Fox’s Bimbo vs China’s Brain

July 17, 2019

The Bimbo, an attractive but unintelligent young woman is Trish Regan, a mouthpiece for untrustworthy Fox News, and the Brain is China’s Liu Xin who is an anchor for China’s CGTN.

The South China Morning Post reported, both women are well known in their own countries and regularly deliver opinions that support the administrations of their respective countries. The debate will focus on the trade war, but the two anchors could also clash on topics ranging from foreign policy to human rights.

“Liu, 44, hosts a current affairs programme called The Point and was an English literature major at Nanjing University, winning a number of awards in English competitions,” explaining why I call Liu the Brain.

Trish Regan, a former beauty pageant contestant, was Miss New Hampshire and represented her home state in Miss America 1994 pageant where she probably met Donald Trump who bought the pageant in 1996.

Regan went on to study voice (singing) in Austria and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston before earning a B.A. in history at Columbia University in 2000.

How do you think Regan’s education helped qualify her to become a Fox News mouthpiece for Donald Trump? In her shows, Trish Regan typically supports President Donald Trump’s line on China policy. Trump is an avid Fox viewer.

“We can make China’s life much harder economically, I promise you that, than they can make us,” Regan said on May 6. “We are their number one customer … Tariffs are our weapon. This is an example of a president [Trump] doing exactly what a president should do.”

Regan went on to say: “From logos to software, you name it, the Chinese have stolen it. And they will keep on stealing it if left unchecked … I’m not willing to give up on being the world’s largest economy so easily. I’m not OK with another country stealing it away from us.”

Liu replied, “Compared to other developed countries, the US has the highest income inequality, the highest youth poverty rate, one of the highest infant mortality rates. Its citizens live shorter and sicker lives.”

Fox’s Trish Regan opened the 15-minute encounter with the show’s only real argument – over whether Liu was speaking for herself or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – which led to the two talking over each other in the most intense moments of the interview.

“Trish, I have to get it straight. I am not a member of the Communist Party of China (CCP),” Liu said after Regan introduced her as a member of the CCP. “This is on the record, so please don’t assume that I’m a member, and I don’t speak for the Communist Party of China; and I’m here today, only speaking for myself as Liu Xin, a journalist working for CGTN.”

When the Fox-Trump Bimbo attempted to pin down the Brain over the theft of intellectual property she told Liu there was “evidence that China has stolen enormous amounts of intellectual property, hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth.”

Liu replied that IP infringements were “a common practice probably in every part of the world”, including the United States.

The Fox Bimbo was wrong and Liu was right. Chief Executive Dot Net listed the Best and Worst Countries for Intellectual Property Protection and China “came in just over halfway down the list and China was praised for the introduction of basic IP rights and proposed patent reforms.”

If you are curious about the actual ranking that is published annually by The Global IP Center dot com, click the link in this sentence and discover that there are 25-countries ranked lower than China and Venezuela is in last place proving that Liu was right when she said IP infringements was “a common practice probably in every part of the world.”

The Global IP Center’s annual report says, “according to Index data in this edition and in previous editions, only China has shown real—albeit incremental—signs of positive reform efforts. China’s score has increased again this year, and China has been a consistent performer across all six editions of the Index.” … “However, over the past 3 editions, America’s performance has weakened.”

In addition, if you take the time to check Media Bias/Fact Check, you will discover the Bimbo’s employer Fox News (this link will take you to the Media Bias site) is rated strongly Right-Biased due to wording and story selection that favors the right based on poor sourcing and the spreading of conspiracy theories that later must be retracted after being widely shared.

“Fox hosts may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports and omit (leave out) reporting of information that may damage conservative causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy.”

Factual Reporting: MIXED
Country: USA
World Press Freedom Rank: USA 45/180

How about Liu Xin’s employer CGTN?

China Global Television Network was rated LEAST BIASED by Media Bias/Fact Check. These sources have minimal bias and use very few loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes). The reporting is factual and usually sourced. These are the most credible media sources.

Factual Reporting: HIGH
Country: China
World Press Freedom Rank: 176/180

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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The History of Democracy in Hong Kong is so Short it Never Happened

June 19, 2019

Recent Western headlines are shouting:

Hong Kong Protesters face a powerful enemy

Hong Kong Protest: ‘Nearly two million’ join demonstration

Huge Hong Kong protests continue after the government postpones controversial bill

Before I focus on the current protests in Hong Kong, first, a small history lesson.

China never willingly gave Hong Kong to the British Empire in 1842. Instead, China lost Hong Kong during the Opium Wars, and later leased adjacent territories to the British under pressure in 1860 at the end of the Second Opium War when the UK gained a perpetual lease over the Kowloon Peninsula that’s across the strait from Hong Kong Island.

This agreement was part of the Convention of Beijing that ended that war, a war started by England and France. In each case the British Empire, France, and sometimes the United States, were victorious and gained commercial privileges and legal and territorial concessions from China.

These conflicts over the opium trade was the start of the era of unequal treaties.

Then in 1898, the British and Chinese governments signed the Second Convention of Peking and “Britain was granted an additional 99-years of rule over the Hong Kong colony.”

Fast forward ninety-nine years and on December 19, 1984, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, and Britain agreed to return not only the New Territories but also Kowloon and Hong Kong itself when the lease term expired on July 1, 1997. China promised to implement One Country, Two Systems policy, so for fifty years, Hong Kong citizens could continue to practice capitalism and political freedoms forbidden on the mainland.

However, for most of its history under British rule, executive power in Hong Kong was concentrated in the hands of the colony governor, a position appointed by the British crown without any democratic input from Hong Kong citizens. The introduction of elected representatives determined by local elections was limited to the role of advisory councils, and that didn’t start until after the 1984 agreement by the British to hand Hong Kong over to China.

Today, since Hong Kong has never been a democracy, who fears being extradited to mainland China?

You might want to see the list of crimes in the new extradition law that so many Hong Kong citizens are mad about … or fear.

Number One: Murder or manslaughter, including criminal negligence causing death; culpable homicide; assault with intent to commit murder.

Click the previous link and discover the other thirty-six crimes. You might want to also read the nine that were removed like “offenses involving the unlawful use of computers” or “offenses against the law relating to environmental pollution or protection of public health”.

For hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong citizens to be out in the streets protesting and holding thousands of printed signs that all look the same (really), there must be a lot of frauds and crooks in that city fearing they are going to lose their freedom to commit crimes.

Who paid for all those signs to be printed by the same company – the CIA?

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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China does not need MAGA Man’s United States

May 22, 2019

Once MAGA Man, the Deplorable Serial-Liar Donald Trump declared a tariff war with most of the world, China started looking for other markets to buy the same products it has always bought from the United States.

For instance, “China’s soybean imports from the United States plunged to zero in November, marking the first time since the trade war between the world’s two largest economies started that China has imported no U.S. supplies,” CNBC said, “Instead, China has leaned on Brazilian imports to replace the U.S. cargoes, customs data showed on Monday.”

About 120-million Chinese work in manufacturing but China’s total workforce is estimated to be almost 800-million and a lot of what is made in China is also sold to Chinese consumers, and Industry Week says, “China’s export share of its gross domestic product has fallen from 37 percent in 2007 to slightly less than 20 percent today, an important outgrowth of a decade-long rebalancing.” (reported on April 2018)

Because of the explosive growth of China’s middle-class over the last thirty years from no middle class to more than 400-million, China doesn’t have to rely on the U.S. market as much as it once did. That’s why China is in a stronger position to give MAGA Man the middle finger and tell him to “F” off.

In fact, China is already doing it by being passive aggressive. To achieve this, China is punishing his supporters by threatening their businesses and/or jobs.

“Over the summer,” The New York Times reported, “the Chinese took aim at Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. In his home state, Kentucky, 18,000 jobs depend on whiskey. So they (China) put a 25 percent tariff on it. Representative Paul D. Ryan, the House speaker, is from Wisconsin, a leading producer of cranberries. So cranberries were added to the list, for good measure. And China went after pork and soybeans, two of the leading farm products in Iowa, home of Charles E. Grassley, a powerful member of the Senate Agriculture Committee.”

The Financial Times also reports, “China is shifting its growth model to one relying more on consumption … In 2000, US consumption levels were 13-times larger than China’s but are now only three-times larger and the gap is closing. … The plausible assumption, however, is that over the next decade a mass consumer society will emerge in China. This will begin to approach that of the US in scale …”

In addition, The Chicago Tribune says.  “A Chinese-owned pork producer is eligible for federal payments under President Donald Trump’s $12 billion farm bailout, a program that was established to help U.S. farmers hurt by Trump’s trade war with China.” That means when China buys American pork, they are really buying Chinese pork raised and butchered in the United States. And that isn’t the whole story. According to AXIOS, “Chinese investors and firms own (the) majority of 2,400 U.S. companies.”

Oh, and MAGA Man means Moscow’s Agent Governing America. MAGA has nothing to do with Making America Great Again and everything to do with destroying the United States. Since that is obvious to China’s leaders, they are already adapting by finding goods in other countries that they once bought from the U.S.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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Power Corrupts and Great Wealth buys that Power

February 20, 2019

In the United States, autocratic billionaires are destroying the country. For instance, since 1973, the Koch brothers have systematically and deliberately built a machine to subvert America’s Constitutional Republic. Charles and David Koch are not alone. They have at least 2,000 other wealthy allies that belong to an organization the Kochs launched in 1973. It is called ALEC, The American Legislative Exchange Council, a non-profit, private sector organization with one goal, to subvert the U.S. Constitution and strip the federal and state governments of their power.

But in China, the Chinese Communist Party is attempting to limit the power of that country’s billionaires. For instance, in 2013, The Atlantic asked, Why Do Chinese Billionaires Keep Ending Up in Prison?  The subtitle says, “In China, the rich get poorer.”

The Atlantic continues: “In the last fifteen years, China has produced greater overall wealth than any other country. The number of its billionaires has gone from a mere 15 to around 250 in just six years, but for a number of these people this vaulted status is short-lived. According to one study, 17 percent of those on the list end up squealing their way to court or end up in jail. If they’re lucky, those who are caught are investigated and jailed. Some are even executed.” …

“What accounts for the sharp rise and fall of China’s wealthiest? In a business environment in which personal connections and favors — referred to as guanxi in Chinese — predominate, many tycoons have amassed large fortunes without concern of rules and regulations. However, such a fast and loose atmosphere can cut both ways.”

That piece in The Atlantic appeared in 2013. Five years later according to Business Insider (December 27, 2018), China now has 373 billionaires, a 5% increase in billionaires since the previous year (2017) while the US, where billionaires run rampant spreading corruption with their great wealth, and seldom if ever end up in prison, there are 585 with an increase of 4% from the previous year.

Lord Acton, a member of Parliament in the UK (in office 1859 – 1865), wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you super-add the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.”

While the United States is drowning in the corruption Lord Acton mentions, China is struggling to contain the abuse of that power.  For instance, the Los Angeles Times ran this piece in 2017: “Some of China’s richest and most powerful men have mysteriously vanished.”

If U.S. citizens Charles and David Koch had been Chinese citizens, they would have probably vanished a long time ago and the world would be better place without them.

Beware, China, great wealth can become a terminal cancer and it will eventually eat you too no matter how hard your leaders try to stop it.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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What might happen to Donald Trump if he was a Chinese citizen?

September 11, 2018

On July 16, 2013, Business Insider reported, Twenty-two Chinese People Were Handed The Death Sentence For White Collar Crime.” … About 4,000 people a year are executed annually in the country, according to human rights organization Dui Hua. And a number of those executed are white collar criminals.”

In the United States, The Christian Science Monitor asked, “How much jail time do white-collar criminals deserve?” For an answer, I turned to Grand Jury Target.com to discover, “the average sentence imposed in fraud cases in fiscal year 2015 was 27 months.”

In China, a convicted white-collar criminal might be executed but in the U.S. the average sentence for fraud (a white collar crime) was 27 months.

What about government officials in China?

Time.com reports, This Is How Much Money You Can Take in Bribes Before the Chinese Authorities Execute You: How much is an errant Chinese official’s life worth? Three million renminbi, or $463,000, according to a statement released on April 18 by Chinese judicial authorities. The legal clarification makes the death penalty applicable to anyone who either embezzles, or accepts bribes of, that sum or more.”

If Donald Trump is eventually found guilty of laundering money for the Russian mob, accepting bribes, cheating on his taxes, fraud, bribing others that know about his crimes to silence them, and maybe even murder, he’s lucky he doesn’t live in China. There’s a big difference between spending 27-months in prison in the U.S. or being executed in China for the same alleged crime or crimes.

If you are curious, you might want to read Trump’s Dirty Money.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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Subscribe to my newsletter to hear about new releases and get a free copy of my award-winning, historical fiction short story “A Night at the Well of Purity”.

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