RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-chinese-challenge/

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Over the past decade America has been in denial about China’s emergence as a global power. We couldn’t believe a country that for generations was a byword for poverty could compete with us. With Donald Trump’s election in 2016 we’ve transitioned to anger. As matters stand, we’ll be bargaining before long.

For thousands of years China’s internal weaknesses—natural disaster, famine, plague, civil unrest, and foreign invasion—kept its attention inward. We are now at the greatest turning point in Chinese history since its unification in the 3rd century B.C. China is turning outward—but doesn’t want to rule you. Like the Borg in Star Trek, it wants to assimilate you.

President Trump is right to insist that America’s status quo with China can’t continue. He campaigned against their systemic theft of U.S. intellectual property and the migration of our manufacturing to China. He reversed 20 years of benign neglect toward China’s challenge to our strategic dominance and took vigorous steps to check China’s expansion. But he hasn’t succeeded. Thus far he has addressed symptoms rather than causes. Our trade war with China settled into an uneasy truce by the end of 2019, with modest damage to both economies but no clear winner.

Industrial Revolution

The past year was a watershed. As matters stand the United States will be overtaken by China in the next several years. China is developing its own intellectual property in key areas. Some of it is better than ours—in artificial intelligence, telecommunications, cryptography, and electronic warfare. In other key fields like quantum computing—possibly the holy grail of 21st-century technology—it’s hard to tell who’s winning, but China is outspending us by a huge margin.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/freedom-fighters-led-by-american-tried-invading-venezuela-11588722164

BOGOTÁ, Colombia—Seasick and vomiting aboard fishing boats packed with guns, ammo and two-way radios, the ragtag band of fighters—including two American veterans of the Iraq war—made their way from Colombia to the Caribbean coast of Venezuela.

But their plan to arrest Venezuela’s authoritarian government and free political prisoners collapsed before they hit shore. The two-boat invasion force, made up mostly of Venezuelan military defectors, ran into helicopter gunships, snipers and even irate fishermen.

The Venezuelan government said it has captured 13 “terrorists” and killed another eight.

“They were playing Rambo,” crowed President Nicolás Maduro during a TV address as he held up the passports of the two detained Americans. On Twitter, the botched raid was quickly dubbed “The Bay of Kids,” a modern-day version of the 1961 failed Bay of Pigs landing in Cuba.

On Tuesday, questions were swirling around the true nature of the amphibious landing as soldiers mopped up what was left of the tiny invading force that, according to President Trump, had received no U.S. support.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/05/caught-with-his-pants-down/

Today was the best day for me so far as this absurdly heavy-handed lockdown is concerned.  I woke to read the immensely satisfying news about Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College – the man who headed the team that modelled the impact of this coronavirus and came up with the apocalyptic prediction that over two million Americans and half-million Brits, give or take a hundred thousand here or there, would die unless immediate and severe lockdown steps not implemented and enforced.  Leave aside that nothing remotely like what he and his team predicted has transpired in Sweden (where they ignored his advice to lockdown and just urged the old and vulnerable to isolate themselves while keeping restaurants, bars, the general economy open) or Taiwan (ditto) or Japan (mostly ditto).

No, what was absolutely delightful and cheered me up no end was that Professor Ferguson had resigned  from the main “scientific” committee advising the UK government. I’ve used scare quotes because a good number of the people on the committee are not hard scientists.

Why did Ferguson resign?  You will just love this:  it turns out the scientist/modeller whose advice has played a biggish part in the world’s response to this corona virus, and who has been insisting for months that all and sundry must observe the strictest of government lockdowns, had himself been ignoring them. During the lockdown he ardently advocated he was bonking his mistress, the married Ms. Antonia Staats, who would sneak away to meet him for a bit of face-to-face lockdowning and viral exchanges with the man who massively and repeatedly over-estimated things viral in the past, like BSE’s effects and foot-and-mouth too.  The unlockdowned married mistress Ms. Staats would travel across London to catch up with her virile virus predictor and have his greatness thrust upon her.

The point here isn’t that Professor Ferguson was married (though he was, but maybe separated).  Nor is it that his carnal compadre, a green left activist climate-change alarmist,  was herself married (though she was).  No, no, no!  The point is that these authoritarian types who are happy to impose heavy-handed rules on you and me aren’t prepared to live by those rules themselves.  One set of rules for you.  Another, much preferable set, for them.