Tag: conspiracy

UPenn Can’t Explain Mystery Donation From Chinese Company

The University of Pennsylvania pocketed a $3 million donation last year from a mysterious Hong Kong shell company that is owned by a Shanghai businessman with deep ties to Chinese government officials.

The donation from Xu Xeuqing, who has no apparent connection to the University of Pennsylvania and was previously embroiled in a Shanghai public corruption scandal, raises questions about the true source of the money. Documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show Xeuqing has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

China has poured money into American universities in recent years, in part to buy influence on campuses, experts say. The donation comes as federal prosecutors have increased scrutiny on the Chinese government’s influence-buying and espionage operations at American universities.

“Unequivocally they’re using the money they’re providing the universities to garner influence there,” said Ben Freeman, the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy. “It’s not the sole motive, but it’s one of a variety of motives.”

Foreign money has poured into the school over the past few years with a significant portion coming from China. The Ivy League school received $61 million in gifts and contracts from China between March 2017 and the end of 2019; over the previous four year period, it took in just $19 million from Chinese donors.

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THE PRANKSTER AND THE ASSASSIN

Kerry Thornley was born on April 17th, 1938 in Whittier, California, the very same conservative bastion of Orange County blandness that bestowed upon us the honorable Richard M. Nixon, who some consider the physical embodiment of the Curse of Greyface.1

In 1958 – as an apparent counterbalance to Nixon’s ascension into the office of Vice President – Thornley and his teenaged pal Greg Hill (while sipping coffee in a Whittier bowling alley) inadvertently invoked Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos and discord. In the aftermath of their caffeine-induced vision, Hill and Thornley founded the so-called spoof religion Discordianism, as well as its disorganizational branch, The Discordian Society.

Initially an in-joke between Hill and Thornley, by the late 1960s the Discordian Society began to attract a loose knit group of writers, artists and free spirits who often adopted comical Pope names. Thornley embraced the Discordian persona of Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst while Greg Hill became known as Malaclypse the Younger.

Other Discordian Popes included Playboy editors Robert Anton Wilson (Mordecai the Foul) and Robert Shea (Josh the Dill), who in tandem co-authored the counterculture classic, The Illuminatus Trilogy, with the first book in the series dedicated to none other than Hill and Thornley. Throughout Illuminatus are numerous references to Discordian memes such as The Law of Fives, The Sacred Chao, and the John Dillinger Died For You Society.

Many Discordian activities concerned pranks designed to not only poke fun at organized religion and uptight people, but also as a means of illumination through the use of surreal and irreverent humor. In recent years, the Discordian Society has grown into a worldwide underground phenomenon, although the only thing that its Popes and Momes can generally agree upon is that tried and true Discordian maxim: “We Discordians must stick apart!” For further information/confusion refer to Principia Discordia or How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her.

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Court overturns Boston Marathon bomber’s death sentence

A federal appeals court Friday threw out Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, saying the judge who oversaw the case did not adequately screen jurors for potential biases.

A three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new penalty-phase trial on whether the 27-year-old Tsarnaev should be executed for the attack that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.

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