America Lost the Cold War

America lost the Cold War.

Let me say it again.  America lost the Cold War.

Let me make myself clearer.  Communism may have failed, but America lost the Cold War.  

It wasn't Ronald Reagan or Robert Welch or Young Americans for Freedom who won the Cold War.  Two guys from Poland, Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa, with a little help from their friends in Lithuania, brought down the Soviet Union.

Well, okay, you're thinking, we didn't necessarily win the Cold War by ourselves, but we Americans took actions of fight Communism and keep it from spreading, so we certainly didn't lose it. Oh, really?  Well, then, let's review those actions:

When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, President Harry Truman went to the United Nations to approve a multinational military force (which ended up being 90 percent American) to counter North Korean aggression.  This was appropriate and proper, as the U.S. could not declare war on North Korea because it did not recognize the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (which is neither democratic, for the people, nor a republic) as the sole legitimate government of the Korean nation.  But it allowed future Presidents to start wars in other countries without congressional oversight or even, in some cases, approval.  This made the executive branch much more powerful than it was supposed to be . . . which proved to be dangerous when Donald Trump took office.

In the meantime, we built up the Japanese economy to make it a bulwark against Communism in China and North Korea.  We never suspected that, in time, the Japanese economy would become a threat to our own.  Now Toyota is the most popular auto brand in the United States. 

When the Chinese Communists drove the Nationalist government to Taiwan, the United States continued to support the Nationalists and keep the People's Republic of China out of the United Nations, which only earned the U.S. a lack of credibility among our allies - which had long accepted the truth of the Communist takeover of China - and the suspicion of Third World countries who thought it subliminally racist that a white government was telling an Asian country how to govern itself.  The United States finally relented and allowed the People's Republic of China to take China's seat at the United Nations in 1971 and became the last Western nation to officially recognize it . . . in 1979.  

Speaking of subliminal racism, the U.S. government supported right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America to prevent communist governments from taking over and in come cases backed military coups to overthrow democratically elected leftist governments - like fifty years ago today, when the United States had Chilean President Salvador Allende overthrown by the fascist General Augusto Pinochet.  And we wonder why so many Latin Americans hate us.  Anyway, supporting right-wing dictators didn't work when we backed Batista in Cuba and got Castro and it didn't work when we backed the Somoza family in Nicaragua and got the Sandinistas.     

As for Cuba, efforts to dislodge Castro almost brought the world to nuclear annihilation, and efforts to make foreign countries pay for leasing state-owned property in Cuba confiscated from American owners after the Cuban Revolution, like the odious Helms-Burton Act, created resentments from Western allies such as France and Canada. 

Our biggest struggle against Communism was the war in Vietnam.  You know the story about that by now.

When a socialist prime minister took control of Iran in 1953, the U.S. and Britain backed a countercoup to restore the Shah to power to prevent nationalization of Iran's oil fields.  The British eventually withdrew from the Middle East, and the U.S. steadfastly and wholeheartedly continued to support the Shah to prevent Iran from becoming a Soviet satellite and keep the U.S.S.R. from having access to the Persian Gulf . . . and then an Islamic fundamentalist revolution took place, leading to a seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the holding of 52 Americans hostage for fourteen months.  Iran and the United States remain bitter enemies, and Islamic fundamentalist jihad against the West has been prevalent ever since. 

When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949, it was created mainly to allow the United States to come to the defense of a Western ally should the Soviet Union invade it - per the provisions of Article 5, that being at an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all of them.  This led the U.S. to spend money on the military and on developing new nuclear weapons and freed Canada and the nations of Western Europe to develop the sort of highly sophisticated welfare programs, public amenities, and mass transit systems that we lack. 

The Interstate Highway System was created partly for defense reasons to move troops - and missiles - around the country while also being available to employ for evacuating major cities in case of a Soviet nuclear attack.  In fact, it allowed middle-class white people to evacuate cities - where interstates were built through minority neighborhoods - and move to the suburbs, while the cities went to hell and developed a pathological urban ghetto culture now perversely celebrated as "hip-hop." 

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the United States aided the Islamic commandos fighting the Red Army.  After the Soviets withdrew and the U.S. turned its attention elsewhere, one of those commandos regrouped with his fellow fighters into a new organization that would use their training from the CIA to commit terrorist acts to spread jihad and fight American interests in the Islamic world.  That organization was al-Qaeda, and the commando who spurred its founding was Osama bin Laden.  After numerous attacks on American interests abroad, bin Laden then helped orchestrate the greatest terrorist attack on American soil - or anywhere, 22 years ago today.

Ironically, the United States became the only country in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance for which Article 5 was invoked.

So, yeah, we lost the Cold War.  Big time.

Up, Up and Away!

From the folks who gave you the Cultural Revolution, cheap underwear, oppression of Uighurs and Tibetans, and a major pandemic, we had a big balloon in our air space!  That's right, the Chinese sent over a spy balloon and claimed it was a weather balloon.

So why do the Chinese need to know how cold it is in Montana?

They didn't.  They were looking to peek at our silos.  I don't mean grain storage buildings on Jon Tester's farm. 

Anyway, the balloon "drifted" across the country on a southeasterly trajectory over to South Carolina, and then over the Atlantic, where it was shot down on President Biden's orders, which he'd given three days earlier on the grounds that it be done as soon as it posed no threat to people below.  Because there was no place on land that it could be shot down without threatening people - even in southern central Montana (actual bird's eye view below) . . . 

. . . it wasn't until yesterday that it was shot down over the ocean.

The government is hoping to retrieve the payload from the balloon - about the size of three city buses - to fin out what the Chinese were looking for with the balloon, but it's likely that the Chinese already found it. 

It's time we stopped dealing with the Chinese like we're walking on eggshells.  They infected Canada with SARS, they infected the entire planet with COVID, and they're melting our children's brains with Tik Tok (a video-based social media platform I don't use, and never will).  The China that can say "Fuck you!" is more dangerous than the Japan that can say no.  Anyone who believes otherwise is full of hot air.

COVID Moment of Truth

Tomorrow, the World Health Organization is to meet to discuss where to end the emergency phase of COVID.  That is, whether they're ready to declare the pandemic over.

If you expect an announcement that the pandemic is ending, don't hold your breath.  On second thought, do hold your breath - it's a good way to avoid getting COVID.

The fact is that since China ended its zero-COVID policy, COVID cases have shot up there like a rocket.  It's spreading so rapidly that it is likely to fall just as quickly, but it's still possibly going to cause a new strain in its wake - a strain serious enough to warrant its own Greek letter.  This hypothetical new strain could keep the pandemic going for another three years.

Some pandits (my term for "pandemic pundits") are critical of efforts of other national governments to test Chinese nationals entering their countries because there's already a lot of COVID outside China that could cause a new strain.  Yes, but there's also a good deal of immunity in the rest of the world because the rest of the world didn't shoot for zero-COVID like China did.  If another strain is going to come from anywhere, it;s where COVID began.

Of course, add American idiots who won't get vaccinated, and you have yourself plenty of reasons why we should expect the emergency to continue . . . and zero reasons why we should not.   

Relax? Don't Do It!

I thought we'd been spared.

It looked there was light at the end of the COVID tunnel.  Despite a rise in infections in the West and a tandem increase in RSV and flu infections, COVID infection rates in late 2022 were still below what they had been in late 2021, the RSV spike among children was due to a lack of exposure to earlier respiratory viruses (and was likely to peak soon and fall off as a result), and the flu spike was likely to follow that same trajectory.  Certainly, I thought, the pandemic would finally fizzle out by this coming spring.  

Then the Commies running the so-called People's Republic of China ruined everything.

China is relaxing and in some cases ending its zero-COVID restrictions and allowing the virus to spread all over the country like runny jelly on toast.  As a result, there have been 250 million COVID infections in China - 18 percent of the country's population - although the government has officially reported only 63,000 cases in the past couple of weeks.  Effective immediately, the government won't be reporting new cases at all.  Meanwhile, Chinese hospitals and crematoria can't keep up with the spike in cases and deaths.

So what does that have to do with the rest of the world? Not only will the Chinese stop testing foreign nationals entering the country, it will start allowing - in a controlled manner, the Chinese government has cryptically explained - Chinese citizens to start traveling outside the country.

Unless other countries rigidly test Chinese travelers entering their domains, we can expect the horrors of 2020 to happen all over again.

And even if prior infections and vaccinations in North America and Europe blunt the spread of the lastest COVID wave now hitting China - the largest wave anywhere since March 2020 - the case and death numbers will still be high . . . particularly in the United States, where right-wing science skeptics still won't get vaccinated.

In other words, don't look at a bright side to all this because there isn't one.

I've been unable to go to many places since the pandemic started nearly three years ago because, even when restrictions were lifted in the United States, I've still had to wear face coverings and engage in some social distancing in indoor public spaces, and as I am uncomfortable going places under these circumstances,  I don't really go anywhere I don't have to other than meetings of the stamp collector's club I belong to.  Many annual events I've regularly attended have been scaled back or canceled altogether.  I still won't attend any events that haven't been cancelled if they're indoors.  But I thought we might be getting toward the end of the pandemic by April 2023 at the earliest.  Hey, Donald Trump wasn't necessarily lying back in 2020 when he said that SARS CoV-2 would go away by April; he just never said what year. 😃

The Chinese have seen to it - all for the sake of  the mighty yuan (and avoiding public unrest that could cause the government to collapse and the army to side with the people) - that this pandemic will go on indefinitely.  And they'll largely escape blame because ,well, we need their supply chains to function.  And the World Health Organization has inexplicably treated China with kid gloves, taking Xi Jinping's propaganda at face value and letting efforts to find the source of COVID atrophy.  The Chinese, of course, are safe in the knowledge that no one in the West will attack them for fear of being labelled racist.

 I am so confident that I will never travel abroad now thanks to all of this that I'm thinking of using my passport - with pages as empty as a monograph book of Irish erotic art - for kindling.  I've gone back to finding the alternative way of seeing Europe - scrolling through landscapes on Google Earth.  Yesterday I virtually visited Holland.

I disagree with most of what the Republicans stand for, but if the House Republican majority in the new Congress makes good on plans to investigate the origins of COVID, I'll be egging them on enthusiastically.

Since I can't go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or see the latest movies in the theaters, I'll have nothing else to do. 

Democrats Living Dangerously

Okay, boys and girls, remember when, in April 2015, Hillary Clinton urged the Democratic National Committee to play up Trump because she so desperately wanted to run against him?  Judging from the recent primaries for the midterm general elections, it seems that the Democrats have learned nothing from promoting the most dangerous Republican candidates.

Democrats have been running ads highlighting the records of Republican election-deniers - the folks who say that Trump won the election of 2020 - in order to help get them nominated so the Democrats, theoretically, can beat these candidates in November.  I touched on that in commenting about the 2022 Pennsylvania gubernatorial primary.  The Democrats have gotten similarly involved in primaries in numerous elections in various states, like the Maryland gubernatorial primary and now the Michigan U.S. House primary in the district based in Grand Rapids, where Republican U.S. Representative Peter Meijer was running for re-election.

The operative word here is "was."  Meijer, a scion of the family that owns the Midwestern pharmacy chain that bears their name, was one of ten House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump for the January 6 insurrection.  He's the sort of Republican I would like to see more of in Congress, because he stood up for principle.  Democrats praised him for standing up to Trump.  But then the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee went ahead and showed their admiration for Meijer by stabbing him in the back and spending money to get his election-denying opponent, John Gibbs, nominated for the November election to give the Democrats a greater chance of winning a House seat in a U.S. House district that hasn't elected a Democrat to represent it since 1990.  Gibbs won.  (In a foreboding sign of how this might backfire on Democrats, their candidate in that district, Hillary Scholten, hasn't gotten any mention from the national media.)

What the hell are these Democrats doing monkeying with the business like this?  All they're doing is helping GOP election-deniers get one giant step closer to winning office.  And some of them have real shots at winning.  If they do win, it will be in part because Democrats helped them get nominated.  Why don't Democrats stop wasting their money on messing with the Republican primaries and start spending it on helping Democrats win in the general elections?  Their cynical political game reeks, and the Democrats could pay a heavy price for it.

Meanwhile, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - who has endorsed the  Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's tactic of interfering in Republican primaries - made a dangerous move this week by visiting Taiwan and, as the U.S.'s third-highest-ranking elected official, speaking defiantly and forcefully about American support for the Taiwanese government and the Taiwanese people.  China considers Taiwan, a country Americans are obliged to defend, to be a breakaway province and hopes to reunite it with the mainland by force if necessary.  (Taiwan's government, the Republic of China, ran all of China until it was driven off the mainland by the Communists in 1949 and has been reduced to just the island of Taiwan and a few small islands off the mainland coast.  Ironically, Taiwan had just been returned to China by Japan after fifty years of Japanese rule.)   

China responded to Pelosi by sending over two dozen warships to the Taiwan Strait and blasted Pelosi for impugning Chinese sovereignty.  So, if World War III breaks out in the Far East, this could be where it starts.

Waving the proverbial red flag in the face of Xi Jinping (who salutes a literal red flag, with a few yellow stars added to boot) is a pretty dumb thing to do when U.S.-China relations are tense enough, and leading government and intelligence officials in Washington told Pelosi to please, please, please not go ahead with her Taiwan visit.  Alas, Pelosi doesn't take orders from anyone and makes clear to everyone else that her way is the way it's going to be.  In other words, she's a typical Italian mom. 😛 

Commie Karma

Shanghai breezes, cool and clearing, evening's sweet caress . . . and spreading Omicron BA.2.

China's largest city, with a population equivalent to three times the size of New York plus the population of San Jose, is and has been under lockdown for weeks over the COVID Omicron BA.2 strain spreading rapidly among city residents because they were either unvaccinated or got China's low-quality, zero-grade vaccine.  And the Chinese Communists think, as always that they can eradicate it with their zero-COVID strategy, which has already caused great misery among the Chinese people.

The residents of Shanghai have indeed been, well, shanghaied, forced against their will to sit in their apartments until the COVID wave passes and not even being able to go out for the most basic necessities except what the government gives them - like food that can make you sick.  Naturally, this is causing global supply chains emanating from China to break down even further, but I'm sure Xi Jinping sees that as a plus if it gets President Biden voted out of office in America.

The residents of Shanghai are getting so restless in a lockdown over a virus spreading in part because their government lied about it when it first emerged, even as Beijing now deals with Omicron BA.2, that this could cause - dare I say it?  a revolution.

One can only hope.

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao . . .  

I Got Real Snow

In my previous blog entry, I said that I wanted a Winter Olympiad with real snow.  After I wrote that, northeastern China got . . . snow.

Enough snow to make the artificial-snow course in China unsafe and force some outdoor events to be . . . canceled.  Ironic, no?

Oh, yeah, central and southern New Jersey were forecast to get some snow - but not northern New Jersey, where I live. I woke up yesterday morning to . . . snow.

Right, nothing makes sense anymore . . . 

The Winter Olympics. Meh.

Depending on how this storm works out, I may or may not be here after tomorrow, but even if I manage to keep the lights on through the next few days, don't expect much commentary on the Winter Olympics in Beijing, which open tomorrow.  Oh, I'm sure there will be a couple of moments worth highlighting, but, given the very fact that they're going to be held in a country that should never have been awarded the Winter Olympics in the first place while COVID - which said country is responsible for - is raging, I expect the Winter Games to be something of a wet blanket.

Bear in mind that Beijing is the worst possible place to hold the Winter Olympics, and not because of the pandemic. Not only is the climate there wrong for outdoor winter sports such as skiing and bobsledding - the Chinese have to produce artificial snow for the ski events - and not only is Beijing an oversized metropolis in comparison to previous Winter Olympic towns like St. Moritz and Lake Placid, the Chinese are planning to monitor reporters and commentators going to Beijing to cover the Games.  And with COVID restrictions in China being as they are, in which the Chinese are aiming for a zero-COVID environment, the Big Brother ethos is likely to be more constricting.  What's worse, the International Olympic Committee had plenty of time, once COVID escaped China, once it became apparent that the Uighurs in Sinkiang were being persecuted and once it became clear that Xi Jinping had Taiwan in his gun sights, to move the Winter Olympics.  Holding them in Beijing now - especially just fourteen years after the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics - is rewarding the Chinese government for bad behavior.  And Bob Costas agrees.

"The IOC deserves all of the disdain and disgust for going back to China yet again," Costas (above) told CNN.  "They're shameless about this stuff. And so, this takes place not only amid COVID, but  . . . the restrictions on press freedom and the sense that everyone there is being monitored in some way."

Costas could have stopped there, but he went on. "We had that feeling in Beijing in 2008. If anything, it’s been ramped up now. It isn't just NBC. Any network that broadcasts big sports is simultaneously in a position of being quasi-journalistic at best. You're reporting on an event but you’re also promoting that event. News organizations like CNN don’t pay a rights fee to cover the White House. NBC pays a huge rights fee along with the production cost. They want people to watch it. It’s a centerpiece of the entire network strategy."

And of course we'll all watch, if only to get or minds off COVID, the weather, and anything Donald Trump says.  Well, we should still be paying attention to Trump.  Because when we look at China under Xi, we could be looking at America under Trump Mark Two. 

Biden's Bungles

President Biden's misfortune have turned into an ongoing disaster, which must be making sane Americans fearing a Trump comeback quaking in their boots. 

I mean, he did the right thing in withdrawing from Afghanistan, and the United States is now at peace for the first time since before 9/11.  Except that he didn't consult other members of NATO, the auspices under which we were in Afghanistan in the first place, before going ahead and ending the war.  Even the Germans have complained that Trump consulted with them more than Biden did.

Biden is now pivoting toward eastern Asia to counter the growing threat from China, having signed a deal with the United Kingdom and Australia to sell nuclear submarines, marine craft exclusive only to the U.S. and the U.K., to the Australian navy, to increase security in the Pacific. Except that he forgot to inform France, which had a now-canceled deal to sell diesel-electric submarines to Australia and has overseas territories in the region (can you say "New Caledonia," boys and girls?), and now the French are livid over it.  He has a lot of fence-mending to do when he addresses the United Nations General Assembly today.

Which doesn't give him any time right now to handle the sudden influx of Haitian migrants trying the enter the country from Mexico.

And as if that weren't bad enough, we now learn that a retaliatory strike responding to a terrorist attack in Afghanistan killed innocent civilians.

The poor guy can't get any relief from his allies in Congress as the Democrats attempt - I use that verb loosely - to pass a two-part infrastructure bill.  There aren't enough votes in the Senate to pass a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill and progressives in the House vow to sink a bipartisan Senate infrastructure deal if the reconciliation package doesn't pass, as they are committed to settling for nothing instead of something when they can't have everything.

And COVID is still a thing, with the vaccine requirements already under threat from state lawsuits before the requirements are even written and with China, which invented COVID, unresponsive to proposed Sino-American efforts to lead the world out of the pandemic. Not to mention the lack of a Sino-American deal to lead the world against climate change.

Biden has the wind at his back.  Unfortunately, it's his own. 

After Tokyo

Oh, cripes, is Beijing 2022 coming soon?

The Beijing Winter Olympics are less than six months away, and in place of moving the Winter Games or postponing them until 2023 or 2024 (the centennial year of the Winter Olympics), some wags are suggesting a boycott of the Winter Games if they're held on schedule.  That reminds me of when right-wing columnist Cal Thomas immediately called for a boycott of the 2008 Summer Olympics as soon as they were awarded to Beijing.  

Thomas' sentiment was a knee-jerk reaction back in 2001, but it's a very understandable one now, and I don't need to tell you again the reasons why . . . though COVID remains a big reason.  But after the relatively successful staging  of the 2020 - no, 2021 - Tokyo Olympics these past two weeks, the main reasons for a boycott are likely to center around Chinese oppression of the Uighurs and their use of slave labor.  Not that COVID, which the Chinese government gave the rest of the world, isn't a concern.

So do I, as someone who thought it was a bad idea to award Beijing the 2022 Winter Games in the first place, think we should boycott the Games?  No, no, no, let the American team go.  Boycotts never work, as anyone remembers the 1980 Moscow Olympics boycott remembers.  It didn't get the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan, which was the reason of the boycott in the first place (and I'll have more on our own withdrawal from that country another time), and President Carter couldn't even get NATO allies other than Canada and West Germany to join him, though the British government wanted to but the British Olympic team did not, and so they went.  Ironically, members of the British Parliament are calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Games now.   Speed skater Eric Heiden, one of the stars of the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, was against any boycott of any Olympiad.  He was right about boycotts in 1980, and he's right about them now.  This country has never boycotted a Winter Olympiad and we shouldn't start with this one. 

Political disputes never work out, but the Olympics usually do.  A lot of folks thought it was folly to award the Games of the XXIVth Olympiad - the 1988 Olympics - to Seoul, because it was the capital of South Korea, a country that had no diplomatic relations with the Communist bloc nations of eastern Europe and whose government was not considered the legitimate government of Korea by those same nations (they considered the so-called Democratic People's Republic in North Korea to be that), and was also a right-wing dictatorship.  There were calls to move the 1988 Games to avoid boycotts.  But everything worked out in the end.  The Communist countries of eastern Europe attended the 1988 Seoul Olympics, South Korea democratized as a result of holding the Games, and that Olympiad produced memorable moments, especially from Americans such as swimmer Matt Biondi and track runner Florence Griffith Joyner.

Not to mention this cutie-pie. 😊

I'll have more about her toward the end of the month. 😉

Andrew Cuomo?  Relax, I'll get to that . . ..;

Wuhan Worries

Remember when Republicans suggested in the early days of the COVID pandemic that the SARS CoV-2 virus might have escaped form a lab in Wuhan, China after having been cultivated there on purpose?  While these same Republicans are blooming idiots, it turns out that they're likely not wrong, at least not in this case.

There is now enough evidence to suggest that the virus - which originated in a city that happens to be the home of a major virology research institute - was in fact developed in the institute lab for study, much likely because of the nasty history China has had with respiratory viruses.  Witness H1N1, the original SARS virus, the avian flu.  Or, if it was not developed in the lab, it might have been discovered in a natural source and been incubated in the lab.  Either way, the Chinese could very well have let the virus escape and gone on to infect the world.  Even Anthony Fauci has refused to rule out that scenario.

The first suggestion that the virus could have been developed in and/or escaped form the Wuhan lab came from former CDC director Robert Redfield, who doubted that a virus like SARS CoV-2 could make the jump from animals to humans so quickly and so efficiently.  And now that there's more evidence that this could be the case, President Biden has authorized further investigation of these claims,  Good luck with that.  The Chinese are so secretive that getting information on the January 6 insurrection without a proper commission will be an easier task.  China's Communist government  refused to cooperate and has forced the World Health Organization to kowtow to its whims because nothing must be allowed to stop its goal of world domination.

Before you go all off on me for spewing Red Menace and Yellow Peril paranoia, please bear in mind that the Chinese are militarizing the South China Sea and threatening the sovereignty of Taiwan, which survives as an example of what a democratic mainland China would look like if the Communists hadn't taken over - sort of like Superman's preservation of the Kryptonian city of Kandor in the Fortress of Solitude after Brainiac shrank it but before the rest of the planet Krypton exploded.  The Chinese are also expanding their soft power by building more infrastructure in Africa and distributing their own COVID vaccine to places like Chile and Seychelles, where people are still getting sick because the vaccines don't work.  More and more countries are getting scared of China - like Japan - and are aiming to do something about it.  China's relations with the rest of the world haven't been this bad since the days of the Cultural Revolution.

And if the state of these looks into the Wuhan lab are any indication, relations between China and other countries are bound to get worse.

And the World Health Organization really ought to consider  reverting to naming diseases after their countries of origin after deciding that it's unfair to do so and thus stigmatize said countries.  Right now, I can't think of a country that deserves stigmatization more than China.

Except maybe Belarus.

Summer Reading

Trump had been trying to stop it, but John Bolton's new book is going full tilt boogie, and the bombshells are dropping and detonating like napalm-filled incendiary devices, threatening to defoliate Trump's leadership veneer and expose the emperor as having no clothes. 

My, I'm getting poetic here!

In his book "The Room Where it Happened," Bolton has revealed many embarrassing things about the current White House occupant,  For one thing, he asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to by more soybeans and wheat from American farmers to help him win re-election, and he had no problems with Xi putting the Muslim Uighurs of Sinkiang in northwestern China in concentration camps.  Bolton also says that Trump asked if  Finland was a part of Russia (it was, actually, until 1917) was ignorant of the fact that Great Britain is a nuclear power, and has obstructed of justice as easy as breathing.

The Justice Department's attempts to book the book will likely come to nothing, since much of the most damning information Bolton has on Trump is already out.  But Bolton is hardly a hero; he sat on this information and teased about being able to testify in Trump's impeachment trial but held back so as to ensure that these facts would only come out with his book and enable him to make a ton of money.  In which case, I would recommend checking it out of your local library - assuming it's not closed due to COVID-19.  And even if Bolton does make a lot of money from this, his earnings may likely be confiscated if there is any classified information in his book, as the Justice department claims.   

Bolton's failure to come forward during the impeachment trial still has a lot of Democrats angry, but it's better this information about Trump comes out this way than not at all.  And the Democrats can impeach Trump again and get Bolton to testify - Lord knows Trump has done more than enough since December 2019 to warrant a second congressional indictment.

The China Syndrome

I'm going to do something I rarely do - agree with Donald Trump.  I think this is only the third time I've agreed with him, the first time being when he said that Hillary Clinton was crooked and the second time being when he said that new government buildings should be designed to look like Greek temples, like they used to be.  This time, I agree with him on China - it's responsible for the COVID-19 virus and should be held accountable.

Now why would I say something like that?  Because the virus originated in China, the Chinese assured us it was under control with all of the public-relations bluster associated with Soviet attempts to downplay the Chernobyl accident, and the unsanitary practices of the so-called "wet markets" in China allowed the virus to make the jump from animals to humans.

This also puts me in agreement with Bill Maher, who, on his HBO show last month, explained how most viruses and diseases are named for the places the originated in, and that the wet markets where exotic animals like bats are sold for human consumption were a breeding ground for a deadly virus, just as they had been for previous coronaviruses that got out.  I also agree with Maher, by the way, that it's only appropriate for such unorthodox dietary habits to be called into question.

To respond to the inevitable complaint that terminology such as "Chinese virus" is racist, it is not racist to say that it is a Chinese virus because it was discovered in China any more than it is to call rubella the German measles because it was discovered by German doctors.  China is responsible for this virus because the Communist government there, which is known for cracking down on anything that threatens the "stability" of its one-party rule, should have been able to contain the virus before it got out of not only mainland China but out of Hubei Province.  Heck, I'm beginning to wonder how different things might have been if the Republic of China government on Taiwan hadn't been driven off the mainland back in 1949 and were still running the country, and how we would have all been better off - because, I would like to point out, the Taiwanese government has been doing a great job in containing the virus on that island.

Having said all of that, though, I would like to stress that it is not proper or permissible to blame Americans of Chinese origin for the virus and make racist threats against them.  But I would also like to especially stress this: Donald Trump may be right to blame the virus on China, but China's culpability does not exonerate Trump from the numerous boneheaded mistakes he made that allowed the United States to become the most COVID-19-infected country on the planet.

Below is Bill Maher's commentary on the issues from April 10, 2020.

 

"WHO The F**k Are YOU?"

Donald Trump announced this past week that the United States is now withholding funds to the World Health Organization (WHO) in the midst of the worst pandemic in over a hundred years.  The only people who approve of this policy are Trump's sycophants, which, I'm sorry to say, include the entire Republican congressional caucus.

Trump's rationale for withhold funds from the WHO is based on is failure to stop the coronavirus from spreading beyond China and taking Chinese assurances of the virus's containment at face value.  Shortly after Trump's announcement, the media started playing clips of Trump from January and February praising the WHO and Chinese President Xi Jinping for their leadership on the virus problem.

It is true that the WHO put too much trust and not enough verification - a spin on Ronald Reagan's favorite Russian proverb, "Trust but verify" - in the Chinese leadership, as Kathy Gilsinan's article in The Atlantic explains.  The WHO was impressed with China's efforts to handle the crisis, even though Chinese coronavirus policy was based largely on wishful thinking and spin.  But the WHO also recognized the severity of the disease and, regardless of how it was going down in China, warned the rest of the world to prepare for a global health emergency.  Trump sort of didn't want to do that.  Now that the United States has the largest umber of coronavirus cases, he's trying to deflect blame to others.  Some government officials overseeing health policy conceded that the WHO made some serious mistakes but caution - their cautions falling of deaf ears, of course - that we should wait until after the pandemic has run its course to assess those mistakes.    

Trump's lack of consistency on many issues - he was once for fighting climate change before he was against it - is annoying even in normal circumstances, but here it's gone beyond the pale.  When he was downplaying the health crisis, he wasn't even consistent with  the WHO while he was praising the organization; he declined the tests it offered to the United States when this disease got serious.  Even if you accept the idea that the WHO let COVID-19 go full tilt boogie, the Chinese still deceived the WHO into making decisions based on unreliable information.  Blaming the WHO for the pandemic is like blaming Eve for the fall of man, even though the serpent in this case is the Chinese Politburo.

A rather loaded analogy, and an ironic one to use a week after Easter, I know, but if the shoe fits . . .

Epidemic

Coronavirus has infected over a thousand people in the United States.  The number may be even higher, as not enough people have been tested.  Switzerland has already banned large meetings through this coming Sunday, and it may be extended.  Meanwhile, Italy is closed.  There's a lockdown across the country lasting at least until Palm Sunday, April 5.  Don't be surprised if it gets extended to Ascension Thursday (May 21).

College classes are being held online at Ivy League universities and state schools, not just diploma mills.  It looks like the NCAA basketball tournament may be scaled back (well, there's a silver lining!).  And the stock market doesn't know where it's going.

I have a feeling that we can't hand-wash, elbow-bump, socially distance, and cancel our way out of this mess.

Oh yeah, Chinese President Xi Jinping says that the tide has turned in Wuhan and that the virus is receding, even as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere has to extend winter cabin fever through the rest of the year and into next winter to stave off a fever of a more literal and lethal sort while the Southern Hemisphere has to look forward to a disease-infested autumn.  Thanks for everything, Xi.  You're a guy. :-p 

Coronavirus

I haven't brought up the coronavirus on this blog up to now because I thought there was nothing I could possibly say about it, other than it's bad, like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.  But the coronavirus outbreak has gotten worse than "bad."

Over 86,000 people all over the world have contracted coronavirus, which originated in China, with over sixty countries affected, and nearly three thousand coronavirus patients, including two in the United States, have died - these numbers may be higher by the time you read this.  The coronavirus has already forced the cancellation of the Geneva Motor Show in Switzerland and, even as I'm wondering if I should even bother going to the auto show in New York this April (more of that later), the Japanese - who have cancelled school across the country for a whole month - are even wondering if they can hold the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.  (The 1940 Tokyo Olympics were cancelled by World War II, but Tokyo did host the Olympics in 1964.) So far, no sporting events in America have been canceled, and there haven't been that many cases here yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the 2020 World Series - which even Hitler or an earthquake couldn't stop, although a greed-motivated baseball strike in 1994 did - also get scrubbed.  Heck, Major League Baseball might want to sit out the whole season!

The Geneva Motor Show was cancelled due to a Swiss government edict banning large events until March 15, the day the show was supposed to end.  The Swiss and the Japanese seem to think the worst of the coronavirus crisis will be over before long, but those bans could be extended.  And even if large gatherings in Switzerland are allowed again as of March 16, the Geneva car show couldn't be postponed for a week or two - there's too much organization involved. Switzerland acted as it did because every nation surrounding it has a report of a coronavirus outbreak.  This past week, the Swiss reported a coronavirus case of their own.  Switzerland was able to stay neutral during World War II because it was protected by the Alps; now the world has gotten so interconnected, geography and topography can't save anyone.

The good news about the coronavirus outbreak is that governments over the world are on it, with South Korea testing thousands of people and disinfecting public spaces and Italy trying to keep coronavirus-infected areas from expanding. The bad news is that the United States has not been one of those countries.  Trump spent several days dismissing the coronavirus scare as a hoax and had put a gag order on health officials who know more about coronavirus than he does.  Without a scintilla of evidence to support his claims, he keeps telling Americans that the coronavirus outbreak will slow down and go away like a miracle.  Oh, it will slow down and go away eventually, but not as quickly as Trump would like it.  He said it would taper off by April; just bear in mind that he didn't say what year.

With the first two coronavirus deaths in America having occurred, Trump is suddenly taking it more seriously than he did before, but his approach is more happy talk and less preparation.  This virus has been around for awhile, as cases showing up only now began weeks earlier.  There are perhaps many more cases that haven't fully manifested themselves.   

Even if there were reason to believe that the coronavirus outbreak could taper off sooner rather than later, there's no indication that we're prepared to handle the coronavirus cases we do get, and the number is still rising.  We need more respirators, as this is a disease affecting breathing.  We need a more robust health-care delivery system, something we Americans have not been good at of late.  A lot of the health-care products we use come from China, where, as noted, the coronavirus started in the first place.  While it's beginning to level off there, the Chinese will still take a long time to recover before they're able to export such products to us.  Not too many other countries who make these health-care products - including this one - can make up the gap easily.   Meanwhile, the coronavirus has affected Chinese supply lines for other goods, which is bound to cause shortages elsewhere.  Hence the stock market falling 11 percent last week.

I can't let this go without mentioning one other thing: Even though the coronavirus started in China, the Chinese government tried to silence those who warned about it.  One of the doctors who was silenced has since died.  Now coronavirus is spreading all over the world.  China makes just about everything for everyone else; why did we surrender our economic power to the Chinese?? 

All of us have to be prepared for normal life bring replaced not by temporary circumstances but by a new norm. A lot of us will either have to give up going to special events or be very careful in attending them.  A lot of us may have to telecommute on our jobs.  And we're going to be more socially isolated than we've ever been, even in this social-media-fueled auto-suburb living pattern that already isolates us enough. Me, I am going to the best thing I can do to avoid getting coronavirus . . . wash my hands regularly. :-O  

The Week In Crazy

So much insanity has happened this week that I'm almost ready to give up blogging.

First, there was Trump's temper tantrum over trade with China, a legitimate issue, considering our trade deficit with the world's most populous country, that he has de-legitimatized with tariff threats and unilateral bullying of China's president. Trump said  he was "the chosen one" - at the same time that he also accused Jews of selfishness and disloyalty for voting Democratic and thus betraying Israel (therefore expressing solidarity with and making anti-Semitic tropes against Jews simultaneously).  Trump may have been chosen by 304 electors, but 54 percent of the American popular electorate chose someone else.

And then there's his sudden support for manifest destiny.  I don't know how this whole business started (to borrow an opening lyric from a late-seventies pop song), but someone suggested that Donald Trump might want to buy Greenland.  I used to joke, back in the late eighties when Trump was a real estate developer and climate change was called the greenhouse effect and not taken very seriously by anyone whose name wasn't Albert Gore, that if the planet warmed up, Trump would buy property up there to build condos.  Now he wants to buy the whole damn island!

Denmark, which owns Greenland, politely let Trump know that the island is not for sale, and Trump canceled a state visit to Copenhagen because Denmark's female prime minister was "nasty" to him.  There may be strategic reasons to own the world's largest island - Secretary of State William Seward tried to buy it when he bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, and President Harry Truman considered the idea in 1946 - and there are also commercial reasons to but it, which I'll explain in the next paragraph. But Trump made a hissy fit when he was old that Greenland was not for sale, not unlike in the book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," when Veruca Salt refused to take no for an answer when she wanted to buy one of Willy Wonka's trained nut-shelling squirrels.  ("I want the world . . .")

Despite being far up in the Arctic, Greenland is a viable island because of its vast mineral resources, which Americans are eager to get in on, and the Danes would be happy if we do, because they make money off mineral exploration, which is already being undertaken there by . . . China.  But then, mineral exploration in Greenland is only made possible by climate change, which is melting glaciers up north as well as exacerbating rain-forest fires in the Brazilian jungle, and rain forests there, which help blunt the effects climate change, have been cleared for farmland at an amazing clip already.  French President Emanuel Macron hopes to address the Brazilian wildfires at the Group of Seven economic summit in the French seaside resort town of Biarritz, except that Trump won't want to talk about it because he wants to keep Mr. Murray's coal trains running back home. 

At least one billionaire industrialist - not the coal magnate Bob Murray - won't live to see the worst effects of the climate change he's famous for denying.  It seems that David Koch died.

And on the day that Trump, whose protectionism the Kochs despised, made unflattering remarks about China and his own Federal Reserve director, sending the stock market down over six hundred points and threatening his own re-election hopes - so long as Marianne Williamson isn't the Democratic nominee.

Crazy.

Chinese Walls

Trump is trying to get China to agree to a better trade deal with the United States, and by a better deal, he means one that will more greatly benefit the U.S.   In the absence of one, despite continuing talks with the Chinese, he's just hiked tariffs against China, already at 10 percent, to 25 percent.

Trump says that he'd hoped to avoid raising tariffs but adds that they will benefit the average American by spurring more U.S.-based manufacturing, though none of his economic policies have shown any payoffs.  China makes practically everything sold here.  The tariffs, if they stick in the event of a failed trade deal, would only increase prices on consumer goods in U.S. stores, while U.S. importers can simply avoid the brunt of the adverse affects of higher import taxes by lower profit margins and cutting costs.  "Most importers, Reuters recently reported, "use a mix of such tactics to spread the higher costs among suppliers, consumers or buyers."

Stocks went down recently but have rallied - damn! - after trade talks with the Chinese ended prematurely but with the promise that progress had been made and that they would resume, Trump is hoping that the incredibly strong American economy - damn again! - will provide leverage against the Chinese, but they hold a great deal of low-interest U.S. Treasury bonds that allow them to exact a little leverage of their own  As James Howard Kunstler put it:

A great deal for us while it lasted. Or so it seemed. Eventually, China caught onto the swindle and began liquidating its US bond holdings to buy gold and other real goods like African mining rights and farmland, Iranian oil, and port facilities in strategic corners of the world . . .. Now China has obviously designed a policy to dissociate itself as much as possible from the losing trade racket with us and replace the American market by increments with whatever customer base it can cobble together from the rest of the world.

The Chinese could bring down that incredibly strong economy of ours if they wanted to, but we're going to be bringing it down ourselves when we allow ourselves paying more for goods that shouldn't be so darn expensive.

Alas, Trump will probably still be re-elected, because he can always rail against Central American migrants and wear down Democratic efforts to investigate him.  He wants to investigate the Democrats for trying to rig the 2016 election to prevent his victory.  Trump supporters are that hell-bent on keeping their guy in power - they may be underemployed and overstressed, but as long as Trump, and not Hillary or Bernie or Mayor Pete or even Uncle Joe, is President, they can sleep more easily.  And he's already blaming the Chinese for whatever harm might come to the U.S. economy, because, hell, you can't trust them furriners.

Clearing the Air

The two biggest polluters on this planet we call ours, the United States and China, formally agreed to adopt the Paris Agreement negotiated in late 2015 to keep the increase in the average global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius.  The United States has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 28 percent below levels of emissions produced in 2005. The deal also hopes to provide $100 billion a year between 2016 and 2020 in financing to help developing countries meet their gas reduction goals.  As soon as the deal takes effect, nations that have ratified it have to wait for at least three years to leave it.

Unfortunately, climate-change denier Donald Trump is gaining in the presidential election polls and a presidential term is four years.  

Despite Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, despite the drought in California and some of the worst flooding in Louisiana in decades, despite the receding beaches in Miami, congressional Republicans still don't believe climate change is real and Trump is happy to please them by promising to commit the country to producing more coal.  President Obama knows this and has framed the deal as an executive agreement rather than as a treaty because he knew the Senate would never ratify it as a treaty.  But if the deal goes into effect before the year is out, that means a President Trump would be able to take the U.S. out of the deal by the end of 2019.  If you thought the United States was the skunk of the world under Ronald Reagan of George Walker Bush, wait'll the Donald takes over; you ain't seen nothing yet!

The one thing that gives me hope is that efforts to combat climate change are going full tilt boogie all over the world, including this country, as more energy producers are turning away from coal and more toward cleaner fuels like natural gas, as well as wind power.  Even if Trump gets into the White House, there's no stopping the tide of history.  And when the tide of the ocean floods his own properties, maybe then the Donald will come around.

On the other hand, maybe he'll eat the loss and build condos in a melted Greenland. :-O :-(              

Modern Chinese Secret

Between all the natural disasters from the flooding in Pakistan to forest fires in Russia and man-made disasters like the functioning of the U.S. Senate comes an underreported story about what's happening in China. The Chinese have been dealing with floods just like the Pakistanis, but that's only one of their problems.

The Chinese are now dealing with a massive traffic jam on the main road through northern China that started nearly two weeks ago and at one point stretched sixty miles. The road has been the site of new construction, and motorists have been trapped in the gridlock for so long that people are sleeping in their cars an unrefrigerated produce is rotting in trucks. Motorists are lucky if they move at least a mile a day, and villagers along the route are selling food and water to the stranded drivers. It is that bad.

This is all due to the cost of China's rapid industrialization and its new role as manufacturer to the world, especially the United States. (The Chinese ecomony is now the second largest national economy, behind the U.S., having surpassed Japan this month.) Coal mines in the northwestern part of the country, supplying necessary power to fuel those factories making the dinner plates and living room bookcases you buy at Wal-Mart, are the main reason for the traffic increase along the so-called Beijing-Tibet highway.

So the next time you're stuck in traffic, be it in Atlanta or Los Angeles, remember - it could be worse. In China, it is.