Secret to success is to know who to blame for your failures.
GOODNESS of briberies
VFS is expected to appear before a Parliamentary inquiry in Canada this week after the Globe and Mail reported that the company had subcontracted its Canadian operations in China to Beijing Shuangxiong, which is owned by the Beijing Public Security Bureau – the local police department. New Zealand also uses the same subcontractor
The bizarre business at the centre of the network, VFS Global, provides visa services for Australia in 43 countries and has facilitated 226 million visas worldwide. It uses Beijing Dongfang Tianxiao Entry-Exit Service Co. Ltd to process applications for Australian visas in Beijing.
Security fears over state-linked company processing visas in China
White People Aren’t Human: How anti-racism adopted the Nation of Islam’s racist theology.
Chronicle of Higher Education Review: Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule’s Technocratic Despotism, by Jason Blakely (Pepperdine):
At first glance there is perhaps no odder couple in American higher education today than the Harvard law professors Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, whose intellectual partnership straddles the country’s widest political gulf.
Sunstein, who was a high-ranking official in the Obama administration, is among the most cited legal scholars of his generation. He is the co-author (with Richard Thaler) of the wildly popular Nudge, which outlines a generally progressive, if eccentric, ideological project called “libertarian paternalism.”
By contrast, Vermeule is a longtime conservative intellectual who clerked for Antonin Scalia, spent the post-9/11 years devising legal apologetics for the expansion of executive power (including torture and ethnic profiling), and was recently appointed by Donald Trump to the Administrative Conference, the federal agency devoted to administration. After converting to Catholicism a few years ago, Vermeule became the most visible defender of an emergent ideology known as Catholic Integralism, which teaches that modern states must be subordinated to the spiritual authority of the Roman Catholic Church.
New York City’s Surveillance Battle Offers National Lessons Wured
A State-by-State Look at Coronavirus in PrisonsMarshall Project
New York police flood subway after spate of stabbings leaves two dead Reuters
Pressure Mounts for Caltrans to Sell 130 Vacant Homes Capital & Main
‘How did Daryl know?’: Transport for NSW outrage over leak to disgraced MP
A Transport for NSW official was outraged over the apparent leaking of the route of a Sydney motorway to controversial former MP Daryl Maguire, allowing a Chinese developer linked to the MP to go on a buying spree along the corridor.
An internal file note documenting the top bureaucrat’s concerns has been tabled in NSW Parliament and obtained by the Heraldafter Transport for NSW unsuccessfully battled to withhold it from the public.
At The Believer Donald Berger has An Interview with Yan Lianke.
Lots of interesting stuff here, beginning with:
Before I reached twenty years old, I had never left the countryside. The books I read were all the red classics in China. I thought that world fiction was just like that. But after I reached twenty, I joined the army, and I read Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I realized that this is how foreigners write their stories, and that it is much better than our fiction. The fiction that I read before was meaningless.
Several of his works are under review at the complete review, see, e.g. Serve the People !
How billions in pandemic aid was swindled by con artists and crime syndicates NBC
Airline industry alarm as vaccine-led recovery hopes take a dive Financial Times
COVID-19 and Pre-Pandemic Financial Distress St. Louis Fe
Scientists clone black-footed ferret, first for endangered US species The Hill
Alligators in Oklahoma Stick Their Mugs Out of Ice Amid Abnormal Freezing Temperatures Sputnik
Mars landing: Excitement builds over new images from Nasa Perseverance rover BBC: “More excitement if Texans had drinkable water instead of this military jobs program.
They Don’t Work To Kill All Dissent, They Just Keep It From Going Mainstream Caitlin Johnstone
Something went badly awry when China’s President Xi Jinping called together the leaders of 17 nations of central and eastern Europe this month. The event was the annual 17 + 1 summit – that’s 17 Europeans and one China. The one easily outweighs the 17 in its sheer economic bulk.
Not only is its economy seven times the size of all the European members put together, it also brings a sack of cash and promises of huge economic benefits each year. It’s Xi’s primary pathway for driving his colossal Belt and Road infrastructure juggernaut, also known as the “new silk road”, across Europe’s poor periphery and into its wealthy core.