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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Powerful Americans Were Catastrophically Wrong about China |
| 2020-04-14 |
| h/t Instapundit [NR] - ... For the last thirty years, the vast majority of powerful institutions in the United States placed a gargantuan bet on the idea that the government in Beijing could be a reliable partner in prosperity and would be a responsible actor on the world stage. Many leading politicians in both parties chose to believe this, many foreign-policy wonks chose to believe this, many academics and university administrators chose to believe this, and obviously, corporate America loved the idea of both using Chinese labor for imported goods and receiving access to the Chinese market. This includes Comcast, Disney, Viacom, AT&T, and Fox Corporation — the parent companies of NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and Fox News, among other large multinationals that own major U.S. news organizations. So, how was the mess of pottage? ...The problem was, the Chinese government was never the stabilizing, reasonable force for order that these Americans wanted to believe it was. We saw the regime’s true nature over three decades of brutal human-rights abuses and censorship and shameless lies to cover that brutality. When the Chinese government initially declared this new virus could not be spread from person to person, and that the situation in Wuhan was under control, very few people wanted to stand up and say they couldn’t be trusted. We had just seen the Chinese government try to blow up the business plans of the National Basketball Association over a single general manager’s tweet. If you cross the Chinese government, you take your livelihood in your hands, if not your life. On March 4, the state-run Xinhua News Agency declared, "If China retaliates against the United States at this time, in addition to announcing a travel ban on the United States, it also announces the strategic control of medical products and the ban on export to the United States, then the United States will be caught in the sea of new coronavirus." Every day, the leaders of China tell us and show us exactly who they are and how they see the world. They are perfectly content to watch us die painful deaths if this means greater leverage and power for themselves. ...It’s easy to see the appeal of the theory out there, contending that the coronavirus came to America earlier than the medical community thinks, that a lot of us suffered anything from "a bad flu" to a "weird flu" in December (or even November) and that a lot of us are walking around having already beaten the virus. It is reassuring, even confidence-building, to think that many of us are already full of antibodies that can terminate SARS-CoV-2, and that we’re a lot closer to herd immunity than the medical community thinks. I wish this were true. But there are three big pieces of counterevidence, indicating this theory is not true. The first counterevidence is strain testing. Nextstrain is an open-source project publishing and analyzing the genomic data of the virus — tracking the minor changes in its DNA as it grows and mutates. (That sounds ominous, thanks to sci-fi films, but most mutations are very minor and don’t really change how the virus works.) So far, all of the collected genomic data of the cases in the United States fall in line with what is already known, with the first confirmed case being in diagnosed in Snohomish County, Wash., on January 21; he had returned to Washington on January 15 after traveling to visit family in Wuhan, China. No one has found any genomic data suggesting a strain of SARS-CoV-2 had been floating around the West Coast or anywhere else in the U.S. from November or December, or even early January. The second piece of counterevidence comes from flu tests. The Seattle Flu Study went back and reviewed thousands the samples it had taken in an ongoing study of flu outbreaks in and around that city. Out of 3,600 samples taken in January and 3,308 samples taken in February, the first test that showed SARS-CoV-2 was on February 21. ...The third, and perhaps most visually powerful piece of counterevidence, comes from what we’re seeing in the hospitals in New York City, as well as places like northern Italy and Spain. This is what happens when SARS-CoV-2 gets into an oblivious and unprepared population. Google "virgin field epidemics" No one in the United States even knew about COVID-19 in January; onset of symptoms in the first recorded patient was December 1, at least according to the study in The Lancet. Final part: was it a lab accident? American intelligence agencies don't think so. I can hardly be accused of anti-Americanism for dropping the "so". |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #8 China cannot seriously threaten us. We have brought this scourge upon ourselves. It is OUR doing. No one forced us to make our pharmaceutical supply chain >80% dependent on China. No one forced us to outsource most of our non-pharmaceutical manufacturing supply chain to China. No one forced us to make our flagship public universities' revenues hence solvency dependent on thousands of extremely well-connected and wealthy, free-spending spoiled ignorant CCP spawn. No one forced us to admit thousands of Chinese spies into our research land and high-tech corporations. We did all this to ourselves. Because we are ruled by f---ing morons. |
| Posted by: Lex 2020-04-14 22:21 |
| #7 Papa Bush's brother ran a company with Deng that shook down any US company wanting to do business in China. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2020-04-14 12:20 |
| #6 Sanctions have proved ineffective to remove dictators. Embracing seemed logical as the J curve theory seemed to indicate they'd turn to a democracy in time. The problem was the J-curve was wrong and our businesses went far beyond just embrace. Too bad Papa Bush did't do more when Tianamen had China positioned as world Pariah. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2020-04-14 11:45 |
| #5 So much we don't know. Like how was President Chiang Kai-shek allowed to spend his summers on his estate in China with his first wife and mother while Taiwan (ROC) and China (PRC) were in a state of war? |
| Posted by: 3dc 2020-04-14 10:38 |
| #4 2nd Tier Powerful Americans Were Catastrophically Wrong about China |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2020-04-14 10:33 |
| #3 "We Come as Friends" movie trailer. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2020-04-14 10:22 |
| #2 The experts aren't what? Oh, wait...I get it! The experts are not experts! |
| Posted by: Bobby 2020-04-14 09:28 |
| #1 The experts aren't |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2020-04-14 09:06 |