July 30, 2023

The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked" (6) -- What Did China Get For Its Money?

July 30, 2023/ Francis Menton

On July 27 (last Thursday), Representative James Comer of Kentucky appeared on Senator Ted Cruz’s podcast. Comer is the Chair of the House Oversight Committee, and the guy who has subpoenaed, and little-by-little is getting, the bank records of transfers from foreign governments to Biden family companies. Late that evening, Twitchy posted about an 8 minute clip from the podcast of Comer discussing some of the things his subpoenas had uncovered. Comer particulrly discusses one large payment from a Chinese government-connected entity, much of which went to various Bidens.
Separately on the same day, July 27, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio released on Twitter (or is it now “X”?) a thread that he called “The Facebook Files, Part I.” Jordan, in addition to being the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, also serves as Chair of is Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Government. In that capacity, Jordan had received a trove of internal Facebook communications documenting pressure from the White House to suppress various true information, notably information relating to the origin of the Covid virus in the Chinese Wuhan laboratory. The Wall Street Journal on July 28 had further reporting on the Facebook emails newly released by Jordan’s Subcommittee.

In other words, we’re starting to learn what China got in return for its investment in the Bidens.

January 19, 2023

In China Things Head South Quickly

January 19, 2023/ Francis Menton

If you follow developments out of China at all, you have likely noticed a spate of bad news recently. For years, even decades, it seemed that China could do no wrong in its growth toward becoming a major world power: China reported economic growth of 10% and up every year; it was becoming the hub of manufacturing for the entire world; and as its economy grew, its clout on the world stage increased rapidly.
Pundits on the left (and occasionally on the right as well), often with overt admiration for the Chinese model of authoritarian state-directed crony capitalism, widely predicted that China would supplant the U.S. as the world’s leading power some time not too far into the 21st century.
Suddenly that’s looking much less likely. What happened?
The fault lines have been there for a long time, but well-concealed by a regime with tight control over information flow, let alone by a Western press with a deep hatred of the West and not hiding its cheerleading for success of the Chinese model. In the last few months, as conditions have deteriorated, the regime has lost a big piece of its ability to keep the lid on.

April 16, 2022

April 16, 2022/ Francis Menton

Cheerleaders for “socialism” as a governance model superior to our own messy republican constitutionalism have long looked to China as their guiding light.
In this post from March 2021 (“Is China About To Win In The Battle For The Future?”), I collected a round-up of quotes from left-wing true believers in China’s inevitable ascendency. Examples included Ian Bremmer in Time Magazine in November 2017 (“How China’s Economy Is Poised to Win the Future”), and Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post in October 2017 (“China is winning the future. Here’s how.”).
And most notably, there was the New York Times’s Tom Friedman’s unforgettable column way back in 2009 articulating the deep faith in the superiority of having a country run by a meritocratic elite free from the tiresome burdens of elections and accountability.
With the intervening year, we have seen multiple examples of China’s authoritarian decision-making proving unable to make reasonable trade-offs, and thus steering the country into massive policy blunders. Here are a couple of current examples:

January 09, 2022

January 09, 2022/ Francis Menton

I thought the whole idea behind getting vaccinated for Covid-19 was to put the societal disruption behind us.
Yes, the vaccines may not be perfect; but then, nothing in this miserable world is perfect. Still, with the vaccines we should surely be able to go back to work, go back to school, hold sporting events and theater and concerts and political rallies and everything else where people gather. And for God’s sake get rid of the masks. Right?
That’s the way it works in Florida. But this is New York. Here, we are engaged in end-stage Covid craziness. Most office work is still suspended, and theater and concerts are 50/50, with endless protocols.
But my favorite is the masking.

November 26, 2021

November 26, 2021/ Francis Menton

The Chinese Virus (aka Covid-19), including the Xi variant, may or may not be fading away. But here in Greenwich Village, despite the best efforts of our politicians and health bureaucrats to keep the population cowering in abject fear, Covid fatigue has definitely set in.
On the West end of Bleecker Street, the many store fronts that became vacant at the peak of the pandemic are almost all now re-occupied with optimistic new ventures. The shoppers are back in force, almost all unmasked. Today looked to me to be unusually busy even for a Black Friday.
The fashion this season is for the storefronts to surround themselves with elaborate floral displays.

October 05, 2021

October 05, 2021/ Francis Menton

I spend a lot of time at this site ridiculing the unfalsifiable hyperbole and altered data that pass for “science” in the field of climate change. But climate change is just one of many areas where people who have little idea what real science consists of nevertheless claim the mantle of science to order others around.
Right now the response to Covid-19, the Chinese Virus, competes with the response to climate change for the most egregious misuse of the imprimatur of “science” to justify political goals.
As background for this post, I refer to the Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science,” which appeared, among other places, in this post of September 12, 2020: “Science is a process for understanding reality through using experiment or data to attempt to falsify falsifiable hypotheses.” Under this definition, the classic example of real science at work is the randomized controlled drug trial, best understood as an attempt to falsify the falsifiable hypothesis that the drug at issue is effective, through proving that a placebo works just as well. When the attempt at falsification fails, then the drug has been shown, at least provisionally, to be effective.
The Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science” is what I seem to remember learning on the subject back in junior high school, and that I have since confirmed by reading up on the work of philosopher Karl Popper and others.