China

A conversation with Gordon G. Chang, for Gatestone Institute

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Mar 17, 2021

Gordon Guthrie Chang is a columnist, blogger, television pundit, author, and lawyer. He is known for books like The Coming Collapse of China—and more recently, The Great US.-China Tech War.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Now that Donald Trump has left the White House—how do you assess the situation of the new communist giant, namely Xi Jinping’s China?

Gordon G. Chang: Xi Jinping now has, in President Biden, the American leader he has always wanted. Biden with his executive orders and other actions has so far given China many gifts and has asked for nothing in return. Among these unilateral concessions are his lifting a ban on Chinese electrical equipment, postponing rules against investments in China’s military-linked companies, rejoining the Beijing-dominated World Health Organization, and delaying prohibitions on Chinese apps.

As a result of receiving so many free gifts from Biden, Xi seems more arrogant and is demanding even more.

We see Xi’s new demands in his intransigent position going into Thursday’s meeting in Anchorage. China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, and his subordinate, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, look as if they are going to Alaska not to engage in meaningful discussion, but to lecture U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and to dictate the terms of the relationship going forward. Beijing has brought “arrogance” to a whole new level.

Yang’s unpleasant February 5 telephone call with Blinken is a warning of Xi Jinping’s new no-compromise attitude.

China’s diplomacy in the communist era has always been tightly tied to its internal political dynamics. The hostility evident today is a clear reflection of Xi Jinping’s I-own-the-world attitude.

Grégoire Canlorbe: How do you account for the Iranian partnership with China and Russia?

Gordon G. Chang: Iran is an enemy of the United States, so it is no surprise it has linked up with other enemies of America, such as China and Russia. There is, as some have mentioned, a new Axis of Evil.

Analysts say these regimes cannot form an enduring partnership. That may be true, but it is not the point. The point is, at this moment, they are working hard and effectively as a group. They are frustrating the United States, and they are frustrating the international community.

Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran are working well together because they share goals and identify the same enemy: the United States. This, as they find new ways to cooperate, is enough to make them exceedingly dangerous.

The new 25-year arrangement between Beijing and Tehran is an indication that bad actors can now have good relations among themselves.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Do you believe the COVID-19 pandemic serves as a bacteriological weapon of Peking to weaken America, while tightening the Chinese links with Iran and Russia?

Gordon G. Chang: We do not yet know the origin of COVID-19, but it likely came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That facility was re-engineering coronaviruses—gain-of-function experiments—and did not adhere to established safety procedures and protocols.

If the disease in fact escaped from that lab, as new evidence suggests, the coronavirus is almost certainly a biological weapon.

Yet, whether the coronavirus came from the lab or not, Xi Jinping turned the pathogen into a biological weapon. He took steps—such as lying about the contagiousness of the disease and pressuring other countries to accept arrivals from China while locking down his own country—to ensure that the virus infected the rest of the world. He acted maliciously and has now killed almost 2.7 million people outside his country.

Grégoire Canlorbe: In the contemporary “cold tech war” between China and America, how do you sum up the advantageous and detrimental aspects of Chinese culture—with respect to the American culture? Concerning the Western big tech companies that are Facebook, Amazon, etc., do you believe they are allies to America against Peking—and against their Chinese homologs (i.e., Baidu, Alibaba, Huawei, etc.)?

Gordon G. Chang: Culture has little to do with China’s advances in science and technology. Those advances are the result of Beijing’s determination and focus over the course of decades. Chinese leaders set a goal to dominate tech, and they have employed every tool at their disposal. They will stop at nothing to own the tech of tomorrow because they understand that tech dominance will give them economic and geopolitical dominance as well.

The adoption of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan this month shows Beijing’s priorities on tech. Tech spending almost doubled during the preceding five-year period, and it is set to grow fast from now through 2025.

China can innovate, and it can steal. Most important, it can concentrate its attention on goals.

The big tech companies are certainly not loyal to America. They are, like many companies, loyal to profits. In other words, they are loyal to themselves.

They will go wherever they can to make a buck—or a yuan—and at the moment they think China is rich pickings for them. In the long run, it will not be, but that is how they now analyze the situation.

Tech giants, such as Microsoft, that helped China develop facial-recognition systems to control racial minorities, apparently have no qualms about helping the Communist Party commit crimes against humanity. We must shame them, and others with the means—mainly those holding governmental authority—must stop them. It is up to Washington to prevent the tech giants from enriching and strengthening a hostile Chinese regime.

Grégoire Canlorbe: In your eyes, what should be done to turn Hong Kong into a sovereign state like Taiwan?

Gordon G. Chang: China’s Communist Party is ruthless. It will continue to rule Hong Kong until it can no longer do so. The way to free Hong Kong, ultimately, is to end the Communist Party. Once the territory is free, its people can decide whether to seek sovereign status.

In the meantime, we Americans have every reason to stop China in that territory. If Xi Jinping thinks he can take over Hong Kong without cost, he will be emboldened to go after other areas. We must establish deterrence.

If Xi feels he controls Hong Kong, he will have more time and resources to challenge Taiwan, Japan, India, the United States, and the rest of the world.

Beijing’s territorial ambitions have grown during the course of this century. Xi Jinping will not stop until he is stopped.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. In the 1990s many Hong Kong movie directors came to Hollywood. Then they preferred to return home—even though Hong Kong, henceforth, was back in the bosom of communist China. How do you account for their decision?

Gordon G. Chang: Money, fame, better Chinese food.

That conversation was initially published by the Gatestone Institute, in March 2021

A conversation with Howard Bloom, for The Postil Magazine

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Mai 4, 2020

Howard Bloom started in theoretical physics and microbiology at the age of ten and spent his early years in science. Then, driven by the desire to study mass human emotion through the lens of science, he went into a field he knew nothing about, popular culture. He founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry and worked with superstars like Prince, Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Billy Joel, Queen, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Billy Idol, Joan Jett, Styx, Hall and Oates, Simon & Garfunkel, Run DMC, and Chaka Khan. Bloom went back to his formal science in 1988 and, since then, has published seven books on human and cosmic evolution, including The God Problem, Global Brain, and The Lucifer Principle. Called “next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, [and] Freud” by Britain’s Channel 4 TV, and “the next Stephen Hawking” by Gear magazine, he is the subject of BRIC TV’s documentary The Grand Unified Theory of Howard Bloom.

Grégoire Canlorbe: As an entrepreneur in the public relations industry, you were particularly active under the Reagan era. How do you explain that the eighties saw both a return to some conservative values and an explosion of creativity and coolness in music and movies?

Howard Bloom: That’s a very good question. I’ve never thought of that connection before. My wife had been a socialist when I met her in the 1960s. And then in the 1970s she became a conservative. So she was siphoning money out of our bank account and giving it to Ronald Reagan’s political campaigns—without telling me. She knew I hated Reagan. But I never connected Ronald Reagan with what was going on in popular music at that point. In the 1960s popular music was the music of rebellion. Rock music was about raising your fist and saying to adults: “I have a right to be an individual. I have a right to exist.” Rock was in tune with the hippie philosophy: “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” And, “We’re here to overturn the establishment.” In other words, rock and roll was part of a rebellion whose political activists were working to toss people our parent’s age out of power. That was the 1960s. But there was no overt philosophy—there was no ideology—of rebellion in the 1970s and the 1980s. However if you look at the attitude of the artists who emerged, it was sheer rebellion.

Joan Jett got onstage and raised her fist. And the way she raised her fist was the strongest part of her message. She was a woman. And as a woman, you were expected to be like Grace Slick or Janis Joplin: the guys had the guitars, the power instruments, and you did not. You simply crooned into the microphone. But Joan was saying: “I’m going to take over the fucking guitar, myself. I have the power. I own the power on stage. And I am going to rebel as a self-contained entity not needing the “weapons” of “males with guitars.” My band? Hey, that’s just an extension of me.” Joan’s was the rebellion of girls who had been raised with working mothers. And for a middle class girl to be raised by a working mother was something brand new. It was a result of the invention of indoor plumbing, the washing machine, the drier, and the dishwasher. Women were no longer the slaves of water-hauling and clothes washing. And the women’s liberation movement had given them the freedom to compete with men in the workplace. Now the daughters of these liberated women had a very new experience of what it meant to be female. And that sense came to a head in Joan Jett. Or it came to a fist. But as for men, I mean, look at several of my other clients. Billy Idol also raised his fist in a gesture of rebellion. Did the anger of these fists have anything to do with the Reagan era? It’s hard to tell.

John Mellencamp also came to the lip of the stage with his fist raised. If you were here, I could show you the difference between the raised fist of each of those three artists. Each made a slightly different muscular statement—a statement made with muscles. And then, there were bands that were already slipping into acceptance of a parent’s generation, and acceptance of an older generation. Not rebellion, but acceptance. And those were bands like Spandau Ballet, Berlin, which were both my bands, and a bunch of others. Later, the whole attitude of rebellion would disappear from popular music. At least, it would be minimized significantly. In fact, Michael Jackson would live with his mother, his father, and his brothers—an unthinkable act among the rock rebels. And that business of raising your fist on stage would no longer be part of the package, if you were a rock ‘n’ roller. In Michael Jackson it would be replaced by fierce pointing.

A conversation with Peter Frost, for American Renaissance

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Mar 22, 2020

Peter Frost is a Canadian anthropologist. His main research interest has been the role of sexual selection in highly visible human traits, notably diverse hair and eye colors. Other interests include vitamin D metabolism in northern hunting peoples and gene-culture coevolution, such as genetic pacification due to the state monopoly on violence.

Grégoire Canlorbe: You are notably known for your claim that the most plausible origin for the high frequency of light coloration of skin in European ethnicities lies in sexual selection (rather than in natural selection). Could you remind us of your argument?

Peter Frost: It’s not just light skin. It’s also the extraordinary variety of hair and eye colors. I prefer to begin with them because they are much less explainable by anything other than sexual selection.

Take hair color. Most humans have black hair and one allele for hair color. Europeans have over two hundred for colors ranging from black to blond. The conventional explanation is straightforward: as humans entered higher latitudes, with less solar radiation, there was less selection for dark skin and, consequently, an accumulation of defective alleles for pigmentation. So the number of hair colors grew as a side effect.

That scenario has two problems. First, the genetic linkage between skin color and hair color is weak: if we took all humans with black hair, we would have a group with the full range of skin colors. Second, millions of years are needed to accumulate that many alleles through relaxation of selection. Yet modern humans have been in Europe for scarcely 45,000 years.

Did Europeans get their hair colors from the Neanderthals? According to a study of five alleles for red hair, one of them seems to be an archaic introgression, but the others are of modern human origin. Even if we assume that all of the alleles for hair color had slowly accumulated during the long existence of the Neanderthals, the timeline is still too short — at most three quarters of a million years. Furthermore, even if they all had a Neanderthal origin, we would still need to explain how they reached their current prevalence. Europeans today are only 1 to 4% Neanderthal.

That’s not all. Eye color, too, diversified during the same 45,000 years. So we have two color polymorphisms, with different genetic causes, developing in parallel within the same limits of time and space. There must have been a process of selection. Something helped preserve those new colors and pass them on to subsequent generations.

That something, in my opinion, was sexual selection. It begins when too many of one sex have to compete for too few of the other. The latter are in a buyer’s market and can pick and choose among prospective mates. Conversely, the “sellers” are in a worse position and have to market themselves as best they can. The successful ones are those who can attract attention and hold it as long as possible, typically by means of bright colors.

A conversation with Heiner Rindermann, for Man and the Economy

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Nov 28, 2019

Heiner Rindermann PhD, is Professor of Educational and Developmental Psychology at the Technical University of Chemnitz (Germany). He is psychologist (PhD University of Heidelberg). His work deals with education and ability development, intelligence and student achievement, economy and politics, evolution and culture, and their interplay at the level of individuals and societies. His recent major contribution is Cognitive capitalism: Human capital and the wellbeing of nations published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press.

Grégoire Canlorbe: An early contribution on your part in establishing the connection between cognitive ability and human development (in the broadest sense) was to show how the spread of AIDS among ethnicities of different continents is greater as the cognitive ability is lower. Could you remind us of your analysis?

Heiner Rindermann: In two publications from 2007 and 2009 with my German colleagues Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff, a sociologist, and Gerhard Meisenberg, a biologist, I showed that education (as a proxy for intelligence and knowledge) and cognitive ability (comprising intelligence and knowledge) reduce the impact of the HIV spread.^[i] If wealth and modernity are added in analyses at the level of nations – comparing different countries – the effects of wealth and modernity even turned positive, increasing HIV rates! Disproving the usual theory, that AIDS is a disease of the poor, the data robustly showed that AIDS is a disease of the low intelligent. But why? Isn’t this result biased or mad?

In closer consideration not at all: Studies from other authors on AIDS or on diabetes at the level of individuals also show that income and even education are not crucial for health. The crucial factor is intelligence. Again: Why? Here the Piagetian approach can help us as used by Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff and cognitive hermeneutics of everyday life as I tried to explain in my Cognitive capitalism book: People at lower levels of cognitive development and intelligence, especially if living in a social environment with a similar low level, tend to think and act irrationally, e.g. they believe in magic and behave in ineffective or even self-damaging ways. I.e., AIDS is not seen as being caused by HIV transmitted by unprotected sex but being caused by God, magical powers or sorcery and consequently can be cured by magical treatment, e.g. by having sex with a virgin. And these aren’t excuses for sexual abuse or own failings but people really believe this.

For instance, a quote from a study by African researchers in Mali underscores this: “Accidents are never attributed to faults or incompetence of the people in charge or machine failure, they are always orchestrated by certain superstitious powers.”^[ii] Such a mindset will not lead to more cautiousness or better maintenance reducing accidents.

A short conversation with James Flynn, for European Scientist

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Oct 29, 2019

James Robert Flynn is a political philosopher and an intelligence researcher based in New Zealand. He is most famous for his publications about the continued year-after-year increase of IQ scores throughout the world, which is now referred to as the Flynn Effect. His last manuscript, entitled “In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor,” and initially scheduled for publication in September 2019, was withdrawn by its own publisher.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Besides your inquiries in intelligence research, you got involved in the exegesis of Aristotle’s philosophy… your very first published book developing “an Aristotelian view” on ideology in politics. What does your current polemical case for free speech owe to this Aristotelian background?

James Flynn: I believe that I would defend free speech my debt to Aristotle aside. Any censorship turns what should be a contest of ideas into a test of strength—who has the power to shut their opponent up—and “might makes right” is hardly a principle that will maximize truth. But Aristotle was well aware that dialogue rather than authority was the proper method. He said: “Plato was a friend to us all, but an even better friend must be the truth.”

Grégoire Canlorbe: While Aristotle’s pre-scientific physics attested to a kind of intelligence more empirical than imaginative, and more qualitative than measurement-oriented, Galilei’s intellect would exhibit qualities of speculation and inspiration, and mathematical and logico-experimental aptitudes, from which modern, properly scientific physics would spring. How would those two distinct sorts of intelligence translate into a contemporary IQ test?

James Flynn: The current IQ tests are culturally relative in the sense that they try to measure skills appropriate in a modern scientific society. Look at the subtests of the Wechsler IQ test: (1) Vocabulary measures when you have a command of the language of a school-educated person; (2) Similarities measures whether you can use abstractions to classify and generalize as scientists do; (3) Arithmetic measures whether you are numerate; (4) Digit span measures whether you have a working memory for numbers; (5) Coding measures whether you note correlations between two systems of identification.

A conversation with Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Yr., for Psych

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Mai 9, 2019

Michael Anthony Woodley of Menie, Yr. (Younger), is a British ecologist and evolutionary psychologist, whose research on secular trends in different aspects of human intelligence has earned him considerable notability.

Woodley of Menie received his Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 2007 and received his Ph.D. from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2011, where he researched the molecular genetic and community ecology of Arabidopsis thaliana, a model organism used in plant science. Since then, the focus of his research has shifted to the evolution of human intelligence and personality, and the relation of these phenomena to life history strategy.

Woodley of Menie holds a lifetime fellowship with the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, and sits on the editorial board of the journal Intelligence. He has authored over 100 papers covering a very wide range of subjects, including human intelligence and life history strategy (especially their genetic and evolutionary bases), personality psychology, comparative phylogenetic methods and primatology, cognitive epidemiology, secular trend analysis, macroeconomics, microbiology, plant science, theoretical ecology, and even cryptozoology.

He has published four books, most recently a popular science work (co-authored with Dr. Edward Dutton) on secular trends in intelligence and their macro-social effects (At Our Wits End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future, Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK). In 2015, the Association for Psychological Science awarded Woodley of Menie the Rising Star designation for his work on secular trends in intelligence. Part of this body of research inspired the coining of the term “Woodley effect,” which refers to any trend indicating a population-level decline in general cognitive ability. His work has been covered in diverse media, including the BBC, The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and RAI (Italian television).

Grégoire Canlorbe: You have been involved in elaborating a “biological meta-theory” for the social sciences—from the perspective of “life history evolution.” Could you start by telling us more about it?

Michael A. Woodley of Menie: First I should explain life history theory. This is a very powerful model in evolutionary ecology for explaining the covariance of anatomical, physiological, and behavioral traits within and across species. Its core idea is that environments pose particular sets of fitness challenges to organisms, which favor the evolution of coordinated suites of adaptations; these coherent adaptive packages can be understood as strategies through which organisms overcome obstacles to fitness (i.e. reproductive success). Species that tend towards very high rates of reproduction (i.e. high yields of offspring) typically have short life expectancies and their offspring tend to be precocial—meaning that they take relatively little time to mature into their adult forms. Their behaviors are also adapted to environments with generally high and unpredictable levels of extrinsic morbidity and mortality—sources of morbidity and mortality are “extrinsic” if adaptive features of organisms have little influence on them, and they are “unpredictable” if they exhibit high spatial and temporal variability that organisms cannot anticipate. The package of adaptations—behavioral, reproductive, and so on—that typically emerges in these environmental circumstances is usually called “r strategy” (where r denotes a species’ reproductive potential). Rabbits exemplify this ecological strategy—they are ready to reproduce within six weeks after birth, and the mother spends only a few minutes per day with her offspring investing resources in their growth. Rabbits also have relatively short lifespans, and in the wild have very high odds of succumbing to predation. The opposite strategy is usually called “K strategy” (where K denotes the carrying capacity of an environment). When a species is optimized for existence at the carrying capacity of its environment, its members exhibit high longevity, prolonged gestation, and extended postnatal development. The high-density populations in which K strategists live experience relatively little, or at least predictable, extrinsic morbidity and mortality. K strategists are typically long lived, in part because they invest heavily in somatic development and maintenance. With respect to behavior, K strategists are usually highly pro-social, investing in the fitness of their genetic kin via communitarian effort. Elephants exemplify this strategy, since they have relatively low rates of fertility, but invest substantially in their (small numbers of) offspring via extended gestation and multiple years of postnatal parental investment. Moreover, they are markedly herd oriented, with individual elephants exhibiting highly protective behaviors toward their entire herd when threatened by predators.

A conversation with Michael H. Hart, for American Renaissance

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Mar 23, 2019

Michael H. Hart is an American astrophysicist, historian, and white separatist militant. He is mostly known for the Fermi-Hart Paradox, and his books The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History and Understanding Human History. He was a speaker at the 1996 American Renaissance conference.

Grégoire Canlorbe: You call for defending the “Judeo-Christian heritage” of American civilization against mass invasions from the Third-World. How do you sum up the values at the core of the Judeo-Christian Weltanschauung—and the outlines of your partition plan intended to preserve those?

In the decades yet to come, do you see rather a Republican candidate or a Democrat one to run for the presidential elections under the banner of a racial-partition program?

Michael H. Hart: I would have a hard time trying to sum up what are Judeo-Christian values. I believe our civilization’s uniqueness lies in the importance it gives to individual freedom.

In my book Restoring America, I identified the three principal causes of our decline as follows: large-scale immigration from Latin America (in particular from Mexico), the decline of pride in our national heritage, and most importantly racial hostilities which are henceforth so great that we can no longer function effectively as a single unified country. Hence we must split into two countries.

The partition would not be exactly a racial one. One of the two countries would be a “Red” one, consisting mostly of those regions in which conservatives make up the majority. The other would be a “Blue” country, consisting primarily of those regions in which “liberals” make up the majority.

Hopefully secession will happen in a peaceful and voluntary manner. But I don’t believe that will be the case. I think that the partitioning will most likely occur in the context of a civil war. It will be implemented by an authoritarian figure. As for knowing whether the latter will be a Democrat or a Republican, I can make no prediction. Many of my conservative acquaintances are silently in favor of partition though.

I should make it clear that I do not advocate dividing the USA long racial lines. (I once had that idea, but I no longer do.). In Restoring America, I suggest dividing the country between the conservatives and the leftists. I anticipate that most blacks—but not all—will choose to live in the leftist country. But I expect that a substantial number—perhaps about a million—will choose to live in the conservative country. They should be accepted by the conservative country without any reservations.