Yeah, this is just odd speculation on the author's part. There's really no need to guess how the neutron bombing has been done, or worse invoke discredited mechanisms for how the reaction took place. The discovery of enriched uranium is more than enough.
Yeah, these are neutron bombs. They're "a low-yield thermonuclear weapon designed to maximize lethal neutron radiation in the immediate vicinity of the blast while minimizing the physical power of the blast itself." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb
Incremental regress!
Long article, some good data, then they end it with this gem:
“Everybody makes stuff in China,” said Joerg Wuttke, former president of the European Chamber of Commerce in China and now a partner at Washington consulting firm DGA Group. “But nobody makes money.”
And what better way to make a clean break with the past than by pinning all the failures on Zelensky and pushing him out?
This is just perfect...his expression there is priceless.
The article explains later that Japan expected the US Federal Reserve to cut interest rates much sooner. But that hasn't happened, hence the need to sell.
After BRICS, Japan is now dumping U.S. bonds and mitigating the losses it incurred from adverse interest rate bets. The latest data shows Japan has offloaded $63 billion worth of U.S. and European sovereign bonds by March 2024. The U.S. bonds sale represents nearly one-sixth of the Central Bank of Japan’s portfolio.
Japan is following in the footsteps of the BRICS alliance, which has been dumping U.S. Treasury bonds for more than a year. Offloading the bonds was the only way for Japan to reduce their losses on the interest rate cut bets.
Freakin emphasis freakin added.
What has led to “the relative decline in U.S. standing,” as the report asks? The opening chapter explains America’s problem starkly: “Its competitive position is threatened both from within (in terms of slowing productivity growth, an aging population, a polarized political system, and an increasingly corrupted information environment) and outside (in terms of a rising direct challenge from China and declining deference to U.S. power from dozens of developing nations).”
This decline is “accelerating,” warns the study. ...
What causes national decline? The Rand authors cite triggers that are all too familiar in 2024. “Addiction to luxury and decadence,” “failure to keep pace with … technological demands,” “ossified” bureaucracy, “loss of civic virtue,” “military overstretch,” “self-interested and warring elites,” “unsustainable environmental practices.” Does that sound like any country you know?
The challenge is “anticipatory national renewal,” argue the authors — in other words, tackling the problems before they tackle us. Their survey of historical and sociological literature identifies essential tools for renewal, such as recognizing the problem; adopting a problem-solving attitude rather than an ideological one; having good governance structures; and, perhaps most elusive, maintaining “elite commitment to the common good.”
No chance in hell on that last one, so here's hoping the rest of their analysis is right.
Glorious lib tears...remember when they used to say communism is inefficient, bureaucratic, blah blah blah?
US trade representative Katherine Tai said... “I think what we see in terms of the challenge that we have from China is… the ability for our firms to be able to survive in competition with a very effective economic system,” Tai said in response to a question from Euractiv.
She described China as a system “that we’ve articulated as being not market-based, as being fundamentally nurtured differently, against which a market-based system like ours is going to have trouble competing against and surviving”.
“Unless we figure out a different way to defend the way our economies work, we know what’s going to happen,” she said, “and it’s going to have significantly damaging economic and political outcomes for our systems”.
These points should make us tread very cautiously with this source. I'm going to add an edit.