An intriguing coincidence - or more than that?

 

Many people today have little or no religious faith.  Regular readers will know that I'm a Christian, and believe in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.  If you don't, that's your right to choose.

A recent post over at DiveMedic's place made me do a double-take.

Nuclear power is the power of the stars. The Chernobyl reactor melted down in 1986. The area, even aquafers with a formation period measured in decades, was heavily contaminated with radionuclides, in some cases more than 100,000 times higher than background radiation.

There is a connection to that in the Christian bible. Let me explain:

The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water—  the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.

The Ukrainian word for the common wormwood plant (Artemisia vulgaris) is “Чорнобиль” (chornóbyl).

Striking, isn’t it?

There's more at the link.

I might add that DiveMedic is not Christian - he proclaims himself to be atheist - but he can still recognize the similarities between history and that text from Revelation.  It becomes even more interesting when one realizes that the Chernobyl reactors are right in the middle of the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia.

Coincidence? Yes, I think most of us will buy that.  More than coincidence?  Who can say for sure?

Makes you think, doesn't it?

Peter

China and tariffs: a Chinese and an informed American perspective

 

First, from the Director of China's Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, Xia Baolong, via X:

"The U.S. isn’t after our tariffs but our very survival. The US has repeatedly contained and suppressed Hong Kong … and this will eventually backfire on itself."

"Let those peasants in the United States wail in front of the 5,000 years of Chinese civilization."

Wail?  Well, I suppose a lot of modern music (?) sounds like that . . .

Next, from Larry Lambert, who has inside knowledge of China after years of dealing with its businessmen and officials, and speaks with authority:

Beijing thought the American leaders they made rich would protect them forever. They believed these corporate puppet masters would never let the US stand up to China. Along came Donald Trump, who owes them nothing.

The numbers don’t lie

• US exports to China: $143.5B
• Chinese imports to US: $438.9B

They flood our markets while closing or restricting THEIR markets.

Trump said: NO MORE.

Meanwhile, countries like India, Vietnam, and Bangladesh are celebrating. They’re ready to take China’s place and open their markets to the U.S. – and Trump’s willing to deal.

Chinese exporters are PANICKING

• Abandoning shipments mid-voyage
• Factory orders FROZEN
• Container volume is down 90%

And this is just the beginning. China can’t replace the U.S. market that made it rich.

Reports flooding in:

• Factories shutting down
• Amazon canceling orders
• Stores closing
• Warehouses overflowing

The house of cards is falling. CNN gives you nothing but Chinese propaganda.

CRUCIAL FACT: America buys 3X more than Japan (China’s next biggest customer).

Without us, they’re FINISHED. And they were already on the ropes.

Will this affect US consumers? Sure, briefly. For a few months, you might struggle to find cheap plastic junk.

But other countries will step up. And TRILLIONS in new investment are flowing into America, while countless factories LEAVE China.

The bottom line: China picked a fight it can’t win. While America adjusts, the CCP will face the consequences of its refusal to open its markets or abandon aggression against its neighbors. The decoupling is underway.

Rather different picture from what the mainstream media is telling us, isn't it?  Who do you believe?  After decades of enduring their lies and propaganda, I certainly don't believe the media . . .

If I were Taiwan, I'd be mobilizing my defense forces and preparing for invasion.  Xi desperately needs a cause to take his people's minds off their economic woes.  A war, a forced "reunification" with Taiwan, would do nicely for that - particularly because President Trump hasn't yet had time to undo the damage done to our armed forces by the previous administration.

Peter

"This is a Get ‘Er Done NOW! frontal assault on 40 years of accumulated Crap"

 

That's how Chiefio sees President Trump's tariffs.

We had a system of all sorts of countries with tariff barriers against US goods and not very motivated to “negotiate” along with a few players who had strong merchantilist trade barriers (not just tariffs but “standards” that often were a bit bizarre and currency manipulation and more) and you want to both “condition the battle field” while you find out “how strong an opponent will each one be?”.

So Trump throws a Tariff Firebomb into Global Trade and watches who runs where. Who has strength and who is an easy play. And he gets his answers.

. . .

This wasn’t any failure, and it isn’t a “back track” as it is only a 90 Day “Pause”. It was firing an opening salvo, and seeing where the enemy response came from. Who wanted to surrender, and who wanted to fight ... I’d count that as a “win” for shaping the battle field and choosing the grounds for the battle.

Clearly Trump has read his Tsun Su and his Clausewitz.

. . .

This is a Get ‘Er Done NOW! frontal assault on 40 years of accumulated Crap up to and including election rigging and assassinations (or attempts of same that failed…) and all to be completed in 2 years. There WILL be dozens of eggs broken, hundreds of bits of Fine China in the China Shop trampled into fragments, and a LOT of casualties in the troops.

We, the MAGA folks, are JUST FINE with that. The faster the better.

Blow up the Federal Government, we can always start over. DESTROY “the Rules Based World Order” it wasn’t working all that well anyway what with “color revolutions” and “Faux Democracy” and all. SHUT DOWN trade with China if that’s what it takes, as long as it returns jobs and manufacturing to the USA. Throw Economic “Hand Grenades” if that’s what it takes. We’re here for you if you need us.

Unfortunately, to me, it looks like the UK and EU “leadership” are corrupt and “slimy weasels” in all this, leading their countries to ruin, and China are a bunch of CCP Liars & Cheats who can not be trusted. So Trump is pissing in their coffee? OK… Can I join in? ;-)

We’ll know in 90 days if this works.

In the mean time: IF I can’t buy cheap Chinese plastic crap for 10 ¢ and have to pay 20 ¢ to get it from some other socialist hell hole, I really do not care. IF my neighbor gets a job at the new Plastic Crap Factory in the USA, well, we’ll have a back yard BBQ and I’ll buy the beer.

There's more at the link.

That sounds about right to me.  Ever since the demise of the gold standard, international trade has been denominated in increasingly devalued currency, and economic strength has reflected that.  Most countries imposed far higher tariffs on imported goods to protect their own economies.  That resulted in the USA accepting their goods at low rates, while our exports to them were charged higher rates.  That meant, in turn, that most of our factories migrated overseas, where corporations could pay lower salaries to their workers, send their production to the USA at minimal cost, and reap the benefits for their shareholders and executives.  The working stiffs who used to produce those goods here?  Who cared about them?  They could always apply for unemployment and food stamps . . .

I think President Trump sees very clearly that if we don't tackle this problem right now, we're economically doomed.  It's almost on the brink of our national bankruptcy already.  We simply can't go on accumulating massive deficits every year, adding them to an already effectively unpayable total debt.  Let's face it - a US national debt of (at the time of writing) $36.7 trillion is impossible to pay off.  There isn't that much money in the world!  We've got to deal with it now, or it will overwhelm us.  President Trump understands full well that we cannot go on importing goods and exporting dollars, while having our own exports of goods hobbled by high tariffs on the receiving end.  It's got to stop, and it's got to stop now.

All those complaining about what it's doing to the stock market are wearing economic blinkers.  They're not looking at the wider picture - only their own profits.  If the stock market crashes, it'll be an economic blow, but we've weathered such before and will do again.  If we as a nation become bankrupt, that's an order of magnitude worse than a stock market crash, because millions of people will be out of work with almost no notice.  The federal government doesn't have any spare cash to dole out in unemployment insurance, food assistance or other aid:  and if it "prints dollars" to pay such bills (as has been done all too often in the past), those dollars will be worthless because there's no economy to back them up.  What costs a dollar today will cost ten tomorrow, and a hundred the day after that.  If you're in doubt, examine Weimar Germany, or Venezuela, or Zimbabwe, or any of a large number of other nations that suffered economic catastrophe that way.

We've got to stop the rot.  It's almost too late to do so.  Tariffs are a bitter pill to swallow, for US consumers as much as for foreign countries and companies that export goods to us, but it's medicine we must take - or face the consequences.

Peter

So much for prepping!

 

Stephan Pastis aces it again.  Click the image to be taken to a larger version of the cartoon at the "Pearls Before Swine" Web page.

It's funny, of course, but it's also something to keep in mind when we talk about preparing for emergencies.  We can make all the plans we like, and stockpile goods and materials to our heart's content, but in the end, if something nasty happens, we'll just have to deal with it on the fly.  It may destroy all our preps, and disrupt all our plans.  We have to be flexible enough to "roll with the punches", adapt our plans, and do whatever is needed to get through the situation.  It may not even be possible to do that . . . in a critical situation, survival is not a guaranteed outcome.

Anyone who tells you to "buy this" or "build that" to be sure of survival is talking through his or her hat.  By all means, prepare yourself and your supplies for emergencies;  but flexibility, adaptability, good health and fitness are going to be much more important than most people realize.

Food for thought.

Peter

Good question!

 

With all the talk about bringing manufacturing back to the USA, Zero Hedge asks:  "Can The Work Ethic Make A Return?"

For generations now, we’ve been told that intelligence and skill are disproportionately distributed in the upper tiers of the U.S. class structure.

Personally, I don’t believe it. It is more likely the opposite: the people who struggle for a living, working two and three jobs to pay the bills, have more skills than most people in the upper third of the income distribution who have never had to worry about paying the bills.

Talk to any serious person in any midsize company today and they will tell you of their struggles. The regulations and taxes are vexing but it is the labor problems day-to-day that really inhibit their operations and progress. It is exceedingly difficult to find workers who will do what they are supposed to do in a timely way, with attention to detail, and without constant hand-holding and praise.

This decline of the American work ethic traces to the educational institutions in part, but also to the reality that most young people in the top half of income earners have never worked a day in their lives until after having earned their credentials.

They are clueless about what it means to embrace a hard job and stick with it until they are done. They resent the authority structures in the workplace and attempt to game the system in the same way that they gamed school for 16-plus years.

It’s one thing to develop skills for survival in classrooms, and a radically different thing to have skills for a new world of manufacturing. Shop classes in high school are mostly gone (only 6 percent of students take them versus 20 percent in the 1980s) and two-thirds of teens eschew remunerative employment completely, simply because it is not necessary. It’s been generations since most people knew anything of farm life, to say nothing of factory life.

Trump is seeking to solve a half-century-old problem in four years.

There's more at the link.

I can only be grateful to my parents for teaching me (the hard way) that money had to be earned.  It started out, as soon as we kids were old enough to do simple household tasks, by linking it to so-called "pocket money".  We were promised five cents for every year of our age, and were given household jobs according to our capabilities.  Mine were mowing the lawn, cleaning up after the dog, washing the car, and so on.  If we didn't do any of those jobs on schedule, as required, we were "fined" five cents from that week's pocket-money.  If we failed to perform them three times in a week, we lost all that week's pocket money.  We soon found out that begging and pleading didn't work, and if we slacked off and half-did our work, in the eyes of our parents that was as good (or as bad) as not doing it at all.  We learned.

Also, when we wanted something expensive (such as a bicycle, or a tape recorder when we hit our teens - and yes, my first tape recorder was a well-worn used reel-to-reel unit, because cassette tapes were new-fangled and expensive), we had to come up with at least 50% of its price.  We could earn that by doing extra chores for our parents, or (in our teens) by looking for part-time work.  (My first part-time job was working at a local pet store during school vacations.  I got to clean out all of the cages and boxes - a s***ty job, literally!  When I grew older I became a part-time shop assistant at an upmarket store in town, dressed in stiffly starched shirt and tie, waiting on customers and behaving very deferentially.)  By such means I always managed to raise half of the money I needed to buy something, and my parents kicked in the rest - but only after I'd earned their support.  Again, we learned.

By the time I entered the armed forces, I'd learned that one got somewhere by working hard and showing willing.  The military knocked the opinionated asshole out of me (although some unkind people might suggest I've retained a touch of that here and there . . . ).  It set me up for the rest of my life.

When I look at teenagers today, in most of the Western world they seem bored, opinionated and self-serving.  "I don't WANNA!" is their battle cry.  Talking to small business owners in the area, they all complain that attracting willing young workers is a constant battle.  If they recruit two people, it's because they know one of them is going to have to be fired, so they have to hire two to keep one.  It's expensive and time-consuming for them - two commodities that no small business can afford.  Drug and alcohol abuse, laziness and poor time management round out the complaints.

What say you, readers?  Do you think today's youngsters, with all their problems and issues, will be willing and/or able to make the transition to modern manufacturing work?  If not, what will that mean for President Trump's drive to bring business back home?

Another thought.  I wasn't kidding when I said that military service made a man out of me, taking an opinionated, self-centered brat youngster and knocking the stuffing out of him.  I wonder whether bringing back conscription might not be a good thing, from that perspective - but I have to admit that too many youngsters today would expect to be feather-bedded, and would complain bitterly about any perceived insult or "dissing" from a drill instructor.  (I remember my DI's well . . . I think they'd suffer apoplexy if they had to deal with today's youth!)  Good idea, or not worth the hassle?

Peter

Why D.O.G.E. is so hard for the left to stop

 

I've been somewhat surprised that the progressive left has filed so few lawsuits opposing the existence, mandate and mission of D.O.G.E. as a whole.  After a few initial lawsuits before it was even legally established, the focus has switched almost completely to complaints on the periphery, rather than trying to stop D.O.G.E. from doing its job altogether.

This article explains why that's the case.

Originally created under the Obama administration to improve government software, the USDS has been rebranded as the United States DOGE Service. This move, as Renz points out, is not merely a name change but a strategic repurposing to align with new priorities.

"Trump did NOT actually create a new agency," Renz noted. "Instead, what he did was repurpose an existing agency - the USDS - into something more useful." This strategy allowed Trump to bypass the need for Congressional approval while ensuring the initiative's legality.

. . .

The executive order is grounded in existing laws, notably 44 USCS Chapter 36, which focuses on developing technology for the government. By leveraging this legal framework, Trump ensured that the DOGE Service's focus on efficiency and IT evaluation remains within the agency's original mandate.

. . .

The executive order mandates the establishment of DOGE teams within every administrative branch agency. These teams, comprising a lead, lawyer, HR person, and engineer, will work under the USDS (DOGE) umbrella to identify waste and improve efficiency.

Renz emphasized the strategic brilliance of this approach: "Looking at the software and how things are managed is a great way to find out where there is waste - particularly when part of the mandate is to ensure efficiency."

. . .

While Renz expressed reservations about the extent of executive branch authority, he commended the strategic execution of the DOGE initiative. "This order was very well done," he stated, adding, "Trump and Musk have really done a good job strategically here."

There's more at the link.

The article made a few things clear to me:

1. President Trump could not have dreamed up this strategy in a week or two.  Even before the election, he must have had people working on ways and means to achieve what he wanted;  and I've no doubt Elon Musk assigned some of his brightest and best personnel to assist in that effort.  The months between election and inauguration must have been at fever pitch, getting all the political and legal ducks in a row to allow the new Administration to get down to it from Day One.
2. It's now clear why President Trump refused the offer of General Services Administration (GSA) funding and assistance during the transition period.  If the GSA had known what he was planning to do, they would undoubtedly have shared that with the rest of the Biden administration, and given Democratic Party lawyers and fixers a head start on figuring out how to block D.O.G.E. and other initiatives.  By keeping things in-house and rejecting official "advisers" or "consultants", President Trump kept his cards very close to his chest, ensuring that D.O.G.E. could "hit the ground running" and shock everybody with the speed at which it moved.
3. Legally, this whole thing was brilliant.  Of course President Trump would have expected "lawfare", with Democrats launching lawsuit after lawsuit to stop him implementing his agenda.  However, by simply using an existing and entirely legal framework to insert D.O.G.E. into the executive function, he bypassed or blocked almost every legal avenue to challenge it.  If it was legal for President Obama's USDS to do what it did, then D.O.G.E. (using precisely the same legal framework and justification) was unchallengeable.  I don't know what lawyers came up with that approach, but it was spectacularly effective.

I think this transition from the Biden to the Trump administrations is going to be studied by political scientists for years to come.  It's a textbook case of how to avoid, evade or nullify efforts to stymie the handover of power.  I can only hope that the Democratic Party doesn't learn from it, and try to do the same when their turn comes (as it undoubtedly will) to assume power once more.  Sadly, I fear that hope is in vain . . .

Peter

Commercial opportunity, or national security threat?

 

I had to shake my head at this headline:

Chinese Shipping Company Wants to

Lease the Former U.S. Base at Adak

According to the report:

The head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command supports reactivating the naval airbase at Adak, a remote Cold War station in the Aleutian Islands - but the U.S. military isn't the only interested party, according to Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK). An unnamed Chinese shipping company has also reached out to the current landowner to express interest in negotiating a lease, Sullivan said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday.

Adak was a key naval base throughout the Cold War, providing a logistics and surveillance hub near Russia's eastern shores. After the Base Realignment and Closure Commission process in the mid-1990s, it was shut down, and it ceased operations in 1997. The land is now held by the native Aleut Corporation.   

. . .

The U.S. military still holds occasional exercises at Adak, and talk of reviving the base has circulated since at least 2021 ... Adak would be a natural location for an enhanced U.S. deterrent presence, Sen. Sullivan said Thursday ... "But you know who checks in with them once a year?" Sullivan asked. "It's a Chinese shipping company that is, certainly, in my view, a front company for the [Chinese military]. So how embarrassing would it be to the Pentagon or the Navy . . . if somehow they signed [a] 100 year lease with a quote 'Chinese shipping company' that always is out there looking at Adak?"

There's more at the link.

I've seen that move many times before in Africa, first from the former Soviet Union, and more recently from China.  They may know that an overtly military presence would attract unwelcome Western opposition, but a "purely commercial endeavor" might be overlooked.  There are many places around the world where a foreign company has leased a port, or established a mine, or built a factory, only for it to become a center for economic exploitation (as bad as colonialism ever was), or an espionage center, or a major presence that destabilizes an entire region.  China is doing that across the Pacific Ocean at present, trying to buy influence with the tiny island nations there by offering buckets of money to build up a port (for "fishing", of course), or establish a major airport to "improve communications".  In the event of things getting heated on the geopolitical front, those would become military bases - perhaps whether the host country liked it or not.  Fly in a few planeloads of heavily armed troops without any advance notice or warning, and no tiny island nation will be able to withstand them.  The fuss would be over in less than a few hours.

China wouldn't do that on Adak, of course:  it's US territory.  However, as a base to monitor submarine traffic, and send trawlers into one of the world's great fishing and crabbing grounds, and generally cause difficulties for Alaska and the West Coast, it has tremendous potential.  If they make the financial offer attractive enough, even a patriotic tribe like the Aleuts would find it very hard to resist temptation.

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 257

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Talk about being asleep at the wheel!

 

According to D.O.G.E. yesterday:

This is absolutely mind-boggling.  Claims for unemployment from people not yet born???  How could even one of those applications have passed initial scrutiny, let alone been paid?

What's worse is that this is just one instance of a government department failing the most basic test of competency and thoroughness in doing its duty.  How can we, the taxpayers and voters of America, trust our government in future when we keep getting this drumroll of departments, agencies and individuals who have signally failed in their task and squandered our posterity?

I won't be satisfied until every government employee who should have caught these applications, but didn't, has been fired;  and until everyone who made such spurious claims has been charged and convicted of the relevant crimes.  It would be nice if the government would also refund taxpayers the amount of tax dollars that have been wasted . . . but I guess that's the definition of a "sunk cost".  We won't see that money again.

Peter