America is on the quiet this week. It’s the deep calm before the storm. People are tired. Unsatisfied opponents of Conservatism are getting wary from victory deferred after victory deferred. Now, they are looking to another failed candidate to put their hope in, Sanders.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. The invented Mueller Russianewsgategate scandal scandal is coming to its grand fizzle-and-pop of an ending. The Left is self-destructing with its old playbook tactic. When melodrama isn’t enough to get what they want, they respond with more melodrama.
Kirstjen Nielsen is finally gone. Since the “New York Times Essay”, the public grew suspicious of insiders trying to sabotage the Trump administration. In the Pacific Daily Times Symphony list of suspects, she was right there at the top with John Kelly. (See Encore articles from September 10, November 19, and December 10 of 2018.) Firing both discretely and far apart was among the best ways to handle saboteurs. Were they? Only Trump knows for sure, and that’s the way it should stay.
China is being overwhelmed—Huawei to the west, British probes to the south, Kim to the north, but the prospect of trade to the east. The weakness is in the Chinese-cultural paradigm of negotiation. Chinese culture wants to sign a contract first, then negotiate the terms after. That’s a polite way of explaining “psychopathic negotiation”.
China labels Hong Kong as an “internal”, national security matter. It’s not; it’s a “joint” matter. According to the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, China can’t govern Hong Kong as its own until 2047—a mandate for Hong Kong being under Beijing’s leadership. By telling Britain to “face reality”, London will see the reality as Beijing reneging on the deal. It’s not that China wants to be malicious, but that China doesn’t understand what a promise really entails.
That could be why the Chinese offer such sweeping concessions to get better trade with America. They might not understand that promises about those concessions will actually have to be kept. But, there’s more that sails over Beijing’s brightest heads.
America shows no indication of backing down on Taiwan. By cozying up on trade, Beijing probably hopes America will receive an indirect message about Taiwan. But, if Taiwan isn’t discussed, then it’s not part of the trade agreement—or any agreement with the US. Beijing, probably laden with more wishful thinking than savvy, won’t understand. They just won’t understand.
That’s the Korean problem to the north. Trump knew exactly what he was doing by telling Kim exactly what “de-nuking” looked like. They had talked before. Kim had taken a three day journey to talk again. Now Kim knows reality: a free economy prospers, North with nukes has neither in the end. That won’t go over well with a culture more prideful than the Chinese. Trump knows this.
Now, Kim is a loose canon to China’s north and the only thing Trump did was unleash the obvious. We’ll see how long it takes for China to understand, if ever.
The message from the EU is clear: “Join us so if you leave we can make you suffer for it.” Now, Italy cozies up to China?
Boeing tried to mount too big an engine on too small a plane because the engine used less fuel. This changed the plane’s aerodynamic personality; software was their solution. But, with software come bugs. So, Boeing had a warning light option if the software got too buggy. Ethiopian and Lion Air chose not to spend the $80k extra for the warning light. That cost Boeing about $40B in stock value. Now, we see that the FAA had turned a half-blind eye.
But, many other warnings have been ignored. America is polarizing. The only things deeper than the deep pockets of the US Treasury are the Left’s demands for spending. Senate Democrats silently watched the “Green New Deal” go down in flames. Cities may follow. When the going gets tough, the Right gets working while the Left gets burning hot mad.
Immigration is broken, not just in America, but everywhere. We need a proper on-ramp for good foreigners to enter any country. But, vitriol doesn’t make reforms. There is a difference between vitriol and a “tantrump”. Trump has achieved far more in two years than Obama did in eight. Still the Left stays vitriolic. That’s their only strategy, it seems.
The Left doesn’t want the Right to survive. The Right wants everyone to have the room to work and thrive. Neither will back down.
It’s not enough that contraceptives be covered in the government-mandated plan; the nuns must conform. It’s not enough you be sensitive to the effect of your words and language; you must be punished for saying or thinking the wrong thing. It’s not enough that gay marriage is legal; you must be forced to bake the cake. It won’t do that attention be paid to scientific arguments on the environment; America must upend itself with green new deals or be judged not to care about children.
Yes, America is polarizing more than ever before. Who wins? We’ll see.
Now, China has become the dark example of why not to be a Democrat in America. This is a new low. As much as being compared to China makes Democrats appear bad, it makes China appear all the worse because it paints China as the archetype of “how not to be”. American sentiment against China grows evermore glum.
No country is above democratic politics. Though Communist, China is still controlled by democracy. If the American public doesn’t like China, they will overthrow China in their own way. But, that’s a concept Beijing is incapable of adapting to because they have no such accountability to their own people at home.
China thinks its “rise to power” is about China being able to make decisions on its own. America thinks that anyone’s rise to power is about growing up and acting like an adult. As long as China keeps saying things like, “China can do what we want, America can’t tell us what to do,” it keeps getting evermore clear whether China is an adult yet.
Taiwan isn’t backing down. The government there continues to press for WHO participation. A Taiwanese airline now has flights to the island of Palau—which is important because it is a good thing that didn’t happen under Beijing control. A Taiwanese Mayor of Kaohsiung, Han, of the pro-unification-leaning political KMT-Nationalist party visited the Beijing office in Hong Kong—raising questions about honesty and motive in Taiwan’s central government.
His party keeps threatening to make laws to help Taiwan be re-unified under Beijing. That party recently won a mid-term at local governments. Perhaps they want to loose the next national election just as quickly.
Now, the US is in serious talks about establishing a strong military presence on Taiwan’s Taiping Island, somewhere between Taiwan’s huge, main island and China’s man-made islets at Mischief Reef. That would lead to a provocation that no trade agreement could withstand.
American immigrants fleeing communism are tending to lean right, according to reports. Memories of the dark regimes they escape come flooding back as they watch Democratic talking points. This wasn’t how the Democratic minds planned things to play out.
But, that’s how things play out in a witch hunt. A concluded investigation with no indictment is, by definition, an exoneration. While an opinion may certainly, surely have “middle ground”, prosecution does not—a person is either prosecuted or not prosecuted. Trump is not being prosecuted. Being “not exonerated” is a matter of opinion. Mueller does not write the opinion of the voters anymore than the voters write the report for Mueller.
If Democrats push the Mueller report as a basis to prosecute or even impeach Trump, then they set a precedent to prosecute Hillary. The Democrats lost, if nothing else roughly $20 million dollars (directly and indirectly reported) over two years, but neither indited Trump nor does it look like they will be able to impeach him, given public opinion. Politically, the non-indictment has already exonerated him, regardless of the non-indicting report’s opinion to the contrary.
Rod Rosenstein’s slow exit can easily be explained by his new boss. Since William Barr took over the absent Attorney General’s desk just one moth ago, he needed a veteran so he could catch up to speed. The concern that Rosenstein stayed in office too long after he was supposed to leave could also be applied to the Mueller investigation that should have been over much more quickly. Two endless endings that lack direction should be expected to end together.
The Federal Reserve needs reforming. According to Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman who holds a position appointed by the president, the president had no impact on the Fed’s recent decisions. Especially with so much talk of “accountability” orbiting squanderous theatrics like in the Mueller solar system, entities that lack accountability need it.
Drama and theatrics! The US might be in a position to enforce the Magnitsky Act against China. Now, like Taiwan before, the US is taking the pot shots. It compares to Tony Stark’s Iron Man tossing rocks at a tank to provoke the tank before obliterating the tank.
Talk of talks about trade with China while focusing on more military money for what Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan calls “China, China, China”—that’s not an effort to make peace with a country that wants it, but an effort to irritate a not-so-closet adversary into justifying a retaliatory victory. China will see the US as two-faced, never figuring out that the US is intentionally getting under Beijing’s skin because the Chinese don’t know how easily irritable their view of themselves makes them.
Then, there’s Korea. In a retelling from The Godfather III, we might say that Kim wouldn’t do this without backing. By rumbling about nuking up again, Kim is flexing muscles that shouldn’t be flexed—but only would be flexed if someone, say like Xi Jinping, were whispering support in his ear. More is going on than even Trump may be revealing, even if Kim’s rumblings are all for show. If tensions rise between the US and Northern Korea, China would be the likely backstage culprit. That would mean that tension in the Koreas would justify US action against China—yet another tank rock to toss.
Then, we have “melo-theatrics” worse than “damn lies”: statistics.
If Trump’s poll numbers were to suddenly plummet, nothing would bring them back like a victory against evermore unpopular China—now at 41% in America. That makes Trump, 47% as of Tuesday, more popular than China. If House Democrats were to take action against Trump, that might encourage China that he would not be able to sustain action against China—when actually a victorious action against China would bring up his popularity to make him politically immune to House Democrats. The freedom and opinion -driven dynamics of American politics eludes Chinese strategists, another front on which Beijing is likely to miscalculate.
If Trump’s popularity were to slip just before a conflict with China, it could have been intentional—as a means to provoke China into thinking that China is stronger against the US than it is. But, China will never figure it out, like the cat chasing the laser pen’s dot—they never figure it out.
