Beginning Wednesday, China is playing host to a meeting in Tunxi ostensibly on Afghanistan and attendees include various neighbors of Afghanistan. Of greater interest are the side meetings taking place there.

China will host a series of meetings about Afghanistan on Wednesday, featuring representatives of Russia, the US, the Taliban, and South and Central Asian countries, as it ramps up diplomatic engagement with its troubled neighbour.

The meetings in Tunxi, in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui, will be a rare instance of officials from Moscow and Washington meeting since Russia invaded Ukraine last month.

The Chinese foreign ministry said on Tuesday that Yue Xiaoyong, China’s special envoy to Afghanistan, would host counterparts from the United States, Russia and Pakistan for the latest “troika plus” talks.

The four-way meeting will be held on the sidelines of a conference of ministers from Afghanistan’s neighbours, at which Foreign Minister Wang Yi will host ministers and officials from Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the Chinese ministry said.

Out of one of those side meetings came this little item.

Foreign Ministers of Russia and Iran Sergei Lavrov and Hossein Amir Abdollahian at a meeting in China confirmed the desire of both countries to strengthen cooperation in all areas, despite the sanctions imposed by Western countries against Moscow and Tehran, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement following the meeting.

Russia talking with Iran, in China. What could go wrong? Even though Lavrov has a shooting war on his hands, and has a hostile West to deal with, he still found time to fly to eastern China. A sign, I think, of the value Lavrov saw in making the trip.

What form this joint sanction-busting cooperation might take is unclear, but there are other interesting things to keep an eye on here. China made this comment at the conference (bold is mine)…

It’s almost impossible to put enough lipstick on the porcine Biden administration. All the polls are in the crapper and the only numbers that are going up are in the grocery aisles. Meanwhile, as Joel Kotkin notes, Biden and the rest of the party are doing their best Thelma and Louise imitation, especially where the environment is concerned: 

The cave-in to the greens has increased the Democrats’ economic vulnerability, particularly in the wake of Russian aggression and the continued role of China as the world’s dominant greenhouse-gas emitter. The well-funded American environmental elite lack the grudging sense of realism of their German counterparts, who have been forced to reconsider some of their energy policies in light of the invasion. But in resource-rich America, the green grandees still oppose boosting fossil-fuel energy supplies, despite 80 per cent of voters, and an equal percentage of Democrats, favouring the use of both fossil fuels and renewables. Public support for Net Zero / the Green New Deal hovers around 20 per cent.

You don’t want to get crosswise of the ol’ 80/20 rule, but somehow the Donks have pulled it off. And it’s got the old Clinton hands up in arms. Back to Kotkin:

Cultural issues represent another fault line between the bulk of the electorate and the tin-eared elites of the party. Democrats’ have embraced what former Bill Clinton strategist James Carville scathingly labels ‘the politics of the faculty lounge’, such as support for the increasingly discredited Black Lives Matter movement and its calls to ‘defund the police’. This idea may be beloved at places like Harvard, but among the less elevated mortals it is widely unpopular, even among minorities, including two of the nation’s Democratic African-American mayors, Houston mayor Sylvester Turner and New York City’s Eric Adams.

Voters view crime as the second-most pressing issue, after the economy and inflation. Here again the survey results are equally distressing for the progressive agenda. Voters, according to one recent survey, blame the Democrats for the current crime wave by a margin of two to one. Moderate Democrats, like retiring Florida congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, herself a refugee from Vietnam, found her support for legislation that would penalise undocumented criminals got her labeled as ‘anti-immigrant’ by the party’s dominant progressive mob.

Now it may surprise those of us in Minnesota that Black Lives Matter is increasingly discredited; Esme Murphy and the KARE Bears haven’t mentioned it much. But it should surprise no one that someone like Stephanie Murphy would lose support of the party apparat; on the bright side, she has thus far avoided being called a Russian operative, but it’s early and she might still get the full Tulsi if she’s not careful. Closer to home, it will be interesting to see how self-styled moderates like Dean “Everyone’s Invited” Phillips navigate the electorate.

There’s a long time between now and November, but it’s difficult to envision a reversal of the trends. One should never underestimate the ability of the Republican Party to blow it. Still, the Donks find events in the saddle and all the narrative engineers at their disposal can’t change the prices at Hy-Vee or Holiday. For nearly half a century, Joe Biden has wanted to be president in the worst way. And he’s getting his wish.

Green, “sustainable” energy policies that make middle class live unsustainable.

Transitioning from houses to apartments, from cars to mass transit.

Moving from meat to vegetables, with maybe some insect thrown in as a treat.

Hyperinflation, which serves mainly to make common savings and investment worthless, but does wonders for the wealth of the plutocrats, “futurists” and pols – who will give up no cars, houses, yachts ,warmth or food.

Seems like the “new world order” looks a lot like the old, pre-1776 world order, doesn’t it?

Victor Davis Hanson – perhaps more optimistic than I feel at the moment – in a piece you should read. Pull quote:

So a reset reckoning is coming—in reaction to the “new orders” championed by Biden and the Davos set. 

In the November 2022 midterms, we are likely to see a historic “No!” to the orthodox left-wing agenda that has resulted in unsustainable inflation, unaffordable energy, war, and humiliation abroad, spiraling crime, racial hostility—and arrogant defiance from those who deliberately enacted these disastrous policies. 

What will replace it is a return to what until recently had worked. 

I hope he’s right. The boundless stupidity of the “send me more stimmies” set – whose votes count just as much as those of smart people – serves as the counterexhibit.

One reason we study the past is because at its core, human nature is constant. Our fundamental needs and our capacity for good and evil can be recognized in any era. How people in the past reacted to circumstances can be predictive of how people in the present might react when faced with similar circumstances.

I’ll share an example of this. In a well-known passage in his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides records (more like imagines, as he wasn’t there) the Melian Dialogue (Book 5, 84–116), a (one-sided?) conversation between Athens and the people of the island of Melos in 416 BC.

At this point in the Peloponnesian War, Athens was still feeling secure in its naval power. In the first part of the war, Athens had major successes against Sparta at Naupactus, Pylos and Sphacteria. Defeats at Delium and Amphipolis though led to the Peace of Nicias between the two in 421 BC. Meant to last 50 years, it barely lasted 6.

In 416 BC, then, as the peace was unravelling, Athens sent a sizeable force to conquer Melos, the reasons for which aren’t relevant to this discussion. I’ll just add that while it’s easy to think of the ancient Greeks as a bunch of bearded guys sitting around in white robes yammering in the public square about philosophy and democracy, they were very much tribal people.

Old And Busted, One Week Ago: Russian forces, stymied by poor logistics and fierce Ukrainian resistance, start digging in to consolidate their gains around Kyiv and Kharkhiv.

New Flavor: “We’ll ‘conduct an operational pause‘, as a sign of good faith for negotiations”.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is at a coffee shop. He orders an egg souffle – the last one in the fridge. As the CASHIER is giving him the egg souffle, Avery LIBRELLE steps, unbeknownst to BERG, up into line behind.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, fuuuuuuor criying out loud, how ya been…

LIBRELLE: President BIden is showing the value of having a season hand with decades of experience in foreign policy in control.

BERG: Uh…

LIBRELLE: (Ignoring BERG for the moment, speaking to the CASHIER) I’ll have one of the cheese and onion egg souffles).

CASHIER: I’m sorry, ma’…er, si…er (Looks at BERG, terrified. BERG shrugs shoulders) …uh, we are out. We just sold the last one.

LIBRELLE: (Looks at BERG). So you got the last egg souffle.

BERG: Yeah, sorry – they are apparently lo…

LIBRELLE: I wanted an egg souffle.

BERG: I know, right? They’re keto, and they’re…

LIBRELLE: We need to sort this out.

BERG: I mean, I’m sorry. I didn’t plan it this way.

LIBRELLE: We need to reach a negotiated settlement on this impasse.

BERG: I mean, I already have it. I paid for it, I’m about to eat it. What “negotiated settlement” did you have in mind?

LIBRELLE: Someone needs to remove you from this coffee shop, and leave me the egg souffle.

BERG: I find your terms unacceptable.

LIBRELLE: Perhaps you need to just disappear.

BERG: You’ve followed a bag negotiating strategy with an even worse one, one that might be chargeable as assault.

LIBRELLE: It was just a harmless ad lib from my internal monologue.

BERG: Sort of like our putative President’s negotiating style.

LIBRELLE: Hey. That was a Biden joke. And you should talk; your Saint Ronald did the same thing when he told the Soviets to tear down the wall.

BERG: Calling for real estate improvements aren’t the same as asking someone to disappear the leader.

LIBRELLE: What are we going to do about the souffle?

(BERG takes a big bite).

LIBRELLE: Fascist!

BERG: (Muffled, with souffle in his mouth) Naturally.

And SCENE.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Three years ago, an employee who wanted to work remotely was routinely denied. All employees must come to the office. For the last two years, an employee who wanted to come to the office was routinely denied. All employees must work remotely. Today, the business magazines are full of articles on The Lessons of Covid. How can remote work increase employee satisfaction while trimming business cost? What has management learned?

Nothing. Management has decided all employees in our office are “hybrid” employees meaning we must come into the office AND we must work from home. Why? It’s the worst of both worlds. I waste expensive gas and contribute to global warming while commuting plus I maintain a home office at my expense to subsidize my employer’s operations. Why not one or the other?

Ahhhh, the true answer is revealed by the survey asking how many days per week I want to commute. The true answer is some people might be working remotely from Florida and allowing them to work remotely from out-of-state wouldn’t be fair. Oh? What about employees who live in Hudson? Prescott? Mason City? Where’s the cut-off line? There is no cut-off line. You just have to come in two days per week, which makes it uncomfortable enough to work from far away.

It’s not about productivity, morale, efficiency, or customer service. It’s about waaaaah, it’s not Fair, I don’t Get To, waaaaah! Lessons of Covid? We don’t need no stinking lessons, we’re management. We do what we want.

Joe Doakes

Some companies have painted themselves into corners; unable to find employees locally to replace people lost “the great resignation “, they recruited remotely, far and wide.

Hard to uncross that line.

This is a CD I’ve been meaning to get around to for a long time, and finally checked off that box. It features two members of Boston, Brad Delp and Barry Goudreau. It was recorded in Goudreau’s home studio and released in 2003. The cover and reverse photos were taken on the beach near Goudreau’s home.

Delp was the clear, high, strong voice of Boston, and while Goudreau (on guitar) was sometimes overshadowed by Tom Scholz, he was part of the founding of Boston and, pun intended, instrumental in the sound of the first two Boston albums that together have sold over 30 million copies.

Notes from, arguably, the worst retirement party ever.

I never watch the Oscars. Literally, not once since, maybe, college.

And I’m not about to start.

But I will say that I wanted to say this; in the entire history of standup comedy, I don’t believe anyone…

…has handled a heckler quite like that.

I wanted to.

But I won’t.

I will, however, say this: It’s entirely possible that the entire episode – the miked-jiust-well-enough audio, Smith stepping into the exact right “mark” to “throw” the “punch” so the camera angle couldn’t see the “impact”, Rock’s cool, calm, collected “response” to the “hit” – wasn’t a perfectly constructed “stage punch”, straight out of a community theater production of West Side Story.

But if it were, it wouldn’t have come across any differently.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

did everything right.

did not initiate conflict.

size disparity – reasonable fear of great bodily harm

attempted to retreat

used only the force necessary to end the attack – one shot

dug out her phone to call 911 immediately after

good girl, proud of her

Joe Doakes

[Author’s note: this completely unoriginal attempt to pick low-hanging fruit so low it would take a ladder to reach cantaloupe was arrived at independently from our host’s post… in the future we will strive to be unoriginal in original ways…]

This is Jeopardy! Our contestants today are our returning champion Warren, from Bakersfield CA. And, Ketanji Brown Jackson from Washington DC.

Here’s our host, Bert Convoy!

[Applause light on]

[Bert] Thank you! Let’s get right to it.

(later in the game)

[KBJ] I’ll take Facts of Life for $200.

[Bert] And it’s a Video Daily Double! What is this person?

[KBJ] I, I can’t… I’m not sure. I’m not a biologist.

[Warren] What is a woman?

[Bert] Correct!

(later in the game)

Exhibit 33,045

SCENE: Mitch BERG is having a glass of wine at the bar in Whole Foods in Saint Paujl, after a day of vigorous shopping. Lost in the reverie, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE has walked in.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, shhhhhuuuure enough, it’s Avery. Long time no see. What’s u..

LIBRELLE: Marsha Blackburn asked Ketanji Brown Jackson a stupid, badgering question at her confirmation hearing to be the best Supreme Court justice ever.

BERG: Best?

LIBRELLE: She is the most qualified jurist in history! The Washington Post showed it! Pictures, being science, never lie!

BERG: Well, not so much.

LIBRELLE: I never read National Review.

BERG: Clearly. So why do you think it was a “stupid, badgering question”?

LIBRELLE: It’s purely politicized, and she’ll never have to rule on that. “What’s a woman?” Mitch, please.

BERG: First: SCOTUS hearings, politicized? Bring that up when Robert Bork, Janice Rogers Brown, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are up for confirmation.

LIBRELLE: Those people were all in the past…

BERG: Exactly. As to never having to rule on that? Perhaps. But answering “what is a woman?”

LIBRELLE: It was an unfair question for which she had no time to prepare.

BERG: (looking at watch). A woman is an adult human with two “X” chromosomes. Three seconds. No prep time. And I didn’t even go to Harvard Law School.

LIBRELLE: She will never have to rule on what a woman is.

BERG: Perhaps. But she’ll be asked to rule on questions where much of the population does know what the answer is; the fact she’s willing to equivocate on something this comical, to keep the “progressive” wing of her party happy, is a very bad sign.

LIBRELLE: There are no such quesitons in the law! Its science!

BERG: When does human life being?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.

BERG: When do community standards violate free association?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not the community.

BERG: Huh. When does the right to free speech interfere with private property rights?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not a professor of rhetoric.

BERG: Huh. What does the phrase “Right of the People” mean?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not a law professor.

BERG: A SCOTUS justice will be ruling on any or all of those things, including in the next term.

LIBRELLE: I don’t care. It was still a stupid question.

BERG: Nah. It fixed the front lines in the culture war – the issue beneath all the other issues in the upcoming mid-terms. And it showed which side are the metaphorical Russians, and which are the figurative Ukrainians.

LIBRELLE: Bla bla bla. So where are the avocados?

BERG: I don’t know. I’m not a grocer.

(And SCENE)

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Giant spiders falling from the sky. My Exodus is a little rusty, which plague is this? And while we’re at it . . .

Joe Doakes

This Thursday piece in the Washington Post caught my eye for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, but it is illustrative of how when war is unleashed, the shrapnel goes in all directions.

In a Minnesota classroom, two weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, a high school teacher asked her class where they would travel if they could go anywhere in the world. Barrett Buck, 16, who was adopted from Moscow at 15 months old, began replying, “Russia, because —” A scoff cut her off before she could finish the sentence.

Buck continued, saying she’d like to experience more of the country of her birth. Then she added, “I don’t support Russia and what’s going on.”

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has complicated the lives of kids like Buck, one of tens of thousands of children adopted from Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s, and their families, as they navigate layers of feelings about their Russian identity amid the backdrop of an unprovoked war.

Mara Kamen, chair of Families for Russian and Ukrainian Adoption (FRUA), a volunteer-run organization shepherding a network of about 7,000 member families who have adopted children from the former Soviet bloc, says kids and teens adopted from Russia have felt intense hurt these past few weeks.

My son and daughter are both adopted from Russia, though at different times and from different places. We made a total of four trips to Russia, two for each of them. With our son, our first day with him in the orphanage was 9/11. With our daughter, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 started the day after we got to Moscow (which, looking at the calendar, within the last week was exactly nineteen years ago.) I might share those stories at some point down the road.

Could we at least call this what it really is – bribing you, with your own money?

Hand one to Fred Melo of the Pioneer Press – he’s done the unthnkable, for a Twin Cities mainstream media figure; actually reporting on the actual state of life on the “Vomit Comet” (AKA Green Line)..

A friend of the blog emailed re this story:

I’d rather double down on reminding people why the Green Line is so awful than be snarky. But, with all the urbanists subtweeting Fred Melo’s post about smoking/drinking on light rail, them tweeting that smoking is no big deal, not a safety issue, I kind of want to ask if smokers will be welcome again at bars/restaurants again. 

It’s a mostly smokeless smoke.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Check me on this – are you seeing what I’m seeing

Joe Doakes

As much as the climate panic crowd wants desperately to believe in the dream that we can glue solar panels to the roof of our vehicle, nail a 3-inch diameter battery-operated fan on the back bumper, do away with all fossil fuels and still toodle down the road at 70 mph and heat our homes with a windmill in the back yard and notice no economic impact, the world runs on petroleum products. Without them, we’re living in the Little House on the Prairie.

With 41% of their gas imports coming from Russia, Europe knows full well how dependent they are Russia. Go figure but they like staying warm in the winter. (And yet, with eyes wide open Germany still embarked on ending their nuclear program. Pro Tip: Never let leftists run your country) They are in a bind when it comes to imposing meaningful sanctions on Russia imports, and everyone knows it.

A significant portion of that gas transits through Ukraine. Though the percentage has dropped over time, according to Statista at least a third of Russian imports comes through Ukraine.

The St. Paul school board voted to keep masks on kids.

Bear in mind, the districts “Director of public health and wellness” recommended dropping the mandate:

“Effective 12:01 a.m. on March 28, that we move forward with the following changes: Masks are not required with low- to medium-community case rates in Ramsey County,” Langworthy said while presenting a slide with numbers.

One of the boards members responded (with emphasis added):

Concerned board members argued taking action, based on numbers that would be delivered with a delay, would be too late.

“If it was from the previous week’s data, we receive it the following Thursday and then we implement masks on Monday, we’d be implementing it from previous weeks’ data though, correct?” board member Chauntyll Allen said. “So, the surge would be happening, basically. It would already be happening — we wouldn’t have masks, we would find out about it on Thursday, and we would implement masks Monday — but from Tuesday or Wednesday the week before until Thursday, students would still be walking around without masks as the surge is existing.”

Ms. Allen has done an admirable, If inadvertent, job of illustrating Kevin Williamson’s thesis that politics is the least efficient possible way of getting anything that matters done.

As far as making public health decisions there anything but reflections of the current state of political logrolling?

You know where I’m going with this, right?

The defining jape of the current economic contortions may have been a piece from last week by Teresa Ghilarducci at Bloomberg, had some “advice” for Americans making “less than $300,000 a year” and coping with inflation:

Inflation stings most if you earn less than $300K. Here’s how to deal:

➡ Take the bus

➡ Don’t buy in bulk

➡ Try lentils instead of meat

➡ Nobody said this would be fun

Ignore, for a moment, that the price of Lentils is apparently outstripping the price of meat:

…and that very few Americans live where buses are, much less get them to where they need to be, and that no s**t it’s not “fun”, seeing your retirement savings getting chewed up and spat out by the inflation that your party brought on.

This particular line needs to be held up against every Democrat, everywhere, this fall.

Most readers of this feature knew the truth in 2020 — Hunter Biden, the uber-prodigal son of the now Leader of the Free World, abandoned a laptop computer at a repair shop in Delaware. The laptop was filled to the brim with embarrassing and yes, incriminating evidence of financial malfeasance and videotaped debauchery. It was real and yes, it was spectacular. And the New York Post was on the case.

But you weren’t allowed to know any of it, and if you tried to tell anyone what you weren’t allowed to know, you were in for a banning:

Twitter went so far as to lock users out of their accounts if they shared this piece of journalism that was clearly in the public interest. It locked the Twitter accounts of the actual White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, and the New York Post itself. Here we had the spokesperson for the democratically elected president of the United States and the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in America being cast out of social media for the crime of sharing a story that was true. This was surely the most egregious, arrogant interference in democratic politics and press freedom carried out by corporate elites in recent times.

Recent times? I think the term we’re looking for here is ever. And as Brendan O’Neill discusses in the piece linked above, the implications are chilling:

This was a truly extraordinary moment in the political life of the United States of America. A free-thinking daily newspaper published a fascinating report on the emails and behaviour of the then vice-president’s son and it found itself shamed, blocked and defamed for doing so. Californian oligarchs, former members of the American deep state and virtually the entire opinion-forming set of the East Coast clubbed together to denounce the Post, ban it from Twitter, and rubbish its reporting as the handiwork of evil Ruskies. Yet some of them now admit the story was actually true, a fact that has been clear since at least December 2020, when federal authorities started investigating Hunter. What took place following the Post’s breaking of the laptop story was a terrifying assault on media freedom, the right to dissent and truth itself.

We are free, theoretically, to express our views. From the founding of the republic, we have been able to drag a soapbox to the public square and hold forth. Twitter isn’t the only public square available; in form and in fact, it’s an upholstered cesspool. But it is the realm where our betters and minders, coextensive as they are, disgorge the received wisdom of our age. And it’s where the game is played. And the game is rigged. Back to O’Neill:

But it was the elites’ brutal stomping on this story that should worry us more. It confirmed that the new woke elites will do whatever it takes to crush inconvenient facts, to bury stories and ideas and beliefs that pose a threat to their power or their interests. And it confirmed that Big Tech billionaires will happily engage in explicit political censorship to protect their allies and sponsors from scrutiny. If an established newspaper like the New York Post can be forcefully locked out of the 21st-century public square, just imagine what could be done to you or me if we ever happened upon some facts the elites would prefer to keep hidden.

There’s a chilling line in the 1939 French film La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game). The character Octave (played by Jean Renoir, the film’s director) says:

You see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.

Those who control the game and the general discourse in the country have their reasons as well. The reason is power, nothing more and nothing less. If we are to play the game, we’d better understand that.

…somebody tells you what a genius and go in miracle was, or how she was the “leader of the free world in pro for four years, just mention this.

…I’ve seen in my lifetime is this: when I was a kid, famine still stalked Africa and Asia.

And today, worldwide, obesity is a bigger problem than hunger, in the third world. This has never happened in all of human history.

And it can all end tomorrow.