Barbarian history examined

So, last night we finished watching the Netflix series Barbarians, and it was quite a bloody spectacle.  It no doubt was the cause of a dream in which I was about to be beheaded by some black clad executioner at, of all places, Disneyland.  (I had also seen a news story about Hong Kong Disneyland during the day, so there is a reason.)  It started with me glumly accepting my fate, only to start worrying that it was really going to hurt a lot before I lost consciousness because his axe didn't look sharp, and arguing that I would prefer to be shot. (Finally, I realised that I hadn't been convicted of a crime, only accused of one, so I didn't deserve execution at all.  I think I successfully convinced him as I woke up.)

Anyway:  I went into watching the series only seeing that it had quite good reviews.  I had a vague idea that it was based loosely on real events, but did not bother, until now, to check that out.  (It's always best to leave reading the real story until after a movie or series is finished, as the degree of invention is often a tad disappointing - especially if the events are  particularly well documented.)   

I did like the show overall - and part of the fun of watching it was trying to work out whether it was pandering to German nationalism, or not.   I mean, it did paint the Romans as being pretty terrible and ruthless in their local rule, but on the other hand, it made the Germanic tribes look very technologically inferior, unpleasantly fractious, and much more into religious "woo" than the Romans.   But the whole story is about a successful underdog attack on the Romans, so put that into the "pro-German" column.   

Now that I have gone looking for historical commentary, at the top of the Google list is this fantastically detailed assessment on a blog by a young American Midwest university history student who seemingly really knows his stuff.   If you have finished the series, I strongly recommend reading Spencer McDaniel's post.

To my surprise, the series is basically much more accurate than I expected.   Sure, it has added fictional details (including ones about a couple of key relationships); but overall, I am quite delighted to read that the show's producers have obviously taken way more care than is common in adding historically accurate details - or when inventing details, at least making them possible and not entirely implausible.

I also had no idea of the nationalistic importance of the story of the battle of the Teutoburg Forest,  but Spencer explains all of that as well.  His blog Tales of Times Forgotten, seems to have quite a lot of interesting content, actually.

I see that a lot of people have discussed the show's accuracy.  Another nerdy guy has made a Youtube video about it, and he seems overall to be quite impressed as well.

So, well done, everyone.   

And all the Wodan talk in the show makes me keener to see The Ring Cycle at the end of this year.  (It was COVID delayed last year.)

McConnell and others have more work to do if they want the cult to fade

I think that the "establishment" Republicans - those with brains enough to know that it's bad for the party to continue to under the sway of Trump and   his family - has been hoping that one-off denunciations and then just not talking about him anymore might work.   And I guess it might, eventually, if Trump starts getting entangled in too many legal actions.

But polling is indicating that the cult isn't fading fast enough, despite 6 January:

An exclusive Suffolk University/USA TODAY Poll finds Trump's support largely unshaken after his second impeachment trial in the Senate, this time on a charge of inciting an insurrection in the deadly assault on the Capitol Jan. 6.

By double digits, 46%-27%, those surveyed say they would abandon the GOP and join the Trump party if the former president decided to create one. The rest are undecided.

"We feel like Republicans don't fight enough for us, and we all see Donald Trump fighting for us as hard as he can, every single day," Brandon Keidl, 27, a Republican and small-business owner from Milwaukee, says in an interview after being polled. "But then you have establishment Republicans who just agree with establishment Democrats and everything, and they don't ever push back."

Half of those polled say the GOP should become "more loyal to Trump," even at the cost of losing support among establishment Republicans. One in five, 19%, say the party should become less loyal to Trump and more aligned with establishment Republicans. 

The survey of 1,000 Trump voters, identified from 2020 polls, was taken by landline and cellphone last Monday through Friday. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

 

 

Mars as a "insurance policy"

I am somewhat sympathetic to this:
 

As I have said before, I think it is better to establish the Moon as a nearby lifeboat - store a lot of information, including genetic, up there in the event that a large chunk of the Earth is ruined.

Chinese crankery

As spotted on Twitter:

Mink again

I noted in November that COVID 19 was causing mink culls in Denmark, where raising mink is a big industry.  (I would have thought Scandinavians were nicer than that!)

I see via Washington Post that the industry is also significant in (of all places) Wisconsin;  and mink farmers there are getting vaccinated ahead of the likes of flight attendants, teachers and others.

As with Denmark, there is Youtube PR material by mink farmers emphasising how humane they are, all while showing that the animals seem to live their entire lives in cages that seem pretty damn small to me, given the size of the animal:

 

Wouldn't we think a cat, an animal about the same size, and perhaps of similar mammalian intelligence,  is not being treated humanely if raised for its entire live in a cage like that?    And wouldn't a shed full of cats so raised cause a lot of concern?   But mink get a pass for confinement, it seems.   

There is no doubt, it would seem, that they are well fed (in order to preserve the quality of the fur); but it's a pretty dull life, no?  

Weird design, even for a university

Have a look at this "semi-outdoor" plaza space in Japan, which has a very sci fi movie setting feeling about it:

 

I can't really tell if I like it, or not.  It has a slightly claustrophobic feeling about it from some angles.  

Can anyone wander in there? I also reckon that while it looks all new and pristine now, it's going to get messy pretty soon, with leaves and stuff from outside, unless they have a way of cleaning that enormous looking space.  Maybe it looks bigger than what it is?  

More thoughts:  sort of gives a "human as an ant inside a nest" perspective, doesn't it?   Also - would be something of a worry being there during an earthquake.  I suppose you might be OK if you stand still under one of the holes?

You can read about the architects arty ideas about what he was trying to achieve, here.

Turbines on ice

Texas seems to be over the worst of the power outages.  I have been wondering how many will have died from the cold:  the Washington Post count currently has it at 47, but you would have to suspect there are many more yet to be found in homes, or amongst the homeless.

But one cool thing the event has alerted everyone to is that wind turbines can be made to be very rugged indeed, including the ones in Antarctica, of all places.

I admired the Jupiter 2 looks of this Belgian Antarctic outpost in a post many years ago, but I don't think that I knew then that it relies a lot on wind turbine power as well as solar panels:

Reading about this base, on its website here, I see that there is lot more to it than the UFO looking bit; but it also seems to only be a summer station and is not manned over winter.

Anyway, they some nice videos, but using Vimeo instead of Youtube.  I presume I can still embed them:

There's also a short one showing what it looks like during a blizzard: 

 

 

Bracing weather!

 I see that Australia's Mawson base had two, more conventional looking, wind turbines installed in 2003 (much longer ago than I would have guessed.)  One of them died in 2017 (fell over, actually), but the other is still going strong, apparently.  Here's a photo:

 

It's a very messy looking base, as I am sure I have commented before.  Still, gets the job done, I suppose.

Oh look - there's the wreck of a Russian transport aircraft near it:

Here's the story:

This week we ventured out to visit the remains of a Russian aircraft on the plateau. The plane is (was?) a Lisunov Li-2T, the Russian built DC-3, and a close cousin of the Basler aircraft which still service the Antarctic programs of many countries today. In 1968 this aircraft and crew dropped in to visit Mawson for Christmas, no doubt with a bottle of their finest de-icing fluid to share. A strong wind gust during take-off caused damage to a wing and propeller, stranding the hapless crew. A Mawson blizzard further damaged the plane, flipping it upside down and sealing its fate. In the following 52 years it has slowly been carried by the plateau towards the coast, about 30 metres each year. Reaching it now requires travelling through crevassed terrain, and the use of glacier travel technique, the party roped together for safety. Two groups made the trip this week, each being trained in glacier travel equipment and rescue skills before they departed.

The plane lies twisted and buried by the snow and slow creeping ice. One landing ski protrudes into the air, the empty cockpit dials poke above the snow surface, a hinged door reveals a fuselage full of snow. The horizontal stabilizer now points skywards making a great backdrop for a photo.

Anyway, these are tough turbines, that's for sure.

I get spam

I occasionally get spam comments - and don't let them through of course.

This one, though, was the first of its kind, and noteworthy:

Lahore is the most making city with solid economy and bunches of amusement working environments. Getting the authentic high class Lahore Escorts Services will be dynamically excellent in the coming days since all the call youths are communicating that they are high class Call Girls in Lahore in a way. Experienced customers will locate the real and premium Pakistan Call Girls in Lahore and the new customers will get unassuming associations for higher rates.

There was a link in there to the escort service, which I have removed.

Perhaps I am easily amused, but the idea of spamming random blogs just in case they might interest someone who happens to be heading to Pakistan and who wants a sex escort while there strikes me as some sort of high point of optimism in marketing. 

The wrath of the trans soon to descend on The Economist

Has The Economist been running a transgender skeptic line before now?   This short article suggests so, and I expect transgender activists, who seem to be the most rabid activists around, will be very upset with it:

Little is known about the effect of puberty blockers - That has not stopped clinics prescribing them enthusiastically

...despite their popularity, the effects of puberty blockers remain unclear. Because they are not licensed for gender medicine, drug firms have done no trials. Record-keeping in many clinics is poor. A 2018 review by researchers at the University of Melbourne described the evidence for their use as “low-quality”. In December British judges likewise flagged the lack of a “firm evidence base” when ruling that children were unlikely to be able to give meaningful consent to taking them. Britain’s National Health Service recently withdrew a claim, still made elsewhere, that their effects are “fully reversible”.

The studies that do exist are at once weak and worrying. The day after the court ruling, GIDS published a study that found children were happy to receive the drugs. But there was little other evidence of benefit—not even a reduction in gender dysphoria. Two older studies of Dutch patients given puberty blockers in the 1990s found that gender dysphoria eased afterwards. But without a control group, it is impossible to tell how patients would have felt had they not taken the drugs.

The article starts with this surpising evidence of the rapid rise of transgenderism as a social concern:

America had one paediatric gender clinic in 2007. It now has at least 50. The sole paediatric gender clinic for England and Wales, known by its acronym, GIDS, has seen referrals rise 30-fold in a decade. A similar pattern is evident across the rich world.

It doesn't even mention the disproportionate rise in teenage girls deciding they are transgender.

Just one more thing to worry about

So, it would appear from this research, that the environmental effect of Earth's magnetic field flipping (which last happened 42,000 years ago) on the planet is not particularly well understood:

One temporary flip of the poles, known as the Laschamps excursion, happened 42,000 years ago and lasted for about 1,000 years. Previous work found little evidence that the event had a profound impact on the planet, possibly because the focus had not been on the period during which the poles were actually shifting, researchers say.

Now scientists say the flip, together with a period of low solar activity, could have been behind a vast array of climatic and environmental phenomena with dramatic ramifications. “It probably would have seemed like the end of days,” said Prof Chris Turney of the University of New South Wales and co-author of the study....

Writing in the journal Science, Turney and his colleagues describe how they carried out radiocarbon analyses of the rings of ancient kauri trees preserved in northern New Zealand wetlands, some of which were more than 42,000 years old.

This allowed them to track over time the rise in carbon-14 levels in the atmosphere produced by increasing levels of high energy cosmic radiation reaching the Earth during the Laschamps excursion. As a result they were able to date the atmospheric changes in more detail than offered by previous records, such as mineral deposits.

They then examined numerous records and materials from all over the world, including from lake and ice cores, and found that a host of major environmental changes occurred at the same time as the carbon-14 levels peaked.

So, what did happen in this period?: 

“We see this massive growth of the ice sheet over North America … we see tropical rain belts in the west Pacific shifting dramatically at that point, and then also wind belts in the southern ocean and a drying out in Australia,” said Turney.

The researchers also used a model to examine how the chemistry of the atmosphere might change if the Earth’s magnetic field was lost and there was a prolonged period of low solar activity, which would have further reduced Earth’s protection against cosmic radiation. Ice core records suggest such dips in solar activity, known as the “grand solar minima”, coincided with the Laschamps excursion.

The results reveal that the atmospheric changes could have resulted in huge shifts in the climate, electrical storms and widespread colourful aurora.

Some stuff in the report is pretty speculative:

...the team suggest they could also be linked to the emergence of red ochre handprints, the suggestion being that humans may have used the pigment as a sunscreen against the increased levels of ultraviolet radiation hitting the Earth as a result of the depletion of ozone.

They also suggest the rise in the use of caves by our ancestors around this time, as well as the rise in cave art, might be down to the fact that underground spaces offered shelter from the harsh conditions. The situation may also have boosted competition, potentially contributing to the end of the Neanderthals, Turney said.

Of course, the worry is how well our civilisation could cope:

The Earth’s magnetic field has weakened by about 9% over the past 170 years, and the researchers say another flip could be on the cards. Such a situation could have a dramatic effect, not least by devastating electricity grids and satellite networks.

All a worry...

 

It must be economics Friday

I don't usually post about economics on a Friday - I tend to try to find more esoteric stories to note.

But this article in South China Morning Post caught my eye.  Young Chinese are worried about their economy, too.  It starts:

As vlogger Ning Nanshan stares down the camera and launches into a lecture about China’s push for technological self-reliance, a flood of “bullet comments” begins floating across the screen.

“Go our own way and corner the rest of the world!” says one of the comments on

Bilibili

, a popular video-sharing site that allows viewers to post messages in real time.

“Our motherland’s five-year plan is so awesome!” says another as it flies across the monitor.

While most of Ning’s videos trumpet China’s advancements in manufacturing, he occasionally touches on more middle class concerns, like runaway house prices. There too, the bullet comments come thick and fast – although with a very different tone.

“It is impossible for house prices to fall, there is no solution to my despair,” says one user.

“Working hard is not the answer, it will not work,” reads another comment.

With few other outlets to express opinions, social media platforms like Bilibili have become important online gathering places for young Chinese. And while they can be home to dizzying displays of nationalism, they also provide brief windows into what some political analysts say is the “serious divergence” between China’s booming economy and the personal prospects of ordinary people.

Further down:

China was the only major economy to post positive growth last year, following a quick recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. Its gross domestic product (GDP) topped 100 trillion yuan (US$15.4 trillion) for the first time in 2020 – about 17 per cent of the world economy –

narrowing the gap with the United States

to only $6.2 trillion, from $7.1 trillion in 2019.

For China’s leaders, the GDP figure was a “milestone” that showed the nation’s economic and technological strength. Analysts have estimated the nation will overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy by 2028, five years earlier than previously forecast.

But the impressive headline figure fails to tell the whole story. Young Chinese in particular are taking to online platforms like Bilibili or Weibo to voice despair over skyrocketing house prices, widening inequality, and the increasing price of everyday goods.

More to my surprise, there are some comments by an "independent scholar" in Beijing which appear to be brave, very brave:

Wu Qiang, a political observer and an independent scholar based in Beijing, said the optimism about China’s economy on social media was mostly “Communist Party propaganda”, with many other topics out of bounds due to the nation’s vast online censorship system.

“The nationalism on Chinese media is a nihilistic statism, which is to conceal inequality through empty slogans without giving real equality and political rights to the people. This is reflected in the suffering people feel in their lives,” he said.

He said China’s strong growth under state capitalism was a “paradox” for many young people, who lacked comprehensive labour rights and work from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.

China’s relatively low household incomes and the small share of employment in the services sector also hint at the divergence between the nation’s booming economy and the life satisfaction of the average worker.

GDP per capita in China was around US$10,200 in 2019, compared to US$63,200 in the United States, according to the most recent World Bank data.

In 2019, China’s private consumption accounted for about 39 per cent of GDP, which was about 30 percentage points lower than the US and Europe, according to data from CEIC. It was also about 20 percentage points lower than developing countries such as India and Brazil.

Long story short - the dramatic rise in GDP is not improving the lives of the people as much as might be expected.

If I was Wu, I would be a bit nervous about knocks on the door and invitations to come speak to local party officials, in the next few weeks.

 

 

Not a conservative

Good article at The Atlantic, pointing out that Rush Limbaugh did not advance conservatism:

As a proponent of conservatism in America, Limbaugh was a failure who in his later years abandoned the project of advancing a positive agenda, culminating in his alignment with the vulgar style and populist anti-leftism of Donald Trump. Character no longer mattered. Budget deficits no longer mattered. Free trade no longer mattered. Nepotism no longer mattered. Lavishing praise on foreign dictators no longer mattered.

All that mattered was owning the libs in the culture war, in part to avenge a deeply felt sense of aggrievement. Limbaugh and Trump were alike in attaining great wealth and political influence while still talking and seeming to feel as though society was stacked against guys like them....

....the proposition that Limbaugh helped conservatism thrive or grow is unsubstantiated. National Review and Barry Goldwater reinvigorated conservatism in postwar America. The high-water mark of American conservatism, Ronald Reagan’s presidency, was over before Limbaugh was a force in American politics.

Over the ensuing decades, as Limbaugh grew in fame and gained as much influence in the Republican Party as anyone, the conservative movement suffered from political and intellectual decline. “In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar,” a writer at The American Conservative once complained. “Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right.” The seesaw of partisan politics gave conservatives occasional victories, such as the 1994 Republican takeover of the House and the 2010 Tea Party wave, but once in office the GOP tended to squander those victories quickly and never accomplished much conservative change. The government kept getting bigger. The country kept getting more socially liberal. The right delighted in the fact that the left was never able to create its own Rush Limbaugh, despite various attempts. But perhaps that supposed failing has helped progressives make gains.

Read the whole thing.

 

Economists and what they don't know

I have being muttering here for perhaps a couple of years now that it seems that there is some sort of unacknowledged crisis in macro economics in which economists (probably on both sides of politics, even though Laffer-ish Right wing economists have been wronger for longer) aren't really admitting to not understanding some fundamental things that are pretty damn important.      

See these two stories which back up my theory.  From Axios:

The world's debt-to-GDP ratio rose to 356% in 2020, a new report from the Institute of International Finance finds, up 35 percentage points from where it stood in 2019, as countries saw their economies shrink and issued an ocean of debt to stay afloat.

Why it matters: The increase brings numerous countries, including the U.S., to extreme debt levels, well beyond what economists have called untenable in the past.

• Nonfinancial private sector debt alone now makes up 165% of the entire world's economic output.

What they're saying: "The upswing was well beyond the rise seen during the 2008 global financial crisis," IIF economists said in the report.

• "Back in 2008 and 2009, the increase in global debt ratio was limited to 10 percentage points and 15 percentage points, respectively."

By the numbers: Global debt increased to $281 trillion last year, with total private and public sector debt rising by $24 trillion in the 61 countries IIF follows.....

Why the debt matters: While worries about significantly pushing up inflation and borrowing costs have not come to pass, slow growth and diminishing returns have, and the world's already high debt levels look to be inhibiting economic growth and threaten to hold back a full recovery from the pandemic in the long run.

• Further, almost all of the debt issued in 2020 was to deal with present circumstances rather than to invest in forward-looking projects or growth, making future investments in such projects more difficult and potentially more costly.

Where it stands: The CBO projected U.S. GDP growth over the next 10 years will be largely below 2% (with the notable exclusion of 2021), and that annual budget deficits will increase.

• The federal debt is set to exceed the size of the economy this year for only the second time since the end of World War II and grow to 107% of GDP by 2031.
• That projection was made without including President Biden's proposed $1.9 trillion stimulus package.

And this reminded me of Noah Smith's recent take on the question of economists and debt:

No one knows how much the government can borrow

Some extracts: 

Remember that some people thought that government borrowing and spending during the Great Recession, facilitated by quantitative easing (Fed bond-buying) to keep interest rates low, was going to lead to substantial inflation. But it didn’t.

Would it have led to inflation if the government borrowing and spending had been 10x what it was? 100x? 10000000000000000000000x? Where’s the cutoff?

We don’t know. David Andolfatto, writing at the St. Louis Fed blog, lays it out:

There is presumably a limit to how much the market is willing or able to absorb in the way of Treasury securities, for a given price level (or inflation rate) and a given structure of interest rates. However, no one really knows how high the debt-to-GDP ratio can get. We can only know once we get there…There is no way of knowing beforehand just how large the national debt can get before inflation becomes a concern.

So when the government borrows more and more from the Fed and spends the money, it’s like our country is walking down an infinite corridor towards an invisible pit. We know the pit is out there somewhere in front of us, but we just have no idea how far we have to walk before we fall in.

Noah then notes that there is far too inadequate research on the issue.  He lists some papers which might give some indication, but his conclusion is this:

Just because the U.S. hasn’t had inflation for a long time doesn’t mean borrowing constraints aren’t a pressing, even urgent research question. There are so many pieces of the puzzle that need investigating. Do deficits matter in the absolute sense, or does it just matter how much is financed by the central bank? Is the start of central bank financing of deficits what kicks off the inflation, or something else? Does it matter what government spends the money on? Are policy regime changes of the kind Sargent talks about actually detectable in the data? And if so, what do they look like? Why hasn’t Japan, with its debt of 240% of GDP, had even the tiniest glimmer of inflation?

And so on.

We need the top minds working on this now, not waiting until after disaster strikes and then analyzing it after the fact!

His take on the matter sounds very plausible to me.

A Seoul problem

Just one of the unusual things you learn by watching Channel News Asia:   housing costs in Seoul have been climbing dramatically in recent years:

 

If you can't be bothered watching the video, the description of the story: 

Home prices in Seoul have risen more than 50% in the last four years. President Moon Jae-in has been under fire for failing to cool the housing market, despite introducing dozens of measures including tax hikes and loan limits. His latest plan to increase the supply of affordable housing has also not been well received. In South Korea, public rental housing refers to small-sized apartments purchased by the local government to be rented out to low-income groups at below market prices. 

The video, which features some people saying that they doubt that those who live in public housing can "fit in" in the local area indicates that the sort of social problems depicted in Parasite are pretty real.

 

About Texas energy

This article in New York Magazine No the Green New Deal did not cause the Texas power outage strikes me as one of the most balanced and comprehensive discussions of the issues.  

It does end with this fair enough point, for example:

Progressives need clear answers about how a green transition can make America’s electric grids more robust against the coming storms. The Week’s Ryan Cooper, drawing on the insights of climate wonk Dave Roberts, sketches out what such an answer might look like. Specifically, Cooper argues that America can achieve electricity resilience by exploiting its vast size and climate diversity through a nationally integrated power grid.

Update:   Oh - 

(Bloomberg) -- Federal regulators warned Texas that its power plants couldn’t be counted on to reliably churn out electricity in bitterly cold conditions a decade ago, when the last deep freeze plunged 4 million people into the dark.

They recommended that utilities use more insulation, heat pipes and take other steps to winterize plants -- strategies commonly observed in cooler climates but not in normally balmy Texas.

“Where did those recommendations go, and how were they implemented?” said Jeff Dennis, managing director of Advanced Energy Economy, an association of clean energy businesses. “Those are going to be some pretty key questions.”

As investigators probe the current power crisis in Texas, which has left millions of people without power or a promise of when it will be restored, questions are sure to be raised about how the state responded to the urgings from the 2011 analysis, issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North America Electric Reliability Corporation, which sets reliability standards.

All the news

*    I don't use Facebook, and suspect the world would be a better place if no one else did, too.

So it worries me not one bit that the company run by an alien (no other way to explain that haircut) has stopped Australian news feeds (or links?). 

Anything that makes Facebook less popular is fine by me. 

*   This sexual assault in Parliament is a very weird story (the circumstances around the entry into Parliament House, the aftermath, the way the politicians first tried to handle it) that reflects badly on how the Morrison government handles internal scandal.   And if this is true, it only gets worse:

*  Why does Scott Morrison retain a quite high approval rating?   And why does he have that, but his party doesn't lead in voting intention?   (I think some polls still show a slight lead?)  I think Morrison has been able to avoid scrutiny due to COVID keeping more eyes on State premiums than him, but gee I find him unimpressive.   I disliked Tony Abbott more, because he was more "in your face", and put up a pretence of being a political deep thinker, and he was a disgrace in his treatment of Gillard when he was Opposition leader.   But Morrison is so....superficial.  

* Rush Limbaugh has died.   No tears from me, and no criticism of anyone who attacks him before the body is cold, either.   (Many are pointing out that he more-or-less pioneered the "all liberals are evil and only want to hurt and crush you" fear based political narrative amongst conservatives which has poisoned politics in American and a slab of the Australian Right.  Quite despicable.) 

Top notch propaganda

I recently subscribed to CGTN (China Global Television Network) on Youtube, and so have been watching some of their huge output of pro-China content.   (Given there seems a 50/50-ish chance that the country will dominate the globe within the next 40 years, I recommend everyone subscribe and hit the "like" button a lot on the assumption that it is being recorded on a government computer somewhere in Beijing and will give you a good "social credit" rating when they become our local overlords.  Or even if you  plan on taking a holiday in China and get arrested for having the wrong bookmark on your phone browser, it probably wouldn't hurt.)

Seriously, I do think it is worth watching because it's startling to see a such a slick, completely unsubtle,  government run pro-China PR project to win global hearts and minds and attack all criticisms.   It's just not something we are used to seeing outside of a war setting, really.  

And it is surprising how they use Caucasian people to do some of the work too.  They are even sometimes resorting to sarcastic mockery rather than just ranting.   See this one about the BBC, with whom they are feuding since England banned them from TV broadcasting:

 

They also have a lot of content designed to humanise the Chinese people.  Like this one:

Uncle Hanzi? 

I think I find this interesting partly because it seems rarely explained in the West how propagandistic the Chinese government is with their own people.  I guess this channel gives us an idea, at least.

The rise of intense, uncritical nationalism within any country is always a worry, and it seems odd that we in the West are not being told much about that aspect of Chinese life.   I think I read a brief comment somewhere recently that modern Chinese nationalism is all based on a narrative of finally getting back at the West for its terrible and humiliating treatment handed out in the Opium Wars.   I wonder if that's right - it sounds kind of plausible, but I have never seen anyone explaining the content of Chinese schools' history books.

I do know that Chinese nationalism makes for some very unwatchable Chinese movies.  (And, I have to confess - as well as apologise in advance to my future overlords - that I do find spoken Chinese one of the most grating languages to the ear in foreign cinema.)   

Anyway, it's all fascinating and a bit of a worry.   I do still side with the idea that engagement is better than attempting isolation. 

 

Does Trump take the "credit" for this?

From the BBC:

China is now the EU's biggest trading partner, overtaking the US in 2020.

China bucked a wider trend, as trade with most of Europe's major partners dipped due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trade between China and the EU was worth $709bn (€586bn, £511bn) last year, compared with $671bn worth of imports and exports from the US.

Although China's economy cratered in the first quarter due to the pandemic, its economic recovery later in the year fuelled demand for EU goods.

 

Wait, what?

 

Yet Bannon has swung back to being a Trump supporter??

A perfectly normal White House.

Update:  from the report in The Guardian on the same story - just how nutty is Bannon though?

Rosen said Bannon had “great frustrations with Trump”, who had been “throwing him under the bus”, particularly over an interview Bannon gave to Time magazine.

Bannon, he said, regularly cited a New York Times column by David Brooks, in October 2017, which said some Republicans visiting the White House suspected Trump might have Alzheimer’s disease – but gave him a standing ovation anyway.

“Bannon kept saying this, and he wanted to do something about it,” Rosen said. “Now, the secret was that Bannon crazily thought that he could be president.”

Asked to what extent Bannon’s claims represented “legitimate news versus Bannon just kind of trying to get attention”, Rosen said: “That’s exactly the trick in trying to deal with Steve, because a lot of it is to draw attention to himself.”

This is why politics is not working properly in the USA

 Part 2::