Monday, August 11, 2025
The Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip observes America under Trump becoming more like China under Xi
Sunday, July 20, 2025
People who agree to become organ donors risk being aggressively harvested when they might otherwise recover
We're getting more like China everyday.
Push for More Organ Transplants Putting Donors at Risk...
... Circulatory death donation is different. These patients are on life support, often in a coma. Their prognoses are more of a medical judgment call.
They are alive, with some brain activity, but doctors have determined that they are near death and won’t recover. If relatives agree to donation, doctors withdraw life support and wait for the patient’s heart to stop. This has to happen within an hour or two for the organs to be considered viable. After the person is declared dead, surgeons go in.
The Times found that some organ procurement organizations — the nonprofits in each state that have federal contracts to coordinate transplants — are aggressively pursuing circulatory death donors and pushing families and doctors toward surgery. Hospitals are responsible for patients up to the moment of death, but some are allowing procurement organizations to influence treatment decisions.
Fifty-five medical workers in 19 states told The Times they had witnessed at least one disturbing case of donation after circulatory death.
Workers in several states said they had seen coordinators persuading hospital clinicians to administer morphine, propofol and other drugs to hasten the death of potential donors. ...
Circulatory death donation used to be largely forbidden. That began to change in the 1990s, when a dying patient asked the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to remove her life support and donate her organs. The hospital honored her wishes, then spent two years creating guidelines for future cases. Use of the practice gradually spread. ...
Sunday, May 11, 2025
Whatever else may be said about Rene Girard, he grasped the big problem even if he miscast it as capitalist, namely Chinamerica
“Everyone now knows that the looming conflict between the US and China, for example, has nothing to do with a ‘clash of civilisations’, despite what some might try to tell us. We always try to see differences where in fact there are none. In fact, the dispute is between two forms of capitalism that are becoming more and more similar,” Girard wrote.
Quoted here.
It's not two forms of capitalism. It's two forms of fascism.
America became its own enemy long before China did.
Girard defaulted to the priority of religion over economics beginning in 1959.
Monday, April 7, 2025
Wednesday, July 13, 2022
AMWAY's Steve Van Andel said the highlight of his entire career was China: He and AMWAY got rich as Croesus from the giant sucking sound of your jobs leaving America
Career highlight: China
When asked to share a highlight of his career, Van Andel talked of traveling with his dad to China in the early 1970s when he was in his teens.
They spent time walking around Shanghai and Beijing so the elder Van Andel could observe people.
He remembers his dad telling him he was curious about where the Amway business could go in the future.
"I'll never forget being with him and talking with him about it and then 20 years later, I remember cutting the ribbon and opening up China," Van Andel said.
China is now Amway's biggest market, generating more than one-third of its sales.
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Abortion has left a "million empty spaces" every damn year since 1973 but we're supposed to view the COVID-19 death toll as cruel somehow
Million empty spaces: Chronicling Covid's cruel American toll...
A reckoning is surely coming, and a million dead from COVID-19 is nothing compared to the utter evil cruelty and complacency of Americans in the face of this unspeakable holocaust of over 60 million.
We're as bad as any of the evil perpetrators of communist democide in China or Russia.
Monday, July 5, 2021
Joel Kotkin has come around, now calls it what it is: Global fascism
In 2018, Kotkin was still tip-toeing around the obvious, but not anymore:
Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world . . .
Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.
Mussolini’s idea of a an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. ...
fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. ...
China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. ...
But in the battle between the two emergent fascist systems, China possesses powerful advantages. Communist Party cadres at least offer more than a moralising agenda; they can point to the country’s massive reduction of extreme poverty and a huge growth in monthly wages, up almost five-fold since 2006. At a time when the middle class is shrinking in the West, China’s middle class increased enormously from 1980 to 2000, although its growth appears to have slowed in recent years.
Like Mussolini, who linked his regime to that of Ancient Rome, China’s rulers look to Han supremacy and the glories of China’s Imperial past. “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping told party cadres a decade ago, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and [to] rejuvenate the Chinese nation.”
Kotkin recognizes at least that American right-wing libertarianism is part of the problem, not part of the solution:
the consolidation of oligarchic power is supported by massive lobbying operations and dispersals of cash, including to some Right-wing libertarians, who doggedly justify censorship and oligopoly on private property grounds.
Regrettably, however, Kotkin still does not connect this failure of the old liberal order in the West with the failure of the old moral order which gave it birth and on which it depended. This is because Kotkin still sees things in primarily materialistic terms.
Kotkin is oddly politically correct when he denounces possible recourse to nativism, which blinds him to the nativism which is at the heart of Chinese state capitalism and gives it much of its appeal and strength. He calls for "a re-awakening of the spirit of resistance to authority" in the West, not realizing that it was Protestantism which made that even possible in the first place.
The problem of the West is spiritual, and Catholicism will never be able to rise to the occasion of refounding it as long as globo-homo defines Rome. The whole idea is inimical to the notion of founding a nation "for our posterity".
Friday, January 25, 2019
Monday, January 14, 2019
Much smaller than first thought to be, the gig economy lies prostrate before the great wall of state capitalism
The Truth About the Gig Economy
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Monday, September 3, 2018
Like just about everyone else on the left, Joel Kotkin continues to twist himself in pretzels to avoid calling our system what it already is
Wednesday, June 27, 2018
Obama's fascist Larry Summers credits Chinese state capitalism for its advances instead of its thefts
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
The American Spectator singles out Michigan for its $16 billion in corporate welfare, but the cronyism trend is up 39% just in the top 10 states since 2015
Saturday, April 2, 2016
Since the 1990s 144,000 manufacturing and related jobs lost in Wisconsin due to free-trade agreements
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
New study says trade with China caused severe permanent harm to American workers
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Why capitalism, communism, socialism and fascism etc. turn out to be culs-de-sac
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Free-trade has hollowed out the middle class
Thursday, January 1, 2015
Updated: Global middle class hits one billion in 2014, but has actually declined since 2010
Update: The inaugural Global Wealth Report in 2010 here actually showed a LARGER global middle class adult population of 1.045 billion then vs. the 1.01 billion today, a 3.3% decline. As a percentage of the world's adult population, the middle class share also has declined, from 23.5% of all adults in 2010 to 21.5% in 2014, a decline of 8.5%.