Fly, my pretties

Talk is afoot that Chinese fentanyl - which killed Scott Adams' stepson - has Xi huángdì's blessing because China wants revenge for the Opium War.

I haven't read much about "the Opium War" (so-called) but I am (dimly) aware of some recent books on topic. Stephen Platt's book got panned over at Reason. Quillette had better things to say of Song-Chuan Chen.

Platt's book is not all that new. Literature decrying those hostilities as "the Opium War" is literally as old as the war itself, hence the name that has stuck to it. The same is true for skeptics: no less a civil-rights icon as John Quincy Adams noted that opium was a MacGuffin; calling it "the Opium War" would be like calling the 1775 Yankee revolt "the Tea War" (much less the wider thirteen-colony Revolution from 1776 on).

But Chinese politicals find it useful to blame outsiders whenever something goes wrong at home, like sitting on news of a bat plague and allowing sick nationals abroad to infect everyone else.

UPDATE 3/14 - Winnie the Flu, trademark 2020 by Sarah Almeida Hoyt.