Bill Maher on Eileen Gu and the “sh*thole superpower”

“Traitor” is too strong a word to describe Gu but I understand why some of her critics have reached for it to capture the depth of the betrayal of which she’s guilty.

Gu is the breakout star of the Olympics, having won two golds and a silver in skiing. She’s also a talented pianist, scored 1580 on her SATs, got into Stanford, and is so gorgeous that she models professionally. She’s a California girl, born in San Francisco to a Chinese-American mother. She should be the pride of the U.S.

She’s a national disgrace. She chose to compete for a genocidal regime, China, at the Genocide Games rather than for her home country.

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China’s Olympic propaganda show ends in global shame

The Russian doping committee set Beijing on fire

It was only fitting that China’s hopes of putting on the perfect Olympics should ultimately be dashed by its new partner in crime, Russia. The two countries started the Beijing Winter Olympics by announcing a “no-limits” partnership against the West, and ended them with one of the biggest sporting scandals in recent Olympic history.

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Elite Capture

While researching how Americans having been getting rich by helping the Chinese Communist Party achieve its outspoken aim of replacing the US as the “world’s No.1 power,” I came across the phrase “elite capture” — their term to describe the actions of influential people in the US towards China.

“Elite capture” can refer to different things, but to the Chinese Communist Party, China’s intelligence apparatus, or those involved in quasi-private business ventures, it is a crucial tool of their success. The idea is simple enough: by tempting another country’s elite with money, access and favors, you move them to see their interests and China’s interests as intertwined or even the same.

The Chinese are not subtle about this, and they barely try to hide it. They practice it around the world, most notably in Africa in pursuit of their Belt and Road Initiative. But elites in Western democracies have proved to be a soft touch, particularly among non-governmental elites.

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Voices from the Fields of Xinjiang

It was a September day, hot and dusty, normal. Meryem Sultan was lined up in front of the school with three classes of Uyghur schoolkids waiting for the buses. Back when she was nine, Meryem hated these school trips to the country. She had to pick caterpillars off the crops because, she was told, Chinese people liked to eat them. Kind of weird. When she was ten, what bugged her was that she was the smartest kid in the class, but now the teachers said they had to pick cotton. Then they told Meryem off, right in front of everyone — “Meryem, your results at school mean nothing. If you can’t pick cotton? You’re useless.” It was humiliating, but other kids were getting regular beatings for slacking off. Anyway, it was “just part of going to school” so Meryem did it. Turned out, she could pick faster than almost anyone in the class, especially the boys. Once she got going, she was “an addict.”

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The myth of Chinese supremacy

Strategic incompetence has always plagued Beijing

When I first arrived in China in 1976, four years had passed since Nixon and Kissinger had gone to Beijing to meet Mao, kicking off what Nixon would label “the week that changed the world”. But that interval was not long enough to dispel the thick fog of misrepresentations and outright lies spun during that visit by both the Americans and Chinese — though none of those tales concerned what really mattered: the geopolitical victory that came from that trip.

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The great Olympic figure-skating debacle

The lede from the AP’s story about what happened last night is unbeatable: “The gold medalist said she felt empty. The silver medalist pledged never to skate again. The favorite left in tears without saying a word.”

Congratulations to Russia, which took first, second, and fourth places in women’s figure-skating while turning the competition into a sh*tshow so repellent that sportswriters were using terms like “child abuse” afterward to describe what went down.

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Genocide Games Crumble to All-Time Low of 6.93 Million Viewers for NBCUniversal

“NBC’s primetime coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics averaged 7.87 million viewers on Monday,” reports Sports Media Watch, “8.70 million on Tuesday and an all-time low 6.93 million on Wednesday[.]”

To put that 6.93 million number into perspective, 7.4 million tuned in to the cable TV show Yellowstone last November. That wasn’t even the season finale. That was the fourth episode of the fourth season.  

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Corbella: Instead of ‘following the money’ behind trucker convoy, let’s go after those who launder their money here

… Basically, the car and the boy’s apartment — worth millions of dollars — is simply an example of money laundering taking place in the open in Vancouver. It’s such a prevalent tactic, particularly for the ruling governing elite in China, it’s got a name — the “Vancouver Model.”

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Coalition of the unwilling: Western elites prefer not to fight authoritarianism

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan addressed the British Parliament, expressing optimism about the “global campaign for democracy now gathering force.” Less than a decade later, the Soviet Union collapsed. After that, it was widely believed that authoritarianism was in decline and that the community of free nations was bound to grow and prosper.

That belief was incorrect. These days we monitor what political scientist Larry Diamond dubbed the “democratic recession.”

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Will Xi Jinping’s ‘End of Days’ Plunge China and the World into War?

When truckers took over Canada’s capital, Ottawa, and shut down border entry points to America, some called it a “nationwide insurrection.” Mass demonstrations have occurred across the democratic world. People have had enough of two years of mandates and other disease-control measures.

Not so in the world’s most populous state, which maintains the world’s strictest COVID-19 controls. There are no known popular protests in the People’s Republic of China against anti-coronavirus efforts.

Yet China is not stable, and Xi Jinping is facing his “End of Days,” as a recent essay by opposition figures (see below) puts it. The revolt is not in society at large but at the top of the Communist Party. As Gregory Copley, president of the International Strategic Studies Association, told Gatestone, Xi Jinping, China’s mighty-looking leader, has an “enormous array of domestic enemies.”

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Disastrous Ratings For CBC’s Genocide Olympics Coverage

Canadian ambivalence over Beijing 2022 seems to be playing out in TV viewership for the Games, with CBC posting initial ratings that are down sharply from previous Winter Olympics and even last summer’s Tokyo Games.

Primetime viewership on CBC for the first six days of events in Beijing is down 22 per cent from Tokyo, and off a whopping 48 per cent from the Pyeongchang Winter Games, according to figures provided Friday to The Globe and Mail by CBC.

… One advertising buyer told The Globe the ratings were about 25-per-cent lower than projections the CBC’s sales department had provided to the industry in advance of the Games, raising the possibility the public broadcaster may have to compensate marketers for failing to reach its expected audience.

Go Incognito

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