I think that three factors are pushing the Chinese away from imminent invasion right now. First, the superweapons that they sold/gave the Iranians didn’t work very well against the US and Israel. They tend to be somewhat risk adverse, and want to know why.

Secondly, they are facing a significant oil supply shortage. They import most of their oil, and were getting below market oil from Venezuela and Iran. Both now shut down. Passage through the straight of Hormuz is now shut down, even though they are supposedly exempt from the Iranian blockade. And the US has made sure that they know that we know, where their ghost fleet of tankers transships oil between tankers to avoid sanctions. Gas lines now are epic, visible from space. That’s very destabling And, yes, the invasion would require oil products.

Third, its neighbors are starting to push back. The new Prime Minister of Japan has, essentially, said that defense of its allies is justified as self defense. Allies including Taiwan. It’s the first time, in 80 years, that they have been allowed to exercise their military. And they are one of the very few countries in the world with access to front line American weaponry (along with GB and Israel). Philippines, Vietnam, etc are also starting to push back. This isn’t an obstacle that China can’t overcome. But rather it just makes invading Taiwan harder.

The Chinese are very patient, and will have a weather window again in the fall. Maybe when they have sufficient gasoline again.

Here is a link to Greg’s YouTube channel and a recent video about the P-47:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qzrg-u-MYdc

For all of my issues with Bushehr Bauxite I agree this changes things a bit, but I feel the Maduro snatch and grab may have done moreso because it was a targeted arrest on a head of state (illegitimate as he was) without a known “tried to assassinate or kidnap or something an existing head of state” ‘justification.’ Khamenei would be easier to justify since he was party to murders of a head of state and head of government before and directly tried to murder Trump twice over, so it is easier to paint that as just reprisal. But this being such a pattern does risk making it more normal.

Issue I see is that goes far beyond Trump, and like I mentioned regarding Khamenei and Putin and so on the bad actors are happy to do it if and when they think they can get away with it. Strikes like Khamenei’s issue raise the temperature a bit but would be easily containable in isolation, problem is they aren’t in isolation from other events and you never know how long it might be before people start trying leader assassinations in earnest.

I figure Bushehr Bauxite may fit best, given the regurgitation of Iranian propaganda or even one upping it when doing the Orange Whale hunt. But trying to do this to our Host is particularly jarring. Even if he continues his track record of not paying close attention to his sources.

The “political” issue involved in Yamamoto’s case was specifically due to the role codebreaking had in identifying where he would be, and that would have roped in higher government officials and possibly FDE.

This is different. This is a war of assassination.

They started it, but it does change things in the world, and I haven’t seen anyone else talking about it.

CC™, aka Baghdad Bauxite, aka that Bullshitting Bozo just loves that hole he is digging for himself.

But after you get that deep, the dirt you shovel out just falls back in on yourself.

Timing is everything in spherical explosive compression warhead design IIRC. Years ago (decades ago?) there were export controls on electronic components capable of such uses. Before the Los Alamos Primer came out there was The Nuclear Weapons Databook series of books published by the lefty NGO Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) in the early 1980s; that’s when I started developing a casual interest in this stuff. I’m not a physicst or nuclear engineer, just one of the clean up crew. …..

Machining a copper plate and assembling it with a high explosive charge to form an explosively formed projectile doesn’t seem too be in the same category of difficulty as a nuclear warhead for a ballistic missile. But that’s just a layman’s speculation.

Topic switch to the P-47. The YouTube channel Greg’s Airplanes and Automobiles has a comprehensive and excellent series of videos (5 – 10) each about an hour in length on the design, through final models of the P-47.

You little shit. You’re literally trying to gaslight our host. And lying about it.

I was thinking more about China and an opening move of a strike against Taiwan than Iran or a minor power of their ilk.

No, no you were not.

Quote Bauxite:

“We may come to regret this, however. We’ve basically given permission for our adversaries to do the same thing to us, if they’re ever capable. Imagine an adversary launching a surprise attack against us, accompanied by assassinations that flip partisan control of the White House. We had better hope that none of our adversaries are ever able to do that.”

Now there are multiple layers to this sort of gaslighting nonsense and your problems with attempting to reframe it after the fact.

Firstly: If you had actually been primarily concerned about an opening by the PRC to go after Taiwan, I’d expect you’d mention something about US forces being distracted or tied down fighting in Iran and leaving the defenses in the Asia-Pacific or at home distracted. I’d expect you to touch on usual bugaboos like munition depletion. I wouldn’t expect you to be this pithy or vague or talk about assassinations flipping *the White House.*

Neo called your ass out as did I and showed how stupid and tone deaf this particular flavor of pearl clutching was. So now you’re trying to pretend references to knocking off the Ayatollahs was somehow giving “permission” for the PRC to go after Taiwan or other cases of big bads going after minors.

But the wording doesn’t support that. And in any case this would be ignoring…

Secondly: As Neo pointed out and the rest of us can observe, at no point did bad actors ever NEED “permission” from the US or other external factors to attack the nations they want to, if they think they can get away with it, including assassination plots. Iran tried to murder Trump at least twice. Putin tried to coup the Ukrainian Government and either capture or kill Zelenskyy, his cabinet, and much of the leadership of the Rada. Iran and Syria and Hezbollah were almost certainly behind the murder of Lebanese PM Hariri. Chavez and Maduro threatened to Anschluss much of Guyana and made barely veiled threats to kill the Guyanese leadership or annex the entire country.

The list goes on and on and on and on and on.

So this particular onset of pearl clenching is stupid, disgraceful, and disingenuous. There’s been consistent hesitation about going after heads of state, and especially civilian ones, but as far as things go Trump and Netanyahu killing the Iranian Supreme Leader after said Supreme Leader greenlit a breaking of that taboo from trying to kill Trump and having done so before with cases like Hariri is just about the easiest, most defensible case for it and the one least likely to inspire widening of that, because it can be easily sold as the FO to the Mullahcracy’s personal FA regarding the taboo.

China is probably the only country in the world right now that might have the capabilities to pull off such a move against us.

And the Chinese would be deterred from doing so because of our explicit nuclear and WMD doctrine as well as the fact that they cannot point to, let alone prove, any case where the US greenlit a plan to personally assassinate Xi or any other high ranking CCP leader in half a century. Meaning that rather than looking like proportional response to Khamenei’s BS including his own murder of political leaders abroad, it would look like an existential escalation.

Does that mean the PRC would be deterred ENOUGH to not do so? God only knows. But I’m pointing out how you are dishonestly glossing over so much in an attempt to bang the Trump Bad Gong, and now you’ve outright graduated to lying about what you wrote *to our Host* when every single one of us can read and paste what you wrote.

I’m not sure that China would have contemplated actually doing such a thing until we did it to someone else (basically – I know Israel conducted the actual attacks against political leaders).

“You’re not sure”. “You’re not sure.” “You’re not sure….”

Holy fuck Bauxite, you’re quite literally arguing that the Party of Mao with a track record of killing people abroad for literal decades, including trying to do things like get together a failed Simba plan to kill Mobutu and Thombe and having openly considered assassinating the Chiangs, would not contemplate this until and unless Trump and Netanyahu killed the Supreme Leader of Iran that tried to kill Trump before?

I’m not even going to guess whether you’re gaslighting us again or if you are legitimately this ignorant, because neither speaks very fondly of you and both underline how utterly credulous you are and desperate to try and turn this into a Trump Bad thing.

Can you even imagine the chaos if we woke up one morning next year to find that Hakeem Jeffries was president and China was invading Taiwan?

No, but it’s worth considering. But again, it was worth considering long before Trump and Netanyahu gave Khamenei a taste of his own medicine, because it’s something along the lines of what the CCP has tried to do before (mostly failing but with a few usually local successes) even without such a “permission”, and would probably involve them contracting out work to allies like Iran and Hezbollah, Putin’s Russia, and other bad actors.

But pointing this FACT – and it is a FACT – out and that it would be irresponsible to only consider it NOW and that the CCP would need absolutely no “permission” to do so would undermine your attempt to paint the killing of Khamenei as more novel and less justified, and thus something you can use to gore Trump.

(“Permission” or patterns of prior behavior might make the PRC *faster* to carry such ideas out or less resistant to planning them, especially on such a scale or with such risks. But that’s not going to change the fact that killing political heads of state or government is not and never has been unthinkable for them before. POTUS and the Israeli PM killing an Iranian dictator who had overseen the murder of a Lebanese PM and tried to kill that very POTUS is not going to be new for them.)

We’ll have to agree to disagree about Trump and long term strategic reasoning.

This is not a case of you agreeing to disagree with Neo or myself. This is a case of you disagreeing with objective reality.

Trump’s a real estate and construction mogul who had direct experience working on construction sites as per his father’s direction. In that world a time frame of months is Fast, and often times years and decades go. You can fault Trump’s strategic frame of reference or how accurate it is, but the idea he cannot think in the long term at all is simply delusional.

It is not worth humoring, because it is not an honest or accurate frame of reference. It is a lie, and one I will call out.

Trump’s MO is to throw caution to the wind and bully his way through. That’s pretty much what he’s doing in Panama, Cuba, Venezuela, and China.

That’s at best one MO, but I note you are ignoring the setup for those. As well as his observable history.

He has multiple multi year construction projects under his belt, and after he fell out with Epstein and Maxwell over Epstein’s abuse of a Mar a Lago employee, Trump pursued the case doggedly for years in concert with both the Feds and private legal representatives of E and M’s victims, to say nothing of Trump’s OTHER legal entanglements. These are not the actions of someone with no long term strategic thinking.

And even things like his casino failings aren’t the failings of one with no such thinking.

And it’s tedious to deal with you pretending otherwise, and I see no reason whatsoever why something that is objectively bullshit be accorded as just a difference of opinion equally valid or defensible as what Neo said.

I’m not saying that doesn’t work for him a lot of the time, but its not an exaggeration to say that he doesn’t worry too much about long term consequences.

Weasel words. But yeah, he does, whether or not he worries enough is another question, as his legal issues showed.

Re: Roosevelt and Yamamoto – There is circumstantial evidence that Roosevelt gave the order, but made sure that there was no written record of that fact. If ordering assassinations of high level foreign leaders in war time was considered completely OK because Roosevelt was CiC and Yamamoto was an admiral, Roosevelt likely wouldn’t have avoided making records of the order.

Did you even read your own source?

At no point whatsoever is there any question of the legality or appropriateness of ordering the killing of “high level foreign leaders in wartime”, especially as Yamamoto was acting as military commander in a theater of combat, not as a statesman on the home front or elsewhere. Your own source shows that the main issue was over protecting the Allied codebreaking efforts and plausible deniability.

It was primarily a question of whether or not it was worth the risk to have pilots take that assignment and whether it would possibly leak to the Axis that we could read Japanese codes versus Yamamoto’s proven utility to the enemy war effort and the obvious legal justification for killing him.

Notably, “politic” only appears in your source twice, Leader 10 times, and the main thing the paper says is, and I quote:

“At the same time, there is no testimony or evidence, suggesting the existence of a preexisting plan or standing order to target anyone, military or civilian, in Imperial Japan’s leadership prior.”

This is, at best, extremely poor wording and only technically true in a very limited sense of whether or not the US had standing orders or plans to “Kill this guy in particular, no matter what”, but which very obviously is superseded by a series of standing orders to target the Japanese Empire and its servants as a whole.

Also the source indicates that after some initial jurisdictional wrangling…

“Zacharias in turn requested a report from the Navy’s Judge Advocate General regarding the legalities and historical precedents for
the mission as he sought to build a case for authorization. Zacharias seemed befuddled. He could not understand why Knox hesitated to authorize the mission himself.76”

Notably absent is much or any wrangling over Roosevelt wanting deniability.

We’ll have to agree to disagree about Trump and long term strategic reasoning. Trump’s MO is to throw caution to the wind and bully his way through. That’s pretty much what he’s doing in Panama, Cuba, Venezuela, and China. I’m not saying that doesn’t work for him a lot of the time, but its not an exaggeration to say that he doesn’t worry too much about long term consequences.

Re: Roosevelt and Yamamoto – There is circumstantial evidence that Roosevelt gave the order, but made sure that there was no written record of that fact. If ordering assassinations of high level foreign leaders in war time was considered completely OK because Roosevelt was CiC and Yamamoto was an admiral, Roosevelt likely wouldn’t have avoided making records of the order.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA623450.pdf