China's Challenge. No I Do Not Have Cancer. I Plan and Hope To Die Healthy. Bernie Speaks Out.

My oldest daughter, and many other fellow memo readers,understandably  misconstrued my "Ranting Posting" in my previous memo.  Rants are comments by a friend of a friend (Joe Ross) not mine, that I find interesting because he seems to have his finger on what is happening politically and in the market.

No, I do not have prostate cancer and my plan and hope is to die healthy  I am glad Joe is doing fine and thank the many who thought I had been afflicted and wished me well.
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Are you happy with the state of the world? How about with the state of your life? Most people are not content with either, and many blame others in their personal lives or think the solution is to become an activist and work on fixing the ultimate source of their problems: our flawed world. Best-selling author and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson explains what’s wrong with both of these lines of thought: they have it exactly backwards. Watch the video for his insights into how your life can start to be better – today.

And:

Those who actually read these memos know I am an avid reader of The Naval War Academy review.  This is partly why I am fairly informed about our naval status.

In the recent edition, I read an excellent article summing up the challenge we face from China's efforts to control the South China Sea and beyond  The authors, Messrs Brands and Cooper, laid out four scenarios:

a) Rollback - This would invite a military confrontation which could lead to war and  serious damage which, at this time, we could probably win, but at a high cost and some of our regional allies might flee from their support of America.

Containment- This means accepting China's gains to date but acting in ways that would block further expansion. This action is predicated on the fact that Rollback is too dangerous but their South China Sea expansions  are not acceptable either and we believe protecting our interests requires action.

 c) Offset -We seek to penalize China for her aggressiveness.  Such actions could be diplomatic, economic and otherwise. The hope is that the cost to China would cause them to curb their expansive posture

d)Accommodation - Allow China to dominate the region simply because we do not believe it is of consequence, considering  the cost is beyond what we wish to pay and/or our controlling goal should be to avoid any conflict with China in the hope we would be able to maintain our military and commercial alliance with nations in the region.

The authors conclude each scenario carries risks and that Obama, at the end of his term, began to move away from his initial strategy of seeking to respond to China's moves.  They also assert that Trump has not fleshed out any cohesive strategy to date notwithstanding the earlier comments by Sec. of State Tillerson which were meant to put China on notice.

My reaction to the article:

Our inaction is sending a message to our allies that is not clear and what we do about N Korea could also become a defining moment.

If trends continue, as they are, it should be obvious America is being eclipsed by China in an area of the ocean where enormous commerce has been free to sail and the repercussions could be severe if China is allowed to determine who gets passage and, thus,  is able to deter commerce at will.

I believe it is only a matter of time before China eclipses America in a variety of ways because China's leadership can act in a cohesive manner and, as long as we remain divided we will be unable and/or unwilling to challenge  China.

Because the mass media wants to make profits they are more interested in perpetuating "Russian Collusion" which means Trump cannot devote full time to the challenges we face.  Because we are busy fighting over illegal immigration, Trump is unable to devote full tie to the challenges we face.  Because Congress cannot pass a budget, Trump cannot implement funding levels we need for the military and thus he cannot devote full time to the challenges we face. Because far too many people hate Trump and want to bring him down, this president is unable to address the mess he inherited as he otherwise would like. (Vulgarity is in the eyes of Sen. Booker's "grandstanding vulgarity." See 1 below.)

Because we are more interested in fighting among ourselves than acting cohesively in ways that provide solutions to the problems we have avoided solving for decades, America is on a path of decline regardless of the renaissance we are currently experiencing with respect to our economy.

Hope my dour view is proven wrong,however, Democrats will never support military spending over welfare spending because the former does not result in garnering vote .Liberals are repelled at the thought of what defending America is all about and have always been reticent.

It is possible China's aggressiveness could harm their economy, frighten their neighbors and a backlash could occur but watch what happens with the Philippines, as that should provide some insight.
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Isn't is strange that The Clinton's, of all people, would know about an organization that was creepy and use them in their  campaign against Trump? (See 2 and 2a below.)
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My friend Bernie Marcus speaks out. He always does and that's what I love about him among other things like a "hamisha"  heart.  Read the full story
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Don't count us old 'cyclers out. (See 3 below.)
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Dick.

1)The Truth in Trump’s Vulgarity

Migrants leave their homes for a reason—often fleeing chaos from poor governance.

By  Mary Anastasia O’Grady

In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers in the Oval Office on Jan. 11, President Trump is alleged to have used a vulgarity to describe the origin countries of some immigrants, including Haitians and Salvadorans. Or so Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) claimed, in an obvious attempt to embarrass Republicans.

Mr. Trump denies having used the expletive. Yet the gist of the remark is grounded in fact: A great many migrants to the U.S. are fleeing insufferable conditions, driven by poor governance. People vote with their feet.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Jan. 16, New Jersey’s Sen. Cory Booker ranted for 11 minutes at Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen because she would not corroborate Mr. Durbin’s claim that the president had used a bad word in the meeting.

Mr. Booker’s histrionics bordered on parody. But the real trouble with all the righteous indignation from him and others about the alleged Trump insult is their cluelessness.

It should be obvious that when there’s no rule of law or property rights or strong civic institutions, daily life often degenerates into chaos. What is more, there is a long history in Mr. Booker’s party of supporting the ambitions of power-hungry, corrupt demagogues and left-wing populism in the Western Hemisphere.

It’s silly to ask why there are not more migrants to the U.S. from Norway, which has one of the highest standards of living in the world. Economically secure nations do not generate large waves of emigration.

The irony of Mr. Booker’s outburst is that most migrants, by pulling up stakes, have shown that they agree with Mr. Trump—whether they admit it or not. They feel so strongly about it that they’ve left loved ones, gambled life savings and set off on precarious journeys to find better lives. The squalor of their homelands is not for them. They think they can do better.

Yet if Mr. Booker doesn’t understand the hell that migrants often leave, Mr. Trump doesn’t understand the value they bring with them. The president doesn’t want the U.S. to take in so many “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” as Emma Lazarus called them in her famed 1883 poem, “The New Colossus.” He prefers a merit-based system that would award points for attributes like education, skills and English-language proficiency.

This is not racism, and providing that Mr. Trump doesn’t sharply cut immigration at the same time, it is not nativism. But it is likely a mistake. The U.S. has been built on the hard work of hungry migrants willing to make sacrifices for a future generation. They are ambitious risk-takers like none other.

It is doubtful they will be stopped. The U.S. has a large number of illegal workers because the labor market absorbs them. Most Americans don’t think it should be a crime to work, so employers ignore the law and hire them. The underground economy swells.

I’ve never met an immigrant delivering fast food on a bicycle in the middle of winter in New York City who wouldn’t rather be home in the village where he was born and raised—if it offered him a future. The most humanitarian thing people like Mr. Booker could do is to support U.S. policies that encourage more Norways and fewer Haitis. That is to say, policies that promote open markets, limited government, low taxes and reliable legal systems.

The secret to this is not something that can be bottled and exported, and nation building has a dismal record. But rich countries like the U.S. might help if they would take a Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm.

Mr. Booker’s “tears of rage,” which he professed to have felt upon hearing Mr. Trump’s alleged characterization of migrant homelands, is especially rich given the history of his party.

Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a corrupt tyrant. But he shared the wealth with Democrats, going into business with Joseph P. Kennedy II and Clintonista “Mack” McLarty in a telecom scam that I documented in a 2008 column. The partnership happened to coincide with the years when President Clinton protected Mr. Aristide, even as he pillaged Haiti.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd threw a hissy fit when the Venezuelan military tried to force Hugo Chávez from office for his violations of civil liberties in 2002. More recently, the Obama administration insisted on pouring millions of dollars into El Salvador, while the ruling FMLN party, made up of former guerrillas, tore up contracts and threatened its political opponents.

Competition through free trade is one of the best ways to force countries into reform. But Democrats have long resisted open commerce with Latin America, most recently with the Colombia free-trade agreement signed in 2006. Now Mr. Trump has joined them.

Millions have fled these countries. Their migration is a familiar American story. Caring about them includes admitting that they left for a reason.

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2) Fusion’s Russian Dirty Work

How the firm sought to discredit an anti-Kremlin activist

By  The Editorial Board

Media defenders of Fusion GPS and the FBI are criticizing as friends of the Kremlin anyone who dares raise questions about their behavior during the 2016 campaign. You almost have to admire their loyalty to sources, if not to readers. We’ll wait for the evidence, thanks, including the memo that the House Intelligence Committee understandably wants to make public.

Meantime, regarding Russia, the recent Congressional testimony by Fusion founder Glenn Simpson deserves more attention—specifically for what it reveals about Fusion’s campaign against Bill Browder, the human-rights and anti-Kremlin activist.

Mr. Browder hired Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky to investigate a 2007 Russian raid on Mr. Browder’s investment company. Magnitsky ultimately exposed a financial fraud perpetrated by corrupt officials and the mafia. Russia responded by arresting Magnitsky and keeping him in pre-trial detention for 358 days, where he was tortured and denied vital medical care. He was found dead on a cell floor in 2009.

Magnitsky and his lawyers meticulously documented his abuse while in prison. His evidence was affirmed by multiple governments and outside organizations, including U.S. prosecutors. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, Congress in 2012 passed the Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned individuals involved in Magnitsky’s death and other Russian rights abusers.

Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by banning U.S. adoptions of Russian children. The Kremlin then embarked on a disinformation campaign against Mr. Browder and Magnitsky, claiming they had defrauded the Kremlin and lied about abuse. A Russian filmmaker produced a “documentary” that spread the Kremlin lies.

Fusion was hired in 2014 to flog this Russian propaganda to help a Russian company named Prevezon that was the focus of a federal civil money-laundering case tied to the fraud Magnitsky uncovered. (Prevezon ultimately settled with the U.S. government for $5.9 million, without admitting wrongdoing.) In his Senate testimony Mr. Simpson embraced his role as a Kremlin megaphone, confirming that he sought to question Mr. Browder’s “credibility” and hound him with subpoenas, chasing him in public places and digging through his business records.

He accuses Mr. Browder of an elaborate scheme (albeit without evidence) to defraud the poor Kremlin and of engaging in “unsupported wild allegations.” He complains about Mr. Browder’s refusal to answer questions from Prevezon (which is run by the son of a Putin crony). And he explains that he planted information about Mr. Browder’s “activities in Russia” and his “history of tax avoidance” with U.S. media.

Mr. Simpson also speaks up for Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-linked lawyer who worked for Prevezon and has headed the Russian lobbying campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act. Recall that Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner have been roundly and rightly criticized for meeting with Ms. Veselnitskaya in June 2016.

Yet Mr. Simpson accuses the Justice Department of interfering with her visa “to inhibit her from collaborating with us on the case.” He admits to knowing she and others were engaged in anti-Magnitsky lobbying in Washington and that he helped get the anti-Browder documentary attention in Washington, D.C.

All of this goes to the question of Mr. Simpson’s credibility and that of the Christopher Steele dossier he commissioned. Mr. Simpson in a recent op-ed claims he was motivated to protect the U.S. against a Russian “attack” and by his worry that Donald Trump was willing to engage with a “notoriously corrupt police state.”

Yet Mr. Simpson admits to abetting one of the uglier Russian disinformation campaigns of recent years. Asked by investigators if he understood he was helping Mr. Putin, Mr. Simpson said it had been “presented” to him that he was working for a “successful real estate investor.” He admits to knowing Ms. Veselnitskaya had worked for Russia’s government but guesses that she was “not like a big political player in the Kremlin.”

Mr. Simpson was doing this Kremlin dirty work at the same time he was working with Mr. Steele to compile the Steele dossier. He says he didn’t share information about the dossier with Ms. Veselnitskaya or other Russians but he can’t guarantee there was a “Chinese wall of separation” at his firm between the cases.

All of this is worth keeping in mind the next time you hear defenders say Fusion was merely a patriotic outfit trying to protect America from the Kremlin. Mr. Simpson admits that Fusion was paid to spread Kremlin disinformation to smear a critic and change U.S. law. Who was really serving Mr. Putin’s interests?

2a) The Steele Dossier Fits the Kremlin Playbook

The likely objective was to undermine Republicans, Democrats—and American democracy.

By Daniel Hoffman

When the “Steele dossier” was first published a year ago, it looked like a bombshell. The document, drawn up by the British ex-spy Christopher Steele, contained salacious allegations against President Trump and suggested that Russia had helped him win the 2016 election. No one has been able to corroborate its charges, but Democrats continue to see the dossier as a road map for impeaching Mr. Trump. Republicans, on the other hand, point out that it was created as opposition research, leading them to see it as an elaborate partisan ploy.

There is a third possibility, namely that the dossier was part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot targeting both parties and America’s political process. This is what seems most likely to me, having spent much of my 30-year government career, including with the CIA, observing Soviet and then Russian intelligence operations. If there is one thing I have learned, it’s that Vladimir Putin continues in the Soviet tradition of using disinformation and espionage as foreign-policy tools.

There are three reasons the Kremlin would have detected Mr. Steele’s information gathering and seen an opportunity to intervene. First, Mr. Steele did not travel to Russia to acquire his information and instead relied on intermediaries. That is a weak link, since Russia’s internal police service, the FSB, devotes significant technical and human resources to blanket surveillance of Western private citizens and government officials, with a particular focus on uncovering their Russian contacts.

Second, Mr. Steele was an especially likely target for such surveillance given that he had retired from MI-6, the British spy agency, after serving in Moscow. Russians are fond of saying that there is no such thing as a “former” intelligence officer. The FSB would have had its eye on him.

Third, the Kremlin successfully hacked into the Democratic National Committee. Emails there could have tipped it off that the Clinton campaign was collecting information on Mr. Trump’s dealings in Russia.

If the FSB did discover that Mr. Steele was poking around for information, it hardly could have resisted using the gravitas of a retired MI-6 agent to plant false information. After hacking the DNC and senior Democratic officials, Russian intelligence chose to pass the information to WikiLeaks, most likely to capitalize on that group’s “self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity,” according to a 2017 report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Simultaneously the Kremlin was conducting influence operations on Facebook and other social-media sites.

The pattern of such Russian operations is to sprinkle false information, designed to degrade the enemy’s social and political infrastructure, among true statements that enhance the veracity of the overall report. In 2009 the FSB wanted to soil the reputation of a U.S. diplomat responsible for reporting on human rights. So it fabricated a video, in part using real surveillance footage of the diplomat, that purported to show him with a prostitute in Moscow.

Similarly, some of the information in the Steele dossier is true. Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, did travel to Moscow in the summer of 2016. But he insists that the secret meetings the dossier alleges never happened. This is exactly what you’d expect if the Kremlin followed its usual playbook: accurate basic facts provided as bait to convince Americans that the fake info is real.

Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized the “rigged system” working against his campaign, but his victories in the primaries and the general election blunted this narrative. The FSB probably believed that Mrs. Clinton would win the election, and that once the dossier became public Mr. Trump would vociferously argue that she had played dirty. Thus the dossier would have had dual benefits: The salacious portions would undermine the Republican candidate, and then his attacks would delegitimize the eventual Democratic administration. The 2017 ODNI report says that pro-Russia bloggers even prepared an election-night Twittercampaign, #DemocracyRIP, designed to question the election’s validity after a Clinton victory.

That is not how events unfolded, but Russia still appears to have enjoyed a major return on its 2016 election meddling. For more than a year, Democrats and Republicans have traded charges of collusion, obstruction and conspiracy. Rather than serve Russia’s interests with increasingly intense partisan bickering, everyone should focus on the common enemy: Mr. Putin and his nefarious attempt to undermine America’s political system.

One credible response would be to pass a bipartisan bill such as the one introduced by Sens. Marco Rubio and Chris Van Hollen that would punish Moscow if intelligence concludes Russia interferes in future elections. Meanwhile, the Trump administration should shine a brighter spotlight on the Kremlin’s espionage and covert-influence operations against the U.S.

Special counsel Robert Mueller should be able to lift the veil on whether the Steele dossier was, as I suspect, a tool of Russia’s espionage. Mr. Steele has reportedly revealed details about his sources to Mr. Mueller, who has also been conducting interviews to determine which parts of the dossier are true and which are false.

Russia considers the U.S. an existential threat to its national security, not because of a military threat—which Mr. Putin purposely exaggerates—but because Western ideals of liberty, freedom and democracy have the power to break his regime’s grip on the country. Americans must enhance their understanding of Mr. Putin’s strategy and tactics better to defend against the Kremlin’s relentless propaganda. Otherwise the Steele dossier controversy will continue to be a victory for Mr. Putin and a loss for our democracy.

Mr. Hoffman, a retired chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency who served in the former Soviet Union, is vice president of SPG, a political consulting group in Washington.

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3)

I went to the liquor store Tuesday afternoon on my bicycle, bought a bottle of Jack Daniels and put it in the bicycle basket.

As I was about to leave, I thought to myself that if I fell off the bicycle, the bottle would break. So I drank all the Jack Daniels before I cycled home.

It turned out to be a very good decision, because I fell off my bicycle seven times on the way home.
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