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The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2022-221
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Coups:
Iran:
Oil sanctions:
Spies:
Chips War:
U.S. of A.:
Art of war:
Use as open (not Ukraine) thread …
I read the two articles about the book Chips War and, as an electronic engineer, there are parts I did not understand. Besides the fact that the book and the review are very US-centric, it seems to me that there are some deep misconceptions, unless they are attempts at obfuscating facts. Not having time to do a review about the review, I am highlighting some passages that baffled me.
The emergence of precision targeting and smart weapons systems offset huge numbers of Soviet weapons with far fewer of America’s own.
That is wishful thinking. There is much more than electronics in precision targeting, and precision targeting is not everything. Precise enough targeting is what you need.
Selling semiconductors and transferring associated technology to China was in the national interest, because – in the aftermath of Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s initiative in 1972 – China was part of the alliance against the Soviet Union.
Really? As far as I know, China developed its electronics industry through joint-ventures with companies seeking cheap labor in the late ’80s and then, most importantly, with huge state sponsored projects in the ’90s. This is part of that US-centric view that permeates the book and its review: everything was invented in USA and gently donated to the world, before realizing that the world is bad and everything must return to the USA, where it belongs.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) took full advantage of American naïveté
The Communist Party took full advantage of American greed and arrogance: it was greed that drove the outsourcing of manufacturing, not “naïveté”. It was arrogance that made Americans think that Chinese could never catch up, even if they were investing heavily since the ’90s.
The Soviet Union was successful in maintaining their semiconductor capabilities at about two to three generations (that is, about five years) behind that of the West for almost the entirety of the Cold War. It did this largely through espionage and appropriation of Western intellectual property, rather than through internal innovation.
Again, total US-centric view. While many Soviet design, as the Elektronika-BK, adopted the instruction set of the PDP-11, I never saw any proof that they actully copied the internal design of the PDP-11.
The side with the better hardware will have a huge advantage in such conflicts, because their systems will be smarter and faster
Again, wishful thinking. Even if it were true, algorithms (mathematics) trumps hardware in this area.
In a modern conflict, the default winner is the one who designed and built the hardware and software that their adversary is using. This undoubtedly creates considerable uncertainty and discomfort in China today, given its near-100% dependence on the West (including Taiwan) for advanced semiconductor chips.
Again, you do not need advanced semiconductor to wage war. You need robust, hardened, good enough designs. By the way, I do not think that electronic chips from washing machines are robust enough to be used in a cruise missile.
Without comparatively inexpensive chips that might cost tens or hundreds of dollars, airplanes cannot fly, trains cannot move, and satellites cannot be launched.
The chips are a “key” good in each of these industries. Other parts can be replaced, or at least built in multiple places – the chips can, in many cases, only be built at one factory.
And very often that factory is a TSMC fabrication facility, located in Taiwan.
You do not need advanced semiconductor to wage war… nor for most of the industry. Most industrial devices are based on good, old, reliable designs: the more reliable, the better. ST microelectronics manufactures chips for the automotive industry in Italy and France. You do not need Taiwan for that and many other things.
Intel is currently retooling its business to act as a foundry, but the transition from fab to foundry is likely to be extremely challenging.
This does not make sense: a fab and a foundry are the same thing. They meant, I think, that Intel is trying to sell its services to third parties (like pure foundry companies do).
These activities often advance faster than Moore’s law in their own critical performance metrics
Moore’s law is not science, it is marketing.
Some more information on the history of Chinese chip industry: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1010985/if-tech-transfers-didnt-build-chinas-chip-industry%2C-what-did%3F
Posted by: SG | Dec 11 2022 19:36 utc | 32
On the alleged coup intend in Germany, which I link with the recent case of corruption in the EP, as warning for those not supporting the Davos agenda ( this time those allegedly financed by Qatar..) and those posing resistance to the surrendering of severeignty…..
By Sertorio in El Manifiesto.com
I suppose the reader informed of the strange events that have taken place in Germany in recent days, when Prince Henry XIII of Reuss and a long score of conspirators were arrested by the political police of the regime in Berlin. The entire press has devoted its headlines to the alleged pronouncement of a conventicle of right-wing radicals who wanted to subvert the model order of the Federal Republic of Germany, the example of all modern democracies.
The reappearance in history of the tiny and extinct principality of Reuss, whose lineage was founded by Erkenbert, Lord of Weida, both amazes and appals. Emperor Henry VI decreed that all male descendants of this house should bear Henry’s name. Around 1300, these princes, who ruled Weida, Gera, Schleiz and Plauen, came to be called Reussen(Russians) by the marriage of Henry of Plauen with Chwihowska, daughter of Brzetislav IV Chwihovsky and the Rurikid princess Maria. In the fifteenth century they reached a seat in the College of Princes of the Holy Roman Empire as burggraves of Misnia. A few generations later the house of Reuss divided into three branches and managed to survive Charles V, Louis XIV, the Great Frederick, Napoleon, Metternich and Bismarck. Until 1918, the Reuss princes were mouse heads in the Second Reich, when their small state was dissolved by the November revolution. All these data I have taken from the Gotha collection, more reliable than the infected Güiquipedias. In the house of my elders they told me that, in things of the bonne compagnie, the only infallible guide was the old Almanachof Justus Perthes, and I am faithful to the words, traditions and prejudices of my ancestors. The small problem is that the Gotha stopped publishing in World War II and my data is possibly out of date. Better.
The fact is that in the last month the newsrooms of the German newspapers began to receive reports from the political police in which they reported on a secret operation that was underway against a dangerous nucleus of conspirators, made up of Prince Henry and a long list of zealots of about twenty, including judge Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, a former AfD deputy, who has been portrayed as a dangerous terrorist, a Calamity Jane, a nun ensign, a Bonnie without Clyde, a Hanna Reitsch, a kind of 58-year-old Lara Croft, whose martial arts knowledge, commando training, and sharpshooting skills had destined her to be tasked (single one!) with taking over the Bundestag by force. Such a well-conceived plot has not been seen since the one designed by the famous Walter in the days of the Big Lebowski.
Of course, it doesn’t take long for questions to arise. One cannot but congratulate the Social Democratic Chancellor Scholz for having saved German democracy – and Europe as a whole – from such a dangerous occasion, but certain questions also insinuate themselves: the first is that a secret that is known in all newspaper newsrooms is not a secret. Any truly serious operation is carried out with the utmost secrecy, it is not announced even at Bild . It was a serious fault of the political police of the German regime to have given so much publicity to such a delicate action. On the other hand, a putsch in truth, like those of Kapp (1920) or Hitler (1923), it is organized with the support of the army or a part of it for a very simple reason: without the support of the military, any coup attempt is bound to fail. When you want to overthrow a regime by force, you need just that… Force. And it is not that there was a shortage of soldiers in the small and select troop of Prince Henry, in Prince Harry of Reuss’ private Agincourt, but these were retired from the armed forces without access to a material heavier than their own bellies. Undoubtedly, European democracy is in danger of violent subversion, as seen with the explosive mail in Spain and coups in Germany. We must strengthen the powers of the secret police to police violent far-rights. Instead of chasing the ghost of Islamism, it is better to deal with and worry about the ominous realities of pro-sovereignty conspiracies.
Prince Henry’s thought is also curious: for this aristocrat, the principality of Reuss was illegally suppressed by a coup (the November 1918 revolution) and present-day Germany, moreover, is not a sovereign state, but rather it is still occupied by its Yankee victors, who maintain the enormous base of Ramstein (50,000 men), without forgetting Ansbach, Pirmasens, Husterhohe, Weilimdorf and Wiesbaden. Germany’s colonial status is a consequence of the Treaty of Paris (1947) which dictated the terms of peace before there was any kind of independent German state with which to negotiate. The Basic Law of Bonn itself renounced national sovereignty and ceded it to the occupying powers in case there was a regime that was not to the taste of its victors.
The Germany that rejected the Diktat of Versailles a century ago today assumes with intimate and firm conviction its status as a slave of the United States. One of Stalin’s great mistakes was thinking about rebuilding the united and neutral German nation after the war. Neither the Anglo-Saxons nor their agents, such as Adenauer, a former Rhenish separatist, were up for it. And in that they continue. Given these conditions, Prince Henry demands that a sovereign German state be restored, that Reuss be returned to him, and that a constituent process be initiated in Germany, while also signing a true peace treaty with the great powers.
This is Prince Henry’s true crime: wanting to restore independence and sovereignty to Germany. At the moment when Scholz sacrifices industry and the well-being of the Germans to the interests of the United States, does anyone imagine the effect that a picturesque denial of Teutonic submission to the interests of America can have? Are there not Germans who are now wondering why they should sacrifice their present and future for the purely selfish ends of the United States? Why does Germany have to present itself unarmed to the commercial war that Washington wages on it with true viciousness? Although it is no longer the nation that monopolized the Nobel prizes, there will be some heads, especially in the East, that they have the dangerous idea of recovering national independence and ending the social democratic regime that came with the bombing of the Yankee occupiers. It seems that there are more and more. It is in this key that everything must be interpreted: the absurd adventures of the harmless and eccentric Prince Henry is a warning sent by the German regime to dissidents and serious patriots.
Posted by: Ghost of Mozgovoy | Dec 11 2022 22:07 utc | 51
The world we live in is one in which we have to make choices from imperfect alternatives: we choose Russia in Ukraine without having any illusions as to the nature of Russian government or society. Those who do not choose Russia have chosen NATO, whether they realise it or not. And the same sort of choice faces those who fear the coming of a totalitarian dictatorship defending the interests of monopoly capital- the only alternative on offer involves rallying the real interests of the masses (99%) behind a programme of equality and democracy, because the only force on earth capable of defeating state power in a society in which that power is entirely in the hands of the 1%, the blue courtiers, call them what you please is the power of the people, not the sheeple but the people to whose credit everything that man has ever done can be laid.
Posted by: bevin | Dec 11 2022 21:44 utc | 46
One of your excellent posts, bevin, thank you.
Let me disagree with your last point with a qibble. You say that the only power that can withstand the 1% is ‘the power of the people.’
First, the people have no power unless they can organize to wield it just as an army has no power in numbers and equipment alone unless they have a good command structure and discipline etc.
Second, principles matter. Perhaps they are the only things which matter. The 1% trample on simple norms by exploiting most peoples’ natural tendency to try to be decent, to be good. But the people need to live in cultures promoting goodness etc. moreover in an intelligent, sensitive way, not just through blind obedience or virtual serfdom. In other words, without shared culture there are no shared values and without shared values the people cannot come together about anything, let alone to muster some sort of power with which to resist the 1%.
What I see these days – to oversimplify – is a Russia and China (and more) who have a relatively clear sense of who they are, what they stand for, what values matter to them. Meanwhile in the West we have no sense any more of who we are – in fact the majority population is now generally self-hating and self-doubting after decades of indoctrination to become so – nor any sense of what we stand for (if anything), and no commonly held values whatsoever, and even though the US and Europe are very different, in these regards they are increasingly similar.
The point being that a system alone can only do so much. Before and behind systems are cultures. Cultures are complex, non-material, sensitive, powerful and all-pervasive. (As well as being impossible to describe or measure in objective terms much as various intellectuals may try or pretend.) Whether they are enlightened or confused we live within culture 24/7, every human being on the planet. In Russia and China (and again others) this is generally understood, though I suspect China is more systems-oriented in terms of policy and discourse these days given the clear materialism behind much of their political philosophy and practice, whereas in the West it is ignored, mainly because western culture has been in decadence and decline since the end of WW II and now visibly broken the past couple of decades.
So that’s my little quibble. What’s underneath and all around, namely bedrock culture, is the prime determinant. And what we have now in the West is traditional bedrock shared culture in retreat, decline, destruction. With that as the actual current culture, I see no way for the people to come together to manifest any sort of power. Fracturing is not what makes solid foundations. That’s a different phase-pattern – or Hexagram if you follow the Yijing.
To me this is the underlying precondition and nature of the so-called ‘reset.’ In order to create their Brave New World they will need to eradicate what is left of the Bad Old World Culture which so few now value and so is now on its last legs. Will they replace this Bad Old World with something better? Not if it’s mainly based on technical and materialist elements (like digital currency, social credit monitoring, absence of individual sovereignty including possibly ownership of property and chattels and so forth). These things will create a very poor culture which will only serve to entrench the technocrat 1%.
Or put another way: revolutions are good at tearing the old down. But they usually require entirely different people and philosophies to create the new thing afterwards. And usually such progressions fail because destroying the old is nearly always, always, always an essentially criminal approach.
If you are suggesting that democracy or socialism are ways to resist the 1%, then I can only say that I see no basis in the currently collapsing cultures for any sort of ability to come together to create such things in any bona fide way whether or no the ism is well-intentioned.
In theory both the Russians and Chinese say they are building such polities based on bedrock socialist principles. And yet both are going towards the same sort of techno-fascist structure that the WEF vaguely describes and which doesn’t really have anything to do with socialism per se, rather control of the many by the few. Nevertheless, I hope you and others here are right and these new polities are pointing the way forward and will create a much better world but I fear that the materialist imperative behind and reinforced by the coming surveillance-and-digital modalities will lead to something more or less inhuman, and thus a very low sort of culture.
This is where I could veer into a discussion about high culture but it is so unfashionable and difficult to discuss given its relative arcanity these days that I won’t. Suffice to say that any good culture has high culture elements – moreover which all classes can appreciate on some level – be it in music, architecture, speech, art, political expression, clothing, cuisine or whatever. There has to be some appreciation of and love for quality, which comes from appreciating various qualities in everyday life which are limitless and ubiquitous.
Just as all the people can have power, so can all people be artists on some level and all cultures engender some sort of appreciation for the preciousness of human experience. Without this, ‘man’s life is cheap as beast’s!’
In any case, if Russia and China are building a new and better socialist world, they will have to do it without the West which right now is entirely lost to such a thing. Even though the West is also looking into these new techno-fascist worlds at the same time as New Eurasia.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/chinese-blacklist-an-early-glimpse-of-sweeping-new-social-credit-control/article37493300/
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/12/11/uk-prepares-to-introduce-a-digital-pound-central-bank-digital-currency/
Posted by: Scorpion | Dec 12 2022 2:03 utc | 82
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