It’s not just an Australian story; it’s a world story about the consequences of failing to take action on climate change. Australian analysts and other commentators are getting plenty of cover, such as Tim Flannery’s article Australia: the fires and our future in The New York Review of Books.
But it is also a global story. When will Australia’s Prime Minister accept the reality of the climate crisis? is Carolyn Kormann’s article in the New Yorker. The Berlin Morning Postreports on the politics of the bushfires with no less detail than one finds in Australian media, emphasising Morrison’s intransigence, while Merkel’s Government announces itsplan to phase out coal completely with compensation to affected regions.
A set of photographs in The Atlantic tells the story most vividly.
CORONAVIRUS 2019-nCoV VISUALIZED: Wuhan Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Global Cases (by JHU CSSE)
A set of photographs in The Atlantic tells the story most vividly.
THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: China Quarantines 40 Million, 1,300+ Infected; Expert Predicted Coronavirus ‘Pandemic’ Could Kill 65 Million; U.S. Evacuation Underway In China.
Related: “China’s years-long expansion into Africa – and the corresponding flood of Chinese workers establishing themselves there – has left the continent particularly vulnerable to the spread of a new iteration of coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China.”
And finally (for now): Wesleyan University student being monitored for coronavirus in Connecticut.
JOHN HINDERAKER: The China Myth Exposed.
From early in our nation’s history, America’s intellectuals have mostly looked down on their own country and yearned for it to be like someplace else–someplace more sophisticated, and more in tune with “modern” intellectual currents, whatever they might be at the moment. That is a long history, which I will skip over. In our own time, American intellectuals have claimed that Soviet Russia, Germany and Japan were harbingers of the future that the U.S. needed to imitate. In each case, the point was that we had to shed our archaic freedoms and enter the brave new world of central planning under the control–benign, of course!–of intellectuals and bureaucrats. Strangely, however, American free enterprise has managed to outlast and surpass all of those supposedly more advanced challengers.Most recently, China has been the favored nation of the future. It has the advantage over Germany and Japan of being straightforwardly authoritarian (if no longer exactly Communist), which endeared it to anti-democratic liberals like Tom Friedman. . . .I could be wrong; it has happened once or twice. But I suspect that the current public health crisis spells the end of China envy among American intellectuals. The context, of course, is the Trump administration’s standing up to China’s dictators. Like Toto, Trump has pulled back the curtain on the Chinese fraud. To coin a phrase, one might say that China’s economic “juggernaut” is in fact a paper tiger.Someday, China may be a free country with a free economy. Until that day comes, the only lesson we can learn from the Chinese government is what to avoid.
Human Rights Watch on China
Human Rights Watch has released a report highly critical of China, noting that China’s contempt for human rights and other countries’ weak response pose a global threat. It mentions the particularly “nightmarish situation” in Xinjiang, home of ethnic majorities, but its criticism is much broader, putting paid to the idea that economic prosperity leads to liberalisation:
The Chinese Communist Party has shown that economic growth can reinforce a dictatorship by giving it the means to enforce its rule—to spend what it takes to maintain power, from the legions of security officials it employs to the censorship regime it maintains and the pervasive surveillance state it constructs. Those vast resources buttressing autocratic rule negate the ability of people across China to have any say in how they are governed.
It also notes that “several countries that once often could have been counted on to defend human rights have been missing in action”, with particular reference to those national heads of government, such as Donald Trump, who scoff at “globalists” who try to stand up for universal standards of human rights.
In its relationship with China the US must decide its core interests
That’s Kishore Mahbubani’s main message in an interview with a Global Times reporter Yu Jincui. The US must decide between attending to the wellbeing of its 330 million American people, or maintaining its economic and military hegemony. If America cannot get used to a world where it is no longer number one, its allies, including Australia, are going to face hard choices. He concludes with some insights into the differences between Singapore and Hong Kong. Unsurprisingly he finds that Singapore has been much better governed than Hong Kong.
How America squandered its cold war victory
Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, author of The limits of power: the end of American exceptionalism, has an article in The Guardian Freedom without constraints: how the US squandered its cold war victory.
The cold war had given Aericans a sense of purpose; with its ending they were left disoriented. Into that space there came a new political and economic consensus around globalised neoliberalism, American hegemony, freedom (or perhaps unconstrained individualism), and presidential supremacy. Its purpose was “to cement the primacy of the US in perpetuity, while enshrining the American way of life as the ultimate destiny of humankind”.
To put it mildly, they screwed it up. Bacevich lists 23 indicators pointing to the emergence of groups who feel left behind by this consensus. He cites Obama’s quote: “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”, and goes on to point out that “Donald Trump’s detractors charge him with dividing the country when, in fact, it was pervasive division that vaulted him to the centre of American politics in the first place.”
(Is our situation somewhat similar? Our alienated groups may not cling to guns or bibles, but they can unite under other symbols – denial of climate change, ownership of large SUVs, and identification with Morrison’s celebration of mediocrity and anti-intellectualism.)
Chinese Virus Is Spreading Between Humans, Prompting Outbreak Fears
Custer, S., Prakash, M., Solis, J., Knight, R., and J. Lin. (2019).Influencing the Narrative: How the Chinese government mobilizes students and media to burnish its image. Williamsburg, VA. AidData at William & Mary: “Chinese leaders have mobilized an impressive array of government agencies, media outlets, and educational institutions at home and abroad as a megaphone to tell China’s story to the world. In this report, we take a data-driven approach to answer one overarching question: How does Beijing use informational diplomacy and student exchange to advance its national interests among its closest neighbors in East Asia and the Pacific (EAP)? AidData collected quantitative data on China’s overtures to twenty-five EAP countries between 2000 and 2019, which we analyze to understand which tools Beijing uses to mobilize media and students to promote its preferred narrative. This report updates and extends work first published in 2018 in Ties That Bind, a first-of-its-kind report that quantified multiple aspects of China’s public diplomacy—financial, cultural, exchange, and elite-to-elite diplomacy—across 25 countries from 2000 to 2016 to assess how it is received by foreign publics and leaders and determine whether it is meeting Beijing’s objectives. Data from both Ties That Bind and this report is available through AidData’s China’s Public Diplomacy Dashboard, in which users can create custom datasets, maps, and graphs, and filter based on the type of public diplomacy, recipient countries, and time period. This study was conducted with generous support from the United States Department of State. The report’s findings and conclusions are those of its authors alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of funder and partner organizations…”
Light rail tram and car collide in inner Sydney constantly communist incompetency chinese shitty trains Spannish builders
The 67-metre tram is blocking South Dowling Street which is closed between Cleveland and Flinders streets as a result of the crash.
BRUCE DOVER. The Foxification of the Murdoch media in Australia.
The ructions inside the Murdoch empire last week when youngest son, James made a very rare but very public criticism of the family companies news coverage of climate change in the wake of the Australian bushfires shines a revealing light on what is likely to be the continued ” Foxification” of our local media. Continue reading
