Monthly Archives: March 2024

How Precious

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The White House folks in charge of such things have announced a theme for this year’s White House Easter Egg Roll.

“A teacher for more than 30 years, First Lady Jill Biden is continuing her theme of ‘EGGucation’ for the event, transforming the South Lawn and Ellipse into a school community, full of fun educational activities for children of all ages to enjoy,” a statement from the White House reads.

Apparently, an Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn needs a theme other than…Easter and unadulterated fun for the kids.

Go figure.

Attrition War

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Seth Cropsey wrote in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed that the US and Israel should fight an attrition war against Iran. He then disparaged the view of attrition war held by us and by Israel:

Attrition is a dirty word in American and Israeli strategic circles. In America, it evokes the Western Front’s brutal stalemate from 1914 to 1918, during which millions were sent to their deaths, and tens of thousands wounded and crippled, for no territorial gains. …

He omitted, though, that Israel is already in exactly that type of attrition war, the one inflicted by Hamas over the last decade and more, and an attrition exacerbated by Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s incessant pressure on Israel to agree a ceasefire right damn now, and never mind that that would leave Hamas bloodied but unbowed—and undefeated.

Cropsey, though, wants a broader version of attrition war:

…cumulative effect of pressure applied over time and in many contexts. The North African, Sicilian, and Italian campaigns that preceded the invasion of Normandy are examples. The US has seldom fought wars it can win with a single maneuver campaign, making attrition a coherent strategy.

Those “attritive” campaigns, though, were possible only by a massively superior industrial power engaging a tightly circumscribed industrial power where the engagement flowed from one side being able to replace battlefield losses by far larger margins than could the other. That situation doesn’t obtain today for Israel or—shockingly—even for the US.

Cropsey fleshed out, some, his version of attrition strategy:

Israel and the US need to put Iran’s strengths at risk. …
Iran provides financial backing to its Axis partners, and in Syria and Lebanon to the states themselves. …
Israel and the US have the tools to strike Iranian military capacity in Syria and Lebanon.

Strike. Not destroy. On a limited field in a limited way. Never mind, either, that those kinetic means would not touch Iran’s financial capability.

On the contrary, it’s time to get out of Israel’s way and actually help them to destroy Hamas utterly.

Then, get after Hezbollah, and destroy that terrorist organization utterly.

In parallel with that, it’s time for the US to stop being timid in the Middle East, and destroy the Iranian proxies in Syria and Iraq, and in Houthi-occupied Yemen.

Stop responding to Iranian actions, and force Iran to respond to Israel’s and ours, shorn of its proxies.

That’s an attrition war worth supporting and executing.

Reassurances

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People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping is busily…reassuring…foreign business leaders, especially American chief executives, that

the country is working to improve its business environment.

Xi mustn’t be taken seriously in any of this.

The PRC’s national security law requires all PRC-domiciled businesses and their affiliates satisfy the nation’s intelligence community requests for information on any subject it deems useful for national security and to actively seek out that information—to conduct espionage if necessary—to obtain that information. That information gathering is far easier when the (foreign) target is present in the PRC.

Further PRC laws require foreign enterprises to partner with local enterprises (though the requirement for equal or majority control by the domestic enterprise has been lifted) and to facilitate technology and intellectual property transfer to the local enterprise as a condition prerequisite to doing any business within the PRC. If those transfers aren’t moving quickly enough to suit the government, the government’s hackers attempt to steal the data.

Yet further PRC laws require Communist Party of China apparatchiks present in those domestic partners to have access to the foreign partner, also.

Overarching all of that: the PRC is a nation that rules by law; it is not a nation that operates under rule of law tenets. As such, the laws by which the PRC operates are malleable and subject to the ephemeral whims of Xi and his Communist Party of China syndicate. That, though, is not unique to Xi, or to the PRC since 1949. Rule by law has been the position of the rulers of mainland China since the nation began coalescing out of the Warring States Period nearly two-and-a-quarter millennia ago.

If those American business heads, already showing excessive credulity by being present at the PRC’s China Development Forum and subsequent personal audience granted by Xi, allow themselves to be taken in by Xi’s blandishments at the audience, they’ll be showing themselves too credulous to be fit to manage their respective businesses.

Threshold Questions

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined on the Supreme Court and Mifepristone in their Monday editorial. Among other things, they wrote that

the threshold question for the Court is whether the doctors have legal standing to sue….

In addition to that, though, another threshold question is whether the Court owes automatic deference to an agency subordinate to a separate branch of government, a branch with which the Court is supposed to be coequal. Especially when that agency has lost as much credibility as has the FDA through its mistakes during the recent pandemic Wuhan Virus Situation.

 

Aside: the WSJ‘s censors wouldn’t allow me to use “Wuhan Virus,” even though they have no problem with Zika, West Nile, or Ebola virus labels. The hypocrisy is strong in the WSJ‘s censors.

Government Influence over the Means of Production

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The Biden administration wants to control—put a leash on—the development of artificial intelligence software, in contrast with the Clinton administration’s hands-off approach to the development of the Internet. That’s the thrust of a Wall Street Journal Monday article.

The matter is far deeper and far broader than that. Biden’s move regarding AI is of a piece with his moves regarding ICE vs battery cars, solar and wind energy vs oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy, and on and on.

In truth, Biden isn’t the first in this; too many prior administrations of both parties, have wanted to…influence…what our private enterprises, especially those that make things, should or can produce—or not produce. The efforts to control range can be indirect—Obamacare’s nationalization of our health provision and health coverage industries, in addition to Biden’s moves—and they reach as far back as Theodore Roosevelt’s unsuccessful effort to nationalize our railroad system, Woodrow Wilson’s and Harry Truman’s outright seizures of a variety of factories and factory systems, ultimately overturned by the courts, and they include prior administrations’ indirect moves of subsidies for some industries—”green” energy, for instance—and no subsidies or significantly smaller subsidies for competing industries.

The matter reaches as deeply and broadly as our tax code, which by design gives overt preference to some industries and de-prefers some other industries.

The Biden administration has only greatly accelerated this trend of government intrusion into the affairs of private enterprise.

This expanding government insistence that private enterprise can make whatever it wants in whatever amounts it wants so long as it has government approval (even if only tacit) to do so is textbook Fascism: private ownership of the means of production, government control of what gets produced and the amounts produced.