Et tu Brutus, et tu.
Those were supposedly Ceasar’s last words after being stabbed by the Senators including his close confidante Brutus. They were not actually. They were “What are you doing?” in pure high cultured elite Italian. Google Translate no longer provides that particular dialect to our great and abiding consternation.
Being stabbed is not a pleasant feeling. It’s not like someone smoking your cigarette. What? A cigarette butt just magically appeared on the balcony. None of my roommates smokes. It’s the last day of May. The ides of March have abated with the times and tides that rule all men. This is beginning to sound a lot like a ketchup of a lot of different writers. As if an alien imbibed all of earth’s books and said “I know kung fu!” Hey very old being who lives inside Keanu. Ola. Is Keanu to your wishes? Is he providing a welcome environment? Well that’s good. Si is always good. You liked Matrix better than John Wick? Why is that? Ah right, meaning. One movie was a indication of the system to come, the other was just a violent retribution. “You killed my dog!” “I shall kill you, and you and you and you and you and all the rest of you who are part of the dog killing gang!” “You have no idea what that dog meant to me!” Ah whatever. It kept Keanu in shape.
Anyway it’s a glorious Sunday morning. The sun’s out and all is well with the world. Except it’s not. If you are sitting in America somewhere and reading this can you genuinely say all is well with America? It might be in your little prarie in Wisconsin or Idaho or South Dakota or Missouri. Although, things are starting to fall apart there too. Shit’s more expensive bro. Even mulch. My balcony suddenly got covered in mulch. My cappuchino in one of the views showed a monkey eating cow dung. Yet when I turned the cup clockwise or counterclockwise they made different shapes. Now that’s interesting art. Things that change meaning depending on your view, lighting, shadow, angle of views and so on. It gets even more interesting that the views are customized to the observer. In my case, yesterday a sparrow on camera, took a dust bath and painting an incredible painting over a 7 minute period. Also the same, different views showing different meanings. From pigs to the Devil. I would tell you that the views also change depending on whether you are above or below the painting. And the space between the viewer and the painting. The medium if you will. Is it air, is it water with its higher refractive properties and so on? Are you inside or outside the water? Maybe what seems to be a pig like man outside water be something else under. Gerard Butler don’t care that I haven’t finished watching the submarine movie. He cool like that.
This is what happens when you drink Chinese green tea from the P.R.C. instead of coffee. The taste is Imperial, the packaging is immaculate. And it’s cheap. Suddenly the mood changes and Alexa starts making jokes about my work ethic. It’s 10:34 am aIready. Didn’t wake up with the dawn? No 6am alarm? And you start to feel guilty. Then you realize it’s Sunday. And I did get up earlier at 4:45. What would I do? Type something maybe? Read the papers and see the news maybe? Worth the trouble? By now you can sort of predict the news. Something else has gone wrong. Imagine the situation: 2nd rate musicians turned down the offer to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday. That’s how bad things are. Did I truly need to wake up and read that? And I don’t usually open the Hong Kong newspapers but I guarantee you the news is positive about China. Wanna bet? I haven’t open them yet. Those who can monitor my computer know this to be true. This is my extrapolation of how the world has been working recently. Maybe I’ll be wrong. Let’s see:
It’s a linked page. You can click on it and be taken to scmp.com
And I win. It wasn’t just the video yesterday about X-Pengs’s flying car factory in Chongking where is American was doing the China-maxxing thing. Apparently it’s become a trend. No longer able to contain China and also looking at the self sabotage in America, Americans who visit China start becoming fans. There are no Chinese spies trying to convert those students, they are just looking at the differences. The WS-10 engine is now already 10 years old. You think Chinese flying cars are going to change transportation in the coming few years? Chinese planes will too. Boeing and Airbus ought to be worried. Are they? Unlikely. GM and Ford aren’t. They’ve simply banned Chinese EVs.
The dysfunction here at home in America is stark and visible to anyone. Is it only dysfunction or are Americans getting stabbed in the back like Ceasar was by their own leaders?
Kevin Warsh wants the Fed to think about inflation differently. American Dream is dying. Death toll from US military boat strike rises to 200.
Clearly there is a stark difference between South China Morning Post that is from Hong Kong and the American newspapers from New York and Washington DC. One shows a clean trajectory upwards, another shows the opposite. In the immortal words of Springsteen song: We’re going down, down, down, down, we’re going down, down, down, down. Congratulations. And you can’t blame the aliens for this : America has been in decline since the Reagan years most clearly. The decline was slow in the beginning, difficult to see but the symptoms are undeniable now. And yet…. no one does anything. Amazing. We are just watching Julius Ceasar getting killed by the Senators. And everyone’s like: not my problem.
