What is the point of this summit?

Trump, currently in China for a summit meeting with the Chinese president Xi Jinping, is definitely in an inferior position.

Donald Trump has landed in Beijing, the first visit to China by a US president in nearly a decade, as he seeks to mend power and prestige weakened by the war in Iran.
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The war has entered its third month, with Tehran tightening its grip over the strait of Hormuz and Washington struggling to turn a fragile ceasefire into a lasting settlement.

Behind the scenes, US officials have spent weeks urging China – Iran’s biggest oil customer and one of the few powers with leverage in Tehran – to pressure the Islamic Republic into reopening the strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply ordinarily passes, while accepting US terms for peace.

The US recently sanctioned several Chinese firms accused of assisting Iranian oil shipments and supplying satellite imagery allegedly used in Iranian military operations. China condemned the measures as “illegal unilateral sanctions” and invoked a rarely used blocking statute prohibiting Chinese entities from complying with them.
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AI is making spam moderation harder

Whenever a new person tries to comment on a post here, the WordPress platform that this blog uses has filters to check if they could be spam. A visit to the spam folder shows that each day tens, if not hundreds, of potential comments are summarily dispatched to the spam folder without my ever seeing them. If a comment passes those checks, then it is sent to me for moderation, to enable me to make sure that it is not spam. Once I approve the first comment from a new person, subsequent comments from that same person go through immediately, so spammers have to make the first comment plausible.

It used to be fairly easy to identify spam comments that make it past the filters and get to me. They were usually poorly written with typos and grammatical errors, they would have links to sites that had nothing to do with the post, they would often have effusive but generic compliments on the content of the post and my writing, and they would usually arrive a long time after the post originally appeared.

But in a recent post of mine about the blame game that has begun over the stagnation in the Iran war, I received the following comment for moderation.
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Evaluating the Democratic candidates for CA governor

In the previous post, I discussed the peculiar features of the so-called ‘jungle primary’ system in California to be held on June 2 that is used to select which two candidates will face off against each other for the governorship in the general election in November. I also discussed the two leading Republican contenders whom I will definitely not be voting for.

Before we get to the Democratic candidates for governor, we have to remember that outgoing governor Gavin Newsom, while good at gaining visibility by trolling Trump on social media is far from progressive and very much a protector of the wealthy. His actions seem to be designed to gain media attention and name recognition to lay the groundwork for a run for president in 2028. John Nichols exposes the hollowness of Newsom

Gavin Newsom made headlines this winter by vowing to defeat a proposal for a one-time 5% tax on billionaires in the state…Last year, a Reuters-Ipsos poll reported that a whopping 86% of Democrats said “changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority.”
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While pandering to business elites, Newsom has slashed budgets to assist the poor and near-poor with healthcare, housing and food – in a state where seven million live under the official poverty line and child poverty rates are the highest in the nation.
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California primary election dilemma

The American election system is pretty convoluted at the best of times and foreigners can be excused for being utterly baffled by it. One general feature of this system is that political parties are weak entities and what membership in them means is informal and largely determined by the individual states and can vary. The party leadership does not get to choose which candidates represent them in a general election. Instead that is decided in a preliminary election called a primary election held several months before the general election in which voters get to decide which of the candidates should represent their party in the general election.

Who gets to vote in their primary election is not controlled by the parties either. In some states, when one registers to vote, one is asked to pick a party preference. Based on that, one is sent a party ballot for the primary election. But it is usually easy to switch from one party registration to another. In some other states, one can just show up on primary day and ask for ballot for one party and vote for a candidate from that party to be the nominee in the general election. Doing so automatically registers you as having that as your party choice. In the next election, one can choose to vote for a member of the other party and your preference gets switched. This sometimes results in devious voting where a Republican (say) votes in the Democratic primary for the candidate that they think the Republican could beat most easily in the general election. It is not clear if this strategy has ever worked but the idea periodically gets promoted.
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Kash Patel channels Captain Queeg

Recently The Atlantic magazine ran a lengthy investigative piece detailing the excessive drinking of FBI director Kash Patel. (I wrote about it here.) Patel was enraged and immediately rushed to file a $250 million defamation lawsuit against the magazine and the article author Sarah Fitzpatrick. Legal observers said that Patel’s lawsuit was not well-founded and likely to lose, and thus would be yet another waste of taxpayer funds. But filing lawsuits is what the members of the Trump clown car do for the flimsiest of reasons.


Fitzpatrick and the magazine were defiant and indeed she said that since the lawsuit she had heard from a great many current and former FBI officials who wanted to provide more dirt on Patel. The results of the fresh outpouring have been released in another article by Fitzpatrick that makes Patel look even worse, someone who seems incredibly childish and obsessed with branding his name.

After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “kash patel fbi director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it. (The person who sold it to us did not want to be named, but said that the bottle was a gift from Patel at an event in Las Vegas.)
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In March, Patel and his team brought at least one case of bourbon to the FBI’s training facility in Quantico, Virginia, for a “training seminar,” where Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes provided mixed-martial-arts instruction to aspiring FBI agents and senior staff. At one point at least one bottle went missing, which caused the director to “lose his mind,” according to clients of Kurt Siuzdak, a retired agent who has assisted FBI agents, including whistleblowers, with legal issues. Siuzdak told me that multiple agents contacted him for legal guidance after Patel began threatening to polygraph and prosecute his staff over the missing bottle. “It turned into a shitshow,” Siuzdak said. Other attorneys told me they received similar calls from FBI employees regarding concerns about Patel’s bottles.

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Going into debt to visit Disney parks

In an earlier post, I wrote about how the effort to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ had resulted in many young people nowadays going into debt in order to try and match and even exceed the lifestyles that they saw their peers boasting about in social media. It appears that people are also willing to go into deep debt to satisfy their desire to repeatedly visit Disney theme parks which are very expensive, even though they are not children nor have children. Amelia Tait writes about these people who have acquired the label of ‘Disney adults’.

So-called Disney adults have become a subject of online fascination, with many people now questioning how much it costs to be one.
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In June of 2024, the loan-comparison website LendingTree surveyed more than two thousand Americans and found that almost a quarter of Disney visitors had gone into debt for a trip. According to the survey, Gen Z-ers like Ashley were the most likely to take on Disney debt, which corresponds with a boom in young adults visiting the parks—either by themselves, or with friends their age—despite Disney World being a place stereotypically catering to families. Still, a high percentage of Disney debtors are parents: among the seventy-seven per cent of survey respondents who said that their children had visited a Disney park, forty-five per cent reported going into debt for a trip, with parents of young children owing an average of almost two thousand dollars. Anecdotally, the figures shared in forums and on social media can climb much higher; one couple told a YouTuber last year, for instance, that they’d taken out a roughly seventy-thousand-dollar loan partly for Disneyland trips.
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The next stage of Iran failure – blaming the critics

A sign that Trump is flailing with his war with Iran can be seen in his wildly shifting positions in order to avoid conceding that things are not going well. After declaring that the US had won the war within the first few hours, and then claiming that it would last at most a month or five weeks or six weeks (it kept changing), he now says that we should compare it with the Vietnam war that lasted for years so that critics were too quick in suggesting that the US was again stuck in an unwinnable war. The idea that a suitable measure should be in years rather than weeks was hardly comforting, So he occasionally reprises the idea that the war is in fact over or that it is not a war at all.

Then there are his abruptly shifting tactical moves. It is clear that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a big problem, not just for him, but for the global economy and that Iran is calling the shots on it. So what does he do? He first declares that the Strait is in fact open, then he orders Iran to open it, then he declares that the US is blockading it, as if that makes things any better. Then just on Sunday, he grandly declared Project Freedom in which US warships would provide safe passage to ships to pass through the Strait and on Monday, he claimed success in that US warships had escorted two ships out. But according to the International Maritime Organization there are roughly 2,000 ships with about 20,000 crew that are stranded in the Persian Gulf as of April 21, and it was obvious to knowledgeable observers that there was no way that US warships could provide escorts for that many. So on Tuesday, Project Freedom was summarily ditched, with Trump going back to that old standby that has not worked before, of threatening indiscriminate bombing of Iran (obvious war crimes) unless they allow free passage.
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Novel legal strategy to eliminate smoking

Cigarettes and other smoking-related products are, as has been pointed out, things that can and will kill you even when used as directed. Not only does it kill, it causes many health problems not just for smokers but for those around them due to breathing in the smoke.

The IHME – in their annual Global Burden of Disease study – estimates that 8.7 million people die prematurely from tobacco use every year. As of November 2023, these are the latest estimates and refer to deaths in the year 2019. The references can be found in the footnote.

7.7 million of those deaths result from smoking, while 1.3 million are non-smokers who are dying because they are exposed to second-hand smoke. (An additional 56,000 people die annually from chewing tobacco.)

The unpleasant smell of smoke also penetrates into clothes and any permeable material so that as soon as one enters a room, one can tell if a smoker has been there.

However, thanks to massive marketing and the hiding of its negative effects, the tobacco industry has managed to create a large number of addicts. The industry has a massive army of lobbyists who work diligently to make sure that governments do not do more to curtail or ban their death-dealing industry. Banning smoking outright will not be easy because of the power of the lobby and those who will argue that it infringes on their personal freedom.
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NFTs are now largely worthless

Remember the craze just a few years ago over Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)? People were paying millions of dollars to purchase various images, with one series known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club being particularly hyped.

The NFT hype benefited from the crypto craze because people seemed impressed with the blockchain process used to certify ‘ownership’ of this asset even if they did not understand it. It made absolutely no sense to me right from the get-go that cartoons and other images that can be copied freely could have any value but many people seemed to think that they did and rushed to ‘purchase’ them even though it was not clear what ‘ownership’ entitled them to.

The ownership of an NFT as defined by the blockchain has no inherent legal meaning and does not necessarily grant copyright, intellectual property rights, or other legal rights over its associated digital file. An NFT does not restrict the sharing or copying of its associated digital file and does not prevent the creation of NFTs that reference identical files.

This phenomenon had all the markings of a bubble and sure enough, the bubble popped.
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God’s Away on Business by Tom Waits

I am reposting this song by Tom Waits that I first heard over 15 years ago because it seems particularly apropos now about the greed and selfishness-infested state of the US in our time, especially the first stanza, where I take ‘the ship is sinking’ as a metaphor for the US.

I’d sell your heart to the junk-man baby for a buck, for a buck
If you’re looking for someone to pull you out of that ditch, you’re out of luck, you’re out of luck
The ship is sinking, the ship is sinking, the ship is sinking
There’s a leak, there’s a leak in the boiler room
The poor, the lame, the blind
Who are the ones that we kept in charge?
Killers, thieves and lawyers
God’s away, God’s away, God’s away on business.




Someone noticed the remarkable similarity between the voices of Waits and Cookie Monster and made a mashup of Cookie’s scenes from Sesame Street with Waits singing the song. For me the words carry even more weight when seemingly sung by the beloved muppet.

Since it is hard to make out the words sometimes, here are the lyrics.
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