Science

So, Really Want to Talk About Foreign Intervention?

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Much ink and many photons have been spent discussing Russia’s attempts to influence (or at least disrupt) the American 2016 Presidential campaign.  Meanwhile…

Here’s an appalling story about how anger from the Chinese government led Marriott Corporation to fire an employee who had ‘liked’ a tweet which congratulated the company for listing Tibet as a country, along with Hong Kong and Taiwan….of course, the Chinese regime considers Tibet to be a part of China, not a separate country.

China forced Marriott to suspend all online booking for a week at its nearly 300 Chinese hotels. A Chinese leader also demanded the company publicly apologize and “seriously deal with the people responsible,” the Journal reported.

And boy, did Marriott ever apologize. Craig Smith, president of the hotel chain’s Asian division, told the China Daily that Marriott had committed two significant mistakes — presumably the survey listing Tibet and the liked tweet — that “appeared to undermine Marriott’s long-held respect for China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

He announced an “eight-point rectification plan” that included education for hotel employees across the globe and stricter supervision.

And the Marriott executive said this to China’s most-read English-language newspaper: “This is a huge mistake, probably one of the biggest in my career.”

(More here…according to this article, the Chinese suppression of Marriott bookings was in response to the initial listing of Tibet as a country rather than to the tweet approving of this listing)

The Chinese economy is, shall we say, a little more dynamic than that of Russia, so the government of China has much more ability to strong-arm American corporations (in general) than does the Putin regime.

Turning now from the hotel industry to the movie industry, Richard Gere says that Chinese pressure due to his stand on Tibetan independence has led to his being dropped from big Hollywood movies.  Also:

Gere’s activities have not just made Hollywood apparently reluctant to cast him in big films, he says they once resulted in him being banished from an independently financed, non-studio film which was not even intended for a Chinese release.

“There was something I was going to do with a Chinese director, and two weeks before we were going to shoot, he called saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t do it,’” Gere recalled. “We had a secret phone call on a protected line. If I had worked with this director, he, his family would never have been allowed to leave the country ever again, and he would never work.”

See also How China’s Censors Influence Hollywood.  Because the Chinese market is so large…(Fast and Furious 7 pulled in $388 million in China, more than it made in the US)…the influence of the Chinese regime on US film production and distribution has become immense.

In recent years, foreign filmmakers have also gone out of their way not to provoke the Communist Party. For instance, the 2012 remake of the Cold War action movie,  Red Dawn,  originally featured Chinese soldiers invading an American town. After filming was complete, though, the moviemakers went back and turned the attacking army into North Koreans, which seemed a safer target, at least until last year’s hack of Sony Pictures.

and

Ying Zhu, a professor of media culture at the College of Staten Island at the City University of New York, worries China’s growing market power is giving the Communist Party too much leverage over Hollywood.

“The Chinese censors can act as world film police on how China can be depicted, how China’s government can be depicted, in Hollywood films,” she says. “Therefore, films critical of the Chinese government will be absolutely taboo.”

In the late 1990s, when China’s box office was still small, Hollywood did make movies that angered the Communist Party, such as  Seven Years In Tibet,  about the life of the Dalai Lama, and  Red Corner,  a Richard Gere thriller that criticized China’s legal system. Given the importance of the China market now, Zhu says those movies wouldn’t get financing today.

Plus,  Chinese companies have snapped up Hollywood studios, theaters and production companies.

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Worthwhile Reading & Viewing

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Bioluminescence at American Digest

Some thoughts on storytelling

Peer influence among adolescents as a driver of transgenderism

Sarah Hoyt: “Have most  institutions, stores and corporations, most large human organizations, gone stone stupid?”

3-D printing in the manufacture of GE’s new turboprop engine

Jim Grant, the well-known observer and analyst of interest rates, asks “what will futurity make of the (so-called) PhD standard that runs our world?” and suggests that, after a major market crash, explanations will include “My generation gave former tenured economics professors discretionary authority to fabricate money and fix interest rates.”

Reminds me:  Danielle DiMartino Booth, who took a job at the Fed following a successful career on Wall Street, remarked that  she did not experience discrimination on account of her sex…but she did face serious prejudice against her on account of not having a PhD.

Worthwhile Reading & Viewing

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Things that were once common knowledge…and now are not

Advice on leadership for Naval Academy cadets…applicable in other walks of life as well

A time-lapse video of 30 days at sea

Animated films:  a transition both in technologies and in implicit political messages

Who murdered beauty?…an analysis of some trends in the world of art

Cedar Sanderson asks  What do Environmentalists, JRR Tolkein, Luddites, and Progressives all have in common?

Company towns, then and now

Summer Rerun: Stories of Solar Stress

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(rerun inspired by the Eclipse)

In my post  A Perfect Enemy, I mentioned Poul Anderson’s 1972 story  A Chapter of Revelation.  Godintending to demonstrate His existence to the world and thereby encourage people to prevent the global nuclear war which is about to occurstops the movement of the sun across the sky. (Technically, He does this by slowing earth’s rotation period to a value identical with Earth’s year.) The reaction to this event is confirmation bias on an immense scale: just about everyone draws the conclusion that the miracle  proves  that  whatever beliefs they already held  were the correct ones…for example, a  Russian scientist (remember, this was written in 1972) suggests that  “The requirement of minimum hypothesis practically forces us to assume that what happened resulted from the application of a technology centuries beyond ours. I find it easy to believe that an advanced civilization, capable of interstellar travel, sent a team to save mankind from the carnage threatened by an imperialism which that society outgrew long ago.”    Moralists, militarists, extreme right-wing evangelists, Black Power advocates…all find in the miracle only proof of their own rightness, and the world slides into further chaos, with riots, coups d’etat, and cross-border military attacks.

Several weeks ago, I picked up Karen Thompson Walker’s novel  The Age of Miracles, in which strange solar behavior also plays a leading part. Eleven-year-old Julia, focused in the usual challenges of growing up, is not too concerned when scientists announce thatfor some unknown reasonthe earth’s rotation has slowed very slightly and the days and nights are both getting a little longer. But the process, whatever it is, continues…the days and the nights get longer..and longer..and longer.

A very well-written book, IMO; especially impressive since it is the author’s first novel. Not everyone agrees: the Amazon reviews indicate that a lot of people liked it very much, and quite a few found it disappointing. But I thought it was very worthwhile; hard to put down, in fact.

Another coming-of-age story involving solar phenomena is Connie Willis’s  Daisy, in the Sun. Like the protagonist of the previous book, Daisy is dealing with the problems of adolescenceoh, and by the way, the sun (which Daisy has always loved) is going to go nova and kill everyone on earth. It’s a strange story, difficult to summarize…I’ll just quote from the author’s introduction:

During the London Blitz, Edward R. Murrow was startled to see a fire engine racing past. It was the middle of the day,  the sirens had not gone, and he hadn’t heard any bombers. He could not imagine where a fire engine would be going.

It came to him, after much thought, that it was going to an ordinary house fire, and that that seemed somehow  impossible, as if all ordinary disasters should be suspended for the duration of this great Disaster that was facing  London and commanding everybody’s attention. But of course houses caught fire and burned down for reasons that  had nothing to do with the Blitz, and even in the face of Armageddon, there are still private armageddons to be faced.

The Poul Anderson story can be found in his short-story collection  Dialogue With Darkness, and  Daisy, in the Sun  is in  Fire Watch.

8/22/17 update:  Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall would be a good addition to this collection.

Poetry for the Eclipse

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The impending eclipse reminded NeoNeocon of  a  poem by Archibald Macleish:

And here face down beneath the sun    
And here upon earth’s noonward height    
To feel the always coming on  
The always rising of the night:  

 

To feel creep up the curving east    
The earthy chill of dusk and slow    
Upon those under lands the vast    
And ever climbing shadow grow  

 

And strange at Ecbatan the trees    
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange    
The flooding dark about their knees    
The mountains over Persia change  

 

And now at Kermanshah the gate    
Dark empty and the withered grass    
And through the twilight now the late    
Few travelers in the westward pass  

 

And Baghdad darken and the bridge    
Across the silent river gone  
And through Arabia the edge  
Of evening widen and steal on

 

RTWT.  The poem reminded me of another poem, George Meredith’s Lucifer in Starlight:

 

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
Now his huge bulk o’er Afric’s sands careened,
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.