DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN: To bail out or not to bail out: China’s Evergrande dilemma.

The Evergrande Group, one of China’s biggest real-estate developers, owes more than $300 billion to a number of lenders. Its interest liabilities are rising by an average of $28 million daily. On Thursday, Sep. 23, alone, the company needs to pay around $120 million as interest payments to bondholders.

If Evergrande begins to default, it will present the Chinese government with a dilemma. Should the company be bailed out, or should it be allowed to fail?

The markets are worried about the contagion effect that an Evergrande collapse will have on the economy; comparisons to the 2008 insolvency of Lehman Brothers, and the financial meltdown that ensued, have already been aired. There’s no good time for an economic crisis, but a particularly bad time for one is when the world is already in the grip of a pandemic.

If Evergrande does go into a bankruptcy court and has its debt restructured, its investors will all take significant haircuts on what they’re owed. But according to the so-called “seniority waterfall”—the pecking order in which creditors get paid—the Chinese government itself makes money first, since state-owned banks are among Evergrande’s biggest creditors.

Developing…

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: LOL — Beto O’Rourke Wants to Be Embarrassed Again. “Way back in the day, Beto would have been laughed off of the political stage. The 21st-century mainstream media is so riddled with leftist bias, however, that he’s kept in the national conversation. The MSM hacks actually believe this guy is smart.”

Well, to them he might be.

COME SEE THE RACISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Dropping SAT helps whites, hurts Asians. “Asian students outscore whites by 100 points on the SAT, and the gap is growing, writes Jay Caspian Kang in the New York Times. So who benefits when colleges drop the SAT and ACT for admissions? Is it blacks and Hispanics? Or is it white students, who’ll find it easier to compete with high-scoring Asians?”

WHO ARE ILLEGALS GOING TO BELIEVE, MAYORKAS OR THEIR OWN LYIN’ EYES? DHS Secretary Mayorkas in Del Rio, Texas: ‘Our Border Is Not Open.’

BAD THINGS COME IN THREES: Beto III: The Betoing. “Spider-man 3. Aliens 3. Godfather Part III. Very rarely is the third installment in a series the best. What brings this to mind is word that Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, hot off losing a senate race and a Presidential primary, has decided to run for governor of Texas.”

PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.

Matt Margolis: Trump Is Reportedly Trying to Oust McConnell From GOP Leadership. Is This a Good Idea?

AJ Kaufman: Ilhan Omar Demands Democrats Disobey Senate Parliamentarian on Immigration. “This ruling by the parliamentarian, is only a recommendation. @SenSchumer and the @WhiteHouse can and should ignore it.”

Yours Truly (Plus the Missus): Cocktails with VodkaPundit: The Perfect Margarita. “I spent years futzing around with various ingredients and ratios, and the final result is so simple and so tasty that I don’t hesitate at all calling this margarita ‘perfect.'”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY:

DON’T RAISE THE RIVER, LOWER THE BRIDGE: Low achievement? Dump the tests. “We’ve been denouncing and canceling the metrics by which achievement (and its shortfalls and gaps) have long been monitored, declaring that tests are racist, barring their use for admission to selective schools and colleges, and curbing their use as outcome measures (e.g., states scrapping end-of-course exams) without substituting any other indicators of achievement.”

NOT A GOOD SIGN: Pentagon Still Won’t Release Names of ISIS-K Terrorists They Claim They Killed in Drone Strike.

SOMEHOW NOT THE BEE: The Taliban is now riding in swan boats with rocket launchers.

OOPS: Biden Is Desperate to Regain Bases, Intel, Allies He Threw Away in Afghanistan. “The missing context: We already had all of those things prior to Biden’s petulant decision to fully pull out of Bagram Air Base.”

BARI WEISS: Everybody Hates the Jews.

Everybody hates the Jews. That’s the refrain from the brilliant satirist Tom Lehrer in “National Brotherhood Week,” a song that I had memorized by the time I was ten, given that I was raised by the kind of dad who made sure songs like “The Vatican Rag” and “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” were the soundtrack to our lives.

But these days, the idea that “everybody hates the Jews” feels like less of a punchline and more like an accurate report of public sentiment. It seems every other day a new study or survey confirms what so many American Jews are feeling, as the old joke had it, that they are hating us more than is necessary.

Today, came the latest study from the Brandeis Center, which released a poll of “openly Jewish” college students. Seventy percent of the students surveyed reported that they experienced antisemitism. Half of the students said they have felt the need to hide their Jewish identity at school, explaining that they felt doing so would protect them from harassment, bullying or social exclusion. This is the kind of thing we would expect to hear about the Jews of Europe. But not here.

Read the whole thing.

DON’T GET COCKY: 2024: A Trump Landslide in the Making?

OH, CANADA: The enactment of Bill C-16, passed under the Trudeau government, allows males who self-identify as females to transfer into women’s prisons—no hormones, surgery, or attempt to appear female required.

I’M SURE THE PROFESSIONAL FEMALE GRIEVANCE INDUSTRY WILL GET RIGHT ON THIS: Not So Inclusive: Taliban Removes Women From Kabul Workforce.

RUSSIA: Apple, Google drop Russian opposition app ahead of election.

Russia’s “Smart Voting” election app has been removed from the App Store and Google Play, in what an opposition spokesperson calls “political censorship.”

Following Russia’s demand that Apple and Google remove the tactical voting app, and then threats of fines, Apple and Google have dropped the “Smart Voting” app in the country.

The app, devised by imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was intended to boost candidates with the best chance of succeeding against incumbents. Apple and Google’s removal came just hours before election voting was due to begin.

I wonder what would happen if Putin were ever to allow an honest election.

#RESIST: America’s Farmers Fight Back Against California’s War on Bacon. “‘The EATS Act would prevent states from impeding agricultural trade from other states within the United States—consistent with the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which provides the federal government with the duty to regulate interstate commerce,’ said Sen. Hyde-Smith in a press release. ‘State and local units of government would still be able to regulate farming and ranching within their own jurisdictions, however, this legislation makes it illegal to impede trade from fellow states.'”

CLIMATE CHANGE FOLLIES: Biden Wants to Beat the Heat: Old Man Yells at Sunny Skies. “It all sounds very tragic and — if you’re a progressive for whom every problem is a nail in need of a big government hammer — a great excuse to shout ‘Hammertime!'”

#RESIST: Is Australia Not Going To Take It Anymore? “This video from Melbourne suggests that Australians have had just about all of the lockdowns they can stand.”

BETTER THAN NEVER: Only 18 Months Late: ‘The Lancet’ Finally Publishes a Letter in Support of the Lab-Leak Theory.

WELL, GOOD: ‘Big Blow To Biden’: Senate Parliamentarian Rules Citizenship Path For Illegals Cannot Be In $3.5 Trillion Bill, Report Says.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: For U.S. Residents Hiding in Kabul, Help Is Slow In Coming.

I’D MISSED THIS ONE LAST WEEK, BUT IT MIGHT REVEAL COLORADO’S CURRENT MOOD: GOP slams leading state Democrats who bailed on President Biden’s visit.

What Coloradans didn’t see during President Biden’s Colorado visit on Tuesday is even more important than the slurred, awkward speech he stumbled through at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Arvada.

Missing at the wildly unpopular president’s side were U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, and U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, the dean of the state’s Democrat delegation.

It’s not that they don’t support Biden’s mission to spend trillions of your taxpayer dollars to enact AOC’s Green New Deal, because they do.

Eight months in and he’s already becoming toxic, even in a state as blue as Colorado has turned.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Idiot Joe’s Neglected Border Crisis Is Getting Even Worse. “By any objective measure, Joe Biden hasn’t been doing well as president. The media and the brain-dead Democrat electorate can’t be objective, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that the rest of us have to live in the dystopian toilet that Biden keeps clogging.”

NOT THE BEE: PA teachers union is promoting a patently racist training course which says ‘public education won’t be fair until school systems limit the power of white parents.’ Come with me and let’s dive into this.