China has out-shined. In the game of power, that’s an execution wish. With an aging population, an irritated neighborhood, a loudly whining generation of kids in Hong Kong drawing media attention, and the taste of freedom provided by trade with the outside world, China’s Communist party is trouble where the West is concerned.
China’s ruling party has not courted support from any territory either under its control or that it aspires to control. Some old school idealists in the retiring generation will support old empire methods, but they aren’t the muscle of the future. The gray-head Communists who dye their hair black don’t understand what a mess adult children can make when someone takes away their toys because that never happened in China before. Allowing their people to do business with the West injected those Western ideals and China can’t go back.
Now, with the massive assertions of power in China, those assertions are about to get stronger. Watch for greater power grabs by the Communist Party. But, even with the power grabs of recent weeks, the rest of the world—including Asia and the West—is on high alert. Russia’s only interest in China is to disrupt the rest of the West, not to have a new rival that changes as fast as Beijing does, in its own back yard of all places. These tariffs from the US and Trump signing a pro-military and otherwise Liberal omnibus spending bill from Congress indicate American resolve to halt China in its tracks—at least the Communists.
As for the ongoing “freedom of navigation” sail-bys in the poetically appropriately named Mischief Reef, Britain is also on board, as it were. The US just did another this week with the USS Mustin. China reacted in predictable anger as if on cue.
So, the assault against China’s Communism has begun. The West think they can win by using rage to control the “bull in the China shop”, as the saying goes. All it would take is one, small Western ship being disrupted by the Chinese and the fury of America’s democracy would stand up—with the greatest military budget in history already approved for the next two years.
David Hogg is right, but the Hollywood Left is trying to exploit him. Baby Boomers have failed to manage their Democracy, along with their kids, and however that generational chain works its way into the students currently in school. Clear backpacks are, best put, “stupid”. Showing girls’ tampons in the hallway and letting all students spy in each other’s bags doesn’t stop a gunman from hurting people. But, that comes from common sense, not the 1st Amendment.
The 2nd Amendment is David Hogg’s best friend. The best way to restrict guns in America is to deny them to everyone who has not completed the Constitutional mandate for all-citizen militia training. Hogg doesn’t care about scrapping it nor about Left or Right politics, though the Left capitalizes on him and his friends. That, too, could backfire.
In all this, David Hogg and his classmates are doing the country a great and wonderful favor: They are getting involved in politics as they should be. One does not need to be a Constitutional expert, we just need to be involved, even with much yet to learn. Bravo, David! Had high school students been so concerned 20 years ago we would not have the problems we do today.
But, we can’t say the same for the Leftist “snatch the guns” reactors. They don’t see the real issue, Trump does: China.
With an irresponsibly depleted military, the last remaining reason China has not invaded the United States is all the guns at large throughout the country. The 2nd Amendment’s militia training of all citizens would solve our gun violence problem, but it’s still not satisfactory for national defense. We need a stronger military.
This terrible omnibus budget that Congress sent to Trump makes a mockery of Congress, not Trump. Trump signed it because of its military budget that would make Reagan proud. It’s the largest military budget in US history.
Signing the budget will not hurt Trump’s changes of re-election. There will be unpopularity for a while, but this showed his “presidential sensibility” and he will have plenty of time to turn this against the dissenters in Congress with them leaving for the 2018 campaign trail. Trump’s base will understand him. International threats from a decade of military neglect is the bigger problem we face. Trumpists will blame Congress and many of those laughing at Trump now could find themselves fired in November.
Symphony has long said that mid terms on new presidents often flop as they likely will in 2018. But, mid-term losses will bring out the Conservative vote in 2020 and more voter turnout altogether.
In the economy, Facebook is in trouble, but it will survive better than the media would have us think. It’s a good time to buy Facebook stock since it’s low—that is with the “buy low, sell high” principle. The company was also founded and headed by a kid with little experience. Manipulating news feeds, suspending accounts, and not planning better for sneaky operations like Cambridge Analytica—they were bound for “brat” troubles. But, Facebook is too important for society to let it slide. The bigger debate yet to come will be over AI research “big” money that will want terabytes of user data to make an AI seem like it has a soul, as part of the AI cult that thinks Star Trek the Motion Picture is reality. A takeover by the public under a combination of stock market status and public utility laws will be the miraculous solution we will be told to think was the brilliant answer no one else thought of.
In another sector of society and politics, manufacturing is coming back to America. This will humble and strengthen the United States as it should. The US will no longer be a “service economy” where all the other [implied-to-be] “lesser” nations do the manufacturing and Americans merely oversee work that is “beneath” them. By having an equal playing field, Americans will come down off their pedestal and start doing hard, skilled labor just like every other nation needs to do. The two younger hard working generations are returning not only to political involvement, but also entrepreneurship and good, old fashioned hard work.
Unlike much of the Western press, Pacific Daily Times does not side with governments, political parties, or socio-economic ideologies. The Times only sides with history, that by learning from history much of the future is foreseeable. Foreseeability, based on history, is the only bias at Pacific Daily Times.
Foreseeability is not preference, hopes, or will—good or ill—toward what will happen, only that the future can, to the extent history repeats, be reasonably anticipated. Too many news outlets seem incapable of understanding that predicting outcomes, within reason, is entirely different from hoping for outcomes. Predicting and hoping are nothing alike. Pacific Daily Times is apathetic and indifferent—uncaring and cold-hearted—for how the future unfolds, except that current events only surprise neglectful history students.
Right now, foreseeability in Asia—not what is hoped-for in Asia—points to the waring parties of China. The KMT-Nationalist party and the Chinese Communist Party seem to have a symbiotic relationship. Their fates seem tied like the villain and hero of some comic series, if the hero kills the villain then both die and vice versa. The KMT-Nationalist party imploded on its home field in Taiwan. It was so distracted with “reunification” with China that it neglected the priorities that kept its power. As a result, Taiwan is run by the de facto pro-independence Democratic People’s Party. The KMT failed to help its CCP friends across the Taiwan Strait because it was overly obsessed with that friendship.
Now, it seems that the CCP is headed in the same direction. Without fear or favor, only calculating predictability based on the past, it seems we could be looking at the beginning of the end of the CCP. Every party that rises too high tumbles, history has executed this with zero exception and will never accept rivals. History demands that history always be the only victor by making all others history.
Since the founding of the current Chinese government in 1912, which the “Chinese year” commemorates, China has confronted its own shame, which it still confronts to this day. The founder, Sun Yat-sen, was a Christian whose Christianity compelled him to the three pillars of Chinese society: nationalism, democracy, and justice for the people. Though the largest nation, China has never been the most powerful nation. Centuries of “leader power distance” touted oppression as “peace-making” virtue. Some say it worked for China, others say it failed for China. Actually, it was the only thing that happened in China, so there is no basis of contrast to prove definably whether that Chinese power distance ethic succeeded or failed except that it brought China to 1911 where Sun defeated it. While the power distance left in the form of a government “empire”, it has neither left the ideology nor the mode of operation in Chinese culture, as repeating history proves once again this month.
Xi Jinping’s thinking remains uncertain. What motivates him? We really don’t know beyond the evidence that his thinking reflects Mao and traditional pre- Sun Yat-sen power distance. He doesn’t want shame for his country and he believes that reclaiming all land from every “old turf war” dispute will make the world think China as worthy of being respected. The rest of the world will decide its own opinion, but Chinese history has its own opinion about Xi.
Xi, as many in China, have loudly declared that they neither import nor export their politics. But, Communism is itself form Europe. Chinese people study English and gladly import Western technology and money while exporting goods to the West. But, most importantly of all, Sun Tzu’s Art of War Ch. 8, ss. 12’s “five dangerous faults” include: 3. a hasty temper provoked by insult and 4. a delicacy of honor sensitive to shame. Whenever Taiwan hints at “independence” or the US sails through UN-international waters which member China disputes, an explosion of rage and demands plume from Chinese press offices. Then we have the insatiable need for respect, the motive behind China’s desire for reunification with many lands, only one of those being Taiwan. Sun Tzu warned against these ideologies nearly a thousand years ago.
China has often misunderstood Christianity. Just as with Confucianism, there is the essential belief and then the government exploitation of it. Most “missionaries” are advancing a government-corporate hybrid, usually known as a “denomination” with an administrative and monetary structure. Jesus did not teach this. Chinese often view Christianity as a religion between God and Man while Confucianism teaches relationship between one Man and another. But, Jesus taught that God and Man is the archetypal relationship guiding the equally important practical application of the relationship between one Man and another. The emphasis on the relationship between God and Man to the exclusion of peer relationships came from European imperial governments misinterpreting the Bible and exploiting people’s ignorance of Jesus’s true teaching.
The great mystery of how the West gained such power and success without the Confucian-preferred version of an “ordered society” remains in the real Jesus. The founders of America, the Pilgrims, studied the Bible to love God as individuals—free from European government misinterpretation and control of the Bible—so they would love each other. All of this Bible study was done as individuals who loved God and had zero government control.
The mess in the West today, interfering with China along with the rest of the world, is an attempt from old oligarchs trying to reassert their power over a free, Bible-reading people. Xi Jinping is fighting against that same old oligarchy as the American people are. Corptocratic chronyism of the West is a problem everywhere. Xi Jinping is trying his best, with good will, to overcome it. But, he owes more to Sun Tzu’s Chinese wisdom and he is trying to overcome ancient evils of the West without first seeking to understand what virtues of the real Bible made the West so strong in the first place. As for whether and how it works out, history will have the last word as it always does.
General Michael Flynn has earned a purple heart. The corruption against him indicated by text messages is scandalous. The public will rally to his defense more and more.
Trump allows Mueller to continue, indicating strength not weakness. Trump is letting Mueller proverbially “hang himself”, or to be “Biblical”, build his own Haman scaffold. Lashing out at Mueller on Twitter comes from Trump’s “social nose” telling him to wait for public support so that when—not if—Trump fies Mueller, the public demands more investigations of the draining swamp, which still will not satisfy the public outcry against corruption.
By not yet taking so much action as demanded, Trump opponents will see him as moderate and his support could even increase in the 2020 election—already likely to increase since the normal mid-term losses long predicted by Symphony will only rouse Trumpists to get out the vote even more.
The Facebook scandal involving the said-to-be-dubious research group Cambridge Analytica neither indites Democrats nor Republicans since the group is likened to “mercenaries” who will work for anyone’s pay. It does raise questions about Facebook’s inside baseball, though at most Facebook’s involvement seems to have been not caring enough or not having policies prepared to handle what Cambridge Analytica was doing, but we’ll have to wait and see. Nonetheless, Facebook will end up being more regulated by Congress, something quite easily done through FTC regulations—Facebook is a company with publicly traded stock. We could see legislation imposing a kind of “fairness and privacy doctrine” on public social media companies. Facebook is becoming a de facto utility, a status clearly proven by how important it was to Cambridge Analytica.
The STOP, School Violence Act of 2018 sponsored by Orrin Hatch has due bipartisan support. It also contains provisions for training, something suggested by Symphony just after the Florida Valentine’s Day Massacre. Democrats naturally want more, but are supportive.
As talks between Kim and Trump march forward, China is resigned to the new situation at its eastern border and is focusing on other areas, specifically trade. In truth, China’s main trade opponent is not the US, but Vietnam.
Vietnam’s main edge in trade will be that it is less expensive. Vietnam is, in many ways, less developed, yet more free to be expressive. Hanoi doesn’t sanction the same censorship as Beijing does. Many hard-working Vietnamese are hungry, even desperate for income. A hard-working, uncensored, hungry, less-expensive people will be difficult for China to compete with on many fronts. This is entirely beside any point about political tension between China and Vietnam.
The meeting between Kim and Trump is less-than-satisfactorily explained. Suddenly they want to talk? Some “teamwork” consultant trying to sell a book will likely attribute it all to diplomacy, along with the preemptive speculation that Kim would give up the nukes because he got them. More is going on behind the scenes and if the true story is ever told it may not be told for ten or twenty years.
As for the Western spin about China’s constitutional changes, it is all about the party, not about Xi. The humble pig farm worker, Xi Jinping, did not rise to power by publicly trying to serve himself. He has followed Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power to a tee and will continue to do so—that means putting the party first in his public agenda.
Scott Walker is self-destructing and may not win a third term. It began in his bid for the presidency when his campaign imploded. Initially, he over-reached. He was too much good for Wisconsin too fast and he wasn’t prepared to take on the wolves. Given the sudden spotlight, he aimed for the presidency. Now, he’s talking like George HW Bush when he reneged on his “read my lips, no new taxes” speech, then said he needed to raise taxes to get along with Democrats toward the end of his first—and hence final—term. If Walker doesn’t lose, then there either aren’t any good Republican or Democratic candidates in Wisconsin or history has decided to stop delivering justice upon those who don’t learn from it.
SpaceX is proving the benefits of both public funding and privatization. Surely both Liberals and Conservatives will want the claim. The US government paved the way for space exploration, but Elon Musk made the stage-one booster return to the landing pad. The world has not seen a breakthrough of this magnitude since Lincoln regulated the first transcontinental railroad through the government while it was built by competing private companies.
Californian idealists, whether right or wrong, are distracted. If they truly believe in their ideals to stand against the Federal government, they will need to stop ballyhooing sanctuary city talking points and repeal their anti-gun laws. Right now, California’s best friend is not social media, but the Second Amendment, specifically the part about a State-regulated militia. Many claim that the National Guard is the militia, but that idea has not been fully tested and vetted and it also has many categorical questions. Calling the national guard to stand against the US military might not work, though it’s a good guess the idea has been tossed around at least one conference room in the bowls of California’s state capitol. We’ll just have to wait and see.
