Trump-Biden rematch let’s go (you heard it here first, Trump will win and the world won’t end), also the US government narrowly avoids a shutdown, two pilots fall asleep at the yoke, something’s going on with Kate Middleton (no one really knows, but we can guess), and gold is hitting new highs which is great for those who hold it and less for those who need to buy it – ask any Chinese or Indian family who has to procure it for their offspring’s wedding this year.
Horny Horner
I rarely do this, but this week I will use a web archival service to share two articles I believe should be read. Christian Horner, better known as Mr Geri Halliwell / Mr Ginger Spice who moonlights as Red Bull’s F1 team principal, has been a very naughty boy, which is par for the course when you’re a rich, powerful man in a sport that for the rich and the peons who wish they were rich. All things considered, leaked sexts cause far more secondhand embarrassment to unsuspecting members of the public than they do to the senders or recipients themselves, but the contents of Horner’s could make even the lustiest of genitalia shrivel. The plot thickens with the accuser’s suspension from the team (yes, she is a co-worker, which is as clichéd as it gets), and the real scandal is F1’s attitude towards women. One should not expect very much from a sport that is all about flaunting wealth and privilege excessively. If Kate Wagner’s piece doesn’t convince you of that, nothing will.
Schrödinger’s Not Over
I’ve had to wait about a month to feature this in a Monday Briefing, and it’s worth the wait. Last month, Stephen Roach over at the FT bleated about Hong Kong being over, by which he means the kind of free-wheeling free market of finance, sex and drugs for white expats living their worst kind of Orientalist trope, not the Hong Kong that millions of native / indigenous people have lived in for decades and centuries. Roach is at least a little less wrong than Noah Smith, whom I really wish would keep his mouth shut about topics he clearly knows very little about.
I have an affinity with Hong Kong, as both sides of my family have their roots in the Pearl River delta, specifically Guangzhou, and they all made pitstops at Hong Kong before sailing south to Nanyang back in the early 1900s, as many fleeing unrest did. I still have relatives who live there, and my partner’s father was born there and has relatives who still live there. Hong Kong, in relation to Guangzhou, was just an outcropping of inhospitable and not very arable rocks that through chance and circumstance became very important to 19th and 20th century imperialist concerns.
wrote an excellent two-parter about why Hong Kong is NOT over, the second of which only dropped yesterday, which is why I’m sharing it today.So, is the Fragrant Harbour over or not over? Maybe we should start by agreeing that it exists, and continues to exist, but what form it takes will never be the form it was from 1841–1997. Let’s call that era the Opium Dynasty, and find another name for post-1997 Hong Kong.
All that Glitters is not Quartz
Sigh. The days of me thinking all the quartz I had to worry about was the movement in my watches. Not everything is good quality quartz, and good quality quartz is apparently very, very critical to the production of crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers. We’re not in a chip war but a sand war, and there’s only one place on earth that mines them – Spruce Pine, North Carolina. So yes, folks, apparently there’s a single point of failure in the production of smartphones and computers, and it sits pretty in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Tightwire
Remember that implosion of Wirecard a few years ago? Its COO Jan Marsalak has been exposed as a GRU spy, which should surprise no one, really. He is a very, very wanted man. Hang in there, it’s a long read.