Inaugural Issue, Number 1
China expects ‘a return to normal’ in relations with US
China expects cozier relations with the U.S., now that Biden is president. China, writes Shi Jiangtao at the South China Morning Post, expects “a more balanced approach,” one that turns “from Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, a geopolitical concept devised by the Trump administration to curb China’s rise.”
Jiangtao, a former Hong Kong diplomat, says “It is still too early to tell exactly what Washington’s changing of the guard means for U.S.-China relations, but the Biden team gave some initial answers to both questions just a week into office – moving quickly to undo much of Donald Trump’s policies, while intent on making the most of his China legacy, albeit with a more balanced approach.”
Echoing the American media’s contention that the U.S. lost prestige during Trump’s term, Jiangtao said the new tone will emphasize “a shared approach to prosperity and security ahead of differences in values and ideology.”
Further, “The change in policy priorities shows Biden’s understanding of the region’s economic interdependence with China, as he tries to avoid Trump’s mistake of forcing countries to choose between the two superpowers. . . . Much will depend on how well the White House is able to rebuild trust among its allies and partners and reclaim credibility as a global leader.”
. . . with the promise to ‘correct” Trump’s wrongs
“The U.S. business community will continue to encourage the new U.S. administration to strengthen dialogue and exchanges with China,” Vice President Wang Qishan writes at the English language China Daily.
“Behind the unprecedented difficulty the ties have suffered in the past few years is the wrong China policy adopted by the Trump administration and its ignoring of the gains made by bilateral cooperation,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said last week. “It is never too late to do the right thing,” adding that “the relationship is at a crossroads and could open a new window of hope.”
Be sure to protect your fingers
Kamala Harris broke an important story on a West Virginia TV station last week when she announced the administration’s commitment to clear the state of its land mines.
“All of those skilled workers who are in the coal industry and transferring those skills to what we need to do in terms of dealing with reclaiming abandoned land mines,” she said in an interview with WSAZ-TV 3 in Huntington/Charleston. Because sentence fragments don’t express complete thoughts, this one is a bit hard to follow, but you get the drift.
This is a bigger story than you might think. At The Federalist, contributor and West Virginia resident Jayme Metzgar wonders if she might get blown to smithereens just leaving her house. “Now, I know what you’re thinking,” she writes. “Are there really that many abandoned land mines lying around in West Virginia? Enough to make a whole job industry out of minesweeping? Is it safe to go hiking there?”
A century ago West Virginians weren’t shy about taking up arms to settle their differences. Metzgar tells the story of a sheriff who used three bi-planes to drop bombs on striking coal miners in what became known as the Battle of Blair Mountain.
Still, she remains skeptical. “Frankly, I doubt there are enough to make minesweeping into a decent hobby,” she says.
Making U.S. higher education the envy of the world
Duke University plans to establish an undergraduate minor in “Inequality Studies,” Campus Reform reports. Its director will be William Darity, the director of Duke’s Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity.
Darity recently called for $12 trillion in reparations for black people. That would be $800,000 for each eligible black household.
Explaining the program, he and two colleagues wrote that “inequality overlaps with our social and economic institutions, reinforcing racism, sexism, colorism and other forms of discrimination. To understand inequality and the social and political forces that sustain it requires understanding how businesses are organized or ruined, how families are maintained or split, how laws are passed or tabled, how wealth is accumulated and lost. To understand inequality is to understand the modern world and the conditions that created it.”
We can’t wait to see the curriculum. Will Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society get credit for destroying the black family?
Add this to your euphemism dictionary
Also from Campus Reform, for its recommended winter reading list, Indiana University’s Department of Information and Library Science refers to convicted murderer Joanne Deborah Chesimard as a “social activist.” Debbie goes by the name of Assata Shakur, and for reference, she is Tupac Shakur’s godmother.
She is distinguished as the first woman, in 2013, to make the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. Still a fugitive, she is a leader of the Black Liberation Army, whose line of business is murder of police officers, airline hijacking, armed robbery, and bombing.
In 1973 she murdered New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster after he pulled her over on a taillight violation. She escaped in 1979 and is believed to live in Cuba. One of her pals is the communist Angela Davis, a favorite on the college speaking circuit and another FBI Most Wanted veteran.
A library spokesman told Campus Reform reporter Kyle Reynolds that Chesimard made the winter reading list to further the library’s goal of “forming a more inclusive and more just society, nation, and world.”
The convenience of having a grandfather who was President
When Tatiana Schlossberg got her job covering environmental issues at the New York Times, it surely had nothing to do with her being the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and granddaughter of the late President. She even had a book published in 2019, when she was 28 years old.
Tatiana is back on stage with a review of three books on “environmental disaster” for the Times. One of them has the uplifting title How to Blow Up a Pipeline, by a Swedish professor and self-described “climate scholar,” from a company that calls itself “the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world.”
Here is part of the publisher’s marketing pitch, which Tim Graham at The Daily Signal describes as the “latest version of a Unabomber treatise”:
“In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop—with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.”
Graham says it’s “intellectually incoherent” for the Times to censor people who claim Democrats stole the election on the fear they might cause violence, “and then offer space to a book advocating property destruction.”
Graham has few kind words for “the poster girl for white privilege, a roving global correspondent born ‘on top,’ promoting violence against energy companies, which provide jobs to Americans in flyover states much less privileged than she is.”
Read Steve’s weekly Friday Letter at The News-Guardian. Please send links to story ideas to steve@combsmedia.us. Thanks.