China

Inside the Biden family business

Featured image Rep. James Comer called a press conference this morning to release the House Oversight Committee’s second bank records memorandum on the Biden family business. The committee press release is posted online here. The 36-page bank records memo released today is posted here. I have posted video of the press conference below. There is a lot of information to digest here and I haven’t done so. The 50-minute press conference provides »

A Chinese police station of our own

Featured image One has to turn to the national and international press for the news that Minneapolis may serve as the host to one of the six or seven clandestine Chinese “police stations” reportedly operating on American soil. The New York Post reports on the matter in “After FBI busts Chinese ‘police station’ in NYC, six more exposed in US” and the Daily Mail in “China may have up to six more »

Macron: Europe’s ‘greatest risk’ is getting ‘caught up in crises that are not ours’ – like Taiwan

Featured image Following six hours of talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke to a Politico reporter and two French journalists aboard COTAM Unité, France’s Air Force One this weekend. He discussed his concept of “strategic autonomy for Europe, presumably led by France, to become a third superpower.” Specifically, Macron said Europe’s “greatest risk” is getting “caught up in crises that are not ours,” such as a potential conflict »

“Compromised Biden to run for reelection”

Featured image RFK Jr. filed a statement of candidacy with the FEC last week. He apparently intends to challenge President Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. The AP could have framed the filing with the message of good will that he intends to promote, but instead covered the filing in a relentlessly hostile story by Michelle Price. The AP story is posted here. The AP story suggests what it could to do »

Turns Out the Chinese Spy Balloon WAS Able to Collect Intelligence Data

Featured image Many Americans were horrified that President Joe Biden allowed an enormous, high-tech Chinese spy balloon to float across the U.S. mainland in February, moving slowly over strategic military installations as it went, collecting data and sending it off to Beijing in realtime, before shooting it down over the Atlantic Ocean. Administration officials assured us they were able to jam the balloon’s data collection mechanisms to block it from receiving – »

After Joe hit his mark

Featured image John noted President Biden’s apparent need for adult guidance when he hit the ground in Durham, North Carolina yesterday. Biden’s remarks on the ground in Durham were at least equally notable. The White House has posted the transcript here. Nick Arama has posted excerpts and accompanying video here at RedState. Biden omitted his usual tribute to chocolate chip ice cream and skipped to exploitation of the tragic murder of students »

A Failed Presidency In 20 Seconds

Featured image Yesterday Joe Biden made the mistake of listening to a question from a reporter at the White House, and briefly trying to answer. I understand that the reporter was from another country; I don’t suppose a liberal American “reporter” would be so bold as to question Slow Joe on the subject of his China connections: Two points to note. First, even in this very brief clip, Biden’s mental and physical »

Xi Jinping Rises as Biden Dithers

Featured image The utter failure of the Anchorage, Alaska, meeting between top U.S. and Chinese diplomats held in March 2021 set the tone for relations going forward. Diplomacy flew out the window at the get-go and did not return. The hostility coming from the Chinese was impossible to miss. It was made immediately and abundantly clear that then-Chinese Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi had neither »

Who smeared Tom Cotton?

Featured image In January 2020 Senator Tom Cotton called for a targeted China travel ban to prevent spread of the Covid virus (letter posted here). Senator Cotton was warning that China was covering up the lethality of the disease and doing little to stop what became a global pandemic. Politico’s Burgess Everett recognized that Senator Cotton’s expression of his concerns gave him “a three-month head start” over his colleagues. In February 2020 »

Wuhan smoking gun

Featured image A highly regarded professor at Harvard Medical School writes from Cambridge: The argument that the COVID pandemic resulted from a spillover of SARS-CoV-2 from a natural reservoir has always relied on the claim that scientists don’t know enough to change previously known coronavirus sequences into SARS-CoV-2 intentionally. That is true, but it relies on the assumption that we know about all of the sequences that were being manipulated in Wuhan. »

Rockin’ pneumonia or the Wuhan flu? A look back [With comment by John]

Featured image The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend’s big story about the probable origin of the Covid-19 virus in China’s Wuhan lab. In the related editorial this morning the Journal calls its scoop “Another turn in the Covid lab-leak story.” The editorial harks back to the April 2020 op-ed column “Coronavirus and the laboratories in Wuhan” by Senator Tom Cotton. Senator Cotton has posted the column in accessible form here. Today’s »

Breaking: Biden Administration Ratifies COVID Lab Leak Hypothesis

Featured image The Wall Street Journal is out this morning with a report that the U.S. Department of Energy has issued a classified intelligence report (who knew the DoE did foreign intelligence?) based on new information that concludes COVID originated from a lab leak at China’s Wuhan virology research center: The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report »

China contributes, cont’d

Featured image Washington Free Beacon reporter Alana Goodman appeared for a three-minute segment on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show this past Wednesday evening. Her appearance followed up on reporting that we noted two weeks ago in “China contributes.” The Free Beacon posted a summary of Goodman’s reporting along with video of the segment (below). This remains something like a deep secret: The University of Delaware has received $6,704,250 in donations from China »

It came out of the sky

Featured image White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared at yesterday’s press briefing (transcript here) that they have no indication of alien involvement in the recent proliferation of “objects” over the United States and Canada. “I know there have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no — again, no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity — (laughter) — with these recent takedowns,” KJP told reporters. What’s so funny ’bout »

Close encounter of the fourth kind

Featured image No sooner had we noted the “Balloon war of the worlds” yesterday morning than we had a close encounter of the fourth kind over Lake Huron. NORAD posted this statement on it at 2:42 p.m. yesterday afternoon. This morning’s AP story is here. U.S. Air Force General Glen VanHerck is the commander of NORAD. He held a briefing following the shootdown (audio below). He professed not to know what’s going »

It’s Raining Balloons*

Featured image The U.S. Air Force shot down its third balloon in as many days over Lake Huron: US fighter jets shot down an unidentified object over Lake Huron on Sunday, marking the third time such action was taken in as many days and coming on the heels of last week’s Chinese spy balloon scandal. Sunday’s takedown is believed to have involved an object that was tracked by radar over Montana on »

Balloon war of the worlds

Featured image In the past 48 hours or so American pilots flying under the auspices of NORAD have shot down two more unidentified objects over North America, one off the coast of Alaska and one over the Yukon in Canada. The objects are said to be smaller than the huge Chinese spy balloon President Biden let traverse the United States before having it shot down over the Atlantic off the coast of »