The University of California is allegedly running a taxpayer-funded program designed exclusively for Latino students, according to a recent federal complaint filed by a legal advocacy group. The Equal Protection Project brought the complaint against the “Puente Project” for allegedly violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as the Constitution through racial discrimination. Source

The Vatican Bank just announced its first foray into equity indexes, laying the groundwork for what could become Catholic-branded ETFs. The indexes will track stocks that are “consistent with Catholic ethical principles.” They are not available for consumers to invest in but they could be in the near future. If you know your Vatican Bank history, you’re probably a bit uncomfortable with this. In the early 1980s, the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, Italy’s largest private bank at the time, triggered one of Europe’s biggest financial scandals. The Vatican Bank was deeply entangled in that mess through shell companies and complex financial arrangements. The bank’s chairman, Roberto Calvi, was found hanging under London’s Blackfriars Bridge. Billions vanished. The Vatican denied direct responsibility but eventually paid hundreds of millions in settlements. It wasn’t just a scandal, it was a theft from the Italian working class. The economy imploded, causing economic pain that lasted decades. And now, decades later, the same institution wants to brand and curate equity markets under a Catholic “moral” screen. The new indexes, built in partnership with Morningstar, will filter companies through church doctrine, excluding businesses tied to abortion, contraception, gambling, pornography and other activities deemed inconsistent with Catholic teaching. It kind of sounds like ESGs in a Catholic frock with the potential to be very profitable for the church. Skepticism is warranted. The post The Vatican’s Moral Index Fund Gamble appeared first on Redacted.

Wasn’t it nice of the U.S. to attack Venezuela so that it can start to sell oil to Israel? What a pal we are to Israel! Now that the U.S. has captured President Nicolás Maduro and taken effective control of Venezuela’s oil sector, the U.S. can decide who can buy oil and who cannot. Since Israel is our “model ally,” they get first dibs! Cuba? We don’t like them because they’re friends with China so they can’t have any. Does this mean their people are suffering? Yes. Do we care? Apparently not. Countries or companies connected to Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and China are explicitly prohibited from dealing in Venezuelan oil under the new U.S. licenses. The U.S. now dictates who can buy Venezuelan oil and on what terms. And one of the biggest beneficiaries is Israel. If you still believe that the U.S. attacked Venezuela for drugs, you’re on drugs. The post We Invaded Venezuela. Israel Gets the Oil. appeared first on Redacted.

According to The New York Times, which reports that it heard the meeting, Musk told employees that xAI needs a lunar manufacturing facility, a factory on the moon that will build AI satellites and fling them into space via a giant catapult.

Foreign Affairs War and ‘Covert Action’ Are Not How to Deal With Iran The track record of such interventions in the Middle East speaks for itself. Credit: saideex/Shutterstock The prospect of President Donald Trump pursuing regime change in Iran has animated the most hawkish voices in the establishment. But American war-weariness has forced the usual suspects to refine the art of apologetics. Rather than calling for “boots on the ground” to liberate the Iranian people, many now argue the same result can be achieved through covert methods. Some assert, without a shred of evidence, that a large-scale strike can topple Tehran’s rulers without American troops ever setting foot in the country. Others avoid the question of what regime change would look like altogether, fearful that Americans will not be pleased with the answer. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board recently put it: “There are prudential questions on the best ways to help topple the regime. But helping the Iranian people end this regime is the right goal that would make America and the world safer.” Clearly, neocons specialize in rhetoric, not sound policy. Whether pursued through covert operations or “decisive” military action, regime change in Iran is incompatible with America First principles. Such a pursuit would not only undermine American interests but also degrade the nation’s character.  To evade this charge, the hawks have increasingly shifted from their usual calls for open war to proposals for covert subversion, hoping the public will be more receptive to the latter. But this rhetorical pivot fails to resolve the underlying problem: The distinction between military intervention and clandestine interference is specious, more cosmetic than substantive.  The proponents of such policies rightly assume that Americans will find covert action more attractive, since it is less heavy-handed and resource-intensive. The effectiveness of this tactic, however, rests on the public’s unfamiliarity with Washington’s lengthy history of failed CIA operations in the Muslim world. If Americans knew that their government had already attempted covert regime change in the Middle East many times, and that in most instances it produced the opposite of the intended effect, they would unequivocally reject the continuation of such a policy.  The hawks, by contrast, are acutely aware of this history. They simply refuse to acknowledge it because their rhetorical maneuver would instantly lose potency. This makes clear that their adoption of this tactic stems not from a genuine change in belief, but from a recognition that overt military action has an untenable track record and is deeply unpopular among Americans. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton is a case in point: He claims to oppose “boots on the ground” but supports using “intelligence resources” to bolster Iranian opposition movements.  What Bolton conveniently omits is that CIA-orchestrated regime change produced the conditions that gave rise to today’s Islamic Republic. In 1953, the CIA’s Operation Ajax ousted Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The agency deployed propaganda, bribery, and paid protests to sow internal discord and restore the shah to power on behalf of Western oil interests. In this very narrow respect, the operation was a success. Yet in a broader sense, it proved a strategic failure. It fostered deep resentment and cynicism toward the shah, whom many Iranians came to view as a Western puppet. That distrust fueled nearly three decades of anti-American sentiment that culminated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the end of imperial rule. Likewise, Saddam Hussein’s rise to power cannot be fully understood without reference to American intelligence. In 1963, the CIA supported the Iraqi Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party—of which Hussein was a trusted operative—in its overthrow of Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim. After the party consolidated power in 1968, Hussein went on to become the country’s leader roughly a decade later. And despite his authoritarian rule, he received vital U.S. intelligence support during the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s. The American intelligence apparatus spent the second half of the 20th century enabling, directly and indirectly, one of modern history’s most brutal dictators. Then, on the basis of faulty intelligence, it sent Americans to die toppling his regime in 2003. Simply put, the use of “intelligence resources” to induce regime change in the 1950s and 1960s created the problematic circumstances of today. Indeed, Bolton’s preferred method of regime change has already been tried and tested. Despite its practical differences from military intervention, it tends to produce the same outcome: increased regional instability and diminished American resources. Even so, advocates of regime change insist these practical differences are meaningful enough to justify the use of covert means. This obstinate refusal to learn from the mistakes of the past would be laughable, were it not so tragic.   Meanwhile, other establishment hawks are taking a more direct approach, openly urging the president to take overt military action against Tehran. These voices often appeal to people’s emotions to garner support for their interventionist causes, regularly appearing on television to discuss the Iranian regime’s horrific atrocities. One example is the neoconservative talk host Mark Levin, who in a recent interview described Iran as a “concentration camp” in which people are “executed summarily.” No serious observer of the situation can deny that Iran’s security forces are violently suppressing protests. But from this premise Levin wrongly concludes that Americans should risk their lives to “take out” the supreme leader and restore power to the Iranian people. That view is misguided—indeed, it is emblematic of the post–Cold War progressive universalism that shifted America’s foreign policy focus from well-defined national interests to gauzy global ambition.   Interventionists also overlook the extent to which restrainers can rely on similar emotional appeals. The consequences of the Global War on Terrorism reach far beyond military failures or the erosion of domestic civil liberties, as serious as those are. The idealistic crusade to stamp out terrorism provoked retaliatory violence that cost both civilians and American troops their lives. The most recent example occurred last fall, when an Afghan national who had served with a CIA-backed paramilitary group allegedly attacked two National Guardsmen in Washington, DC, killing one and severely injuring the other. This was not an isolated incident, but part of a much larger pattern rooted in the foreign policy establishment’s impulse to reshape the Muslim world by force of arms.  Nevertheless, the hawks continue to treat Iran as an opportunity to pursue another fruitless venture in the Middle East. This time, though, their country of choice has a population of over 90 million, an opaque nuclear hedging policy, and the largest ballistic missile program in the region. To put it bluntly, the idealism of the interventionist camp knows no limits. To make matters worse, the camp’s champions are ignorant of another great sacrifice that must be made to realize their vision of regime change: the very foundations of America First, at least as the Founders would have understood it. To quote the late Angelo Codevilla in his final book, America’s Rise and Fall among Nations, the original meaning of America First, namely pursuing what benefits our American character and advances our legitimate interests—in short, fully minding our own business while leaving other people to mind theirs—was the basis of the United States’ successful foreign policy from 1815 to 1910, as best described by John Quincy Adams and carried out by his successors. It is the foreign policy by which America grew great in peace. It fulfills the Declaration of Independence’s promise to take up our “separate and equal place among the powers of the earth.” It is common sense. The implications here are profound. Codevilla contends that no U.S. foreign policy decision, regardless of what legitimate interests it may serve, can properly be called America First unless it benefits the character of the nation. And what is a nation’s character if not the culmination of those moral qualities distinctive to its people? The Founders of this particular nation, despite some of their differences, agreed that morality is deeply rooted in a respect for the God-given rights of every individual. Indeed, they viewed the protection of individual liberty as a core tenet of republican governance. But it would be wrong to conclude from this that they had little regard for the collective rights of nations.  The Founders held that every nation has a right to establish its own system of government, free of foreign imposition. Hence the Declaration’s assertion that it was necessary for Americans “to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” These words cannot be reduced to mere rhetoric. Instead, this universal truth must be accepted as “the seed from which the whole tree of American statecraft has grown.” One of the nation’s greatest statesmen and the author of the Monroe Doctrine, John Quincy Adams, believed that this truth implied a foreign policy principle essential to any true republic: “That each Nation is exclusively the judge of the government best suited to itself, and that no other Nation may justly interfere by force to impose a different Government upon it.” Pursuing regime change for the sake of installing a more favorable government is manifestly unjust. And by its very nature, an unjust act is not only immoral but also incapable of benefiting a nation’s character. By agitating for U.S. intervention in Iran, some on the right have sacrificed the very America First principles they claim to uphold, namely, the principle that a nation’s foreign policy ought to “advance its legitimate interests” in a way that preserves its moral fabric. This is an unfortunate development, and its gravity should not be taken for granted. When the American right abandons those distinctive values that have defined this nation since its founding, no one will be left to defend them. A few sober voices in Washington continue to cherish these uniquely American values, and many labor within the administration to conserve them. One can only hope the president stands among their number.   At the moment, Trump’s rhetoric on Iran is at least concerning. Speaking with POLITICO a few weeks ago, the president said, “It’s time to look for new leadership in Iran.” Shortly thereafter, he deployed fighter jets, air-defense systems, and a carrier strike group to the region, along with a veiled threat: “We have a big force going toward Iran. I’d rather not see anything happen, but we’re watching them very closely.” After the carrier’s arrival last week, Trump warned in a Truth Social post that if Tehran did not quickly negotiate a deal to end its nuclear program, he would authorize an attack “far worse” than Operation Midnight Hammer—the June offensive in which American B-2 stealth bombers struck three Iranian nuclear facilities.  It may be tempting to dismiss these comments as bluster and the deployments as mere signaling, but the president is playing a very dangerous game. He has presented Tehran with what is in effect an ultimatum: either abandon uranium enrichment, halt ballistic missile production, and end support for regional armed proxies, or prepare for war with the United States. The fundamental problem is that these conditions constitute the entirety of Iran’s leverage in its geopolitical struggle to sustain multipolarity with Israel in the Middle East. The notion that Tehran might “quickly” agree to such terms is wishful thinking. Any sober assessment of the situation points to the negotiations breaking down. With U.S. warships stationed in the Arabian Sea, Trump may be forced to make good on his promises. What happens after that? Almost certainly nothing good.  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei cautioned on Sunday that any U.S. attack would trigger a “regional war.” Trump’s response: “Hopefully, we’ll make a deal. If we don’t make a deal, we’ll find out whether or not he was right.” At the same time, Trump appears conflicted over whether to use military force to decapitate the regime. According to officials cited in a Thursday New York Times report, the president is eager to reach a deal with Tehran, and “telegraphing the threat of military action was intended to drive the Iranians into a negotiation.” Over the past few days, his aides have given him a range of military options that could “possibly bring about a change in government.” Trump, however, is concerned about the viability of these options. He wants to know whether it is possible for the regime to be removed without dragging America into another Middle East quagmire.  In principle, such an operation is imaginable. In practice, the historical record is unforgiving. From Iraq to Libya, regime-change wars in the region have only led to open-ended conflict and destabilization. But the president appears mindful of this reality, which explains both his reluctance to authorize any large-scale strikes, “decisive” or otherwise, and his desire to engage in diplomacy.  Public reporting indicates four factors shaping Trump’s calculus. First, the pretext for any military action has already evaporated: The Iranian government’s brutal crackdown largely extinguished the peaceful protests Trump once cited to justify a decapitation strike. Second, his top advisers warned that U.S. forces in the region lack the military assets needed both to sustain a large-scale attack and to withstand potential retaliation. Trump has since moved assets to the Middle East, but to what extent is he willing to weaken America’s posture in other theaters? Third, two key regional allies—Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—have ruled out the use of their airspace for a potential U.S. strike. Fourth, he was made aware that any serious effort to topple the regime, whether labeled “decisive” or not, would likely trigger a prolonged conflict. Taken together, these realities lie at the heart of the president’s hesitancy to greenlight the strikes.  At its core, the Trump foreign policy doctrine rejects the establishment’s legacy of forever wars that fail to serve American interests and, by extension, the pursuit of regime change in Iran. Last month, the administration released its 2025 National Security Strategy, in which it expressed a commitment to hemispheric defense and to ending wars “quickly and decisively, with the lowest possible casualties to our forces.” And in keeping with this new doctrine, the administration captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, in a two-and-a-half-hour mission that ended with zero American lives lost. Time and again, the president has illustrated an aversion to long, drawn-out conflict—sometimes to the chagrin of his most hawkish advisers and secretaries. Let us hope he remains so. The post War and ‘Covert Action’ Are Not How to Deal With Iran appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs American Conservatives Don’t Hate Europe  But they do reject the erosion of its civilization. Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images As President Trump prepared to give his address to the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) on January 21, expectations within the transatlantic community were not exactly high. Against the backdrop of escalating tensions over Greenland and tariff threats, Trump delivered an hour-long speech that combined his administration’s accomplishments with pointed criticism of Europe. The continent’s leaders and elites responded with a mix of indignation, defensiveness, and unease—an understandable reaction given the circumstances.  That said, many European responses to the Trump administration’s policies, whether regarding Greenland or the U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), share a telling common thread. They demonstrate an inability to grasp the administration’s civilizational realist worldview. Most American conservatives do not hate Europe; the continent is just too strategically and culturally linked to America to pretend its governing trajectory is sustainable. A Europe that is unable or unwilling to think and act like a serious power ultimately weakens the alliance it claims to defend.   Contrary to the prevailing perception in Brussels and many European capitals, much of today’s American right-wing criticism stems from an enduring sentimental and civilizational attachment to the continent from which the United States itself emerged. “We believe deeply in the bonds we share with Europe as a civilization,” said Trump in his WEF speech. Vice President Vance echoed this sentiment in an interview several days later: “They are one of our most important allies in the world; we share a common civilizational heritage.”  If these statements did not make it clear enough, the NSS explicitly states that “America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent.” These expressions sit uneasily with claims that the administration just hates Europe. If America truly viewed Europe with contempt or disregard, it would not repeatedly emphasize its cultural centrality or express concern about its long-term trajectory—whether one agrees with that assessment or not.   At the same time, this administration does approach transatlantic relations through a realist lens, deprioritizing Europe relative to other theaters and reiterating familiar demands around burden-sharing. The United States expects Europe to evolve into an independent security actor. America’s global priorities have shifted toward the Pacific, and the transatlantic relationship now depends on greater European capacity and self-reliance. Many transatlanticists have long conflated deprioritization with betrayal, but only a political class accustomed to dependency interprets realism as abandonment. The disillusionment in Europe over America’s more realist reorientation after Biden stems in part from the fact that realism withdraws the moral deference Brussels has relied on for U.S. protection. Once that deference is questioned, Europe must justify itself on performance rather than the rhetoric of shared democratic values alone.   But what is more concerning is Europe’s seemingly entrenched inability to think in power terms. The Greenland episode is emblematic of this dynamic. While Washington’s approach unsettled allies and strained diplomatic convention, the continent’s reflexive moral outrage treated the issue as sacrilege rather than a strategic question to be negotiated between serious powers. Europe’s purported preparedness to face off against the Trump administration with no hard power to back its rhetoric only further underscored its detachment from great power politics.  This pattern extends well beyond Greenland. Despite possessing far greater latent military capacity and outmatching Russia economically, demographically, and technologically, many European politicians act as if their own survival in the face of Russian aggression depends entirely on American intervention. Most revealing, however, were the reactions from certain NATO leaders who hinted at closer alignment with China in response to the very real transatlantic strain. That suggestion is not merely unserious; it is strategically incoherent to turn toward an authoritarian great power that openly rejects the political, legal, and moral claims that Europe professes to uphold.   These disputes cannot be explained by recent diplomatic friction alone. Beneath the surface lies a more consequential divergence over how Europe is understood. Despite the administration’s affinity for Europe as a civilization, it draws a clear distinction between Europe and the European Union. Many on the American right blame the latter for destructive policies on migration, energy, regulatory overreach, censorship, and the dilution of national sovereignty. They critique a governing worldview that has hollowed out much of Europe’s capacity to think historically, politically, and strategically. Europe’s political class, along with their ideological counterparts in the U.S., can no longer distinguish between Europe as a civilization and the European Union as a managerial project. In this framework, any critique of policy failure is reflexively treated as an attack on European sovereignty and dignity. When institutions come to stand in for civilization, criticism of governance is no longer heard as allied candor, but as an existential affront.   But what most unsettles policymakers in Brussels is the administration’s use of civilizational language. Terms such as “civilizational erasure,” “promoting European greatness,” “national identities,” and “remaining European” are immediately dismissed as xenophobic or extensions of American culture-war politics. A European parliamentary brief highlights how the NSS departs from past iterations in how border security now informs U.S. foreign policy. Immigration is, of course, a politically charged issue on both sides of the Atlantic, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that Europe’s migration policies played no role in the administration’s assessment. But reducing the White House’s cultural critique to immigration alone misses the point.   The central grievance among conservatives in both the United States and Europe is that many EU policymakers are the most vocal in claiming to defend Europe while concurrently rejecting its historical foundations and diluting its cultural coherence. When French Olympic ceremonies make a mockery of the Last Supper, the British police forbid Christian parades, and the EU Commission advises employees against saying “Merry Christmas,” it becomes difficult to persuade ordinary citizens that Europe’s governing institutions are neutral stewards of a shared inheritance rather than active participants in its erosion. They seem to conceive of Europe as a post-historical regulatory space and administrative architecture rather than a continent shaped by memory, myths, and continuity.  Within this paradigm, expressions of national attachment or historical pride are reflexively dismissed as far-right jingoism. The legacy of the Second World War has produced a governing consensus where attachment to nation, culture, and history is no longer regarded as legitimate politics. Yet this consensus rests on a fundamental confusion: The European Union is a fallible and revisable political-bureaucratic arrangement. Europe itself is not. Many Europeans hold a sincere attachment to the European Union or the European project itself, but treating those institutions as the ultimate end of European politics inevitably produces unrealistic assumptions and strategic blind spots.  The irony is difficult to miss. Transatlantic policymakers have spent decades framing virtually every major issue in existential terms: Ukraine as an existential fight for “European values”; regulation as an existential defense against inequality; and speech controls as an existential bulwark against disinformation. But similar language becomes heretical the moment it is applied inward.  One might reasonably ask why the United States should concern itself with Europe’s civilizational self-understanding at all. Realists have a clear answer: Civilizational confidence is not nostalgia; it is capability, and a prerequisite for alliance credibility. Societies that do not believe in themselves struggle to sustain defense commitments. Recent polling reflects this erosion starkly. Only 38 percent of Germans report that they would be willing to fight for their country if invaded, while in Italy, the figure drops to just 16 percent. In the United Kingdom, arguably Europe’s most robust military, nearly half of respondents report that they would not fight for Britain under any circumstance.    Some combination of mass immigration, political alienation, cultural fragmentation, and economic malaise probably drives these figures, but what matters strategically is that defense requires emotional and cultural buy-in. Soldiers do not fight and die for abstract post-national values or international liberal orders, nor do they mobilize without an attachment to nation, community, and a shared sense of purpose.  When a society becomes so culturally fragmented that its flag no longer represents a shared inheritance, military credibility declines. This is an empirical observation, not an ideological talking point. Alliances ultimately rest on assumptions of political will, social cohesion, and the capacity for collective sacrifice. The United States cannot base long-term security planning on allies whose populations may no longer view defense as a shared obligation. Whether one approves of Europe’s current trajectory or not, this is precisely what the American and increasingly the European right is saying when it warns of a decline in Europe’s self-confidence and the erosion of its national identities.   It is in this context that the transatlantic alliance finds a source of cautious optimism. Toward the end of the NSS, it notes the “growing influence of patriotic European parties.” Like the citizenry of the United States, voters across Europe are reasserting agency through movements that prioritize national interest, sovereignty, and continuity over managerial consensus. The Trump administration’s willingness to engage diplomatically with these movements is neither interference nor provocation; it is a normal alignment among conservative governments and movements that share assumptions about sovereignty, legitimacy, and national interest. It will likely become a regular feature of transatlantic politics in an era of hyperpolarization. A strategically independent Europe defending its interests is not a threat to America. In fact, it was the kind of Europe the transatlantic relationship was intended to sustain.  The controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s approach to Europe ultimately reveals less about American hostility than about European self-perception. What is being challenged is not Europe’s importance, but a governing trajectory that has conflated institutional consensus with civilizational strength. U.S. and European interests remain structurally aligned, and their civilizational ties are real and enduring. The United States is not asking Europe to abandon its values or imitate American politics. It is asking Europe to take itself seriously again and act like a civilization worth defending—because it is worth defending.   The post American Conservatives Don’t Hate Europe  appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The China Collapse That Wasn’t Comforting narratives about Chinese internal dynamics are not just wrong, but dangerous. It’s a story Washington tells itself whenever reality grows uncomfortable: China is about to collapse. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), we are assured, is a brittle, illegitimate regime on the brink of popular revolt. Once it falls, a friendly democratic China will emerge—and America’s ruling class won’t have to change anything that they’ve been doing or thinking about since the end of the Cold War.  That means all the elites’ spending—along with all other forms of elite excess—is irrelevant. In their view, China, a country that is both America’s greatest strategic challenger as well as one of its most important trading partners, is going to implode. It’s a house of cards, they say.  It’s all wishful thinking. Could China collapse? Sure. Any regime could collapse. Is the system in China a house of cards? Maybe. But one could—and probably should—argue that the American financial and political order is also a house of cards, cards that are already teetering.  For the last year, the corporate press and their fellow travelers in the Chinese expat community here in the United States have been sharing totally unconfirmed stories about China’s President Xi Jinping having been placed under house arrest. We’ve heard whispers about senior generals in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) revolting. One prominent geopolitical analyst informed me last July that, by the 2025 plenum of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, Xi was going to announce his resignation as part of a secret deal between himself and his rivals (who were set to take power from Xi). It never happened. As if that wasn’t enough, when Xi recently directed a massive purge against senior military leaders in the Central Military Commission (CMC), a powerful committee of top People’s Liberation Army (PLA) military officers chaired by Xi himself, the Wall Street Journal depicted it as some form of successful counter-coup led by a reinvigorated Xi against his internal party enemies.  But there was no evidence of any coup to necessitate a counter-coup. Western intelligence services, such as the CIA, piled on, claiming that the main PLA officer removed by Xi, General Zhang Youxia, was secretly on the CIA’s payroll, providing the American intelligence services with detailed accounting of China’s nuclear weapons capabilities in exchange for gobs of cash. The only problem with that claim is that Zhang was fabulously wealthy (as were all of the PLA leaders whom Xi purged earlier this year). Zhang and his cohort got wealthy by sitting at the top of the Chinese Communist Party and protecting and supporting Xi Jinping. Given that the punishment of treason is exactly what befell these generals, why would they have risked their futures by risking their wealth and status to feed U.S. intelligence about the state of China’s nuclear arsenal and disposition?  Right after the removal of those older generals, multiple “open-source intelligence” (OSINT) accounts on social media began spewing baseless claims that troops were appearing on the streets of Beijing following the purge of the CMC. The implication was that a potential civil war could erupt at any moment. But these accounts are often tied to larger propaganda pushes in the West, which is why it is important to point out what they have been claiming on social media (and these accounts have massive followings, notably on X). In case you’re wondering, no civil war has occurred since Xi’s major purges.  But these are the sorts of narratives that pervade Western media, dominate the discourse in the halls of power throughout the West, and shape the perception of Western leaders. (This is why we keep getting China wrong.)  Even as the claims that Xi’s rule was at an end circulated throughout the West, the New York Times published a story revealing that the most recent Pentagon Overmatch Brief found that, if a war over Taiwan erupted, the Chinese military would decisively defeat the U.S. military in a relatively short order.  Clearly, China cannot both be collapsing and have a conventional military that today could rapidly defeat the U.S. military in a fight over the First Island Chain (the region stretching from the Kamchatka Peninsula through Taiwan down to the Philippines). Frankly, I’ll take the Pentagon’s assessment on this one over the flights of fancy our feckless political and media elites are engaging in when it comes to their China analysis. American elites have embraced what amounts to a strategic coping mechanism because, fundamentally, they understand that the Chinese have caught up to—or even surpassed—the United States in critical ways. The only reason China has achieved this is because of the generous trade policies as well as the strategic ambivalence that American elites have had toward China since the 1970s. In other words, it’s the American establishment’s fault that China is even in the position it is to threaten us, militarily and economically.  This tiresome strategic coping mechanism of the Western elite when it comes to China’s rise could not even hide the fact that China’s economy is doing better than our own, contra the endless heralding of a new American golden age. The Financial Times was forced to admit earlier this year that China’s trade surplus was an astonishing $1.2 trillion in the last quarter of 2025 (even after President Trump subjected China to a grueling trade war). Cue the rejoinder: “China lies about its figures!” Certainly. Others will say the data coming from China are unreliable for other reasons. But the folks over at the FT know this. Their reporting accounts for these realities. Here’s why the Financial Times used China’s trade surplus figures. Beijing participates in international statistical frameworks promoted by organizations, like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Their data—notably customs trade data, which is so important for determining trade surpluses—follow broadly accepted definitions and reporting practices. External economists can (and do) audit and compare these global sets, which is how they concluded that China’s trade surplus was so large. Western elites have spent the last year telling us not to worry about China because Xi is about to be removed from power. When that didn’t happen, they insisted that the purges of the CMC by Xi signaled that China was growing weaker, not stronger (even though Xi removed any potential impediments from the CMC to his rule). Meanwhile, those same voices argue that China’s economy is done—even though their trade surplus went stratospheric last year. As my former editor at the Asia Times, David P. Goldman, used to constantly remind me: “Don’t worry about what China does wrong. Worry about what they do right.” With cutthroat alacrity, Beijing has transitioned its economy from a backward, agrarian, North Korea–style cult of personality in the 1970s into a dynamic, vibrant state-capitalist society. In just 50 years, they have gone from being a non-factor in the global economy to the second-largest economy in GDP terms and the largest economy in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), which most economists argue is a superior measurement of economic strength compared to traditional nominal GDP. What’s more, China today is not animated by the Marxist ideology that the CPC was founded upon. The party’s core legitimizing narrative is national rejuvenation, and the reversal of what Chinese leaders refer to as the “Century of Humiliation.” Even though so many Westerners have said Xi is the closest leader to Mao since Mao, Xi appears to govern less like a Marxist ideologue and more like a civilizational nationalist.  In authoritarian systems, purges rarely signal collapse. They signal that the leader believes he is strong enough to act. That is precisely what you are witnessing with Xi’s ousting of these PLA generals. He is consolidating and expanding his power as he is pressured by his American competitors in a variety of areas. Under these conditions, contrary to the “China is collapsing simply because they’re not Star-Spangled Awesome like the U.S.” narrative, Xi Jinping and China are set to become more powerful and aggressive, not less. Of course, China is not invincible. It is struggling to transition to a postmodern, high-consumption model economy. As a result, its economy is currently experiencing a downturn. There is an overhang from China’s housing crisis in 2022. There is real demographic decline that threatens future prosperity. Even though you won’t hear it in the media, there is a true youth unemployment crisis. But how many economic downturns has the United States endured? Why assume China’s regime will implode during a downturn but not the American one under similar conditions? Especially when China today possesses around 30 percent of all global manufacturing capacity by value. Its dominance in rare-earth refining, battery supply chains, and industrial inputs has ensured that Beijing is already dictating terms to Washington (and the world).  Indeed, China makes the world’s electronics, along with the world’s electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, industrial chemicals, and machine tools. The United States, on the other hand, primarily flips financial assets. In the twenty-first century, manufacturing power is strategic dominance.  A country like China that makes everything rarely collapses suddenly. Financial empires, like the American empire, historically collapse faster than industrial ones. Just ask the British, who effectively abandoned their domestic industry in favor of over-financialization beginning in the mid-19th century, leading to the inevitable collapse of British economic power by the 1960s.  Under these conditions in China, then, a Japanese-style stagnation is plausible. A Soviet-style implosion is highly unlikely.  We should not seek to overestimate Chinese weakness, and we must stop underestimating Chinese resilience. Foreign policy built upon such fantasies leads to the Iraq War. One built on realistic assessments, however, creates strategic opportunities and relatively bloodless victories of the kind we enjoyed in the Cold War.  China’s collapse is not inevitable. Nor is America’s ongoing decline irreversible. Only one of these two outcomes is being taken seriously by the American elite. Getting it wrong means America’s decline becomes inexorable—and China’s rise, however bumpy, becomes unstoppable.   The post The China Collapse That Wasn’t appeared first on The American Conservative.

From Southbank to the world.  The post The very meaningful origins of Ezra Collective first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Kurt Cobain’s first musical contribution was hauling gear for the Melvins, whose early work was key in Grunge’s development. That gig led Cobain to Krist Novoselic. Their initial effort had Cobain on drums and Novoselic playing guitar. When Melvins’ drummer Dale Crover joined, Cobain moved to guitar and Novoselic handled bass. Starting out as Ed, Ted, Fred and later, the Fecal Matter, they finally settled on Nirvana. Playing the Northwest club circuit they built a dedicated following. That, in turn, resulted in Nirvana signing with the Seattle based Sub-Pop label. Despite Cobain’s numerous compositions, the band’s first release was a cover of Shocking Blue’s “Love Buzz.” Debut album Bleach” became a college radio staple.  Recorded in Seattle, the album contained, in addition to “Love Buzz,” “About A Girl” and “Negative Creep.” It sold 40,000 copies in North America prior to the release of “Nevermind.” Since then, the album has since moved more than 1.9 million copies in the U. S. alone. “Bleach” was the only Nirvana album released on the Sub Pop imprint and their only studio album to feature drummer Chad Channing. “Silver” came out in mid ’90. After a series of drummers had come and gone, Nirvana found David Grohl. They also had a demo that caught the attention of producer Butch Vig who subsequently worked on the band’s next album. “Nevermind” was nothing short of being a landmark creation with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” “In Bloom,” “Lithium” and “On A Plane.” But the best song was “Come As You Are.” Starting with a hypnotic, reverb drenched guitar riff – straight from the bottom of Link Wray’s gene pool. The song built until it exploded with Cobain screaming “No I don’t have a gun.” Of course, he did. Smells Like Teen Spirit Come As You Are Primarily written by Cobain, the album was the band’s first release on a major label, DGC. It replaced Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” at #1 on the Billboard 200. and brought Grunge into the mainstream with Cobain the genre’s poster child. “Insecticide,” released in ’93, was an excellent collection of early Nirvana live and studio recordings containing “Aneurysm,” the B-side of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” “Aneurysm” was one of the few Nirvana songs credited to all three members and became a concert staple. Aneurysm Heart Shaped Box Later that year, “In Utero” dropped. The album was not as driving, hard-edged or sonically dense as “Nevermind.” Some attributed this change to Cobain’s growing heroin addiction. The brooding “Heart Shaped Box,” the acoustic, self-reflective “Dumb” and the remorseful “All Apologies” were the best tracks. But the album’s production was fraught with several false starts and sudden stops. The original album mix was by Steve Albini but then remixed for what the band and their record label termed a more “desirable sound.” Unhappy with the turn of events. Albini later dismissed Nirvana as “R.E.M. with a fuzzbox” and “an unremarkable version of the Seattle sound,” Even though the album debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 with first week sales of 180.000 copies retailers were skittish. Wal-Mart said they declined to sell the album due to a lack of consumer demand while Kmart claimed it did not fit with their “merchandise mix.” Actually, both retailers worried that the album’s back cover would offend customers. In an effort to de-escalate the situation, DGC issued a new version to the stores with edited artwork and the track “Rape Me” retitled “Waif Me.” While “In Utero” didn’t match “Nevermind’s” sales numbers it went over 15 million copies. In Utero The Man Who Sold The World Nirvana’s ”MTV Unplugged In New York,” recorded in November of ’93 and released the following year, illustrated the band’s depth and musicianship. At the time of the taping Cobain was suffering from drug withdrawal. An observer noted: “There was no joking, no smiles, no fun coming from him … everyone was more than a little worried about his performance.” That performance, which included a cover of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World,” proved Nirvana was not solely reliant on Grunge’s wall of sound. However, in a break with MTV Unplugged tradition, Nirvana used some electric amplification and effects and played mainly lesser-known material and covers and moved over 8-million copies. When things unraveled, it all went too quickly. Maybe it was life with Hole’s Courtney Love (Kurt and Courtney married in ’92 with Francis Bean born later that year). It could have been the pressures of Rock stardom. Or heroin (Cobain had been in and out – mostly out – of rehab). Maybe there was just a big hole that nobody or nothing could fill. On April 4th, 1994, Cobain’s mother filed a missing person’s report. A few days later Cobain’s body was discovered at his Seattle residence (ruled suicide by shotgun). He was 27. The tragedy and the seeming utter senselessness of it broke Grunge’s spell. Compiled largely by Novoselic, “From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah,” a live album, was released two years after the multi-platinum “Unplugged album. It was designed to show the band’s harder edge in contrast to the acoustic set for MTV. The album debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 selling nearly 159,000 copies in its first week of release and spent 25 weeks on the chart to become the band’s sixth platinum effort in the U.S. Years later, the furious mud-slinging battle with Grohl and Novoselic pitted against Love and a fleet of attorneys subsided long enough to get the papers signed allowing the release of a retrospective simply titled “Nirvana” featuring the group’s last recording, “You Know You’re Right.” You Know You’re Right ###   The post Nirvana appeared first on RockinTown.

from Liberty Sentinel by Alex Newman: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/