Month: December 2018

The American Thinker posted this piece today.

The north slope of Alaska is loaded with oil.  It’s all over the place.  Look at this map.  There are dozens of oil fields on the north slope.  Prudhoe Bay is just the most famous.

Just to the east of these fields on Alaska’s North Slope is the small part of the misnamed Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that President Trump got Congress  to open to development.  Alaskans have been trying to do this for thirty-five years.  Trump got it done in his first year in office.

If there’s not oil there in quantity I’ll eat my mukluks.  Leasing could begin as early as July.  The oil companies have been waiting for this for years.  They’re ready to get on with it.  But the north slope is a  tough place to do business, and this is going to take a while.  But before too long the Trans Alaska Pipeline will be filled with ANWR oil.

But don’t we already have enough oil for energy independence?  What do we need with all this new ANWR oil?

The answer is ready made, and the residue of pork barrel political pressures.  The best way to transport north slope oil is by land.  It’s much more environmentally friendly, and the route east, and down the McKenzie River valley, leads right to the American market.  That’s where the pipeline should have gone.  But Alaska boomer Wally Hickel was Secretary of the Interior, and Alaskans wanted an all-Alaskan line, for the jobs, and the money.  To hell with the environment.  Hickel didn’t care about it.

So the line ends in Valdez, on Alaska’s southern coast.  From this particular spot on the planet, only one oil destination in the world makes any economic sense:  Japan.

That’s where Prudhoe Bay oil should have gone, except for irrational political pressure.  Sometimes we had ships from Valdez going through the Panama Canal to deliver on the Gulf Coast!  They’d wave at the tankers from Venezuela going the opposite way, headed for Japan.   It was nuts.  We won’t do that again.  ANWR oil will go to Japan, number one.  If there’s some left over maybe South Korea would be number two.  There could be one hell of a lot of oil in ANWR.  And it will flow for a very long time.

With secure American energy, Japan is more firmly than ever in our economic orbit.  Relations with Japan will become even closer.   As it turns out, our two cultures complement one another.  With Japan, and our Anglosphere allies, the American Alliance will rule the waves, and thus the trade, of the world in this century.

This is what President Trump means when he talks of energy dominance.  Trump thinks geopolitically.  He wants Japan as our number one ally in Pacific.  He knows they need oil.  He learned of the oil in ANWR.  He put two and two together and got ANWR opened.

Trump is making things happen in this world, world historical things.  Most Americans haven’t got a clue to what he’s doing.  But he’s doing a masterful job.

 

 

 

We welcome Mexico to the American Alliance.  It is manifestly in their best interest to join.  Amicable relations with el gigante del norte means a better life for the Mexican people.

This is a major development.  In agreeing to take our money to seal their southern border, the Mexicans have accepted responsibility to control emigration to America from their borders.  That responsibility must, in turn, apply to their own citizens.  Once the Mexican government respects our border, our relationship will grow and prosper.  It’s in the long term Mexican self interest to cooperate in this area.  It will open up vast areas of enterprise for our mutual benefit.

With our Canadian and Mexican friends, we control North America, with South America as our protectorate.  Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Japan are full fledged members of the Alliance.

And the Brits?  Are they part of the great American Alliance?  They’re in the process of deciding.  We’d be better off with them.  Britain is our mother country, after all.

I met an English kid at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich in 1967.  He was about my age, 21, a small guy with a front tooth missing.  We wound up on a smuggling convoy together, all the way to Tehran, where we said goodbye.

I got to know John Aldersey pretty well, and liked him a lot.  He was a factory worker in Liverpool, and he told me they wanted to make him a foreman, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to.  He was afraid it would set him apart from his mates.  It was an attitude I’d never encountered before.  But then, I’d never been out of America.

On my walk up the valley last night, I looked over my shoulder and saw a full moon, just rising above the eastern ridge.  On new year’s night.  An omen.

 

At 2:30 PST the new year began.  For the next six months every day will be longer than the one before.  The heavenly laws of nature say one year has passed, and a new one begun.

The idea of having January 1 as the beginning of the new year is an ignorant superstition.  It comes from the Romans, who weren’t too swift at math.  Try long division with roman numerals.

No, a new year began today, and it promises to be a doozy.  Entertainment will be provided by the Democratic candidates for President, pandering shamelessly to the socialist wing of the Democratic parry, where all the energy is.  It will be a contest, among other things, for the one most consumed with hatred for Donald Trump.

The next year will be a test for President Trump.  His enemies are still in the field, harrying him at every turn.  But he’s confident he’s doing the right thing, and he knows he’s got his base at his back.  He believes in America, and he will prevail.

Finally, under President Trump, we have adjusted to the fact that the cold war with the Soviets is over, and we won.  It took us 25 years and four feckless Presidents before, thank God, Trump was elected and we began to come to our senses.  With the fracking revolution, and our energy independence, we can now fully make some sense of the world, and our place in it.

For close to a hundred years there have been five Great Powers in the world, the United States, Europe, Russia, China and Japan.  And that’s the way it’s going to be in the foreseeable future.  Geopolitics deals with the relations between these Great Powers.

Japan and the Anglosphere (USA and friends) have the unique advantage of being maritime and trading nations, separate and apart from Asia and, thus, from the other three, land based powers.   World War Two was won because of superior resources, and Japan learned a great lesson.  Alone among the Great Powers, the USA is capable of complete self reliance.  Since they understand this in the context of the most wrenching event in Japanese history, they will never fight the Anglosphere again.  Japan is a great power in its own right, but it is almost like it’s a member of the Anglosphere.  The rest of the world can go to hell.  Japan and the Anglosphere will get along just fine.

The United States has a special relation to Israel, because America is a Christian nation.  Israel is a Holy Land, where Christ the Savior was born and crucified.  For hundreds of years Christians fought the Crusades for control of the Holy Lands.  America will not allow Muslims to control this land again.  So Israel is safe.

Other than that, our interests are almost wholly mercenary.  Where can we get the best deal?  We’d like to try to see if a deal could be made with Russia.  A new understanding with Russia would result in an enormous increase in Russian economic output.  With some imported American technology, the Russian economy could take off, to the immense benefit of the Russian people.  We would want some security guarantees, and a draw down in nuclear weaponry.  But, because of Putin’s adventurism, the Russian Option is off the table for now.

So, for now, the Anglosphere, Japan and Europe are arrayed against the Great Powers of the Asian landmass,  Russia and China, ancient and continuing rivals.

Syria and Afghanistan have nothing to do with any of this, and are therefor useless to us, in geopolitical terms.  These places mean nothing to us, and President Trump has finally decided to put his foot down, and get out.  God bless him for it.  I hate seeing young Americans die for nothing.

Mattis is a cold war dinosaur.  We don’t want military men as Secretary of Defense.  War is too important to be left to generals.

The new Secretary of Defense will understand that our military serves our geopolitical self interest, and no other.

That’s the Trump Doctrine.

My son Darren learned about it at Montana State from a business professor.  Three is kind of magic number, and always has been, at least since the Holy Trinity was embraced by the first Christians.  For some reason, people like things in threes.

So what’s wrong with four?  Studies have shown that animals, such as crows, can count to four.  And a lot of research has shown that the innate human capacity to count is also four.  Why do we like three so much better than four?

Triangles are inherently stronger than squares.  I’m sure there’s a mathematical equation that demonstrates that.  And four is basically our limit.  Handling four things at once is a strain, and some people can’t manage it.  And you want everybody.  So you stick with three.

Then there’s the problem of three bodies.  Von Braun and the Germans solved one problem in getting to the moon.  Their rocket would provide the thrust.   But in some ways the navigation was lot trickier than the propulsion.  The mathematics involved in getting a spacecraft from the earth to the moon had been considered unsolvable.  So declared the Encyclopedia Brittanica.  “It would be like planning ahead of time that a tennis ball could be tossed into a coffee can from a distance of three hundred miles while the thrower, the ball and the can were all moving.”  (This New Ocean).

800 mathematicians, over the course of two hundred years, had failed in attempts at it.  In 1961 it was finally solved by a doctoral student at UCLA, under Doctoral adviser Shoshichi Kobayashi, named Michael Minovitch.  He did it for fun on the computers at the Jet Propulsion Lab.

Somehow, with the solution of the problem of three bodies, the rule of three seems even stronger.