SpankyMcFarland

Another building block slips into place: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/27/iran-and-china-sign-25-year-cooperation-agreement-in-tehran Four countries - Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey (to say nothing of the Stans) - seem to be heading towards a heady mélange of Islamic theocracy and Chinese domination. The systems may have their differences on whether to worship Mao or a Man Upstairs but fortunately there is agreement that dissent of any sort must be wiped out. One mantra Erdoğan and Imran Khan have already perfected for their new masters: Uighurs, what Uighurs?

Hopes for a better Iran just took a serious dive:

I never said everything goes. However, we are in the middle of a pandemic that has already wreaked enormous damage, directly through the disease it causes and indirectly through the disruption of healthcare and our economy. David Spiegelhalter’s actual job title at Cambridge includes the public understanding of risk so I think we can assume he’s aware of the complexities here. AZ’s documentation could have been better but there are risks with every treatment one takes. One has to balance costs and benefits and, so far, I think the evidence is in favour of taking the vaccine. As I said, I would be more than happy to take this vaccine today if I could.

Lard Tunderin Jaysus B’y, you’re only trying to start a row now.

When in Blighty make this your morning mantra: look right, look left, look right again.

One line that caught my attention from Erin O’Toole’s speech: “we will build domestic vaccine production capacity”.

The evidence linking AZ vaccine to blood clots is weak. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/15/evidence-oxford-vaccine-blood-clots-data-causal-links Normally, caution is warranted by governments when an issue like this is raised but these are not normal times. I would happily take an AZ vaccine today if I could.

It’s not a big problem but our head of state hasn’t visited in a very long time. Which is kind of odd for any county.

Thousand are not killed every year, though. I have briefly driven on the wrong side of the road in the UK myself but I haven’t killed anybody and if I did I would fully expect to be charged. (I was also once in a collision with a German driving on the wrong side of the road over there but nobody was seriously hurt.) Obviously, there’s no intent to injure but it’s still negligence causing death. The case you cite was treated properly. The accused faced a court, pleaded guilty, apologized to the family and the court, and avoided a jail term which he could have faced. The German government didn’t surreptitiously sneak him out of the country and refuse to hand him over for trial afterwards. Britain is not Saudi Arabia and there is no reason why any American could not expect a fair trial there on such a charge. The exact status of this woman has yet to be clarified - some say worked for the CIA is not good enough - and is very much in dispute in Britain no matter what the Americans and the British government (which is playing a double game) now allege. I’m thread-drifting here but my point is that this American action in brazenly removing Sacoolas shows how things work in the real world when a more powerful country wants to get round the law. The right thing for the suspect to have done would have been to stay in the country, respect British law, and let the process play out. So-called diplomatic immunity, no matter how dodgy, could still have been asserted at the appropriate time. It is true she almost certainly wouldn’t have received a jail term but the mere prospect of facing foreign justice, even of the British variety, proved intolerable to her and her government. Just to clarify, on balance I may disagree with the wisdom of the Meng extradition but I would certainly defend its legality. Something the regime in Beijing refuses to understand is that we are a nation of laws.

The new reality for America’s close allies, e.g. Canada, Australia, Britain, is that their citizens are potential hostage targets for Beijing. At the moment, the PRC is prepared to go after the ‘running dogs’ and not their imperial masters. I doubt if I’m going to visit China any time soon. Lord knows what to do about the PRC. I’d like to see more products in Wal-Mart from countries not yet under Mainland Chinese control, e.g. India, Vietnam. Bangladesh is coming under pressure but it’s putting up more of a fight than Pakistan did: http://www.businessworld.in/article/Protests-in-Bangladesh-s-cities-against-China-Pakistan-for-persecution-of-minorities/10-12-2020-352298/ https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/editorial/reset-with-bangladesh/article34110972.ece India really has to up its game. The proposal to send millions of people ‘back’ to a country half the size of Labrador already bursting at the seams with 163 million of them should be binned. Obvious things - we’ve got to stop any more Mainland Chinese ownership of our companies and start looking more carefully at people buying houses here. Political donations must come under greater scrutiny. The CCP leadership loves sending its kids to Western schools - not ours so much - but I think all countries in Europe and North America should look at that to hurt them a little bit. More to the point, we have to assist the US any way we can on the military and high tech fronts. Which means increasing expenditure there and reducing it elsewhere. Which I don’t see happening any time soon. One matter where further progress might be made - Huawei. IMO it should have no place here.

Unfortunately, extradition has a political dimension, a huge one with Meng. Here’s an example of a recent case in the UK where the Americans invoked diplomatic immunity under highly dubious circumstances to avoid extraditing a person who clearly committed a serious offence. The woman was driving on the wrong side of the road and killed a young man. While still under investigation, she was whisked out of the country by her own government! It is highly offensive that the US pulled this trick on one of its closest allies - not what it is supposed to do at all. But that’s how the world is. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/04/harry-dunn-anne-sacoolass-diplomatic-immunity-in-question-us-court-is-told One reason the Meng case has taken so long is that the extradition case is not the strongest. Unlike that traffic death in the UK, this is not a simple case of criminality that all countries would recognize as such. Given what Huawei gets up to on a regular basis, it is weak beer, and Trump’s comments about exchanging her for trade concessions made a mockery of the whole process. The US should have pursued criminal charges against individual HSBC employees for the business they’ve done in Iran and Mexico. The assistance they gave to the cartels was highly significant. If necessary, new legislation is needed to make such prosecutions much easier. Until jail time is a distinct possibility in every country, banks are going to continue laundering money - sorry, assisting their clients with creative solutions - with gay abandon.

The one issue I have in the whole Meng thing is why the US singled her out in the first place and why we complied with their request. The bank she was working with when this alleged fraud occurred was the notorious HSBC which had done tons of illegal business with Iran already and had knowingly laundered hundreds of millions for the Mexican drug cartels. Of course, as usual, they claimed ignorance on what Meng was up to and, as usual, the British government is helping them keep their secrets: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-huawei-tech-britain-idUSKBN2AJ19Q https://www.lightreading.com/security/either-huawei-or-hsbc-is-lying-as-meng-case-moves-to-hong-kong/d/d-id/768031 Why did the US not demand the extradition of HSBC’s top people from London for offences that continued for many years or, at the very least, send a few of the local guys to prison for their egregious conduct? Instead they got a fine which is the cost of breaking the law for bankers these days. Former diplomat, Colin Robertson, just mentioned on CBC that other countries were approached to extradite Meng on these charges and politely refused which looks prudent in retrospect. The extradition had a political element from the start and Trump’s comments about exchanging Meng for Chinese concessions on trade only served to confirm this reality. Asking country A to extradite a regular Joe from country B to country C for doing business with country D sounds a bit of a stretch under any circumstances, but going after the daughter of China’s most strategically significant oligarch was always going to mean trouble for everyone involved.

If we want royals we could easily find our own like the Brits themselves did when William and Mary failed to do the business or Norway when it became independent. We were lucky with QEII and her longevity has enabled us to deny we have a problem, as we do with most things.

Xi’s big brothers do more than just watch you: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/china-ai-surveillance/614197/

The Dutch monarchy has a style more appropriate to the times: https://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/inauguration-not-coronation-and-how-the-dutch-monarchy-is-almost-just-a-job-1.59027

Most leaders in Asia are probably more comfortable dealing with the CCP than the Americans. Pesky questions about human rights, rule of law or summary executions just don’t come up with Xi and Co.

Here are views expressed on war with the US over Taiwan by PRC generals in 1995 and 2005 when the country was much less powerful: Apart from its profound symbolic significance, Taiwan has become a crucial player in the semiconductor market: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-25/the-world-is-dangerously-dependent-on-taiwan-for-semiconductors The US needs to ramp up its manufacturing capacity in this area as soon as possible, no matter what the cost; if the PRC develops a stranglehold on high tech we are all done and dusted. Down the road, South Korea and Japan are also uncomfortably close to the world’s awakening giant.

I think British India had rather more serious divisions on its plate than a debate over monarchy.

What a story. I must look out for it. Monarchs can make a difference as Juan Carlos did in Spain during the attempted coup, although he blotted his copy-book in later life. If we must have one after QEII, let’s go for a suitably low-key Canadian version à la Benelux and Scandinavia.

If you want a monarch you get your own. It’s not hard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haakon_VII_of_Norway

I’m getting déjà vu all over again. Groundhog Day. Across the world, nations adjacent to larger, similar ones struggle to avoid cultural inundation and assimilation. I’m sure such tendencies preceded the nation-state and go way back in our past, perhaps before hom sap. See the guys on the other side of the hill? We are so not those guys. That’s what makes us us.

I fear Taiwan is doomed. A Chinese country where the people have chosen democracy and tolerance is an open rebuke to Beijing’s dreadful alternative.

This isn’t a topic I’m too excited about one way or the other. Having a quaint connection to some European monarchy is kinda neat in its own way and doesn’t really matter. I do see how it distinguishes us from the Americans who make a much graver mistake in combining the roles of head of government and state - very silly. If you want to keep that Wills and Kate, pomp and circumstance, celeb malarkey going, fair enough, but make sure we have a real head of state here, i.e. a GG who is truly independent of the PM, not some hapless crony.

Xi and the gang aren’t daft. They must know the doctrine of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is extremely silly and evokes giggles in their own country among some of the world’s most successful capitalists. The only certain way to stifle such laughter and protect the regime is to take over the world. That is the logic we are all trapped in now.

The prospect of a world dominated by the CCP is utterly horrific. David Goldman offers a few suggestions as to how one might postpone such an event at the end of a decidedly pessimistic article: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-chinese-challenge/ His prescription of investment in high tech (especially less profitable areas) may have some merit but I’m surprised he thinks a bested US, or anybody else for that matter, could expect a genteel, post-WWII British fade in the new order. Any special relationship would be of a brutally asymmetrical kind. We’ve seen the treatment Han Chinese had to endure from their own government since 1949 and what the Uighurs are going through; the gloves will be well and truly off abroad. Socialism with capitalist, robotic and genetically modified characteristics has the potential to bring centuries of truly, madly, deeply harmonious order to our pale blue dot.