Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as the newest justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on Saturday (10/06), and began hearing oral arguments on yesterday (10/09), after the Court came back from its Columbus Day holiday.

Much has been said about the unfair and downright nasty tactics used by some Democrat Senators and their allies during Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle.

But the reason they resorted to these tactics is because the federal courts have become so important in their quest to change America into their version of a Progressive Utopia.  For many decades, liberals have been using the federal courts to implement the changes they have been unable to achieve through Congress and state legislatures.

When they cannot convince voters and legislators, they have resorted to federal judges to ignore the law and ignore the Constitution and implement their social policies by judicial fiat.  With Justice Kavanaugh bringing a 5-4 conservative majority to SCOTUS, these days promise to be over for liberals and the left.

Inevitably as China becomes more powerful and influential in international relations, Beijing will fundamentally change the international system created by the United States and the Cold War.

The key question for international politics is what kind of world does China seek to create by 2049 — the centenary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Will China sustain the present liberal system or forge another anchored on its ambitions, culture, and desires? Millennia of Chinese history strongly suggests the latter.

In this essay, we illuminate China’s model of global governance and touch upon its derivative economic and political features. Conceiving of what type of world China will create is significant for three reasons.

First, it is critical for the United States to understand so that the full scope of China’s strategic ambitions and direction may be understood.

Second, U.S. decision-makers should expect that the world China would like to create by 2049 will be fundamentally different. The economic order will be a curious mix of hyper-capitalism and neomercantilism. The political order will be authoritarian.

Third, understanding China’s ambition and grand strategic objectives allows the United States to develop policies and undertake measures to thwart them.

The population of the Russian Federation is falling by 700 people a day, or more than a quarter of a million a year (Narzur.ru, September 23).

The decline stems from a combination of rising death rates, changes in the age structure of the population (resulting in fewer women in the prime child-bearing cohort but more elderly), dramatically falling immigration rates, and ever greater shortages of medicines and even medical facilities.

And of course, alcoholism off the world scale.  At the very least, international health officials say, alcohol in its various forms remains “the main cause of death” in Russia today. (Thinktanks.by, October 3).

Ever more Russian analysts are describing the current demographic situation as a disaster for the future, one that may make it increasingly difficult for that country to field a sizeable military or generate economic growth.  Here are the stats showing how Russia is literally dying.

Now we know for sure.  The answer is No. There is not a single decent person among the Democrats in Congress.

Because not one Democrat has had the fortitude to stand up and admit that what they are doing to Judge Brett Kavanaugh is obscene and grossly indecent.

We must therefore admit that there is not one of them with the moral sense to know that destroying a man for politics is wrong.  It's not only wrong, but depraved.  Not one Democrat member of the Senate, not one in the House.  Those on the Judiciary Committee are just the most depraved and venal of the lot.

The very worst aspect of all this is that the Democrats in Congress all surely know that Kavanaugh is innocent of Blasey Ford's ridiculous accusation.  They know, and they do not care.

Cory Booker now admits it publicly – saying “It no longer matters if Kavanaugh is innocent or guilty.”  They are beyond shame, beyond decency, beyond morals.

[In 2005 here at TTP, I wrote Infantlizomania, the defining neurosis of liberals, the compulsion to treat adults as children.  Now we see Democrats are infantilizing themselves. –JW]

Ever wonder why, while watching the Kavanaugh hearings, you thought you were peering through a keyhole at a particularly unruly and infantile kindergarten class with the teachers off on a two-hour bathroom break?

Think no further than our college campuses today.

That’s where so-called Social Justice Warriors rule the roost, isolating themselves in "safe spaces," pushing "trigger warnings," and accusing everybody and his sister of "microaggressions" and "cultural appropriation" while making sure — oh how they make sure — no speaker gets within miles of the premises with a thought that might offend their precious snowflake sensibilities.

Their infantilism has metastasized to the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Blumenthal, Booker, Feinstein, Klobuchar, Whitehouse, Coons, Hirano, Harris, Leahy, Durbin –  the whole lot –  are the grownup imitators and wannabes of the juvenile anti-intellectual bigots dominating our campuses, pointing fingers but abjuring concrete evidence as some vestigial figment of white privilege.

I am not a crier. My husband jokes about my “six-second cry” when I finally shed some tears.

But as I watched Brett Kavanaugh’s opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, I cried—and for more than six seconds.

I wept for him, for his crushed wife seated behind him, for his young daughters, and for his friends. I cried for our country. It was an emotional release of sympathy, frustration and rage.

I wasn’t alone. The shared tears and collective fury are galvanizing women voters, but not in the way Democrats initially calculated. The Democrats’ insistence that due process and a presumption of innocence don’t apply to men (particularly conservative white men) is a terrifying prospect for the husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers we love.

The Left still doesn’t understand that we don’t hate men like they do.

A spate of unusual reports in Hong Kong and overseas Chinese-language media lend credence to the idea that, while Xi Jinping remains China’s undisputed paramount, his authority seems diminished.

A moratorium of sorts appears to have been called on the relentless personality cult constructed around Xi, while signs have emerged that China’s economic policymaking apparatus has been hamstrung by disagreements between Xi and his top economic policymaker over how to handle a deepening trade war with the United States.

Stories about political troubles befalling Xi could be exaggerated. Xi recently completed a 10-day trip to Africa and the Middle East; it is unlikely he would have left the country for so long if his position were in imminent danger.

Further,  the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is unlikely to move against Xi after a massive reshuffle of its command-and-control apparatus in late 2015 and early 2016 that saw Xi install protégés in most of the PLA’s senior roles. (China Brief, October 20, 2017).

Nonetheless, while Xi’s status as top leader likely remains unchallenged, his authority—including his ability to make decisions on major political, economic and foreign-policy issues—seems impaired in recent weeks.   The primary cause of this impairment is US President Donald Trump.

[The Soviet Colonial Empire was the 20^th century worldwide expansion of the 19^th century Russian Colonial Empire. My friend of many years Paul Goble here shows how the murder of three Russian investigative journalists spotlights Putin’s attempt to create Russian colonies in Africa –JW.]

The Kremlin has seemingly taken another step to cover up the murders of three Russian journalists who were killed at the end of July in the Central African Republic (CAR), while investigating Moscow’s dispatch of weapons there.

Moscow has far more to hide in the CAR and is prepared to act quickly and harshly to make sure those secrets stay hidden. All along, the Russian government has vociferously denied any involvement in the widely publicized murders of the three journalists, Orkhan Dzhemal, Aleksandr Rastorguev and Kirill Radchenko.

Russia has announced it had opened its own “investigation” into the deadly incident. At the same time, however, officials and Russian analysts have gone out of their way to deny that Russians in the CAR were in any way responsible for the reporters’ deaths or that Moscow was acting covertly to undermine what stability there is in that country or anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa (see EDM, September 4).

The truth seems to be the opposite.

The showdown between the fabulist Chrissy Ford and the righteous Brett Kavanaugh couldn't have come at a better time.

As we approach the crucial midterms -- which will decide whether the president has two more years in which to fulfill his restoration of the Republic, or be subjected to the likes of Spartacus Booker and Stolen Valor Blumenthal -- it laid bare the stark divisions in a country that seems to be coming apart.

On the one side, Mrs. Ford, a practitioner of "psychology," of a lesser form of Viennese Voodoo that masquerades as a social "science" and seems to channel folks in need of its services into the ranks of its purveyors.

The little-girl voice, the upturned question at the end of each reply, the absolute certainty about absolutely nothing -- this is the couch-riding Left at its most repellent.

On the other: Judge Kavanaugh, a man defending his life, his career, his reputation, his family, his faith, his future, and that of the country.