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The Chinese captions in that video use the expression 乡巴佬 xiangbalǎo - “country bumpkin” - (lit. ‘countryside - close to - fellow’) to mimic JD Vance’s attempt to use the word ‘peasant’ as an insult.

JD Vance is now being mercilessly trolled by the Chinese government on 小红书 xiǎo hóng shu - (‘little red book’) - China’s equivalent to Instagram - with humorous little animations of Chinese ’peasants’ pointing out that US tariffs will make his eyeliner cost more ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmUs6sL4vwc

The current proprietor of The Atlantic is Laurene Powell Jobs https://www.thewrap.com/laurene-powell-jobs-atlantic-praise-signalgate/ Laurene Powell Jobs is the widow of Steve Jobs who founded Apple. She purchased The Atlantic in 2017, six years after the death of her husband in 2011, and she is a billionaire (worth $15 billion) in her own right. She also seems to be in the process of inheriting the mantle of the legendary Katherine Graham who became the publisher of The Washington Post after the death of her husband Philip Graham in 1963. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Graham Graham appointed Ben Bradlee as editor, and backed him fearlessly in the face of enormous hostile pressure from the Nixon administration over the publication of follow-up articles about the Pentagon Papers (first published by the New York Times in 1971), and then memorably backed her editor when he went to press with articles about the Watergate Scandal written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein from 1972 onwards. Watch this space..

Yes. I’d agree with all of that. The Song dynasty (960-1279) was a period of quite violent social transition. It was progressively conquered and pushed southwards, before the surviving members of the royal court were quite literally driven into the sea by the Mongols at the Battle of Yamen. The attachment that many Chinese still feel to their ancestral roots is seen quite dramatically during the ‘Golden Week’ of the 春節 chun jíe Spring Festival, when many millions of Chinese travel back to their rural villages to celebrate the Chinese New Year with their parents and extended families.

Because the Chinese are literate (and subtle) enough to understand that he meant it as a crude insult ! The contrast in traditional Chinese social hierarchy between 农民 and 商人 which I alluded to, was one that existed in Imperial China all the way back to the Tang dynasty (618 - 907) - if not before. The present relationship between the agrarian values of rural China, and their modern high technology industrial base are fairly complex and quite ambivalent at times - yet one more reason why they don’t appreciate derogatory comments from westerners, and sometime colonial oppressors like JD. Vance.

If JD Vance was looking for media attention when he spoke to Fox news last Thursday then he probably succeeded beyond his wildest ambitions. While defending president Trump’s insane trade tariffs, the vice-president launched into a tirade against the ‘globalist economy’ which included this gem: "To make it a little more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.” https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/08/china/china-slams-vance-peasants-remarks-intl-hnk/index.html This remark has now gone viral on Weibo 微博 - the Chinese microblogging site - with some 140 million views, and countless downvotes and negative responses from many commentators, including Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian who replied “It’s both astonishing and lamentable to hear this vice president make such ignorant and disrespectful remarks.” JD Vance who in the past proudly embraced his own poverty stricken childhood in rural Appalachia with a 2016 memoir entitled “Hillbilly Elegy” completely overlooks the fact modern China is a country where factory floors are lined with industrial robots, cities are embracing homegrown electric vehicles and remote counties are connected by a nationwide web of high-speed railways. The Chinese word for a ‘peasant’ is 农民 nong min which simply means a ‘farmer’. If JD Vance had ever done the slightest research on this subject, then he might have found out that historically speaking 农民 is not a term of reproach in China. The ‘peasants’ are in fact traditionally regarded as the foundation and bed-rock of the entire Chinese social system. It was the 商人 shang ren or merchant class who were always despised and regarded as the lowest of the low in China !

Testing

During a recent House foreign relations subcommittee on 1st April 2025, Republican Texas Congressman Keith Self had this to say from the podium: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/keith-self-congress-quoted-joseph-goebbels/ The full significance of this quotation might be better appreciated by citing the language and context in which it was originally spoken (see below): The words first came from Jospeh Goebbels on October 16th 1933 when he was announcing a new National Press Law making it a crime to practice journalism in Germany except as a licensed member of a nationwide closed shop called Der Reichsverband der Deutschen Presse - headed by one Dr. Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. https://time.com/archive/6751737/foreign-news-consecrated-press/ “Houston - You have a problem ! ”

Congressman Jake Auchincloss (D-Massachusetts 4th) has raised an interesting point about a possible interplay between these latest trade tariffs, and meme crypto-currencies which the Trump administration recently quietly exempted from Federal Securities & Exchange regulatory oversight. https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/senator-warren-and-representative-auchincloss-call-on-sec-to-explain-legal-loophole-for-trumps-meme-coins

They would probably ask 'Mr Green' (his father Fred) what to do next..

About 45% of all American imports are used as intermediate inputs to the production of American goods. The American military complex manufacturing base for building the "instruments of war" is substantially dependent on very large imports of steel, mineral ores and many other raw materials from abroad - which are all in the process of being hit by the new import tariffs announced by Trump - which will amount to a consumer tax hike 3 times larger than the one imposed in 1942 to pay for WW2 (by some estimates).

Lawrence Summers —> 71st Secretary of Treasury(1999 - 2001). Professor of Economics Harvard University (1983 - 1991). Currently a board member of Open AI.

The intellectual author of this pseudo-economic gibberish and voodoo maths appears to be a Trump advisor and cabinet member called Peter Navarro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJbZCbBLqkk A Rachel Maddow MSNBC segment (above) tells the story of how he was originally recruited by Jared Kushner during Trump’s first term campaign on the strength of an Amazon book review of Death By China - one of a series of books by Navarro who is a fierce pro-tariff hawk, and a self promoting charlatan who frequently refers in his writings to a fictional economic genius called ‘Ron Vara’, which is an anagram of his own surname Navarro. Peter Navarro was convicted and jailed for 4 months in 2023 on two charges of contempt of Congress after refusing to answer subpoenas from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on Congress. After being released in July 2024 he subsequently rejoined Trump’s second term campaign and was reappointed as senior counsel for trade and manufacturing in December 2024 after Trump won the election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Navarro Navarro is likely to be thrown head-first under the bus as this crisis develops, and will probably go down in legend - along with ♫ ♫ “The Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” ♫ ♫ - as the presidential advisor who singlehandedly wiped $6.6 trillion off the US stock markets in just two days.

They were just cherry-picking input parameter values to get (4 x 0.25) = 1, and then dividing the final result by 2 in order to look generous. But they don't seem to have understood the significance of a delta symbol Δ which represents a *change* in tariff required, not the value of the actual tariff itself. https://x.com/i/grok/share/OMmVAUdtAgC88lBfXN1TvYZbA

As economists struggle to make sense of the bizarre list of punitive tariffs announced yesterday by president Trump, some noticed that the listings appear to have been organised by TLDs (top level domain) i.e the internet country code suffix - which provides one clue (amongst several) that this list was compiled with the help of an LLM (large language model) AI chatbot system such as ChatGPT Vibe Code https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/did-an-llm-help-write-trumps-trade A surreal list of obscure and largely uninhabited islands that are being punished with trade tariffs was compiled in this report by Rachel Maddow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lStWAhGfxn0 It includes: * Tokelau (.tk) - 3 small Pacific islands mainly famous for their ‘swimming pigs’ - 10% tariff * Keeling Islands (.cc) - 2 small Indian Ocean islands pop. 593 -10% tariff * Jan Mayen (.sj) - volcanic island in Arctic Ocean, uninhabited - 10% tariff * Heard Island & Macdonald Island (.hm) - uninhabited Antarctic islands -10% tariff *Falkland Islands (.fk) - South Atlantic, pop. 3200 + 1 million penguins - 41% tariff ! Paul Krugman. a Nobel Prize-winning economist had this to say: When approached for comment, the White House claimed that their new tariffs were calculated using the formula shown below, and gave a link to this webpage: https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations The problem is that every single academic economist interviewed has denounced this formula as being completely meaningless ‘Voodoo Mathematics' of a type never previously seen in international economic modelling. Critics point out that the selected parameter values for ε and φ cancel out According to the BBC Verify this formula actually boils down to:

I really wouldn't bother. Most ppl who have read your comments in this thread will probably concur with a piece of advice originally attributed to Mark Twain:

Are you kidding me ? I grew *up* with the music of David Bowie and many others of the era (I recall watching him perform ‘Space Oddity’ his very first hit on TOTP in 1969). I lived through the summer of ’69 and heard all the music of the Doors, the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead etc. the first time round, as well as the second and third… On the subject of language - I’m currently on a 1,932 day unbroken streak on Duolingo (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Scottish Gaelic) - Check me out there if you wish to have a discussion about language

OK - let's assume that English is my fifth language (it isn't) - perhaps you'd like to explain precisely what nuance in "hmmm" I'm missing ?

If you had read the link I supplied about the Sturmabteilung (SA), then you might also have found this threaded article about their uniforms and insignia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniforms_and_insignia_of_the_Sturmabteilung The point is that practically all of the various titles and ranks commonly associated with the worst manifestations of the German Nazi military machine such as Fuhrer, Sturmfuhrer, Gruppenfuhrer and Obergruppenfuhrer - were all originally invented out of thin air by the Sturmabteilung in the early 1930s, and were later adopted in toto by the Schutzstaffel (SS) which took over their role after ‘The Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934. No such ranks or insignia existed in the regular Wehrmacht (Army) or Kriegsmarine (Navy). None of this was about ‘fashion’ or ‘looks’. It was about the systematic weaponisation of racist and antisemitic street thugs into organised paramilitary groups by cladding them in war surplus uniforms and giving them imaginary military ranks in order to channel their aggression, and control their violence and hatreds. That is why fascists “..always need a uniform”.

The mineral cooling oil in itself is an excellent dielectric medium as you say, but unfortunately that situation changes rather rapidly when it escapes, catches fire (it has a low flash-point) and is then mixed with with water and firefighting foams. Aqueous Film-Forming Foam (AFFF) which is designed for fighting Class B fires (flammable liquids) is positively lethal if applied to a Class C electrical fire, because the chemical foam concentrate is even more conductive than water. That is what I meant to convey.

X is trying to hide this from view by tagging it as 'Adult Content' - Can't think why.

Real military units, real military insignia, real military ranks - as opposed to the ersatz fake ones favoured by cosplay fascist paramilitaries trying to make their penises feel bigger 😛

Because paramilitary fascist organisations always cosplay and borrow their uniforms and insignia from real ones. The German SA (Sturmabteilung - ‘storm troopers’) of the 1930s became known as ‘Brown Shirts’ because they adopted a uniform of brown Lettow-shirts and ties which were bought in bulk as cheap war surplus issue that was originally meant for use by German colonial troops in Africa during WW1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung Mussolini’s ‘Black Shirt’ paramilitary thugs adopted all black uniforms based on those worn by the Arditi who were an elite shock force unit of the Italian army in WW1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackshirts

https://www.hindustantimes.com/photos/reimagining-president-donald-trump-in-studio-ghibli-style-artwork-photos-101743085800483-1.html