Tag: China

Why China Can’t Win the Trade War

The US cannot win a military war against China. By the same token, China cannot win a trade war with the USA under the present circumstances. In addition to the fact that the nation with the trade surplus is the one with the weaker hand in a trade war, there is the situation regarding China being the leading holder of US debt.

And as J. Paul Getty is believed to have said: “If you owe the bank $100 that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.”

In any event, here are the retaliatory measures reportedly being contemplated by China in response to the 104 percent tariffs imposed by the US government.

1) Retaliatory Tariff increases on U.S. Agricultural Products including Soybeans and Sorghum.

Whoop-de-damn doo. No one cares about the profitability of Big Agriculture. Feed it to the cattle.

2) Banning import of U.S. Poultry into China

Whoop-de-damn two. No one cares about the profitability of Big Agriculture. Lower prices on rotisserie chicken and at KFC are not things that fall into the problem category for Americans.

3) Suspending Sino-U.S. cooperation on Fentanyl-related issues

Whoop-de-damn three. There is nothing the Chinese can do, or should be expected to do, to stop Americans from taking illegal drugs.

4) Countermeasures in the Service related Sector

China already erected The Great Firewall. That card has been played.

5) Banning the import of US Films into China

Feature, not a bug. Burn Hollywood, burn.

6) Investigating the Intellectual Property Benefits of US Companies operating in China

It’s hard to threaten IP rights when there has never been any respect shown for them from the start.

China has already raised tariffs on US imports to 84 percent, which will effect pretty much zero Americans in any way, shape, or form.

That is a weak, weak hand that is arguably net beneficial to the USA. Frankly, I don’t see what China can do on the trade front that might even have the hope of accomplishing anything, although obviously it could choose to escalate to proxy military conflict in Ukraine, the Middle East, and the South China Sea.

It would be better to follow the lead of many smaller nations, refuse to retaliate, and accept President Trump’s invitation to negotiate for better terms. Because this really isn’t something that the USA can afford to back down on.

DISCUSS ON SG

104 and Counting

Tariffs on Chinese goods are going to 104 percent.

China now faces another 50% in tariffs after Beijing missed a noon deadline to withdraw the retaliatory import taxes it imposed on the United States.

The new tariffs will go into effect at 12:01 am, the White House said. That brings the total tariffs on all goods from China coming into the United States to 104%.

Trump placed a 34% increase on China when he announced his tariff plan on Liberation Day. That was on top of 20% import taxes rolled out earlier this year on Beijing.

The president, on Monday, pledged another 50% tariffs after Beijing responded to his tariff threat with a 34% increase on U.S. goods coming into China.

Well, the Chinese can’t say they weren’t warned. I warned them, on their state TV, nearly nine years ago, that President Trump would wage, and would win, a trade war against them. None of the Chinese or Hong Kong economists agreed, of course, but what was obvious then is even more obvious now.

When you’re running a trade surplus, you can’t win a tariff battle. Reciprocal tariffs are not a viable weapon for the country doing most of the exporting, because the importing country benefits from protecting its manufacturers.

DISCUSS ON SG

China Hits Back

Even though the trade war is not the war that China can win right now.

China will soon impose an additional 34 per cent tariffs on all American imports in retaliation for Donald Trump’s 34 per cent levy. Beijing announced the measure today, the most serious escalation in a trade war with Trump that has fed fears of a recession and triggered a global stock market rout.

The new tariff, which comes into effect on April 10, matches the rate of the ‘reciprocal’ tariff imposed by Trump this week. The levies are in addition to the existing tariffs already imposed on US goods.

US exports to China totalled $143.5 billion last year, according to Office of the US Trade Representative data. Oilseeds and grains, including soybeans, machinery and aerospace products were America’s top exports to the country. The US imported $438.9 billion worth of goods from China last year, with top imports including electrical and electronic equipment, machinery, toys, and plastics.

I don’t know why China is doing this, since the balance of trade surplus means that the more US-China trade declines, the more it will hurt China rather than the USA. All I can think is that China isn’t actually concerned about the inevitable trade war, but is more interested in gradually turning up the heat in a conflict that it knows to be unavoidable.

Time would appear to be on China’s side in this regard. It has been 25 years since Bill Clinton announced the United States-China Relation Act of 2000 that opened the floodgates of US-China trade.

DISCUSS ON SG

Clown World Abandons Taiwan

“The Taiwan Fixation” is a long and meandering article in Foreign Affairs that serves to obscure the primary point being made there. But the inescapable conclusion eventually reached by the intrepid reader who manages to slash-and-burn his way through the jungle-like maze of text is that Clown World’s strategerists now accept that the US military is no longer capable of winning a war with China. Which is good, because it isn’t.

The fate of Taiwan keeps American policymakers up at night, and it should. A Chinese invasion of the island would confront the United States with one of its gravest foreign policy choices ever. Letting Taiwan fall to Beijing would dent Washington’s credibility and create new challenges for U.S. military forces in Asia. But the benefits of keeping Taiwan free would have to be weighed against the costs of waging the first armed conflict between great powers since 1945. Even if the United States prevailed—and it might well lose—an outright war with China would likely kill more Americans and destroy more wealth than any conflict since the Vietnam War and perhaps since World War II. Nuclear and cyber weapons could make it worse, bringing destruction on the U.S. homeland. These would be catastrophic consequences for the United States.

As terrible as a U.S.-Chinese war would be, an American president would face immense pressure to fight for Taipei. Many U.S. policymakers are convinced that Taiwan, a prosperous democracy in a vital region, is worth protecting despite the daunting price of doing so. Political calculations may also push a U.S. president into war. By staying out, the president could expect to be blamed not only for permitting the economic meltdown that China’s invasion would trigger but also for losing Taiwan after a decades-long battle of wills between Washington and Beijing over the island’s future. That would doom a president’s legacy. Against such a certainty, any chance of salvaging the situation could look like a better bet—and by opting to fight China to protect Taiwan, the president would preserve the possibility of going down in history as a great wartime victor. In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson faced a choice between ramping up a U.S. military campaign in Vietnam and allowing the Communists to take over the country. He doubted that a war was necessary or winnable. But he sent American soldiers all the same.

U.S. leaders need a way to escape the ghastly decision to either wage World War III or watch Taiwan go down. They need a third option. Washington must make a plan that enables Taiwan to mount a viable self-defense, allows the United States to assist from a distance, and keeps the U.S. position in Asia intact regardless of how a cross-strait conflict concludes. This way, the United States could abstain from sending its military forces to defend Taiwan if China invades the island and does not attack U.S. bases or warships..

Before the moment of crisis arrives, political leaders should initiate a frank national dialogue about U.S. interests in the western Pacific. Americans must know the true costs of conflict with China: the deaths of tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers, the possibility that nuclear weapons would be fired in desperation, an economic downturn dwarfing that of the Great Recession of 2008, and severe disruption to everyday life. It will take great effort for policymakers to communicate the scale of the potential devastation because a war with China would look nothing like the relatively small and contained wars that the United States has waged in recent decades.

In addition to making clear the costs of war with China, U.S. officials should stress the need to coexist with China as prominently as they discuss the need to compete with it. In the coming years, especially if Beijing’s behavior improves, American policymakers should adopt “competitive coexistence” as an approach for U.S. relations with China. In doing so, they would convey Washington’s willingness to establish stable patterns of interaction, limit security competition, and address global problems collaboratively. At a minimum, political leaders should avoid undue alarmism about Taiwan. The Biden administration was right to tamp down public speculation about the year by which China might intend to launch an invasion. The Trump administration should go further to discourage catastrophic thinking, including by communicating to the public that China would not pose an immeasurably greater challenge to the United States if Taiwan came under its control.

I don’t know why the neocons are preemptively aligning themselves with reality in the case of China when they aggressively refused to do so in the case of Russia. Perhaps they simply don’t hate the Chinese with the same irrational hatred they harbor for the Russians, perhaps the extent of the Chinese industrial advantage is simply too great for even the most magickal-thinkers to believe they can simply wish away, or, more likely, they want to reserve the limited US military resources that will be available for any foreign adventures for the Middle East.

The trade war with China should provide sufficient excitement to keep even the most inveterate drama-seekers occupied. There is simply no benefit to the United States of engaging in an actual war in the South Pacific.

DISCUSS ON SG

State Implies Support for Independence

I don’t know if this action by the US State Department is simple Deep State shenanigans or what would appear to be a significant step by the Trump administration:

Bloomberg: Earlier this week, the U.S. State Department removed the words “we do not support Taiwanese independence” from a fact sheet on Taiwan relations on its website. Have you discussed this with the U.S. and do you have any comment now? 

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Guo Jiakun: There is but one China in the world, Taiwan is part of China and the government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China. It is a prevailing international consensus and basic norm governing international relations, and also a solemn commitment the U.S. has made in the three China-U.S. joint communiqués.

History cannot be tampered with, facts cannot be denied, and truth cannot be distorted. U.S. State Department updated its fact sheet on relations with Taiwan and gravely backpedaled on its position on Taiwan-related issues. This move severely violates the one-China principle and three China-U.S. joint communiqués, goes against international law and basic norms of international relations, and sends a seriously wrong signal to the separatist forces for “Taiwan independence.” This is another example of the U.S. clinging to its wrong policy of “using Taiwan to contain China.”

We urge the U.S. to immediately correct its wrongdoings, abide by the one-China principle and three China-U.S. joint communiqués, handle the Taiwan question with extra prudence, stop using Taiwan to contain China, stop upgrading its substantive relations with Taiwan, stop helping Taiwan expand so-called “international space,” stop emboldening and supporting “Taiwan independence,” and avoid further severe damage to China-U.S. relations and peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.  

This is a key moment for the Trump administration to decide if it is genuinely nationalist or if it is still going to try to prop up the lite globalism known as “civic nationalism” that has systematically weakened the USA for the last century.

Although most people are incapable of examining the roots of their beliefs, at their cores, the Chinese position is the nationalist one and the independence position is the civic nationalist one. Regardless, it isn’t any business of the USA’s how the unification process takes place, so it’s not a good sign that the State Department is sending interventionist signals like this.

Americans might not consider this to be a big deal, but it’s the top story on Global Times today.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Case of the Gold Buddhas

This is the first I’ve ever heard about any of this. Don’t ask me if it’s legitimate or the plot of Chuck Dixon’s next action movie.

Now that we’re finally allowed to talk about conspiracies and USAID—can we talk about the CIA moving gold on ships?

Can we talk about how, before WWII, nearly every village in China had a gold Buddha filled with gems, serving as the local bank?

Can we talk about how the Japanese looted them all and launched a massive sealift operation to stash them in the Philippines?

Or how a farmer found ONE of these Buddhas—only for Ferdinand Marcos to steal it?

Or how a U.S. court valued that SINGLE Buddha at $22 BILLION in 1998?

Or how, if that one Buddha had been invested in the S&P 500, the farmer would be richer than
@elonmusk
today?

Can we talk about how Google raided libraries and archives, scanning every book to track it down?

Can we talk about how certain tech firms used this knowledge to leverage the US Government and CIA to work for them?

Or how most of that gold is STILL buried in the Philippines—
And how Taiwan is a distraction while China builds a massive Navy to take it back?

Or how at least one of the CIA’s secret ship registries was accidentally exposed in the USAID data dump?

Or how the CIA funded a History Channel program about all this—to paint anyone searching for the truth as a nutcase?

Or how the co-founder of Jeff Bezos’ starship company wrote a bestselling “fiction” book about this gold becoming the world’s Bitcoin reserve—nine years before Satoshi Nakamoto launched Bitcoin?

It does tend to strike me as an awful lot of interest in a barbarous relic. But how can one single gold Buddha be worth anything close to that much?

DISCUSS ON SG

Testing the Free Trade Hypothesis

It has long been a mantra of the free trade crowd that both sides lose from a trade war. President Trump has called that mantra into question by launching a trade war with Canada, and likely Mexico and China as well:

Canada will retaliate against President Donald Trump’s new tariffs with 25% levies on a raft of U.S. imports, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Saturday, warning Americans that Trump’s actions would have real consequences for them.

As relations between the long-time allies who share the world’s longest land border reach a new low, Trudeau told a news conference he was slapping tariffs on C$155 billion ($107 billion) of U.S. goods. Those on C$30 billion will take effect on Tuesday, the same day as Trump’s tariffs, and duties on the remaining C$125 billion in 21 days, he said.

Trudeau’s announcement came just hours after Trump ordered 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports and 10% on goods from China, risking a trade war that economists say could slow global growth and reignite inflation. Trump said he would impose 10% tariff on all energy imports from Canada.

The Canadian leader said tariffs would include American beer, wine and bourbon, as well as fruits and fruit juices, including orange juice from Trump’s home state of Florida. Canada would also target goods including clothing, sports equipment and household appliances.

Trudeau said the coming weeks would be difficult for Canadians but that Americans would also suffer from Trump’s actions. “Tariffs against Canada will put your jobs at risk, potentially shutting down American auto assembly plants and other manufacturing facilities,” Trudeau said, addressing U.S. citizens during a press conference in Ottawa. “They will raise costs for you, including food at the grocery store and gas at the pump.”

Canada is considering non-tariff measures, potentially relating to critical minerals, energy procurement and other partnerships, Trudeau said. The 9,000-km (5,600-mile) U.S.-Canada border handles over $2.5 billion in trade a day, especially in energy and manufacturing, according to Canadian government data from 2023.

In 2023, Canada exported close to C$550 billion worth of goods and services to the U.S., or more than three-fourths of its total exports. Energy accounted for 30% and manufacturing contributed around 15% to exports south of the border. Exports to the U.S. accounts for roughly 17.8% of Canadian gross domestic product and more than 2.4 million jobs in Canada.

Let’s look at the three trade balances:

  • Canada: Canada’s merchandise trade surplus with the U.S. last year was C$100 billion. That equates to 3.2% of Canadian GDP. The U.S., however, enjoys an edge in services trade, mainly related to Canadians flowing over the American border. This impact shrinks the trade surplus to C$85 billion, or 2.8% of Canadian GDP, and $45 billion, or -0.2% of U.S. GDP.
  • China: China had a surplus of $990.6 billion with the US. This accounts for 5.4% of Chinese GDP and -4.4 percent of US GDP.
  • Mexico: Mexico had a surplus of $171.5 billion with the US. This accounts for 9.5% of Mexican GDP and -0.8% of US GDP.

Conclusion: the USA will handily win a trade war with all three countries, which is presumably why President Trump singled them out. The US economy will observably benefit from removing foreign competitors taking sales away from domestic businesses; the GDP cost to the foreign countries is an order of magnitude greater to them because their interaction with the USA is more parasitical than symbiotic.

The maximum direct impact to US GDP would be expected to be +5.4 percent, or a benefit of $1,215 billion to the US economy. The maximum direct impact to the three foreign economies would be expected to be an average of -5.9 percent. So even a trade war that leads to a complete end to all trade between the US and the three countries would be expected to significantly help the US economy and increase US wages, and harm all three foreign economies.

Remember, the theoretical justifications for free trade have always been false and incorrect, as first demonstrated by Ian Fletcher and then conclusively disproved by me. Free trade is absolutely and inherently detrimental to a nation, because its logic of efficiency and optimally pairing labor with capital absolutely requires the complete destruction of families, local communities, and the demographics of the nation itself.

The fact that decades of even partially free trade within and without the US borders has significantly fostered these three negative societal trends isn’t an accident, it is specifically predicted by my theoretical observations and argument in my 2016 book ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE.

Here is the relevant Presidential order. It’s informative to see that instead of cracking down on its illegal fentanyl production and exports, the Canadian government has elected to embrace trade war. The irony here is that the USA is simply attempting to do what China tried, and failed, to do in the Opium Wars.

DISCUSS ON SG

Underwhelmed by Deep Seek

Given Gemini’s obvious attempts to put a thumb on the scale, I thought it would be interesting to see how Deep Seek did when posed exactly the same questions. The results so far are inconclusive and underwhelming.

Given the average length in years of a human generation, and assuming that the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor lived 9 million years ago, how many human generations has it been since the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor?

An error occurred

An error occurred

UPDATE: The version made available by Gab did better.

 The user is asking how many human generations have passed since the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor (CHLCA), which was 9 million years ago. They mention using the average length of a human generation. Hmm, so first I need to figure out the average generation length and then divide 9 million by that number.

Wait, but what exactly is considered a generation here? Is it the average age of parents when they have offspring? I think that’s typically how generation length is defined. For humans, I remember reading that a generation is roughly 20 to 30 years. But I should verify the exact value. Maybe different sources use slightly different numbers. For example, some studies might use 25 years as an average. Let me recall. The Generation length can vary depending on the context—demographic, genetic, or historical. In population genetics, they often use 25 to 30 years. But I need to pick a standard value here. Maybe the user expects an approximate answer, so perhaps 25 years is a commonly cited average. Alternatively, if I check some references, the OECD uses 25 years for a generation, and some genetic studies use around 25-30. Let’s go with 25 years as a middle ground. So if each generation is 25 years, then the number of generations would be 9,000,000 divided by 25. 

By the way, that was significantly reduced from the original wall of text. Deep Seek really agonizes over its answers.

Scientists have measured a genetic difference between modern humans and modern chimpanzees measured in DNA base pairs. How large is that difference and how many genetic fixation events are required to account for it?

First, I remember that humans and chimpanzees share a very high percentage of their DNA, often cited as around 98-99% similarity. But the exact figure can vary depending on the study and what’s being measured. For example, some sources say 98.7%, others might say 95% when considering insertions and deletions (indels) and other structural variations. So the actual number of differing base pairs would depend on the total genome size and the percentage difference.

The human genome is roughly 3 billion base pairs long. If we take the commonly cited 1.2% difference (from the 98.8% similarity), that would be 3,000,000,000 * 0.012 = 36 million base pairs different. But wait, I need to check if that includes all types of variations or just substitutions. Because indels (insertions or deletions) can cause more significant differences. For example, a study in 2005 suggested that the actual single nucleotide substitutions account for about 1.23% difference, and when including indels, the total difference increases to around 4% or higher. But maybe more recent studies have updated these numbers.

Alternatively, the 1.2% figure is often used for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), while structural variations add more. However, the user specifically mentions “DNA base pairs,” which might refer to single nucleotide differences. But it’s a bit ambiguous. Let me confirm: DNA base pair differences can include substitutions, insertions, deletions. So total difference would be all those.

So to summarize:

  1. Genetic difference: ~35-40 million base pairs (considering SNPs and small indels), or higher with structural variations.
  2. Fixation events: Approximately equal to the number of differences, so ~35-40 million, as each difference is a fixation in one lineage.

However, it’s important to note that some studies might present different numbers. For example, a commonly cited figure is about 35 million single nucleotide differences and around 5 million indels, totaling 40 million. Therefore, the answer would be that the genetic difference is approximately 40 million base pairs, and around 40 million genetic fixation events are required. </Thinking>

The genetic difference between modern humans and chimpanzees, measured in DNA base pairs, is approximately 35–40 million differences when considering single nucleotide substitutions (SNPs) and small insertions/deletions (indels). This represents about 1.2–1.3% divergence in aligned sequences of the ~3 billion base pair genome. Including larger structural variations (e.g., duplications, inversions), the total divergence increases to 4–5%, but these are less often counted as individual base pair differences.

For genetic fixation events (mutations that become universal in a population), the total number required to account for these differences is roughly equivalent to the number of observed differences. This is because each divergence represents a fixation event in one lineage (human or chimpanzee) since their split from the CHLCA ~7–9 million years ago.

Summary:

  • Base pair differences: ~35–40 million (SNPs and indels).
  • Fixation events: ~35–40 million (assuming each difference arose and fixed in one lineage).

DISCUSS ON SG

An Intrinsically Uncompetitive Society

The cost of having your society run by nepotistic foreign socio-cultural parasites is the inevitable loss of competitiveness.

It is not surprising really. I am an innovative psychology. You can see how I synthesize stuff here, bringing together Google Streetview and surveillance camera footage, and reveal the surveillance in America as few could. Politics and biology, psychology, I come up with interesting stuff. And when I was just a young lad, I was identified by US Domestic intelligence’s grade school monitoring units as innovative, and their response was to supply me with massive amounts of pornography to try and make me a degenerate. When that was ineffective, they decided to flood in the kids of agents, acting as kid spies to try and beat me down. When that failed, they rolled out honeypots. And when I proved resistant to it all, I believe they rolled out an early version of the Havana Weapon to degrade my health physically.

I do not think I am unique in that regard. I even think there was another kid, maybe brighter than me, and certainly more disciplined and dedicated to academics, who they also beamed into chronic illness to try and clip his wings as well. I would assume that has been going on across the nation, with every young kid who showed an innovative potential, for the last thirty to forty years, as domestic intelligence has tried to make sure nobody could rise too high in society, and maybe oppose it. My guess is, given the granularity of the surveillance, if you ever have a child with real potential, the single biggest threat they will ever face in life will be US domestic intelligence, because the American Stasi will find them, it will view them as a threat, and it will try to destroy them using all the most advanced tools of the CIA. It is just how it works in America now.

As a result, at present, the only chance America has to compete lies with the rubes and imbeciles of the insecure surveillance, and there just are not enough innovators there to keep up with nations like China.

After six decades of fake science, fake literature, fake art, fake genuises, fake 115-average IQs, the financialization of the economy, and the moral and intellectual degradation of the workforce, it is absolutely no surprise that the USA is losing on every side to its global rivals in China and Russia. The fetishization of frauds from Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth to Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, combined with the suppression and sidelining of the genuine American creative class, has been sufficient to render the USA a global also-ran.

Someone once asked: “Where is America’s Wang Hunin?” Wang, arguably the most observant individual of the 20th Century, rose from a complete nobody who wasn’t even a member of the Chinese Communist Party to the CCP’s chief ideologist solely on the basis of the merit of his prescient observations. Someone else answered: “Living in Europe making comic books.” And while I’m not the equal of Wang Hunin, who saw things 20 years before I did despite being only 13 years older than me, the difference between the way he was embraced and elevated by the Chinese political elite versus the way I was explicitly banished from even the editorial pages at the age of 23 by the US political elite is telling.

The irony is that I’ve been treated with far more respect by the Chinese and Russian state medias than by the ostensibly private medias in the USA and Europe. Pravda used to occasionally run the very syndicated Universal Press column that the newspapers in the USA refused to touch, back when I was warning everyone about the coming financial crisis in 2002. Note that I’m not at all bitter. I caught enough of a glimpse into the US political elite at a young age that I wanted nothing to do with it and I’m quite content with having been sidelined. I like what I’m doing and I harbor zero desire to get involved with The Great Game. But that doesn’t change the effect the sidelining of me and others more talented than me have inevitably had for the last six decades.

So now we have corrupt second-generation mediocrities like Donald Kagan and complete frauds like Elon Musk establishing US geopolitical strategies instead of anyone setting them in the national interests of the American people. As long as we do, China’s triumph is absolutely 100-percent certain no matter what economic or demographic vagaries it might be facing. It’s like seeing one NFL team building a historic staff with Ron Wolf at GM, Bill Belichick as head coach and Andy Reid as the offensive coordinator and the other being run by the historically awful combination of GM Matt Millen, head coach Marty Mornhinweg, and the immortal Brad Childress not calling plays as the offensive coordinator.

The truth always and inevitably wins out over time because the longer the parasitical pretenders have influence in a society, the further from objective reality their policies will reliably guide it. It’s not an accident that everything across the West from AI to zoology has become fake and gay, because convergence toward entropy is the objective. The latest iteration of The Empire That Never Ended will fall again, because it celebrates falsehood and worships evil.

DISCUSS ON SG