Spot-the-difference competition

The Rope Skipping Association’s flag problems explained…

The official design, compared with the one used in the award ceremonies at the 2025 World Jump Rope Championships over the weekend, has petals that taper off more prominently into a point. Slightly more space is left between petals, and the stars are also larger.

The errant banner, snipped from the HKFP photo, is the top one. Note how the tiny stars and insufficiently pointy petals leap out at you. Looking at the government’s authorized version below, vexillological pedants will also notice differences in dimensions and maybe tone. But I suspect all three flags displayed at the medals ceremony are wrong in some way. The rope skippers could argue that theirs is aesthetically more pleasing and should be adopted as the real one, but probably won’t.

A pic of Bill Clinton with Jeffrey Epstein – outside the MTR.

Some mid-week reading…

I was in DC when the Washington Times first hit the streets (literally – they dumped piles of the paper on the sidewalks to try to get rid of them). Launched by the Moonies, it struggled to gain respect. But by today’s standards, it’s perhaps only averagely untrustworthy. Columnist Miles Yu of the Hudson Institute looks at Beijing’s upcoming parade to mark the anniversary of the defeat of Japan in World War II…

On Sept. 3, the Chinese Communist Party will orchestrate a grand military parade in Tiananmen Square to commemorate victory over Japan in World War II.

Ostensibly a tribute to wartime heroism, this display is, in truth, a monumental distortion of history, a calculated fiction meant to glorify the party, vilify its contemporary adversaries and mislead its people.

At the heart of this charade lies the falsehood that the CCP was the principal fighting force against Japanese aggression during the war. This claim is a brazen lie.

…the Soviets and their CCP clients were effectively bound to a policy of nonconfrontation against the Japanese in China during most of the war. Any military action by the CCP would have jeopardized the USSR’s neutrality pact with Tokyo, and thus Mao Zedong and the CCP carefully avoided real conflict with the Japanese. As a result, the Japanese military and the CCP forces virtually coexisted in the same large swaths of Japanese-occupied North China, where there was little to no communist resistance.

There’s a bigger picture here. Without Japan to worry about, the USSR was able to move forces west to resist Germany’s invasion and begin the pushback that led to the Nazis’ surrender. And without the USSR to worry about, Japan felt confident about attacking Pearl Harbor and launching war against the US and the UK in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In the grand scheme of things – although China suffered massively in the war – even the ROC forces played only a limited role in Japan’s defeat.

From Bitter Winter – how Beijing’s United Front uses a Taoist sect in pushing ‘soft power’ overseas…

According to [a] source, in the wake of the Confucius Institute’s fall from grace in numerous western countries and the ill sentiments generated by years of wolf warrior diplomacy, Taoism presents the PRC government with an opportunity to drum up positive feelings by promoting a cultural export that is already viewed favorably in the West thanks to popular translations of the “Tao Te Ching” and associations with tai chi and traditional Chinese medicine. This source further posited that the UFWD may be anxious to insinuate the Chinese Taoist Association into overseas Taoist groups before the religion has a chance to grow much bigger “because it’s a religious movement the CCP thinks they can actually control abroad.”

I have never paid much attention to Taoism. Could it be one of the world’s more boring religions? A scholarly Mormon source tries to be nice…

…the [foundational text] Tao Te Ching is not always easy to understand, but in a very real sense it is not to be “understood,” at least with the mind.

The Catholic Encyclopedia takes a slightly more skeptical tack…

One may well ask how the pure abstract doctrine of Lao-tze was turned into a medley of alchemical researches, a practice of witchcraft, with the addition of Buddhist superstitions, which constitute today what is called Tao-kiao, the religion or the teaching of Tao. 

The Diplomat examines China’s soft power efforts in North Korea…

The delivery methods are varied and discreet. China explores multiple channels to get media content into North Korea, including sending USB drives, SD cards, and MP5 video players through traders or other North Koreans traveling to China. The goal isn’t just for North Koreans to consume Chinese content, but for them to become familiar with Chinese culture and view it as part of their daily lives.