Dear Japan 🇯🇵:

Told you not to worry after China to urged its citizens to cancel travel to your country.

Growth due to tourists from mainland China dropped to 3% this month, below the 37.5% growth across the whole year to the compared to the same period the previous year.

But even with this Chinese boycott, overall visitors to Japan grew 10.4% year-on-year this month.

Singaporeans, Malaysians, Indonesians, Taiwanese, South Koreans and Aussies picked up the slack!

Many are flocking over for a PRC-free Japan winter holiday. This was just a month ago when Ambassador Yamagami responded to my post saying that the rest of Asia Pacific will make up for the tourist shortfall facing 🇯🇵

https://twitter.com/yamagamishingo/status/1991284266756633052

It's almost impossible to conclusively prove that Harvard's academic output and policy stances are directly influenced by large financial contributions.

All we have is the observable: the timing of these gifts, the meetings that took place, and the outcomes.

A thread🧵 In February 2020, Chinese real estate developer Evergrande Group - yes the one that collapsed - pledged $115 million in funding to a Harvard led consortium, the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness, to research COVID-19.

🚨BREAKING: To add to Harvard’s ongoing woes, we have uncovered a shocking new detail.

Harvard University may have violated US sanctions by hosting and providing training sessions for a Chinese paramilitary organization (XPCC)

Here's what we found 🧵 Harvard, along with other top US universities, is already facing intense scrutiny over foreign gifts and contracts that raise concerns about undue foreign influence.

Secretary @LindaMcMahonEd has said that Harvard has not been “fully transparent or complete in its disclosures." The Dept. of Education is currently investigating Harvard’s foreign donations.

Another instance of journos tainting @elonmusk with the worst possible associations - this time Stalin - based on unnamed sources and baseless claims about filling top positions at OPM (Office of Personnel Management) with his “lackeys”

Let me show you what a pathetic excuse for an article this is 🧵 It opens with a source listing some names of incoming appointees and how they are linked to Elon’s companies.

Then they quote a professor from Harvard Kennedy School of Government who says “in the past, there have been one or maybe two political appointees in ALL of OPM”

Update: I’m on ✈️ from London to Boston

Meanwhile thank you to all who shared and offered advice. No leads yet though some annoying scammers

Here’s what’s been done so far:

Called & reported Harvard, Boston & Cambridge Police

Animal Control Boston/Cambridge & vet clinics

https://twitter.com/msmelchen/status/1724058978756284809

- Posted about 43 flyers around the park where he was last seen (will post more)

- Posted online & called MSPCA, Animal Rescue League

- Posted , Nextdoor, Pawboost, PetRadar, LostMyDoggie

Still in problem-solving mode. If you have tips, please share! 🙏 missingdogsmass.com

I wonder how different our world would be like if our leaders and intelligentsia weren't so completely divorced from violence - both simulated or real.

Ancient Greek thinkers such as Plato - meaning "broad shoulders," so named because of a physique honed by wrestling - were not merely men who lived their lives in their heads, pontificating in abstraction away from any understanding of savagery and the zero sum nature of conflict. Both Hemingway and Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War.

Today, the stereotype that characterizes our erudite class is the

Pay attention to what’s happening in Ireland.

@shellenberger says that Irish hate speech bill (soon to be passed) is one of the worst he has seen in decades of policy work.

He commends @FreeSpeechIre and @Ben_Scallan for their work on this issue. Never would I expect that one by one, Western nations would increasingly adopt the draconian censorship laws of the country of my birth (🇸🇬).

The Irish legislation will criminalize any speech - in person or offline -

My latest for @TheSpectator:

Affirmative Action backfires in many ways, failing to help the minority students it purports to help. Blacks feel like they don’t belong; Asians feel resentful.

Singapore rejects AA but has a solution that has seen success

https://t.co/FSVVpsikDNthespectator.com/topic/singapor…
“Like many of the other ideas pushed during the racial reckoning (see: defund the police), affirmative action appears to be yet another manifestation of what @robkhenderson has so astutely called “luxury beliefs.” Does the actual fate of these students not matter as much as their… https://t.co/2UEJXrfuEgtwitter.com/i/web/status/1…

In the early 2000s when I left Singapore for America, most Singaporeans admired the US.

My sense being back here these days is that not only is it no longer true, there's a considerable amount of contempt for America due to its cultural export of woke garbage.

Relatives and high school friends who I never once ever talked politics with my whole life suddenly are eager to engage me on how American politics and how "crazy America has become."

Sometimes it's about crime, sometimes it's about lawlessness or the homeless/drug epidemic, but increasingly

I'm so happy to read this perspective by @Megankstack in the @nytimes.

Of course it took a journalist who reported on China, Russia and Egypt to say this: calling the Lab Leak Theory disinformation, was itself, disinformation.

She brilliantly traces
nytimes.com/2023/03/28/opi… the formation of the narrative (that lab leak = conspiracy theorist / racist), how it evolved into "consensus," and explains how the folks vested with the authority to create the consensus had huge conflicts of interest.

It's clear to me that the epistemic process is no

One of the greatest casualties of the culture wars is Prof. David Sabitini. What was, in any other time, a complex romantic interplay between grown adults has instead devolved into a public spat, facilitated by the DEI-HR industrial complex.

The costs
apps.bostonglobe.com/metro/investig… to society are not trivial. David's research was pioneering in the field of cancer biology and he was Nobel Prize-bound. He ran a 40-person lab, and all that research was abruptly terminated, resulting in untold loss of medically significant knowledge.

Over his 24 years at the

2022 was such a hell hole for me. If it had a theme at all, it was about loss and mortality.

I still haven’t figured out how to exist in this world without my dad. I don’t know if I have fully processed the fragility of life after almost perishing in a road accident in Cambodia. And then close friends my age are getting diagnosed with cancer. All in the same year.

This kind of devastation takes a toll on the mind and body. There are lines on my face and bags under my eyes now not caused by lack of sleep. They seem to have become permanently

My trip to Erbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, has shattered some previously-held impressions of the region, and inspires a great deal of hope for the Middle East in general.

I couldn't help but think: if only Hitchens were around to see this. The level of development and high quality of life (in some ways it surpasses many US cities) left me speechless. Out of the ashes of Saddam's dictatorship, a string of wars, the rampage of terror groups and sectarian violence, rise a city that is resilient and looking to the future.

I've always abstained from explicitly cheerleading for a particular political party or candidate, until @ShellenbergerMD ran for governor. There are reasons for this.

Firstly, self-interest. I'm one more robbery away from moving out of CA. Second, I saw first-hand the abject state of human misery on the streets of SF which had a profound effect on me back in January 2022.

I was in town to renew my passport and took the opportunity to meet up with my friend, the citizen journalist @JennyChachan. The plan was to meet at "the library," to

The student loan debate has brought up this idea that tuition should be based on future salary. Perhaps I'm naive but I still valorize the pursuit of knowledge that ostensibly has no practical value. Humanity's future depends on long-term thinking unguarded by market pressures. This is not to say that education should not have any contact with reality. This is not to say that elite overproduction isn't a problem. What is woke culture if not the wrath of underemployed humanities scholars with fancy degrees and heaps of social capital?

And yes it is

It is crass to speak of a silver lining to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but one of the consequences of this reality is that it makes the Chinese invasion of Taiwan less likely, or at least staves off the timeline of takeover. China has seen the difficulties the Russians are having with what it assumed was a relatively straightforward invasion of Ukraine.

Structurally, Xi has every reason to fear that he too may face the same pitfalls that Putin did when it came to assessing the likelihood of success

Now that the WaPo and the NYT have authenticated the contents of Hunter’s laptop, don’t let them memory hole how the story was treated by the media a year ago.

Also, has anyone from @Twitter been held accountable for the “mistake” of banning the story & locking @nypost account?

https://twitter.com/msmelchen/status/1319324346020671488

Hot off the press!

https://twitter.com/mviser/status/1509186635887435782

Participating in the security kabuki theater here in Singapore is driving me nuts.

Every single time I have to scan the Orwellian-sounding TraceTogether app to enter a mall (and then enter a shop *inside* that mall), a part of my soul dies.

Various restrictions here just really don’t make sense. The limit on groups dining at the same table is… 5. Why? The trains are packed but somehow once you reach the restaurant you have to split your group.

Imagine being stuck at this stage of the pandemic when in the West, it’s business as usual & mandates

Nothing is more jarring to processing death than witnessing the cremation of a loved one.

I saw a robot push my dad’s coffin into the furnace. My sister, in between sobs, turned to me and said “um, this is some Squid Games shit.”

They asked what I wanted to do with the ashes. The crematorium offered an option to turn “my dad” into diamonds. I thought about it for a while before realizing that I had just seen the coffin go into the furnace, so exactly how many dad molecules versus coffin molecules would be in there?

I didn’t like the molecular

I'm slowly easing myself back to normal life after the sudden and unexpected death of my father. My world has stopped and it feels surreal that it is going on without me.

Life, if I can even call it that, is simultaneously meaningless and overwhelming. I avoid the news because this is what my dad and I bonded over the most: political banter. Our last conversation lasted an hour on Valentine's Day on Russia-Ukraine.

Today, I can’t read an article without feeling the urge to send it to him and ask him what he thinks. This pattern of behavior is so

Yes, I will die on this hill. You cannot buy authenticity and love. The reason people *love* Joe Rogan is because the conversations he has on his podcast reflect the conversations that people have in real life.

For starters, the format. It's long and searching and not set up in pre-canned segments where guests have at most, minutes to make a soundbite. He chooses who he's interested in - and they really run the gamut - from ex-Navy Seals to political dissidents exiled in Russia to ... literally just nobody, like me.

His questions are free from the