Twofer Tuesday (and the mail)

Politics and China

I’ve been trying to deal with situations in Hong Kong and Big China more intensely over the past few days. A statement was put to me directly by a shot caller. “You have the best plan to resolve the situation but what would it look like if a Westerner (foreign, barbarian devil) solved this vexing problem?” They’re right. It would make them appear to be totally incompetent. Thus ends the comment.

Planet X

There has been a lot of discussion about a tenth planet (assuming that you’re counting Pluto as the ninth planet) bouncing around the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the space-oriented community for a long time. That hypothetical planet that has been described as “the solar system’s missing link,” Planet X has been part of the lexicon for several years, first mentioned in 2014. It was brought up again in 2016, when Caltech astrophysicists Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin wrote about it.

In October 2017, Batygin said that there are “five different lines of observational evidence” that point to the existence of Planet Ten.

The five lines of evidence are:

• Six known objects in the Kuiper Belt, all of which have elliptical orbits that point in the same direction.
• The orbits of the objects are all tilted the same way; 30 degrees “downward.”
• Computer simulations that show there are more objects “tilted with respect to the solar plane.”
• Planet Nine could be responsible for the tilt of the planets in our solar system; the plane of the planet’s orbit is tilted about 6 degrees compared to the Sun’s equator
• Some objects from the Kuiper Belt orbit in the opposite direction from everything else in the solar system.

“No other model can explain the weirdness of these high-inclination orbits,” Batygin said at the time. 

In October 2017, NASA released a statement saying that Planet Nine (or Planet X) may be 20 times further from the Sun than Neptune is, going so far as to say “it is now harder to imagine our solar system without a Planet Nine than with one.”

The Mail

No speech at the UN has any force of law, but it does express foreign policy doctrine and to that extent it is useful. It also expresses intentions (such as the intention of not to do what Obama did, which was to agree with the UN arms control policy that would disarm Americans). He could have given that speech anywhere but the UN is a large international megaphone.

I don’t know but I expect that there was input from all of his speechwriters and from President Trump and Vice President Pence. That’s usually how this big speeches are formulated.

The Trump Administration has been remarkable amid lackluster American political movements over the years. It was a tectonic shift and the Deep State, accustomed to anointing puppets, was caught with their pants down. And as you suggest, the Dems don’t have much to put up against four more years of Trump except impeachment, not for a crime, but out of political desperation.

I spoke to a friend in China today. The friend didn’t like Trump’s tweets. I explained that it’s the only way that he can communicate to the American people – and to the world. The media would twist any words that he uttered. This speech to the UN is a lot like a tweet. It’s going to go to the world without substantial editing by the corrupt, lying press.

You’re welcome. It was a great speech. The world knows that the USA is back from the miserable tepid years when we were run by a catamite. 

The world needed to know where we stood and President Trump explained it. The Chinese were outraged that they were called out on a public stage and that President Trump explained that they were a nation of mountebanks. There are a lot of Chinese businesses going under because fair trade is returning – a lot of anguish. They thought that they could feed off the US like a parasite endlessly. Didn’t work.

Promises made, promises kept.

You would have to work hard to misunderstand what President Trump said, but with the media explaining it, I realize that black goes to white and the other way around. Thank you, Claudio, for your comment. I have 9 grandchildren now and hopefully at least a couple of them choose the Space Force.

I have to disagree. Obama was Bush light in many respects. The last nationalist we had was President Reagan. The Trump Doctrine as laid out did not pander to China, it did not embrace a one-world government. It embraced nationalism and American exceptionalism. While I understand your interest in how the catsup is really made from a point of view of intense granularity, a speech at the UN isn’t where you get that. And I don’t know that it’s a president’s job to explain anything in excruciating detail. I’m thinking back to Lincoln trying to micromanage the War of Northern Aggression/American Civil War (however your tastes run) as his generals bungled again and again and again. He had no choice but to do what he did and to fire general after general after general. Today the American machine is so much larger and infinitely complex. It’s difficult for a President to give you what it is that you want.

That’s what I heard as well. And intent is key in a UN General Assembly speech.

I think that many other warriors envied the arrow that went through Harold Godwinson’s eye there at Hastings. Party over. Lingering deaths are no way for a warrior to die. Patton said, “The last bullet of the last battle of the last war.” He was onto something.

Beans lays out the advantage of the Norman combined arms approach rather than the Saxon (and Viking) shield walls below and I don’t want to step on his commentary. Harold had excellent Huscarls (professional heavy infantry) in addition to the fyrd, who were feudal levies. The march, the fight, the exceptional, unseasonable heat (portent of modern global warming in 1066), etc all played against Harold. 

AND THE POPE gave a Papal Bull to William, showing Harold’s army that God was with the other side. We tend to discount that today with the mores and values of our time, but then, flying the Pope’s Flag sent a message of excommunication and hell to the opposing army.

It was an epic struggle and underscored the will and determination of William, whose drive and ambition launched that second invasion on the eve of the Viking invasion + Tostig, could be said to be “heaven sent” by his ally the Pope. In war, timing, momentum, a full belly with lines of supply and communication, and luck are equally important. The Norman cavalry of the day would be viewed as very light cavalry by us today but it mixed things up and drew out the shield wall (as Beans points out). Also “Norman” means northmen. Many of the warriors who followed William descended by Vikings who had settled in Normandy.

Footnote:

During WW2 the German belt buckles bore the inscription “Gott Mit Uns” (God is with us). A lot of those belt buckles were buried along with their owners.