Failure of nerve: America has basically ceded control of the South China Sea to China since the 1950s

China has been playing a long game while America has dithered year after year with changeable, irresolute leadership. This is one important reason China laughs at America's political system. It knows it can get away with this stuff as long as it waits us out. Right now it is howling with laughter as everyone is consumed with Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels while it installs offensive missiles with impunity. We are a joke! And one day this joke may mean many dead Americans and the loss of freedom for countless others.   

From the story here:

While the installation of missile platforms are [sic] new to the Spratlys, China has already deployed similar systems in the nearby Paracel Islands. Satellite images of Woody Island, Beijing's military headquarters in the South China Sea, show deployments of Y-8 transport aircraft as well as J-10 and J-11 fighter jets. China first took possession of Woody Island in 1955 and has since outfitted it with ports, aircraft hangars, communication facilities, helipads and a runway. [Gregory] Poling notes that this particular outpost serves as a blueprint for China's future developments on Fiery Cross Reef, Subi Reef and Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands.

Laugh of the Day: If paying off a hooker means Trump has to leave office, Washington DC will be empty by tomorrow

A caller just now to the Rush Limbaugh show.

Roger Kimball calls Robert Mueller a fanatic, wants him shut down NOW

Here.

In a 2014 poll, 9.7% admitted to coming to work after smoking marijuana, which would have been 14.2 million Americans high at work at the time

Civilian employment averaged 146.3 million in 2014.

The story is here.

I'm sure Rex Tillerson is thrilled that the Boy Scouts is now just the Scouts

A Marist Poll from 2017 puts marijuana use monthly at almost 35 million US adults

The poll is here.

Apparently the 7.6 million missing jobs I keep writing about would be filled but for the fact that the unemployed are all smoking marijuana

From the story here:

[E]mployers ... are quietly taking what once would have been a radical step: They're dropping marijuana from the drug tests they require of prospective employees. Marijuana testing - a fixture at large American employers for at least 30 years - excludes too many potential workers, experts say, at a time when filling jobs is more challenging than it's been in nearly two decades.

The socialist backlash is coming

Rasmussen says 46% already favor government guaranteed jobs.

Hillary admits 41% of Democrats already are socialists.

All it will take for socialism to finally succeed is the onset of the depression the Feds keep intervening to prevent. One can intervene only so many times after which that doesn't work anymore. The problem is the interventions distort the course of capitalism so much that its natural mean-reverting ways will have to be by definition quite severe next time. Enter outright socialism because the young have been brainwashed against capitalism and will clamor for something other than capitalism or the Fed interventionism (aka state capitalism) which hasn't worked.

There will be blood.

China installs missiles in Spratly Islands, Admiral Harry Harris says China eroding the free and open international order

China has no business annexing this territory, and the international court of The Hague has so ruled already in July 2016.

Here:

China has installed anti-ship cruise missiles and surface-to-air missile systems on three of its fortified outposts in the South China Sea, sources tell CNBC. ... The Spratlys, to which six countries lay claim, are located approximately two-thirds of the way east from southern Vietnam to the southern Philippines.

May is the most wonderful time . . . of the year . . .

. . . to sell stocks if you've capitalized on the spectacular 9-year run since March 2009.

Getting in when stock valuations are cheap is key. So is getting out when those valuations soar as now. On the scale used in the chart, valuation right now is about 13.2, similar to the year 2000 when everything fell apart. At the January 2018 high valuation averaged 14.3.

Trump's impotence at the border is breeding not contempt exactly, but indifference

The lie of the day: "Mueller’s team continues to operate almost entirely leak-free"

Garrett M. Graff, "journalist", formerly of Politico, formerly of the Howard Dean presidential campaign, in Wired here.

What he really is is a Mueller toady:

"Mueller always knows more than we think".

"Mueller is building a bulletproof case".

"Mueller likely already knows how this story ends ... and it seems clear that Mueller might actually be relatively close to wrapping up the investigation".

Ilan Wurman calls for a return to interpretive departmentalism, siding with President Jackson and Justice Scalia

Here:

Thomas Jefferson, for example, pardoned individuals convicted under the Sedition Act because he believed that act to be unconstitutional notwithstanding contrary pronouncements by the courts, and Abraham Lincoln urged Congress to reenact the Missouri Compromise although it had been struck down as unconstitutional by the Court in Dred Scott. And Andrew Jackson vetoed the Second Bank of the United States, even though it had been approved by the Court.

“If the opinion of the Supreme Court covered the whole ground of this act,” Jackson wrote, “it ought not to control the coordinate authorities of this Government. The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others.”

Real Clear Politics is making sure Jon Tester is getting broad, expansive coverage

Sonia Sotomayor has seen better days

Sotomayor has gained a lot of weight since her nomination in 2009 (right). She fell in her home in April (hmmm) and is scheduled for shoulder surgery tomorrow.

Blue Origin launched and returned successfully today in its eighth test flight

The rocket's capsule reached nearly 66 miles up and safely parachuted to a soft landing in the west Texas desert.

The rocket also safely returned to a landing pad. The rocket is not a heavy launch vehicle like Elon Musk's, but it returns to earth in similar fashion to be reused. Space tourism is just around the corner.

Excellent video of the whole thing, here.

The Weekly Standard's girly man way of calling Pat Buchanan a fascist without really calling him one

Here's the html:

https://www.weeklystandard.com/charles-j-sykes/patrick-buchanans-strange-new-respect-for-the-ayatollah

Here's the actual headline:

Patrick Buchanan’s Strange New Respect for the Ayatollah

Here's the index of articles the way the girly men only wish they could title it, but don't have the balls to:

Was the last North Korean nuclear weapon detonation yield at Mantapsan underestimated by over 100%?

According to a Wikipedia entry here, the following formula is used to calculate the radius of the crater created by an underground nuclear blast:

r = 55 * ${\displaystyle \sqrt[3]{y}}$

If y was 100 kilotons as widely reported, for example here, the radius r of the crater should have been in the neighborhood of 255ft. with the entire underground void thus having a diameter of something like 510ft.

Yet the researchers referenced in this article state that the diameter of the void left under Mantapsan was 656ft.

That presupposes an r-value of 328 and thus a y-value of 212 kilotons, not 100, meaning the North Koreans detonated a weapon with a yield 112% higher than widely reported.

Senator Jon Tester of Montana looks increasingly well fed in his government job

What economic boom? 1Q2018 real GDP at 2.3% disappoints again