#i have read ccp about a thousand times now

[luxhesperus]

mygod this line makes me so feral sjhzjznssbmadks

to me, this is a great example of what it is to be loved unconditionally. jingheng admits that there are things he does not like about the present bixing (which are understandable) but wants/chooses him not despite it but through it.

jingheng is choosing him unconditionally. yes, there are things he'd rather not be doing around bixing but why does that have to mean he cannot have him? why do those things he doesn't like have to necessarily mean that he loves bixing any less?

at the end of the day, jingheng has always been committed to choosing bixing rather than the things he is and isn't — rather than the things he did and did not become.

(i am foaming at the mouth pls why is the bare minimum more often than not fictional? 😭😭)

#lin jingheng #lu bixing #lulin #ccp #can ci pin #残次品 #i have read ccp about a thousand times now #can yall tell ccp is my comfort novel #and these boys are my comfort characters

[mariacallous]

Decades ago, Western political scientists began asking a question that has never been fully resolved but has also never seemed more urgent. They noted that since World War II, extremely few countries had joined the ranks of the globe’s truly wealthy nations and almost all that had were already democracies or were in the midst of political transitions that would lead to systems that gave citizens a choice in the selection of leaders. So, they wondered: Could China, the world’s largest country—and, since the Soviet Union’s demise, the most powerful and, in aggregate terms, richest authoritarian society—buck the trend?

If it failed to do so, China would be said, in the jargon of experts, to have succumbed to the middle-income trap: a theoretical snare awaiting countries that failed to liberalize their political systems no matter how successful they had appeared during an early phase of economic takeoff.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has been mindful of this challenge and at times has even boasted about his country’s ability not only to break this mold of notional constraints but also to prove the superiority of his version of authoritarian rule. Now, no sooner than Xi has engineered changes in China’s leadership succession rules so that he can preside over his country for life, a crisis that may come to be seen as an ideal test of the middle-income trap theory is upon him.

Its proximate cause appears to have been an apartment block fire in the far western Chinese city of Urumqi that killed 10 people. It reportedly took firefighters more than three hours to put out the blaze, which local officials said was caused by a faulty power strip, causing many on social media to speculate that the city’s ongoing strict COVID-19 lockdown measures may have hampered the response and prevented residents from evacuating. Chinese authorities have denied this and even suggested that blame lay with the apartment dwellers for being slow to flee.

The shocking news of this incident has set off the most serious political protests in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crisis, with Chinese people in a rapidly growing number of cities—including the place where Xi himself studied in Beijing, Tsinghua University—coming out in the streets by the thousands to hold up blank sheets of paper, symbolizing censorship, and braving arrest as they chant recently unimaginable slogans such as “Step down, Xi Jinping! Step down, Communist Party!” and “Don’t want dictatorship, [we] want democracy!”

Yet as tempting as it will be for many, it is wrong to see this crisis as solely the result of a spark from Urumqi. This challenge to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the state has been building for some time. The country’s unusually strict and prolonged campaign to contain the COVID-19 pandemic has been a source of deep discontent for many months, leaving many Chinese people feeling disenchanted with Xi, who seems more obsessed with control than any leader since Mao Zedong.

After a previous incident in September involving the crash of a bus carrying people from the locked-down city of Guiyang to a quarantine camp, which killed 27 people, the number of messages I began receiving from friends in China that spoke of wanting to leave the country or mentioned stories of others who had already escaped skyrocketed. That may seem merely anecdotal, but what happened next was anything but.

On Oct. 13, on the eve of the Party Congress in Beijing where Xi effectively coronated himself—and amid high, citywide security—a man hung large protest banners on Sitong Bridge, which passes over a major central thoroughfare, denouncing not just the country’s zero-COVID policy but also Xi’s dictatorship, censorship, personality cult, and suppression of human rights. The banners read:

We don’t want nucleic acid testing, we want food to eat; We don’t want lockdowns, we want freedom; We don’t want lies, we want dignity; We don’t want Cultural Revolution, we want reform; We don’t want [dictatorial] leaders, we want elections; We don’t want to be slaves, we want to be citizens.

In an echo of the famous Tank Man of Tiananmen, the man was arrested and reportedly has not been seen or heard from since. State censors made furious attempts to remove mention of the protest from webpages and social media, but the intensity of interest overwhelmed them.

The next highly unusual occurrence happened during the Party Congress itself, when Xi’s predecessor as CCP general secretary, Hu Jintao, was ushered off the main dais at a critical moment during the proceedings. Hu had just reached for a folder that is thought to have contained the final list of the members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the highest instance of power in the country after the general secretary. One theory is that Hu suspected that Xi had not respected commitments to allow people other than his closest personal allies to sit on the body, erasing past practices of relatively collective rule. Another leader prevented Hu from opening the folder, and then Xi gave the signal for him to be unceremoniously led out.

While it may be impossible to know exactly what transpired, many people in China responded with shock, as if they had finally realized how deep the country had descended into a new stage of despotism. Again, many friends in China wrote to me, asking what I had heard and writing that they could not afford to say anything, except to deplore the overall situation in the country.

Although the details of these recent events are unique, some of their contours bear strong resemblance to previous crises in the country. Take, for instance, the 1989 Tiananmen crisis. Although Deng Xiaoping, as paramount leader, eventually approved the murderous crackdown on the student and worker demonstrators who filled the square, he later said privately that it was “very unhealthy” for “the destiny of a country to be built on the prestige of one or two people.” Not since Mao has China been so dominated by a single figure as Xi.

Even worse, under Xi, at each hint of crisis, whether economic—as with the pandemic-induced slowdown or a real estate bubble—or now political, instead of the liberalizing reforms his country and its broad middle classes need and hope for, Xi has reflexively become even more sternly top-down and authoritarian in his response. This ominously echoes his famous comment about the end of Soviet rule under Mikhail Gorbachev in which Xi said the Soviet Union’s Communist rulers lost their nerve, meaning that they failed to rule without flinching and to crack down on opposition mercilessly when necessary.

No one knows what is in Xi’s mind, but he is surely aware of the example of Zhao Ziyang, his predecessor decades ago as CCP general secretary during the Tiananmen crisis (a position under Deng). Zhao, in that much simpler and poorer time, had warned that “reform includes reform of the economic system and reform of the political system. These two aspects affect one another. … If [political reform] lags too far behind, continuing with the reform of the economic system will be very difficult, and various social and political contradictions will ensue.”

Zhao had envisioned clear separations between the role and authority of the party and the government; much more independence for the country’s courts; an end to the purely rubber-stamp function of the country’s parliament; increased freedom of speech and of the press; and even a greater role for the country’s tiny, authorized alternative political parties. He and his allies argued that if the people were not granted freer expression, society would have no pressure valve, practically guaranteeing explosive crises in the future. Xi seems to have never thought well of any change that might reduce the CCP’s power, but it seems likely that even he knows that at some point China’s political system will have to adapt for the country to continue to modernize and escape the theoretical middle-income trap.

His problem, like that of so many leaders who concentrate immense power in their own hands, is that no moment ever quite looks like a good one to make serious, substantive change. The difference between Xi and Deng, who had previously long been considered the country’s most powerful ruler since Mao, is that Deng always took care to have high-profile politicians executing decisions and implementing policy in the foreground. Under Xi, who seems to utterly dominate every important committee and instance of power himself, there is no one but the great leader himself. When the Tiananmen crisis broke, Deng could blame Zhao—and did. Xi, however, has no meaningful deputy or surrogate and therefore has no one else to blame.

This places him in the teeth of an altogether different trap. If he orders his troops and police to execute a heavy-handed crackdown on a fed-up and networked citizenry, things could get bloody quickly, as with Tiananmen—with grave consequences not just for his relationship with his people but also for China’s place in the world. It is even possible that some of his commanders could refuse to execute his orders, as at least one principled general named Xu Qinxian did during Tiananmen.

On the other hand, if Xi abruptly changes strategy and puts on the garb of a supple moderate, people both within his system and without may decide that he is weak and vulnerable and become emboldened to mount bigger challenges to his authority.

One way or another, China is poised on an uncomfortable fulcrum right now, and it will have to choose a course.

[ecto-stone]

So I don’t really know that much about that my blood au you created could you tell me a bit about it?

Ha hah I Hope this is Edible

So My Blood Au is just Me dumping all the cool stuff i can think of into a DP what if Vlad is Good ^For Starter MB Vlad or Vladimir Jude Masters is a Paranormal investigater/ hunter/exocist in a sense. He seemingly Perfect in People eye, Not Really on the inside as he have many problem stem from living so long and going though alots of thing that he prefer not to talk about that he hide from People , go so far as to adjust his own emotion to what he find fit to the situration making him really hard to read. (Not Jack and Danielle, those are close enough 2 peel him like an onion if they sense something off). -Vlad And Danny are not same kind of Halfa in this AU, Vlad is Two soul (Half Blue Demon Vampire Ghost, Half Human twisted together and blend into one) and Danny is Soul within soul (Going though the accident give him two identical soul that over lapped each other) -Ghost are nerf and ecto beam and ecto Base attack can harm ghost but they can't harm Physical thing in living world Unless they are infuse with Core element same with Human entering Purgatory. -The world have 5 Realm: LivingWorld, Purgatory (GhostZone), Elsewhereness, Fairy Land and Unworld. +Going with the idea that originaly Vlad is supposed to be a vampire and many ghost in the series feel like they are more supernature creature then Ghost. Living world now have many Human and other Creature living among each other , hidden in plain sight +Purgatory: Where Ghost go and heal before they move onto Elsewhereness (Heaven in this verse) or Rebirth back to the living cycle. There are many area in Purgatory that fit human decription of after life look like , this is due to collective faith and ideal of many Ghost focus with each other to created these Resting stop. Incidentally like the living world these area are also watch over by being call King and Queen of the Death (Caretaker and protector of the Death soul, a being with incredible power capable of bending reality). Most well known one are the King Dark, Prince Argon and Princess Dora of the Dark Age Zone. Queen Desire of the thousand and one night. ect.. newest King of the death is Ghost Writer (library of the forgotten) but he prefer not be refer to as king, just Ghost writer. +Elsewhereness: The final resting Places of enternal Bliss. Once the Soul is ready to let go of all earthly desire, they are send here. Not much is known about this realm or it location. When a Soul reach enlightment it will automatically know where to find it. The realm also House many god. +Fairy Land: Home to care taker of the childhood inocent and many god that work to keep the universe running. Most common creature that live here is Fairy with two side one silly colorful side that appear to children to granted what ever their heart desire. The other is the Blue fortune side that Weaved the fabric of Luck and fate. +Unworld: A Dark realm with one way in no way out. It house many dangerous creature, ancient outer god and unspeakable Evil that have been banish to through age by god and human. >the Origin Story: +Vlad and Jack are Friend from Childhood (Their Bond are really tight kinda like Sworn Brother ) unlike their canon counter part meet in college. They Hunt Ghost but in more of a Release soul from their earthly bound kind of way via the info they get from the Masters Family Grilmore. (There is one major inconvience is that You need to wait for the correct day and time to perform ritual sending ghost back to purgatory so they can Move on to Elsewhereness/heaven of this verse ) +They Meet Maddie in college (Maddie and Vlad almost alway in a total clash with each other with Maddie tech almost Hunter like way in dealing with ghost and Vlad more traditional Way of Handling them) Which end with Three of them forming the Original Ghost Trio. With Maddie accept Vlad and Jack Respect the Death ideal. And Vlad and Jack incorperate More Technology into their Asset. +Maddie point out the inconvinient of having to wait for the correct day for each ghost to send them back to Purgatory (Their room are fill with

Container for ghost), Which lead to them comming up with the idea of Making a Ghost Portal. <Note: MB Vlad is not into Romantic relationship, Platonic one Matter to him more> >The Accident: No diet soda the Accident is purely due to one miscalculation that cost Vlad life (his Head got Blash Clean off infront of Jack and Maddie) In that Split Second of His face getting disintigrating, Vlad get a Glim into UnWorld (the Realm where are Demon and evil of the four realm are banish to) and Got Latched on and Pushed Back to the living world by a Demon Vampire Ghost Both Soul are now inhabited Vlad headless lifeless body, in Which about 3 day after Vlad burial that Vlad Body got completely decontructed inside the coffin and recontructed into a body that is more fitting to host both . Vlad have a hard time remembering Who he is after kinda get rebirth and Wander the world until he Get Suck into a Natural Ghost Portal and got Flunk Back in time. >Journey of an Immortal Being: -Vlad Stuck in the Past, He recovered his memories, Going through existenal crisis, Evil phase, Evil make me feel bad, Not Evil anymore, Found out that he is immortal now, Existenal crisis part2, Acceptance, Travel the World and Start doing the what ever he like, learning old way of magic still helping ghost and other supernatural being. -Caused several Major Change to the past that Mythical Creature got un extinct. (Due to the Law of life and death this does not affect who get born or not, it just that the world got alots more races now and those used to be born human in the original timeline might get born as another races entirely) -Get Mistaken for Messiah.( Look You can't kill Vlad, He would just be gone for like 3 day then comeback) -Caused the legend of Dracula. -Vampire cult have a horrible obession with Vlad as a Whole. Look like vampire act like one, can walk in plain day light and more importantly the ability to Open a Portal to Unworld . ( Vlad don't use this ability much and can only open small one as it is very energy consuming) -Meet his own ancestor Which is the Fentonightingale that Later Splited into Fenton and Nightingale (later change to Masters) leading to revealation that Jack and Him might be very distant Related. -Bickering With Time God (Do not trust the Clock Man that work for the Eyes) -Get Caught in War far too many time. -Meet Phantom (an odd entity that is oddly clingy to him) in the Great War. -Meet Other Some of the DP ghost when they still alive -The Horrible Bar incident that reveal Phantom true nature, an evil being that wish to turn the world back to it original nature of nothiness and try to turn vlad to the his side, Kill, Seal in Rock Case covered with Sigil to prevent Phantom from escape, Chuck it into the ocean. - The Contruction of the Coffin Ghost Portal. (Havent actually went into the Purgatory caused the CCP is one Way Portal. -Forming of many Hidden town that home supernatural being. Amity Park is one of them. - And many more unseen story >Daddy Stolen Ribbone saga (MB Vlad is sterile, he want to have kid but can't.) -The Vampire cult that he have grudge with attemp to Clone or at least created a child that have Vlad Power through ritual and cult like method. Imagine Danny Clone but even more mess up . -Vlad end the life of most of them by his own hand (they are suffering, it is best to let them go) -Birth of Danielle: +Danielle Evelyn Masters or just Dani/Dee for short is the only Stable child come out of this whole odeal. She is Created From Vlad Ribone like a Twisted Eve. And like in the book it caused both of them to be very attached to each other in a Fatherly Daughterly Way. +Dee Have Vlad Ghost power and Demonic Power but No ghost form (Her default funtion as both and whether she is in ghost mode or Human mode is all Up to energy control) and no connection to Unworld there for she can't open portal to Unworld. Dual Soul nature Wind/Fire.

+She like Frog and is interested in Marine biology (which Vlad have full support over, she have a room fill with Vlad hand made frog plusie that she all named. +He raise her teach her everything he know about how to deal with supernatural being and how to Snipe Vampire from a long distant with pin point accuracy.

+An kidnapped incident with the Vampire cult latter resulted in Dee Death at the age of 12 (1999), and Vlad becoming fully Merged into one Being with Plasmius. and wipe out the entire vampire cult in a horrible Vlad the impaler way). +After wiping out the remainder of the cult, vlad go into retirement and work as a wall Painter < he work supper fast on celling painting and no one know why> >The Boy Who Fly (2 year before the start of actual MB story) -Danny Gain his power at the age of 10, his parent know. The event of Portal acivation caused the whole town to have a black out. -They move House alots for 2 year. And Jack try his best to make his family as normal as they can be after accidenly k his friend all those year ago and now half eff his own son. -They finding out amity park their new home is on accident when the RV engine die mid way through the middle of no Where (The town shown it self to those in need) -Danny hide his abiltiy. But after a gym incident. and getting Praise by his peer for it instead of scold like with the adult Danny start getting bolder using Floating power around his new friend when no adult is watching. <Vlad who is Working on the Giant Raven paiting for the School Saw this and know imediately What Danny is> -They offically meet each other on the the roof top, when Danny mom ask him to go down the store and by some bread and he decided to try to Air Frog Swim to it. They become friend and Vlad even teach Danny how to fly properly before having to leave (they visit each other alots after the revealation, and vlad is a good adult friend that Danny can talk to) (Danno forgot about the bread and return home breadless) -Jack may stop with the whole Paranormal hunter/ghost scientist job but not Maddie. She keep doing it behind his back due to danny special need in ecto base consumtion (he havent grow abit since the accident and keep getting smaller and it concerning) -Jack found out and they have a Fight. which lead to Maddie go to his Sister house. -Danny Found out about why his dad was so stressed out about ghost thing now. When looking through his parent old stuff with his new friend tucker. (Dude why does your parent have a Picture of the wall painter in thier old junk). He show the image to Vlad. -Danny Get jack to tell the story about the inccident. Dad what if i tell you that Your friend who die 18 year ago survived and is on our front door right now. Reunion, Jack feeling guilty about making them both like this. Go Get Maddie. Happy reunion of the trio. -Fenton Parent become accepting to Danny condition, Danny have a good mentor that can teach him ho to control his power And they live happy ever after for now

#Q/A #good god how do you add read more on a QA #my blood AU #Danny Phantom #danny phantom au #god this is long #hachi text

[yueqingyuan]

The Cancipin Agenda

I promised and now I deliver! Welcome to my 2k word Cancipin pitch, adapted from discord rant form for perusal by the general public.

Links to the raws, translations, audio drama, and more can be found here. I would suggest reviewing the content warnings before reading this novel, as it covers many heavy themes.

Notes and general disclaimers:

Spoilers: I tried to keep things vague but assume a low-lever spoiler warning for this whole pitch, I try to mark anything that gets more specific.

Terminology: I read the raws and have only seen snippets of the English translations on people’s livereads, so the terms I use may not match them 100%.

I think Cancipin is an objectively well-constructed and highly impressive novel, but I am also very biased because priest checked off All my tastes with this one, take that how you will.

Just a personal pet peeve but it deals me 50 psychic damage every time I see CCP and have to disambiguate if people are talking about the priest novel or the Chinese government so I request that people abbreviate the title as C2P if possible!! plz

OKAY NOW LET’S BEGIN

General premise

Cancipin is a sci-fi novel set many millenia in the future, in a society where all 8 inhabited galaxies[1] are united under a central governing body, with only the 'interstellar pirates' in the outer regions refusing this authority. Residents of the first 7 galaxies live in a (supposed) utopia, supported by a system called the Garden of Eden that allows humans to interface directly with technology and get all their needs taken care of 24/7. However, the 8th galaxy was recovered from interstellar pirates much later and lags far behind in technology, and the locals and any people in the other galaxies with a condition that prevents them from interfacing with Eden basically get dumped there to rot. (Gotta love that dystopian class inequality!)

[1] They're probably actually solar systems but the Chinese term 星系 is ambiguous and galaxies sounds better I guess, don't worry about it too much ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Setting

Minor spoiler warning since a lot of this info is only revealed later on in the novel, but not really a plot spoiler.

Cancipin is set neither in an era where humanity is at the peak of its technological development nor is it fully post-apocalyptic. Instead, several thousand years ago, there was an age of exploration when humanity built out a transportation network to settle greater parts of the universe and achieved breakthroughs in genetic technology to make all humans live to a life expectancy of 300, but later on, a regime of tyranny took over and a lot (though not all) of this progress was lost.

It describes a world where humanity makes active choices to step back from certain technology that is deemed to be too dangerous - further genome editing is banned despite the successes in extending life spans, and because the tyrannical regime used advanced AI technology to stay in control, there are strict rules that AI must not be allowed to operate independently and cannot resemble humans too closely. It's very interesting to think about what balance a society should reach between allowing research that improves people’s lives and staying away from projects that are too risky to continue. In usual priest fashion, the novel is not about the technology itself so many of these details simply operate in the background, but it paints a thoughtful picture about where humanity might find itself millenia in the future.

Plot premise

Lin Jingheng is a former admiral of the interstellar union. Though he was disillusioned with the union since years ago when his adoptive father Lu Xin was framed and hunted down by powerful people within the system, he continued to fight to defend the union and put on appearances as he secretly planned a revolt. 5 years ago, he put the first part of his plan into action by faking his death and escaping to the 8th galaxy - partly because it would be easier to avoid detection in a place with no Eden, and partly to look for Lu Xin's long-lost child, who disappeared after his pregnant wife was shot down while attempting to flee.

Through a series of coincidences, the first person he meets there is Lu Bixing, the son of the top weapons dealer in the 8th galaxy who ran away from home to follow his dreams of exploring the 8 galaxies and building a school. Lin Jingheng set a genetic lock on the escape capsule he fled in to only open for Lu Xin's child, but as Lu Bixing is the sort of mad scientist to find a mysterious capsule floating in space and go "i'm gonna HACK it" and not just leave well enough alone, he was never able to confirm whether he had the right person.

So, both of them end up settling down on the nearby planet Beijing Beta as Lin Jingheng bides his time taking over the local gang/shadow government of the planet and Lu Bixing is happy to have found a sugar daddy generous sponsor to fund his school. 

But all of their plans are shattered when the interstellar pirates invade and war breaks out, and the rest of the novel follows the journey of this whole world through turbulent times as they try to find a new order in the ruins of the old.

Major themes of the novel involve faith, the resilience of humanity, and the cyclic nature of history. It tells the story of a broken world putting itself back together, and the importance of standing back up even knowing you’ll fall again.

Characters and relationship dynamic/development

Both of the main characters are shaped by their past. Lin Jingheng and his twin sister Lin Jingshu grew up in a cold, lifeless home with only each other to lean on, only to be separated at a young age when their father died. Lin Jingheng was lucky to be taken in by Lu Xin, one of the few people of the Interstellar Union who truly believed in its Declaration of Freedom, and the admiral who disobeyed orders to recover the Eighth galaxy from the interstellar pirates over a century ago. Though Lin Jingheng would lose this adoptive family too early and get pushed into acting the role of the cold, ruthless, power-hungry bastard by the vortex of First galaxy politics, he never truly gives up on his adoptive father’s influence and his sense of duty towards all the people of the Interstellar Union. And, for all that he acts like a huge bastard to everyone else, he remains a secret romantic and incredibly soft towards the people he cares about.

Lu Bixing, meanwhile, grew up in the Eighth galaxy, witnessing how the Union had abandoned them first-hand. Though he is open-minded, extroverted, and strives to understand people with values unlike his own, his loyalties remain primarily to the Eighth galaxy. Even though he ran away from home, his father, a weapons dealer who goes by Monoeyed Hawk, is one of the most important people in his life (and even if he ends up stuck in the middle of a lot of fights between his ‘sugar daddy’ and his ‘real daddy’). More details about Lu Bixing’s youth get into spoiler territory, but I will note that I consider the 信徒/’Patron’ physical-only extra 100% required reading after the main story. In short, though Lu Bixing gives an initial impression as the sunny, optimistic, maybe even a bit childish type, the optimistic exterior is a side of him that he actively chooses to show to the world. He is more than capable of stepping up and taking responsibility when necessary, and as he says himself, being good-natured doesn’t mean not having a backbone.

In summary~ we have ~ sunny charming extroverted (mad) scientist/school headmaster who gives excellent motivational speeches x stoic cynical serious (but actually a huge mensao) ex-general whose favorite hobby is insulting people with increasingly creative roasts.

As for the development of their relationship, Cancipin is a prime example of what I love about priest’s nianxia[2] novels. Specifically, the way she sketches how two people can go from an uneven relationship between protector and protected, and evolve to become true equals by the end. Even though their romantic relationship begins before the halfway point, their early relationship definitely involved Lin Jingheng treating Lu Bixing as someone to one-sidedly protect and spoil, and Lu Bixing goes through a truly stunning character arc to become someone Lin Jingheng can trust and rely on by the end.

Against the background of a world thrown into turmoil, priest shows us the story of two seemingly different people who undergo and resolve their own crises of faith, find that they are not so different in the end, and choose to fight for a better world hand in hand.

[2] I don’t want to mislead people who specifically enjoy age gap dynamics, so please note that despite the 16-year age gap, that aspect is NOT really prevalent in their relationship, and is also not very remarkable in a setting where people stay young until age 200. The age gap is definitely much less of a factor than it is in Shapolang, Your Distance, etc.

On a lighter note, due to Lin Jingheng’s reputation as a Right Cold Bastard, their relationship is apparently so hilariously baffling to outsiders that priest wrote four whole different scenes of side characters finding out they’re together, and it’s 500% hilarious each time.

NOTE: The following section is going to get more spoilery, and I will allude to some events from both Cancipin and Shapolang more directly! Skip down to the side characters section if you want to avoid spoilers!

Connections to Shapolang and priest’s writing journey

I would highly recommend reading Cancipin sometime after reading Shapolang. The two novels share a number of similarities from a high-level perspective, and knowing what priest disliked about her earlier work, it was interesting to note aspects of Cancipin that appeared to be her making up for some of those regrets and learning from past mistakes to craft a more solid narrative.

She complained that SPL didn’t have sufficient tension because Chang Geng was too OP, but made sure to be absolutely ruthless in Cancipin and make sure fate is never on their side. Most things that could go wrong do go wrong, and she absolutely took the “let’s break this boi like a glowstick and see what happens” approach with Lu Bixing’s growth arc by tearing away his support system and making him step up to take responsibility. In addition, while Changgu could definitely have ended up at odds over their conflicting loyalties and simply didn’t because they got lucky, Lin Jingheng and Lu Bixing have to confront this conflict head-on and actively choose how to compromise on their priorities.

However, being forced to walk this more difficult path means that every single success in Cancipin feels incredibly well-earned because they had to fight for what they want and take initiative to reconcile their differences. Their relationship feels all the stronger for all they had to work for it, and I love them so so much.

Side characters

As usual, priest included quite the interesting and expansive cast of side characters. I won’t go into too much detail as I’ve gone on for quite long already and many details are spoilers, but we have:

Zhanlu, Lin Jingheng’s AI assistant, v cute v babie (I find all the AIs in this novel soooo interesting from an AI alignment perspective but I digress)

Lin Jingshu, Lin Jingheng’s equally hot and scary twin sister, wonder what she’s up to?

Monoeyed Hawk, Lu Bixing’s real daddy, BEST DANMEI DAD 500%, keeps getting in catfights with Lin Jingheng trying to keep him away from his darling son

Admiral Woolf and Professor Harden, older characters who watched the growth of the Union since its founding

Lu Bixing’s students, all cute kids who get a lot of character growth themselves

Elizabeth Turan and Lin Jingheng’s other ex-subordinates, Lin’s circus, pretty much all of them are in love with him (relatable)

And many more!

Action writing

I'm not usually one to gush over action scenes but they deserve a mention because the space battle scenes in this novel are Just. So. Good. In usual priest fashion she didn't spend too much time giving them a bunch of fancy gadgets, so the battle scenes aren’t too hard to follow, but she uses a certain set of basic maneuvers to build up the most fascinating strategy battles and it’s absolutely mesmerizing to follow.

Sometimes I do get tired when there's a lot of plot at once but that was absolutely not the case in this novel, I just absolutely couldn't put it down because the plot, action, and relationship arcs were all just so enthralling.

Anyways, that’s all I’ll say for now, but read Cancipin!! I definitely consider it one of priest’s masterpieces, you won’t regret it!! lulin yyds thanks for your time

#novel rec #cancipin #priest #can ci pin #c2p #残次品 #my rec #long post #wooo i'm done staring at this take my braindump

[canmom]

Animation Night 46: dònghuà 2

Once again: 嘿朋友动画的晚上正在上映电影！

Tonight we’re going to return to the subject of Chinese animation, aka dònghuà! Last time we went here, I went on a pretty long tangent researching the history of Chinese animation; so head to that post if you’d like to read about its origins with animators like the Wan brothers drawing frames under Japanese occupation; the post-war stylistic flourishing at Shanghai Animation Film Studio during the early Mao years, such as Te Wei’s beautiful ink-wash films; the sudden about-face during the Cultural Revolution when the CCP decided it would rather send those animators to the countryside and animation should only be used for propaganda films; the doldrums following Mao’s death, after the Shanghai Animation generation died out, and the remaining studios provided cheap outsourcing for foreign studios; and now the rapid, startlingly impressive revival of anime-influenced films in the last few years.

That revival is coming in part at the hands of studios like Wolf Smoke, Haoliners, and Nice Boat, who have been bringing some pretty amazing traditional animation in the last few years. Unfortunately, finding out anything about that animation - the story of its production, the hopes of its creators, and indeed idiomatic, well-edited subtitles - tends to be quite difficult! You have to make do with very barebones English-language articles which repeat the same information, and hope you’re not too misled by machine translation of the wiki articles.

Even so, there’s enough groups working on it that I have been able to put together another program of donghua, mostly from the last few years! The main thing we’re going to be checking out is Ne Zha (哪吒之魔童降世 Nézhā zhī Mótóng Jiàngshì, literally Birth of the Demon Child Nezha), a CG-animated action/comedy film directed by ‘Jiaozi’ (a pseud that translates to ‘dumplings’, real name Yang Yu) at Chengdu Coco Cartoon (可可豆动画). Jiaozi was a self-taught animator, diverging from the medicine track to teach himself 3D animation.

He did well early on with a short film 'See Through’ (打，打个大西瓜 lit. Hit, Hit the Big Watermelon), a short film about a pointless war over a tiny island and two pilots caught up in the midst of it, which does some fascinating things with pacing and physical comedy, using gesture and symbolism to tell a story without dialogue! The film earned a ton of awards, and rightly so, it’s pretty outstanding work. But for a while, it seems he could only work on outsourced animation.

This situation changed after China saw the release of the major collaboration project Monkey King: Hero Is Back (西游记之大圣归来 Xīyóu jì zhī dà shèng guīlái, lit. Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage), which made a fuckton of money and showed the media companies there was actually quite a lot of profit to be made in domestic 3D animation. Yi Qiao, CEO of anime distributor Colorroom Pictures, smelled money - and he flew out to meet Jiaozi in person. Qiao turned out to be right in his bet, because after a five year production, Ne Zha ended up setting records as the second-highest grossing film in China.

Like the upcoming sequel in the same universe, Ne Zha is a modern riff on part of the 16th-Century novel Investiture of the Gods (封神演義 Fēngshén Yǎnyì), a Ming-dynasty fantasy imagining of events thousands of years prior when Ji Fa overthrew the Shang Dynasty and founded the Zhou Dynasty in 1046 BC. Which means we may find some of the characters and events a little opaque, but part of the director’s intent is indeed to

As we saw last time, the popularity of Nezha as a mythological figure owes a lot to a previous animated film, Nezha Conquers the Dragon King, one of the last major projects of Shanghai Animation Film Studios following Mao’s death; last time I showed only segments of that film but this time I think I might play us the whole thing for a comparison of two different eras!

The other pillar of tonight’s Animation Night is the work of Nice Boat Animation (好传动画 Hǎo Chuán Dònghuà). Last time we watched a trailer for their upcoming historical drama film Shuo Feng - Po Zhen Zi, which has supposedly been released in China last year; I can’t get my hands on that film, but they’ve been doing a lot of other incredibly impressive work before that.

While there’s not much info to be had in English, Nice Boat seem to be very small, and rather defiantly ‘indie’ (they released Dahufa (2017) with a mocking note thanking those who ‘brought them difficulties’ with getting the film approved). But they absolutely have the talent to back it up, with their fight choreography in series like Fog Hill of Five Elements (雾山五行 Wu Shan Wu Xing) (2020) giving the most sakuga-rich anime a serious run for its money. Strong enough - at least in my book! - to make up for some very confusing plotting and relatively limited character animation outside the delicious fight scenes.

So, on that front: Fog Hill of Five Elements (Wu Shan Wu Xing) (2020) features a small township whose apothecary has secretly wronged a group of bird demons, and now face those demons’ revenge - but a wandering immortal with elemental powers happens to get caught in the middle of the conflict.

Alongside that, there’s Nice Boat’s feature film Dahufa (大护法) (2017) - a gorgeously stylised film about a warrior attempting to rescue his prince from a society run by a dystopian cult. Funded intermittently by tools like Kickstarter, the film proved rather controversial on its release due to both its graphic violence (including intense scenes of executions by firing squad) and the ready political readings as critical of the CCP (and though the director speaks more of capitalist alienation, that’s not exactly disconnected!) Apparently the Communist Youth League denounced the film on this basis, which predictably caused it to get a lot more attention and views.

I don’t really know the ins and outs of modern Chinese film censorship, but a lot of articles comment on the blurry lines of what is acceptable - and like, speculatively, this may well be part of the reason why the vast majority of animation I can find has a mythological rather than contemporary setting! But a film like Dahufa seems a lot more on the nose, bringing even in the trailer some incredible surreal imagery and a fantastic visual sense that I can’t wait to see in context.

We’ll see more from Nice Boat pretty soon, with work on this season’s post-apocalyptic robot anime ‘Eden’ for Netflix. Hope it turns out to be good.

Time permitting, I would also like to show some more of the work of Wolf Smoke - mostly very short films and trailers, I don’t have anything the length of Valley of White Birds, but they have an impressive range of shorter films in a variety of tones (ok, admittedly mostly action! but it’s good shit!)

There’s some really tasty stuff going on in the world of donghua at the moment, and I would love for it to get better known in English. Animation Night 46 is going to start at 7pm UK time over at the usual place, twitch.tv/canmom - let’s see if I can draw some sort of title card in the last half an hour!

#animation night #donghua

[revenge-of-the-shit]

Hi, I recently found your blog here and found it a lot insightful! In the BB you ( rightfully) called out the subtle sinophobia hidden within the BB. I am Korean(sorry if I sound like Sery Kim) and I wanted to create a story of how to criticize the CCP without having it negatively blowback on Asian Americans living here in the US. Do you have any tips?

Hey there! Thank you for reaching out. Here's my two cents on writing fiction that's CCP-critical, although when you write things like this, it's important to reach out to multiple Chinese voices, I think: Tl;dr: The most important thing is to show that the government is NOT the people. Separate the people and the government, because the actions of the few do not represent the majority.

If you want to criticize the CCP by depicting its fictional counterpart as a foreign entity in your story, show its impact on the people living within the central country. What I mean is this: let's say your story is set in fictional-USA, and your character is watching the CCP do something in fictional-China. Show the impact that it has on Asian Americans. Show how anti-asian racism rises; show how Chinese families react; show that the Chinese ppl are separate from the government. And honestly, for extra nuance steps: show how the propaganda works. I hate the CCP. So do a great number of my friends (Chinese or not). And family members. But I also have family members living in Canada and in Hong Kong who love the CCP. And it sucks. But what this means is: there's nuance. Not 100% of Chinese ppl love or hate the CCP. There's a mix. Some have been brainwashed by propaganda. Some just... truly believe in the party. There's nuance to it.

If you want to criticize it by writing about characters in the country, there's two routes you can take: a) The character who's the rebel. This is the character who dislikes the govt; who is critical; who works against it or secretly fumes against it. When writing this character, it is vital that they are not the only one. Be careful not to send the message "only exceptional Chinese ppl don't like the CCP" because that's just wrong. There IS hidden resistance; but it's so, so quiet because people need to survive. b) The character who plays by the govt's book. Personally, I'm a fan of unreliable narration done right. Explore the mindset of a character who wholeheartedly believes that their government is always right and that the government is the people. If done right, you could create some terrifyingly nuanced and complex insight into the mind of someone who has been fed propaganda from the moment they were born. And make it clear that there's some doublethink going on - that there's hypocrisy underneath the surface and that there's ISSUES. I'll give you an example of propaganda. (CW: Anti-Indigenous Racism) I'm Canadian. All my life, I've been taught in school and in the media and in the books I read that Canada is a pretty neat country. Sure, we've got some problems, but as a whole people seem polite and all the bad stuff seems left behind in history, right? Wrong. Wrong. This mindset is absolutely fucking WRONG. I celebrated Canada Day for most of my life because I was taught that it was a good thing to do. I never really understood what it stood for other than a nationalistic holiday because it was always taught to me as a celebratory day. I was told that residential schools were closed a long time ago, and I was told that we're better now. No. No we aren't. Canada is literally recovering thousands of bodies of Indigenous children who were ripped from their homes and murdered by the government and the church. Last year, settlers ransacked Indigenous fisheries on our east coast. The RCMP (national police) is still demonstrating disproportionate violence against Indigenous peoples. Canada Day isn't a day of celebration. It's a day where the colonizers celebrated their hold over stolen land while they committed literal genocide on the native people. It should be a day of mourning. Of reflection. But the fact is, I didn't know about this for years because I wasn't taught this. At all. I was taught that the cops were always good, that Canada is nicer than its southern neighbour in terms of racism, and that Canada day is a very good and proud day. And I believed it, because I was a child and it was ingrained my education for the entirety of my schooling. While Canada is certainly more democratic, the fact remains that there's still propaganda entrenched in a cishet white patriarchal system, and it's something I'm still unlearning to this day. Anyhow, I digress. Tl;dr: writing from the POV of a character who has been fed propaganda - and who learns to unlearn this propaganda - can be really, REALLY good if done well.

#annessarose rambles #annessarose writes #racism #anti indigenous violence #non sw #writing advice #genocide tw #long post

[tinyshe]

Pope: Private property is ‘not Christian’, WEF agrees

At the turn of the month November-December, the pope made a move that was described as shocking by many. He argued that Christianity did not support the right to own a home. This led to surprised and outraged reactions, whereby several pointed out that those who are forced to rent or beg for shelter can never be free. Free West Media can here reveal that the Pope's statement is in line with the plans that the globalist elite has long discussed and also more or less clearly communicated to the public, something that most people have overlooked. Among other things, we present the World Economic Forum's 8-point vision for 2030. These world-changing plans are beginning to materialize in various ways now, including in China.

Published: January 19, 2021, 3:46 pm

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Pope Francis attracted a lot of attention in Catholic circles on November 30 when he said several controversial things in a video message to judges from the Committee on Social Rights in Africa and America. However, the general public is not aware of his sensational statement, as the system media did not report on it.

The pope said, among other things, that a new “social justice” is needed and that private ownership is not something obvious in Christianity and therefore not for the Catholic Church either.

“Let us build the new social justice and admit that the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute and immovable,” said Francis.

Outraged reactions

Many were shocked by the statement and pointed out that the right to own private property is one of the most important human rights.

PROFESSOR KLAUS SCHWAB, 82, is a German engineer, economist and professor of business policy who is best known as the founder and chairman of the powerful globalist foundation World Economic Forum (WEF). In his book Covid-19: The Great Reset, Schwab claims that the world “will never” return to normal, despite acknowledging that the alleged coronavirus pandemic “does not pose a new existential threat.” – The pandemic represents a rare but narrow time window with opportunities to reflect (re: flect), rethink (re: imagine) and restore (re: set) our world, Schwab said at the launch of The Great Reset this summer. Photo: KTU

They pointed out that without that right you are like slaves of old, who must rely on their owners giving them a roof over their heads and food. Being always forced to earn in order to pay for the most basic need – protection against the forces of the weather – makes you both unfree and in practice completely powerless, some said on social media.

The pope’s statement was also widely discussed in Christian circles and no comments were positive. The exception was possibly the Twitter account Lichten & Bright who wrote:“Thank you for letting us know the Pope’s position on private ownership of property and means of production. We had no idea that he was an advocate of nationalizations [the state seizes] all land and business companies and against democratic elections. Thoughtful things”.

The Twitter account Catholic Victory wrote briefly that “Francis is a heretic and not a pope”.

Several people pointed out that it was reminiscent of the startling tones heard for several years from the World Economic Forum (WEF) foundation, which is best known for the annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. It brings together some of the world’s most powerful policy makers and globalists in politics and business. It was precisely the WEF that this summer, via its “ambassador” Prince Charles, launched The Great Reset, which more and more world leaders are now talking openly about being implemented.

The author of The Great Reset is Klaus Schwab, chairman of the powerful WEF, who wrote a 280-page book entitled COVID-19: The Great Reset. The book puts forward the argument that the pandemic has proven absolutely necessary to immediately introduce a completely new world order.

No private ownership 2030

To get an idea of ​​the background to the pope’s strange statement and what The Great Reset might mean, we can watch a video from the WEF entitled “8 predictions for the world 2030”.

COVID-19: THE GREAT RESET is 280 pages long and was already published on July 9, almost four months into the pandemic. Many have pointed out the improbability of writing such a comprehensive and complex book in such a short time. It tells us that the pandemic has shown the need to immediately introduce a new world order, which does not quite unexpectedly advocate a comprehensive “world government” and a merger of governments and multinational corporations to meet people’s needs. The incentive for for-profit large companies to pay out, for example, social benefits is, to say the least, vague. Instead of prioritizing profits, companies must now put “people at the center”. The book also proclaims that capitalism is obsolete and should instead be replaced by a new merger of capitalism and socialism, which is called “Stakeholder capitalism”. Critics call it communism in the form of a totalitarian global technocracy ruled by a small globalist elite using Big Tech (technology giants) and artificial intelligence (AI).

The first point there is as simple as it is remarkable. It states that “You will own nothing and you will be happy”. The point also explains that “Whatever you need, you will rent”. So no more ownership, but everything should be rented, including the clothes you wear on the body.

Can they really mean it? We visit WEF’s website for more information. There you can in a text, which paints the future they want to see in 2030, read the following:

Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city – or should I say “our city”. I own nothing. I do not own a car. I do not own a house. I do not own any appliances or clothes.

The text on the WEF’s website also states that it is not only private ownership that will be abolished in the new utopia, or dystopia depending on who you ask, but there will also be no privacy. We can read there that:

Sometimes I can get annoyed by the fact that I have no real integrity. Nowhere can I go without being registered. I know that somewhere everything I do, think and dream about is recorded. I can only hope that no one will use it against me.

Many who hear it for the first time believe that it must be a conspiracy theorist’s crazy fantasies, but it is instead the richest and most powerful globalists on the planet who meet annually in Davos who present it in text and video form. System media has not reported on this and then the general public does not know these visions and agendas of these globalists.

Canadian Whistleblower has been right so far

Someone who claimed to be a Canadian MP and member of the Liberal Party of Canada (Canada’s Liberal Party led by Justin Trudeau, the country’s current Prime Minister) wrote an open letter on October 10 to warn the Canadian people that the pandemic is a smokescreen with the aim of introducing a far-reaching agenda where, among other things, people will be forced to renounce their right to private ownership. The Whistleblower did not reveal his name, but wrote that “I sit on several committee groups, but the information I provide comes from the Strategic Planning Committee, which is governed by the PMO [abbreviation for Prime Minister’s Office]”.

The anonymous MP then set out a secret roadmap established by Trudeau, which would be implemented regardless of their views or objections. He initially states that a second shutdown will be introduced in November, which will then be even tougher over Christmas and New Year. This is exactly what has happened in both North America and Europe. The whistleblower then indicates a frightening development in 2021, where, among other things, a third wave from a mutation called “COVID-21” – this time with real death rates – will be followed by an even harsher third shutdown in the first and second quarters of 2021.

Regarding the current economy and ownership, he indicates an impending “collapse of the supply chain, stock shortages, major economic instability” in the second quarter of 2021. Desperate people will then be offered the general basic income program, Universal Basic Income [UBI] in English. It can be mentioned here that Australia has already made it clear that only vaccinated citizens will be given welfare funds under a new law with the slogan “No jab, no pay”, “no syringe, nothing paid”.

In China, thousands of people in rural areas who voluntarily abandon their privately owned property and move to newly built apartments have been rewarded in various ways, while those who struggle are arrested and punished. Their houses are being demolished regardless of compliance.

POPULATION FROM THE RURAL AREA has begun in China. Here you can see Xiguozhuang, the first village in China’s eastern Shandong province, where residents saw their houses demolished at short notice. Fewer than a dozen homes remain along the village’s main road when the photo was taken in August. The Communist Party (CCP) forcibly expels farmers from their homes and farms. Liu, an affected farmer, recounts how he came home one day and discovered that local officials were preparing to demolish his house. When he called the police, they arrested him instead. Liu told the news channel NPR how about a hundred government officials surrounded his home before breaking down and arresting him, because he “resisted”. Liu’s privately owned property has now been demolished and apartment buildings await him and his neighbors. Photo: Amy Cheng / NPR

NEWLY BUILT MICRO APARTMENTS IN CHINA. Here you can see high-rise buildings with micro-apartments in Heze, in China’s eastern Shandong province, where Liu and his neighbors will be forcibly relocated when they are ready. The farmers are upset about the high rent they are being forced to have and will find it very difficult to afford. They are given the right to continue using the land, but they say that it will be impossible due to the long distance between the rental apartments they have been forced to and their land and that they do not have buildings left there that are necessary for the work. For several years, China has built many new cities, some of the largest in the world, which in most cases are still completely empty. This has been a mystery to many. Now that the CCP is starting to forcibly relocate people to the countryside and demolish their homes and farms, some are beginning to suspect that these “ghost towns” were built for Agenda 2030 and the massive expulsions from the countryside the globalists advocate (see NyT v50 / 2020).

Then the whistleblower describes in detail how the Canadians will be forced to renounce their ownership starting already this year. The anonymous Member writes:

Based on the roadmap provided, the Strategic Planning Committee was asked to design an effective way to change Canadians to meet unprecedented economic hardship. One that will change Canada and change the lives of Canadians forever. What we were told was that the federal government would offer Canadians a total debt write-off to compensate for what is essentially an economic collapse at the international level, where the federal government will offer Canadians to write off all their debts. Here’s how it works:

The federal government will offer to write off all personal debts (mortgages, loans, credit cards, etc.) where financing will be provided by the Canada [International Monetary Fund] IMF during what will be known as the World Debt Reset.

In exchange for accepting this total debt forgiveness, the individual will give up ownership of all property and assets forever. The individual will also need to agree to participate in the vaccination program for COVID-19 and COVID-21, which would allow the individual to travel and live indefinitely even during a complete shutdown (using a photo ID called Canada’s HealthPass).

With the pope’s statement, the Vatican and the Catholic Church have now officially taken the position that such possible plans do not run counter to the “Christian tradition”. Pope Francis was the one who, at the UN headquarters on September 25, 2015, the first visit ever by a pope, saw to it that all world leaders signed Agenda 2030.

All rights reserved. You have permission to quote freely from the articles provided that the source (www.freewestmedia.com) is given

[evilelitest2]

How did China become the way it is now? They went from dynasties to a communist dictatorship that targets Uighurs?

Well i will say, the Qing Dynasty (last dynasty of China) also did a lot of genocides against Nomadic non Han peoples on the frontier provinces (Despite being a non Han steppe dynasty themselves) , like China has a long history of that sort of thing.  But to answer your main question, this is really complicated but i’ll try to reduce it down to a few steps

Step one: The Qing Dynasty, last Imperial Dynasty of China, is chilling out being the Imperial power when the British Empire, in their endless addiction TEA basically gets a ton of the nation addicted to opium to force China to Trade with them, cementing their role as history more aggressive drug dealer.  When china is like “hey we don’t want to do discount heroin” Britain launches a series of “Opium wars” where they destroy the Qing army and force them to basically a accept these unequal treaties where Britain and the other European powers could basically run sections of most of the Chinese coastal cities, were immune to Chinese law, take Hong Kong for themselves (different story) and force China to enter unequal trade treaties. 

Step 2: In part to response to this, an unorthodox Christian sect starts a massive Revolution/Civil war called the Taiping Rebellion, which has the “FUN” distinction of being one of the most bloody war in human history...ever.  up to 30 million people die.  Remember this is happening at the same time as the American Civil War, whose highest death count only gets up to 1 million.   This does massive damage to Qing China, even though they win the war, and makes them super hostile to Christianity and western adaptations.  

Step 3:Japan, who is going through their own period of Modernization, decides the best way to reject Western Imperialism is to Imperalize Korea.  This leads to the First Sino Japanese War in 1895, who defeat China and start to take over chinese territory.  They take even more when they win the Russo Japanese War in 1905.  

Step 4:  The Qing rejection most attempts to reform the state (such as the Hundred Days reform) and instead attempt to fight all the Colonial powers...at once in the utterly disastrous 1908 Boxer Rebellion.  The Qing are semi colonized as a result and financially ruined and have lost the respect of the people. 

Step 5: Sun Yat Sen, the most prominent Republican (as in democracy) founds his resistance group to China based on the notions of China accepting westernization, modernization, a secular anti traditionalist goverment, nationalism, anti imperialism, and democracy.  The idea that for China to have a good future is to embrace a western style of nation state building.

STep 6: In 1911, a carelessly discarded cigerrete leads to an explosion which leads to a popular rebellion against the Qing.  Before anybody, including the rebel leaders themselves are ready, suddenly the Qing dynasty is gone leaving behind a massive Power Vacumm.  

Step 7: Sun, taking control of the state, founds the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang or KMT.  They attempt to create a modern Republican Chinese Nation State but erm...

Step 8: A previous Qing General named Yuan Shikai attempts to overthrow the Republic and create a new Imperial Dynasty.  He fails and dies, but the civil war between him and the KMT leaves the KMT in control of only a few Chinese cities, and the rest of China breaks into a bunch of local petty fiefdoms with local military leaders just declaring themselves warlord and running China.  

Step 9: Sun is like “ok the democracy thing isn’t working out” and enlists the general Chiang Kai-Shek to help the KMT unify china.  Chiang starts to fight the other warlords, and when Sun dies in 1925,  Chiang turns the KMT into a military positivist dictatorship with the long term goal of unifying/modernizing China and then maybe becoming a democracy.  

Everybody Pauses for World War I

Step 10: Some Chinese intellectuals think that the new party should be founded on more left wing principles, and they found the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  They ally with the KMT because they also want to modernize/unify China, and accept from the Soviet Union as well as other anti colonal forces

Step 11: Chiang (with the help of the CCP) does a pretty good job at defeating the Warlords and unifying China.  BUt Chiang then betrays the CCP and massacres most of them as well as left wing KMT members, and starts to adopt an anti Communist profile.  

Step 12: The CCP, now much more radical, sets up their commune and fights against both the KMT and the warlords.  But they lose and are forced to flee across the rural China as part of the “Long March”.  Most of the communists die but those who survive to arrive to the last communist hold out in safety, is the new communist leader and totally not a psychopathic murderer, Mao Zedong.  

Step 13: Chiang has mostly unified China, defeating or subduing most of the Warlords, and is slowly but surely destroying the last remnants of the Communist party, who have retreated to a few hold outs in the rural north.  The new KMT state is relatively stable but still a military dictatorship surrounded by enemies. Meanwhile Japan is going through its fascist phase and is gobbling up bits and pieces of Manchuria, but Chiang doesn’t think he has the strength to fight Japan until he has finished fighting the Communists.  

Step 14: Japans military on the Ground goes rogue and just sort of...invades Manchuria on their own.  Meanwhile Chiang is literally kidnapped and forced at gun point to declare war on Japan in 1937.  The KMT and the CCP make an alliance to fight against Japan jointly.  The Second Sino Japanese War has begun 

Step 15: Between 1937-1945, The KMT is almost entirely driven back to rural Western China by the Japanese, who spend their time committing horrific atrocities which the goverment still hasn’t apologized today (which is why the rest of East Asia hates Japan), including the absolute horrific Rape of Nanking (look it up).   meanwhile the CCP fights a few token battles but then hides in the north and slowly trains up their forces and lets the KMT and Japan fight it out 

Step 16: The US gets Japan to surrender and the CCP and KMT immediately go back to fighting each other.  However the economically ruined KMT isn’t able to defeat the far more disciplined CCP and is defeated in 1949.  The CCP declares itself a new country, the People’s Republic of China (PRC).  Meanwhile the KMT under Chiang flees to the Island of Formosa (Taiwan) and says that they still are the Republic of China.  The two Chinas then spend the the next 70 years pretending the other doesn’t exist

Step 17: Mao, now dictator of China, attempts to modernize the economy and centralize the state.  The good news is that the economy does recover.  The bad news is massive human rights violations and the massacre of a few million people.  The PRC while an ally of the Soviet Union, really is an independent communist state that actually can hold its own.  Mao gets involved in the Korea War against the US and while the PRC doesn’t win, they also don’t lose which establishes them as a world power.  

Step 18: However Mao very quickly goes off the Deep End and launches the “Great Leap Forward” possibly the worse economic policy in human history which leads to the death of up to 40 million people....whoops

Step 18: The PRC leadership puts Mao in a corner so he can think about what he did and try to restore order, but then Mao is able to launch a revolution against his own government with the students called “The Cultural Revolution” which is...the weirdest revolution ever?  Its like if a dictator lead a revolution against his own goverment...long story for another time.  The Cultural Revolution destroys mountains of traditional chinese art and culture, kills, arrests and harrassings thousands to millions of people, and just breaks the state, finally ending with Mao’s death in 1976. 

Step 19: With Mao’s death, the more moderate faction of the PRC takes over, purges the more radical members of the Party, ends the Cultural revolution and starts to semi liberalize the economy, leading to the weird communist/capitalist/mercantilism/Imperial hybrid China operates under today, including of course massive corruption.  The dictatorship because less intense and relaly less communist and they start to drift away from the Soviet Union.  Then in 1989 as the Soviet Union is collapsing, and their is a massive student protest against corruption and in favor of China becoming a more liberal democratic and socialist state.  The goverment after a few months of dithering, opens fire on the protesters and you still aren’t allowed to talk about it in China today.  Death toll varies but most non Government accounts put it at around 10,000.  

Step 20: China becomes a global super power, only behind the US and EU in power and turns their government into a major economic hub, though they keep pissing off their western allies with unfair business practices.  Recently however, the country has gone from an oligarchic autocracy to an...autocracy autocracy with the rise of their new leader, Xi Jinping, who has centralized authority and made the country a lot more oppressive and autocratic, while pushing aback against corrupt and dissident.

Step 21: Which finally brings us to the Uyghurs. Imperial China did this too, but the PRC really has a problem with the various non Han minority groups, doubly so for those who are Muslim and have separatist leanings. So the extermination of the Uyghurs really could be read as a continuation of how the PRC has treated the Tibetans, the Mongolians, and even Hong Kong over the last few decades.  This is part of their vision of China as being a centralized, modernize, secular, unified Nation State, which doesn’t really leave room for regional ethnic religions minorities, doubly so against those with a non Chinese language.  

That is the super simple version, Chinese history is super complicated.

#ask EvilElitest #Chinese History #PRC #CCP #KMT #Republic of China #People's Republic of China #chiang kai-shek #mao zedong #Qing Dynasty #Sino-Japanese War #Rape of Nanking #uyghur genocide #Imperial Japan #Xi Jinping #Chinese Communist Party #Imperialism

[potteresque-ire]

A Virus By Any Other Name ...

This post is about the “Chinese Virus” controversy. It’s admittedly somewhat painful for me to write. Under the cut, for this is long.

Please call the coronavirus by its official name, COVID-19, but please, also, never forget which GOVERNMENT allowed the once easily containable virus to spread to the good people around the world, starting from the people which the same government is supposed to look after, the people of Wuhan, China.

Do not let this GOVERNMENT get away with its propaganda. Yes, the virus could’ve originated anywhere in the sense that the first animal-to-human transmission could’ve happened outside China, but it was the Chinese GOVERNMENT who hadn’t learned from SARS, who’d turned a blind eye to the selling of wildlife in filthy, inhumane conditions in the Huanan Seafood Market (武漢華南海鮮批發市場). It was the Chinese GOVERNMENT who reprimanded and silenced the good doctors, among them Dr. Ai Fen (艾芬) and Dr. Li Wen Liang (李文亮), who tried to alert their colleagues of a new SARS-like virus detected among their hospital’s newly admitted patients working in the seafood market late December 2019. It was the Chinese GOVERNMENT who lied to the people in Wuhan that the virus would not transmit from animals to humans until January 20th, days *after* the city of Wuhan, with permission from the GOVERNMENT, held a 40,000 family feast (萬家��)  in celebration of Chinese New Year.

Every loss of life contributed to the virus from every country could have been avoided if this GOVERNMENT did not cover up, is not still covering up. Dr. Ai’s interview has been taken offline the day after it was posted and she has disappeared, like so many who have dared to speak the truth about this GOVERNMENT. Dr Li has passed away from the virus. Due to the coverup, doctors like him couldn’t wear proper PPEs. He was only 33.

It is true that the lockdown of Wuhan and the Hubei province bought Europe and US time to prepare for the virus, which the Western countries have largely squandered. But just because the Western governments have their fault doesn’t mean the much greater crime of the Chinese GOVERNMENT is automatically absolved. For now, of course, the attention should be focused on taking care of yourself and your loved ones, monitoring your government to make sure they are doing the right things, but when this is all over -- and it will be over -- please remember that, as it was said in The Hunger Games, who the real enemy is. Please remember while a virus is responsible for a disease, a GOVERNMENT is responsible for an outbreak. Outbreaks of this nature is also a repeated offence for the Chinese GOVERNMENT, which made the same mistake 17 years ago for SARS and pulled the same dirty trick to absolve itself from responsibility. Its coverup of the SARS outbreak in the Guangdong province late 2002 (also from wildlife trade) resulted in 299 deaths in Hong Kong in Spring 2003 -- 299 isn’t a large number, but Hong Kong is only one city -- and up to this day, most people in China remain convinced, thanks to the GOVERNMENT’s propaganda, that the virus originated from Hong Kong and in fact, their GOVERNMENT saved Hong Kong from the outbreak.

This GOVERNMENT is shameless. This GOVERNMENT has been taking advantage of the kindness of the Western world, its desire to rise beyond its racist, imperialist history. It has, and will continue to claim that drawing any link between this virus and China is xenophobic.

It isn’t. It isn’t when the Chinese GOVERNMENT is indeed responsible for the outbreak. Associating the virus specifically with the Chinese PEOPLE is unfair. Associating it with the Chinese GOVERNMENT is fair game.

Having issues with a government isn’t the same as discrimination against its people. This is especially true when the government isn’t elected. And just like being anti-Tories isn’t the same as anti-Brit and being anti-Trump isn’t being anti-US, being anti-CCP (for Chinese Communist Party) isn’t the same as anti-Chinese. Katniss Everdeen pointed her arrow on President Snow and President Coin but she was never against the people on Panem. She was for the people of Panem. Likewise, when you resist the lies the Chinese GOVERNMENT is spreading, when you insist on remembering, speaking the truth about this virus and this pandemic, you’re pointing your arrow at a fascist regime, not only the CCP but dictators everywhere who want to silence and wipe the memory of their people.

You are helping the people of the country.

Please show the Chinese GOVERNMENT that their efforts to re-write the history of this pandemic will be futile. This display needs not be violent. For the last 30 years, on every June 4th, thousands of Hong Kongers sit in a candlelight vigil to remember the victims of the 1989 June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre. These vigils carry one simple message: we haven’t forgotten. We remember who the killers are. We remember who rolled the tanks over thousands of students who demanded little more than reforms, a chance to speak with the GOVERNMENT as equals.

Meanwhile, please try to not cast the blame of the pandemic on the Chinese PEOPLE. It can be difficult at times, I understand; I read what the Foreign Ministry of China has been saying, what the state-run tabloids like People’s Daily and Global times are reporting and I fume. Smoke-out-of-my-ears-fume. I also feel unbearably ashamed because my ancestry, at some point millennia ago, converged with those despicable beings who wrote and said those things. But ... please remember that many Chinese PEOPLE have also suffered and lost their loved ones, that while the Chinese GOVERNMENT’s propaganda machine may be touting their sacrifices, but these PEOPLE have never been asked if they’re willing to make such sacrifices in the first place. Their GOVERNMENT has betrayed them by not containing the virus early, by neglecting to alert them and ask them to take proper precautions. Their GOVERNMENT has valued their lives below its own petty need to save face and create illusions of Good Times, and this betrayal has ended up costing the world. No lucrative business deals, no promise of a 1.4 billion people market can ever repay this loss, and when this is all over, there will be politicians and business giants in your country, wherever you are, who’ll tell you otherwise. Do not let them have their way.

Please call COVID-19 by its official name, but please, also, preserve its history. Viruses are a part of nature, they’re not the enemies here. Instead, remember who let it loose and ravage our world. The perished lives, regardless of their race, skin colour and nationality, deserve at least that much.

#pie speaks

[alexsmitposts]

“Warrior” Steve Bannon Arrested as Trump’s America is Crumbling It often happens this way: extreme right-wingers, or call them ‘ultra-conservatives,’ either in the United States or Europe, suddenly fall from grace, after committing the most heinous crimes. Sometimes it is child abuse or sexual harassment, but most of the time, it is a corruption of tremendous proportions. In theory, in their own theory, it is not supposed to be this way. Listen to the conservatives, and they will tell you that they are there in order to uphold law and order, as well as the traditional culture of their countries. But the reality is often very far from the theory. Steve Bannon has fallen. He has fallen hard, flat on his face. But definitely not as hard, as others would fall, would they commit crimes of similar magnitude. Steve Bannon was actually not caught and charged with trying to ignite the WWIII or conspiring to overthrow the left-wing governments all over the world. He was not charged with an attempt to destroy China. He was arrested ‘only’ on charges of ‘defrauding investors,’ together with his cohort Brian Kolfage. On 28 August, CNN reported: “Kolfage was arrested last week, along with Bannon and two others, and charged by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York with defrauding investors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars a project pledging to construct a wall along the southern US border. He is due to be arraigned on the charges on Monday in a video court appearance.” In February 2020, I wrote for NEO: “Steve Bannon, a former White House strategist and Breitbart editor, was finally kicked out of an Italian monastery, which even Newsweek wittily described as a “far-right boot camp.” Or, as even some of the Western mainstream media outlets defined it – a modern ‘gladiator’s school.’ The monastery was supposed to offer “classes,” which Bannon described as “the kind of underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West.” That, for already quite some time, means ‘insulting and antagonizing China,’ as well as several other nations which the Western extremist and often openly racist ideologues have been depicting as hostile to the US and European hegemonic interests. Some of those who oppose Bannon’s radical political stands are now bringing vast charges against him, but legal and moral, and such charges are ranging from pushing the United States towards the war with the People’s Republic of China to interfering with internal affairs of other countries, including those in Europe. There are other, unsavory accusations against the former White House strategist and a close ally of President Donald Trump: child abuse and enormous corruption. The question is: how could the individual against whom so many accusative fingers are pointed at, survive at the top of the establishment for so many years, in so many different roles and positions? Yes, he gets kicked out from places: first from the White House, then from the “gladiator booth camp,” and finally from the luxury yacht belonging to an anti-Beijing apostate. But somehow, he always manages to bounce back. Until now. Hopefully, for not much longer. *** Alarms should have been ringing for so many years. But were they? If yes, no one has been paying much attention. As early as in 2016, even an extreme right-wing FOX News picked up Associated Press report which was accusing Bannon of anti-Semitism: “In a sworn court declaration following their divorce, Piccard said her ex-husband had objected to sending their twin daughters to an elite Los Angeles academy because he “didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews.” “He said he doesn’t like Jews…” In August 2019, Mail Online raised an alarming issue, connecting Mr. Bannon with an accused child sex trafficker George Nader: “A convicted pedophile visited Donald Trump’s White House on at least 13 different occasions in 2017 to meet with then-chief strategist Steve Bannon, according to leaked visitor logs. George Nader, who has been convicted of sexually abusing young boys and is now in federal prison awaiting trial on child sex trafficking charges, first visited Bannon in the White House in February 2017, the month after Trump’s inauguration, the Washington Examiner reported. After that, he kept visiting Bannon, who had a West Wing office yards from the Oval Office, the leaked visitor logs revealed, but it isn’t clear if he entertained Nader in his office or somewhere else in the White House. The revelation raises serious questions about how a convicted pedophile could be allowed entry repeatedly to the White House. The Secret Service is responsible for carrying out background checks of all visitors.”   The “revelation” also raises questions about whether there have been two tiers of justice: one for the common US citizens, and another one for those who are levitating in the highest spheres of, mainly right-wing, power. Steve Bannon was also apparently giving false testimonies under oath, related to the Wikileaks and Julian Assange. And if one would think that Steve Bannon is ‘only’ anti-Semitic, then what about his deep allergy towards the Muslims; and the support for the Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” and keeping out from the United States all those “bad people” (meaning non-whites and non-Christians)? His obsession with the wall between the US and Mexico is, of course, related to the “topic.” *** But who would be Steve Bannon without China? He is hatred impersonated against China. As for his fellow right-wing crusaders, like Peter Navarro, Marco Rubio, and Mike Pompeo, China is always ‘there,’ in the middle of vile speeches, dragged through the dirt, belittled. Steeper and faster is a decline of the American Eagle, more confident is an ascend of the Chinese Dragon, louder, more desperate, and bizarre is the anti-Chinese rhetoric of the pro-Western warriors, led by Steve Bannon and his mates. On 08 June 2020, AntiWar.com described something that would be unimaginable just several years ago, but what is turning into a norm, under the present White House administration: “New Yorkers looked to the sky in puzzlement the night of 03 June as a fleet of airplanes circled New York Harbor with banners that read “Congratulations New Federal State of China.” Behind the bizarre stunt was exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. The duo deemed the Chinese Communist Party illegitimate and declared a new state of China from a boat floating in front of the Statue of Liberty. In a live stream, Guo and Bannon read the Chinese and English versions of “A Declaration of the New Federal State of China,” a document that lays out their fantastical plan to take out the CCP and form a Western-style democracy in China. The live stream aired in China on 04 June, which marked the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown in Beijing. “The Chinese Communist Party is a terrorist organization funded by the Communist International which has subverted the legitimate Chinese government in the past,” the document declares.” Would this be done the other way around, like if the People’s Republic of China declared the United States of America a terrorist genocidal and illegitimate state, because it exterminated most of its native population, forced slaves from Africa onto its territory, and then massacred tens of millions of people on all continents of the world, that would be surely considered a declaration of war. But obviously, the US and its leadership are truly ‘spoiled’; they are used to getting away, literally, with a murder. Or with a war. Steve Bannon has been twisting the narrative on basically everything that is related to China, from Xinjiang to the South China Sea, an extremist religious cult such as Falun Gong, recent historical events, Chinese Revolution, and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He and his cohorts are fanatically anti-Communist, as they are outrageously racist. The danger of Bannon lies in the fact that he is an integral part of the extreme right-wing network, which is now spreading from Europe to India, from North and South America to Asia. He is its product, as well as its maker. Whoever is confronting China is his ally: from India’s Modi to Donald Trump. Or all those West-backed rioters and the anti-Beijing individuals like Elmer Yuen Gong Yi. In fact, the Hong Kong riots are direct results of the activities of Steve Bannon and his mates. If they are not stopped, there really may be a war. But that does not frighten Steve Bannon. He has nothing against a war. He desired a war. He is igniting it. Like the crusaders of the middle ages, he thrives on expansions and the conflicts. Forbes reported, somehow sarcastically, on 20 August 2020: “The yacht former white house senior advisor Steve Bannon was arrested on recently is the 152-foot-long Feadship Lady May that’s reportedly owned by Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire who has business ties with Bannon. And it’s for sale.” It is all very symbolic. It is shocking. But at least the man who did so much harm to the world, and who has been pushing his country towards direct confrontation with the most populous nation on earth, is under arrest, although presently released on $5 million bail. Associated Press reported on 24 August 2020: “US District Judge Analisa Torres said President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist can appear in her court along with three co-defendants on a video screen because of the health threat posed by the coronavirus.” A lenient treatment. But logical; shockingly, Mr. Bannon is not seen as a delinquent by the US establishment. To many, he is just a pro-Western, pro-Christian, pro-right-wing warrior. As he himself so proudly declares he is.

[paraclete0407]

1. Staring to think the FSB really did ‘accidentally’ lose track of some material and maybe that is the next step in the Covid era

2. ‘Chain of care / adoption / ownership’ - whose kid belongs to whom, fighting with colleagues over my piano-teacher’s four daughters and one son, they all seemed happy.  ‘That’s a reason to hate’ - it was a long time ago, however, and the nature of the hate has changed.  I no longer know domestic attitudes and probably there are few adoptions going on at all.  Maybe nowadays everyone’s happy and have the same values.  

I feel woozy and beyond horrible that I haven’t lived up to my own and may have contributed to misunderstanding rather than understanding.  I pray that the details I share will give a bass-note of sorts but I sincerely feel conflicted about educational philosophy particularly w/r/t teaching dark things to children at a young age rather than teach biblical values with some kind of rigorous but kind system or embody these values tacitly(?).  We learned about Shoah, abortion, WWII Pacific.

3. ‘Love-stories that begin with movies’ - and yet, I heard music (’Sheep May’).

4. ‘A Millionaire’s First Love’ - give everything at once, a vow, a strong hand.  I might have made a mistake in my lack of preparation or in not continuing to give.

5. ‘The Bridge of Life.’  ‘Scholar-David’ trying to be some kind of scholar, I examine the paradigms, Confucius, New Testament, later Old Testament, old and new - ‘keeping the old alive.’  Emerson says the scholar of one candle understands the desires of others but it seems a dangerous idea.  Trying to figure out others’ minds all the time is catering if not communism or manipulation.  I preferred the other one who knew what to say or decided that they could speak without having to explain why they were saying what they were saying but perhaps this too is fiction.  I said something about knowing someone else’s dream and BigBoss got mad at me, what do you know about love, boy - I thought he was being prideful but in retrospect I couldn’t judge, maybe.

I also judged myself - ‘disappointed.’  ‘You do not have the right to judge!’  Eating some vegetables.  I don’t know why I said that but in retrospect was possibly trying a kind of maneuver to show someone something.  I was happy or satisfied.

6. History was still going on.  When _ _ put their hands on my trapezius or neck-muscles or so, this sad-eyed person who in retrospect as not as vulnerable as I was or at least not as feckless, I was reading in the NYT about Raqqa, this distant darkness.  What a horrible name, to my ear.  It’s very old.  Their leader is so ugly.  Trump said he died crying which is something to say but I would bet a person like that - I just don’t know what I don’t know; I’m a child of the ‘90s;  The ‘EJE’ of bin Laden, the people partying outside the White House making me think of Return of the Jedi to be honest.  Ewoks.  Years later Director Brennan writes about how pleased he is that real, ordinary, every day Americans are chanting, ‘CIA!  CIA!’  Brennan lived in Egypt, studied Arabic.  It was also JSOC though a lot of people think about DEVGRU, ST6.  This amazing NYT phoo of the ‘operator’s back-muscles amid this gear, later talking with my med school dropout friend about how the SEALs shoot off more ammunition in markmanship-training than like the entire Marine Corps to achieve expertise but then it’s the NYT and they ill say anything that sounds like, ‘CCP deserves to rule the world due to hard work / culture of achievement / Xiang Yu decapitating himself after killing tens of thousands of innocent villages just to get the arcade record or sth’ and I read One Bullet Away and the officer there ignited a lot of propellant(?) as well to make sure he had the highest qualification for his men.   McRaven with the ‘devil horns’ at his speech - I’m a McChrystal fundamentalist I think he should ‘kill everyone.’  If medicine- and food-dist fail as I think they might who’s gonna manage stuff the Postal Service?  I felt like what’s even going on in his head all the time, 20-hour day, work out with men half his age, 60-page report, one meal.  Feel I could do that if I had a ‘place.’  I keep hearing ‘Diffugere Nives’ in my head - ‘say to thy soul’ - I hate that; I’m not Greco-Roman; I want to be post-heroic; I don’t want to participate in war; I don’t even want to go to soi disant ‘professional school’ b/c the people seem burned out and sad to put it too simplistically, I have no idea what they’ve seen.  S’hai-1 who was ‘an aurora; White Goddess’ (again I hate to use non-Christian figures of speech but perhaps one could call her a ‘viatrix?’ - traveler? - Yeats ‘pilgrim soul’ - someone trying to carry a baby to safety or carry a destiny?) at 24 in NYC and of whom I wondered during Covid what kind of valley of the shadow she was passing through now she seems like a child.  I was reflecting, ‘The psychopathology of the Millennial Generation, the situation, becoming a child then an adult then a child again’ but IDK if that is everyone or just my mom or whatever happened with Taeyeon between ‘Purpose’ (my wife who is also my co-educational-administrator at work / Math Dept. Head Ancient and world Languages Dept. Head or ‘Chief of Staff’) then with ‘What Do I Call You’ that I am thinking, ‘Egad and Mein Gott this is about confirmation of religious identity,’ and how in the future people will value (non-productive or what psychoanalysts might call ‘aim-inhibited’) interactions or presence. That is why my friend’s internet-friend is in ‘Obama’s dream’ with some kind of caffeinated cold beverage - why I think about ‘You Love Me’ as a kind of ‘Min Jin Lee chapter title’ where it is like, oh you love me.  Cagey people, holding their cards, saying stuff lke John Green novels where they seem not sure if they are talking about love, living a story, experience, realization.  I respect John Green, and wondered for a time why my YAL ‘Reading Interests of Adolescents’ professor didn’t like him till I figured out that ‘Alaska’ is kind of like ‘let’s consume women + let’s be degen adventurers’ and ‘Fault in Stars’ appears to posit r/Romantic couple-love as well as teens teaching other teens as some valid defiance of the world.  My old classmates liked to ‘Braveheart’ in the backyard talking about fighting; I remember the execution-scene and how the French princess is like, ‘your son is le cuckold! - Franco-Scottish blood will prevail!’  (A decade or more later the notorious album Exodus 2004 said, ‘Can you and I start mixing gene-pools / Eastern Western people get naughty multilingual’ The sex-as-defiance trope is ubiquitous ‘Three Days of Condor.’  ‘The Terminator’ (’Terminator 1′) I guess is more high-minded and less ‘70-s-self-involved or stuck in its own time than ‘Condor’ in that the child actually does save the world later on or at least get rid of some machines. 

I now wish that I had spent less time trying to be normal or looking at the other couples at RU and more time working on ‘2003′ as I felt like I understood more what would happen when two people set out to ‘create’ or ‘own’ their own existence / life in a time where identity and personal interests were under attack or being overdetermined or driven or appropriated or conscripted by governmental and social developments such as the Iraq War whereby I felt all the worthwhile women were just looking for men at arms and the rest were ‘sub-culture; the anime club.’  I hesitated between two spheres as I felt that one had obvious impact, the other authenticity.  

I believed in ‘soft sci f’ for a long time and pared down my ambitions over time by diluting them with ‘Updikeana’ as I call it or ‘Austeneana’ or any kind of pathos or sympathy or showing of characters’ weakness or lack of virtue.  IDK if ought to publish this but 2016 I decided to delete everything and was onl left with ‘To Have Everything’ ad one other thing; THE was about nuclear terrorism and divorce basically.  I guess was already partaking of frankly the pleasures of evil - t’d be great if our dreams didn’t come true and instead many people died and our love-systems failed due to our greed or impatience or mismanagement or engaging targets of opportunity.  I again was writing ‘naively’ and didn’t know what I meant or why, was only concerned with the one and beauty and whatever ‘resonance’ it had with my own feelings or soul; I was interested in the way that people grow apart not only through physical distance at times but through divergent interests or at least that I could tell at the time, though, in retrospect I feel as if everyone were feeling or believing the same fundamental things and even understood that there would be a pandemic.  

[stephenmccull]

The Hype Has Faded, but Don’t Count Out Convalescent Plasma in Covid Battle

Six months after it was controversially hailed by Trump administration officials as a “breakthrough” therapy to fight the worst effects of covid-19, convalescent plasma appears to be on the ropes.

This story also ran on NBC News. It can be republished for free.

The treatment that infuses blood plasma from recovered covid patients into people newly infected in hopes of boosting their immune response has not lived up to early hype. Some high-profile clinical trials have shown disappointing results. Demand from hospitals for the antibody-rich plasma has plunged. After a year of large-scale national efforts to recruit recovered covid patients as donors and the collection of more than 500,000 units of covid convalescent plasma, known as CCP, some longtime advocates of the therapy say they’re now pessimistic about its future.

“I fear the CCP train has left the station,” said Dr. Michael Busch, director of the Vitalant Research Institute, one of the largest blood-center based transfusion medicine research programs in the U.S. “We created all this enthusiasm, and then these studies came out and they say this stuff didn’t work in the first place.”

But that sentiment is by no means universal. Other respected proponents say we are watching the science progress in real time, and it’s simply too soon to count out convalescent plasma. They note that larger studies employing more calibrated doses of convalescent plasma and more targeted groups of patients, during a set window in their illness, have met the standards for moving forward and may show promise.

“It’s just been a really interesting story to see it unfold,” said Dr. Julie Katz Karp, director of transfusion medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals in Philadelphia. “People are doing a good job of reading the literature, but one week the answer is ‘yes,’ the next week, ‘maybe not.’”

Convalescent plasma was thrust into the national conversation last August, when the Food and Drug Administration, under political pressure, made the decision to authorize the treatment for emergency use despite objections from federal government scientists cautioning that the therapy was unproven. In the months since, tens of thousands of Americans have been infused with plasma.

Enthusiasm faded in recent weeks following two serious setbacks: A large federal clinical trial, dubbed C3PO, testing the use of convalescent plasma in high-risk patients who came to an emergency room with mild to moderate covid symptoms was halted late last month after researchers concluded that, while the infusions caused no harm, they were unlikely to benefit patients. That same week, a pooled analysis of 10 convalescent plasma studies, published in JAMA, found no clear benefit.

In January, the FDA scaled back the emergency authorization of convalescent plasma, limiting its use to hospitalized covid patients early in the course of the disease and those with medical conditions that impair immune function. The agency also said that only plasma with high concentrations of virus-fighting antibodies could be used after May 31.

At the same time, the covid surge that engulfed the U.S. through much of the winter eased, sending demand for convalescent plasma plummeting. Hospital infusions fell from a high of about 30,000 units a week at the start of the year to about 7,000 per week in early March.

Further complicating matters, federal contracts worth $646 million that paid U.S. blood centers to collect covid convalescent plasma are about to expire, prompting centers nationwide to reconsider whether the complicated process of collecting the plasma is still worth the work. Given the added complexity, blood centers have been reimbursed $600 to $800 a unit for the covid product, compared with the $100 price for a regular unit of fresh, frozen plasma.

“We’re not getting orders,” said Dr. Louis Katz, chief medical officer at the Mississippi Valley Regional Blood Center in Davenport, Iowa. “I don’t want to collect a product that is not going to get used and will cost me more money.”

Officials with the American Red Cross have paused direct collection of convalescent plasma, citing changes required by the FDA’s revised emergency use authorization and an “evolving” market. People previously infected with covid may still donate whole blood, and those units that test positive for high levels of antibodies could be used as CCP.

Even as they acknowledge the setbacks, plasma proponents say declaring its death just a few months into the research would be a foolish overreach. The idea of using plasma from recovered patients to treat the newly ill is a century-old concept that has been employed on an experimental basis during a host of plagues, including the devastating 1918 flu, the 1930s measles outbreak and, more recently, Ebola.

Rather than abandon efforts, scientists need to refine the way convalescent plasma is used and temper their expectations, said Dr. Michael Joyner, principal investigator of the Mayo Clinic-led program that supplied convalescent plasma for more than 100,000 U.S. patients last year.

“This is an unstandardized dose of an unstandardized product being given to all comer patients for a disease with variable progression,” Joyner said in an email. “So it is unrealistic to expect cookie-cutter results like you get for statin/heart attack trials.”

Joyner and others pointed to research that continues to show promise. In mid-February, scientists in Argentina reported that giving convalescent plasma with very high concentrations of antibodies within three days of onset of mild covid symptoms helped slow the progression of disease in older patients. In mid-March, researchers in the U.S. and Brazil reported in a study that has not yet been peer-reviewed that plasma therapy didn’t improve symptoms during hospitalization for patients with severe cases of covid. But it was associated with a 50% reduction in death after 28 days that “may warrant further evaluation,” the authors wrote.

Oversight committees this month gave the nod to two federally funded clinical trials of convalescent plasma to continue enrolling hundreds of patients. One, led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, is testing convalescent plasma in people who were infected and developed symptoms of covid but were not hospitalized. The other, led by scientists at Vanderbilt University, is testing high-potency plasma in hospitalized patients.

There’s no question “antibodies work against the virus,” said Dr. David Sullivan, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University and a principal investigator for the institution’s plasma trials.

“It’s all dose and time,” Sullivan said, adding that giving convalescent plasma with high concentrations of antibodies within the first few days of infection is crucial.

The most promising use of convalescent plasma might come from “super donors,” people who were infected with covid and then vaccinated, said Dr. Michael Knudson, co-medical director of the DeGowin Blood Center at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.

Knudson said his early research shows plasma from recovered then vaccinated people can provide five to 20 times more neutralizing antibody than the plasma from those who have not been vaccinated. “This would be almost a completely different product compared to what is used to date,” he wrote in a presentation to colleagues.

Joyner and others believe “boosted” plasma could be used as a potent antiviral treatment early in infection, similar to how monoclonal antibodies — laboratory-made proteins that act like human antibodies in the immune system — are used. It could be a cheaper option for low-resource countries unable to afford the monoclonal treatments at more than $1,200 per dose.

Even the National Institutes of Health scientists conducting the halted C3PO trial, Dr. Simone Glynn and Dr. Nahed El Kasser, agreed that more data about the usefulness of convalescent plasma is needed. “The answer is no, it is not the final word,” they said in an emailed statement.

But overcoming skepticism about the use of any type of convalescent plasma, let alone “super” plasma, won’t be easy, given the roller coaster of recent results. And broad use of convalescent plasma will depend on continued funding. If the federal contracts with blood collectors are not renewed, covid convalescent plasma likely will be paid for by hospitals or private insurers, depending on where patients receive the treatment.

In the meantime, the federal government, along with academic centers and private donors, has continued to fund the Hopkins and Vanderbilt trials. And the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority has allocated at least $27 million to for-profit companies that collect covid convalescent plasma from paid donors to create hyperimmune globulin, a purified and concentrated form of plasma that may halt disease. Results from late-stage clinical trials of that therapy are expected later this spring.

“I think that it would be a mistake to stop now,” said Dr. Claudia Cohn, chief medical officer of the AABB, an international nonprofit focused on transfusion medicine and cellular therapies. “We have some evidence that it works and evidence that we can produce high-titer plasma. Let’s see what we can do to keep people out of the hospital.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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This story can be republished for free (details).

The Hype Has Faded, but Don’t Count Out Convalescent Plasma in Covid Battle published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[gordonwilliamsweb]

The Hype Has Faded, but Don’t Count Out Convalescent Plasma in Covid Battle

Six months after it was controversially hailed by Trump administration officials as a “breakthrough” therapy to fight the worst effects of covid-19, convalescent plasma appears to be on the ropes.

This story also ran on NBC News. It can be republished for free.

The treatment that infuses blood plasma from recovered covid patients into people newly infected in hopes of boosting their immune response has not lived up to early hype. Some high-profile clinical trials have shown disappointing results. Demand from hospitals for the antibody-rich plasma has plunged. After a year of large-scale national efforts to recruit recovered covid patients as donors and the collection of more than 500,000 units of covid convalescent plasma, known as CCP, some longtime advocates of the therapy say they’re now pessimistic about its future.

“I fear the CCP train has left the station,” said Dr. Michael Busch, director of the Vitalant Research Institute, one of the largest blood-center based transfusion medicine research programs in the U.S. “We created all this enthusiasm, and then these studies came out and they say this stuff didn’t work in the first place.”

But that sentiment is by no means universal. Other respected proponents say we are watching the science progress in real time, and it’s simply too soon to count out convalescent plasma. They note that larger studies employing more calibrated doses of convalescent plasma and more targeted groups of patients, during a set window in their illness, have met the standards for moving forward and may show promise.

“It’s just been a really interesting story to see it unfold,” said Dr. Julie Katz Karp, director of transfusion medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals in Philadelphia. “People are doing a good job of reading the literature, but one week the answer is ‘yes,’ the next week, ‘maybe not.’”

Convalescent plasma was thrust into the national conversation last August, when the Food and Drug Administration, under political pressure, made the decision to authorize the treatment for emergency use despite objections from federal government scientists cautioning that the therapy was unproven. In the months since, tens of thousands of Americans have been infused with plasma.

Enthusiasm faded in recent weeks following two serious setbacks: A large federal clinical trial, dubbed C3PO, testing the use of convalescent plasma in high-risk patients who came to an emergency room with mild to moderate covid symptoms was halted late last month after researchers concluded that, while the infusions caused no harm, they were unlikely to benefit patients. That same week, a pooled analysis of 10 convalescent plasma studies, published in JAMA, found no clear benefit.

In January, the FDA scaled back the emergency authorization of convalescent plasma, limiting its use to hospitalized covid patients early in the course of the disease and those with medical conditions that impair immune function. The agency also said that only plasma with high concentrations of virus-fighting antibodies could be used after May 31.

At the same time, the covid surge that engulfed the U.S. through much of the winter eased, sending demand for convalescent plasma plummeting. Hospital infusions fell from a high of about 30,000 units a week at the start of the year to about 7,000 per week in early March.

Further complicating matters, federal contracts worth $646 million that paid U.S. blood centers to collect covid convalescent plasma are about to expire, prompting centers nationwide to reconsider whether the complicated process of collecting the plasma is still worth the work. Given the added complexity, blood centers have been reimbursed $600 to $800 a unit for the covid product, compared with the $100 price for a regular unit of fresh, frozen plasma.

“We’re not getting orders,” said Dr. Louis Katz, chief medical officer at the Mississippi Valley Regional Blood Center in Davenport, Iowa. “I don’t want to collect a product that is not going to get used and will cost me more money.”

Officials with the American Red Cross have paused direct collection of convalescent plasma, citing changes required by the FDA’s revised emergency use authorization and an “evolving” market. People previously infected with covid may still donate whole blood, and those units that test positive for high levels of antibodies could be used as CCP.

Even as they acknowledge the setbacks, plasma proponents say declaring its death just a few months into the research would be a foolish overreach. The idea of using plasma from recovered patients to treat the newly ill is a century-old concept that has been employed on an experimental basis during a host of plagues, including the devastating 1918 flu, the 1930s measles outbreak and, more recently, Ebola.

Rather than abandon efforts, scientists need to refine the way convalescent plasma is used and temper their expectations, said Dr. Michael Joyner, principal investigator of the Mayo Clinic-led program that supplied convalescent plasma for more than 100,000 U.S. patients last year.

“This is an unstandardized dose of an unstandardized product being given to all comer patients for a disease with variable progression,” Joyner said in an email. “So it is unrealistic to expect cookie-cutter results like you get for statin/heart attack trials.”

Joyner and others pointed to research that continues to show promise. In mid-February, scientists in Argentina reported that giving convalescent plasma with very high concentrations of antibodies within three days of onset of mild covid symptoms helped slow the progression of disease in older patients. In mid-March, researchers in the U.S. and Brazil reported in a study that has not yet been peer-reviewed that plasma therapy didn’t improve symptoms during hospitalization for patients with severe cases of covid. But it was associated with a 50% reduction in death after 28 days that “may warrant further evaluation,” the authors wrote.

Oversight committees this month gave the nod to two federally funded clinical trials of convalescent plasma to continue enrolling hundreds of patients. One, led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, is testing convalescent plasma in people who were infected and developed symptoms of covid but were not hospitalized. The other, led by scientists at Vanderbilt University, is testing high-potency plasma in hospitalized patients.

There’s no question “antibodies work against the virus,” said Dr. David Sullivan, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University and a principal investigator for the institution’s plasma trials.

“It’s all dose and time,” Sullivan said, adding that giving convalescent plasma with high concentrations of antibodies within the first few days of infection is crucial.

The most promising use of convalescent plasma might come from “super donors,” people who were infected with covid and then vaccinated, said Dr. Michael Knudson, co-medical director of the DeGowin Blood Center at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.

Knudson said his early research shows plasma from recovered then vaccinated people can provide five to 20 times more neutralizing antibody than the plasma from those who have not been vaccinated. “This would be almost a completely different product compared to what is used to date,” he wrote in a presentation to colleagues.

Joyner and others believe “boosted” plasma could be used as a potent antiviral treatment early in infection, similar to how monoclonal antibodies — laboratory-made proteins that act like human antibodies in the immune system — are used. It could be a cheaper option for low-resource countries unable to afford the monoclonal treatments at more than $1,200 per dose.

Even the National Institutes of Health scientists conducting the halted C3PO trial, Dr. Simone Glynn and Dr. Nahed El Kasser, agreed that more data about the usefulness of convalescent plasma is needed. “The answer is no, it is not the final word,” they said in an emailed statement.

But overcoming skepticism about the use of any type of convalescent plasma, let alone “super” plasma, won’t be easy, given the roller coaster of recent results. And broad use of convalescent plasma will depend on continued funding. If the federal contracts with blood collectors are not renewed, covid convalescent plasma likely will be paid for by hospitals or private insurers, depending on where patients receive the treatment.

In the meantime, the federal government, along with academic centers and private donors, has continued to fund the Hopkins and Vanderbilt trials. And the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority has allocated at least $27 million to for-profit companies that collect covid convalescent plasma from paid donors to create hyperimmune globulin, a purified and concentrated form of plasma that may halt disease. Results from late-stage clinical trials of that therapy are expected later this spring.

“I think that it would be a mistake to stop now,” said Dr. Claudia Cohn, chief medical officer of the AABB, an international nonprofit focused on transfusion medicine and cellular therapies. “We have some evidence that it works and evidence that we can produce high-titer plasma. Let’s see what we can do to keep people out of the hospital.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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This story can be republished for free (details).

The Hype Has Faded, but Don’t Count Out Convalescent Plasma in Covid Battle published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[go-redgirl]

The following month — amid sustained outrage over the March 25 directive, which was revoked on May 10 — the DOH issued a report blaming the spread of the coronavirus in nursing homes on asymptomatic staffers.

Cuomo has also repeatedly attacked The Post for its hard-hitting reports on the nursing-home crisis, suggesting the coverage was politically motivated to “kill all Democrats.”

And during spectacularly ill-timed appearances Tuesday on MSNBC and CNN, Cuomo tried to blame for COVID deaths on former President Donald Trump, offering one quote that seems to now apply equally to his own administration in light of the James report.

“Incompetent government kills people. More people died than needed to die in COVID. That’s the truth,” he said.

James’ report does not increase the number of overall deaths in the Empire State from the coronavirus, which stands at an estimated 42,887 confirmed and suspected COVID-19 cases, according to Johns Hopkins University case tracker.

The state DOH puts the number at 34,579, but that tally only includes confirmed deaths.

New York’s nursing-home death toll from COVID-19 may be more than 50 percent higher than officials claim — because Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration hasn’t revealed how many of those residents died in hospitals, state Attorney General Letitia James announced Thursday.

In a damning, 76-page report, James also said that some unidentified nursing homes apparently underreported resident fatalities to the state Department of Health and failed to enforce infection-control measures — with more than 20 currently under investigation.

The bombshell findings could push the current DOH tally of 8,711 deaths to more than 13,000, based on a survey of 62 nursing homes that found the state undercounted the fatalities there by an average of 56 percent.

The report further notes that at least 4,000 residents died after the state issued a controversial, March 25 Cuomo administration mandate for nursing homes to admit “medically stable” coronavirus patients — which James said “may have put residents at increased risk of harm in some facilities.”

“As the pandemic and our investigations continue, it is imperative that we understand why the residents of nursing homes in New York unnecessarily suffered at such an alarming rate,” James said.

“While we cannot bring back the individuals we lost to this crisis, this report seeks to offer transparency that the public deserves and to spur increased action to protect our most vulnerable residents.”

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COMMENTS: 

To: Oldeconomybuyer

In a sane world, Cuomo would be facing a death penalty sentence for mass murder and crimes against humanity. The communists tried to cover it up like a cat covering its turds in a sandbox. The stink was just too much, and when they went to empty the sandbox...well...someone was watching and there they were.

12posted on1/28/2021, 11:41:02 AMbylgjhn23

(Pray for America....)

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To: jimtorr

Cuomo and the legislature immunized them from both criminal and civil WuFlu liability in April’s budget.

BTW, Cuomo didn’t just send sick residents back to their facilities inspite of Fedzilla relaxing regs, Cuomo allowed sick staff to report to work until mid-May, when he abruptly ended the policy.

Nobody ever asks about that.

14 posted on 1/28/2021, 11:44:16 AM by mewzilla (Break out the mustard seeds. )

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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Cuomo, Newsom, and others should be INDICTED for their role in creating deadly conditions in nursing homes during this pandemic.They’re absolutely guilty of TENS OF THOUSANDS of criminally negligent homicides!

18 posted on 1/28/2021, 11:48:13 AM by 2aProtectsTheRest (The media is banging the fear drum enough. Don't help them do it.)

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To: 2aProtectsTheRest 

It wasn’t negligence.

19 posted on 1/28/2021, 11:51:44 AM by mewzilla (Break out the mustard seeds. )

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To: Oldeconomybuyer

That figure was 56 percent higher than the numbers for those facilities published by the state Department of Health, which only published the number of people who passed away while still at the nursing homes at the time of their deaths, not those who were subsequently taken to a hospital and then died.This information was known back when it was happening. I read about it, probably here on FreeRepublic.

20 posted on 1/28/2021, 11:52:09 AM by Freee-dame

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To: mewzilla

Proving intent is difficult. Proving criminally negligent homicide when you force nursing homes to accept people known to be infected with a disease that kills elderly folks at extremely high rates (~18% for those over 80 years) is TRIVIAL. On its face, it’s a clear and obvious slam dunk case. Each of them. Times tens of thousands of cases. The question then becomes not IF they’re guilty, but HOW MANY cases can be attributed to them. As a prosecutor, your easy answer is to charge with the minimum number of lives lost directly because of the policy. Whether that’s 10,000 deaths or 40,000 deaths isn’t that critical as the punishments will be massive either way.And they DESERVE it.

posted on 1/28/2021, 11:56:04 AM by 2aProtectsTheRest (The media is banging the fear drum enough. Don't help them do it.)

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To: Oldeconomybuyer“

As part of the report, James’ investigators surveyed 62 nursing homes across the state and found that 1,914 residents from those facilities either died there or at nearby hospitals after testing positive for coronavirus or exhibiting symptoms of the deadly disease.”That’s what we are experiencing. The nursing homes are holding patients until they start to crash and then calling EMS to transport them out so they die elsewhere.We transported multiple people with DNR’s one of whom crashed before we got out of the parking lot.It has slowed down in our area, but we were transporting 4-5/ambulance/day for several weeks.

24 posted on 1/28/2021, 11:56:57 AM by Clay Moore (Mega prayers, Rush )

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To:  Oldeconomybuyer

CORONA VIRUS Cuomo Follows Newsom in Easing COVID Restrictions After Biden Inauguration!“Right on cue.”Published on 25 January, 2021 Paul Joseph Watson Pacific PressNew York Governor Andrew Cuomo has followed Michigan, Chicago and California in announcing plans to ease COVID restrictions, prompting many conservatives to allege that the timing is political.

The Governor said in a press conference that the situation in relation to new cases and hospitalizations was improving, meaning lockdown measures could be relaxed soon.“Cuomo didn’t give further details on what type of restrictions he might loosen or what cluster zones might be eliminated or changed,” reports Syracuse.com. 

“The state Health Department is reviewing data on the zones now and Cuomo said expects to have announcements in the coming days.”Respondents to the story said the move was politically timed to help Joe Biden ultimately claim victory over COVID.“Yep. Right on cue after Trump is out of office!” remarked one.

In Buffalo holding a COVID briefing. Watch live: https://t.co/J50To0kTv9— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) January 25, 2021“Now they will reduce the unreported replication factor for the COVID test, and presto – no more COVID,” said another.“Amazing how it all disappeared a week after Trump’s gone,” added another.

As we highlighted earlier, California Governor Gavin Newsom is also set to lift the stay-at-home order across all regions tomorrow based on data that’s not publicly available.“Michigan, Chicago, now California. It’s almost as if the “science” changed, once Biden became president? How convenient for Whitmer, Lightfoot, and Newsom?” tweeted Steve Cortes.“Using small businesses, churches, schools, and citizens as pawns in a crass political game is evil,” he added.

Michigan, Chicago, now California.25 posted on 1/28/2021, 11:58:16 AM by Grampa Dave (Law & order took the last train out of DC and America on election/coup/night, Tues., Nov. 03, 2020!)[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

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TOPICS: Breaking News; Culture/Society; Government; News/Current Events; US: New York

KEYWORDS:

ccp; china; chinavirus; cuomo; govcuomo; mortality; nursinghomes; virus; wuhanchinavirus; wuhanvirus

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OPINION:  Andrew Cuomo is a suite wearing ‘thug’. He talks like a street ‘thug’ acts like a suite wearing ‘thug’ and is as ignorant as they comes.

Whats up with New York, it much be someone much better than Andrew Cuomo!

[canmom]

now i’m kind of wondering: I’m aware the CCP under Mao executed hundreds of thousands of landlords around the time of the GLF (the number I’ve seen, supposedly claimed by the CCP itself, was 800,000 executions of alleged landlords and Japanese collaborators). not long before that, the country was going through a massive and very bloody civil war.

so I’m curious like, before the GLF, how were those landlords extracting rent in a time when the state as we’d understand it today was largely absent?

was it more of a personal, almost feudal situation, where rather than relying on a state to provide the threat of force, the landlords would pay, idk, mercenaries or something?

if I understand the history right, this was a time when most of the population were still peasants farming for subsistence, and giving up their surplus product to the landlords directly, rather than the situation today where we have wage labourers hired for capitalist production, giving a portion of our wage to a landlord. so it’s maybe not immediately comparable to landlords we’re so familiar with.

as it happens, of course the CCP was trying to drastically reorganise the economy at the same time as they killed all those landlords anyway (with all the disastrous consequences that followed when their policies were shit), but I guess production (such as it was) was not pursued on capitalist lines yet so it didn’t have the same relation to landlords’ property that it does today?

but mostly I feel like I don’t understand it. I want to read up more about this period to understand like, how the economy worked in China before the CCP. maybe see what sources Sorghum and Steel cites, since they talk about that period a bit. I need to reread it especially since part 2 is out now

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

January 3, 2021

My weekly roundup of things I am up to. Topics include dietary needs, farmer well-being, cooking, reform, vaccine distribution, scientific progress, and a health update.

Dietary Needs

I got three sections done on Urban Cruise Ship this week. The first of them is on Dietary Needs. The main goal here is to have an assessment of dietary needs for the purpose of recommending food production systems. It does little good to focus on raw calorie count but then be deficient on vital nutrients. A secondary goal is to identify solutions for meeting needs that are currently unmet. Iodizing salt is one key example of this.

Like most sections, what I have now is only a start. But a start is necessary before the finish.

Farmer Well-Being

The second section is this one with several aspects of farmer well-being. A couple of interesting points:

- Urbanization is driven by three major trends: rural-to-urban migration, the indigenous growth of cities, and the reclassification of villages as cities as they grow. Most development literature focuses on the first trend but neglects the other two.

- There is some anxiety in the literature about the “uncontrolled growth of cities”, though I have yet to see a good exposition of how and why urban growth should be controlled. I remain skeptical. Nevertheless, I had gone into this topic expecting to find that the literature was generally anti-urban, and I have found it to be much more nuanced than that.

- Estimates vary, but I figure that about 1% of the Earth’s surface area is urban. Meanwhile, agricultural yields are still growing and population growth is slowing. For these reasons I think it is very unlikely that urbanization would pose any real threat to food security.

- Urban agriculture is a complex topic for which there is limited data. But unless we are talking about greenhouses, hydroponics, or other forms of intensive agriculture, I would not expect urban agriculture to be very important. It is something people generally do for exercise or aesthetic reasons, not to grow food.

- A number of NGOs extol the value of “local knowledge” in agriculture. I cited several studies that look into the subject more deeply, but I don’t have anything quantitative. Obviously there is a danger of romanticizing indigenous cultures, but it is something worth looking at more seriously.

Cooking

The third section I did this week is on Cooking. The use of polluting, biomass-based cookstoves is perhaps the leading indoor air pollution issue globally. While we debate electric versus natural gas stoves in the Western world, moving to any form of modern energy for cooking is far more important. Aside from pollution, traditional cooking takes a lot of time (estimates I’ve seen are hundreds or even thousands of hours per year) gathering fuel, which is unpleasant, especially if the fuel is animal dung.

Despite the risks, I did cite the AGA study I mentioned a few weeks ago that it costs $572-806 per ton to decarbonize by banning gas appliances. I don’t generally like citing industrial trade groups since there is an obvious bias, but after looking some more I still don’t see any other reliable estimate of carbon mitigation costs.

I also whipped up a chart of saving energy while cooking. Efficiency matters too, though I am generally skeptical of highly distributed solutions because it is not easy to make the general public change cooking habits. But there are plenty of small, easy things on the efficiency front.

American Reform

This Palladium article came out a few days ago, arguing that reforming American institutions is the answer to the threat posed by China’s rise. It is worth reading.

I’ve generally taken a dovish view on China. Not that I think the CCP is admirable in many respects but I see little coming from the Chinese that is a real threat to American power or well-being. Furthermore, even as the United States has its own challenges going forward, China is facing severe demographic and debt crises and is probably not far from its geopolitical high water mark. Avoiding the impulse to panic is the wisest course.

Nevertheless, articles such as the linked Palladium one use China as a bit of a morality tale: it’s a pretext for the United States, or the Western world more broadly, to get its own house in order. In this regard the China threat is perhaps a noble lie: a statement that is not true but is meant to motivate valuable action.

Vaccine Distribution

This week there has been much anxiety about the slow pace of vaccine distribution in the United States. These articles by Marginal Revolution, Scott Aaronson, and John Cochrane are good representatives.

“Distressing” would seem like an understatement of the appropriate response to the distribution. The CDC initially proposed on racial equity metrics in vaccine allocation, a plan that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to eugenics. Aside from that, the obsession of distributing vaccines in “the right order” seems to have displaced the need to do it quickly. Thousands of people are dying every day in the United States. The seeming lack of urgency about this fact is probably the most disqualifying fact that has emerged about the public health profession.

While distribution could be much faster, I’m not sure we’re doing such a terrible job. The United States is one of the better countries in terms of vaccines distributed per person. Commentators have compared the US unfavorably to Israel. It seems to me that Israel is an exceptionally well-run country by many metrics; another example is the rate of water recycling and desalination. Israel, along with Singapore, Taiwan, and a handful of other states, seems to show high levels of state capacity. Replicating that is far from a straightforward matter.

Any serious attempt to look at the Covid-19 failure will have to grapple with the fact that failure seems to have been uniform across the federal, state, and local governments in the US, as well as the fact that most countries did poorly. Hopefully the final chapters of this episode are now being written, but with the new variant, with high reproduction rate, spreading around the world, I am worried.

Scientific Progress

There continue to be a flurry of articles about scientific progress, including this one by Eli Dourado which is pretty good. Eli makes a strong case that there are many technologies on the drawing board, and the world is not facing apparent stagnation for want of ability to invent new things. We have to look harder at the diffusion mechanisms. Apparently it is much more difficult to make robots do useful things than to make them dance.

What Eli doesn’t do so well is give us a sense of what those diffusion mechanisms look like. The basic question I want answered remains: why has productivity growth slowed most of the time since the 1970s and especially since 2005, and what if anything do we expect to be different about the 2020s such that diffusion would increase again?

A couple of nitpicks, since Eli goes into some topics that I work in. It it my understanding that the main bottleneck to wind and solar expansion right now is siting, not energy storage, and so the extended discussion that Eli gives to energy storage may be premature. He discusses enhanced geothermal, as have several other commentators recently, which is a bit puzzling to me since enhanced geothermal has been a hot topic since at least the 2000s, and I don’t see a lot of sign that things the area has significantly evolved recently. He discusses small modular reactors, noting with disappointment the recent delay in the NuScale project, though there isn’t a serious attempt to examine the drivers of nuclear costs. There is also discussion of electrolyzed aviation fuel, a concept which I support but I doubt will be economically viable this decade.

Maybe the 2020s will be the decade for autonomous vehicles, drones, and tunnels. The first two of these items have been on the agenda for a long time, and why they haven’t been commercialized already gets back to the question of technology diffusion noted above.

Regarding farming, I continue to expect that greenhouses and hydroponics with natural light, rather than vertical farming, will be the main drivers of agricultural intensification. Even with recent advances in LED technology, artificial lighting is just too expensive. And we can still get plenty of agricultural intensification with natural light. Eli predicts that lab-grown meat may be successful where plant-based meat substitutes are not. That comes down to market acceptance. Plant-based options tend to be cheaper and have lower environmental impacts. Established options like the Boca Burger have shown that they have a market, albeit a limited one. Why will lab-grown meat have greater market share? This could very well be the case, but I’d need to see the reasoning for it.

Health Update

With the start of the new year, this seems like a good time to take stock of where I am health-wise.

I was in quarantine for two weeks at the end of December. My wife was in Floria, and due to potentially being at higher risk, I decided to be away from her. Quarantine time was extended because she got a minor cold. All measures taken to avoid the virus are either underreactions or overreactions; the trouble is that we don’t know in advance which is which.

I was feeling under the weather for the first two days this year, but now I am better. Aside from being a bit more tired than usual, by all outward signs I have recovered to pre-stroke levels. Being tired may be an after-effect of the stroke, the result of being cooped up in a hospital bed for a while, or it may be a long term trend that I didn’t notice until now.

My appetite is down significantly; again it is not clear why this is the case. This is a welcome change, since I have lost about 10 pounds since the peak and I was getting pudgy before (I still am a bit). I also drink one cup of coffee per day, down from 3+ before the stroke. This is due to a lack of desire for coffee, not any deliberate effort to cut back.

Some time in January I am due to go in for an angiogram, which should check whether the procedure I had in September was successful. I don’t know if the Covid situation has disrupted that schedule.