The U.S. is in real trouble...

 Amici,

It is murderously difficult to try to watch Joe Biden talk. He has trouble reading his teleprompter, gets confused, looks around. At one point he said: "I’m just waiting for them to tell me when we get going here since we’re live streaming this,” Biden said not realizing the live stream had already started. “I’m supposed to look over here and not at you guys.”

It's all just insulting beyond words.

The U.S. is in real trouble. A long-time friend of mine wrote me the other day to say that he's never, in a long life, seen the U.S. go so far downhill so fast as under the Biden administration. He's right. We are watching an astounding national (and global, of course) disaster as the U.S. falls to pieces.

Just take this example: the gasoline shortage mess. One person on Twitter wrote: "This is crazy. I stopped for gas just now having no idea what was happening. It’s out. People here told me they’d been to other stations and found the same." It's bad enough that the governors of North Carolina and Florida have called state emergencies. Just four months of Biden, and we're back in Jimmy Carter land.

Truly, we've not seen this since Jimmy Carter was president, and the Gulf Oil Crisis/Iran Hostage mess. Now, this particular Biden-Era gasoline-supply fiasco is supposed to be incidental to some cyber attack, from Russia, the Democrats' favorite whipping boy, to say the least. 

But there are those who are not buying that. An excerpt:

"When the state police tell us something prudence dictates we evaluate their motive against previous state police statements and make an independent decision.  That’s the basis of not being a victim to professional lying.  That said, which is more likely:

A) A random cyber-hack from a dubious eastern-European source, has compromised the refined fuel capacity in the United States?

~ OR…

B) The FBI, a political division -and state police- acting on behalf the U.S. intelligence community, are making this claim in order to provide cover for the Biden administration’s purposeful policies that are skyrocketing the price of fuel?

An P again:

Widespread belief exists to the effect that the "Intelligence Community" is actually running the country. "Intelligence" is not a word I'd use.

Biden was on camera trying to explain about the fuel shortage and was obviously in over his senile head. To watch him is to cringe. Yet Biden is the front man for whoever is running the country, and perhaps it actually is most likely the "the Intelligence Community"; they seem to be in the driver's seat, them and the Rockefeller Foundation, George Soros, and of course Klaus Schwab. A lovely combination of thugs and wackos. Bill Gates is in that mix, and others like him.

Overall, though, this fuel supply mess is just part and parcel of the freak-show disaster the pResident has inundated us with. For example, inflation, and see also this. 

Joe Biden, our actual, real-life Manchurian Candidate. Utter incompetence. He really doesn't know where he is half the time. For example this, and this, and then this. He thinks his policies are on the "right track"; it is just too pathetic for words.

He is raising taxes, too. Higher taxes and inflation. As Newt Gingrich said the other day, this is as old as the hills. If one can't raise taxes because of public resistance or poverty of the masses (both elements of the French Revolution, remember), and you have to keep raising spending to pay off your political cronies and allies, Gringrich said (and the Dems do exactly that, and have done so since FDR; Republicans often do it too, but not nearly so much), then "the only way you make up the difference is through inflation". Just remember, my friends, the Western Roman Empire fell because its taxes were too high, and the value of its currency decreased -- so, desperate local communities turned to Barbarian overlords because they demanded less tax from the locals. The empire didn't collapse; it was liquidated in bankruptcy court and sold to newcomers.

On top of all that, we have a bizarre "Woke" cultural war raging.

Victor Davis Hanson's essay here; it details the absurdities of the Maoist culture war being waged. An excerpt:

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

And he makes an essentially important point:

What is saving the country, for now, is not the third of Americans who have bachelor’s degrees, given the university has become a woke deductive, anti-empirical, anti-Enlightenment institution. For now, the more practical two-thirds of the population who did not graduate, and either never experienced the academic mind or got out quickly after they did, are our rear guard at Thermopylae. I concede, with the sadness of a former believer in higher education, that an entire institution has failed its pledge to the Enlightenment and we are back 2,700 years to Hesiod’s warning that with material progress comes moral regress.

And see this video interview with Hanson here, via The Conservative Treehouse. 

As you-all known, I've been writing a lot about Covid lately, but Covid is just one aspect of all the madness. It enabled the election theft, for one thing. Yet this crazy "Woke" Maoist-style Cultural Revolution is an essential part to it, as Hanson explains, and so is the non-president "pResdent" Biden (they keep trying to push forward Camel-Toes to replace him but she is so utterly unliked as to be astounding). The-powers-that-be try to say Biden is well liked, but who believes these polls? 

Excerpt:

Lastly, I’ll note that this massive approval, even if it truly exists, is not translating at the ballot box. Democrats were just shut out of a Trump +3 district in Texas via a special election. The Republican candidates took over 60% of the vote and the top two finishers who will go to the runoff are goth in the GOP. And while the turnout was low, as is to be expected, those same dynamics of lower turnout will exist in 2022 because it is a non-presidential election.

You know the polls are bogus because of stories like this one reported here. This article sport a number of videos taken by people that show no one, NO ONE bothered to turn out to see the 81 million vote getter.

And once Biden got into the water plant, he shuffled about with his cue cards because of course he can't remember anything.

Bottom Line:

I don't think China will wait till the American elections next year to seize Taiwan. Maybe they can steal the 2022 election the way they stole the last one, but things have fallen apart already in the U.S. and the meltdown is exponentially growing (consider the Border and the tens of thousands flooding across it). I just can't imagine -- even with all the election stealing -- they can maintain their grip on power. Perhaps it all depends on whether the Republicans in Arizona can complete their Maricopa County audit. The Antrim County election fraud case is with the judge now in Michigan, who will decide if it proceeds on May 18.

Personally, I blame Donald Trump for letting the election get stolen. He should not have allowed it, and should have raised hell about the 2016 election stealing in California – but then he should have never let that happen. Of course, he would have had to be part Machiavelli and part Napoleon to have outmaneuvered the forces arrayed against him. And "hindsight" is so crystal clear.

But "we the people" are stuck with this mess, and it will profoundly affect the entire world.

As Buckaroo Banzai famously said, "No matter where you go, there you are."

An Préachán

As "The World Descends into Darkness", a few reflections

 Amici,

The world descends into darkness,

China wields the ruling ring of Mordor

And Ringwraiths rule the world.

That's my death "rann" on the United States of America.

Friends, I feel emotionally like an old-time soldier who's just been shot. He knows enough to know it is fatal, but he's going to take a minute or two before he loses consciousness.

Welcome to the Darkness of the Reign of Mordor.

Across the board in the U.S., Civil Liberties are under massive assault. It is unprecedented, and Victor David Hanson, Dinesh D'Souza, and Harmeet Dillon discuss below what is happening and how horrible it is.

But as I've been saying since the fraudulent election occurred, precisely because it was so massive a fraud – made up of every fraud the Democrats have tried before, but all together, and on a scale so huge as to be staggering, although most easily seen in the big Democrat hell-holes inner-city America – that therefore they have to unleash all Hell to stop the revelation of it. They MUST create a police state to stop all discussion and revelation of the fraud, a police state so all-encompassing that the U.S. hasn't seen the like since Woodrow Wilson created the first Fascist state (even before Mussolini coined the word "Fascist"). They simply MUST cow the rest of us into silence. After all, we could watch in "real time" as votes added up for the Republican candidates in the Georgia run-off, and then watch as they were subtracted so the Democrats could win. Stalin once said that making Poland Communist was like saddling a cow, yet that's what the Dem's have done in Georgia. They'll do it to the whole nation.

It's going to get worse before it gets better, and honestly, it may never get better. And maybe we, as a nation, deserve that? (One could start with just abortion, but that discussion is for another email, as we huddle around oilcan fires, shivering from the cold and dark.)

At the Citizenfreepress site, I came across this discussion involving Victor Davis Hanson, Harmeet Dillion, and Judge Jeanine Pirro.

Victor Davis Hanson said, "We have descended into a collective madness that is a lot scarier than McCarthyism, whether it's trying – we've three times entered articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, and now they want to try him as private citizen. They've deplatformed him, they've banned his followers. We're hearing these creepy words (like) "de-Baathification" "deprogramming" "reprogramming", and Jeanine, these are not insignificant people. These are the levers of power in American society. These are five trillion-dollar Silicon Valley people, it's the corporate boardroom, it's Wall Street, it's professional athletes, it's Hollywood, it's the Media. These are considerable people.

"But Donald Trump has no voice now. He's not tweeting. He's not indiscriminately tweeting. He's gone. He has no voice. So there's going – Americans don't like bullies. They may get tired of sore losers but they can't stand bullies. And Donald Trump is taking this, and it's going to work in his favor. And I think you're going to have a backlash. You can't have a clarion call and say we're going to have blanket amnesty in a time of lockdowns...when people are terrified of this pandemic, and 8,000 people are going to cross the border without any background check and open borders.

"This is madness, and it is all about prepping for this new agenda that's going to come out in two weeks, and (this agenda) doesn't poll well, whether it's the green new deal or packing the court or a new national voting law. Smearing people as racist was a political ply to scare so they can steamroll this agenda in two weeks.

...
"I don't know whether Katie Couric prefers the Soviet, the Chinese, or the North Korean model (VDH is referring to Couric's call for "deprogramming" Trump's followers) but remember: Donald Trump did not surveil Associate Press reporters, he did not sic the FBI on the opposite political campaign, and he didn't weaponize the IRS to go after his enemies. When we have fascism, it does NOT come from somebody with orange hair and a long tie; it comes from somebody who's a suave, charismatic liberal and says he's a constitutional law professor. ...Take a look at the last administration where we really did have abuses of civil liberties on the part of the government, which was green-lighted by Katie Couric and others." 

Then Judge Jeanine spoke with Harmeet Dillon, civil libertarian and CEO of the Center for American Liberty, who said, "This is a civil right crisis of epic proportions, whether you're left or you're right, you should be deeply concerned about the weaponization of this corporate alliance that Dinesh mentioned against the citizens, and the idea that the FCC can control what's on the airwaves."

What follows is a few of the headlines of past few days, headlines the MSM might decline to publish.

• Vice-President Pence, Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader McCarthy won't attend Trump's good-bye ceremony YET Trump's approval rating hits 51% the day before Biden's inauguration. (Yes, either the Republican leadership is suicidal – politically – or they really are "Uniparty" and not Republicans at all.)
• Even after U.S. Capitol riots, a CNN poll (CNN, mind you) shows 75% of Republicans believe the election was stolen from President Trump.
• Joe Biden talks about his death during an emotional farewell speech to his home state.
• Chuck Schumer says the Senate will vote to bar Trump from ever running again. (Remember Schumer's comments about Kavanagh and Gorsuch back in March of 2020? No? Refresh your memories here (with video). What Schumer said was absolutely direct threats to the Justices. But he can get away with that, of course. He's a Democrat. Trump tells his followers to protest peacefully and he is impeached.)
• Meanwhile, Biden is set to cancel Keystone Pipeline (Canada is frantic over this; great move by Biden who wants to show world how much better at international relations he is than Trump /sarc)
  
• AND Biden will offer amnesty to TWENTY-MILLION illegals in his first week in office.
• CIA chief Gina Haspel, a John Brennan protégé, resigns as CIA director after successfully covering up Chinese involvement in our 2020 election.
• The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Biden's plan to raise minimum wage to $15/hour will kill off 4 million jobs. 
• Mitch McConnell threatened Trump that if Trump pardoned Julian Assange, "We are much more likely to convict you".
• Biden's nominee for Secretary of Defense says he'll "Rid our ranks of Racists and Extremists." (Hahaha, you know how stupid that is, especially when China's Red Army is the most "racist" and "extremist" army on Earth? They'll mop the floor with our "tranny" military. In general, the Han Chinese can be VERY racist, esp after being so prodded by the CCP.)
  
• Biden'spick for Deputy Secretary of Education believes schools "Spirit Murder" Black children and that white teachers need to undergo "Antiracist Therapy".
• "Tranny" Pennsylvania Health Director picked to be assistant Health Secretary. (That's so hellishly insane I need hardly comment.)
  
• Retired general Barry McCaffrey says of Biden's inaugural: "I'd be worried about gun-carryingg Republican Congressmen being near the president."
• Honduran heading to U.S. in caravan says Joe Biden is giving us 100 days to reach the U.S.
• Speaking of immigration, Democrats are calling for the Capitol to be surrounded by a permanent fence. (Why not just do a Kremlin and build a high brick wall?)
• Project Veritas has video of a Twitter Executive detailing plans for global censorship.
• Creepy Bill Gates is buying up U.S. farmland and is now the largest owner of private farm land in the U.S. What is he up to?
• Actor Alec Baldwin says he dreams of seeing President Trump hang (were a Repub to this about Biden, well, you get the picture).
• A former Facebook Exec calls for OANN and Newsmax to be deplatformed: "We have to turn down the capability of Conservative influencers to reach huge audiences"
  
• And Katie Couric, as VDH noted above, herself a former MSM talking head, says Trump supporters "need to be deprogrammed".

My friends, welcome to Mordor.

Here (while it is still up), Eric Metaxas remembers how his parents taught him about how bad Communism and Fascism was (as they had experienced it, losing their parents to it, etc.) and how when he first went to a regular American public school, how the American kids there were clueless to how awful the outside world could be. (Metaxas needs to get off YouTube; they cut a major interview of his with Mike Lindell yesterday.) But he details how in the past few weeks he himself has been falsely labeled – NPR spread these false reports – as promoting violence, with old friends outraged that he was advocating violence, etc., and how were the Democrats were actually convinced they legally won the election, they wouldn't be promoting all the lies, slander, and calumny against Conservatives.

This will be the "new normal" from here on out.

An Préachán

Victor Davis Hanson discusses the politicization of the military...

... military coup possible against President Trump. Very sobering podcast. The podcast is here; titled: Winding the Coup Clock.

Here's an excerpt I transcribed from the end of Prof. Hanson's talk:

We're in a really precarious position once the generals and admirals dominate the media and the cultural landscape and tell us that an elected president has no moral authority to do anything and then unelected officers and unelected intelligence bureaucrats have the higher moral ground to oppose him, and when you have an admiral saying he should leave sooner and the better, and another person said we can unite without him, I'm not sure that that doesn't enter Trump's mind that if he gave an order to a four-star that to send in the 82nd or 101st into Seattle and restore order, that that general would say "No," and what would be the reaction if he did say no: Would everyone say, "Oh my God; in the 232nd year of our republic, we now have a military coup!" or would they say, "Aha, this person was a genuine Patriot; he stood up to a tyrant; he protected the Constitution." And he would be canonized. And with those options and differences in reaction be known to the military, and how would they react to them once you will erode the authority of the commander-in-chief, for whatever reason of your dislike of him and once you politicize the military and once you have 93% negative coverage of an administration, and once you've already established the precedent in the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA and the FBI that you have the president and the vice president in 2016 that you have a moral right to the Constitution to oppose that president -- whether that's surveilling his national security advisor or doctoring documents or redacting names and leaking them or -- when you've already gone there and cross the Rubicon, I wouldn't  be surprised at anything anymore.

An Préachán again: In other words, if you're not afraid, you should be.

Such a coup would cause absolute chaos in government, economic crash (just as good economic news is coming out) and probably open warfare in the streets. Real warfare, not the garbage rioting by ignorant thugs and Antifa whites. An American coup would also be the greenlight for China to attack Taiwan and anyone else they wanted to.

As for a true civil war in resistance to the generals, Forbes says about a million people have signed up for Trump's Tulsa rally. Don't believe the polls saying his support is at 45%. Those same polls predicted Hillary would win. (I think the polls fake the number for a variety of reasons, not least of which is to adversely affect pro-Trump morale; but also of significant importance is that the big urban political machines need "cover" for their vote stealing, and strong polls for Biden today can explain how he gets the usual Democrat Black vote in those urban areas.)

We are in seriously dangerous waters, my friends. It is no joke. And all this idiocy of Russian Collusion (I know people who insist Trump DID collude with Russia, or who insist that the Mueller report did find collusion, etc.) and endless effort to delegtimize Trump from the get-go (Obama clearly intended to have Trump in a confrontation with Russia when Trump took the oath of office) have created the environment where what these retired generals and admirals are saying is WWII aviation gasoline poured on a fire.

Here are two Victor Davis Hanson articles related to this:

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/03/the-military-intelligence-complex/ and

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/not-so-swift-smear/

See Hanson also on the current riots:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/protests-coronavirus-bitter-irony-of-revolutions/

An Préachán

On Hitler's birthday, the U.S. descends into absolute tyranny...maybe

I came across a blog comment I came across the other day:

Nobody Special Defcon4 • 3 hours ago

It should have never happened in the first place. The entire country gave up essential liberty for a little temporary safety, which gave government unfettered control over their lives.

Indeed, it has. Today on a number of websites, I saw a "This day in history" but none mentioned the 1889 birthday of der Führer.

However, some grim, very totalitarian news to report that might have pleased the Nazi leader:

First, one should read Victor Davis Hanson here (highlights are my own):

An excerpt:

What explains the current taboo on topics regarding the coronavirus?

It is now a truism that almost every influential model that has been advanced about the spread of the coronavirus was flawed. They almost all erred on the side of exaggerated morbidity. But to suggest that in public is deemed heresy.

This article by Willis Eschenbach is excellent at exploring how these models predicted such dire consquences -- and are now are proven to be (to put it mildly) grotesquely off -- is fascinating.

This site: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/#latest is a Swiss site with a lot of info, if you want it. And I mean, a lot. Check it out.

Now, with that in mind, consider the following:

Yes, Facebook is taking down all posts wherein U.S. citizens try to organize protests against the lockdown. See here at the invaluable Conservative Treehouse:

An excerpt:

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO – “If someone is spreading something that is misinformation—certainly, someone saying that social distancing is not effective to help limit the spread of coronavirus—we do classify that as harmful misinformation and we take that down.”

“At the same time, it’s important for people to debate policies, basically give their opinions on different things, so there’s a line on this. But more than normal political discourse, I think, a lot of the things people are saying that is false around a health emergency can be classified as harmful misinformation that has a risk of leading to physical danger, and we will take that down.”

[Ron: Has Zuckerman never heard of Sweden?]

...The rules restricting liberty, in response to the crisis, have been pronounced without any representative voice supporting them. All of the rules are arbitrary, and many of these rules will be challenged in court.

However, until those court challenges take place, the only option for a redress of grievance comes in the form of public protest. Currently, there is no way for an citizen to appeal to a representative voice against the decrees from a state governor; other than a public protest…. This is a critical point; because non-representative government was the origination of the first great American rebellion against dictates from King George III.

Rebellion against unilateral and authoritarian power is America. Rebellion or push-back against non-representative government is the thread that connects the varying patchworks of our constitutional republic. Protest is so critical to our nation that it is protected within the very first amendment to our constitution.

Blue state governors have united to begin an economic civil war and block any White House effort to re-open the U.S. economy.  Enforcement of these unilateral orders is part of that plan.  The governors must use all censorship tools to retain their totalitarian agenda.

Again, this is all very predictable, during this economic war residents within the Blue occupied territories will be held captive to the political whims of their regional generals.

It is as though they want to bring on a civil war. They might well get that wish.

Then, in pure damnation, the U.S. federal government plans to tax people to pay for their own incarceration. 

An excerpt:

Comrades, senators within the United States government have proposed a terrific scheme to force taxpayers to fund their own confinement.   According to the plan $500 billion will be provided to state and local officials in an effort to offset lost revenue as a result of keeping citizens under house arrest.  Under the remarkable plan, taxpayers will now be paying for their own confinement.

Under the proposal, citizens who are not permitted to work; and who cannot leave the confinement of their homes or residence to earn a living; are now going to be compelled by the authority of the government, to pay the continued salaries of government workers.

Meanwhile, in a brilliant twist to benefit the State, as a result of their dictatorial power there is no currently functioning system of representation for any citizen to petition their unwarranted house-arrest.  You just can’t make this stuff up folks… unfortunately.

Ron again: The "blue state" governors are pushing this thing to the maximum, and the Federalis seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid. It doesn't matter what Sweden does, or anyplace else in the world (South Dakota). Violence will surely erupt, and in the very near future. As noted in this American Greatness article. That certainly seems to be the reality: small businessmen, the "deplorables" who voted for Trump, they're the ones being flattened. Whether the Chinese ChiComs plotted all this or not, it sure is turing out to their advantage.

As for the actual virus, technically Sars-Cov-2 (it should be Sars period, as the original Sars seems to have disappeared), yes, it is deadly enough to people like me, older, with pre-existing conditions (I have COPD) and so on, so they could be quarantined, naturally enough, and occasionally lock-downs (quarantines) of specific towns and regions might be warranted, as in Lombardy and NYC. (NYC, and its immediately adjoining counties, were they a separate country from the U.S., has more per captia deaths per million people than ANY other country! If you substract NY from the U.S., the U.S. isn't even in the top ten countries for COVID deaths! (And that is with them inflating the COVID death stats shamelessly.)

https://pjmedia.com/trending/heres-how-much-downstate-new-york-is-skewing-the-united-states-coronavirus-numbers/

And where, oh where is the common sense in herding locals into one specific place -- their local groceries -- if this disease is spread through close contact? This is an important interview with Professor Johan Giesecke regarding lockdown policies. 

An excerpt:

The only measure “we know” will work “is washing your hands is good for you and good for others when you’re in epidemic, but the rest, like border closures, school closures, social distancing, there’s almost no science behind most of these,” argued Giesecke.

Enough is enough. Americans have some degree of patience, but it is wearing thin. Even in Europe, people are beginning to ask questions.  

BTW, a "true spirit of America" post: local government officials flooded a skate part with sand to stop the skaters, so the kids turned it into a dirt bike track! 

Then there's this remarkable piece of protest!

Nil desperandum auspice Deo!

An Préachán

Can China Feed Itself?

Can China feed itself? Not really, as of now. And certainly not if they go to war.

We hear endless what a titan, what a colossus, Red China is. And President Trump is trying to slow down their greedy, godless, and already brutal march to world domination. Those deeply vested in China oppose Trump, obviously. Victor Davis Hanson has a good article on China and the President here.

But for what it is worth, as a disciple of Sun Tzu (and I eat popcorn with chopticks and practice Chinese calligraphy when I have the time, which is rare), I maintain that in a street fight, especially if your opponent is a huge, beefed up colusses, it is easy to take him down if you go for a knee. You don't have to take out both knees. One cracked knee will put him on the floor and keep him there. Marquis of Queensbury it isn't, but such is life.

What I mean is, should China – God forbid – ever actually try to go to war with its Asian neighbors, or the U.S., it has a knee in danger, indeed. Its agriculture.

Can Communist China feed itself? And if they can't feed themselves, why not? The Answer: Because they have a huge population much larger than their share of the world's arable land. And they have a top-down, Communist economic system. That's the basic idea. Of course, technology and genetics can help with both (though the Communism will hamper that), but any sort of war or aggressive behavior on their part, and those aids go out the window.

Had the time to do a bit of searching for this. According to this article in Nature: the Chinese hope to become self-sufficient in grain, but right now they import 95 million tonnes (metric) and that's 17 percent of their "domestic production". It's actually an interesting article, especially if one reads between the lines. 

They say the Chinese claim to store for emergency (like what, war?) most of what they import (but can we really be sure of that? We know how they lie like rugs about their other production stats). As noted, they have 7-8 percent of the worlds agricultural land, but feed 22 percent of its population. Clearly, any national crisis, like a sustained war effort, would challenge such a situation, putting it under extreme stress.

Apparently, north China produces 60 percent of their grain, but that's due to extensive irrigation. According to reports, water tables are lowering and droughts occur. But hahaha, the article also argues that "Global Warming" (yeah, right) will provide them with both more water and more arable land. Since we know Global Warming is a scam, all of that can be discounted.

Then there's this Bloomberg article: 

This one is ridiculously upbeat about how China will get more countries to grow food for it and how it will use technology to feed itself – but for our purposes, the whole point is that they WON'T get food from other countries if they go to war, A, and B, an agriculture that is heavily based on technology can go bust if the power grids are taken down, or the infrastructure damaged in other ways. (Damage to infrastructure often happens in war, 'tis said.)

All very, very shaky.

And thanks to an acquaintance, here's an air quality map of China. Phew! How do they breathe???

Remember, Communist China produces pollution like the Communist regimes did in Central Europe and Russia. The Chicoms have grievously polluted their environment. My acquaintance also wrote, "A recent World Bank study found pollution in China was caused approximately 750,000 preventable deaths a year and almost five hundred million Chinese citizens have no access safe drinking water. Did you get that? Forty percent of the country has no safe drinking water."

So therefore, it seems to me, that China has more problems than they care to admit, and any crazy war of imperial conquest would collapse them from within. 

AnP