But we can still put people in a tin can and send them around the moon like we did already in 1968.
We also don't have a military capable of stopping Russian aggression in Europe, because we're too tired after Iraq and Afghanistan.
Put up or shut up, Ben.
The UAE is bypassing the Strait of Hormuz with 1.9 million barrels per day now coming out of Fujairah via its overland pipeline, and Saudi Arabia's overland pipeline west to Yanbu is moving about 4.5 million barrels per day out through the Red Sea, but that's not the 20 million barrels per day lost due to the war, and no LNG is moving at all.
Pakistan and Bangladesh get two thirds of their LNG from the Gulf, Taiwan gets one third of its LNG. Taiwan says its has eleven days' supply remaining. Many others are also severely affected by the cut-off of LNG from Qatar. About 20 LNG tankers are trapped in the Gulf, half the global fleet available for charter.
Meanwhile Iran has increased export of its oil from 1 million barrels per day in February to 2 million in March, 90% of which goes to China, and Iran is now charging tolls to vessels to exit the Gulf along its coast, which occurs only under Iranian escort.
In their idealism they are little different than Zohran Mamdani.
... The United States is undeniably the beacon of hope for the world because it’s founded on the value of the individual and the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence. We believe every person should have an equal opportunity to pursue their dreams and determine their destiny.
For free people, there is truly no problem too big or care too small. Free people don’t wait on a government middleman to solve their problems or redefine what’s possible. ...
More.
The choice isn't between this Americanism and Zohran Mamdani. They aren't really competing visions.
On the contrary, both are impotent in the face of intractable problems.
New York City, with an annual budget of in excess of $100 billion, needs to spend well in excess of $50 billion to fix its water and sewer systems which limit population growth and drive up rents. The place is already $125 billion in debt. In his wildest dreams Mamdani will increase taxes "only" $10 billion, about which they are having a fit.
The so-called free people of the United States also have met problems which are truly too big for them, one in the Black Sea, one in the Red Sea, and one in the South China Sea, about which $38 trillion in national debt keeps them from doing very much.
Every person should have opportunity to determine their destiny, they prattle on, except for the people of Ukraine, of Israel, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan, who will just have to do it themselves. How long does this list have to get before it includes you, too? Or are you on it already?
Their self-indicting answer?
The more the Uniparty changes, the more it stays the same.
Bush invades Iraq. Putin invades Ukraine. Trump invades Venezuela.
Expect Xi to invade Taiwan at any minute.
One big happy family of invaders, carving up the world.
 |
| "Let''s devalue the Yen and spend the hell out of it" |
Japan’s ruling party picked hardline conservative Sanae Takaichi as its head on Saturday, putting her on course to become the country’s first female prime minister in a move set to jolt investors and neighbors. ...
Takaichi, who says her hero is Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, offers a starker vision for change than Koizumi and is potentially more disruptive.
An advocate of late premier Shinzo Abe’s “Abenomics” strategy to boost the economy with aggressive spending and easy monetary policy, she has previously criticized the Bank of Japan’s interest rate increases. ...
It's obviously the nationalism, anti-globalism, and possible militarism which really bother the writer from Reuters:
... But her nationalistic positions — such as her regular visits to the Yasukuni shrine to Japan’s war dead, viewed by some Asian countries as a symbol of its past militarism — may rile neighbors like South Korea and China. ...
Takaichi also favors revising Japan’s pacifist postwar constitution and suggested this year that Japan could form a “quasi-security alliance” with Taiwan, the democratically governed island claimed by China. ...
“We hope she will ... steer Japanese politics in an ‘anti-globalism’ direction to protect national interests and help the people regain prosperity and hope,” Sanseito said in a statement.
If Japan really wanted to scare the world, maybe it could peg the Yen to the price of plutonium, the vast majority of which in the world it owns, and start aggressively selling it to the highest bidders.
 |
| "That will teach them" |
The thread is here.
The limits of conventional power have been reached.
Putin has been experiencing the same in Ukraine and could have been defeated, too, had Trump not given him a lifeline with his stupid peace talks.
The future of Taiwan is in great peril.
In other words Trump's calculations of foreign countries' tariffs on the United States result in fictional rates.
From the story here:
... For instance, the U.S. claims that China charges a tariff of 67%. The U.S. ran a deficit of $295.4 billion with China in 2024, while imported goods were worth $438.9 billion, according to official data. When you divide $295.4 billion by $438.9 billion, the result is 67%! The same math checks out for Vietnam.
“The formula is about trade imbalances with the U.S. rather than reciprocal tariffs in the sense of tariff level or non-tariff level distortions. This makes it very difficult for Asian, particularly the poorer Asian countries, to meet US demand to reduce tariffs in the short-term as the benchmark is buying more American goods than they export to the U.S., ” according to Trinh Nguyen, senior economist of emerging Asia at Natixis.
The U.S. also appeared to have applied a 10% levy for regions where it is running a trade surplus. ...
Futures at 7:00 AM EST:
Republican lawmakers on Wednesday said President Trump’s call for Congress to “get rid of” the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which provided $52 billion for the domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry, is dead on arrival on Capitol Hill. ...
“I think reconstituting domestic manufacturing of advanced semiconductors is a national security and economic imperative,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), who was one of 17 Senate Republicans who voted for the law.
Cornyn noted that “the whole purpose of this was national security.”
“Because if there’s a disruption between Asia or Taiwan, to be more specific, and the United States, we would plunge into a depression and we wouldn’t be able to build advanced weapons or aircraft like the F-35,” he said.
The Texas senator said “the idea” for the law came from the first Trump administration, particularly then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“I understand the president suggesting maybe there’s a better way to do this than use tax dollars as incentives … but I think the original bill was responsible [for] this trend [to bring] much greater investment here in the United States,” he added.
He said he’s open to “tweaks around the edges” but explained “the program that Congress passed — that money is essentially spent.”
More.
But The Federalist has its blinders on. Biden baaaaaaad! Trump gooooood!
"Let's see if we can find some naive kid to write a story about it!"
By Defending Free Speech Worldwide, Team Trump Reclaims America’s Global Moral High Ground:
Under President Donald Trump, the suppression of natural rights by Western powers will no longer be ignored by the United States.
Yep, J. D. Vance goes to Europe to beat up on our friends. But suppression of freedom will be ignored, in places like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China. And above all in Ukraine.
This is the essence of libertarianism: Make the good the enemy of the perfect.
But defending freedom where it really counts would take some courage, and they don't have it.
The author of this article, who graduated from college in 2022 with a BA in political "science", ends it touting the execrable Darren Beattie at Marco Rubio's State Department, a Taiwan surrender monkey.
The article is the second in the queue at Real Clear Politics this morning. One goes there looking for some serious editorial judgment and gets this.
Trump/Vance don't have the moral high ground. They are just the cowardly other side of the same old hypocritical American coin.
As if the nine-dash line doesn't even exist.
Beattie is a total suck-up, just like Rubio.
WaPo, May 28, 2024, here:
. . . at one event, he suggested that he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing if Russia invaded Ukraine or China invaded Taiwan, surprising some of the donors.
The roll call vote is here.
I would have reported in real time but Blogger had a major outage yesterday afternoon lasting several hours.
Taiwan last week, South Korea this week.
The Biden administration has reached an agreement to provide up to $6.4 billion in direct funding for Samsung Electronics to develop a computer chip manufacturing and research cluster in Texas.
The funding announced Monday by the Commerce Department is part of a total investment in the cluster that, with private money, is expected to exceed $40 billion. The government support comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022 with the goal of reviving the production of advanced computer chips domestically.
More.
The July 2022 roll call vote is here.
TSMC’s Arizona subsidiary is set to receive up to $6.6 billion in U.S. government funding under a preliminary agreement announced by the Biden administration on Monday.
The funding, under the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, will support Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s more than $65 billion investment in three cutting-edge fabrication plants in Phoenix, according to the nonbinding agreement.
More.
Dunderheads Peter Meijer and Fred Upton from Michigan voted for the bill, in addition to other has-beens like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.
Lose yourself: Vivek Ramaswamy's 2024 presidential campaign haunted by endless flip-flops:
Here's Obama:
“With my successor coming in, I think he saw an opportunity because the U.S. president didn’t seem to care that much about a rules-based international system,” Obama said, the Daily Mail reported. "As a consequence, I think China’s attitude [is], 'Well, we can take advantage of what appears to be a vacuum internationally on a lot of these issues.'"
It was Obama who never cared about the rules, never challenged China's military expansion in the South China Sea under Xi, and telegraphed nothing but weakness to China.
Here's Xi Jinping as early as 2014:
Tabled by the popular ultranationalist blogger Zhou
Xiaoping, the plan would authorize the assassination of blacklisted
individuals—including Taiwan’s vice president, William Lai Ching-te—if
they do not reform their ways. Zhou later told the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao
that his proposal had been accepted by the conference and “relayed to
relevant authorities for evaluation and consideration.” Proposals like
Zhou’s do not come by accident. In 2014, Xi praised Zhou for the
“positive energy” of his jeremiads against Taiwan and the United States. ...
But the most telling moments of the two-sessions meetings, perhaps unsurprisingly, involved Xi himself. The Chinese leader gave four speeches in all—one to delegates of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, two to the National People’s Congress, and one to military and paramilitary leaders. In them, he described a bleak geopolitical landscape, singled out the United States as China’s adversary, exhorted private businesses to serve China’s military and strategic aims, and reiterated that he sees uniting Taiwan and the mainland as vital to the success of his signature policy to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese ethnos.”
In his first speech on March 6, Xi appeared to be girding China’s industrial base for struggle and conflict. “In the coming period, the risks and challenges we face will only increase and become more severe,” he warned. “Only when all the people think in one place, work hard in one place, help each other in the same boat, unite as one, dare to fight, and be good at fighting, can they continue to win new and greater victories.” To help the CCP achieve these “greater victories,” he vowed to “correctly guide” private businesses to invest in projects that the state has prioritized.
Xi also blasted the United States directly in his speech, breaking his practice of not naming Washington as an adversary except in historical contexts. He described the United States and its allies as leading causes of China’s current problems. “Western countries headed by the United States have implemented containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development,” he said. Whereas U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has emphasized “guardrails” and other means of slowing the deterioration of U.S.-China relations, Beijing is clearly preparing for a new, more confrontational era.
On March 5, Xi gave a second speech laying out a vision of Chinese self-sufficiency that went considerably further than any of his previous discussions of the topic, saying China’s march to modernization is contingent on breaking technological dependence on foreign economies—meaning the United States and other industrialized democracies. Xi also said that he wants China to end its reliance on imports of grain and manufactured goods. “In case we’re short of either, the international market will not protect us,” Xi declared. Li, the outgoing premier, emphasized the same point in his annual government “work report” on the same day, saying Beijing must “unremittingly keep the rice bowls of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people firmly in their own hands.” China currently depends on imports for more than a third of its net food consumption.
In his third speech, on March 8 to representatives from the PLA and the People’s Armed Police, Xi declared that China must focus its innovation efforts on bolstering national defense and establish a network of national reserve forces that could be tapped in wartime. Xi also called for a “National Defense Education” campaign to unite society behind the PLA, invoking as inspiration the Double Support Movement, a 1943 campaign by the Communists to militarize society in their base area of Yan’an.
In his fourth speech (and his first as a third-term president), on March 13, Xi announced that the “essence” of his great rejuvenation campaign was “the unification of the motherland.” Although he has hinted at the connection between absorbing Taiwan and his much-vaunted campaign to, essentially, make China great again, he has rarely if ever done so with such clarity.
One thing that is clear a decade into Xi’s rule is that it is important to take him seriously—something that many U.S. analysts regrettably do not do. When Xi launched a series of aggressive campaigns against corruption, private enterprise, financial institutions, and the property and tech sectors, many analysts predicted that these campaigns would be short-lived. But they endured. The same was true of Xi’s draconian “zero COVID” policy for three years—until he was uncharacteristically forced to reverse course in late 2022.
Xi is now intensifying a decade long campaign to break key economic and technological dependencies on the U.S.-led democratic world. He is doing so in anticipation of a new phase of ideological and geostrategic “struggle,” as he puts it. His messaging about war preparation and his equating of national rejuvenation with unification mark a new phase in his political warfare campaign to intimidate Taiwan. He is clearly willing to use force to take the island. What remains unclear is whether he thinks he can do so without risking uncontrolled escalation with the United States.
Asked in a CBS 60 Minutes interview broadcast on Sunday whether U.S. forces would defend the democratically governed island claimed by China, he replied: “Yes, if in fact, there was an unprecedented attack.”
More.
