The nation is polarizing even more. The anti-Israel sentiment from some members of Congress is only one part. The Russianewsgategate scandal surfaces more evidence every day, but no one changes heart or mind on the matter. Portland protests have the same non-effect on persuading people to change sides, only mobilizing everyone.
Chris Cuomo is grossly annoyed by Limbaugh’s nickname for him. Perhaps he thinks he’s the only one allowed to get offended. Senator Lindsey “Gramnesty” wore his like a badge of honor and Andrea “Tarantula” Tantaros welcomed Rush as a guest on her show to explain the good humor of it all. At this point, it’s unlikely Rush will be able to grace the ratings of Chris, who seems to be the only one with a nickname the rest of us aren’t allowed to use.
While protests and extreme voices raise their volume, the only thing provoking people to switch sides are Liberals in the spotlight. It’s not all—neither those in the spotlight or those switching sides. But, some of the dumber and loudest among the Left have made themselves such an embarrassment that many social-minded voters are starting to think that they will get more social justice from the Right.
The election has always been and remains in Trump’s favor. China will lose the trade war, as well as the other war it was always going to instigate. Gun laws and abortion laws will strengthen in both directions. While the Right seems to have the advantage for now, neither Right nor Left has any clear path towards domination, only further polarity. There’s no stopping it. Buckle up, grab your popcorn, and stay safe.
China instructs Hong Kong not to confuse restraint for weakness, notwithstanding that China is making that very mistake with the West in not sponsoring the demands of Hong Kongers that Hong Kong’s government keep the Sino-British promise of 1984. China claims that the West has meddled in Hong Kong. The biggest problem with this argument isn’t lack of evidence, though evidence is lacking. The bigger problem is need—the West wouldn’t need to meddle in order to create the chaos we see in Hong Kong because China has already done more than enough. Balancing Hong Kong’s unrest with China’s interference, the math adds up.
As China poetically said of Hong Kong, a “blow from the sword of law is waiting for them in the future.” China should heed its own words. But, we already knew China was incapable heeding any wisdom, including its own, which is probably why the West doesn’t bother commenting anymore. After all that has happened, China recently had the lack of self-awareness to call its growing power a “peaceful rise” in defense of growing Australian concerns.
Taiwan is gearing up and arming up. Their new “Cloud Peak” missile can reach Beijing. It’s mobile and in mass-production. It still pales in comparison to Beijing’s aggression toward everyone, everywhere. But, Taiwan figures, at least an attack from Beijing would hurt in Beijing. But, Beijing’s probably not capable of understanding that. So, the Taiwanese can’t count on their Cloud Peak missiles as any kind of deterrent, only a disruptor to cripple and confuse and weaken sequential attacks from an attacker who struck first.
Every time there’s a shooting, everyone uses emotion to say everyone was right and everyone else was wrong. “More killing, so all the rest of you should agree with my politics, dah!” It started with attitude. Mass shootings only indicate an already-divided country. People either demand guns everywhere or guns denied or some combination thereof; no one argues in favor of training the militia.
The Second Amendment guaranteed the right for all to own and carry firearms because all were obligated to be trained in the militia. Liberals want none of it and so-called Conservatives want the arms with not a single word about militia training for all. But, militia training for all citizens would solve the problem, both the attitudes of potential shooters and the readiness of the general public. People with “mental problems” wouldn’t be allowed in the militia and thereby wouldn’t be able to own firearms. Denying weapons to the insane and unstable in that way would calm concerns of the Right.
The Right is concerned that the Left wants to force the Right to behave like they are part of the Left. With recent laws that punish people for not agreeing to LGBTQ speech patterns, who can blame them? With Universal Studios’ The Hunt even having been filmed, who can blame the Right for feeling the need for self-defense? Still, we don’t need massive gun ownership without training; we need the militia for all people. The militia is what the Right-Wing’s precious Constitution calls for, but the Right-Wing has not. So, their fear of the Left, however justified, is well-earned.
Even in a Liberal utopia where everyone is filled with hatred, while all means of acting on such hatred have been removed, no one would be safe without public-wide training. The whole public needs to be trained to deal with every dangerous scenario, from a dictator’s takeover to an invasion to a mass shooting. It’s called the “militia” and it’s the one thing neither extremist nor moderate of our polarized political spectrum even peeps about.
If one were to guess what was going on between Trump and Kim, internal politics of North Korea would explain it all. Korea is no exception to East Asia’s history of ongoing domination quarreling. Kim is not universally loved within his own government. The military is constantly at his back door and he must squash mutinies constantly. Pomp and acting like he’s the “military man” makes it hard for his enemies within to rally ill will against him.
Also, Trump has commented that many things are going on with North Korea behind the scenes—things which remain beyond the paparazzi watch of the Western presses. When Trump indicates no objection to the non-nuclear missile launches in North Korea, it almost seems as if Trump knows Kim is doing something the rest of the West doesn’t know about. For all we know, the number and frequency of non-nuclear missile tests could be a kind of Morse code only known to Trump and Kim. Given what has been publicly told, that would not be impossible. This only leads us to conclude that we can’t conclude anything about what’s happening in North Korea so far; there have just been too many jokers added to the deck.
Then, there’s China, China, and also China.
When it comes to raising public support for Western action against China, China is its own worst PR enemy.
China keeps doing the same thing. Beijing’s solution to rejection is to incite more rejection. Beijing’s solution to resistance is to give excuse for more resistance. It’s in a self-destructing insanity tailspin—paranoid of invisible enemies, justifying interfering in Hong Kong under the auspices that Hong Kong was already interfered in by the West.
That’s what this is all about, by the way. The whole reason Beijing accuses Taiwan and the US of causing the Hong Kong riots is to build the case that “Hong Kong was already interfered with”, and therefore sending in China’s military to stop the protests would not violate the Basic Law. The problem is that the Basic Law does not grant China permission to use military force against unarmed Hong Kong citizens on the basis of “Western interference”. But, the Chinese don’t understand the concept of “lawfulness” anyway. They just come up with whatever excuse sounds sophisticated enough to seem smarter than everyone else and thereby hypnotize the public into compliance.
China wants to blame the US and Trump won’t give China one single excuse to be twisted into so-called proof. Trump treads cautiously, but he is neither callous nor oblivious. His silence should be a warning to China that he is no fool. Sadly, China will take his silence to mean that he has caved into Beijing’s aggression and the Chinese military will only grow more overconfident than it already is. But, choices of the past four decades suggest that may have been the plan all along.
The tipping point is upon us. If China’s warship crashed into a Taiwan freighter on accident, then there would be no reason to fear or respect China’s Navy because their crew can’t steer. The alternative is to interpret it as an act of war. China doesn’t consider either because an angry bully in blamer-mode doesn’t consider others, not even how others can or will respond.
Tariffs and trade headlines aren’t about trade or tariffs; they are about Trump. The trade war with China isn’t about China having taken US jobs since before the 1980s, it’s “Trump’s trade war”. The poor American farmers who planted crops to suit the Chinese are all beside themselves. A bad environment—whether in weather or economics—is the new normal and farmers are being told the same thing as American companies that depend on China: get used to it and look elsewhere.
America’s economy can’t be dependent on China because China is not dependable. Look at the self-contradiction of someone who says otherwise. Trump’s former economic adviser, Gary Cohn, says in one sentence that China was going to take down its own economy anyway, then in another sentence says that US trade policy is backfiring. Which is it? Was China going to do all this anyway or did the US initiate something that backfired? Both can’t be true at the same time.
Either the US affected China’s economic policy or it didn’t—for better or worse. Claiming that we didn’t make a difference while also claiming that we made a difference that backfired doesn’t indicate a well-considered economic framework; it indicates someone shooting in the dark, trying to find any argument that will convince people to dislike Trump. After all, America’s economy was wonderful while it made China rich, but once the US economy stopped serving China, it wasn’t a “US trade war”, it was “Trump’s trade war”.
Many Trump critics believe Trump supporters are stupid, but they still try to use reason to persuade Trump supporters. This is another self-contradiction, adding to the self-contradicting reasoning. Even if self-contradiction could persuade Trump supporters to abandon him, there would be no place to turn. Democratic infighting is at an all-time high. It’s almost as if the Democrats want to lose the 2020 election, pretending to fight valiantly while they do. But, that wouldn’t be anything new. They have been doing that with human rights and civil rights for decades.
China says that Hong Kong CEO Carrie Lam may not resign because she must remain in power to clean up the mess China started and blames on her. Albeit, staying in power to clean up her scape-goat mess is impossible because cleaning up that mess requires her to resign as the people demanded. The “mess” includes her being there in the first place—because her election was not from self-governance as Hong Kongers were promised in 1984. The mess also includes China saying who may and may not resign—because China doesn’t get a say about one grain of sand in Hong Kong until 2047.
The whole problem goes back to China’s inability to not meddle. A Beijing-managed group based in Shenzhen has been carefully researching and observing the developments in Hong Kong so that Beijing can know how to properly respond—whatever that’s supposed to mean. Make no mistake, they aren’t trying to understand how to govern a free people or understand the reasonable requests of a free and self-motivated economy. They aren’t trying to learn whatever wisdom might have made the West so rich and powerful in the first place. No, Beijing is on a mission to Sinicize Hong Kong out of being Hong Kong.
The current task is to figure out how to “disappear” 2 million Hong Kongers without the world noticing. Hong Kong’s police under-reported the 2 million turnout; they’ll probably under-report the number of “disappeared” people as well, and they need research to make it sound convincing. If the protests had happened in Xinjiang, Beijing wouldn’t need to do such research because the world wouldn’t be watching because making 2 million people disappear in Xinjiang was never a problem in the past. And, that’s what Hong Kongers rightly fear.
Beijing’s research narrative presumes that Hong Kongers only fear being “Xinjianged” because some phantom, invisible Western influence influenced them. They have no proof of this, but that’s Beijing’s presumption. If there’s a problem, it must be America’s fault. So, Beijing’s approach is to sneak around and spy from the shadows until this phantom “influence monster” from the evil West shows its face. That’s Beijing’s plan to solve the Hong Kong problem.
Now, there’s constitutional discussion about where and how Hong Kong’s “Basic Law” allows military intervention from China, namely if Hong Kong’s government asks. But, the whole discussion misses the whole point—that Hong Kong’s Basic Law is based on the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 of non-interference from Beijing. Beijing already interfered by not allowing self-governance in Hong Kong as promised. Not letting Carry Lam resign is yet another violation of that promise and premise. So, technically, the law beneath the Basic Law has already been dissolved. And, Beijing only incriminates itself further by claiming that promises made in the past don’t need to be kept because they are in the past.
Pay attention because, while Taiwan is a linchpin that will bring America into war with China, Hong Kong is the linchpin that will bring the UK and Europe along with it.
