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Authored by David Archibald via AmericanThinker.com,

One of the first people to see that the infatuation with China would end in tears was Robert Kaplan. In 2005 he wrote an article entitled “How We Would Fight China”, though he didn’t say when or why we will be doing that fighting, or even the how as per the title.

Well the tears are flowing now as the relationship is mostly over. China’s share of world exports peaked just shy of 15% in 2015 and is now contracting. China’s share of world GDP is also about 15% and that too will contract.

In Carroll Quigley’s ‘Tragedy and Hope’ first published in 1966, he wrote that the Chinese Communist regime in the first years after its founding was “insanely aggressive.” The Chicoms reverted to type about ten years ago and went back to ‘snarl diplomacy.’  Only being poor had kept them from trying to impose their will on others.

The corporate retreat from China is proceeding as fast as factory production can be relocated. But even if China wasn’t in breach of its WTO obligations to have a free market economy and a convertible currency, didn’t steal intellectual property, and wasn’t bullying its neighbours, there is another reason why we should completely decouple from China and it is a reason that is overarching and critical to our self-worth as a civilisation.

Dr Arthur Waldron, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying China for over 50 years. He married a Chinese lady so his views are not those of an inherent Sinophobe. In an online interview he provides interesting detail on the mistakes made in our relationship with China, starting with Nixon.

Dr Waldron starts the interview by reminding us that:

China is the most evil regime the world has seen since the Third Reich, setting aside the Soviet Union.

The whole 68-minute interview is interesting but where he is a thought leader is in his parable of the delicatessen, transcribed below:

Suppose you lived on 86th st and at the local delicatessen with fine produce, at the front of the shop were all these goodies.

But if you went to the very back of the shop there were sort of vats which were kept just above freezing which had freshly harvested kidneys and livers and hearts and all the things which are used at this moment. …

People are being killed so their organs can be used for transplants. Many of which go to the very elderly Chinese leadership or their children. The son of one of the recent leaders of China has had cancer and he has had many organs replaced.

Well, what would you say about this shop. Would you say, well, I think I’ll just shop in the front of the shop and I won’t pay any attention to the fact that there are all these living human organs, God knows where they came from, that are in the back.

What you would say is ‘What the heck is this shop doing in America?’

You can’t decouple these things. This is one integral system.

And that is one of the reasons we have to quarantine China economically.

A rationalisation for saying ‘Well yes it’s true that there is some question with what Hitler is doing with the gypsies and the Jews but Leica still makes a hell of a good camera.”

In the late 1930s when it was quite evident that Hitler was persecuting and killing minorities, would you have bought any German goods, knowing that in doing so you were an enabler of that evil regime? It is no different today. Every Chinese plastic toy or Christmas decoration plucked off the shelves at Walmart contributes to a future U.S. combat death, but beyond that there are also metaphorical vats of human organs at the back of the Walmart store that the buyer is enabling.

Thankfully killing people for their organs is repugnant to us and that needs to continue if we are to remain a good and kind civilisation. But trading with, speaking with, interacting with people who kill people for their organs debases us.

If we continue trading with such people that makes us morally complicit in their barbarism. For our souls, for our self-respect at least, we must stop trading with such people, and training them in our universities, and letting them into the country.

Dr Waldron’s view is that without our trade the Chinese polity will disintegrate; their state-owned enterprises aren’t enough to sustain their economy. The Chinese people’s best chance of liberation is if we nudge things in that direction.

Thank-you Dr Waldron for your insights.

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David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.

Prospective college students now have official government data they can use to gauge which colleges and which major programs will make the most fiscal sense. The Trump administration released the data last week, which offers the nation’s most granular look into the finances of recent college graduates yet. 

By looking at the median income versus the median debt of graduates from different schools and different levels of degrees, the data finally offers a tangible risk/reward for students considering a range of colleges and degrees. And some of the examples of the data are stunning, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

For example, Bismarck State College can now say its business majors earned a median of $100,500 one year after graduating – higher than many elite business schools. And highlighting the amount of debt that students left college with also becomes and important part of the equation. Dentists leaving NYU’s graduate program, for example, left school with a median of $387,660 in debt while earning just $69,600. 

The data shows that graduates typically earned more in their first year than what they borrowed in total, but 15% of programs resulted in graduates carrying a debt load greater than their income. In 2% of instances, graduates owed more than twice their annual salaries. 

The data was uploaded to a consumer website that was initially created by the Obama administration called the “College Scorecard”. It offers data on more than 36,000 programs at about 4,400 colleges. The data allows consumers to compare programs and “defies years of efforts by the higher-education lobby to keep much of this information hidden.”

For profit colleges may not like some of the comparisons. Computer engineering students leaving DeVry University-Illinois, for example, owed $53,391 at graduation while earning just $37,800. Meanwhile, students at Wichita State in Kansas leave the same program with just $31,000 in debt while earning $61,800.

The effort is part of a Trump administration ethos that making the college landscape a more competitive free market will help bring tuition and student debt down. The administration has been working with companies like Google to find ways to make the data more accessible to families. And to protect privacy, the government isn’t introducing data on programs with limited numbers of students. 

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a statement: “The best way to attack the ever-rising cost of college is to drive real transparency.”

The debt and earnings data only represents students who got federal financial aid, which can be a small number at some universities. The figures also exclude debt take on by parents on behalf of their children, which has been a growing way for parents to help shoulder the load of student debt for their kids. 

The data reflects common sense at some points. Science and engineering majors at top schools earned the most. MIT math majors earned a median of $120,300 after graduating while borrowing just $8,219. Those who earned master’s degrees at USC for drama and theater arts shouldered $100,796 in debt while earning just $30,800 their first year out. 

And the data is surprising elsewhere. Ivy League schools don’t always see the top salaries. Columbia University rhetoric and writing graduates earned just $19,700 their first year out of school, while taking on $28,556 in debt. 

Some students have simply struggled to find work in their field after graduating. 22 year old Johnna Ueltschi borrowed about $32,000 to study psychology and criminal justice at UCF in Orlando. She says she has struggled to find a job and now works as a hostess making $10/hour. 

“I was a good student, I graduated on time, I did everything that I was conventionally supposed to do. Finding a job is a lot harder than they lead it on to be when you’re in school.”

You can explore all of the data using the Wall Street Journal’s online search tool here. 

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad asset who was used by Israeli intelligence to blackmail American politicians, according to a former Israeli spy.

Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli spy and alleged “handler” of Robert Maxwell, told the authors of a new book, Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales, that Epstein ran a “complex intelligence operation” at the behest of Mossad.

Believing that Epstein planned to marry his daughter, Maxwell introduced him and Ghislaine Maxwell to Ben-Menashe’s Mossad circle.

“Maxwell sort of started liking him, and my theory is that Maxwell felt that this guy is going for his daughter,” Ben-Menashe said.

“He felt that he could bless him with some work and help him out in like a paternal [way].”

Israeli intelligence bosses gave the green light and Epstein then became a Mossad asset.

“They were agents of the Israeli Intelligence Services,” said Ben-Menashe.

When it became clear that Epstein wasn’t very competent at doing much else, his primary role became “blackmailing American and other political figures.”

“Mr. Epstein was the simple idiot who was going around providing girls to all kinds of politicians in the United States,” said Ben-Menashe.

“See, fucking around is not a crime. It could be embarrassing, but it’s not a crime. But fucking a fourteen-year-old girl is a crime. And he was taking photos of politicians fucking fourteen-year-old girls — if you want to get it straight. They would just blackmail people, they would just blackmail people like that.”

There’s also a Mossad connection to a different kind of sex offender; Harvey Weinstein.

Weinstein reportedly hired ex-Mossad agents to suppress allegations against him. Working for an Israeli firm called Black Cube, these agents pressured witnesses and tried to intimidate journalist Ronan Farrow in order to “bury the truth” about Weinstein’s activity.

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Artist Portia Munson is known for chaotic looking pieces of “art” which often times features thousands of pieces of ephemera per piece. Ephemera comes from the Latin word for “things you can find at a yard sale or tucked away in your grandparents garage“. 

Case in point is her work “The Garden”, which she made in 1996 and contains more than 1500 separate objects from plastic flowers to stuffed animals, according to Bloomberg. She calls the piece a “meditation on feminism and climate change”. 

Because, of course…

As you can see from the photo, the piece looks more like something you’d see on a Beatles album cover or inside of Cheech and Chong’s Volkswagen bus.

Wendy Olsoff, owner of New York Gallery P.P.O.W., thought it may be a good idea to feature the art at the Meridians section of Art Basel Miami Beach in hopes that she could sell it. 

Olsoff said: “We thought it would be fantastic. It talks a lot about the environment, which is obviously in dire straits in Florida, and it also taps into feminism and other topics that we always explore in our program.”

Munson says the objects are arranged in a specific manner that minds the “idea of artificial beauty, consumerism, and cultural ideas around the feminine aspects of nature.”

Olsoff hoped to sell the piece and, after shelling out $60,000 to reassemble, fireproof and maintain the pile of crap, she slapped a $225,000 price tag on it.

Olsoff said: “Maybe if we had done a little homework first and figured out how much it would cost [to install], [we] might not have been so hasty. We didn’t really realize it.”

It was last on display two years ago and since then, the thousands of items for the piece had been sitting in storage at Munson’s home, collecting dust. Every object had to be catalogued and restored. 

“When you open a box of plastic after three or five years, there’s going to be pieces that are decaying and disgusting,” Olsoff said.

Then, every piece of fabric had to be made fire resistant to meet fire safety guidelines. 

Trey Hollis, the gallery’s director of art fairs, traveled to Munson’s house upstate, brought everything to an open field, strung up the objects on a clothesline, put on a mask, and sprayed everything with fire-retardant coating. 

Olsoff did little outreach to existing collectors. “We do normal previews. But this is a little different,” she said. 

But lo and behold, the piece was only on display for six minutes before Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, the husband and wife founders of the 21c Museum Hotel, took interest in it. It was a match made in liberal heaven. Wilson, standing in the piece, seemed to fit right in with it:

Steve Wilson said: “We own a piece by Munson already, which we bought 12 years ago. And we just bought this piece.”

They settled at a price under the $225,000 asking price – a small price to pay for a new safe zone where Steve can also meditate on feminism and climate change. 

“It’s a done deal. It’s a spectacular piece— one of those things that takes my breath away.”

If you say so, Steve. 

Seemingly unaware that everybody in the world is already laughing at SoftBank’s disasterous “investment” in WeWork, one Bernstein analyst believes that Masayoshi Son is going to have the “last laugh”. 

Bernstein’s Chris Lane says that he believes WeWork can still have a bright future if SoftBank is able to overhaul the business plan (isn’t that true for any business?). Lane says the company should focus on the corporate office market and likens WeWork’s model to Starbucks, where its branding and global scale can give it an advantage, according to Bloomberg.

He believes the company can achieve profitability by pulling back on “extraneous areas” and slowing its expansion to focus on its existing space. He thinks this will lead to the company being able to grab 8% of an emergent market for pre-fitted offices for corporate clients. 

Lane wrote in his report: “We think investors should think of the basic business as being similar to Starbucks. While profitable, the scale of profits that can be generated from a single site is small. Starbucks as a corporation only makes sense if you plan to open thousands of outlets.”

Lane spoke to management and says he thinks there’s an opportunity for WeWork to move beyond the niche of selling office space for entrepreneurs and onto offering flexible real estate for a broad range of companies. Hilariously, he is referring to it as “managed space as a service” and thinks WeWork can make $500 per month on memberships as an “ongoing annuity”. 

We used to just call this “being a landlord”.

Lane is also confident in WeWork’s new management:

SoftBank named Marcelo Claure, the former chief executive at Sprint Corp., executive chairman of WeWork and put him in charge of the turnaround effort. Under his leadership, Lane says the company will be able to focus on profitability by stopping any incremental expansion, filling its existing space and slashing overhead by getting rid of expansion staff and non-core businesses. WeWork’s ability to gather data about office-use and optimize layouts — while not entirely substantiated — could prove disruptive to the industry, he added.

He estimates that WeWork’s revenue will rise to $1.5 billion per quarter, up from $720 million a quarter, if it can push occupancy to 90% on its current portfolio. He predicts the company will once again try to go public, but not until 2023. He thinks the company could have an EV of $28.8 billion by 2025, which would make SoftBank’s stake worth $19.1 billion. 

Lane concluded: “We believe WeWork’s valuation is justified if you believe in the long-term, ‘office space’ will be a managed service outsourced to professionals – and that WeWork will be the leading global player. Despite the huge embarrassment WeWork has been for SoftBank this year, we suspect SoftBank will have the last laugh when they bring the company back to market in a few years – bigger and profitable.”

We’ll believe it when we see it. 

Recall, after SoftBank’s initial investment in WeWork, the company started chasing its losses and re-invested in the company months ago. WeWork’s shares are down about 30% from their peak and the $14 billion Softbank has invested has been decimated – WeWork is now valued at less than $8 billion. 

A year after Elon Musk hit the jackpot when the SEC decided to merely slap his wrist over his infamous “funding secured” securities fraud, the Tesla creator struck legal gold again on Friday afternoon, when a Los Angeles federal jury found that Elon Musk did not defame British cave explorer Vernon Unsworth by calling him a “pedo guy” on Twitter.

“My faith in humanity is restored,” Musk told reporters in the hallways of the courtroom after shaking hands with his lawyer moments after hearing the verdict in the Los Angeles courtroom. He did not address Unsworth, whose team had told the court earlier on Friday the Tesla CEO should pay at least $190 million in damages for his tweets about the diver.

The lawsuit had pitted a 64-year-old financial adviser earning a salary of about $33,000 against one of the richest and most famous men in the world, who told the jury he was worth about $20 billion…. but was “short on cash.” The dispute stems from the Tesla and SpaceX chief’s involvement in the Tham Luang cave rescue in June and July 2018, which saw 12 young football players and their coach successfully extracted from a flooded cave system by a team of British cave divers.

On 13 July 2018, after the successful completion of the rescue, Unsworth said in an interview with CNN that the rescue pod Musk had delivered to the cave site was a “PR stunt”, adding that he should “stick his submarine where it hurts”. A video clip of the interview went viral, drawing the ire of Musk.

The billionaire entrepreneur responded in a series of tweets on 15 July, suggesting that Unsworth’s presence in Thailand was “sus[picious]” and calling him “pedo guy”.

Musk eventually deleted the tweets and apologized to Unsworth.

The jury had been tasked with determining whether a reasonable person would understand the tweets to mean that Musk was calling Unsworth a pedophile. Musk’s attorneys argued that the tweet was not a statement of fact, but an insult, which is considered protected speech. They also attempted to show that Unsworth’s reputation had not been seriously damaged.

According to The Guardian, Unsworth’s attorneys introduced evidence of the broad dissemination of Musk’s tweets, which were reported in 490 English-language articles on 361 websites in 33 countries. They also introduced evidence of Musk’s behavior after the 15 July tweets, including his hiring of a private investigator to seek proof of Unsworth’s “nefarious behaviour”.

As Bloomberg notes, the four-day civil trial marked the first time that Musk has been called as a witness at trial. The Tesla CEO told the jury the tweet shouldn’t have been taken literally and was fired off in anger after Unsworth, in a TV interview, insulted his effort to help rescue members of a Thai soccer team from a flooded cave in 2018.

It’s another win for Musk, 48, who’s managed to get out of legal trouble relatively unscathed. Musk agreed to step down from his role of chairman of Tesla Inc. for three years in 2018 to settle a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit over a tweet the regulator said misled investors. But he’s run Tesla and SpaceX as usual.

As was widely expected, late on Friday the White House said it won’t participate in Monday’s hearing by the House Judiciary Committee.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone called the impeachment inquiry a “reckless abuse of power” in a letter to Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler ahead of a Friday deadline he set for the president to indicate whether his representatives would seek to call or cross-examine any witnesses or submit evidence. The letter didn’t say explicitly whether Trump would participate in the hearing, although it was strongly implied.

White House will not participate in Impeachment Hearings next week. Letter from White House attorney attached. #Impeachment #POTUS pic.twitter.com/XwOj9pXqq3

— Edward Lawrence (@EdwardLawrence) December 6, 2019

“House Democrats have wasted enough of America’s time with this charade,” Cipollone wrote. “You should end this inquiry now and not waste even more time with additional hearings. Adopting articles of impeachment would be a reckless abuse of power by House Democrats, and would constitute the most unjust, highly partisan, and unconstitutional attempt at impeachment in our Nation’s history.”

The letter quoted Trump, who said earlier this week that “if you are going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so we can have a fair trial in the Senate, and so that our country can get back to business.”

As a reminder, on Wednesday House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., will pick up the baton from his Intelligence Committee counterpart Adam Schiff., as the House’s impeachment inquiry moves to the next step – but it is a far cry for Nadler from 1998, when he warned that an impeachment would “overturn the popular will of the voters.”

“The effect of impeachment is to overturn the popular will of the voters,” Nadler said on the House floor during the Clinton impeachment hearings, in footage unearthed by Grabien. “We must not overturn an election and remove a president from office except to defend our system of government or constitutional liberties against a dire threat, and we must not do so without an overwhelming consensus of the American people.”

Authored by Adam Sabes via CampusReform.org,

New York University-Shanghai quietly created a pro-Chinese government course last year, in which students study “civic education,” all at the request of the Chinese government.

According to Vice, the course, titled “NYU Shanghai Chinese National Student Civic Education,” includes a lesson in which students watch a video about “Promoting the Prosperity and Development of Socialist Culture with Chinese Characteristics.”

The course syllabus lists multiple trips that students take as part of the course, such as a visit to the Longhua Memorial Cemetary and one the Shanghai War Memorial. Both locations celebrate and honor those who have died fighting for the communist party.

The course syllabus also reportedly states that the classes are not taught by NYU professors, but rather from other Shanghai universities.

This course was very much kept a secret, without ever being listed along with other courses. Students who were required to take the course were only informed about the new class via WeChat, a chat application used in China.

The course was introduced during the 2018-2019 school year over winter break and was not listed on the class registration system, according to the report.

A university spokesperson told Vice that the course is required by the Chinese government for Chinese citizens, and added that students who are not citizens of China do not have to take the course.

While the university maintains that the course is independent of NYU-Shanghai, the chancellor of the school appears to have spoken during one of the class sessions, according to the syllabus obtained by Vice.

Bobby Miller, vice president of the NYU College Republicans, said NYU has submitted to the “will of the Chinese regime.”

“NYU Shanghai’s shameful capitulation to the Chinese Communist Party’s propagandistic demands is a total betrayal of the university’s pledge that classes would be conducted ‘in accordance with the principles of academic freedom,'” Miller said.

Miller also noted that NYU’s Tel Aviv campus, located in Israel, is constantly under scrutiny by university members.

In May, an NYU academic department boycotted the program over entry restrictions, as reported by Campus Reform.

He said that this is “highly ironic” since NYU operates campuses in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, “both of which are located in countries with abysmal human rights records and a complete disregard for academic freedom,” Miller said.

This new report comes at a time when Confucius institutes in the United States are under intense scrutiny, with FBI Director Christopher Wray having testified to Congress that the Chinese government is using U.S. universities to exploit American research and development.

R. Kelly has been accused of bribing an Illinois government employee in 1994 to obtain a fake ID so that he could legally marry 15-year-old singer Aaliyah Dana Haughton, according to a federal indictment.

After obtaining the fake ID on August 30, 1994, Kelly and Haughton applied for a marriage license which listed her age as 18, according to the New York Times, citing a personal familiar with the matter. The marriage was eventually annulled, and Haughton died in a 2001 plane crash at the age of 22. She is identified in the indictment as “Jane Doe #1.”

Kelly, 52, has maintained that he had “no idea” Aaliyah was 15 when they married.

“My understanding is that she did not claim to be 15, and in order to get married, she had to lie about her age,” said Kelly’s lawyer, Steven Greenberg, during a 2018 interview with ABC‘s “Good Morning America.”

Not true, according to prosecutors – who say Kelly had a direct role in that lie.

More than two decades ago, Vibe magazine reported that an Illinois marriage license for Mr. Kelly and Aaliyah listed her age as 18. Mr. Kelly, whose real name is Robert Kelly, was 27 at the time. The license was dated Aug. 31, 1994, the day after Mr. Kelly allegedly paid the bribe.

Aaliyah was 14 when she made her first album, “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number,” which was released in 1994 and produced by Mr. Kelly.

Mr. Kelly, an R&B singer whose hit singles include “Ignition (Remix)” and “I Believe I Can Fly,” has faced longstanding sexual abuse accusations. Law enforcement scrutiny of Mr. Kelly intensified after several women spoke out publicly in a six-part Lifetime documentary, “Surviving R. Kelly,” which was released in January. –New York Times

Kelly was arrested after “Surviving R. Kelly” aired in January, 2019 – after he was accused of mental, physical and sexual abuse by dozens of accusers.

How can Kelly be indicted now?

While criminal activity from 25 years ago would normally fall outside the statute of limitations, preventing prosecution – Kelly faces a broad racketeering charge in Brooklyn, where he is accused of operating a criminal scheme to recruit fans, many underage, to have sex with him.

Because of this, the statute of limitations does not apply, allowing federal prosecutors to introduce claims from any time relevant time.

His associates arranged for the travel and lodging of his sexual partners. But once they arrived, prosecutors said, the women had to follow strict rules. They were not allowed to leave their room without Mr. Kelly’s permission and had to call him “daddy.” They were isolated from their friends and families, making them financially dependent on Mr. Kelly, the indictment said.

…

The Brooklyn indictment, which was originally filed in June, also accuses Mr. Kelly of kidnapping, forced labor, failing to disclose a sexually transmitted disease to sexual partners and producing child pornography. –New York Times

Kelly has pleaded not guilty, and is currently in federal custody in Chicago. As the Times notes, he was first arrested on charges of possessing child pornography in 2002, stemming from a sex tape which featured him urinating on an underage girl. He was acquitted in 2008 on all counts. 

Moreover, a Brooklyn federal prosecutor said recently that Kelly had paid off witnesses in the Chicago case who were willing to flip on him. According to his lawyer, they simply decided not to testify.