More Books on the U.S. and China's Rise [BUMPED]

I posted a lot of links to books on China and U.S.-Chinese relations the other day, at my Deal of the Day roundup here.

And since I'm reading and thinking about this stuff this afternoon, I thought I'd post some more.

See, Aaron L. Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia.

Also, Hugh White, The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power.

And, Yan Xuetong, Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power.

All of these works are reviewed by Professor Yuen Foong Khong, at International Security, "Primacy or World Order? The United States and China's Rise — A Review Essay."

BONUS: See Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy.

NBC Battleground Map: Clinton Surges Past 270 Electoral Votes

Well, it's something to think about at least.

Here, "Clinton Surges Past 270 Electoral Votes in NBC News Battleground Map."

Interesting that Florida, Nevada, Iowa, and Ohio are all "toss-up" states.

Latest @NBCNews battleground map shows a tough road for Trump. pic.twitter.com/fDDxhEoZad

— Ali Vitali (@alivitali) August 15, 2016

Well, compare to Sabato's Crystal Ball, which doesn't list any toss-up states, thus giving Donald Trump 191 electors. Either way, Trump's got a lot of ground to make up.

Here is our current Electoral College map. We've been at 347 Safe/Likely/Lean Clinton, 191 S/L/L Trump since March pic.twitter.com/7l8IpOGWwt

— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) August 11, 2016

Donald Trump Course Correction

A sober editorial, at the Wall Street Journal:

WSJ lays down the gauntlet: either Trump course corrects now or he should drop out. https://t.co/Ly2FBnqHqp pic.twitter.com/mkEvDElT3c

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) August 15, 2016

In New National Security Speech, Donald Trump to Call for Ideological Screening for Terrorists

Well good.

Of course, he'll be savaged by the Islamo-coddling left-wing media.

But this is great.

Via Jennifer Jacobs, at Bloomberg:

Trump will call for "screening test to admit only those who support US laws and values,” his aides say. https://t.co/btxhwbeU9M @kevcirilli

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) August 15, 2016

The Road Ahead for Populism

Some folks think Trump's powerful populism has already petered out. Many no longer support him, but they don't like Hillary either.

From Salena Zito, at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

“I am going to shut my eyes, hold my nose, vote, and then go home and disinfect myself,” https://t.co/CulEZ23ZkQ

— SalenaZito (@SalenaZito) August 15, 2016

Young Voters Flee Donald Trump

Well, he doesn't need to win a majority of young people, but still. He's only getting 20 percent of their support.

At USA Today:

ICYMI: New Millennials poll shows Clinton consolidating the support, if not the enthusiasm, of Sanders' voters: https://t.co/7lu4kTqcNl

— Susan Page (@SusanPage) August 15, 2016

Public Opinion on Poverty, Social Welfare, and Personal Responsibility

Opinions have changed very little since 1985, the last time thus survey was conducted.

And social welfare programs have failed to lift millions out of poverty. The number of Americans living below the poverty line is about 15 percent, and it's been stuck there since about 1970, five years after the start of the Great Society.

How much have we spent? It's in the trillions. And leftists still think we aren't doing enough. And if you look at the headline at the piece, the Times used the results to take a jab a Donald Trump's white working-class supporters. It's too predictable.

See, "How do Americans view poverty? Many blue-collar whites, key to Trump, criticize poor people as lazy and content to stay on welfare."

Must read: @latimes and @AEI revisit a landmark 1985 survey. How much as changed? https://t.co/H6VIwPzSP1 pic.twitter.com/mmL0OrxmER

— Megan Garvey (@garveylatimes) August 14, 2016

The Meaning of the 2016 Election

From Francis Fukuyama, at Foreign Affairs, "American Political Decay or Renewal?":

Trump’s policy pronouncements are confused and contradictory, coming as they do from a narcissistic media manipulator with no clear underlying ideology. But the common theme that has made him attractive to so many Republican primary voters is one that he shares to some extent with Sanders: an economic nationalist agenda designed to protect and restore the jobs of American workers. This explains both his opposition to immigration—not just illegal immigration but also skilled workers coming in on H1B visas—and his condemnation of American companies that move plants abroad to save on labor costs. He has criticized not only China for its currency manipulation but also friendly countries such as Japan and South Korea for undermining the United States’ manufacturing base. And of course he is dead set against further trade liberalization, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Asia and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe.

All of this sounds like total heresy to anyone who has taken a basic college-level course in trade theory, where models from the Ricardian one of comparative advantage to the Heckscher-Ohlin factor endow­ment theory tell you that free trade is a win-win for trading partners, increasing all countries’ aggregate incomes. And indeed, global output has exploded over the past two generations, as world trade and investment have been liberalized under the broad framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and then the World Trade Organization, increasing fourfold between 1970 and 2008. Globalization has been responsible for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in countries such as China and India and has generated unfathomable amounts of wealth in the United States.

Yet this consensus on the benefits of economic liberalization, shared by elites in both political parties, is not immune from criticism. Built into all the existing trade models is the conclusion that trade liberalization, while boosting aggregate income, will have potentially adverse distributional consequences—it will, in other words, create winners and losers. One recent study estimated that import competition from China was responsible for the loss of between two million and 2.4 million U.S. jobs from 1999 to 2011.

The standard response from trade economists is to argue that the gains from trade are sufficient to more than adequately compensate the losers, ideally through job training that will equip them with new skills. And thus, every major piece of trade legislation has been accompanied by a host of worker-retraining measures, as well as a phasing in of new rules to allow workers time to adjust.

In practice, however, this adjustment has often failed to materialize. The U.S. government has run 47 uncoordinated federal job-retraining programs (since consolidated into about a dozen), in addition to countless state-level ones. These have collectively failed to move large numbers of workers into higher-skilled positions. This is partly a failure of implementation, but it is also a failure of concept: it is not clear what kind of training can transform a 55-year-old assembly-line worker into a computer programmer or a Web designer. Nor does standard trade theory take account of the political economy of investment. Capital has always had collective-action advantages over labor, because it is more concentrated and easier to coordinate. This was one of the early arguments in favor of trade unionism, which has been severely eroded in the United States since the 1980s. And capital’s advantages only increase with the high degree of capital mobility that has arisen in today’s globalized world. Labor has become more mobile as well, but it is far more constrained. The bargaining advantages of unions are quickly undermined by employers who can threaten to relocate not just to a right-to-work state but also to a completely different country.

Labor-cost differentials between the United States and many developing countries are so great that it is hard to imagine what sorts of policies could ultimately have protected the mass of low-skilled jobs. Perhaps not even Trump believes that shoes and shirts should still be made in America. Every industrialized nation in the world, including those that are much more committed to protecting their manufacturing bases, such as Germany and Japan, has seen a decline in the relative share of manufacturing over the past few decades. And even China itself is beginning to lose jobs to automation and to lower-cost producers in places such as Bangladesh and Vietnam.

And yet the experience of a country such as Germany suggests that the path followed by the United States was not inevitable. German business elites never sought to undermine the power of their trade unions; to this day, wages are set across the German economy through government-sponsored negotiations between employers and unions. As a result, German labor costs are about 25 percent higher than their American counterparts. And yet Germany remains the third-largest exporter in the world, and the share of manufacturing employment in Germany, although declining, has remained consistently higher than that in the United States. Unlike the French and the Italians, the Germans have not sought to protect existing jobs through a thicket of labor laws; under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Agenda 2010 reforms, it became easier to lay off redundant workers. And yet the country has invested heavily in improving working-class skills through its apprenticeship program and other active labor-market interventions. The Germans also sought to protect more of the country’s supply chain from endless outsourcing, connecting its fabled Mittelstand, that is, its small and medium-size businesses, to its large employers.

In the United States, in contrast, economists and public intellectuals portrayed the shift from a manufacturing economy to a postindustrial service-based one as inevitable, even something to be welcomed and hastened. Like the buggy whip makers of old, supposedly, manufac­turing workers would retool themselves, becoming knowledge workers in a flexible, outsourced, part-time new economy, where their new skills would earn them higher wages. Despite occasional gestures, however, neither political party took the retooling agenda seriously, as the centerpiece of a necessary adjustment process, nor did they invest in social programs designed to cushion the working class as it tried to adjust. And so white workers, like African Americans in earlier decades, were on their own...

It's not just Trump who's agitating for a nationalist economic policy. The Democrats have been pushing protectionist proposals for some time, and Bernie Sanders was pretty much in sync with Donald Trump on the issues. Fukuyama broaches this, but he's a leftist, so won't give Trump any credit.

The winds of change are in the air, either way. The anti-globalist movement's just getting started, frankly.

But keep reading.

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."



Also at Theo's, "Cartoon Roundup..."

Cartoon Credit: Legal Insurrection, "Branco Cartoon – Electroshock Therapy."

This Charlie Sykes Quote Getting a Lot of Play on Twitter

I'm not at all familiar with Charlie Sykes, although he's getting kudos left and right for these comments, via Oliver Darcy:

Interviewed @SykesCharlie recently for story on conservative media I'm working on. Worth reading what he had to say pic.twitter.com/cqsVOabG7Q

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 14, 2016

It's interesting, although I don't think there'll be any kind of reckoning. Indeed, if Hillary wins things are just going to get worse. Conservatives are only just now catching up to the left in tweaking reality. Frankly, I don't like reality-tweaking, and I said so yesterday here, "First Woman to Medal in Six Olympics Ignored by Media Because She's Pro-Second Amendment — Except She Wasn't."

The god's honest truth is always going to come first for me. I'm not a big fan of talk radio, in any case, so I've got little at stake in this debate. Perhaps Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly are implicated here with their shows on Fox News, but even then I only tune in once in a while nowadays.

Things are going to hell in this country, and it's like Sarah Kendzior says: Even if Hillary wins the forces that have been unleashed during this campaign aren't going away. Where I differ with Kendzior is that I think this is a good thing. Let's break things up. We can start with blowing the current two-party system to smithereens. I just don't care anymore. If the GOP candidate is the only thing that's going to stop leftism, at least temporarily, than he'll have more support. But I don't consider myself Republican and most of the party leaders are establishment hacks who can FOAD as far as I'm concerned.

Thinking about it, this seems like a theme I'll be coming back to with some frequency as we move forward. Who knows what's going to happen in November, although I'd feel a lot better if Trump gained some traction against Hillary in the polls?

On that topic, we'll see...

Deal of the Day: Save Up to 45% on Osprey Backpacks [BUMPED]

At Amazon, Up to 45% Off on Osprey Backpacks.

More, Osprey Packs Celeste Daypack, and Osprey Comet Backpack.

Also, Save on Pogo Water Bottles.

Plus, Kindle Paperwhite E-reader - Black, 6" High-Resolution Display (300 ppi) with Built-in Light, Wi-Fi - Includes Special Offers.

Still more, Apple EarPods 827 In-Ear Stereo Headphones with Remote and Mic - White.

And, Shop Great Back to School Deals!

BONUS: From Jared Meyer, Uber-Positive: Why Americans Love the Sharing Economy.

Tessa Fowler [BUMPED]

ADDED: I might as well bump this to the top -- I forgot to link the Twitter photos previously.

Great photos on Twitter.

Last seen way back in January 2015, "Sunday Rule 5."

Another Sunday Rule 5

Again, these things take a long time to post, so Ima do a FMJRA (linking those who link back).

At the Rule 5 blogfather's, "Rule 5 Sunday: Gold Medal, Ahoy!"

And at Pirate's Cove, "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup," and "If All You See……is a world turned to desert because Other People won’t buy local, you might just be a Warmist."

More, at 90 Miles From Tyranny, "Morning Mistress (Loses Her Bikini Bottoms)."

From Ms. EBL, "Hedy Lamarr: The Heavenly Body."

Still more, at Woodsterman's, "Fun With GIFs ~OR~ Rule 5 Woodsterman Style."

And some extra related linkage, at Drunken Stepfather, "BOUNCING POKIES STEPLINKS OF THE DAY."

Egotastic, "Camille Rowe In Hot Lingerie and Other Fine Things to Ogle."

At WWTDD, "Emily Ratajkowski Takes Her Tits to the U.N. and Shit Around the Web."

And that's Chantell at the photo, seen on Twitter as well, and previously, "Well, Here's Your Saturday Afternoon Rule 5."

If I missed you, and you're linking, tweet me and I'll update.

Thanks!

"Can anyone doubt for a single moment that, were 'people' like this to gain ultimate power over us as they so fervently, insanely desire, they'd be trotting their political opposition off to gulags just as fast as they could get them constructed — just as their ideological twins in the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cambodia, and who knows how many other places did? Just as they always have done upon their ascension to power, no matter where on Earth they might be?"

I posted Cold Fury to the sidebar, but the entry just reminded me of this video I put up here long ago, at "The Cuban Archipelago."

But read the whole thing, from our buddy Mike, "How the Left “Debates”."

No doubt.

You'd be lined up and shot, by folks just like Che and his henchman after Cuba's "national liberation."

Pat Condell: Europe's Leaders Are Importing War (VIDEO)

Angela Merkel especially, but all the poxy "leader" scabs are implicated, especially the scum of the European Union.

Once again, the inimitable Pat Condell:

Race, Gender, and the 'Carceral State' [BUMPED]

It's far-left scholarship and criticism, but nevertheless interesting.

See Gabriel Winant, at Dissent, "Black Women and the Carceral State."

And reviewed there, Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South, and Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity.

Remember, this idea of the "mass incarceration" state is on the cutting edge of leftist thought, and it's obviously having a dramatic and dangerous impact on public policy (President Obama recently commuted the sentences of over 200 federal inmates, and not for just "non-violent" felonies either).

And see Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.

Recall also that attacks on "mass incarceration" are central to Angela Davis's communist agenda. See, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.

Know your enemies, people. You gotta know your enemies.

Review of Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth [BUMPED]

See William Nordhaus, at the New York Review of Books, "Why Growth Will Fall."

Gordon's book is on my birthday list, heh.

And at Amazon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War.

Nobel Peace Prize Update: Obama Bombing Another Country, and Nobody Even Noticed! (VIDEO)

It's the far-left Lori Harfenist, at the Putin-backed RT America.

But you know what? Who cares? She's nailing it here.

Watch:

Milwaukee Riots After Police Shoot and Kill Black Armed Suspect (VIDEO)

There's not a lot of news coverage of the rioting, actually.

I had on Fox News for about a half-hour, and not even a short blip of a report.

I suspect folks have gotten so used to blacks burning down cities that it's hardly news anymore. Besides, getting the news out there would destroy the left's "Black Lives Matter" narrative (and help Donald Trump).

Rioters screamed "Black Power!" as a fillin' station went up in flames.

Obama's America.

See the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, "Calm restored at scene of unrest as Clarke calls for National Guard," and "Man shot by Milwaukee police subject of witness intimidation case."

More at Twitchy, "Rioters make Milwaukee ‘like a war zone’ after police shooting of armed suspect [photos, video]."

And there's video here, at Ruptly, "USA: Angry protesters burn petrol station after police shoot and kill man in Milkwaukee."

Maggie Haberman: 'There's an Enormous Amount of Frustration' in Donald Trump's Campaign (VIDEO)

Following-up from last night, "Inside the Failing Mission to Save Donald Trump From Himself."

I know Trump attacked NYT for its pathetic left-wing bias, but honestly, d'you think there isn't "enormous frustration" in the campaign?

Maggie Haberman's a leftist, but she's also a consummate professional (IMHO), and I expect she's to not too far off the mark with what's going on.

Watch, from CNN this morning:

Inside the Failing Mission to Save Donald Trump From Himself

According to Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, Trump's allegedly "beyond coaching."

Tweeted by WaPo's Jenna Johnson.

Here's the deeply reported New York Times article that Donald Trump is so very angry about: https://t.co/qr2gSZgn57

— Jenna Johnson (@wpjenna) August 14, 2016

And here's Trump's response.

The failing @nytimes has become a newspaper of fiction. Their stories about me always quote non-existent unnamed sources. Very dishonest!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 13, 2016

It's worth a read, FWIW.

I think Maggie Haberman's pretty fair, for the most part.

'Men Going Their Own Way'

Heh.

Check out this very interesting post at the Other McCain, "Attention @MGTOW: Survey Question." And be sure to read the comments. I think R.S. McCain missed his calling as a psychologist:

Scapegoating the opposite sex for our romantic disappointments is a problem for both men and women. Learning to accept responsibility for your own problems means learning how to adjust your expectations to the reality of your situation, rather than blaming other people because your dreams haven't come true.

More.

BONUS: Helen Smith, Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters.

The Presidential Horse Race at the L.A. Times 'Daybreak' Tracking Poll

I'm not giving up hope yet, although I'm not unrealistic either.

The "daybreak" poll is just one poll.

Still, the race is basically tied:

How are Trump and Clinton faring in our USC Dornsife poll? See for yourself: https://t.co/FAC5mBEGA3 pic.twitter.com/IytPGgQ2Gt

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) August 13, 2016

Panic is still sooo unsexy: Where the presidential race stands today: The USC Dornsife / Los Angeles Times poll https://t.co/gSyPTmNcCh

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) August 12, 2016

First Woman to Medal in Six Olympics Ignored by Media Because She's Pro-Second Amendment — Except She Wasn't

I love the Gateway Pundit, but sometimes the posts over there don't match reality.

Here's the entry, "FIRST WOMAN to Medal in SIX Olympics Ignored by Media Because She is Pro-Second Amendment."

Actually, Rhode was featured very prominently at the front-page of this morning's Los Angeles Times, "L.A.'s most unsung Olympian continues to excel in her sixth Olympics."

And lots of Rhode coverage in the MSM on Twitter.

So, let's just stick to reality, okay.

There's plenty of media bias.

In the case of Kim Rhode, not so much.

ADDED: From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "OLYMPIC OIKOPHOBIA: ‘Little Known’ Olympic Shooters Snubbed by Sponsors While Media Play Dumb." That's a good point about the corporate sponsors bailing out on Olympics shooters, although again, there's lots of media coverage. It's just not as sensational as fencers in hijabs, or what have you.

'Hell or High Water': Hollywood Makes a Pro-Gun Movie — Woot! (VIDEO)

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "DID HOLLYWOOD MAKE A PRO-GUN MOVIE? Hell or High Water Features Armed Citizenry."

Samantha Hoopes Whack-a-Mole (VIDEO)

Via Sports Illustrated:

Robert Paxton on the Question of Donald Trump and Fascism

An interview with Robert O. Paxton, at Slate, "Is Donald Trump a Fascist? Yes and no."

And here's Paxton's classic book, The Anatomy of Fascism.

Actually, I'd argue Trump represents an Americanized version of fascism, but it's like Paxton says, the term's so loaded with the weight of historical evil you don't want to use it loosely.

Saturday Morning Roundup

I'm going to post a lot of book links today. I've been slacking on my Amazon sales.

Meanwhile, from around the horn.

At Blazing Cat Fur, "Continental Breakfast."

And at the Other McCain, "In The Mailbox: 08.12.16."

Knuckledraggin', "Your Good Morning Girl."

Astute, "POLITICIANS AND PRESS IN TWIN FALLS, IDAHO DEFENDING JUVENILE MUSLIM RAPISTS."

Theo's, "Bike Week Daytona 2016 Bikini Babes..."

At Director Blue, "Larwyn's Linx: Hacker leaks phone numbers, email addresses of every House Democrat; Hillary’s protective wall around Chappaqua estate."

American Digest, "Season 3 of 'This Old Nag': Dragging Her Over the Finish Line."

Power Line, "NYTimes: Another Day, Another Hit Piece Against Donald Trump."

Maggie's Farm, "Maggie's Farm, "Durn Interestin' Roundup":

Roger here. Bird Dog has gone to the spa to take the waters. And by "spa," I mean tavern. And by "waters," I mean single malt. Anyway, he's left me to guard the chicken coop until he can finish his sabbatical, and make bail. I don't know what to talk about. That's because I'm not interesting, the way Bird Dog is...

BONUS: The Hostages, "Big Boob Friday."

Sebastian Gorka

He's great!

At Amazon, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War.

Donald Trump Great Again

At Amazon, Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America.

David Horowitz, The End of Time

Did you read my post from the other day, "The Nature of the War Against Us"?

That was an excerpt from David Horowitz autobiographical, The End of Time.

What Teens Need Most from Their Parents

Well, they need a tremendous amount of attention and supervision.

I didn't realize how much until I wished I'd done more for my oldest son, who's having some early adulthood challenges now. (He'll be 21 in January.)

Yes, that's life, I know. But you always wish you'd done more to guide your kids, and provide a strong moral foundation.

It's weird when you think back on it, although my family's blessed that we're all together, doing well and healthy. You just think about it. Could you have done more? Have I been a good parent?

In any case, at WSJ:

The teenage years can be mystifying for parents. Sensible children turn scatter-brained or start having wild mood swings. Formerly level-headed adolescents ride in cars with dangerous drivers or take other foolish risks.

A flood of new research offers explanations for some of these mysteries. Brain imaging adds another kind of data that can help test hypotheses and corroborate teens’ own accounts of their behavior and emotions. Dozens of recent multiyear studies have traced adolescent development through time, rather than comparing sets of adolescents at a single point.

The new longitudinal research is changing scientists’ views on the role parents play in helping children navigate a volatile decade. Once seen as a time for parents to step back, adolescence is increasingly viewed as an opportunity to stay tuned in and emotionally connected. The research makes it possible to identify four important phases in the development of intellectual, social and emotional skills that most teens will experience at certain ages. Here is a guide to the latest findings...

Keep reading.

House GOP Task Force: Obama Administration Pressured Officials to Cook Intelligence on Islamic State (VIDEO)

There will be a reckoning one day.

This administration's making President Nixon and his plumbers look like pikers.

At Roll Call, "House GOP Report: Intelligence Officials Pressured to Alter Reports on ISIS; Analysis skewed to make U.S. campaign against ISIS look more successful, report says."

And watch, at Fox News:

Simone Manuel Becomes First Black American Woman to Win Gold in Individual Swimming

I'm so happy for her.

At the New York Times, "Rio Olympics: Simone Manuel Makes History in the Pool":

Tears of Victory for @simone_manuel​.https://t.co/BWGaUNiTHM https://t.co/6ISMPGyu0U

— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) August 12, 2016

RIO DE JANEIRO — Katie Ledecky’s roommate at the Olympics is setting records now, too.

Simone Manuel, who is sharing a room with Ledecky in the athletes’ village here, became the first African-American woman to win an individual event in Olympic swimming on Thursday night. She and Penny Oleksiak of Canada tied for the fastest time, an Olympic record in the women’s 100-meter freestyle: 52.70 seconds.

“I definitely think it raises some awareness and will get them inspired,” Manuel, 20, said about the significance of her accomplishment. “I mean, the gold medal wasn’t just for me. It was for people that came before me and inspired me to stay in the sport. For people who believe that they can’t do it, I hope I’m an inspiration to others to get out there and try swimming. You might be pretty good at it.”

Manuel and Oleksiak shaved 0.01 seconds off the Olympic standard of 52.71, set earlier in the Rio Games meet by Australia’s Cate Campbell. Sweden’s Sarah Sjostrom won the bronze in 52.99.

The last time an American won gold in the event was 1984, when Nancy Hogshead and Carrie Steinseifer also tied and shared the gold medal with a time of 55.92 seconds.

Several black swimmers have won Olympic medals for the United States. The first female of African-American descent to make an American Olympic team was Maritza Correia, a member of the 400-meter freestyle relay team that won silver at the 2004 Athens Games.

Lia Neal, a Brooklyn native, won a bronze in a relay at the 2012 London Games and a silver in a relay here at the Rio Games.

Anthony Ervin and Cullen Jones, who are black, have won Olympic gold medals...

More.

The Nature of the War Against Us

From David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine, "Understanding our enemies both secular and religious":

Love death. This is the improbable instruction that the founder of an Egyptian sect called the Muslim Brotherhood imparted to his followers in the 1920s. A disciple named Mohammed Atta copied this instruction into his journal just before leading the attack on the World Trade Center three days before my biopsy. Was it a coincidence that this dark creed took root in a country of monuments to the human quest for life beyond the grave? The sentence Mohammed Atta actually jotted down was this: “Prepare for holy war and be lovers of death.”

How can one love death? This is a question that is incomprehensible to us unless we are overwhelmed by personal defeats. But it is the enigma at the heart of human history, which is a narrative moved by war between men. For how can men go to war unless they love death, or a cause that is worth more than life itself?

*****

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, but the summons to holy war was planted in Arab hearts more than a thousand years before. The prophet Mohammed created the Muslim faith and claimed he was fulfilling the gospel of Christ. But Mohammed was a warrior and Jesus a man of peace who instructed his followers to shun the path of history and separate the sacred from the profane. His kingdom was not of this world: Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s. Mohammed summoned his followers to make the world a place for God, which meant conquering Caesar himself.

Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who was executed for treason in 1966, is recognized as the intellectual father of the Islamic jihad. His brother Mohammed was a teacher of its leader Osama Bin Laden and his texts are read by would-be martyrs in madrassas across the Muslim world. The hope that consumed Sayyid Qutb’s life was to establish the rule of Islam throughout the heathen nations and the Islamic umma, to make the world a holy place.

Sayyid Qutb regarded Christianity as a threat to this Islamic redemption. He condemned Christians for their separation of the sacred from the profane, God’s world from Ceasar’s. He called this division a “hideous schizophrenia,” which reflected the very corruption he set out to correct. Christians had created liberal societies, Qutb said, in which “God’s existence is not denied, but His domain is restricted to the heavens and His rule on earth is suspended.” Islam’s task was “to unite the world and the faith.” It was what Jewish mystics called “tikkun olam,” a mission to repair the world by bringing about the rule of God’s law on earth.

Qutb wrote this prescription in one of his most famous texts, which he called Social Justice In Islam. The mission of Islam, he explained, was “to unite heaven and earth in a single system.” To make the world one.

This is the totalitarian idea. When the wave of redemption is complete, nothing will remain untransformed, nothing unholy or unjust. Total transformation is the goal of all radical jihads, including the flight that burned the towers of evil in Manhattan. It is the cause that Mohammed Atta served. Like all revolutionary passions, the totalitarian hope of radical Islam is to redeem the world. It is the desire to put order into our lives and to heal the wound in creation.

But there is no earthly doctor who can cure us. The practical consequence of all radical dreams, therefore, is a permanent holy war.

Inevitably and invariably, the effort to make the world whole begins with its division into two opposing camps. In order to conduct the work of salvation, redeemers must separate the light from the darkness, the just from the unjust, the believers from the damned. For radical Muslims this division is the line separating the House of Islam from the House of War, the realm of the faithful from the world of heretics and infidels, who are impure of heart and who must be converted or destroyed.

*****

A thousand years before Mohammed Atta left on his fatal mission, a Shi’ite named Hassan al-Sabbah began a holy war to overthrow the Muslim state. In Hassan’s eyes, the Sunni caliphate that the Prophet Mohammed had established to govern Islam had already fallen into a state of corruption. It was no longer holy; it was no longer God’s. To cleanse Islam and restore the faith, Hassan created a martyr vanguard, whom others referred to as the “Assassins,” and whose deeds have bequeathed to us the word itself. The mission of the Assassins was to kill the apostate rulers of the false Islamic state, and purify the realm.

Because their mission was a service to God, it was considered a dishonor to return alive, and none did. The Koran assured the Assassins that the reward for the life they gave was paradise itself.  “So let them fight in the way of God who sell the present life for the world to come. Whosoever fights in the way of God and is slain, conquers. We shall bring him a mighty wage.” When the Assassins’ first victim, the vizier in Quhistan was slain, Hassan al-Sabbah said, “The killing of this devil is the beginning of bliss.” Revolutionaries love death because it is the gate of heaven and the beginning of bliss.

*****

Four years before 9/11, Mohammed Atta traveled to Afghanistan to join the International Islamic Front for the Holy War against Jews and Crusaders, whose leader was Osama bin Laden. Atta was a small, wiry man, the humorless son of a demanding father. After his team of modern Assassins turned the towers in Manhattan into a smoking ruin, his father told reporters, “My son is a very sensitive man.  He is soft and was extremely attached to his mother.”

Before the hour of his jihad, on the very page where he had copied the summons to love death, Mohammed Atta acknowledged that it was a call to perform acts unnatural to men. “Everybody hates death, fears death,” he wrote, but then explained why men should love it nonetheless. “Only the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, will be the ones seeking death.” Mohammed Atta had found a cause that was greater than life itself.

But was Mohammed Atta right? Did his martyrs sign up for death to gain a greater return? This presumes that the only reason people would seek to end their lives in this world is the hope of reward in another. Do they not also run towards what they fear? When we have guilty secrets to hide do we not find ways to end the awful wait before judgment by leaving the clues that betray us? Especially if we are withholding secrets from those we fear and love. Are we not all guilty in the eyes of God, and did not Mohammed Atta fear and love Him?

What if martyrs hate life more than they love death? If we look at the scanty record of Mohammed Atta’s time on this earth, it suggests that escape was always on his mind. “Purify your heart and clean it of all earthly matters,” he wrote in his instructions to his martyr team. “The time of fun and waste has gone. The time of judgment has arrived.”

In his short life, Mohammed Atta does not seem to have had much room for pleasure. His father was a successful lawyer, who was ambitious and austere. The family had two residences but lived frugally and apart from others. “They didn’t visit and weren’t visited,” said a neighbor later. The father agreed, “We are people who keep to ourselves.” An adolescent friend of Mohammed’s described the Atta household: “It was a house of study. No playing, no entertainment. Just study.” Even as an adolescent, to avoid the contamination of the flesh Mohammed would leave the room when Egyptian television featured belly-dancing programs, as it frequently did.

According to those who knew him as a young adult, Mohammed Atta was insular, religiously strict and psychologically intense. The death of an insect made him emotional; the modern world repelled him. A fellow urban planning student remembered how the usually reserved Mohammed became enraged by a hotel construction near the ancient market of Aleppo, which he viewed as the desecration of Islam’s heritage. “Disney World,” he sneered, the Crusaders’ revenge. Mohammed continued to avoid sensual images whether from television screens or wall posters. He hated and feared the female gender, averting his eyes from women who so much as neglected to cover their arms.

Others testified that he could not take pleasure in so basic and social a human act as eating. A roommate recalled that he sustained himself by spooning lumps from a heap of cold potatoes he would mash and leave on a plate in the communal refrigerator for a week at a time. A German convert who hung out with members of the terrorist cell that Mohammed headed, thought it was his morbid seriousness that allowed him to lead others but dismissed him derisively as a “harmless, intelligent, nut.” The people he lived with longed for him to leave. A girlfriend of one of them said, “A good day was when Mohammed was not home.”

Five years before his appointment with death, Mohammed Atta drew up a will in which he admonished his mourners to die as good Muslims. “I don’t want a pregnant woman or a person who is not clean to come and say good-bye to me because I don’t approve it,” he stressed. “The people who will clean my body should be good Muslims… The person who will wash my body near my genitals must wear gloves on his hands so he won’t touch my genitals…. I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter.”

 In life, Mohammed Atta despised women, but on his way to death, he promised his martyrs many, citing the Koranic verse: “Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out, ‘Come hither, friend of God.’ They have dressed in their most beautiful clothing.”

Mohammed also wrote down these instructions for the mission ahead: “When the confrontation begins, strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world. Shout, ‘Allahu Akbar [God is great],’ because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers.” Whoever neglected his will or did not follow Islam, Mohammed warned, “that person will be held responsible in the end.”

Like Mohammed Atta we long for the judgment that will make right what is not. We want to see virtue rewarded and the wicked rebuked. We yearn for release from the frustrations and disappointments of an imperfect life. Consequently every God of love is also a God of justice, and therefore a God of punishment and death. If this were not so, if God did not care to sort out good from evil, what would His love be worth?

The emotions of fear and hope spring from the love of self, and therefore make our motives suspect. Are those who claim to be God’s warriors pure of heart and above doubt? Can men serve God if they are really serving themselves? Do martyrdoms like Mohammed Atta’s represent noble aspirations, or are they merely desperate remedies for personal defeats?

Mohammed Atta was a withdrawn and ineffectual man who died without achieving his worldly ambitions. He never realized his goal of becoming an architect or urban planner, never married or had a family. Apart from his jihad, Mohammed Atta never made a mark in life. But in death he was a god, bringing judgment to 3,000 innocent souls.

If Allah is the maker of life, as Mohammed Atta believed, could He desire the destruction of what he had created? What is suicide but rage at the living, and contempt for the life left behind? Mohammed Atta offered his deed of destruction as a gift to God. In his eyes, his martyrdom was unselfish and the strangers he killed were not innocent. His mission was to purge the world of wasteful pleasures, to vanquish the guilty and to implement God’s grace.

But if God wanted to cleanse His creation, why would He need Mohammed Atta to accomplish His will?

*****

These are the questions of an agnostic, who has no business saying what God desires or does not. Nonetheless, an agnostic can appreciate believers like Pascal, whose humility is transparent and who is attempting to make sense of the incomprehensible through faith. Why are we born? Why are we here? Why do we die? An agnostic can respect the faith of a skeptic who confronts our misery and refuses to concede defeat. He can admire a faith that provides consolation for the inconsolable, and in a heartless world finds reason to live a moral life.

But murder is not moral and the desire to redeem the world requires it. Because redemption requires the damnation of those who do not want to be saved.      

*****

My father was an atheist, and a progressive who embraced the secular belief of the social redeemers. Along with all who think they have practical answers to the absurd cruelties of our human lot, my father felt superior to those who do not, especially those who take solace in a religious faith. In this prejudice, my father had impressive company. The psychologist Sigmund Freud regarded religion as an illusion without a future. But, like all revolutionaries Freud could not live without his own reservoir of belief, which was science. Progress was his human faith.

Whether they are secularists like my father and Freud, or religious zealots like Mohammed Atta, those who believe we can become masters of our fates think they know more than Pascal. But in their search for truth where do they imagine they have gone that he did not go before them? What do they think they know that Pascal did not? Their bravado is only a mask for the inevitable defeat that is our common lot, an inverse mirror of their human need...

Keep reading.

Black Lives Matter – The Privileged and the Oppressed

Here's some research, from Anne Sorock at the Frontier Lab, via William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, "Research Report: #BlackLivesMatter more about radical social upheaval than “Black Lives”":

Using Black Lives Matter movement to redefine the American experience into anti-Capitalist upheaval...

Read it all, at that link.

PREVIOUSLY: "#BlackLivesMatter Coalition Makes Demands, Wants Reparations for Slavery."

Lindsey Pelas Amazing Snapchat

At the Last Men on Earth.

And Maxim, "Lindsey Pelas on Snapchat is the gift that keeps on giving."

Also, at EnStars, "Lindsey Pelas: PHOTOS: Model Posts Exotic New Image In White Sports Bra [VIDEO]."

BONUS: On Twitter.

Weekend at Hillary's

Via Ben Garrison:

#HillaryClinton #My3WordStruggle "Call the Doctor!" #BenGarrison #cartoons at https://t.co/Oj98iIxEAZ pic.twitter.com/ky5G7X6nPX

— BenGarrison Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) August 12, 2016

Lingering Email Controversy Haunts Hillary Clinton

This is on the front-page of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal.

Thank goodness.

See, "Email Questions Haunt Hillary Clinton":

The email controversy that Hillary Clinton hoped had died out when federal prosecutors closed their investigation last month now looks likely to shadow her campaign all the way through Election Day...

That's behind the paywall, but here's an earlier iteration, at the Washington Wire blog, "Hillary Clinton’s Email Controversy Haunts Campaign."

Anne R. Pierce, A Perilous Path [BUMPED]

It's been perilous, alright.

At Amazon, Anne R. Pierce, A Perilous Path: The Misguided Foreign Policy of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

And I'm enjoying Robert J. Lieber, Retreat and its Consequences: American Foreign Policy and the Problem of World Order.

And thanks for shopping through my amazon links!

At no extra cost to you, your purchases help fuel my reading splurges.

Thanks again!

State Department Spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau: 'Am I not speaking English?' (VIDEO)

At Twitchy, "‘Am I not speaking English?’ State Department dodges questions about pay-for-play scheme [video]."

Watch:

Nico Hines: Sleazy Daily Beast Grindr Piece Outs Homosexual Athletes in Rio

I'm not linking.

Check Memeorandum, "The Other Olympic Sport in Rio: Swiping."

I don't know what the purpose of this piece was, other than pure spite. And I certainly don't know how Daily Beast got off on publishing it.

More at Slate, via Memeorandum, "This Daily Beast Grindr Stunt Is Sleazy, Dangerous, and Wildly Unethical."

And at the Advocate:

"Daily Beast's #Grindr-Baiting Is the Worst Invasion of Privacy" https://t.co/AZGMQ5Wlk4 By @dnlreynolds #Rio2016 pic.twitter.com/0Tkh0qw6jQ

— The Advocate (@TheAdvocateMag) August 11, 2016

Laura Ingraham: The mainstream media, 'They don't really care, it turns out, whether America goes down the tubes...' (VIDEO)

Actually, the leftist media's working with the radical left to tear it all down.

Watch:

Top Democrats Warn Against Writing Off Trump

Actually, that's smart.

At Politico, "As the GOP nominee's poll numbers continue to sag, fear of complacency is suddenly a hot topic of discussion on the left."

And see Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "FLASHBACK: Gallup Had Dukakis Up by 17 at This Point in 1988."

Deal of the Day: Save Big on Select BLACK AND DECKER Drill Kits

At Amazon, BLACK+DECKER BDC120VA100 20-Volt MAX Lithium-Ion Drill Kit with 100 Accessories.

Also, Save Now on Select Products by BLACK+DECKER.

Plus, Dyson V6 Slim Cordless Vacuum (Certified Refurbished).

More, KIND Bars, Dark Chocolate Nuts & Sea Salt, Gluten Free, 1.4 Ounce Bars, 12 Count.

And, from Bill Gertz, The China Threat: How the People's Republic Targets America.

Thomas J. Christensen, The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power.

Still more, from Robert Ross, China in the Era of Xi Jinping: Domestic and Foreign Policy Challenges, and China's Ascent: Power, Security, and the Future of International Politics.

Dennis V. Hickey, Foreign Policy Making in Taiwan: From Principle to Pragmatism.

Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Managing the China Challenge: How to Achieve Corporate Success in the People's Republic.

BONUS: Ezra Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.

South Carolina Law on Disrupting School Faces Legal Challenge

I read this entire piece and there wasn't a single word on whether using a cell phone is class is okay, or whether there should be consequences for students who not only disrupt class, but who defy their teachers.

That's why the police have to come take the students away. They've literally taken over the classroom and teachers are overwhelmed and can't teach.

Following-up from last year, "White Police Officer is Seen Flipping Black Female High School Student on Her Back (VIDEO)," and "South Carolina School Arrest Controversy Proves America's Classrooms Are Out of Control."

At NYT:

She was arrested and charged for disrupting class. Now she's challenging South Carolina's "disturbing schools" law. https://t.co/Zg83lHiIcO

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 11, 2016

So, she's pushing for a right to disrupt class? https://t.co/DjT4vsHDeN

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) August 11, 2016

Majority of Canadians Think 'Universal Basic Income' Too Expensive, Makes People Lazy

They like the idea, actually.

It's just going to cost too much and create dependency.

But other than that!

At Toronto's National Post, "Canadians think guaranteed income good, but too expensive and it makes people lazy: survey":

Canadians may support a guaranteed minimum income in principle, but they don’t want to pay for it and they suspect it may turn people into shiftless louts, according to a new survey by the Angus Reid Institute.

As many as 67 per cent of respondents backed a guaranteed income set at $30,000, provided that the payment would “replace most or all other forms of government assistance.”

However, nearly as many (66 per cent) said they would not be willing to pay more taxes to support such a program, and 59 per cent said it would be too expensive to implement.

A further 63 per cent said it would “discourage people from working.” Among Conservative voters, this sentiment jumped to 74 per cent of respondents. But even in the NDP camp respondents were split 50-50.

“It’s not as though you see people on the left of the spectrum incredibly supportive of this,” said Shachi Kurl with the Angus Reid Institute.

At various times in the last 100 years, the concept of a guaranteed minimum income has been embraced by everyone from hardline conservatives to hardline progressives.

Conservatives, including U.S. president Richard Nixon, have touted it as a way to dismantle the welfare state by merely cutting the poor a cheque each month.

Progressives, meanwhile, counter that it’s a necessary way to support workers idled by outsourcing and automation.

Indeed, the Angus Reid survey even hinted that this issue could rise in prominence as more and more jobs are taken by robots...

Well, dismantling the welfare state would be good, but then if everyone's getting a basic income, you'd dismantle the workforce as well, heh.

But keep reading.

Compromised: Justice Dept. Refused FBI Probe of Clinton Foundation (VIDEO)

From Matthew Vadum, at FrontPage Magazine:

The highly politicized Department of Justice swatted down pesky FBI requests to investigate the Clinton Foundation earlier this year, CNN reported yesterday.

CNN buried the lede, as it frequently does on news stories that make Democrats look bad. The online version bears the innocuous-sounding headline, “Newly released Clinton emails shed light on relationship between State Dept. and Clinton Foundation.”

It is not until the 25th paragraph that the article states that an unidentified law enforcement official gave CNN a heads-up earlier this year. As the probe of Clinton’s private email servers was ramping up “several FBI field offices approached the Justice Department asking to open a case regarding the relationship between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.”

At that time, the article continues, the Justice Department “declined because it had looked into allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation around a year earlier and found there wasn't sufficient evidence to open a case.”

Not even enough evidence to look into the foundation’s affairs?

Not more than a year after the publication of Peter Schweizer’s blockbuster book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, opened the floodgates for investigative reporters to dig into the matter.

As I’ve written before, various lawyers have told me there is already a strong legal case against Mrs. Clinton. The fact that she destroyed email evidence -- evidence subject to a congressional subpoena, no less -- is already evidence in itself that she obstructed justice through spoliation of evidence. Spoliation means you can take as evidence the fact that evidence has been destroyed. Courts are entitled to draw spoliation inferences and convict an accused person on that basis alone.

The only reason FBI Director James Comey didn’t recommend she be prosecuted is because, well, he lacks a spine and he’s corrupt. He said there was no evidence of Clinton’s “efforts to obstruct justice,” a requirement that does not actually appear in the Espionage Act.

Evidence of corruption at the Clinton Foundation is everywhere, yet CNN and much of the mainstream media are still doing everything they can to ignore, misrepresent, or downplay the questionable things Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton did through the foundation.

The congenitally corrupt Clintons created their private email system to frustrate Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requesters, shield Hillary's correspondence from congressional oversight, and steer money to their corrupt foundation, which, amazingly enough, still enjoys tax-exempt status.

These illegal, insecure private email servers Clinton used while at the State Department are at the heart of the scandal over her mishandling of an Islamic terrorist attack in militant-infested Benghazi, Libya on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 that left four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens, dead. Even now, four years after the assault, the Obama administration has failed to provide an autopsy report about Stevens who was initially reported to have been ritualistically sodomized before being murdered by Muslim terrorists.

Every few days Judicial Watch has been releasing emails obtained under FoIA that may ultimately lead to evidence of political interference at the highest levels that provided cover for the anticipatory presidential bribe processing vehicle known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation...

More.

Dow, Nasdaq, S&P 500 Rally to Highs Not Seen Since 1999

Break out your Prince jokes.

At WSJ, "Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq Close at Records on Same Day for First Time Since 1999":

Major U.S. stock indexes set records again Thursday, the first time since Dec. 31, 1999, that the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite have hit those milestones on the same day.

The rally was sparked by higher oil prices and earnings reports from U.S. retailers that weren’t as weak as feared.

Consumer-discretionary and energy stocks led broad gains across the market. The Dow industrials rose 118 points, or 0.6%, to 18614, above its previous record close of 18595 hit July 20. The S&P 500 gained 0.5% and topped its Aug. 5 record. The Nasdaq Composite added 0.5%, surpassing its previous high set at Tuesday’s close.

Investors are “into stocks because there’s nowhere else to go,” said Tim Rudderow, president of Mount Lucas Management, which oversees $1.6 billion.

Shares of Macy’s rose 17% as the department-store operator reported better-than-expected sales and said it plans to close 100 stores. Kohl’s gained 16% after reporting a surprise increase in profit even as it cut its earnings forecast for the year.

The two retailers were the S&P 500’s best performers Thursday, but they were still among the worst over the past 12 months. Retail-store owners have been hit in part by the growth of Internet-based competitors, and even Macy’s well-received results included a sharp drop in quarterly profit and another period of declining sales...

Still more.

I sure hope my Roth IRA starts coming back. Man, that sucker's been languishing for a couple of years now, lol.

In the Mail: Robert J. Lieber, Retreat and its Consequences [BUMPED]

Just came today a couple of days ago.

At Amazon, Retreat and its Consequences: American Foreign Policy and the Problem of World Order.

ADDED: I'm enjoying this book.

Jessica Mendoza Endures Sexism as MLB's First Woman Color Commentator (VIDEO)

Personally, I don't see what the big deal is.

For one thing, if it wasn't for social media you wouldn't be hearing about "rampant" sexism against Ms. Mendoza. Women have been making their way into the top ranks of sports journalism for awhile, and mainstream media hacks are bending over backwards for more "diversity."

Yeah, the Twitter abuse is reprehensible, but then, that's the name of the game nowadays. You know what they say: "If you can't stand the heat..."

In any case, at the Atlantic, "Breaking Into Baseball’s Ultimate Boys’ Club":

Jessica Mendoza, a former athlete and MLB’s first female TV analyst, brings a player’s sensibility to her job. But she’s still subject to the routine abuse directed at women in sports journalism.

Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial, U.S. AirSea Battle, and Command of the Commons in East Asia

This is a great piece.

From Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich, at International Security, "Future Warfare in the Western Pacific: Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial, U.S. AirSea Battle, and Command of the Commons in East Asia":

The United States has long enjoyed what Barry Posen has termed “command of the commons”: worldwide freedom of movement on and under the seas and in the air above 15,000 feet, with the ability to deny this same freedom to enemies. This command has contributed to a remarkable era of military primacy for U.S. arms against potential state rivals.

Many observers now fear that this era may be coming to an end in the Western Pacific. For more than a generation, China has been fielding a series of interrelated missile, sensor, guidance, and other technologies designed to deny freedom of movement to hostile powers in the air and waters off its coast. As this program has matured, China's ability to restrict hostile access has improved, and its military reach has expanded. Many now believe that this “A2/AD” (antiaccess, area denial) capability will eventually be highly effective in excluding the United States from parts of the Western Pacific that it has traditionally controlled. Some even fear that China will ultimately be able to extend a zone of exclusion out to, or beyond, what is often called the “Second Island Chain”—a line that connects Japan, Guam, and Papua-New Guinea at distances of up to 3,000 kilometers from China. A Chinese A2/AD capability reaching anywhere near this far would pose major challenges for U.S. security policy.

To avert this outcome, the United States has embarked on an approach often called AirSea Battle (ASB). Named to suggest the Cold War continental doctrine of “AirLand Battle,” AirSea Battle is designed to preserve U.S. access to the Western Pacific by combining passive defenses against Chinese missile attack with an emphasis on offensive action to destroy or disable the forces that China would use to establish A2/AD. This offensive action would use “cross-domain synergy” among U.S. space, cyber, air, and maritime forces (hence the moniker “AirSea”) to blind or suppress Chinese sensors. The heart of the concept, however, lies in physically destroying the Chinese weapons and infrastructure that underpin A2/AD. As Chinese programs mature, achieving this objective will require U.S. air strikes against potentially thousands of Chinese missile launchers, command posts, sensors, supply networks, and communication systems deployed across the heart of mainland China—some as many as 2,000 kilometers inland. Accomplishing this mission will require a major improvement in the U.S. Air Force's and Navy's ability to find distant targets and penetrate heavily defended airspace from bases that are either hard enough or distant enough to survive Chinese attack, while hunting down mobile missile launchers and command posts spread over millions of square kilometers of the Chinese interior. The requirements for this mission are typically assumed to include a major restructuring of the Air Force to de-emphasize short-range fighters such as the F-35 or F-22 in favor of longer-range strike bombers; development of a follow-on stealthy long-range bomber to replace the B-2, and its procurement in far greater numbers than its predecessor; the development of unmanned long-range carrier strike aircraft; and heavy investment in missile defenses and information infrastructure. The result would be an ambitious modernization agenda in service of an extremely demanding military campaign to batter down A2/AD by striking targets deep in mainland China, far afield from the maritime domains to which the United States seeks access.

ASB has thus proven highly controversial. Many observers object to its likely cost: a military program this ambitious will surely be very expensive in an era of increasingly restricted U.S. defense budgets.5 Others cite its potential for escalation: U.S. air and missile strikes against targets deep in the Chinese mainland could easily spur retaliation against U.S. or allied homelands and a possible global war against a nuclear power.

The need to incur any of these costs or any of these risks, however, turns on the underlying question of exactly how effective Chinese A2/AD can become. Many mainstream arguments, on both sides of the debate, take for granted a substantial A2/AD threat: ASB advocates would respond to this threat by battering it down; many ASB opponents would avoid it via a distant blockade of China at straits beyond A2/AD's reach; both sides tend to grant A2/AD an ability to deny U.S. access to large parts of the Western Pacific absent a massive U.S. offensive inland. Just how large a part of the Western Pacific the Chinese could close is often vague, however; many are skeptical that China can extend control all the way to the Second Island Chain, but few policy analyses have yet focused on the foundational military question of A2/AD's actual effectiveness and the range at which this capability can be expected to deny U.S. access or threaten allied shipping.

This article thus provides a more systematic assessment of the potential military effectiveness of Chinese A2/AD. We ask not whether ASB would be escalatory, but whether it is necessary. That is, to what extent will ongoing technology trends allow either side to deny freedom of movement to the other, and over what area? Will China be able to push U.S. forces far enough from its shores to threaten U.S. alliances? If so, which ones, and how gravely? And what, given this, represents the best military strategy for the United States to adopt for the long term?

To answer these questions, we focus on the long-run potential of key technologies rather than on an assessment of existing or even programmed forces, equipment, and doctrine, and we do so in the context of an extended competition between mutually adaptive peer competitors, neither of which can simply outspend the other. The A2/AD debate is mostly about the future, not the present. For now, there is little real A2/AD threat to confront: most analysts still see U.S. naval and air superiority over the Pacific except for the immediate Chinese littoral and sometimes the airspace over Taiwan. The Chinese today field only a handful of weapons with ranges anywhere near the Second Island Chain, and their military lacks experience in power projection beyond the vicinity of the Chinese coast. The chief reason for concern lies not in China's current arsenal, but in the trajectory of technical and acquisition trends whose maturation could take decades or even generations. Similarly, the ASB agenda for the United States is also mostly about the future: given the long service lives of warships, and the long lead times for developing new programs such as a stealthy long-range bomber to replace the B-2, the stakes in the A2/AD/ASB debate are mostly about the military prognosis for ten to twenty years from now, not tomorrow or next year. And by the time such major programs mature, faster-moving developments such as electronic countermeasures or tactical innovations may go through multiple rounds of adaptation, measure, and countermeasure, on both sides. The A2/AD debate is thus less about the military balance in 2016 or even 2020 than it is about the military future a generation from now, after an extended two-sided competition; below we use 2040 as a representative time frame for an environment with mature A2/AD technology on both sides.

Our focus on the long-term future motivates two critical framing assumptions. First, just as we cannot limit ourselves to today's Chinese arsenal, neither can we limit ourselves to today's Chinese military doctrine or current Chinese assumptions about the course of a war with the United States. Much can change in a generation. Perhaps Chinese doctrinal adaptation will be constrained by deep-seated cultural or historical factors, but twenty-five years of technological change will create strong incentives for doctrine to adapt, and it would be risky to assume that China will not respond. We thus focus on what technology will make possible for either side, from which we infer strategies and operational concepts that would be advisable, but we leave to others whether China will act on the incentives these changes will create.

Second, we assume that the United States cannot prevail by outspending China over this longer term. In the Cold War, the United States could do just that: a declining Soviet Union could not keep pace with Western economic growth, enabling the West to exhaust the Soviets in a protracted arms race. China, however, is not the Soviet Union: its gross domestic product is widely expected to exceed the United States' in coming years. A strategy that requires the United States to outspend a rising economic peer is unsustainable in the long run: it would simply lead to faster relative economic decline and ever-greater difficulty over time in keeping up. Calls to overwhelm Chinese A2/AD with superior expenditure are self-defeating for the time horizon at the heart of this whole debate.

Given such a long-run, two-sided assessment, we find that by 2040 China will not achieve military hegemony over the Western Pacific or anything close to it—even without ASB. A2/AD is giving air and maritime defenders increasing advantages, but those advantages are strongest over controlled landmasses and weaken over distance. As both sides deploy A2/AD, these capabilities will increasingly replace today's U.S. command of the global commons not with Chinese hegemony but with a more differentiated pattern of control, with a U.S. sphere of influence around allied landmasses, a Chinese sphere of influence over the Chinese mainland, and contested battlespace covering much of the South and East China Seas, wherein neither power enjoys wartime freedom of surface or air movement.

This finding derives from the physics of the key technologies coupled with inherent asymmetries in the operating environments of the land, air, and sea surface. Improvements in reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA) technology underlie much of A2/AD's defensive potential, but RSTA effectiveness varies widely with the complexity of the background against which it must detect targets. The sky and the surface of the sea present much simpler backgrounds than the land. Land-based missiles deployed amid a complex background thus enjoy systematic RSTA advantages against airborne or sea-surface foes. As RSTA improves, land-based mobile missile launchers are likely to remain much harder to target than more-exposed aerial or surface-naval combatants of comparable sophistication. This asymmetry will make it increasingly expensive to sustain air or sea-surface operations over or near hostile territory defended by such missiles. The same underlying asymmetry, however, makes effective A2/AD control of the air or sea surface harder the farther away from a controlled landmass it must reach. For long-range RSTA, radar is essential and is likely to remain the most robust solution to the demands of sensing mobile targets over wide areas in a long-term competition. Radar, however, is inherently vulnerable as an active emitter whose physics require an unobstructed line-of-sight to the target for location information precise enough to direct weapons. Whereas mobile missiles can launch from concealment amid complex terrain, radar must reveal its location through the act of sensing. Radar can be defended, but its defenders must themselves survive preemptive attack; the farther one must operate from a friendly shoreline, the more challenging this defensive requirement becomes and the more difficult it becomes to provide the RSTA needed for A2/AD to control the air or sea surface. A2/AD's achievable reach will vary over time, but it will be especially difficult for either China or the United States to extend A2/AD's reach beyond about 400–600 kilometers from a friendly coast, a limit defined by the Earth's curvature and the physical horizon this establishes for airborne radar operating over survivable land-based protectors. Reach on this scale, however, falls far short of what either side would need to dominate a theater the size of the Western Pacific.

These findings imply that, with astute U.S. policies, A2/AD is not a decisive long-term threat to most U.S. allies in the region. Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines are all either mostly or entirely beyond the likely reach of Chinese A2/AD given appropriate allied military choices. The threat to U.S. alliances often raised in the A2/AD literature can thus be mostly averted even without ASB.

Our analysis is not, however, a straightforward good-news story for the United States and its allies. Taiwan, for example, is much closer to the Chinese mainland than Japan, South Korea, or the Philippines, and it is much more exposed to a Chinese A2/AD threat that U.S. arms are unlikely to be able to preempt. Its proximity to China will not necessarily expose Taiwan to a credible invasion threat—the same technologies that enable Chinese A2/AD will enable Taiwan, with U.S. assistance, to extend its own A2/AD zone around the Taiwanese landmass in a way that would make a Chinese amphibious invasion prohibitively costly. But while Chinese military shipping would not be able to survive long enough to sustain an invasion, China could prevent Taiwanese or neutral shipping from sustaining the Taiwanese economy. The fate of Taiwan in such a contest would rest on the threat of distant blockade by the United States against Chinese seaborne trade and the relative vulnerability of insular Taiwan and continental China to trade cutoffs. If AirSea Battle could preempt Chinese A2/AD, this scenario could be avoided—but it cannot. To do so would require sustained penetration of defended airspace on a scale that A2/AD will make cost-prohibitive by 2040; it is unlikely that ASB would be able to lift a Chinese blockade of Taiwan once China deploys mature A2/AD capability.

Second, our analysis does not indicate that Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines—or for that matter Vietnam, Singapore, or even Australia and the continental United States—will be wholly invulnerable to Chinese coercion. Technological change is progressively reducing the net cost of striking fixed targets such as power plants, cities, transportation hubs, or other civilian value targets with precision-guided ballistic missiles at ever-increasing ranges. This change will not enable A2/AD-like military control at great distances from China or the landmasses of U.S. allies, but it will make a form of coercive strategic bombardment available to any state that chooses to field the needed missiles, including China. Of course, China would be vulnerable to retaliation, either in kind or from distant blockade or other means. The outcome of such coercive campaigns would be shaped by the much-discussed dynamics of resolve and stakes. The ideal solution from the U.S. standpoint, however, would be an ASB-like preemptive capacity to destroy before launch the missiles that China would use for such missions, thus averting this threat altogether. This ideal solution, however, is at odds with the nature of the relevant technological trends.

To support these findings, we proceed in six steps. First, we establish an analytical context by sketching the political and geostrategic aims that the United States and China might pursue in potential future warfare in the Western Pacific and the role A2/AD and ASB might play in such a war. Next we describe A2/AD and its technological foundations in more detail, explaining why it constitutes a uniquely important issue for U.S. strategy in the Western Pacific. We then explore some critical weaknesses inherent in these technologies, especially the vulnerability of the long-range RSTA systems on which all else rests. This analysis implies a real but limited A2/AD ability to deny freedom of movement to an opponent. Next we consider the potential of ASB to deny China such a real-but-limited A2/AD capability; we reject this ambition as unachievable without sustained expenditures that would exceed China's. We conclude by summarizing key points and developing in greater detail their implications for policy and scholarship...

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Kylie Jenner Red Bikini on Her 19th Birthday

She looks great, although maybe hanging out with this Tyga brother ain't the best idea, lol.

At London's Daily Mail, "Kylie Jenner poses in a red bikini and gold body chains as she celebrates birthday in the Bahamas with Tyga after warrant is issued for his arrest."

More, "Birthday girl Kylie Jenner is ready to celebrate her 19th birthday on holiday with Tyga."