Russia learned of a German proposal to use long-range Taurus missiles to destroy the Kerch Bridge (linking the Russian mainland with the Crimean peninsula) by bugging a conference phone call among German generals. The Germans, Zero Hedge reports, were using "off-the-shelf and apparently non-secure video phone technology" to discuss highly sensitive matters of national security. One general on the line reportedly "dialed in from his hotel room."
The Kerch Bridge
The implication is either that Germany's generals are very stupid people, or that they deliberately used a highly insecure method of communication for the purpose of informing Russian intelligence of what they considered an insane plan that could result in all out war. In the latter case, their hope, presumably, being that a Russian warning of retaliation, a promise for example to take out, say, London Bridge (upon which billions in tourism revenue depends) or Germany's Hohenzollern Bridge (upon which billions in industrial production depends) would stop the madness.
Anyhow, even if you can strike it, how do you destroy something that's 20 kilometers wide.
Nancy Pelosi makes a private -- which is to say non-official -- visit to Taiwan, and China has gone ape. China has surrounded Taiwan with warships engaged in live-fire exercises, while sending warplanes to invade Taiwan's airspace.
Could any country have a more ridiculous excuse for such outrageous behavior?
Yet Western media and many pundits are wittering on about Nancy Pelosi endangering world peace.
No, it is China that is endangering world peace.
China has offered precisely zero reason to believe that Pelosi's Taiwan trip, in her capacity as a private citizen, constituted a threat to Chinese national security. In the absence of such a threat, China's reaction amounts to a threat of an unprovoked invasion of an independent nation, the ultimate war crime.
But perhaps Pelosi's visit was instigated as a US-devised trap for a paranoid China. If China acts on its threat to invade Taiwan, then NATO will have the justification it may want for war on China.
Which raises the question: why would the West, meaning the United States and its most sycophantic NATO allies such as Britain and Germany, want war with China.
For two reasons.
First, while China is rising in industrial output, scientific and technological capacity, military might, and national self-confidence, the West declines, meaning that war now is better than war later.
Second, war with China could reverse the trends in social development not only in the West but in China too.
How could war with China, hurt China while being the cure for Western decline?
Through an inevitable ban on trade with China, as a result of which:
1. China loses much of its huge export market for manufactured goods, this resulting in widespread unemployment and social unrest in an economy already suffering from an imploding real estate bubble.
2. The US and other post-industrial states experience widespread shortages and huge increases in the cost of manufactured goods. The unavailability of cheap Chinese products reverses many detrimental social changes of recent decades. The resulting boom in domestic manufacturing will create millions of decently paid jobs, which together with a huge increase in the cost of living, while raising the incentive for working people to acquire useful job skills as a prerequisite to decently paid employment.
Whether these changes would sufficiently tip the balance in war to the advantage of the West, is impossible to know. However, without a restoration of its industrial base, the West is surely doomed to both economic and military eclipse by China.
There is, obviously, no logical reason why reform in the West should be contingent on war with China. But there are powerful social forces that, short of some catalyzing event such as a major war, will continue to resist rational economic and social development in the West. These malevolent influences include:
1. Great Western corporations that have profited massively by offshoring labor services from the West to China and other developing nations. These include a remarkably large proportion of the best known Western manufacturing names. For example, Ford, GM, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Boeing, and many, many more. Even famous craft industries have been off-shored, Ireland's Waterford Glass to Indonesia being among them, along with England's Wedgewood pottery.
2. Expansion of so-called higher education to accommodate a substantial fraction of the population including, inevitably, many of below average academic potential. Along with this reduction in the average intellectual competence of the academy's student intake has occurred a massive dilution in the competence of the teaching staff. Today, instead of a small group of low paid and dedicated professionals, universities are largely staffed by second-, third-, and fourth-rate, overpaid, alleged scholars whose research pursuits amount in a vast number of cases to little more than piffle, often degenerating into anti-intellectual politically correct or woke rubbish with which to poison the minds of youth.
3. The growth of public services, such as Britain's grotesque National Health Service with over a million employees, which serve less the public than its employees and administrators at the expense of the public.
4. The adaptation of political party platforms in Western democracies to attract the public service vote, with the consequence that employees of Western governments have a political stranglehold that prevents any reform is of what are mostly bloated, unproductive and often socially harmful bureaucratic establishments.
So what do you want? More Bido-, Trudo-, or BoJo-led pseudo-democracy or, Heaven forbid, some monster like Trump who might shake up and pare down our great parasitic bureaucracies and corrupt educational establishments, while punishing unpatriotic industrial corporations once synonymous with Western industrial greatness.
