Emily Dickinson, if she had a blog, might have included this, one of her poems, as her first posting:
This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,-
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!
Personal Postscript — We are now in a brave new world of (temporary?) social distancing and (permanent?) government overreach. Have blogs become more or less relevant to you in these turbulent times? Why do you blog? How are you coping with the apocalyptic slouching beast disguised as our pandemic hysteria?
This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,-
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!
Personal Postscript — We are now in a brave new world of (temporary?) social distancing and (permanent?) government overreach. Have blogs become more or less relevant to you in these turbulent times? Why do you blog? How are you coping with the apocalyptic slouching beast disguised as our pandemic hysteria?
A spy no more: The secret life of Australian citizen and writer Yang Hengjun
The uniform, the spy novels and a secret life. The breadcrumbs that suggest Australian citizen Yang Hengjun, detained in China for 429 days, was once a Chinese intelligence officer.
Americans love living in a disaster movie: “The only language we have to describe our present reality comes from referencing the Hollywood films our culture churns out. ‘I’m in Times Square and it’s like I Am Legend’, a friend texted me this week. ‘I wish it was always like this’.”
Two 20-somethings extend ‘invisible hands’ in virus outbreak Associated Press
China does not just want to hide their mishandling of the outbreak, but they want to blame the origin of the virus on the United States and paint themselves as heroes saving the rest of the world from the pandemic they started. China’s Communist Party-controlled newspaper, People’s Daily, attributed shipments of masks and other medical equipment to countries like Iran and Italy as their love and care for all people. The Washington Postreported that those shipments were not donations, but exports purchased by those countries.
Not to be deterred by facts, however, Atlantic Staff Writer Anne Applebaum upheld the lie that China was “sending aid” to Italy out of the goodness of their hearts.
In an article titled “The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff,” Applebaum makes the case for why the Trump administration is just as bad as the Chinese Communist Party. Applebaum initially describes China’s failings in handling the virus, but then compares Trump to officials in Wuhan for being “concerned about the numbers—the optics of how a pandemic looks.”
She acknowledges China’s threats against it’s own doctors, but shifts blame away from the Chinese Communist Party because they did not instruct “anyone in the United States not to carry out testing.” She writes “many of those recounting China’s missteps have become just a little bit too smug.”
Interesting to see Applebaum, who made her bones with Gulag: A History, a frank re-assessment of Soviet Communism, and has a new book due out in June titled Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, shilling for the authoritarian Chinese.