Beijing’s efforts to expand its power in Central Asia by investment and cooperation with the governments in the region are currently being undercut by the reactions of Central Asian populations to China’s repression of their co-ethnics and fellow Muslims in Xinjiang.

Many members of the Central Asian nationalities currently living in Xinjiang have ancestors who escaped there after the Soviets crushed the Basmachi movement (Turkestan Liberation Organization) in the 1920s and 1930s.

But over the past several months, they have been fleeing western China in increasing numbers and, upon arrival to their ancestral homelands, telling their co-ethnics about the concentration camps that the Chinese authorities have confined them to in the hopes of “re-educating” them away from Islam and national traditions and toward Beijing’s preferred values.

The massive scale of this flight was highlighted in a recent report issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Prior to last week, for days Adam Schiff had concocted a pretty effective fix.

He conducted secret impeachment inquiries in the House basement. Schiff kept quiet about his rigged rules. He orchestrated selective media leaks from the opening statements of favorable witnesses and then more or less threatened with ethical violations any Republican member who copied his tactics and leaked their own often effective cross-examinations.

The result was that the public heard only from Schiff about Schiff’s damning slam-dunk hearings. A drip-by-drip melting of both Trump’s polls and resistance to impeachment followed.

Schiff emerged for brief soundbites, bit his lip, and for a minute or two regretted the tragedy of having to hear damaging testimony about his own president.

But then Schiff’s Hubris finally lured in Nemesis. So quo vadis?  Where do the Dems go marching to now?

Next year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics may spell the swift death of the transgender movement as a dominant politically-correct touchstone.

Biological men, self-identifying as women, are poised to make a clean sweep of the Women’s Olympics, triggering a very public debate on this third-rail subject. That firestorm, pitting pro-women feminists against extreme pro-transgender progressives, will begin July 24^th, just as the Presidential sweepstakes moves into its sprint to the finish line.

It could, in fact, deconstruct the entire progressive coalition. Currently, that umbrella of competing needs appears to be held together by duct tape and baling wire.

I attended two Ivy League schools (Dartmouth and Yale) some time ago, roughly the Early Paleolithic Age, and, best as I can remember, sort of liked them.

But lately I'm beginning to think the whole elite school thing has turned into one big shuck, maybe it even was then—and not just because of the revelations of all the cheating surrounding admissions or that the institutions apparently discriminate against Asians as they did against Jews back in the day.

No, it's more basic than that. These formerly august institutions have morphed into kindergartens for jejune, virtue-signaling wannabe Trotskys and Rosa Luxemburgs (a.k.a. social justice warriors) who can't even let us watch a farshtunkene football game in peace.

In the middle of this year's Harvard-Yale game last Saturday (11/23), the great activistes spewed out onto the field to demand, what else, action on climate change—delaying the game for over an hour.  So why is there still an Ivy League?

Watching Schiff's trumped up inquiry about nothing but a phone call, the transcript of which has been available to the public for many weeks, is like watching The Caine Mutiny (1954) without the drama.

The film is about a naval captain whose first officer relieves him of his command when the man demonstrates obvious signs of mental instability.  All that is missing from Schiff's on-air mental collapse are the little steel balls that Humphrey Bogart as Captain

Queeg fiddled with while on the stand at the court-martial of the mutineers.

Queeg was obsessed with missing strawberries.  Schiff's impending mental breakdown is demonstrably more obvious, less subtle than Queeg's.  He intends to see President Trump removed from office, no matter what.  His eyes seem to radiate his inner fury and rage.  He sits stone-faced while the smart people in the room destroy every bit of his carefully constructed narrative.

Schiff is Capt. Queeg on steroids.

In December 2008, Barack Obama summarily fired every ambassador appointed by George W Bush.

The media did not care for four reasons. First, it was Barack Obama. Second, they recognized that the president controls the executive branch. Third, it was a parting shiv to Bush. Finally, it was Barack Obama.

Whether any of the ousted diplomats cried is unknown.

But now in the Trump era, as Obama-era somnambulists awake every day to a new outrage that heretofore had been considered standard operating procedure inside the Beltway, a dismissed ambassador is given hours to vent her thoughts and feelz in front of one of Capitol Hill’s most powerful committees.

If you weren’t moved by the sad tale of former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch—an Obama appointee—getting the ax by Donald Trump, according to Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, you don’t have a pulse.

Any suggestion that the wide-ranging sanctions regime the Trump administration has imposed against Iran was not having the desired effect has been roundly refuted by the nationwide protests that have erupted in response to the regime's decision to increase petrol prices.

Critics of American President Donald J. Trump's announcement that he was withdrawing the US from the Iran nuclear deal last year and imposing a fresh round of sanctions against Tehran have argued that the measures would fail to have the desired effect.

They claimed that the ayatollahs would be able to circumvent the sanctions by trading with countries such as China, that remained committed to the nuclear deal.

Those arguments have now been decisively proved wrong – here’s why.