"Well, it's rather brutal here. Right now we are advising all our clients to put everything they've got into canned food and shotguns." -- Brain Gremlin, Gremlins 2.
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Canned food and shot guns.
Personally, I have most of my retirement assets in finished brass and copper jacketed lead. Oh, and a little steel core for the raid party.
4 comments:
It's worth noting that one of the purposes of China's upcoming military parade (aside from fanning national anti-Japanese sentiment) is to "send a message" to "corrupt" officials resisting Xi's extraordinary consolidation of autocratic authority.
This is significant because it strongly suggests that Xi intends to 'repair' the economy by explicitly moving it onto a war footing. Even if I believed for a moment that the Chinese market crash wasn't orchestrated deliberately by Beijing, I couldn't doubt what this portends for the near future of Japan and the South China Sea.
The dollar is already losing all the gains it had from strengthening against other fiat currencies, and is going to fall further. But don't expect Xi to be satisfied with that. Beijing is looking to bolster their own image of military capability against U.S. technologies in a relatively controlled conflict, so as to encourage final abandonment of the petrodollar system and thus knock the main support out of the reserve status of the dollar. While it is not necessarily Japan which will be used as a proxy punching bag for this demonstration, most the indicators are pointing that way.
If things go well enough for China and badly enough for the U.S. economy, the Philippines are probably next in line. It's doubtful they will be first in line because of the high danger of direct military conflict with America, but that will be less of a concern if Chinese military assets make a strong showing against Japan's American-made materiel, and the U.S. posture in the Pacific seems vulnerable (at both tactical and international levels).
In Beijing's ideal scenario, the U.S. can be cast as trying to defend the indefensible (and I can't think of a single definition that doesn't apply) petrodollar system by a show of military force (and the memes for this are deeply rooted in international, and even American, perceptions). A few sharp, limited engagements and an Obama apology for the mere existence of America will serve their objectives well at low cost. But they're definitely ready to go as far as necessary to prove that the U.S. is a paper tiger, including resorting to nuclear strikes against high-value military assets like a carrier group. Don't expect them to back down even in the face of a possible strategic nuclear exchange...Beijing regards the Chinese people as a lot more expendable than their deep-rooted racism would lead you to believe.
As for how American can win this war...the first step would be to hang Obama and all his ilk from the nearest lampposts for treason. Not going to happen, and even if it did, it wouldn't reverse the total disintegration of civilization in America. China can't achieve more than regional dominance, so the best strategy we have left is to survive the collapse and rebuild well enough to win the next war.
"Personally, I have most of my retirement assets in finished brass and copper jacketed lead. Oh, and a little steel core for the raid party."
Copy 5x5
Hang Obama? I'm not aware that he received any direct campaign contributions from the PLA. It's been documented that Slick Willie did. After a certain amount of "Golly gosh!, how the heck that that get in there?" he was forced to give it back. I suspect that a little digging into the sources of the contributions to the Clinton's foundation would turn up more questionable funds.
PLA boosters would not be able to stage without technology released to them by the Clinton administration.
Hanging Willie would be nice, but it doesn't exactly alter the fundamental command chain problem in any militarily relevant degree.
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