(Trump admitted he intentionally downplayed coronavirus threat, new Bob Woodward book claims / Boing Boing)

‘An excerpt from RAGE, Bob Woodward’s new book, reveals that Donald Trump admitted he intentionally downplayed the coronavirus threat. At least 190,000 Americans have died of COVID-19.

“I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”…’

— via Boing Boing

What astounds me, over and over, is not trump’s nefarious actions but — is it idiocy or brazenness? — that he so readily gets caught. I hope, although it is not likely, that he lives a long life after evicted from the White House in January, so that he has to endure on a daily basis the abject shame of how the history books will remember him.

Related: Dr Drang on Woodward

‘The only question I want asked of the legendary journalist while he goes on another of his legendary promotional tours, is whether he ever ran across, in one of his legendary deep background interviews, anyone who estimated how many Americans died because he sat on Trump’s lies for six months to avoid spoiling his legendary book and depressing its legendary sales….’

— via All this

Go beyond ‘The Great Wave’:

(‘Fumei Chōja and the nine-tailed spirit fox’: Fumei Chōja appears as a character in kabuki and bunraku plays which also feature the shape-shifting nine-tailed fox and its adventures in India, China and Japan)

‘One of the world’s most important collections of art has re-emerged after having been lost for more than 70 years.

The corpus – 103 original drawings by the non-Western world’s most famous artist, the 19th century Japanese painter, Hokusai – came to light in Paris and has now been bought by the British Museum.

The newly discovered artworks appear to have formed part of one of the most ambitious publishing projects ever conceived – a Japanese plan to create a huge pictorial encyclopaedia.

Known as the Great Picture Book of Everything, it was conceived by Hokusai (best known for his most famous work – The Great Wave) – but was never completed.

The project was abandoned in the 1830s – either because of cost or possibly because Hokusai insisted on reproduction standards that were difficult to attain.

The Great Picture Book of Everything was to have been a comprehensive way for the Japanese to have access to images of people, cultures and nature around the world – at a time when virtually no Japanese people had been allowed out of Japan for some two centuries –  and virtually no foreigners had been allowed into 99 per cent of the country.

In that ultra-restrictive atmosphere, the project was to have given people an opportunity to explore a highly stylised printed version of the outside world as well as Japan itself.

However, so limited was Hokusai’s access to up-to-date images of foreigners and foreign cultures, that he often had to use very old pictures as his source material – which led to him portraying much of the outside world as it would have looked several hundred years earlier….’

— via Independent