O Sage One, please call your office so that we may send you your “new” item of gunny goodness.
Congratulations to you, and many, many thanks to all who participated. Thanks to your generosity, the Widow Irish will be getting $1,000 in her account tomorrow.
Here’s a very perceptive look at the current fun and games in Iran, and the U.S. strategy behind them:
This isn’t one war, but two.
There is a regional chessboard, on which Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other Gulf states all play. Iran’s proxies, its drones and ballistic missiles, its nuclear ambitions, its funding of Hezbollah and the Houthis. All of that belongs primarily to this smaller game. Israel has always understood this board. So have the Saudis. So has everyone in the neighbourhood.
But there is a second chessboard, vastly larger, on which the United States and China are the primary players. On this board, the central question of the next 30 years is being worked out: whether the American-led global order survives, or whether China displaces it. Every American foreign policy decision, from the pivot to Asia to the tariff wars to the posture in the Pacific, is ultimately a move on this board.
America is in this fight because of China. Specifically, it is about dismantling the most significant Chinese forward base outside of East Asia.
Read the whole thing, I beg you, because it shows that far from being a silly cowboy playing with a loaded gun, Trump’s grasp of global strategy is so far removed from that of his political opponents (and even of most of his nominal political allies in the West) that it defies belief.
We often joke about Trump playing four-dimensional chess while his opponents are stuck to a chessboard. The above article shows exactly how that 4-D chess game actually works.
I am very impressed that this appeared in the normally-silly Daily Mail. As far as I can tell, not one American news publication has come close to this succinct analysis, instead busying themselves with the minutiae of the campaign.
“The Federal workforce is now at its lowest level since 1966.” — Cristian Heiens
Not a bad start. Now let’s roll it back another 60 years, to 1906. (For those unaware, there would be only a few dozen IRS officials, just to give one example.)
Back in April last year, I noted that Lee Zeldin was taking aim at this piece of Obama-grade bullshit:
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin said that the agency will review the agency’s endangerment finding — the “holy grail of the climate change religion” that has created over a trillion dollars in regulatory impact. The finding stated that greenhouse gas emissions are an alleged threat to public health and welfare.
“Review”, was it? Well now, lookee here:
President Trump is set to repeal an Obama-era climate finding that was the basis for federal greenhouse-gas regulation, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Repealing the finding, which was a scientific determination that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health, would remove the legal basis for greenhouse gas regulation, Reuters reported.
The repeal is expected to be published later this week, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the repeal would be “the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.”
With the repeal, regulatory requirements to measure, report, certify, and comply with federal GHG emission standards for cars would be removed, administration officials told the Journal. However, the repeal would not apply to stationary sources such as power plants.
Time to get one of these precious things, methinks.
The headline refers to this action by DJT:
President Donald Trump will launch a strategic critical minerals stockpile with $12 billion in funding as part of an effort to protect American manufacturers from supply shocks as the Trump administration seeks to cut reliance on Chinese rare earths.
Formally known as Project Vault, the project would take $1.67 billion in private capital and $10 billion as part of a loan from the Export-Import Bank to obtain and store minerals for automakers, tech firms, and other companies that need access to rare earths.
Reports have compared the idea to the country’s emergency oil stockpile. Project Vault would obtain rare earth elements such as gallium and cobalt, which is used in iPhones, batteries, and jet engines.
So… anyone have any ideas why this hasn’t existed since, say, the appearance of the PC and digital phones in the market?
Given that our defense systems — aircraft to tanks to ships — have relied on computer chips since, oh, the 1980s, it astonishes me that no Administration since the 1980s had established this already. Then again: Clinton, Obama, Biden — that’s seventeen twenty years of Presidency that essentially hated the whole concept of a Defense Department because they’re all either overt or quasi-Marxists.
Explicable, but still inexcusable.
