Location: On the edge of tomorrow looking back at yesterday. Gender:
Posted:
Oct 22, 2021 - 9:25am
From Wired Science Spoken Addition Podcast A must listen too story.
China is at it again with a global Swine Fever infection that have spread just outside our borders in Haiti. More than half of their pigs have been destroyed. It can be transmitted in feed, on clothing, trucks and global travel. This started in Africa 100 years ago, but has arose again in China this year, and this time it’s almost out of control. They hide all their ills form the rest of the world until it’s too late.
No vaccine or cure. No risk to humans, for now. Can travel in ham, like sandwiches, even if it is cooked or cured.
If found in the US it would shut down the meat production, devastating the economy.
As a U.S. diplomat managing our relations with China, I often was asked, “What is our leverage over China?” Beijing was always either doing something we didn’t like — buying oil from Iran, building a port in Cambodia, locking up dissidents — or not doing something that we thought it should, like enforcing sanctions on North Korea or opening its market to U.S. agricultural products. We were constantly considering what sticks or carrots we might deploy to change China’s behavior. There were no easy answers; frustrations over the insufficiency of our leverage and our inability to “change China” are longstanding. But China’s growing power exacerbates the problem. And in this era of great power competition, the need to accrue and use leverage to influence Chinese actions has never been greater. President Biden himself has acknowledged that leverage when it comes to China is lacking. Soon he will meet with China’s president, Xi Jinping. So where will the requisite U.S. leverage come from?
It is pretty painful to watch the stratospheric levels of western hubris when it comes to dealing with China.
"Let's stand on a platform of human rights and fairness, oh yeah, and let's get England and its staunchest colonies to stand beside us as a bastion of all that is good in the world."
Cripes. Cringeworthy.
That said, I can't give China a free pass on its path of asserting its national interest at the expense of smaller nations' sovereign rights either. The CCP seemingly can't and won't get the idea of international diversity as being a good thing. Something they have in common with a lot of other empire builders. Empire builders are a bad bunch, the lot of em.
As a U.S. diplomat managing our relations with China, I often was asked, âWhat is our leverage over China?â
Beijing was always either doing something we didnât like â buying oil from Iran, building a port in Cambodia, locking up dissidents â or not doing something that we thought it should, like enforcing sanctions on North Korea or opening its market to U.S. agricultural products.
We were constantly considering what sticks or carrots we might deploy to change Chinaâs behavior. There were no easy answers; frustrations over the insufficiency of our leverage and our inability to âchange Chinaâ are longstanding. But Chinaâs growing power exacerbates the problem. And in this era of great power competition, the need to accrue and use leverage to influence Chinese actions has never been greater.
President Biden himself has acknowledged that leverage when it comes to China is lacking. Soon he will meet with Chinaâs president, Xi Jinping. So where will the requisite U.S. leverage come from?
Dutch restrictions on exporting such machines to China, which have been enforced since 2019, havenât had much financial impact on ASML since it has a backlog of orders from other countries. But about 15 percent of the companyâs sales come from selling older systems in China.
In a final report to Congress and Mr. Biden in March, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence proposed extending export controls to some other advanced ASML machines as well. The group, funded by Congress, seeks to limit artificial intelligence advances with military applications.
Mr. Hunt and other policy experts argued that since China was already using those machines, blocking additional sales would hurt ASML without much strategic benefit. So does the company.
âI hope common sense will prevail,â Mr. van den Brink said.
Yeah that truth and reconciliation thing is really a messy business. It's like you have to vet all the regret and then render judgment based on some personal criteria, but where does it end?
Nothing personal. Article 2, paragraph 4:
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
No, of course not,. No offense meant or taken.
Standards are written and conditions set. Then there's the reach part. Where are we going? What have we learned? Where are we going based on what we've learned? Ohhhh. Hey that's not working very well. Paper agreements are one thing. Individual actions another. Is that helped or hindered by the internet? Is the internet helped or hindered by individuals? You get where I'm going with it. There are artificial answers. We aren't going to like them. The antithesis of humanity is vengeance metered by humans...
Yeah that truth and reconciliation thing is really a messy business. It's like you have to vet all the regret and then render judgment based on some personal criteria, but where does it end?
Nothing personal.
Article 2, paragraph 4:
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
Hurrah for the Tribe of Innocent Moralizers! Let us instead celebrate the integrity of a man (partly) responsible for the deaths of who knows how many Muslims (Iraq, Syria, etc.) and all with zero accountability.
Yeah that truth and reconciliation thing is really a messy business. It's like you have to vet all the regret and then render judgment based on some personal criteria, but where does it end? Is the belly full of substance or bloated from emptiness? Rhetorical innocence is a death spiral. We live as one or die as a species. One can see that it's happening. We like stuff. We like power. We like the stuff of power. It belongs to us, and we're keeping it real on the internet. We're going to Mars! We're taming the stars! Well actually, no. We're not. We're having our priorities shoved right down into our bloated sense of importance...
Let us instead take a moment to celebrate the integrity of a man (partly) responsible for the deaths of who knows how many Muslims (Iraq, Syria, etc.) and all with zero accountability.
Douthat: Not enough propaganda/demonization of China in Hollywood movies!
Americans have never exactly excelled at understanding other societies, and a few Chinese bad guys in James Bond movies obviously won’t shed the light we need. But Hollywood’s supine attitude toward Chinese power is a useful window into a larger problem: We need to see our great 21st-century rival clearly, and too often we see only through a glass darkly, if at all.
the chinese communist party is legitimately doing enough horrible stuff extinction level force initiated by the ccp in order to reach the goal of ethnic han supremacy we really don't have to sensationalize anything just the facts should do it
Uyghur genocide
The Uyghur genocide is the characterization of the series of human rights abuses committed by the government of China against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang as genocide. Since 2014, the Chinese government under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the administration of CCP general secretaryXi Jinping has pursued policies that incarcerated more than an estimated one million Muslims (the majority of them Uyghurs) in internment camps without any legal process. This was the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II. Thousands of mosques were destroyed or damaged, and hundreds of thousands of children were forcibly separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools.
Government policies have included the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in state-sponsored internment camps, forced labor, suppression of Uyghur religious practices, political indoctrination, severe ill-treatment, forced sterilization, forced contraception, and forced abortion. Chinese government statistics reported that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar fell by more than 60%. In the same period, the birth rate of the whole country decreased by 9.69%, from 12.07 to 10.9 per 1,000 people. Chinese authorities acknowledged that birth rates dropped by almost a third in 2018 in Xinjiang, but denied reports of forced sterilization and genocide. Birth rates in Xinjiang fell a further 24% in 2019 (compared to a nationwide decrease of 4.2%).
Douthat: Not enough propaganda/demonization of China in Hollywood movies!
Americans have never exactly excelled at understanding other societies, and a few Chinese bad guys in James Bond movies obviously wonât shed the light we need. But Hollywoodâs supine attitude toward Chinese power is a useful window into a larger problem: We need to see our great 21st-century rival clearly, and too often we see only through a glass darkly, if at all.
"It is by coffee alone that I set my life in motion. It is by the juice of caffeine that the thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains, the stains become a warning."
"It is by coffee alone that I set my life in motion. It is by the juice of caffeine that the thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains, the stains become a warning."
China is laughing its azz off over the $4.5T the Dems want to spend on communist style goodies for all, and takedown of capitalist pigs running the country.
Hey Nancyâs gona get a loan from from China.
China fine print, we own your Azz Biotches!
God, Iâve been watching this country go down the path to ruin all in the name of GREED.
Really, really sad state of affairs. Weâre footing the bill for Chinaâs buildup of their country and military which, in a not too long future, we will be at war with. WW III.
China is laughing its azz off over the $4.5T the Dems want to spend on communist style goodies for all, and takedown of capitalist pigs running the country.
Hey Nancy’s gona get a loan from from China.
China fine print, we own your Azz Biotches!
God, I’ve been watching this country go down the path to ruin all in the name of GREED.
Really, really sad state of affairs. We’re footing the bill for China’s buildup of their country and military which, in a not too long future, we will be at war with. WW III.
Gene, I don't mean to invalidate your feelings or anger here, but your tag reads "On the edge of tomorrow looking back at yesterday". Don't look back, Gene. Have steely courage in the face of despair. That's something you can do calmly and deliberately. Keep those you love in your heart and leave room for the occasional straggler...
Location: On the edge of tomorrow looking back at yesterday. Gender:
Posted:
Aug 11, 2021 - 4:22pm
China is laughing its azz off over the $4.5T the Dems want to spend on communist style goodies for all, and takedown of capitalist pigs running the country.
Hey Nancy’s gona get a loan from from China.
China fine print, we own your Azz Biotches!
God, I’ve been watching this country go down the path to ruin all in the name of GREED.
Really, really sad state of affairs. We’re footing the bill for China’s buildup of their country and military which, in a not too long future, we will be at war with. WW III.
Today, the challenge offered by China to the United States and indeed the capitalist world economy is a model that departs sharply from the private laissez-faire model of capitalism that has prevailed in global capitalism to date. In the latter model, the government is called in (à la Keynes) only when crises hit and threaten private capitalism. And then the government’s economic interventions are constricted in scope and reach and are temporary in time. Minimal government regulation and minimal direct production of goods and services by government are the key rules.
In contrast, in China, the Communist Party and the state intervene much more in economic affairs by regulating private businesses (foreign and domestic) more and also by having the state own and operate businesses. What results for the party and the state is an overarching control of economic development. That control, in its extent and duration, far exceeds the governments’ role in western Europe, North America, and Japan. Having the party and state as collaborative entities pushing determined policies enables the regular mobilization of most private and public resources to achieve agreed goals. Chief among the goals has been economic development to escape the endemic poverty of southern Asia.
A May 22 New York Times report on the account offered only general details of the role the US Joint Chiefs of Staff played in the run-up to the 1958 Taiwan crisis. However, it is now clear from the original highly classified documents as well as other evidence now available that from the beginning, the Joint Chiefs aimed first and foremost to exploit the tensions to carry out nuclear strikes against Chinese nuclear military targets deep in highly-populated areas.
Chiang Kai-shekâs nationalist Kuomintang regime and the Joint Chiefs were allies in wanting to embroil the United States in a war with China. (...)
According to the account authored by Halperin, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force Gen. Nathan Twining, told State Department officials in an August meeting that the third phase would require nuclear strikes on Chinese bases as far north as Shanghai.
The Joint Chiefs played down the threat to civilian casualties from such tactical atomic weapons, emphasizing that an airburst of tactical atomic explosions would generate little radioactive fallout. But the account indicates that they provided no concrete information on expected civilian casualties.
Given the fact that both the Chinese gun emplacements across the Taiwan Strait and a key airbase serving the Chinese military forces in any conflict over the offshore islands would have been located close to significant population centers, such atomic explosions would have certainly caused civilian casualties on a massive scale. (...)
When Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warned that Japan would object strongly to using nuclear weapons against the Chinese mainland, and forbid the launching of nuclear weapons from their territory, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke suggested that the opposition to nuclear weapons in Japan was âinspired by the Communists,â and that foreign leaders would soon recognize that the use of nuclear weapons by the US âwas in their interestsâ.
Burke closed his argument by claiming that if the US did not maintain the threat of tactical nuclear weapons in conflicts, it would âlose the entire world within three years.â That obviously absurd argument suggests that the intense desire among the Joint Chiefs to use nuclear weapons against China was less motivated by any threat from Communist Chinese than by their own institutional interests. (...)
