Farcical parallels: election fraud and WCEV

Since the election results were apparent by Nov 5, Trump and the GOP have waged a foul-crying campaign which has made a lot of noise but little headway in courts.  Don’t forget Trump had alleged frauds well before Nov.  To be fair, it was a bipartisan effort to claim election interference, especially supposedly foreign interference, from Russia, Iran, and China.  Like Bill Barr proclaiming with a straight face that China was doing the most out of all in the Wolf Blitzer CNN interview, or for the Dem, Russia, Russia, Russia.  It is always funny why of the 200 countries on Earth only those 3 are mentioned; apparently all the rest 197 are in a coma.  In terms of evidence, little was presented, and it was never sure what the 3 did or why what they did constituted interference.  The best we learn was some FB or tweets or media news echoing a few FOX or right-wing stories.  Nobody asks how useful those can possibly be, even if one takes the lax position that they are for consumption in the US, instead of, say, foreign reporting for their own countries, whereas at the same time those foreign tweets/reports are outnumbered by American tweets/reports 1 million to 1, and the foreign news services merely repeating, not inventing, American news stories.  To use an analogy, outside is pouring, and a guy dumps a cup of water, then we accuse him of wetting the road, or worse, the road is wet because of him. 

Back to the election fraud circus.  Three weeks in, nothing has come out of it: no real evidence, no real legal arguments, no nothing.  Well, what does one expect?  Yet the real problem is that so many people believe in it.  Even now, having endured so many grand promises from Giuliani and Sidney Powell confirmed by exactly nil, maybe the majority of the 74 million Trump voters still cling to the laughable idea.  But anyone with a brain knows from/before the start it is false.  If he follows the events long enough, he knows.  If he doesn’t follow, he can still learn, with a wide range of sources of information about claims and counterclaims.  At least in the US, a strong “opposition” exists to counter any domestic claims. 

Nonetheless, in spite of all those “safeguards”, strong rebuttals, and cold, hard numbers, 30-40% of the Americans still believe the election was rigged.  Following this light, no wonder the US public or the West doesn’t stand a chance against WCEV (May 1, 2020 blog). 

For there is practically zero safeguard against WCEV in the West.  “Opposition” doesn’t exist, as anyone who dares not toeing the official lines is accused of un-American or worse.   Regarding COVID-19, HK, Xinjiang, or whatever.  As much as “normal” Americans looking at the Trump election allegation and its so many believers with utter disbelief, ditto for regular Chinese looking at all the accusations against China and the Americans believing in such.  Please not again the stale excuse that the Chinese don’t know because China has no free press, because here lie not judgment calls, but plain, verifiable facts.  Not debating whether a certain thing is right or wrong, but rather whether a certain thing ever happens or not.  Like not what to do with Iraq with WMD, but whether there was even WMD in Iraq.  For example, the Western media swallow the official line that Huawei is insecure, yet neglecting to mention there has been ZERO proof that Huawei or the Chinese government is doing anything even remotely like the US.  Remember Snowden (2013)?  Even before Snowden, there had been many books about NSA and the movie “Enemy of the state” (1998).  And after Snowden, just this month, Denmark (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/danish-whistleblower-details-nsa-collaboration-submarine-cable-spying-surveillance-data-center/).  The worst the West can come up with on Huawei is a couple of years-old bugs, but such technical loopholes, which tech companies didn’t or don’t have?  CSCO?  MSFT?  FB?  Yahoo?  APPL?  GOOG?   Don’t we all agree that these American companies have had many more problems over the years than Huawei, a company that has been the most scrutinized since Obama? 

The latest topic, not counting COVID-19, is Xinjiang in China, as the West alleged concentration camps, forced labors, and, lately, genocides in Xinjiang.  The parallel to the election fraud farce is absolutely striking, in terms of both the absurd claims and the overwhelming evidence against them, except that at most 40% Americans believe the fraud trash, but 100% believe the Xinjiang trash.  It is not that refuting evidence has not been provided (in fact, much more exists), yet the West has discounted it completely, only mentioning that the Chinese government denies the charges, but of course it does.   

About the concentration camps, the West used to claim 1 million people in the camps, now it is 2 million, and naturally it will swell to 3 million in 2021.  Since Xinjiang has about 25 million people, about half minorities (the other half are the ethnic Han Chinese, the only real Chinese, right?), and only the minorities are eligible for camps, even 1 million mean 8% of that population!  If we exclude children and the very old (allowing the evil Chinese with minimal morality), that percentage can be as high as 15%, for just 1 million campers, or 30% for 2 million!  With so many of the most able bodies locked up, any society would have collapsed long ago, but has any reporting provided any scintillation of evidence remotely for that?  Absolutely not.  The Xinjiang government never said how many people, but has always maintained there were vacation schools, and the people, some illiterate, some with minor offenses, took classes for a few weeks or months.  They had breaks and could go home over the weekends, and the training helped them get jobs afterwards.  Confirming these are the many detailed news reports, TV, interviews, even visits by foreign delegations to the schools, but of course it is all Chinese propaganda, so rightfully ignored.  Then, what does the West have instead?  UK would rather show a video about a “concentration camp” produced by an arrested drug dealer without any indication to any “concentration camp”, or the anti-China ASPI discovered concentration camps all over Xinjiang using satellite images, only upon local examination turning out to be commercial buildings, government offices, elementary schools, high schools, senior facilities, etc.  Never mind Xinjiang had retired the vacation schools many months or even years ago.  In the West, the same things are called boarding schools.  In China, concentration camps.

But how about the eyewitnesses and so-called experts?  If one pays any attention, he will recognize it is always the same handful of faces in all those “Hearings” in the US or Europe.  For comparison, Giuliani and Powell have produced over 100X more eyewitnesses, affidavits, experts, lawyers, officials including the very top one, Trump, to claim a rigged election!  No doubt much more overwhelming and convincing than the Xinjiang gang, right?  So shouldn’t we all believe election fraud at least?  Another similarity: a certain eyewitness claimed her relatives were killed in Xinjiang, while the Chinese media actually tracked them down and found everybody to be very much alive and well.  Incidentally, Giuliani and the GOP have also denounced so many dead people voting.  What is wrong with all these dead people?

On to the forced labor accusation, it is not even sure what it means, unless one takes the position that China is one big forced labor camp.  Then, what a giant hell, and why singling out Xinjiang!  In truth, China is near the end of an anti-poverty drive in a number of provinces, amply and consistently reported over the past several years.  The unemployed get trainings, the governments work with businesses to create new jobs, so that the workers and their families get over the poverty line.  Xinjiang is just one of these provinces, nothing special about Xinjiang in this aspect.  To come up with their narratives, Western reports actually cut-and-paste Chinese news but twist the original meaning to paint a completely opposite picture, knowing their audience don’t read Chinese.  Turning a good thing into a bad one.  The exact, same mentality leads to a colossal failure in the West’s COVID-19 response. 

Like no election is perfect, but people don't void an election or cry foul when vote counts are not 100% precise, nobody argues all is rosy in Xinjiang or China, but is there such a place on Earth?  There are still petty thieves, drug dealers, prisons, etc, in Xinjiang, China, or every other country, and conceivably a tiny minority of people just don’t like working.  But most would prefer a policy that actively helps the poor, rather than the GOP position that it is your choice or responsibility if you are poor, but gives large tax breaks to the richest of the rich, or for the Dem, lip services but no actions, blaming GOP obstructionism conveniently. 

As for the “genocide” in Xinjiang, this is getting more and more ludicrous.  But at least they no longer nag about “genocide” in Tibet, so improvement there is, although whether China no longer does genocide in Tibet, or the West just gets tired of talking about it, can’t be certain.  Never mind the population growth of the minorities in Xinjiang always greatly outpaces that of the national average, or the Han Chinese in Xinjiang.  Even in the most recent years, when the growth does slow, coinciding with faster economic development in Xinjiang.  In fact, birth rates in China have been dropping for many years, so somebody must be doing the Chinese genocide!  But wait: the birth rate in China is still higher than that in many Western countries.  So who is going on a genocidal rampage in the West now?  Similarly, who were colluding and how, to vote, or count the votes, massively, illegally in GA, PA, MI, WI, NV, AZ, etc?  BTW, don’t bother substituting with the “cultural genocide” nonsense, as vague and lightweight as a snowflake.  That is akin to switching from the vast Dem conspiracies to blaming China, Iran, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela interference for Trump’s loss.  But at least Sidney Powell brings two more countries out of coma.

All conspiracy theories are similar, so are their believers.  Neither the "Right" nor the "Left" are immune.  But if one sees the malarkey in Trump’s claims (at least 60% Americans do), s/he can step back, broaden the view, and easily see the same farce in WCEV.

 

What next?

Joe Biden finally wins the US election.  The future may be brightened, but is far from certain.  Trump is ousted, but Trump’s minions are not.  We don’t know what Trump will do in the next two months to make his disastrous 4-year-long actions and consequences worse and stick.  With GOP Senate control likely, how much Biden is able or wants to reverse Trump’s policies, let alone advance his own, is unknown.  A healthy opposition is important, but healthy is not the word fitting the Trump-enabling GOP right now.  The anti-science clouds have not dispersed, either.  While the Trump base proudly embraces and advances that climate, liberals are definitely not immune to the craziness either.  And they may now be its main driver from 2021 on.

NYT had another story about COVID-19 origin (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/world/who-china-coronavirus.html).  On the whole the event descriptions are mostly true, but the way the authors framed the story, the order they arranged the sentences, the handful of opinions inserted into it, and the scientific details and historic perspectives they omitted, left it no doubt another long-chewed gum on the same path since Jan 2020. 

NYT wanted to tell us, stealthily, that China blocked WHO from independently investigating COVID-19 origin.  It failed to mention that WHO has no such authority or isn’t even capable of doing any such thing.  Has WHO ever done it with any other disease, and what are the results?  NYT didn’t say, because it is blank.  WHO is no Interpol, and even Interpol doesn’t do it.  And what does “independently” even mean?  WHO running free in China?  Does China need to cooperate?  If so, how to define “independently”?  Who is to judge China cooperating or WHO working independently?  Everybody wants to know how COVID-19 arose, hugely important for science.  China has always maintained, with WHO, that it is a scientific question, not a political one.  My earlier blogs have dissected this over and over, first on Mar 28, 2020.  Yet all talks since Jan must inevitably turn to China bashing in the West: any WHO praising China’s controlling COVID-19 is a sign of surrendering and must be dismissed, while any WHO complaints, however minor, are indictive of China’s guilt.  There exist so many minefields that nothing will ever satisfy NYT or the West, whenever this question is posed.  Seen it before with the same media and circus on Iraq’s WMD.

From NYT actually, and countless Chinese media reports, there have been plenty of work in China and interactions with WHO since Jan.  NYT spent a lot of time on China’s CDC Director Gao, although how the story was told left an impression that Gao, hence China, is hiding sth, by first talking about the Wuhan market being the origin in Jan, then reserving course soon after.  Yet anybody following COVID-19 will know it is how we improve with more data becoming available over time, frankly a natural and standard process in every aspect of life. 

NYT’s single-minded focus on the Wuhan market is a sign that the West has learned little about China over the past 10 months.  My blogs have talked about this many times, since March 28, 2020.  They are barking at the wrong tree, because the Wuhan market is now almost certainly a place of superspreading event, not the origin of COVID-19.  NYT seemed to want to examine the whole market, but does it know how big the market is, and how many animals there were?  The NYT article mentioned that Gao talked about finding positives in the environment but not in the animals or animal samples they gathered.  This finding had been reported by Chinese media months and months ago.  Wuhan city shut down the market quickly, before CDC got involved, so Gao got what the city left him in late Dec and early Jan.  Anyway, when the market was shut down, should anybody expect to save all the animals and meat, mostly chickens, ducks, pork, beef, fish, seafood, etc, when there were no testing kits until almost 3 weeks later?  If there were exotic (mostly illegal) animals, their numbers were low, and the vendors would have been the first to bail.  And nobody has ever seen bats at the market.  I fully expect that China’s CDC has given WHO the data from the Wuhan market, because there is nothing to hide, and pointless to hide anything there.  And the early Wuhan cases were already been published in scientific journals in Feb! 

Contrast the Wuhan market to Beijing’s Xinfadi Wholesale Market, a place of another superspreading event in June.  Almost the exact same thing happened in Xinfadi, and environmental samples at specific locations were tested positive.  The likely cause at the moment is contamination and infection by frozen imported salmon packaging.  Nobody says Xinfadi is the origin of COVID-19.  Mounting evidence indicates people should move on from the Wuhan market.

If not the Wuhan market, where now?  Certainly not lab related or man-made, because DNA doesn’t lie.  What else?  We don’t know.  Just have to accept this fact, and let the professionals do the work, sans political bias.  Australia’s and the West’s endlessly and comically harping about investigating COVID-19 origin implies that China, WHO, or scientists are not working on it, which is false.  It also implies that China must be at fault; if not, or any day we don’t know the answer, there must be a China or WHO coverup.  In short, it is just a cheap shot to blame China.  Wuhan discovered COVID-19, but scientifically, who knows where the first patient, or the first bat for that matter, came from?  Do we know for sure how any other infectious diseases, e.g., AIDS, originated?  Answer: almost zero, if not actually zero.  From a strict point of view, this is practically impossible: once you find patient 0, any sensible person may ask: how about patient -1?  One can bet that China is as eager as, if not more than anybody else to find out, and work is ongoing, but any day the answer is not unavailable is not a day China is covering up: there are diseases decades, hundreds, and thousands of years old that humans still have no idea.  If history is any guide, where a disease was first reported is almost never the place it first appeared, and the disease has been with humans for a long time prior to discovery, e.g., AIDS. 

And studying the origin is irrelevant to containing the pandemic, the most pressing job now.  With HIV/AIDS still a menace, who cares about who the first patient was getting it from the first monkey?  Lastly, with so many infectious diseases throughout history and around the world, had any person or country got the blame then?