THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE: NBA Chickens Out, Kisses Up To China.
Archive for 2019
October 8, 2019
October 7, 2019
AT AMAZON, save on Cleaning Tools.
POLITICO: Sanders heart attack casts cloud over his candidacy. “Bernie Sanders has been sidelined for nearly a week — after failing for almost three days to disclose that he had a heart attack. It’s unclear when the 78-year-old senator will return to the stump. His campaign has yet to divulge the severity of his heart attack. . . . Throughout the Democratic Party, however, insiders and strategists are openly questioning the effect his heart attack would have on his bid for the White House — and on the primary as a whole. Sanders’ team is also coming under fire from some journalists and Democrats for not announcing earlier that he suffered a heart attack. His aides have declined to allow reporters to interview Sanders’ doctors.”
WORST ISLAMOPHOBIC ADMINISTRATION EVER: U.S. Adds Chinese Firms to Blacklist, Citing Repression of Muslim Minorities.
The U.S. added 28 Chinese entities to an export blacklist Monday, citing their role in Beijing’s repression of Muslim minorities in northwest China, just days before high-level trade talks are set to resume in Washington.
The action, which the U.S. said wasn’t related to trade talks, was nonetheless likely to disturb Chinese officials already incensed over what Beijing sees as U.S. support for an increasingly disruptive pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
“I think the Chinese are probably going to see a connection, even if the administration says there isn’t one,” said Matthew Goodman, senior adviser for Asian economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “It’s going to complicate the discussions this week…the timing is going to be awkward for the Chinese.”
Targets of the action include video-surveillance and facial-recognition giants Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, Megvii Technology Inc. and SenseTime Group Ltd. The decision by the Commerce Department to add the firms to its “entity list” alongside telecommunications giant Huawei TechnologiesCo.—which was added in May—means suppliers will be barred from providing technology that originates in the U.S. to the Chinese firms without a license.
The newly identified entities “have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups” in northwest China’s Xinjiang region, the Commerce Department said.
A spokesman said the move was unrelated to trade negotiations.
Hmm.
HMM: IG could not explain 18-day window between Ukraine call and whistleblower complaint. I have a theory. . . .
TWO TAKES ON THE SYRIA DECISION THAT DISAGREE WITH THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: (1) Security Studies Group: The Syria Decision.
As we warned at the time, the American position was much more exposed and much less tenable than was commonly understood. . . .
Just as allowing Iran to run wild hurts China much more than it hurts the United States, China is harmed by our allowing the Turks to provoke an insurgency that will bedevil the stability of the very region where China intends its massive investments. The wars that China’s own allies are starting are going to be the biggest tax on China’s growing power and influence, which means it will become China’s problem — and not America’s — to stop those wars. That means that China and Turkey, and not America, will end up paying the cost of Middle Eastern security. The danger they face is that they will overextend themselves, and provoke fights they cannot walk away from in the process. It may be a bigger burden than Erdogan or Xi imagine that they are taking on here.
It is unlikely that President Trump thinks so strategically or so ruthlessly. More likely he is simply convinced that these wars drain American blood and treasure in an unacceptable way, and he just intends to stop doing it whatever it costs.
(2) Trump’s Syria withdrawal bravely puts America First, the establishment last. “His decision will stop risking American lives and wasting taxpayer dollars on policing Middle East politics. This is long overdue, seeing as our security goals in Syria have already been accomplished. To recap, the U.S. military first intervened in the Syrian conflict in 2014. Our goal was to destroy the Islamic State Caliphate, as the terrorist group had built up territorial control of much of the conflict-ridden region. Mission accomplished.”
Well, I’m fine on reducing our commitments to the region. Trump’s diplomatic approach has the Arab world allied with Israel, and Saudi Arabia liberalizing internally. And thanks to fracking, the mideast isn’t that important to us anymore. On the other hand, the Kurds are good people, and I don’t like leaving them hanging, which is what this looks like to me. On that point, I’m in general agreement with Tom Rogan: “We relied upon the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and other Kurdish militias in order to substantially degrade ISIS. Yes, Western special operations played a crucial role in this effort. But the Kurds took the brunt of the casualties. And the Kurds kept fighting alongside us even after their northern heartlands had been retaken. Their tenacious courage saved American lives by denying ISIS the space and time to plot attacks against Western homelands.”
UPDATE: Two more: Walter Russell Mead: Trump’s Jacksonian Syria Withdrawal.
Explaining his decision to pull U.S. troops away from the Turkish-Syrian border at the cost of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, and open the way for Turkish forces to create what Ankara calls a “safety zone,” President Trump tweeted early Monday that “it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.” . . .
Mr. Trump isn’t the first U.S. president to try to hold America back from a Middle East conflict. President Obama made a similar, and similarly hasty, decision in 2013 when he chose not to respond to Syria’s violation of his chemical weapons “red line” with a military strike. Many of the same people criticizing Mr. Trump today criticized Mr. Obama then, and the subsequent course of the Syrian war underlined both the humanitarian and the strategic case against Mr. Obama’s decision. Mr. Trump’s Syria decision may also prove to be a mistake, but it should give the establishment pause that two presidents as different as Messrs. Obama and Trump reached similar conclusions about the political risks in the Middle East.
The U.S. may be the most powerful actor in the region, but it can’t resolve the economic and social conflicts that destabilize the Middle East. As long as this is the case, those who want presidents to commit to long-term military engagements, however limited and however advantageous, must expect a skeptical hearing in the Oval Office.
Plus: Syria Could Be Turkey’s Vietnam. “Erdoğan may talk about a terror threat emanating from northern Syria, but he has yet to prove that one exists. Quite the contrary: Not only were Syrian Kurds the most effective indigenous fighting force against the Islamic State, there is also overwhelming evidence that Turkey cooperated, profited from, and at times coordinated with Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliates and the Islamic State. . . . Erdoğan may be cocky, but he could be falling into a trap. Turkey’s drones may give it a qualitative military edge in mountains and rural regions but may be of substantially less utility in the northern Syrian cities if limiting collateral damage is any concerns. The Kurds have extensive experience fighting on the ground. Meanwhile, recent political purges of the Turkish military make the Turkish Army a shell of its former self. With Kurdish insurgents voluntarily going into Syria at Turkey’s request as part of the previous peace agreement, Syrian Kurds simply have no place to go. A century ago, Turkish forces slaughtered the Armenians by marching them into the desert to their deaths; the Kurds refuse to be the sequel. Turkish invasion and ethnic cleansing—Turkey’s stated purpose is to settle a couple million Arabs in the region—will spark insurgency in northeastern Syria and across Turkey.”
Things have changed in the mideast, but when your decisions about Syria are compared to Obama’s, it’s not a good sign.
Plus, it’s a NATO thing.
I am speaking, of course, of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is, increasingly, Turkey’s effective dictator. But it’s crucial to emphasize that these are Nato forces. This not only means they are supplied with state-of-the-art weaponry; it also means those weapons are being maintained by other Nato members.
Fighter jets, helicopter gunships, even Turkey’s German-supplied Panzer forces – they all degrade extremely quickly under combat conditions. The people who continually inspect, maintain, repair, replace, and provide them with spare parts tend to be contractors working for American, British, German or Italian firms. Their presence is critical because the Turkish military advantage over Northern Syria’s “People’s Defense Forces” (YPG) and “Women’s Defense Forces” (YPJ), those defenders of Kobane that Turkey has pledged to destroy, is entirely dependent on them.
That’s because, aside from its technological advantage, the Turkish army is a mess. Most of its best officers and even pilots have been in prison since the failed coup attempt in 2016, and it’s now being run by commanders chosen by political loyalty instead of competence. Rojava’s defenders, in contrast, are seasoned veterans.
SHAME ON GEORGETOWN LAW: Acting Homeland Security Secretary shouted down by protesters at Georgetown Law.
THE CZECHS SHOW MORE BACKBONE THAN THE NBA: Prague and Beijing to end sister-city relations over Taiwan and ‘One China’ policy.
OPEN THREAD: Happy Monday!
DANIEL GREENFIELD: Impeachment is Built on a Trap That Obama Created for Romney.
PPD19 was issued on October 10, 2012.
The presidential debates were underway and the election was up in the air. In the weeks before PPD19, Mitt Romney had begun to lead in a number of polls. It is striking that PPD19 came out during the exact same period that Romney was leading in as many polls as he ever would in that election.
On October 9, the day before PPD19, even a DailyKos/SEIU poll showed Romney in the lead. After Obama’s disastrous debate performance, his people had to be worried about the possibility of defeat.
The real purpose of PPD19 was to aid Obama loyalists is undermining a Romney administration.
The 2012 election was closer than most people remember. A little more effort by Romney and he’d have been president.
SO HELEN’S TRYING OUT A STANDING DESK AND WE GOT THIS ONE. Assembly was super-easy and straightforward — why did it take so long for people to start sorting and labeling the parts by assembly step? — and it’s surprisingly sturdy and nice.
WELL-OFF WHITE PEOPLE SEEM PRONE TO MASS HYSTERIA THESE DAYS: The madness of Extinction Rebellion: This is an upper-middle-class death cult and we should ridicule it out of existence.
AT AMAZON, Fall Deals in Grills and Outdoor Cooking.
[THUNBERG SCOLD VOICE]HOW DARE YOU![/THUNBERG]: Duke Energy Says Their Solar Power Program Is Increasing NOx Pollution.
I BLAME HIS INFLAMMATORY RHETORIC — OH, WAIT: Violent Crime Drops, Trump Gets No Credit.
The FBI’s good news about crime got very little publicity, and I can’t find a single publication that gave the Trump administration any credit for the trend. Why should they, you might ask, since homicide and other violent crimes have been declining since the 1990s?
Because that decline was interrupted by a two-year upward spike in 2015 and 2016, the last two years of the Obama administration. The homicide rate then fell in 2017, and more steeply in 2018. Last December, as I noted here, the New York Times reported that the murder rate for 2018 was “on track for a big drop.” It gave us this useful chart, with the 2018 rate projected (the actual rate came in slightly lower). . . .
I conservatively estimated that the 2015-2016 increase in homicides under Obama cost more than 5,000 lives (most of them black). Conversely, thousands of lives are now being saved, as the homicide rate declines. You might consider this newsworthy, but our newspapers don’t. Anything that reflects negatively on the Obama administration or positively on the Trump administration–this is a twofer–is best left unmentioned. . . .
The Times doesn’t speculate about what might have caused a “broad shift in the pattern,” or why that threatened “broad shift” was reversed when Donald Trump took office. The reader is left to ponder the mystery of a “broad shift in the pattern” that coincided with the Obama administration’s campaign against law enforcement.
Weird. Well, not really.
DUMB “ETHICAL” RULES: ‘Heartbreaking and ridiculous,’ says Ontario dental hygienist who lost licence for treating wife.
I’ve warned about this.
FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN BEIJING, CHINA: The Top Ten times coaches and players got political before the NBA kowtowed to communist China.
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Media and Climate Hoaxers (But I Repeat Myself) Report That Literally Everywhere on Earth is Warming at Twice the Rate of the Rest of the Earth.
(Classical reference in headline.)
CHINA BANNED SOUTH PARK AFTER THE SHOW MADE FUN OF CHINESE CENSORSHIP:
In a case of life imitating art imitating life, the Chinese government has purged all references to South Park from the country’s highly restricted internet—following an episode of the show that criticized Chinese censorship.
“Band in China,” the second episode of the show’s 23rd season, satirizes China’s heavy-handed crackdowns on free expression. The kids attempt to make a biopic about their new rock band, only to discover that they need to sanitize the plot to appease the Chinese government. Meanwhile, Randy Marsh gets sent to a Chinese prison, where he meets Winnie the Pooh—a reference to China’s odd attempts to clamp down on the beloved bear for its supposedly resemblance Chinese President Xi Jinping. The episode also castigates Disney for making artistic concessions in order to remain in Chinese markets. “You gotta lower your ideals of freedom if you want to suck on the warm teat of China,” one character says.
Unsurprisingly, China has not responded favorably.
Also unsurprisingly, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park’s creators, had lots of fun mocking the NBA’s groveling apology to China’s totalitarian rulers:
DOES THIS EVEN RISE TO THE LEVEL OF “UNEXPECTEDLY?”: Treasury Department Complains of Unworthy EV Credit Recipients.
THAT’S IT — IMPEACH HIM: That Trump Tweet About Nickelback Made People Want to Listen to Nickelback.
