Daily Mail.

Florida, United States6 hours ago

Several days ago I saw a video of a young man wearing a Trump tshirt on a plane sitting in a window seat. In the middle seat was an older woman and her husband was in the aisle seat. The woman was verbally attacking the young man and he just sat there trying to ignore her. Then a flight attendant appeared to find out what was going on. The older woman demanded that the young man be moved to a different seat and the flight attendant said no. The older woman kept complaining until a man appeared and told the old woman she and her husband were being removed from the plane and a few minutes later they were. It was very satisfying.

GreyRanga
 November 8, 2024 9:16 am

I’ve been going to cardio rehab for the last 2 weeks. Out of ten people only a lady and myself are not diabetics. Half of them are obese.

You need to distinguish between Type 2 (where lifestyle is a contributor) and Type 1 (autoimmune condition where insulin producing beta cells in the pancreas are destroyed) or “other” (often a loss of the pancreas due to injury or cancer).

From Cassie’s link at 10:50.

As for Kamala Harris, she won’t be that occasional losing presidential candidate who nevertheless is accorded a status as her party’s leader going forward.

I thought exactly that during her “concession” speech when I saw her doing those awkward arm waves like a marionette with elastic strings and declaring “We will continue to fight!”
In the immortal words of Tonto abandoning the Lone Ranger as the hostile Indians came over the hill … “Waddya mean ‘we‘, Paleface?”.
I could almost see the shepherd’s crook coming from stage left to haul her off.

dover0beach

November 8, 2024 12:26 pm

Reply to  Zippster

A lot of the ChinaCollapse narrative eminates from neocons. I trust Chinese numbers more than those generated by neocons.

We’re going with feelz, right?

Was the recent support package intended to assist an economy currently experiencing an economic boom?
Chinese banks have a very serious balance sheet issue, brought about oversupply in the real estate sector (which is/was 30% of the economy).
Why would neocons lie or exaggerate the problems with the Chinese economy? They’re more likely to be overstating Chinese economic prowess, similar to how some people exaggerated the Soviet Union’s power, in order to encourage more defense spending.

Why would the CCP provide accurate stats?

China’s giant economy faces an equally giant crisis of confidence—and a growing deficit of accurate information is only making things worse. Even as the country wrestles with a property crash, the services sector slowed by one measure in August. Consumers are fed up. Multinational firms are taking money out of China at a record pace and foreign China-watchers are trimming their forecasts for economic growth.
The gloom reflects real problems, from half-built houses to bad debts. But it also reflects growing mistrust of information about China. The government is widely believed to be massaging data, suppressing sensitive facts and sometimes offering delusional prescriptions for the economy. This void feeds on itself: the more fragile the economy is, the more knowledge is suppressed and the more nerves fray. This is not just a cyclical problem of confidence. By backtracking on the decades-long policy of partially liberalising the flow of information, China will find it harder to complete its ambition of restructuring the economy around new industries. Like the Soviet Union, it risks instead becoming an example of how autocratic rule is not just illiberal but also inefficient.
More on this

The tightening of censorship under President Xi Jinping is well known. Social-media accounts are ever more strictly policed. Officials are warier of candid debate with outsiders. Scholars fear they are watched and business people mouth Communist Party slogans. Less familiar is the parallel disappearance of technical data, especially if it is awkward or embarrassing for the party. Figures for youth unemployment, a huge problem, have been “improved and optimised”—and lowered. Balance-of-payments statistics have become so murky that even America’s Treasury is baffled. On August 19th stock exchanges stopped publishing daily numbers on dwindling foreign-investment inflows. As the economic dashboard dims, the private sector is finding it harder to make good decisions. Officials probably are, too.

To understand the significance of this shift, look back to the mid-20th century. Witnessing the totalitarianism of the 1930s and 1940s, liberal thinkers such as Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek argued that political freedom and economic success go hand in hand: decentralised power and information prevent tyranny and allow millions of firms and consumers to make better decisions and live better lives. The collapse of the Soviet Union proved them right. In order to maintain political dominance, its rulers ruthlessly controlled information. But that required brutal repression, starved the economy of price signals and created an edifice of lies. By the end, even the Soviet leadership was deprived of an accurate picture.
As China grew more open in the late 1990s and 2000s, its leaders hoped to maintain control while avoiding the Soviet Union’s mistakes. For many years they allowed technical information in business, the economy and science to flow far more freely. Think of Chinese firms with listed share prices disclosing information to investors in New York, or scientists sharing new research with groups abroad. Technology seemed to offer a more surgical way to censor mass opinion. The internet was intensively policed, but it was not banned.
China’s top leadership also redoubled its efforts to know what was going on. For decades, it has run a system known as neican, or internal reference, in which journalists and officials compile private reports. During the Tiananmen Square protests, for example, the leadership received constant updates. Techno-utopian party loyalists reckoned that big data and artificial intelligence could improve this system, creating a high-tech panopticon for the supreme leader that would allow the kind of enlightened central planning the Soviets failed at.

It is this vision of a partially open, hyper-efficient China that is now in doubt. Amid a widening culture of fear and a determination to put national security before the economy, the party has proved unable or unwilling to limit the scope of its interference in information flows. Monetary-policy documents and the annual reports of China’s mega-banks now invoke Xi Jinping Thought. Deadly-dull foreign management consultants are treated as spies. This is happening despite the fact that China’s increasingly sophisticated economy requires more fluid and complex decision-making.
An obvious result is the retreat of individual liberty. In a reversal of its partial opening, China has become a more repressive place. Many Chinese still have liberal views and enjoy debate but stick to private gatherings. They present no immediate danger to the party.
The information void’s other effects pose more of a threat. As price signals dim, the allocation of capital is getting harder. This comes at a delicate moment. As its workforce shrinks, China must rely more on boosting productivity to grow. That is all about using resources well. The country needs to pivot away from cheap credit and construction to innovative industries and supplying consumers. That is why capital spending is pouring into electric vehicles, semiconductors and more. Yet if investment is based on erroneous calculations of demand and supply, or if data on subsidies and profits are suppressed, then the odds of a successful transition are low.
China’s admirers might retort that the country’s key decision-makers still have good information with which to steer the economy. But nobody really knows what data and reports Mr Xi sees. Moreover, as the public square empties it is a good bet that the flow of private information is becoming more distorted and less subject to scrutiny. No one wants to sign a memo that says one of Mr Xi’s signature policies is failing.
After the horrors of the mid-20th century, liberal thinkers understood that free-flowing information improves decision-making, reduces the odds of grave mistakes and makes it easier for societies to evolve. But when information is suppressed, it turns into a source of power and corruption. Over time, the distortions and inefficiencies mount. China has big opportunities but it also faces immense problems. A fully informed citizenry, private sector and government would be far better equipped to take on the challenges ahead.

Was the recent support package intended to assist an economy currently experiencing an economic boom?

I note you called it a support package not a stimulus, JC.

It does indeed seem to be aimed at stabilising the banking sector. Customers of some Chinese banks have had their accounts frozen for months. Dozens of banks have been absorbed into larger entities too.

Trust the CCP. Yep
The Chinese authorities are concealing the state of the economyBut the Communist Party’s internal information systems may also be flawed

Listen to this story.
Zhao jian’s article was online for just a few hours on August 16th before censors erased it. To Western readers the content would have appeared anodyne, but to a Communist Party official it was laced with dangerous ideas. Mr Zhao, a respected economist, argued that it was hard to grasp why China’s government was not making more effort to stimulate the economy. The most serious economic downturn in a generation had caused uncertainty about the future to “coil around the hearts of the people”, he wrote. “The logic and constraints of decision-makers cannot be understood by the market.”
The deletion of the article, ironically enough, proved Mr Zhao’s point. China’s army of internet censors routinely purge posts that run counter to the policies of Xi Jinping, the country’s supreme leader. But the realm of what is considered too sensitive has expanded rapidly in recent years, and now includes much discussion about the economy. Academics and pundits who seek to debate seemingly mundane economic matters are silenced. Data that used to be readily available are disappearing from the public sphere. That not only further restricts ordinary people’s already limited freedom to speak their minds, but also harms growth by hampering investment. Most of all, it underscores Mr Zhao’s pressing question: on what basis is economic policy made? What does the government know that ordinary people do not—and how reliable is the information on which it is basing its decisions?

Deviations standardChina’s official economic data have always had their flaws. Li Keqiang, the previous prime minister, once questioned their accuracy. Economists have long grumbled that the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) does not provide enough detail about its methodologies. But China-watchers used to assume that the data would gradually become more comprehensive and reliable. Instead the reverse seems to be happening. Recent data on China’s capital account have been so contradictory—there has been a yawning discrepancy of about $230bn between customs and balance-of-payments statistics in recent years (see chart)—that America’s Treasury called on Chinese officials to clarify the figures. The resulting explanation was so convoluted that it only further confused matters. On August 19th, to the dismay of investors, China’s stock exchanges stopped publishing daily data on flows of foreign capital, a critical gauge of sentiment. The numbers will now be revealed only quarterly.
More on this

The Economist
Meanwhile, the data that are made public are ever less consistent with the experience of firms and investors on the ground. The official numbers show that the GDP growth rate has reverted to pre-pandemic level, despite the moribund housing industry and low investment in infrastructure. This is a risible claim, says Logan Wright of Rhodium Group, a consulting firm. “The broader problem is simply that the GDP data have stopped bearing any resemblance to economic reality,” he explains.
The steady contortion of official statistics seems designed to obscure news that might embarrass the government. For instance, in mid-2023 a professor at Peking University said publicly that there were 16m young people without jobs who did not feature in the unemployment statistics because they had stopped looking for work. If they were taken into account, the professor asserted, the underemployment rate for youth would be over 46%. Within a month the NBS stopped issuing data on urban youth unemployment altogether. Then in January it began publishing an “improved and optimised” figure, which also happened to be far lower. Academics and journalists have had relatively little to say on the subject since then.

All hail the economy!Officials’ bold claims about the economy often go unquestioned, at least in public. The government has declared that no one in China lives in absolute poverty any more—the sort of assertion that might naturally invite all kinds of questions about whether the data are correct and the right standards have been applied. Yet there has been almost no debate about the finding in the media.
In much the same vein, subjects of great importance to the economy, but of an awkward nature for officials, receive little scrutiny. The biggest victims of China’s property crash are the 20m-30m households that are thought to have paid for apartments that have never been completed. Understanding who these people are, how they are coping economically and what could be done to help them is critical to reviving the property market. Yet few economists appear to be conducting any research on these cheated millions.

The full economic effects of long, severe and unpopular lockdowns during the pandemic in cities such as Shanghai and Wuhan have never been publicly examined. In several cases journalists and social-media commentators broaching such topics have been jailed. The true number of deaths from covid-19 in China is unknown. A prominent scientist based in Shanghai who was looking into the origins of covid found himself locked out of his laboratory earlier this year. Officials seem much more interested in controlling discussion of the disease than in understanding its impact.
Even ardently pro-government pundits are sometimes silenced if their opinions have not received official approval. In late July Hu Xijin, a nationalist journalist, praised directives on the economy issued at a recent meeting of senior party leaders. But his interpretation of them as a boon for private enterprise apparently ruffled feathers. Posts to that effect were deleted from his social-media accounts, which then fell silent. The party, not content with regulating and managing markets and the economy, seems to be claiming a monopoly on interpreting them, too.
The reticence about discussing the economy extends to private interactions with foreigners. In theory the authorities are courting investors to help stimulate growth. Visiting businessmen confirm that meetings are easy to come by. But discussions lack substance, they complain. The pitches local officials make to attract investment to their region have become vague and formulaic, says one such visitor. There is little detail on local economic conditions. And securing more substantive meetings with regulators has become much harder.
Foreign academics report similar experiences. Universities are keen to hire professors with expertise in industry from abroad to compensate for an exodus of such people during the pandemic. But informal exchanges have become more strained. Visitors with long experience in China say they are able to see old contacts, but that their meetings must be reported to and approved by the authorities. Conducting field work in China has become increasingly difficult, says Huang Yanzhong of Seton Hall University in America, because contact with foreigners could present a risk to local people. “You sense the political environment and you don’t want to get people in trouble,” he says.

These sorts of restrictions also extend to foreign journalists. Many have returned to China after the pandemic to find their interactions with companies closely supervised by bureaucrats. In Hefei, an inland industrial city, big Chinese firms have been instructed not to speak to the press without permission from local authorities. Journalists are asked to submit hour-by-hour travel schedules along with the names and contact details of those they plan to interview. Some diplomats have been subjected to much the same treatment.
For those outside the country, getting access to information about the economy is even harder. The authorities appear to have asked Chinese firms selling corporate data to curb sales of certain statistics to foreigners. For example, one such firm, Wind, stopped providing information on online spending last year to users outside China. A database on corporate ownership compiled by Qichacha, a corporate-intelligence firm, is no longer accessible abroad. The firm also used to provide data on bankruptcies, but now says the information is “too sensitive”.
When a special economic zone in Shanghai set out rules earlier this year governing the use of data, it explicitly banned the transfer abroad of any information on stock prices or market trends, a surprising regulation for what is, after all, China’s financial hub. Stockbrokers are ever more reluctant to hand over analysts’ reports; negative takes on the economy or state policy are becoming rare. Some official data series on industrial output have started to vanish, Mr Wright says. A legal database that appeared online a decade ago is becoming less comprehensive and harder to access, says Rory Truex of Princeton University. When it comes to obtaining data, he says, “Nothing good in China can last.”
Access to China’s universities is also becoming more circumscribed, curtailing one of the main ways in which foreigners and locals alike improved their understanding of the Chinese economy. During the pandemic campuses, like most public spaces, were closed off; special permission was required to enter. But as much of China reopened early last year, some universities stayed shut. To this day visitors need permission in advance to set foot on these campuses. Academics at a number of institutions have been told they must seek approval to speak with foreign press. In a few regions this must be issued not by officials at their university, but by bureaucrats at the provincial level.
Since Mr Xi came to power in 2012 the conditions under which academics operate have become far more constrained. In 2019 several top universities amended their charters to make explicit reference to their loyalty to the Communist Party, which sparked a few small protests on campuses. Last year the party’s oversight committees at some universities began formally merging with the university administration. This, in effect, gives the party day-to-day control over how universities operate. This is a part of what Mr Xi has called “socialist education with Chinese characteristics”, which involves subordinating academic imperatives to the needs of the party. Academic freedom is at one of its lowest points since the Cultural Revolution, a period of fanaticism in the 1960s and 1970s, says Sun Peidong of Cornell University.

Much academic research remains relatively unfettered by political constraints because it has nothing to do with contemporary Chinese society. The government has heaped funding on the natural sciences, engineering and medicine, helping transform China into a powerhouse of scientific research. But the study of anything related to political, economic or social conditions within China, scholars say, has suffered badly under Mr Xi.
China’s universities are full of talented faculty, some of whom are still devising ways of writing about fraught topics. One method is to wrap critical ideas up in a politically correct coating. Corruption, for instance, tends to be too sensitive a topic on which to centre a research project, an academic explains. But a project that focuses on a prominent government initiative could include a portion on how that initiative has been affected by corruption. The crux of the research is in essence buried within a longer paper. Those who read academic papers, in turn, have become accustomed to wading through long reports to find small pearls of insight.
Controversial topics can be discussed as long as they omit any analysis of the central government’s policies. An economist specialising in Taiwan says he frequently writes papers that analyse the stances of the Taiwanese and American governments but simply exclude most information on China’s approach to the topic at hand. Some economic researchers have been able to conduct local surveys on controversial subjects, but have no intention of publishing them now. Instead they are sitting on their findings in the hope that a time will come when it is safe to publish them, Ms Sun claims.
The gradual strangulation of information about the economy is not just vexing for foreign investors and economists. It also raises the same question that Mr Zhao did in his censored article: on what basis do Mr Xi and other senior officials make decisions about how to manage the economy? They are not groping around in the dark. China has long maintained a confidential system for collecting information from academia, the news media and think-tanks. Journalists, researchers and economists are asked to pen “internal reference” reports, or neican in Chinese. These documents are commissioned at all levels of government. Local officials have access to analysis produced by local researchers. Trusted scholars at top universities and think-tanks, meanwhile, produce reports for the most senior leaders in Beijing.
Illustration: Daniel Stolle
Neican can be far punchier than material for public consumption. A report might demonstrate, say, that even though local officials talk excitedly about a boom in whizzy technologies such as AI or robotics, the actual benefit to the economy of these industries is woefully small. Academics and journalists can live something of a double life, producing both public reports and those meant only for the eyes of officials. A reporter at Xinhua, the state news agency, for instance, may appear to be churning out nothing but adulatory drivel, but behind the scenes could be writing explosive articles exposing polluting firms or corrupt officials. It is a privilege to be allowed to write internal reports, says one such author, noting that there is intense competition to do so.
Think-tanks are a mainstay of neican. Under Mr Xi, even as independent think-tanks have been forced to close, state-aligned ones have multiplied. The doors of the last prominent free-market think-tank in China, Unirule, were literally welded shut in 2019, briefly trapping some of its researchers inside. But hundreds of “think-tanks with Chinese characteristics” have been established by city and provincial governments, ministries and even some state-owned firms. Between 2018 and 2020 such outfits nearly tripled in number, from 507 to 1,413. (The fad is fading somewhat: by the end of last year there were only 1,096.) Most of the research they do is for internal consumption only. Their output can give officials a good understanding of the local dimensions of problems like the property crash, says a researcher. Another affirms that he is able to write openly about administrative problems such as the difficulty of implementing government edicts at odds with one another.
Some experts have speculated that China’s vast digital economy provides policymakers access to a trove of high-quality data about firms and consumers in real time. The state is building exchanges where data that companies collect on transactions can be bought and sold. But these platforms are still a work in progress. By the same token, China’s security services run a massive nationwide surveillance operation that by its very nature tracks the movement of people and goods and the opinions expressed by ordinary citizens. But there is no evidence that officials make use of such information to improve their understanding of the economy.

Errors thrive in darknessThe ultimate question is, how much of all this information filters through to the top echelons of the Communist Party? That is hard to say. Authors often brag about the influence of their neican reports, says Mr Huang, but there are no reliable data about who is having an impact on public policy. A researcher says he is informed if a senior official has made a note on one of his reports, but is not told what the note says. The profusion of think-tanks presumably delivers an enormous number of recommendations to different arms of the government. But Bob Chen, an investor based in Shanghai, recently argued on a local podcast called Baiguan that the centralisation of power at the apogee of the party means that the recipients no longer have the authority to push through whatever reforms the reports might espouse.

Moreover, it seems only natural that neican reports would tend to flatter the authorities. A state researcher notes that the more positive his analysis is, the better the reception it receives. That provides an obvious incentive to put an optimistic slant on things. The obverse also appears to be true: the same researcher who said he was free to discuss administrative problems also cautions that he never directly criticises policy edicts from on high.
No one outside the highest reaches of power understands exactly what Mr Xi reads and how he acts on the information. China’s economic policymaking has always been somewhat opaque, but this mattered less when growth was strong and policymakers appeared pragmatic. With growth deteriorating and the bureaucracy becoming more ideological, the dearth of good information about the economy is much more worrying. It may eventually become as big a problem for China’s leaders as it is for puzzled outsiders.

No comment(s) from CL, despite a massive Trump win and a Ukrainian appointed as Australia’s Cardinal, point to something not quite right.

I miss his insights.

Well it’s my brother’s birthday today so off to raise a glass of frothy Carlton Draught with him. And to belatedly celebrate the most magnificent of wins in any sphere of life, from Donald Trump.
Toodle pip!

So, who gets which jobs in a Trump cabinet?

Agriculture – Lee Greenwood? 😛
Commerce – Musk?
Defense – Pompeo?
Education,
Energy – Vivek?
Health and Human Services – RFK.
Homeland Security – Patel?
Housing and Urban Development,
Interior,
Labor,
State – Rubio?
Transportation,
Treasury, and Veterans Affairs – Paulson?
Attorney General – Mark Levin?
Press Secretary – Alex Jones?

Trump’s Landslide Win EXPLAINED

JC
 November 8, 2024 3:16 pm

No kidding, this is the funniest vid for the entire election period. 

Nice.
But I still think the one posted by Rosie of the Latino guy in tears because he is worried that Orange Man will deport his mother-in-law is still the clubhouse leader.

Sickening scenes coming out of Amsterdam. The Nazis filmed themselves stabbing, kicking and driving over Jews.

The need to bring back public hangings.

The Nazis in Holland have now broken into the hotels where the visiting Israelis were told to stay for their safety.