ARE THERE ANY TEETH IN ALL THAT BARKING?

 It looks like the ruling class all over the world are a bit ired by the President's decision to reflect upon them their trade policies toward US. Quite a few of them are rearing way up on their hind legs to screech about how they are going to make US rue the day!!!!! 

I suspect it's almost all theater and there isn't a single country except maybe one unexpected one that will be stupid enough to embark on an all out trade war with US because Trump does have a point. We won't lose anything if they don't buy our goods in the pitiful volumes they allow today and they'll be gutted like fish if we don't buy any of their goods in volume and in the meantime we'll be pocketing the lucre and nobody really needs a new BMW or VW since they last forever anyway.

I am really interested in what form their destructor will take when President Trump retaliates on a massive scale for the EU Commission's ongoing Censorship and Deplatforming Campaign against Musk and the rest. It's not like he doesn't have a massive dog or two of his own in this fight.

I think Gozer the Gozerian sounds like Ursula von der Leyen. I think they're all just barking a lot and will roll over and play dead as soon as nobody is looking. Kind of like what they're doing now in Ukraine as it becomes apparent to all that the rulers of the EU cannot reach out and dredge up any cannon fodder to send to Ukraine since they have run short of their own and cannot find anybody stupid enough to step up and do it for them.

UNKIND RAW POLITICS

 It occurs to me that there is a very easy way to hire the smarter employees. All an employer really has to do is spend a minute discussing political philosophy with new candidates and they will self-sort on intelligence just like that. I imagine the other side feels the same exact way so this is easily applicable to both parties and all I can say is it would be helpful if there was some secret sign that every store and business displayed to let all potential customers know what kind of service they can expect within.

I really enjoyed Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. In retrospect his vision of a future of franchise stores for everything from jails to pizza delivery all included the sacred Employee Binder which told every employee every step of every store process in order that every transaction was always the same for every customer. As I said, kind of amusing in hindsight since it is now looking like very few of our high school graduates can read anything at that level.

OTGH, one could simply ask potential employees how they feel about Elon Musk and you'd get your sort right there too. No need to be fancy.

ON TARIFFS

 Tariffs served two primary purposes throughout history. They raised revenue for the State/King and they protected domestic industries that the King/State thought were vital to the State. This is obviously dead as a door nail in any State that is sustained on nothing but 35 trillion $ in debt and has offshored almost 100% of its heavy industry and most of every other kind of industry ranging from pharmaceuticals to household goods. 

This is an interesting experiment in reinvention that I'm looking forward to watching. There is no place for our industry to go but up and only fairies believe that superpowers can be funded by external revenue cutters collecting tariffs on imported goods.

Has anyone else noticed how literally every single thing that Europeans now do is disagreeable and always amounts to an attack on freedoms and liberties that we have long enjoyed? It really is like reading the books about the slide into both World Wars where the European leaders almost deliberately took every single action that would and could only lead to an outbreak of War. They're all doing it again and it's like they cannot even see it. 

And no, I don't see their enemy as Russia so much as the nature of tyranny. Europe is rapidly becoming every bit as ugly and evil as the USSR was and with the same impact on its economy, GDP, and relations between nations. I almost wonder if they realize how close they all are to living on a knife's edge? The EU exists today only because the Germans worked their asses off to make it and lead it and now the German work ethic is essentially gone and so is much of their industrial power. They are following England and they don't have nearly as far to fall.

I hope that we have historians as honest and enthusiastic as those from the past.

HOW TO MAKE IT NOT YOUR PROBLEM

 If you glance at the map far below (last Tuesday) you can see Yanbu up there on the top right side on the Saudi coast. The last time I was there was to exchange prisoners offload some unnecessary Explosive Ordnance Disposal guys and their megaton of equipment on Ocean Unit 5. I have no idea what the Harkness did with them but we were well shed of them and we then drifted down to Jeddah to get rid of the rest of the useless supercargo.

While I was there I learned that the Saudis had actually chosen Yanbu as a critical component of the new infrastructure that the Kingdom was building to get around that little geographic trap known as the Strait of Hormuz. They were sufficiently insightful and well advised to see that having 100% of their oil exports flow through a narrow waterway controlled by the Islamic Shiite Republic of Iran was simply a disaster waiting to happen. They were losing tankers every week to missile attacks launched by Iran on ships destined for Dammam and Ras Tanura and could see that there was no end in sight which I'm sure they found particularly bothersome. One might say they did it to themselves but they had help and literally everyone else wanted Iraq to kick Iran's butt in that long dismal pointless war.

So anyway, here we have the most stable monarchy in the world, long called the most conservative stick in the mud since Noah tied off the ark at the end of the float and what were they up to back in 1984? Why yes, they were making sure that they could ship their oil products and receive any goods they wanted without having to risk the narrow waters of the Bab el Mendeb or the Strait of Hormuz. Iran still squats atop the entrance/exit to the Persian Gulf and the very unstable and psychotic Yemenis control the southern access to the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

Yanbu neatly avoids both.

Now ask yourself if there are any strategic geographic traps that we have perhaps been very busy ignoring for the last 50 years or so. Are there any signs at all that we plan to do anything about them? I make mention from time to time that we don't actually have any means to sweep enemy mines laid in the approaches to our harbors or even in our harbors. You can wonder how they would get there but that would simply mean you've never been there.

The Panama Canal is not as important as it was. It's not just that the world gets smaller every time another enormous ship class is built that is actually too big to fit through the canal, it is also because the idiots that operate the country and canal thought they could double their national income by doubling the size of the canal. They didn't think it through. The canal only works because of the rainfall that collects in the Gatun Lake and nobody doubled the rainfall. Every time a ship passes through the canal it takes 52 million gallons of water out of the lake. The hard limit on the canal is not the size or number of locks, it is the amount of rainfall collected by the Lake. The idiots forgot that.

I keep seeing references every day to making sure that we spend way too much money getting ready for a war with China. It is always called the coming war with China and I keep asking how these people expect us to win or fight our way to a draw with China and if they can do neither now, what exactly has to be done to let us win or fight China to a draw in the future and how much will that cost and WHY? Nobody ever answers. They all insist that we need a huge navy to fight China for Taiwan or something and I have yet to see any evidence that the Taiwanese are willing to fight for Taiwan and absent some sincere and massive weapons programs and military buildups by the Taiwanese themselves, I'm not inclined to include them in among our vital interests. We can get whatever it is you can't do without from Vietnam or Thailand.

I've never been to China but I hear they have high speed trains whizzing all over the place and their infrastructure is like brand new....well, OK, they've only had to build it this one time in the last 3000 years which has no doubt saved them a lot of money. They don't spend a lot on defense, on the army or invading other places and they haven't really invaded anybody in my lifetime or even beyond that. They have a track record for not invading other countries that goes way back. Srsly, they should be a lesson to us all in that regard.

It really is true that all politicians and their like minded scalawags do is try to make you afraid of something and then con you into giving them more money to fight against it. Look at them! They made 2 entire generations terrified of CO2!

Look at the leading clowns of Europe who want a war with Russia and are allegedly rushing to spend a trillion $ to fake making a serious military threat to Russia and then they mean to invade Ukraine peacefully and squat on the Russian frontier after Putin has made it pretty damned obvious that he doesn't want NATO troop sitting right on his front porch. I'm sure he's beginning to wonder if he really does have to nuke a city or two just to prove his sincerity since the Europeans seem remarkably obtuse. We should bow out of the NATO and leave the kids to their idiotic spats. Our best shtick may be old but it serves us best if we let them go a little crazy killing each other for a few years before we step in and help. As we noted though at the time, there is very little upside to entering a war on a continent flush with nuclear weapons and long range delivery systems. They are quite literally incapable of behaving rationally and we really don't need to be a party to madness.

MUCH OF THE UKRAINE DEBACLE IS EXPLAINED

 I suspect that the average Vlad in the Street in Kiev is going to be a little pissed off when he learns that the crack military experts that lost the war in Afghanistan were the ones that were leading, guiding and running the Ukrainian efforts to defeat Russia in a no win war. Srsly, Milley better have all kinds of documentation to show that he was acting at the real direction of President Biden when he undertook to make war on Russia through Ukrainian proxies or he is in real trouble, Immunity Decree or not. 

I think the New York Times just broke the Democratic Party for once and for all. They have to repudiate the actions of Milley and the other generals or they have to stand by waging a secret war on Russia and then they need to explain in squeaky little voices why all of the Presidential Directives and Orders on this matter were signed with an autopen. Does anybody really doubt that they were all autopen? Does anyone really think slow Joe wouldn't have mentioned/dropped by accident/blurted out that he was leading a war against Russia and Milley was in charge of it?