#taiwan is a free democratic country there is nothing china can do about that so the vote needs to be in favour of green😭

[oloreaa]

Election day!!

[darkmaga-returns]

There is always risk in pulling a quote from the Internet from someone famous; often the quotes are paraphrased, falsely attributed, or just plain made up. But this past week really deserves the following quote, purportedly from the father of the Russian revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

He said: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

Where do we even start looking back at the last seven days?

The collapse of the Democrat Party was on full display this past Tuesday here in America. And its fallout — from a billion dollar election war chest to $20 million in debt — is a scathing indictment of the stench of dysfunction in this country. But really, that’s the just start of some of the wild news that emerged from countries around the globe this week.

Germany — The three-party coalition government effectively collapsed, according to The Guardian, after Chancellor Olaf Scholz unexpectedly fired Finance Minister Christian Lindner, who is also leader of the coalition member Free Democratic Party. The country’s instability comes at a most inopportune time; Germany’s economy is about to implode from looney-tunes ‘green’ policies that have crippled the energy and manufacturing sectors. Watch this story as it unfolds, it is absolutely one of the saddest tales of complex incompetence that has the potential to set off an economic crisis of epic proportions.

Israel — Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu dismissed his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Tuesday, and by Wednesday, Israelis were protesting in the streets of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, as reported by Sky News. Netanyahu attributed the firing to a "crisis of trust,” while Gallant appeared to press for a hostage deal in Gaza, drafting Orthodox Jews into the military, and an inquiry into the failures around the October 7, 2023 terror attack. Of course, given the ongoing hostilities with its neighbors, uncertainty and instability is breeding ground for error or worse, erratic decisions. Hear that ‘tick tick tick’ sound? You know what that is. Be prepared mentally, spiritually and any other way you can think of.

Spain — Two words you don’t often see in the same sentence: Spain and flooding. But over the past couple of weeks, Spain has suffered terrible flash flooding. About two weeks ago, in Valencia, almost 1.5 feet of rain fell in just eight hours. This past week, rain came down so quickly in the coastal town of Cadaques, that a torrent of water washed 30 or more vehicles down the street piling them up against a bridge like so many dinky toys. Unlike Valencia though, there was no loss of life in Cadaques (thankfully). Protests have been reported — lots of angry people are watching government inaction as confirmation of its contempt for its citizens.

Taiwan — Now this is what you call ‘just-in-time’ delivery! From The Defense Post:Taiwan has received its first batch of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) from the United States, Taipei’s defense ministry said Wednesday, as the island races to boost its defenses against a potential Chinese attack.Washington has long been Taipei’s most important ally and biggest arms supplier — angering Beijing, which claims Taiwan as part of its own territory.In the past five decades, the United States has sold Taiwan billions of dollars worth of military equipment and ammunition, including F-16 fighter jets and warships.Of note, the HIMARS system can fire a variety of munitions, including the Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), which Taiwan has also purchased. Given a range of about 186 miles, which means it can reach mainland China, the ATACMS system is just another finger poke in the Chinese eye.

[jacob-in-taiwan]

Independent Excursion 1

For my first independent excursion I decided to go to Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Before coming to Taiwan, I had essentially no knowledge on both Chinese and Taiwanese history. I’ve been learning so much about how this wonderful country got to where it is today, but one figure whose name I kept hearing yet still didn’t know much about was Sun Yat-sen. I figured that it would be good if I spent my free day filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so I decided to visit Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. To my disappointment, when I got there the hall had been temporarily closed. I was still able to enjoy the brilliant architecture of the building, so it wasn’t all for naught. 

After visiting Chiang Kai-Shek memorial hall, I was really interested to hear how divisive he is today. On one end of the spectrum, he has an amazingly constructed memorial hall that houses an entire museum for him. It must be noted that the museum speaks just as negatively about Chiang Kai-Shek equally as much as it praises him. Events in recent years highlight the other end of that spectrum. His tomb has been vandalized and statues of Chiang have been moved to a park in Taoyuan. Furthermore, many people support removaling Chiang from Taiwan’s currency, as well as his name from roads and schools. There has even been talk of repurposing the memorial hall itself, which would be a significant move as it is one of the most famous tourist sites in Taipei. All this controversy led to me asking questions about Sun Yat-Sen. Seeing as Sun and Chiang were close associates in the Kuomintang, or KMT, I mainly wondered if Dr. Sun was viewed as controversial as Chiang. Memorial halls play a huge role in preserving history, educating masses, and community engagement, but they also play a significant role in cultural identity and preservation. Through the physical structure of the two memorial halls much can be revealed about how the Taiwanese people identify themselves. 

In America, our history is much more straightforward. Democrats and republicans don't always agree on everything, but almost everyone in the states admires our founding fathers. They weren’t perfect, but for the most part no one has any issues with them. Much like the memorial halls in Taipei, the monuments and memorials in Washington D.C. are significant tourist spots. For Americans, these statues are representative of the “American spirit.” The men who are immortalized were brave and free-thinkers that would stop at nothing until their freedoms were secured. This is something Americans can relate to and identify with, therefore there is not much controversy when it comes to these monuments. 

In Taiwan it isn’t as simple. As mentioned above Chiang Kai-Shek is a very divisive figure in the present day. Chiang is still viewed as a strong leader by some older residents, but many Taiwanese people oppose the use of his image or name in public spaces. There has been a significant de-Chiang-ification movement over the past years, with the goal to stop worshiping authoritarianism. Just within the past two weeks the changing of guard ceremony was moved outside of the memorial hall, away from the statue itself, in an effort to comply with this. A statement made by the Taiwan Ministry of Culture gave the following reasoning for these actions, “Eliminating worshiping a cult of personality and eliminating worshiping authoritarianism is the current goal for promoting transitional justice.” 

Chiang Kai-Shek’s actions during his time as ruler led to the death and imprisonment of thousands of people, and it's because of this that many younger people believe his legacy is redolent to what they perceive as authoritarianism in mainland China. To put it simply, the immortalization of such a controversial figure would naturally be met with controversy. Many Taiwanese today do not identify with Chiang. They don’t believe he represents the democracy and independence they believe in today, and because of that the memorial hall is not viewed as something to be proud of. However, the question still remains. What about Sun Yat-Sen?

Despite the close relationship between Dr. Sun and Chiang, the former has the distinction of never actually ruling Taiwan. As mentioned previously, a large reason why many people don’t like Chiang Kai-Shek is because he had “blood on his hands.” Sun Yat-Sen did not. But it’s not just that Sun is “better than the other guy,” he does actually have his valid reasons for praise in Taiwan. Dr. Sun played a significant role in the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the founding of the Republic of China, the official government of Taiwan today. Furthermore he is praised for his contributions to modernization and promotion of democracy. Sun Yat-Sen's ideas are still very influential in politics in the present day, particularly his three principles of the people (democracy, nationalism, and welfarism). All this is to say Sun Yat-Sen is a generally accepted figure within Taiwanese culture, and that is reflected by his memorial hall. When I personally visited the hall I was disappointed to see that it was closed for renovations, but now I see the deeper story behind it. Whereas Chiang Kai-Shek hall is bathed in controversy, with demands to repurpose or even demolish it, Sun Yat-Sen’s hall is quietly being restored and improved. There were no protests or vandalism. Instead, the people were accepting that the memorial hall needed to be preserved. Chiang Kai-Shek was rejected, and Sun Yat-Sen was accepted. 

Public spaces can tell us a lot about a society. When it comes to memorials for historical figures it can reveal much about a societies’ cultural Identity and values. Taiwan is no exception to this. Chiang Kai-Shek is a controversial figure among the Taiwanese people, so naturally his memorial hall is vexed as well. In stark contrast Sun Yat-Sen is much more accepted, so his memorial hall is met with care and respect. The culture of any society goes so much deeper and is so much more complex than what can be revealed by memorial halls. However, the ways the Taiwanese treat the memorials of Sun Yat-Sen and Chiang Kai-Shek can help us understand them just a little bit more. 

Works Cited:

Horton, Chris. “In Taiwan, Young Protesters and Ex-Presidents Chafe against China.” The New York Times, February 28, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/world/asia/taiwan-chiang-kai-shek.html. 

National dr. Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall-Chronology of dr.Sun Yat-sen. Accessed July 23, 2024. https://www.yatsen.gov.tw/en/cp.aspx?n=6695. 

Ramzy, Austin. “Divisive Monuments? Put Them All in a Taiwan Park.” The New York Times, August 22, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/world/asia/taiwan-statues-chiang-kai-shek-park.html. 

Sun, Yat-Sen. Dr. Sun Yat-sen: His life and achievements. Forgotten Books, 2019. 

[galerymod]

Democracy at the breaking point

Yes, there are two so-called great friends who have talked for hundreds of hours and basically have the same opinion. But what does that have to do with America or democracy, you ask yourself. It's not about two insignificant men but about the two absolute rulers of two huge countries, XI and Putin. Both are of the opinion that the time of democracies as the best form of government is over and that America and the West should now relinquish their claim to leadership to China and its allies. Both of these states have begun to dismantle our democracies through disinformation and propaganda. They are supporting all the forces of suggestion, whether left or right, in order to drive a wedge into society and thus damage democracy and cause it to be questioned by the population. They do this openly or covertly by spreading other narratives, as I like to call them. A narrative of those up there, a narrative that facts are not true, a narrative of the powerlessness of the individual, a narrative of false facts just to make democracy capable of acting. In which unrest, resentment, disenchantment with democracy and sideshows are created so that they can realise their goals. And they are simply to increase their claim to power in the world in order to maintain the existing unjust systems in every form. China is a sleeping dragon for as long as it is useful to XI, the absolute ruler. The allies XI and putin are unequal allies, one is the powerful and prudent XI and the other rather the imprudent putin, but far from it, both have eliminated all forces in their states that could be dangerous to them without scruples. Putin the entire opposition and the democracy movement and XI the internal opponents in his party. One with extreme violence and the other with the pretext of fighting corruption.

All propaganda and false reports that are in the interests of the two are broadcast to the world in order to secure their future and spread their "values" around the world. They are both narcissists and do not tolerate any criticism. Russia uses extremely harsh measures and does not even shy away from murder. China uses a perversely perfect population surveillance system with a punitive Algerian IT system which controls the population perfectly.

These two absolute rulers have only one goal: to destroy the world order that emerged after the Second World War with the USA's claim to leadership as the world police force. They are doing this at all levels, whether in the UN or at all other political levels, as well as at all suggestive levels such as the Internet.

That is why Trump can win, they have managed to light the fuse in large parts of the free world so that the democracies disintegrate themselves.

Rulers and parts...... that means nothing less than using all forces to destroy the unity of the West and its internal social unity in order to then occupy the free spaces that the democracies can no longer deal with because they are only concerned with themselves. In addition, Chinese companies are acquiring more and more economic influence in Western societies in the name of the Communist Party, i.e. in the name of XI, and thus ultimately securing the silence of those responsible in politics and business. The voluntary muzzle, favourite justification in the case of China, within Chinese affairs, even when it comes to democratic Taiwan.

AS A DEMOCRACY, WE MUST START TELLING THE BETTER STORIES AND STAND UP WHEREVER INJUSTICE IS INVOLVED. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO SECURE OUR INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AND THUS THE FREEDOM OF EQUALITY IN DEMOCRACY.

when trump announced america first, he was already starting to pave the way for china and russia's influence in the world, because wherever america withdraws from world affairs, a vacuum is created which is filled by less democratic forces.

AMERICA MUST BE CAREFUL THAT IT DOES NOT TURN ITS OWN DEMOCRATISATION INTO A LOBBYOCRACY THAT BENEFITS ONLY A FEW SHOULD THAT BE THE CASE AT SOME POINT, CHINA'S SYSTEM HAS FRIGHTENINGLY BECOME AN ALTERNATIVE FOR MANY OF THOSE LEFT BEHIND.

Mod

The one who does not confuse freedom with his own freedom but with the freedom of those who think differently from him and are also rooted in the democratic system.

Only together are we strong and on this basis we must constantly renegotiate the rules to make our democracies fairer for all of us and not just in favour of individual groups in society.

I love democracy and I am annoyed by it, but I can participate in it and help shape it, criticise it and it doesn't make me disappear or kill me. So out there, what have you not understood about the freedom of all, do you really want that no matter what criticism you have made of the system, the moment you criticise it you are afraid that you will disappear or even be eliminated.

Stop beating your opposites about the ears and look for what you have in common. This is the only way to make systems that are truly connected to the freedom of the individual strong.

Tell your story of freedom in democracy. Democracy always means the freedom of all and not the freedom of ideas of individual groups.

A wise man once said to me, mod in bad there is no good!

You have to be able to endure democracy because only through the process of debate can the best possible results be achieved in a compromise for the prosperity of all.

Republicans need to be  panicking because their forerunner for President is going to prison

[obiternihili]

Something about property rights

I felt like I needed to rant yesterday and decided to adapt the discord messages into a tumblr post.

I spent most of a class this morning thinking about the Anglo interpretations and notions of property rights, trying to actually contrast it with workable alternative notions of property rights and feeling kind of hopeless about it and finding it hard to actually come up with anything that isn't literally communism.

And in retrospect it made the whole “philosophically questioning the whole notion of property rights” feel more, idk, respectable than it had before, when it just sounded like the USSR and China opposed its inclusion in the UDHR for technical reasons or pure self interest in covering their own atrocities.

The whole thing started with thinking about the Zapatist slogan “la tierra es de quién la trabaja”. “The land belongs to those who work it.” To me, the Zapatistas were pretty cool guys, who sided with the little guy and the indigenous peoples of México. But I thought immediately about how a colonial American might react to it, and I couldn’t escape the idea that they’d hear the slogan and go, “ah, yes, we should kill the savages and steward the land correctly”.

As much as the magna carta is held up as this great precursor to democratic rights in this country, its origins are far more dismal and petty. It wasn’t really a democratic impulse, it was more like a bunch of petty-kings coordinated to overwhelm a high king. But it doubtlessly had a strong effect on feudalism and came to be a part of English identity before that even really made sense from a modern perspective. In short it came off almost as a promise that “every man is a king of his own home” and that helped to make property itself sacrosanct.

So when capitalism changed the people’s relationship with the land, the serfs were “liberated” as the commons were siezed by their de jure owners. The collapse of the commons fundamentally changed people’s relationships with property, exacerbating the whole “every man is a king of his own house” issue, and making property the be-all-end-all of basic needs like shelter. To the degree that the Magna Carta made property sacrosanct, in a literal “this is a divinely appointed right” sort of sense, the collapse of the commons codified exactly what that meant, making that sacrosanctity intrinsic to thriving.

So because of tying these issues together so deeply, it made sense to steal the lands of people “not working it” according to how you might work it. So that it made sense to go to war because the yankees were stealing your chattel, and horror of horrors not even repurposing them! So that telling South Africa “hey, no, black people are people too” was unholy, violating their sacred authority to clean their own house. So it makes sense that Australia continues to break promises to its Aboriginal communities, if, say, their homes have a potentially profitable mine to work. So it makes sense that Canada breaks promises to its indigenous population, if there’s an oil pipeline they can lay. So that it made sense, paradoxically, for the US to strong arm México into changing articles of its constitution about indigenous land rights in order to pass NAFTA and be able to threaten to go United Fruit Company on the people for not being profitable to the corporations. And the EZLN, which formed directly because of the anxieties of these moves as the Maya genocide was still very fresh on everyone’s minds, are neo-Zapatistas; the land belongs to the one who works it! The Maya who always has, or the companies that want to (exploit it)? 

I remember once as a teen confronting the attitudes this bears on a small chan.

Before the BLM stuff, actually regarding OWS and those "rich punks arguing for socialism with their iphones" and shit;  I'd made an off hand comment about things not being worth more than lives at some point and someone replied "I'd totally kill someone if they stole my phone".

I made a comment in utter exasperation (this was on a board that was like /pol/ before that was really what it is now and there was no reason to believe they weren't serious), saying something like "Is, what, a month's pay really worth a human life to you?" ($800 really was more money than my mom was making at the time, let alone taking out rent and shit first, and I gave them benefit of the doubt that they weren't rich first world fucks who could afford to take a hit. At that point I’d learned that most people in India, even dirt poor people who couldn’t afford water, generally had smart phones in order to help with work and things; conscientious of this, the fact that I know and knew dirt poor almost homeless people in the US who needed phones for work, I was trying to allow for “if I lose this phone, I lose my job, my home, my health, and my life” which is a reality a lot of people live with, and at least somewhere to come at this issue with).

(But) the commentators, both the user I was arguing against and several people using trips, proceeded to mock me for apparently living in a 3rd world country for thinking a phone cost more than one paycheck.

To these people a phone wasn’t even worth a week’s pay, let alone two. And yet, to them, another person’s life, no matter how desperate they were, no matter how hungry or sick or anything they were, they were worth less than that.

This exchange was about the time I started nurturing (or giving in, depending on your perspective) the idea that "maybe some people aren't just, mistaken, or seeing something I don't, or have some complex network of beliefs making them bite a bullet, but like, actually goddamn legitimately evil in terms of their fundamental values". I gather absolutely that there’s a lot going on with this; that you could understand the guy to mean “I think thieves should be killed” as opposed to ““humans”“ or whatever. But, like, still.

Traumatizing is an overly dramatic word for what that conversation all those years did to me, but maybe it was. And it’s not like a phone’s *nothing*. But the way the users undercut me, and revealed not only how worthless the phone was to them, but how little human lives were worth to them in relation to the phone just kind of knocked the wind out of me

This made the rounds recently. This is the legacy of that property is sacrosanct bullshit.

And, like, fuck, this is the whole cultural underpinning of what’s been going on with the gun shit here. It’s why guns are so important to us. Why we feel it’s absolutely justified to shoot a kid in the back for lifting a $2 bottle of beer from a convenience store and leaving him to bleed to death without so much as calling the police. The entire fucked up thing we got going on w/r/t race here in the land of the free? It’s because of our relationship to property rights.

At the same time, you get climate change from people who feel it’s their right to do whatever to their property. Oil’s money. Dairy farms, meat, cash crops like almonds. You don’t like your water dirtied? But I’m only fracking over ma plotte!

What’s going on in Brazil? Some natives won the right to their lands against farmers who wanted to clear the forest, and mysteriously within a few weeks everything’s lit on fire. 𝅘𝅥 Dark torrents shake the airs, as black clouds blind [São Paulo] ♫

You even get the nimby zoning shit out of this. How dare you let colored people into my neighborhood! That’s stealing from my property values! A tall building? That’s stealing my sunlight!

In a more mixed sort of way, you got homeless shelters, oil wells, chemical plants, industrial parks, military bases, fracking, wind turbines, desalination plants, landfill sites, incinerators, power plants, quarries, prisons, pubs, adult entertainment clubs, concert venues, firearms dealers, mobile phone masts, electricity pylons, abortion clinics, children's homes, nursing homes, youth hostels, sports stadiums, shopping malls, retail parks, railways, roads, airports, seaports, nuclear waste repositories, storage for weapons of mass destruction, cannabis dispensaries, recreational cannabis shops and the accommodation of persons applying for asylum, refugees, and displaced persons - a list i just lifted from wikipedia’s articles on nimbies. Looking at that, there’s some clearly sympathetic issues too. I mean do you really want a train cutting through your farm, no matter how well you’re recompensated, no matter how much it will objectively improve the lives of the people in the cities, no matter much better it is for the environment to commute together?

But, like, what exactly are the alternatives?

We could look at other cultures. What did Belgian property notions look like? Leopold of the Congo? What do French notions look like? Forcing Algieria to pay back the “investment” France made by colonizing them? Well, the English and the French go back a long, long ways, maybe we could look at Germany?

The first genocide of the 20th century is often recognized to be that of the Herero, in Namibia’s, Germany’s biggest steal  in the struggle to carve up Africa like the Black Dahlia.

I already mentioned Brasil.

What about China? Surely they aren’t western!

By some notions they were the first feudal nation in the world, and yet only left the system really in the 20th century. That’s a lot of cultural baggage that underlays the reality the Chinese live under today.

The early republican period saw the rise of warlords and other petty bastards effectively continuing the feudal reality in much the way sharecropping and jim crow continued chattel slavery in the US. The successor states aren’t pretty either; Taiwan, continuing republican ideals, cleared out much of its indigenous population for the Han in ways analogous to what European powers did to the natives of their countries; the PRC, which was born to challenge the ideals of the old republic for its own, took back “what was theirs” with Tibet.

The PRC, explicitly rejecting property rights as the west understands it, doesn’t even have a legal analog to eminent domain, and in effect can seize property on a whim without compensation, forcibly engaging in actions like people moving, which I feel it should be known when done to a community often results in genocide.

Something else illustrative of the conflicts of interest in the problem lies with the 3 Gorges Dam project. Ostensibly to control flooding to villages downstream, over a million residents of the Chongqing area were forcibly relocated, with rumors of people who resisted the project being explicitly drowned and because everything’s just hopelessly corrupt the money actually provided for recompensation never made it to the hands of farmers now stuck in a big city without the education for work.

Similar stories to Taiwan’s play out in other capitalist countries; similar stories to the PRC’s play out in countries that reject those notions.

Generally you just reinvent the same concepts drawing from the lord and serf mentalities of old. There’s shit like this going down in the Muslim world, in East Africa, South America, South Asia, whereever. It’s not just an Anglo thing, even though I’ve let myself believe it were, because of how I was taught about history, from my culture’s perspective.

Then you have to ask yourself, when there’s no net, when you have to provide for yourself first, do the commons necessarily make sense?

Is it even viable, economically or politically, to abolish private property and return to the commons like people have advanced? Would, to enjoy the benefits of something evidentally only stable under feudalism, we have to return to some kind of practice of feudalism? Is that even worth considering?

There are more people alive today than ever before. And that didn’t happen just by accident. We really, actually, seriously have made incredible improvements to agricultural yield and safety, ensuring that the only places on the planet that starve are those that are being starved, by monsters like the Saudis. But the scale we need, the scale we want, the scale we have - is much more than just what one farmer can provide for himself. And the fact that we do have other farmers do the mass farming with their bulk fertilizers, machinery, pesticides, and such, means that most of us don’t have to spend time every week tending to our gardens making sure we have enough staple foods to survive, so we can pursue our own hopes and hobbies and dreams and undertakings and services and so on.

All of it sort of leads to the question, Who deserves the land?

The worker whose blood sweat and tears are wrought into the soil? That could lead to the issue of killing my Yokuts friends' gatherer ancestors for stewarding their lands, husbanding their ecosystem and managing burns and wild populations, instead of raping the lands, burning everything to ash to farm foreign crops that aren’t even adapted to the water issues here. And it doesn't proclude the workers from choking us with smoke, if they feel they need to. The guy on the oil rig isn’t doing it because he endorses what the oil companies do or because he thinks it’s necessarily a good thing, he does it because it makes him bread. Why would worker’s self management solve that? Shareholders and workers alike would only care about taking home what they can.

The "owners” in the English sense? Taking subsidy after subsidy, fighting actively to drain our rivers, collapse the formerly self-renewing resources entirely, bringing us droughts, feeding even the lactose intolerant among us the lie that we need fatty heart clogging cheeses to be healthy? Illegally hiring, exploiting, and deporting the vulnerable? Big farms are just any other business, their owners are the same venture capitalist vultures preying on anything else in that world. South of me used to one of the biggest lakes in North America, virtually the entire south valley was lake Tulare. It’s a bunch of cities now.

So, the people who need it?

Maybe but who decides that? War for territory is a fundamental struggle built deep into us; war is even practiced by chimps. Military ration planning like we saw in the USSR and PRC cause Holodomors. United Fruit and their entire coalition caused the Silent Genocide. Abolishing private property entirely would, what, return us to the times when the lands were unclaimed? That would just lead to petty struggle after petty struggle, like a chimp disemboweling another.

And now, having written this a second time, I’ll end with what I wrote earlier

[opedguy]

Biden’s Foreign Policy Oozes Hypocrisy

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), July 1, 2021.--When 78-year-old President Joe Biden invited China to a get-to-know-you summit hosted by 58-year-old Secretary of State Antony Blinken and 44-year-old National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, he thought he could undermine the past policy of 75-year-old President Donald Trump.  Trump was tough on China when it came to trade practices led by trade policy expert Peter Navarro but steered away from ideological lectures typical of Democrat foreign policy.  Biden and his immediate family, including his controversial 50-year-old son Hunter and his 75-year-old brother Jim, made a fortune in China that flew under the press radar in the 2020 election.  U.S. press did everything possible to cover-up Biden’s business ties with China that made him and his family millions.  Media elites, in broadcast and print, did everything possible to cover-up Joe’s past business ties with China.      

       So when Biden’s team met in Anchorage, Alaska March 18, they thought nothing of accusing Beijing of genocide on Muslim Uyghurs in Western China, the crackdown in Hong Kong of pro-Democracy protesters and ongoing threats to the Republic of China or Chinese Taiwan.  Senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi pushed back against Blinken and Sullivan’s critiques, telling them both that no country that had a history of oppressing African Americans should lecture others about human rights. Biden’s been all in with Critical Race Theory, white privilege and white fragility, calling the United States a “systemically racist” country.  While it’s everything Biden’s radical left followers wanted to hear, it was a disaster for U.S. foreign policy. Biden didn’t want totalitarian regimes like China and Russia accusing the U.S. of human rights abuses, something brought on when Biden called the U.S. “systemically racist.”  

           Because of the attacks against China’s human right record has continue by Biden over the last six months, Chinese President Xi Jinping pushed back, commemorating the 100 year anniversary of the Communist Party in China [CCP].  Xi left no doubt that Bejing would not be deterred by the U.S. and European Union [EU], picking on China’s alleged human rights abuses.  Xi has tried to sell himself to Western governments as Western-friendly communist leader, encouraging the world to use China as a manufacturing hub for multinational corporations around the globe.  EU officials got nervous with Biden’s holier-than-thou approach to Beijing.  Biden’s approach to China is one of an evangelist looking to find and convert the faithful to the American way, something Xi rejects out of hand.  China wants no part of any country trying to change its totalitarian communist system.    

         Speaking at the Tiananmmen Squate Gate for the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi donned full Mao Zedong Communist regalia, speaking on the same balcony as Mao announcing communist rule in 1949.  CCP officials made sure the Xi spoke to 70,000 communist faithful, proclaiming the party would last for eternity.  “The Chinese people will absolutely not allow any foreign force to bully, oppress or enslave us and anyone who attempts to do so will face broken heads and bloodshed in from of the iron Great Wall of the 1.4 billion Chinese people,” Xi proclaimed today.  Xi’s Mao-like rhetoric sends a loud message to the U.S. and EU that China won’t be bullied into giving its citizens human or civil rights.   Mao talks about not being bullied by a “foreigner,” but Xi reserves the right in Mainland China and Hong Kong to crack heads and oppress anyone who disagrees with the CCP.     

        Xi likes to play to a domestic audience, starved of a Free Press and open communication through the Internet.  CCP like to control the message to the Chinese people, saying things that appear outrageous to anyone in the West.  When Chinese Foreign Minister Spokesman Zhao Linjian said May 26 that the U.S. military created the deadly novel coronavirus and planted in Wuhan, China, that wasn’t news at all in China. Chinese people are so indoctrinated, so brainwashed, so buffaloed by the CCP, that there’s no measure of reality they can use to discern utter rubbish.  Yet in the West, outrageous lies backfire, causing even more doubt about China.  All Chinese citizens hear about Muslim Uyghurs is that they are Islamic terrorists looking to topple the Beijing government if given a chance.  Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters are also demonized as dangerous revolutionaries.      

       Xi’s sending Biden the strongest message possible to not mess with China.  “We will turn the people’s military into a world-class military, with even stronger capabilities and even more reliable means to safeguard the nation’s sovereignty, security and development interests,” Xi said, warning the West to stop push China to democracy.  It’s very self-centered policy goals at the expense of others and of the prevailing world order,” said Robert Sutter, George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs.  When Sutter talks about China’s “self-centered” policy, he’s referring to a China-centric foreign p policy, the same policy that prompted the World Health Organization [WHO] to reject the lab-leak theory on the origin of the deadly novel coronavirus.  Xi can’t keep the story straight because all facts lead Shi Zhengli’s Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV] bioweapons lab.

  About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news.  He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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The Coronavirus can be stopped but only with harsh steps the experts say.

Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel. Whether they can keep it suppressed remains to be seen. But for the United States to repeat their successes will take extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country’s leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens. It will also require international partnerships in an interconnected world. There is a chance to stop the coronavirus. This contagion has a weakness. Although there are incidents of rampant spread, as happened on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, the coronavirus more often infects clusters of family members, friends and work colleagues, said Dr. David L. Heymann, who chairs an expert panel advising the World Health Organization on emergencies. No one is certain why the virus travels in this way, but experts see an opening nonetheless. “You can contain clusters,�� Dr. Heymann said. “You need to identify and stop discrete outbreaks, and then do rigorous contact tracing.” But doing so takes intelligent, rapidly adaptive work by health officials, and near-total cooperation from the populace. Containment becomes realistic only when Americans realize that working together is the only way to protect themselves and their loved ones. In interviews with a dozen of the world’s leading experts on fighting epidemics, there was wide agreement on the steps that must be taken immediately. Those experts included international public health officials who have fought AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, flu and Ebola; scientists and epidemiologists; and former health officials who led major American global health programs in both Republican and Democratic administrations. Americans must be persuaded to stay home, they said, and a system put in place to isolate the infected and care for them outside the home. Travel restrictions should be extended, they said; productions of masks and ventilators must be accelerated, and testing problems must be resolved. But tactics like forced isolation, school closings and pervasive GPS tracking of patients brought more divided reactions.

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You Can Take Care of Yourself in Coronavirus Quarantine or Isolation, Starting Right NowThe Accusations Were Lies. But Could We Prove It?Is It OK to Take a Walk? It was not at all clear that a nation so fundamentally committed to individual liberty and distrustful of government could learn to adapt to many of these measures, especially those that smack of state compulsion. “The American way is to look for better outcomes through a voluntary system,” said Dr. Luciana Borio, who was director of medical and biodefense preparedness for the National Security Council before it was disbanded in 2018. “I think you can appeal to people to do the right thing.” In the week since the interviews began, remarkable changes have come over American life. State governments are telling residents they must stay home. Nonessential businesses are being shuttered. The streets are quieter than they have been in generations, and even friends keep a wary distance. What seemed unthinkable just a week ago is rapidly becoming the new normal. What follows are the recommendations offered by the experts interviewed by The Times.

Scientists must be heard

The White House holds frequent media briefings to describe the administration’s progress against the pandemic, often led by President Trump or Vice President Mike Pence, flanked by a rotating cast of officials. Many experts, some of whom are international civil servants, declined to speak on the record for fear of offending the president. But they were united in the opinion that politicians must step aside and let scientists both lead the effort to contain the virus and explain to Americans what must be done. Just as generals take the lead in giving daily briefings in wartime — as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf did during the Persian Gulf war — medical experts should be at the microphone now to explain complex ideas like epidemic curves, social distancing and off-label use of drugs. The microphone should not even be at the White House, scientists said, so that briefings of historic importance do not dissolve into angry, politically charged exchanges with the press corps, as happened again on Friday. Instead, leaders must describe the looming crisis and the possible solutions in ways that will win the trust of Americans. Above all, the experts said, briefings should focus on saving lives and making sure that average wage earners survive the coming hard times — not on the stock market, the tourism industry or the president’s health. There is no time left to point fingers and assign blame. “At this point in the emergency, there’s little merit in spending time on what we should have done or who’s at fault,” said Adm. Tim Ziemer, who was the coordinator of the President’s Malaria Initiative from 2006 until early 2017 and led the pandemic response unit on the National Security Council before its disbanding. “We need to focus on the enemy, and that’s the virus.”

Stop transmission between cities

The next priority, experts said, is extreme social distancing. If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt. The virus would die out on every contaminated surface and, because almost everyone shows symptoms within two weeks, it would be evident who was infected. If we had enough tests for every American, even the completely asymptomatic cases could be found and isolated. The crisis would be over. Obviously, there is no magic wand, and no 300 million tests. But the goal of lockdowns and social distancing is to approximate such a total freeze. To attempt that, experts said, travel and human interaction must be reduced to a minimum. Italy moved incrementally: Officials slowly and reluctantly closed restaurants, churches and museums, and banned weddings and funerals. Nonetheless, the country’s death count continues to rise. The United States is slowly following suit. International flights are all but banned, but not domestic ones. California has ordered all residents to stay at home; New York was to shutter all nonessential businesses on Sunday evening. But other states have fewer restrictions, and in Florida, for days spring break revelers ignored government requests to clear the beaches. On Friday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said he advocated restrictive measures all across the country.As State Pleas Mount, Trump Outlines Some Federal Action; Senate Democrats Block Stimulus PackageMarch 22, 2020 In contrast to the halting steps taken here, China shut down Wuhan — the epicenter of the nation’s outbreak — and restricted movement in much of the country on Jan. 23, when the country had a mere 500 cases and 17 deaths. Its rapid action had an important effect: With the virus mostly isolated in one province, the rest of China was able to save Wuhan. Even as many cities fought their own smaller outbreaks, they sent 40,000 medical workers into Wuhan, roughly doubling its medical force.

Latest Updates: Coronavirus Outbreak

As lockdowns spread, debate about costs grows.As the epidemic in New York explodes, other states worry about domestic contagion.Spanish soldiers find residents of nursing homes ‘absolutely abandoned.’ See more updatesMore live coverage: MarketsU.S.New York In a vast, largely closed society, it can be difficult to know what is happening on the ground, and there is no guarantee that the virus won’t roar back as the Chinese economy restarts. But the lesson is that relatively unaffected regions of the United States will be needed to help rescue overwhelmed cities like New York and Seattle. Keeping these areas at least somewhat free of the coronavirus means enacting strict measures, and quickly.

Stop transmission within cities

Within cities, there are dangerous hot spots: One restaurant, one gym, one hospital, even one taxi may be more contaminated than many identical others nearby because someone had a coughing fit inside. Each day’s delay in stopping human contact, experts said, creates more hot spots, none of which can be identified until about a week later, when the people infected there start falling ill. To stop the explosion, municipal activity must be curtailed. Still, some Americans must stay on the job: doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers; police officers and firefighters; the technicians who maintain the electrical grid and gas and phone lines. The delivery of food and medicine must continue, so that people pinned in their homes suffer nothing worse than boredom. Those essential workers may eventually need permits, and a process for issuing them, if the police are needed to enforce stay-at-home orders, as they have been in China and Italy. People in lockdown adapt. In Wuhan, apartment complexes submit group orders for food, medicine, diapers and other essentials. Shipments are assembled at grocery warehouses or government pantries and dropped off. In Italy, trapped neighbors serenade one another. It’s an intimidating picture. But the weaker the freeze, the more people die in overburdened hospitals — and the longer it ultimately takes for the economy to restart. South Korea avoided locking down any city, but only by moving early and with extraordinary speed. In January, the country had four companies making tests, and as of March 9 had tested 210,000 citizens — the equivalent of testing 2.3 million Americans. As of the same date, fewer than 9,000 Americans had been tested. Everyone who is infected in South Korea goes into isolation in government shelters, and phones and credit card data are used to trace their prior movements and find their contacts. Where they walked before they fell ill is broadcast to the cellphones of everyone who was nearby. Anyone even potentially exposed is quarantined at home; a GPS app tells the police if that person goes outside. The fine for doing so is $8,000. British researchers are trying to develop a similar tracking app, albeit one more palatable to citizens in Western democracies.

Fix the testing mess

Testing must be done in a coordinated and safe way, experts said. The seriously ill must go first, and the testers must be protected. In China, those seeking a test must describe their symptoms on a telemedicine website. If a nurse decides a test is warranted, they are directed to one of dozens of “fever clinics” set up far from all other patients. Personnel in head-to-toe gear check their fevers and question them. Then, ideally, patients are given a rapid flu test and a white blood cell count is taken to rule out influenza and bacterial pneumonia. Then their lungs are visualized in a CT scanner to look for “ground-glass opacities” that indicate pneumonia and rule out cancer and tuberculosis. Only then are they given a diagnostic test for the coronavirus — and they are told to wait at the testing center. The results take a minimum of four hours; in the past, if results took overnight, patients were moved to a hotel to wait — sometimes for two to three days, if doctors believed retesting was warranted. It can take several days after an exposure for a test to turn positive. In the United States, people seeking tests are calling their doctors, who may not have them, or sometimes waiting in traffic jams leading to store parking lots. On Friday, New York City limited testing only to those patients requiring hospitalization, saying the system was being overwhelmed.

Isolate the infected

As soon as possible, experts said, the United States must develop an alternative to the practice of isolating infected people at home, as it endangers families. In China, 75 to 80 percent of all transmission occurred in family clusters. That pattern has already repeated itself here. Seven members of a large family in New Jersey were infected; four have already died. After a lawyer in New Rochelle, N.Y., fell ill, his wife, son and daughter all tested positive. Instead of a policy that advises the infected to remain at home, as the Centers for Disease and Prevention now does, experts said cities should establish facilities where the mildly and moderately ill can recuperate under the care and observation of nurses. Wuhan created many such centers, called “temporary hospitals,” each a cross between a dormitory and a first-aid clinic. They had cots and oxygen tanks, but not the advanced machines used in intensive care units. American cities now have many spaces that could serve as isolation wards. Already New York is considering turning the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center into a temporary hospital, along with the Westchester Convention Center and two university campuses. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said on Saturday that state officials were also considering opening isolation wards. In China, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, leader of the World Health Organization’s observer team there, people originally resisted leaving home or seeing their children go into isolation centers with no visiting rights — just as Americans no doubt would. In China, they came to accept it. “They realized they were keeping their families safe,” he said. “Also, isolation is really lonely. It’s psychologically difficult. Here, they were all together with other people in the same boat. They supported each other.”

Find the fevers

Because China, Taiwan and Vietnam were hit by SARS in 2003, and South Korea has grappled with MERS, fever checks during disease outbreaks became routine. In most cities in affected Asian countries, it is commonplace before entering any bus, train or subway station, office building, theater or even a restaurant to get a temperature check. Washing your hands in chlorinated water is often also required. “They give you a sticker afterward,” said Dr. Heymann, who recently spent a week teaching in Singapore. “I built up quite a collection.” In China, having a fever means a mandatory trip to a fever clinic to check for coronavirus. In the Wuhan area, different cities took different approaches. Cellphone videos from China show police officers knocking on doors and taking temperatures. In some, people who resist are dragged away by force. The city of Ningbo offered bounties of $1,400 to anyone who turned in a coronavirus sufferer. The city of Qianjiang, by contrast, offered the same amount of money to any resident who came in voluntarily and tested positive. Some measures made Western experts queasy. It is difficult to imagine Americans permitting a family member with a fever to be dragged to an isolation ward where visitors are not permitted. “A lot of people’s rights were violated,” Dr. Borio said. Voluntary approaches, like explaining to patients that they will be keeping family and friends safe, are more likely to work in the West, she added.

Trace the contacts

Finding and testing all the contacts of every positive case is essential, experts said. At the peak of its epidemic, Wuhan had 18,000 people tracking down individuals who had come in contact with the infected. At the moment, the health departments of some American counties lack the manpower to trace even syphilis or tuberculosis, let alone scores of casual contacts of someone infected with the coronavirus. Dr. Borio suggested that young Americans could use their social networks to “do their own contact tracing.” Social media also is used in Asia, but in different ways. China’s strategy is quite intrusive: To use the subway in some cities, citizens must download an app that rates how great a health risk they are. South Korean apps tell users exactly where infected people have traveled. When he lectured at a Singapore university, Dr. Heymann said, dozens of students were in the room. But just before he began class, they were photographed to record where everyone sat. “That way, if someone turns up infected later, you can find out who sat near them,” Dr. Heymann said. “That’s really clever.” Contacts generally must remain home for 14 days and report their temperatures twice a day.

Make masks ubiquitous

American experts have divided opinions about masks, but those who have worked in Asia see their value. There is very little data showing that flat surgical masks protect healthy individuals from disease. Nonetheless, Asian countries generally encourage people wear them. In some cities in China where masks are compulsory, the police even used drones to chase individuals down streets, ordering them to go home and mask up. The Asian approach is less about data than it is about crowd psychology, experts explained. All experts agree that the sick must wear masks to keep in their coughs. But if a mask indicates that the wearer is sick, many people will be reluctant to wear one. If everyone is required to wear masks, the sick automatically have one on and there is no stigma attached. Also, experts emphasized, Americans should be taught to take seriously admonitions to stop shaking hands and hugging. The “W.H.O. elbow bump” may look funny, but it’s a legitimate technique for preventing infection. “In Asia, where they went through SARS, people understand the danger,” Dr. Heymann said. “It’s instilled in the population that you’ve got to do the right thing.”

Preserve vital services

Federal intervention is necessary for some vital aspects of life during a pandemic. Only the federal government can enforce interstate commerce laws to ensure that food, water, electricity, gas, phone lines and other basic needs keep flowing across state lines to cities and suburbs. Mr. Trump has said he could compel companies to prioritize making ventilators, masks and other needed goods. Some have volunteered; the Hanes underwear company, for example, will use its cotton to make masks for hospital workers. He also has the military; the Navy is committing two hospital ships to the fight. And Mr. Trump can call up the National Guard. As of Saturday evening, more than 6,500 National Guard members already are assisting in the coronavirus response in 38 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. High-level decisions like these must be made quickly, experts said. “Many Western political leaders are behaving as though they are on a tightrope,” said Dr. David Nabarro, a W.H.O. special envoy on Covid-19 and a veteran of fights against SARS, Ebola and cholera. “But there is no choice. We must do all in our power to fight this,” he added. “I sense that most people — and certainly those in business — get it. They would prefer to take the bitter medicine at once and contain outbreaks as they start rather than gamble with uncertainty.”

Produce ventilators and oxygen

The roughly 175,000 ventilators in all American hospitals and the national stockpile are expected to be far fewer than are needed to handle a surge of patients desperate for breath. The machines pump air and oxygen into the lungs, but they normally cost $25,000 or more each, and neither individual hospitals nor the federal emergency stockpile has ever had enough on hand to handle the number of pneumonia patients that this pandemic is expected to produce. New York, for example, has found about 6,000 ventilators for purchase around the world, Governor Cuomo said. He estimated the state would need about 30,000. The manufacturers, including a dozen in the United States, say there is no easy way to ramp up production quickly. But it is possible other manufacturers, including aerospace and automobile companies, could be enlisted to do so. Ventilators are basically air pumps with motors controlled by circuits that make them act like lungs: the pump pushes air into the patient, then stops so the weight of the chest can push the air back out. Automobiles and airplanes contain many small pumps, like those for oil, water and air-conditioning fluid, that might be modified to act as basic, stripped-down ventilators. On Sunday, Mr. Trump tweeted that Ford and General Motors had been “given the go-ahead” to produce ventilators. Providers, meanwhile, are scrambling for alternatives. Canadian nurses are disseminating a 2006 paper describing how one ventilator can be modified to treat four patients simultaneously. Inventors have proposed combining C-PAP machines, which many apnea sufferers own, and oxygen tanks to improvise a ventilator. The United States must also work to increase its supply of piped and tanked oxygen, Dr. Aylward said. One of the lessons of China, he noted, was that many Covid-19 patients who would normally have been intubated and on ventilators managed to survive with oxygen alone.

Retrofit hospitals

Hospitals in the United States have taken some measures to handle surges of patients, such as stopping elective surgery and setting up isolation rooms. To protect bedridden long-term patients, nursing homes and hospitals also should immediately stop admitting visitors and do constant health checks on their staffs, said Dr. James LeDuc, director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch. The national stockpile does contain some prepackaged military field hospitals, but they are not expected to be nearly enough for a big surge. In Wuhan, the Chinese government famously built two new hospitals in two weeks. All other hospitals were divided: 48 were designated to handle 10,000 serious or critical coronavirus patients, while others were restricted to handling emergencies like heart attacks and births. Wherever that was impractical, hospitals were divided into “clean” and “dirty” zones, and the medical teams did not cross over. Walls to isolate whole wards were built, and — as in Ebola wards — doctors went in one end of the room wearing protective gear and left by the other end, where they de-gowned under the eyes of a nurse to prevent infection.

Decide when to close schools

As of Saturday, schools in 45 states were closed entirely, but that is a decision that divided experts. “Closing all schools may not make sense unless there is documented widespread community transmission, which we’re not seeing in most of the country,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former C.D.C. director under President Barack Obama. It is unclear how much children spread coronavirus. They very seldom get sick enough to be hospitalized, which is not true of flu. Current testing cannot tell whether most do not even become infected. In China, Dr. Aylward said, he asked all of the doctors he spoke to whether they had seen any family clusters in which a child was the first to be infected. No one had, he said, which astonished him. That leaves a quandary. Closing schools is a normal part of social distancing; after all, schools are the workplaces for many adults, too. And when the disease is clearly spreading within an individual school, it must close. But closing whole school districts can seriously disrupt a city’s ability to fight an outbreak. With their children stuck at home, nurses, doctors, police officers and other emergency medical workers cannot come to work. Also, many children in low-income families depend on the meals they eat at schools. Cities that close all schools are creating special “hub schools” for the children of essential workers. In Ohio, the governor has told school bus drivers to deliver hot meals to children who normally got them at school.

Recruit volunteers

China’s effort succeeded, experts said, in part because of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The government declared a “people’s war” and rolled out a “Fight On, Wuhan! Fight On, China!” campaign. It made inspirational films that combined airline ads with 1940s-style wartime propaganda. The ads were somewhat corny, but they rallied the public. Many people idled by the lockdowns stepped up to act as fever checkers, contact tracers, hospital construction workers, food deliverers, even babysitters for the children of first responders, or as crematory workers. With training, volunteers were able to do some ground-level but crucial medical tasks, such as basic nursing, lab technician work or making sure that hospital rooms were correctly decontaminated. Americans often step forward to help neighbors affected by hurricanes and floods; many will no doubt do so in this outbreak, but they will need training in how not to fall ill and add to the problem. “In my experience, success is dependent on how much the public is informed and participates,” Admiral Ziemer said. “This truly is an ‘all hands on deck’ situation.”

Prioritize the treatments

Clinicians in China, Italy and France have thrown virtually everything they had in hospital pharmacies into the fight, and at least two possibilities have emerged that might save patients: the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, and the antiviral remdesivir, which has no licensed use. There is not proof yet that any of these are effective against the virus. China registered more than 200 clinical trials, including several involving those treatments, but investigators ran out of patients in critical condition to enroll. Italy and France have trials underway, and hospitals in New York are writing trial protocols now. One worry for trial leaders is that chloroquine has been given so much publicity that patients may refuse to be “randomized” and accept a 50 percent chance of being given a placebo. If any drug works on critical cases, it might be possible to use small doses as a prophylactic to prevent infection. An alternative is to harvest protective antibodies from the blood of people who have survived the illness, said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The purified blood serum — called immunoglobulin — could possibly be used in small amounts to protect emergency medical workers, too. “Unfortunately, the first wave won’t benefit from this,” Dr. Hotez said. “We need to wait until we have enough survivors.”

Find a vaccine

The ultimate hope is to have a vaccine that will protect everyone, and many companies and governments have already rushed the design of candidate vaccines. But as Dr. Fauci has explained multiple times, testing those candidate vaccines for safety and effectiveness takes time. The process will take at least a year, even if nothing goes wrong. The roadblock, vaccine experts explained, is not bureaucratic. It is that the human immune system takes weeks to produce antibodies, and some dangerous side effects can take weeks to appear. After extensive animal testing, vaccines are normally given to about 50 healthy human volunteers to see if they cause any unexpected side effects and to measure what dose produces enough antibodies to be considered protective. If that goes well, the trial enrolls hundreds or thousands of volunteers in an area where the virus is circulating. Half get the vaccine, the rest do not — and the investigators wait. If the vaccinated half do not get the disease, the green light for production is finally given. In the past, some experimental vaccines have produced serious side effects, like Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can paralyze and kill. A greater danger, experts said, is that some experimental vaccines, paradoxically, cause “immune enhancement,” meaning they make it more likely, not less, that recipients will get a disease. That would be a disaster. One candidate coronavirus vaccine Dr. Hotez invented 10 years ago in the wake of SARS, he said, had to be abandoned when it appeared to make mice more likely to die from pneumonia when they were experimentally infected with the virus. In theory, the testing process could be sped up with “challenge trials,” in which healthy volunteers get the vaccine and then are deliberately infected. But that is ethically fraught when there is no cure for Covid-19. Even some healthy young people have died from this virus.

Reach out to other nations

Wealthy nations need to remember that, as much as they are struggling with the virus, poorer countries will have a far harder time and need help. Also, the Asian nations that have contained the virus could offer expertise — and desperately needed equipment. Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Alibaba, recently offered large shipments of masks and testing kits to the United States. Wealthy nations ignored the daily warnings from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general, that far more aggressive efforts at isolation and contact tracing were urgently needed to stop the virus. “Middle income and poorer nations are following the advice of international organizations while the most advanced nations find it so hard to implement it,” Dr. Nabarro said. “That must change.” In declaring the coronavirus a pandemic, Dr. Tedros called for countries to learn from one another’s successes, act with unity and help protect one another against a threat to people of every nationality. “Let’s all look out for each other,” he said. click here to read more on crohnsdigest click here to buy the Best supplements for the immune system: Natural remedies to boost your immune system click here to read top tips to keeping fit and healty Read the full article

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On January 1, 1912 Dr. Sun Yat-sen was inaugurated as the first president of the Republic of China consolidating a decades-long effort to overthrow an ancient feudal order premised upon a hereditary power structure of the “divine right of bloodlines”. Sun’s fascinating life defies any pre-existing categorization as a “socialist” or “capitalist” both schools of which he attacked as fallacies. Also known as the Founding Father of China, Sun is one of the few people revered as a hero of impeccable moral character equally by Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan alike.

Twitter Suspends Accounts For Propaganda, Has Literal Propagandist As High-Level Executive

“When questioned by Middle East Eye about MacMillan’s work in the British Army’s online propaganda program, Twitter hilariously responded, “Twitter is an open, neutral and rigorously independent platform. We actively encourage all our employees to pursue external interests in line with our commitment to healthy corporate social responsibility, and we will continue to do so.”

That’s very nice of Twitter, isn’t it? They encourage their employees to pursue wholesome external interests, whether that be tennis, volunteering at a soup kitchen, or moonlighting at a military program explicitly devoted to online psychological warfare. You know, just everyday socially responsible pastime stuff.”

“... as I documented recently, the mass purges of foreign Twitter accounts we’ve been seeing more and more of lately always exclusively target governments and groups which are not in alignment with the interests of the US-centralized power alliance of which the UK is a part. We’ve seen mass suspensions of accounts from Cuba, China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and the Catalan independence movement on allegations of “coordinated influence operations” and “covert, manipulative behaviors”, yet Twitter currently employs a high-level executive for whom coordinated influence operations and covert, manipulative behaviors on behalf of the British government are a known vocation.” “ This is just one more item on the ever-growing mountain of evidence that these giant, immensely influential social media platforms we’ve all been herded into are nothing other than state propaganda for the digital age.”

“We are living in a globe-spanning corporate oligarchic empire, and these government-aligned Silicon Valley giants are a major part of that empire’s propaganda engine.

The real power of that empire and that oligarchy lies in their invisibile and unacknowledged nature. Officially we all live in separate, sovereign nations run by democratically elected officials; unofficially we live in a massive transnational empire ruled by a loose alliance of plutocrats and opaque government agencies where military propagandists are employed by social media monopolies to manipulate public narratives.

Yet whenever you try to publicly discuss the threat that is being posed by oligarchic narrative control online, you get told by establishment loyalists and libertarians that Twitter is just a simple private business running things in a way that is entirely separate from government censorship and state propaganda.”

<>We are those of us who just love making signs made of cardboard to hold upwards in protest of the shortage of advertising-for-free spaces:

“jazz improvisation,                                                                                   Buddha’s happy~go~lucky blues...                                                                stay-tuned for a commercial                                                                          SNAFU!“                                                                                                     ~ jf

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 http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/09/eternally-vigilant.html Sun Yat Sen was one of the great historical figures of the 20th century, but we Americans never heard much about him. His acolytes were lesser and more egotistical, Mao and Chiang Kai-shek. Eleni sent this article with some quotes from Master Sun about the British Empire, considering it as a whole entity, not considering where the core will-to-power might lie, which directed that empire. Where does that will-to-power reside now? It seems mobile and transnational, like money, come to think of it… ​ ​“The British are as cunning as the fox and as changeable as the weather and they are not ashamed of themselves… Britain seeks friendship only with those which can render her services, and when her friends are too weak to be of any use to her, they must be sacrificed in her interests. Britain’s tender regard for her friends is like the delicate care usually shown by farmers in the rearing of silkworms; after all the silk has been drawn from the cocoons, they are destroyed by fire or used as food for fish. The present friends of Britain are no more than silkworms.” ​ ​“The key policy of England is to attack the strongest enemy with the help of the weaker countries and join the weakened enemy in checking the growth of a 3rd country. The British foreign policy has remained basically unchanged for two centuries.” ​ ​“When England befriends another country, the purpose is not to maintain a cordial friendship for the sake of friendship but to utilize that country as a tool to fight a third country. When an enemy has been shorn of his power, he is turned into a friend, and the friend who has become strong, into an enemy. England always remains in a commanding position; she makes other countries fight her wars and she herself reaps the fruits of victory.” https://theduran.com/sun-yat-sens-advice-to-young-revolutionaries-dont-be-imperial-stooges/

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1.) Sun Yat-Sen was Georgist; see American economist Henry George. Sun based the principle of Minsheng, The People’s Livelihood, on land-value taxation!  

2.) A fascinating personality! Dr. Sun Yat-Sen consolidated a decades-long effort to overthrow an ancient feudal order premised upon a hereditary power structure of the “divine right of bloodlines”. The same can be said about efforts in Russia to “overthrow an ancient feudal order premised on a heriditary power structure of the “divine right of bloodlines”. It became a bloody revolution, since the tsar and the nobility would not cede.Interesting that these changes in China and Russia happened around the same time, in the second decade of the 20th century.Both, China and Russia, have come a long way since then. I am glad to find some good texts about China and Russia on the DURAN.

[renka-aardvarknews-blog]

Airbus, Boeing signing economic suicide pacts with Beijing

By Marshall Auerback, Asia Times. Airbus is considering whether or not to shift the assembly process of its latest generation of A330 planes to China as part of a bid to increase its market share in the world’s fastest-growing civil-aviation market. The European multinational is following a trend started by Boeing, which recently opened a new completion plant in China. On the face of it, the decision by the two companies (which dominate the civilian aviation market) makes sense: Build where your biggest customer lives, especially as China does not yet have a fully home-grown civil-aviation industry ready to compete globally. The benefits are many, including the goodwill and esteem of the country that would be buying these planes. In the long term, however, that might prove to be a costly miscalculation. Based on its recent history (here and here), it won’t take long for China to catch up and largely displace both companies domestically in Beijing’s home aviation market, as well as seizing a large chunk of the corporate duopoly’s global market share. Airbus and Boeing could therefore be making short-term decisions with negative long-term consequences for their future profitability. Given China’s formidable economic advancement, none of this should come as a surprise to either Airbus or Boeing. Nor should it shock Western governments. The problem is that everybody has historically been guided by the naïve assumption that simply admitting China to organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) would induce Beijing to, in the words of Philip Pan, "eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot." China has unquestionably modernized, but its politically illiberal, dirigiste polity has, if anything, massively moved in the opposite direction, strengthened by that very modernization process that has done anything but falter. Furthermore, the country has many aims and goals that are antithetical to the long-term prosperity of Western companies and economies (as the European Union is beginning to recognize). Boeing and Airbus might simply become the latest Western sacrificial lambs. Beijing has explicitly targeted wide-bodied aircraft as one of its 10 new priority sectors for import substitution in its "Made in China 2025" document, so whatever short-term gains Airbus and Boeing receive in terms of securing additional orders from China could well be undermined longer-term. The resultant technology transfers and lower labor costs will almost certainly give Beijing a quantum leap toward competing directly and ultimately displacing both companies. Given the merger with McDonnell Douglas, Boeing will continue its march toward in effect becoming a branch of the US Department of Defense, as its civilian market share crashes, but Airbus doesn’t really have the luxury of a military alternative, given the relative paucity of European defense expenditures. As if Boeing needed any further problems, the 737 fiasco represents the latest in a series of setbacks for the company. Boeing’s 737 global recall, coming on the heels of the initial launch problems of the 787 Dreamliner some six years ago (where the "demoduralization" of production meant that Boeing "could not fully account for stress transmission and loading at the system level," as Gary Pisano and Willy Shih write), together illustrate the dangers of spreading manufacturing too far across the globe: Engineers, notes City University of New York fellow Jon Rynn, "need to ‘kick the tires’ of the new production processes they design. So while a market may be global, production and the growth of production take place most efficiently" in relatively close geographic quarters. American companies such as Boeing consistently underestimate the value of closely integrating research and development and manufacturing, while underplaying the risks of separating them (as recent events have demonstrated again to the company’s cost). By deciding to expand its A330 production in China, Airbus looks poised to repeat Boeing’s error, a potential miscalculation that most European Union companies have hitherto largely avoided, because the EU has prioritized domestic manufacturing/discouraged offshoring more than its US counterparts (in regard to the loss of US manufacturing jobs attributable to China, the American Economic Review paper by Justin R Pierce and Peter K Schott specifically notes that there was "no similar reaction in the European Union, where policy did not change"). Beijing itself has historically balanced its purchases from both major civil-aviation manufacturers to ensure that it does not rely too heavily on one aircraft supplier, which means that Airbus will likely benefit from the void created by the 737 recall. All the more reason why the European conglomerate should be wary of following the Pied Piper-like expansion into China. (The 737 recall also complicates resolution of the US-China trade conflict, which had appeared closer to resolution in light of Beijing’s proposal to buy an additional US$1.2 trillion in US exports over six years. Boeing aircraft purchases featured heavily on Beijing’s shopping list.) But the longer-term challenges relate to China’s economic development path and its corresponding move up the high-tech curve, which have largely been characterized by mercantilist policies of protection and heavy government subsidy. In this regard, the Chinese state has followed a national development strategy first outlined in the mid-19th century by German economist Friedrich List, who argued that the national government should play a crucial role in promoting, guiding, and regulating the process of national economic advancement. Protectionism, List argued, should play a role here as well during the country’s "catch-up" phase of technological development. List wrote the analysis against a historic backdrop where Germany was beginning to challenge the dominant economic power of its time, the United Kingdom. So the defenders of Beijing might well point to his work to show that there is nothing new about using the state as a principal instrument to accelerate economic development and innovation. However, List was analyzing two capitalist economies operating within the context of a 19th-century gold-standard global financial system, which invariably circumscribed the scope of state involvement (the finite availability of gold reserves limiting fiscal-policy options). By contrast, today the global economy operates under a fiat-currency system, and what therefore distinguishes China’s economic domestic development from its 19th-century predecessors is the sheer scale of fiscal resources it can deploy in the furtherance of its economic (and military) objectives. Some of these objectives might not be so benign to the West longer-term. Which points to another consideration for the West: For all of its supposed embrace of capitalism, China is still primarily a state-dominated economy, which eschews the disciplines of a free-market economy. This means it has the capacity (and ideological predisposition) to use the national fiscal policy as a loss leader, absorbing losses well beyond what would be tolerated in an economy dominated by private enterprise (private companies, of course, can go bust). Beijing underwrites its designated national champions by relying on a combination of subsidies (some disguised, as they flow through state-backed investment funds and the financial sectors) and "Buy China" preferences to develop Chinese products, even though these policies are contrary to the rules of WTO membership, which China eagerly joined in 2001. As economist Brad Setser argues, "various parts of the Chinese state compete, absorb losses, and then consolidate around the successful firms. Other countries … worry about the losses," notes Setser, but not the Chinese government, which simply socializes the losses at the national level, and writes them off. In this regard, Boeing and Airbus would do well to consider China’s experience in the solar industry. Designating this as another strategic sector for growth in the 1990s, Chinese solar companies, with the explicit backstop of the state, ultimately raised enough funding via debt to build sufficient solar capacity for the world three times over. The overinvestment ultimately killed the cash flows of major Western competitors and knocked them out of the business, leaving the market free for China to dominate. Commenting on the trend, Scientific American highlighted that "between 2008 and 2013, China’s fledgling solar-electric panel industry dropped world prices by 80 percent, a stunning achievement in a fiercely competitive high-tech market. China had leapfrogged from nursing a tiny, rural-oriented solar program in the 1990s to become the globe’s leader in what may soon be the world’s largest renewable energy source." Here was a classic case of state-guided/supported commercial companies receiving benefits that went far beyond anything in, say, South Korea or Taiwan, or even Japan in the earlier part of their development. Now this trend is manifesting itself across the entire spectrum of the Chinese guided economy, including agricultural equipment, industrial machinery, telecommunications, artificial intelligence, computer chips, and civil aviation. In another disturbing parallel that Boeing and Airbus would do well to consider, "the timeline of China’s rise began in the late 1990s when Germany, overwhelmed by the domestic response to a government incentive program to promote rooftop solar panels, provided the capital, technology and experts to lure China into making solar panels to meet the German demand," according to Scientific American. Much like the German solar companies, which shipped valuable manufacturing and technological expertise to China, to sustain demand, Boeing and Airbus could well be signing their economic death warrants by agreeing to offshore increasing amounts of production in China to sustain their global market shares (aided and abetted by their more market-oriented governments, which frown on the idea of national industrial policy). The same thing is happening in wind power in China, which is expected to see offshore wind capacity grow from 2 gigawatts last year to 31GW in the next decade. China’s expansion here has already forced Siemens and Gamesa to merge to cope with the rising competitive challenge. As far as aviation itself goes, Setser makes the point that "China may cut into the United States’ future exports by building its own competitor to the 737 and also cut into Europe’s future exports if Airbus decides to build the A330 in China and China buys ‘Made in China’ Rolls-Royce engines for the C929 and the A330." Even if this allows the duopoly to maintain its dominance in global civil aviation, it is hard to see how shifting manufacturing production of aircraft components to China to get orders constitutes a "win" for the US or European workers who are already being displaced. And Boeing’s weak-kneed response to the 737 crisis will likely exacerbate the company’s problems going forward. The bottom line is that both Western governments and Western corporations have persistently underestimated the power of China’s economic development model and the corresponding economic threat that it poses to the West’s own affluence. The usual criticism levelled against the Chinese growth model is that a country that subsidizes its industries ends up with inefficient industries because heavily protected local firms are shielded from global competition, ultimately leaving the country that resorts to protectionism with inferior products. The idea of national champions, built up via state dirigisme, according to classic liberal economic doctrine, ultimately ensures that economic efficiency and commercial considerations get squeezed out. Rent-seeking and corruption become institutionalized, goes the argument, so these national champions ultimately will not be able to compete in the global marketplace. That was certainly the assumption of Milton Friedman, who called the Communist Party of China’s state-driven strategy "an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency." By contrast, according to Defense and the National Interest, the governing assumptions of capitalist economies is that "the discipline of the ‘marketplace,’", not the state, is better suited to choose winners and knock out losers "who cannot offer the prices or quality or features of their competitors." China represents the ultimate repudiation of these seemingly ironclad economic laws. The country’s success has come across a slew of industries: clean tech, notably wind and solar power, Internet companies (despite overwhelming censorship, China has corporate behemoths, such as Alibaba, or Baidu, that rival Google in scale and scope), and more recently, in the telecommunications sector (where Huawei has clearly benefited from "Buy China" preferences created by the state via its state-owned telecommunications enterprises and now is considered to be the global leader in 5G telephony). In practice, therefore, there is no reason the same model cannot work with regard to civil aviation even as Airbus and Boeing eagerly provide the rope with which they may hang their respective companies in the future. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute, which provided it to Asia Times. Read the full article

[itsfinancethings]

After more than a decade, Martin suddenly quit writing his column. He said goodbye to his readers, editors and colleagues. But he did not name the fear that prompted him to abandon his commentaries—at least not until he left Hong Kong.

“The day [the national security law] passed I just couldn’t write anything. I stared at the screen for hours,” he messaged TIME from onboard his flight out of the semi-autonomous enclave. “I hate self-censorship, so I’d rather call this an end.”

Martin, who asked that his real name not be used because he needs to return in the future, is hardly the only one to fall silent rather than risk tangling with the draconian new restrictions.

In the three and a half weeks since the enactment of the law at the end of June, a sense of fear and uncertainty has taken hold in Hong Kong, where anything seen to provoke hatred against the Chinese government is now punishable with up to life in prison. Some people have redacted their social media posts and erased messaging app histories. Journalists have scrubbed their names from digital archives. Books are being purged from libraries. Shops have dismantled walls of Post-it Notes bearing pro-democracy messages, while activists have resorted to codes to express protest chants suddenly outlawed.

The first arrests came just hours after the law was implemented. On July 1, the 23rd anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China from Britain, hundreds of protesters were rounded up for unauthorized assembly amid the coronavirus pandemic. Ten, including a 15-year-old girl and a 23-year-old motorcyclist who drove into police, were accused of breaching the new law, mostly by carrying separatist stickers and pro-independence flags.

In at least one respect, the regulations are already proving successful: the sometimes violent demonstrations that flared across the freewheeling Asian financial capital over the past year have largely evaporated. The unrest, which seized university campuses, paralyzed public transportation and brought police and petrol bombs into residential neighborhoods, wrought millions of dollars in damages and plunged Hong Kong into a recession. It also challenged Beijing’s bottom line as the movement morphed into an open challenge of the Chinese Communist Party’s authority, with demonstrators sporting American flags, beseeching foreign governments to intervene and increasingly chanting, “independence, the only way out.” Their fight brought this previously stable financial capital directly into the crux of imploding U.S.-China relations.

To Beijing, the legislation is necessary to secure its sovereignty over the territory. “People in Hong Kong can still criticize the Communist Party of China after the handover,” Zhang Xiaoming, deputy director of the Chinese government’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, reportedly said at a press conference earlier this month. “However, you cannot turn these into actions.”

Read more: Hong Kong Is Caught in the Middle of the Great U.S.-China Power Struggle

Some hope the crackdown will only be temporary as Beijing restores stability. But others fear the far-reaching new law marks the arrival of authoritarian control in a city that has long cherished its freedoms and independent judiciary.

“Overnight, Hong Kong has gone from rule of law to rule by fear,” says Lee Cheuk-yan, a veteran activist and former legislator.

Lee chairs the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, which established the world’s only museum dedicated to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest movement in Beijing. Afraid the museum, and its advocacy of an end to one-party rule in China, may fall foul of the new law, the alliance is rushing to raise $200,000 to digitize its archives.

While Lee and his colleagues discussed moving the artifacts abroad, including video footage and items donated by mothers of students killed in the bloody military crackdown, doing so seemed like handing victory to the Chinese government and its attempt to erase the event from collective memory. But keeping the operation running is now a game of dramatically higher stakes.

“Our worry is that the law is so vague about everything and so broadly defined that we don’t know how they will categorize our organization,” Lee says. “Will they strike at us?”

That sense of foreboding hangs over many organizations as they speculate what might make them a target.

Chan Long Hei—Bloomberg/Getty Images Police officers stand guard outside the Office for Safeguarding National Security in Hong Kong, set up at the Metropark Hotel, in Hong Kong on July 8, 2020.

‘We should all be making plans’

Drafted in secret, the law only became public as it took effect shortly before midnight on June 30. By morning, boats bearing giant red and yellow banners sailed across Victoria Harbor heralding the new legal regime.

Though the new measure specifically bans subversion, sedition, terrorism and collusion, several lawyers who are experts in Chinese law told TIME the phrasing of these crimes can be interpreted so expansively as to apply to almost any activity or speech. On the mainland, similar charges are routinely wielded to crush even moderate dissent.

“It’s so much worse than anyone expected. It can encompass all the acts we have been doing in the protests over the last year,” says Lee, who is facing multiple charges of unlawful assembly stemming from before the law’s enactment.

The Hong Kong government insists the new law will only affect a small minority of people, and that the city’s free speech is not under threat. But officials also say that the law encompasses popular protest slogans, including “Liberate Hong Kong” and “Hong Kong Independence,” that are now deemed to be inciting others to commit secession or subverting state power.

It remains unclear how far the law’s 66 provisions—which touch on education, media, non-governmental organizations, universities, the internet, social organizations, international organizations, elections and more—will extend.

“Each day the government announces something new about this law,” says Fung Wai-wah, president of the pro-democracy Professional Teachers’ Union. “The red line is still moving.” Stoking concern for academic freedom, schools have been told to review course materials, books and libraries to ensure nothing is in violation. “This censorship is as irrational as it is ambiguous,” Fung adds.

For the first time, Chinese security agents will operate openly in Hong Kong, while the most serious offenders may be extradited for trial in the Communist Party-controlled courts on the mainland. Simon Young, associate dean of the University of Hong Kong’s law school, suspects that if such extradition powers are used “It may well be that we don’t know until after the person has entered the mainland jurisdiction. It’s certainly something that keeps us guessing and in fear.”

The city’s top official, Chief Executive Carrie Lam, denies there is “a wide spread of fears [sic]” among Hongkongers, even as a Chinese government official warned the law is intended to act like “a sharp sword hanging high” over the heads of potential offenders.

“This is not just a new law, it’s really a new order in Hong Kong,” says Fred Rocafort, a former diplomat and legal expert on China at law firm Harris Bricken. He expects “relatively constant applications of the law for even relatively minor acts” as this state of affairs is established.

Read more: ‘Hong Kong Is Freer Than You Think’

Some see a deliberate deterrent effect in the law’s ambiguity.

“The whole purpose is to incept people’s minds so they have to ask the question of whether everything they do is maybe a violation,” says Peter Yam, a film producer currently working on an independent documentary about the Hong Kong protests.

While the subject matter could be considered incendiary in the current political climate, Yam says he and the crew have discussed the law and don’t want to focus on it. “If our films are put under review and censored then there’s nothing we can do,” he says.

Since the law was enacted, Yam has received a stream of messages from friends and colleagues debating whether it’s time to leave the city for good.

“I want to stay until the last moment,” he says. “At the same time, we should all be making plans.”

While Australia, Taiwan and the U.K. are all offering avenues for fleeing Hongkongers, many of the 7.4 million residents of one of the world’s most starkly unequal cities cannot afford an exit strategy. Those who stay will have to navigate what it means to lose some of the liberties that distinguished their home from the mainland.

In 1997, the former British colony was grafted back onto China under a political formula known as “one country, two systems,” designed to preserve its separate legal and political systems within an authoritarian state. The conceit meant Hong Kong was the only place in China where calls for political reform could be full-throated, and the color and vulgarity of anti-government invectives were limited only by imagination. Here, publishers hawking banned books and practitioners of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement could promote literature inaccessible just over the border. Unfettered by censorship, the hard-bitten local press documented any perceived interference by Beijing.

Lam, the city’s leader, said she could guarantee the press would not be targeted by the new law only if all reporters also gave “a 100% guarantee that they will not commit any offenses under this piece of national legislation.”

Rachel Cartland, a former civil servant and long-time guest presenter for Hong Kong’s public broadcaster RTHK, found the government’s statements less than reassuring. She announced she was stepping down from a radio program over the new law, just days after its enactment.

“I put aside this thought of, well, ‘How likely are they to come after me?’ and just looked at it dispassionately,” she says. “People are really going to have to think through: how is this going to affect me?”

‘The cost of politics will be much higher’

The government is expected to “strengthen the management” of foreign nongovernmental organizations and news agencies, according to the law, a condition that has prompted deep concern and expedited corporate relocation plans. On July 14, the New York Times announced it was shifting its Hong Kong-based digital news operation to South Korea, citing visa problems and the city’s “new era under tightened Chinese rule.”

The police force has also been given sweeping new powers to regulate online content and intercept communications. Companies may be compelled to remove content deemed a threat to national security and to handover private user data. In response, tech giants like Facebook and Google announced a pause on data requests from Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, primary elections held by pro-democracy parties mid-July could be considered a violation of the national security law by way of “subverting state power.” (The government alleges that the primaries were potentially subversive because the stated aim of many candidates, if elected, will be to veto the government’s budget and legislation, even though such deadlocking is permitted under the city’s mini-constitution.) Organizers claim that more than 600,000 cast ballots in the two-day vote, with results favoring young democrats who tend to be more confrontational toward the Chinese government. It’s unclear if these candidates, many of whom protested the new law, will face disqualification or other repercussions.

Read more: ‘One Country, Two Systems Is Still the Best Model for Hong Kong But It Badly Needs Reform‘

“The cost of politics will be much higher than before,” says Tanya Chan, a lawmaker and convenor of the pro-democracy camp. Her book was one of several removed from circulation at the public libraries pending a review. The targeting of her travelogue was “puzzling,” she says, though she expects that “sooner or later” this law “will affect almost every aspect of our normal life.”

Some groups have preemptively disbanded. Demosisto, the youth political party founded by prominent activist Joshua Wong, ceased to be on the same day the law was enacted, while other upstart political organizations relocated overseas.

Nathan Law, a co-founder of Demosisto—and frequently vilified in Chinese state media as a conspirator of foreign governments over his lobbying for U.S. sanctions on Hong Kong—went into self-imposed exile in London a day after he testified online to a congressional hearing.

“It has created a chilling effect,” says Law, “and destroyed the Hong Kong that we used to know.”

But for some, exasperated by the violence and disruption of last year’s protests, the law brings welcome tranquility back to Hong Kong’s streets.

Ronny Ng, a 52-year-old IT professional, says he was tired of not being able to go out or get to work as protest after protest transformed his neighborhood into a battlefield. “If you’re not against the government or against China, the new law won’t be a problem,” he says while on a cigarette break outside his office. Those who are, he admits, “should probably leave if they can’t adapt.”

Chan Long Hei—Bloomberg/Getty Images Blank sticky notes are displayed inside a restaurant in Hong Kong on July 8, 2020.

Among businesses in the financial center, reactions have been mixed. After the details were revealed, a survey by the American Chamber of Commerce showed the majority of U.S. companies operating out of the hub were increasingly concerned, especially about the law’s ambiguity. Yet an exodus seems unlikely, with 51% of respondents also expecting it would have either no effect or even a positive effect on their operations, given the suspension of protests.

Still, resistance hasn’t been fully extinguished. Demonstrators have already found cheeky ways to circumvent the law, like using numbers, acronyms and homonyms instead of the words in the outlawed protest chant. The Post-it Note walls have returned, although they no longer carry any messages. Blank paper has become the latest marker of defiance. So too have the opening lines of China’s national anthem: “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves!”

Ahead of the new law’s implementation, some journalists and academics had predicted the “death” of Hong Kong. But Yam, the film producer, insists this not the end of his beloved city.

“I’ve never seen Hong Kong so vibrant in a way,” he says while on a lunch break during one of the last days of filming. “It turns out we really want freedom.”

[stephenmccull]

Conspiracy Theories Aside, Here’s What Contact Tracers Really Do

In the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, contact tracing is downright buzzy, and not always in a good way.

Contact tracing is the public health practice of informing people when they’ve been exposed to a contagious disease. As it has become more widely employed across the country, it has also become mired in modern political polarization and conspiracy theories.

Misinformation abounds, from tales that people who talk to contact tracers will be sent to nonexistent “FEMA camps” — a rumor so prevalent that health officials in Washington state had to put out a statement in May debunking it — to elaborate theories that the efforts are somehow part of a plot by global elites, such as the Clinton Foundation, Bill Gates or George Soros.

At the very least, such misinformation could hinder efforts to contain the virus, and at worst has sparked threats against tracers, say some observers, including the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a London-based organization that studies polarization.

The dynamic, ISD notes in a June report, “is being generated both by individual social media users and by key influencers in conspiratorial communities” and plays on fears that Big Brother is watching us.

According to that report, social media posts, mainly videos, have been associated with “widespread sharing of petitions and other efforts to galvanise political action against contact tracing.” The videos, steeped in disinformation and conspiracy think — whether alleging tracers’ ties to the deep state or casting them as part of a Democratic effort to interfere in the 2020 election — “are receiving more than 300,000 views each on YouTube and are being shared tens of thousands of times across public Facebook pages and groups.”

Of course, the real story behind tracing is nothing like these colorful conspiracy theories. It’s an age-old infection control strategy, and it’s a bit tedious, actually.

“We’ve been doing it in public health for decades,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Part old-fashioned shoe-leather detective work, part social work, the goal is to interrupt the spread of the illness by reaching out to people who test positive — and people they have been in close contact with — and provide needed support for them to isolate. It has to be done quickly, and it takes a lot of people. Recent case count surges in some parts of the country are making the task more difficult.

So let’s take a look at what it is and isn’t.

What’s the Process?

When a person tests positive for certain communicable diseases, health care providers must report their contact information to public health departments. Contact tracers then try to reach out quickly, generally by phone.

The tracer will ask for the patient’s address. Some social media sites have decried this as nefarious, but it’s not. The tracer does not want to provide private medical information — “Mr. Smith, I see you tested positive for COVID” — to the wrong person. Those contacted should also feel free to confirm it really is the public health department calling, experts note, as there have been reports of fraudulent calls.

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During the initial call, the tracer makes sure the patient is OK and understands the disease and what to expect. Ideally, the contract tracer builds a relationship with the patient. Some can link the patient with local resources or services, such as food delivery or needed medical supplies, that can make it easier to stay isolated until they have recovered from the virus.

What’s a Close Contact?

Contact tracers ask where the infected person traveled and with whom they came in close contact — generally defined as being within 6 feet for 15 minutes or more — from about two days before they started showing symptoms until they isolated themselves.

That does not include such things as simply passing people on the street or opening the door to pick up a package dropped off by a FedEx driver.

Providing the information is voluntary, but it is the only way the programs will work. Most patients happily comply, but a few are reluctant, said Plescia.

“That was a little surprising,” he said. “You would think if you might cause another person to become ill, you would have an interest in that person being notified. But some worry they are snitching on other people.”

Tracers do not disclose the name of the infected person. Contacts simply “receive a call saying ‘You have had a significant exposure,’” said Crystal Watson, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and co-author of a report on contact tracing.

To assist with tracing, some restaurants, stores, salons and other businesses are keeping daily logs of customers. Some voices on social media have raised concerns about those logs, saying they are intrusive and suggest that Big Brother is watching. Their purpose, though, is to make it easier for health officials to notify other employees and patrons in the event that someone tests positive.

Close contacts are urged to quarantine for 14 days, check their temperature regularly and avoid contact with other household members, if possible.

For each infected patient, tracers need to contact an average of 10 other people, said Watson — noting, however, that the number could be far higher. “If contact tracing is done in a place where there’s a big epidemic and no one is under social distancing restrictions, you’ll have to contact more,” she said.

Speed is of the essence in finding close contacts. Infected people start showing symptoms within two to seven days of exposure — although it can take up to 14 — and they may be contagious before symptoms appear.

Who Asks All of These Questions?

In the early days of the COVID pandemic in the U.S., tracing was limited because testing for the virus was also limited. The two really go together. That meant the nation used the other tool at its disposal, the blunt instrument of stay-at-home orders. Now, with testing more available, and with many states in the fits and starts of reopening, the more targeted effort of contact tracing becomes important.

Used effectively, it can sharply slow outbreaks, as seen in countries that have employed comprehensive tracing programs, such as Japan, New Zealand and China.

So far, though, the U.S. has a more limited effort, and it varies by state.

An estimated 37,000 contact tracers are now employed by public health departments nationwide, triple the number just a few weeks ago, according to an NPR state survey and tracking effort. Still, those numbers are far below estimates of what many say is necessary. Indeed, Watson and other Johns Hopkins researchers say the U.S. needs to add a minimum of 100,000 contract tracers.

Can They Force Me Into Quarantine?

Although health officials do have the authority to isolate people who pose a danger to others, that power is almost never used.

“Mandatory quarantine hasn’t really been used since the days of smallpox in this country, although the president used it in the beginning of the pandemic for some people repatriating back to the county,” said Watson.

Public health officials avoid such aggressive tactics because they don’t want to discourage people from getting tested. As for hauling people away from their homes by force, that also doesn’t happen here, although it does in some authoritarian countries. Instead, a number of cities and regions have set up special hotels or other facilities where infected or exposed people who live in homes where they can’t isolate themselves from other family members can voluntarily spend their convalescence.

Is It Working?

It has certainly worked in other countries, said Howard Koh, professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and former assistant secretary for health in the Obama administration.

“Italy, Spain, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and New Zealand have all gotten to the other side of the curve,” said Koh. “When they have outbreaks, they are relatively small and they jump on them right away.”

One difference, he said, is those places have a national strategy.

“In our country, we have a 50-state strategy, a patchwork response including contact tracing, with some states having embraced it and some have barely started.”

Massachusetts and New York have reported success with tracing, said Watson.

But there are many areas of the country, especially the Sun Belt, where cases are spiking, complicating efforts to control the virus. With more interest in getting tested, turnaround time for results grows. And large numbers of new cases mean contact tracers have far more people to track down, making it challenging to do so in the short time frame needed to be effective.

“I’m discouraged that a lot of the states where we are seeing a big surge right now have not put a lot of effort into developing their contact tracing workforce,” Watson said, echoing Koh’s call for a national plan. “We need an initiative by the federal government focused on contract tracing.”

Conspiracy Theories Aside, Here’s What Contact Tracers Really Do published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[dinafbrownil]

Conspiracy Theories Aside, Here’s What Contact Tracers Really Do

In the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, contact tracing is downright buzzy, and not always in a good way.

Contact tracing is the public health practice of informing people when they’ve been exposed to a contagious disease. As it has become more widely employed across the country, it has also become mired in modern political polarization and conspiracy theories.

Misinformation abounds, from tales that people who talk to contact tracers will be sent to nonexistent “FEMA camps” — a rumor so prevalent that health officials in Washington state had to put out a statement in May debunking it — to elaborate theories that the efforts are somehow part of a plot by global elites, such as the Clinton Foundation, Bill Gates or George Soros.

At the very least, such misinformation could hinder efforts to contain the virus, and at worst has sparked threats against tracers, say some observers, including the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a London-based organization that studies polarization.

The dynamic, ISD notes in a June report, “is being generated both by individual social media users and by key influencers in conspiratorial communities” and plays on fears that Big Brother is watching us.

According to that report, social media posts, mainly videos, have been associated with “widespread sharing of petitions and other efforts to galvanise political action against contact tracing.” The videos, steeped in disinformation and conspiracy think — whether alleging tracers’ ties to the deep state or casting them as part of a Democratic effort to interfere in the 2020 election — “are receiving more than 300,000 views each on YouTube and are being shared tens of thousands of times across public Facebook pages and groups.”

Of course, the real story behind tracing is nothing like these colorful conspiracy theories. It’s an age-old infection control strategy, and it’s a bit tedious, actually.

“We’ve been doing it in public health for decades,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Part old-fashioned shoe-leather detective work, part social work, the goal is to interrupt the spread of the illness by reaching out to people who test positive — and people they have been in close contact with — and provide needed support for them to isolate. It has to be done quickly, and it takes a lot of people. Recent case count surges in some parts of the country are making the task more difficult.

So let’s take a look at what it is and isn’t.

What’s the Process?

When a person tests positive for certain communicable diseases, health care providers must report their contact information to public health departments. Contact tracers then try to reach out quickly, generally by phone.

The tracer will ask for the patient’s address. Some social media sites have decried this as nefarious, but it’s not. The tracer does not want to provide private medical information — “Mr. Smith, I see you tested positive for COVID” — to the wrong person. Those contacted should also feel free to confirm it really is the public health department calling, experts note, as there have been reports of fraudulent calls.

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During the initial call, the tracer makes sure the patient is OK and understands the disease and what to expect. Ideally, the contract tracer builds a relationship with the patient. Some can link the patient with local resources or services, such as food delivery or needed medical supplies, that can make it easier to stay isolated until they have recovered from the virus.

What’s a Close Contact?

Contact tracers ask where the infected person traveled and with whom they came in close contact — generally defined as being within 6 feet for 15 minutes or more — from about two days before they started showing symptoms until they isolated themselves.

That does not include such things as simply passing people on the street or opening the door to pick up a package dropped off by a FedEx driver.

Providing the information is voluntary, but it is the only way the programs will work. Most patients happily comply, but a few are reluctant, said Plescia.

“That was a little surprising,” he said. “You would think if you might cause another person to become ill, you would have an interest in that person being notified. But some worry they are snitching on other people.”

Tracers do not disclose the name of the infected person. Contacts simply “receive a call saying ‘You have had a significant exposure,’” said Crystal Watson, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and co-author of a report on contact tracing.

To assist with tracing, some restaurants, stores, salons and other businesses are keeping daily logs of customers. Some voices on social media have raised concerns about those logs, saying they are intrusive and suggest that Big Brother is watching. Their purpose, though, is to make it easier for health officials to notify other employees and patrons in the event that someone tests positive.

Close contacts are urged to quarantine for 14 days, check their temperature regularly and avoid contact with other household members, if possible.

For each infected patient, tracers need to contact an average of 10 other people, said Watson — noting, however, that the number could be far higher. “If contact tracing is done in a place where there’s a big epidemic and no one is under social distancing restrictions, you’ll have to contact more,” she said.

Speed is of the essence in finding close contacts. Infected people start showing symptoms within two to seven days of exposure — although it can take up to 14 — and they may be contagious before symptoms appear.

Who Asks All of These Questions?

In the early days of the COVID pandemic in the U.S., tracing was limited because testing for the virus was also limited. The two really go together. That meant the nation used the other tool at its disposal, the blunt instrument of stay-at-home orders. Now, with testing more available, and with many states in the fits and starts of reopening, the more targeted effort of contact tracing becomes important.

Used effectively, it can sharply slow outbreaks, as seen in countries that have employed comprehensive tracing programs, such as Japan, New Zealand and China.

So far, though, the U.S. has a more limited effort, and it varies by state.

An estimated 37,000 contact tracers are now employed by public health departments nationwide, triple the number just a few weeks ago, according to an NPR state survey and tracking effort. Still, those numbers are far below estimates of what many say is necessary. Indeed, Watson and other Johns Hopkins researchers say the U.S. needs to add a minimum of 100,000 contract tracers.

Can They Force Me Into Quarantine?

Although health officials do have the authority to isolate people who pose a danger to others, that power is almost never used.

“Mandatory quarantine hasn’t really been used since the days of smallpox in this country, although the president used it in the beginning of the pandemic for some people repatriating back to the county,” said Watson.

Public health officials avoid such aggressive tactics because they don’t want to discourage people from getting tested. As for hauling people away from their homes by force, that also doesn’t happen here, although it does in some authoritarian countries. Instead, a number of cities and regions have set up special hotels or other facilities where infected or exposed people who live in homes where they can’t isolate themselves from other family members can voluntarily spend their convalescence.

Is It Working?

It has certainly worked in other countries, said Howard Koh, professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and former assistant secretary for health in the Obama administration.

“Italy, Spain, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and New Zealand have all gotten to the other side of the curve,” said Koh. “When they have outbreaks, they are relatively small and they jump on them right away.”

One difference, he said, is those places have a national strategy.

“In our country, we have a 50-state strategy, a patchwork response including contact tracing, with some states having embraced it and some have barely started.”

Massachusetts and New York have reported success with tracing, said Watson.

But there are many areas of the country, especially the Sun Belt, where cases are spiking, complicating efforts to control the virus. With more interest in getting tested, turnaround time for results grows. And large numbers of new cases mean contact tracers have far more people to track down, making it challenging to do so in the short time frame needed to be effective.

“I’m discouraged that a lot of the states where we are seeing a big surge right now have not put a lot of effort into developing their contact tracing workforce,” Watson said, echoing Koh’s call for a national plan. “We need an initiative by the federal government focused on contract tracing.”

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/conspiracy-theories-aside-heres-what-contact-tracers-really-do/

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Conspiracy Theories Aside, Here’s What Contact Tracers Really Do

In the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, contact tracing is downright buzzy, and not always in a good way.

Contact tracing is the public health practice of informing people when they’ve been exposed to a contagious disease. As it has become more widely employed across the country, it has also become mired in modern political polarization and conspiracy theories.

Misinformation abounds, from tales that people who talk to contact tracers will be sent to nonexistent “FEMA camps” — a rumor so prevalent that health officials in Washington state had to put out a statement in May debunking it — to elaborate theories that the efforts are somehow part of a plot by global elites, such as the Clinton Foundation, Bill Gates or George Soros.

At the very least, such misinformation could hinder efforts to contain the virus, and at worst has sparked threats against tracers, say some observers, including the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a London-based organization that studies polarization.

The dynamic, ISD notes in a June report, “is being generated both by individual social media users and by key influencers in conspiratorial communities” and plays on fears that Big Brother is watching us.

According to that report, social media posts, mainly videos, have been associated with “widespread sharing of petitions and other efforts to galvanise political action against contact tracing.” The videos, steeped in disinformation and conspiracy think — whether alleging tracers’ ties to the deep state or casting them as part of a Democratic effort to interfere in the 2020 election — “are receiving more than 300,000 views each on YouTube and are being shared tens of thousands of times across public Facebook pages and groups.”

Of course, the real story behind tracing is nothing like these colorful conspiracy theories. It’s an age-old infection control strategy, and it’s a bit tedious, actually.

“We’ve been doing it in public health for decades,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Part old-fashioned shoe-leather detective work, part social work, the goal is to interrupt the spread of the illness by reaching out to people who test positive — and people they have been in close contact with — and provide needed support for them to isolate. It has to be done quickly, and it takes a lot of people. Recent case count surges in some parts of the country are making the task more difficult.

So let’s take a look at what it is and isn’t.

What’s the Process?

When a person tests positive for certain communicable diseases, health care providers must report their contact information to public health departments. Contact tracers then try to reach out quickly, generally by phone.

The tracer will ask for the patient’s address. Some social media sites have decried this as nefarious, but it’s not. The tracer does not want to provide private medical information — “Mr. Smith, I see you tested positive for COVID” — to the wrong person. Those contacted should also feel free to confirm it really is the public health department calling, experts note, as there have been reports of fraudulent calls.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

During the initial call, the tracer makes sure the patient is OK and understands the disease and what to expect. Ideally, the contract tracer builds a relationship with the patient. Some can link the patient with local resources or services, such as food delivery or needed medical supplies, that can make it easier to stay isolated until they have recovered from the virus.

What’s a Close Contact?

Contact tracers ask where the infected person traveled and with whom they came in close contact — generally defined as being within 6 feet for 15 minutes or more — from about two days before they started showing symptoms until they isolated themselves.

That does not include such things as simply passing people on the street or opening the door to pick up a package dropped off by a FedEx driver.

Providing the information is voluntary, but it is the only way the programs will work. Most patients happily comply, but a few are reluctant, said Plescia.

“That was a little surprising,” he said. “You would think if you might cause another person to become ill, you would have an interest in that person being notified. But some worry they are snitching on other people.”

Tracers do not disclose the name of the infected person. Contacts simply “receive a call saying ‘You have had a significant exposure,’” said Crystal Watson, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and co-author of a report on contact tracing.

To assist with tracing, some restaurants, stores, salons and other businesses are keeping daily logs of customers. Some voices on social media have raised concerns about those logs, saying they are intrusive and suggest that Big Brother is watching. Their purpose, though, is to make it easier for health officials to notify other employees and patrons in the event that someone tests positive.

Close contacts are urged to quarantine for 14 days, check their temperature regularly and avoid contact with other household members, if possible.

For each infected patient, tracers need to contact an average of 10 other people, said Watson — noting, however, that the number could be far higher. “If contact tracing is done in a place where there’s a big epidemic and no one is under social distancing restrictions, you’ll have to contact more,” she said.

Speed is of the essence in finding close contacts. Infected people start showing symptoms within two to seven days of exposure — although it can take up to 14 — and they may be contagious before symptoms appear.

Who Asks All of These Questions?

In the early days of the COVID pandemic in the U.S., tracing was limited because testing for the virus was also limited. The two really go together. That meant the nation used the other tool at its disposal, the blunt instrument of stay-at-home orders. Now, with testing more available, and with many states in the fits and starts of reopening, the more targeted effort of contact tracing becomes important.

Used effectively, it can sharply slow outbreaks, as seen in countries that have employed comprehensive tracing programs, such as Japan, New Zealand and China.

So far, though, the U.S. has a more limited effort, and it varies by state.

An estimated 37,000 contact tracers are now employed by public health departments nationwide, triple the number just a few weeks ago, according to an NPR state survey and tracking effort. Still, those numbers are far below estimates of what many say is necessary. Indeed, Watson and other Johns Hopkins researchers say the U.S. needs to add a minimum of 100,000 contract tracers.

Can They Force Me Into Quarantine?

Although health officials do have the authority to isolate people who pose a danger to others, that power is almost never used.

“Mandatory quarantine hasn’t really been used since the days of smallpox in this country, although the president used it in the beginning of the pandemic for some people repatriating back to the county,” said Watson.

Public health officials avoid such aggressive tactics because they don’t want to discourage people from getting tested. As for hauling people away from their homes by force, that also doesn’t happen here, although it does in some authoritarian countries. Instead, a number of cities and regions have set up special hotels or other facilities where infected or exposed people who live in homes where they can’t isolate themselves from other family members can voluntarily spend their convalescence.

Is It Working?

It has certainly worked in other countries, said Howard Koh, professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and former assistant secretary for health in the Obama administration.

“Italy, Spain, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and New Zealand have all gotten to the other side of the curve,” said Koh. “When they have outbreaks, they are relatively small and they jump on them right away.”

One difference, he said, is those places have a national strategy.

“In our country, we have a 50-state strategy, a patchwork response including contact tracing, with some states having embraced it and some have barely started.”

Massachusetts and New York have reported success with tracing, said Watson.

But there are many areas of the country, especially the Sun Belt, where cases are spiking, complicating efforts to control the virus. With more interest in getting tested, turnaround time for results grows. And large numbers of new cases mean contact tracers have far more people to track down, making it challenging to do so in the short time frame needed to be effective.

“I’m discouraged that a lot of the states where we are seeing a big surge right now have not put a lot of effort into developing their contact tracing workforce,” Watson said, echoing Koh’s call for a national plan. “We need an initiative by the federal government focused on contract tracing.”

Conspiracy Theories Aside, Here’s What Contact Tracers Really Do published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[courtneytincher]

The G7 Should Pressure China but Find a Solution with Russia

Another G7 summit impends, in Biarritz, France, with few achievements likely. Although the gathering might avoid last year’s dramatic photo of President Donald Trump staring down the other attendees, expectations are low. No effort will be made to draft a final statement, a first for the group, which began in 1975. Given the members’ divisions, the attempt would be “pointless,” observed French President Emmanuel Macron, who blamed “a very deep crisis of democracy.” The G7 no longer has the heft it once had. Its members still dominate the world’s economy, but not to the same degree. During the 1980s, G7 members accounted for about 70 percent of the world’s GDP. That number now is below half. Moreover, the members have only about a tenth of the world’s population. And turning the G8 into the G7 by expelling Russia meant losing a member that was more important than its economic role alone would suggest.Attendees this weekend also might have trouble making their decisions stick. The newly-installed British Prime Minister Boris Johnson might be out of a job in weeks. So could Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who trails in polls for elections in October. Meanwhile, Italy’s ruling coalition just collapsed and Germany’s long-serving Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is a lame duck. Finally, Macron endures even lower poll ratings than Trump, who faces an election next year. Only Japanese leader Shinzo Abe seems secure politically.However, the G7 meeting offers the most important leaders of the most important Western nations an opportunity for serious discussions of important issues, conducted privately though not secretly. Indeed, this grouping has the advantage of being more personal, about the leaders, than institutional, about the countries. Members can more easily focus the meeting on what they want, irrespective of the formal agenda.Even before the summit’s start, Trump roiled the proceedings as is his want by proposing that Moscow be invited next year to the meeting hosted by the United States. Trump apparently offered this without much diplomatic preparation and—rather like his off-the-cuff comment about buying Greenland before his aborted trip to Denmark—it sparked European opposition. However, Macron commented favorably on the idea, though adding that it would be a “strategic error” to do so before resolving the Russo-Ukraine conflict.In fact, adding Russia is a surprisingly good idea. President Vladimir Putin, suspended in 2014, has not transformed himself into a liberal Western democrat. However, keeping him outside the club isn’t going to cause him to become one either. And Moscow’s permanent estrangement only serves the interest of China, an even more authoritarian, powerful, and dangerous opponent of Western liberalism to which Russia has moved closer.Inviting Putin back into the club should be part of a process to achieve peace and stability in Eastern Europe and pull Moscow back from its embrace of China. Only compromise can prevent the divide from becoming permanent. This weekend, G7 participants should chat about options to simultaneously secure Ukraine and accommodate Russia.For instance, the allies could drop plans for North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion, limit military aid to Kyiv, and end economic sanctions. In return, Russia could abandon support for Donbas rebels in Ukraine, grant Kyiv full navigational access in contested waters, and stop using natural gas as a weapon. Both sides could eschew political interference in the other’s affairs—after all, America and Ukraine are not blame-free in this regard. Kyiv would be left to forge whatever economic ties it desired east and west. If the allies left Biarritz with a determination to reach such an agreement, its fulfillment could be celebrated with Russia attending next year’s newly-reinstated G8 enclave.Moreover, G7 members should use their forum to develop a common policy to press Xi and the People’s Republic of China to respect human rights and international norms. The back-drop of mass protests in Hong Kong makes the issue particularly pressing. Even so, it is important not to inflate the threat posed by China. The People’s Republic of China faces significant economic, social, and political challenges, and poses no direct military danger to America or Europe. The problem for Japan is greater, but still limited mostly to a handful of contested islands.However, Beijing’s widespread, sometimes brutal crackdown at home, increasingly threatening approach to both Hong Kong and Taiwan, and more aggressive stance toward territorial disputes challenge common Western interests and values. Members of the European Union and NATO, as well as the United States, have expressed concern over Beijing’s course. A united diplomatic stand by leading Western states would be more likely to temper the People’s Republic of China’s international behavior. This would especially be true if accompanied by a message of accommodation to Moscow which helped the latter see its interests better served by leaning West. Brexit is likely to be decided one way or another by next year’s meeting anyway. But, the G7 summit provides an opportunity for informal meetings on how the United Kingdom, assuming it leaves, with or without an exit agreement, relates to both America and Europe. The fabled Special Relationship may be near the end of its life, but Washington and London still have reason to cooperate closely. Nevertheless, the UK’s positions on many issues remain closer to those of Europe. Constructing a new, positive, enduring relationship with London requires that the Trump administration not squeeze the potentially fragile Johnson government too hard. Irrespective of the UK’s looming departure from the EU, Trump has made the U.S.-European relationship unnecessarily hostile. Although he is right to criticize the continent’s military dependence on America, the relationship remains important. It is in Washington’s interest to retain positive ties with Europe as well as the UK.The forum also offers an opportunity to bring together many of the combatants in President Trump’s multiple trade wars. That could allow him to set priorities. For instance, the administration continues to threaten to sanction European automobile-makers and Japanese products as part of ongoing trade talks. Yet the economic battle with China, which reflects so much more than pure commercial concerns, deserves the most attention. Furthermore, joint action by America, EU, and Japan—toward Huawei, for instance—would have a greater impact on the People’s Republic of China. Thus, summit attendees should discuss a common position on economic ties with Beijing. More broadly, these democratic and market-friendly nations should pursue a common trade agenda. Finally, a good place to start would be Trump’s idea of triple zero: no tariffs, non-tariff barriers, or subsidies. The G7 could encourage his rare pro-free trade moment. Finally, Trump should use the meeting to advance his America-first foreign policy—a particularly useful effort with an election approaching—but without trashing the allies. Instead of publicly berating the Europeans for their anemic military efforts, he should privately prepare them for upcoming U.S. force withdrawals. How they responded would be left up to them. While beginning to shed—rather than share—defense burdens, Trump should emphasize that the U.S. plans to maintain a good relationship with its international friends. The change in approach would be subtle but critical: Washington would simply decide its own policies rather than attempt to control what its allies do. If past is prologue, nothing much should be expected from Biarritz. However, it isn’t too late to use the time productively. Substantive talks would be more critical than sanitized communiques which even Macron admits that no one reads.Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.Image: Reuters

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

Another G7 summit impends, in Biarritz, France, with few achievements likely. Although the gathering might avoid last year’s dramatic photo of President Donald Trump staring down the other attendees, expectations are low. No effort will be made to draft a final statement, a first for the group, which began in 1975. Given the members’ divisions, the attempt would be “pointless,” observed French President Emmanuel Macron, who blamed “a very deep crisis of democracy.” The G7 no longer has the heft it once had. Its members still dominate the world’s economy, but not to the same degree. During the 1980s, G7 members accounted for about 70 percent of the world’s GDP. That number now is below half. Moreover, the members have only about a tenth of the world’s population. And turning the G8 into the G7 by expelling Russia meant losing a member that was more important than its economic role alone would suggest.Attendees this weekend also might have trouble making their decisions stick. The newly-installed British Prime Minister Boris Johnson might be out of a job in weeks. So could Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who trails in polls for elections in October. Meanwhile, Italy’s ruling coalition just collapsed and Germany’s long-serving Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is a lame duck. Finally, Macron endures even lower poll ratings than Trump, who faces an election next year. Only Japanese leader Shinzo Abe seems secure politically.However, the G7 meeting offers the most important leaders of the most important Western nations an opportunity for serious discussions of important issues, conducted privately though not secretly. Indeed, this grouping has the advantage of being more personal, about the leaders, than institutional, about the countries. Members can more easily focus the meeting on what they want, irrespective of the formal agenda.Even before the summit’s start, Trump roiled the proceedings as is his want by proposing that Moscow be invited next year to the meeting hosted by the United States. Trump apparently offered this without much diplomatic preparation and—rather like his off-the-cuff comment about buying Greenland before his aborted trip to Denmark—it sparked European opposition. However, Macron commented favorably on the idea, though adding that it would be a “strategic error” to do so before resolving the Russo-Ukraine conflict.In fact, adding Russia is a surprisingly good idea. President Vladimir Putin, suspended in 2014, has not transformed himself into a liberal Western democrat. However, keeping him outside the club isn’t going to cause him to become one either. And Moscow’s permanent estrangement only serves the interest of China, an even more authoritarian, powerful, and dangerous opponent of Western liberalism to which Russia has moved closer.Inviting Putin back into the club should be part of a process to achieve peace and stability in Eastern Europe and pull Moscow back from its embrace of China. Only compromise can prevent the divide from becoming permanent. This weekend, G7 participants should chat about options to simultaneously secure Ukraine and accommodate Russia.For instance, the allies could drop plans for North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion, limit military aid to Kyiv, and end economic sanctions. In return, Russia could abandon support for Donbas rebels in Ukraine, grant Kyiv full navigational access in contested waters, and stop using natural gas as a weapon. Both sides could eschew political interference in the other’s affairs—after all, America and Ukraine are not blame-free in this regard. Kyiv would be left to forge whatever economic ties it desired east and west. If the allies left Biarritz with a determination to reach such an agreement, its fulfillment could be celebrated with Russia attending next year’s newly-reinstated G8 enclave.Moreover, G7 members should use their forum to develop a common policy to press Xi and the People’s Republic of China to respect human rights and international norms. The back-drop of mass protests in Hong Kong makes the issue particularly pressing. Even so, it is important not to inflate the threat posed by China. The People’s Republic of China faces significant economic, social, and political challenges, and poses no direct military danger to America or Europe. The problem for Japan is greater, but still limited mostly to a handful of contested islands.However, Beijing’s widespread, sometimes brutal crackdown at home, increasingly threatening approach to both Hong Kong and Taiwan, and more aggressive stance toward territorial disputes challenge common Western interests and values. Members of the European Union and NATO, as well as the United States, have expressed concern over Beijing’s course. A united diplomatic stand by leading Western states would be more likely to temper the People’s Republic of China’s international behavior. This would especially be true if accompanied by a message of accommodation to Moscow which helped the latter see its interests better served by leaning West. Brexit is likely to be decided one way or another by next year’s meeting anyway. But, the G7 summit provides an opportunity for informal meetings on how the United Kingdom, assuming it leaves, with or without an exit agreement, relates to both America and Europe. The fabled Special Relationship may be near the end of its life, but Washington and London still have reason to cooperate closely. Nevertheless, the UK’s positions on many issues remain closer to those of Europe. Constructing a new, positive, enduring relationship with London requires that the Trump administration not squeeze the potentially fragile Johnson government too hard. Irrespective of the UK’s looming departure from the EU, Trump has made the U.S.-European relationship unnecessarily hostile. Although he is right to criticize the continent’s military dependence on America, the relationship remains important. It is in Washington’s interest to retain positive ties with Europe as well as the UK.The forum also offers an opportunity to bring together many of the combatants in President Trump’s multiple trade wars. That could allow him to set priorities. For instance, the administration continues to threaten to sanction European automobile-makers and Japanese products as part of ongoing trade talks. Yet the economic battle with China, which reflects so much more than pure commercial concerns, deserves the most attention. Furthermore, joint action by America, EU, and Japan—toward Huawei, for instance—would have a greater impact on the People’s Republic of China. Thus, summit attendees should discuss a common position on economic ties with Beijing. More broadly, these democratic and market-friendly nations should pursue a common trade agenda. Finally, a good place to start would be Trump’s idea of triple zero: no tariffs, non-tariff barriers, or subsidies. The G7 could encourage his rare pro-free trade moment. Finally, Trump should use the meeting to advance his America-first foreign policy—a particularly useful effort with an election approaching—but without trashing the allies. Instead of publicly berating the Europeans for their anemic military efforts, he should privately prepare them for upcoming U.S. force withdrawals. How they responded would be left up to them. While beginning to shed—rather than share—defense burdens, Trump should emphasize that the U.S. plans to maintain a good relationship with its international friends. The change in approach would be subtle but critical: Washington would simply decide its own policies rather than attempt to control what its allies do. If past is prologue, nothing much should be expected from Biarritz. However, it isn’t too late to use the time productively. Substantive talks would be more critical than sanitized communiques which even Macron admits that no one reads.Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.Image: Reuters

August 23, 2019 at 01:09PM via IFTTT

[whittlebaggett8]

Taiwan’s Democracy Is Utterly Confounded by Populist Mayor Han Kuo-yu

Han Kuo-yu is refusing to disappear. The polarizing mayor of Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s greatest southern city, sauntered north to Taipei final weekend to greet reportedly hundreds of hundreds of rabid supporters rallying in the weighty rain. Hardly ever thoughts that Han has not formally introduced he will run for president in Taiwan’s January 2020 presidential elections. Despise him or like him, Han has Taiwan glued to his just about every move.

Han, who was elected to Kaohsiung’s highest workplace just more than six months in the past, shares several properties of nontraditional “populist” politicians created to break all the presumed guidelines of democracy. Han appears to be bolstered by all publicity, irrespective of whether great or poor. Each social media point out, of which there are lots of, ingrains him even further into the Taiwanese consciousness. Taiwan’s ruling authorities fined one particular Tv set station in March for failing to actuality-check out its protection of Han, but due to the fact the puppy times of his marketing campaign, TVs in Taiwan have showcased nearly nonstop Han Kuo-yu – whether fantasy or truth, fawning or crucial, there has been wall-to-wall coverage of the opposition Kuomintang’s (KMT’s) new superstar.

Han has performed precious minor as mayor of Kaohsiung. His town council appearances – his opportunity to chat plan with probing opposition legislators – have been disastrous. His record of particular scandals has continued to develop, the hottest involving allegations of an extramarital affair with a woman who gave start to a kid. (Han has sued the publication which initial shared the rumors.) Han’s critics are eagerly awaiting the incident that will eventually sink him. The upcoming important hiccup, they say, is the one particular that’ll do him in the voters can only cope with so much Han Kuo-yu. His momentum, according to Taiwanese media critical of Han, was fading over the final couple of weeks. Saturday’s rally has, for now, quashed that thought.

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Taiwan observers have not nonetheless grasped how to cope with the “Han wave” – the term for the mayor’s viral, seemingly inexplicable recognition. Then yet again, from the United States to Brazil, from Italy to the Philippines, nobody has built complete feeling of the world’s new breed of populists and their uncanny capacity to seize the eyes and ears of the community.

Like his contemporaries, Han convinces his supporters he has a one of a kind treatment to all that presumably ails them. Han offers himself, with little proof, as a walking stimulus for Taiwan’s stagnant overall economy. He also strikes a palpable dread into his critics – his openness to forging nearer ties with Beijing is the existential anathema to the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP’s) agenda for retaining a absolutely free, democratic Taiwan. In stark contrast to the staunchly pragmatic President Tsai Ing-wen, who is not recognised for currently being an inspiring general public speaker, Han regularly conjures like, concern, or both of those at after.

Han publicly denounces adverse messaging in favor of preaching acceptance and prosperity a core plank of his Kaohsiung financial stimulus system is acquiring a “love economy” around the city’s aptly named Love River. But his rally on Saturday proved an acceptant place for anti-gay relationship campaigners, who drew cheers from a great deal of the assembled crowd. (Han himself has cautiously prevented talking on Taiwan’s current move to legalize exact same-sex marriage, which was opposed by substantially of the KMT.) Several of his supporters have embraced the island’s background of racism toward Southeast Asians – of whom there are now over 700,000 in Taiwan, generally migrant staff who deal with frequent discrimination. Han fueled that fire in March by utilizing a derogatory time period for Filipino caretakers, to which he quickly issued a clarification.

But nothing has toppled Han, who nevertheless outpaces all other opportunity candidates in most public belief polls. Han has remained coy about his presidential ambitions, stating that when he is hesitant to abandon Kaohsiung, he will operate if the KMT deems it necessary for the excellent of Taiwan by drafting him as its applicant. This is a web page out of the playbook of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who said he would only operate for president to “save the republic” and experienced a consultant file for candidacy on his behalf as he publicly vacillated on no matter whether to run.

This new course of candidates, masters of harnessing shock benefit and commandeering awareness, have confounded citizens and journalists tasked with producing sense of them. In Taiwan, Han Kuo-yu has finished the exact same. Valuable several, including these who frequently speak to Han supporters, claim to really understand the “Han wave.”

Some of Han’s critics argue that it’s best to allow Han hold talking and wait for him to shoot himself in the foot. This argument relies on the premise that Han’s reputation will be sunk by a rational counterstrike to his escalating empire of captured emotion. Taiwanese voters do have a potent record of pragmatism. They have voted from deeply held sentiments – final November, voters convincingly struck down a proposal to contend in the Olympics as “Taiwan” alternatively than “Chinese Taipei,” though most Taiwanese do not take into consideration them selves Chinese – and the country has convicted two of its previous presidents for crimes fully commited in office. Having said that, there is no evidence that Han’s support is seriously threatened by a cascade of altered minds. As of now, this argument is generally rooted in hope.

Other individuals, in an echo of the chatter encompassing the Mueller Report in the United States, intention to paint Han as a vassal of Beijing and its shadowy affect campaigns. There is some evidence that Chinese actors aided Han’s on the net reputation before and throughout his election as mayor, but there is absolutely nothing suggesting that Han has individually colluded with China to earn elections, nor that Chinese astroturfing is largely accountable for Han’s surge in popularity. Some Han-friendly Taiwanese media retailers are themselves ideologically near to China, but the entirety of Taiwan’s absolutely free press, no matter of their politics, has eagerly fed the Han Kuo-yu frenzy.

There’s also a query of whether or not Taiwan’s political coverage, mainly concentrated in Taipei, understands why Han’s supporters back him – contacting to head the travel in the United States to venture into Appalachia and flyover states to understand Trump voters. Taiwan’s domestic media is remarkably polarized, simply divisible into green (DPP-leaning) and blue (KMT-leaning). Taipei-based foreign coverage of the place can be inclined to overstating the recognition of the U.S.-pleasant DPP and President Tsai, who has suffered from reduced acceptance ratings for the vast majority of her time in business. (The KMT triumph in November’s regional elections, greatly described as surprising, was not specifically astonishing to most Taiwanese voters.) Lots of words and phrases have been penned describing the dangers to democracy, and to Taiwan-U.S. ties, of Han’s opportunity candidacy considerably less have been committed to checking out the precise roots of his help and asking the not comfortable query of why so many Taiwanese cheer when Han speaks of financial rapprochement with Beijing.

For all we know, a lot more journeys to KMT-leaning rural provinces such as Changhua, Miaoli, and Hualien, wherever Han strategies to hold a rally this weekend, could supply precious context. Voters exterior Taipei have long felt scorned by a presumed Taipei-centric approach taken by both of those get-togethers Han himself won in the traditionally DPP-leaning Kaohsiung in substantial element mainly because its longtime DPP mayor, Chen Chu, left just before the conclude of her phrase to provide as an adviser to Tsai. Han’s recent proposal to shift the capital of Taiwan from Taipei allows voters somewhere else on the island to think about them selves finally involved in the island’s middle of energy. It’s pretty much unquestionably an empty coverage assure, but it is an emotional masterstroke.

And Han’s rise does not seem to be about coverage. Right after all, Han does not deal a lot in coverage to this date, he has made available only sweeping statements describing his personal cross-strait stance, along with boilerplate proclamations of how he hopes to shower Taiwan with prosperity and pleasure. Han has no fantastic populist parallel – he pointedly eschews Trumpian vitriolic name-contacting, for occasion, and in a state whose important functions do not work on the remaining-proper spectrum, he’s hardly a proper-wing scion – but he is Taiwan’s very own populist, blazing a path by Taiwan’s foundation of democratic norms as a puzzled nonetheless enraptured populace gazes at the aftermath.

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There’s currently extensive news reporting on the former Defense Intelligence Agency officer Ron Hansen, who spied on the United States for the Chinese intelligence service. He was caught by American authorities and made a plea arrangement, likely facing 15 years in prison when sentenced this coming September. In return, Hansen will tell U.S. intelligence everything he did and everything the Chinese asked of him. This sort of plea deal in cases of this kind are common. It’s of real value to find out what the enemy, the Chinese in this case, learned from their spy and the techniques they used to communicate with him, how they passed him money, what information and people they targeted, and so on. This teaches us what to look for in the cases of other Americans who might be spying for the Chinese. Also, knowing what the Chinese learned lets us accurately assess the damage done and what Chinese priorities are. Their priorities are more interesting then one might think. The Chinese would ask a trusted spy of this nature exactly what they wanted to know, and from this we can thereby learn where the gaps existed in their information and, perhaps more importantly, where no gaps existed. No gaps means they know the information from some other source. You can see where that takes us, and why it would be useful. To someone with my background, one of the aspects of this case that really floats to the top is the motives of Hansen to spy for the Chinese to begin with. In his case it appears that money was high on his list, and he was apparently well paid, which is not common for the Chinese. This is certainly a measure of the harm he did to the United States. For any students of such things, the intelligence agencies of the rest of the world always consider greed to be the weakness of Americans. Hansen also spent time in Taiwan as a young man, where he learned to appreciate the country and culture. Finally, just uncovered by Bill Gertz at The Washington Free Beacon, buried in the transcripts of phone conversations, we learn that Hansen hated President Donald Trump passionately and viewed working against Trump as his duty. This is not the first time an individual believed that resisting Trump justified leaking classified information. In 2018, Reality Winner was sentenced to five years and three months in federal prison for leaking classified information to the press that she thought would damage Trump. These are just two examples of the poisonous atmosphere the resistance movement within the liberal Democratic Party has created. Most of the leadership at Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency (NSA) are overwhelmingly liberal and take it unto themselves to betray their oath of office to support the Constitution of the United States of America for political motives. In the bowels of bureaucracy, it is “mainstream” to talk openly about how best to resist the lawfully elected president of the United States, and it shows up everywhere. There was a time when most in government were professionals first, but those days are gone, and now it’s overwhelmingly personal politics first. We don’t have to look very far back to remember Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) had a Chinese spy on her staff for about 20 years, who was her office director and her driver when she was in San Francisco. She claimed that since the Chinese spy was in California and did not have direct access to classified information kept only in Washington D.C., it was all a big nothing burger. What is almost beyond belief is that this was accepted by everyone, including Congress and the cast of characters at the DOJ, FBI, CIA, and NSA who all know better. Being an expert on exactly this sort of case, please let me authoritatively point out this was a fantastic opportunity for the Chinese and a stunning success from their perspective. Any CIA officer who successfully recruited a similar person to spy on the Chinese leadership for 20 years would be a rock star. This was a truly big deal and very damaging to U.S. interests. Anyone who says differently is ignorant or a liar, and yet absolutely nothing has been done. Wouldn’t it be worth knowing if over a 20-year period, the chief of staff who was a spy for the Chinese recommended or hired people to work on Sen. Feinstein’s Washington D.C. staff? Are they still there now or did they move to work in another senator’s office? One other point worth noting, Sen. Feinstein’s estimated net worth is $94 million. Most of that comes from her husband Richard Blum’s private equity firm, who does much of his business with none other than the Chinese. Did any of the tens of millions of dollars made by the Feinstein family have anything to do with the Chinese spy or Chinese intelligence? Can you imagine if Donald Trump’s wife made tens of millions of dollars doing business with Russia and it was discovered that Trump’s chief of staff was a Russian spy on his staff for 20 years? China is probably the greatest long-term strategic threat the United States faces, and the socialist liberal movement within the Democratic Party has given birth to the resist movement to fight behind the scenes against the duly elected president of the United States. This negative force in American politics is so poisonous that it justifies in the mind of liberals almost any action, no matter how wrong. It is clear, the leadership, particularly at the FBI and DOJ, are staunch Democratic supporters and appear to buy into the resist movement to the point they are willing to overlook glaring, significant damage to U.S. national security only because looking into the matter would hurt a senior Democratic senator. It seems they will also invent an investigation against political opponents, and the fact this plays into the hands of our enemies like the Chinese is not even a consideration for them.