[Last week, 9/20, Paul Goble told us about China’s plans to separate the Middle Volga from Russia.  We’ve long known about China’s plans to recapture Far Eastern Siberia.  Now, as Paul explains this week, China may have plans to control Russia’s entire Arctic.]

Moscow has long declared that China’s role in the development of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) is a central part of their strategic cooperation. Despite this, the Kremlin cannot be entirely comfortable with the recent extent of Beijing’s expanding activities in the Arctic Sea.

Nor can Moscow be at ease with the Chinese government’s increasing ties with Russian regional governments in the Far North and along the coast of the Arctic Sea.

If any country other than China did the same, Moscow almost certainly would denounce such actions as neo-colonialism. If any country other than Russia did so anywhere else in the world, the Russian government would make the same pronouncement.

Given the international sanctions regime, Russia has little choice but to allow China to take these steps. Such actions carry the risk that the Russian-Chinese alliance may begin to collapse, with ever-more Russians concerned that Moscow is losing out to Beijing.

There is a growing body of evidence that indicates the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership is in freefall. If true, this makes Xi Jinping more dangerous as it increases the likelihood of an attack against Taiwan.

It also means Xi’s regime, the CCP, is extremely vulnerable to pressure from America, and the rest of the free world, to evict them from power.

Xi and the CCP face a deeper problem than the lasting economic downturn in China and myriad of social problems the Chinese regime confronts—problems that cannot be papered over by Xi’s prominence at the BRICS meeting or at any other international fora.

The Chinese regime’s problems are multiple and are the result of a fundamental cause—communism. As such, the Communist Chinese regime is illegitimate and is in a lasting and insuperable legitimation crisis.

The leadership is in crisis for two major reasons:

[For some time now, TTP has been telling you about the independence movements in Russia’s Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, with Moslem Tatars and Bashkirs fighting in Ukraine against Russia, knowing Ukraine’s freedom will lead to theirs and start the breakup of Russia. With that, they know they can prosper for they have a lot of oil, easily extractable with no permafrost like in Siberia.

And TTP has been telling you for years about the long-range designs Chicom China has on eastern Siberia.  Now, our friend Paul Goble tells us the latest: China’s campaign to separate the Middle Volga from Russia.]

Kazan, Tatarstan. Russians have become increasingly concerned with the expansion of Chinese influence in the Russian Far East, along the Northern Sea Route, and in some of the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

Now, the Kremlin is confronted with a potentially more disturbing development: the rise of China as a major player not just along Russia’s periphery but near its core. Beijing has been increasing its investments and influence in Tatarstan and the Middle Volga.

America has been in a veritable cultural revolution since the 1960s. Nearly all our major institutions finally became woke—the administrative state, traditional and social media, universities, K-12, the corporate boardroom, entertainment, professional sports, and the foundations.

So the Obama and the Biden administrations finally seemed to have achieved their aims, in what the Obamas once boasted would be the “fundamental transformation” of America into something unrecognizable by its Founders.

But what they gave us was nihilism—the destruction of norms, laws, and customs. There is no border, no criminal justice system, no real president any more.

The citizen is a serf, the illegal alien the veritable citizen. The former needs a passport to reenter the country, the latter is waved on through. There is a slob in gym shorts and a hoodie establishing dress codes for the Senate, teen murderers bragging that they won’t spend a day in jail, and a would-be state legislator filming herself doing sexual gymnastics while begging for cash only to be upset over the invasion of her “privacy.”

So the Left got what it wanted and gave us our new America. And the result?

WASHINGTON, D.C. — With Democratic Senator Bob Menendez facing charges of bribery, President Biden weighed in this morning, condemning the Senator for accepting his bribes in bars of gold rather than fungible assets laundered through 20 shell companies.

"Gold? That's a real rookie move, Jack!" said Biden to reporters. "If you're gonna get rich off a bribe, you gotta have money wired to several different shell companies over the globe which will then launder the money and wire it to your son in exchange for a painting, who will then buy some expensive items, and give you your cut. Come on, man! This ain't rocket surgery! Don't they launder money in Mexico or wherever this Menendez guy is from?"

[Is there a more obnoxious jerk who epitomizes woke arrogant speaking-for-science fraudulence more than Neil DeGrasse Tyson?  Read on how he was so masterfully exposed by two knowledgeable Brits.]

Bruce Thornton and others have usefully dubbed it “scientism”: “Dressing up ideological beliefs or even fads in the quantitative data and forbidding jargon of real sciences like physics or engineering.”

It allows progressives who actually know and care nothing about science to boast that they “believe in science” or “follow the science” whereas their reactionary opponents, presumably, do not.

For some years now, the premier prophet of scientism in America has been Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who since 1996 has been the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, and who, like his fellow astrophysicist Carl Sagan before him, has won fame as a promoter and popularizer of science.

Until, that is, he was exposed as a bloviating fraud last Saturday (9/23).