Saturday, February 1, 2020

ON IDIOCY

You get old enough and you get to watch history repeat itself again and again and again.

The cunning authors of this piece are probably 14.
Chinese Communist Party agents are using our suicidal pathologies — blind worship of “diversity,” naive exaltation of “cultural exchange” programs, and reckless surrender of our education system — against us for economic espionage, intellectual property theft and world dominance. While Beltway blowhards rail against foreign interference in our elections, Beijing’s hijacking of our classrooms ensues with hardly a peep of political resistance.
What she doesn't see is that the theft doesn't cost this nation anything and leads to a better world for the peasants out there who can't, for instance, pay $40,000 a month for a life saving drug. To be honest few can but the way we've screwed up pharma means we all pay.

I was talking with my way better half this morning who works for a man who routinely does/did business in China and she told me how he made it to the countryside once a little while ago and learned something I could have told him 10 years ago. 3rd world cities are no picnic but you step out of them and you step back 300 years in time. Bucolic is a word best reserved for places in western Europe, Japan and South Korea. The rest of the world has barely caught up with electricity and most people in America don't know that.  They seem to think it's all like California. When I was young I took a bus from Rota to Cadiz and it went through southern Spain and it was like going back to the 16th century.

At one point I thought Castro's policy of sending hundreds of Cuba's doctors to the 3rd world to gain power and influence through communism was a joke. They're not at all what we think of as doctors but they were worlds better than the witchdoctors they replaced.

Knowledge is fungible. We can make it and trade it all day for centuries and profit by it. The people that think we're in some sort of war with China would profit if they read some history. China has a history going back thousands of years, much like Egypt. Egypt was overrun by islam and history stopped for them in the 8th century but China isn't going to let that happen.


3 comments:

Ominous Cowherd said...

I think Malkin's point is that it's really self destructive to encourage foreigners to steal government and industry secrets.

I think you are disagreeing with her because the medical-industrial complex has paid our corrupt government to make medicine unaffordable, and because the financial lobby has paid our corrupt government to send jobs to China? So the answer I think you are pushing is to bandaid the first by exacerbating the second?

Wouldn't undoing the damage done by the corrupt government, the MIC and the financial lobby be a wiser approach? I think is the solution Malkin is groping toward. That is definitely the solution Trump has been patiently implementing, while he keeps the Left distracted by impeachment.

capt fast said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
HMS Defiant said...

I failed to make myself clear. Yes the Chinese and others are stealing our techniques and our practices but what they are getting is of little use when they return and find that there is no program for capital investment in a startup to build widgets.
The real thieving of our stuff is done by cyber penetrations of every single network in America. The Chinese have little difficulty getting at Boeings data, or the USNs complete data at NAWC AD or in fact anyplace on NMCI. All it takes to compromise the whole network is for one person to be a badguy.
I'll be honest, I'm not too sure about the security of the siprnet. We treat it like we used to treat TASK GROUP ORESTES and the KW-7 encryption. We sent everything over those networks and the Russians read it for almost a decade thanks to John Walker, his son and some of Walkers friends.
Who is the last great Chinese thinker you heard of who got fabuously wealthy from technology? Same thing for Russia. They have it all but they can't do anything with it.
Is there a chinese cell phone on the market (other than iphones)? Are computers all over the world running on Chinese designed chips?
Right now the graduate schools in Science and Engineering depend on getting those students because they pay the full tuition and make excellent students. There just arent a lot of Americans interested anymore in getting hard science post graduate degrees and the universities are suffering from it.