“To be clear, China has many significant problems of its own. It faces a demographic crisis: Its working age population has been shrinking for more than a decade. Its economy is deeply unbalanced, relying on unsustainable trade surpluses and unproductive investment to make up for inadequate consumer spending. Its economic growth is slowing. It suffers from high youth unemployment. Discontent is rising, held in check by autocratic, police-state measures. But despite China’s domestic troubles, in geopolitical terms China is on the ascendant. Trump’s visit to Beijing is a field trip by a failing, flailing would-be autocrat pleading with a real strongman, who leads a much more serious country, to bail him out of the mess he’s made.” (05/14/26)
“AIs excel at pattern recognition, correlation spotting, and out-of-sample prediction from vast datasets; they do not deduce the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, the coordinative power of market prices under private property, or why fiat results in boom-bust cycles or all manner of unproductive financialization schemes.” (05/14/26)
“Active duty CIA officer James Erdman III testified in front of the Senate Oversight Committee on Wednesday about Agency obfuscation of findings around the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. In his prepared remarks, he made an explosive detour into the JFK case. He stated that the CIA took back control of 40 boxes of documents that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was reviewing for declassification under President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14176. That January 2025 decree ordered the release of records concerning the JFK, MLK and RFK assassinations.” (05/13/26)
“A New York man was found guilty on Wednesday of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government after a trial over federal prosecutors’ allegations that he operated a ‘secret police station’ on behalf of Beijing in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said Lu Jianwang, 64, should have alerted the U.S. Attorney General that he was a Chinese agent when he helped open the so-called police station in 2022. They also said he helped China’s government locate a pro-democracy activist living in California. Lu was arrested in April 2023. He had pleaded not guilty to the three felony charges he faced: conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent, acting as an unregistered agent of China, and obstruction of justice. A jury in Brooklyn federal court reached the verdict after a weeklong trial.” (05/13/26)
