Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Dr. Strangelove]

Negotiating tactic or time waster? This article lays out the various ways in which the North Koreans jerked around Pompeo for 48 hours

* Was expecting to meet Kim Jong-un. Didn't happen
* Was not informed which hotel he would be staying at ahead of time
* Time consumed by endless banquet meals
* North Korea's chief negotiator allowed the media to watch them for lengthy periods of time and appeared to grandstand at Pompeo's expense

As we know, once he was on a plane heading home they declared the negotiations "regrettable" and that the US made 'gangster' demands

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-08/one-night-in-pyongyang-inside-pompeo-s-fraught-north-korea-trip

[AlabamAlum]

4 are free now. Waiting for the rest.

[froot loops]

It sounds like they exhausted all the air tanks and need to replenish before going on with further evacuations.

[AlabamAlum]

Yes. Now they are saying that an attempt to rescue the rest could be hours or even days.

[iam416]

[Jeff Buchanan]

The best coverage (most succinct) has been from the BBC. The link below is sort-of a summation of previous BBC articles. Reading previous articles, the place in the illustration where you see the two divers ahead of and behind one of boys, requires the divers to take their tanks off, underwater, to squeeze through tight places. The boys aren't wearing tanks but don a full face mask fed from the tanks of the two divers accompanying them. Each ingress and egress takes about 4h there and 4h back. I've seen several numbers but 11h total in and out with a rest stop of some duration seems to be the average reported. I don't think the underwater part is that long but, shit, what an undertaking to get essentially non-swimming kids let alone untrained scuba diving kids though this drill is, as talent said, nothing more than a miracle.

Reportedly, they brought the weakest out first and all four of them were alive on egress so, that's a good sign but one of them was medevaced by helo and one by ambulance (precautionary I guess) to the nearby hospital. I would expect exhaustion, dehydration and hypothermia (from water immersion during egress) would be factors. Kids have very small margins of survival within these factors which partly explains why this is so risky, not withstanding the scuba thing.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44757804

[Jeff Buchanan]

This link is for you Kapture ....... it demonstrates how tricky the politics of immigration reform are when a legislator's constituency is actually listened to.

The article also asserts, based on recent polling data, that there has been a significant shift among voters away from Trump's "restrictionist" immigration policy and towards more accomodative models .

No one should be surprised that how an immigration related question is framed makes a big difference in the respondent's answer. My view is that the apparent voter movement away from Trump on immigration has to do with how the media have covered the immigration debate. You have to dig really deep to understand why Trump is approaching immigration in a way that is, to me, not completely unjustified. The public debate, influenced by a negative and overly emotionally based view of DJT's immigration policy in the media, to put it frankly, isn't a well informed one. I'm hoping the Congress's is better informed but even they still have to deal with poorly informed and biased constituents as well as biased colleagues.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/restrictionist-immigration-agenda-trump/

[AlabamAlum]

7 boys out now. 5 to go and the coach.

[AlabamAlum]

Eight boys out, but now...

Officials said late Sunday they'd need to pause the operation for at least 10 hours to fill oxygen tanks that had been depleted during the first phase of the rescue mission.

Here's what I don't understand, you have US SEALS, British Special Forces, Volanthen and Stanton (the two best known and most accomplished cave divers in the world), Elon Musk sent a team of engineers who built a self-contained escape pod mini-sub, As well as France, Russia, and Australia sending people, but we can't truck in a few more 18-wheelers of tanks?

[Dr. Strangelove]

Boris Johnson resigns...wow...Theresa May's government teetering on the brink

[AlabamAlum]

Ignore my screed. It is not actually tanks being filled as it is spent tanks being replaced along the route.

I guess my question now is why isn't a second group tailing the 8 divers who go to get the boys (two divers per boy) and replacing the tanks the eight who are sent to rescue have used?

I wonder if they are tasking the same 8 divers to remove all the boys since they have had success thus far?

[CGVT]

My guess is that they are taking them out to the place that they can walk from one at a time .That way if there is a problem they don't have kids in the tunnel if it gets blocked by an an accident

[Jeff Buchanan]

I think this is spot on. The entire article, not worth reading, is linked below.



These comments show the crucial links between different parts of a sovereign nation's policy, in particular the international diplomacy and trade realms. If I had more confidence that Trump wasn't an inexperienced hand at these with a penchant to be a bumbler, I'd have full confidence in the direction he is headed re China. Two US warships transited the Taiwan Straits this weekend. Normally, this wouldn't seem significant but in the current circumstance with increasing tensions between the US and China, it is.

The risk's here include a US trade policy with no apparent "off ramps" as I mentioned in a previous post and an unintended exchange, even what might seem like a benign one, involving US and Chinese war ships in and around Taiwan and elsewhere in the South China Sea could escalate uncontrollably. Trump has yet to face any kind of real international crisis. We should worry about how he might deal with one going forward.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-n...Name=worldNews

[Jeff Buchanan]

A "Reagan moment" for Trump as he undertakes a trade war with China?. This author thinks so but there are substantial risks and DJT's trade strategy requires "careful strategic design and Many existing trade agreements would benefit from modernization. And most economists agree that the U.S. has genuine trade grievances against China, including intellectual property theft, asymmetrical technology transfers, and non-tariff barriers, such as the requirement that foreign companies enter joint-venture agreements with domestic firms to access the Chinese market.

But most economists also agree that competitive tariffs are a risky way to address these grievances. Because tariffs transmit stagflationary pressures (that is, they encourage simultaneous economic contraction and inflation), they risk undermining a global recovery that is already facing challenges. And they complicate long-overdue monetary-policy normalization, while increasing the likelihood of global financial instability.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/co...teid=rss&rss=1

[AlabamAlum]

I think that you may be right, CGVT.