Archive for the ‘Uncomfortable Truths’ Category

Foreign follies

Posted: March 23, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: ,

By Christopher Harper

Joe Biden’s foreign policy is shaping up as a real mess.

China, the West’s most powerful adversary, obviously sees weakness in the Biden administration. China’s director of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, Yang Jiechi, noted what he called the superiority of “Chinese-style democracy” and listed “America’s sins.” The latter included a reference to Black Lives Matter, human-rights problems, and that the U.S. “has exercised long-arm jurisdiction and suppression and overstretched the national security through the use of force or financial hegemony.”

Yang added: “We believe that it is important for the United States to change its own image and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world. Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.”

Instead of giving Yang the verbal back of his hand, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken seemed like a kid who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Blinken responded that the U.S. “acknowledges our imperfections, acknowledges that we’re not perfect, we make mistakes, we have reversals, we take steps back.” But then the United States makes progress again.

Round One to the Chinese.

Although I realize Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t a nice guy, it seems pretty silly for Biden to call him “a killer” and expect the two to conduct a way to conduct business and at least some diplomatic niceties.

Responding to the comments, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that “these are very bad statements by the president of the United States. He definitely does not want to improve relations with us, and we will continue to proceed from this,” Peskov said.

Vlad the Bad offered Joe a chance to calm down in a meeting sometime soon.

Round Two to the Russians.

But there’s more. The Biden team has managed to anger Saudi Arabia by temporarily halting the sale of weapons to the kingdom, mainly because of its role in the death of a Saudi journalist and the ongoing war in South Yemen. Let’s face it: Saudi Arabia has been a key ally in the Middle East, particularly in halting Iranian moves in the region.

At least Biden finally got around to speaking with Israeli leaders. In a telephone call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden reaffirmed the relationship with the Jewish state.

The two leaders were described as speaking for about an hour and having a “very warm and friendly” call, touching on their personal ties and saying they’d work together to “continue strengthening the steadfast alliance” between the two countries, according to the Israeli reports.

Biden also said he hoped to strengthen the partnership, including on “defense cooperation,” according to the White House. The president said it was important for the two nations to work together on “regional security issues” such as Iran.

Nevertheless, one out of four isn’t particularly good when it comes to such critical elements of U.S. foreign policy.

Cryptocurrency for conservatives

Posted: March 20, 2021 by ng36b in blogs, Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: , , ,
Cryptocurrency and their symbol, from coinmama

Boycotts and deplatforming seem to be all the rage in 2021. Won’t stand for the National Anthem? People will vote with their remote controls and watch something else. Don’t like someone’s opinion? Easy, just demonetize their videos, like what YouTube is doing to PragerU right now. It’s easy to sit back and watch this as a passive observer when you don’t really care about ESPN or make YouTube videos.

But when your bank cancels your account, or you can’t use a credit card, it makes that passive stance no longer tenable. You might not care about ESPN, but not being able to purchase gasoline with a credit card becomes a regular nightmare. Worse still, what if no major bank will carry your money? Almost all employers pay employees electronically. What would you do?

If that sounds far fetched, its not. Bank accounts associated with conservative groups like the NRA have been under pressure to get canceled. Mastercard and Visa, the biggest names in credit cards, stopped donations to the David Horowitz Freedom Center (although they eventually restored it). Attacking financials hits home for everyone, because you can’t boycott banks, and that makes them a juicy target for radical liberals wanting to hurt conservatives.

While we should all be standing up and fighting these efforts, we should also protect ourselves. If you own a business that risks cancellation, you should be accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment. Cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, is a disaggregated ledger system where individual nodes on a network verify accurate transactions, and pay for that with a coin. If it sounds confusing, it is, however, so is trying to understand how banks process your money electronically. A good Bitcoin primer is this video from 99 BitCoins:

More importantly, Bitcoin and other blockchain cryptocurrencies have now been around for a while. Most of the bugs are worked out, and major companies are accepting them as payment. Tesla is the most notable, but add AT&T and even Burger King (only in Venezuela) to that list. Its growing and its not going away.

For conservatives, cryptocurrency offers the ability to pay people in a peer-to-peer mode that nobody can cancel. No government can freeze your account. No financial institution can be bullied into canceling you. Even better, the money transfers between crypto wallets (think of them nominally as the account that holds your cryptocurrency) only lists account numbers. This makes it incredibly difficult to track down or dox people that are frequenting a business or donating to conservative candidates.

Speaking of donating, since we’ve seen a fair amount of doxxing of people who donate to PACs, Political Action Committees can accept cryptocurrency, and its happening more frequently. Conservatives that think they shouldn’t get hassled about legal donations should consider telling their candidates to take cryptocurrency. Most PACs right now immediately cash the cryptocurrency into US Dollars and report it, which is fine, and it still maintains a decent level of anonymity for the donor.

Now is the time to get started. I recommend all conservatives learn about cryptocurrency, get a cryptocurrency wallet, and purchase some common cryptocurrency (Bitcoin and Ethereum are good candidates due to their popularity). For individuals, you should get an account that allows easy bank transfers, such as Coinbase, which doesn’t charge for ACH transfers. Even better, Coinbase has a series of short videos that teach you about different cryptocurrency and pay you in small amount of crypto to help you get started. If you use this link, it also helps me out.

For businesses, Coinbase offers a commerce site, https://commerce.coinbase.com/. The site generates a separate commerce wallet for common cryptocurrency and makes transferring to your commercial bank account easy. Even better, if your bank tries to cancel you, you can hold your money in cryptocurrency until you setup at a different bank.

Cryptocurrency is going to be the conservative answer to financial cancel culture. Now is the time to start, so that when the times get bad, you’re one step ahead of the liberal juggernaut.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

China fails faster than the US Navy in shipbuilding

Posted: March 13, 2021 by ng36b in Uncomfortable Truths, war
Tags: , , , ,
Image courtesy of USNI

In the 1950s and 1960s, the term “Made in Japan” was a way of pointing out the poor quality of items, particularly vehicles, coming from Japan. Recovering from World War 2, Japanese manufacturing was just getting back on its feet, while America had enjoyed not being bombed or nuked into submission. But the Japanese were pretty industrious, and while American cars continued to decline in quality, particularly in gas mileage, Japanese vehicles slowly improved. All that was needed was a spark, and when the oil crisis happened in 1973, imports of the more fuel efficient Japanese cars soared. “Made in Japan” no longer implied poor quality.

“Made in China” is going through the same throes now. The picture above is the LUYANG III destroyer. If it looks uncannily like a US Destroyer, you’re not wrong, and capability-wise, its pretty close in many respects. The PLA Navy is on pace to crank out 2-3 of these every year. That alone is scary, but more importantly, the LUYANG III represents a Chinese 3 step building plan that involved failing fast, then making a big investment.

China didn’t have the most robust ship building, and its first LUYANG model, the Type 052B, was more of a test platform. They built two of these and learned a LOT about shipbuilding in the process. The Type 052B isn’t very capable in a big fight, but the point was to build something and be OK at failing a lot.

The next failed step was the Type 052C. Here China added extensive air search capabilities and used only Chinese systems. They also made these at different shipyards, exposing them to the issues created when you build ships in an enterprise. It’s not a bad ship, but again, was built to teach the Chinese how to build warships.

Enter the Type 052D, the LUYANG III. Extremely capable warship. Now that China has the right design, its cranking these out quickly. There are 13 in service and 11 in construction now. To put this in perspective, in 2019 the US Navy commissioned 2 new destroyers, and 8 total ships, one of which was an aircraft carrier.

Speaking of aircraft carriers, China is working on carrier #4 now. You’ll see the same “fail fast” pattern here as well. First carrier was a Ukrainian purchase. It sucks, but it was mostly designed to teach China how to operate with a carrier. The second carrier was China’s first Russian-knock off, the Shandong, and it taught the Chinese how to build something pretty large. The third carrier, with an estimated 85K tonnage, will likely be completely Chinese design and help iron out bugs in the design process. Talks about carrier number 4 being nuclear are already happening. I’m guessing that when China begins carrier #5, it will have a design it likes and will crank out 10 of them in a row.

In the meantime, we can’t get a US shipyard to crank out a warship on-time or on-budget, and we’re cutting the shipbuilding budget anyway. We have more experience than the Chinese Navy, but that gap is closing as the Chinese deploy around the world, including near constant deployments to the Middle East and Europe.

Give it five years, and China’s Navy will have the numbers and equipment to be better than the US Navy in nearly any combat situation. That should scare us.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

A royal mess

Posted: March 9, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncategorized, Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: ,

By Christopher Harper

I’ve never really understood the American fascination with the British royal family.

For centuries, the monarchy has been a dysfunctional band of malcontents who battled over religion and turf. Henry VIII and George III were bona fide madmen. Princess Margaret and Lady Diana didn’t get along with the other royals. Prince Charles always struck me as a dopey mope.

So why did 17 million Americans watch an interview by Oprah Winfrey with Prince Harry and Princess Megan?

I don’t know. Maybe prurient interest?

A quick survey of my friends on Facebook found no one would admit to watching the two-hour attack on the royal family.

One British friend, a former BBC reporter, disagreed. “It’s quite important, he wrote. “Just think about it. It’s about institutions, race, personal freedoms, mass idiocy, and it’s told through a story of two young people who went against the grain. Yes, they’re rich. But does that make The Grapes of Wrath better or less significant than The Great Gatsby?”

It’s not a bad defense for watching the program. Since there’s little I haven’t watched on Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix during the pandemic, my standards are pretty low, but I still wouldn’t spend two hours on Harry, Meghan, and Oprah.

Then there’s the money. It’s reported that someone—probably Oprah’s production company—paid between $7 million and $9 million for the interview. There was a time that paying for news was an ethical breach. I guess the interview may not be technically news, but still.

It’s unclear who got the money. Everyone swears that Harry and Meghan didn’t get a dime. Since they face being cut off from the royal treasury, particularly after the interview, I find the disclaimer hard to believe.

Since the program aired on CBS, how much did the one-time “Tiffany Network” plop down?

I never thought Oprah was a particularly good interviewer. I worked with the best: Barbara Walters.

It seems that Oprah didn’t press the royal couple on what I would consider the most crucial question: What did they expect to happen after they got married?

In 1936, King Edward VIII took over the reign of England. However, he abdicated his throne to marry the love of his life, Wallis Simpson, an American and two-time divorcee. In an interview many years later with the BBC, Edward provides a path Harry and Meghan should take. See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2021/03/07/meghan-can-learn-mrs-simpsons-tell-all-tv-interview/

At the end of the interview, the reporter asked the duke if he had any regrets about not having remained king. “No,” he said. “I would have liked to have, but I was going to do it under my conditions. So I do not have any regrets. But I do take a great interest in my country – my country which is Britain – your land and mine. I wish it well.”

Older Entries
Newer Entries