Friday, April 22, 2022

News: April 22

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Republicans Say, ‘Let Them Eat Hate’ Ohio’s G.O.P. primary has, after all, been a race to the bottom, with candidates seemingly competing to see who can be crasser, who can do the most to dumb down the debate. Vance insists that “what’s happening in Ukraine has nothing to do with our national security” and that we should focus instead on the threat from immigrants crossing our southern border. Josh Mandel, who has been leading in the polls, says that Ohio should be a “pro-God, pro-family, pro-Bitcoin state.” And so on. Any of these candidates would be a terrible senator ......... They’re happy to exploit white working-class resentment, but when it comes to doing anything to improve their supporters’ lives, their implicit slogan is, “Let them eat hate.” ......... The social problems that have festered in 21st-century America — notably large numbers of prime-age males not working and widespread “deaths of despair” from drugs, suicide and alcohol — have if anything fallen most heavily on rural and small-town whites, especially in parts of the heartland that have been left behind as a knowledge-centered economy increasingly favors high-education metropolitan areas. ........ The arithmetic on this claim never worked, and in practice Trump’s trade wars appear to have reduced the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs. ........ I’d say that G.O.P. campaigning in 2022 is all culture war, all the time, except that this would be giving Republicans too much credit. They aren’t fighting a real culture war, a conflict between rival views of what our society should look like; they’re riling up the base against phantasms, threats that don’t even exist. ........ the panic over critical race theory, although this has come to mean just about any mention of the role that slavery and discrimination have played in U.S. history. Florida is even rejecting many math textbooks ........ roughly half of self-identified Republicans believe that “top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.” .......... yes, undocumented immigrants do exist. But the idea that they pose a major threat to public order is a fantasy; indeed, the evidence suggests that they’re considerably more law-abiding than native-born Americans. ........ making the alleged insecurity of the southern border your signature campaign issue is especially bizarre if you’re running for office in Ohio ......... (Almost 38 percent of the population of New York City, and 45 percent of its work force, is immigrant. It’s not exactly a dystopian hellhole.) ......... czarist-era instigators of pogroms. When the people are suffering, you don’t try to solve their problems; instead, you distract them by giving them someone to hate. ...... the G.O.P. as a whole has turned to hate-based politics. And if you aren’t afraid, you aren’t paying attention. .

How a Recession Might — and Might Not — Happen The U.S. economy is still very strong, with, for example, initial claims for unemployment insurance at their lowest point since 1969. Yet everyone is talking about recession. ......... there is always a chance of a recession in the near future, no matter what the current data look like. ....... The kind of recession we have, if we do have one, will depend on which way the Fed gets it wrong. ........ Inflation is, of course, unacceptably high. Some of this reflects disruptions — supply-chain problems, surging food and energy prices from the war in Ukraine — that are likely to fade away over time. In fact, I’d argue that these temporary factors account for a majority of inflation, which is why just about every major economy is experiencing its highest inflation rate in decades. .......... We’ve become a country in which workers take what they can get, and employers pay what they must. ......... we can close that gap without having a recession simply by slowing growth, while letting potential G.D.P. catch up. As long as inflation isn’t entrenched in expectations and temporary disruptions fade away, closing the gap should bring inflation down to an acceptable rate. ........ we could have an unnecessary recession, one that could develop quite quickly. ......... there is a path through this difficult moment that needn’t involve a recession. ....... the Fed is overreacting to inflation .

Deborah Birx’s Excruciating Story of Donald Trump’s Covid Response “Silent Invasion,” an insider’s look at the Trump administration’s pandemic policies, is earnest and exhaustive, our reviewer says......... The word “coordinator” is an equivocal title under the best of bureaucratic circumstances, let alone in the Trump White House ....... She had said yes to “a job I didn’t seek but felt compelled to accept” ....... Birx had an office in the West Wing but almost no staff, and her only leverage was persuasion. ....... Advanced data-reporting structures and procedures, such as she and her PEPFAR team had helped African nations develop over years, did not exist in the United States ........ Did he propose that Americans drink bleach? It wasn’t clear that he didn’t. ......... “I looked down at my feet and wished for two things: something to kick,” she writes, “and for the floor to open up and swallow me whole.” ......... renting a car (evidently) to make connections and dropping in on governors, universities, public health officials and local media outlets, from Arizona to Florida to New Hampshire; eventually she visited 44 states. ......... the need for more Covid testing, especially “sentinel testing” of young people reporting no symptoms, who nonetheless could be infected and transmitting the virus among their families and communities; more masking by everybody; and more social distancing, especially by avoidance of large indoor gatherings. ......... To presume that vaccines have now solved the problem totally is a mistake .

Are China and the United States on a Collision Course to War? Here is one way the American era could end: China, on a pretext or piqued by some provocation, orchestrates an invasion of Taiwan. Beijing launches a shower of missiles toward Taipei, crippling its American-supplied military, followed by attacks on Okinawa and Guam. More than 200,000 People’s Liberation Army troops climb ashore at 20 different beachheads along the Taiwanese coast. American submarines sink some Chinese ships; still, it’s not enough to slow the onslaught of paratroopers and helicopters. Slowly — then swiftly — the pitched fighting tilts in favor of the Middle Kingdom, altering the military and political balance in East Asia. The result, which ultimately reduces a world superpower to one weakened player among many, comes to be seen by historians as the “American Waterloo.” .......... some reports have shown Washington losing to Beijing as many as 19 straight times in desktop war games simulating a conflict over Taiwan. ............ In a larger sense, Xi has come to believe that the age of American predominance in Asia is over. ....... He has taken to observing with icy understatement that the geopolitical landscape is “undergoing profound changes unseen in a century.” Beijing, Rudd believes, now sees “the time as ripe … to change the nature of the order itself.” .......... how Americans failed utterly to comprehend even the “basic intellectual grammar” that lay beneath the cultures of the region they sought to shape. ........ After leaving office, at age 60 he enrolled at Oxford University to study for a doctorate focusing on understanding Xi’s worldview. .......... Rudd, who has visited China more than 100 times and speaks fluent Mandarin, is one of the few foreign politicians who have had a chance to get to know Xi personally — first as a diplomat when Xi was a junior official in Xiamen, and later when Xi was vice president; on one occasion the two men spent hours conversing in Chinese before a winter fire in Canberra. .......... have left Rudd with a rare feel for China’s cultural flash points. ......... “Our best chance of avoiding war,” Rudd writes, “is to better understand the other side’s strategic thinking and to conceptualize a world where both the U.S. and China are able to competitively coexist, even if in a state of continuing rivalry reinforced by mutual deterrence.” ........ Xi has worked harder than his predecessors to court Russian leaders, flattering Putin by implying that the two countries are peers and bolstering joint military exercises. He has referred to the Russian president as his “best friend”; he calls Putin on his birthday. ........ “recognizes great value in Moscow being prepared to act far more adventurously than China itself” ........ China has been working to reorganize the strategic chessboard. .......... more than $90 billion between 2012 and 2017 into building ports and coast guard hubs along a maritime route through the Arctic known as the Northeast Passage that would cut the voyage from Asia to Europe by more than two weeks and nearly 5,000 miles. ......... The consequences of a full-scale war with China are almost too grave to contemplate. ......... liked to complain that Americans too often think of foreign policy problems as “headaches” for which they can just “take a powder” and make them go away. ........ there will be no wishing away of Xi Jinping and his transformative worldview, at least in the short term. The headache is chronic; Americans will need to use all their ingenuity if they hope to manage the pain. .

The Rise of Authoritarian Capitalism .





‘These Guys Are Very Different’: Inside Andreessen Horowitz’s Rise The VC firm's financial performance is catching up to its powerful public image, thanks to contrarian bets and its operating structure modeled after a Hollywood agency. Now Marc Andreessen is trying to get bigger, faster in a quest to be the J.P. Morgan of venture capital. ........ its partners had placed bigger bets on cryptocurrencies than almost anyone else, and they did so during moments when most investors had soured on the field. ........ With this week’s Coinbase public listing, Andreessen Horowitz generated one of the biggest paper returns from a single-company investment in VC history. Its stake in the cryptocurrency brokerage is worth $10 billion, which is more than half the amount of capital the firm raised from investors in its 12 years of operation. It could generate a similar return from its stake in enterprise software firm Databricks, and it holds billions of dollars’ worth of other cryptocurrency assets ....... Andreessen Horowitz is supercharging the bold VC playbook that brought it to this point. .

What Sequoia Gains by Blowing Up the VC Fund Structure .

The People Determining Twitter’s Fate Now that Elon Musk has put Twitter into play, the company’s fate is likely to be determined by a small circle of people, including a Saudi prince and a Silicon Valley CEO. The group—with shareholders such as Elliott Management’s Jesse Cohn, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and Silver Lake chief Egon Durban—has a long history with both Musk and Twitter. .



Asian Americans Have Always Lived With Fear their workarounds — the extra steps they have been taking to stay physically safe. ........ Ever since Asians began arriving in the United States, they have been met with hostility and rejection, often sanctioned by state and federal legislation. The sad part is that so little has changed. ......... Back in the ’70s and ’80s, the West feared the growth of Japan; as China became a superpower, Sinophobia rose, too. Since 9/11, Islamophobia and attacks against Sikhs and Hindus have been unrelenting. Now the Covid pandemic and demagogy have brought more waves of hatred. .......

Asians and Asian Americans pay the price of nativist fear.

..... The assailants may also believe that we are weak physically and politically, unwilling to organize, react or speak up. ....... For some, deep down, my ordinary Korean face — small, shallow-set eyes, round nose, high cheekbones, straight dark hair — reminds them of lost wars, prostitutes, spies, refugees, poverty, disease, cheap labor, academic competition, cheaters, sexual competition, oligarchs, toxic parenting, industrialization or a sex or pornography addiction. ....... From my decades of interviewing people, I have learned that nearly every person believes that she is the hero of her story. ....... Then there are those who are self-controlled enough to mute their racist speech, so I will likely never hear a hateful confession from them. Nevertheless, in some small or grand gesture, when they wish, I will be made to feel their deep-seated desire to diminish or eradicate a person like me — the Asian other — the source of their unwanted, violent, shameful feelings. ....... At 53, I am no longer an immigrant girl. Like her, though, I still keep vigil for my elderly parents, sisters, husband, son and our growing family.

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