Interesting article about Trump and the China tariffs being about more than economics.

He started out as an mossbacked mercantilist, fuming about the trade imbalance between the world’s two biggest economies. Why was China selling us so many pots and pans, lightbulbs, TVs, and computers, while buying a much smaller dollar amount of pork bellies, cars, and tractors? Surely improper currency manipulation and state subsidies must account for so large a trade deficit, and surely, he imagined—like the seventeenth-century French Finance Controller Jean Baptiste Colbert—it was sucking the wealth right out of our nation. Though sophisticated economists countered that it benefits rather than impoverishes us to have another country sell us goods we want for less than it would cost us to make them, Trump sensed the social costs of this imbalance with an acuity the economists lacked. It was killing our factory towns, weakening our social fabric, and transferring abroad important skills and capabilities that we might someday regret having lost, especially if we needed to scale them up quickly. The gain in these transactions was easier to quantify than the loss.

But Trump came to realize that the problem was much larger. To enter its market, China for years has required high-tech companies to transfer proprietary technology to local partners, so that U.S. corporate bosses, with their focus on quarterly results rather than long-term viability, promiscuously allowed Chinese firms to filch a storehouse of laboriously acquired Western knowledge that could vault so industrious a people to domination of the highest-value industries in short order. What’s more, these were technologies key to the projection of power, both domestically, in Orwellian systems of social control, and globally, through cyberwarfare, spying, and sophisticated weaponry. Add to that Xi Jinping’s hegemonic ambitions, already well advanced with his “Belt and Road” initiative meant to vassalize developing nations and establish embryo naval ports there, along with his illegal militarization of the South China Sea, and Lenin’s contemptuous quip that the capitalists will sell you the rope to hang them with rings more ominously true than ever.

Trump has grasped that China presents a national security problem even bigger than its commercial challenge, and he responded with a tariff regime that, given America’s vastly superior economic staying-power, might force a reluctant China to change its ways.

Liar, liar, pants on fire

https://www.france24.com/en/20190823-amazon-fires-how-celebrities-are-spreading-disinformation

Never get tired of quantum
http://flip.it/R8agcV

The Amazon is burning! Women, minorities hardest hit. We're all gonna die! Wait, wut?

We are told that Amazon fires are at record levels right now. This is a blatant lie. The only “record” is that Amazonian fires have DECREASED over the “record”.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/23/amazon-fire-history-since-2003/

NASA Say The Amazon Is Burning At Below Average Rates - Yet Many News Stories Say Record Rates - Which Is It?

https://www.science20.com/robert_walker/nasa_say_the_amazon_is_burning_at_below_average_rates_yet_many_news_stories_say_record_rates-240959

Oooooh, Hasbro made a Socialist version of Monopoly and of course it's not true Socialism

https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/1164233656799506433

You know she does have a point

https://twitter.com/MsBlaireWhite/status/1164608523046572032

Suzanne Venker, on boys shortly after the Parkland shooting.

Mr. Black is not the first to attack masculinity and suggest it’s at the root of all evil. Indeed, the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ has become boilerplate language in America.

It’s not a hard sell, either. After all, it is boys and men who are typically to blame for violent acts of aggression. Ergo, testosterone—the defining hormone of masculinity—must be to blame. But testosterone has been around forever. School shootings have not.

Mr. Black is correct that boys are broken. But they're not broken as a result of being cavemen who haven’t “evolved” the way women have. They’re broken for another reason.

They are fatherless.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/the-desperate-cry-of-americas-boys

In addition to being fatherless, how many of them were doped up on psychotropic drugs as children?

Also, do they really need to purchase a mansion in Martha's Vineyard?

https://twitter.com/RantyAmyCurtis/status/1164702001474736128

Reminder: we live in the age of miracles.

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/grave.jpg

Are these kind of wedding celebrations still happening in America?

https://twitter.com/heckyessica/status/1164930366089703425

I don't know about weddings but yes that does happen in the poorer Hispanic neighborhoods for new years. And yes what goes up does come down. Sometimes tragically.

A characteristic of charter schools and parochial schools in the US, esp those with uniforms, is the same emphasis on order.
We can see the same thing in traffic. When everyone obeys traffic laws, things go along smoothly but when people dart in and out there are accidents. In the downtown of big cities failure to follow rules leads to gridlock which means that ambulances cannot get to hospitals and people die--I saw figures for NYC once. Don't have a heart attack in NYC during rush hour--you'll die.

Weeeelllll . . . in El Salvador . . . according to Quartz.

This dystopian trial in El Salvador is what a total ban on abortion looks like

Can the Mad and Lonely Shooter Be Stopped?

From Dec. 2015:

Mass Shootings: the “New Normal?”

Word to the fanboys: Boom!

She does NOT look like somebody to mess with.

Winnipeg Runner Chases Down Alleged Thief to Retrieve Stolen Bike Wheel

Well, whaddya know!!!

All The People Who Think They Are Better Than You Are Much, Much Worse

Public school = child abuse.

Decades of Intensifying Left-Wing Influence on High School Students

And then there's this.

Hollywood #MeToo pioneer Alyssa Milano: I aborted two of my children, and I’m ‘not sorry’

Obama judges . . . what CAN'T they do???

Obama Judge Rules Medicaid Must Pay for Transgender Sex Reassignment Surgery

Trump’s Deregulation Promise

> Liar, liar, pants on fire

It wasn't celebrities, but this scared the short off me a couple days ago.

TM is kind of a joke account... I should have known.

Preference: Sidekick. YMMV

About Alyssa Milano:

Whatever you think about her choices, the article mentions Accutane.

That's almost guaranteed to produce gross birth defects. Nobody using Accutane should risk or continue a pregnancy.

Thanks for mentioning that, Rad. I had no idea.

What's puzzling is that an anti-abortion site would let that slip into the article in the first place. (Unless the people THERE didn't know.)