…so…it’s probably nonsense…but I was thinking about the whole thing with the presidential records act & the record-breakingly un-presidential ex-pretender to that office…& I figured his attitude is broadly consistent with thinking of that stuff as an audit trail

All presidents since the 1930s have preserved a sizable chunk of their records, often to be displayed in their presidential libraries. But it wasn’t until 1978, after Nixon tried to keep many of his documents private, that Congress passed a law codifying the practice that presidents must preserve all historically relevant material. Here’s more on how the law came to be.

Without it, presidents themselves decided which records to share with the public. And, thus, they shaped history in the way they wanted it to be told. Nixon’s library originally portrayed the Watergate scandal only as an attack on Nixon, rather than as an abuse of power. (The Nixon estate lost a 20-year litigation battle to keep the more damaging parts of Watergate out of his presidential library.)

…20 years they plugged away at trying to “adjust” that record…& I don’t know what the over/under is on how long hair furore fights the IRS over an audit for any given year of his tax returns…but I could see that kind of drawn out legal tussle over any audit of his term in office…but…like the nixon thing…that wouldn’t necessarily preclude the thing being largely settled from most perspectives a lot sooner

The National Archives’ Latin motto (“Littera Scripta Manet”) loosely translates to “The Written Word Endures.” Its role is to help protect the nation’s history by preserving access to government records, which then allows Americans to hold elected officials accountable for their past actions. The law also facilitates presidential transitions by letting the incoming administration read up on what the outgoing administration was doing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/07/what-is-presidential-records-act-how-did-trump-violate-it/

…but…as with altogether too many things of late…the reality of the thing somehow doesn’t appear to be noticeably tethered to…well…reality

The first minutes after Donald Trump announced that his Florida estate had been searched by FBI agents went better than the former president could have imagined. His years-long effort to cast the bureau as inherently biased against him quickly prompted even Trump-skeptical Republicans to side with him against the devious “deep state.” The wagon-circling reportedly pleased Trump, whose team saw a new breath of unity with Trump as its focus.

…the man is more or less an ambulatory incarnation of the concept of reductio ad absurdam…so perhaps it ought not to be surprising…but his concept of loyalty is…well, I’m not sure it’s even compatible with much of the abstract stuff we associate with loyalty…it seems to be a more mercurial affair that equates pretty directly to how closely people hew to the course of action he considers to promote his interest…to the extent that the degree to which doing so requires obdurate denial of reality seems to be his shorthand for how “loyal” his support is

That this reaction was based on claims of political bias within the FBI that have no basis in the available evidence was beside the point. The point was that the FBI became the opposition, just as Trump would have hoped.

But it turns out that this wasn’t enough. Baseless assertions of impropriety and bias by the FBI have now been kicked up a notch with multiple figures on the right claiming — again without evidence, much less justification — that maybe the agents planted evidence as they combed through Mar-a-Lago. Because, it seems, any opponent of Trump’s must be cast in the most nefarious terms possible.

…which is passing strange when you consider the ratio at which acting in his legal defense over the last few years has correlated with disbarment…more so if you allow for the potential upward trajectory on one side of that equation…but even if you just consider rudy…& the kraken lot…& the ones that needed presidential pardons to stay out of jail…it can be hard to see where it is they find people willing to throw themselves on that pyre

The insinuation was first made by Trump attorney Christina Bobb. Speaking to a right-wing streaming service, Bobb (herself a veteran of the right-wing network One America News) repeatedly tried to suggest that the FBI had acted inappropriately. She asked to see their warrant when she arrived at Mar-a-Lago on Monday morning; she claims they at first resisted. She hoped to observe the search; they prevented her from doing so.

…& with some of the choir they’re preaching to courting whatever it is their fever dream imagines a civil war to look like…I get why it might be worth reporting the shit they talk

https://twitter.com/shannon_last/status/1556811732835786752
[…part of the reason this is late this morning is I’ve had a problem with nothing seeming to be willing to embed in the usual fashion…but if you follow that link you’ll find a view down the rabbit hole in question]

…I just don’t get why we assume that those hawking it actually believe it

All of this runs the obvious risk of treating this insinuation as in any way credible. It is not, even in Bobb’s vague formulation. There is literally no reason to think that the FBI wanted to add anything to the evidence that wasn’t already present. Asserting that there is reason to think so requires that you believe (or want others to believe) that the bureau is inherently corrupt and out to get Trump, which is begging the question.

Anyway, it got worse. Another Trump attorney, Alina Habba, appeared on Fox News on Tuesday night with host Jesse Watters. Watters, whose track record of accuracy is not spotless, quickly elevated the idea that the FBI was up to something.

“What the FBI is probably doing is planting evidence, which is what they did during the Russia hoax,” he said. “We also have a hunch they doctored evidence to get the warrant — again, what they did during the Russia hoax.”

…hell, I don’t think I’m entirely persuaded that a majority of the people who so much as don’t-oppose-these-assholes actually believe this stuff…cognitive dissonance can carry a lot of water but even willfully immersed in an exclusive diet of this obvious bullshit I think most of them have passed over into knowing it’s bullshit…but whether on account of sunk costs or an extreme form of existential panic inducing them to desperately demand that reality be responsive to their assertions…they’re all in on living in a world they imagine to be better for them

Watters’s hunch should be considered as strongly correlated to demonstrated reality as I should be considered a contender for this year’s Cy Young Award. Yes, an FBI official pleaded guilty to altering an email used in a warrant application, but he avoided jail time in part because a judge believed the claim that the information he added was accurate. The “planting evidence” statement is a reference to a complicated assertion made by special counsel John Durham that’s never been substantiated. But each is a good example of how isolated, decontextualized claims targeting the FBI have propagated through the conservative bubble with the central aim of casting the bureau and not Trump as the dubious actor.
[…]
This, of course, is how it works: Use unfounded allegations of wrongdoing against the government as a reason to distrust the government and use distrust of government as a reason to suggest that the government committed acts of wrongdoing. It’s exactly how defenses of Trump’s claims about election fraud worked. He insisted that fraud was going to occur and then that it had occurred. A lot of people believed him. That belief was then cited as a reason to address election fraud, which heightened the sense that something needed to be fixed.
[…]
Skepticism of law enforcement is always warranted and always an important part of the American system. But there’s a difference between informed skepticism and an effort to use eroded trust in law enforcement to further erode trust in law enforcement.
[…]
“Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be left alone, without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting,’ ” Trump wrote. “Why did they STRONGLY insist on having nobody watching them, everybody out?”

This isn’t skepticism. This is Trump continuing a years-long pattern of disparaging the integrity of the FBI at every opportunity, solely to inoculate his supporters against occasions in which he was or might be the focus of the FBI’s interest. For occasions, that is, like this one.

There is an added benefit to this line of argument. Should the FBI announce that it uncovered something incriminating among the documents, Trump et al have a prefabricated response: You put it there. The base inoculated once again.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/10/trump-fbi-search-republicans/

…that mueller she wrote podcast I’ve mentioned a time or two somewhat colorfully describes this process as “lubing the truth”…& it’s been a mainstay of the MAGA approach to the myriad attempts they make to actively flout the law…morality…ethics…basic human decency…yadda yadda…ironically it’s one of the few lenses through which an argument can be made for there being something akin to consistency to the “logic” by which they operate

There are not many people who know exactly why FBI agents searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday. The FBI knows, certainly, and the former president and his attorneys probably have a good sense as well, given that they saw the search warrant. Everyone else is operating on what’s been revealed by Trump’s team and public reporting: The FBI search was largely or entirely a function of the investigation into Trump’s retention of documents after leaving the White House.

We know that he did, by his own admission. This year, a number of boxes of material were turned over to the National Archives. Included in that material were some that were classified. On Monday, the FBI removed another dozen boxes, with speculation rampant that more of that material was similarly restricted.

If Trump is found to have violated federal law in removing and retaining classified documents without authorization, he could be convicted of a felony punishable by five years in prison. And that conviction would be a felony carrying that punishment because of a law signed by President Donald Trump.

…that’s not even ironic…that’s straight up farcical

During his first year in office, a central tool used for surveillance by the intelligence community — Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act — was set to expire. Shortly before it did, Congress passed an extension of the authority for another five years.

But that didn’t come without turmoil. Trump came into office angry at the intelligence community for revealing to reporters that it believed Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. He excoriated intelligence agencies on Twitter — and continued to do so as the contours of the investigation into that interference became clear.

On the day that the House was set to vote on the reauthorization, Trump complained on Twitter:

“House votes on controversial FISA ACT today.” This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?

(That initial phrase is in quotes because Trump, characteristically, was responding to something he saw on Fox News.)

The tweet freaked out advocates of the extension. A few hours later, he tweeted his support and it passed. On Jan. 18, 2018, he signed it into law.

What became law was S. 139. It had been introduced by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) as the Rapid DNA Act of 2017. But sometimes Congress hollows out existing legislation and replaces it entirely with other legislation to move the process forward more quickly. So S. 139 was replaced with H.R. 4478, which extended Section 702 for another five years.

It also had a stipulation editing 18 U.S. Code §1924. It originally read:

Whoever, being an officer, employee, contractor, or consultant of the United States, and, by virtue of his office, employment, position, or contract, becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.

With Trump’s signing S. 139 into law, that became: “ … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than five years, or both.” And with that, it became a felony.

…fundamentally you’d think that it might count for something that in order for your arguments to hold any water it’s necessary to redefine terms on a scale of black=white

In an interview on Fox News Tuesday night, former Trump administration official Kash Patel made th[e] case [that Trump] [had declassified everything he took to Mar-a-Lago].

“What I can tell you definitively is that President Trump was a transparency president,” Patel said when asked if there was any classified material at Trump’s Florida estate. “And time and time again … we tried to get all of it out. And President Trump, on multiple occasions at the White House, declassified whole sets of documents. Including — I remind you and your audience that around October of 2020, he issued a statement from the White House declassifying every document related to not just the Russiagate scandal, but also the Hillary Clinton email scandal.”

…I swear I about got whiplash from trying to follow the path of that pretzeled “logic”…it’s not improper let alone illegal for him to have in his possession the sort of thing he expressly made it a felony to hold because he only had them to provide them to the public as part of his declassification/transparency efforts…which is why he squirreled them away & still won’t publicly disclose what they were much less their contents or who he might have granted access to them

We’re trudging toward a very gray area here, clearly, but it is conceivable that Trump’s defense against his potential possession of classified material at Mar-a-Lago may be that he declassified it while still president, even if no formal record of the declassification was made. This introduces a slew of other questions, since that material would now presumably be publicly available in some form.
[…]
Patel was one of the administration’s most loyal defenders during Trump’s presidency. As a staffer to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), Patel was intimately involved in the congressman’s fervent effort to push back against the investigation into Russian interference. Nunes was also a critic of Clinton’s handling of her email server, suggesting at one point in 2016 that he hoped “the irresponsible handling of classified information documented by the FBI will be considered if any of these individuals currently possesses a security clearance or applies for one in the future.”

H.R. 4478, the legislation that became S. 139 and which escalated the punishment for the retention of classified material, was introduced in the House by Nunes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/10/trump-fbi-search-surveillance-law/

…leaving aside the extent to which holding a security clearance in the alleged administration didn’t necessarily accord with being someone who passed muster for that sort of thing…which just adds another layer to the absurdity of the piece…

Republicans are proclaiming outrage over the search, arguing that no president has ever been subjected to such a proceeding. They may be right. But then, no modern president has been the subject of as many and varied investigations as Mr. Trump — who invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination in one of them on Wednesday.

Of course, criminal investigations of presidents shouldn’t be undertaken lightly. The warrant in this case isn’t public; even if it were, only a sealed affidavit could tell the full story about the evidentiary basis for the search. The improper retention of records is a serious offense that shouldn’t be dismissed, but it is so far unclear whether Mr. Trump’s retention of these records constituted a violation of national security, a threat to democracy, or any other grave abuse. Attorney General Merrick Garland, then, finds himself in a tricky position: He may eventually be summoned before GOP-controlled congressional committees and ordered to explain himself for allowing the FBI’s actions — a job that will prove more difficult if the inquiry doesn’t lead to criminal charges or evidence of major wrongdoing.

For now, the prudent reaction to the search would be to await its tangible results. Instead, Republicans are behaving with gross irresponsibility: from talk show hosts urging violence that seems all-too-possible after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, to Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon comparing the FBI to the Gestapo, to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) declaring the Justice Department in “an intolerable state of weaponized politicization.” This rhetoric is disturbing and dangerous — not to mention hypocritical. In fact, it is Mr. Trump’s administration and acolytes who sought to weaponize the Justice Department, and it is they who today are attempting to turn what to all appearances is a legitimate inquiry into a political circus.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/10/republican-response-mar-a-lago-search-dangerous/

…&…I guess…try not to get pulled under by its rip tide

On Tuesday, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee tweeted out this brilliant response to the search at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence: “If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you.”

Well, yes, that is how the rule of law works. If you had committed acts that would persuade a judge to sign off on a search warrant, you, too, would be visited by law enforcement.

…I mean…I’m pretty sure the US national archive isn’t interested in any paperwork I might have sculling about…so in some ways that’s easily done…but…arguably very much by design…that’s somewhat besides the point

This should be obvious, yet it was not just a stray Republican staffer on the Judiciary Committee who was outraged to find that the defeated former president was subjected to a search warrant. The entire Republican Party went to Defcon 1. What followed was a barrage of attacks on law enforcement, pledges of fidelity to a cult leader undergoing multiple federal and state investigations, and vows of revenge. Oh, and now it’s Republicans who want to defund law enforcement.
[…]
Republicans’ over-the-top reaction comes in a couple of varieties. In one category are the career-climbers who likely have never bought into Trump’s excuses but capitulate whenever Trump and his MAGA cult demand a show of support.
[…]
For example, Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin surely understands why a warrant requiring probable cause was approved to seize materials from Mar-a-Lago. But the now-familiar blend of cowardice and ambition required his absurd response: “A stunning move by the DOJ and FBI,” he tweeted. “This same DOJ labeled parents in Loudoun County as terrorists and failed to enforce federal law to protect Justices in their homes. Selective, politically motivated actions have no place in our democracy.”

In another category are the crazed and at times violent threats from supporters, not unlike the kind we saw regarding the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The category of cynical Republicans who parrot Trump propaganda and false claims of victimhood risk riling up these unstable and dangerous forces, just as GOP lawmakers did by mouthing lies about a stolen election.
[…]
This is how fascist movements operate. They use violence and the threat of violence to achieve their goals. They deploy state power to debilitate opposition. They demonize an independent judiciary and utilize captive media to keep supporters in a state of fury.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/10/gops-crazed-reaction-search-trump-home-shows-its-true-colors/

…& I know I bleat about this with dismal regularity…but…in this kind of context

Forests from the Arctic to the Amazon are transforming at a “shocking” rate due to the climate crisis, with trees advancing into previously barren tundra in the north while dying off from escalating heat farther south, scientists have found.

Global heating, along with changes in soils, wind and available nutrients, is rapidly changing the composition of forests, making them far less resilient and prone to diseases, according to a series of studies that have analyzed the health of trees in north and South America.
[…]
The Arctic is heating up several times faster than the global average and the emergence of dark conifers on previously pristine white tundra threatens to absorb, rather than reflect, more sunlight, causing further heating. The trees may also disturb the migration of various local species. “These trees are moving very quickly,” said Dial.

Farther south, separate research has found a transformation is under way at the boundary between the boreal and temperate forests, with species of spruce and fir increasingly unable to cope with the hotter conditions. Scientists estimate that even small amounts of further heating, caused by human activity, could cause up to a 50% die-off of traditional boreal forest trees in certain places, with many other trees becoming stunted in their growth.
[…]
The impact of the climate crisis is also being felt in the heart of the Amazon, a further study has underlined. Scientists have raised concerns that the huge rainforest ecosystem is in danger of tipping into a new, altered state, eventually becoming a savannah, and the new research found that a lack of phosphorus in the Amazon’s soils could have “major implications” for its resilience to global heating.

…all this fucking about with deckchairs while refusing to look at the oncoming…yeah, okay, so an iceberg is probably the worst possible metaphor for the way the climate crisis is headed…but I feel like the titanic analogy is sound given that it was supposed to be unsinkable…& although the globe will most likely shake off whatever we do to it…the possibility that the consequences of our collective actions could see us sunk without trace is the sort of unavoidable reality that people who find refuge in the MAGA style alternative reality are fleeing from…problem being…this is not a drill

The fate of the world’s biggest ice sheet rests in the hands of humanity, a new analysis has shown. If global heating is limited to 2C, the vast East Antarctic ice sheet should remain stable, but if the climate crisis drives temperatures higher, melting could drive up sea level by many metres.

The East Antarctic ice sheet (EAIS) holds the vast majority of Earth’s glacier ice. Sea levels would rise by 52 metres if it all melted. It was thought to be stable, but is now showing signs of vulnerability, the scientists said.

The EAIS is far larger than the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS), which hosts the so-called “doomsday” Thwaites glacier, which has lost significant stability. Total loss of the WAIS would cause 5 metres of sea level rise.
[…]
The Greenland ice sheet, which could deliver 7 metres of sea level rise, is on the brink of a tipping point after which accelerated melting would become inevitable, scientists warned in 2021. While the full impact of melting ice is felt over centuries, researchers warned that the level of carbon emissions over the next few decades will lock in future sea level rise.
[…]
“The fate of the EAIS remains very much in our hands,” said Prof Chris Stokes, at Durham University in the UK, who led the study. “This ice sheet is by far the largest on the planet and it’s really important that we do not awaken this sleeping giant. We used to think ice sheets in East Antarctica were much less vulnerable to climate change, compared to West Antarctica or Greenland, but we now know there are some areas already showing signs of ice loss.”

In March, the Conger ice shelf in East Antarctica collapsed, with scientists saying it was “a sign of what might be coming”. In 2018, scientists found that a group of glaciers spanning an eighth of the East Antarctic coastline were being melted by the warming seas.

The new analysis, published in the journal Nature, assessed the sensitivity of the EAIS to global heating using data on how it responded to higher global temperatures in the past, information on the changes happening now and computer simulations of possible futures.
[…]
The analysis includes data from the geological past showing that the last time CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were higher than today was about 3myears ago. Temperatures were then 2-4C higher – in the range the world could experience later this century – and sea level eventually rose 10-25 metres higher than at present. As recently as 400,000 years ago, part of the EAIS retreated 700km inland when global temperature rose only 1-2C.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/10/east-antarctic-ice-sheet-in-our-hands-climate-action

In a study published Monday, [Professor Camilo] Mora and his colleagues at the University of Hawaii canvassed tens of thousands of studies to analyze the global impacts of climate change on infectious diseases that affect humans. They determined that nearly 220 infectious diseases — 58% of the total studied — had become bigger threats because of climate hazards.

“Systems have been evolving for millions of years and now humans have come along and changed things,” Mora said. “We are punching nature, but nature is punching us back.”

The study, which ultimately analyzed more than 3,200 scientific works, is one of the most thorough examinations of climate change’s overall impact on diseases worldwide.
[…]
When Mora and his team examined the effects of 10 climate hazards on 375 infectious diseases, they found more than 1,000 ways that climate change spurred disease transmission. Rising temperatures were the biggest driver of pathogenic diseases, followed by precipitation, floods and drought.
[…]
Climate hazards even put direct stress on the human body and make people more vulnerable to infection.

“What happens with warming countries in particular is that drought, because it undermines nutrition and increases malnutrition, compromises our body’s ability to fight infection,” said Amir Sapkota, an epidemiology and biostatistics professor at the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health. Sapkota was not involved in the research.

Mora said heat waves could be pushing some viruses, through natural selection, to tolerate higher temperatures. That’s bad news, he said, because one of the human body’s key weapons against a viral invader is heat from a developing fever.
[…]
In the Arctic Circle, for instance, ancient pathogens in the bodies of animals frozen beneath permafrost have begun to re-emerge with some nasty effects. Through genetic analysis, scientists traced a 2016 anthrax outbreak in Siberia to buried prehistoric animals exposed during a heat wave.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/climate-hazards-are-turning-218-diseases-bigger-threats

…but there are…quite literally…people whose entire careers are predicated on a pretense that there’s nothing to see here…& they aren’t all wearing a MAGA hat

Neither of Kentucky’s Republican senators voted for the climate bill. The state’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, rarely mentions climate change and, as Inside Climate News has pointed out, he does not list climate change as a driving force behind his environmental policy.
[…]
“I wish I could tell you why we keep getting hit here in Kentucky,” Beshear said of the flooding and to the consternation of climate activists who know exactly why Kentucky keeps getting hit. “I wish I could tell you why areas where people may not have much continue to get hit and lose everything. I can’t give you the why, but I know what we do in response to it. And the answer is everything we can. These are our people. Let’s make sure we help them out.”
[…]
About half the country in 2021 — 47% — believed global warming would harm them personally, according to data gathered by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

…I know a lot of largely unfair criticism is heaped on the premise that a big chunk of the US population doesn’t really think of the place as part of the world…except in the sense that the baseball league is “the world series”…but upwards of 50% of any population being so insanely parochial as to believe that the effects of a literally global phenomenon are something to which they are personally immune…is the very definition of an insane degree of denial

The climate crisis might be the existential threat driving an increase in weird weather and national disasters, but it’s not likely to drive the majority of people out to vote in November.

In a CNN poll conducted by SSRS in June and July, only about a third of registered voters said that climate change would be extremely important to their vote for Congress this year. That includes about half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters and just 13% of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters.

…it might ultimately be a suicide pact…but it continues to amaze me the extent to which some people are invested in the idea of “hurting the right people“

CNN’s Brandon Tensley wrote for his Race Deconstructed newsletter that climate change is hitting some communities harder than others. He talked to Deke Arndt, the chief of climate science and services at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

“The reality is that when creeks get up and out of their banks, they almost always find the folks who are already living closer to the margins, whether these are people in manufactured housing or mobile homes or people in homes that are well within the floodplain,” Arndt told CNN. “We saw it in eastern Kentucky last week. We saw it in my home region of western North Carolina last summer.”

It’s an unrelenting theme, experts say: Flash floods, in particular, punch hard on already vulnerable communities. To help protect against climate-related hazards, we must think about disaster mitigation not as a short-term goal — but rather as a long-term one.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/08/politics/climate-change-us-floods-what-matters/index.html

…I mean…I expect that very few of them care about…or indeed entirely grasp…the damage it does to the national interest they tell themselves they’re championing

When I was a university student in northwestern China in the late 1990s, my friends and I tuned in to shortwave broadcasts of Voice of America, polishing our English while soaking up American and world news. We flocked to packed lecture halls whenever a visiting American professor was on campus.

It was a thrilling time. China was emerging from isolationism and poverty, and as we looked to the future we studied democracy, market economics, equality and other ideals that made America great. We couldn’t realistically adopt them all because of China’s conditions, but our lives were transformed as we recalibrated our economy on a U.S. blueprint.
[…]
But after years of watching America’s wars overseas, reckless economic policies and destructive partisanship — culminating in last year’s disgraceful assault on the U.S. Capitol ­­— many Chinese, including me, can barely make out that shining beacon anymore.
[…]
I have misgivings about some of my country’s policies. And I recognize that some criticisms of my government’s policies are justified. But Americans must also recognize that U.S. behavior is hardly setting a good example.
[…]
The shift in Chinese attitudes wasn’t a given. But when U.S.-led NATO forces mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1999 during the Kosovo war, our idolizing of America began to wane. Three people were killed in that attack, and 20 were wounded. Two years later, a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet collided in the South China Sea, leaving a Chinese pilot dead. These incidents may have seemed relatively minor to Americans, but they shocked us. We had largely avoided foreign wars and were not used to our citizens dying in conflicts involving other countries. The shift in perception gained pace as the 2000s unfolded and more Chinese had televisions. We watched as the carnage of America’s disastrous involvement in Iraq, launched in 2003 on false pretenses, was beamed into our homes.
[…]
It’s no accident that China’s military spending — a source of concern in Washington for years — began rising in the early 2000s after the Belgrade bombing and the plane collision. It quickly took off after the war in Iraq showcased how far ahead the U.S. military was compared with ours. China’s past weakness had been calamitous: Western powers attacked and forced China to surrender territory in the 1800s, and Japan’s brutal invasion in the 20th century killed millions.

U.S. officials no doubt want China to follow the American path of liberalism. But in contrast to my university days, the tone of Chinese academic research on the United States has shifted markedly. Chinese government officials used to consult me on the benefits of American capital markets and other economic concepts. Now I am called upon to discuss U.S. cautionary tales, such as the factors that led to the financial crisis. We once sought to learn from U.S. successes; now we study its mistakes so that we can avoid them.

The sense of America as a dangerous force in the world has filtered into Chinese public attitudes as well. In 2020 I remarked on a Chinese television program that we still have much to learn from the United States — and was attacked on Chinese social media. I stick to my view but am now more careful in talking positively about the United States. When I do, I preface it with a criticism.
[…]
To be clear: China needs to change, too. It needs to be more open to dialogue with the United States, refrain from using U.S. problems as an excuse to go slow on reform and respond more calmly and constructively to American criticism on things like trade policy and human rights.
[…]
None of this is meant to gloat over America’s troubles; a strong, stable and responsible United States is good for the world. China still has much to learn from America, and we have a lot in common. We drive Chinese-built Fords and Teslas, wash our hair with Procter & Gamble shampoos and sip coffee at Starbucks. Solving some of the planet’s biggest problems requires that we work together.

But that doesn’t mean following America over the cliff.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/opinion/china-us-relations.html

…what’s the alternative, though?

…so…I am beyond out of time…let’s hope that just goes for me…& today…rather than…you know…some of the alternatives?

[…will try to find some tunes…assuming I can induce those to embed…but if they don’t materialize you can put that down to technical difficulties rather than an absence of intent]