Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
How the Vatican capitulated to the Chinese Communist Party The Holy See’s 2018 provisional agreement with Beijing is failing, but the problems with the Vatican’s China policy did not begin five years ago. They stem from the 1980s, when the Holy See began pursuing dialogue with the Chinese Communist Party. The Vatican has capitulated more … Read more
The lab was run by a Chinese man, Jesse Zhu, and was paid millions of dollars by China while experiments were being conducted at the Reedley facility. Legal Insurrection readers may recall that this summer, I reported on a warehouse in Reedley, California had been the site of a massive remediation project and investigation after … Read more
There’s nothing quite like a major diplomatic summit between two rival superpowers, one power militarily ascendant, expansionist and hungry, the other led feebly by frail Joe Biden. High stakes diplomacy and hi-stakes drama on the streets of San Francisco. Spies. Intrigue. Oodles of cash and fortunes to be made. A plethora of unctuous toasts. American … Read more
The latest self-inflicted blow to the Vatican’s China policy came in mid-July, when the Holy See announced that Pope Francis had “recognized” Bishop Joseph Shen Bin as Bishop of Shanghai—despite the fact that the bishop had been “transferred” to China’s most important and prestigious diocese by the Xi Jinping regime, not by the pope. A … Read more
Authorities found at least 20 potentially infectious agents, along with over 900 lab mice. Local and federal public health officials have been investigating an unlicensed, Chinese-owned laboratory in Fresno County, Califonia, where it found at least 20 potentially infectious agents, including coronavirus, HIV, hepatitis, and herpes, along with over 900 lab mice. According to the … Read more
In 2007, I wrote a piece called “Taiwan’s Two Dozen: Who will dare have relations with Free China?” The piece is not available on the Internet, or at least I have not been able to call it up. Perhaps craftier Googlers than I can do so. Anyway, at the time, those 16 years ago, Taiwan … Read more
This week the Communist Chinese Party is holding a congress at the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. The purpose of the congress is cement Xi Jinping’s genocidal, imperialist autocracy. This post explains the centrality of Tiananmen Square to the Chinese dictatorship, and to the Chinese people victimized by the dictatorship. In … Read more
Conflating power and brutality is a common error among a certain kind of thug and thug-groupie — Xi, Putin, Kim, Muhammad bin Salman, Daniel Ortega, Donald Trump — but brutality is the mark of a weak regime rather than a powerful one. Powerful countries have enduring institutions, influence, and the power of attraction that you … Read more
The CCP wants the world — and even its own citizens — to focus on gleaming skyscrapers, modern high-speed trains, and “zero Covid,” instead of noticing the failed skyscrapers, half-empty trains to nowhere, and collapsing real-estate values leaving middle-class savers in peril. The PRC’s face-shifting has diverted attention from the many challenges the country faces, … Read more
If you ask Chinese diplomats stationed in Israel, they will tell you that “there is no antisemitism in China.” Their Israeli counterparts in Beijing will likely tell you the same: that an observant Jew can stroll down any main street in Shanghai with a yarmulke on his head without fear of verbal or physical harassment—which … Read more
If you don’t know about Jimmy Lai, you need to. He is one of the heroes of our time. His name should be known the same way we know the names Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. We know of John Paul II not just because he was pope. He knew that the … Read more
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was signed into law by President Joe Biden late last year. A rare bipartisan Beltway move, the law is intended to keep goods made with forced labor in China’s Xinjiang province out of the U.S. market. There’s no denying the Chinese government’s atrocities in the Uyghur region. However, in … Read more
The Evergrande soap opera is far from over. In addition to its terrible financial management, it is in a bubble market. Panic spread again when developer Fantasia Holdings was unable to pay several of its bonds on October 11. That same day, two other developers, Sinic Holdings and Modern Land, indicated that they wouldn’t be … Read more
Black lives matter to Disney. We know this because the super-woke corporate giant never tires of telling us. Like others in the capitalist club it spent a great deal of 2020, the year of the George Floyd protests, telling the world how cool it was with BLM. It even released a 30-second TV commercial in … Read more
Oh, how the Left media devoted four years of the Trump presidency to a narrative that the Trumps were in it just to get rich at the expense of American suckers. A favored storyline was that Donald Trump, Ivanka, the sons, Jared Kushner, the hotels, casinos, and golf courses all were awash in cash and … Read more
A few days before his trip to Europe, the President offered a new plan to shrink his $4.7 trillion plan to $1.85 trillion by discarding or gutting many social spending plans in order to leave 30% of the total ($555 billion) for “climate-related” corporate welfare. As an explanation of Biden’s priorities, The New York Times’ … Read more
Enes Kanter’s pro-Tibet protest is making people very uncomfortable Remember when “Free Tibet” was a mainstay of the cool, hippie subculture that dominated the Nineties? Back when Hollywood cared about the fate of Buddhism’s Holy Land? Few will even remember that Disney — yes, the same Disney that recently filmed parts of the live-action Mulan … Read more
The law just addresses use of individuals’ data by private companies, carving out exceptions for government harvesting of data. Over the last few years, China has established thousands of checkpoints in its western provinces, designed to surveil the ethnic minorities who must scan their IDs (and faces) regularly so their every movement can be tracked. … Read more
Personalized regimes are also bad at recognizing and correcting their failures, for, unlike in open society, there are no other agents, like the free media and civil society, to point out the government’s mistakes. Perhaps most importantly, in a centralized system with an all-powerful dictator assuming an image of infallibility and invincibility, lower level officials … Read more
In one of the great ironies of history, we find socialists and anarchists on the side of the new generation of slave-holders. The workers and wage-slaves of the world are being delivered into the hands of the overlords of the globalist future. These socialists and anarchists, obsessed with the slavery that was, sell us into … Read more
Corporations who bow to online mobs in the West should be cutting ties with real authoritarian regimes wave of woke corporatism has been sweeping America. The latest example comes courtesy of CEOs being forced to weigh in on SB-202, a Georgia bill to restructure mechanisms of the state’s voting procedures and laws. Spurred on by … Read more
In just one month, Obama’s former acting solicitor general argued in defense of Nestle in a child slave labor case before the Supreme Court, Apple and Nike lobbied against a slave labor bill, Apple and Amazon were caught using slave labor, and Nestle, Pepsi, Unilever, and even the Girl Scouts were discovered to be using … Read more
Since the world’s first CCTV camera was installed in Germany in 1942, the number of surveillance cameras around the world has grown immensely. In fact, as Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop notes, it only took us 79 years to go from one camera to nearly one billion of these devices. In the above interactive graphic, Surfshark … Read more
Recycling is in Need of Repair, Adam Minter Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale “Adam Minter on why secondhand markets are the true circular economies“ Related PostsRemembering Mao’s Carnival of Hate We Should All Hope Israel Succeeds China Isn’t Taking Over Manufacturing, It’s Taking Over Retail As Jimmy Lai Attracts Worldwide … Read more
Since 2015, however, Uighurs have had little choice but to host certain guests at their intimate gatherings. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) no longer stays in the background; rather, officials insist on being physically present. This further limits the ways Uighurs negotiate and express their identity in public. In its quest to secularize Uighur identity … Read more