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: Land of Greatness

Because it took a certain amount of greatness to watch some of the four-night extravaganza, which was even more boring than many had feared, with its relentless repetition of the four or five talking points and its deadly limitation on formats (person at the center of a stage rants to empty auditorium; person at the center of a tastefully curated background rants to camera; with the double climax Wednesday and Thursday of person at the center of a stage ranting to an audience uttering faint cries of approbation). So I did do a bunch of live tweeting last night, some of which contains some possibly useful information, and I'll try to lay some of that out.

On speaker Ann Dorn, widow of the 77-year-old African American retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn, who was murdered on 2 June, during the looting that occurred in the first couple of nights of protest over the killing of George Floyd, as he was watching out for a pawnshop owned by a friend, to express her support for Trump for offering "federal help to restore order in our communities" and for his recognition that "we need more Davids in our communities, not fewer" and that "we need to come together".

"David Dorn’s daughters want it known that their late father did not support President Donald Trump and would not want his name or image to be used to further Trump’s political agenda."

— Yas, Semite! (@Yastreblyansky) August 28, 2020

Cotton Mouth

"Treason Memorial: The Portrait of Tom Cotton" by Daniel Edwards, 2015, when Cotton and 46 other Republican senators violated the Logan Act by going over President Obama's head to attempt negotiating directly with Ayatollah Khamenei, depicting "the life-size head of Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton looking seditiously ahead, beneath the looming representation of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, who appears to have a sly and divisive smile. Etched below is a ‘U.S. seal of treason,’ featuring the bald eagle, scornful and glaring with its back turned away, accompanied by text which describes the offense committed by the 47 senators." Via Send2Press Newswire.

The battle over Senator Tom Cotton's fascist piece calling for the deployment of federal troops across the country in an "overwhelming show of force" against the "orgy of violence" perpetrated by "left-wing radicals like antifa" and their "thrill-seeking rich" allies in "exotic cars" continues even after James Bennett's departure, and The Times is presenting more commentary. Here's Mr. Bret Stephens:

In the week of the Op-Ed’s publication, an ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 52 percent of Americans favored deploying troops to help quell violent unrest in American cities. That’s not a political fringe unworthy of consideration. And Tom Cotton isn’t some nobody you’ll never hear from again. He has the pulse of his party, the ear of the president and an eye on higher office. Readers deserve an unvarnished look at who this man is and what he stands for.

LOL, "unvarnished". That's the issue right there. Cotton's prose is so varnished you could just about stand it up on a pedestal in the Arkansas capitol and call for it to be removed as a fraudulent glorification of the racist or (as the case may be) treasonous past. An unvarnished look would have to come from a pitiless reporter, not from the man himself, who's as curated as a presidential library.

Art of the Deal

Léon Bakst, costume design for the wicked fairy Carabosse in a production of Sleeping Beauty, 1921. Via Wikimedia Commons. If you get her at your christening party, your kid might get a bad deal.

Sometime last week Senator Chuck Schumer bumped into President Donald Trump at a Capitol Hill function (honoring old Bob Dole), and remarked, we're told by Politico,

that there will be no deal on Dreamers if hard-line conservative GOP Sen. Tom Cotton is involved, according to several congressional sources.

Schumer also told the president that he was not being well-served by White House staffers during negotiations over the fate of 700,000 young immigrants who face potential deportation if no deal is reached to protect them.

Trump "grew defensive", and Politico asked Senator Cotton for comment:

In a brief interview, Cotton said Schumer did not want him in the room for the Dreamers' talks, "probably because I would get a good deal, and he wants a bad deal."

Cotton may just be really stupid, but I think he shows there a remarkable mastery of the strangeness of Trumpian language, in the fairy-tale sweep of that: Schumer desires the bad. Schumer rejects Cotton because Cotton is "probably" going to defeat evil. What else were you expecting?