Tag Archives: politics

Progress?

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Is northern Korea starting to fulfill the commitment Baby Kim supposedly made to begin denuclearizing?

An American research group [38 North website] on Monday claimed that North Korea has begun dismantling its main missile-engine test site [Sohae Satellite Launching Station], a possible sign that Pyongyang is fulfilling the promises North Korean leader Kim Jong-un made to President Trump at the summit in Singapore last month.

Or is it simply taking the site apart and moving it somewhere else?  A lot of engine tests, after all, can be done underground.  Only time will tell.

I wonder because of the big deal being made about northern Korea’s lack of missile launches and nuclear bomb tests over the last several months, beginning just prior to the US-northern Korea summit in Singapore, and the tear down of (one of?) northern Korea’s underground nuclear bomb test sites.

There are a couple of potential reasons (among several) for those latter items.  One reason for the lack of launches and tests is that the northern Korea nuclear weapons program has reached a milestone, and it’s simply been consolidating and studying the data collected before it begins anew, building on the outcomes of those analyses.  Another alternative is that

[t]he overall importance of the Sohae missile site has also likely diminished…since North Korea, apparently satisfied with its missile design, had shifted to mass production last year.

Or, they could be acting on that alleged commitment.

One reason for the underground test site dismantling seems rather obvious, albeit ignored in the MLMSM.  This is the same site that People’s Republic of China analyses say was ruined by northern Korea’s last bomb test and the subsequent earthquakes at the site and the collapse of the underground portions of the site.  The explosive dismantling of the surface portions of the site could have been just PR.  Or, northern Korea could have been acting on that alleged commitment.

Don’t attend to the chit-chat going back and forth between the two governments; watch instead the actions of northern Korea.  So far, the series of actions taken by northern Korea are indistinguishable from propaganda.

And all of it must be viewed against the backdrop of northern Korea’s parallel commitment to return the remains of our soldiers who are formally MIA in last century’s Korean War, a commitment that, so far, Baby Kim has chosen to not keep.

Serious or Not?

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European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker came to DC Wednesday, allegedly to talk about trade.  Juncker came with no offers, or even ideas, to propose concerning the European Union’s trade status with the US , and he was proud of that lack.  Apparently, he just came for some idle chit-chat and to see the sights.  EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom, though, had some concrete things to say before Juncker left to come over.

If the tariff dispute were to include cars that would be a “disaster,”

Deutsche Welle cited her as saying.  And this, as paraphrased by DW:

trade is between companies and people, not between states. The citizens, she says, would end up paying the price for the quarrel.

President Donald Trump has already proposed, both to the G-7 and to the G-20, a completely tariff-free trade regime.  There is already an offer on the table, agreed in principle between the US and German auto companies, to have completely tariff-free auto and auto parts trade between the US and the EU.

The EU, the other six members of the G-7, and the other nineteen members of the G-20 refuse even to acknowledge, much less discuss, those no-tariff offers.

If Malmstrom is serious, why will she not discuss these things in Brussels, especially the removal of tariffs from the auto and auto parts trade?  If Malmstrom is serious, why is she not working to get the EU’s governance out of the way so companies and people can conduct their trade without EU interference?

In the event, Trump and Juncker did reach an agreement to discuss a deal–and to work toward realization of Trump’s offer of a no-tariff trade regime, and to include in that discussion talks with a view to working toward a no-subsidy and no-trade non-tariff barrier regime.

We’ll see what comes to fruition–any EU agreement requires unanimity across all 28 wildly philosophically disparate nations, any one of which can veto an agreement.

Foreign Business Inside the PRC

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The Qualcomm’s acquisition of NXP Semiconductors is supposedly in jeopardy as the People’s Republic of China threatens approval of the acquisition in its prosecution of its long-term trade fight with the US.

But wait—Qualcomm is an American company, and NXP is a Dutch company.  Why does the PRC even have a say in this?

[The PRC] is the last of nine markets where Qualcomm and NXP need approval from competition authorities….

There’s a perfectly straightforward way around this.  The two could stop doing business in the PRC, which is not a business-friendly nation, anyway, what with the nation’s demands that foreign companies give up their technology to domestic “partners” and that they install backdoors into their core softwares so the PRC government can go in and poke around at whim.

Certainly, there would be large initial costs from walking away from such a large market, and there would be market share reduction in the middle term from ceding that market to competitors.  But what would be the costs, really?  Less anticompetitive restrictions on the combined company’s operations, less government sanctioned—even demanded—theft of proprietary and intellectual property, saddling the PRC albatross to those competitors anxious to fill the “gap.”

And real gains from quitting the PRC market: more efficiencies from better focus on the other eight markets, and a better ability to keep and expand the combined company’s technological edge over its competitors by not having to give up that edge to the PRC.

Another Role for UNRWA

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A writer of a Letter to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal wondered why the UNWRA still was involved in handling Palestinian refugees instead of the UNHCR, which handles all other refugees worldwide.  This includes Palestinian refugees in the Gulf states, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, but not those in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Gaza, and other geography close to or abutting Israel.

Here’s what the UNWRA did in support of its “refugees,” in particular Hamas’ 2014 terrorist war against Israel in furtherance of their own Gaza “refugees.”

  • warehoused the terrorists’ rockets for them
  • allowed the terrorists to dig their tunnels under UNRWA facilities
  • participating in the terrorists’ staged propaganda

As another letter-writer in the same chain noted, UNRWA exists because those supporting terrorism demand it—especially, contra that writer, those in the UN.

There are Security Breaches

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…and there are security breaches.  The NLMSM wants to talk about some, and it wants to spike reports about others.

Here’s one that the NLMSM is doing its best to spike.  It seems that Peter Strzok, a most highly paid and senior HR specialist in the FBI, had a meeting in 2016 with two people the then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough had sent to brief him and three other FBI folks on a…matter…concerning

an “anomaly” that their forensic analysis had found in Clinton’s server.

According to [Congressman Louie (R, TX)] Gohmert, the inspector general discovered that, with four exceptions, “every single one” of Clinton’s emails—more than 30,000—”were going to an address that was not on the distribution list.”

In other words, according to the information Gohmert received from the intelligence inspector general, something was causing Clinton’s server to send copies of all of her email communications outside of the country “to an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia.”

If true, this means that Clinton’s email communication with her top aides, department leadership, ambassadors, and other officials, including President Barack Obama, may have been read by an alien entity, perhaps a foreign power hostile to the United States. That could include confidential, sensitive, and even classified information about our foreign policy or our allies.

In response to Gohmert’s question about that during Strzok’s testimony before a joint committee hearing, Strzok claimed that while he could remember the fact of the meeting, he could remember none of the substance of it.  Which means he’d chosen to do nothing about the information the two IC IG personnel had just told him about.

Apparently, to paraphrase David Frost’s paraphrase of Richard Nixon, if the Clinton does it, that means it’s not a security breach.

It’s also interesting that Frank Rucker and Janette McMillan, the two people McCullough had sent to do the briefing, have not been called to testify.