Category Archives: politics

WTO, Tariffs, and the EU

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The WTO ruled in favor of the US regarding a 15-yr-old dispute over French subsidies of Airbus that directly harmed The Boeing Company, to the tune of $7.5 billion.  The ruling allows the US to impose those $7.5 billion as tariffs, and the Office of the US Trade Representative says that we’ll apply

a 10% tariff on aircraft imported from Europe and apply a 25% import tax on other agricultural and industrial items on October 18….

France says they’ll respond with retaliatory tariffs if we go through with this.  French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire:

If the American administration rejects the hand that has been held out by France and the European Union, we are preparing ourselves to react with sanctions[.]

EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom agrees with Le Maire:

If the US decides to impose WTO authorized countermeasures, it will be pushing the EU into a situation where we will have no other option than do the same[.]

Couple things about that.  One is that the US has already proposed both no-tariff-at-all and no-tariffs-on-autos trade régimes, but the EU has refused to discuss either, despite then-European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s promise to take the matters up.

The other thing is that, under WTO rules, it’s illegal to apply retaliatory tariffs in response to tariffs applied pursuant to a WTO judgment.  The French and EU threats regarding the WTO-permitted tariffs on the Airbus affair clearly demonstrate EU (and French) bad faith by themselves. Coupled, though, with the Eu’s refusal to discuss the no-tariff offers already on the table, it’s clear that the EU has no intention at all in dealing honestly with us on trade.

Our own effort at good-faith negotiation is just as clear:

The WTO had approved up to 100% tariffs, but the US decided to limit the tax.

“Rioting”

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Recall the teenage protestor in the Hong Kong protests earlier this week, the one who was shot in the chest at point blank range by a Hong Kong cop who thought he was being threatened by the boy.

A Hong Kong court charged 18-year-old student, Tsang (Tony) Chi-Kin, with rioting, a charge carrying a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Tsang was among seven people charged with rioting on Thursday.
The secondary school student also faces two additional counts of attacking two police officers, punishable by up to six months in prison.

Riotous bastard dared to interfere with the cop’s bullet.  Nor were the cops in any great hurry to get the boy treatment or to let any protestors help him.  Despite that, he’s in stable condition in a Hong Kong hospital.

This is the kind of despotic tyranny that People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping intends to impose on Hong Kong.  And on the Republic of China later.

Impeachment Moves

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In J T Young’s Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed on the importance of the current impeachment effort to “the Left,” he correctly pointed out that

Impeachment is the left’s means of gaining control of the Democratic Party—which is liberal, but not as far left as many Republicans imagine.

After all, Young wrote,

Those who oppose impeachment would risk a primary challenge from the left. Those who support it would endanger themselves in the general election. Either way, the left wins by converting or purging moderates. Controlling both the nominee and the [Progressive-]Democratic caucuses in Congress would strengthen the Left’s hand considerably, whether or not it was good for the party as a whole. Rules, funding, personnel—all would bend to the Left’s liking.

He’s right, but that’s not the only reason for the Progressive-Democratic Party’s impeachment move: Party also is simply keeping the smear alive through the election season so as to preempt the 2020 elections. They want Republicans to quit trespassing in their White House.

One other thing: Party isn’t as “liberal” as many Republicans imagine? Yes, it is. It’s only necessary to look at Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi’s avowed pride in her progressive policies, and the fire in the belly of Party: Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Pressey, and Omar to see that much. These persons comprise the leadership of Party; all of them—every single one—are socialists; and they are the voice, as well as the fire, of Party.

The Climate Emergency

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There is no climate emergency.

That’s the opening sentence of a letter from Professor Guus Berkhout of The Hague and 500 other scientists and climate science professionals to António Guterres, UN Secretary-General, and Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Berkhout, et al., did expand on that.

The general-circulation models of climate on which international policy is at present founded are unfit for their purpose. Therefore, it is cruel as well as imprudent to advocate the squandering of trillions on the basis of results from such immature models.

These immature models have, in fact, consistently failed to predict the past and the present simultaneously, and they’ve badly overstated, to the point of exaggeration, the predicted future amount of global warming over each of the last 20 years.

Those models also ignore all the natural causes of what is, in fact, planetary warming: the sun has been warming for some 4.5 billion years, so of course the earth has been, also.  Orbital mechanics play a significant role, too, not only our trip around the sun, but the precession of our rotational axis.  We (in the northern hemisphere, where most of the land surface turns out to be—a tectonic plate motion that also plays a role in our climate evolution) currently tilt toward the sun when we’re farthest away, and tilt away from it when we’re closest. That’s why our summers and winters are so relatively temperate and close to each other in average temperatures.

Our axis precesses, though, at a rate that completes a cycle in 26,000 years.  Thus, in a few thousand years (think of the time since the last Ice Age for an idea of how quick that is, geologically.  It’s well inside, for instance, the rate at which our tectonic plates mosey around), we’ll tilt toward the sun at our closest approach to the sun and away from it at our farthest.  Those will be some hot summers and cold winters in the northern hemisphere.  Climate control that.

For all of this, though, at present we are, and for the foreseeable future (in human lifetime terms), will be some degrees cooler than the geologic warming trend line, and it’ll be a significant while before we even warm up to the level of the Medieval Warm Period or the climate extant during the height of the Roman empire.

Politicizing Tragedy

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Recall a mass shooting in 2018 at a Thousand Oaks, CA, bar in which 13 were killed and a dozen injured.  Recall further that Ventura County Sergeant Ron Helus was killed as he moved to stop the killer from doing more.

Various charity activities since had raised thousands of dollars for the families of other police officers who’d also died in the course of their several duties, and

The Blue Bowl, a charity flag football game, was intended to raise money for the family of fallen Ventura County Sergeant Ron Helus as well as [those] other officers killed in the line of duty….

However, Thousand Oaks Police Chief Tim Hagel has pulled his department out of the event, leading to its cancelation, and all that money already raised for those other officers’ families is

now being returned to donors….

All, and solely, because Trump supporters would be speaking at the event.

Mike Randall, Fallen Officers Foundation Vice President:

He [Hagel] basically said over and over in the conversation, “This is not Trump country, that slogan ‘Make America Great’ is not favorable, popular, within 1,200 square miles,” that we don’t want Republicans here. I could not believe it[.]
“The only thing,” and I quote, “the only thing you [could have done to make] this worse, Mike, was to invite Dick Cheney and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.”

Now, no one will get any aid. Never mind that the collected speakers would have been an ecumenical group: Governor Gavin Newsom’s public safety liaison, Trump supporter and Hollywood icon Scott Baio—a fellow congregant of Helus’ at church—Trump-supporting singer Joy Villa, and others.

Hagel didn’t approve, so everyone gets cut off.  No one gets needed financial assistance.

This stinks.  But more dangerous than just the odor of this move, Hagel has shown that he doesn’t “serve and protect” all the citizens of Thousand Oaks.  Only those of whom he personally approves.