China has put US arms companies Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman on its sanctions list for selling weapons to Taiwan, the Foreign Ministry in Beijing said on Friday.
I doubt if either company sells anything to the PRC, so what do they care if they're on the PRC's sanctions list? To them, it's probably no more significant than being sanctioned by North Korea.
Speaking of North Korea, following the visit to Russia by the Only Obese Man in North Korea, my guess is that they are going to send the Russians a lot of artillery shells that are decades past their "good if used by" dates.
The battle lines are now formally drawn. Cold War 2.0 with China as the lead Communist dog. Xi is experiencing some difficulties with his loyalist appointees. Corruption is a feature of this system, not a bug.
ReplyDeleteDPRK keeps coming up drones:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/28/north-koreas-kim-displays-nuclear-capable-missiles-drones-at-parade
Let's just say they resemble Iranian drones...
Ukraine stood up a drone industry on the fly and now we are seeing all of their creativity, engineering and industry. Sea and air superiority done a different way. I hope I live long enough to read all of the books afterwards.
Mr. Jones, corruption seems to pervade through all political systems. It's just a matter of how rampant it can get and how fast everything rots from the core. Luckily for us a democratic republic is the best working system so far with the least rotten apples and hopefully those apples can be tossed before there is a spread of rot. Like in 2020, but they got the House back and the Supremes.
ReplyDeleteLet's cut the mister mister. The Economist publishes a corruption index from time to time
ReplyDeletehttps://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/01/25/corruption-is-getting-worse-in-many-poor-countries
I consider it a reasonable estimator. You may note a disparity between democracies and autocracies. As base rates and comparison classes, what do we find with the Communist autocracies of China, Russia and DPRK? We find the same things. James Church did the DPRK in his novels:
His "Inspector O" novels have been well-received, being noted by Asia specialists for offering "an unusually nuanced and detailed portrait" of North Korean society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Church
In scientific terms it's CHAMPS/KNOWS
This article tests the power of a cognitive-debiasing training module (“CHAMPS KNOW”) to improve probability judgments in a four-year series of geopolitical forecasting tournaments sponsored by the U.S. intelligence community. Although the training lasted less than one hour, it consistently improved accuracy (Brier scores) by 6 to 11% over the control condition.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making/article/developing-expert-political-judgment-the-impact-of-training-and-practice-on-judgmental-accuracy-in-geopolitical-forecasting-tournaments/123EB18425391D05FA6581FDBB3F309F
Some of bases rates and comparison classes are going to go out the window after the Ukraine conflict
Battleplan is a 2006 military television documentary series examining various military strategies used in modern warfare since World War I. It is shown on the Military Channel in the U.S. and Yesterday. Each episode looks at particular military strategy – or "battleplan" – through two well-known historical examples, gauging them against the ideal requirements necessary to successfully conduct that strategy. All the episodes use examples from modern warfare, dating from the First World War (1914–18) up to the Iraq War (2003). Lloyd Clark (Royal Military Academy Sandhurst) and Bruce Gudmundsson (US Army War College) analyze the information and talk about it on the show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleplan
Addendum - I meant to include this for anyone that is curious
ReplyDeletehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-rehfeldt-69777025/
I practice safe internet for many reasons one of which is my last name.