toucana

A BBC report today says that almost 90% of the population of Henan 河南; - China’s third most populous province - have now contracted COVID. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-64208127 This equates to almost 88.5 million people. Ths figure was disclosed by a provincial official called Kan Quancheng at a press conference, and it stands in stark contrast to official Covid figures issued by the central government which say that just 120,000 people in a country of 1.4 billion have been infected since China changed its ‘Zero Covid ‘ policies in December. The same report mentions that Chinese officials have declined to include Pfizer’s antiviral Covid medicine Paxlovid in its basic medical insurance schemes as a result of high prices quoted by the US firm. The drug temporarily covered by Chinese healthcare insurance schemes until 31 March has been in high demand since China’s Covid cases surged last month. China abruptly abandoned its ‘Zero Covid’ lockdown policy in mid-December because it had become politically untenable, and increasingly unenforceable as well. There was an interesting story by CNN last month about an emigre blogger using the the handle Li Lao Shi (Teacher Li) - who became an unofficial clearing house for information about the remarkable wave of protests that broke out across China in mid-November. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/10/china/china-twitter-teacher-li-profile-intl-hnk/index.html The blogger says that even he was stunned to receive videos of mass protests on Urumqi Road - one of the major streets in Shanghai - with protestors calling for the overthrow of Xi Jin Ping and openly defying a mass police presence in doing so. Similar reports were flooding in from many other parts off China, including the capital Beijing, the southern metropolis of Guangchou, and that of Chengdu in the west. The Chinese authorities have always been highly sensitive to the possibility of a complete collapse of central government in their country, It has happened many times in their history, most recently in the warlord period of the 1920s and 1930s. China’s constituent provinces are so large that many of them could easily form independent countries - Manchuria alone is the size of France and Germany put together, and Sichuan the second largest inland province in China would become the 8th largest country in the world if it declared independence. The most recent change of policy by China on its Covid policies is basically driven by Realpolitik and pragamatism. They had no alternative. There were real fears that the Chinese Communst party would lose social control of entire provinces if they did not change course.

In case you missed it - a photo of Santos flashing White Power gang signs on the floor of Congress - published by Reuters and taken during the chaotic 15 ballots to elect a US Speaker - Also answers to 'Mr Ripley', and currently wanted in connection with cheque-book fraud charges in Brazil which he confessed to back in 2008 before skipping the country.

Kevin McCarthy’s loss in the ballot to become Speaker of the House marks the first time such a thing has happened in US Congressional history since 1923, when it took 9 ballots to elect Fredrick Gillet (R-Mass) as Speaker of the House. After losing a sixth straight ballot earlier today, Kevin McCarthy reportedly said that he had no problem in breaking the record for the number of ballot attempts on the Speakership. It is not clear however that he understands quite how high that bar might be. In 1855 it took 133 ballots over the course of two months for the 34th Congress to elect Nathaniel Banks as their new presiding officer and Speaker of the House - Anyone care to start a sweepstake on how long this could run ?

Ritchie Torres, a Democratic Congressional representative for New York's 15th District has tweeted his intention of introducing a new bill called the SANTOS Act - (Stop Another Non-Truthful Office Seeker) - which would require candidates to disclose their educational, employment, and military history under oath. 'Mr Ripley' could yet wind up being immortalised by an Act of Congress

‘Mr Ripley’ is now reported by the NYT to be under federal investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, and also by the Nassau Coumty N.Y. district attorney’s office of Anne Donnelly. Both are looking into the “numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-elect Santos’ during his successful 2022 campaign to represent parts of of Long Island and Queens”. NBC News reports that George Santos lent his own election campaign $700,000 in 2021, even though he had signed a declaration on a campaign finance form that he was making just $55,000 per year in 2020 - which meant he would have had to save 13 years of income in its entirety to make such a donation. Under FEC regulations, candidates are required to itemise and declare campaign donations above $5000, so in the absence of records that could account for this $700,000 loan, investigators will be taking a long hard look at his state and federal tax returns to determine whether they are looking at tax fraud, campaign finance fraud - or both.

There is a dictum “Follow the money”. Where did this guy get the money to launch a second attempt at a Congressional campaign? Who is covertly paying him? What interests does he really represent ? Some of those answers are alluded to in a photo of a document shown at the end of that video clip I linked. It shows details of filings in Florida for an LLC called Devolder, a holding company which magically transformed George Santos from a penniless deadbeat who had been twice evicted for non-payment of rent in 2017, into a millionaire by 2020. One of the principal investors in this LLC appears to be an associate of a Russian oligarch closely allied to Vladimir Putin. And by a curious coincidence George Santos is an outspoken critic of US support for Ukraine, and is a sympathetic apologist for Putin . “The best poliiticians that money can buy” - as they say.

An article in The Atlantic by former Congressman Steve Israel tells an interesting tale of how a complete con-man has become the new Republican Congressman-elect in New York’s 3rd district - one which Steve Israel himself represented for 16 years. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/george-santos-fraud-long-island/672587/ George Santos is a character who seems to have stepped straight out of the pages of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel - or its excellent film adaptation starring Matt Damon - ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’(1999). Practically every statement made by this Congressman-elect during his recent election campaign has turned out to be a complete falsehood. The resumé details of his high school and university education are completely false in every respect, ditto for his claimed employement history with Goldman Sachs amongst others. George Santos has claimed to be Jewish, though he is actually Roman Catholic - he subsequently tried to finesse this by claiming he only said he was ‘Jew-ish, not Jewish’ - Santos says that his parents were refugees from the holocaust , but research shows they have always lived in Brazil. He claims that his mother was in the South Tower of the WTC on 9/11 - she was not. He also claims to be openly gay, though he is in fact married. You can find a full run-down and exposé of all his lies in an entertaining and excoriating interview with Tulsi Gabbard on Fox News ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWaj7-uwLzg

The J6 committee also claimed in its summary report on Monday that a Trump-backed attorney urged a key witness to mislead the committee when giving evidence to them. CNN has since claimed that Stefan Passantino - the top ethics attorney in the Trump White House - was the lawyer who allegedly advised his then client Cassidy Hutchinson to tell the committee she did not remember key details. Before giving testimony Cassidy Hutchinson dropped Passantino and got a new lawyer. https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/jan-6-committee-final-report/index.html Passantino and his law firm Elections LLC were being funded by a PAC (political action committee) called ‘Trump Save America’. By Tuesday, Passantino’s biography had been removed from the website of a mid-western law firm where was a partner, and he is now said to be on ‘a leave of absence’. Given that lawyers, especially jurists, are supposed to avoid ethical conflicts of interest like this, it’s unlikely to be the end of this particular matter.

Yours for only $99 ! The exclusive NFT - (Non-Fungible Trump)

This is a recent video posted by a computer repair YT channel I follow. What intrigued me was the nature of the problem. Basically a computer gamer tried to improve the performance of an Asus laptop by applying liquid metal to the motherboard - instead of the thermal paste normally used on heatsinks. And it left me wondering - Did they sleep through the class about metal being an excellent conductor of electricty - or what ? Kudos to the repair guy for getting this one running again ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-mClhyaJng

Extending easy loans to people with bad credit records has been likened to handing your credit card to a heroin addict - it’s unlikely to end well. The most compelling example in recent history is the Subprime mortgage crisis which very nearly wrecked the world banking system in 2008. It began in the USA when the Bush administration dismantled statutory financial controls on the housing market. Lenders embarked on a highly predatory campaign of selling ARM (adjustable rate mortgages) to low income ‘Subprime’ customers - quite often without any form of background check, and using automated ‘No questions asked’ underwriting systems. The lenders offset their financial liabilities by setting up parallel companies with separate books, and rolled the debts up into financial products called CLO (collateralised loan obligations) sold as bond issues with superficially highly attractive returns of up to 26% p.a. which were subject to only minimal appraisal by credit rating agencies - who were paid by the vendors to provide AAA+ ratings. The gigantic flaw in this scheme was that it depended entirely on massive sums of money coming from the Subprime borrowers at the bottom of the heap, who were now being leveraged by the rapidly rising interest rates on their ‘adjustable rate mortgages’ (which only ever went up - not down). Many of these mortgage holders went into default. Without this income, the CLO bond issues began to fail catastrophically, and their failure in turn started to pull down the big monoline insurers who normally underwrite bond issues of this type. Within a very short time, major banks and institutions went into a global panic, and they stopped lending money to each other, because none of them knew how badly each other was compromised by these bad debts. Several of them such as Lehman Bothers and Bear Stearns went bankrupt and collapsed altogether in 2008. And that is the problem - Where does the bad debt go ? It is completely reckless to issue cheap loans to deadbeats, and just assume that someone else will pay them off when they default.

There are several recent articles about Chinese dissidents in the southern provinces successfully using Cantonese slang idioms to confuse and defeat Chinese state censorship on Weibo. https://qz.com/china-censors-stumped-by-cantonese-1849496778 Cantonese which is spoken by up to a 100 million people in the south of China is usually incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers in spoken form - apart from anything else Cantonese has a 9 tone pitch phoneme system - as opposed to the 4 tones normally found in Mandarin. It is possible to write Cantonese in standard Chinese script forms that Mandarin speakers can read relatively easily, but it only works if the Cantonese speaker makes a conscious effort to use standard simplified script forms, and avoids the use of obscure idioms and dialect vocabulary and grammar. The dissidents protesting against prolonged lockdowns and other forms of repression have taken to using complex and archaic scripts form for many words - quite a few of which haven’t been in common use in Mandarin since the Ming dynasty in the 17th century. The famous 18th century Kangxi dictionary (康熙字典) for example lists over 47,000 script forms, as opposed to the 8,000 or so characters that a a literate Mandarin speaker would normally be familiar with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwckaHxOWXs

TFG calls for the "termination of the Constitution", and his immediate reinstatement as POTUS.

The Thirteenth Floor is a special favourite - as noted by TheVat it was based on a German TV series called World on A Wire. If you enjoy VR based SciFi theme films, then you might also enjoy Avalon (2001) which is Japanese/Polish collaboration directed by Marmoru Oshii - who is probably better known for his original animated version of Ghost in The Shell (1995). Avalon was made on location in Poland with a Polish speaking cast and crew. A stand alone sequel called Asssault Girls set in the same world was released in 2009

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) who was born when his mother went into premature labour after being told of the Spanish Armada, lived in era when men of learning habitually wrote and even *thought* in classical Latin. The Latin phrase bellum omnium contra omnes was a motif rendered by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan as “warre of everyone against everyone”. In the earlier work De Cive (1642) he wrote: ostendo primo conditionem hominum extra societatem civilem, quam conditionem appellare liceat statum naturæ, aliam non esse quam bellum omnium contra omnes; atque in eo bello jus esse omnibus in omnia. "I demonstrate, in the first place, that the state of men without civil society (which state we may properly call the state of nature) is nothing else but a mere war of all against all; and in that war all men have equal right unto all things." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellum_omnium_contra_omnes

DJT is clearly having an atomic scale meltdown about his stolen 'Electron':

Given that this entire thread originally began with a discussion of 'Hammer Violence', it's probably worth revisiting the Young Turks video segment about the epic troll perpetrated by the Good Liars team at the NRA conference 5 months ago:

'Low Tide' - (Barry Blitt)

Here in Blighty, they'd also be spending the next two years of their life in jail for the criminal offence of possessing a firearm and ammunition. Ditto for Russia, China (PRC), N. Korea, and a whole host of other countries too. I feel that Americans as a whole simply do not grasp how atypical ((and quite how deranged) their attitudes towards firearms and gun violence really are. It seems to come as a perpetual surprise to them to discover that their rates of firearm related homicides are generally 25 time higher than anywhere else in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States

John Toebbe and his wife were both jailed yesterday. He received a 19 year sentence for attempting to sell US nuclear submarine secrets to a foreign power, but his wife Diana received a 22 year sentence - far longer than the 3 year sentence originally proposed in a plea deal. https://news.sky.com/story/right-out-of-the-movies-couple-who-tried-to-sell-us-nuclear-submarine-secrets-to-foreign-country-are-jailed-12743447 District Judge Gina Groh who sentenced them in Charleston West Virginia on Wednesday, took strong exception to the fact that Diana Toebbe covertly attempted to write two letters to her husband while both of them were in jail, which urged him to exonerate her. The letters were intercepted by the authorities. The propulsion system data which the Toebbe couple attmpted to sell was classified only at the lower Confidential level (not at Secret or Top Secret levels). Prosecutors did not disclose which country the accused tried to sell their secrets to, though some sources suggest it was the Braziian navy.

The Meidas Touch news site recently produced a viral super-cut video after Fox anchor Laura Ingraham asked "Which Republican official or candidate has ever condoned or encouraged any form of violent physical assault ? Can you start naming them ? I can't think of any". The video was featured by Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC last night as her sign off to the 'The 11th Hour".

The Conservative Party MPs at Westminster are elected by and held accountable to the voters in their respective constituencies (and by the electorate at large). The constituency party members on the other hand are accountable to absolutely no one whatsoever - and yet they are in the position of being able to have the decisive say in selecting who will become the next PM, absent any form of wider plebiscite. This might matter less is quite so many of this 0.37% segment of the population didn't largely consist of golf club Brexiteers and casual racists - like the caller 'Gerry' in this video clip below who phoned in to LBC radio host Sangita Myska's show yesterday and who wanted to complain that Rishi Sunak (former chancellor and leadership front-runner) can't really be 'British' because he is brown skinned.

The most recent information I can find is a Guardian article which says the active fee-paying membership of the UK Conservative party is currently around 200.000 people. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/08/tory-members-over-60-white-male-choice-of-leader The World Population Review site indicates that the UK population is around 67,522.166 The number of these over 18 years old is somewhat less than 54 million. https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-kingdom-population That means the active membership of the UK Conservative party represents around 0.37% of the adult population of Britain. The Guardian article notes that ”More than half are aged over 60, and they tend to be male residents of southern England. They are overwhelmingly white – at 97%”

As Britain prepares to select its third PM in just over 6 weeks, attention is being drawn to the curious nature of UK Conservative Party membership rules, and the critical role that members play in selecting a new PM. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/21/2130404/-How-did-the-UK-get-Truss-the-UK-may-be-able-to-blame-us-or-someone-else If a British PM voluntarily steps down from office, it does not trigger a general election. Instead a two-part internal leadership election process begins. First, a slate of candidates is chosen in a ballot by Conservative Party MPs at Westminster. The final selection is then settled by a vote of ordinary members of the Conservative party in the UK - right ? Wrong ! As these two websites make clear: https://www.conservatives.com/members/membership-faqs#accordion-ce4b514d78-item-6f9020ca8c https://www.twocitiesconservatives.org.uk/join-clwca-and-conservative-party-online You *don’t* need to be resident in the UK to join the Conservative Party, and you don’t even need to be eligible to vote in the UK in order to do so. For the sum of £25, it would seem that anyone, anywhere, can acquire - “All the benefits of party membership, including participation in the Conservative Policy Forum, attendance at party conferences, and a vote in the election of the party leader”. - Who then automatically becomes the new PM. Reassuring isn’t it ?

A frank discussion between Xi Jinping and Putin about the latest Russian mishaps in Ukraine would probably also provide some pause for serious thought by Xi about any future Chinese plans vis-a-vis Taiwan. The recent imbroglio over Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, and the US navy’s subsequent despatch of warships through the Taiwan straits would have brought home to the PRC that the US is quite serious about meeting its stated committment to supporting Taiwan in the event of a military attack by China. The patent superiority of American high-tech weapons systems supplied to Ukraine such as the HIMAR artillery rockets, SAM air defences, and the anti-ship missiles that sank the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet will all be a potent reality check on China’s more hawkish generals. Taiwan itself is a formidably difficult target to invade. During WW2 the US military chiefs made a decision at the Honolulu planning conference in 1944 to bypass Formosa (as it was then known) completely, and to invade the island fortress of Okinawa instead, which led to the largest and bloodiest amphibious operation of the Pacific war. The invasion of this much smaller garrison island led to over 40,000 US casualties, including the 4-star General Buckner who was the commander. (He was killed by shrapnel from a Japanese artillery shell while inspecting the clean-up operations). It should be noted that Okinawa has an area of just 463 sq.mi. Taiwan by contrast has an area of 13,976 sq. mi. The cost benefit value of attacking Taiwan was too high to contemplate in 1945, and remains so today.