John Cena likes money. That’s about all you need to say in conclusion after watching his forced, hostage video-like, confession of crimes that would make even the most jaded of Community Party goons proud and open to tears.
I mean, you could take it to extremes and be like: John Cena hates democracy, universal human rights, and supports genocide. That would probably be accurate, but still at least a little over the top for what’s actually inside his brain.
But the reality doesn’t really get past the hard goal of coin. John Cena likes money. China has money Hollywood wants China’s money. Hollywood will do as China tells it. John Cena will do as China tells him.
You need look no further for other examples than LeBron James / entire NBA (who worship BLM, but who also somehow apparently don’t believe in universal human rights, but also love money) or Zucky (who still has a copy of Xi’s book on the desk inside his heart, and who also loves money).
One of China’s most effective weapons is not what it does, but what it makes money loving cowards do for them without prompting. China didn’t send a knife wielding goon to Cena’s house. Cena did this entirely on his own. It’s quite pathetic. Cena is a grown man allowing somebody he’s never met determine what he says.
You know I just watched Five Came Back by Netflix where it chronicles how Ford, Wyler, Capra, Huston, and Stevens basically left Hollywood to put their lives and careers on the line to defeat fascism. It cost them their bodies and their brains for the rest of their lives.
I guess if China invaded Taiwan, or China continues to exterminate an entire culture, or if China sank a few US aircraft carriers, Cena would have to apologize to China for all the trouble we caused them.
I think Cena, James, Zucky, and all these celebrities and tech goons think the rules are different now. That China is not Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, or Soviet Russia. And so taking China’s money is perfectly fine. That they will do as they’re told, cash that check, and there couldn’t possibly be consequences.
They should tell that to their Muslim neighbor, particularly if they’re Uighur. Or maybe they can go on record and explain to America why they think Communist China is awesome, and how Democratic Taiwan is full of losers. In the meantime, it completely exposes them as money loving hypocrites who society should ignore, but won’t.
There is a very clear choice. China is not shy of describing what kind of world they want the 21st Century to generate. They’re not lying, it’s all very clearly put out there by Xi and his people. But these dudes have made a choice, and the choice is money.
Nature is insane. If you were to submit to a book publisher a concept of a bug that emerged from the ground only every 17 years, was born, went through its life cycle, and then died in only a few weeks they wouldn’t place your bizarre work in fiction or science fiction, but fantasy.
My brother and his friend were joking about what other great mysteries lie buried beneath the Earth’s ground. Why not dragons or some other type of crazy mythical creature with a shelf life of 3,573 years underground? Who are we to say our stone age ancestors were wrong with their ideas of crazy creatures.
The cicada serenade sure does take me back. There are several broods that impact various geography throughout the globe. Their appearance can range in periodicity from 1-17 years or at least so I’ve read. 17 years ago I wasn’t even living in America so I missed this brood’s last ride.
One of my childhood houses backed up against an agricultural preserve with a ton of woods. The serenade would last for weeks and there were probably millions of them back there, nostalgia. I live in the city now so I can hear them but they’re a good ways off into the suburbs where there are more trees.
So I can’t really hear them loudly, the ones that were born in the apartment courtyard all emerged and seemed to all die very quickly. The apartment groundskeepers came in and swept out all their corpses and none have emerged since so I guess in my area the journey is over for this brood as a failure. Although if that was the case, how did they get into the ground here locally 17 years ago? Not sure.
I guess that’s the attrition rate inherent in any of nature’s concepts whether it be bugs or turtles or rabbits. I wonder how many of this brood gets to fulfill their purpose and how many die out first? It’s all crazy. But also, I sure am glad my dog has decided that while she likes to sniff the cicadas, she didn’t desire to eat them.
On March 10th, 1945, 279 B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers conducted the most devastating conventional bombing raid in human history. Their target was Tokyo. The new tactics they employed had been tested but never implemented on such a large scale.
High altitude precision bombing over Japan had proved difficult compared to Europe due to high altitude winds over Japan. The US Army Air Forces decided to switch tactics, primarily at the behest of Curtis LeMay, although the ideas were not entirely his own.
The tactic of large formations of B-29s conducting high altitude precision bombing using high explosive bombs was completely altered. The attacks would happen at night. The B-29s would attack as a swarm, with each bomber flying individually without formation. The attacks would be conducted from very low altitudes to ensure accuracy and to confound Japanese anti-aircraft defense. Finally, the B-29s would use incendiary bombs instead of high explosive bombs.
The target was Tokyo itself, its people, and the largely wooden based construction of Japanese homes and small businesses. Some bombers carried a small number of high explosive bombs which were the first out of the bay. The idea being to crack open the roofs of structures using high explosives so the follow on incendiary bombs would fall within.
LeMay took extreme risks in the plan. To increase bomb load, all defensive guns on the B-29s were removed except for the tail gun. A lack of defensive formation meant each B-29 would be highly vulnerable to Japanese night fighters without mutual defensive support from other B-29s. Nevertheless, LeMay decided to proceed with the new tactics.
The raid succeeded on a scale few could have imagined. The Japanese were completely taken off guard by the new tactics. No Japanese night fighters were able to engage a single B-29. Japanese anti-aircraft guns did manage to down 14 B-29s with the loss of 96 Americans. But generally, Japanese anti-aircraft fire was ineffective as the gunners were not prepared for a low altitude attack and the low altitude run of the B-29s rendered Japanese radar mostly blind.
The attack started a firestorm throughout Tokyo with a ferocity previously seen in places like Hamburg. However, the wooden base of Japanese construction made the consequences even stronger. An estimated 100,000 Japanese died in one night, almost all of them civilians.
Until the end of the war, the USAAF would continue to employ the nighttime, low altitude, incendiary attacks across all of Japan. And yet, by August 1945 even after five months of firestorm bombing Japan was no closer to surrender. As World War II would demonstrate, no amount of conventional strategic bombing would ever bring an Axis country to surrender.
In Germany, it had taken a complete conquest via ground forces. American plans were in place for a ground invasion of Japan to start on Kyushu which estimates claimed would cost millions of lives. And so the decision was made to try and short circuit such a scenario. The Soviet Union would enter the war, and America would employ atomic weapons in a last attempt to force Japan’s surrender without a ground invasion.
On August 6th, 1945 the first atomic weapon was dropped on Hiroshima with perhaps over 100,000 Japanese killed. And yet, Japan still did not surrender. President Truman did announce to the public and to Japan what had been done. A single plane, with a single bomb, had done what had previously taken hundreds of bombers.
Japan’s leadership was well aware of what had happened, but refused to surrender anyways. The same concept, that the Japanese people could endure anything, and Japan could fight on remained inside their minds. It must be acknowledged that by this point most of the Japanese senior leadership were certifiably insane. It is akin to Hitler’s last moments, where he ordered divisions to attack, that no longer existed.
And so the decision was made to use a second atomic weapon, this time on Nagasaki. For the most part, Nagasaki had avoided conventional bombing throughout the war due to its difficulty as a target. But with an atomic weapon accuracy and raid tactics were essentially irrelevant.
On August 9th, 1945, once again, a single B-29, with a single bomb. At 11:01 in the morning a plutonium core weapon detonated about 2,000 feet above Nagasaki (the airburst setting allowing for the blast wave to not be absorbed by the ground). Approximately 80,000 people died.
The devastation is clear to see, before and after:
Hirohito, finally, seeing the inevitable, and perhaps making one of the braver decisions of his life (there was no guarantee that the militarists would not simply assassinate him and fight on) decided to surrender. When he spoke via radio to the Japanese people it was the first time they’d ever heard his voice.
Nagasaki Peace Park began in 1955 and has a museum and hall adjoining it. It’s hard to explain what it was like to visit the place as an American man in my early twenties. Nuclear war on such scale, such horror, is difficult to comprehend when you haven’t seen it or know personally anybody who did.
I don’t really have any conclusions to draw here. I could probably write a super long post on the morals of strategic bombing done by both sides during the war. Or the ethical decision to use atomic weapons to avoid a horrific ground invasion. But others far wiser than I have written legions of books on these topics.
As to the rest of this post, it’s just about the photos I took while there, and a few words from the Japanese themselves.
ground zero or otherwise known as the hypocenter
some of the ruins were left on purpose inside the park
Written by a correspondent in Delhi from The Economist:
Correspondent’s diary
India’s second wave of covid-19 feels nothing like its first
Holed up in Delhi, where friends are falling ill too fast to count
Diary
Apr 30th 2021
DELHI
WE ARE AMID an ocean of human suffering but cannot see it. Having returned abruptly to the kind of isolation we hoped we had put behind us months ago, my wife, our two little boys and I are staying put in our nice flat, in a leafy “colony” near the centre of Delhi. Our new rule is strict: we do not go outside for any reason. The past 12 months have trained us well enough for that; these routines are well-worn, for parents and children. We grown-ups however cannot stay away from our phones, and so peace of mind is a distant memory. My wife just called from downstairs. Her friend’s brother-in-law needs an oxygen concentrator or he is likely to die at home. If we find one for him (and she is already working her connections), can we scrounge enough cash to buy another, for ourselves?
The mind’s eye is filled with pictures of desperate families scrambling after oxygen cylinders, failing more often than not. All day the early-summer heat has me picturing bodies, bagged and stacked on the pavement, waiting their turn for the pyres that burn everywhere across the city. Sometimes I switch off the screen in my home office on the second floor and step onto the roof terrace to water potted plants and scan the neighbourhood below. All is quiet and green. Smoke from the crematorium down the street has disappeared into the usual haze of the season. Our small park is more leaf-blown than usual, but someone has been watering there too. A security guard at the corner is wearing his mask, but he’s been doing that for a year now, as if the past month were nothing new. In contrast to the first lockdown, the milkman is still coming and newspapers are being delivered.
Yet everything has changed, with a speed that we still cannot comprehend. My family had hunkered down much harder than most. We kept our social life in forfeit and wore masks outdoors, if not always at the playground. We had come to seem like laggards within India. Most of this country began to relax after September if not earlier, as the caseload started to drop. Just last month I started travelling again—I was road-tripping through weekly markets, sampling country liquor offered by strangers for a cute feature story, then watching a jubilant political rally fill a small town’s bazaar. Days later I was dandling my two-year-old on my lap at an airport, sharing his first iced lolly. Those were the before times. A fortnight later, back in Delhi, I find that more than half of my friends have covid-19, in their families if not in their own bodies. Acquaintances are dying faster than they can be counted. I read in the papers that the forestry department is clear-cutting parkland to feed more wood to those pyres.
The official news outlets also bring the daily statistics: 386,000 new infections today, 208,000 dead counted since the pandemic began. Between the lines, it is possible to read the disclaimers too. If only 1.7m tests are being conducted per day, what can that 386,000 really mean? Is it that 0.0004% of the country has come down with the virus since yesterday, or that nearly 23% did? That would be 314m people, nearly the whole population of America. Obviously, the true number lies between those absurd extremes, but who knows where? The statistics about death tolls are more nakedly false. It is plain that thousands are dying every day, but who, where and exactly how many we cannot know, thanks to some petty deceptions but mostly sheer confusion. I get a better sense from the piecemeal reporting in Indian websites covering, say, the smaller towns and cities of Uttar Pradesh, where none of the official line can be trusted, than from my fellow observers forced to stay in the capital.
But the saddest and also the most terrifying accounts all come via the phone, in texts or panicked voices. Everyone is ill and no one can find medical help. Stating the obvious, the American embassy mass-messages, “Access to all types of medical care is becoming severely limited in India due to the surge in Covid-19 cases” and concludes that my fellow Americans should make plans to leave the country “as soon as it is safe to do so”. Social-media feeds are an endless list of pleas on behalf of the dying. A friend from Lucknow, living in New York, writes elegant, almost daily obituaries for friends from his hometown—three of them, I can’t help noting, are my age, and at least one was, also like me, fully vaccinated.
I have a nightly ritual of phone calls to check on friends within a two-mile radius. An elderly woman has recovered, but feels distraught that her neighbours across the street both died. Another friend’s aunt is still ailing but in the meantime her husband died—I hadn’t heard he was infected. Newborn twins, their parents and their nanny are all running a fever in tandem. A WhatsApp group set up by foreign journalists to discuss visa issues has become another place to plead for help finding medical supplies. It informs me that the clinic where I found my own second dose of AstraZeneca a week ago has run out of vaccines. Only 1.8% of the country has been fully vaccinated and it is anybody’s guess how long it will take to manufacture or import the roughly 2bn doses we are left wanting.
Watching the other international correspondents fall ill and scramble to leave tends to make me want to stay behind these locked doors, with my potted plants and boisterous little kids. Appliances may be breaking down, but our groceries keep coming and the WiFi works. An NGO in Delhi counts more than 100 Indian journalists who have died of covid-19, 52 of them this month. For their bravery, I am able to read about those pyres, without having to risk seeing them for myself.
This horror is noticed abroad. Messages from faraway friends I haven’t seen in years convince me of that. They are worried for us and I am happy to reassure them that we four are fine, relieved to be talking about the situation from the bird’s-eye view of my terrace. Much easier on the nerves than ringing up the next-door neighbour to find out whether our mutual friend is still alive.
But my long-distance conversations convince me that something has been lost in the transmission. These well-read friends in Europe, America and East Asia never understood how different the past year of covid was, here in India—and so they cannot understand what it feels like now to hit the vertical wall of this so-called second wave. I struggle to convey that we have not been on a wavy ride, like Britain’s or some American states’. Look at the shape of our graphs. Our first surge was scary, but tapered away like the tail of a paper tiger. The virus had spread everywhere during 2020, no doubt, despite a brutal lockdown and other efforts at containment. Sero-positivity surveys conducted in some cities showed that majorities of large populations had been exposed to the coronavirus and developed antibodies to it. But Indian bodies resisted it, perhaps, they say, because of “cross immunity” gained unnoticed over lifetimes lived amid the barrage of everyday germs. The rickety hospitals stayed afloat too, and eventually their covid wards emptied. By the beginning of 2021 we were saying that 150,000 Indians had died. For perspective: three times as many die from tuberculosis every year. “At the beginning of this pandemic, the whole world was worried about India’s situation,” the prime minister, Narendra Modi, recalled in a triumphal mood only in February. “But today India’s fight against corona is inspiring the entire world.”
India fought a phony war and—by dumb luck—it won. Then suddenly, less than three weeks ago, our world turned upside down. Having taken credit for his country’s divine good fortune of last year, Mr Modi will want to shrug off blame for the second wave, as if it were an act of God which no preparation could have averted or even lessened. There is a lot to say about what could have been done instead. Yet without any of the government’s self-serving intentions, many of the rest of us feel convinced that a different disease has emerged since our year-long dry run began. Covid-21 I find myself calling it.
The facts one would need to build that case stay stubbornly out of reach. The available genomic analysis shows that the distinctively Indian “double mutant” variant, B.1.617, is prevalent in some parts of the country but not in Delhi, where the Kentish B.1.1.7 is like wildfire. India is woefully behind in sequencing its strains, having only announced a genomic consortium in December 2020 and then funding it only in March.
What is clear to clinicians, as opposed to the boffins, is that covid-21 is more transmissible than the kind we saw last year. A doctor friend tells another friend in her podcast that this is “much much more contagious, much much more transmissible than the wild variety of covid-19.” It used to be that just one member of a household might catch it. Now everyone does. In our extended family, in Kolkata, 13 of 15 people under one roof became infected before any showed symptoms.
Its “immune-escape” mutations are formidable. Being vaccinated, I am sensitive to the stories of inoculated people falling ill—which could not be more common, in my social circles—and even dying. The vaccines are saving lives, no doubt. Deaths among the fully vaccinated are rare; I hear of them only among friends of friends of friends, like the poor 25-year-old lab technician in a hospital whose best friend teaches German to a pal of mine over Zoom. Which brings us to the fact that this time young people and even children are developing symptoms, including an erstwhile quarantine-playmate of our four-year-old. Younger adults are becoming severely ill, as they did not last year. Finally, those people who have had the disease twice, a plentiful category thanks to that “immune-escape” feature, say that the reinfection feels different. The fever comes quicker and they are more prone to developing pneumonia. Dumb, divine luck with covid-19, and now the bad luck of covid-21, as if it were retribution. That is the way it feels to those of us who find ourselves without access to reliable aggregations of information, but awash in personal anecdotes. I suspect that someday biomedical research may prove that the two kinds of luck were connected, but we will have to wait years for that.
For now there is much outrage. Maybe Mr Modi’s government will pay a price for its blunders and complacency. I suspect that this is mostly expressed as a wishful diversion, in tragic pursuit of a silver lining. That would be a way for my part of Delhi, those who have the privilege of sitting at home and contemplating escape, to take a break from our primary occupations: fear and sorrow.
The Arcturus Project 