The Witness Chronicles, a Grasshopper Sub

The Witness Chronicles October 4, 2023

Disaster dodged, simplified China, and the disintegration of the Republican Party

Oct 04, 2023

brown leaf on body of water — Photo by Cole Keister on Unsplash

Well, it’s been a nutty week and that is not showing any sign of changing, but it sure looks like the GOP shot itself in the foot, more than once. I’ve had to back off because every time it looked like the show was over, there was another encore.

Of course this is just the beginning. Now that McCarthy is out, a good thing, really competent people like Scalise and Jim Jordan are stepping up to fill those teeny tiny boots. Good luck boys.

Meanwhile here in Western NY, the weather has been stellar. We were one degree short of ninety today with clear blue skies and low humidity. But of course this weekend will be cold, rainy, and windy. So it goes.

I guess this is good weather for cooking and hunkering down. But I’m not ready to write off fall. And, FYI, you cannot have an Indian Summer unless there has been a frost, so it’s not just a random stretch of warm weather. Fun fact.

Did you write today? Did I?

Disaster Dodged But Damage Done

Republican House forced to accept reality

Kevin McCarthy is taking a victory lap, but it’s premature at best. Matt Gaetz, grandstander number one, has declared he will take McCarthy down. It means nothing at this point because we now know the truth.

The Freedom Caucus has been gutted in the past week.

First there was the ridiculous Biden impeachment hearing run by James Comer, a man for whom facts have no role. The hearing was ridiculed by Fox pundits. Even they couldn’t find a shred of anything in this silly farce.

Then McCarthy put a proposal on the table with all the concessions the caucus wanted and they voted it down, proving they are completely full of crap.

It looked like all that was left was the nuclear option. Shut it down and then wait for McCarthy to be replaced, after doing irreplaceable damage to his party. One problem: no one wants the job. Then he did the obvious and collaborated with the Democrats and they got a 45 day reprieve with no cuts except Ukraine aid.

Which will almost certainly be replaced in the next few weeks.

So, to recap, the Freedom folks got nothing, zero, nada. Not only that but they were widely ridiculed by their own people, as witnesses in the impeachment thing clearly said there was no case.

McCarthy may yet hang in there but now the Dems own him. The GOP, as a party, comes out looking like children playing at politics. And their leader, Trump, who has repeatedly called for an unconditional shutdown with no concern for those affected, the economy, or the American public.

His desire for chaos and division, his only strategy, fell to pieces as political leaders defaulted to protecting their own asses. McCarthy for one, cannot reenter the Trump fold. Gaetz, MTG, Boebert, Comer, Gosar, and the rest were revealed as shrill, empty, and completely out of touch with reality.

Kind of a major turnaround in a single weekend, to put it mildly. And the timing! We are just about to enter a Presidential election year and one party is in total disarray. Well, the House version anyway. All of this is vindication for Mitch McConnell who kept his Republican Senate members in check, knowing there was nothing good to come out of this budget fight.

Btw, Trump and his family will appear in New York State court on Monday in the trial that is bad for his business but will be unlikely to affect his election chances. But it means the Trump family business is falling apart and he is still wracking up astronomical legal bills, even before the really serious trials begin.

Whew. Did you get all that? I’m certain I’m leaving something out. Oh, yeah, the other guy, Joe Biden, the actual President of the United States, who started his attack on Trump, finally mentioning his name and eviscerating his ‘policies’.

The Republican campaign of portraying Biden as doddering, senile, and an out of touch has been, probably contributing to an underestimation by the right. The reality is Biden and the Dems have played this masterfully by staying on the sidelines and letting the Republicans eat each other alive.

After all, why do anything until you need to?

Simplistic China Update: Housing and War

There’s some weird stuff going on

I make no claim to know much about contemporary China. I read a few newsletters, the mainstream coverage, and stories like the Philippines reef thing that sounds like gangs of children playing at war. But there is definitely a weird thing going on in this pivotal, power player nation.

First, housing and their economy. At some point during their recent growth period, prior to Covid, housing development was as much as 30% of the GDP. Given that housing is pretty speculative, especially on the grand scale of the big China developers, this should have been seen as a major problem.

Here’s an indicator of the scale of this: there are enough vacant or unfinished housing units in China to house the entire population. That’s in addition to existing units.

That is a preposterous factoid and like most ‘facts’ from the ancient land, it must be taken with skepticism. But, based on the absolutely bonkers images of dozens of identical high rise apartment buildings lined up in major cities, many vacant and unfinished, it seems possible.

Many average Chinese citizens, with newfound disposable income, invested in these units. But then, as might seem obvious given the numbers, the bottom fell out of the market, leaving millions holding the bag.

The nation’s two ginormous developers, Evergrande and Country Garden, are now teetering on bankruptcy. These are not normal Western real estate development companies. Their debts are measured in hundreds of billions and they are defaulting.

The Chairman of Evergrande was detained this week, on the usual unknown suspicions, by the totalitarian government that uses disappearing prominent figures to throw blame when obviously terrible economic decisions backfire. Given the scale of Evergrande’s problems, it is likely we will never see him again.

But it won’t solve that near trillion dollar collapse.

Nevertheless, supreme leader Xi is doubling down on absolute power, with senior government officials disappearing left and right. Not just government figures, almost anyone who achieves a certain degree of power or fame. Success in China is great, if you keep your head down.

It would help to be invisible.

The real estate crash has taken the entire Chinese economy down with it, aided by the West’s realization that Chinese monopolies on things like commodity computer chips, could hold our economies hostage. The US and allies are scrambling to end our reliance on these and other critical tech, while limiting Chinese access to needed manufacturing infrastructure.

We seem to have belatedly realized that the Chinese will steal any intellectual property they can get their hands on, especially the really leading edge stuff.

Which brings us to the Chinese military build up, which is truly alarming and unprecedented in scale, but also subject to Xi’s heavy-handed leadership, like everything else.

Nearly all senior level defense officials have disappeared in recent months.

It should be noted that one man cannot micromanage the economy and military of an enormous country, no matter how large his ego and ambitions.

Their military is building advanced weapons, including planes and ships, while laying claim to footholds all over Southeast Asia, on territory long considered the sovereign land of existing countries.

In the Philippines, the Chinese military has been harassing the fishing trade in waters that are considered Philippine property, even roping off sections of reefs that China can build land on, as they are doing all over the region.

This resulted in the unlikely image of average fishermen in small boats defying that naval might and cutting barriers to their traditional fishing waters.

As I mentioned at the beginning, this is not my area of expertise at all, but while surveying the political and environmental news, these stories and anecdotes keep popping up. They would not mean anything except that we are talking about the second greatest economic power of earth, with major aspirations to be number one.

And, seemingly all run by the iron hand of one man. Unlike Putin’s iron hand in Russia, China is not a failing economy fighting an unnecessary war while its economy is in tatters. Putin clings to the notion of Russian greatness that has not existed in decades.

Xi has real power.

But power over what? A failing economy with 25% unemployment among college educated Chinese under the age of thirty and a disintegrating economy? And a military that is sophisticated technologically but seems to be run by schoolyard bullies?

I write about domestic US politics, which are pretty nuts these days. But only a few thousand miles away, across the Pacific, a huge country with a potent military is wavering. Yet our politicians and people not only seem to know nothing about China, but don’t seem to care.

Stability means balance, not one-sided power. The human planet is wildly unbalanced right now and no one in my country seems to have a clue or even care. Maybe a few more of us should keep our eyes on China when we think about our political choices.

The Republican Party May Disintegrate in 2024

Irreconcilable differences? It’s looking likely

Despite the rattlings of Fox and the MAGA news outlets, the Republican Party is in danger of a serious splintering next year, as hard core obstructionists tear it to pieces. And their presumptive leader is not capable of unifying anyone; it’s just not in his nature.

With the imminent and unnecessary shutdown of the government we are witnessing anarchy in action, as leadership weakly struggles to even get GOP members to talk to each other. Speaker McCarthy will almost certainly be out, possibly within days, and there is no obvious successor.

After all, who would want the job?

Who is conspicuously absent in this mess? The Democrats and most Senate Republicans. The Dems are lying low and letting their opponents tear each other to pieces. As for Trump, he spends his time skewering any members of his own party who threaten to try and govern, while he promotes the government shutdown.

It’s his hope that in the resulting chaos his court cases will become forgotten or even cancelled. The logic behind this is nonexistent at best, but he knows he has no other recourse.

The guy isn’t running for President, he is running to try and save his ass. No other way to put it, the guy could care less about the Party or the future.

And he is their best hope for unity? He hates the word.

Outside of the House, the Party apparatus has decided that backing popular issues like women’s reproductive rights and human rights for non-whites, LGBQT, immigrants, non Christians, and basically anyone not white is bad policy. But they seem to forget that when you eliminate everyone, except intolerant white Christians, there’s not much left.

Last night the Party held its second primary debate, a pointless exercise that just makes them look even weaker as a field of wannabes spent most of the time taking potshots at each other. Once again, GOP members are going after their own rather than the opposition.

I did not watch the debates for two reasons. First, it was broadcast on Fox News, a discredited fake media outlet that was legally forced to admit it had a corporate policy of lying to support right wing narratives. Second, why would I destroy brain cells watching that stuff?

While this charade was going on, watched only by pundits and people with nothing better to do, leading candidate Trump spoke to an audience in Detroit at an auto factory that is not a union facility, though Trump was there ostensibly to speak to striking UAW workers. Workers whose leadership has been harshly critical of his stances on almost everything.

It was nothing but badly planned political theater that had nothing to do with supporting workers (why would he care, he never has), a farce. The audience was almost entirely hardcore MAGA people brought in to fill a room. The standard Trump circus.

As far as I can tell, his speech was the usual self-centered nonsense and paranoia. His lead is apparently insurmountable, which is going to be a gradually worsening problem for the Republican Party, as we see almost weekly court appearances throughout his campaign.

This kind of thing tends to wear away at a candidate’s credibility, but credibility is not one of Trump’s strengths. But what last night’s debate and Trump’s speech showed us is that Trump is much weaker than his party will admit, and their bench is incredibly weak.

Not a great look going into just over a year before the election.

During the last presidential election, the Republican Party officially decided not to offer a platform of policies on important topics like the economy, Ukraine and foreign policy in general, China, immigration, climate change, or anything else.

Yes, they decided not to go on the record, as a Party, on any specific policy. And they appear to be continuing with this non-policy. So, in addition to complete disarray in the upcoming election, they will not go on the record as standing for anything.

But they have a shadow policy platform that is based on censorship, racism, intolerance of any non-white traditional lifestyles, isolationism, and pure anarchy rather than governance.

Those anarchist elements, the House Freedom Caucus, are shutting the government down this weekend, barring some kind of political miracle. This has never worked out well for the Party and this time it really makes them look like children. Spoiled children.

And then there is the second story from that dysfunctional Republican House, their attempt to impeach Joe Biden, despite having zero evidence. This sideshow is really designed to showcase really dumb Republicans like Representative Comer, who wouldn’t recognize a fact if he saw one, but never misses a chance to grandstand with rumors and innuendo.

My advice here? Why would you showcase one of the dumbest Party members without him even having one factual claim to legitimacy? Too late, that’s a done deal. Party position? We are the party of willful ignorance.

Despite my liberal views, I am basically a moderate who is not thrilled by a major party imploding, seemingly by intent. A democracy is not a democracy without a legitimate opposition. That’s a huge problem, if you believe in democracy.

Which gets to the crux of this story. Have the Republicans seriously given up on the basic premise of our Constitution and the equal rule of law? It certainly looks like they have, but is it really intentional? Do they really want a dictatorship run by a maniacal criminal egotist? Do they have any core of decency left?

What I see is a party that has no focus, no integrity, and no backup plan if Trump loses. They are allowing their party to destroy itself from within, based on one man’s narcissistic obsession with his own victimhood. Victimhood he brought down upon himself and he richly deserves.

There is no shred of decency there and never has been. So why would a major Party in a great Democracy throw it all away for that?

Find me one good reason why. And good luck defending it.

The Witness Chronicles, politics decoded

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