Tag Archives: politics

Futile Gestures

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President Barack Obama (D) sent the guided missile destroyer USS William P Lawrence to sail to within

12 nautical miles of a land feature in the South China Sea known as Fiery Cross Reef[.]

Fiery Cross Reef is a terraformed “island” that the People’s Republic of China has transformed and on which it’s built a 10,000 foot runway and associated military support buildings; the facility is in the Spratly Islands in the southern part of the South China Sea, a body the PRC has seized, occupied, and been claiming as an inland PRC lake.

The sailing is the

third time in less than a year that the US has conducted so-called freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea in an effort to challenge what the US sees as the excessive maritime claims of China and other nations to the islands there.

Obama presents this as a brave and bold challenge to the PRC and a brave and bold assertion of the excessivity of those Chinese claims.  Indeed, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russel wondered out loud,

If the world’s most powerful navy cannot sail where international law permits, then what happens to the ships, the navy, of a smaller country?

But stopping at the 12-mile limit is not an assertion of a right to sail where international law permits; on the contrary, it’s an acknowledgment of the PRC’s claims to the island(s), if not a tacit admission of the PRC’s claim to the entire Sea.

Notice:

The choice of Fiery Cross for the US warship’s operation was likely part of the US signal.  Last month, a high-ranking Chinese general visited Fiery Cross, marking the highest-level Chinese military official to visit any of the islands in the South China Sea in recent years.

The better time to make this sailing—to 12 miles or to my limit—would have been while General Fan Changlong, Vice Chairman of the PRC’s Central Military Commission, was visiting the island.

If Obama were truly interested in sailing where international law permits, he’d have our Navy sail as close to each of those islands as navigable waters physically permit, and he’d have our Navy also do it in conjunction with the navies and fishing and other commercial shipping of the other nations surrounding the South China Sea.

Stopping at 12 miles is futile for everyone except the PRC.

NATO vs Russia

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The Brookings Institution posited some potential Russian moves in response to recent NATO and US military and political moves.  Brookings also noted the timidity of the current NATO moves:

One idea under discussion is the deployment of a battalion from NATO member states such as the United States, Britain, and Germany in each of the Baltic States and Poland.  That will hardly suffice to defend the Baltics.  A 2015 RAND study suggested the need for seven brigades—including three heavy armored brigades—to have a chance of stopping a major Russian offensive.

But.

[S]uch a force would appear overly provocative to Moscow, posing a potent ground offensive capability less than 400 kilometers from Russia’s second city of St Petersburg.

Unfortunately, what the NATO politicians don’t recognize (or choose not to) is that it’s necessary to be provocative in order to deter.  If Russia sees no danger from its illegal seizure and annexation of Crimea, and support for armed separatism in eastern Ukraine [and buildup of its own forces in eastern Ukraine], or from its nuclear threats against Poland and its cyber warfare conducted against those Baltic States, then Russia will simply continue those threats, those invasions, those occupations.

I aim to be provocative (with not too many apologies to Malcolm Reynolds).  Here’s more provocation: we need to move the flotilla in the Baltic Sea, the one that’s been a repeated target of Russian fighter-bomber buzzings, close on Kaliningrad.  And when the Russians send fighter-bombers to buzz the flotilla again, the flotilla—every single ship of it—should blanket the Russian aircraft with ECM so as to cut it off utterly from its Russian base.  And the flotilla—every single ship of it—should illuminate the Russian aircraft with targeting radar.

It’s time to stop fearing angrifying our enemy and thereby letting it get away—literally—with murder.  It’s time to get provocative.

Free Assembly

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Beginning with the freshman class that enters in fall 2017, Harvard University students will no longer be allowed to hold leadership positions in campus groups while also maintaining membership in the exclusive, single-gender final clubs that dominate the school’s social scene.

And

The policy barring students from holding leadership positions in official groups while being members of what the school calls “unrecognized, single-gender social organizations,” also extends to the younger fraternities and sororities.  Students will also not receive the dean’s endorsements for elite scholarships and fellowships if they’re found to be members of the groups.

Whatever happened to freedom of association?  It’s true enough that Harvard is a private institution, but as the Supreme Court has held about private enterprises on a number of occasions vis-à-vis other venues, it has enough of a public institution characteristic—accepting a broad reach of students, just as any other private business, a store for instance, accepts a broad reach of customers—that it needs to act like one here.

It’s also true enough that the 1st Amendment’s right of the people peaceably to assemble only enjoins the Federal government.  However, the principle is no less valid in its applicability to a university.

A Good Thing about Price Wars

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…on the geopolitical stage.  Dan Strumpf and Jenny Hsu talked about a broader question in their piece in The Wall Street Journal; I want to focus on one aspect of it.

Stiffening competition from countries such as Russia and Iran is threatening Saudi Arabia’s longtime hold over markets including China, Japan, and India.

It’s certainly true that stiffening competition is threatening Saudi Arabia’s longtime hold over market pricing; however a hold over markets is quite another oil well.  Saudi Arabia has held throughout this supply explosion’s depressing effect on oil prices that it’s not going to reduce production rates and sacrifice its market share—its hold on markets—on the altar of pricing.  Furthermore, the kingdom’s replacement of its aging market share hawk with a younger market share hawk would seem to indicate a continuation of the Saudis’ position that they will do what they need to do to preserver that share (and that hold).

So, what does competition do, particularly with regard to oil-hungry customers like the PRC, Japan, and India?

It generates a price war.  Don’t look for oil prices to rise significantly above current levels (OK, maybe they’ll go as high as $60-ish).

Russia and Iran can’t afford those prices; their budgets can’t hack them.  Saudi Arabia can, for quite some time, yet.  That alone makes this particular price war attractive.

Institutional Racism

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Now our public schools are actively teaching racism to our children.

…administrators at Raoul Wallenberg High School decided last September to forgo the democratic process in student elections and appoint members of the freshman class to most of the seats on the student council.  The freshman president and all student leaders for other grade levels were still elected.

Part of the reasoning behind the change was to “encourage more diversity in our student leadership,” according to Principal Cheryl Foster, who responded to questions from the San Francisco Examiner through a district spokesperson.

Because, like all voters in the eyes of the Left, these students are just too grindingly stupid to know what they must do, and so their Know Betters (at least one of whom was either too afraid, or too contemptuous, of the press to respond directly) must choose for them.

But these worthies gave their game away.

…school officials tried to court her [Christina Martinez] son, James Ortiz, 15, onto the student council because of his surname.

And

Assistant Principal Zaia Vera reportedly told Martinez she wanted Ortiz in office because it would make the student government look more diverse.  Asian girls were the predominant candidates for student office in recent years.

“She said to me, ‘Mrs Martinez, you could understand as a fellow Latina what we’re looking for here,” Martinez, who is not Latina, recalled.  “‘We only have Asian girls run for office and we want the Wallenberg website to show not only Asian girls.'”

Asian girls are the epitome of evil, you see.  But that’s not all of it.  Of course, Vera knew Martinez and her son were not Hispanic; like any competent high school official, Vera knew her students and their parents.  This is just Vera’s and Foster’s stinking racism.

Their racism is doubly damaging: not only does it deny others a fair shot—they’re explicitly held back in this case solely on the basis of their race—or perceived race—it tells the favored minority—Hispanics in the present case—that they’re inherently inferior, with no hope of success without such precious coddling.

If the district officials had any integrity, they would fire Foster and Vera for cause.