Professor Alexander Lukin’s book “China and Russia: The New Rapprochement” discussed the promise of Sino-Russian cooperation.  That was in 2018.

In contrast, Lukin now frankly admits that “any possible changes in U.S. policy will probably prove less of a deterrent to further Russian-Chinese rapprochement than will Russian concerns over China’s growing assertiveness.” He argues that “the peak of Russian-Chinese rapprochement has probably passed.”

There’s an old saying that best friends can make the worst enemies.  Is that happening between Russia and China?

The whole Progressive, Leftist enterprise can be characterized as the astonishing practice of trying to improve things by making them worse. It has always been so.

Today, Lenin’s heirs insistently promote equity and anti-racism, even as the results of their policies look like chaos. Border control is non-existent, vagrancy is explained away, crimes have been de-criminalized, and everyone must be injected with substances that are not entirely safe or effective. But rejoice brothers and sisters in the struggle, for we’re eradicating inequalities and disparities.

How is it, though, that despite the wretched examples of Soviet Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and other experiments in political and social ruin, up to and including the Biden administration, we can’t shake this ever-failing philosophy?

Don’t want this to happen to your state’s schools?  Here’s a suggestion or two to prevent that.

Until quite recently, American parents thought of public schools as democratically accountable local institutions. But the pandemic revealed how much of K-12 education is controlled by teachers’ unions, unelected bureaucrats, and non-governmental organizations.

This reality, considered alongside the apparent collusion between the Biden White House and the National School Boards Association to create a pretext for a federal law enforcement intervention to chill parental opposition to critical race theory (CRT), will raise the specter in many parents’ minds of a public education “deep state.”  This has to be stopped.

[As a prelude to his HFR tomorrow, Yasuhiko wrote this introductory note for your consideration ---JW]

A war is being waged between the destructive forces of Tyranny and the creative forces of Liberty.

This war is as much political as psychological. A tyrannical program has been enrooted and infixed into the governance and the constitution of human consciousness, depriving it of its innate longing for liberty, for freedom, and for evolution.

For millennia, the powerful forces of tyranny have triumphed over the feeble forces of liberty, politically and psychologically. An entire new way must be created in the human mind and consciousness that will bring about a victory of liberty over tyranny.

If Beijing wanted it could simply take control over a majority of global mining rigs and launch a "51% attack", in the process nuking the blockchain and effectively destroying the world's greatest monetary experiment overnight.

However, in the span of just a few short months, back in May, China’s State Council - which was focused on marketing its disastrous digital yuan and hoped to eliminate all competition - expelled its entire domestic bitcoin mining industry.  It was a move that many have said will be remembered as the "single greatest geopolitical mistake of the 21st century."

Especially as it has been to the enormous benefit of America.

Richard “Rachel” Levine

Yes, the photos above are of the same person.  Richard was married with two children until he decided at age 52 to pretend he was a woman named Rachel.  He is now 62.

Not only did Joe Biden appoint Richard, a man who claims he’s a woman, and whose poor public health decisions led to thousands of unnecessary COVID deaths, as assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Biden has now made that man a four-star admiral and proclaimed we should all cheer at his administration “making history” for doing so.

I repeat, this is not a joke.  Here is the CBS News headline this morning (10/20):

Dr. Rachel Levine Makes History As The Nation's First Openly Transgender Four-Star Admiral

There is a massive propaganda push against those choosing not to vaccinate against COVID-19 with the experimental mRNA vaccines. Mainstream media, the big tech corporations, and our government have combined efforts to reward compliance and to shame and marginalize non-compliance.

Never has there been such an effort to cajole, manipulate through fear, and penalize people to take an experimental medical treatment.

However, as time has passed with this pandemic and more data accumulates about the virus and the vaccine, the unvaccinated are looking smarter and smarter with each passing week.  This is why from a medical perspective.

The highest echelon of the U.S. military has become dysfunctional.

Somehow a gradual drift in the agendas of our military leadership has resulted in too many various emphases on domestic cultural, social, and political issues. And naturally, as a result, there is less attention given to winning wars and leveraging such victories to our nation’s strategic advantage.

The consequences of these failures are downright scary for a world superpower upon which millions at home and billions worldwide depend.  There are too many concurrent Pentagon crises. Any one of them would be dangerous to our national security. Together they imperil our very freedoms and security.  Here they are.

Coal imports as far as the eye can see

Last year, President Xi Jinping announced that Communist China was going to go carbon neutral by 2060. Like every Communist 5-year-plan, it began with lies and ended in disaster.

The 14th Renewable Energy Development Five Year Plan would have China dominate the green energy industry and increase its share of non-fossil fuel energy from 15% to 20%.

That was last year. This year, China is importing American coal to keep the lights on in its cities.

China's desperate buying spree has sent the price of lignite coal, the dirtiest coal, up from $20 to $120. While Democrats are trying to destroy coal in America, our shipments of coal have increased 30 times making China our second biggest coal market.

And we have the “green energy” of the reds to thank for it.

[In her just-published book, “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” Mollie Hemingway reveals how social-media companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook responded to the 2016 election of Donald Trump to go from free-speech advocates to woke cancel-culture censors. Here is a key excerpt:]

Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was a shock to much of the country, but Silicon Valley took it especially hard. The progressive bastion of San Francisco had turned tech companies from libertarian idealists into liberal crusaders. The industry as a whole felt complicit in Donald Trump’s rise and was intent on doing everything in its power to suppress his voice and those of his supporters.

From the beginning, the tech overlords were plotting how to strike back. Here’s how they did.

The remarkable similarities between a recently leaked 2018 proposal from EcoHealth Alliance head Peter Daszak and the defining characteristics of COVID-19 raise new questions regarding the origins of the pandemic.

The proposal,  entitled Project Defuse: Defusing the Threat of Bat-Borne Coronaviruses, dated March 27, 2018, sets out the organization’s plan to create entirely new coronaviruses through the synthetic combination of preexisting virus backbones.

It describes how those viruses were going to be made more virulent in humans by the insertion of a furin cleavage site, a feature that distinguishes COVID-19 from all other SARS-related coronaviruses. This, in 2018…..

Biden’s America

[Note by Jack Wheeler:  Last Friday’s HFR explained that “China Zhou’s vax mandate does not exist – there is no OSHA regulation published in the Federal Register nor is there any published Presidential Executive Order….it is all intimidation and no legality.” Yesterday (10/12), the White House announced Biden will override stare laws against his vax mandate because “federal law overrides state law.”  But there is no such federal law.  This brilliant analysis below by the Federalist Foundation is a must-read.]

Yes, we’ve heard all about Joe Biden’s alleged vaccine mandate for private companies employing 100 or more people. It was all over the news even before he announced it on September 9. His announcement has jeopardized the employment of millions of Americans and increased worker shortages in critical domains such as health care.

There’s only one problem. It’s all a mirage. Biden’s so-called vaccine mandate doesn’t exist — at least, not yet. So far, all we have is his press conference and other such made-for-media huff-puffing.  Here’s what’s really going on.

Winslow Homer: Huntsman with Dogs, 1891

On Tuesday (10/05), I gave a lecture for students at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in a course I believe is unique in the nation. It wasn’t so much an art history lecture as an American history lecture, using art—or rather a lecture about what Americans believed about themselves, for better and for worse, as manifest in works of art.

I’d like to discuss two of them here—two of them that are now inconceivable, not just because the practical necessities they show are no longer in play, but because the culture they describe, culture as a spiritual reality, embodying the high aspirations of the human soul, is gone. What has taken its place is another matter.

The two paintings are not sentimental, as almost all of our politics is now. By that I mean that our politics is less about thought or pragmatic planning than about feeling, and less about genuine universal human feeling than about its self-swindling substitute, sentimentality, a ginned-up mimic of feeling; and the louder you cry the sentiment up, the less genuine and the more shallow or delusive it is likely to be. 

Even as President Biden shrugged his shoulders over progressives’ harassment and intimidation of a sitting United States senator of his own party — a crime under Arizona law — Biden’s Justice Department was running roughshod over the First Amendment, threatening to investigate and prosecute parents for protesting against school boards and teachers who insist on indoctrinating children with the cultural Marxism beloved by Democrats.

On Monday (10/04), Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum in which he wailed about the “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”

Garland knows this is dangerous nonsense. I personally know that he knows it.

His Fraudulency Joe Biden’s attorney general has just announced that the FBI will be engaged to terrorize parents who oppose left-wing school board policies.

All around the country, parents have been speaking out and protesting against several absurd and destructive school board policies that have been put in place to damage, sexualize, and indoctrinate innocent children.

Tragically, too many of the government-run schools in this country have become breeding grounds for mentally ill educators desperate to force their warped political agendas and neuroses on our children.

And now that parents have had enough, Fascist Joe is now unleashing his FBI Brownshirts on parents who have the audacity to want a say in how their child is educated.

                                                                                 Edith Wilson                                Edith Wilson Wannabe

Many Biden watchers have long observed Jill Biden’s grasping obsession with becoming the First Lady.  Throughout the campaign as Joe Biden’s failing mental abilities became more and more obvious, did she love him enough to end it?  Oh no, not Jill.  She continued on with her elder abuse.

One explanation may be her long fascination with Edith Wilson – exemplified by dedicating her 2019 autobiography Where the Light Enters to: “The inspiring, groundbreaking First Lady Edith Wilson.”

She admired and apparently coveted the role that Mrs. Wilson filled after President Woodrow had a stroke in October 1919.  Edith Wilson hid the seriousness of her husband’s condition and took over the job of running the country until the end of his term in March 1921.  Now it’s Jill’s turn.

America can no longer tolerate this evil deranged man

Yesterday (9/10), Mr. Biden delivered the most insulting, contemptuous, and divisive speech by a president in U.S. history.

As Biden crudely lectured and indicted the unvaxxed, he is importing hundreds of thousands of unvetted, unvaccinated, untested migrants from all over the world at the southern border and now from Afghanistan as well.  What gives?

Is he importing a replacement population by design while trying to kill off those of us who are native-born Americans with vaccines that not only do not work, but for many have dire side-effects such as death, injury, and illness.  Could this all be part of the globalists' Great Reset?  Probably.  It all feels like part of someone's grand plan.

I motored up to Larry Elder’s house last Sunday (9/05) for a visit – he needed a break if only for an hour or two.

He was just getting off a Zoom press conference when I arrived and soon he’d be off to yet another conference in his quest to upend Gavin Newsom and become governor of California.  The recall election, as you know, is next Tuesday (9/14).

So we talked about what I call the Mystery of California. How, given the atrocious condition of the state of California and the city of Los Angeles, where I lived for fifty years and he still does, would any sane person not want to try to a new approach to government and a new governor?

That’s the mystery. How did the most beautiful piece of real estate arguably in the entire globe turn into—let’s be blunt—a rubbish heap?

At long last, the deadly reign of Anthony Fauci will come to an end.

That’s because yesterday (9/07) The Intercept, a hard-left publication, released (thanks to its FOIA lawsuit) 900 pages of government documents definitively proving that Fauci used his position to fund gain-of-function research into bat viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (“WIV”)—and then lied to Congress about it.

Here are the lessons to be learned from the fascist fraud of Fauci.

The Russian evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin coined the term “elite overproduction,” better understood as an overproduction of people who see themselves as potential elites, despite being mediocrities.

Take Jake Sullivan, the United States National Security Advisor to President Joe Biden.  This guy is the primary architect of the plan to leave Afghanistan. A quick look at his résumé shows that he is laughably unqualified for the position. He is an overeducated idiot who is sure he is the smartest man in every room, despite being one of the dumbest men in every room.

How did a vacuous airhead like Jake Sullivan get into this position?

Ice Cream Joe, virtually all Democrats, and their accomplices in mainstream media are now up-in-arms because the split U.S. Supreme Court—on a 5-4 ruling—refused to “block” the Texas law from going into effect.

They love parroting the line that restricting the right to murder the unborn in Texas “will disproportionately disadvantage black women who have most abortion in the state,” while failing to acknowledge the obvious corollary that SB8 will be a huge advantage to unborn black babies who now will have a real opportunity to experience the wonder of life rather than be sacrificed to Joe Biden’s culture of death.

As Pastor Jack Graham of Dallas’ Prestonwood Baptist Church observes, with the Texas Heartbeat Law, “We’re going to turn America from a culture of death into a culture of life.”

The fall of Kabul is not the end, as Joe Biden seems to think, of the Afghanistan nightmare.

It is the beginning of a never-ending bad dream. Biden and the Pentagon have managed to birth a new terrorist haven, destroy much of U.S. strategic deterrence, and alienate our allies and much of the country.

Something is terribly wrong in the ranks of America’s top commanders that reflects something wrong with the country.

Our hapless president's speech yesterday (Tuesday 8/31) was not a speech at all. It was a full-blown childish tantrum.

While he was ostensibly celebrating his massive "airlift" of thousands of mostly Afghan refugees, from the beginning, it was clear he is extremely angry. He almost shouted his claim that his catastrophic misadventure in Afghanistan has been a “historical” achievement. This is a huge lie, and everyone knows it, even those trying to spin this debacle as a win.

The man is a pathological liar without heart and soul. As the months of his administration slip by, it becomes clearer and clearer that he is a sociopath.

Damn you all.  You’re American citizens, with the right to vote in presidential elections. You’re grownups with no excuse.

For four years, we had a president who revived America’s economy (especially for minorities), shored up Americans’ individual liberties, forged several remarkable peace agreements, and greatly strengthened our international position—thus firmly checking the ambitions of our powerful adversaries.

But now, thanks to you -- yes, you Biden voter, look in the mirror! — that’s all thrown in the ashcan.  As a result, America has reached perhaps the lowest point in its history, and lower ones will soon be coming.

So my question: are you going to come to your senses or not?

[Yesterday, August 30, 87 retired Generals and Admirals signed the Open Letter below stating their reasons why Chairman of Joint Chiefs (CJCS) Mark Milley and Secretary of Defense (SecDef) Lloyd Austin must resign.]

The retired Flag Officers signing this letter are calling for the resignation and retirement of the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) based on negligence in performing their duties primarily involving events surrounding the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The consequences of this disaster are enormous and will reverberate for decades beginning with the safety of Americans and Afghans who are unable to move safely to evacuation points; therefore, being de facto hostages of the Taliban at this time.

The death and torture of Afghans has already begun and will result in a human tragedy of major proportions. The loss of billions of dollars in advanced military equipment and supplies falling into the hands of our enemies is catastrophic. The damage to the reputation of the United States is indescribable.

The entire Western world – from New Zealand and Australia to all of Europe and North America – is living a massive COVID lie. That lie is strangling the life out of liberty, and it will destroy our American constitutional order if we do not end this horrifying charade.

But cut through it all and ask — how many Americans are dying? According to Johns Hopkins, the fatality rate of COVID in the United States is 1.7 percent, which means that 98.3 percent survive. That takes into account all deaths, including people who had underlying conditions and the elderly. Excluding those who are obviously high-risk, the survival rate is close to 100 percent.

If COVID ever were an emergency, it is no longer one now, and it has not been for a long time. There is no justification for the continued suspension of the American form of self-government that secures all our individual rights and liberties.

To say of someone they “have a green thumb” is to note everything in their garden grows and blossoms.  Joe Biden’s thumb is not green – it is brown.  Everything he has touched since entering office has turned to feces.

None of his blame-gaming, none of his distortions, none of his fantasies and unreality can mask that truth. Everything from the Afghan Catastrophe, to the Inflation Fiasco, the Border Disaster, to Energy Insufficiency, the Race Calamity, to the Crime Explosion – there are several proposed explanation of his fecal touch.

Before my son became a Marine, I never thought much about who was defending me.  Now when I see a picture of a member of our military who has been killed, I read his or her name very carefully. Sometimes I cry.

In 1999, when the barrel-chested Marine recruiter showed up in dress blues and bedazzled my son John, I did not stand in the way.  John was headstrong, and he seemed to understand these stern, clean men with straight backs and flawless uniforms.  I did not.  I live in the Volvo-driving, higher education-worshiping North Shore of Boston. I write novels for a living. I have never served in the military.

As the Afghan Fubar continues to worsen, here’s something to consider. We’ve done this three times since 1975, all to horrific results for those who were left.  What is the singular constant of those last 46 years?

Joe Biden was somewhere in the decision tree.

First as a US Senator from Delaware, who along with his senate majority refused to fund military support to the South Vietnamese.

Second came in orchestrating the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 as O’Bama’s VP.  That withdrawal gave us ISIS.

Final withdrawal is from Afghanistan, which is still underway.