text:
ProductDec 3, 2019
Updating our gifting policies to protect our community
By Eric Han, Safety, TikTok
TikTok is a global community for creativity. Our platform empowers users to express themselves, inspire others, and have fun in a safe and welcoming environment.
As part of our commitment to providing a fun and positive experience for our community, we recently reviewed our policies and protections around virtual gifting. This feature allows users to send virtual gifts to creators during a live stream, and it's one way users can show their support for and reward their favorite creators.
Although the feature is overwhelmingly used positively, we know we have a responsibility to improve our features and policies to protect against misuse. To help see that the gifting feature continues to be used appropriately and respectfully, we are announcing new age restrictions today.
While we will continue to have a 16+ age limit for a user to host a live stream, our updated policy will only allow those aged 18 and over to purchase, send, or receive virtual gifts. Before today, anyone older than 13 was allowed to send virtual gifts, and anyone over 16 could receive them. As a reminder, purchases themselves are facilitated through the App Store or Google Play, and an individual user's settings around in-app purchases can be managed and adjusted at any time through the App Store or Google Play directly.
We are making these changes to foster a safe environment where users of all ages can enjoy a live stream without encountering misuse, such as any pressure to send virtual gifts.
Our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service exist to promote trust, respect, and a positive environment on TikTok. We will continue to introduce measures to protect our community, so our users can stay focused on what matters to them – creating, sharing, and enjoying the creativity of TikTok's community.
The updated policies will be rolling out to users over the next few weeks and will be effective across all TikTok markets before the end of the year.
CommunityJan 14, 2021
Trending on TikTok: Stitch it together
TikTok users tell us they love the new Stitch feature without telling us they love the new Stitch feature! Take a deeper look at the content form this trend in addition to top videos, creators, songs,
Introducing the TikTok for Black Creatives incubator program
TikTok exists to create joy and inspiration, and that is made better because of our diverse community of creators. A huge part of that is thanks to our Black creators and artists, who have touched so
By Eric Han, Head of US Safety, TikTok At TikTok, we know that creativity and expression are personal. And so is privacy. That's why we empower our community with a range of controls to manage their o


HTC and Samsung are always competing to see who can come up with the next big hit, but sometimes they both have the same idea at once. Coincidentally, Samsung and HTC have both just revealed their latest products in the up-and-coming line of wearables: smart gloves. HTC has gone with the moniker of the HTC Gluuv, while Samsung decided that the appendages are more important and dubbed its smart glove Samsung Fingers.
Starting with the HTC Gluuv, we can see that it has a sleek, modern design and is packed to the gills with specs. The Gluuv connects with the new HTC One (M8) physically for an even stronger connection. It brings some neat features to the table, such as a BoomBass accessory, to add even more sound to your HTC One (M8) with BoomSound. Even better, BoomBass charges via Gluuv when you carry it on your shoulder. In fact, the entire Gluuv is packed with gestures. To "like" something on Facebook, simply give it a thumbs up with Gluuv, and bam, it's liked. And if you think that you've found love at first sight, double check by swiping right with Gluuv to see how Tinder pairs you.
With Gluuv, we were glad to see that HTC didn't stop innovating with camera technology. HTC Gluuv packs an incredible 87.2-megapixel camera that can give you the world's best selfie. But it also allows you to quickly and discreetly take magnificent pictures of the world around you. If you see something that piques your interest enough to take a picture, simply air pound it and Gluuv will automatically focus and shoot. If you want to do more with the photo, gesture editing is available with an intuitive pinch for bokeh effect.
HTC isn't the only manufacturer to innovate, though. Samsung has gone all out with its latest wearable, Samsung Fingers. Samsung Fingers is incredibly flexible and easy to use, thanks to the 3-inch Super Emo-LED display within the palm that allows for maximum control. The glove also features specs for the spec-hungry such as 5G connectivity, 802.11wz Wi-Fi, 4GB RAM, 32 or 64GB storage, 16-megapixel camera, built-in speaker and mic and a weight of just 1 gram. Fingers is also incredibly thin at just .2mm.
Features are where the magic really happens. Samsung Fingers can create a virtual version of you so that people can literally talk to your hand. It can also give you on the fly information about what is in your hand with a neat ability to keep beverages either hot or cold by manipulating the potential and kinetic energy of an object. Worried about losing power too quickly? Don't. Samsung Fingers features rapid solar charging. If you start losing power, just raise your hand to the sky and allow the sun to restore Fingers to full energy.
Several gestures are programmed, including gestures to make accept, or reject calls and a special gesture that allows life-like reproduction of flatulence when the corresponding finger is pulled. Best of all, if you contort your hand into the shape of Spider-Man's hand when he's shooting webs, then you can shoot out a laser projection of what is on the Emo-LED display of Samsung Fingers. Possibly the greatest feature is that Samsung is marketing to all audiences with two variants of Samsung Fingers. Samsung Fingers Tough is for those of you out there who like to look intimidating, with durable studs mounted on each knuckle. Samsung Fingers Class is for the more suave crowd, with life-like touch sensitivity, as if you weren't even wearing a glove.
Overall, we have to applaud HTC and Samsung for their definitively, without a doubt, surely not fake smart gloves. We even give them kudos for launching on the first day of April, a perfect day to launch such innovative products.
What are your thoughts on these absolutely real smart gloves that are definitely not a hoax?


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Do you know what the average age of a prosperous nation is? 200 Years.
Alexander Tyler was a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh and made the following statement in 1887, about the fall of Athens.
Sound chillingly familiar to our current circumstance?
Tyler pointed out that in the course of 200 years, the world's greatest civilizations followed the same pattern.
Obamacare Draft Application Is Online with 60-Pages of Description!
Obamacare is now 20,000 pages long and they're still writing rules! Sequestration won't slow any of this down – aren't we lucky?
Unsurprisingly, the application for Obamacare is a bureaucratic mess. The draft version of the Obamacare application and the 60-page description appeared online without any warning. They can be found here.
It is 15 pages with 21 steps, some steps having additional questions. Three government agencies including the IRS will scrutinize the application for identity, finances, and citizenship. If approved, you then have to pick a health plan. In order to pick a health plan, you have to be familiar with healthcare jargon.
We can't ask people to get photo ID's to vote because it's too confusing and difficult, but we can make them fill out confusing bureaucratic paperwork before they can even pick a health plan. Picking a health plan is also confusing.
The government has to know all about your financial situation because of the subsidies. Lower income people will be forced onto Medicaid, a very poor healthcare system. Medicaid pays doctors so poorly that people in the program must rely on the charity of doctors. Middle class people will get subsidies for a better plan.
The government gets to go into your bank accounts to check on your answers any time they want so you'd best not make a mistake.
People will need CPAs to figure out some of the questions.
If the child's relationship to the applicant hasn't already been provided and the state has taken up an option to limit the allowable relationships of a caretaker relative to a dependent child, skip to item 4.
If you apply online, you will supposedly get almost instant approval. However, if your income has changed in the last year and you need financial assistance, be prepared for even more paperwork.
All you need to do to prove citizenship is to have an ID such as a social security number. If a person is here illegally and doesn't apply for Obamacare, are hospitals really going to turn them away? Of course not and we will end up with the same problem this plan was supposed to resolve – the burden of the uninsured on taxpayers.
You'd better fill it out if you need healthcare because it's mandated under the law. When the Obamacare law was first drafted, Pelosi and her buddies wanted to imprison violators. Do not be surprised if jail time doesn't come back.
Let's hope the Chinese hackers get busy downloading our tax code and Obamacare. It will surely cause all the Chinese systems to crash.
There is their very condescending informational video for people who need assistance. It won't get them through the process.


This was only the second (out of twelve) Test tours to date on which India had won a Test series, the other occasion being in New Zealand in 1967-68. It was also the first time that India had won a Test match against West Indies after 24 attempts, and started India on her hat-trick of series wins (1970-71, 1971, 1972-73).
Veteran selector Dutta Ray, unwell with high blood pressure, was forced to miss the meeting that appointed the tour captain. After the decision not to appoint Chandu Borde as captain because of his lack of form and fitness, Merchant used his casting vote to discard 'Tiger' Pataudi and appoint Ajit Wadekar to lead the side.
To the disappointment of many commentators, Chandrasekhar was left out of the tour party while Engineer and Surti were not considered because of a ruling that they must have played during the season's Ranji Trophy competition.
The Indians were the first Test touring team from any country to visit Dominica.
The team planned to visit Canada for a week (the last week in April) after the West Indian tour and go to Washington and Philadelphia to play Indian student teams but these extra visits fell through.
Jaisimha 36, Durani 23, Prasanna 22, Wadekar 21, Sardesai 21, Bedi 19, Venkat 14, Abid Ali 12, Mankad 7, Solkar 5, Viswanath 4, Gavaskar 0, Govindraj 0, Jayantilal 0, Jeejeebhoy 0, Krishnamurthy 0.
While Bal Dani urged a change from Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi as captain after 36 Tests in charge, Dutta Ray, Gopinath and Jagdale favoured retaining him. The Chairman backed Ajit Wadekar as skipper instead. Dutta Ray missed the vital meeting at the Brabourne Stadium on 8 January so the vote was 2-1, but Merchant used his casting vote to ensure that Wadekar was appointed skipper.
The team was chosen at a subsequent meeting in Bombay on 12 January and was announced the next day in Madras, after approval by the Indian Board. Wadekar insisted on the inclusion of Dilip Sardesai and he scored a double century in the first Test and two other hundreds.
Unavailable: The Nawab of Pataudi (Hd), 30, once he was not selected as captain. He said on the day that the captaincy was settled, he would be entering politics and contesting Haryana in the elections.
Rusi Surti, 34, was playing for Queensland and Farokh Engineer, 32, had made his home in Lancashire, so they were unable to play in the Ranji Trophy tournament, and therefore deemed not eligible.
Not selected : Bhagwat S Chandrasekhar, Farokh Engineer, Rusi Surti, Syed M H Kirmani.
Having convened at Bombay on 24 January, the team had a week's practice under Sardesai's supervision. They flew out of Santa Cruz Airport, Bombay, on 1 February, by way of London and New York. Gavaskar needed to have a septic finger injury lanced at J F K Airport and was unable to play for a fortnight. The plane left London Heathrow two hours late and the team missed its connecting flight from New York. They landed at Palisados Airport in Kingston, Jamaica, on 3 February rather than the evening before. Their equipment had not yet arrived, however, so they had to miss a day's practice.
Wadekar (captain), Venkataraghaven (vice-captain), Tarapor (manager).
This group co-opted Jaisimha, Sardesai and Durani.
None. Despite Gavaskar's indisposition, and that of Viswanath - who later had to be drafted into the side for the Third Test because Prasanna was injured - the team got by without reinforcements.
5 - Abid Ali, Bedi, Krishnamurthy, Sardesai, Solkar, Venkat, Wadekar.
3 - Durani, Jaisimha, Mankad, Prasanna,Viswanath.
• Gavaskar's prodigious batting displays saw him score 774 runs in eight Test innings at a Bradman-like average of 154.80. Gavaskar made two fifties on his debut when India won the second Test. He added centuries in each of the next two Tests and then played innings of 124 and 220 in the final Test.
• Sardesai struck three centuries, including 112 in the victory at Port-of-Spain. Earlier he had rescued India from 75 for 5 with a double century that made West Indies follow on in the first Test. Adding a further century at Bridgetown, he aggregated 640 runs for the series.
• India gained a first Test victory over West Indies after trying for 24 matches.
• Venkataraghaven was India's highest wicket-taker, with 22, in a series against the West Indies.
The team relaxed for a day on Tobago, then caught the 8 am Sunjet flight for New York on 21 April. Wadekar flew direct from London where he met the others on their arrival in New Delhi. The whole squad flew home to a jubilant welcome in Bombay.
"Gone with the Indians" (1974)? by Brunell Jones [pub Sport/News Service].


text:
Q: Remove all vowels in a string with Java I am doing a homework assignment for my Computer Science course. The task is to get a users input, remove all of the vowels, and then print the new statement.
I know I could easily do it with this code:
string.replaceAll("[aeiou](?!\\b)", "")

But my instructor wants me to use nested if and else if statements to achieve the result. Right now I am using something like this:
if(Character.isLetter('a')){
    'do something'
}else if(Character.isLetter('e')){
    'do something else'

But I am not sure what to do inside the if and else if statements. Should I delete the letter? Or is there a better way to do this?
Seeing as this is my homework I don't want full answers just tips. Thanks!

A: I think what he might want is for you to read the string, create a new empty string (call it s), loop over your input and add all the characters that are not vowels to s (this requires an if statement). Then, you would simply print the contents of s.

Edit: You might want to consider using a StringBuilder for this because repetitive string concatenation can hinder performance, but the idea is the same. But to be honest, I doubt it would make a noticeable difference for this type of thing.

A: Character.isLetter('a')

Character.isLetter(char) tells you if the value you give it is a letter, which isn't helpful in this case (you already know that "a" is a letter).
You probably want to use the equality operator, ==, to see if your character is an "a", like:
char c = ...
if(c == 'a') {
    ...
} else if (c == 'e') {
    ...
}

You can get all of the characters in a String in multiple ways:

*

*As an array with String.toCharArray()

*Getting each character from the String using String.charAt(index)

A: I think you can iterate through the character check if that is vowel or not as below:
  define a new string
  for(each character in input string)
    //("aeiou".indexOf(character) <0) id one way to check if character is consonant
    if "aeiou" doesn't contain the character
      append the character in the new string

A: If you want to do it in O(n) time

*

*Iterate over the character array of your String

*If you hit a vowel skip the index and copy over the next non vowel character to the vowel position.

*You will need two counters, one which iterates over the full string, the other which keeps track of the last vowel position.

*After you reach the end of the array, look at the vowel tracker counter - is it sitting on a vowel, if not then the new String can be build from index 0 to 'vowelCounter-1'.

If you do this is in Java you will need extra space to build the new String etc. If you do it in C you can simply terminate the String with a null character and complete the program without any extra space.

A: I don't think your instructor wanted you to call Character.isLetter('a') because it's always true.
The simplest way of building the result without regexp is using a StringBuilder and a switch statement, like this:
String s = "quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
StringBuffer res = new StringBuffer();
for (char c : s.toCharArray()) {
    switch(c) {
        case 'a': // Fall through
        case 'u': // Fall through
        case 'o': // Fall through
        case 'i': // Fall through
        case 'e': break; // Do nothing
        default: // Do something
    }
}
s = res.toString();
System.out.println(s);

You can also replace this with an equivalent if, like this:
if (c!='a' && c!='u' && c!='o' && c!='i' && c!='e') {
    // Do something
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Joan Esculies i Serrat (Manresa, 1976) és un historiador, periodista i escriptor català.

Professor de la Facultat de Comunicació a la Universitat de Vic - Central de Catalunya. Professor associat del Màster d'Història del Món Contemporani a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Doctor en història per la Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Màster en nacionalisme i conflicte ètnic pel Birkbeck College de la Universitat de Londres. Llicenciat en Periodisme per la Universitat Internacional de Catalunya i en Biologia per la Universitat de Barcelona. Postgraduat en Direcció Estratègica de la Comunicació per ESADE.

Col·laborador de La Vanguardia des de la tardor de 2021. Ha col·laborat a El País (2017-2021) i al diari Ara (2011-2021).

En l'àmbit de la no-ficció ha publicat diversos articles centrats les figures de Josep Tarradellas i Francesc Macià, en l'aparició del nacionalisme radical català i en els paral·lelismes que ha cercat el catalanisme amb altres moviments nacionalistes. És autor de les obres Josep Tarradellas (1899-1936). Dels orígens de la República (2012) i Joan Solé i Pla, un separatista entre Macià i Companys (2011). En l'àmbit de la ficció ha publicat Contes Bàrbars (2009); Tràilers (2006), Premi Mercè Rodoreda de contes i narracions 2005 i L'ocell de la pluja (2003), premi narrativa Ciutat d'Elx 2002.

El 2018 va publicar Ernest Lluch: Vida d'un intel·lectual agitador, que va rebre el Premi Gaziel de biografies i memòries. L'any 2020 prologà el llibre Catalunya contra Castella, obra de 1936 d'Anton Sieberer, en la primera publicació traduïda de l'alemany al català. Per la biografia Josep Fornas, el solucionador, va rebre el 43è premi Carles Rahola d'assaig.

Referències

Enllaços externs
 Tesi doctoral de Joan Esculies

Escriptors manresans
Historiadors manresans
Alumnes de la Universitat de Barcelona
Alumnes del Birkbeck College
Premis Mercè Rodoreda de contes i narracions
Alumnes de la Universitat Internacional de Catalunya
Escriptors catalans del sud contemporanis
Historiadors catalans del sud contemporanis

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


VATICAN CITY, DEC. 23, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the Advent sermon delivered Friday by Father Raniero Cantalamessa, Pontifical Household preacher, in the presence of Benedict XVI and members of the Roman Curia in preparation for Christmas.
Preaching in the Redemptoris Mater Chapel of the Apostolic Palace, Father Cantalamessa continued a series of meditations on the beatitudes.
The beatitudes are not arranged according to a logical order. Except for the first one, which sets the tone for all the others, each one can be considered separately without its meaning being in the least compromised.
The Pope's message for the World Day of Peace has made me decide to dedicate our meeting today to the beatitude about the peacemakers and to postpone for another time my reflections on the third beatitude, the one about the meek. The message of peace, directed to the whole world, must first of all be accepted, meditated on, and bear fruit here among us, at the center of the Church.
There is a fundamental affirmation in the message that is the interpretive key of the whole. The Holy Father says: "Peace is both gift and task. If it is true that peace between individuals and peoples — the ability to live together and to build relationships of justice and solidarity — calls for unfailing commitment on our part, it is also true, and indeed more so, that peace is a gift from God.
These words help us to understand the beatitude of the peacemakers and this beatitude, in turn, throws light on these words of the Pope's message. The nearness of Christmas sets a particular tone, a liturgical one, to our meditation. On Christmas night we will hear the words of the angelic hymn: "Peace on earth to men loved by the Lord." The meaning of these words is not "may there be peace", but rather "there is peace"; it's a news not just a wish. "The birth of the Lord," St. Gregory the Great said, "is the birth of peace": Natalis Domini natalis est pacis.
2. Who are the peacemakers?
Peacemakers are not synonymous, then, with the peaceful or pacific, that is, tranquil, calm persons who avoid contrariety as much as possible (they are proclaimed blessed by another beatitude, that of the meek); neither are peacemakers synonymous with pacifists, if by pacifists we mean those who are against war (with great frequency, against one of the two sides in a war!) but who do nothing to reconcile the combatants. The most just term is pacifier.
In New Testament times the rulers were called the peacemakers, above all the Roman Emperor. Augustus Caesar put world peace as his top accomplishment, which he achieved through military victory (parta victoriis pax). He built the famous Ara pacis, the Altar of Peace, in Rome as a testament of his legacy.
Some have understood the Gospel beatitude to be intentionally opposed to this assumption and to have pointed to the true peacemakers and the true way in which peace is promoted: through victory, yes, but victory over themselves, not over their enemies, not by destroying the enemy, but by destroying enmity, as Jesus did on the cross (Ephesians 2:16).
Today, however, the prevalent view is that this beatitude must be read according to the Bible and the Jewish sources in which helping people in discord to reconcile and live in peace is seen as one of the principal works of mercy. On Christ's lips the beatitude of the peacemakers is derived from the new commandment of fraternal love, it is a way in which love of neighbor expresses itself.
In this sense we would say that this is the beatitude par excellence of the Church of Rome and of her bishop. One of the more precious services that the papacy has rendered to Christianity has always been to promote peace among the various churches, and, in certain eras, also among the Christian kings and rulers. The first apostolic letter of a Pope, that of St. Clement I, written around the year 96, (perhaps even before the fourth Gospel) had the purpose of returning peace to the Church of Corinth which was divided by discord. It is a service that cannot be rendered without some sort of real juridical authority. If we want to see the value of this service we just need to look at those situations where it is absent.
The history of the Church is full of episodes in which local churches, bishops or abbots, arguing among themselves or with their flocks, have turned to the pope as an arbiter of peace. I am certain that even today this is one of the more frequent services, even if little known, of the pope to the universal Church. Equally the Vatican diplomacy and the apostolic nuncios find their justification in being instruments at the service of peace.
But God himself, and not man, is the true and supreme "peacemaker." It is for this reason that those who work for peace are called "sons of God." They resemble God, imitate him, they do what he does. The Pope's message says that peace is characteristic of the divine action in the creation and redemption, that is in God's action as well as in Christ's.
Scripture speaks of the "peace of God" (Philippians 4:7) and more often of the "God of peace" (Romans 15:32). Here peace does not mean what God does or gives, but also what God is. Peace is what reigns in God. Almost all the religions that flourished around the Bible know divine worlds marked by internal warfare. Babylonian and Greek myths about the world's coming into being speak of divinities at war with each other and tearing each other to pieces. In heretical Gnostic sects in Christianity there is no unity and peace between the celestial Aeons, and the material world is supposed to be the fruit of an accident and a disharmony in the higher world.
The one who has best celebrated this divine Peace that comes from beyond history, was Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Peace is for him one of the "names of God" just as "love" is. Even of Christ it is said that he "is" himself our peace (Ephesians 2:14-17). When he says, "My peace I give to you," he transmits that which he is.
There is an inseparable link between peace gift from above and the Holy Spirit; it's not without reason that both are represented symbolically with a dove. In the afternoon on Easter Jesus gave, in practically the same instant, to this disciples peace and the Holy Spirit: "Peace be with you!" … He blew over them and said to them "Receive the Holy Spirit" (John 20: 21-22). Peace, says St. Paul, is a "fruit of the Spirit" (Galatians 5:22).
It is then understood what it means to be a peacemaker. It is not about inventing or creating peace but of transmitting it, letting in the peace of God and of Christ "that transcends all understanding." "Grace and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 1:7). This is the peace that the Apostle passes on to the Christians of Rome.
In the Bible, however, shalom, peace, says more than simply tranquillity of order. It also means well-being, repose, security, success, glory. Indeed, sometimes it means the totality of the messianic goods and is synonymous with salvation and goodness: "How beautiful are the feet of the messenger of good news on the mountains, he who announces peace, the messenger of goodness and of salvation" (Isaiah 52:7). The new covenant is called a "covenant of peace" (Ezekiel 37:26) and the Gospel is called the "Gospel of peace" (Ephesians 6:15), as if the word "peace" summarized the whole content of the covenant and the Gospel.
The Pope's message also says that besides being a gift, peace is also a task. It is of peace as a task the beatitudes speak to us in the first place.
The apostolic preaching is rich with practical indications about what makes for and what is an obstacle to peace. One of the better known passages is that of the Letter of James: "For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every foul practice. But the wisdom from above is first of all pure, then peaceable, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, without inconstancy or insincerity. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace for those who cultivate peace" (James 3:16-18).
But it is not on this personal sphere that I want to focus. Today a new, difficult, and urgent field of work is opening up to peacemakers: promoting peace between religions and with religion, that is, promoting peace between different religions and between the various religions and the secular, non-believing world. The Pope dedicates a paragraph of his message to this field.
In the present moment we have an example of this cultural derision, or at least marginalization, of religious beliefs with the campaign in different European countries and cities against the religious symbols of Christmas. The reason often given for this is the desire to not offend persons of other religions among us, especially the Muslims. But it is a pretext, an excuse. In reality it is not the Muslims who do not want these symbols but a certain non-believing group in society. Muslims have nothing against the Christian celebration of Christmas, indeed, they honor it.
We have arrived at a rather absurd juncture: On the one hand, many Muslims celebrate the birth of Jesus and want a creche in their house and say that "those who do not believe in the miraculous birth of Jesus are not Muslim," while others call themselves Christians who want to make Christmas a "winter festival" populated only by reindeer and teddy-bears.
What that allows for a dialogue between religions — founded not only on the political reasons that we know well, but rather on a solid theological foundation — is that "we all have a single God," as the Holy Father recalled when he visited the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. It is with this same truth that St. Paul began his discourse at the Areopagus in Athens (cf. Acts 17:28).
Subjectively we have different ideas about God. For us Christians God is "the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," whom we do not know except "through him," but objectively we know well that God can only be one. There is "only one God, Father of all, who is above all, who acts in all, and is present in all" (Ephesians 4:6).
"Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today. Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. Imagine all the people, living for today. Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.
This song, written by one of the idols of modern rock music, with its suave melody, has become a kind of secular manifesto of pacifism. If that which is envisioned here were to be realized, the world would be poorer and more squalid than we can imagine. It would be a drab world in which all differences were abolished, where people are destined, not to peace, but to tear each other apart because — as René Girard has shown — where everyone wants the same thing, the "mimetic desire" will be unleashed and with it rivalry and war.
We believers must not allow ourselves to fall into resentment and polemics not even with the secularized world. Alongside dialogue and peace between religions, there is another aim of peacemakers: that of peace between believers and non-believers, between religious persons and the secular world, indifferent or hostile to religion.
It will be difficult this test: to give a reason, with firmness, for the hope in us, but to do so, as St. Peter says, "with sweetness and respect" (1 Peter 2:15-16). Respect does not mean in this case "human respect," keeping Jesus hidden so as not to excite reactions. It is a respect of an interiority that is known only to God and that no one can violate for constrain to change. It is not putting Jesus into parentheses, but rather a showing forth of Jesus and the Gospel through our lives. We ask only that an equal respect be shown by others to Christians, something which so far has often been lacking.
We end returning with a thought on Christmas. An old response of Christmas liturgy of the hours said: "Hodie nobis de caelo pax vera descendit. Hodie per totum mundum melliflui facti sunt caeli" (Today true peace has come down from heaven for us. Today the heavens distill honey over the world).
How can we correspond to the infinite gift that our Father gave to the world, giving his only son? If there is one faux paux that we should not commit during Christmas, it is to recycle a gift and by mistake give it back to the person that gave it to us. But with God, we can't help but do this continuously! The only act of thanksgiving possible is the Eucharist: Giving back Jesus, his son and now our brother, to the Father.
Holy Father, venerable Fathers, brothers and sisters: thanks for your kind attention and Merry Christmas!
 Benedict XVI, "The Human Person: The Heart of Peace," Message for the World Day of Peace, 2007, §3.
 St. Leo the Great, "Treatises," 26 (CC 138, line 130).
 J. Dupont, "Le beatitudini," III, p.1001.
 Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, "The Divine Names," XI, 1 s (PG 3, 948 s).
 St. Augustine, "The City of God," XIX, 13 (CC 48, 679).
 Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, "Commentary on the Gospel of John," XIV, lect.VII, n.1962.
 Magdi Allan, "Noi musulmani diciamo sì al presepe," Il Corriere della sera, Dec. 18, 2006, p. 18.
 St. Thomas Aquinas, "Summa Theologiae," I-IIae q. 109, a. 1 ad 1; Ambrosiaster, On the First Letter to the Corinthians, 12, 3 (CSEL 81, 132).
 Idiomelon of the Vespers for Christmas.


text:
Chilean ash cloud continues to disrupt flights
Amsterdam to ban tourists from their notorious cof …
Route Watch: Riga, Kaunas and Salzburg
› Travel News › Route Watch: Riga, Kaunas and Salzburg
Ryanair and EasyJet are at it again! New routes on low cost airlines means more chances for travellers to explore Europe and beyond for a fraction of the price. Weekend city break? You got it. Keep your eyes out for cheap flights on these routes and get ready to explore a new corner of Europe.
Riga, Latvia
From November Ryanair will begin flights from Leeds-Bradford to Latvia's cultured capital city, Riga. This city thrives, it jives and buzzes. In the Baltics, there's no place like it. The city is a gallery of Art-Nouveau architecture with wide parks and turrets which break up the skyline. The historic old town caught the attention of UNESCO's heritage committee long ago and it's no wonder the locals self-proclaimed their city the Paris of the East. Down a shot of Black Balsams liquor that this city is famous for and practice your Russian. Riga is one of the few cities where the locals are the minority, with almost 50% of the city being Russians!
Flights to Riga
Kaunas, Lithuania
Ryanair is also set to open up new routes to Kaunas from Leeds- Bradford come November. This city doesn't like up to its reputation for being a mafia-driven post-Soviet city. That's all wrong. As the second largest city in Lithuania, Kaunas is the industrial and cultural centre of the country. Today it's definitely over-run by students and backpackers, soaking in the pretty architecture and museums worth gossiping about. The food on the other hand, leaves something to be desired. The city's history isn't a bright one. Get your history lesson at the Museum of Deportation & Resistance, also at the Ninth Fort where Nazis and Stalin set up camp.
Flights to Kaunas
EasyJet won't be left out of this new route watch. From December 17th, the low cost giant will operate two flights a week from London Luton to Salzburg. From Mozart to famous cakes and snow-topped mountains, Salzburg is the cherry on the cake for any trip to Austria. If you're looking for a little Wolfgang action, then Schloss Mirabell is where you should start. Take a seat and listen to one of the master's symphonies played where it was meant to be played. Shop along the Getridegasse or trot your way through the historic town in a horse-drawn carriage. Sound of Music fans? Grab a bike and see what's left of the movie sets and film locations. Some how, at the end of the day, Salzburg is able to keep its class among all the kitsch.
Flights to Salzburg
Which cities are you dying to discover?
Imgs: Nenyaki, Lee Fenner, zamistor / Flickr cc.
Ruined fresco becomes Spain's newest attraction
The Berlin Wall turns 50 in August
Coca-colanization: Always Coca-Cola? No way…
Travelling to Thailand? Maybe not. (Updated: May 19)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Stanford Students: Offering Western Civilization Classes Destroys Diversity
Rachelle Peterson
Editor Accused of Libel Wins in Paris Court: Victory for Academic Freedom
The progress of ideas was vindicated in a decision in favor......
NAS Opposes American Studies Association Boycott of Israel
Members of the American Studies Association are voting on......
UConn Coddling Students
NAS board member, Jay Bergman, writes to the President of th......
This article was originally published by PJ Media.
"Hey, hey, ho, ho, the mere option of studying Western culture's got to go."
Those aren't the words but the spirit of what a group of Stanford students is saying to classmates who are "elitist" and "racist" enough to want to study Western history.
In February the editors of the Stanford Review, an independent campus publication, published a manifesto embracing Western values and announcing a petition to put Western civilization back into the core curriculum. Stanford abolished that course in 1988, a year after Jesse Jackson marched students around campus chanting against the topic. Currently Stanford offers the class to a tiny fraction of its 7,000 students. The only Western civilization survey course is carefully locked away inside the "Structured Liberal Education" (SLE) program, where a cohort of 90 students opt to study the liberal arts.
Those who signed the pro-Western civilization petition met a barrage of unflattering (sometimes unprintable) epithets and warnings that signatories would be blacklisted and shunned from future campus leadership. One suspected—suspected, mind you—supporter was stripped from helming a support network for low-income students. Evidently his co-leaders concluded there are no good reasons a low-income student might want to study the history of the society whose economic ladder he is trying to climb.
To the surprise of the progressive left, plenty of Stanford students actually do want to read the great works of Western culture. The petition attracted 370 signatures, more than enough to earn a spot on the student ballot. The student elections commissioner tried to muscle the petition off the ballot but failed. Then a new group of anti-Western civ activists took up a new tactic: eliminate or radically revise SLE, the one place Western civilization is currently taught.
Why target Western civilization? This counter-campaign calling itself "Who's Teaching Us?" (WTU) promotes diversity, which Western civilization—the civilization that eliminated slavery, empowered women, and introduced the idea of equality—apparently does not have enough of. WTU has drafted 24 demands to make the campus more diverse. One would subject SLE to a scorched-earth "reevaluate and reform" program. In the meantime, WTU would create an alternative to SLE that focuses on "social justice and anti-oppression scholarship, with an emphasis on works by people of color and PoC frameworks."
WTU's ambitions reach beyond the curriculum. It wants the people Stanford puts at the front of the classroom to be less white. Not only that, it wants the administrators to be less frequently white, and male. Among the list of demands is the injunction that the next president and provost should be neither white nor "cisgender" males.
The group also wants Stanford to hire at least ten new tenure-track ethnic studies professors and to pledge immediately—before any of these new professors are hired or receive student evaluations or teaching performance assessments—the university's "commitment to the retention of these professors." It ignores, as the editors of the Stanford Review point out, that "Stanford's faculty is more diverse than that of the average American college, and Stanford hires disproportionate numbers of minorities relative to the number of minorities who graduate with doctorates." WTU appears fine with disproportionality so long as it favors "minorities." It proposes that the student body should have "at least…proportional representation of minority group members."
Lest Stanford's currently white-dominated faculty accidentally offend students, WTU would create a system for all Stanford community members to report anonymously "microaggressions" that faculty commit; these microaggressions would be classified as "Acts of Intolerance" (that is, hate speech) and departments would be required to consider these records when evaluating professors. Stanford already requires every student to take a course on "Engaging Diversity," but Who's Teaching Us would require a second such class. It would reform both diversity courses so that they focus only on "power, privilege, and systems of oppression." WTU's position seems to be that no one may learn about another culture—even to appreciate it—without fixating on how that culture was victimized and oppressed.
WTU's proposed shelter of safe space, sadly, cages students into narrow identity studies and bars them from accessing many of the great works and accomplishments of history. Its proposals reduce knowledge to personal experiences and would prevent even the remaining remnant of liberal arts students from studying the works that formed the culture that Stanford students live and work in.
If WTU truly wants to further diversity at Stanford, probably the single best thing it could do is to support the Stanford Review's call for a Western civilization requirement. There are 579 distinct courses that meet Stanford's "Engaging Diversity" requirement. There is none available to the entire student body that surveys the history of the first culture to appreciate intellectual diversity and enshrine intellectual liberty in law. That's a history lesson all colleges and universities should learn.


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Location 1 mile 5 miles 10 miles 20 miles 30 miles 50 miles No maximum
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Aynho L1
Aynho Moorings are situated on a rural stretch of the Oxford Canal close to the medieval market town of Banbury. The location provides boaters with an excellent base from which to explore this interesting town, as well as surrounding countryside and winding course of the South Oxford Canal.
The site is approximately 185m long and provides space for up to 11 vessels moored against the towpath.
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The mooring site begins approximately 60 metres south of Bridge 190, where the B4031 (Station Road) crosses the canal. There is an access slope next to the bridge onto the towpath.
Aynho village is within a mile of Bridge 190 by road, with Banbury approximately 7 miles away.
Kings Sutton
Facilities, including water, pump-out, diesel, bottled gas and refuse disposal, may be available by arrangement with Walker Dock Services, just north of Bridge 190 and within 200 metres of the mooring site. Boat repairs are also available and there is a shop selling provisions and chandlery.
There is no designated car parking at this site and boaters must make their own arrangements.
The site is immediately opposite private moorings on the off-side. A stone towpath runs the full length of the mooring site, bordered on each side by a grass strip.
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Q: How to return an empty Mat in a function for c++? now I have a function:
cv::Mat func(int number){
cv::Mat img;
...
if(number>=0)return img;
else if(number<0) return xxx;
}

Here, when number<0 I want to return an empty Mat, but return NULL; or return; are incorrect. So how to how to return an empty Mat in a function?
Anyone can give some advises?

A: Well, depending on what empty means to you, you can:
return default constructed cv::Mat
...
if(number>=0)return img;
else if(number<0) return cv::Mat{};
}

or create black (or any other color) cv::Mat with same size and type as your img
cv::Mat img;
...
if(number>=0)return img;
else if(number<0) return cv::Mat{img.size(), img.type(), cv::Scalar{0,0,0}};
}


The United States Courthouse in Cedar Rapids — designed by OPN Architects with William Rawn Associates — was honored this week by The American Institute of Architects Academy of Architecture for Justice. The courthouse, which opened in 2012, is one of eight recipients of the Justice Facilities Review award.
The award honors justice facilities that demonstrate thoughtful, beautiful, and functional solutions to complex justice design issues.
The design of the courthouse for the Northern District of Iowa in Cedar Rapids strives to both convey authority while still connecting to its community. This courthouse is not only a symbol of justice, but also of rebirth.
In 2008, days after a 500-year-flood submerged 10 square miles of Cedar Rapids, then President George W. Bush flew to the community of 120,000 to survey the damage. What he saw – hundreds of homes, businesses, and civic buildings underwater up to 9-feet in some places – was an almost complete devastation of the city's downtown core and surrounding neighborhoods.
He was moved by this birds-eye view of the deluge's breadth and depth to declare the community a federal disaster zone. In doing so, funds for a new federal courthouse in Cedar Rapids were immediately released and the project, which had long been shelved, was suddenly a symbol of the U.S. government's commitment to the city's resurgence. That pledge in the days following the flood had a profound effect on Cedar Rapids' resiliency which reverberates nearly 10 years later.
As a result of a deliberate decision to design the building as a connection between the city's downtown core and what was then a more industrial stretch along a busy street to the south, the areas adjacent to the courthouse have all been reborn. The courthouse was a catalyst for the construction of a new headquarters for a corporate avionics and aerospace company, human services campus, and parking structure. It also created incentive for an insurance company to move their headquarters to the flooded public library building, allowing a new public library to be built at the company's former site. The new library as energized another quadrant of the downtown area in its own right.
The busy avenue flanking the courthouse's back is no longer a barrier to pedestrians as court employees park on its south side and motorists are now accustomed to yielding at crosswalks. As a result, nightlife and cultural entities along one of the cross streets that runs from the far north of downtown through to the completely reborn NewBo District to the south have created a cohesive entertainment district that has connected and activated the two neighborhoods.
None of this development and rebirth would have taken place if the pledge to build the courthouse and invest in the city had not been made.


Researchers working within the Urban Innovation Initiative study and build technology to help shape the future of urban environments. Expertise in design, hardware and software prototyping and deployment, and data analytics, is combined to target three application areas: climate change and related environmental effects on society; productivity and the economic health of cities; social equity and the health of people and their communities.
With more than 2 billion additional urban residents projected by 2050, humanity is rapidly becoming increasingly densely populated. Simultaneously, through the internet, mobile devices, and sensors and wearables, data and technology play an increasingly important and complex role in nearly every aspect of modern urban life, influencing communication, privacy and information exposure, mobility and transportation, environmental impact, economic equality and opportunity, and even the food we eat. With backgrounds in computer science, ethnography, social sciences, engineering, biology, chemistry, and design, researchers in the Urban Innovation Group thus bring a multidisciplinary approach to leverage these trends to understand sociotechnical systems in urban environments and help build the future of technology in the service of society.
The Urban Innovation Initiative makes its research available through scholarly publication, through open source software and datasets, and through collaborations with universities, and with business and product teams at Microsoft.


text:
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Exclusive: Newt Gingrich on the 2020 Election, the Georgia Runoffs, and the Communist China Threat
VIDEO: Bill Gertz: Leaked Database Suggests Widespread CCP Infiltration; China Silencing Hong Kong Activists
By Jan Jekielek
Note: If you're having trouble viewing the video above, please click here.
A leaked database of 2 million Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members suggests widespread CCP infiltration into the upper echelons of government and the private sector. The Big Four auditors collectively employ over 2000 Chinese Communist Party members, including at least one partner at each firm, according to the Telegraph. This could mean the Chinese Communist Party has access to some of the inner workings of virtually every major U.S. firm.
In this episode, we sit down with China analyst Bill Gertz, a national security correspondent for The Washington Times and author of "Deceiving the Sky." We discuss the leaked database, recent revelations of a suspected CCP spy, Fang Fang, developing close ties with prominent U.S. politicians, and Hong Kong authorities targetting pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai with the National Security Law.
This is American Thought Leaders 🇺🇸, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Jan Jekielek: Bill Gertz, so great to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Bill Gertz: Great to be here.
Mr. Jekielek: So Bill, you're the national security correspondent with the Washington Times. And you're the author of an amazing book, which I've been recommending to people often, called "Deceiving the Sky," about what the Chinese Communist Party has been up to over these past years, especially in America. And there's been an awful lot of Deceiving the Sky that's been revealed in recent weeks.
Specifically, what I wanted to talk about first is this giant database of about 2 million entries of Chinese Communist Party members embedded in all sorts of organizations. We see this recent Telegraph article, there's hundreds of them in the Big Four accounting firms, multinational banks, embassies, and consulates. Tell me what you're thinking about all this?
Mr. Gertz: Well, this is very significant. This is a leak from inside the Chinese Communist Party, which identified not just membership in the party, but the places where these members have been squirreled away, so to speak, including a lot of corporations and government officials.
Now, five or six years ago this wouldn't be surprising, because at that point the governments around the world, led by the United States, began highlighting the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party. So it was kind of dismissed. In fact, I've had people in the past tell me, "I've done business in China for 20 years, and I've never met a communist." When, in fact, it is a deeply embedded Marxist-Leninist system with Chinese characteristics, as they like to say.
And I think It's important to understand that membership in the Chinese Communist Party makes those people devoted not to the nation of China or to the people of China, but to the political party of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. And they definitely can be tasked to do any task that the party wants, whether that's collecting intelligence, suborning foreign officials, and gathering information that could be useful for government and party agencies.
So it's very important that these have been identified. I think that intelligence services around the world are now going to be able to take a look at a lot of these people and find out how many of them are spies, how many of them are operating on behalf of China's Ministry of State Security and the like.
But I think the important thing is that in the last few years we've recognized the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party, and that's really important. Now we can start unraveling some of their networks.
Mr. Jekielek: One of the commentaries that I heard, which I think both you and I won't find serious but people are thinking this sort of thing; they're saying, "So yes, they're part of a political party, what's the big deal?"
Mr. Gertz: It's not just a political party. It's an ideological drive, as I say in my book, to basically take over the world. The Chinese are doing that systematically. Again, we're having a vigorous debate on the nature of the Chinese communist system. I think people have tried to minimize it, play it down. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been the most significant in making the point that the Chinese Communist Party has tried to co-opt the entire Chinese history and culture as if there is no difference.
I think this is important to understand that this is really a party that's very similar to the Soviet Communist Party. And again, people have tried to say, "Well, they're not really communists, they like to trade, they like to make money." But when you look closely, every leader since Mao Tse-tung in China has orchestrated a massive capitalist conspiracy against China.
So they see themselves as besieged by the capitalist world, they see themselves as, basically, at ideological war with a non-communist world. They can make concessions, they can be practical in certain terms, but there is this ideological war and we need to start waging that war. This has been a war that's been waged by one side, the Chinese side, and now the West, the free world, needs to wake up and start fighting back against the Chinese Communist Party.
Mr. Jekielek: One of the things in this recent Telegraph article is that they've been mining this database as a number of entities are, like us, of course. They found that there's at least one partner that's a Communist Party member in each of those Big Four accounting firms that audit every major multinational corporation, to the best of my knowledge. What is the significance of that?
Mr. Gertz: Well, it allows for inside access to very, very valuable and sensitive information that can be used. If the Chinese Communist Party has someone inside of a major financial firm, that's really gold in terms of the party. Say if they wanted to manipulate that company's information; they could do that in ways that would benefit certain companies—Chinese companies that are listed on various stock exchanges.
This is a big issue right now. The President [has] on his desk, waiting for either signature or veto, a bill that would basically force Chinese companies listed on U.S. capital markets to divest unless they agree to Western accounting practices.
So we know it's almost like a mafia kind of system, the Communist Party, and they can use information that they gain from inside of companies, or inside of foreign governments. They know how to put all of this together. It's not disparate pieces of information, they have major plans in place.
For example, the "Made in China 2025," which has directed the entire nation to allow China to lead in the high tech areas, whether it's rare earth minerals, that's one area, and computer microchips, things like that.
So getting someone inside who can provide this information to the Communist Party, they can then use that and exploit that in ways that will benefit them and harm what they regard as their adversaries, which is the rest of the non-communist world.
Mr. Jekielek: Bill, you make an interesting point about how there's this collection, not necessarily a massive collection by every individual, but all of these different pieces of information go to a central point. I'm wondering if you could speak to how CCP intelligence collection differs from what we typically think of as collection in the West?
Mr. Gertz: In the West, in the United States in particular, they've developed this myth—especially within the US intelligence and counterintelligence community—that they call "the grains of sand theory." That is that Chinese nationals, especially party members, diplomats, intelligence service personnel and business people, are all collectors of information. They go out and they get these grains of sand of information.
But the argument was that they have been unable to integrate all of that disparate information into a coherent picture. I disagree with that strongly. I think that they do have a very centralized system that can take that information and utilize it. Certainly, some sectors may not be communicating clearly with other Chinese collectors, but they are able to use it.
I highlight this in my book, "Deceiving the Sky," when I talk about cyber-espionage in the case of a Chinese People's Liberation Army hacker named Su Bin. He was based in Canada. He was able to, for a total of about $340,000, steal about $3 billion worth of technology from the Boeing Company related to the C-17 military transport. This is the real workhorse of the American military. It's the key to expeditionary warfare, which is an American specialty.
Now the Chinese not only were able to steal that information about the C-17, they actually very rapidly applied it to their Y-20 transport, which looks very similar to the C-17. And just recently, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China put out a report and said they've only got 10 of these transports. But in a sign of how much China is expanding its military forces, they plan to have 400 of these Y-20 transports in the coming decades.
So clearly, China is on the march around the world and they are spying at a fantastic rate and able to use the information—not just to gather it, but to put it into practice.
Mr. Jekielek: There's also evidence of these Communist Party members actually within consulates and also American consulates and embassies. I believe it's consulates, just to be clear. What does that actually mean? We know a little bit from what you've said, but what are the implications of it actually being in these US government missions?
Mr. Gertz: Well, that's not a surprise. They call them foreign national employees inside embassies. This confirms what many suspected, that the foreign nationals are granted this extraordinary access to be allowed to work. They rely on foreign employees in their embassies and consulates around the world. And they're assumed to be working for the intelligence service of China.
But now, I think that they've been able to identify these employees. The way it's been done is you can go through the list, and then you can go and get the diplomatic list at the various embassies and consulates, and you can see, in the case of Shanghai, there were several of these Communist Party members that are employed by the US consulate in Shanghai. The consulate has acknowledged that they recognize it as a concern.
The question then is, will this lead to the State Department taking the decision?—"Hey, we're not going to allow Chinese Communist Party members to be employed at the embassies and consulates." We'll see how that plays out. A lot of these foreign missions rely heavily on their foreign employees to get a lot of things done, but we'll see how that plays out.
Mr. Jekielek: This is just such a giant database. It's over 2 million entries, from what I understand. It's about 1.05 million entries when they're deduplicated. So there's going to be a lot of mining of this data to be done by a lot of different people. What types of information are most interesting to you from there? Maybe you can give a hint to some budding researchers here?
Mr. Gertz: I think the way to look at it … Well, first of all, there's 93 million people in the Chinese Communist Party. So this is a relatively small percentage of their party membership. But I think what's significant is that it will allow people, researchers, and investigative reporters like myself, to begin to trace some of the patterns of employment and penetrations by these places that then can be used to go and analyze how other sectors that we don't have lists for are penetrated by Chinese officials. This is an area of a very important focus.
I think the State Department under Pompeo has not gotten to the point where they want to. But they have already restricted entry into the United States by Chinese Communist Party officials, recognizing that they pose a threat, whether it's an intelligence threat or a malign-influence threat.
It will also help to really expose the corruption within China, because a lot of the so-called princelings—the offspring of top party officials—they not only come to the United States, they park their money here. They send their children here to universities, they drive around in Lamborghinis, and some of them even managed to get a U.S. passport. So under the Chinese communist system, this is a major no, no.
We can begin to start looking at identifying some of the Chinese Communist Party efforts to exploit the free and open system that we have. If we go to a system of reciprocity, the first thing that should be done would be to cut off the access of those people, unless China grants similar access to Americans in China. Unless that happens, I think all of the Chinese party members should be expelled from the United States.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to take a little bit of an aside here. You just mentioned this fascinating phenomenon that the Communist Party elite, not just the Communist Party itself, but the Communist Party elite, many of them we know have actually offshored a lot of their money which, as you said. "It's a big no, no." I think it's even officially punishable by death, possibly. I don't know what the current state of that law is. Can you speak to that before we go on please?
Mr. Gertz: Corruption in China is extensive and rampant. It's a key feature of the party system since the 70's when they did their so-called reform and opening up. It inspired massive amounts of corruption, financial corruption at many, many different levels. Xi Jinping has supposedly cracked down on corruption. But he's used that basically as a front for going after his political opponents.
So the corruption system—this is something that I have not seen a single American think tank, or the US government for that matter, produce any kind of report on how corruption among the Chinese elite works, and how it plays out. That's certainly something that every American should be aware of, so we know what kind of system we're dealing with and what kind of people that we've been dealing with, in the case of the Chinese party elite.
They do have lots of their money here. They put it into real estate, they put it into offshore accounts. I think we got a taste of this when the Panama Papers broke, and they showed how some of the Chinese elite [work.] It's very difficult to track this down because often what the Chinese Communist members do is they don't use their own names, they use their offspring's or their spouse's, and that way they hide it.
I think the U.S. intelligence community should be tasked with going after this information and revealing it to our policymakers and ultimately to the general public.
Mr. Jekielek: Let's jump to talking about these recent revelations in this recent Axios report of spying within one particular sector, which is of course among U.S. politicians. I know you've been following the story of Christine Fang—or Fang Fang, her Chinese name—an alleged Chinese spy. There's a U.S. congressmen involved and there's all sorts of lower level politicians involved. Can you give me a thumbnail of what happened here?
Mr. Gertz: Sure. It's a classic case of what counter intelligence officials and experts call a farming operation. That is, you send a young officer or intelligence agent to the United States. In this case, Fang Fang came to the San Francisco Bay Area. As a student, she went to college, joined the Chinese Student and Scholar Association, and she used that position to begin reaching out to up-and-coming political figures, the most important of which was Representative Eric Swalwell. He was a local councilman in the Bay Area and won a surprise victory in 2012 to Congress. She picked out a couple of other members of Congress as well, that also tried to offer assistance.
It's a classic case of how to compromise a senior official and they struck paydirt in the case of Eric Swalwell. He went to Congress; within two years was placed on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Fang Fang, the suspected agent, was suspected of being connected to the Ministry of State Security. The FBI was able to track her to meetings with San Francisco Chinese Consulate officials. In the FBI, they used to call that a clue, and that launched this investigation into her activities.
This thing went on for a number of years, to the point where Fang Fang was able to begin doing bundling work for Swalwell. That's basically political fundraising for his re-election campaign in 2014. This is extremely valuable information. As I mentioned earlier, that allowed her access to who is funding, who is providing donations, and it also would be a way that they could covertly provide funding and therefore build up his ability to get re-elected.
Swalwell ran for President of the United States for a very short time. So this is a really big deal, and again, the Democrats have run for cover. The New York Times has not written a single story about this very significant compromise by a Chinese agent. It's very similar to what happened back in the 90s, when the Chinese began covertly funding the re-election campaign of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. That was eventually exposed in the newspaper and led to a major investigation.
But again, because it was the Democrats, it was largely played down and ignored. A few people went to prison, but not much was made of it. In the case of Swalwell, there are a lot of unanswered questions. All Swalwell has said is that he did nothing wrong and that he cooperated with the FBI in the investigation. Nancy Pelosi said she had no concerns, that's the Speaker of the House. But Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader in the House said, clearly, Eric Swalwell was compromised and should be taken off the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
We should be hearing from the intelligence community that they are looking at a damage assessment. If secrets were not compromised, as Swalwell claims, what was the influence part of it?
In one of my recent Washington Times columns I went back and looked at his statements in open hearings of the House Intelligence Committee where at one point he challenged a homeland security official who argued that China was influencing the American elections at the same level as Russia. And it was his view that this was completely wrong and unsupported by intelligence. Of course, clearly, he was downplaying the China aspect.
This is the kind of influence that needs to be investigated—to see how were a politician's views influenced by having a Chinese agent close to him. And then of course there's the question of whether or not they had intimate relations. Swalwell staff is on record of saying that they can't discuss something like that because it's classified information. Well, I think we need to get a full accounting of what happened here, and It would be instructive for other members of Congress to learn how it happened.
Just last week, the Director of National Intelligence went on record in the Wall Street Journal, and he said that China had launched a major influence operation against more than a dozen members of Congress. He didn't provide any other details, but clearly he was probably referring to the Swalwell case in that instance,
Mr. Jekielek: This is really interesting. I also know of numerous cases like you just described, Bill, where Chinese suspected assets go after relatively lower level officials with the hope that, as you described, it will strike pay dirt at one point. It also begets the question of how common is this sort of farming, as you describe it?
Mr. Gertz: That's also a very good question. Because China for so many years was treated as a quasi-ally of the United States, these types of things were, first of all, within the intelligence and counterintelligence community, they weren't made a priority. It was only during the Trump administration that the focus on China—both espionage, intelligence gathering and malign influence operations—became a major focus.
The Justice Department launched something called the China Initiative about three years ago. They have done an amazing job in exposing a lot of these networks. We've seen almost on a monthly basis either an American agent of China who is paid covertly for university research work or actual Chinese spies and agents being arrested or prosecuted.
My question is, why haven't we done more to try and penetrate these operations as opposed to just exposing them or forcing them to flee the country, as they did in the case of Fang Fang and Eric Swalwell?
Mr. Jekielek: You're describing … I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it seems like you're describing a big failure of U.S. counterintelligence efforts.
Mr. Gertz: Yes. I did a book about 12 years ago called "Enemies" [Enemies: How America's Foes Steal Our Vital Secrets-and How We Let It Happen]. It was about American counterintelligence and the many failures that we've had. Counterintelligence is that very arcane subset of intelligence gathering, targeting foreign spies. The U.S. has done a horrible job of this since the 1970s.
That's when inside the CIA there was a major backlash against one of the top counterintelligence officials at the time. His name is James Angleton, who I knew back in the 80's after he had left the CIA. Angleton believed in strategic counterintelligence. That is, at the time during the Cold War, he wanted to target the KGB and the East-bloc intelligence services, because they were so integral to supporting the system over there. He lost out in an internal battle with William Colby, the CIA director, who was more of an advocate of covert action type of activities and more positive intelligence gathering; he didn't want to target foreign intelligence services.
Ever since that period, after Angleton was forced out, for example, the CIA used to ridicule the concept of counterintelligence. They actually called it "sick think," because you had to suspect your fellow intelligence officers of being spies. You had to go into their backgrounds, you had to question their motives, you had to question their patriotism. Ever since then, we've had a really, really bad problem of not being able to do counterintelligence.
In recent years, the FBI which does domestic counterintelligence has also been shown to have been completely unprepared to deal with foreign intelligence threat. I think we saw that in the case of Peter Strzok, who was highly politicized, who threatened an insurance policy to make sure that Trump would never take office. We had a top group at the top of the FBI that ruined the counterintelligence capabilities of the FBI.
I will make a point here, if I'm not going on too long. The FBI in the 1970s carried out one of the greatest counterintelligence coups in American history. This involved the case of the number two official in the Communist Party USA. His name was Morris Childs, and he was recruited as an FBI spy. So he became a double agent for the FBI. Because he was in the official Communist Party in the United States, he had access to both the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai—the Chinese Communist Party headquarters there.
This went on for many, many years. The CIA was very jealous of it, because they gathered a lot of intelligence. There is a book about it which was called "Operation Solo." many years ago.
The FBI today has been so politicized and limiting in its ability to conduct aggressive counterintelligence, that they could never run an operation like that today. I've long advocated that what we need in the United States is a separate counterintelligence service, like the British have in what they call MI5. This has been resisted for political reasons.
In my book, I quoted Mark Kelton, the retired deputy CIA counterintelligence chief as describing China's intelligence activities in the United States as an intelligence assault on the country that has not been seen since the KGB days of the Cold War. So we really need to improve our ability to not just identify and stop these spies, but to penetrate their operations, turn them against them.
And in the case of China, I think we could really bring about the decline of the Communist Party of China, if we went after both their military and civilian intelligence agencies and got people to defect.
Mr. Jekielek: Bill, there's some discussion or debate about how closely communist and communist-aligned organizations in the United States, like the Communist Party USA, are actually connected and communicating with Communist Party in Zhongnanhai and elsewhere. How does that work today? Do you have any beat on this?
Mr. Gertz: Yes, in the past it used to be a much closer relationship because they did not have the same sophisticated tools. And of course the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, so there was no connection between the CPUSA and Moscow. But in the case of China, the American Communist Party came under the United Front Work Department, which is the main liaison group that is beginning to come to prominence. Especially, we've seen a lot about their activities in Australia, and some in the United States.
We're starting to really expose what they call United Front work, which goes back to the early communist days of the last century, where they invested a lot of money. It was both an intelligence gathering tool as well as an influence and political warfare tool.
I think we need to do much more to expose and educate the American public and especially our leadership to the kinds of things that China is doing through the United Front work.
Mr. Jekielek: From what I understand, Fang Fang left amidst controversy in 2015 to go back to Communist China. What is the fallout of this and why are we only finding out about this five years later?
Mr. Gertz: Well, if you ask Swalwell, he'll tell you that he thinks that it was leaked deliberately by the Trump administration because he was a critic. But if you look at the timing, according to the reports that we've seen, rather than go after … apparently they did go after Fang Fang—I'm talking about the FBI counterintelligence unit. They gave Swalwell a defensive briefing. Now a defensive briefing is basically, "You know this worker that you've got raising money for you and planting people in your office? She's actually an MSS agent." Oh, he's surprised. Oh, so he does the right thing and he cuts off connections.
According to the reports, the same year that he was briefed, Fang Fang left the country. Did Swalwell tip her off? Obviously, if he cut off relations with her, she knew that her operation had been compromised and fled the country.
Again, this was a counterintelligence failure. I don't know all the details. But clearly, they should have at least tried to turn her into a double agent, confronted her, or at the very least interrogated her to find out more details about her activities, her network and whether she could help expose some of the other influence operations that China has been conducting in the United States.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to switch gears a little bit here. I want to talk about something that we don't hear a lot about, but which is really important to me personally. And this is the fate of Hong Kong. Recently, we even had Jimmy Lai charged under this national security law, with the prospect of him getting up to life in prison. Now, this is something that was, frankly, unimaginable to me even a year ago.
Mr. Gertz: What we are witnessing taking place in Hong Kong is kind of the second Tiananmen aftermath. After the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, when the party sent tanks against unarmed civilian pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's main square, they launched a massive nationwide crackdown on anyone with pro-democracy views or beliefs or statements. We're now seeing a similar kind of action taking place in Hong Kong.
The initial step was recognized by the Hong Kong people and opposed vehemently in massive demonstrations for many months beginning in June of last year. They recognized that the national security law is the first step in Beijing's effort to crack down on all vestiges of democracy in Hong Kong. And that's playing out in a very systematic way. We're seeing arrests of all pro-democracy advocates and legislators—anyone who speaks out in support of democracy.
China promised in its basic law when Hong Kong reverted back from Britain to China, that they would allow the democratic system to remain in place. They violated that. They lied. Now we're seeing the consequences. Jimmy Lai is the owner of Apple Daily, one of the most outspoken critics of the Communist Party in Hong Kong. Not only have they arrested him, they're now investigating him in a way that indicates that it's going to be a show trial, or an automatic conviction, in order to silence the voices.
It reminds me of that famous Chinese saying, kill a chicken to scare a monkey. That's exactly what the party is doing. They're going after key figures and putting them in long prison terms. They think that this will silence the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. It remains to be seen how they will react and whether we will see some more spontaneous demonstrations. The Chinese strategy is clearly to try and go after a number of key officials and hopefully that will scare the rest of the people into going along with the crackdown.
Mr. Jekielek: How do you rate the response of the United States and the West, in a broader sense, to all of this?
Mr. Gertz: Well, the Trump administration has done the right things that they can do. Certainly, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, has been out front in taking the lead. They've sanctioned Chinese officials for Hong Kong and they've ended Hong Kong Special Trade status. That was a major step. It was controversial. A lot of the business community said, "This will only hurt the West and hurt Hong Kong".
But Pompeo has taken aggressive action. I think more could be done. It's time to perhaps create a Hong Kong parliament in exile that could begin advocating for separating Hong Kong from the mainland, going back to the pre-reversion.
Mr. Jekielek: What about offering asylum or immigration opportunities to Hong Kongers and dissidents?
Mr. Gertz: Well, I think Taiwan is taking the lead there. They're saying if you can get to Taiwan, you can live here free. And of course, they're cracking down on that. They've recently gone after a group of people who tried to flee there. I think other nations are offering shelter and safe harbor to democracy activists. That's certainly something that could be done.
What really needs to be done is to find a way to support some of the pro-democracy people within the government and perhaps see how that plays out. But the situation in Hong Kong from a free market democratic standpoint is fairly dim, in the sense that the Chinese are taking aggressive, brutal action to crush democracy in Hong Kong.
Mr. Jekielek: Again, it's very hard to watch all this happen. At the same time, you describe these 12 that tried to escape on a speedboat to Taiwan. Now, they've been charged with illegally crossing a border or some of them organizing to illegally cross again, with broad powers to give them heavy sentences. We'll see how all that plays out.
Bill, at the same time, we keep getting more and more information about gross human rights violations in Xinjiang. Most recently about potentially half a million people being forced into labor in the cotton field. What is happening with China under the Chinese Communist Party right now, or are we just learning of this right now?
Mr. Gertz: The numbers have remained for several years now that over a million people have been incarcerated in western China in Xinjiang. These are ethnic Uyghurs, they're Muslims. And yet the outcry from the Muslim world is almost negligible. This is again an indication of how powerful China's information operations have been—its influence activities. They've managed to silence the Muslim world against this crime against humanity that's being carried out in western China.
I think much more needs to be done to expose that. The U.S. government should step up and take satellite photos and release them, high resolution images which can show what's going on there, and really help to gather world opinion and world diplomatic pressure and political pressure on Beijing to end these crimes against humanity.
Mr. Jekielek: Bill, you talked about the power of Chinese Communist Party information operations. One of the big ones that I've been deeply concerned about has to do with Coronavirus or the CCP virus, as we call it at the Epoch Times. There's a lot of this kind of information operation, pushing the idea that it came from somewhere else. I'm sure you've come across this. It's basically to avoid responsibility. Tell me about what's happening with this.
Mr. Gertz: This is part of a massive global disinformation campaign by Beijing to deceive the world about the nature and origin of the coronavirus outbreak, and which began in Wuhan in December of 2019, a year ago. This is another crime against humanity—the way that the Beijing party leaders have misled the world, partly to deflect criticism of China for their gross mishandling of the virus.
I would also say that there is strong circumstantial evidence that this virus did not come from an intermediate host—that it came from a bat into a Chinese military laboratory somewhere in China and that somehow it leaked out and caused the pandemic.
We don't know the final answer to that because the Chinese have lied about the origins and they've refused to permit international inspectors to go in there and try to find the origins. The latest iteration of this to try to find the origin is that they've sent a team of World Health Organization epidemiologists into China not to look at their military labs and their civilian labs where this virus may have come from, but to look for that elusive animal host that somehow was the cause of this outbreak.
That story just doesn't hold water anymore. The idea that initially a bat infected some animal like a pangolin or other intermediary host, and then it miraculously jumped to a human at a wet food market. That theory has been widely discredited, even with the Chinese.
Again, we've seen their massive misdirection about the origin. They first tried to say that it was the U.S. Army that brought it to some military games in China in November of last year. Then we saw the disinformation campaign that it actually began in Italy. That was debunked, because we know that Wuhan is a major source for overseas Chinese workers, many of whom went to Italy and worked in Italy around the time of the Lunar New Year last year.
The same with New York, Wuhan is a center for overseas workers. That's how it spread when the Chinese refused to lock down Wuhan at the time of the outbreak. And now we're seeing this other canard from the communist party that somehow it came into China on frozen food.
We need answers from China. Before the Trump administration leaves office, if they do next month, we've got to get to the bottom of the origin of this virus. If we don't, we're going to be hit with more viruses. China boasted of having found 2000 new viruses since 2012, when in the previous several 100 years only as many as 3000 viruses had been uncovered.
So they uncovered a massive number of viruses. They've been obsessed with research on viruses. And now their people are trying to defend them in the American medical and scientific community that somehow this didn't come out of a Chinese laboratory. It doesn't pass the smell test, in newspaper terms.
Mr. Jekielek: Very disturbing thoughts. I certainly hope to see some further investigation around the origin, although it's going to be very hard because the original wet market was bulldozed. The labs have been wiped clean. What kind of investigation can be done here?
Mr. Gertz: The Communist Party of China knows the origin of this virus, and they're just not telling anyone. International pressure needs to be put on them to disclose what they know. They're lying about it. Their top spokesman at the PRC foreign ministry is on record as blaming the American military for this. We know they're lying about it. What's the truth? They need to be forced into telling the truth.
My position on that is that we should end all normal trading relations with China. We should end all normal relations with a country that caused the deaths of 300,000 Americans and countless others around the world. This is serious business and we need to take it much more seriously than it's been taken so far.
Mr. Jekielek: Bill, any final thoughts before we finish up?
Mr. Gertz: I'm looking forward to 2021. We're going to be having some vigorous debates about how to deal with the People's Republic of China and the Communist Party of China in the coming months.
I urge you to keep up the great work that you've been doing in getting to the heart of this debate, and continuing to educate both the American and international publics on these matters.
Mr. Jekielek: Bill Gertz, it's such a pleasure to have you on again.
Mr. Gertz: Thank you very much.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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