I wanted to write something to complain about San Mateo’s Hillsdale Mall opening a renovated food court with 4 Japanese restaurants out of the 7 establishments there, 5 Japanese restaurant in a mall totalling 10 restaurants.

What happened?

Did Uniqlo buy the mall?

But then I got thinking, this is America, and some non-trivial group of people decided to depend a non-trivial amount of money on this project. It must have been worthwhile. Culturally, Japan and Korea have enjoyed much more publicity, acceptance and commercial success in America than Chinese. Which is okay, no matter how you slice and dice it, Americans find Japanese and Korean culture and products more alluring than those of Chinese. And if Chinese people feel Japanese culture is a thickly veiled but shallow copy of it’s own, and that Koreans’ are not far behind in their admiration, that’s all good. What American like is distilled and westernized version, and that may actually be quite rational and effective. Why dig through thousands of years of history when you can have the pretty and the useful in another culture? I feel I’ve come to accept this fate for Chinese culture in America. And the Chinese don’t need Americans cultural admiration anyways. It’s okay if all he Chinese restaurants in America suddenly vanished, it won’t be missed like sushi, when suffering same fate, will be after a few generations. That’s just where human nature led us, and let’s not fight it.

But a little bit more diversity might be nice, immho.

While watching Ready Player One reinvigorated me briefly last night to the miracles in American creativity, I am drawn back to the gloom news of escalating real, non-cultural, non-entertainment, non-culinary, conflict where by Canada arrests Huawei’s CFO for essentially aiding terrorists against America.

Huawei makes phones that compete with Apple and Android. (They pretend to compete, and has the sales volume on paper, but really, I’ve very rarely seen anyone use one.) It’s certainly possible that it inadvertently supplied terrorist with devices that dramatically increased their terrorizing effectiveness. But honestly, if it is one of the world’s largest phone makers and exporters… Aren’t there a lot of other normal people who uses their phones? Could American and Canadian actions be like all the non-galtian politicians of The Atlas Shrugged, they use ideologies and FUD to maintain their own control–at the cost of global stability and quality of life of all they government, and maybe even at cost of fundamental human rights?

The lack of clarity in fact the lack of evidence of effectiveness of the American government is concerning. I mean, I half expect, mostly joking to myself, this is just a ploy to keep the Fed rate down in December.

The American government distrusts itself. During the Kavanaugh confirmation, we saw senators arguing about whether or not to use FBI reports, and using decade old quotes to imply that the FBI is useless. Like… What the fuck is wrong with this government? I don’t understand, shouldn’t it at least pretend that all it’s parts are functional?

It is, therefore unclear, who in the government trusts whom, (major branches, like CIA reports, apparently being ignored.)

Now, I am of course perpetually mindful of media manipulation, and that much of these may be quotation out of context reported to create an irresponsible looking Republican government. I feel perhaps at least 35% of that. But, Republicans are Republicans, and president Trump is Trump.

But as a citizen, I wish there were some more clear communication regarding what’s real and what’s not. I mean, what’s happening isn’t far from that Atlas Shrugged movie (it has like the least stars of all movies but some how being promoted on Amazon Prime right now. Maybe a lot of people watching what I watch also watched all three movies in the series.), with slightly different dominating political ideology and political mechanisms… That’s a stretch, I know… The main difference is that some one or more very powerful bodies are really lying and doing something at cost to the individual peoples for their own political gain, blatantly.

Okay, okay, I know, I know, I must be feeling like Sherlock Holmes here. How do we go forth in this land, governed as such? In a world, as it is?

PS disclaimer, I am not a terrorist. I neither state nor imply the preferred means of change. Like I wouldn’t want to stop the engines of the world. Or even stop any functioning engines of the world… Well maybe polluting ones, with planned deprecation. But this is getting a little bit too absurd, isn’t it? The suspense is killing. What will China do to retaliate? More worryingly, what if Xi and Trump are actually in bed together every night via an intercontinental hyperloop that they secretly installed, for good sakes. The pillars of the world are crumbling… So very depressingly…

I see why the Atlas shrugged now. It doesn’t know the answer. Do you? <shrug /> I sure as heck don’t.