: UK Inches Closer To Eliminating Private Car Ownership.
SCIENCE! CDC Director Walensky Makes Revealing Admission on Why COVID Isolation Period Was Shortened. “‘It really had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate,’ CDC Director Walensky says on why the CDC shortened the isolation period from 10 days to 5 days if you’re asymptomatic.”
THE REAL MINIMUM WAGE IS ALWAYS ZERO: Food prep robot ‘Alfred’ joins kitchen staff at Travis Air Force Base.
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Politico Gushes: Lawrence O’Donnell ‘Riding High’ — As Biden’s Favorite Ring-Kisser.
Isn’t it funny how the liberal media found close ties to President Trump to be seamy and scandalous (think Sean Hannity), but close ties to President Biden are just great? Politico reporter Max Tani is touting MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell as “riding high”…because he’s tick-tight with Biden chief of staff Ron Klain. The headline is “How Lawrence O’Donnell became the White House’s favorite cable news personality.”
When his contract renewal was in doubt four years ago, Lawrence O’Donnell begged his viewers to help keep him on the air at MSNBC.
Now, as the left-leaning network’s prime-time lineup is at its most unstable point in a decade, the 70-year-old anchor has inadvertently become MSNBC’s most valuable star; or, at least, it’s most dependable one, owing to the rare, direct line he enjoys into the Biden White House.
O’Donnell is, unlike virtually anyone else in cable these days, riding high.
As other programs have struggled to break out of the post-Trump slump that has tanked ratings and left some shows straining to find the urgency that drove programming during the previous administration, he has found a unique role as the Biden team’s go-to anchor on MSNBC. O’Donnell’s decades-long relationship with President Joe Biden and his chief of staff, Ron Klain, has paid off handsomely, making the MSNBC host one of the White House’s only go-to news anchors and granting him rare on-camera access.
“News anchor”? That’s hilarious. He’s just as much a “news anchor” as Hannity. Tani admits O’Donnell is NOT riding high in the ratings. Fox’s Laura Ingraham dunks on him nightly. It’s just that Brian Williams is out, and Rachel Maddow’s going to try and step away from nightly duties, so he wins by default. Never mind Fox’s actual ratings in prime time.
Flashback: Lawrence O’Donnell: “I am a socialist. I live to the extreme left, the extreme left of you mere liberals.”
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Man Becomes Jeopardy’s Top ‘Female’ Earner.
TOP SELLER: Victorinox Fibrox Pro Chef’s Knife, 8-Inch. #CommissionEarned
I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE: Study links kids’ screen time during pandemic with rise in mental, behavioral issues.
SUSTAINABILITY: U.S. home prices surge 18.4% in October.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Iowa School Volleyball Coach Accused of Sexually Abusing Student She Met After He Hit Her Car.
WHERE WOKISM IS A OUI BIT DIFFERENT:
But why now, and why in a country like France, with its very different history from the United States? For that matter, why has wokeism taken hold in other European countries, where the radical movement seems in many ways to be an imitation of its American counterpart?
In France, there’s an oft-noted irony within the answer. Despite vocabulary that seems appropriated from American academia, the main concepts originated with a group of leftist French academics in the 1960s and 1970s, who became the rage in many American universities and whose ideas, though simplified and sometimes caricatured, have been enthusiastically reimported into France.
The most influential figure was Michel Foucault, the psychologist and philosopher whose lifelong sympathy for marginalized groups and oppressed people led him to a sustained reflection on the dominating and exploitative nature of power, including its ability to define what is supposedly normal – as opposed to what it considers abnormal or sick.
In matters such as gay rights and equality for women, Foucault-like sympathy for the marginalized feels the same on both sides of the Atlantic. But American wokeness is most powerfully concentrated on a question of race that seems unique to America. Centuries ago, Europe may have engaged in the slave trade, but no European country has anything comparable to the history of American slavery, no decades of Jim Crow, no Ku Klux Klan, no lynchings or legal segregation of the sort that afflicted black America, and also no civil rights movement, no Martin Luther King Jr., and no George Floyd killed in Minnesota. And yet, the vocabulary of critical race theory, with terms like le racism systematique, le privilège blanc, microaggression, even le fragilité blanc, has taken hold in France like an invasive species.
Part of the answer seems to be the contagious global appeal of a doctrine explaining complicated questions, holding the same attraction for French academics, students, and others as for their American counterparts. The appeal is especially strong for a younger generation impatient and dissatisfied with the more moderate views of traditional liberalism — or, in France, the traditional left, even if it was the same enlightened left that fought against colonialism, against anti-Semitism, against the powerful, conservative Catholic Church, as well as for choice on abortion, equal access to education, and France’s extensive social safety net.
Then there’s the matter of demographic change. Britain, Germany, and France have substantially increased their minority populations through high immigration and higher birth rates among non-whites. This has generated two conflicting reactions. One is the increased strength and appeal of right-wing anti-immigrant parties, in France represented most conspicuously these days by a former television personality, Eric Zemmour, who to his detractors looms as a French Trump.
Lisez le tout.
FRANK SCHELL: Why China Got Away With It.
China has gotten away with it: businesses and industries destroyed or damaged; massive recession and unemployment; medical systems strained to the point of collapse; countries rent asunder by populism; transport systems in disarray; interruption of children’s education and development; loss of confidence in governments; rising mental illness, anger, and civil disobedience; vulnerability of the elderly and those with underlying conditions; and nearly twice as many American dead than in World War II. The full effects of COVID-19 and its variants are yet to be known.
Whether the COVID pathogen was an accidental release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or an act of Nature via infected bats or pangolins matters less than the cover up by the Chinese Politburo — delayed disclosure by months, and the persecution of medical experts who tried to tell the truth. That domestic flights in and out of Wuhan were shut down while international ones were allowed to continue speaks for itself. Did the Chinese Politburo think that China should not be the only country to suffer — and that the catastrophe should be exported and shared?
The world’s reaction to this monstrous act has thus far been relatively mild.
Read the whole, damning thing.