4CHAN USERS ARE LEAKING INFO ALLEGEDLY FROM HUNTER BIDEN’S IPHONE AND…YIKES.

UPDATE: Yikes, indeed: Hunter’s search history reveals his obsession with porn and sex fantasies including ’18yrs old,’ ‘lonely widow’ and ‘MILF crack cocaine porn,’ he uploaded his own amateur videos and texted Pornhub link to phone listed in his contacts as ‘Dad.’

(Updated and bumped.)

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What is China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)?

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)

The BRI is an ambitious plan to develop two new trade routes connecting China with the rest of the world. But the initiative is about far more than infrastructure.

It is an effort to develop an expanded, interdependent market for China, grow China’s economic and political power, and create the right conditions for China to build a high technology economy.

Why create the Belt and Road?

There are three main motivations for the BRI. The first, and most discussed internationally, is China’s rivalry with the US. The vast majority of Chinese international trade passes by sea through the Malacca strait off the coast of Singapore which is a major US ally. The initiative is integral to China’s efforts to create its own more secure trade routes.

There is no doubt that China’s intention is also to make participating nations interdependent with the Chinese economy, and thereby build economic and political influence for China.

In that respect it has similarities with the Marshall Plan that followed the Second World War – but with the essential difference that China dispenses funding to other nations based purely on shared economic interests.

The second key reason for the initiative is the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis. China’s government responded to the emergency with a ¥4tn stimulus package, issuing contracts to build railways, bridges, and airports, but saturated the Chinese market in the process. The Belt and Road framework provides an alternative market for China’s vast state-owned companies beyond the borders of China.

Finally, the Belt and Road is seen as a crucial element in the Chinese government’s efforts to stimulate economies of the country’s central provinces, which historically lag behind richer coastal areas. The government uses the Belt and Road to encourage and support businesses in these central regions, allocating budget generously, and encouraging businesses to compete for Belt and Road contracts.

So how’s that working out for all concerned?

OPEN THREAD: Gonna use my imagination.

JONATHAN ADLER:  “Will Chevron Get the Lemon Treatment?”

BARI WEISS:  “The New Founders America Needs.”

SHE’D HAVE MY VOTE … IF HAD A VOTE:  “Anti-Woke Warrior Princess Enters Conservative Leadership Race.”

SEE ALSO: SRI LANKA. A Popular Uprising Against the Elites Has Gone Global:

A popular uprising of working-class people against the elites and their values is underway—and it’s crossing the globe. There is a growing resistance by the middle and lower classes against what Rob Henderson has coined the “luxury beliefs” of the elites, as everyday folks realize the harm it causes them and their communities.

There were early glimmerings last February, when the Canadian Trucker Convoy pitched working class truck drivers against a “laptop class” demanding ever more restrictive COVID-19 policies. You saw it as well in the victory of Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who ran on parents’ rights in education and went on to win both suburbs and rural areas. You can see it in the growing support of Hispanic voters for a Republican Party, which increasingly identifies as anti-woke, and pro-working class. And now we’re seeing the latest iteration in the Netherlands in the form of a farmer’s protest against new environmental rulings that will ruin them.

Over 30,000 Dutch farmers have risen in protest against the government in the wake of new nitrogen limits that require farmers to radically curb their nitrogen emissions by up to 70 percent in the next eight years. It would require farmers to use less fertilizer and even to reduce the number of their livestock. While large farming companies have the means to hypothetically meet these goals and can switch to non-nitrogen-based fertilizers, it is impossible for smaller, often family-owned farms. The new environmental regulations are so extreme that they would force many to shutter, including people whose families have been farming for three or four generations. In protest, farmers have been blockading streets and refusing to deliver their products to supermarket chains. It’s been leading to serious shortages of eggs and milk, among other food items.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE:

REDISCOVERED MIES VAN DER ROHE BUILDING COMPLETED IN INDIANA:

A glass building designed in 1952 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe has completed at Indiana University in Bloomington, more than 50 years after the German-American architect’s death.

Now known as the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, the design was adapted for contemporary use from the rediscovered plans by New York architecture studio Thomas Phifer and Partners.

It was originally commissioned by the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity at the same time Mies van der Rohe was working on the Farnsworth House.

The 60-foot-wide (18-metre) and 140-foot-long (43-metre) building is two storeys with a profile of white steel, characteristic of the 20th-century architect.

The top level is wrapped completely in glass and projects out over the concrete walls of the recessed ground-floor structure. The lower level is mostly open, with a central atrium that extends up through the second storey.

Partitioned interiors have both stark white and wooden walls, with floors of grey limestone and white epoxy terrazzo. Select furnishings by Mies van der Rohe and Florence Knoll were included.

Architecture-oriented YouTuber Stewart Hicks recently uploaded a tour the Eskenazi building:

Hicks seems determined to make a lost Mies van der Rohe building that had been designed by Mies, that’s instantly recognizable as an offshoot of Mies’s Farnsworth House, Crown Hall, and numerous other examples of Mies’s steel and glass American-era architecture as some sort of building without an architect.

But what would the man himself think of that notion? In his 1985 biography of Mies, Chicago area architectural historian Franz Schulze compared the mindsets of Walter Gropius and Mies, the first and last directors of Germany’s Bauhaus design school, before each man fled the Nazis to America in the 1930s:

The rivalry between Mies and Gropius relaxed as both men grew into old age, though the basic difference in their philosophies of teaching and designing were never resolved. Gropius was a devoted advocate of teamwork, both at the Bauhaus and in his American practice, while Mies remained a steadfast authoritarian. One day while visiting with Mies in the home of Chicago realtor Robert H. McCormick, Gropius was holding forth on the advantages of collaboration in the creation of a building. “But Gropius,” Mies inquired, “If you decide to have a baby, do you call in the neighbors?”

I’ll take that as a definitive answer.

UPDATE: Roger Kimball: Is modernism the enemy? The case of Mies van der Rohe.

(Updated and bumped.)

F/A-18 SUPER HORNET FIGHTER JET BLOWS OFF USS TRUMAN DURING BAD WEATHER.

EARLY PRIME DEAL: 20V Cordless Drill with Battery and Charger. #CommissionEarned

OF COURSE — DO THEY LOOK LIKE BIOLOGISTS? Church of England: There is ‘no official definition’ of a woman.

READER FAVORITE: LED Floor Lamps for Bedroom Living Room with Remote. #CommissionEarned

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: White House fires back at ‘out of step’ activists fuming over Biden’s response to abortion ruling.

The White House is blasting progressives who “have been consistently out of step” with the Democratic Party amid criticism that President Biden’s response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade has been too little, too late.

The White House defended Biden’s handling of the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion on June 24, while progressive Democrats have called for a number of responses, including packing the Supreme Court, ending the Senate filibuster, declaring a public health emergency, and launching abortion clinics on federal property.

“Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” outgoing White House communications director Kate Bedingfield fired back in a statement Saturday. “It’s to deliver help to women who are in danger and assemble a broad-based coalition to defend a woman’s right to choose now, just as he assembled such a coalition to win during the 2020 campaign.”

“The president has been showing his deep outrage as an American and executing his bold plan — which is the product of months of hard work — ever since this decision was handed down,” she said.

Outrage so deep that Biden is laser-focused…on vacationing once again in Delaware this weekend: Bidens set to be at North Shores home July 8-10.

Earlier: Biden Is Too Old to Be President Says — the New York Times?

JIM GERAGHTY: The Ever-Expanding ‘Group Therapy for Liberals.’

Stephen L. Miller — a.k.a. RedSteeze — has argued for a while now that the late-night talk shows aren’t meant to be entertainment or comedy anymore; they are now, functionally, late-night “group therapy for libs.” And that description, while harsh, seems pretty accurate — the constant sneering and ridicule at figures on the right, the warm welcome for celebrities on the left, the obsessive focus on whatever is outraging the Twitter Left at that moment, the reassurance that every good and right-thinking American thinks the same way. . . .

And maybe despite their seeming triumphs and power, the modern urban progressive Left needs that reassuring group therapy. If you’re a progressive, it can often feel like the world is always giving you some sort of bad news: Republicans oppose the bills you want to see passed. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema won’t get on board. The Supreme Court keeps ruling against your side. The polling for the midterms looks terrible. Despite mass shootings, Congress and states won’t just ban guns the way you wish. Trump won’t go away. Tucker Carlson and other figures on Fox News keep saying things that outrage you. People still listen to and watch Joe Rogan. Elon Musk might buy Twitter.

In fact, it might be time to ask if a lot of modern journalism is meant to serve as a form of group therapy for liberals, too. Think about how much print, television, and web journalism features the subtext, “You are right, and your uncle who votes for Republicans is wrong. In fact, he’s racist. And sexist. And homophobic and transphobic. And selfish. And doesn’t care about the earth. You are the good and righteous one, and you were right to scream at him and storm away from the Thanksgiving table.”

Well, it might not be an “ever-expanding” group therapy session: Joy Reid, pictured atop the article, might not have an in-perpetuity contract with MSNBC after all: Heartbreak at MSNBC as Joy Reid’s ‘ReidOut’ Crashes and Burns in Ratings Wars. “Perhaps most infamously, Reid came under fire in late 2017/early 2018 when she claimed she was ‘hacked‘ after posts from her old blog were dug up and found to contain what LGBTQ rights activists said were ‘bigoted’ and ‘homophobic’ remarks. MSNBC stood by her at the time, but if rumors of her on-air days being numbered are true, it sounds like the higher-ups there might have just about reached their limit with her.”

RIOTS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: Abrams campaign has spent over $800K on private security, despite ties to radical ‘defund the police’ group.

(Classical reference in headline.)

THURSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM: Just Stop Oil protesters damaged Constable’s The Hay Wain in gluing stunt, gallery says, as eco-zealot faces accusations of hypocrisy for racking up 50,000 air miles jetting to Bali, Australia and the Canary Islands.

Yesterday security guards watched as Hunt and fellow student Lazarus, who describes himself as a ‘musician and activist’, forced the National Gallery to evacuate art lovers, tourists and a class of 11-year-old children on a school trip from Room 34 where the painting hangs.

MailOnline can reveal that Miss Hunt, 23, is the co-founder of Just Stop Oil whose social media pages are adorned with exotic holiday pictures from locations including south-east Asia, Australia and the Canary Islands. Earlier this year she glued herself to the red carpet at the Bafta awards, and she has broken into an ExxonMobil oil refinery in Hampshire.

The former XR supporter even used the long haul trips to try to bolster her environmental credentials, telling social media followers from Bali: ‘Can we look back in another 50 years and say we did everything to protect our pretty cool planet?’

If Miss Hunt flew to every destination she would have clocked up 49,404 air miles over five years and been responsible for the emissions of 13 tons of carbon dioxide.  The European average – per person – is 8.4 tons in a whole year, according to the My Climate website.

I don’t want to hear another word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint.

(Classical reference in headline.)

HOW TO LEVERAGE A MURDER:

While rewriting the constitution was so unpopular that it failed, [Shinzo] Abe’s motives were not. Indeed, if these are controversial views, the controversy seems limited to these outlets’ foreign bureaus.

These rhetorical flourishes don’t shed light on Abe’s life and thought. They cloud and confuse more than they provide any enlightening context. It’s unclear why they were included at all save the inescapable desire to use the former prime minister’s death for parochial political purposes. In their eagerness to frame Abe as some kind of fanatic, these journalists have exposed their own fanaticism.

Read the whole thing.

GRADUALLY, THEN SUDDENLY:

● Shot: Bill Gates commends Sri Lankan healthcare system.

—The Daily Mirror, April 18^th, 2018.

● Chaser: Sri Lanka healthcare on verge of collapse in economic crisis.

—The BBC, April 17^th.

● Hangover: Dear Democrats, This Is What Your Oppressive Global Initiatives Lead To.

—Kevin Downey Jr., PJ Media, yesterday.

ROGER KIMBALL: Trumped Up J6 Hearings Pump Trump Up. If Trump is the candidate, Americans will vote for him not in spite of January 6, but in part because of it—especially the deep-state response to it.

U.S. DISTRICT COURT ORDERS LAW SCHOOL TO RESCIND NO-CONTACT ORDERS ISSUED AGAINST CHRISTIAN LEGAL SOCIETY FACULTY ADVISOR AND STUDENTS WHO SHARED THEIR RELIGIOUS VIEWS WITH ANOTHER STUDENT.

KNIVES OUT: Biden Is Too Old to Be President Says — the New York Times?

SOCIALISTS NATIONALLY DISCOVER THEIR NEXT HITLER: Terrified Dems Ramp Up ‘Worse Than Trump’ Anti-DeSantis Narrative as Fears About His Popularity Grow.

GREAT MOMENTS IN “GOING GREEN:” The Hummer EV produces more CO2 than a gas-powered sedan. Even going all-electric has its limits for how much good it can do.

IRA STOLL: Good News.

It’s hard to know for sure precisely what accounts for the [NY] Times labeling this article explicitly as “Good News.” Maybe the Times headline writers don’t actually trust the newspaper’s own readers to agree that increased racial diversity in bookstore ownership and management is good news, and the headline writers think the readers need to be heavy-handedly told that it is? Or maybe there are internal career-advancement incentives at the Times that reward newsroom employees for signaling that they are on board with the racial-diversity-is-super-important-but-viewpoint-and-religious-diversity-doesn’t-matter point of view?

Read the whole thing.

READER FAVORITE: Alpha Grillers Instant Read Meat Thermometer for Grill and Cooking. #CommissionEarned