Also, Facebook Finally Peaked and Meta Lost $230 Billion in Value –

“So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people – greedy, barbarous, and cruel…”
— T.E. Lawrence in ‘Lawrence of Arabia‘ 1962

The Big Picture - 
By Glynn Wilson - 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Puzzled by the destructive political divide in the United States, all kinds of intellectuals and scholars on the right, middle and left have observed that American politics these days looks a lot like tribalism.

So I’m always on the lookout for stories to share that could shine some light on this phenomenon.

This week, while messing around on Facebook (which is in big trouble by the way, see below) I ran across an episode of the Bill Maher Show on HBO that’s worth talking about today as the Winter Olympics of 2022 kick off in Beijing — and China teams up with Russia in the battle over whether to fight a war over the prospect of NATO expanding into Ukraine.

“New Rule: You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are a silly people and Americans are a silly people,” Maher says. “That’s the classic phrase from Lawrence of Arabia when Lawrence tells his Bedouin allies that as long as they stay a bunch of squabbling tribes they will remain a silly people. Well we’re the silly people now.”

You want proof that we are a silly people? In the first interview with Julia Marino, the snowboarder who brought home the first medal for Team USA, what burning question did NBC ask and what answer is trending big on Twitter and the Chinese social media app tik-tok?

Do you like pineapple on pizza?

.@TeamUSA's first medalist Julia Marino stopped by to answer our burning questions like: "Pineapple on Pizza?" #WinterOlympics @OnHerTurf pic.twitter.com/cvjpfstYKO

— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) February 6, 2022

Now back to the monologue of Bill Maher: New Rule: Losing to China | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

“China — all 1.4 billion of them — they’re not a silly people. If anything they are as serious as a prison fight.”

“Look, we all know China does bad stuff,” he continued. “They break promises about Hong Kong autonomy. They put Uyghurs in camps and punish dissent and we don’t want to be that. But it’s got to be something between authoritarian government that tells everyone what to do, and a representative government that can’t do anything at all.”

“In two generations China has built 500 entire cities from scratch, moved the majority of their huge population from poverty to the middle class, and mostly cornered the market in 5g and pharmaceuticals. Oh and they bought Africa. Their new silk road initiative is the biggest infrastructure project in history, indebting not just that continent but large parts of Asia, Europe and the Middle East to the people who built their roads, bridges and ports.

“If you want to go anywhere in the world these days,” he joked, “you better have a yen for travel (haha).”

“In China alone they have 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. America has none. Our fastest train is the tram that goes around the zoo. California wanted to build high-speed rail connecting the entire state, but alas could not. We’re six billion in the hole just trying to finish the track connecting the vital hubs (not) of Bakersfield and Merced. One small step for nobody, one giant leap for raisins.”

[Applause]

“On a national level we’ve been having infrastructure week every week since 2009, but we never do anything. Half the country is having a never-ending woke competition deciding whether Mr. Potato Head has a dick, and the other half believes we have to stop the lizard people because they’re eating babies.

“We are a silly people even when we all agree on something like getting rid of the penny. No the inertia, the ass covering, the graft, the lawyers, the cowardice — nothing ever moves in this impacted colon of a country. We see a problem and we ignore it, lie about it, fight about it endlessly, litigate it, sunset closet it, kick it down the road and then write a bill where a half-assed solution doesn’t kick in for 10 years.

“China sees a problem and they fix it,” he said. “They build a dam. We debate what to rename it. That’s why their airports look like this (pic) and ours look like this (pic).

“In San Francisco it took 10 years just to get two bus lines through environmental review. The big dig — a tunnel in Boston — took 16 years. And don’t get me started on my solar hookup (he still doesn’t have it).

“China once put up a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days. They demolished and rebuilt the San Yuan Bridge in Beijing in 43 hours. We binge watch — they binge build.

“When Covid hit Wuhan the city built a quarantine center with 4,000 rooms in 10 days — and they barely had to use it because they quickly arrested the spread of the disease. They were back to throwing raves in swimming pools while we were stuck at home surfing the dark web for black market Charmin (toilet paper).

“We’re not losing to China. We lost. The returns just haven’t all come in yet.

“They made robots that check a kid’s temperature and got their asses back in school. Most of our kids are still pretending to take zoom classes while they watch tik-tok and their brain cells slowly commit ritual suicide. As George Bush once said: ‘Is our children learning?’

“There’s a progressive trend now to sacrifice merit for equity. Colleges are chucking the SAT and ACT test and in New York Mayor De Blasio announced merit would no longer decide who gets into the schools for advanced learners, but rather a lottery system.

“You think China’s doing that? Letting political correctness get in the way of nurturing their best and brightest?

“You think Chinese colleges are offering courses in the Philosophy of Star Trek (or) the Sociology of Seinfeld and Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse? Those are real.

“And so is China, and they are eating our lunch. And believe me in an hour they’ll be hungry again.”

Meanwhile, to see how silly we are, I lost a friend on Facebook this week who had gotten all excited about some clickbait on CNN’s YouTube channel making it appear that the coming war in Ukraine is the fault of the Biden Administration, taking the line of Putin and Xi Jinping, while arguing that the war is a “distraction” from the other real issues we need to be dealing with.

Do you see the contradiction? He’s sucked into an obsession with the distraction, while trying to suck me in too. So I said, “exactly, which is why I have not been focusing on the war. We have real problems here to deal with.”

If we can’t save our own democracy from misinformation, propaganda and fascism, how can we possibly help the rest of the world fight mob capitalism in Russia, capitalist communism in China, and climate change from rendering Homo sapiens extinct on planet Earth?

In case you missed the story out of China on the opening day of the Olympics:

BEIJING — President Xi Jinping of China on Friday offered firm support to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in the Kremlin’s showdown with the West over Ukraine, strengthening a relationship that presents a continuing challenge to the United States’ dominance on the world stage.

In a highly choreographed display of solidarity, the two leaders met in Beijing ahead of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, the first meeting that Mr. Xi has held in person with a foreign counterpart in nearly two years.

It comes at a moment of escalating tensions between the West and Russia over Ukraine. Mr. Putin has amassed more than 100,000 troops to his neighbors north, south and east in what NATO allies view as a menacing prelude to an attack.

In a lengthy joint statement, China accused the United States of stoking protests in Hong Kong and encouraging independence in Taiwan, while Russia said the United States was playing a similarly destabilizing role in Ukraine.

NYT: Russia and China join in opposing any expansion of NATO

Facebook Peaks

Then we can’t let this big story go without comment. Virtually every news outlet in the world is gleefully reporting that Facebook’s dream of connecting the whole world is dead.

But that is highly inaccurate. That was not Facebook’s dream. Mark Zuckerberg’s dream first was just to get laid. He then thought his idea was good enough to make a billion dollars by getting almost everyone in the world to sign up and share chick pics and selfies. Those dreams did come true.

It’s just that now that he has a wife and gets laid, and has billions of dollars. He’s just not interested in Facebook anymore. All he cares about now are his virtual world Metaverse toys.

Facebook has become a political problem. It is now being run by bots on autopilot, and is programmed to screw all news outlets that publish criticism of it, along with any politician who claims to want to regulate it.

I think Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle came really close to summarizing the situation honestly on Friday. She may have just been too nice.

Everybody who is paying attention by now knows that Facebook lost a half a million users in the fourth quarter of 2021, and as a result, the stock price dropped, making the company’s market value tank by $230 billion. It’s projected to lose $10 billion in 2022.

“So much of our public life takes place on a handful of technology platforms, where what we see and whom we reach is determined by policies set by some faceless programmer in Silicon Valley. We are all of us tenants of the digital manor — even, it turns out, some of the lords.”

Opinion: We all learned a painful lesson from Facebook. Now Facebook is learning it, too

The New York Times also summarized it.

6 Reasons Meta Is in Trouble

The best news here is that as Facebook is losing advertising dollars because Apple is blocking it from gathering data on people and protecting the privacy of iPhone users, and as a result, Google is picking back up market share in web advertising. So Google is now amassing even more money they can pay us, when we find a law firm to sue.

They owe us over a half a million in advertising revenue. If we had that money, we could start a new social media app that would put Facebook out of business for news and activism — a social media company that would actually have a real mission: To save democracy and the planet.

If the programmers in Silicon Valley had a boss who was an expert on web journalism, we would not be in this mess.

We may even be in a position to compete with China, or at least keep a solid alliance going, instead of them teaming up with Russia to eat our lunch.

Joe Biden Says ‘China is going to eat our lunch’

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