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…but if He Kexin is 16, I’m 50. Reading this story in light of what was broadcast to the entire world tonight, I’m uncertain who can deny that the ChiComs fielded a “women’s” gymnastic team with several girls who were not old enough to compete.
Store it away; this will all come out one day when American historians are rooting around the Beijing archives.
Apollo posted this at 11:50 PM EDT on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 as Commie Recrudescence
Gideon Rachman deliberately works a cliche into every sentence of his column today. It takes a very good writer to write so badly. A sample:
In the matter of clichés, we are all sinners. And with that appropriately hackneyed thought, let me begin:
The Beijing Olympics is one of those iconic moments that tell us we have reached a tipping point. Our kids are going to inherit a very different world.
As a confident China strides on to the Olympic stage, the US is mired in a credit crunch and a war on terror – it is the perfect storm.
It was Napoleon who said: “Let China sleep, for when China wakes she will shake the world.” The turbo-charged Chinese dragon woke up in the go-go 1980s. Whisper it softly, but there will be no respite. This is not even the beginning of the end, although it may be the end of the beginning.
Read, enjoy, ponder. I might need to re-examine everything I type before writing again.
Hubbard posted this at 1:55 PM EDT on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 as Politics and the English Language, Commie Recrudescence, The Right Words
This is perhaps one of the worst articles I have read all year. Not only does the author not understand the goals of the Reagan Revolution (the vast majority of which have become a permanent part of American Political Life; see: low taxes), he somehow completely misunderstands the culture of conservatism that surrounds giants like William F. Buckley. While a case can be made that the conservative movement is on the defensive, it would be hard to argue that it is dead as a political force.
Bonus Retarded Collectivist Points for the use of the word “counterrevolutionary”.
Jamie posted this at 1:53 PM EDT on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 as Conservatism, Commie Recrudescence
In America we live safe in the knowledge that something like this could never happen here.
Am I right?
Hello?
…
Jamie posted this at 1:36 PM EDT on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 as Commie Recrudescence, Liberty and/or Security
For the love of god Hippies, if you don’t want to learn basic history, please shut the hell up:
(H/T)
Jamie posted this at 9:56 AM EDT on Monday, April 21st, 2008 as Dirty Hippies, Commie Recrudescence
Back in November 2006, Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko died of Polonium-210 poisoning. At the time, Charles Krauthammer summarized well what many of us thought:
Some say that the Litvinenko murder was so obvious, so bold, so messy — five airplanes contaminated, 30,000 people alerted, dozens of places in London radioactive — that it could not possibly have been the KGB.
But that’s the beauty of it. Do it obvious, do it brazen, and count on those too-clever-by-half Westerners to find that exonerating. As the president of the Central Anarchist Council (in G.K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday”) advised: “You want a safe disguise, do you? . . . A dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb? Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!”
The other reason for making it obvious and brazen is to send a message. This is a warning to all the future Litvinenkos of what awaits them if they continue to go after the Russian government. They’ll get you even in London, where there is the rule of law. And they’ll get you even if it makes negative headlines for a month.
Some people say that the KGB would not have gone to such great lengths to get so small a fry as Litvinenko. Well, he might have been a small fry, but his investigations were not. He was looking into the Kremlin roots of Politkovskaya’s shooting. And Litvinenko claimed that the Russian government itself blew up apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere in 1999, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, in order to blame it on the Chechens and provoke the second Chechen war. Pretty damning stuff.
But even Litvinenko’s personal smallness serves the KGB’s purposes precisely. If they go to such lengths and such messiness and such risk to kill someone as small as Litvinenko, then no critic of the Putin dictatorship is safe. It is the ultimate in deterrence.
Edward Jay Epstein, as noted here before, has been busy asking hard questions to get to the truth. Mr. Epstein has a long piece in today’s New York Sun that explains that explains the connection between Polonium-210 and arms smuggling. As it turns out, lots of of places other than Russia can produce Polonium-210: America, Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Taiwan, North Korea. This means that the exotic murder weapon didn’t necessarily come from Russia. Litvinenko, Epstein argues, may have had ties to arms dealers. This makes him a bigger fish than we realized. It also means that someone other than the Russians may have had a motive to keep Litvinenko quiet.
Another peculiarity is that Britain has refused to release the autopsy report or medical records. Admittedly, this may be Britain’s way of preventing an inquiry into its perpetually struggling National Health Services. After detailing the many tangled strands that surrounds Litvenenko, Epstein his conclusion:
After considering all the evidence, my hypothesis is that Litvinenko came in contact with a polonium-210 smuggling operation and was, either wittingly or unwittingly, exposed to it. Litvinenko had been a person of interest to the intelligence services of many countries, including Britain’s MI-6, Russia’s FSB, America’s CIA (which rejected his offer to defect in 2000), and Italy’s SISMI, which was monitoring his phone conversations. His murky operations, whatever their purpose, involved his seeking contacts in one of the most lawless areas in the former Soviet Union, the Pankisi Gorge, which had become a center for arms smuggling. He had also dealt with people accused of everything from money laundering to trafficking in nuclear components. These activities may have brought him, or his associates, in contact with a sample of polonium-210, which then, either by accident or by design, contaminated and killed him.
To unlock the mystery, Britain must make available its secret evidence, including the autopsy report, the comprehensive list of places in which radiation was detected, and the surveillance reports of Litvinenko and his associates. If Britain considers it too sensitive for public release, it should be turned over to an international commission of inquiry. The stakes are too high here to leave unresolved the mystery of the smuggled polonium-210.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Hubbard posted this at 9:21 AM EDT on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 as Those Wacky Foreigners, Commie Recrudescence, Walking the Cat Backwards, Kraut-hammered