China’s Military Buildup:
It’s Aimed at Us

China’s defense budget has for years grown by double-digit percentages as it transforms itself from a land power — although still left with the world’s largest army at 2 million — into a blue water naval power. The West — ever distracted
by the Middle East, Central Asia and now, Ukraine — has been left to watch, to the degree that it has been watching at all. Here’s what that transformation has achieved so far:

making waves

China is expected to have a navy of 342 ships by 2020. The U.S. fleet numbers 243 surface and submarine warships. Spread thin around the world, only 64 ships are projected to make up our navy’s presence in the China theater.

With a production rate five times that of the U.S. and a projected 78 submarines by 2020, the Chinese have opted for the quantitative advantage of cheaper diesel-powered boats. But by 2008 China already had an estimated 30 advanced, partly-stealthy subs and have since sent down the ways their first “boomer” submarine armed with nuclear missiles and having a range of 4500 miles that reach Alaska or Hawaii, and, if launched from out in the Pacific, the continental United States. The Wall Street Journal makes the point that, “China’s boomer patrols will make it one of only three countries — alongside the U.S. and Russia — that can launch atomic weapons from sea, air and land”.

Moreover, China has re-engineered its missiles to carry multiple warheads. This step is possibly influenced by the U.S. orienting its missile defense systems toward Asia, although that is to intercept the threat of incoming from North Korea. Nevertheless, Ashley Tellis, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says it’s notable that China chose to upgrade the particular missiles “that can unambiguously reach the United States”.

setting sail

The Chinese navy has begun to roam. By 2008, during the height of Somali piracy, China sent two destroyers to the Gulf of Aden, their first foray of warships to Africa in 600 years. Its navy went to the Mediterranean in 2011 for the first time ever to evacuate Chinese citizens from Libya. “The maritime battlefield has been broadened,” says a Col. Wang Jin, “and China’s navy needs to react to protect its rights globally”. China’s subs have moved away from their coastlines, regularly spotted in the Philippine Sea year round, indicative of their crews learning proficiency in operating away from home. In December 2013, the Chinese sent a nuclear-powered submarine on the surface through the shallow Strait of Malacca, between Malaysia and Indonesia — a major passage for trade — and from there it disappeared until it resurfaced near Sri Lanka and then in the Persian Gulf, returning through the strait in February. It was the first known voyage of a Chinese sub to the Indian Ocean, “proving that it has the endurance to reach the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s headquarters in Hawaii”, said the Journal. This September, pointedly to make a statement while President Obama was in Alaska, it would seem, five ships from the Chinese navy were seen in the international waters of the Bering Sea.

projecting power

When Defense Secretary Robert Gates went to China in January, 2011, he was taken by surprise when in a visit to an airfield a radar-evading
fighter was rolled out. It even looked much like our own stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor, with the same twin tailfins. Until then, the U.S. was the only country with operational stealth aircraft. Less than two years later, the Chinese had landed their fighter, the J-15, on the deck of their first aircraft carrier. That ship, the
China’s first aircraft carrier, named “Liaoning”
Liaoning, was bought from Russia but completely rebuilt by the Chinese, who have said that two more carriers will be completed this year. The J-15 “is considered by many to be somewhat more advanced than our own carrier-based F/A-18E/F Super Hornets”, says a former director of the United States Naval Institute, who goes on to say, “For the last two years Chinese pilots have been practicing carrier-based operations — mainly launches, arrested landings, and safety drills. To watch videos of these drills is to recognize how the Chinese have borrowed from the American instruction manual”. The Chinese recognize that the aircraft carrier allows a navy to project its power however deeply into blue water it chooses to go.

asymmetrics

There are anguished voices in America that decry how we have allowed our navy to shrink to so few ships. Others call them captives of history who imagine a bygone world in which the outcome of a war could turn on set piece ship-against-ship battles.

This is an age of technology in which a shower of the low-cost missiles that China has been developing could send one of our Nimitz class nuclear carriers to the bottom with its 5,000 souls on board and its 90-or-so planes. The Chinese have concentrated on long-range anti-ship missiles. By 2010, a Chinese
program to pack conventional explosives into a nuclear ballistic missile, converting it into a carrier-killer that would descend from space at hypersonic speed, had reached “initial operational capability”. Other anti-ship missiles can be delivered from aircraft, guided-missile destroyers, fast patrol boats and submarines. We have known for five years of China’s building an anti-ship ballistic missile base in southern China’s Guangdong Province from which its missiles are capable of reaching the Philippines and Vietnam.

China has made clear that it intends to resolve sovereignty disputes in its “near seas” — the Yellow, East China and South China Seas — on its own terms. If America’s intentions are to keep the South China Sea open at all costs, the costs may be dear. The Chinese have positioned unknown numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles near the coast to dissuade American or Japanese warships from coming close. Its scores of submarines are meant to overwhelm the U.S. Navy in any defense of Taiwan.

China has spent heavily — $100 billion by 2013 in one estimate — to develop cyber-technology and the satellite reconnaissance and communications that will yield the long-range precision targeting it needs to keep America half an ocean away.

China has also worked to produce the technology to block American surveillance and communication satellites. It successfully destroyed a satellite in 2007, joining the U.S. and Russia as the only countries able to do so. “This is the first real escalation in the weaponization of space that we’ve seen in 20 years”, Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell said at the time. “It ends a long period of restraint”.

That capability has progressed with frightening speed. China “will soon be able to destroy every satellite in space”, according to Lt. Gen. Jay Raymond, commander of the 14th Air Force in a speech this year. We have known of this intent for years, while all our attentions have focused on the Middle East. A report to Congress in 2008 told of “writings” by the Chinese military that “emphasize the necessity of ‘destroying, damaging and interfering with the enemy’s reconnaissance/observation and communications satellites’. “

Gen. Wesley Clark wrote in an op-ed article in The New York Timeslast October that a well-placed Chinese associate had told him in 2013 that, “We can see your stealth aircraft”; “we have our own GPS and can shoot down yours”; “we know your technologies from all your companies and from NASA, because Chinese scientists work these for you”; …“Chinese shipyards are working 24 hours a day, seven days a week”; “more than 30 ships were launched between October 2012 and April 2013”; “by 2019 China will have four aircraft carriers deployed.” Curiously, this alarming pronouncement was found only online; it was omitted from the print version of the Times.

China’s cyber attacks have repeatedly rummaged through America’s wide-open computer systems to extract at will industrial and military secrets and data on millions of our citizens. Beyond looking for Chinese-Americans that they can enlist as spies, they may be honing their skills for the ultimate goal in a war — to cripple America by shutting down our power grid.

So infested are we by China, that a researcher and writer named Peter Fisher, who consults to the Pentagon, warns that in an air war with China, our fighters might be blown out of the sky because of the astonishing revelation that our F-35s run microchips made in China; they could contain baked-in sleeper code.

deficiencies

For now, the U.S. is far more powerful, should a fight break out. And there are cracks in China’s military façade. This March, The Wall Street Journal reported that at least 30 generals had fallen in Xi Jinping’s corruption purge revealing “rampant buying and selling of military ranks” that even had unofficial price tags. Ten million yuan would buy a generalship, for example, which tells you that the corruption only begins at that point, because the general would expect to recover the price of his commission and far more.

An officer corps stocked with incompetence can obviously affect an army’s ability to fight. Add to that the Chinese army hasn’t fought in a war in over three decades.

In the air, the engines on its fighters lack the power of their U.S. counterparts and even those bought from Russia are not as efficient. The western arms embargo enacted after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre has held them back. “Western defense firms believe that is why they are often on the receiving end of cyber-attacks” as China probes for ways to steal our designs.

At sea, Chinese submarines are noisy and cannot pass through the many straits through which they must pass to reach open ocean without detection. Moreover, those narrow, shallow straits are easily blocked.

China’s hardware is good, says Christopher Johnson at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, but the software needed to target its anti-ship missiles was lacking — at least it was a year and a half ago says this source. They may have a fighter that looks like the F-22 but when they move up to replicating the F-35, the software that makes it so potent will be more than difficult to replicate — that is, if the U.S. can ever learn how to protect its secrets.

The Migration Crisis, a Firsthand Report from Munich

By our correspondents in Germany, Kenneth and Natalya MacWilliams

Europe is being engulfed. Within Europe, Germany is experiencing the brunt of it. Within Germany, Munich is by far experiencing the brunt of it. Munich can for the moment be called ground zero.

There are many migrant and refugee centers in the greater Munich area. Migrants are first received at a central registration point where they remain for only one or two days while information about them is recorded, and then they are sent to various camps on some basis, where they remain until whatever will happen.

It was on Saturday that Natalya and I decided we wanted to find this initial screening center, thinking that there we would get the best handle on the nature and composition of the first migrant wave that has been crashing on Munich.

Finding it was easier said than done. From many inquiries within central Munich we eventually got a lead that it was in a certain general area on the outskirts of the center. So we took the U-bahn (subway) out to that general area and began walking the streets (kind of a deserted area) and asking questions. After walking in various different directions for about an hour (fortunate that it was a gorgeous day) and asking about a dozen people (none of whom knew anything) we finally hit upon three old men drinking beer (at 9:30 AM ) in the back of an outside, dilapidated tavern. They were semi-smashed (nothing to do with Oktoberfest; this was their normal routine) but one of them spoke a few words of English (he understood “refugee” and “where?”). In spite of the language barrier and the alcohol he seemed to know what he was talking about. He pointed us in the right direction and indicated that it would be a very long walk. Off we went (again thankful for the beautiful, cool day) until we came across a parked bus and asked the driver for more precise directions. He was north African and knew immediately where the migrants were. He motioned us aboard and in ten minutes he let us off directly across from the non-marked, barely visible refugee center, seemingly out in the middle of nowhere with industrial buildings all around.

This is a satellite photograph of the area which was taken prior to all of the temporary buildings and shelters just being hastily erected to process and hold these daily arriving groups of migrants.

We stood around curbside for a little while, getting our bearings. No one was walking by or along the street, and the only activity we saw were occasional buses going in and out. We quickly realized that the entire area appeared to be fenced or walled off and that there was only one entrance, which you can see in the bottom right hand corner of the photograph, just inside the fence, just above the words “Lotte-Branz”. So it was through this entrance that we boldly marched, straight into the arms of the federal German security.

They were polite but extremely firm that there was no way we were going to get inside, and I tried everything. And they absolutely forbid photographs. So eventually we were turned around and marched back out.

At that point we walked around the whole perimeter and eventually I wandered up some old abandoned railroad tracks (on the left margin of the property in the satellite photo above) and found a spot where I could climb up on something and get some photos over the fence without being noticed. From there I was able to take this:

Here are some of the migrants, sitting outside (I’m apparently really asking for trouble here because I was explicitly warned away in no uncertain terms):

During this process we noticed that some of the migrants from inside the area walked out of the area without any problem. We spoke to those of them who could speak a little English (most could not) and learned that the migrants within the camp were being registered and would be moved elsewhere within a day or two maximum, to make room for new arrivals. We also learned that while they were in this camp they were free to leave the camp and walk outside of it if they wished (they were not being confined) but that from a practical standpoint there was nowhere to go because (a) so few of them spoke any English, (b) they had little money in their pockets, (c) the area in which this camp was located was apparently out in the middle of nowhere in a light industrial area, and (d) none of them had any idea where they were in the greater Munich area or any idea how to move around within it.

It was at this point that Natalya and I settled down, out of view of the security police, and began approaching every wandering migrant we could see to determine if they spoke any English and to ask if they would talk with us about why they had made the overall effort from day # 1 in their long journey, and about what they had been through and experienced thus far. What can be said here is that every one of them who admitted to speaking English was willing to talk with us, more or less openly to one extent or another. And all of them said they were being treated well by Germany, that the accommodations were OK and that the food was OK and that most importantly they felt safe. In our opinion Germany truly is to be complimented. Everything the country has done is exemplary. Germans are entitled to and should stand tall.

We ourselves had no lunch because we had never imagined it would take us so long to find the place and we had expected to be back in Munich for a late lunch. That was not to be, but eventually lack of food and water got the better of us in the afternoon and that is when we decided to call it quits and to try to find our way back into central Munich. We could not find any bus stop (the bus that brought us there initially appeared to go out of his way to do so and dropped us off at a non-bus stop). But after finally finding some Germans we got directions to a bus stop and eventually got there, which is when chapter two of this most interesting day began.

As we were sitting on a bench beside the road waiting for what seemed forever for a local bus to take us to the nearest U-Bahn station, a young teenage black boy with the eyes of a deer fearfully caught in the headlights very cautiously approached us and asked us in barely understandable and halting English (it took several tries for us to get it) if we could tell him where there was a toilet. Slowly, over time, as he sat on the bench, we learned that we was a migrant or refugee, that he had been taken to the camp that morning, that he would be moved to a permanent camp later today or the next day, and so — with 100 Euros in his pocket (his copy of his migrant registration paper which I asked to see indicated that) and with a plastic grocery bag stuffed with a parka — he had decided to continue on his journey to his final destination of Stockholm and had simply walked walked out of the registration center and was heading on his way. We asked him what his plan was, how he intended to get to Stockholm. Eventually he was able to communicate that he was going to first try to find the railroad station in Munich (he had no idea where it was or how to get there) and that he would go first by train to Hamburg and then to Copenhagen and then to Stockholm. By the time we were learning all of this — and it took a lot of time because his English was almost non-existent and frequently I took to drawing pictures to explain things — we were all on a bus that was thankfully heading toward an outer U-Bahn stop.

So over the next hour or so with him on the bus, in the subway, and in the Munich central train station we eventually learned — it came out slowly, as I said, in broken bits and pieces — the following. He was from Eritrea and had reached Munich by way of Italy. He arrived in Munich early that morning on a train from Italy, where he was picked up in the train station by the police and taken to the registration camp Natalya and I had just found. We tried to convince him to stay in Germany and to return to the Munich initial registration camp where we assured him he would be very well cared for but he was adamant against it. Our continual insistence eventually surfaced the fact that his brother was in Stockholm and he was trying desperately to get to his brother. His mother and his four year old sister were still in Italy, where they had all somehow arrived safely from Eritrea. None of them spoke any better English than he did.

He believed that if he remained in the Munich camp that it would be weeks and months before he would be allowed to proceed, and at that time he feared the borders with Denmark and Sweden might be closed. And that delay would also stop him and his brother from helping his stranded mother and four year old sister. He had no idea about train fares and his 100 Euros were immensely less than what he would need to buy train tickets for same day travel from Munich to Hamburg, then change trains for Copenhagen, then change trains to get to Stockholm. Buying tickets a day in advance would have reduced the fare somewhat but would have required him to sleep in the open because of no money, and that would have significantly increased the likelihood that he would be picked up by the police and taken to a refugee camp further on.

So he was bound and determined to move on northwards right then and there, against all odds. And he was asking no one for any help.

We were by now in the train station and it was at this point that I asked him to sit still and stay with Natalya until I came back. From my time here last winter I had a very good and reliable contact near the station who was an expert in travel documents and on travel laws and on railroad passage, so I went to talk to him and fortunately found him. He assured me that if the police picked him up again that he would find himself right back in the registration camp. He also said that his only chance of making it to Stockholm would be to buy right now a ticket to Hamburg — the train was leaving in 30 minutes — and that ticket would leave him with a balance of 4 Euros in his pocket — and the minute he got off the train in Hamburg to buy his next ticket on to Copenhagen, and the same in Copenhagen … so that if the police questioned him anywhere along the way he could show them the ticket plus cash in hand as proof that he was not a vagrant.

So I went back to Natalya and spoke with her privately. We both agreed on the crazy thing we did next. We explained to him the concept of a loan. That he understood once we got over the language barrier on that concept. Then we told him we were going to make him a loan of all the money he needed to buy all the train tickets he needed to get to Hamburg and then to Copenhagen and then to Stockholm (Natalya had checked the exact amounts) and told him that he should hold onto his 100 Euros for food and buses etc. And we asked for his promise that once he reached his brother and once they got their mother and sister to Stockholm with them, and once they were earning any money and could afford to do so, that he should contact us and repay us.

He agreed most emphatically, but who knows. What struck both Natalya and me about him was that throughout all of this he had, as I said, the look of a deer caught in the headlights and seemed quietly terrified. In any case it was our instinct that he was honest and we trusted what he said, and we went with that.

He has our names and addresses and we have his name and the information from his Munich registration papers. We have no idea whether we will ever hear from him again, but I’m betting that at some future date we will, especially since he promised to let us know if he reaches his brother. And if he ever earns enough money to pay us back, and tells us he is ready to do so, what we plan to tell him is to consider his debt paid providing he takes the money he was going to send to us and turns around and finds someone else who is in the position he is in today and helps that person himself just as we helped him today.

So at that point, with just minutes to spare before the train for Hamburg left Munich station, we walked him to a 2nd class car, got him seated, and told the German car attendant to take good care of him. And before I left I asked him if he knew what a lion was. Finally he understood and said yes. Then I asked him if he knew what a heart was. He got that more quickly. Then I told him that even though he was very young that he had the heart of a lion. At that, for the first time, some fear left his eyes and he smiled. That smile made it all worthwhile for Natalya and me even if nothing more ever comes of any of this.

Triggers and Micro-
aggressions, the New Campus Curriculum

We have returned this from over two months ago given what has been happening on campuses since.
    

Three American military servicemen sprang to action and subdued a terrorist wielding an AK-47, a handgun and a box cutter on a train from Amsterdam to Paris, preventing what could have been a slaughter.

At almost the same time, two West Point graduates completed the grueling 61-day (at a minimum) U.S. Army Ranger training ordeal as the first women ever to do so.

Sounds like America has bred another generation of courageous and resolute character that we can be proud of, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, a very different breed seems to be coming along, found in the next slice of that generation that is now in college.

Education is meant to prepare us for the world. The college environment should teem with clashing ideas and ideals, stimulating curiosity and openness to discovery, teaching students to stand on their own, to think, to discourse on what they have learned, to debate controversial topics.

Instead, we hear of “triggers” and “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions” and a new obsession with “safety” on the part of students who have turned highly aggressive themselves in their demands that perceived affronts be penalized and suppressed. “Triggers” are occurrences — words, passages in literature, historical facts, etc. — that might upset certain people, and campus groups have seemingly sprouted everywhere to demand that “trigger warnings” appear in course descriptions and their syllabuses to protect the unaware.

This new ultra-sensitivity is viewed as the re-emergence of the “politically correct” dictates that scolded free speech in the late ’80s and early ’90s and — everything now requiring partisan labeling — is considered a liberal movement. Jonathan Chait writes in an essay in New York magazine that “Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate”.

Some examples

A Muslim student at the University of Michigan wrote write a satirical column that spoofed the culture of taking offense at everything that he said pervades the campus. In so doing he had created a “hostile environment,” in which at least one staffer at the university newspaper, the Michigan Daily, felt threatened. When he refused the demand that he write a letter of apology to the staff, the Daily fired him, and women students littered his doorway with splattered eggs and hate messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick”.

Four students wrote to the student newspaper at Columbia University objecting to a class discussion of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” they’d heard about from another student who said she was a survivor of sexual assault. The epic poem recounts the imagined history of the world with depictions of violence, sexual assault and the mythological rape of Persephone and Daphne. The professor’s focus “on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery” as opposed to the violence had “triggered” the student who “disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation” because “she did not feel safe in the class”. “Like so many texts in the Western canon”, the four wrote, “it contains triggering and offensive material” that “can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background”. They relayed an idea from another section of the Literature Humanities course that students ought to be able to substitute their own choices of what to read. Toni Morrison, for example.

Peggy Noonan, Reagan speechwriter and columnist at The Wall Street Journal, is having none of the Columbia whinge. “I won’t name the four undergraduate authors, because 30 years from now their children will be on Google, and because everyone in their 20s has the right to be an idiot”.

The Sexual Assault Task Force at Brown works to make the university a safe place for rape victims, insulated from anything that might trigger memories of trauma. This alone says a surprising amount of student encounters there are viewed as rape. Anyway, the announcement of a debate about campus sexual assault between the founder of website feministing.com and a libertarian who was likely to call this a “rape culture” set off alarms. The task force got Brown’s president, Christina Paxson, to stage a simultaneous competing talk to provide “research and facts” about “the role of culture in sexual assault”. And for those uncomfortable with both approaches to the subject, a “safe space” to which to retreat would be provided.

To explain, Judith Shulevitz, who writes on feminism, culture and science at The New York Times was told that students want their colleges to have “safe spaces” to protect them from discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. The safe room at Brown, she was told, is equipped “with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma”. The place was used by a couple of dozen people during the lectures who felt “bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” said one student.

Former Barnard president Judith Shapiro called this a reinforcement of students’ “self-infantilization”. For their fragility, they’ve been given the name “snowflakes”. Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote in Slate that universities cosset students more than in the past because today’s undergraduates are more juvenile. “Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity”, he wrote. Back to examples:

At the end of last year, law school students at Harvard petitioned their administrations to delay exams in consideration of those “traumatized” by the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., and the choking death of an unarmed black man on Staten Island, NY. If they did not delay, Harvard would “allow the systematic underperformance of a great many students of color and allies” because “we cannot walk away from our pain”. Law students at Columbia and Georgetown universities made similar requests. This prompted media comments along the line of, wait until they see what it is like to practice law on the outside.

At Oberlin, a document warns that Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, a novel set in post-colonial Nigeria and widely included in the reading lists of American schools, will “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more”. So if a student has experienced any one of these — say racism in the U.S. — can the student opt-out of reading the book so as not to be exposed to the author’s experience with the other triggers — colonialism, religious persecution, etc. — and the dangers endured by people living under the oppressive cultures of other lands? How is the student’s understanding of the world advanced if these realities are avoided?

At other colleges, activists demand that a trigger warning be affixed to Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” because of its anti-Semitism and to Mark Twain’s American classic, “Huckleberry Finn”, because of racism, despite it being a story of the bonding of races. And then there was the Rutgers student who wanted “The Great Gatsby” to be approached with caution because of “suicide, domestic abuse and graphic violence”.

Gatsby? Seriously? Will anything escape trigger-warnings? Will course syllabuses be reduced to children’s books, or those coloring books in Brown’s safe house? A Wall Street Journal columnist calls this sort of college “just a $240,000 extension of kindergarten”.

For the few who have experienced actual trauma, avoiding reminders runs opposite to the standard advice, which is that “controlled exposure” offers the best chance of abatement. For others, who are just shying from conflict found in literature or history, this is impossibly delicate. The “Iliad” has vivid descriptions of savage hand-to-hand combat and agonizing death. But to hide from these accounts is both to stay ignorant of mankind’s world thousands of years ago and to pass by one of the greatest poems ever written. Missing out should be the trigger warning.

When they step out into the world, how does this new breed of student expect the world to re-order itself as they demanded in the comfort zone they created at college? “They’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled”, said Shulevitz. Life will offer opportunity and freedom, but also jarring exposure to ignorance and bigotry and confrontations that require a spinal column. “What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin in the years just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection and enter the workforce?”, ask Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt at The Atlantic

avoidable hurts

Microaggressions are mostly different from triggers, although one wouldn’t think so judging from a sit-in staged at UCLA to protest microaggressions, one of which was the offense committed by a professor who corrected a student who spelled “indigenous” with an uppercase I. His “lowercasing the capital I was an insult to the student and her ideology”, the group claimed.

It gets weirder: A theater group at Mount Holyoke College recently announced “The Vagina Monologues” would no longer be performed, partly because that would be a microaggression for those women in the audience not possessed of vaginas.

Microaggressions are the small, and often as not, unintentional slights that can occur between students of different backgrounds. The more typical microaggression is something said in conversation when one student inadvertently hurts another. While that sounds just like the hyper-delicacy of the triggered, making students aware of certain sensitivities is its own contribution to a young person’s education.

We came upon an example that made this clear. Phillips Academy, the prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, usually referred to as Andover, boasts of a student body of “youth from every quarter” and backs up that claim with a current enrollment from 45 states and 38 countries, 42% of color, and about half of whom get need-blind financial aid — a mix that, apart from the kids being homogeneous in smarts, prompted the headmaster to say that, “This is the most diverse environment that most of these kids will ever live in”. That makes for a compost in which the youths need some training to make them aware of the very different backgrounds that have raised up those who are now their peers. This Andover website lists close to three dozen slights reported by students which makes a good case that microaggressions are real and, more important, that making all these examples apparent to a student body in all-school assemblies could go a long way toward advancing understanding, consideration and tolerance that could hopefully carry forward into life.

weaponization instead

But rather than emerging with a new-found worldly sophistication, too often, students have gone on to seek out microaggressions to deploy as weapons, on the lookout for items in their college courses they can use against faculty. And some universities — those presumed citadels of free speech — have caved in, joining their persnickety students by ruling against the use of certain terms in classrooms that might upset those who must always be guaranteed a “safe space”.

Janet Napolitano was Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security and is now president of the University of California. From her desk came instructions to deans and department chairs advising against use of certain phrases such as, “There is only one race, the human race” because it eradicates “the significance of a person of color’s racial/ethnic experience and history”, or “America is the land of opportunity”, virtually a motto but which we are now told could be taken as “People of color are lazy and/or incompetent and need to work harder”. This coming from the same university whose Berkeley campus was the scene of the demonstrations and sit-ins on the nightly news by students ardently fighting for free speech in the 1960s.

The University of New Hampshire went all out for fear of offending Latino students. Avoid the word “American”, says the school’s “Bias-Free Language Guide”, because that assumes the U.S. is the only country in the hemisphere. Say “U.S. citizen” instead.

faculty on edge

A college professor sent an article to Vox.com in June titled, “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me”. He wrote under a pseudonym, which proves his point. Fearful for their jobs, he and his colleagues comb through the material they assign to students, pruning whatever could send a student complaining to the dean that he or she has been offended. He quotes Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis who wrote, “Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated”. At Brandeis University a professor was pronounced guilty of racial harassment, denied a hearing and assigned a monitor in his classes after he criticized the use of the word “wetbacks” in his Latin American Politics course.

Nicking a student’s feelings or making them feel “unsafe” in the presence of uncomfortable thought, however appropriate to the course they are taking, “can now get a teacher into serious trouble”, says the Vox contributing professor. How could a professor now dare say “affirmative action is racist”, despite that being the point of affirmative action. He writes a blog, and when some liberals called him paranoid, he said, “I guarantee you that these people do not work in higher education, or if they do, they are at least two decades removed from the job search”.

So what’s going on here? The answer is a reversal of college-student roles. College administrations now kow-tow to the students; one hears the word “customer”. It’s those soaring tuitions, eagerly paid for by government-issued student loans, that the administrators want to make sure keep coming. Those “academic freedom” spouting professors had better get out of the way.

And as for how the students got that way and what is on its way, we have this in a letter to the Journal: “If you think the college students of today are ‘snowflakes’, wait until you see what is next. Thanks to all of those helicopter moms who raised snowflakes, we now have the Apache Helicopter Moms who swoop down and fix everything for their children. As an elementary school teacher, I see this on a daily basis. Students aren’t held accountable for anything, and parents are continually making excuses for their behavior.

The Twisted Logic of the Iran Debate

To follow the inverted logic of the furious debate over the Iran nuclear deal has been an adventure in Wonderland where Alice learns that down is up and up is down. Opponents argued that we
should hold out for a better deal. After holding fast against six nations for 18 months, surely Iran will be only too obliging to return to the table. Or, why don’t we just toughen the sanctions? Never mind that our partner nations would abandon both us and the sanctions in disgust if the U.S. were to back out of the deal. But the agreement “paves Iran’s path to a bomb” in 10 to 15 years warns Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Somehow that’s the danger, not that Iran would set its centrifuges spinning again now if there is no deal.

Dick Cheney and daughter Liz wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal to report that a deal that is designed to block all pathways to a nuclear weapon “will actually accelerate” nuclear proliferation because of “America’s unwillingness to stop the Iranian nuclear program”. How’s that again? Because preventing Iran from continuing its nuclear development will see “nations across the Middle East work to acquire their own weapons”. Pretzel logic.

The topsy-turvy illogic that we should just demand a better deal has been voiced by many in Congress, many of them probably not even aware during the past 18 months, punctuated by disputes and walkouts, that the grudging negotiations were taking place. “Congress should reject a bad deal”, say ads from AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “We need a better deal”. Up pops Joe Lieberman, without portfolio but somehow given a podium in the media to say that “because of its depleted economy” Iran will come running back to the table because they “need an agreement more than we do”. Lieberman then took the reins of United Against a Nuclear Iran, a supposedly bipartisan group belied by its advertising.

cover up

For its part, the Obama administration didn’t play it straight. Much like Obamacare, false promises were uncovered one by one — that there is no “anywhere, anytime” guarantee; that a request must be filed to inspect a newly suspected site, setting in motion a 24-day process giving Iran ample time to sweep evidence under the rug; that Iran will ludicrously inspect itself at the Parchin military base.

(The Parchin “bombshell” — The Wall Street Journal — that is “utterly humiliating” — The Washington Post — was a phony issue, though. For a facility widely suspected of involvement in nuclear weapon development, self-inspection is of course a joke, but it isn’t news. “In his television appearance the Ayatollah ruled out military bases”, we reported April 13th. “It must absolutely not be allowed for [the IAEA] to infiltrate into the country’s defense and security domain under the pretext of inspections,” he said.)

These surprises gave the opposing camp a steady resupply of ammunition and it got nasty. Netanyahu views the U.S. Congress as his own lobby and has engaged in persistent meddling with U.S. policy. He set about contacting American Jews directly and telling them the deal would give Iran “hundreds of bombs tomorrow” and turn any terrorist group backed by Iran into a “terrorist superpower”. Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, has gone through the back door to meet with some 60 senators and representatives to lobby against the accord. Netanyahu told the Jewish community he rejects the deal “because I want to prevent war”. Obama told everyone that all that would be left as the alternative to the deal is war.

This succeeded in splitting the Jewish community into opposing factions that one called “fratricide”. Several Democrats in districts with large Jewish populations broke with Obama and sided with Netanyahu, most prominently New York Senator Charles Schumer. Brooklyn’s representative Jerry Nadler, also Jewish, stayed with Obama and received death threats.

Countering the Israeli campaign, “Cabinet members and other senior administration officials talked directly with more than 200 House members and senators”, reported The New York Times. “The president spoke personally to about 100 lawmakers…called 30 lawmakers during his August vacation”. What may have worked better still was the visit here by diplomats from all five partner nations in the deliberations — Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia — to deliver a message to on-the-fence Democrats that this is the best deal they can expect and there won’t be another.

too great expectations

Iran has been living under increasingly tough sanctions for the past decade. In the talks they showed an unyielding resolve to hold out unless one after another concession was granted. The concern on our side of the table was that they would quit the talks, meaning the end of the interim accord that halted their nuclear activities while negotiations took place, and resume nuclear weapon development with a “breakout time” — the time needed to produce enough enriched uranium to make one bomb — estimated at a mere two to three months. The six nations opposite Iran at the bargaining table reasoned that a regime of restrictions and inspections — some for 10 and some for 15 years and beyond — is better than the status quo ante that existed before the interim accord.

only buying time

The abiding fear is that the agreement, by allowing Iran to keep a sharply reduced number of centrifuges spinning and to continue research, will enable Iran to become a threshold nuclear state a “screwdriver’s turn away” from producing a bomb when the 10-15 years are up. The one-year breakout time initially brought about by the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) restrictions, will by then have withered away to zero. Those complaints somehow expected that the U.S. and partners could have and should have exacted from the Iranians a prohibition that would extend into perpetuity, conditions to which no sovereign country would have acceded. Their view is that end of restrictions somehow legitimizes Iran as a nuclear proliferating state.

But there are no requirements for the western nations to allow Iran to do as it pleases when restrictions lapse. All options are then available to us if Iran reverts to its nuclear ambitions.

Far more troubling is the return to Iran of its own funds frozen by the West, variously spoken of as $100 billion to $150 billion. It sets up a scenario in which we are left with nothing but have to trust Iran — exactly what the Obama administration has promised not to extend. Iran’s economic health will be restored, the sanctions will have been lifted, the arms and ballistic missile embargoes ended, so what is left to hold Iran to the deal? The “snap-back” sanctions? Will Europe give up the profitable trade with Iran that will have grown up by then? Will Russia and China and the other nations that cooperated with the U.S. on sanctions be willing to injure their economies once again by sanction reinstatement? That leaves nothing but trust that Iran will see the deal through, and that is a pipe dream.

Iran will mock our naïveté and return to its plan to become the hegemon of the Middle East enforced by its nuclear blackmail weapon. We will then be one or two presidents further along, possibly much more concerned with a militaristic China, so who can say whether we will then be willing to attack Iran? Restored to health, Iran will have built up its defenses and weaponry such that it could become much more difficult to cripple the nuclear program or the country than now.

the bigger picture

Mostly lost in the fierce debate were the consequences if the United States — the country that pressed the hardest and led the talks — were to walk away from our own deal. This would have told the world that the U.S. cannot lead, has become too dysfunctional to get a job done. There is the danger that allied and friendly countries, seeing the handwriting of realpolitik on the wall, might defensively seek to improve relations with China. There’s apprehension that this in turn would play into China’s hand to weaken or replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, a huge diminishment for the U.S.

But not much heed is paid to that. The mindset is far more parochial. It is stunning that, among the hundreds in Congress, there is so far no Republican who will decide for him- or herself to vote for the accord. That all march in lockstep says their vote will be entirely political with no regard for whether their act may not be in the interest of the nation. Otherwise, surely someone would step forward to break ranks.

a war strategy?

Worse, we are in a new moment of our democracy in which the losing side of a law’s passage sets about to destroy the law in other ways. Don’t like Obamacare? Then plot to block its funding, for example. As Obama looked close to getting enough votes to prevent Congress surmounting his veto, Sen. Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, began leading a move to vote for a new set of sanctions against Iran for supporting terrorist groups in the Middle East. There is little doubt that Iran would view removing one set of sanctions and imposing another with a different label as one and the same, and grounds for breaking the deal — fulfilling the Republican objective. In fact, Iran has already made that clear in two provisions of the JCPOA (paragraphs 26 and 37) in nearly identical words, “that if sanctions are reinstated in whole or in part, Iran will treat that as grounds to cease performing its commitments under this JCPOA in whole or in part.”

In March, fellow Tennessee Republican Senator Tom Cotton lined up 47 senators to sign a letter to the Ayatollah and Iranian leadership warning them that the United States cannot be trusted. Corker has decided to prove him right. These moves to deliberately break the deal beg the question of whether what this faction really has in mind is to trigger war now as the better option.

War With China: Is It Already Here?

China has hit a rough patch. We’ve been importing about 8% less than last year, so they’ve devalued the yuan to make their goods cheaper and our goods more expensive. That way we Americans will boost our imports again, and China will buy less of our products. After all, they need our money to build their air force and navy so they can advance their plan to shut us out of the
South China Sea and then the western Pacific. We’re only too glad to help.

With our military bases dotting the region and our ships plying its waters, the United States has been a dominating presence in the region since our victory in the Pacific 70 years ago rescued China from occupation by the Japanese. But now China wants to become the hegemon. They want us out, and are testing us with provocations. “If there’s a door, China will knock on it, and if there’s no answer, China will try the handle”, writes Tod Lindberg of The Weekly Standard.

Meanwhile, as China grows ominously stronger, the U.S. has for the last fourteen years been preoccupied elsewhere, weakening itself in will and wherewithal in the futile morass of a Middle East better left to sort out its own suicidal cravings. President Obama has been steadily distracted from his “pivot” to the Pacific by non-stop critics who want a “strategy” but have none of their own, and in the East is reduced to little more than a trade pact and a smattering of troops sent to Australia. The Chinese must be pleased.

“The ultimate strategic effect of the Iraq war has been to hasten the arrival of the Asian Century. The military trend that is hiding in plain sight is the loss of the Pacific Ocean as an American lake after 60 years of near-total dominance”. That’s Robert Kaplan, a geo-strategical analyst who seems always to be out ahead of our government. He wrote that in 2007.

The Chinese have been knocking. Ownership of the islands in the South China Sea have always been disputed, the seabed thought to hold oil and natural gas, but China has over the past few years decided to take possession against its weak neighbors. China does not want control of them all, says Wu Shicun, president of a government-sponsored institute, only 80%. A map they issue has nine dash lines
The nine dash line                    Credit: The Economist
that reach from the Chinese mainland hundreds of miles almost to the Vietnam, Malaysia, and Philippines coastlines, demarcating a zone they contend is all theirs.

Chinese dredges have been sucking sand from the sea floor to turn reefs into an archipelago of seven islands amidst the Spratly Island group some 500 miles from China and halfway between Vietnam and the Philippines, a sea area so treacherous that old British Admiralty
sailing charts marked the entire area “Dangerous Ground”. Over the past year and a half the Chinese reclaimed 2,000 acres from the sea bottom, are building two lighthouses, radar installations, have been spotted unloading artillery, and have laid a 10,000 foot runway capable of handling any aircraft from fighter jets to heavy-lift cargo transports.

This gives them an outpost to “allow Beijing to conduct regular, sustained patrols of the airspace and water, and to attempt to press its far-flung maritime claims as many as 1,000 miles from its shores”, says Mira Rapp-Hooper, director of a website that monitors activity in the disputed territory.

no trespassing

In May, a U.S. Navy P8-A Poseidon surveillance plane overflying Fiery Cross Reef, one of the new islands, was told repeatedly, “This is Chinese navy. You are approaching our military alert zone. Leave immediately in order to avoid misjudgment”. A crew from CNN was on board to broadcast their navy’s reprimand (delivered in English) and the U.S. crew responding each time that it was flying through international airspace.

The U.S. was told to end its “provocative behavior” by the Chinese foreign ministry. Claim of the reefs is “unshakable”. The American flights are “very irresponsible and dangerous,” and “likely to cause an accident”. The Communist Party’s paper, the People’s Daily, warned America that those who “hurt others” could “end up hurting themselves”. The state-owned Global Times of China said unless America stopped objecting to the island-building, war would be “inevitable”.

There have been many other incidents. Our companion article has a rundown .

The South China Sea is is the shortest route between the Pacific and Indian oceans, and the Middle East and Europe beyond. Through its shipping lanes pass half the world’s cargo tonnage and 80% of the oil destined for China. That confers outsized strategic importance on this crossroads. Ownership of the several islands, islets, reefs and rock piles of the South China Sea and beyond are perpetually disputed. China and Vietnam both claim sovereignty over the Paracel Islands. China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia all claim sovereignty over the Spratly Islands. Indonesia has been awakened by the realization that China even includes parts of the Natuna. China is claiming them all.

China has a rationale for wanting to protect the tanker routes, a role so far played by the United States navy. Its moves to create artificial islands with military bases are what alarms the countries that ring these waters. And for island nation Japan, almost wholly dependent on trade, China’s control poses an enlarged threat. The South China Sea is “on the way to becoming the most contested body of water in the world”, says Kaplan.

What’s troubling for the countries that encircle the South China Sea — principally Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines — is that Chinese officials and scholars have been referring to the “nine dash line” mentioned above, dashes on a map drawn in 1947 before the Communist victory indicating with territorial claims that almost all the sea belongs to China. This zone is described as a “core national interest”. The nine-dash map appears in government documents and even in Air China’s in-flight magazine. Newly-issued Chinese passports now show an image of the line.

A country has exclusive claim to the first 12 miles of surrounding sea under maritime law, and an economic zone of 200 miles for exclusive fishing and mining, but the 200 miles are considered international waters by the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea meaning free access for all other purposes. Not for the new China. It has acted to force foreign militaries out of the 200-mile economic zone off them mainland, and now claims the Law of the Sea gives them the 200-mile economic zone extending outward from each islet or rock outcrop that it claims is theirs , blocking all other countries from fishing rights, oil or gas drilling, or sea-floor minerals. They have decreed that any territorial dispute is to be handled only one nation on one, giving Beijing a lopsided advantage over each smaller neighbor. Its economic power makes it the bully in the schoolyard.

down to the sea in ships

The nine dash line? That’s for now. China then looks beyond to what a powerful navy will bring. They speak of the “second island chain”, seen in this second map
The 2nd island chain                    Credit: The Economist
embracing even the American territory of Guam, a key military base, which clearly shows the objective of reducing or eliminating the American presence.

In 2013 a group of Chinese scholars, analysts and military officials gathered to even question Japan’s rule of the Ryukyu island chain, which includes Okinawa, home of 1.3 million Japanese and 27,000 American troops.

Finally, in the expectation of becoming the dominant super power, China would look to what they call the “third island chain”, extending their maritime reach out into the Pacific where the United States currently has unchallenged naval supremacy. The chain begins with America’s and Russia’s Aleutian Islands. In unofficial Chinese military literature the southward line includes the Hawaiian Islands.

How will the u.s. respond?

In November 2013, China declared an “air defense identification zone” over the Senkaku Islands and the East China Sea. All aircraft entering the zone were required to self-identify. The U.S. acquiesced by advising commercial airlines to comply, which was viewed as a mistake. Japan and South Korea refused. We have since signaled token resistance by flying two B-52s through the zone.

America’s policy has for too long been based on the wishful belief that China’s often-expressed plan for a “peaceful rise” could be trusted. American corporations have been so lustful of profiting from the potential of the rising Chinese market that they have put up with exclusionary practices, currency manipulation, counterfeiting, trade secret theft and technology transfer — what former NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander called “the greatest transfer of wealth in history”. Our government had begun to view China as a “strategic competitor”, but such talk was toned down by George Bush after the attacks of September 11th 2001, when our focus shifted to the Middle East. Barack Obama is constantly pulled back into that cauldron. Meanwhile, China charges ahead with its island building and threats.

There is concern that China will declare another defense identification zone over the South China Sea, given their nine-dash line claims and rapid build out of its islands. The U.S. last year warned China that it would not accept another identification zone or China’s territorial claims of the islands. U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter repeated that warning this May, saying, “There should be no mistake about this: The United States will fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows, as we do all around the world”.

The test of our resolve should come soon, as it must. In a 2012 op-ed, James Webb, former Navy Secretary and now running for president, warned, “History teaches us that when unilateral acts of aggression go unanswered, the bad news never gets better with age.”

General Secretary Xi Jinping visits Washington in September when he and President Obama will seek to “ease tensions”.

Next time: China’s military build-up.

The Potent Promise of Freedom of Expression

By guest columnist Al Rodbell

When we think of someone railing against the use of language that spares discomfort to others, people like Rush Limbaugh and of course that guy (whatshisname) who is leading the polls for the Republican presidential nomination comes to mind. I mean, what could be wrong with getting rid of the term “mental retardation” that is hurtful, and replacing it with “developmental disability”?

I had been a volunteer at our local zoo, a pretty famous one, where I would get great pleasure out of interacting with the people who came from far and wide, often with children or older relatives in tow. It’s a confusing place, so I relished the sense of relief when they saw me in my official red shirt and felt help was at hand, that maybe they could find their way to that exhibit they had traveled so far to see. I’m a pretty outgoing guy, and people often respond in kind, and before long there is often a conversation going.

Recently, a woman came over to tell me someone in their party was lost. I had to ascertain first whether it was a child, or if not, whether the person had unusual issues that required my radioing security for an immediate search. When I asked these questions, the woman was uncomfortable, saying “well, it’s a difficult situation.” After pressing her, she said, “She does have problems, but we never talk about them.”

A few months before a mother came up to me saying her child was lost. This is always an emergency, since it could be possible that it is an abduction, so those at the exit need an identification to prevent such an exit. But I was stumped. The mother and the father were of mixed race, and since clothing could be changed I was about to ask the child’s race, color of skin, but I hesitated.

While this sounds rare, there are times when precision, whether of a medical condition or of identity, is needed. In both of these cases at the zoo the “crisis” was over quickly before I had to ask further questions, as both lost persons showed up. In the case of the lost adult, I understand why the friend had difficulty with a description. The lost, now found, woman did have a confused demeanor. Now middle aged, I can only guess what her DSM diagnosis would be, but she was not fully functioning. It was great that she was part of a group, maybe a family, maybe something else, and everyone was happy she was back with them.

Yet we need language that is precise, and sometimes have to ask specific questions about mobility, health and other issues to determine what kind of assistance is needed, and this risks possibly offending someone. My pleasure in this gig was that quite the opposite occurs, that people appreciate my concern and there is a connection. But, the fear of offending pervades the complex. We are constantly warned never to have a personal conversation with anyone, as management can’t be sure whether there will be emotional harm.

Now a change of scene, from zoos to recreational tennis at public courts, and a conversation today with Jim. Unlike the zoo, at these games there is no one telling anyone what, or what not, to say to anyone else. It’s a diverse group of men and women, with a range of ages of over 60 years, I often being the oldest of the twenty or more players on a Tuesday morning. We play doubles, with the winners moving up and the losers down the five courts. We sometimes talk politics during the changeover break, but with care and never too seriously. Everyone knows I’m always ready to hang around afterwards to continue an interesting discussion.

Most of us enjoy winning, but there even more pleasure in a stimulating competitive game with each player raising the other’s level. And does Jim ever love to win!. He hustles to make shots like someone in college, not someone on Social Security. Yet, he is never even a bit miffed at his partner when he/she misses a set up, but he will go after that return with his face lighting up when he hits that ball down the line for a winner.

Just today, when time was called and he said, “we won”, he caught himself, saying, “I know I should never say that, as we are all winners, and nobody loses.” I was taken aback, and asked if he was serious. He was, and then he described his career as a physical education teacher before he retired not that long ago, and that the message was out that instructors should never accentuate winning a tennis game, as that could hurt the loser’s feelings.

Now, I have to try to get Jim’s nature right for the reader. Jim has never hurt anyone’s feelings in the several years we have played together. In fact, he energizes us, his vitality and drive inspiring me to play better and focus on making that point. And being fully in the moment is a rare joy, a relief that, although I often get playing these Tuesday games, is at its best with Jim, whether playing with him or against him.

So, I couldn’t imagine anyone telling him not to share his enthusiasm, his pleasure of winning a set, as I’ve never seen Jim cause anyone discomfort. But, he explained this was the reality, that the message had gone out when he was teaching, that no one was to be a loser. What I had thought was a joke, “you came in first runner up, rather than you lost,” was no joke at all. No more of a joke than the head of zoo volunteers telling me, and everyone else, never to have a private conversation when interacting with the visitors. Oh, and with the zoo, it wasn’t only the chance of insulting them, but of “harassment” — better safe than sorry.

When the world watches in amazement as whatshisname continues to lead the pack even while he is an obnoxious simplistic blow-hard, there must be be something he is promising. Those volunteers in the zoo, those teachers of phys. ed, and how many others who are told that their conversations, unless vetted by authorities, could harm their organization, are living a diminished life, being denied the very human (actually primate) pleasure of social interaction.

Whatshisname somehow knows that he is popular, not in spite of his obnoxiousness, but because of it. He is free to be who he is, and doesn’t give a damn who doesn’t like it. For those cowed teachers or volunteers who live in fear of expressing themselves, this is seen as a model of liberation for themselves, a virtual social revolution that is lead by one who shows no fear of castigation for being as crude as he wants to be.

                       Al’s other essays can be found at AlRodbell.com.

Sep 10 2015 | Posted in Zeitgeist | Read More »