China
May 24, 2022 — Scott Johnson
In 1930 William Empson elaborated Seven Types of Ambiguity for the literary crowd. The Biden administration is adapting the concept to give us Seven Types of Confusion. We can itemize the confusion that derives from gratuitous fabrication. We also have the confusion related to the persistent assertion of the thing which is not so, as Swift puts it in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels. We continue with the confusion that
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May 23, 2022 — Scott Johnson
“President” Biden made big news this morning with his announcement that the United States would defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion by China. See the triple-bylined AP story “Biden: US would intervene with military to defend Taiwan.” The AP reports from Tokyo: President Joe Biden said Monday that the U.S. would intervene militarily if China were to invade Taiwan, saying the burden to protect Taiwan is “even stronger”
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May 20, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The Bradley Foundation held its annual Bradley Prizes award ceremony this week in Washington on May 17. Moderated by the Wall Street Journal’s own former Bradley Prize-winning Kim Strassel, the event honored 2022 recipients Wilfred McClay, Glenn Loury, and Chen Guangcheng. Having been sent a link to view the ceremony via live stream, my wife and I watched at our kitchen table. When the great Bill McClay finished speaking, my
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April 27, 2022 — Scott Johnson
At FOX Business Bradford Betz takes up the concern expressed by Jeff Bezos about Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter. Given Tesla’s reliance on China’s for car sales and lithium batteries, Bezos worries that China may influence (i.e, “gain a bit of leverage”) on Twitter. Betz gives us this tu quoque: Bezos’ commentary on Tesla’s relationship with China is peculiar given a Reuters investigation in December [accessible online here] that found
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April 5, 2022 — Scott Johnson
We don’t need to be reminded not to get excited about Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden ever being brought to justice or even seriously embarrassed. The coverage of the longstanding grand jury investigation into Hunter Biden is nevertheless reaching a fever pitch. Today’s New York Post cover story reports that a grand jury witness was asked to identify “the big guy” in Hunter Biden’s laptop emails. Please spare me. The
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April 1, 2022 — Scott Johnson
This week the Washington Post published a story on the contents of Hunter Biden’s very real laptop. The FBI have misplaced the laptop, but the Post has possessed the contents since June 2021. Now at least part of the story can be told. When the New York Post first broke the laptop story in October 2020, a few weeks before the presidential election, the Washington Post was not happy about
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March 6, 2022 — Scott Johnson
In addition to helping the Biden administration fund and facilitate the evildoing of the Iranian regime, the friends of Vladimir Putin are administering a dose of humiliation for good measure. The Putinites are rubbing it in and denying the administration so much as a fig leaf. Andrew McCarthy explicates one prong of the humiliation at NRO in “Russia and Iran Taunt Biden in Humiliating Revival of Nuclear Deal.” Mikhail Ulyanov
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March 4, 2022 — Scott Johnson
We have featured the work of science writer Matt Ridley on several occasions over the years. Now he is the author (with Alina Chan) of the new book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. Brendan O’Neill has recorded a podcast with Ridley to discuss how the Covid-19 virus might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan and how scientists tried to suppress the lab-leak origin theory. Spiked has
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March 3, 2022 — John Hinderaker
When I was growing up, the USSR and Communist China formed the original Axis of Evil. Then, in later years, the “Sino-Soviet split” changed the geopolitical calculus. Now, it seems that a Russian-Chinese alliance may be re-forming. A week ago, it was reported that American diplomats went to their Chinese counterparts with evidence of an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine, in hopes that President Xi would try to talk Putin
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February 26, 2022 — Scott Johnson
It may be charitable to infer that President Biden and the officials running the show in his administration don’t have a clue. The question is implicit in Edward Wong’s February 25 New York Times story “U.S. Officials Repeatedly Urged China to Help Avert War in Ukraine.” Subhead: “Americans presented Chinese officials with intelligence on Russia’s troop buildup in hopes that President Xi Jinping would step in, but were repeatedly rebuffed.”
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February 25, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The Russian sanctions that President Biden announced at his press conference yesterday (White House transcript here) are a joke. Weren’t sanctions intended to deter Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? Why, yes, they were. Isn’t it a bit late to deter the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Why, yes, it is. So Biden prevaricated: “[N]o one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening. That has to sh- — this is going to
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February 20, 2022 — John Hinderaker
The Chinese Communist Party has enlisted an unknown but substantial number of American academics in its effort to, among other things, steal intellectual property. The Trump administration commendably launched a “China Initiative” in the Department of Justice to look into such infiltration, not only in academia but also in the business world. Reportedly, the Biden administration is about to shut down that effort: The DOJ’s China Initiative, launched under former
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February 14, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
Last week, just before the NBA reached its deadline for trades, the Boston Celtics dealt Enes Kanter Freedom to the Houston Rockets. The Rockets then cut the outspoken critic of Red China. Kanter Freedom went to Houston in a multi-player deal. To me it looks like Houston got more value in terms of player personnel than Boston did. The center Boston obtained in the deal, Daniel Theis, has less impressive
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February 7, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Someone has managed through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to dislodge a consultant’s 254-page report to Andy Marshall’s legendary Office of Net Assessment in the Department of Defense from way back in 2013. Marshall, who died in 2019, and his ONA are legendary in defense and intelligence circles (his nickname was Yoda) for its outside-the-box thinking and projections, many of which proved themselves out over time. The 2013 report
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February 7, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
I was happy to read, via NRO’s Jack Butler, that the ratings for Friday’s opening ceremonies at the Winter Olympics were down 43 percent from 2018. Butler cites an article in Axios which notes that ratings for the opening ceremonies in Tokyo last summer were also down, but by only 6 percent. Thus, Axios’ explanation for the mass tuning out of the China ceremonies — that “broadcast and cable TV
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February 5, 2022 — Scott Johnson
What to say about nattering House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s nauseating palaver advising Olympic athletes to shut up and play ball lest they offend their totalitarian Communist hosts (video below)? I have wanted to cool down before venturing a thought. Charles Lipson now speaks for me in the Spectator column “Nancy takes a knee for Beijing at the Winter Olympics.” Subhead: “If politicians like Pelosi wish to add their two yuan,
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February 4, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
This column in the Washington Post by Barry Svrluga is full of deserved contempt for China and the fact that the Winter Olympic Games are being held there. He writes: According to Human Rights Watch and other advocacy groups, the Chinese government has arbitrarily detained, tortured and forced into labor more than a million Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic population largely in Xinjiang, in the country’s northwest. Beijing has suffocated free
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