Category: Uncategorized

Mailvox: a different perspective on Hong Kong

An update on the Hong Kong situation from a mainlander:

I wanted to send this to you last week but the outside internet has been completely inaccessible in China for the past two weeks because of the National Day holiday. They do this every year but it’s particularly bad this year.

A few days ago the ENTIRE Hong Kong metro system was closed because the “protesters” went on a rampage in response to a new law making it illegal to wear a mask in public. Every single metro station. Imagine if that had happened in a major American city of ten million people, what the police and the National Guard would do.

Pat Buchanan has an article in which he states, “The people of Hong Kong, who are surely being cheered by many on the mainland of China …” All respect to Pat Buchanan but he doesn’t understand this situation at all.

There is mutual hatred between Hong Kong and mainland people. NO ONE on the mainland is cheering the Hong Kong protesters. They think Hong Kong people are a bunch of spoiled brats who are now wrecking their own city and being used by the West because they think they’re better than mainland people. And Hong Kong people, meanwhile, think they ARE better than mainland people because they’ve had the benefit of a hundred years of imposed quasi-Western civilization and the result is a more well-mannered people and a more orderly society in a higher-quality environment.

But Hong Kong has been going downhill for decades now, due to various reasons that are not reducible to a simple statement, and the mainland has been in the ascendancy. But regardless, if Beijing sends in the troops, (which I don’t think they will do because the bad PR outweighs any other benefit; they’ll probably just let Hong Kong burn because they don’t really need it) I assure you that the vast majority of mainland Chinese will applaud this decision and love their government even more, seeing it as just desserts for a bunch of spoiled traitors, i.e. Chinese who don’t want to be Chinese and who collude with the yang guizi (foreign devils).

The global media would of course use any move by Beijing as a way to paint China as the new Nazis. You can see this narrative already developing and being pushed by Bannon and others, as well as the Hong Kong protesters themselves, who are quite obviously trying to provoke a violent response. But for the mainland Chinese, it would only solidify their sense of “us against the world.” My fear is that the people who want the next big war are actively pushing in this direction. I hope that Trump and Xi Jinping really are friendly, because they’re increasingly looking like Kennedy and Khrushchev.

Milo busts the Prime Minister

Although frankly, I doubt that proof of the suspected affair will make any difference whatsoever to the Brexit political math given that it was seven years ago, neither Johnson nor Arcuri have directly denied an affair, and Boris Johnson’s lack of marital fidelity over the years has not exactly been a secret:

The businesswoman at the centre of a storm about her links to Boris Johnson ‘bragged’ about having sex with him and proudly showed off what she called her ‘Boris bruises’, her former friend Milo Yiannopoulos has claimed.

Jennifer Arcuri’s alleged fling with Mr Johnson when he was Mayor of London was an ‘open secret’, according to Mr Yiannopoulos, a controversial right-wing activist who also worked on the London tech scene at the time.

Speaking to MailOnline, Mr Yiannopoulos claimed that Miss Arcuri had ‘loudly and proudly’ displayed evidence of the romance and said he had tried to warn her off it. He stressed she was not alleging the bruises were the result of any ‘anything abusive’, but instead were ‘trophies’ from ‘enthusiastic, consensual lovemaking’.

Yesterday Miss Arcuri repeatedly refused to deny a romance with Mr Johnson, who is facing a City Hall probe over alleged conflict of interest.

Then again, I have no doubt that the EU and the Remain forces in the UK will attempt to cite this as conclusive evidence that Britain should stay in the EU. Facts and reason have never had anything to do with their nonsensical arguments.

This comment appears to be the most common reaction: I still don’t care. Just get us out of the EU. And this is why no one cares who or what Boris does in his off-hours:

Boris Johnson effectively killed off hopes of a Brexit deal today after turning down a demand from Angela Merkel for Northern Ireland to stay in the customs union.

In a crunch moment for negotiations, the PM and the German Chancellor clashed brutally in an early morning phone call.

No10 sources said Mrs Merkel told the premier that the province must remain within the EU’s customs union indefinitely. But Mr Johnson retorted that meant a deal was ‘essentially impossible, not just now but ever’.

Sometimes no deal is the best deal. This is obviously one of them.

Canada’s Bill Clinton

Canadian Prime Minister Justin “Blackface” Trudeau is reportedly attempting to buy the silence of his accuser in what appears to be a teacher sex scandal dating back to his substitute teacher days:

Less than two weeks ahead of federal elections that have already been looking conclusively grim for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, rumors of an explosive sex scandal are percolating at the highest echelons of Canada’s media establishment.

Ottawa’s longest-tenured political observers had been expecting a career-ending expose in Sunday’s edition of The Globe and Mail — but that story never came.  Sources are now telling The Chronicle that Trudeau is in private talks with the principal source of that piece to suppress explosive sex allegations that, if made public, would likely force Trudeau to resign his office.

Trudeau’s accuser is said to be a former student at West Point Grey Academy and the daughter of a wealthy Canadian businessman.  Sources tell The Chronicle that she is being represented by counsel and is being offered monetary compensation in exchange for a pending, but not yet signed, non-disclosure agreement.

One way or another, young Blackface’s political career would appear to be finished.

The Great Withdrawal begins

The God-Emperor is directly confronting the treasonous neoclowns.

President Donald Trump’s sudden decision to pull back U.S. troops from northern Syria drew quick, strong criticism Monday from some of his closest allies in Congress. It was condemned, too, by Kurdish fighters who would be abandoned to face a likely Turkish assault after fighting alongside Americans for years against the Islamic State.

The announcement threw the military situation in Syria into fresh chaos and injected deeper uncertainty into U.S. relations with European allies. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham called it “a disaster,” while Syria’s Kurds accused the U.S. of turning its back on allies and risking gains made in the years-long fight against ISIS.

Trump defended his decision, acknowledging in tweets that “the Kurds fought with us” but adding that they “were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so.”

“I held off this fight for almost 3 years, but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home,” he wrote.

There are precisely zero Americans who aren’t on the neoclown take who don’t support the withdrawal of US troops from the Middle East. The most idiotic thing about the mainstream narrative here is that it wasn’t the US military that defeated ISIS in the first place, it was Syria, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah.

It’s not as if the neoclowns actually care about the Kurds or the sovereign integrity of Syria, it’s that they are seeing their insane dreams of orchestrating a US-Iran war vanishing into smoke.

Speaking of Chinatown

Things aren’t looking so good for the global financial system:

China banks are running out of cash in HKD and USD. Maximum withdrawal limit drop from USD1300 to USD38. A drop of 34 times. China financial doom day coming.

Can you say “bank run”?

Aquinas on usury

As is so often the case, it profits those of us whose understanding of a given topic is insufficient to consider what Thomas Aquinas has to say on the subject:

To take usury for money lent is unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist, and this evidently leads to inequality which is contrary to justice. In order to make this evident, we must observe that there are certain things the use of which consists in their consumption: thus we consume wine when we use it for drink and we consume wheat when we use it for food. Wherefore in such like things the use of the thing must not be reckoned apart from the thing itself, and whoever is granted the use of the thing, is granted the thing itself and for this reason, to lend things of this kin is to transfer the ownership. Accordingly if a man wanted to sell wine separately from the use of the wine, he would be selling the same thing twice, or he would be selling what does not exist, wherefore he would evidently commit a sin of injustice. On like manner he commits an injustice who lends wine or wheat, and asks for double payment, viz. one, the return of the thing in equal measure, the other, the price of the use, which is called usury.

On the other hand, there are things the use of which does not consist in their consumption: thus to use a house is to dwell in it, not to destroy it. Wherefore in such things both may be granted: for instance, one man may hand over to another the ownership of his house while reserving to himself the use of it for a time, or vice versa, he may grant the use of the house, while retaining the ownership. For this reason a man may lawfully make a charge for the use of his house, and, besides this, revendicate the house from the person to whom he has granted its use, as happens in renting and letting a house.

Now money, according to the Philosopher (Ethic. v, 5; Polit. i, 3) was invented chiefly for the purpose of exchange: and consequently the proper and principal use of money is its consumption or alienation whereby it is sunk in exchange. Hence it is by its very nature unlawful to take payment for the use of money lent, which payment is known as usury: and just as a man is bound to restore other ill-gotten goods, so is he bound to restore the money which he has taken in usury.

The Philosopher is Aristotle. And it’s worth noting how, centuries ago, Aquinas logically concluded the inevitable consequences that we are empirically observing, which is that taking usury for money lent will lead to an unjust form of inequality.

Contrary to the assertion of economists like Murray Rothbard, the gradual acceptance of usury across the West was not a civilizational advance, but rather, a slow descent into misrule and barbarism.

America as Chinatown

Thanks to President Trump, Maureen Dowd just noticed that the USA is corrupt:

Forget it, America. It’s Chinatown.

Washington, once the guarantor of American values, is a crime scene. This capital of white marble is now encircled by yellow tape, rife with mendacity, cowardice and corruption. It’s Chinatown on the Potomac.

Robert Towne, the screenwriter of the 1974 classic “Chinatown,” wrote the movie as a eulogy to great things that were lost. He said that he was not conjuring a place on a map but a state of mind: the futility of good intentions.

Or, as Raymond Chandler, the premier chronicler of Los Angeles noir, once wrote: “We still have dreams, but we know now that most of them will come to nothing. And we also most fortunately know that it really doesn’t matter.”

This is hardly news to Generation X, let alone Generation Z. But it’s interesting to see that Baby Boomers may be finally losing their childlike faith in The System. Regardless, Baby Boomer columns like Dowd’s are increasingly out-of-touch, referencing as they do former cultural touchstones like 45-year-old movies that are completely foreign to the three younger generations, to say nothing of the immigrants and children of immigrants.

White-collar journalists discover financialization

Sports Illustrated just laid off nearly half its staff:

Sports Illustrated cut more than 40 members of its staff on Thursday as part of a restructuring plan. The layoffs were haphazardly executed, with management scheduling meetings Wednesday evening, only to cancel them the next day about 10 minutes before the planned start time. The meetings ended up taking place four hours later, with one scheduled for staffers who were getting laid off and a separate meeting for those who were not, according to a source.

theMaven, which licensed the rights to Sports Illustrated’s print and digital publications in June, is behind the decision as it takes full ownership of the company from Meredith Corporation. Meredith sold the Sports Illustrated brand and intellectual property to marketing company Athletic Brands Group earlier this year but had agreed to manage the media business for up to two years.

Rumors about impending changes and layoffs have loomed over the company ever since theMaven took over. The Seattle-based startup also announced in June that Ross Levinsohn has agreed to serve as CEO of the new company, which will be named Sports Illustrated Media. Levinsohn had a short stint as publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times, but was put on unpaid leave in 2018 over “questionable behavior” in his past, which he denied.

theMaven plans to hire about 200 contractors to increase Sports Illustrated’s local sports coverage, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Sports Illustrated has been subjected to some major changes in the last few years. After being sold to Meredith Corporation by Time Inc. in 2018, ABG bought the brand and intellectual property in May for $110 million. Meredith continued to publish the magazine and website.

The unusual structure of that deal suggested that the Sports Illustrated brand is much more valuable than the magazine.

The sniping is amusing. Who cares if the layoffs were “haphazardly executed”. And it’s even more amusing to note the emotional, near-hysterical coverage these steep cuts at an elite journalistic institution are receiving considering the way the news media has generally ignored, when they haven’t openly sneered at, the suffering of blue-collar Americans.

That’s what is so enraging about Thursday’s blood-letting: It didn’t need to happen. Sports Illustrated did not have to be turned into whatever it will now become.

I asked sports journalist Patrick Hruby for his reaction to the news. “I think Sports Illustrated was caught by two different forces,” he said. “The first is the broader shift from print to digital media and the reality that in the digital world, Google and Facebook have gobbled all the advertising money. That money isn’t coming back, so there was going to be contraction to begin with. But it’s the second force we need to pay attention to. It’s the second force that turns a contraction into destruction. That is the fact that prestigious legacy journalism has been hit within the same bullshit industry—private equity—that’s ravaged so much of the journalistic world. Their business model is not ‘let’s manage a contraction.’ Instead, it’s ‘smash and grab.’ They are vampires bleeding these organizations dry and then selling them for parts. This is of course not limited to just journalism. It’s the over-financialization of our economy. What has happened to Sports Illustrated is what has happened to this country.”

The whole deal was financed by a $54 million loan to the vampires from the bigger vampires. This is the inevitable end result of usury; the methodical strip-mining of the economy.

If at first you don’t succeed…

Try, try again. The Democrats double down after their first “whistleblower” turned out to have no actual knowledge of the events he was describing:

The attorney representing the whistleblower who flagged President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine says a second whistleblower has now come forward.

Mark Zaid told ABC News on Sunday that he is now representing a second whistleblower who has first hand knowledge of events.

Zaid, a Washington lawyer, is already representing the whistleblower at the center of the impeachment inquiry into Trump.

The first whistleblower, who said Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden, is a CIA officer and at one point was assigned to work at the White House, sources said.

The second person who has come forward is also reportedly an intelligence official.

Of course, they said the first guy had first-hand knowledge of events too. Until he was asked to provide it. Interestingly enough, this is the same lawyer who is handling the lawsuit for the Marvel artist accused of tortious interference between Antarctic Press and Comics Matter.

An interesting and unexpected nexus. I wonder why they’re so desperate to stop the Trump administration from looking into Ukraine? I don’t suppose the massive donations to the Clinton Foundation have anything to do with it, do they?