Plague Update: Logic Fails
There’s a cartoon showing how many people still think that COVID-19 is just like chicken pox, and you aren’t likely to get a symptomatic infection another time while healthy, so…
China
Xi puts women in their place
When President Xi Jinping introduced his Politburo Standing Committee at the 20th Communist party congress in Beijing, one thing stood out. Of the seven, none were women. Furthermore, of the…
Time to friend-shore?
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently introduced a concept she referred to as “friend-shoring.” In her words, “Friend-shoring is the idea that countries that espouse a common set of values…
How fares the emperor?
Xi Jinping has it all: general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, chairman of the Central Military Commission, commander-in-chief of the People’s Liberation Army, and the Politburo Standing Committee filled…
When a Veil Is Not a Veil: Fashion, Modesty and Evolving Rules
Just as France begins to consider prohibiting women from wearing niqab, or a full veil, fashion designer Riccardo Tisci features a very attractive young woman wearing a sort of pseudo-veil…
Nancy P’s Asian adventure
On first hearing about U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s planned visit to Taiwan it struck me as a rather, shall we say, stupid idea. It would infuriate the…
Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – David Adams examines the evidence that COVID-19 remains infectious far longer than assumed by politicized public health messaging. And Ted Raymond reports that…
Plague Update: Drugs and Tests
Are the Rapid A Tests much good for making social plans? Not definitively. Cases are going undetected by tests in many cases, giving false negatives that result in infectious people…
Are liberal values failing?
A recent article in The New York Times by David Brooks, “Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun,” discusses the decline of globalization generally and Western values specifically…
Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – William Haseltine writes about the long-lasting and severe cognitive effects of long COVID, while Danny Altmann discusses the urgency of developing effective treatment…
Don’t just blame the anti-vaxxers, blame our political elites too
Justin Trudeau has chosen to place all of the blame on the unvaccinated for the current spike in cases and hospitalizations. The problem is, this is only a half-truth. It…
Free the Fujian Six! Open Letter from a Young Maoist Awaiting Prison [Chuang]
Just as 2022 began, the world received news that delivery worker and organizer Chen Guojiang, known as Mengzhu (??), had been freed after nearly a year in detention. But Mengzhu’s…
Every weakness is claimed as strength: Chuang’s ‘Social Contagion’ is critical proletarian research for our catastrophic present [Lausan.hk]
By JN A “SARS outbreak” on the mainland was first reported by media in Hong Kong on December 30, 2019. For those living in or involved with politics in Hong…
World’s top movie not what you might think
It may come as a surprise to Canadian film fans, but the top box office movie in 2021 is not James Bond’s No Time to Die or the legendary sci-fi…
Big Box Stores Remove Products Used to Violate Human Rights
Two of the largest retail chains in the United States have stopped the sale of Chinese-made surveillance products used by the Chinese government to violate human rights. This move to…
Big climate promises at the UN … but
The United States and China, rivals on the world stage and also the two biggest economies and the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases made some big climate promises at…
Struggles from Below in the People’s Republic of China: An Interview with Ralf Ruckus, Author of “The Communist Road to Capitalism”
Onlookers watch cars burning after hundreds rioted in Xintang town, a district of Guangzhou, on June 12, 2011. Hong Kong television on June 13 showed scenes from the previous night…
The door remains open a crack for Canada to act in the interests of its citizens, including the ones jailed in China
Canada ignored the lifeline China threw us last spring, when a Chinese court adjourned the trial of Michael Spavor without a verdict. The implication at the time was clear: Let…
China and the U.S. Left: A Dialogue Between Critical China Scholars and Spectre Journal
This exchange was originally posted on the Spectre Journal website on July 17, 2021 It is no secret that the US left is confused about how to respond to the…
If You Are Going To Vote, Read This
Things are changing rapidly in the world, but as of this moment, we can say a few things about the major political parties of the Western world, with reasonable certainty.…