Imagine
if the White House had invited Guagua, the celebrity son of imprisoned
crooked Chinese politician Bo Xilai, to the White House a week before
Xi Jinping’s state visit at the Mar-e-Lago summit. There would have been
a typhoon of angry complaints from the Chinese ambassador.
The equivalent just happened in China, with help from the astute publicity-information
department, which accepted the request from U.S. Democratic Party presidential
candidate Mark Zuckerberg for a personal meeting with Xi Jinping at the
Great Hall of the People. Tactfully, Donald Trump did not raise a fuss
over this cold slap at his face.
Then the Podesta brothers CAP machine, which is entrenched here inside
NGOs, American tech companies here, and even at the U.S. Embassy, pulled
off a classic dirty trick with a Facebook-funded publicity stunt. The
news came out a day before Trump’s visit that three freshmen with the
UCLA basketball team got “caught” stealing from the Louis Vuitton mega-store
in Hangzhou. ESPN played up the news of the local police questioning players
with the Bruins and Georgia Tech, which were scheduled for the NCAA season-opener
in Shanghai on November 10.
A star from the Facebook reality show “Ball in the Family”, LiAngelo was
one of the arrested trio. His family of ballplayers (dad, mom and three
boys) are featured in Facebook’s first-ever reality show, produced by
the same production team for “Keeping up with the Kardashians”. The mastermind
behind FB’s “Ball in the Family” series, which premiered in late August,
is daddy Lavar Ball, a media clown who loud-mouths to the TV reporters
at L.A. Lakers games, where his eldest son Lonzo is a rookie guard with
a lousy start for this season. Who cares about scoring, when It’s all
about “Showtime!” and keeping up with Kim and her girlie corps of fashion
models?
Now back to the arrest in China: The George Tech Bulldogs swore to the
detectives that they are as honest as the team mascot that always barks
at thieves. So the police took a long close look at the crew from UCLA,
who fit every stereotype of gangsta’ rap. LiAngelo has slit-shaven eyebrows,
Jalen Hill is adorned with dreadlocks, and Cody Riley’s got a crazed stare.
Now, officers, don’t judge them by appearances. These boys aren’t really
South-Central ghetto, where I spent time in my childhood. Papa Lavar gave
LiAngelo the keys to a brand-new Ferrari at the semester’s start, presumably
bought with the down payment from Zucketberg for the reality-show contract,
since daddy hasn’t sold enough $495 sneakers from his Big Baller sporting
wear company to cover his . . . hoop. You see, officer, it was just a
spoof, a stunt for the reality show, the manager at Louis Vuitton on Rodeo
Drive was in on it all along.
ESPN played right into the Facebook publicity scam with ballistic reporting
that the B-ball boys were facing a possible 3 years in a Chinese prison.
For what? For swiping three pairs of sunglasses? This is the best publicity
Louis Vuitton has ever received, now that upscale luxury sales are down
in China. Suddenly, the brand is Bling-Bling. Not even Rihanna could put
Louis Vuitton into the hiphop must-have list. This all makes one start
to wonder how much did LV pay for product placement in this reality show?
Their scary overnight detention in a Chai-neeez police station, where
a firing squad is waiting out back and there’s no toilet paper (according
the script of the reality show), ends in their release the next morning
on bail under “house arrest” inside the Hyatt Regency Hangzhou Tower,
one of the most expensive hotels in China’s most expensive tourist city,
with meals and beer delivered by room service. If that’s prison, we should
all be locked up.
Meanwhile, basketball and football hero Lavar (who just never got the
breaks he deserved like Magic or OJ, and so ended up playing American
football in England) and Mama Tina (who was also a college women’s basketball
player) are sitting in the Shanghai stadium, worrying about their boy
in the clink (don’t mess with the spelling of that), before this meaningless
season (pre)opener, which isn’t going to count in the 2017-18 season ratings
anyway. It’s just a scrimmage between freshmen on both sides to drum up
interest in NCAA satellite feed into the world’s biggest media market.
(This offshore ritual was started three years ago by a team from Harvard,
a game which sold less than 600 tickets, mostly to alums who’ve never
seen basketball before). So after a slow start, this year’s Shanghai opener
was melodrama at its finest, which makes one wonder how much did the organizers
pay Facebook for the news of the arrest. It also give Lavar another chance
to say that in his prime he could do a jumper against Michael Jordan anytime
of day, with a billion Chinese fans nodding their heads in awe at this
living legend of American sports.
Mind you, this entire scripted and staged fake reality occurred just one
day before the arrival of the soon-to-be deposed Republican President
Donald Trump, while the news coverage and public comments during his visit
were massively blotted out by Zuckerberg’s business partners inside the
propaganda bureau; it’s Ball in the Family, right? Facebook would have
to pay a billion dollars or more from one of his wife’s accounts to get
the licensing to crack the Chinese market. Trump is a pauper by comparison.
(For official purposes, and so I don’t get thrown into a Hangzhou jail
cell for slander and libel, let me state here that, after close inspection
with my magnifying glass and pocket calculator, I ascertain that media
licensing in China is absolutely free of corruption. And if you don’t
believe my sworn statement, go ask the propaganda chief who hosted Zuckerberg
and Tim Cook.)
Meanwhile, a herd of Silicon Valley execs, mostly Democrats, timed their
“promises, promises” Beijing promo visit to distract online media away
from Trump. When I say the Podesta machine is entrenched in Beijing in
alliance with other countries hostile to Trump, including India, let’s
cite one example. The online hacking of Carter Page’s alleged “money-laundering”
from the Balkans to the Trump campaign headquarters in New York was organized
by former U.S. military cyber-warfare personnel assigned to China by the
Obama administration.
These less-than loyal Americans are still here, trying to pick apart Trump.
It’s called Benedict Arnold-type treason, and Podesta’s crew is guilty
on top of their vice-related offenses. How much of their “discoveries”
are true and how much is invented and put online from a foreign country?
Of course, the USA is doing the same with turncoating Chinese citizens
residing in the States to snoop against their own country. We live in
a world without a shred of respect for the principle of strong fences
making good neighbors.
So the winner of the dirty tricks is the king of fake news Mark Zuckerberg,
whose 2020 presidential campaign against incumbent Trump was kick-started
with a pre-emptive photo-op with the world’s most powerful leader, his
venture into reality media assured by the staged shoplifting and arrest
for dramatic purposes, and by now a big piece of the Ball brothers’ marketing
franchise. With these assets, he probably hopes sooner than later to own
the Lakers and China online along with the White House.
Social Media Rules! As the movie suggested, there’s more to social media
than meets the eye. Therefore, my advice to Steve Bannon and his bulldogs
at Breitbart is to take a long close look at the wife’s connections with
the Vietnamese “trading” empire that pumps “sleepy time” into the USA
and via Boston into Ireland and Europe, the immigrant underworld that
provided the wherewithal for FB to get its start-up. Then maybe the Zucks
can trade places with LiAngelo inside a jail.
Yoichi Shimatsu, science writer, was a community volunteer during
the boat-people era of the 1980s in a parole program in New York
City that removed Vietnamese youths from NYC, Boston and Chicago out of
heroin-smuggling gangs and put them to work in real-economy jobs or on
a college track. Listen to his radio talk with Jeff Rense from Beijing
during the Trump visit.
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