Celebrated in American, censored at home

 

How delicious! Chloé Zhao won an Oscar yesterday in her adopted homeland, and the news has been censored in China, where she was born 39 years ago.

The news was briefly celebrated on Chinese social media, too, but the joyous posts didn't stay online very long. They were scrubbed by Xi Jinping's busy censors because Ms Zhao criticized her birth country in an interview eight years ago. 

In America by contrast, critics are celebrated. It's only those who go against the Woke consensus who are given a hard time. Indeed, I suspect that one reason "Nomadland" is in such favor is that it shows the hard lives of agricultural workers in California. 

Among other ironies, Ms Zhao is represented in the media as the first woman "of color" to win an Oscar for best director. Apparently this is considered a great event, even as America's best universities discriminate against Asian-American applicants. (If they didn't, they'd make up too large a portion of the student body, and in a Woke world that's inequitable.) 

Born in Bejing, Ms Zhao came to the US when she was in high school. She graduated from Mount Holyoke, where she'd likely have some difficulty being accepted today, were she eighteen and not famous.

So much for the folly of Brexit

The Good People in Britain and America have had a great time since since 2016, mocking the ignorant yobs who voted to leave the European Union. All sorts of bad things were certain to happen, as punishment richly deserved for their sins against globalism and the wise central government in Brussels. The upshot seems rather different. Britain's vaccination rate is the highest in Europe, with nearly 40 jabs per 100 people. Compare that with fewer than 12 in France, Germany, and Italy. Only on the fringes of the Continent (Hungary nearly 18, Denmark and Estonia nearly 15) do we see any significant progress at all, and none comes close to half what the clownish Boris Johnson has managed to do in Britain.

Oh, and Belgium, home of that government? Its vaccination rate is 10.4 overall, though I suspect it's a bit higher for members of the European Parliament.

Hurrah for the Swiss!

 

 

We can always depend on Switzerland, which in a referendum has decided, 51 percent to 49, to ban full-face coverings like the Burqa that Muslim women are forced by men to wear, not to mention the ski masks favored by rioters in other countries. Good for them! Extremismus stoppen, indeed!

Medical masks of the sort worn to avoid the Wuflu virus are, of course, permitted by the sensible Swiss, as are I'm sure ski masks worn by skiers on cold days.

FedEx: when it absolutely, positively must be thrown into a snowbank

 We got an email from FexEx last night: "Your package from PHOTO LAB was delivered on Tue, 12/22/2020 at 4:21pm." So where was it? Not in the Rubbermaid bin with the label, Put Packages Here. Not on the doorstep. Not in the garage or in either of the cars.

Finally one of the grandkids volunteered to walk out to the main road and look for it. She found the package, with its Fragile labels intact, stuck in a snowbank, one-third of a mile from our house.

Of the four package delivery services that bring stuff to us, Amazon is always the best, followed by UPS and the mail carrier. FedEx ranks at the bottom. And can I email FedEx to complain? Nah. User unknown!

The couple who brought us a vaccine

 

Let's now celebrate (legal) immigration! Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin were born in Turkey but emigrated to Germany, she the child of a surgeon, he the son of a "guest worker" at a Ford factory near Cologne. They grew up, became doctors, met, married (during their lunch hour), and founded a firm called BionTech. Playing off their expertise in cancer research, Dr Sahin last year sketched a template for a coronavirus vaccine. The American drug company Pfizer joined BionTech to develop the most promising of the candidates. Thus Germany created, the United States developed, and Britain this week approved the use of the world's first Covid-19 vaccine from a trustworthy company and country. (Seriously, would you want a jab from Vladimir Putin? Or Xi Jinping?) And all because two Turkish parents sought a better future in the West.

The campaign is over, and peace returns to America

 From the Rasmussen poll today:

Tuesday, December 01, 2020

U.S. voters now regard each other as a bigger enemy than Russia or North Korea and just as dangerous as China.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 24% of Likely U.S. Voters think Biden voters are America’s biggest enemy as 2020 draws to a close. The same number (24%) see China as enemy number one.

Nearly as many (22%) regard Trump voters as the biggest enemy, while 10% view Russia and seven percent (7%) North Korea as the largest threat to the United States. Eleven percent (11%) are more wary of something else.

The sorrows of the Taylors, father and son

The saddest part of Japan's mad vendetta against Carlos Ghosn is that Michael and Peter Taylor, the two adventurers who spirited the former Renault-Nissan chairman out of his confinement in Tokyo, are now themselves behind bars. They're being held in a bleak county jail near Boston. The elder Mr Taylor was awakened one morning in May, went to the door in his underwear, and found himself confronted by a dozen armed federal agents. (He had a ticket for that day's flight to Lebanon, which has no extradition treaty with Japan. Too bad he didn't make it!) "I thought I was dreaming," he later said. "I thought I was in Baghdad."

Mr Taylor's confusion is understandable. The whole affair has a third-world quality. Shame on Japan for trying to hold Mr Ghosn in perpetual confinement, and shame on the United States for abetting Japan's pursuit of the men who snatched him from durance indefinite.

A fourth man, Mark Kelley, is still mired in Japan's byzantine criminal justice system. Tricked into returning to the country when Mr Ghosn was arrested two years ago, he's defending himself in a trial not expected to end until some time next year. This was the foreigners' reward for turning the near-bankrupt Nissan around and making it more successful than the French company that rescued it.