Archive for September, 2019

This Just In: Trump is Right on China

Posted: September 3, 2019 by chrisharper in Always look at the bright side of Trump
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A trifecta of anti-Trump organizations—DaTimes, DaPost, and the Council on Foreign Relations—has endorsed the president’s policy on China.

As I have noted in the past, China has used government support illegally to dump cheap exports to the United States. Moreover, President Xi has claimed the South China Sea, one of the richest waterways in the world, as his own. His Belt and Road Initiative is intended to open up markets on nearly every continent. And then there’s Hong Kong.

“China can’t join all the right international clubs and go on playing by its own rules. It can’t make some trade ‘deal’ and then not be held fully accountable, relying on the infinite global capacity to turn a blind eye to its predations,” Roger Cohen writes in DaTimes.

“The president’s statement linking a trade deal and the Hong Kong demonstrations — ‘It would be very hard to deal if they do violence. I mean, if it’s another Tiananmen Square, it’s — I think it’s a very hard thing to do if there’s violence’ — was perhaps his finest hour.”

In DaPost, a Chinese dissident goes even further.

“[A]s someone who has spent years with the knife edge of the Chinese Communist Party bearing down on my throat for my human rights work, I know that the president is on to something. Tariffs and economic threats may be blunt tools, but they are the kind of aggressive tactics necessary to get the attention of the CCP regime, which respects only power and money. It’s not just about ‘winning,’ as the president sometimes puts it, and it’s not simply about trade: It’s about justice, and doing what’s right for ordinary Chinese and American people,” writes Chen Guangcheng, a professor at Catholic University.

The Council on Foreign Relations gives Trump a B+ on his China policy, noting that “his administration has taken the lead in awakening the United States to the growing threat that China poses to U.S. vital national interests and democratic values.”
Although the trade war will cost almost every American some amount of cash depending on the electronics, textiles, and shoes we buy, I think the policy will save us a great deal of money in the long run. And with DaTimes, DaPost, and the Council actually praising Trump, we may finally have something that conservatives and liberals can finally agree upon.

Author Rebecca Makkai changes my mind

Posted: September 3, 2019 by datechguy in Uncategorized
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on the issue of the necessity of the profession of psychiatry

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

If there is anyone out that who needs a shrink it’s this lady.

Remember When Europeans Hit the British Empire…

Posted: September 3, 2019 by datechguy in culture, News/opinion
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…that peoples once under seem to have more respect for it than the academics who critique it:

of all the dramatic photos showing hundreds of young protesters storming the city’s legislative building this week, one image makes for particularly uncomfortable viewing in Beijing: The British colonial flag draped aloft a podium in the assembly’s chamber.

That’s not all. On a day supposed to celebrate the 22nd anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to the “motherland,” other protesters were pictured defiantly flying giant Union flags in the Legislative Council.

Why are some protesters — many of them millennials — harking back to a bygone colonial era, two decades after Britain handed the city over to China as a semi-autonomous territory?

“Does it really mean that people seriously want colonial rule again? No — but I don’t think there’s any dispute among protesters that British rule was better than what we’ve got after the handover, especially in recent years,” said Lam Yin Pong, a Hong Kong journalist.

Furthermore this is not a phenom confined to Hong Kong:

“If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we’d do it,” said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. “Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job.”

Mr. Dube acknowledged that the white regime of Ian Smith was awful. But now he worries that his 3-year-old son will die of starvation, and he would rather put up with any indignity than witness that.

An elderly peasant in another village, Makupila Muzamba, said that hunger today is worse than ever before in his seven decades or so, and said: “I want the white man’s government to come back. Even if whites were oppressing us, we could get jobs and things were cheap compared to today.”

His wife, Mugombo Mudenda, remembered that as a younger woman she used to eat meat, drink tea, use sugar and buy soap. But now she cannot even afford corn gruel. “I miss the days of white rule,” she said.

Nearly every peasant I’ve spoken to in Zimbabwe echoed those thoughts.

That’s from that well known bastion of white supremacy the New York Times.

As a rule countries that emulated British common law and their system of rights that came with it have prospered (think India) but for those who have not the Greatest argument for the British Empire has been what has replaced it worldwide.

Report from Louisiana: Medical Marijuana Eases Blanco’s Last Days

Posted: September 2, 2019 by datechguy in News/opinion
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Former Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco died August 18; she had been suffering from ocular melanoma.

Whether or not one agrees with her politics, pretty much everyone will concede that Governor Blanco was a class act. She was always gracious and kind, and her love for the state of Louisiana was never questioned. She caught a lot of heat during Hurricane Katrina, but no one ever questioned her love of the state or the city of New Orleans.

Last week The Advocate reports that toward the last days of her life Governor Blanco turned to medical marijuana for relief from the pain of her advanced disease.

Medical marijuana was made legal in Louisiana in the 1970s but it took until 2019 for all of the loopholes, regulation, and proper framework to be put in place. Now the drug is distributed as an oil by nine pharmacies throughout the state. It is legal in about thirty-three states in the U.S.

In July 2019, Blanco entered hospice care and by August was receiving medical marijuana. The drug was immediately effective on her and relieved her from the blackouts that she had from morphine. Her family insists that the oil returned a valuable quality of life to Blanco’s last days.

From The Advocate:

Blanco-Hartfield [Blanco’s daughter], put half a milliliter of oil under her mother’s tongue. “Within 60 seconds, her whole body relaxed,” Blanco-Hartfield said. “She smiled and a peacefulness came over her. It was amazing.”

The following day, Blanco-Hartfield gave her mother a mixture of two milligrams of crushed methadone that had been dissolved with a peppermint into water and half a milliliter of marijuana oil.

“All she had to do was let it go down her throat,” Blanco-Hartfield said. “By that night, she was smiling, eating, laughing and drinking. She could speak one-word commands. We never imagined we’d see that again. It made all the difference in the world that she no longer had to take the morphine.”

According to the family, Governor Blanco was able to rest comfortable, eat, and participate in important family events in her last days, and they believe that if the drug had been available sooner, Blanco may have even lived longer.

The drug remains very expensive, but if it does in fact provide such relief to terminal and to suffering patients, certainly it should be accessible.

Link to The Advocate story: https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/politics/article_1a4e44be-cb6a-11e9-8292-fb567939e0f0.html

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