I read a hilarious set of fake ‘debate questions’ from the 2016 primaries, and there was one about Bannon and Biosphere 2.

Biosphere 2 was an attempt to create a self-sustaining closed ecosystem capable of supporting human life, possibly with applications for future space travel. It was actually the first such attempt – it was called “Biosphere 2” because the first such self-sustaining biosphere was the Earth itself. Eight “crew members” entered the facility along with various plants and animals, the airlocks were sealed, and for a year everyone tried to do what they could to keep the various species and environmental parameters in balance.

It didn’t work; CO2 levels started fluctuating wildly, soil microbes surged out of control, ants and cockroaches overran the facility, oxygen dropped to worrying levels, and the experiment was stopped early out of concern for crew health. They decided to try a second mission, and that was when they had a change in management and brought on Mr. Bannon as director.

Unfortunately, a lot of the crew members really didn’t like Bannon and his team. Possibly some of it had to do with an incident where a crew member submitted a list of safety complaints and Bannon threatened to “shove it down her f**king throat”. It got so bad that some of the crew deliberately vandalized the Biosphere, causing gas exchange between the inside and the outside and ruining the scientific value of the experiment. Although they probably could have tried again, by that time lawsuits and financial mismanagement had sapped their funding, and they finally sold the whole thing off to Columbia University as a research campus.

So my question for [Trump] is: in all of history, there have only been two self-sufficient ecosystems capable of maintaining human life. Your team has already destroyed one of them. The other is Earth. How scared should we be?

John Kerry

it’s hard to translate directly into English because there’s a lot of nuance that westerners aren’t culturally prepared for, but a rough approximation would be something along the lines of “pig poop balls”

Seems to literally mean New China, but idk much Chinese history, so idk what connotation they mean

The term is usually used to refer to specifically the revolutionary, post-1949 China and especially the Mao era, and is common in red songs and slogans, especially during the life of Chairman Mao.

中国(Zhōngguó) technically would mean something like that if you look at the characters on their own, but together they are one of the names of China.

新中国(xīn Zhōngguó,New China) is a term that usually has Communist connotations in modern political use, and was common in red songs and party slogans.

Isn’t there also the cultural influence of the Mandate of Heaven? Or does that not really influence people any more. Wouldn’t be surprised as China’s seen massive increases in material conditions over the past century and that’s probably gonna influence people more than tradition.