Poetry

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Y’all need a break from C19 and Flynn at the moment. I know I do. Cross-posted at Assistant Village Idiot, as usual.

We think of poetry as a decorative art, important for beauty and the expression of elusive ideas in a strong or vivid manner. This is true of some early poetry, but many cultures used poetry more functionally. The point was to tell a story, an important story to preserve history. What strike us as decorative items now, such as rhyme or meter, were put there as aids to memory. The poet could not write things down, and did not want to falter or get lost over many passages. Structure locks these in. We still see this even in our literate culture. Children learn the states of the union as a song “There’s AL-abama, AL-aska…Rhode Island, Tennessee!” I have heard at least three songs teaching the books of the Bible: “I’ll tell you the truth about the book of Ruth…There’s Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther and Job I want to go to heaven in a righteous robe…” (and that was just from overhearing my sons). It is not unusual for adults in Bible study to laughingly mention that much of their memorized Scripture is from music. (Note: Handel’s Messiah is excellent for this.)

Telling a story in poetry happens less often these last two centuries. Rudyard Kipling would do it, Tennyson. When story is attempted now, however, the intent is often comic. We don’t allow songs to go on at story length very much these days. But we do see the memory advantage of this, don’t we? “Bumpty, bumpty, bumpty bright, BUMPity, bumpty, bump tonight!” And if you get lost, having to slur a few syllables, you can get right back on the horse next line.

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What is going on with China right now ?

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China was admitted into the World Trade Organization in 2001 with the understanding that they would participate in free trade and to international norms.

Until the 1970s, China’s economy was managed by the communist government and was kept closed from other economies. Together with political reforms, China in the early 1980s began to open its economy and signed a number of regional trade agreements. China gained observer status with GATT and from 1986, began working towards joining that organization. China aimed to be included as a WTO founding member (which would validate it as a world economic power) but this attempt was thwarted because the United States, European countries, and Japan requested that China first reform various tariff policies, including tariff reductions, open markets and industrial policies.

That has not happened. China has followed a mercantilist trade policy, stealing intellectual property, requiring companies selling to the Chinese to share ownership with often corrupt entities owned by the Peoples Liberation Army and relatives of regime principals.

Mercantilism is a policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports for an economy. It promotes imperialism, tariffs and subsidies on traded goods to achieve that goal. These policies aim to reduce a possible current account deficit or reach a current account surplus. Mercantilism includes an economic policy aimed at accumulating monetary reserves through a positive balance of trade, especially of finished goods. Historically, such policies frequently led to war and also motivated colonial expansion.[1] Mercantilist theory varies in sophistication from one writer to another and has evolved over time.

America has been largely passive in tolerating this behavior until Donald Trump became president. Some of this passivity may reflect Chinese influence with US politicians.

While it may seem politics as usual in Washington today, some are alarmed.

“Nobody in the 1980s would have represented the Russian government. And now you find so many lobbying for the Chinese government,” said Frank Wolf, a retired U.S. representative from Virginia who long served as the co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. “I served in Congress for 34 years. I find it shocking.”

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Adventures in Social Media – Mil-Vet Version

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As I retired from a relatively uneventful career in the peacetime Air Force in 1997, I’ve been out of the military for longer than I was in it. I don’t hang around so much in military veteran circles online as I did early in the decade afterwards, when my daughter was serving in the Marines after 9/11 and deployed to Kuwait and Iraq. But she does venture into veteran social media circles, on a local basis through organizations and outlets like Bourbiz, Grunt Style, Ranger Up, and Black Rifle Coffee … and she called my attention to what amounts to a dumpster fire ongoing in veteran circles. Holy heck, it’s more a raging nuclear inferno than your plain ordinary social media dumpster fire. Read the series of articles, she said, it’s jaw-dropping and so I did. Oh. My. G*d. I thought the Vietnam-era “stolen valor” incidents so thoroughly documented in this book were the far frozen limit, but this Steele character appears to have ventured into hitherto unexplored dimensions.

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Rush Limbaugh Went There.

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He was being funny, late on last Thursday’s show, and he came up with this.  “My favorite conspiracy theory is that this virus is the work of a bunch of lunatic billionaires who really believe that we are destroying the planet and they have discovered that we can’t get to Mars in time and we can’t colonize the moon so they have come up with a way to get rid of billions of people to make the world have a longer survivability potential.”  I’ve been referring, recently, to Tom Clancy novels, but I had no plans to go anywhere near Rainbow Six.

As the novel involves precisely that kind of lunatic billionaire, as well as some clandestine work to shut down the plan and disappear the plotters, because of the risk of “a global panic when people realize what a biotech company can do if it wants,” though, well, perhaps there’s another story in it.

Regular readers of Tom Clancy know that the likelihood of a secret being blown is proportional to the square of the number of people in on it.  The novel left a number of possible dots to connect to put together yet another story, one with the potential to topple governments.  If I had any sort of novel-writing skills, I might essay such a thing, although it might be more productive to offer some of the dots, as if a mental exercise in quarantine, should anyone wish to essay such an effort.

There are almost enough dots to make a post as long as a Tom Clancy novel.  They’re below the jump.

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