Innocent Bystanders

War With China September 6, 2010

I love Chinese military parades.  You gotta admit, they look pretty scary.  They look like they are ready to kick some ass, which is the whole purpose of these parades.  I don’t think I have shown this one before.  It is awesome.  Note that the boot-stomps and other sound effects are dubbed in.  Also, they are using Western military march music to produce this spectacle.

These parades conceal a deeper reality about the vulnerability of China.

Here’s how a war with China would happen.

1.  China goes nuts about Taiwan or oil rights in the South China Sea, and attacks.  In the process, they shoot at a U.S. carrier task force.

2.  Whilst calmly offering a military response, the U.S. repudiates it’s debt to China, currently around $900 billion.  We twiddle our thumbs for a few days while the renminbi (the Chinese currency) goes under, the Chinese banking system collapses, and the Chinese economy  is exposed as a house of cards and heads for the Stone Age.

3.  Guess what, we win.  And there is a big bonus — our debt structure is more sustainable.  A war with China would be hugely profitable.  Bring it.

See, the underlying reality of U.S.-China relations is this:  the elites in China have maintained their legitimacy and power with economic growth.  That growth has been fueled by piratical foreign exchange rates, which means they hold huge amounts of dollars, the world’s reserve currency.  They can’t really afford to piss us off in a big way.  We hold all the cards, and those cards are U.S. Treasury bonds.   They deserve their weak position, because they basically ripped us off to pump up their economy.

So, China, I love your parades.  But at the core, your economy, your demographics, and your politics are rotten.  You fail to scare me.

Long-term, an amicable and productive relationship with China means they have to wean themselves from the drug of artificial exchange rates.  They get this; it’s just something they keep putting off.

Obama does not get this, of course.  The Community Organizer In Chief does not have an ounce of economic sense.  He projects weakness to the Chinese, and they can smell it on him.

What an ass.

Homeless People Have It Rough September 5, 2010

Well, maybe not all of them.

A homeless man who called 911 from the hot tub of a suburban Portland home and asked for towels, hot chocolate and a hug got arrested for trespassing instead.

Beaverton police say Mark Eskelsen called 911 from his cell phone, identified himself as “the sheriff of Washington County,” and asked for medical help. He later admitted he wasn’t the sheriff but informed the dispatcher he’d been “yelling for about an hour and a half.”

Read more at  The Brea Canyon Monument: Homeless people have it rough.