The EU has passed its AI act, becoming the first attempt by any major government to develop comprehensive regulations for the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI). The regulations are scheduled to take effect at the end of May of this year. The details of the bill are still being sifted through as tech companies scramble to understand the regulations and adjust their business models accordingly.
The European Union’s parliament on Wednesday approved the world’s first major set of regulatory ground rules to govern the mediatized artificial intelligence at the forefront of tech investment.
Born in 2021, the EU AI Act divides the technology into categories of risk, ranging from “unacceptable” — which would see the technology banned — to high, medium and low hazard.
The regulation is expected to enter into force at the end of the legislature in May, after passing final checks and receiving endorsement from the European Council.
The European Union’s parliament on Wednesday approved the world’s first major set of regulatory ground rules to govern the mediatized artificial intelligence at the forefront of tech investment.The EU brokered provisional political consensus in early December, and it was then endorsed in the Parliament’s Wednesday session, with 523 votes in favor, 46 against and 49 votes not cast.“Europe is NOW a global standard-setter in AI,” Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for internal market, wrote on X.
The president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, described the act as trailblazing, saying it would enable innovation, while safeguarding fundamental rights.
“Artificial intelligence is already very much part of our daily lives. Now, it will be part of our legislation too,” she wrote in a social media post.
Dragos Tudorache, a lawmaker who oversaw EU negotiations on the agreement, hailed the deal, but noted the biggest hurdle remains implementation.
The U.S. House passed a bill 352-65 that would compel CCP-owned TikTok to divest itself of CCP ownership or else face a nationwide ban. The Senate, through Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schummer (D-NY), is signaling its intentions to slow down the process and consider whether to approve the bill as delivered or add amendments to it before passing their version.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) is under the impression the DNC-led Senate intends on delaying the bill, hoping everyone will forget about it so they never have to bring it up for a final vote at all. He said, “They will try to kill this slowly, refer it to committee … think about it some [more] and this time next year we’ll be right here having the same conversation.”
The U.S. House appears poised to pass legislation that would force TikTok to completely sever all ties with the CCP or else be banned. The problem is the final bill might include a trojan horse that would allow the government to ban ANY social media app congress deems to be a threat to election security, even if they’re owned by Americans.
Former President Donald Trump, who once supported a ban (and was working towards that goal) has hedged his bets, but not for the Trojan Horse reason cited above. He said, “There’s a lot of good, and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok. But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you’re going to make Facebook bigger.”
Microsoft Engineer Shane Jones wants his own company’s AI tool Copilot Designer taken offline after discovering, among other things, that the prompt “pro-choice” produced images of dagger-toothed demons consuming infants, among other dark images.
Jones has written a letter, which was highlighted by the AI tool’s interpretation of the spirit of “pro-choice,” which is a sanitized way of endorsing the practice of murdering unborn human beings, especially as a means of mitigating the consequences of sexual activity. He said of the program, “This is really not a safe model.”
… When Jones prompted Designer with the phrase “pro-choice,” the AI image generator spat out images of demons with sharp teeth about to eat an infant, and blood pouring from a smiling woman. In another example, Jones prompted Designer with “car accident” and received images of sexualized women in lingerie next to violent car crashes. CNBC was able to replicate similar images, but Gizmodo was not in our testing.
… “We are committed to addressing any and all concerns employees have in accordance with our company policies and appreciate the employee’s effort in studying and testing our latest technology to further enhance its safety,” Microsoft said in a statement to Gizmodo…
More congressmembers across the aisle have been talking about introducing legislation that would essentially force CCP-owned ByteDance to sell TikTok to non-CCP-affiliated partners or else be banned from the United States altogether. One bill might be voted on in the House as early as next week. President Trump has come out against the idea, claiming it helps Facebook, which he implies is more of a threat than TikTok is.
When, in the middle of 19th Century, metallic cased cartridges began to revolutionize the utility of firearms, inventors around the world focused on systems that could improve the utility of firearms in general. The bulk of this development, however, was rather surprisingly applied to the civilian sector, and not the military side.
Military forces are highly conservative by nature. If a thing or a tactic worked in the last war, chances are good that it will work in the next one. Certainly, buying new weapons to replace the old and worn out ones is just a good policy, overall, but “new anything” used to be held as highly questionable: “new stuff” and new tactics are suspect until they have been proven under fire. There is also the concern of confusion and congestion in the supply system should war break out while you are in the middle of transitioning to a new system; this was one of the key arguments of US Army Brigadier General James Ripley – long the whipping boy of those who though that the Henry Rifle (the predecessor to the Winchester lever action rifles) should have been adopted – had about metal-cased cartridge weapons in general: the army procurement system was simply not set up to handle a massive change-over in the middle of a war.
Money played its part, too, because “new” equals “expensive”. The Vickers Machine Gun – the British version of the Maxim Gun – cost roughly $10,000 in today’s money. In 1914, that was an eye-wateringly large amount of money for a weapon that only fired rifle-caliber ammunition. The prior experience of European militaries using automatic weapons in colonial wars – where the opposition carried flintlock muskets, at best – was not seen as relevant to a “major power” war.
These concerns are not fits of childish whining. Getting this kind of thing wrong results in your own troops ending up dead when they didn’t have to be, and frequently catastrophic failures on the battlefield, as the US Navy discovered in World War 2, when it found that its new torpedoes didn’t work…at all.
When World War 1 began in August of 1914, most of the nations involved committed the arrogant cardinal sin of assuming that the war would be over – in their favor, of course – by December. Needless to say, it wasn’t. World War 1 saw European armies bash their heads against the wall, literally, using every tactic and weapon they could come up with to try and break the deadlock of trench warfare, which was itself straight out of the book, when mobile operations could no longer make progress, and you didn’t want to surrender your gains. And this is no different today, as Russian and Ukrainian troops quickly discovered in 2022.
What to do?
Conventional infantry tactics of the time for assaulting a trench system were what we would now term “human wave attacks”, largely unsupported by weapons we now consider essential tools of warfare. Rifles were universally, manually operated bolt-action weapons…and that was it. Machine Guns like the Maxim and the Vickers were not easily moved under fire, and mortars were scarce. The best forces could do for support were massive – sometimes days-long – artillery barrages, that were frequently ineffective. While there were aircraft, their impact in supporting infantry attacks was more or less non-existent. What assault troops needed was a lightweight automatic weapon that could be carried and operated by a single soldier on the move, a weapon small enough to be maneuvered in tight quarters, and that could be fired more rapidly than any rifle, but which was not a handgun.
Imperial Germany and Italy were the only powers to actually develop and deploy submachine guns (quickly abbreviated to “subguns” or “SMG’s”) during the First World War. While rather awkward (the Italian Villar-Perosa), or rifle-like (the German MP-18), the new weapons quickly showed their promise, quite literally “in the trenches”.
The heyday of the SMG, however, was the Second World War. In that war, industry caught up to technology, and changed the game. Low-cost machining equipment allowed the rapid production of simple designs. Where designs at the start of the war, like the Thompson and the Lanchester were essentially elegant and finely made weapons, they were at least as heavy as a conventional rifle, and were expensive, time consuming and extremely expensive to make.
The SMG’s of the “interwar period” (the time between the first and second world wars) quickly gave way to weapons optimized for rapid production. The British STEN Gun, the American “Grease Gun”, and the Soviet PPS were extremely low-cost, to the point of being downright crude in the case of the PPS. In a very real sense, the bulk of World War 2 SMG’s were the polar opposites of the World War 1 and Interwar designs…too much so.
Post war, SMG development sought to find a middle ground, even as the selective-fire “assault rifle” began to make its presence felt. The Israeli “Uzi” and the “Carl Gustav m/45” from Sweden still used inexpensive manufacturing methods, but the weapons were produced to a much higher standard of quality than wartime necessity and developing design had allowed.
As the 1960’s dawned, however, two rival designs appeared that would become the defining designs of the submachine gun class: the MP-5 and the MAC-10.
The MAC-10, designed by Gordon Ingram in 1964, was extremely compact, and was manufactured in a variety of calibers. Not much larger than a handgun, the MAC-10 series were quickly “bootlegged” by criminals, because the design was easy and cheap to build…The MAC design, however, had a number of flaws. The worst of these was its extremely high rate of fire, which could range from 900 to well over 1,100 rounds per minute, making the weapons extremely hard to control in any situation. This also affected their reliability, resulting in frequent jams. The MAC design still limps along today, with various small companies striving to fix the design to make viable as more than a curiosity.
The other design is the near-legendary MP-5. Made by the German firm Heckler & Koch, the MP-5 became the touchstone to measure other SMG’s against.
Appearing only in 9x19mm, the MP-5 had a solid and reliable action, excellent sights, and came with a wide variety of barrel lengths and buttstock options, enabling it to be tailored to any situation users could think of. The weapon first really entered the public eye during the 1980 Operation Nimrod, where British SAS commandos retook the Iranian embassy in London from hostage-takers in a daring daylight assault. The images of black-clad SAS troopers carrying MP-5’s quickly saw Hollywood desperately acquiring any version of the weapon they could, resulting in the weapon being shown in literally hundreds of movies, television shows and video games. The MP-5, however, is no shirker – it very much lives up to its media reputation.
Military forces around the world loved the MP-5, praising its reliability and accuracy. But, for those military’s that had purchased other weapons from Heckler & Koch such as the G3 rifle, among others, the MP-5 quickly became the go-to for military police and special forces.
As the 1970’s drew to a close, however, the assault rifle rose to dominance. Many militaries decided – mostly for financial reasons – that if they could eliminate an entire class of weapons that required a separate supply chain, weapons that could be replaced by the assault weapons their front line troops were carrying anyway, limiting those few remaining weapons to highly specialized units only, that would be a net win for their budgets…and for a time, events seemed to bear this out. It turns out that now, however – some 40+ years later – there are problems with this idea.
While there is a good deal of overlap between assault rifles and SMG’s, they are very much still apples vs. pumpkins. Even shortened assault rifles still weigh much more than the closest SMG. Additionally, the recoil and muzzle blast from an assault rifle’s cartridge is far larger than that of a handgun. Coupled to this, is that rifle cartridges of all categories move far faster, travel far farther and hit far harder than a 9mm or .45 ACP round. This is a serious problem in close-range urban or hostage-rescue operations, because over-penetration is a serious risk. Among the results of the many problems of “too much” power, is the euphemistic term “collateral damage” – and mangled civilians (especially children) mangled by your troops are definitely not something your government wants on the nightly news.
Submachine guns have a long history, and they still have significant roles to play. War and other necessary hostile actions are not going away anytime soon, heartfelt desires to the contrary. There need to be reforms in the procurement process because increasingly, civilian politicians – and all too frequently, general officers – are definitely not the people who should be making decisions.
After all – your life might depend on their decisions.
Almost a year ago, we briefly discussed the common hand grenades used by infantry and police around the world. These remain among the most common non-rifle weapons carried by soldiers around the world. While we have touched on this particular subject in passing in several articles, this week we are looking at the hand grenade’s ‘next level’: the Rifle Grenade.
Since grenades came into widespread use in the mid-17th century, the weapon’s greatest detraction was its range. Limited to the strength and coordination of the thrower, hand grenades can only be used at very short ranges, typically within 50 yards/45 meters, at the most extreme range. While it is technically possible to throw a hand grenade farther, outside factors – extreme fear, fatigue, enemy fire, etc. – severely limit the throw range.
Coupled to this, in the early days, fuses were generally a piece of rope that had been soaked in a solution of saltpeter (KNO3) or gunpowder. Obviously, this did not make for a very reliable timing system in the field, where it was openly exposed to rain and mud…and other fluids. As a result, grenades faded from use in 1760’s, their memory kept alive by the units of European armies specially selected for use – the Grenadiers – who, due to their size and strength (the better, it was believed, to throw grenades farther) were converted into assault units, designated to assault an enemy position.
As World War 1 dawned, technology had advanced to the point where reliable timing fuses, protected from the environment, finally made hand grenades reliable enough to use; tactics, however, still had to catch up, as in 1900 the term “rifle company” meant precisely that – 100-120 men, equipped with rifles and bayonets, with only officers carrying pistols. New, and very expensive weapons like machine guns were actually considered to be light artillery (as their size and weight placed them on light carriages based on those for light cannons and howitzers). They and their heavier counterparts had to be assigned to an infantry unit separately. The PBI’s (“Poor, Bloody Infantry”) had to make do, and figure it out, otherwise.
But, as the horrors of full-scale trench warfare closed in along the Western Front, armies needed a way for the infantry to attack an entrenched enemy. Grenades were ideal, but they could only be used at very close range, and while the opposing trenches could occasionally get to within 100 yards of each other, that was still too far for the hand-thrown grenade.
The British, German and Austrian solution to the problem was the “rod” grenade. This worked exactly how it sounds: a steel rod was attached to the bottom of a hand grenade that had been fitted with a longer fuse; the rod was inserted into the rifle’s muzzle and aimed, then the grenade’s safety ring was pulled out, and the grenadier pulled the trigger to fire a blank cartridge with no bullet in the case. The force of the gases from the firing shoved the grenade and its rod out of the rifle, and threw it 150-200 yards or so.
I can hear the groans and shrieks of terror and horror from all the shooters reading this from here.
The rod grenade – while it did work – severely damaged rifle barrels, to the point where a rifle would quickly become useless for anything else, as the stress of repeated firings warped the rifle barrels to the point where they could no longer fire accurately…assuming that they did not blow up in the firer’s face on the next launch.
In response, the British swiftly developed the “cup discharger”. This was a steel cup, just large enough to fit a hand grenade inside, that was clamped onto the muzzle of the rifle. A blank cartridge was loaded, and a hand grenade with a “gas check” plate welded to its bottom was slipped into the cup, and fired. While this system still placed heavy stress on the barrel from gas over-pressure, it was nowhere near as bad as the rods had been. Great Britain would continue to use this system through World War 2. Both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan would use a similar system, although both of those combatants used rifled dischargers to add range and accuracy.
The French tackled the problem in a very…well, ‘French’ manner, with the “VB” grenade, named for its designers, Messer’s Viven and Bessières. This also used a special cup – in this case more like a cylinder, which clamped to the rifle’s muzzle. A specially designed grenade (quite different from a standard hand grenade) was slipped into the cup and aimed. The grenadier did not have to use a special blank round, though – the VB was activated and launched with a conventional bullet: When fired, the bullet exited the muzzle, deftly striking a lever inside the grenade, which activated the percussion cap to ignite the fuse. The action of the lever’s bottom end swing closed trapped the propellant gases coming up behind the bullet, and used them to throw the grenade clear of the discharger cup.
The VB worked very well, and solved the only real problem of the cup discharger, in dispensing with the blank cartridge. When the United States entered the war it, too, adopted the VB design, although it had to manufacture its own weapons, as American and French system and calibers were significantly different. The US would retain the VB design until the early stages of World War 2, using them as late as the 1942 Battle of Guadalcanal. In contrast, while the French military abandoned the VB after World War 2, their Gendarmerie would use the design to launch tear gas grenades into the 1990’s.
World War 2 Japan took a very different course, with their Type 100 Grenade Discharger. This device fired standard hand grenades from a cup fitted to the rifle muzzle, and that was launched using a standard rifle bullet. However, unlike the VB system, the Type 100 was offset from the muzzle, and used a gas tap from the firing to launch the grenade out to about 100 yards. This is not surprising, however, if one knows the history of Japan’s infamous “knee mortar”.
The United States led the way after World War 2, by adopting the “spigot” type of rifle grenade. This mounted a grenade on top of a tube with stabilizing fins, which slipped over the muzzle of the rifle, and was fired by a blank cartridge. This eliminated the need for a separate launcher, although still requiring a special cartridge. NATO would eventually standardize on a grenade with a mounting tube with an internal diameter of 22mm. This allows a common system for any standardized rifle to fire both blank cartridge, “shoot-through”/VB-type grenade and “bullet-trap” type grenades.
Advancements in materials technology would lead to the development of the “bullet-trap” design, allowing a rifle to fire a grenade with a regular cartridge; the rifle bullet would be captured by the bullet-trap on the grenade, using both the force of the cartridge’s gas and the physical force of the projectile’s impact to launch the grenade.
In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, with the rise of the “intermediate cartridge”, the muzzle-launched rifle grenade began to fall out of favor, as the intermediate cartridges available lacked the energy to effectively launch the older grenades to the same ranges. The only solution was to shrink the size of the grenades. This led to rifle grenades being seen to be less effective than lightweight rocket launchers such as the M72 LAW. There was, however, a replacement that stepped in and took over: the 40mm Hi-Low Grenade.
First deployed by the United States in 1961 with the adoption of the M79 grenade launcher and the later M203 system that could be easily mounted under the barrel of most military rifles, this system was so revolutionary, no established state military’s land warfare units lack some system firing a variation of the Hi-Low system.
These weapons are able to launch grenades out to 200 to 400 yards (sometimes farther), which have a blast effect similar to a regular hand grenade, but that also fire a wider variety of grenades than the older models of rifle grenades.
Wars are always violent; expecting them to be “clean” or “surgical” is a fantasy. Weapons development is not evil, if the weapons make your forces more capable of ending a war faster, with as little destruction and savagery as possible.
As the legendary Chinese general Sun Tzu said in the opening lines of his military treatise, The Art of War, in c.500BC –
The art of war is of vital importance to the state.
It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence under no circumstances can it be neglected.
The Biden White House will use the King’s decree, an Executive Order, to attempt to mold AI in its dark, anti-American, anti-human image, announcing plans to create a sweeping executive order that will bypass the legislative process, giving, ostensibly, a demented old man the power to dictate to the country the terms of its AI use.
The order is justified by White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, who reveals his anti-Americanism in his very speech. He said “Given the pace of this technology, we can’t move in normal government or private-sector pace, we have to move fast, really fast – ideally faster than the technology itself. You have to continue to be proactive, anticipate where things are headed, continue to act fast and pull every lever we can.”
Normal government pace is the standard of our constitutional republic, which this White House is working diligently to destroy. Whether it’s fear of the white race, or man-made climate change, or, now AI, the White House will trot out any monster it can to terrorize Americans to fear so much for their safety they’re willing to surrender their American constitutional liberty to the demagogues behind the manipulation of reality that led them to that fear in the first place.
To be sure, God will use this regime in part to check some aspects of AI that should be checked. No matter how hard Satan and those who knowingly or unknowingly follow his agenda (to lead humanity to suicide), God will turn what they meant for evil into good. So not all aspects of whatever this god-like executive order contains will even be opposed by this writer, or, I would wager, you, the American reader.
Still, one must be vigilant not to be conformed to this world, not to be conditioned to accept the precedent this executive order hopes to create, empowering the President to create legislation without going through congress as our Constitution demands, thus undermining the Constitution’s actual power in the minds of anyone that blindly cedes such power to this demented old man in the name of fear.
The executive order, which Biden will unveil at an event Monday, is sweeping in scope. It will require developers of powerful AI systems to share results of their safety tests with the federal government before they are released to the public.
If an AI model being developed poses national security, economic or health risks, the order will compel companies to notify the federal government under the Defense Production Act.
The action will also ease immigration barriers for workers skilled in critical areas of AI to study and stay in the US; establish standards to prevent AI production of dangerous biological materials; and develop best practices to minimize the risk of AI displacing human workers.
The order aims to prevent AI-related fraud by directing the Commerce Department to develop guidance for watermarking AI-generated content.
And it will spell out government use of AI, including standards for safety but also measures to help agencies acquire new technology that could increase efficiency or cut costs.
It should be noted that nowhere does the writer of this article even raise the flag on how dangerous it is to leave such a critical issue as how a nation is to govern such a powerful tool, that is as dangerous as it is filled with opportunity, in the pen of one doddering old man, or any one person, in an action that, if the American people accept it, kills the letter and spirit of our constitution.
The GOP-led House should, at the very least, pass resolutions declaring this action to be an overt violation of the Rule of Law, and for that reason alone should immediately impeach this President and any official connected to it that congress has the power to impeach.
The far-left has proven they are willing to build their hateful ideology into every institution they can, and AI will be no different. They hope to control this tool to control resistance to the Satanic cause they serve, the elimination of the human species from the face of the planet, even if they don’t fully, or even remotely, understand or believe they are doing.
Actors not in the top tier of acting are finding life difficult economically as the SAF-AFTRA strike continues into its 5th month. Some have found work with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, “training” AI through acting. While the actors have signed contracts that state their likenesses cannot be used for future endeavors, the language is written in such a way that perhaps, maybe, Meta has plenty of legal loopholes to betray that simple promise.
The actors were paid to participate in a study called the “emotion study,” which ran from Jul through September of this year. The study offered actors $150 per hour to “emote” for AI machines to analyze in the hope that AI can then be used to artificially “emote” in seamless ways to humans.
The irony of the work is not lost on the actors, who recognize they’re helping to train machines that might one day replace them, even if Meta “promises” not to use their image in any commercial way in the future.
Even though the actors are “acting,” the project claims it’s not “struck work” because Meta is not one of the employers the guild is striking against. As Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator claims, “This isn’t a contract battle between a union and a company, It’s existential.”
Max Kalehoff, the VP of growth and marketing for the company running the study for Meta, said “The vast majority of our work is in evaluating the effectiveness of advertising for clients—which has nothing to do with actors and the entertainment industry except to gauge audience reaction.”
In addition to the job posting, MIT Technology Review has obtained and reviewed a copy of the data license agreement, and its potential implications are indeed vast. To put it bluntly: whether the actors who participated knew it or not, for as little as $300, they appear to have authorized Realeyes, Meta, and other parties of the two companies’ choosing to access and use not just their faces but also their expressions, and anything derived from them, almost however and whenever they want—as long as they do not reproduce any individual likenesses.
Some actors, like Jessica, who asked to be identified by just her first name, felt there was something “exploitative” about the project—both in the financial incentives for out-of-work actors and in the fight over AI and the use of an actor’s image.
Jessica, a New York–based background actor, says she has seen a growing number of listings for AI jobs over the past few years. “There aren’t really clear rules right now,” she says, “so I don’t know. Maybe … their intention [is] to get these images before the union signs a contract and sets them.”
While this writer does not support government laws prohibiting the use of Ai trained by humans to better manipulate humans to buy stuff they might not actually want or need, companies that choose to use this technology should be considered unethical, untrustworthy, not worth investing in or doing business with. Of course, being a realist, this writer realizes the ability to cut ourselves off from the companies that are already using these types of services is not very realistic, and won’t be until we self-steward minded people build our own institutions, institutions that would not deign to use such unethical practices to manipulate the masses for the sake of profit.
Political factions are sure to follow, if they aren’t already, which makes it all the more urgent for you, and me, to be self-stewarded people who steward our preferences and beliefs to guard our minds against such crafty manipulations.
Amid all the shrill backbiting over continuing to flagellate the dying Ukrainian efforts against Russia, as well as the capering of France trying to stave off the disintegration of its African satrapies, as those states internally realign themselves with Russia and China – by force, when necessary – a specter lurks in the background, the proverbial “elephant in the room”: Communist Chinese insecurity over Taiwan.
In this insecurity, lay the seeds of global economic collapse.
At the end of World War Two, Communist leader Mao Zedong led his “People’s Liberation Army” out of their mountain hideouts, and slid in behind Soviet forces occupying Manchuria, swiftly arming themselves with ex-Japanese military equipment captured from the defeated Imperial Japanese Army. Thus armed, the Communists went on the offensive against the exhausted Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) forces, which had born the brunt of fighting against the Japanese for the preceding eight years (1937-1945).
Despite several billion dollars in US aid, and the poorly though-out deployment of the III Amphibious Corps and elements of the 7th Fleet, the sheer exhaustion and demoralization of the KMT resulted in a series of worsening defeats on the battlefield, until, in 1949, the surviving KMT military and government units retreated (for the most part) to the island of Formosa (now, Taiwan), and established a government in exile.
That is the situation as it remains, today.
Communist China, throughout its bloody and draconian history from 1950 until today, cannot abide that a recognized province of the country is not under its thumb. This manifests itself in the news of today, as near-continual violations of Taiwan’s declared air and sea boundaries by Communist military forces. The normal response of the United States has been to occasionally deploy aircraft carrier battle groups into the disputed waters as a dare to the Communists to fire on them.
The question for many, however, is – why? After all, the United States famously showed Taiwan the door in 1972, which made the country a diplomatic pariah state…so, why does the United States constantly go “eyeball-to-eyeball” with Communist Beijing over the island? For that matter, why can’t Beijing just let it go?
Two answers: For Beijing – and particularly for Premier Xi Jinping – Taiwan is a gaping sore for the Communists, as the island rapidly prospered under the KMT’s governance, while Communist China wallowed in poverty, famine and induced technological stagnation under the increasingly mentally unstable Mao…and that, in spite of the extreme brutality of the KMT’s actions in securing the island, beginning in the late 1940’s. As prosperous as Communist China has become in the aftermath of the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, the Communist state still lags behind Taiwan by a long distance.
Second, the United States knows a fundamental truth that many around the world (and particularly within the United States), a truth that is the basis of this article:
Any Communist attempt to invade and conquer Taiwan – even if it failed – would collapse the global economy overnight.
The reason for this is brutally simple: microchips.
Silicon chips, semiconductors, or integrated circuits as the Reader prefers, are what drive modern technology, from the device you are reading this article on, to the CPU in your car, computer chips drive every object of any consequence in your everyday life.
Most of Taiwan’s chips are produced by one company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). Unlike other manufacturers like Samsung and Intel (who manufacture chips for internal products), however, TSMC chips are not proprietary to them. Instead, their chips supply manufacturers of computer-driven hardware around the world, companies like Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm, to name just three. Other nations around the world currently hover at less than half of TSMC’s production capacity; the United States currently holds about 12% of the global manufacturing capacity.
Invasions, as proven by the Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, are bloody, messy and highly destructive affairs. Any actual Communist Chinese attempt to seize Taiwan would be no different, the severe problems of a combined arms assault on the island equating to a probable Communist failure aside. To say that such an invasion would “disrupt” TSMC’s operations is a laughable understatement, not least because standard military doctrine virtually guarantees direct attacks on the company’s production facilities, to say nothing of worker attrition from “collateral damage”.
What would such a circumstance mean for the global economy? Simply, virtually all generalized computer and electronic device production and repair or upgrades utilizing semiconductors would grind to a halt, as stocks of chips dried up virtually overnight. This is due to the phenomenon of “just-in-time delivery”, an outgrowth of the wave of globalization that has been the norm since the 1990’s.
The Reader may recall the term “supply chain disruption” that became popular during the recent pandemic. Workers at both manufacturing plants, but also – critically – stevedores and loading crane operators stayed home, either terrified of catching the disease, by legal order, or both. This ricocheted throughout the global supply and transport system, and was greatly aggravated by what many considered to be a minor event, namely the grounding of the container ship Ever Given in March of 2021. The effects of these body blows to the global economy continue as of this writing.
In regards to a hypothetical – but very possible – Communist invasion of Taiwan, the disruption would be vastly worse, as there is no way for global manufacturers to quickly retool to make up for the loss, even if a ceasefire were quickly closed…And note that this does not address the general disruption of commercial cargo traffic in and out of the Communist nation, in the event of such a war.
But, there is an even greater danger lurking in this very possible scenario: the facts that not only will Taiwan not go quietly, but that they have a plan to take Communist China with them.
Without resorting to nuclear weapons.
The non-Communist Chinese in Taiwan all know full well what a Communist takeover of their country would entail. Given the Communist state’s recent history, to say nothing of its habit of “disappearing” political dissidents and anyone who disagrees with their regime too loudly. Because of this, there lurks a plan that Taipei lets slip every once in a while, to remind Beijing of what the consequences of invasion would be.
Taiwan’s “doomsday” plan (YouTube link) would be a series of strikes against the Three Gorges Dam. If concentrated, such a strike package would collapse at least a section of the dam, releasing the force of 39.3 km3 to pour downstream in a massive deluge.
Provisionally, this action could kill up to 400 million people…And this is not an idle threat, as the KMT has done it before. To say that this could result in a nuclear response is a given…with everything else that derives from that.
Right now, Communist China is desperate to appear tough and capable. The chances of bluster turning into an actual invasion are very real, however.
This fact is something that should be taken seriously by anyone reading this.
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