THERE were no Celestial plenipotentiaries in top hats and tails on a vast starboard veranda deck or instruments of surrender laid out for signatures in a poky country courthouse. Yet the Battle for the USA has been won. It must have been a nerve-racking few days for Joe Biden, briefed hourly – as he believes he was – on the invasion of the United States by a giant Chinese baboon. But that’s the least of the anxieties – reasonable or chimerical – brought to the forefront of the overwrought Western psyche by the ping-pong King Kong that was the illimitable dirigible of 2023. Tom Cruise won’t be buying the rights to the pilot’s account of how he manoeuvred a $200 million F-22 Raptor into position to deflate an $11 blimp. Not even Cruise could sell Top Gun: Vanderbilt. As a kinetic victory at least, it was the greatest achieved by the US since the invasion of Grenada. As a psy-op démarche, however, Beijing’s whether balloon exposed what the Oval Office is prepared to do and in what time frame, who dominates in deciding and which branches of government are at enmity with others. Herewith the data: Washington is prepared to do nothing, ponderousy; the Pentagon doesn’t trust the President (this one any more than his predecessor) and the CIA doesn’t trust the Joint Chiefs. Forget the photos: a Chinese tourist could get a thousand of those with a mini-drone. This was a HUMINT test that America set itself up to fail.
I say America failed – not just President Biden personally – because the balloon affair was merely a trivial symptom of systemic national decline. Russia’s Sputnik was the first analogy off the rank for commentators but O.J.’s Bronco is a better likeness: this too was a slow-speed chase where the audience as much as the fugitive was on the lam from reality. After all, when it comes to spying on Americans, the you-know-what went up in 2016; the Democrat-Big Tech-Intelligence Community Stasi has been monitoring MAGA patriots and conservatives for several years. If Biden is entitled to a defence for last week’s fiasco – even notwithstanding his collusion with domestic political saboteurs – reasonable doubt exists. It is now claimed there had also been aerial incursions during Donald Trump’s tenure. While a few of the former President’s officials see this revelation as sandbagging by administration loyalists in the Department of Defence, there is a slightly less disturbing explanation.
Namely, that one of the purposes of a spy agency is to keep some information from the executive in the latter’s – and the nation’s – best interest. The alternative is leak-able disclosure and Pavlovian demands for spectacular military responses. In addition to becoming a news cycle albatross (or a ‘wag the dog’ boon for politicians), this could easily escalate to casus belli and beyond. Depending on your outlook, what happened last week either proves that point or shows why a re-think of state secrets and democracy is long overdue. Furthermore, it happens to be true that signals intelligence can sometimes involve observing – rather than blowing up – enemy devices, crafts or conveyances. The Republican accusations of treason against the President for not imitating Elmer Fudd were a throwback to when the GOP and Fox – rather than the Democratic National Committee and CNN – were chummy with the CIA. There is no proof the most famous gasbag since the Hindenburg was a threat and no reason to believe the Nord Stream bombers suddenly saying otherwise. The CCP is the West’s number one enemy, yes, but number two are the warmongers who have done more to destroy the West over the past 20 years than all the Xi in China.
This was an accidentally live-to-air but largely meaningless crisis that everybody either got wrong, Kamala-splained or gleefully bagged as low-hanging polemical fruit. The President didn’t come out the loser because of what he didn’t do but because of all the lawless treacheries he has encouraged and countenanced hitherto. Biden is not, however, solely to blame for the overarching mess the US and its allies now find themselves in vis-à-vis China. The reason Australian government buildings are reportedly monitored by Chinese-made cameras is that Australia doesn’t make its own. And it doesn’t make its own because the ‘experts’ and predecessors of Anthony Albanese in both political parties decided making things was old hat. The economic rationalists believed ‘trade liberalisation’ would make us richer and the Old Left liked the idea of bringing Mao’s children in from the Cold War. Western ‘leaders’ refuse to discuss this meta-reality because it will take decades to claw back from the Middle Kingdom what we gave away. It seems nothing deserving of a sidewinder ever gets one in an age of curated commotions lofty and wafting.
The balloon was almost certainly a shiny bauble designed to get the US military complex to cover up the locations and items they didn’t want the Chinese to see. The activity on the ground and in the air would undoubtedly then be able to be observed via satellite. The items and locations themselves are not the issue, it’s the identification of what the US sees as its valuable assets that is important.
Albo’s major priority (aside from the Voice) is to turn Australia into a “renewable energy superpower”, industry, the economy and business be damned.
Nevermind that he can’t even supply cheap, reliable energy now.
I’m pretty sure they’ve been covering those things up for a long time.
Satellite spying nowadays is mostly theatre – the “great game.” None of what the Chinese are doing (or what the Americans are doing over Chinese skies) makes any difference to the reality of mutually assured destruction. This one was spotted and therefore drifted into the news cycle.
—————
Bob Santamaria was warning in the 1980s and 90s that off-shoring our manufacturing capacity in the name of trade liberalisation would have catastrophic consequences. Both Laborite economic rationalists and Liberal Dries laughed off his arguments.
This is a rare case where Biden is being wrongly pilloried. The shoot-it-downers are the same people who’ve been sceptical of knee-jerk escalations in Europe. Megyn Kelly laughed off safety considerations on Paul Murray Live during the week, saying “Montana has, like, 13 people.” No, it has 1.1 million people.
Yes, off-shoring was rationalised because we would be the clever country, not needing to make anything, while devising ways to use everything, cheaply, greedily, dirtily.
This one was so enormous the general public could not have failed to see it. Pretty sure they’ve never been like that before, if indeed the stories about norad missing previous iterations are actually true.
It could have easily been shot down after it was sighted in Alaska. There is no reason the Chinese would float these things around the world to track the weather. There is an ulterior motive, if we floated one over North Korea that size would it make it to the edge of their airspace?
NORAD claims they missed the earlier ones but says they were tracked through “additional means” by the “intelligence community.”
In other words, they’ve known about them for several years.
The states Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana, and North Dakota are known as the “nuclear sponge”. With their low populations and large landmass the US decided they made good expendible targets, and deliberately put very visible missile silos out into the open.
If the other side attacks the “sponge”, it costs them a whole lot of material to just disable the silos and perhaps hit a dozen hikers and prospectors … however, if they don’t attack the “sponge” and instead go for the major cities, the result is a guaranteed epic retaliation strike.
All part of the Cold War mentality … rational if perhaps not reasonable.
NBC, 2012: looks familiar…
US spy balloons hover over Afghans, causing unease.
U.S. spy balloons at almost every military base in Afghanistan have become constant features of the skies anywhere American troops are concentrated or interested in.
That didn’t pan out.
If nothing else, this complex affair proves how dangerous and foolish it is to have a Commander-in-Chief who is a mentally impaired 80 year-old. There was no chain of command discernible. The CIA obviously believes itself to be sovereign over all intelligence; the Pentagon, meanwhile, decides what to tell Presidents and even communicates secretly with China behind the back of the administration.
Agreed, the bigger issue for me is the blatant lying. The story changed so many times they ended up having to shoot it down just to take the heat off the lies.
Biden could have let it go unhindered, the msm would have gone silent almost immediately, they are in for a penny in for a pound. If they can cover for the laptop and the ukraine corruption, this is small beer. Yet, the whole admin is totally untethered and the foreign enemies know.
Convenient and unprovable, every time this admin gets themselves in a pickle they leverage the intelligence community. It’s a bad strategy because all it does is take away confidence in that community. So now we have the unlikely story that the intelligence community tracked Chinese balloons during the Trump admin but no one in that administration knew and neither did norad. Either, they misled the Trump admin (who if they get back will now want to find out) or they are lying. Both situations just reinforce the idea the deep state is the problem. It’s zero sum politics just to keep the sheeple from asking too many questions.
A mentally impaired 80 year-old whose administration and its backers have become conditioned to lying so brazenly a consequential strategic blunder can’t be far off. This is what happens when you know your media and agency allies will cover all your tracks.
Biden described the Afghanistan withdrawal an “extraordinary success” in a speech that could only have been drafted by a Democrat Goebbels. The laughable interpretations of that cluster from within the legacy media told us all we needed to know in order to infer the dangers that lurk when the most powerful person on the planet is being conditioned to get away with any blunder.
TJ. (1.11am) it might pay to not become hysterical….
I’m still waiting for the mass-starvation everyone was promising 8 months ago. And the total financial collapse predicted years and years ago due to all the profligate spending (Quantitative Easing it’s called in the US) and the stratospheric oil prices (petrol is cheaper in Oz than it was 12 months ago…18 months ago etc). and the full-on internment camps for non-gene-jabees, and the ICBMs raining down here there and everywhere.
Try to “keep your head while all about are losing theirs” etc. Lotsa BS from many quarters!
Free trade is based on the law of comparative. What today’s free traders refuse to accept is that the classical economists constructed their free trade arguments within the framework of the gold standard because only a gold standard could provide a fixed exchange rate, or the mint price of gold as it was called. It was the mint price that ensured that purchasing power parity, as the classical economists understood it, was aligned with the country’s comparative advantage. It is also the reason why David Ricardo, regardless of what our economists claim, believed that economic circumstances sometimes justified a tariff.
A reminder of the manufacturing capabilities of this once-great nation destroyed by political ideologues:- Islington
The article mentions once-household-names in South Australia and elsewhere that no longer exist. Doubtless, other examples come to mind in older readers.
In modesty I may say that my wife’s late father was one of the foremen sent to England for training.
After Biden’s blistering performance in putting down republican interjectors at the SOTU the only mentally impaired people are the deplorables.
As for the Chinese balloon at least they knew about this time and given it was as large as three trucks it was absurd to shoot it down where people and property would be destroyed.
Actually, the so called economic rationalists were correct, the hard work of supply side prescriptions do in fact, raise productivity and incomes very well.
Whereas Keynesian demand pump priming leads to prolonged malaise, even though the politicians love the licence to splash mountains of cash to the peasants.
The last forty years bear clear witness of this reality.
The problem has arisen because there was not a wise accounting of national interest and the need for national capability, the presumption that all our trading partners aim to get to the same stage of economic nirvana, or even play the trading game just as fairly. And as far as manufacturing goes, well even with the obvious productivity gain and gradual rising incomes for the workers, they listened too much to the unions that it was not enough, to Workers’ ruin.
One size fits all never does.
They always know about them, and ignore them. They only problem is this time someone else saw it and even the automatic response of the system is to also ignore it, this time the politics forced them to do something and it took them a while for the system to decide how.
Non Mentis
After Biden’s blistering performance in putting down republican interjectors at the SOTU the only mentally impaired people are the deplorables.
LOL, what are you smoking?
As for the Chinese balloon at least they knew about this time and given it was as large as three trucks it was absurd to shoot it down where people and property would be destroyed.
Wasn’t it appalling that the RAF shot down all those German aircraft over populated areas? Someone might have been hurt! Try to show even a little bit of maturity, you imbecile.
China has co-opted world manufacturing for several reasons, Albanese was elected on bringing back manufacturing, Morrison also blathered on about it, its not coming back until both parties agree to stop pandering to groups that find a reason not to do it.
Reason 1, China is not restricted by a capricious union movement that makes demands that deliberately make manufacturing uncompetitive, they seem to think that doing this reverts industry back to government control and it does, the Chinese government.
Reason 2, a moving feast of safety requirements that China is also not subject to, reform and simplification of safety is long due but resisted by the unions even when Gillard tried to start it.
Reason 3, a political movement that needs a new environmental scare to keep the population voting for them
Reason 4, companies substituting esg for delivering good and useful goods and services. This has led to banks for example, deprioritising profit for touchy feelies. An analysis of the profits banks that refuse funding to miners would be revealing.
Reason 5, the most important we are not and have no prospect of being competitive with energy prices
Reason 6, threats of banning and closing industries based on politics has created almost an impossible sovereign risk barrier for manufacturers
ROFLMAO.
Biden’s ranting for no reason at all is one of the clear signs of dementia.
It was so large the us military admitted to concealing sensitive locations as it approached. That is a hint that it should have raised alarm bells earlier.
Trampis, you are a total imbecile you Just repeat the same lines with no thought.
Good list, Bucc.
Something in this country’s spirit – especially in its men – died when workers were forced to wear orange, yellow and pink shirts.
No country can “co-opt” the industry of another country if free trade is based on a gold standard. A failure to understand the gold standard has resulted in a failure to understand how current monetary conditions have badly distorted the pattern of international trade. For example, under gold there would be no Dutch disease.
Gerry, the Chinese tactics around currency and dishonesty about economic statistics I’ve left out, because I really suspect we won’t know exactly what they’ve been doing until the regime falls.
Needless to say your point is correct, the west and Australia in particular has been arrogant and willingly given away any advantage it might have had around manufacture on the altar of political posturing.
CL, thanks, the infantilising of trades people is at the nadir with chain of responsibility requirements for truckers.
Buccy 12.06pm. All correct….
FFS, China is a fascist -run country which started out as a communist one. In either case it is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT leftist authoritarian-govt controlled. Why anyone would expect anything other than what we’ve got (ie received) is beyond my understanding…..
Example: If I produce something or other in large quantities, and a Chinese buyer / importer wants 10 million of them ….this means the Chinese Govt is ordering them. To get my $20 Million profit, they will demand my ‘help” in some way or other. Maybe I will be part of an influence-buying scheme with local politicians (think Darryl Maguire and Gladys for example).
BTW: EVERY Chinese person allowed to move to Australia has been thoroughly vetted and approved by the CCP. This is immigrants, students, every one. They are ALL politically / ideologically “reliable” and will follow orders when instructed to. And……they ALL have family back in China to consider!
Buccaneer, my point is that currency manipulation is only possible with paper currencies. The problems that paper currencies create was fully debated by the classical economists. Every economist should read up on the Bullion Controversy that was triggered by Walter Boyd’s 1801 letter to William Pitter the Younger that fully explained the reason for the depreciation of the pound and the price of gold. Unfortunately, our right adamantly refuses to discuss this issue just it refuses to discuss the vital importance that Australia’s experience of the Great Depression has with respect to both political parties adherence to Keynesian policies.
Gerry, I agree totally, it’s not just the Chinese that have been manipulating currency and financial markets. My take is that we have 2 extreme distortions in the market now, both are looking decidedly shaky. One is the Chinese economy and the way they distort competition for their advantage, the other is the US and it’s shenanigans with printing money and carrying extreme debt.
In my mind they are partly connected, should they both fall over at once, there will be hard times for everyone.
My basic complaint is this, Buccaneer: Whenever it is pointed out that manufacturing keeps falling as a proportion of GDP (which is not a measure of economic growth) the likes of the Institute of Public Affairs smugly tells us that it is (a) comparative advantage and that makes us better off, and (b) it is natural for manufacturing to fall as a proportion of GDP because we now prefer more services than manufactured goods.
My response is that because we are on paper currencies there is no way they can tell if it is comparative advantage or not. With respect to (b), if we prefer services to manufactured goods then why are we importing more manufactured goods? They also ignore the fact that many manufactured goods are capital goods. In any case, free trade theory has nothing to say about the ratio of manufacturing employment to GDP or to the occupied population.
The question of free trade, China and exchange rates is a question requires a public debate. Regrettably, our right’s response is to dismiss anyone who has the temerity to raise the subject. This is pretty rich coming from highly credentialed people who don’t even know the classical economists’ basic argument for free trade.
Gerry, I agree. I used to support free trade un thinkingly, but free trade between nations can’t be free if the terms are loaded to one side. The Thai, Aus trade agreement showed us this. That parties where only one is negotiating in good faith cannot come to an arrangement that works for both.
When it comes to currency, there are too many factors that mean currencies are an arbitrary reflection of the value of money from that country.
It’s like creating a standard for shoe size, then every other party just uses their own measurements so the standard means nothing.
Sam Bankman-fried ran a ponzi scheme based around an online business called “FTX” plus a crypto currency called “FTT” … and it was manipulated up the whazoo … he got away with it for a few years at least and might even have bought enough friends to get away clean.
Paper is no longer a requirement when it comes to manipulated currency.
I know you are into Gold but what I’ve noticed is that a lot of people believe even this is manipulated. Point being that it’s people making decisions therefore some people make bad decisions. Neither paper nor metal nor digital-whack-whack will fix poor choices.
The issue is that institutions are only trustworthy if they demonstrably make trustworthy decisions. The marxification of institutions means they use gaslighting to cover when their decisions don’t work out with immunity. People notice, then they stop trusting.
It seems I have not made myself clear, Buccaneer. It is not a question of terms being loaded to one side or one side manipulating its currency. Even in the absence of any currency manipulation or one-sided deals you will get exactly the same problem because we are on a paper standard. This means national money stocks will change at different rates causing some countries to continually run trade deficits while others acquire trade surpluses. I suggest that the more Keynesian a country is the worse will be its trade deficit. Only a self-regulating mechanism can change the situation.
In short, the classical argument is that free trade means trade on a gold standard. This is a fact that our right refuses to debate. Immediately recall that fact as soon as some one our right incorrectly refers to David Ricardo.
Hysteria? I always think it’s a pity that when C.L., is obviously attempting to raise the standards here, some clowns just don’t get it.
Gerry,I have plenty of sympathy for your argument, but think that it is but one at many problems that all need to be unwound. Getting people to talk about it is tricky as prosecuting the case that we return to a gold standard will always fall on deaf ears while good jurisprudence is no valued in the media. The problem, I think, lies in the view of the political class that power is exercised through spending, not through the creation and application of law.
You misunderstand me, Buccaneer, I am not arguing for a gold standard. I am simply stating the economic fact that stable exchange rates are impossible in the absence of a gold standard, a fact that classical economists fully understood. It is also another economic fact that Keynesianism aggravates the situation. Another vital fact is that in the absence of a self-regulating mechanism that will stabilise exchange rates the pattern of international trade will be distorted.
I am presenting facts, not a policy solution. This raises an important question: Why is it that every economist on our right refuses to even acknowledge these facts?
By the way, this issue is being dealt with on my blog. I shall also be putting up a post refuting the false accusations made against the gold standard by The Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance and Nouriel Roubini. I don’t expect the ATA to respond.
Gerry, my take for what it’s worth, is that the conversation has moved on. That there is not yet a big enough breakdown in the current operation of exchange rates for committed Keynesians to re examine their internal bias.
I also think that Keynesian economics is convenient for the political elite of both sides, it enables them to prioritise spending, the very thing that enables access to power without necessarily gaining agreement.
Buccaneer, there was never a conversation.
Exchange rates don’t actually breakdown. Once you move to a floating exchange rate they can appear fairly stable even though everyone is inflating. In any case, no one should be talking about trade, industry and China without making an effort to understand what is really happening and why it is happing.