90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, March 14, 2020

State Dept. 'hauled in' Chinese ambassador - then put China 'on notice' for lying to world, blaming America for coronavirus

'We wanted to put the government on notice...'

The State Department hauled in the Chinese ambassador to the United States on Friday to confront him over communist China's increased effort to blame America for the global coronavirus outbreak.

Diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and China increased significantly this week after top Chinese propagandist Zhao Lijian, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, publicly shifted blame for coronavirus onto America, claiming it "might be the US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan."

According to Reuters, David Stillwell, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, summoned Cui Tiankai, Chinese ambassador to the U.S., and delivered a very "stern representation," which resulted in the Chinese delegation becoming "very defensive."

CBS News confirmed the development:

A State Department official who spoke with Reuters said China wants to deflect criticism for "starting a global pandemic and not telling the world" — but the U.S. is putting China "on notice."

"Spreading conspiracy theories is dangerous and ridiculous. We wanted to put the government on notice we won't tolerate it for the good of the Chinese people and the world," the official said.

Despite being responsible for the coronavirus pandemic, China has been working overtime to remake its image as the world's responsible global superpower, the New York Times reported in February.

From the Times:

Munich: Muslim Migrant attacks random driver with an axe - Embeds it in his head.....

The migrant is said to have seriously injured his victim’s head in the process. The victim's wife witnessed the attack from the car.

With axe-like object, a pedestrian is said to have hit a car driver on the head in Schwabing late on Sunday afternoon. The victim has been in hospital ever since. The Munich police only made the incident public two days later in order not to endanger the work of the investigators. At noon on Tuesday, police forces arrested the suspect in the city, a 34-year-old migrant.

On Gernotstrasse, a 33-year-old man from Munich was driving with his wife towards the Mittlerer Ring, stopping at Burgunderstraße because a pedestrian jumped in front of his car and began to suddenly hit the hood with his hands. The 33-year-old got out of the car and physical confrontation ensued.

According to the police, at that moment the pedestrian pulled out “a kind of hatchet” and hit the left side of the 33-year-old’s head. The man from Munich suffered an injury that left him bleeding heavily. He was rushed to hospital. His wife, who had remained in the car during the crime, was not injured. The offender fled.

On Monday, the suspect, a 34-year-old Iraqi living in Munich, was arrested. During the forensic investigation conducted at the scene of the crime, a fingerprint of the 34-year-old was found on the hood of the car and on Monday evening a warrant against the suspect for attempted...

A Psychological Study of Trump Worth Reading

"I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use." —Samuel Johnson

Donald Trump inspires almost universal disapproval and scorn among wordsmith professionals in the mental health field. He has been the target of diagnoses ranging from "pathological narcissism" to "bipolar disorder" to "dementia."

At last we can be grateful among the torrent of books about the president for one that justifies what Dr. Johnson called the "epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper."

Sheldon Roth, M.D. has performed an important service, not just to history, but to the field of depth psychology. He has demonstrated ways in which it can illuminate the deep motivational wellsprings of a unique individual like Donald Trump. His psycho-biography, Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J. Trump, makes real and clear the truth of Wordsworth's observation that "the child is father to the man."

Trump is in the middle of a remarkable first term during which he has disrupted the various myths of our present-day wordsmith Utopians. Their favored story has been of American decline, a decline well deserved by a racist and sexist country. Donald Trump utterly dismissed this story, laughing at its politically correct absurdity. His humor offends them while shattering their belief that presidents should be austere and solemn. How did he manage to prevail in reviving American optimism, growing the economy while destroying the ISIS caliphate and reversing our appeasement policies toward Iran and China? And he did all of this under constant siege by the wordsmith graduates of our elite universities and journalism schools. Laughter and optimism helped.

Dr. Roth has chosen to assume that there are discoverable psychological reasons why Donald Trump beat all rivals to become a disruptive president. Trump's personal psychology, Roth shows, met the psychological needs of a country that had lost its confident stance toward the future. It's why his slogan, "Make America Great Again" (MAGA), worked. His flawed humanity possessed skills that met the historical moment.

Dr. Roth's book does not make a political argument. Instead, it explores the roles played by Donald Trump's mother, father, siblings, and mentors in shaping his psychological life. It looks with a unique perspective at the role of fantasies and dreams, through exploration of a movie, Citizen Kane, that sank deeply into the young Trump's psyche. Movies draw much from dreams and can function as borrowed dreams and fantasies for viewers. Dr. Roth utilizes dream analysis as applied to Trump's favorite movie to deepen our understanding of his lifelong drive to succeed in shaping his life. Dr. Roth also notes the psychological strengths Trump gained from exposure to the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale's sermons. Those sermons shaped not only his conscious ability to sell a positive agenda, but his fundamental unconscious stance toward life and his version of the American dream as a constant striving toward...

Biden's Coronavirus Advisor Wants Old People To Die, He Told the Elderly to Avoid Flu Shots, Vaccines

Former Vice President Joe Biden — the presumptive Democratic nominee — may not openly support full-on socialized medicine, but his choice of advisors on a new Public Health Advisory Committee is very suspicious. Biden announced the committee as part of his plan to fight the coronavirus, but one of his advisors, Ezekiel Emanuel, published an op-ed in The Atlantic saying he wants to die at age 75 because life simply isn't worth living after that point. The op-ed isn't just personal, either — it attempts to convince the reader that death may be preferable to living in advanced age.

In fact, Emanuel's op-ed goes on to advise the elderly to refuse life-saving medical care — the exact kind of care needed to combat the coronavirus. Given the fact that the coronavirus poses the greatest risk for the elderly, Biden's choice of Emanuel is troubling — if not downright terrifying.

"Here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss," Emanuel writes. "It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic."

Ouch! Try telling older voters that their lives are not worth living in November — see how that will go over at the polls. Yet Emanuel's op-ed is not just insulting to the dignity of the elderly — it actively encourages them to avoid medical care.

Biden's coronavirus advisor actively encourages the elderly to "think of an alternative to succumbing to that slow constriction of activities and aspirations imperceptibly imposed by aging."

What about simple stuff? Flu shots are out. Certainly if there were to be a flu pandemic, a younger person who has yet to live a complete life ought to get the vaccine or any antiviral drugs.

Yes, Biden's coronavirus advisor encouraged people over 75 to avoid flu shots. Joe Biden himself is 77. Yet Emanuel's advocacy against basic health treatments extends further:

Hayward: China Threatens to Cut Off Medicine, Throw America into ‘Mighty Sea of Coronavirus’

An article in China’s state-run Xinhua news service last week threatened to impose restrictions on medical exports so the United States will be “plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus.”

The Xinhua piece, published on March 4 and entitled “Be Bold: The World Owes China a Thank You,” was largely composed of standard Chinese Communist Party propaganda about how the world stands in awe of China’s amazing response to the coronavirus outbreak. Naturally, it neglected to mention how the virus ran wild in the first place because of Chinese bureaucratic incompetence and cover-ups.

The Chinese have become as determined to wipe the first months of the coronavirus from the pages of history as they are to keep anyone from remembering Tiananmen Square. The Xinhua article made a point of noting that China has leverage over the U.S. and Europe because it can restrict the supply of medicines that were unwisely outsourced to China in the heyday of globalism.

The Chinese paper explicitly threatened to do so if Americans and Europeans continue criticizing its response to the coronavirus or act too slowly to lift travel bans and other restrictions the Chinese government dislikes, but then cushioned the threat in the Communist Party’s usual creepy way by insisting China is filled with so much “love” for the world that it would never harm the people of other countries, or even “insult” them the way China has been “insulted” during the coronavirus epidemic.

One of the insults harped on by Xinhua was Walter Russell Mead’s February 3 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal entitled “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” a piece that prompted Beijing to expel Wall Street Journal reporters and begin complaining incessantly that Mead’s piece was insulting and racist. According to Xinhua’s March 4 editorial, Mead, his column, and the entire Wall Street Journal publication are now “infamous.”

Although most commentary has focused on the “mighty sea of coronavirus” threat, the Xinhua piece is also interesting as an early example of the Chinese Communist propaganda crusade to portray the coronavirus as originating in the United States and claim it was brought to Wuhan by the U.S. Army. Xinhua muttered darkly on March 4 about Americans “returning from Wuhan, China” right before the outbreak exploded and complained it was therefore hypocritical and insulting for the U.S. to...