Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen

 

Former U.S. president Donald Trump launches 'TRUTH' social media platform

Says some of the more measured coverage, from Reuters. Well, not exactly. Actually, it's that he will launch it, as soon as the company that's going to create it exists, after the finalization of a merger between the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) and a company called Digital World Acquisition Corp, a "special acquisition company", the singular purpose of which is to buy TMTG for $293 million and list it on NASDAQ. Unless some shareholder in the acquisition company, run by former investment banker Patrick Orlando decides to take their shares back, and Orlando's track record in setting up special acquisition companies or SPACS is not a long or hope-inspiring one:

Orlando, who has worked at Deutsche Bank and BT Capital Markets, has launched at least four SPACs and has plans for two more, according to his firm's website and regulatory filings.

But none of the SPACs have completed a deal yet. A China-based SPAC that Orlando led failed last month to complete a merger with Giga Energy Inc that would have valued the transportation solutions provider at $7.3 billion, because it could not deliver the cash required, according to regulatory filings.

My bold. Also, TMTG, or as Trump Jr. called it yesterday in a Fox News interview,

New Bottle For Old Whine

 

Graphic by The Heckler, June 2011, in honor of legendary Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, quoted as saying, "Surprisingly, my tears are slightly peachy with a touch of licorice."

People somewhat exercised by this big article in The Atlantic by a psychiatrist, Sally Satel, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, "The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left":

In the 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality, an inquiry into the psychologicalmakeup of people strongly drawn to autocratic rule and repressive politics, the German-born scholar Theodor W. Adorno and three other psychologists measured people along dimensions such as conformity to societal norms, rigid thinking, and sexual repression. And they concluded that “the authoritarian type of human”— the kind of person whose enthusiastic support allows someone like Hitler to exercise power—was found only among conservatives. In the mid-1990s, the influential Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer described left-wing authoritarianism as “the of political psychology—an occasional shadow, but no monster.” Subsequently, other psychologists reached the same conclusion....

Actually Adorno was not a psychologist but offered a sociological perspective to the team, and made a relatively small contribution (to five of the 23 chapters). And I don't think it's correct to say they "concluded" that authoritarianism was found only among conservatives; rather, rightwing authoritarianism was what the mostly American psychologists ( Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford) set out to study, carefully weeding out the contrast with revolutionary leftism that was a key to the original Frankfurt School project:

Boys From Brazil, Now From China and More Obnoxious Than Ever

New York Post, December 2020, denouncing teh way "The Middle Kingdom is launching 'unethical' military experiments that sound fit for the superhero flick 'Captain America,' John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed." And FRANCE TOO! which "gave the go-ahead for augmented soldiers, and some fear the super troopers could be the new norm in the recent future", with "drugs to keep troops awake for long periods of time and combat stress, and even surgery to improve hearing." “There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power,” Ratcliffe proclaims, citing US intelligence. “People’s Republic of China poses the greatest threat to America today.”

I could understand, conceivably even subscribe to efforts to set up a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022 over human rights issues, but the General Jack D. Ripper batshittery of Senator Tom Cotton's issue is another matter:

The senator wrote that "the CCP... considers DNA collection a vital intelligence-gathering objective" and that the Chinese government "has reportedly conducted tests to develop biologically-enhanced soldiers and intends to use DNA data to catapult Chinese biotechnology companies to global market dominance."

"In 2022, thousands of world-class athletes will gather to compete in China. Their DNA will present an irresistible target for the CCP," he warned. "Thus, we should expect that the Chinese government will attempt to collect genetic samples of Olympians at the Games, perhaps disguised as testing for illegal drugs or COVID-19."

There are actually a couple of facts embedded in there. One is that a Chinese company, the Beijing Genomics Institute, now just called BGI, is the world's the biggest genome sequence provider, after the US-based Illumina. Like others in the business, they grew up in basic research with the Human Genome Project, doing bulk sequencing and the construction of a representative genome for everybody, but sequencing individual human genomes has become more significant in recent years in a number of different ways, for medical research, patient diagnosis and care, and now also consumer use, as the price goes radically lower, with companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA, which don't do the sequencing themselves but send saliva samples to companies like Illumina and BGI for processing.

For the Record: The Lab Leak Theory

 

Wait, Andromeda strain was a coronavirus? Why weren't we informed?!

Shorter Monsignor Douthat: The real reason it's important to find out if Covid leaked from a lab is I really want it to be true. https://t.co/artuHtCc5I

— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 30, 2021

That's really about the size of it:

Yes, if we never figure out the truth of Covid’s origins, the dangers of media groupthink will be the only lesson we can draw for absolutely certain. But if we could find out the truth, and it turned out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology really was the epicenter of a once-in-a-century pandemic, the revelation would itself be a major political and scientific event.

China

 

Nine-Dragon Wall, Beihai Park, Beijing, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is a very fraught time in the history of Chinese-American relations, as I hardly need to point out, with everybody needing to recover from the distortions of the Trumpery, when the US was ruled by an ignorant emperor whose mind was entirely focused on the irrelevant—nice playdates with their emperor, fighting over the balance of trade, and blaming them for the coronavirus—leaving them a more or less free hand in stealing intellectual property, militarizing the South China Sea, competing with the US for allies in the Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America, and violating human rights around the country's perimeter. While their rulers must be relieved at the prospect of a period of predictable stability, they know they will be coming in for harsher trade conditions

“Despite Trump’s claim that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” the ultimate results of the phase one trade deal between China and the United States — and the trade war that preceded it — have significantly hurt the American economy without solving the underlying economic concerns that the trade war was meant to resolve. The effects of the trade war go beyond economics, though. Trump’s prioritization on the trade deal and de-prioritization of all other dimensions of the relationship produced a more permissive environment for China to advance its interests abroad and oppress its own people at home, secure in the knowledge that American responses would be muted by a president who was reluctant to risk losing the deal.” 

and heavy criticism from the Biden administration, as in reaction to this week's news stories from culturocide in Xinjiang, where they are breaking up families of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minority groups by shipping young people to jobs thousands of miles away where they won't be able to speak their languages or practice their religion, to killing democracy in Honk Kong.

Harmony

Unforgivably late in getting to this, but blogfriend Andrew Johnston has put out a documentary film on Chinese attitudes toward the USA—not the Chinese government or the Party, but the ordinary people he interacts with on a daily basis in his life in Hefei, Anhui. It's full of great insights, cool location shots, and richly merited aspersions on vile Mike Pompeo and the Former Guy he worked for. Watch on YouTube from below or his website.

For the Record: Tough on China

 

Illustration by Javier Zarracina/Vox.

Rafael trying to come out plus trompiste que le Trompe:

All things he fought against

Whereas with the one thing he campaigned on https://t.co/dtYcVQLqiZ

— It's Just Soup For My Family (@Yastreblyansky) September 6, 2020

Seriously...

Douthat and the only-two-countries-in-the-world model of Grand Strategy

Mahjong tiles revealing that China has words for "north", "east", "south", and "west".

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, takes his Grand Strategy chops out for a spin ("The Chinese Decade"):

richer-but-not-freer China proved that it was possible for an authoritarian power to tame the internet, to make its citizens hardworking capitalists without granting them substantial political freedoms, to buy allies across the developing world, and to establish beachheads of influence — in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, American academia, the NBA, Washington, D.C. — in the power centers of its superpower rival....

So China has won twice over: First rising with the active collaboration of naïve American centrists, and then consolidating its gains with the de facto collaboration of a feckless American populist. Four months into the coronavirus era, Xi Jinping’s government is throttling Hong Kong, taking tiny bites out of India, saber-rattling with its other neighbors, and perpetrating a near-genocide in its Muslim West. Meanwhile America is rudderless and leaderless, consumed by protests and elite psychodrama and a moral crusade whose zeal seems turned entirely inward, with no time to spare for a rival power’s crimes.

Furthermore, Trump’s likely successor is a figure whose record and instincts and family connections all belong to the recent period of American illusions about China. 

One of those naïve American centrists, he means, Joe Biden, and of course sneaking in the reference to the familiar smear for the cognoscenti, because that's how Ross rolls—Biden's "family connections" meaning the bogus story from Peter Schweitzer's fabrication factory according to which Hunter Biden took some kind of illicit profit from associations with the Chinese government (I dealt with it briefly here in the form of a Radio Yerevan joke).

Douthat: Q Is Right!

Ding dong, the Bilderberg is dead!

And here's Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, at his weirdest, with an agenda I want to try unpacking ("The End of the New World Order"): it starts off with a mysterious warning that some rightwing conspiracy theories, while false, may be sort of true in a way that overrides their particular falsehood:

This is as true in the Trump era as in any other. Extraterrestrials are probably not among us, but we keep being handed new evidence that the U.F.O. phenomenon is real. QAnon is a landscape of fantasy, but the fact that powerful sexual predators have ties to presidents, popes and princes is a hard post-Jeffrey Epstein truth....

The phrase “New World Order” was lifted by the conspiracy-minded from the optimistic rhetoric of George H.W. Bush, and since then the paranoia and the facts have always existed symbiotically. The fantasy is looming totalitarian control, black helicopters descending, secret Bilderberg plots. But it’s been encouraged by various undeniable realities — the growth of transnational institutions, the manifest power of a global overclass, the often undemocratic expansion of the European Union and the rise of digital surveillance and the ties binding China and the U.S. into “Chimerica.”

I'm not so sure about this whole perspective. It's like if you read about the myths of Zeus or Thor and came away with the idea you'd found proof that thunder goes back at least 3000 years. That's not the point! We have independent reasons for believing that thunder is millions of years older than that because that's how Earth weather works! They made up stories about it 3000 years ago because they didn't know that, but we do; the myths tell us more about the people than about the natural phenomenon.

For the Record: Now With More Pompeo

Photo by Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images via Intercept (I think originally used in The New Yorker).

Trump has only two ideas about China, both of which are not actually about China but about his election campaign—wanting to get his name on a "deal" to the content of which he is basically indifferent, which will enhance his view of himself as a master negotiator, and wanting to blame China for all the problems of the universe, which the rally crowds adore—and doesn't understand that they contradict each other and that the more abuse he heaps on the country the more difficult it will be for the dictator Xi Jinping to have another playdate with him. But the way he's working the coronavirus into the latter goal, pushing his people to fabricate the case that Chinese scientists created the virus in a Wuhan laboratory, is getting dangerously reminiscent of the kind of fabrication used to set up the Iraq War in 2002-03, and there's something scary about the role Secretary of State Pompeo is playing in the business:

Seems like privatizing intelligence is the way to make sure you get the intelligence the boss wants. https://t.co/86W8YQRKFN

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 18, 2020

So somebody asked a contractor called "MACE" to come up with it-- pic.twitter.com/n0xWg7vqj1

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 18, 2020

Lede, Buried

Protesters thanking the United States, via Sky News.

Speaking of gratitude, Hong Kong activists and some of their admirers have been tweeting out a lot of it to Donald Trump for signing the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act authorizing sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials involved in the repression of the demonstrations and requiring the State Department to do an annual review of Hong Kong's special trade status, passed unanimously by the Senate and 417 to 1 by the House.

Those thanks may be a little misplaced. That the president signed the bill was inevitable given the majorities, though as a matter of fact he'd threatened to veto it before the votes; that isn't news. But the buried lede is that he issued it with a signing statement that the newspapers aren't running in full: I ran into it on Twitter.

Trump has signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law — reluctantly. This signing statement isn't a shining endorsement, more like a "they made me do it" since a veto would've been overturned. pic.twitter.com/Ky8XyhU4QQ

— Alejandro Alvarez (@aletweetsnews) November 27, 2019

That is to say, he reserves the right to not obey it if he finds it "interferes" with his "constitutional authority, just as he did with the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) authorizing sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential election, passed by similar majorities at the end of July 2017 (including some of those Republican senators now saying "Ukraine might have done it"), which he also threatened emptily to veto before signing it into law in 2 August. And successfully avoided implementing it for almost two and a half years at present writing, as I explained last June.

In short, there aren't going to be any sanctions on China in behalf of democracy in Hong Kong as long as Trump is president, because emperors don't submit to Congress if their grand viziers can figure out ways of avoiding it and their fellow emperors don't want them to.

For the Record: June 4

Image by vienman.com via Taiwan News and an excellent discussion of George H.W. Bush's failure to respond to the Tiananmen killings.

On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, I got embroiled in an idiotic Twitter war discussing the Chinese president with a transatlantic mob of conservatives who have recently found that they object to the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang province being forcibly "re-educated" into Xi Jinping Thought and the decisions of the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, after being completely indifferent to it for years, and my tweet went a little viral:

Xi's a horrible person but he knows how to behave himself in public. Never tells the host country who to pick as prime minister, for instance, or talks about whether the local princesses are nasty or not.

— See Pinned Tweet (@Yastreblyansky) June 2, 2019

Trump's a garrulous old fool who can't control his tongue and keeps insulting people left and right. You should hear what Khan's predecessor as mayor said about inviting him to London--guy called Boris https://t.co/JdDwGRTdg1

— See Pinned Tweet (@Yastreblyansky) June 2, 2019

An awful lot of people decided I was trying to say that Xi Jinping was a nicer person than Trump, and haughtily informed me that Xi is in fact a bad man.

Leverage

Photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters via Daily Beast.

When the John Bolton interview on NPR started up yesterday morning, I was pretty taken aback:

Steve Inskeep: We'll just dive right in. But I want to start with the arrest that we learned about last night and that I presume you've known about for some time. What is the message that is sent by the arrest of Meng Wanzhou?

National security adviser John Bolton: Well, I'd rather not get into the specifics of law enforcement matters but, but we've had enormous concern for years about ... in this country about the practice of Chinese firms to use stolen American intellectual property to engage in forced technology transfers and to be used really as arms of the Chinese government's objectives in terms of information technology in particular. So not respecting this particular arrest, but Huawei is one company we've been concerned about, there are others as well. I think this is going be a major subject of the negotiations that President Trump and President Xi Jinping agreed on in Buenos Aires.

She's busted for intellectual property theft? Because the news coverage was pretty clear that the offense she was being held for was to do with her company violating Iran sanctions. Did Bolton not know that? Also, copyright violation isn't generally considered a criminal offense.

Literary Corner: The Case of the Delayed Devaluations

Joan Miró, L'Été, lithograph, 1938, via Denis Bloch Fine Art.

It's a Story

by Donald J. Trump

Just to—just to finish,
I think a lot of good things
are going to happen, but I
delayed my devaluations.

Monetary, you know, on
the monetary—the devaluations,
my currency manipulations, and also
my tariffs, for a period of a year,
with China, because I wanted to
get as much help as—as they could
give us with respect to North Korea.

That had an impact. So I delayed it.
But there came a time when I couldn’t
delay it any more because it’s too much
money that they drain out of our country.
Just too much money. That’s where we are now.

So I put 50—I hope you can cover
this pretty much as I say it
because you can’t really cut
it out. It’s—it’s a story.

It's actually true that Trump single-handedly brought about a huge devaluation of the RMB, in early July, through the last round of crazy tariff impositions, as Bloomberg reported at the time:

For the Record: Who Knew?

Chinese exceptionalism: It's much simpler if they just own everything (via Wikipedia). 

Apparently the Emperor had no idea the Chinese military might build up islands in the South China Sea and use them for missile launch pads.

Mattis Accuses Beijing of ‘Intimidation and Coercion’ in South China Sea https://t.co/4ROkZv4LJf

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 2, 2018

What? You're wondering if Mattis is surprised? Or you're wondering whether you're surprised yourself? Or the question mark is a slip?

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 2, 2018

It takes a thief

Green-headed tree agama, via San Diego Zoo.

David F. Brooks finally starting to give in to his inner sycophant, as he contemplates Donald Trump's and Michael Cohen's histories with organized crime. Maybe it's a feature-not-a bug! At least from the foreign policy perspective ("Donald Trump's Lizard Wisdom"):

I can’t help but wonder if that kind of background has provided a decent education for dealing with the sort of hopped-up mobsters running parts of the world today. There is growing reason to believe that Donald Trump understands the thug mind a whole lot better than the people who attended our prestigious Foreign Service academies.

"Hopped-up" (1920s slang for "maniacal in a drug-induced kind of way") makes it art.

The Brooks hypothesis is that just as it takes a thief to catch a thief, so it takes somebody who's practiced on Fat Tony Salerno to equip a chap to deal with Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Trumpian triumphs of recent weeks demonstrate that. Not that Brooks is advocating the Trump doctrine!

Please don’t take this as an endorsement of the Trump foreign policy. I’d feel a lot better if Trump showed some awareness of the complexity of the systems he’s disrupting, and the possibly cataclysmic unintended consequences. But there is some lizard wisdom here.

It's just the Douthat electric slide: "I'm not saying, I'm just saying."

I think there may be a couple of flaws in this argument, one being that none of these eggs are actually chickens at present, as in the North Korea case:

For the Record: Trump's Very Bad Day

And in case you didn't get a chance to notice,

#BREAKING: The victims of Donald Trump’s fraudulent university will finally receive the relief they deserve. A federal court just finalized our $25M Trump University settlement. pic.twitter.com/mBSJwgIY8i

— Eric Schneiderman (@AGSchneiderman) April 9, 2018

I didn't realize that was still pending in any way. "Your so-called lawyer got his office, apartment, and the hotel room he was staying in while his apartment was getting renoavated all raided by FBI agents looking for evidence of crimes of illegal campaign finance contributions, wire fraud, bank fraud, and by the way you need to write a check for $25 million to pay off all those people you defrauded back in 2010. Have another cheeseburger!"

Then there was this explosion quoted at TPM indicating that he's heard how the soybean and hog farmers feel about his trade war plans:

President Trump is Not Authorized to Speak for Himself

National Guard troops outside Hidalgo, TX, in 2011. AP photo via MPR.

Yesterday, in the wake of Trump's announcing to a press availability on Tuesday that he was pulling all the US troops out of Syria and "The White House" clarifying a few hours later that no, that was not in fact the case ("President Trump," they did not add, "is not authorized to speak for the Trump administration"), BooMan wrote,

He may be crazy and flat wrong on many details, but he is the president and if he wants to end our commitment to the region, you’d think that he could force a change in policy. But he can’t. Obama found himself handcuffed in some respects, too. If there is such a thing as the “deep state,” this is how it manifests itself. Even presidents have to bow to them on occasion.

I thought that was exaggerating both the existence of a "deep state" and this president's involvement in the government:

Can Jared Kushner Do His Job? What Job?

In my film version of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, I'm casting John Kelly as the unnamed governess, Donald Trump as poor little Miles, and Jared Kushner as the unspeakably evil, but possibly imaginary, ghost of Peter Quint. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times.

I can't get over all the solemn concern as to whether Jared Kushner will be able to do his job without a security clearance—like Mara Liasson audibly shaking her head on NPR: "He won't be able to read the President's Daily Briefing!", that single page of amply illustrated bullet points highlighting stories where the president's name shows up. Imma come right out and speculate there isn't that much classified information in the PDB anyway, not only because the governess is afraid Trump might get angry, or pass what he learns to Putin or Netanyahu or who knows who, just by way of showing off how clued in he is, but because there's no real positive point in it—what useful thing would Trump be able to do with such information? He doesn't even believe it if it doesn't show up on Fox.

Documents, and different things

Operatic Monkey, via, is a great hero, and in the end of the story a Buddhist saint, but the part of the story everybody loves is the part where he's making maximum trouble.

Remarks from the press availability aboard Air Force One, on the way to Hanoi, this morning:

It's been a -- I think it's been a great trip. In certain ways, it's been very epic. I think things have happened that have been really amazing. Prime Minister Abe came up to me just at the end, and he said that since you left South Korea and Japan, that those two countries are now getting along much, much better. That's from Prime Minister Abe -- that there's been a real bonding between South Korea and Japan. So that was great.

Yes, they're working as hard as they can to revive the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement without the United States. Since Trump ended US membership in the TPP at the beginning of his term and pulled out of the US-South Korea FTA in September, they've seen more and more incentive to work together, in spite of the obvious rivalry between the two similar economies, through the current insanity. They have to come up with ways of stabilizing the situation without US participation, and they hope to do it without surrendering to Chinese hegemony. It's the same for Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam. They are united in the face of the threat posed by Donald Trump to the Asia-Pacific order.