Tag Archives: politics

Rome Said to Carthage

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Rome Said to Carthage

“You don’t need those weapons,” in prelude to the Third Punic War, which ended in the complete destruction of Carthage.

The People’s Republic of China objects to the US’ Golden Dome plans, a defense system in orbit, among other places, that would defend our nation against missile attack from any direction and from any source or launch site. PRC Foreign Minister Mao Ning gaslights that Golden Dome has a

strong offensive nature and violates the principle of peaceful use in the Outer Space Treaty[.]

He neglects to mention, though, the PRC’s overt military threats against the Republic of China and each of the nations rimming the South China Sea. Those threats, too, come against the backdrop of the PRC’s massive and rapid buildup of the PLA[1], a buildup that consists exclusively of offensive weapons. That buildup has achieved, so far,

  • four million men under arms
  • world’s largest navy
  • world’s largest coast guard
  • world’s largest naval militia
  • huge fishing fleet whose ships are designed for rapid arming
  • world’s largest submarine fleet
  • third largest, second most advanced (and steadily growing and improving) air force
  • arsenal of ballistic anti-ship missiles
  • nuclear capable theater ballistic missiles
  • large, growing ICBM fleet
  • global reach hypersonic missiles that when fully deployed will give it first strike capability
  • stated willingness to use its “ordinary” nuclear ICBMs in a first strike without concern for the destruction it would absorb from return strikes
    • Mao Zedong: “What if they killed 300 million of us? We would still have many people left.” That promise remains unretracted

Now, Beijing is saying to us, “You don’t need those weapons.”

[1] Cotton, Tom, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China

There’s a Hint There

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John Bolton has a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he claims to be worried about the fate of the President’s National Security Council. I’ll leave aside the fact that his source is either a dishonest leaker or a voice in his head. This is what he buried toward the end of his piece:

Scowcroft’s model [of an NSC structure] bestowed a key advantage on the president: creating interagency staff who reached into bureaucratic depths gave him [the President] greater insight into potential agency agendas and disagreements before they rose to higher levels, thereby reducing the risks of confrontation and delay. A dramatically constrained NSC staff wouldn’t have such abilities.

Maybe—just maybe—it would be better to clean out the bureaucracies at those other agencies, eliminating agency agendas and the bureaucrats who push them, at the expense of the agenda of the White House for which they work.

Maybe—just maybe—it would be better to thin those agencies’ payrolls to shallow out those bureaucratic depths.

Maybe—just maybe—it would be better to install agency chiefs and deputies/assistants who would work with each other to resolve more of the disagreements, then consciously bring the remaining disagreements to the President for him to resolve—which is part of a President’s job.

No maybe, this time—it most assuredly would be better to fire those bureaucrats who would rather be confrontational than work as part of the team they were hired to be part of.

The Biden Coverup

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What’s to be done about those who participated in the coverup? How do we hold them accountable—and by accountable, I mean how do we see them suitably and publicly punished?

The press’ complicity in the coverup is well known by all of us not already in thrall to their writings and television natterings. Most of us have learned to take their words skeptically, and we’ve moved on to other news and commentary sources, newer and perhaps no more trustworthy, but that’s yet to be demonstrated.

The Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians, though—they’re another matter. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, the only Party member willing to expose the emperor was the back bencher Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips, who openly campaigned for President late in Party’s primary Potemkin contest on the premise that Biden wasn’t up to another four years either physically or mentally. Party castigated him as a traitor to his party, an opportunist, and a Republican cat’s paw. Then, in a remarkable—and instructive—demonstration of Party’s dedication to democratic elections and to democracy of any form, Party canceled altogether their sham primary and pronounced by fiat Kamala Harris its candidate.

Party politicians other than Phillips contributed to the coverup of Biden’s growing mental incompetence either directly through their pronouncements of his fitness or indirectly through their studied silence on Biden’s capacities.

In sum, Party politicians openly lied to us citizens, and as the WSJ also put it, they denied the American people a better presidential choice, or at least in the eyes of some 77 million of us, a better alternative candidate for the office. They denied even their own voters the opportunity to choose a better alternative.

Party and Party politicians lied to all of us about so foundational a matter as who will lead our nation in its time of peril, who will exercise American influence around the world on matters central to our economic and political national security.

If Party politicians are willing to lie to us—have lied to us—about such a basic matter, what else will they lie to us about if reelected to their existing offices, or worse, if reelected to majorities in the House and Senate and in the White House?

No, It Isn’t

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Clean Energy Is Under Attack Even Where It’s Booming goes the Wall Street Journal headline. There’s a hint regarding that buried in the middle of the article:

The hit to the power sector could prove significant. More than three-fourths of the proposed solar projects and more than one-third of the wind farms in long queues to connect to the power grid needed tax incentives to be economically viable as of January, said Corianna Mah, analyst at Enverus Intelligence Research.

No, clean energy is not under attack. Market-distorting, vote-buying subsidies and tax credits are under attack—as they should be. Clean energy will do fine when the market—us consumers—want it. If clean energy projects cannot succeed without those handouts, they aren’t economically—or technologically—viable.

See, for instance, natural gas. Oil, even cleaned-up coal, too, once the costs of regulatory impediments designed as actual attacks on hydrocarbon energy are subtracted off. But wait—oil subsidies…. Those are a tiny fraction of all those clean energy subsidies and tax credits. But yes, oil subsidies need to go away, also.

Another Reason Why

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The People’s Republic of China is demonstrating yet another reason why the United States—and Western Civilization nations generally—must revamp our supply chains to remove them entirely from the PRC. The PRC has resumed shipments of certain rare earth-based components critical to national defense and to the weapons systems implementing our defense capabilities. That resumption, though, comes with the PRC government’s strict control over the licensing requirements for export of those components.

Neha Mukherjee, a rare-earths analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence:

It’s basically like a tap. They can decide when to export and when to not, and the control is in their hands, completely[.]

The control is in their hands, completely, not just through that absolute control of the required licenses, but more importantly because the PRC

mines around two-thirds of global rare-earth minerals and processes about 90% of the world’s supply.

That’s what needs to change. We need to develop our own sources of rare earth ores (we have lots, as do most western nations), develop our own processing capabilities, and develop our own alternatives to rare earth centric magnets for our systems along with alternative forms of magnets, even alternatives to magnets altogether.

The news writers of the WSJ article at the link profess a lack of understanding of the PRC’s shift.

The reason for the recent granting of export licenses couldn’t be determined.

The reason is self-evident. It’s nothing more than the PRC telling us and the rest of the West, in no uncertain terms, that they can cut us off entirely, or they can export these things freely—depending on how “friendly” we are to it, how much we comport our activities to its wishes.

The rearrangement of our supply chains will cost us several pretty pennies, but even at that, it will be far cheaper than being controlled by an enemy nation because we cannot defend ourselves.