" Is Cuba’s Communist Party Finally Losing Its Hold on the Country? "

" Historic protests across the island cast doubt on the regime’s staying power. "

By Jon Lee Anderson

" On Sunday, July 11th, the world took note of a historic event in Cuba, as thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest against the government. Many shouted “Patria y Vida!”—Fatherland and Life—the title of a banned but extremely popular rap song that riffs on a slogan coined by the late Fidel Castro: “Fatherland or Death.” Many also shouted “Libertad!”—Freedom—and similar phrases that are not only heretical but, when shouted in protest, illegal in Cuba, where the Communist Party is the sole legal arbiter of political life.

The uprising began in San Antonio de los Baños, a sleepy town near Havana that had been hit by a recent string of long power cuts. But Cubans across the island have become frustrated by their government’s inability to provide them with even such basic amenities as food and medicine, amid a slow vaccine rollout and spiking covid infection rates. The protests metastasized quickly, as the news and images of what was happening shot across Facebook, Twitter, and other messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp. Within hours, there were protests in as many as sixty towns and cities, from Havana to Santiago, at the southeastern end of the island, five hundred miles away. During the past decade, despite long-standing official restrictions on the media and most other sources of independent information, Cuba’s government has gradually allowed its citizens access to cell phones and the Internet, both of which are now in widespread use. Just as skeptical Party apparatchiks had feared, this technology is proving to be a threat to their order. As Abraham Jimenez Enoa, a young Cuban friend who reported on the protests, told me this week, “The only certainty right now is that the people of this country want a change, and the Internet is helping us fight for it.”

No sooner had the protests spread than an official crackdown also got under way. As black-uniformed special-forces units, police, and stick-wielding plainclothes agents were deployed, new images emerged showing policemen beating protesters and dragging them away. There was also some violence and vandalism carried out by demonstrators: shops were looted and a couple of police cars were overturned.

Just hours later, in a bid to show that the government had regained control, President Miguel Díaz-Canel was shown on television walking down a street in San Antonio de los Baños with a security entourage, and no demonstrators in sight. He later appeared on camera to denounce the protests as a counterrevolutionary measure organized and financed by the United States, and he called on “Cuba’s revolutionaries” to “combat” the miscreants. By nightfall on Sunday, a shocked silence had fallen over the island. Access to the Internet was restricted indefinitely. Even so, news trickled out over the next few days of deepening repression by security forces and of widespread detentions, reportedly including the jailing of several prominent dissidents and government critics.

As leaders around the world condemned the crackdown—President Biden called Cuba “a failed state”—Díaz-Canel seemed to reconsider his more bellicose rhetoric, and, on Wednesday, July 14th, he appeared on state-controlled television to express his hope that “hatred does not take possession of the Cuban soul, which is one of goodness, solidarity, dedication, affection and love.” Directing his comments to “the Cuban people,” he said he wanted to see them enjoying “social peace and tranquillity, showing respect and solidarity toward one another and other needy people of the world, and to save Cuba in order to continue growing, dreaming, and achieving the greatest possible prosperity.” He spoke at length, largely blaming the unrest on “an enormous media campaign against Cuba” and a “deliberate campaign of unconventional warfare” waged by the United States. As for the “adversities” that Cuba’s enemies had exploited to provoke the protests, he said, these were the fault of the long-standing U.S. trade embargo, “the blockade.” Nevertheless, for the first time in the sixty-two-year history of the revolution, the notion that the Communist Party enjoys the immutable support of the citizens had been shattered, and, more than any other time since the end of the Cold War, its ability to remain in control was thrown into doubt.

Joe Garcia, a Cuban American and a former Democratic congressman from Miami who was recently in Cuba and often serves as an informal intermediary between the U.S. and Cuban governments, said that Díaz-Canel, a protégé of Raúl Castro, had stumbled in his first big test since becoming President, in 2018. (Earlier this year, he also became the head of the Communist Party.) “For the first time in six decades, the Cubans have seen a leader blink,” Garcia said. “This problem isn’t going away. They’ve got a health crisis and an economic crisis that their government has been unable to deal with, and telling the Cubans that it’s all the fault of the embargo is not something that’s going to fill their stomachs. Blaming the protests on the Americans, like he did, begs credibility. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the C.I.A. did it. That either means a massive intelligence failure on the part of Cuba’s intelligence services, which are supposed to be among the best in the world, or else the C.I.A. just got a lot better at what it does. Protests in sixty towns and cities across Cuba? Come on.”

The last time major protests broke out in Cuba was in August of 1994, and they occurred only in Havana. In that pre-Internet and pre-smartphone age, demonstrations were easier to contain—and Fidel Castro was alive and still very much in command of the nation he had ruled since seizing power, in 1959. It was the fourth year of the so-called Special Period, which Castro proclaimed after the Soviet Union’s collapse triggered a precipitous end to three decades of the generous subsidies that had kept his regime, and the economy, afloat. The U.S.S.R.’s demise was also a crisis for the global communist ideal, but, while most of the socialist regimes of the era also collapsed, or else quickly adapted to the new circumstances, Castro doubled down. Vowing to never give up on socialism, he said the Cubans would go it alone, if necessary, and survive.

They did survive, but by the summer of 1994, conditions had become harsh. Fuel, food, and medicine were scarce, electrical blackouts frequent, and feelings of despair widespread. Finally, in August, riots exploded along Havana’s Malecón, the seaside promenade that runs past the cramped and dilapidated neighborhoods of Centro and Old Havana, where ill feeling had been festering after several attempts by residents to flee the island by sea had been thwarted by authorities, and resulted in a number of violent deaths. When Castro was alerted to the commotion, he rushed to the Malecón, where a large mob of men and youths had assembled. They shouted anti-government slogans and picked up rocks and masonry from building sites, apparently preparing to go on a rampage. Upon sight of Castro, however, the rioters first fell silent and then began to cheer him, and soon order was restored. It was a remarkable moment, which has since found a prime place in fidelista mythology.

But it wasn’t only Castro’s presence that stunned the 1994 rioters into submission. Hundreds of rough-and-ready loyalists drawn from élite Communist Party worker’s battalions, wielding clubs and lengths of rebar, were trucked into nearby backstreets for the purpose of intimidating any protesters who did not stand down. I was living in Havana at the time, and that day I tried to approach the Malecón. As I did, plainclothes agents in the crowd around me stopped a car with an anti-Castro sign, dragged the driver out, and beat him before taking him away. People around me watched in silence and then moved away. Just then, the trucks full of workers came roaring past.

That night, Castro went on television and announced that any Cuban who wanted to leave the island by sea could so. For the next three weeks, some thirty-five thousand people built improvised boats and rafts and set sail for Key West and Miami. It was an embarrassing episode for Castro, but, as so many times before, he came out the ultimate winner, first by removing a good number of troublesome malcontents from the island, and then by forcing President Bill Clinton to deal with the crisis. Washington, fearful of another exodus like the 1980 Mariel boatlift, which had overwhelmed Miami with more than a hundred thousand Cubans, agreed to give residency to most of the balseros, as the rafters were called, and to double the number of legal Cuban émigrés it allowed in the country at the time, from ten thousand to twenty thousand yearly.

Díaz-Canel’s walk through San Antonio de los Baños on July 11th seemed a clear attempt to emulate Fidel’s iconic 1994 Malecón appearance, and his follow-up television appearance appeared similarly intended to project the power of command. But Díaz-Canel’s appearances only underscored the differences between him and Fidel Castro—and the changing times in which we live. Even if Castro’s offer to Cubans was brutal—“Leave, if you wish,” he said—it did provide a way out. Díaz-Canel, on the other hand, offered Cubans no solutions, only repression, followed by accusations of whose fault it all was: the Americans. “If Fidel had been alive, he’d have done that, and then fed them, too,” Garcia said. “But Díaz-Canel can’t.”

The paradox for Díaz-Canel, who is said by people who know him personally to want to be a reformer, is that he is boxed in by circumstances. Having been embarrassed by the Cuban uprising, he must show strength in order to preserve order. But to placate the public’s rising frustrations, he must also signal moderation, which he has belatedly tried to do; in a second address, on Wednesday, he acknowledged that his government bore responsibility for the issues that had sparked the protests, including both the shortages and the rising prices of food and medicine. But to call for dialogue, or else to “open up,” as many outsiders—the European Union and Pope Francis, among others—have urged him to do, could telegraph weakness to the boldest Cuban dissidents, and provoke new demonstrations. In any event, it seems a certainty that the unrest in Cuba has not ended.

So far, despite widespread expectation that the Biden Administration might engage in a renewed diplomatic opening, it has taken a tepid approach toward Cuba, even leaving in place many restrictions and punitive measures imposed during the Trump years; these include a last-minute listing of Cuba as a state sponsor of terror, which penalizes U.S. and foreign companies seeking to invest in the island, as well as restrictions on financial remittances and travel to the island by Americans. Earlier this year, Biden’s newly appointed national-security adviser for Western Hemisphere affairs, Juan S. Gonzalez, told me that Cuba was not a front-burner issue, given the President’s need to tackle other major crises at home and abroad. Officials have also alluded to the challenges of finding a consensus for possible gestures to Cuba on Capitol Hill, where the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Menendez, is a Democrat from New Jersey, but also a Cuban American, and closer to the Republicans than to the progressive wing of his own party when it comes to Cuba.

It is this political reality, along with the fallout that the Administration could incur from conservative Cuban Americans in Florida in next year’s congressional elections—and particularly in the Democrats’ bid to unseat Senator Marco Rubio—that has effectively kept the Administration from taking decisive action. Garcia told me that it was his understanding that the Administration had been planning some good-will gestures to Cuba, including opening up remittances again and easing travel restrictions, but, since the uprising, making any such blandishments looked difficult. “To do so now,” he said, could appear to Cuban Americans in Florida as “appeasement.”

To avoid a crisis of increasing proportions, both leaders must find a way to persuade their more intransigent allies that the best thing for Cuba, and for the United States, is renewed engagement, and also a credible and sustained opening within Cuba that can address the needs of its citizens and reduce the stresses that now threaten the island’s stability. If the Cuban Communist Party wants to survive, its denizens will have to face up to the reality that its days of unquestioned hegemony are over, and it will have to agree to share power with Cubans who have other points of view, and to give them an equal opportunity to find solutions to the problems of Cuba that they have proved unable to address.

The United States, for its part, should make it abundantly clear that it stands ready to assist Cuba and its people, but that it is opposed to violence and bloodshed, both of the kind the Cuban government has used against its protesters and the kind some Cubans, mostly from the safe distance of Miami, are calling for against their government. For the first time in living memory, Cubans on and off the island need to find a spirit of democratic compromise to find a common way forward. "

The Status Quo  '  Two Separate Chinese Nations  '   FOREVER ?!  .. !!!!     .........    Irreconcilable Differences ?!  ...   Did President Trump ' Luck Out ' ?! .. !!!!   :

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" Joe Biden’s Misery Index Rises ."

" Highlights in this week of continuing political disappointment. "



By Conrad Black

"This column is becoming a weekly checklist on the descent of American public policy and attitudes further into the depths of frivolity, chaos, and national self-dislike. I was honored to make a small contribution last week to the edition of this website celebrating its fifth anniversary. In the editors’ statement on that anniversary, they renewed their hostility to the ineptitude and moral decrepitude of the bipartisan ruling class, their “opposition to the unaccountable administrative state,” their dislike of an American oligarchy, particularly the “Big Tech monopoly to suppress disagreement,” and their contempt for “pernicious utopian ideologies.” It is a privilege to be associated with such opinions.

In this past week, we’ve seen the absurd spectacle of a group of Texas state legislators commandeering a private plane as they fled from Texas to escape the ability of the governor of Texas to require them to return to Austin and discharge the duty they were elected to carry out, in this case, vote on a voting reform bill.

The selfies they took on the planes as they swilled beer—maskless despite masking regulations the Democrats are particularly fervent about upholding, given that they are the party of COVID terror—and the subsequent positive COVID tests of several of the fleeing legislators are almost too ludicrous to believe. Vice President Kamala Harris’ comparison of their ridiculous flight to Washington with the gathering of the founding fathers of America to declare its independence in 1776 confirmed that the race between the escalating foolishness of elected Democrats and the apparent sincerity with which the Democratic harlot-media endorses anything the Democrats do or say continues at neck-and-neck pace.

The proposed Texas voting rules that occasioned the flight of the Democratic legislators require voter identification, prohibit ballot-harvesting and the casting of votes by one person on behalf of other people, provide a reasonable (i.e., not open-ended) window of hours and days for voting, and assure that the counting process will be witnessed by representatives of all contending parties. The attempt by the Democrats to portray this as “voter suppression” is an outrage, especially Joe Biden’s nonsensical volcanic eruption last week that such efforts have produced the “greatest crisis since the Civil War,” even after he had conceded, following months of violent objection, that voter identification is actually not a bad idea. This is all very distressing. 

It is obvious that there were serious problems with the 2020 presidential election and no matter how endlessly and emphatically all of the elements of the anti-Trump coalition and the almost totalitarian unanimity of the national political media repeat that there is no room for belief that the election produced a fraudulent result, a very large number of Americans, for excellent reasons, believe that it was a tainted election. There were 18 challenges to the constitutional integrity of the election in the six swing states to which all problems of voting or vote counting were confined. In addition, there was the Texas attorney general’s case alleging that the swing states did not meet the constitutional requirement of ensuring fair presidential elections. The judiciary at every level refused to judge any of these cases on their merits and the abdication of the judiciary from its coequal status with the executive and legislative branches in the exercise of its highest responsibility—to assure fair elections to national office—and disquiets and rankles with every thinking American. For the incumbent president to state that measures to assure just elections are a menace to the country on the scale of a war in which 750,000 Americans died to preserve the Union and abolish slavery is a shocking immolation of his own credibility.

In part, we are witnessing the gradual erosion of the two great myths which underpin the present wobbling administration: despite having 95 percent support from the national political media and outspending Trump two-to-one, it did not win a clean or unquestionable election; and despite fervent attempts to pretend otherwise, the trespass at the Capitol on January 6 was not organized, incited, or condoned by Trump or his organization and it was neither seriously armed, remotely coordinated, or intended by anyone to be an insurrection.

The failure to come up with any serious indictments despite holding trespassers in prison for six months on what must have been strenuous shakedown efforts to suborn false inculpatory testimony, indicates that the politicization of the FBI continues. The Democratic effort to present the 2020 election as a deliverance of democracy from potential revolutionary despotism is a complete failure. The presentation by the FBI of a Lego set of over a thousand pieces, in its box, that when assembled makes a model of the United States Capitol, which was found at the home of January 6 trespasser Robert Morss, is indicative of how seriously the FBI has deteriorated, at least partially because of the political rot that infected it in the Obama era under Comey and McCabe.         

Other highlights in this week of continuing political disappointment include efforts by apologists of the justice system to equate the likely failure of the argument against voting systems to a complete debunking of the unanswerable concerns about drop boxes filled with unverifiable votes in lopsided numbers arriving in the middle of the night; and the news that the National Football League will play what is generally regarded as the African-American anthem “Lift Every Voice” prior to the national anthem at their games this year, and have “social justice messaging” interspersed among other diversions at the games and on the players’ outfits.

If one looks hard enough, the social justice of an NFL game is probably not found in the affront to the U.S. flag and anthem of obscenely overpaid athletes milking their natural gifts through 20-hour week/seven-month work years. Instead of rolling over like poodles, the NFL owners should have contracted the league, expelled the most demonstrative malcontents, and chucked the invertebrate commissioner, Roger Goodell. If they had done that and asked the fans for support they would have received it, and the anti-American players would have straggled back eventually. At least, unlike the National Basketball Association, they haven’t yet been suborned by the Communist Party of China.

Next to Biden’s assimilation of measures to assure fair elections to the Civil War, the most depressing utterance by a U.S. government official last week was Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s request of United Nations officials to be the “scourge of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia in the United States.” This is a mission for which the moral elevation of the Iranians, Chinese, Russians, and North Koreans, perfectly prepares them. The rabbits are chasing the hunters, the children are operating the candy store, and the lunatics are running the asylum.   

Finally, the misery index—a combination of the rate of unemployment with the rate of inflation, which reached 21.9 under President Jimmy Carter and fell down into the sixes under President Reagan—is back after scarcely having been thought of these 40 years. It was 6.9 when Trump left office, and as of June it was 11.5. The trend is clear, the administration has shown no plausible method of stopping or reversing it, and the Biden societal miracle has produced a crime wave and a flood of illegal unskilled immigrants as well. There’s also the general harassment of vaccination non-enthusiasts, but I can’t face it this week.

It will all get worse. "

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" China Is Not going To Wait Forever "     ( J . " Henry "  Kissinger )    ....................................

" U.S. Drops Visa Fraud Cases Against Five Chinese Researchers. "

"Justice Department’s move marks significant setback to its effort to stop alleged Chinese intelligence-gathering at U.S. universities .  "

By : Aruna Viswanatha

" WASHINGTON—The Justice Department dropped cases against five visiting researchers accused of hiding their affiliations with China’s military, in a major setback to a landmark effort to root out alleged Chinese intelligence-gathering in the U.S.

In brief court filings late Thursday and Friday, prosecutors said they would no longer pursue visa fraud and other charges against the scientists, including biomedical and cancer researchers in California and a doctoral candidate studying artificial intelligence in Indiana.

One of the visiting scientists, Tang Juan, had been scheduled to go to trial on Monday. Court papers filed in her case earlier this week show some Federal Bureau of Investigation analysts casting doubt on the value of the cases. Judges had dismissed parts of the cases against Ms. Tang and another researcher in recent weeks after finding that FBI agents hadn’t properly informed them of their rights against self-incrimination when interviewing them.

The academics had been arrested last July in an FBI sweep that began after another researcher, Wang Xin, acknowledged to law enforcement—as he tried to leave the U.S.—that he had lied about his military service on his visa application to boost his chances of gaining admission to the U.S., and had been tasked with bringing back some information by a supervisor.

The U.S. ordered China to close its Houston consulate at the time, sending relations between the two countries to their lowest point in at least three decades and prompting the Chinese to order a U.S. consulate closed. The State Department cited evidence that allegedly showed consular officials helping visiting researchers evade scrutiny.

Soon after, more than 1,000 Chinese military-affiliated researchers left the U.S., officials have said.

A senior Justice Department official said the punishment for the crimes the researchers were charged with usually amounted to around a few months in prison, and the defendants had all been detained or under other restrictions in the U.S. since their arrest a year ago. That led the agency to determine that further litigation in the group of cases would unnecessarily prolong their departure from the U.S. and that their situations since their arrests amounted to sufficient punishment and deterrence.

A Justice Department spokesman said “recent developments” in the cases had prompted the department to re-evaluate the prosecutions. “We have determined that it is now in the interest of justice to dismiss them,” the spokesman, Wyn Hornbuckle, said, adding that the agency “continues to place a very high priority on countering the threat posed to American research security and academic integrity by the PRC government’s agenda and policies.” PRC is an abbreviation for People’s Republic of China.

A lawyer for Ms. Tang, who had been a visiting cancer researcher at the University of California, Davis, said she was pleased with the government’s decision and planned to return to China soon. A lawyer for neurologist Chen Song, who had been at Stanford University, said, “The government has done the right thing by dismissing this case”; and a lawyer for a researcher in artificial intelligence at the University of California, Los Angeles, Guan Lei, said he was proud of his client. Lawyers for the other two scientists, Mr. Wang, a visiting biomedical researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and an artificial intelligence doctoral student at Indiana University, Zhao Kaikai, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The case dismissals came days before the State Department’s No. 2 official, Wendy Sherman, travels to China for the first face-to-face meeting of senior officials in more than three months, amid escalating efforts of the Biden administration to confront Beijing on cyberattacks, human rights and other issues. The senior Justice Department official said there was no connection in the timing.

Lawyers for the researchers have generally argued that the scientists had been upfront about their home institutions and viewed their collaborations as part of a longstanding system of U.S.-China academic exchanges, dismissing any notion of a military plot.

According to documents filed in the case against Ms. Tang earlier this week, some analysts at the FBI more recently said the evidence in the cases showed no clear link between potential obfuscation on a visa application and the illicit transfer of U.S. technology to China—a primary concern for the FBI.

“Although there have been five arrests and one wanted scholar who remains at large as a result of this effort, only two of these six have had connections to technology transfer...leading [the FBI’s China Tech Transfer Analysis Unit] to determine that scrutiny of this indicator did not yield heretofore-unknown instances of technology transfer,” analysts within the FBI’s counterintelligence division wrote in a draft memo dated April 2021.

Prosecutors in Ms. Tang’s case said the memo didn’t reflect the government’s position, describing it as “preliminary in nature” and said it and another FBI draft document “misapprehend certain facts and contain multiple layers of hearsay.”

The memo also described experts on China’s People’s Liberation Army as disagreeing on the status of civilian PLA employees like doctors and scientists. It said that China’s PLA isn’t a direct analog to the U.S. military and that while the civilian cadre are at times required to wear a uniform, it appeared that they may not consider themselves soldiers. It also said the U.S. visa form “potentially lacks clarity.”

“While this indicates a potentially institutionalized indifference to U.S. visa policies, especially with respect to the civilian cadre, it remains an unreliable indicator of nefarious obfuscation of one’s military affiliations, and even less of an indicator of technology transfer activity,” the memo said.

The developments come after several years of arrests of academics on charges of hiding their ties to China. The Trump administration embarked on an aggressive effort to target rising concerns among U.S. authorities that American taxpayers are unwittingly funding Chinese scientific development and boosting China’s drive for global pre-eminence. Several academics pleaded guilty to such charges, but others have fought the cases, arguing that the government was misunderstanding the nature of international scientific collaboration.

The first such case to go to trial, involving a former mechanical engineering professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville accused of hiding his post at a Chinese university to get U.S. grants to support his research, ended in a mistrial last month.

The U.S. scientific community has increasingly criticized the government’s effort.

“The unprincipled theft of intellectual property by Chinese individuals, companies and the government is very real. However, this legitimate concern has spilled over into a distrust of Asian Americans who, like my parents, made the United States their home. Many of my Chinese American colleagues feel that they’re under increased and unjustified scrutiny by the U.S. government,” former Energy Secretary Steven Chu said at a congressional roundtable on the subject last month. "

The Pulitzer Goddesses :

Thanks Lil' Herbie  .  It is Wonderful to be a Baby Boomer (  .. albeit one of the final members  . 1964 )  .    Ahhh  ,    ...... to be a BOOMER !!!!!!   We put a Man on the Moon but could not figure out a way to keep the NVA off of the South Vietnamese    ----   both are equally mind-boggling  .  " Do Not Get Caught in an Asian Land War  ...... Too Damn Many of 'em ."  ( LBJ , January 22nd , 1973  . Deathbed  [ Final Breath ] )  .......  RIP ! 

Thank You Everyone for all of the Cards , Texts , E-Mails , Phone Calls , etc  ......  Heading out to the Pool for the Day    .........................." I LOVE YOU ALL !!!!!!   "

" Is Taiwan Next? "

" In Taipei, young people like Nancy Tao Chen Ying watched as the Hong Kong protests were brutally extinguished. Now they wonder what’s in their future. "




By Sarah A. Topol

" Under the sharp light of Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport, the 19-year-old was easy to find. He stood alone where Nancy Tao Chen Ying had instructed.

Nancy was at her office when she received the message. It was a hot and humid Friday afternoon in July 2019, and a friend in Hong Kong asked if she could get to the airport: A young anti-government protester was fleeing the semiautonomous Chinese territory; could she pick him up once he landed? Nancy had never done this before, but when she agreed, the protester sent her an encrypted message with his flight details, and she left work to meet him.

Slightly less than five feet tall and 26 years old, Nancy wore her long dark hair side swept, the layers framing her face. She dressed well, often in pastels, changing styles like moods. As Nancy approached him, the boy seemed unsettled. Tall and slim, he loomed over her, clutching a small backpack. He told her that while he had brought some clothes, he had little money. “It’s OK,” Nancy told him, leading him to the metro. “Let’s just go to Taipei first.”

Because they were introduced through mutual friends, Nancy assumed she was the only person in Taiwan the Hong Konger could trust, the only person in Taiwan he probably even knew, but the nearly hourlong metro ride downtown was quiet. The boy didn’t strike up a conversation and was indifferent to Nancy’s questions.

“What should I call you?” she asked.

“Call me —.”

“What happened to you in Hong Kong?”

“The police came to arrest me and searched my house.”

Nancy didn’t push for more details; she was familiar with the contours of his story. There was proof that he attended an anti-government protest — something incriminating. He had either posted bail or not been charged yet, and within 48 hours, he decided to flee. Looking to blend in with other travelers, he took little with him. Dozens upon dozens of versions of the same story had been playing out in Taiwan for the last few weeks.

Months earlier, in the spring of 2019, Hong Kong’s chief executive proposed an extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kongers to face trial in mainland courts, further solidifying China’s control over the semiautonomous territory. Mass peaceful marches demanding the bill’s withdrawal were answered with volleys of tear gas. Skirmishes erupted. As violence escalated, many young protesters feared they would be arrested on rioting charges that carried up to 10 years of prison time. Unsure of the future, they fled alone or in small clusters to Taiwan.

The Taiwanese, themselves separated from China by only 81 miles of water and living with 70 years of the Chinese Communist Party’s threats of forceful annexation, overwhelmingly supported Hong Kong’s protest movement. Many ordinary Taiwanese citizens had been moved to send money or donate supplies, like hard hats, gas masks and goggles, to the front lines. Taiwan’s democratically elected government issued grandiose statements of solidarity, but when the Hong Kong escapees started to arrive, the same politicians did little to help. Taiwan could see a version of its future in Hong Kong and worried that coming to its aid too overtly would hasten that scenario’s arrival.

Instead, an ad hoc network of civil-society organizations and individuals tried to take care of the new arrivals — they would need housing, food, money and medical care. Some Taiwanese, like Nancy, had links with Hong Kong activists or politicians who funneled people to them. Other times Hong Kongers plugged into networks in Taipei.

Once she picked up the first protester, Nancy started escorting more, sometimes heading to the airport as often as three times a day. She devoted hours after work as a producer at a television station to helping them settle into their new lives. Many of the arrivals were deeply traumatized, unable to sleep or process what had happened to them. They had left their real names, their photos, their families behind. Nancy’s shuttling and companionship was itself a small act, but she believed it was part of a greater struggle.

For years, young activists in both places had chanted “Hong Kong today, Taiwan tomorrow” as a rallying cry to draw attention to their entwined fates. Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping had clamped down on freedoms on the Chinese mainland as he purged his rivals, ramped up forced assimilation in Tibet and began a campaign of cultural genocide in Xinjiang. Then the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) turned its attention to Hong Kong. Many people worried Taiwan would be next.

China had always denied that Taiwan existed as a separate country, dismissing it as a wayward province and using its increased global clout to gradually erase Taiwan’s existence. It had successfully pushed Taiwan out of a variety of institutions, from the World Health Organization to BirdLife International. “Taiwan” was removed from airline booking websites and boarding announcements by major U.S. and international carriers, leaving only the option to book a flight to “Taipei, Taipei” or “Taipei, China.” A country of 24 million, more populous than all of Scandinavia and roughly on par with Texas, did not exist on maps, in Interpol or at the United Nations. Its government is recognized by only 14 countries and the Holy See.


In recent years, Chinese warplanes buzzing the Taiwan Strait’s midline increased substantially, and the country’s warships regularly encircled the island. In March, America’s top military officer in the Indo-Pacific region told a Senate hearing that he believed China could invade Taiwan in the next six years.

Nancy, like many of her generation in Hong Kong and Taiwan, had undergone a gradual and reluctant political awakening, spurred in part by the threat of Xi’s authoritarianism in the region. In these contested polities, on the edges of China’s empire, which had flourished outside Beijing’s direct control, young people came together to try to understand: How do you fight against Goliath’s denial of David’s very existence? For Nancy and her friends, this was existential. The challenge from China would determine the future of their countries and their lives.

Ever since Nancy was little, she was a contrarian — unafraid to rebel against things she thought were stupid or unfair, like how teachers seemed to favor students who got good grades, even if they had been misbehaving along with the rest of the class. When she was growing up in Taipei, there were lots of things that just did not make sense to her. It did not quite add up that her schoolbooks said Taiwan was a province of the greater Republic of China (R.O.C.), which comprised mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, and that its capital was Nanjing. Nanjing was a city in the People’s Republic of China, where Nancy had never been, so why was it listed as the capital of her country? When she challenged her teacher, she told her to just do what everyone else was doing — write the correct answer and move on.


Indeed, it was confusing. The R.O.C. is typically referred to internationally as Taiwan; it is by and large not recognized as a country and is instead referred to by many media organizations, including this one, as a “self-governing democracy.” But the archipelago, of which Taiwan is the biggest island, has a Constitution, a president and a Legislature. Its citizens have voted for their representatives in free and fair elections since 1992, the year before Nancy was born. They serve in their own armed forces and carry a green Republic of China passport when they travel, though in 2003, after they complained they were being confused with Communist China, the government changed the passport to say both “Republic of China” and “Taiwan.”

This Gordian knot of identity was a product of a contested history. For centuries, Taiwan had been at the whims of colonizers, settlers, warlords and dictators. As far back as 1544, when a Portuguese vessel passed the island and a passenger exclaimed “Ilha Formosa” — beautiful island — outsiders had decided even its name. It was originally populated by Indigenous Austronesians, but Han migration from China increased with the arrival of European traders, including the Dutch East India Company. The Qing empire took control in 1683, but after a humiliating defeat by the Japanese in 1895, it ceded Formosa to the victors. The Japanese made the island their model colony to prove they could rival white European imperial powers, setting up Japanese schools and much of the island’s infrastructure.

The Republic of China, meanwhile, was established far away in Nanjing in 1912 after revolutionaries overthrew the Qing empire, but it was quickly torn apart by Japan’s invasion and internal conflicts between the ruling nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communists. After Japan lost World War II, Formosa was given to the R.O.C. by the decree of the Allied powers. Residents were not consulted, but after 50 years of Japanese control, many held genuine enthusiasm for their Chinese liberators. Their hopes to speak their own language, practice their own culture and elect their own leaders quickly vanished. The KMT governed Taiwan with an iron fist, regarding the locals as Japanese collaborators and pillaging the island’s resources for the ongoing civil war on the mainland.

In 1949, the Communists defeated the nationalists and established the People’s Republic of China. The remnants of the R.O.C., led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan. Each government proclaimed itself the rightful ruler of all of China. The tsunami of around 1.5 million exiles who accompanied Chiang to Taiwan produced two castes: benshengren — people from this province — and waishengren — people from outside this province. Nancy’s paternal grandmother grew up under Japanese rule and watched the newcomers take the best jobs and resources. Later she married one of these new arrivals, but he ran up gambling debts and then ran back to the mainland, leaving her to settle his tab. She sold their house and moved the family to Taipei, supporting Nancy’s father and his three siblings by selling sliced fruit and shaved ice, a traditional dessert, on the street.

The KMT embarked on a campaign of forced Sinicization — Mandarin was made the official government language instead of Hokkien, which Nancy’s grandmother spoke along with a vast majority of the six million locals. Streets in Taipei were renamed after Chinese cities, and schoolbooks taught mainland geography and R.O.C. history. The benshengren were written out of their own existence. Chiang’s secret police ensured no one stepped out of line.

By 1987, under pressure at home and abroad, Chiang’s son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, lifted martial law. It had been in effect for 38 years. In the previous decades, Taiwan’s economy soared, driven by petrochemicals, light manufacturing and a growing focus on technology. After the younger Chiang’s death in 1988, the first benshengren president, Lee Teng-hui, became the head of the government and accelerated Taiwan’s transition to democracy. In 1992, Taiwan held its first direct election for Parliament; the first presidential election was in 1996. Lee touted a new national identity to try to unify the country: People were neither waishengren or benshengren but “New Taiwanese” instead.

By the time Nancy was born, her grandmother had invested in small plots of land that she turned into parking lots. She bought three apartments, including the one Nancy lived in with her parents, her older sister and her younger brother. Her grandmother had sent all her children to school, including, unconventionally for the time, her daughters. Nancy worshiped her as a feminist role model, and her grandmother favored her back. Nancy went to her grandmother’s apartment every day after school.

At her grandmother’s, Nancy was a princess — fed, adored and spoiled — but at home, things were different and often difficult. The middle child, Nancy was both eager for attention and frustrated with her family. Her father was a Taishang — a Taiwanese entrepreneur in China — and was often absent for long periods. (After the West issued sanctions against China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, many Taishang went to the People’s Republic to make their fortunes. Taiwanese-owned factories and local labor would primarily be responsible for the meteoric rise of Chinese manufacturing.) Nancy’s father identified as Chinese, waishengren from Jiangxi Province, like his father before him. When he was home, he was volatile. Nancy hated it and him.

As a teenager, Nancy was apathetic about a lot of things, including school and politics. She had always been headstrong and independent. She quit after-hours cram school to hang out with her boyfriend, got poor grades and took her college entrance exams only because her mom and sister frog-marched her to the doors of the building. Her mother was so worried she wouldn’t be admitted anywhere that she had Nancy’s exam entrance ticket blessed at multiple temples. Her family was ecstatic when Nancy barely gained admission to a private college outside Taipei.

After Taiwan democratized, the KMT began to compete in free elections against the Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.), which was formed by many of the previous dissidents the KMT oppressed during its nearly 40-year military reign. Each party was known by its affiliated colors — blue for KMT and green for D.P.P. There would be no real national reconciliation.

Throughout Nancy’s childhood, the D.P.P. and KMT traded the presidency between them. The parties had different ideas of what Taiwan was and should be. The KMT, once the implacable enemy of Communist China, had begun to advocate working with the C.C.P. — deep blues claimed this economic cooperation would eventually democratize China and allow for reunification under the R.O.C. Moreover, it would benefit Taiwan’s economy.

The D.P.P. believed somewhat the opposite. The deep greens advocated for dropping the antiquated R.O.C. label and declaring outright independence as a country called “Taiwan.” They would cease any claims to the mainland, Hong Kong and Macau, for which the greens never felt affinity. In this case, they could work with China, but as equals.

And so the debate over Taiwan’s future would always hinge on the somewhat muddled construct of “independence” or “unification.” Most Taiwanese, however, fell somewhere in between. A majority favored keeping the status quo, in which the “Republic of China (Taiwan)” was de facto independent. This was preferable to risking an all-out war with their larger neighbor.

For its part, China encouraged the blue-green divide, working with the cooperative KMT when it was in power and isolating the more autonomous-minded D.P.P. when it was at the helm. In 1992, during closed-door meetings between the KMT and the Communist Party in British Hong Kong, they reached an agreement that Taiwan and China were part of the same country. The KMT would later tell the Taiwanese public this was open to different interpretations, allowing for the possibility that it was all the R.O.C. It would become known as the 1992 Consensus. When Beijing perceived slights to this arrangement, it retaliated. "




**************************




The campaign to erase Taiwan continued in the face of the pandemic. “Taiwan has no escape — the pressure is there already,” Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, told me. “The Chinese government is powerful in blocking Taiwan’s international participation, grabbing our diplomatic allies. They’re also trying to threaten Taiwan militarily in a very direct way. We don’t want the situation in between Taiwan and China to get any worse than what it is right now.”

In May 2021, after more than a year with virtually no local transmission, Taiwan experienced its first domestic Covid surge. Tsai explained that the government was unable to sign a deal for the Pfizer vaccine because BioNTech, under pressure from China, asked Taiwan to remove the word “country” in the news release about the purchase. Despite Taiwan’s compliance, the deal stalled. China had offered to donate its own vaccine to Taiwan, backing the D.P.P. government into a corner. The Covid spike had already hurt Tsai’s popularity, and vaccine politics increased polarization, with the KMT suggesting the D.P.P. was politicizing lives in refusing Chinese-made vaccines, while the D.P.P. maintained it was China who cut off their Pfizer imports to begin with. In the end, two Taiwanese companies, the electronics manufacturer Foxconn and the chip maker TSMC, purchased the vaccine from BioNTech and donated it to the Taiwanese government.

It was hard to know what to make of Taiwan’s precarity — when the act of existing was itself a provocation. It was a country still in transition from one authoritarian regime that could soon be subsumed by another. During this brief moment of respite, Taiwan was flourishing, but would the Taiwanese themselves ever have the chance to decide their own fate?

Nancy embodied so many of Taiwan’s unique contradictions. Her grandmother identified as Japanese, her father identified as Chinese and Nancy identified as Taiwanese. Yet they all shared the same apartments and rights to a ballot box. “Taiwan hasn’t figured out who Taiwan is yet,” Lev Nachman, postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, explained. “They can’t start letting in refugees and immigrants in and giving them citizenship, because we don’t even know who’s Taiwanese here yet.”

“When you’re contested, every other political issue is secondary.” Nachman continued. “It’s not that people don’t care about things like minimum wage or economics, but those things get filtered through this lens of ‘Who are we? How do I feel about China? How does that impact my identity? Am I Taiwanese? Am I Chinese? Am I both? What does that mean politically? Where does that mean my loyalties lie?’”

Both Hong Kong and Taiwan were conservative societies, made up of waves of ethnic Han migrants, locked into economic dependence on China. They had shared little by way of identification, until they found themselves pushing back against an encroaching Beijing.

“Hong Kong today, Taiwan tomorrow” had receded from the headlines. First Tibet, then Xinjiang, then Hong Kong — the edges of empire had been dutifully absorbed. Taiwan was the only one remaining. The Taiwanese carried the mantle — holding memorial protests, selling banned books and maintaining censored websites for the Hong Kongers who no longer could.

Nancy herself teetered between nihilism about Taiwan’s future and the most fervent belief that Hong Kong’s democratic spirit would someday be reborn, somewhere. Impending erasure had bred a kind of earnest patriotism — an attempt by the Taiwanese to assert their existence in any space that would tolerate them. It was trendy to take photos with a green “I support Taiwan Independence” flag during international travels and post them online. Nancy carried one wherever she went on vacation — posing with it in Japan, Germany and the Netherlands. In Paris in 2018, she was mobbed by a group of Chinese tourists who tried to grab her flag and shouted at her, “Taiwan is a part of China!”

Across the region, young people were undergoing versions of the same story — trying to grow up, build a life in a city, in a culture, in a country whose values existed on borrowed time. Pan-Asian solidarity had been minimal until the party’s punitive response to the yearlong Hong Kong protest movement brought a sense of collective generational crisis to the forefront.

For the last year, the #MilkTeaAlliance has abounded online, partly as a symbol of young people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Myanmar and Thailand standing up for their freedoms, often either directly against China or regimes perceived to be propped up by China. They had all harbored the dream that they could change their geopolitical fate — tiny tops spinning in unison until they ran out of momentum.

In late June, when I called Nancy, she told me she had stepped back while Gam had taken more of a management role in the online shop they started together. They decided he would use the profits to pay for his product-design degree. His Mandarin was improving, and he was trying to settle more fully into his Taiwanese life. When he thought it would no longer endanger her, he had contacted his mother. Now they talked all the time. He hoped he could bring her to Taiwan one day.

Nancy had written a letter to Tony in prison for his 20th birthday — part of a campaign to let him know he hadn’t been forgotten. There were so many things she wanted to tell him, but she knew her words were being monitored. “Sister always remembers the days when you came to Taiwan and ate with me,” she wrote to him. “Keep fighting,” she signed it. “Never forget your own worth and beliefs.”

Nancy had given up her career to help Hong Kongers in exile. She wanted to protect Taiwan’s own nascent democracy, but she wasn’t sure where that had really gotten her. Still, she was happy she had. She didn’t think she could have lived with herself if she hadn’t stood by her beliefs. She had started taking Cantonese classes and had a weekly family-style dinner with Hong Kong friends in Taipei. Would they stand up for her, the way she stood up for them? She wasn’t sure. "

Who Shot J.R.  ?!   .......  Why Would Anyone Do Such A Thing ?! :

" U.N. Report Says Some Climate-Change Effects May Be Irreversible . "

" Report highlights human responsibility for record heat waves, droughts, more intense storms and other extreme weather events seen around the world in recent years . "

By Robert Lee Hotz

" Rising seas, melting ice caps and other effects of a warming climate may be irreversible for centuries and are “unequivocally” driven by greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity, a scientific panel working under the auspices of the United Nations said Monday in a new report.

Issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization of 195 governments, the report is drawn from a three-year analysis of 14,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies. It is the first major international assessment of climate-change research since 2013 and the first of four IPCC reports expected in the next 15 months.

“We’ve known for decades that the world is warming, but this report tells us that recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid and intensifying, unprecedented in thousands of years,” said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the panel and the senior adviser for climate at the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Further, it is indisputable that human activities are causing climate change.”

Dan Lunt, a climate scientist at the U.K.’s University of Bristol and one of 234 co-authors of the report, said, “It is now completely apparent that climate is changing everywhere on the planet.”

The report “connects the dots in a way we really haven’t seen before,” said climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, who wasn’t involved with the report. “The message eerily resonates with what we’re seeing this summer in Canada, the U.S. and Europe as extreme weather events play havoc on us and our infrastructure.”

The report highlights human responsibility for record heat waves, droughts, more intense storms and other extreme weather events seen around the world in recent years. It also sharpens estimates of how sensitive the climate is to rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases—a key metric in forecasting the rise of global temperatures in the years ahead.

Levels of carbon dioxide released into the air by the burning of fossil fuels, cement production and deforestation and other land-use changes reached a modern seasonal high of 419 parts per million in May. That is higher than at any time in the past 3.6 million years, according to NOAA.

Atmospheric levels of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, are now about 2½ times their preindustrial levels and steadily rising, according to the International Energy Agency.

The report establishes scientific baselines for COP26, a key climate-change summit to be held in Glasgow in November. Representatives from 197 countries are expected to present updated plans for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

A global agreement resulting from a 2015 climate summit in Paris called on nations to take steps to limit future global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). But the efforts are falling short.

“This report tells us that we probably need even more action by all the major economies to work together to avoid even worse impacts than we’re already seeing now,” said Jane Lubchenco, deputy director for climate and the environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She wasn’t involved in the IPCC effort.

Greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity have raised global temperatures by 1.1 degrees Celsius since around 1850, the report said. Without rapid reductions in emissions, global temperatures could rise more than an additional 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next 20 years, the report forecasts.

“We know there is no going back from some changes in the climate system, but some can be slowed or stopped if emissions are reduced,” said NOAA’s Dr. Barrett.

The report reflects new scientific methodologies honed in an era of growing climate disturbances. It draws on a better understanding of the complex dynamics of the changing atmosphere and greater stores of data about climate change dating back millions of years, as well as a more robust set of satellite measurements and more than 50 computer models of climate change.

“We are now much better at integrating all the information,” said Gavin Schmidt, NASA’s senior climate adviser and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Sciences in New York, who wasn’t involved with the report.

Last year, global temperatures tied for the warmest on record, capping the warmest decade in modern times. Oceans are warming, and sea level is increasing by 3.7 mm, or about 0.1 inch, a year, the scientists said in the report. Mountain glaciers, sea ice and polar ice sheets are steadily melting. Weather around the world has grown more extreme by many measures, the scientists said, with more frequent heat waves and prolonged droughts in some regions and heavier rainfall and flooding in others.

“When you see what has happened this summer with heat waves in Canada and the heavy precipitation in Germany, I think this is showing that even highly developed countries are not spared,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a senior scientist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and a lead co-author of the report. “We don’t really have time to adapt anymore because the change is happening so quickly.”

" Why America Loses Wars . "

By George Friedman

" The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is moving to its inevitable conclusion. The Taliban, the radical Islamists the U.S. was fighting, are taking back control of the country, one city at a time. Put differently, the United States has lost the war it fought for the past 20 years. There are those who want to continue to fight, but I doubt that another 20 years will bring victory considering that the definition of success is vague and wildly ambitious. The goal was to transform an ancient and complex society from what it was to into what we wanted it to be. Defeating a country comprising warring factions and imposing peace and a new culture was beyond Washington’s reach.

This is not the first war the U.S. has lost since World War II, and given the overwhelming military power of the United States, it must be explained. To explain it, we must begin with World War II, in which the United States was confronted with a conflict initiated by Japan and Germany. The United States responded by defining war as eliminating the enemy’s military and shattering the enemies’ society by destroying their industrial plants and cities. Victory required the enemy’s defeat and a social and moral transformation of the defeated.

World War II taught the United States a number of lessons. The first was that the decision on timing was made by U.S. enemies. Pearl Harbor and Hitlers’ declaration of war made the decision on Washington’s behalf at a time that suited them. It took away the advantage of initiative, beyond nibbling at the edges of the war. Second, Washington learned that in fighting an enemy you must use overwhelming force and that it was essential to shatter not only the military but also the morale of the nation as a whole. The U.S. would do that by applying overwhelming force on the enemy’s military and society.


Victory transformed the U.S. Its power was vast and intersected much of the world. The U.S. had failed to see this prior to World War II. It now was obsessed with it. It created a vast military-industrial complex, seeing it as the critical element of national security. So it had greater friction than before, and more power than before. But it had taken another lesson from World War II. Defeating the enemy’s military was not enough. As with Germany and Japan, war could only end with a moral and cultural capitulation by the enemy nation and a transformation to liberal democracy.

After World War II, America’s main adversary was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a moral nightmare. Soviet power was daunting, and a global moral challenge faced the United States. Realpolitik and a moral struggle combined, and the U.S. and Soviet Union fought to transform nations into partisans of the moral project of either liberal democracy or Marxism-Leninism. Over time, this lapsed into massive cynicism on both sides, but at the core, the moral and grand strategies blended, and the real struggle was for the hearts and minds of the populace, shaped by covert and overt war.

Korea was the first war of moral absolutism but was shaped by very conventional war. It was in Vietnam that the new strategy was tested. Vietnam had been occupied by the French, who were defeated in their war against the communists. It ended with the division of the country between communists and anti-communists who posed as liberal democrats to salve the American soul but were simply ambitious men dedicated to holding power, using anti-communism to draw the Americans into protecting them. As a war, it was divided between endless combat on the ground and an air campaign designed to break North Vietnamese morale, much as the U.S. had broken the Germans and Japanese. But the war went beyond that. The goal was to create a government that morally rejected communism and embraced liberal democracy. So long as the communists continued to fight, the U.S. would lose. Its military capability did not reduce the communist north and their southern fighters to the state of the Wehrmacht in 1945. The regime the U.S. tried to invent and protect had no moral interest in liberal democracy.

The problem in Vietnam was the incongruity of its strategic and moral aspects. The strategy called for the defeat of the enemy army and a transformation of Vietnamese society. Somewhere in there was the automatic opposition to the spread of communism, but absent from that was an evaluation of whether this was the right place to fight world communism and whether we had the military force to compel moral change. Communism was spreading elsewhere, so why choose Vietnam as the place to fight?

The U.S. had a military reason to fight the Japanese in the Pacific. But in Vietnam, the military reason, the political reason, the moral principles constantly churned. U.S. strategy was to attrite the North Vietnamese military, cause their public to grow war-weary and impose U.S. will. The U.S. took the attrition and generated its own war-weariness after seven years of fighting. The U.S. lost Vietnam, but from its perspective, the world went on. For all the death and destruction, the war didn’t change much. It was the wrong war fought in the wrong place with the wrong strategy and goals. The lesson of World War II is to control how and where war is waged. In Vietnam, the enemy decided where the war began. By opposing any communist intrusion anywhere, the U.S. allowed the enemy to choose the time and place for Washington to roll out its prepackaged strategy.

Islamic extremism was a moral challenge to America, but before that, it was also a useful ally against the Soviets. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. supported and praised the resistance. The U.S. figured Soviet enemies in Afghanistan shared at least empathy with the United States. Each served the interests of the other, and the Soviets were defeated. Then came 9/11, which was the extremist declaration of war against the U.S. The U.S. ideal of controlling war initiation was lost, in the same way it was lost in Vietnam. Something had to be done. As in Vietnam, the U.S. was sucked in almost unknowingly. It needed to destroy al-Qaida. Having hurt but not destroyed it, it felt compelled to stay engaged. To stay engaged, a degree of offensive warfare had to be undertaken until it became necessary to create a new regime that shared liberal democratic values. In other words, another ancient society would be transformed but without World War II levels of devastation. The strategic and moral collided. Strategically, Afghanistan was vast, and no amount of force could control more than a fraction of the country. Morally, the Afghans had their own political order that didn’t value liberal democracy any more than it valued Marxism.

The wars against the Soviet Union and against the Taliban had a common theme. The U.S. was offended by their moral values and formulated a national strategy based on it. At some point, the national strategy overreached as the moral ambition exceeded strategic possibilities. Not wanting to admit failure, the war went on to exhaustion.

World War II was a moral exercise. It brought the U.S. era upon the world. The moral dimension of that war became a necessary dimension of future wars, which became more frequent as the U.S. became a global power. The moral dimension was easily visible: devise not only a clear strategy for waging war but also a measure of when the war was failing. And above all, know when the strategy isn’t working and avoid being trapped by falling back on the moral to avoid making hard decisions.

The world has grown used to U.S. military intervention. It condemns it and is then comforted by its condemnations. But losing wars after years of struggle – or staying in wars you are losing for moral reasons or to hide the reality – makes no sense. The U.S. has to control where and how it goes to war. Its notion of victory includes the moral transformation of ancient people who do not think they are immoral. A moral principle on terrain well known, and weapons suited for it, works. A moral principle on unfamiliar terrain and inappropriate weapons is less effective. "

" Democrats Will Ruin the Climate . "

" They’ve wrecked the cities and the border. Why would climate policy be different? "

By : Daniel Henninger

" Notwithstanding that we are passing the 18th month of a global Covid-19 pandemic that has killed 4.3 million people and crushed national economies, the United Nations decided that what the world needs just now is more bad news, as summarized by the New York Times : “The new report leaves no doubt that humans are responsible for global warming, concluding that essentially all of the rise in global average temperatures since the 19th century has been driven by nations burning fossil fuels, clearing forests and loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that trap heat.” What’s more, the report says climatic destruction is going to get worse no matter what we do. I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to be alive when the world ends.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change even includes an interactive atlas depicting that global warming’s ruin will be everywhere, meaning there’s nowhere to hide. Now what?

My short answer: Don’t put the Democrats in charge of Noah’s Ark. It will sink.

If only for the sake of discussion, let’s stipulate the U.N.’s climate report may be right that warming is a problem. One still may pose a practical political question: Instead of mitigating the world’s climate challenge, what evidence exists that these progressive advocates—Democratic politicians or affiliated scientists—would do anything other than make it worse if we put them in charge of the solutions?

The currently observable reality is that progressives, who have now captured the Democratic Party at all levels of government, don’t seem able to run anything anymore—not cities, not Covid, not a national border. Why would letting them run climate policy be different?

Whatever one thinks about the “root causes” of the rise in violent urban crime or the more than one million migrants apprehended at the southern border in the current fiscal year, both stand as significant case studies in political mismanagement.

The nonresponse to the overrun border by the Biden administration and to urban violence by progressive mayors in Chicago, New York, Washington and Portland, Ore., suggests this high-probability scenario on climate: They will make mistakes, the world will go to hell, and then they will deny we are in hell—and what’s worse, insist that we keep doing the same manifestly wrong things.

Even more fantastically, the progressives offload responsibility for their policy failures onto us with constant guilt-tripping: The cities are a mess because of systemic racism. The world is burning because “humans” have used fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.

One may question the progressives’ ability not only to govern but even to do politics effectively. The idea of systemic racism, often allied with teaching some version of critical race theory, is so extreme that it simply falls outside a strong majority’s consciousness of the real world. No surprise, an active refusal to adopt those ideas is under way among parents in public and private schools.

A similar mystery is why the progressive greens, and the climate press for that matter, actually believe it is effective politics to describe life on Earth as at the edge of a cataclysmic apocalypse—with the world engulfed over the next 30 years in hurricanes, wildfires, floods and melting icebergs. And that avoiding doom will require uncapped public spending and ceding authority over daily life to unseen climate scientists. These claims are beyond any politics that normal people can process.

The Covid-19 pandemic, a real event requiring constant public vigilance, has reached a state of personal and political fatigue. But the progressive version of the Democratic Party is oblivious to how many guilt-laden political burdens they can load onto the body politic. Past some point of incomprehension, people tune out or resist. With the climate apocalypse, resistance is simple: Stop caring. It’s hopeless.

It was not always this way with Democrats. After it became clear that Vermont’s three-year experiment in a single-payer healthcare system had manifestly failed to control costs, its then- Gov. Peter Shumlin admitted as much and ended it in 2014. Still, single-payer advocates dismissed Vermont as too small to disprove their idea, and progressives like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have persisted.

With climate regulation, we have the test case of California, the world’s fifth-largest economy. Progressive-run California for years has been the most climate-correct state in the union, and the most screwed up.

By suppressing the use of fossil fuels and natural gas while elevating solar and wind, California has created an electrical grid that performs poorly under stress, causing statewide power outages. Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to shut down the state’s only nuclear power plant, which is emissions-free, in 2025.

New York’s defrocked Gov. Andrew Cuomo closed the state’s Indian Point nuclear plant in April. This Wednesday, amid a heat wave, the Con Edison utility text-messaged residents that if the power goes out, “Reply HELP for help.”

If only life under progressive misgovernance were that easy. "

[ Back By Insane Demand  --   Enjoy  ]  :

J. " Jerome "  Garcia ! ®™©