2020 Vision

You know what I love? People who talk about something they hate after asking, "You know what I love?" I love watching and listening to people trying to make a legitimate statement about extreme feminism, "Me Too" run amok, or reverse sexual discrimination without appearing to think that any of those things actually exist in the world. It's not exclusively, but mostly men I'm talking about. Men who are afraid of women. You know what else I love? That dude's hat. Here's an example I stumbled upon:

 

People apologizing for having Sanders speak at a women's march weren't doing so because he's not a feminist, he is, not because his policies don't help women, they do, not because he isn't popular among women voters, he is, not because he would say anything bad about women, he didn't, it was because the mob were (as the speaker describes them) butthurt that he ran against Hillary in 2016. Despite the fact that there were 2 of 42 speakers with penii at this rally, Bernie was viewed by some as the lead speaker, presumably because he was the most famous. Hardly grounds for apology. The announcer actually comes harrowingly close to saying what we all know he means when he says that objections to Bernie speaking were based entirely on... (genitalia?) false pretenses.

The one possibly valid reason for feminists being upset or requiring an apology for Bernie Sanders speaking at a feminist rally would be the idea that his popularity and inexplicable failure to win the fixed Democratic candidacy race for the 2016 election, indirectly (and understandably) led to disenfranchised voters, which partially, along with cheating, stupidity and Russian shenanigans, eventually led to the worst president in history. The ralliers then being referred to as "Clintonistas" might make more sense. What doesn't make sense, to me, is how anyone can view it in this popular way with absolutely nobody being offended. Hell they can have rallies! "Bernie cost us our female president!" That's fine for them to say. But if I were to write here about the possibility of extreme feminism having prevented Bernie Sanders from becoming the Democratic nominee for the 2016 election and eventually the president, people would eat me alive, wouldn't they? I'd be called a woman-hater, misogynist, conspiracy theorist and such. But with Bernie and, (who knows?), maybe Hillary running again for Dem leadership for the 2020 election, I am seeing and reading more people who are tip-toeing about the edges, but never quite saying exactly that.

Analogously, it's fine to say, "It's about time for a woman to be president," while it'd be political suicide to say that you'd prefer a man. How to end a political career 101. But saying you want a new kind of bush in the Whitehouse (hardy har har) would GET you votes! Unless you were a man, then it'd be sexual misconduct.

I think with the way the whole country was feeling the Bern in 2016, he would have steamrolled Trump and become one of the best presidents ever. And I don't even think it was the majority of feminists who fixed the Democratic leadership vote, they supported him. Even at Hillary's alma mater. If you get a chance, watch Michael Moore's newest, "Fahrenheit 11/9" and go to about the 45 minute mark and you will see Democrat reps at the DNC in 2016 lying about the results of their leadership election. LYING! But even Moore doesn't quite say the female alliance went over the line! In the fucked up system that we all mistake as democracy nowadays when elections can be decided beforehand with whatever the hell "SUPERcandidates" are, lying wins. Sanders destroyed Hillary and he would have slam-dunked Trump. And now America'd be talking about building infrastructure, not border walls; healthcare for all not some; tax breaks for tax payers not rich tax dodgers; but instead they have this bozo screwing 99.9% of the country to build his corporate profile. But a few people (not all women but mostly) being emotional and not cerebral, singing Helen Reddy in their heads and doing their part for the sistahs, tears in their eyes or rolling down their cheeks, said, "Vagina power!"

I'm the asshole for wondering about that? But it's fine and dandy for people to get butthurt about Bernie speaking at a feminist rally because either he cost them their first first man or just because he is a man? Well that's just about as unfair as the male-dominated society feminists are meant to be fighting against!

The whole thing was a travesty! Even Elizabeth Warren said the DNC was fixed! Of course she semi, but never fully, retracted the statement. Of course she did! She's running for president in 2020 so will need to win her party's nomination in the same way Hillary did. (meaning by becoming the Dem's rep, not by just being a chick) She can't very well be on record as saying it's rigged. By the time the damn thing happened Bernie was so far ahead of Hillary in every poll and in the minds of the American people that it HAD to be rigged. He was going to revolutionize the system. Hillary was a moderate. Not an inspiring word. Even SNL knew what should have happened! Bernie was the golden goose, Hillary was some chicken that'll do. Although they DID say that if Bernie won, he wouldn't have beaten Trump. I think he would have done much better than Hillary although, silly me, there I go again thinking elections aren't rigged. Then there's talk of Hillary's super PAC and maybe the rich donors her and Bill had so many of tilted the DNC in her favour.... Maybe it was money, but I think it's more likely that it was a little bit Too Me Too.

Yeah, I know, I hate women. I should be sent to sensitivity training. I'm a terrible human being. Sue me, but I just think in any election people should be voted on for what they will do to help their countries, not their sex. I differ from Madeleine Albright who said there's a special place in hell for women who don't support women in elections. Or Gloria Steinem who said, about the 2016 election, that the boys were all with Bernie inferring that the girls should all be with Hillary. They were both backin' their bitch in 2016. But do you know who was against this kind of voting? Hillary Clinton. Or at least she said that.

Cue the mealy mouthing. I like the Me Too movement and I believe in equality between the sexes. But like unions, politics and super powers, with great power comes great responsibility. Nobody's super because of their power. They're superheroes or supervillains based on how they wield it. It has to be tempered with wise regulation. And with the ferociousness of the women's movement, it is often apparent (at least to me) that they have very few regulators. Most people are too scared of them! So in a little way (like my usual "AT LEAST" type of thinking) I can view this whole situation as a bit poetic. The absolute reality that if you have more votes than your opponent and lose is the opposite of democracy and it might be how Hillary won the Dem leadership in 2016. But it makes it possible to say, "Well at least she lost the presidency the same way."

I guess the question is, will powerful feminists learn from this monumental mistake if it really was just a big girls' club that shot itself in the foot? Bernie's running again. Will girls vote for girls because they're girls? Will a better girl come along? I like Liz Warren. But I don't think she'd be half the president Bernie would. Will the U.S. suffer another winner who doesn't get into office? Will they finally realize that their system is why they suffer these tragedies?

It might be another interesting election next year... The fireworks are already beginning. Get ready for some "organic virality," or in the jargon of old farts like me, "mud slinging."

No Country Has a Monopoly on Corruption

The location of the Kim/Trump summit has been announced! But I don't think the building of lasting peace will be all they talk about building when they meet at the end of this month in Hanoi. A whirlwind of thoughts come up in my noggin when I think of this dog and pony show. And you can choose which is which for yourself. I guess they begin, oddly enough, with Iran and China and Canada and... well let me splain...

I was worried that maybe the Iran sanctions that were violated by the Huawei Princess, Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, were the new ones imposed unilaterally by Heir Shtroomphmeister after he heroically (in his mind) withdrew from the international Iran sanctions, but, nope, she violated the international ones. The ones that are working. Not the ones Trump fabricated to actually punish the other countries (the allies of the U.S.) who have imposed sanctions to discourage nuclearization in Iran. Trump says he's all about denuclearization in North Korea, but as I have written of here before, I think Dumby's just jonesin' to build golf courses, condos and hotels he can use with his pony pal Putin for some future top secret North Korean bro-downs. And when he proudly stated that he withdrew from the international sanctions on Iran, which are working to curb Iran's nuclear aspirations, during the state of the union address, (and received ignorant and dutiful applause), he neglected to mention the new sanctions he imposed on his allies to punish their punishment of Iran. And when he went on to take some credit for getting North Korea to the brink of denuclearization with ostensibly the same efforts he is penalizing in his allies, he was again applauded, but we know he doesn't give a shit about that sort of thing. Don't we?

But to get off Trump, (that's what she was paid not to say), who always finds his way into my posts these days, Skycom and Huawei are linked. Meng Wanzhou used to actually be on the board of directors at Skycom. So vacating the seat may have some mitigating effect on the up to 30 year sentence she could face for fraudulently helping Skycom deal with Iran, it does not indicate full separation between Huawei and Skycom. Indeed, it may just have been part of a plan to create an appearance of separation. So the proper thing for Canada to do in this situation would be to extradite her to the U.S. and allow her to face trial. I think she'll get a slap on the wrist and a fine that won't hurt her at all. She won't get 30 years in prison. I'd be surprised to see her get any prison time. What is more likely is that she'll be used by the U.S. as a pawn in the trade war with China. Something like, if you allow North Korea to continue building the hotel/casino across the Yalu River from Dandung (with some Trumped up financing of course) we will go easy on Sabrina Meng Wanzhou. By the way, notice in that article China's oh-so-ingenious (and pretty much their only) political tactic of saying, "Do what we want, or else." The U.S. might be powerful enough to get away with giving them a big (or in Trump's case maybe not so big) middle finger, but all North Korea and Canada seem to get is the "or else."

The Canadian quandary is that doing what they HAVE to do might just result in the execution of one of its citizens. That's something Canada does not believe in. China knows we have an extradition treaty with the U.S. that we can't break, and we know how China behaves in cases such as these. They don't give a crap. It gives me shivers when I think of stories like this one. Kevin and Julia Garratt, two Canadians who had spent 30 years in China teaching ESL and eventually opening up a coffee shop, were suddenly (and completely without grounds (pun apology)) arrested as spies in retaliation for Canada's arrest and extradition of an ACTUAL Chinese spy who had stolen American military fighter jet plans. These unsuspecting, innocent Canadians were the victims of a Chinese "or else." Can you imagine going through what they did? And at the end of it all they still maintained a love for their adopted country of China. Because, although you should know by now, I hate China, when I say "China," I am talking about the few people who run that shit show over there. Most of the regular people are not so detestable. Some are actually nice.

If you recall, I was threatened with publication of fake charges against me when I chose not to allow my employers to cheat me while I was in Taiyuan. Their offer had a familiar ring to it: "Give us what we want, or else." This Garratt story from (Hey what do you know, Dandung! See how this all ties together nicely?) could have been mine! It could happen to ANY foreigner living in any city in China. The Great Wall is not a national symbol that has diminished in its message over the years. Rather, it has become like the wall along the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms that keeps the Wildlings out. I wonder if Trump is a UGE fan of Game of Thrones because of that beautiful wall... China hasn't "opened up" economically to mix with the other countries of the world, it has done so to screw us all. Yet we continue to do business and stick our national economic digits deeper into the Chinese finger cuffs...

Now I don't believe Bob Schellenberg to be innocent like the Garratts, or me, so maybe China is improving a little???, but, he's gonna get punished when Canada does the right thing. China likes punishing people for doing the right thing. It's a pattern. They also like encouraging people to do the wrong thing at their own peril. Ask former ambassador to China, John McCallum. He'd been over in China for a year, long enough to learn how "corruption" isn't a strong enough word for what goes on there. You don't last even that long without learning how to play the game. And you don't get fired for just saying, "It would be great if the extradition request was dropped." He was probably wheeling and dealing with Huawei to bring their baby home and it bit him in the arse. I wouldn't be surprised if he was offered money to take her side in the media and put pressure on his own country to have her released, but I WOULD be surprised to find out about it. We'll probably just have to speculate.

Having said all of this, the U.S. anti-corruption laws, well, they're sorta corrupt. It seems to many like they are selectively enforced against company officials who may be beating Americans to the corruption punch. The story of Fredirick Pierucci of Alstom is a good example. To sum it up, the French company Alsom was doing a deal in Indonesia and their rep there, Pierucci, took advantage of the "well-oiled" system of corruption in the country which greases local officials to promote your company. It was a 118 million dollar deal. But before Alsom could perpetrate its corruption, G.E. wanted to buy the company and profit from the same corruption. So the ANTI-corruption America-Fuck-Yeah task force sprung into action. They arrested Pierucci and tsk-tsked Alsom for its abominable business practices and got the CEO, Patrick Kron, to talk up the G.E. deal, which was eventually accepted juuuuuust before Perucci was released from American prison and Kron received a 7.5 million dollar bonus for the G.E. deal. There's, of course, no proof that that's exactly what happened, but that's exactly what happened.

So the question needs to be asked (and this may have been where John McCallum was going) what U.S. rivals of Huawei are at this very moment scrambling to buy Skycom Tech (a Hong Kong company) or merge with them and take advantage of the very same "illegal" dealings with Iran? Are there any? We know that the Senate Intelligence Committee has been advised against using Huawei products. Whether they just want to ensure U.S. data collection takes priority over Chinese data collection in the world's smartphones is unknown but it wouldn't surprise me. What WOULD surprise me is finding out about it.

Remember ZTE? The Chinese telecom company that was accused of violating N. Korean and Iranian sanctions? Three months of U.S. sanctions against that company weakened it so much that it was on the verge of collapse. But wait a sec, Trump is good buddies with Kim Jong Un now and he has punished the people who are punishing Iran. What happened to ZTE again? Oh yeah, I remember now. Ivanka Trump got some business from China and ba-da-bing, ZTE sanctions were lifted. The corruption was magically forgiven, or unmagically just replaced with other corruption.

In the end, I would not be surprised if Meng Wanzhou is returned to China after some U.S. company can broker a similar deal in Iran that she was arrested for making. Canada, as always, will get little or nothing from the U.S. for their part in the corruption and will be punished by China for it. And China will have to look for some more illegal deals that they can make without the U.S. finding out about them and stealing them. But I will be surprised if I hear about all of this in the news.

Just a bunch of rich, guilty, (and oh they are guilty!), criminal scumbags playing real life Monopoly with the lives and resources that belong to the rest of the world. Meng Wanzhou had to go to jail, go indirectly to jail. She did not pass Go and did not pick up her 200 billion dollars. But with a lucky roll of the dice, perhaps in Hanoi, or if China can produce another get outta jail free card like the Ivanka Trump deal, she'll be back in the game.

So, in the next summit between Trump and Kim, do you REALLY think they'll be talking about nuclear disarmament when they have SO much more on their agendas?