Plz let me finish

 

Can we please stop talking about the Torenza passport woman, Lafufus and Your Party? Not to mention flat earthism. Let me finish my chocolate shake for crying out loud!

This is my 12,000th post, btw. 

Hong Kong elections

 

LOL. This guy was Paramount Leader of China when this little incident happened...

En helt vanlig dag på jobbet

 

Credit: Pop Mart 

Bråda dagar hos Tullverket. Men är inte originalet också Made in China? 

Tullen: Stoppat Labubu-kopior för 1,4 miljoner kr

Exorcists on TikTok

 

Here we go again. 20 years ago, there was an unconfirmed claim on the internets that Christian fundamentalists opposed the Smurfs (for all kinds of unrelated reasons). Not sure if that was even true, or some kind of anti-Xian satire, but these days the memes make themselves.

A new toy line known as Labubus (and the rip-off version Lafufus) has created pandemonium on TikTok, with misguided believers claiming that the adorable critters are demon-possesed, specifically by the Sumerian demon Pazuzu. Which would have been completely unknown to the layperson...had it not been for "The Exorcist".

Guys, I´m sure there is real evil out there (I don´t know, Epstein or something) so stop obsessing about some Chinese collectible elves, please!   

Bananas

 

Chairman Mao, come back, all is forgiven! How is this even possible? Money laundering? Is crypto real money in the first place? 

So some "crypto entrepreneur" bought a banana for 6 million dollars and then consumed it. The banana was apparently "conceptual art"?!  

Crypto entrepreneur eats banana he bought for 6 million dollars

The throne of Kong

 

Credit: Thurundir

"Godzilla vs. Kong" (2021) is the latest but apparently not last film in the so-called MonsterVerse series. One of the lead actors is Swedish: Alexander Skarsgård (I admit I had no idea). While the film isn´t terribly interesting, I admit that it was better than I expected and can work as light entertainment on a rainy Saturday evening. Some standard tropes have been reimagined in fun ways. Thus, the crackpot conspiracy theorist who turns out to be right is African-American, while the ugly computer nerd who knows everything turns out to be just ugly, knowing essentially nothing at all! Some other tropes are the usual ones, such as the mad scientist being eaten by his own monstrous creation (bye bye!). 

I did enjoy all the "in-house" references to the Illuminati, lizard people, the breakaway civilization, and so on. Indeed, the entire MonsterVerse concept is  woven around one of the crazier alternative ideas out there (pun intended): the Hollow Earth. The monstrous "Titans" inhabiting these nether regions of our planet get their enormous powers from a mysterious source even deeper down, and naturally the bad guys (called Apex) want to tap it for their own nefarious ends: to energize "Mechagodzilla", a robot interfacing with the extracted neural pathways of a particularly evil Titan, the famed hydra-like Ghidorah. Unfortunately for Apex, the robot spins out of control and becomes the apex predator. The only thing that can save the human race (and, I suppose, the franchise) is a temporary alliance between two other Titans who are usually at each other´s throats: King Kong and Godzilla...

The final battle between the cryptid monstrosities is set in Hong Kong, but before we reach that point, the film takes us on an extended trip through the Hollow Earth, which turns out to be anything but a paradise. Sure, the jungles are lush, but the titantic beings dwelling there are engaged in an apparently never-ending bellum omnium contra omnes, with Kong as the "king" sitting on a mountain throne, trying to uphold some semblance of order with his huge battle-axe, powered by the enigmatic energy from further below. I can´t say that´s much of an improvement over life on the surface, to be honest! Apparently, the sequel will be called "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire", a rather ominous title and pit these titanids against an even bigger terror from the bowles of our hardboiled planet, the identity of which isn´t revealed by Warner Bros just yet. OK, let me guess. Sorath? Cthulhu?

I´m already bracing myself for that extravaganza!   

OMICRON PANIC

 

Here we go, right on schedule... 

A modest proposal

The few remaining Trumpistas are angry. Why? Because Biden wants to give 11 million Hispanic DACA recipients citizenship. Read: 11 million new AOCs. And 11 million new Democrat voters.

However, this problem is relatively easy to solve. 

The GOP can simply import the 11 million Uyghurs and 7 million Hong Kong Chinese which the Trump operatives pretended to care so much about during the recent election campaign. 

Check mate, Beijing Biden!

Or no? 😂

The War *for* Drugs

"Opiumkrigen" is a book in Swedish by Bertil Lintner, a foreign correspondent now living permanently in Thailand. His articles have appeared in Svenska Dagbladet, Far Eastern Economic Review, and Asia Times.

"Opiumkrigen" gives a short (150 pages) overview of Chinese 19th and early 20th century history, with the main chapters dealing with the Opium Wars. While Lintner never takes a side in the Hong Kong conflict, the book as a whole could certainly be used by those who believe that the territory should be an integreted part of China.

Today, opium is mostly associated with China and the Chinese. Lintner points out that the opium poppy probably comes from the Eastern Medditerranean region, and was cultivated there by humans already during the Neolithic. The Muslim invaders introduced it to India. When India was subsequently conquered by the British, they took over the poppy fields and the opium production. There was just one problem: who should they sell it to? For obvious reasons, the British didn't want people in *their* colony to become opium-addicts! Bad for social stability, you see.

The solution was to export (or rather smuggle) the opium to China, where opium had never been used on a massive scale before. This was also good for the British terms of trade, since the mercantilist policy of China had soaked Britain of its precious silver, used to pay for Chinese tea (the Chinese more or less refused to import anything from the British colonies). This sounds vaguely familiar somehow...

By large-scale smuggling operations, aided and abetted by corrupt local officials in southern China, the British gradually turned the Chinese into a nation of opium addicts. When the Manchu emperor in Beijing ordered the illegal opium destroyed, the British got their causus belli and the "Opium Wars" were on.

The First Opium War (1839-1842) and the Second Opium War (1856-1860) were both resounding victories for Britain. The Chinese were essentially massacred by superior British fire power. Hong Kong became a British crown colony, China was "opened up for foreign trade" and other colonial powers saw their chance and started preying on the Chinese. And, of course, the opium trade continued, even more profitable than before.

Colonial wars are seldom moral, but the idea of turning an entire nation into junkies just to adjust the trade balance strikes me as one of the more evil ideas in human history (and let's face it, the competition for that title is pretty stiff).

After opium followed morphine and then heroine, both Western opium-derived products that were dumped on the Chinese market.

Eventually, large scale domestic poppy growing and opium production was established. On the one hand, this lowered the fabulous profits of the Western colonialists, who suddenly became more amenable towards liberal-philantropic demands to suppress the international opium trade. On the other hand, the opium crisis simply continued, now with Chinese warlords and crime gangs as the main culprits.

Lintner clearly knows his Chinese and Asian history, and manages to mention almost everything in this book: Christian missionary activity, the Boxer Rising, the Shanghai International Settlement, opium trade and ditto addiction in French Indochina and the Philippines, and even the recent Hong Kong protests. Ironically, he says relatively little about the Communist Party of China, although he does point out that they clamped down hard on poppy-growing and opium addiction after taking power in 1949.

A very curious oversight is that the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) is treated as a mere episode. But surely this was one of the bloodiest conflicts in Chinese and 19th century history?

I also spotted some typos, but that's because I'm a nerd!

Overall, I would rate "Opiumkrigen" very high. The book must have been published in January of this year, and feels very current due to the ongoing conflicts between the People's Republic of China and the United States.

And while it never mentions the opiate crisis in the United States, certain parallels seem to be discernable... 

Honey Badger´s War

A lot of material like the above was recently posted on YouTube, suggesting that Donald Trump´s disgraced ex-advisor Steve Bannon is back in full force. The timing cannot be a coincidence: Trump have started a virtual “trade war” against China, while the democracy protests in Hong Kong are gaining momentum. The first interview with Bannon was made last year at an “undisclosed location” somewhere in Texas, but hasn´t been released until now. The second was made recently and promotes a forthcoming film produced by Bannon attacking the Chinese-owned mobile phone company Huawei. Despite Bannon´s fall from Trump´s grace, it seems that the former national security advisor still has some allies left and wants to play a bigger role in the near future as informal chief strategist of American geopolitical moves against the Middle Kingdom.

Bannon is often portrayed as an “isolationist”, despite his constant anti-Chinese rhetoric. After watching the video clips above, I don´t think anyone can claim that again in good conscience. Rather, Bannon comes across as a strident interventionist and Cold Warrior (even including the 60´s and 70´s anti-Communist and human rights rhetoric), but against the People´s Republic of China rather than Russia (the enemy of choice of the US foreign policy establishment). He says that the United States is a Pacific power and that “going home is not an option”. Indeed, Bannon combines his right-wing populism with the anti-Chinese interventionist perspective, casting China in the role as the enemy of the American working people. Clearly, “America First” or “American nationalism” doesn´t mean what some people think it means – splendid national isolation in the City on the Hill. No, it means challenging the Chinese in “their” geopolitical space in the Pacific region, and even on the Chinese mainland itself. And while the challenge is mostly economical, Bannon doesn´t seem to rule out some kind of military action, although not in Hong Kong or the PRC proper, but certainly in the South China Sea.  

In the interview, Bannon argues that China wants to become the new hegemonic world power by combining two quite different geopolitical orientations: the Eurasian-based strategy associated with Mackinder and the sea-power strategy associated with Mahan. This is unique in great power history. He expresses strong disapproval of the Italian populist government for their pro-Chinese orientation. Is this why Salvini & Co didn´t want to have Bannon over in Italy? Bannon further mentions how China is de facto treating the South China Sea as their own territorial waters, while creating a global network of naval bases. However, Bannon believes that Chinese hegemonic ambitions have one fatal weakness: they are really based on Western, principally American, money! This reminds me of Anthony Sutton´s analysis of Stalin´s Soviet Union, according to which the Stalin regime became strong only thanks to massive American and Western aid. The United States elites are doing the same thing all over again, essentially building up an expansionist Communist power. They are doing it at the expense of the American people and the workers, essentially de-industrializing the US in the process, making millions of Americans unemployed, creating the opiate crisis, etc. Meanwhile, pundits claim that China´s upward trajectory can´t be stopped (Bannon mockingly calls this “the second law of thermodynamics”), while the U.S. is supposedly a declining power. Like Reagan took on the Soviets, Bannon believes that Trump can take on the Chinese, proving who is really global boss.

Bannon´s solution is two-fold: support for Trump against the “party of Davos” (the pro-Chinese Western globalists) and increased pressure on the Communist regime in Beijing. One action proposed is to send home all or most of the Chinese foreign students in the U.S., many of whom work in American laboratories, including sensitive weapons laboratories. Bannon regards them as a national security threat. He also wants to close down the so-called Confucius Institutes, claiming they are directly financed by the Chinese military (the PLA). In the more recent clip, Bannon proposes to simply stop American investments in China and bring the money home, while hindering Huawei and other Chinese businesses to penetrate the West. In this way, the Communist government of the PRC will simply collapse, Soviet style, and American hegemony be reasserted. While Trump isn´t ready to go quite as far yet, he *has* recently tweeted threats to the same effect, which may explain why Steve “Darth Vader” Bannon decided to enter the fray just now. What will happen if or when the PLA attacks Hong Kong is, shall we say, an interesting question!

Three other reflections. First, it´s interesting to note that Bannon sees China rather than Russia as the main enemy. The usual line in DC is that Russia is enemy number one, while various adventurist think tanks want the West to take on both the PRC and Russia at once (while also bombing the shit out of the Muslims). Second, the South China Sea shows the problems with the strategy of balancing the great powers – my favored “strategy” (see my review of Huntington´s book “The Clash of Civilizations”). Since the South China Sea is vital for international trade, it´s difficult to see how it can ever become part of an internationally recognized Sinosphere. But that, of course, means that “balance” is impossible. Third, note the implicitly Bonapartist idea of President Trump ordering U.S. private businesses to stop investing in China, an authority Bannon believes the president actually has. An imperial-populist presidency attacking powerful private corporations? I suppose we live in interesting times… 

Stan Lee, you just got five marvellous stars

Marvellous. I found the Swedish version of this Marvel Comics Super Special in my closet yesterday. It really is a comic book adaptation of "Meteor", a classical disaster film from 1979, starring Sean Connery and Natalie Wood. The comic suited me perfectly, since the film was considered unsuitable for children by the Swedish censors. Meanwhile, the local supermarket was selling the Marvel Super Special to...well, children. (They sold candy, too.) Clearly, some marketing guru in Hollywood knew exactly what he was doing! (Thanks, by the way.)

The plot of "Meteor" is pretty basic stuff. A super-sized asteroid, known as Orpheus, is on a collision course with Earth. The United States and Soviet Union have to cooperate to blast it sky high, using top notch nuclear weapons already placed in orbit as part of the Cold War. Unfortunately, several smaller asteroids remain undetected and destroy Hong Kong and Innsbruck (sic). The grand finale is set on Manhattan (where else?), where one of the mini-asteroids crash into the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building and the Rockefeller Center, after which it none-to-gently lands in Central Park. However, the heroes and heroines manage to destroy Orpheus at the very end, saving most of world civilization...for now.

I recently saw the original film, and realized that the comic book version is somewhat different and actually better! However, it does contain one curious gaffe (or at least the Swedish translation does), placing Hong Kong in Japan. Hardly surprising, since the amateur astronomer in Hong Kong who discovers Orpheus in Marvel's version, has a Japanese name. Presumably, a Japanese business executive living in the British crown colony? Or a ridiculous mistake from the Marvel script writers? This was 1979, remember...

The most entertaining part of the comic album is a long list of short reviews of *other* disaster films. Most of the reviews are pretty scathing, which is hardly surprising, as the Marvel Comics editors tell us their honest opinions of "Dawn of the Dead", "Robot Monster" or Roger Corman's "Teenage Caveman". LOL. The somewhat idiosyncratic list also includes classics like "Barbarella", "Zardoz" and "Star Wars"...

"Meteor" ends with an interview with Bill Cruse from the special effects department, and an article about real disasters, including the Black Death in Europe during the 14th century.

We can't say we haven't been warned.

Five stars!