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Cold War

“Is this poker, or int’l relations?” Moscow called to accept that is guilty of po isoning Skripal

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“Are we playing cards here or dealing with serious matters? Is this a game of poker or international relations?” Maria Zakharova said when asked by Sky News correspondent John Sparks if Moscow accepted that “Russia has a serious credibility problem,” as a large group of countries simply don’t believe its denials in the case of the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal.

“Is it a sort of international game within the rules set by the UN Charter or, alternatively, is it an unrestricted use of force and pressure?”she said, questioning the behavior of the UK and the US.

Cold War, Western Hegemony's Collapse

You Know The US Is Losing, We’re Willing To Talk

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Authored by Tom Luongo,

How do you know when the United States is at a disadvantage in a geopolitical quagmire?

Our diplomats and Presidents want to ‘open up talks.’

Multiple times in the past four years the U.S. has used negotiating ceasefires in Syria and Ukraine to rearm and regroup those we’re backing or get our opposition (the Syrian Arab Army, the Russians) to let their guard down and then attack within 24 hours.

We’ve used the U.N. Security Council as a bludgeon to brazenly lie about on the ground facts in Syria to attempt to save our pet jihadists in places like Aleppo and now eastern Ghouta.

And in each of these instances the Russian counterparts have documented the U.S.’s mendacity, patiently building up an international file of such incidents for future use. As I’ve pointed out so many times, the Russians rightly feel we are “Not Agreement Capable” either from a short-term or long-term perspective.

Winning Looks like Losing

So, why do I think the U.S. is in a losing position right now, despite the pronouncements from President Trump and his most ardent supporters that he’s winning on everything?

Because on the two most important issues of 2018, Korean denuclearization and strategic arms control, Trump is ready to sit down and talk. And we have not been willing to do that on either of these issues at the Head of State level for most of this century, if not longer.

I wrote recently that the Neoconservative cabal in D.C. is in its final push for war with Russia. The catalyst, for me, was President Putin’s state of the union address on March 1st where he unveiled new weapons that conjured up images from the finale of Dr. Strangelove.

I said, and still believe …

The neocons are cornered. All of their major pushes to destroy Russia and Iran and control central Asia are collapsing. The EU is fast approaching a political crisis. The U.K. is still a loyal subject but the White House has a cancer at its center, Donald Trump. The window has nearly closed on regime change in Russia. In effect, it’s now or never.

And the clock started the moment Putin unveiled these weapons. It’s not that the military and intelligence services in the U.S. didn’t know about these systems. They did.

The embarrassing part is that for fifteen years (or more) the neocons, through their mouthpieces like John Bolton, have argued that war with Iran and Russia was the right course of action precisely because it was winnable at minimal cost to the U.S.

They peddled the lie that the Russians couldn’t defend themselves against us while our military commanders, especially one James Mattis, argued otherwise and from a position of knowledge, not ideological fervor.

In Korea it is the Koreans themselves that are pushing for reunification. The election of President Moon Jae-in is a testament to that. And the rapidity with which the situation has gone from full throated U.S. push for war and regime change to, “Hey, let’s talk about this,” has been stunning.

It means that some underlying fact has changed which precludes the U.S. from taking the neocon approach of further encirclement and destabilization of Russia and China.

Trump is now willing, against the advice of his inner council, to talk with Vladimir Putin about arms control. Why? The Russians have weapons that we cannot and will not be able to counter for a decade, if not longer.

We may have or will soon have weapon systems of parallel aggressive capabilities, but counter systems, like missile defense and electronic warfare, no. In fact, the Russians are most likely ahead of us in both of those areas as well.

So, now that the neocon push for war has been outed as the worst kind of malicious fever dream the only thing left to do is push this moment to its crisis point and trap Trump and Putin in a stand-off that most likely ends in tears.

MOAR Escalation!

Remember, not two weeks ago U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley failed to advance a total ceasefire in eastern Ghouta to save our ISIS/Al-Qaeda pet Salafist head-choppers there before they were wiped out. The resolution went nowhere because you can only go to that well so many times before it doesn’t work anymore.

The hysteria surrounding the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal is being used cynically to force Europe back into the fold of the U.S.’s ambitions to destroy Russia.

Every time Haley goes to the security council with another worthless ceasefire she is building the case for Russia’s removal from the U.N. Security Council. Or, at least, that’s the thinking. But, if that happens, then the U.N. is finished.

Meanwhile, as I pointed out earlier, the Russians keep making the case that it is the U.S. that negotiates in bad faith, treats allies like lepers and abuses its status to push for ends orthogonal to their interests.

And that brings me to Germany and the Nordstream 2 pipeline, Russia’s next weapon in its war with the U.S. U.S. lawmakers are apoplectic that this pipeline is getting built. Just this morning Germany issued the permits to allow its construction over the most strenuous objections from the U.S.

More sanctions are being threatened, assets frozen. More pressure will be placed on Denmark to not issue the permit. But Nordstream can be re-routed around Danish waters if need be for a small cost. So, with Germany’s permit Nordstream 2 is, for all practical intents, a go.

Lastly, China’s yuan-denominated oil futures contract (which is convertible to gold, FYI) began trading on Sunday evening and the initial volume was impressive to say the least. With China becoming the world’s largest importer of oil and the need for an oil futures benchmark in something other than light sweet crude, the challenge posed by this contract to the pricing of oil to the current petrodollar system is real.

And this will play into any and all trade negotiations between Trump and Jinping over the next year. The goal of this contract is not only to remove unnecessary friction from oil pricing but also to put pressure on Saudi Arabia to un-peg the Riyal from the U.S. dollar and accept Yuan as payment for the significant amount of oil they sell China.

You will know in the next few months just how much this new weapon is forcing change by how willing the U.S. is willing to cut deals on trade.

We’re approaching the crescendo of Trump’s ‘Crazy Ivan’ ploy to exert maximum leverage in a number of areas including foreign policy and trade. I believe the neoconservatives are worried he will not cut acceptable deals in the end, because they know his hand is poor.

Therefore, the big bluff he’s trying to execute will be called. This is why they are pushing for war so badly. And this is why he’s willing to go along with them, they are handing him leverage that he understands.

Unfortunately, Putin doesn’t bluff. And for a bully like Trump, losing is not an option. Lying our way into war is a time-honored U.S. Presidential tradition. Is this time different? The world hopes so.

It's All About Jews, Military Affairs, Western Hegemony's Collapse

Nearly a World War, America Threatened Russia Over Israeli Underground Terror Base Deep in Syria

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American made in 2015, gassing Syrians with White Helmet help in 2018 in East Ghouta

…by Gordon Duff, VT Senior Editor

Israel ran a base just outside Damascus, shelling civilians for years. America threatened war with Russia as forces closed in, discovering an al Qaeda control center run by the IDF.

A huge underground secret Israeli base has been found in East Ghouta, outside Damascus, including 40 tons of chlorine gas, tons of ammunition, American made tunneling equipment and, worst of all, a US supplied poison gas plant.

Strange reports flooded the news. The area outside Damascus called East Ghouta had been home to terrorist groups that had barrel bombed the city for years. The giant shells rained down on civilians randomly, killing a hundred or two hundred a week. Damascus never reported the real numbers. I have seen it personally.

Complete chlorine gas intensifier before being stripped of valuable control systems

Then it became precision guided munitions with satellite targeting, not just barrel bombs and the Syrian government backed by Russia moved in to stop it. That’s when reports of gas attacks by Damscus began flooding in, mostly fabricated by George Clooney’s “White Helmets,” terrorists by night, phony heroes by day, faking attacks or killing kids themselves for the films they make.

Trump threatened war with Russia unless the terrorists were allowed to continue unabated, even sent in two carrier battle groups.

Russia told Trump they would put American aircraft carriers on the bottom if they launched a single plane against Syria. War has never been closer and no one really knew why.

Similar Israeli command posts, including suicide-drone bases exist in Romania, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Jordan, Kurdish controlled Iraq and Syria and Cyprus. In Africa, look to Libya, Mauritius, Mali, Chad, Niger, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Cameroon and Uganda.

It isn’t just America that has bases around the world.

It's All About Jews

Free Education?

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Here’s a quote from a friend just today about the topic of meritocracy in our school system: “Just like the Catholic church in the middle ages recruited the smartest peasants in order to forestall revolutionary potential, and to learn mind bending religious dogma to befuddle the remaining peasants, current practice is much the same.”

We can substitute economics dogma to the befuddlement mix. The bottom line is every ruling elite has co-opted the top 1%-5% of high IQ, high wage earners, to make the pyramid work. Sociology writing is all over this. Veblen, Weber, etc. We can see this little group created everywhere natural resources are coveted by private empires.

The universities are doing exactly what they are supposed to do to protect the interests of the Trustees and Donors who run them for a reason. They are a tool of, not a cause of, the inequality and over-concentration. It is interesting how the story goes into hairsplitting and comparing Asians to others, etc. But, the real story is a well understood sociology story. This explains why Napoleon established free public education after the French Revolution.

It's All About Jews

Jewish Demographics

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Regarding the declining Jewish achievement, it looks like it can be primarily explained through demographics:

“Intermarriage rates have risen from roughly 6% in 1950 to approximately 40–50% in the year 2000.[56][57] This, in combination with the comparatively low birthrate in the Jewish community, has led to a 5% decline in the Jewish population of the United States in the 1990s.”

Jewish surnames don’t mean what they used to. And intermarriage rates are lowest among the low-performing and highly prolific Orthodox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Demographics

Jewish birth rates have been falling faster than the white population, especially for the non-Orthodox:

“In contrast to the ongoing trends of assimilation, some communities within American Jewry, such as Orthodox Jews, have significantly higher birth rates and lower intermarriage rates, and are growing rapidly. The proportion of Jewish synagogue members who were Orthodox rose from 11% in 1971 to 21% in 2000, while the overall Jewish community declined in number. [60] In 2000, there were 360,000 so-called “ultra-orthodox” (Haredi) Jews in USA (7.2%).[61] The figure for 2006 is estimated at 468,000 (9.4%).[61]”

http://www.jewishdatabank.org/Reports/RecentTrends_Sheskin_2011.pdf

“a very low fertility rate of 1.9, of which 1.4 will be raised
as Jews (2.15 is replacement rate)”

http://www.aish.com/jw/s/48899452.html

“As against the overall average of 1.86 children per Jewish woman, an informed estimate gives figures ranging upward from 3.3 children in “modern Orthodox” families to 6.6 in Haredi or “ultra-Orthodox” families to a whopping 7.9 in families of Hasidim.”

These statistics would suggest that half or more of Jewish children are being born into these lower-performing groups. Given their very low intermarriage rates, a huge portion of the secular, Reform, and Conservative Jews must be intermarrying (more than half if the aggregate 43% intermarriage figure is right). And the high-performing groups may now be around 1 child per woman or lower, and worse for the youngest generation.

So a collapse in Jewish representation in youth science prizes can be mostly explained by the collapse of the distinct non-Orthodox Jewish youth.

Incidentally, intermarriage also produces people with Jewish ancestry who get classified as gentiles using last names or self-identification, reducing Jewish-gentile gaps by bringing up nominal gentile scores at the same time as nominal-Jewish scores are lowered.

It's All About Jews

The Strange Collapse of Jewish Academic Achievement

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By RON UNZ

From my own perspective, I found these statistical results surprising, even shocking.

I had always been well aware of the very heavy Jewish presence at elite academic institutions. But the underwhelming percentage of Jewish students who today achieve high scores on academic aptitude tests was totally unexpected, and very different from the impressions I had formed during my own high school and college years a generation or so ago. An examination of other available statistics seems to support my recollections and provides evidence for a dramatic recent decline in the academic performance of American Jews

The U.S. Math Olympiad began in 1974, and all the names of the top scoring students are easily available on the Internet. During the 1970s, well over 40 percent of the total were Jewish, and during the 1980s and 1990s, the fraction averaged about one-third. However, during the thirteen years since 2000, just two names out of 78 or 2.5 percent appear to be Jewish. The Putnam Exam is the most difficult and prestigious mathematics competition for American college students, with five or six Putnam winners having been selected each year since 1938. Over 40 percent of the Putnam winners prior to 1950 were Jewish, and during every decade from the 1950s through the 1990s, between 22 percent and 31 percent of the winners seem to have come from that same ethnic background. But since 2000, the percentage has dropped to under 10 percent, without a single likely Jewish name in the last seven years.

This consistent picture of stark ethnic decline recurs when we examine the statistics for the Science Talent Search, which has been selecting 40 students as national finalists for America’s most prestigious high school science award since 1942, thus providing a huge statistical dataset of over 2800 top science students. During every decade from the 1950s through the 1980s, Jewish students were consistently 22–23 percent of the recipients, with the percentage then declining to 17 percent in the 1990s, 15 percent in the 2000s, and just 7 percent since 2010. Indeed, of the thirty top ranked students over the last three years, only a single one seems likely to have been Jewish. Similarly, Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986 to 1997, but have fallen to just 5 percent over the last decade, a result which must surely send Richard Feynman spinning in his grave.

Other science competitions provide generally consistent recent results, though without the long track record allowing useful historical comparisons. Over the last dozen years, just 8 percent of the top students in the Biology Olympiad have been Jewish, with none in the last three years. Between 1992 and 2012, only 11 percent of the winners of the Computing Olympiad had Jewish names, as did just 8 percent of the Siemens AP Award winners. And although I have only managed to locate the last two years of Chemistry Olympiad winners, these lists of 40 top students contained not a single probable Jewish name.

Further evidence is supplied by Weyl, who estimated that over 8 percent of the 1987 NMS semifinalists were Jewish,[60] a figure 35 percent higher than found in today’s results. Moreover, in that period the math and verbal scores were weighted equally for qualification purposes, but after 1997 the verbal score was double-weighted,[61] which should have produced a large rise in the number of Jewish semifinalists, given the verbal-loading of Jewish ability. But instead, today’s Jewish numbers are far below those of the late 1980s.

Taken in combination, these trends all provide powerful evidence that over the last decade or more there has been a dramatic collapse in Jewish academic achievement, at least at the high end.

Several possible explanations for this empirical result seem reasonably plausible. Although the innate potential of a group is unlikely to drop so suddenly, achievement is a function of both ability and effort, and today’s overwhelmingly affluent Jewish students may be far less diligent in their work habits or driven in their studies than were their parents or grandparents, who lived much closer to the bracing challenges of the immigrant experience. In support of this hypothesis, roughly half of the Jewish Math Olympiad winners from the last two decades have had the sort of highly distinctive names which would tend to mark them as recent immigrants from the Soviet Union or elsewhere, and such names were also very common among the top Jewish science students of the same period, even though this group represents only about 10 percent of current American Jews. Indeed, it seems quite possible that this large sudden influx of very high performing immigrant Jews from the late 1980s onward served to partially mask the rapid concurrent decline of high academic achievement among native American Jews, which otherwise would have become much more clearly evident a decade or so earlier.

This pattern of third or fourth generation American students lacking the academic drive or intensity of their forefathers is hardly surprising, nor unique to Jews. Consider the case of Japanese-Americans, who mostly arrived in America during roughly the same era. America’s Japanese have always been a high-performing group, with a strong academic tradition, and Japan’s international PISA academic scores are today among the highest in the world. But when we examine the list of California’s NMS semifinalists, less than 1 percent of the names are Japanese, roughly in line with their share of the California population.[62] Meanwhile, Chinese, Koreans, and South Asians are 6 percent of California but contribute 50 percent of the top scoring students, an eight-fold better result, with a major likely difference being that they are overwhelmingly of recent immigrant origin. In fact, although ongoing Japanese immigration has been trivial in size, a significant fraction of the top Japanese students have the unassimilated Japanese first names that would tend to indicate they are probably drawn from that tiny group.

In his 1966 book The Creative Elite in America, Weyl used last name analysis to document a similarly remarkable collapse in achievement among America’s Puritan-descended population, which had once provided a hugely disproportionate fraction of our intellectual leadership, but for various reasons went into rapid decline from about 1900 onward. He also mentions the disappearance of the remarkable Scottish intellectual contribution to British life after about 1800. Although the evidence for both these historical parallels seems very strong, the causal factors are not entirely clear, though Weyl does provide some possible explanations.[63]

In some respects, perhaps it was the enormously outsize Jewish academic performance of the past which was highly anomalous, and the more recent partial convergence toward white European norms which is somewhat less surprising. Over the years, claims have been widely circulated that the mean Jewish IQ is a full standard deviation—15 points—above the white average of 100,[64] but this seems to have little basis in reality. Richard Lynn, one of the world’s foremost IQ experts, has performed an exhaustive literature review and located some 32 IQ samples of American Jews, taken from 1920 to 2008. For the first 14 studies conducted during the years 1920–1937, the Jewish IQ came out very close to the white American mean, and it was only in later decades that the average figure rose to the approximate range of 107–111.[65]

In a previous article “Race, IQ & Wealth,” I had suggested that the IQs of ethnic groups appear to be far more malleable than many people would acknowledge, and may be particularly influenced by factors of urbanization, education, and affluence.[66] Given that Jews have always been America’s most heavily urbanized population and became the most affluent during the decades in question, these factors may account for a substantial portion of their huge IQ rise during most of the twentieth century. But with modern electronic technology recently narrowing the gaps in social environment and educational opportunities between America’s rural and urban worlds, we might expect a portion of this difference to gradually dissipate. American Jews are certainly a high-ability population, but the innate advantage they have over other high-ability white populations is probably far smaller than is widely believed.

This conclusion is supported by the General Social Survey (GSS), an online dataset of tens of thousands of American survey responses from the last forty years which includes the Wordsum vocabulary test, a very useful IQ proxy correlating at 0.71. Converted into the corresponding IQ scores, the Wordsum-IQ of Jews is indeed quite high at 109. But Americans of English, Welsh, Scottish, Swedish, and Catholic Irish ancestry also have fairly high mean IQs of 104 or above, and their combined populations outnumber Jews by almost 15-to-1, implying that they would totally dominate the upper reaches of the white American ability distribution, even if we excluded the remaining two-thirds of all American whites, many of whose IQs are also fairly high. Furthermore, all these groups are far less highly urbanized or affluent than Jews,[67] probably indicating that their scores are still artificially depressed to some extent. We should also remember that Jewish intellectual performance tends to be quite skewed, being exceptionally strong in the verbal subcomponent, much lower in math, and completely mediocre in visuospatial ability; thus, a completely verbal-oriented test such as Wordsum would actually tend to exaggerate Jewish IQ.

Stratifying the white American population along religious lines produces similar conclusions. An analysis of the data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that Americans raised in the Episcopal Church actually exceeded Jews in mean IQ, while several other religious categories came quite close, leading to the result that the overwhelming majority of America’s high-ability white population had a non-Jewish background.[68]

81SEBRGTffL.jpg

Finally, in the case of Jews, these assimilation- or environment-related declines in relative academic performance may have been reinforced by powerful demographic trends. For the last generation or two, typical Jewish women from successful or even ordinary families have married very late and averaged little more than a single child, while the small fraction of Jewish women who are ultra-Orthodox often marry in their teens and then produce seven or eight children.[69] As a consequence, this extremely religious subpopulation has been doubling in size every twenty years, and now easily exceeds 10 percent of the total, including a far higher percentage of younger Jews. But ultra-Orthodox Jews have generally been academically mediocre, often with enormously high rates of poverty and government dependency.[70]
 Therefore, the combination of these two radically different trends of Jewish reproduction has acted to stabilize the total number of Jewish youngsters, while probably producing a sharp drop in their average academic achievement.

Military Affairs

Two Failures In One Day – Missile Defense Is An Embaressment – It Won’t Work

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Within the new $700 billion defense budget the U.S. Congress allocated more money for missile defense:

The Pentagon would spend an additional $1 billion on two of Lockheed’s missile defense systems, bringing total appropriations for the Missile Defense Agency to $11.5 billion.

Two incidents last night provide again that missile defense is a waste fo money. It hardly ever works. Strategic missile defense, which the U.S. builds to take down intercontinental missiles, will not protect against the new weapons Russia is now pursuing. The U.S. military acknowledges this. After Putin announced the new weapon systems the Trump administration raised the white flag and suddenly asked for new arms control talks.

Last night the Yemeni army launched (vid) seven ballistic missiles against Saudi Arabia. Three of those targeted the capital Riyadh, four were aimed ar military and infrastructure targets. In Riyadh the Saudi forces fired a a number of Patriot surface-to-air missiles and claimed that those successfully intercepted the Yemeni missiles. The Saudis Patriot Advanced Capabilities-2 system (PAC-2) are made by the U.S. company Raytheon which is also hiringformer U.S. soldiers as ‘Patriot Battery Systems Technician Field Engineers’ to man and maintain the Saudi systems.

Earlier Saudi claims of successful intercepts turned out to be false. The small warheads of the Yemeni missiles separate from the larger missile body and are difficult to detect. The U.S. provided systems inevitably aims at the bigger empty missile body.

This time various videos from Riyadh show that at least seven interceptors were fired against the three incoming missiles. At least two of the interceptors failed catastrophically. The other five seem to have simply self destructed at height. There is no sign of any real interception.

One of the Patriot interceptors prematurely exploded during its boost phase. Its burning debris showered the ground with hot parts.

patriotdestruct1-s.jpg
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Another Patriot interceptor made a u-turn and struck the ground some hundred meters away from onlookers:

patriotdestruct3-s.jpg
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Inevitably some snarky comments followed:

Jeffrey Lewis @ArmsControlWonk
When your PAC2 gets radicalized and turns on you …
—
Haykal Bafana @BaFana3
Even #Saudi Patriot missiles know who the real enemy is: They boomerang back to earth and bomb Saudi Arabia.
—
agitpapa @agitpapa
How a real Patriot should function, killing the guys who did 9/11 instead of serving them.

The other defense missiles seem to have self destructed at height presumably after they lost contact with the target. Each of these Patriot MIM-104C missiles costs some $2-3 million.

The Saudis say that one man was killed and two were wounded in the Yemeni attack. It is more likely that these people were victims of the missile defense fire than of the attacking missiles.

In another missile defense incident yesterday Israel fired at least some twenty of its U.S. paid Iron Dome interceptors against presumed missiles coming from the Gaza strip:

Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile shield intercepted a number of rockets fired from the Gaza Strip on Sunday, Israeli media reported, after warning sirens sounded around the Hamas-controlled Palestinian territory.

irondomesalvo-s.jpg
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Several videos show the missiles explode in a flash high up in the air. Such explosions are often interpreted as successful intercept but are usually just the programmed self-destruction which prevents that whole missile carcasses fall down on the people below. Indeed none of a missiles the Israeli army fired destroyed any targets as none were there:

Multiple Code Red false alarms were blasted in the Hof Ashkelon and Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Councils and in the southern city of Sderot Sunday evening as the Iron Dome missile-defense mistook bullets from the Gaza Strip for a fusillade of rockets.The regional councils originally reported that the Iron Dome anti-missile system was said to have intercepted every rocket rocket. However, the IDF later confirmed that no salvo had been fired at Israel.

“No salvo was fired at territory in the State of Israel. The situation in the Gaza region is usual. The interceptions by the Iron Dome system were activated because of the firing of bullets from the strip. Nothing fell in Israeli territory. It is being checked whether mortars or rockets were even fired at all,” the statement read.

Before the IDF clarification, the regional councils instructed the southern residents to remain in sheltered rooms.

Each Iron Dome missile costs at least $50,000. The IDF just spent $1,000,000 of U.S. taxpayer money because some ‘oversensitive‘ system mistook random gun fire not aimed at Israel for incoming missiles.

The U.S. strategic missile defense is against incoming long range missiles. The Patriot systems in Saudi Arabia are suposed to defend against medium range ballistic missiles. The Israeli Iron Dome systems should defend against short range missile attacks.

All three systems are obviously incapable of fulfilling their task. All three demonstrate that missile defense is prohibitively costly. The cost of each missile defense interceptor is a multitude of the costs of the attacking missile. The number of interceptors is limited and the systems can be exhausted and overwhelmed by swarm attacks of cheap dummies followed by a real attack.

Last year the Saudis were pushed by the Trump administration to buy the new Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system:

The package that cleared Friday would include 44 THAAD launchers, 360 interceptors, 16 THAAD Fire Control and Communications Mobile Tactical Station Groups and seven AN/TPY-2 THAAD radars, along with associated support equipment and training.

This new system is supposed to defend Saudi Arabia against Iranian ballistic missiles. But according to a South-Korean analysis the THAAD missile defense system has the same problem the Patriot system has. It can easily be deceived by cheap decoys and it tends to hit the incoming missile body while missing the separate warhead which simply continues its attack on the target.

When the Saudi clown prince visited Washington last week The U.S. president made an embarrassing show (vid) out of such sales. The Saudis will have to pay some $15 billion for the basically useless THAAD system. “That’s peanuts to you,” said Trump, but Saudi citizens may not agree with such banter. The clown prince was, apparently, not amused.

trumpsalessaudi-s.jpg
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But what can he do? If he stops buying useless U.S. weapons the borg in Washington will ‘regime change’ him in no time.

Current missile defense is economically not viable. The limits of physics make it easy to overcome. But the systems still have their purpose.

For U.S. politicians they are a salable way to move taxpayer money towards the owners of the defense industry. For the Israeli government they are a (U.S. paid) psychological tool to prevent its people from protesting against the consequences of Zionist land robbery. The Saudis see them as inevitable ransom payment in the U.S. extortion scheme of its ‘allies’.

Yesterday’s public failures of missile defense endanger those schemes. If the general public comes to believe that missile defense can not work the whole scam falls apart. Any future sale should thus be conditioned on a promise to not ever use the acquired system.

Western Hegemony's Collapse

US Tech Incompetence

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In the code warrior field, the US ranks quite poorly, and the fact that US software companies often outsource to an even lower ranked India doesn’t improve matters. Proclaiming oneself “exceptional” and “indispensable” are poor substitutes for doing the actual heavy lifting.

HackerRank did an assessment of its 1.5M users to answer the question: “… which countries do the best at programming challenges on HackerRank?”.

According to our data, China and Russia score as the most talented developers. Chinese programmers outscore all other countries in mathematics, functional programming, and data structures challenges, while Russians dominate in algorithms, the most popular and most competitive arena. While the United States and India provide the majority of competitors on HackerRank, they only manage to rank 28th and 31st.

You can see the full results here: http://blog.hackerrank.com/which-country-would-win-in-the-programming-olympics/
Not definitive, but it correlates well with more formal, high end competitions such as the ICPC (https://www.rt.com/news/343723-russian-programmers-icpc-contest-victory/)

It's All About Jews

The “Globalists” Love Gefilte Fish

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ISRAEL SHAMIR

Our grandparents faced a quandary when they had to describe some body parts or physical activity. The ‘obscene words’ remained taboo at least until D.H. Lawrence broke the prohibition in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the four-letter words became printable only recently. However, now we have new banned words, or words one can use only at one’s own peril.

‘The Jews’ is such a word. Speaking about the Jews is fraught with consequences. Jews do not like to be referred to, unless in extremely flattering terms. You are likely to be banned in Facebook and other social networks for referring to ‘Jews’. You can be fired. Even a hundred years ago it was a troublesome step, likely to cause social ostracism.

Therefore, there is a permanent demand for euphemisms.

  • “Semite” is an early and enduring euphemism of the 19th century which is still with us thanks to “anti-Semitism”.
  • The Clergy prefer to write ‘Masons’ instead of ‘Jews’.
  • ‘Khazar’ or ‘Khazarian’ is popular in the networks, thanks to Arthur Koestler, the author of The Thirteenth Tribe. He claimed modern Jews were the descendants of the Turkic Khazars who were Judaised in 12th century.
  • The nickname ‘Ashkenazi’ originally referred to the Jews of Central Europe; the East European Jews of Lithuanian and Ukrainian origin gladly accepted it despite the German Jews’ objections. Nowadays it is just an euphemism for a Jew, with an extra bonus: not-very-prominent (outside trade and money) Oriental Jews will gladly join in Ashkenazi denunciation.
  • ‘Zionist’ is a popular term of use and abuse, as in “Jews are fine, it is Zionists whom I dislike”.
  • “Reptilian” or ‘Illuminati’ are the words used when all the rest fail.

There is one big problem with these words. They clearly show that you are afraid to write the J word. And they know how to deal with frightened persons. It is enough to murmur in response, “It’s an antisemitic slur”, and the guy will collapse in a paroxysm of denial. There is a second problem: it makes very little sense to call the Bolshevik Jews “Zionists.”

The Jews themselves have proposed a few euphemisms of their own: ‘Hebrews’ or ‘Israelites’ were the preferred ones, but they didn’t make much inroad in the English-speaking world. However, ‘Hebrews’ became the official designation of Jews in Russia, while the ‘Jews’ moniker had been outlawed, though it survived in Poland and the Ukraine.

Now the US has produced a new word: “globalists.” The Huffington Post called the tweet of Donald Trump about the dismissal of “globalist Gary Cohen” – anti-Semitic. It turns out that a “globalist” is just a Jew. For example, globalists like gefilte fish.

This neologism pleased Ann Coulter, and she amused her numerous readers with her tweets: “Paul Newman is only half globalist,” “How many globalists came under the distribution in the fight against male assault and harassment!”, “Israel is the last refuge of globalists.” These Tweets received thousands of likes and reposts, and caused an angry condemnation … of globalists.

Mahmud Abbas, the president of Palestine, created an euphemism accidentally. He called the US Ambassador to Israel a “son of a bitch”, and His Excellence Right Honourable Ambassador David Friedman said it is was an “antisemitic slur”.

A propos, the creation of euphemisms is a very Jewish way to deal with taboos. At first, the Jews banned the Name of God יהוה, and then they banned the substitute, and the substitute of the substitute, and the substitute of the substitute of the substitute. Nowadays, the religious Jews refer to ‘God’ in writing in an oblique way.

The whole of political correctness (PC) grew out of extrapolating this Jewish attitude to other groups. In the PC culture, the word ‘Negro’ was displaced by “Black”, and then by ‘black’ in low case, and then by “Afro-American”. Thus PC had created a new fence around the ban.

The idea of fences is another Jewish concept. A Jew is forbidden to pick fruit on the Sabbath. Fine! Then, the Jews created a fence around this prohibition forbidding the climbing of an apple tree on the Sabbath. The idea is: if you climb on an apple tree, you may be tempted to pick an apple. And then they built another fence, forbidding the climbing of any tree one the Sabbath. Otherwise, you’ll get used to climbing a pine on the Sabbath, and one day you’ll climb an apple tree.

PC is this additional fence. If today you refer to a black person, tomorrow you will be tempted to refer to Jews. And if you refer to Jews, perhaps you will do so in unflattering terms. The concept of micro-insults and micro-aggressions completes the fence.

And now we have a new fence: a reference to ‘bankers’, ‘moneylenders’ and even ‘globalists’ has become forbidden, as in the case of George Soros. The Hungarians referred to him as a “globalist banker” and the Jewish world rushed to his defence. Not that he is liked by his fellow Jews, he isn’t, but they have to fight the breach in the fence. You know the logic: today you call Soros ‘’a globalist’, and tomorrow you will call a Jew – a Jew.

President Putin did just that. In an interview with Megyn Kelly, he answered her question about the 13 Russians who were indicted by Mueller for alleged interference in the elections: “They do not represent the interests of the Russian state. Maybe they are not Russians, but Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews with Russian citizenship. Check it out.”

He was attacked ferociously. The leading Jewish organization ADL (Anti-Defamation League) referred to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (this is their standard response whenever a Jew is mentioned), and added, “Don’t you dare blame the Jews for interfering in American elections!”

This is especially piquant – if there is a foreign country that actively interferes in the US politics and elections, it is primarily the Jewish state and its supporters. American friends of Israel, Sheldon Adelson and Jeff Katzenberg are the largest donors; and in general Jews spent more money on presidential elections in the US than on helping needy Jews. Israeli diplomats are actively interfering in American elections at all levels, as the Jewish website Mondoweiss writes. But you can mention that only in marginal publications on the verge of a ban from Google and Twitter.

And in Israel, the energetic young MK Xenia Svetlova, (a Knesset Member for the Zionist Union), accused Putin of anti-Semitism and called upon Netanyahu to ‘protect the Jews’. It’s nothing personal – Xenia grew up in Moscow, worked for Russian TV channels, even loved Russia, but when she went into politics, she had to prove that she was not a Putin stooge. And she calls for Israeli intervention in Syria against Assad and Putin, and for the condemnation of Putin’s anti-Semitism.

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The Tatars and Ukrainians did not resent Putin’s words. The Russian Jews in Russia dismissed it, too. For a good reason: the taboo on the word ‘Jew’ is not universal. It does not exist in Russia. Russia is the land of many native ethnicities, a hundred and fifty or so, from Yakut to Mordva, and people freely refer to all of them without fear. The Jews in Russia are just another ethnicity, or ethnos, or nation, one of many. ‘Russians’ in Russia connote members of Russian ethnicity, the most numerous nation of the Russian Federation, not the citizens of Russia, as you would expect.

This attitude may surprise an American, or a Frenchman. It is not totally unknown in Europe, where Walloons and Flemings populate Belgium, and Catalans and Basques live in Spain. Still, a Frenchman of Brittany or Provence is a Frenchman first, and a Breton or Provençal a distant second. In the US, ‘ethnicity’ is a domain of recent immigrants, Greeks or Poles; the Americans have race and religion as identity-forming factors.

In Russia the ethnic identity has been enforced since Stalin’s days: it was actually recorded on the ID. I explain this by Stalin’s personal perceptions: a native of Georgia, the country in Transcaucasia, he was brought up in the local tradition of ethnic awareness. For Russians proper, this ethnic identity is of little importance. They know of it, but do not consider it greatly important. That is why in modern Russia ‘ethnicity’ is not registered on the ID anymore.

Of course, Megyn Kelly, while referring to ‘Russians’ indicted by Mueller, had meant ‘citizens of Russia’, and not ‘ethnic Russians’. Me myself, like the majority of old émigrés, also refer to “Russians” meaning people in Russia or from Russia, or even people from the former Soviet Union. In Israel, every person whose origins are in the USSR is called ‘Russian’, to the chagrin of Russian Jews. They would like to be called ‘Jews’ in Israel, and ‘Russians’ in Russia, but alas, it is other way around, they are called ‘Jews’ in Russia and ‘Russians’ in Israel.

Russian ethnic nationalists of the kind embraced by my colleague Anatoly Karlin would like to keep the ethnonym ‘Russians’ just for themselves, but they are harmless, you can disregard their whines – they aren’t globalists for you.

Now, for the first time ever, the Russians are being trained to stick to American word usage. This is done by Facebook, a platform that millions of Russians use. Besides opening Russia for American business and stealing its data, Facebook is a powerful enforcer of PC in Russian minds. Whenever you refer to blacks, Jews, or even Ukrainians you risk being banned for a week or a month.

As unusual this attitude is for the Russians, they are susceptible for training, as we all are. These small punishments go a long way to bring Jewish hegemony to Russia. Beside protecting Jews, or Blacks from micro-insults, the banning of words has a powerful impact on the mind. Whoever tells you what you may or may not say, is a person of authority. This way of subduing people to your command is called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and the CIA is on the forefront of using this black magic of words.

Israelis, and Jews in general do not accept these taboos. It is perfectly all right for Israelis and Jews to refer to ‘Jews’, or worse. The late Israeli MK Ze’evi, a popular right-winger minister, called Martin Indyk, the US Ambassador in Israel, a ‘Jewboy” (יהודון); Netanyahu’s aide called another US Ambassador a ‘Jewboy’, too. Israelis speak freely of blacks; they do not speak only, but deport them as well. They do not mind banning non-Jews from renting apartments quite openly, too. This disregard of taboo gives Jews an additional power in dealing with Gentiles, like a disregard of the Matrix gave supernatural powers to Neo.

The Palestinians disregard the taboo, too. They do not hesitate shouting “Jews are coming”, when Israeli soldiers on their jeeps roll into their villages. Americans of Palestinian origin are scrupulous with their observance, they never utter the forbidden J-word, (unless they want to say something nice about a Jewish friend), otherwise they speak of ‘Zionists’. That is why Palestinians in Palestine are free, and Palestinians in the US are not, like all Americans.

This taboo should be broken. Until it is done, the Jews will continue to dominate the discourse and the US society, the Palestinians will suffer, the bankers will grow fat and prosperous, legal and illegal immigration will continue unabated. Saying “Jew” will have a liberating effect, like mouthing the name of Rumpelstiltskin. And it is much shorter.

Israel Shamir can be reached at adam

This article was first published at The Unz Review.

Cold War

Chinese President Xi Jinping: What Is His Background?

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By GODFREE ROBERTS

Xi Jinping, brother Xi Yuanping, father Xi Zhongxun in 1958
Xi Jinping, brother Xi Yuanping, father Xi Zhongxun in 1958

In a well-governed country, those who discuss policy must be in accordance with the law; those who carry out official matters must be regulated. Superiors evaluate actual performance; officials carry out their work efficiently. Words are not permitted to exceed reality. Actions are not permitted to overstep the law.

In a disordered country, those who are praised by the multitudes are richly rewarded though devoid of accomplishments. Those who stick to their duties are punished, though free of guilt. The ruler is in the dark and does not understand. Worthies do not offer proposals. Officials form factions; persuasive talkers roam about; people embellish their actions. Those who are taken to be wise devote themselves to artifice and deceit; high officials usurp authority. Cliques and factions become widespread. The ruler is eager to carry out projects that are of no use, while the people look haggard and worn. Huainanzi, 221 BC.

In 1980 Deng Xiaoping set 2020 as the completion date for his Reform and Opening program–a 40-year overhaul of China’s economy.

On June 1, 2021 President Xi will announce that all Deng’s goals have been reached and a basic xiaokang society established: no one is poor and everyone receives an education, has paid employment, more than enough food and clothing, access to medical services, old-age support, a home and a comfortable life–a claim no other country can make.

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Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s Prime Minister for 30 years, said the primary responsibility of a government leader to “Paint his vision of the future to his people, translate that vision into policies which he must convince the people are worth supporting and, finally, galvanize them to help him implement them,”

A month after becoming President, in 2012, Xi painted his vision for Two Centennials: to fix inequality (‘socialist modernization’) by 2012 and to transform China into ‘a great modern socialist country, prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful’ by 2049. American Nobelist Robert Fogel agrees that China will be prosperous: its economy will be twice the size of Europe’s and America’s combined in 2049.

Because he must paint China’s new vision, colleagues granted Xi ‘core leader’ status in 2017 and amended the constitution in 2018 so he and PM can serve another term and make sure the new era gets off to a good start. Since he will be around until at least 2027, it may be a good idea to get to know him before our media intensify their attacks on him. Here’s a short bio.

People who have little experience with power–those who are far from it–tend to regard politics as mysterious and exciting. But I look past the superficialities, the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the detention houses, the fickleness of human relationships. I understand politics on a deeper level.–Xi Jinping⁠, President of China.

Though wages had been doubling each decade for a generation, by 2009 local corruption was impacting faith in the national government and the Party needed a Confucian junzi–a combination of Bill Gates and Nelson Mandela–to retain its Heavenly Mandate. Ever-vigilant, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing was investigating a high born reformer who had triumphed over injustice yet remained compassionate, sincere, persistent and modest:

U.S. EMBASSY C O N F I D E N T I A L
SECTION 01 OF 06 BEIJING 003128
SIPDIS. 2009 November 16, 12:20 (Monday)
SUBJECT: PORTRAIT OF VICE PRESIDENT XI JINPING: ‘AMBITIOUS SURVIVOR’ OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION.

Unlike those in the social circles the professor ran in, Xi Jinping could not talk about women and movies and did not drink or do drugs. Xi was considered of only average intelligence, the professor said, and not as smart as the professor’s peer group. Women thought Xi was ‘boring’.

The professor never felt completely relaxed around Xi, who seemed extremely ‘driven’. Nevertheless, despite Xi’s lack of popularity in the conventional sense and his ‘cold and calculating’ demeanor in those early years, the professor said, Xi was ‘not cold-hearted’. He was still considered a ‘good guy’ in other ways. Xi was outwardly friendly, ‘always knew the answers’ to questions, and would ‘always take care of you’. The professor surmised that Xi’s newfound popularity today, which the professor found surprising, must stem in part from Xi’s being ‘generous and loyal’.

Xi also does not care at all about money and is not corrupt, the professor stated. Xi can afford to be incorruptible, the professor wryly noted, given that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. In the professor’s view, Xi Jinping is supremely pragmatic, a realist, driven not by ideology but by a combination of ambition and ‘self-protection’.

Xi knows how very corrupt China is and is repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution, the professor stated. The professor speculated that if Xi were to become the Party General Secretary, he would likely aggressively attempt to address these evils, perhaps at the expense of the new moneyed class.

Xi inherited his silver spoon from a remarkable man. When the Japanese invasion interrupted his father’s schooling in 1933, Xi Zhongxun established a rebel area, commanded its army, expanded its territory, became a general at nineteen, provincial governor at twenty-two, the new Republic’s youngest Vice-Premier and one of the Revolution’s Eight Immortals. After escaping imprisonment by the Nationalists, Zhongxun was sentenced to death by fellow Communists for his outspokenly liberal views when Mao, emerging at the end of the Long March, reached his redoubt in Shaanxi Province in 1936 and pardoned him. Zhongxun spent the next twelve years alternating between governing and rescuing beleaguered armies. A superb negotiator–whose conversion of a rebel leader Mao compared to a famous conciliation in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms–he was widely loved and admired for his competence, outspokenness and honesty.

American journalist Sidney Rittenberg, a friend in the 1940s, recalled, “Xi Zhongxun took me with him a number of times traveling in the countryside among the villages and he knew whose baby was sick and whose grandpa had rheumatism and so forth, and he would go to these homes and talk to them and they loved him. He was always getting into trouble because of his plebeian style and democratic way of thinking. He was a very good man in my opinion, probably the most democratic-minded member of the old Party leadership. I just hope that a lot of this rubbed off on the son”.

Zhongxun’s non-ideological, pragmatic outspokenness got him jailed again, for seven years, during the Cultural Revolution. Rehabilitated, he was assigned to govern destitute Guangdong Province and Deng Xiaoping joked at his farewell, “The Government has no funds but we can give you favorable policies”. Finding Guangdong’s government blocking residents’ flight to neighboring Hong Kong–where wages were a hundred times higher–he risked re-imprisonment by proposing a special economic zone for private enterprise. After furious debate, Beijing approved his plan and he stabilized Guangdong, stopped the exodus, liberalized the economy and built China’s first free enterprise zone which, today, attracts Hong Kong graduates seeking better pay. His first son, Jinping, was born in Shaanxi Province in 1953 and grew up listening to his famous father’s stories, “He talked about how he’d joined the revolution and he’d say, ‘You’ll certainly make revolution someday’. He’d explain what revolution is. We heard so much of this our ears grew calluses”. In a Confucian land, Jinping’s high birth brought high expectations: “The primary duty of a son is to live an upright life and to spread the doctrines of humanity in order to win good reputation after death and thus reflect great honor upon his parents” The Book of Filial Duty⁠.

Young Xi’s life in the public eye began inauspiciously. During the Cultural Revolution the twelve year old was paraded as an enemy of the people wearing a metal dunce cap and a placard around his neck before being sentenced to prison. But the juvenile detention center was full so he was sent to poverty-stricken Liangjiahe village as part of Mao’s “Up the Mountain and Down to the Countryside” campaign to educate privileged youth about rural life. When his tearful family farewelled him, “I told them if I didn’t go I wasn’t sure I’d survive”. His older sister stayed and, persecuted by radicals, committed suicide two years later.

He would spend seven years growing to manhood in Liangjiahe, sleeping on brick beds in flea-infested cave homes, enduring the peasants’ life of hunger and cold, ploughing, pulling grain carts and collecting manure. “Just after I arrived in the village beggars started appearing and, as soon as they turned up, the dogs would be set on them. Back then we students, sent down from the cities, believed beggars were bad elements and tramps. We didn’t know the saying, ‘in January there is still enough food, in February you will starve, and March and April you are half alive, half dead’. For six months every family lived only on bark and herbs. Women and children were sent out to beg so that the food could go to those who were doing the spring ploughing. You had to live in a village to understand it. When you think of the difference between what the central government in Beijing knew and what was actually happening in the countryside, you have to shake your head”.

Liangjiahe’s farmers rated the city boy six on a ten-point scale, “Not even as high as the women,” he said. “I was very young when I was sent to the countryside, it was something I was forced to do. At the time I didn’t think far ahead and gave no thought to the importance of cooperation. While the villagers went up the slopes and worked every day, I did as I chose and people got a poor impression of me so, after a few months, they sent me back to Beijing and I was placed in a study group. When I was released six months later I thought hard about returning to the village and talked to my uncle who had been active in revolutionary work in the 1940s. My uncle told me about his work back then and about how important it is to cooperate with the people you live with and that settled it. I went back to the village, got down to work and learned to cooperate. Within a year I was doing the same work as people in the village, living as they lived and working hard. The hardship of working shocked me, though eventually I could carry a shoulder pole weighing more than a hundred pounds up a mountain road. People saw that I had changed”. The only reliable light was provided by old kerosene lamps and the village had neither running water nor electricity. There was no school but he was ‘always reading books as thick as bricks,’ villagers recall. He began to lead small projects like reinforcing riverbanks and organizing a blacksmiths’ cooperative and constructed the first sewage system in the county, “The pipe from the pond was blocked and I unblocked it. Excrement and urine flew all over my face”. From plans sent by his mother he built a methane digester that gave Liangjiahe reliable light at night and eventually the county named him ‘a model educated youth’–a prerequisite for admission to university during the Cultural Revolution–and awarded him a motorcycle which he exchanged for a two-wheeled tractor, a rice mill and a submersible pump.

After repeated rejections because of his father’s imprisonment he was admitted to the Communist Party in 1974, the village elected him Village Party Secretary and, at twenty-two, his political career was launched. The following year he was accepted by Tsinghua University and a dozen villagers walked the twenty miles with him to the railhead, “It was the second time I cried there. The first time was when I got the letter saying that my big sister had died”. “Experiencing such an abrupt change from Beijing to a place so destitute affected me profoundly,” he later recalled.

He returned to Beijing to greet a father who, released after seven years in solitary confinement, was unable to recognize his grown sons and recited a familiar Tang poem: Returning to my home village after years of absence, My brows have grayed though my accent is unchanged. Children who meet me don’t recognize me. Laughing, they ask, what village do you come from? After graduation from Tsinghua his father’s old comrade-in-arms, Geng Biao, made him Personal Secretary to the Minister of National Defense and the twenty-four-year-old spent three years in uniform, studying the vast military he was destined to command.

His father urged him to enter government while friends and classmates were going into business or studying abroad so he left Beijing to begin a twenty-five year apprenticeship administering villages, townships, cities, counties and provinces across the country. Along the way, he picked up a PhD for a dissertation on rural marketization. Like his father, he was effective, diligent and versatile and left a trail of prosperity behind him as he rose through the ranks. Posted to backward Zhengding County, Hebei Province in 1982, he demonstrated the paternal flair for economic development: learning that a TV production of The Dream of Red Mansions was scouting locations, he persuaded the county to employ local craftsmen to build real mansions instead of temporary sets. Fees from the production company paid most of the construction cost and, as soon as shooting ended, he turned the set into a tourist attraction that still hosts a million paying visitors each year and has been the backdrop of hundreds of productions.

Promoted to the governorship of Fujian Province, he upgraded its Internet, networked the provincial hospitals’ medical records and made government transactions accessible on line. He sent officials to work in villages throughout the province and set up citizens’ committees of to supervise village Party Committees–an innovation Beijing legislated nationally as The Organic Law of Villagers’ Committees. He was the first governor to crack down on food contamination and created the first provincial environmental monitoring system. Today, Fujian’s pristine environment attracts high tech startups. Appointed Zhejiang Provincial Party Secretary in 2002, he fundraised fifty percent of the five hundred million dollar cost of the twenty-two mile Hangzhou Bay Bridge, the world’s longest, from local businesses. “Private funds have infiltrated all walks of life here,” he told a visitor, echoing his father.

Earnest, blunt to the point of rudeness and a workaholic, his track record ranked high in Beijing’s annual surveys. He was, in the words of U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen, “The kind of guy who knows how to get things over the goal line”. Like his father, he possessed immense energy for work, as Taiwanese businessman Li Shih-Wei, who saw him regularly, told The Washington Post, “When we discussed my problems he would listen closely, track the issue and try to find solutions. His working efficiency was pretty high–quite rare among the officials we encountered there. Meetings were usually in the government cafeteria, not the fancy restaurants most officials chose. His lifestyle wasn’t luxurious”. Xi encouraged initiative with policies like ‘special procedures for special cases’, and ‘do things now,’ urged officials to meet people face to face and set an example by meeting seven hundred petitioners in forty-eight hours.

A regular at farmers’ markets, on fishing boats and down coal mines, he became a local celebrity for being the first local Party Secretary to visit all the villages in Zhengding County, a performance he repeated everywhere he governed and, after becoming President, visited all of China’s 33 provinces, regions and municipalities. His only recorded outbursts were over corruption. According to one Zhejiang official, Xi ‘kept his reputation wholesome and untainted by allegations of corruption’ and, under a pen name, contributed hundreds of earnest opinion pieces to local dailies: “If we remain aloof from ordinary people we will be like a tree cut off from its roots. Officials at all levels must change their style, get close to ordinary people, try their best to do good things for them, put aside the haughty manner of feudalism and set a good example”. In an essay on graft he said, “Transparency is the best anti-corrosive and as long as we embrace democracy, go through a proper procedures and avoid ‘black’ case work, fighting corruption won’t be just empty words”. “How important the people are in the minds of an official will determine how important officials are in the minds of the people. Officials should love the people in the way they love their parents, work for their benefit and lead them to prosperity”.

He waited twenty years to give his first public interview, and his advice⁠ was prosaic, “Politics is risky. Lots of people who’ve experienced failures reproach themselves: ‘I’ve helped so many people, I’ve done so much and all I get is ingratitude. People don’t understand me. Why must it be this way?’ Some colleagues who started when I did gave up their jobs for such reasons. But if you have a position somewhere, if you stick to it and continue your work then, in the end, it will produce results. The essence of success is to fasten onto your assignment and continue working. I’ve come across many difficulties and obstacles. That’s inevitable. Going into politics is like crossing a river. No matter how many obstacles you meet there is only one direction, and that’s forward”.

In 2007, after Shanghai officials looted its pension fund, he was assigned to clean up the giant city, a sinkhole of iniquity for centuries. He turned the governor’s mansion into a veterans’ home, promoted green, sustainable development and pushed Shanghai to become a leading financial center–drawing a relieved headline⁠4 in the People’s Daily: ‘Glad to Hear Some Good News from Shanghai at Last’. Today, Shanghai’s pension fund is in surplus, its police are noted for their honesty, its courts a preferred international forum and its education system the best in the world. In 2008 Xi produced a flawless Beijing Olympic Games, on time, on budget and without a hint of corruption–while coordinating the military, police, bureaucracy, localities, diplomacy, security, logistics, media and the environment–a feat that made him a leading contender for the presidency.

In a patriarchal society, fond memories of his father could only help.

Though our media refer to Xi as ‘President’ (President Trump called him ‘the King of China’), China has no such office and no Chinese official resembles an American President, about whom Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, observed, “We elect a king for four years and give him absolute power within certain limits which, after all, he can interpret for himself”. While American Presidents hire and fire their administrative teams, make war, pardon, imprison or assassinate enemies Chinese leaders, even Mao, are board chairmen only. They can set agenda and direct discussion but, ultimately, must follow to the votes of the seven-man Steering Committee, none of whom they chose or can dismiss–and virtually all Steering Committee decisions are unanimous.

Xi’s primary leadership responsibilities were spelled out in the Twelfth Five Year Plan which, as a member of the Politburo Standing Committee for the previous five years, he helped draft: double national wages and pensions during his tenure, clean up corruption, reform the military, pass a stalled Social Security bill and, by December, 2020, deliver the Party’s xiaokang promise: ‘a society in which no one is poor and everyone receives an education, has paid employment, more than enough food and clothing, access to medical services, old-age support, a home and a comfortable life’.

Xi’s style fits the Chinese mold: his speeches are businesslike, soft-spoken, non-confrontational and his first presidential address was retail politics, “People expect better wages, higher quality medical care, more comfortable homes and a more beautiful environment”. He invited the Carter Center to help expand democratic participation in policy-making, called for a greater role for the constitution in state affairs, strengthened Congressional participation in interpreting the constitution and generating citizens’ involvement in the legislative process. Promising to tackle corruption, he quoted Confucius, “He who rules by virtue is like the North Star, which maintains its place and the multitude of stars pay homage,” and placed responsibility for integrity squarely on official shoulders. His most sensational political gesture was lunching at the communal table in a Beijing dumpling restaurant and chatting with customers for twenty minutes without security.

Though not as precocious as his father, he proved comparably effective. The piecemeal, outdated, inconsistent legal code and judicial unpredictability he inherited had undermined people’s faith in the legal system. He reformed the legal system, abolished laogai re-education through labour, eliminated local government interference in the courts, called for transparency in legal proceedings and professionalization of the legal workforce and the Supreme People’s Court agreed to broadcast its proceedings live. He formed cross-jurisdictional squads of officials to coordinate corruption investigations, gave them independence, filed a million disciplinary cases and prosecuted a hundred ministers, generals, senior executives, university chancellors and private CEOs.

Abroad, he turned the Shanghai Cooperative Organization, SCO, into the largest political confederation on earth, uniting half the world’s people and four nuclear powers–Russia, China, India and Pakistan–in a single security zone. In 2013 he offered to finance the Belt and Road Initiative, BRI, a ten trillion dollar program of roads, railways, telecommunications, energy pipelines and ports integrating the Eurasian continent from Barcelona to Beijing into a seamless, secure, integrated market.

In 2017 he broke ground on Jing-Jin-Ji, an 82,000 square mile green megacity with the population of Japan. It will integrate Beijing’s financial, regulatory and research strengths with Tianjin’s port and Hebei’s technology using seven hundred miles of new rail lines, scheduled completion in 2020. In 2017 he initiated the transition to a dàtóng society by endorsing Social Credit, a transparent, publicly owned system ranking the creditworthiness of government departments and officials–from President down–businesses and citizens. More carrot than stick, it provides increasingly valuable benefits, from low-interest loans and no-deposit rentals to visa-free travel, with rising public reputation.

In 2018, the system blocked a developer’s attempt to fly first class to London and provided a tourist-class seat because he had persistently ignored court orders to pay his subcontractors.

The Future

Because 2020 will mark the successful conclusion of Deng Xiaoping’s 1980 Reform and Opening program, it will be Xi’s responsibility to “Paint his vision of the future to his people, translate that vision into policies which he must convince the people are worth supporting and, finally, galvanize them to help him implement them,” which Lee Kwan Yew described as the primary responsibility of government leaders.

A month after becoming President, Xi described his Goals for Two Centennials: to spend 2020-2035 fixing inequality (‘socialist modernization’) and spend 2035-2049 transforming China into ‘a great modern socialist country, prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful’. According to American Nobelist Robert Fogel, China will certainly be prosperous: in 2049 its economy will be twice the size of Europe’s and America’s combined.

Because he must paint China’s new vision, colleagues granted Xi ‘core leader’ status in 2017 and amended the constitution in 2018 so he and Premier Li could serve more than two five-year terms, a move was greeted with some alarm. Li Datong⁠, a prominent Party member and real estate developer, wrote, “I am a Chinese citizen, and a voter in Beijing. You are delegates chosen by us, and you represent us in political deliberations and in political action–and you represent us in exercising the right to vote. As I understand it, the stipulation in the 1982 Constitution that the national leaders of China may not serve for more than two terms in office was political reform measure taken by the Chinese Communist Party and the people of China after the immense suffering wrought by the Cultural Revolution. This was the highest and most effective legal restriction preventing personal dictatorship and personal domination of the Party and the government and a major point of progress in raising the level of political civilization in China in line with historical trends. It was also one of the most important political legacies of Deng Xiaoping. China can only move forward on this foundation, and there is emphatically no reason to move in the reverse direction. Removing term limitations on national leaders will subject us to the ridicule of the civilized nations of the world. It means moving backward into history, and planting the seed once again of chaos in China, causing untold damage”.

Wang Ying, a businesswoman and government reform advocate, called the proposal “An outright betrayal, against the tide of history. I know that you (the government) will dare to do anything and one ordinary person’s voice is certainly useless, but I am a Chinese citizen and don’t plan to leave. This is my motherland too!”

Chinese are always reluctant to judge current leaders; it takes decades, they say, to discover if their policies were beneficial, but what can we make of Xi at this stage? Lee Kwan Yew, who knew him personally, said, “I would put him in Nelson Mandela’s class of persons. Someone with enormous emotional stability who does not allow his personal misfortunes or sufferings to affect his judgment. In a word, he is impressive”.

Neither his character nor his track record has spared him the burdens of everyday government: in 2018, Xi was still trying to merge China’s provincial retirement funds into an American-style Social Security system–which he pointed to as a model–and making slow progress towards a national land tax. Politics is universal.

Sources

1 In a 2000 interview with the journalist Chen Peng. Chinese Times

2 The Book of Filial Duty.

3 Born Red. New Yorker

4 How China’s Leaders Think: The Inside Story of China’s Past, Current and Future Leaders by Robert Lawrence Kuhn

5 Li Datong’s Open Letter

From: China 2020: Everything You Know is Wrong forthcoming 2018, read a sample here.