Two Views

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken was planning to discuss the barbarian invasion of Ukraine with PRC functionaries and then to meet with PRC President Xi Jinping. Now, though, the People’s Republic of China has a spy balloon research airship riding the winds over the US, and Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee are demanding that Blinken confront Xi over the PRC balloon. Blinken has decided to postpone that trip.

There are two likely reasons for Blinken’s decision. One is that, as Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) put it (my paraphrase), Blinken should cancel his trip to demonstrate American displeasure over the balloon.

The other reason is that Blinken is just too chicken to make the trip and publicly call out Xi over the PRC violation; Blinken wants to avoid yet another ass-chewing by PRC functionaries like the one he got in his initial session with PRC personages in Alaska.

Objectivity

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Leonard Downie, late of The Washington Post, and writing in WaPo last Monday, decried the objective use of objectivity in today’s journalism while occupying quite a number of column inches offering “objective” techniques for maintaining credibility in the preferred lack of objectivity. The core of his objection is this:

They [reporters, editors, and media critics] believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading “bothsidesism” in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change, and many other subjects. And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences, and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.

This, though, is just one more way in which these wonders, abetted by folks like Downie, seek to control what us average Americans know about the world around us: they deliberately, consciously, and mendaciously conflate opinion writing with fact and event reporting.

Those concerns—race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change, etc—all are valid subjects about which to write, but they belong on the opinion pages instead of being dishonestly masqueraded as facts. If these…persons…maintained that separation, they truly would be pursuing truth.

Objectivity, after all, really is expressing or using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice—everywhere, that is, except in the Left’s Newspeak Dictionary.

Subsidies

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President Joe Biden (D) is arranging subsidies for American companies in a misguided effort to support development and production of electric vehicles and their batteries in the US. The EU objects, saying the subsidies disfavor EU nation-domiciled companies, and is proposing some options to counter the American subsidies.

One provision suggested by the commission could allow governments to directly match certain green subsidies offered by the US. European competition chief Margrethe Vestager said that means that if a company was offered $1 billion to build a new battery factory outside of Europe, “a member state could offer the same.”
The matching subsidies program would have several conditions, Ms Vestager said. A business would have to show how it could benefit from a subsidy from the US or another country, and any matching funds would have to benefit more than one European country.

The EU can’t make any economic move at all without layering on yet more bureaucracy and regulation. These conditions seem also to be offered because the EU doesn’t trust, rightly or wrongly, its own constituent nations to play nice among themselves even against a common external competitor. This is another example of the central planners demanding one-size-fits all regulation, and demanding them preemptively, denying the constituents any opportunity to perform on their own recognizance.

Treaty Abrogation

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Russia is actively blocking on-site inspections of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons development facilities and has been doing so at least since last August. This is a stark and deliberate violation of the New START nuclear arms limitation treaty that Russia so solemnly signed with us years ago. Furthermore, Russian government officials are refusing to meet with American government officials even to discuss Russia’s refusal of inspections.

It’s time to recognize that Russia has abrogated New START and to say so out loud.

Then it’s time to resume the arms race we had with the Russian-dominated Soviet Union, a stage in the race that we won decisively those years ago on the basis of our superior economy and technology, advantages we still have. This is an arms race that Russia cannot win, especially given its expenditures and demonstrated technological skills in its barbaric invasion of Ukraine, and the new loss would be especially catastrophic for the barbarian.

Furthermore, the arms race would both spur and provide markets for our weapons production and development industries (which in turn would facilitate our economic growth), which in turn would facilitate supporting Ukraine against the barbarian’s invasion, and it would facilitate helping the Republic of China to arm itself with a range of modern weapons in advance of the President Xi Jinping-threatened invasion by the People’s Republic of China, to the detriment of the PRC.

On top of that, despite the growing and modernization of the PRC’s PLA, the arms race is one that the PRC also cannot win—our economic and technology advantages extend to the PRC’s capability.

Also: the need to engage in the race or fall further behind would force barbarian chieftain Vladimir Putin to reallocate at least some funding away from prosecuting his war against Ukraine and toward the arms race. The same need would force Xi to reallocate at least some of his funding away from prepping the PLA for his threatened invasion and toward the same arms race.

In fine, an arms race, along with its collaterals, would be a win-win-win for us, a loss (again) for Russia, and a net loss for the PRC. And would provide indirect support for both Ukraine and the RoC.

And a win for Ukraine and the RoC and so for Western Civilization generally.

An Easy Solution

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LanzaTech is a “carbon-capture” company with a number of joint ventures with People’s Republic of China-controlled companies around the world. The company also has on its Board of Directors a Managing Director of Sinopec Capital, itself a PRC-domiciled (and so under the control of the PRC’s intelligence community via the PRC’s 2017 National Security Law) company.

LanzaTech even acknowledged in its Form S-4 announcing its decision to become a public, exchange-listed company, filed last March with the SEC, that [section head emphasis in the original]

We may be subject to risks that the Chinese government may intervene or influence our operations at any time.
Because we have employees located in China and conduct some operations in China, including through our China-based joint venture and at the facilities in China operated by our partners using our process technology, we are subject to the risk that the Chinese government may intervene or influence our operations at any time.

Despite that admitted (potential) subordination and Senate Republican objections centered on LanzaTech’s ties to the PRC government, the Biden administration’s Energy Department awarded LanzaTech a $1.6 billion dollar contract to research biofuel production. And with that tie, to pass any discoveries and developments and concepts along to the PRC.

Congress as a whole controls the Federal government’s pocketbook, and spending bills must originate in the House. It’s time to reduce or eliminate altogether funding for the Department of Energy until its unelected and subject to Senate confirmation managers become responsive to Congressional requirements. Start with reducing the Department’s funding by those $1.6 billion and applying the Holman Rule to reduce Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s salary to $1.00 per month. To the extent her intransigence continues, continue reducing Department funding and reduce the salaries of her Deputies to $1.00 per month.

This is straightforward to do, even if it might be politically difficult without the Senate and the White House. But that’s a matter to keep in mind in the fall of 2024.