The China Challenge

Part of the problem with ongoing events in China and especially the protests in Hong Kong is that much of the crisis is internal to that country. The West, even the United States, has limited control over events.

Complicating matters is that the US is wracked by its own internal conflicts. The legitimacy of American political institutions is in doubt as never before. This is partly expressed in trade policy. While it would be wrong to suggest American trade policy is accelerating events in China surely it is factual to say that both crises are playing into each other.

Both nations are struggling with governance. China is testing the proposition of whether a totalitarian party can lead a great country in the 21st century. America is determining whether a neo-Aristocracy powered by fiat money can transition to as yet an unknown future.

It’s an open question which country is being destroyed by its ruling elite. Perhaps both.

The only effective American response to the China challenge is internal. It has to get its house in order if it is to regain its place as the cornerstone of the future. A crackdown in Hong Kong will lead not to a military response but to yet further stress on trade. But it will not be limited to trade. The impact of trouble in China on the global currency and financial systems has yet to be reckoned.

We truly live in interesting times.

The Scandal of Money

I am reading George Gilder’s The Scandal of Money which has so far proved tremendously interesting not in the least because it coincides at many points with my own earlier thinking as set forth in the pamphlet War of the Words.

Gilder examines money as information and asks, correctly, whether it conveys truth about the physical world and the state of human capital.  You can tell he’s going to argue for the negative. 

Mein Kampf and Mao’s Red Book are morally the same

Ukraine’s Constitutional Court has upheld a law that equates communism to Nazism and bans the dissemination of its symbols, a law that has prompted angry protests from Moscow.
In the July 16 ruling published on its website, the court said the “communist and Nazi regimes” used similar methods of “implementing repressive state policies.”
“The communist regime, like the Nazi regime, inflicted irreparable damages to human rights because during its existence, it had total control over society and politically motivated persecutions and repressions, violated its international obligations, and its own constitutions and laws,” it said.

RFERL

As the 20th century fades into the past Communism will be seen for what it truly was: the Other Totalitarianism, arguably the greater one. This judgment was held at bay by its hordes of professional apologists. As that coating wears off the verdict can no longer be avoided.

This will upset the True Believers those who believed — and many still believe — in what turned out to be the most murderous ideology of all time. But the sad truth is that good intentions are often at the heart of many historical evils. Meine Ehre heißt Treue was sincerely uttered also.

Are the True Believers supposed to forget it? No, they’ll just have to live with it. Like the relatives of all those people their beautiful murderous ideology killed.

It would be interesting to know how much aggressive virtue signaling is really driven by the secret guilt and growing awareness, not of being worse than others — for all men are sinners — but of being no better. We used to say back in the day that the primary reason people joined the ranks of the grim and determined was to escape from mediocrity. They just couldn’t stand the idea they weren’t special.

Belonging

The space we inhabit is already delimited by many boundaries described by membership. Private airline lounges are closed to economy travelers at airports. The doors to restaurants, hotels and shops are effectively shut to illegal aliens and poor people who go to San Francisco. The deceptive absence of physical walls belies the fact there are virtual barriers everywhere. It’s those barriers that count.
Expect this trend to continue.

New At the Belmont Club

Our fragile world

Megacities are immensely fragile because complexity is only prevented from descending into chaos by the order provided by massive quantities of energy. The power outage in Manhattan is a reminder that civilization cannot function for more than a few hours without electricity.

What will happen in a 5G, Internet of Things world if the whole mind bogglingly complex edifice rests on the tottering, variable and fragile basis of Green Power? In such a civilization a hundred percent uptime would be a hard requirement for many systems.

In a less technological era the fall from the few appliances to the state of nature was short. Running out of candles in 1802 would be inconvenient but not disastrous. But in our complex world running out of power means losing comms, refrigeration, water and maybe even the elevator in a 60 storey building.

The Empty Earth

Green energy like any other form of power generation will require large installations to produce. The land devoted to windfarms, solar energy arrays and biofuel cultivation, not to mention tidal generators will grow as the population increases.

Since “Green” Satanic Mills must ultimately replace the old Satanic Mills with facilities of comparable or even more extensive size the only way to actually reduce the human footprint is to reduce population. This linkage is downplayed but obvious.

Given the overlap of population growth and environmental problems, many would like to see a change in U.S. policy on global family planning. In 2001, President George W. Bush instituted what some call the “global gag rule,” whereby foreign organizations that provide or endorse abortions were denied U.S. funding support.

Environmentalists considered that stance to be shortsighted because support for family planning is the most effective way to check population growth and relieve pressure on the planet’s environment, and as a result, the global gag rule was rescinded in 2009 by President Obama but put back in place by Donald Trump in 2017.

Global population and the environment

The Scientific American explored the conflict between the Green Agenda and Open Borders.

What to do about booming legal and illegal immigration rates is one of the most controversial topics on Americans’ political agenda these days. More than a million immigrants achieve permanent resident status in the U.S. every year. Another 700,000 become full-fledged American citizens. The non-profit Pew Research Center reports that 82 percent of U.S. population growth is attributable to immigration.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that U.S. population will grow from 303 million people today to 400 million as early as 2040. While many industrialized nations, including Japan and most of Western Europe, are experiencing population growth slowdowns due to below replacement birth levels and little immigration, the U.S. is growing so fast that it trails only India and China in total numbers.

Recently this conflict came to a head in of all places, San Francisco, where the affluent Woke opposed the tides of homeless on the grounds they were bad for the environment.

One of the big challenges to the Green Vision is that the technology it relies on is immature. A WW2 style effort to build massive installations of current Green tech will cover the earth in obsolete junk.

They Were Expendable Part 2

What would happen to the Philippines if a naval conflict broke out with China?

A blockade of China would be conducted from the Indian ocean and the final line would be at the Malay barrier bounded by the Lombok, Sunda and Malacca Straits. That would be outside the range of Chinese area denial systems.

The strategic imperative to maintain lines of communication with Japan, Korea, Australia and optionally Taiwan can be met by convoying the Luzon strait bound ships south and east of the Malay barrier, either to the north or possibly completely around Australia. Given the importance of these allies, the USN will do everything necessary to see Japan et al are supplied.

The USN is probably not, nor ever was prepared to fight a major action in the South China Sea littoral. Not a single major WW2 fleet engagement occured in the SCS. All occurred EAST of the Philippines, on the Pacific deep water side. The SCS is more Australia’s war patrol station and its fleet of diesel electric subs is optimized for littoral operations, though that is changing now with USN’s Virginia class subs and AUUVs.

To defend the Philippines it must be supplied. That means convoying ships to the RP’s west coast ports (Manila, Batangas, Subic) since it has no east coast ports on the Pacific side. That would put the USN precisely where it doesn’t want to be, under the missiles of China’s PLAN and Second Artillery Corps. Not only that, PLAN has an immense stock of mines. China has in fact the biggest mine force in the world. Japan, not coincidentally, has the biggest minesweeping force, though USN is ramping up.

The Visayan and Mindanao ports may be fitfully supplied by coastal shipping. But Luzon will starve without convoys. Manila in particular will suffer. The most likely escorts of food and fuel and medicine, if there are any convoys at all, will come from Japan. It won’t be out of altruism. Luzon is vital to the security of Taiwan and the Ryukyus. The Philippines is a “nice to have” for the US but it is a must have for Japan.

That’s why the Japanese fleet died off eastern Philippines; why the Japanese Army died in Luzon. But the defense of the Philippines was always debated, as far back as War Plan Orange in Washington. In 1944 Roosevelt was still undecided over whether to bypass the Philippines until MacArthur convinced him that it was needed to interdict the China coast and prevent the Kwangtung Army from reinforcing the Japanese home islands.

The Philippines is the victim of geography, a weak and corrupt state surrounded by India, China, Japan, Russia, Korea and the United States — the most powerful countries in the world. Heaven watch the Philippines because nobody else will.

What was the secret Russian sub doing?

A tragic fire aboard a secret Russian nuclear ‘mini-sub’ in the Barents Sea that killed 14 senior sailors has refocused media attention on a little noticed flash point of the world: the Arctic. That an important Russian system was being tested or demonstrated was suggested by reports “that among the 14 dead were 7 senior navy captains and 2 ‘Heroes of Russia’.” The presence of so many Russian navy worthies raises questions because brass do not typically twiddle dials on mini submarines but watch them being twiddled until something went horribly wrong.

New at the Belmont Club

The perils of virtue

To say that conservative-liberal dialogue was heated was an understatement. There was in the drumbeat a buildup suggestive of teams psyching themselves to do something bold, building up a mood of defiance and despair so incandescent that Andy Ngo, a conservative journalist preparing to cover an event in Oregon, feared for his safety. He tweeted on June 29 “I am nervous about tomorrow’s Portland antifa rally. They’re promising ‘physical confrontation’ & have singled me out to be assaulted.” There were actual leaflets announcing the planned attack on Ngo.

New at the Belmont Club

The first war of automatons

The US cyberstrikes Iran’s missile systems after Tehran shoots down a US drone. This is not the end of war but a change of its forms. Just as the Coral Sea was the first naval engagement beyond visual range of the opposing fleets this is the first battle in which only automata die.

So far at least.

But the effects of virtual war are quite real, the economic cost stupendous. Just as our life savings are merely a database entry but vital what is essential in the modern world is invisible to the eye.

The one possibility the left was unprepared for was if Trump did not strike militarily at Iran. Bomb, damn you, bomb. What? No bombing?

The great thing about old style warfare is everybody knew where they stood. You were a civilian or you wore a uniform. Wars were declared. Enemies surrendered. The clever theorist believed they could gain advantages by cheating on all those fronts. Boy were they wrong.