A Few Further Words on The Limits And Futility of Hard Power

I probably won't have time to write a lengthy post this weekend, but I thought I'd share a few essays from other writers on the subject of hard power. 

• First, there is an essay titled, "The Illusion Of Hard Power: Reflection On How Democratized Technology And Strategic Geography Broke The Superpower Monopoly On War".  If you're wondering why both Iran and Ukraine have managed to successfully paralyze the war machines of much larger and more well-endowed aggressors, this article does a good job of providing an explanation.
• Then, "The Future of American Strategy: Fighting Without Friends" describes how the soft power of the United States has been eroded over the last decade and especially how our Chump-in-Chief Trump has aided in the destruction of that soft power.  The fact that the U.S. is now stumbling in its attempt to wield hard power in an unjust and ill-advised series of unprovoked wars is not helping things at all.
• There are also articles describing how policy makers in the United Kingdom, Japan, and Turkey are all lusting to build up the hard power of their nations, even though these nations are characterized by declining birthrates and stagnating economies, and even though any attempt by the leaders of these nations to offensively deploy hard power would likely result in a fair number of their young men and women getting shot up in the process.
• Lastly, please see my posts titled "The Hard Drug of Hard Power" and "So Then, What Is Soft Power?" for a view of a different way of making our way through the world.

我三人行，必得我师焉。

"我三人行，必得我师焉" - 可是我得仔细挑我的两名同伴！For a long time we in the West have been told that the United States is the sole and best repository of knowledge of how to organize a society that can successfully make its way through the world.  But lately I've come to deeply question such an assertion. (Especially now that I've had to live in a country ruled by a chump like Trump and a political party like the Rethuglicans!)  It seems to me that we in the West are receiving a distorted view of the world, and especially of China.  For a long time therefore I have wanted to get out of the country for a bit in order to see the world with my own eyes from a different perspective.  And for a long time China has appealed to me as an especially interesting place to check out - first, because over the last century or so it has successfully freed itself from Western colonialism, and secondly, because it seems to me to be among the wisest nations in its adaptations and preparations for passing through the challenges of the 21st century.  

A perfect opportunity came up last month, when the International Conference on Power and Renewable Energy (ICPRE), a subsidiary of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), held their 11th International Conference in Shanghai.  I first heard about the conference back in July and immediately decided to sign up.  Then I was slightly misled by some American acquaintances of mine who told me that I would not need a visa as long as I stayed for ten days or less.  It turns out that that was only partially true.  When I asked more knowledgeable people about the travel process, I was informed that yes, I actually did need both a passport and a visa.  Fortunately I already had the passport, so I worked on obtaining a 10 year tourist visa which I received before the end of August.  After that came the frenzied process of catching up on work, arranging a pet sitting service, making sure I had a room in the hotel where the conference was held, and buying plane tickets.  Then came the night on which I boarded a China Air Lines wide-body jet for a 13 hour flight from the U.S. West Coast to Taipei, then from Taipei to Shanghai.  (Note to anyone who reads this: if you're older than 40, and if you don't want to torture yourself, don't try flying all the way in economy class!)

My first hours in Shanghai contained some funny moments, and some not-so-funny moments.  One of the funny moments came when I went through the security check procedure for new arrivals at the Shanghai Pudong Airport.  I was wearing a T-shirt which I had had printed in the U.S. with the following quote:

将欲歙之，必固张之；

将欲弱之，必固强之；

将欲废之，必固兴之；

将欲夺之，必固与之。

When one of the security personnel saw my shirt, he laughed and nudged his female co-worker, pointing at my shirt.  He asked in English, "Sir, do you know what that means?"  I said, "I do indeed!  If you want to shrink something, you must first expand it..."  Another funny time came when I was riding in a taxi from the airport to the hotel.  The taxi driver (a truly colorful character) offered me a cigarette during the ride, forcing me to find a way to say 对不起，我不抽烟。When he asked “为什么？” I pieced together a reply that ran something like “因为我想生活很多年。。。”  He pulled out his phone (which contained a voice translation app) and engaged me in a wide-ranging philosophical discussion until we got to the hotel.  However, I never took the taxi again while I was there, as the ride from the airport had cost me 400元.  The part that wasn't so funny was my own fault.  While I was at the airport I went to an ATM to withdraw some ready cash and forgot to take my bank card with me once I had received the cash.  That led to several panicked hours on my part until my Chinese friends in Shanghai taught me to use a couple of phone apps for payment.  Thus I found that in Shanghai, people very rarely use cash.  Instead, WeChat and Alipay are used for the majority of transactions.  (By the way, I got my card back.  The ATM operators found it and held it for me until I could retrieve it.  Imagine what would have happened if I had lost it while traveling in the USA!)

Now to the conference.  This conference provided me with an overview of what I would call China's "operational philosophy" concerning microgrids, modernization of grid transmission, and integration of renewables into the power grid.  I won't get into fine details here and now, but suffice it to say that a lot of the research presented provided me with ideas for my own engineering practice here in the U.S.  Of course, the presenters occupied a position close to the cutting edge of theory, whereas I am several steps removed from that cutting edge.  However, what often happens is that theoretical insights are turned into building codes and manufactured hardware, and it's good for day-to-day practitioners to understand the sorts of changes that may be coming to their particular fields of practice due to advances in theory.

As for the subject of academic and professional conferences in general, the United States under Trump has been playing a rather stupid, racist, white supremacist game in its attempt to restrict access to academic knowledge.  I have heard credible reports over the last eighteen months of academics from a number of nations who have been denied permission to enter the U.S. to attend conferences in which the exchange of valuable scientific and technical knowledge might benefit those nations.  China, on the other hand, has a robust schedule of academic conferences in 2026 and is planning similarly rich offerings in 2027.  And the process of obtaining a visa from China is far, far simpler and easier than the process in the U.S. has become.  China therefore, in concert with other nations of the Global South, is building a robust set of parallel institutions in the international sphere for the sharing of cutting-edge knowledge.  At the ICPRE conference I attended I saw people, both listeners (like myself) and presenters, from a wide range of nations.  The building of parallel institutions among historically marginalized nations has the power to turn the Unites States itself into an irrelevant bouncing ball.  This can begin in the academic arena.  If the U.S. wants to be like a six or seven year old brat shouting at the neighborhood kids, "I have a brand new toy!  And you can't play with it!", this nation may be surprised to find that the other kids have found other ways to be happy besides playing with that particular toy.

One other case in point regarding the sharing of knowledge: during September, Shanghai hosted the 48th annual WorldSkills Competition.  The WorldSkills organization has existed since the early 1950's and was formed initially in order to promote economic growth in the nations of Western Europe whose economies had been damaged or wrecked by World War 2.  The WorldSkills organizers saw that one of the keys to recovery was the development of a highly skilled workforce in the nations which had been so damaged, and this development of skills has become the mission of the WorldSkills organization. As the name of the organization indicates, the organizers have expanded this mission to the entire world. Unfortunately, I had to leave for the U.S. the day before the competition began, so I didn't get to see any of it directly.  But one of my Shanghai friends sent me a couple of video clips via WeChat.  WorldSkills is one of those examples of soft power which arises from genuine hospitality and decency toward all of the world's peoples.

Lastly, I want to note my observations of a couple of publicly-funded fixtures of Shanghai.  First, there's the library system.  Shanghai has two world-class libraries of the sort one would find at an R1 research university.  However, these libraries are entirely public, and hence open to the public.  I spent several hours wandering the stacks and aisles of both of them.  (Also I got my own Shanghai Public Library card...) A heavenly experience it was - even though my Chinese is so weak that I couldn't read most of the books!  What a contrast to many cities in the U.S., in which Rethuglican/conservative governments have slashed funding for public libraries.  Then there was the Shanghai subway system.  It did not take long for me to figure out how to use it, due in part to the fact that all of the subway signs are bilingual.  The Shanghai subway removes a great deal of stress from commuting, and is a vital part of getting around, due to the congestion which clogs Shanghai's streets and high-speed highways on a regular basis.  I am reminded of an American policy paper I recently saw titled, "Public transit delivers large gains for the local economy."  Shanghai has taken this lesson on board, as it is preparing to expand its commuter rail network even more.  Too bad that when I returned to the U.S., I found out that local governments where I live are cutting funding and service for TriMet, which for a long time was a shining light and example of public transit in the United States.

Anyway, now that I'm back in the USA, I can hardly wait until next year, when I hope to return to China, God willing, for another academic conference.  再见！

我爱上海！我想回来！

What I've Recently Been Up To, and A Preview of Coming Attractions

I just got back to the United States from a trip to Shanghai, China.  For a long time I had been wanting to visit China, and I found a perfect opportunity in an engineering conference that was scheduled to be held in Shanghai this month.  Unfortunately, it's late right now, I'm jet-lagged, and I have to get up early tomorrow for work, so I can't now describe my trip in more detail.  Hopefully I shall have the opportunity to do so sometime in the next several days.  Also, I have a few more posts on the role of parallel institutions in nonviolent liberation struggles.  Those of you who are regular readers of this blog, please stay tuned...

Bouncing Around On The Top

In my posts on strategic nonviolent resistance, I have emphasized how the organization of a righteous parallel society is a key component of resistance against a would-be tyrant.  I have also emphasized how the building of independent centers of economic power by, for, and among the oppressed is a key tool for bringing painful economic pressure to bear on the society of the tyrant via massive withdrawal of economic cooperation from the society of the tyrant.  Today I want to highlight how the building of the parallel institutions of a parallel society robs the tyrant's dominant society of its power.  Let's turn again to Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, specifically a passage from Chapter 9, which I quote below:

Combined with political defiance during the phase of selective resistance, the growth of autonomous social, economic, cultural, and political institutions progressively expands the “democratic space” of the society and shrinks the control of the dictatorship. As the civil

institutions of the society become stronger vis-à-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control. If and when the dictatorship intervenes to halt this “escalating freedom,”

nonviolent struggle can be applied in defense of this newly won space and the dictatorship will be faced with yet another “front” in the struggle.

In time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered. Poland in the 1970s and 1980s provides a clear example of the progressive reclaiming of a society’s functions and institutions by the resistance...

 Even under martial law, with many imprisonments and harsh persecution, the new independent institutions of the society continued to function. For example, dozens of illegal newspapers and magazines continued to be published. Illegal publishing houses annually issued hundreds of books, while well-known writers boycotted Communist publications and government publishing houses.  Similar activities continued in other parts of the society.

Under the Jaruselski military regime, the military-Communist government was at one point described as bouncing around on the top of the society. The officials still occupied government offices and buildings. The regime could still strike down into the society, with
punishments, arrests, imprisonment, seizure of printing presses, and the like. The dictatorship, however, could not control the society.  From that point, it was only a matter of time until the society was able to bring down the regime completely. [Emphasis added.]

Turning Trump, his fat-cat brethren (including Musk), and the Rethuglicans into a bunch of irrelevant bouncing balls - now that would be a fine sight indeed!  And it is a worthy goal toward which to work, even though we must now start small and build incrementally.

How Grass Breaks Concrete

In my last few posts, I have discussed the evil foundations of the wealth of the world's richest people.  The loudest-mouthed man among these is of course Elon Musk.  A few months ago, Musk's fanboys (a.k.a. "flying monkeys") proclaimed him the world's first trillionaire, although a more recent valuation shrank the value of his holdings to "only" $684 billion.  Nonetheless, most pundits rank him as the world's richest man.  But Musk is a typical example of all of the world's richest people, in that the wealth of them all is built on similar foundations.  In particular, I wish to point out wealth obtained by exploiting defenseless human beings as well as monopolistic and monopoly-building practices as key elements of those foundations.  Let's zoom in on monopolistic and monopoly-building practices in today's post.

First, let's quickly define a monopoly as a market in which most of the goods or services sold in that market come from a single provider.  In the limit, all of the goods or services come from only one provider.  If this provider is a true saint, then he or she will provide the goods or services at high quality and at a price which can easily be borne by those who need these goods and services.  But monopolists usually are not saints.  Nor do saints usually create monopolies.  So monopolists naturally tend to charge the highest price they can get away with in order to provide the trashiest goods and services they can get away with, so that these monopolists can reap the highest profits they can get away with - even if the combination of high price and trashy quality eventually bankrupts most buyers in the market.  

Monopolies can arise seemingly naturally under certain circumstances.  For instance, in the North American West in the 19th century, executives of powerful railroad companies argued that their monopoly control of certain transportation markets was a natural outcome of the railroad business and therefore should not be opposed or interfered with.  This argument seems to have a certain validity in that sometimes the introduction of a transformative new technology like rail transportation requires so many resources that only a few players can enter the market for this new technology.  Thus a hundred-acre dirt farmer in 19th-century Iowa would not have been able to afford building his own railroad.  To consider space travel as another example, it is certainly true that for a long time, the only entities that were capable of sending rockets (and eventually humans) into orbit were the governments of large and wealthy nations.  Thus a 1960's geeky kid in a working-class family would not have been able to build her own rocket to fly to the moon.  However, it is also true that those players who were able to dominate capital-intensive new markets frequently did so not only because these markets required a potential player to have lots of resources, but also because some of these players relied on dirty tricks.  To see how this played out in the 19th-century North American railroad market, please read "For tech giants, a cautionary tale from 19th century railroads on the limits of competition", The Conversation, March 2018.

I would argue that it is these dirty tricks that are the dominant factor in the creation of the most recent monopolies and oligopolies which have dominated both the American and global economies over the last five or six decades.  One particular dirty trick is the use of "predatory pricing", which is the practice of a player entering a market in order to destroy competitors by selling the goods offered in that market at a price below the price at which other players can offer those same goods.  What is interesting is that the wanna-be monopolist player need not be a very big business at first - just as long as he or she has a huge cash reserve backing him or her up.  That way, he or she can stay afloat even while selling at a loss for a long time, while driving his or her competitors out of business due to the fact that these competitors cannot afford to stay in business if they don't sell at or above a certain price point.  

The harm caused by predatory pricing and the role of this pricing practice in the building of monopolies has been well-documented.  In December 2024, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (under the outgoing presidency of Joe Biden) hosted a virtual workshop titled, "Competition Snuffed Out: How Predatory Pricing Harms Competition, Consumers, and Innovation."  The topics discussed in this workshop are also captured in a January 2025 article written by Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance titled, "Competition Snuffed Out: Stacy Mitchell Testifies at FTC Workshop on Predatory Pricing."  Mitchell starts out by describing the predatory pricing practicing of the Amazon businesses of Jeff Bezos over the last 30 years.  But Amazon is by no means the only near-monopoly which has been built over the last several decades in the U.S.  There are also Wal-Mart and other large retail chains which wiped out many locally-owned mom-and-pop small convenience stores, as well as the Whole Foods "health food" store chain which wiped out many locally-owned smaller countercultural health food stores.  There is Uber with its predatory pricing and exploitation of so-called "independent contractor" drivers which wiped out many local taxi companies.  (By the way, at last count, there was a rape or attempted rape in an Uber vehicle every eight minutes in the United States.)  I would also argue that this may be true of the iFixit national electronics repair store chain, although I don't have concrete proof.  Yet all of the businesses I have named in this paragraph are examples either of monopoly or of oligopoly in the making.

I would therefore also argue (as I have in a recent post) that Elon Musk's SpaceX company is an example of attempted monopoly-building via predatory pricing.  Based on a link I provided in that recent post, Musk is selling access to low earth orbit (LEO) at a price per kilogram of payload that is significantly lower than the price at which other launch providers are able to send satellites into LEO.  However, we also know that SpaceX is a money-losing business which has most likely not paid U.S. taxes since it was founded in 2002.  (See also "The Final Frontier of Tax Avoidance: Elon Musk’s SpaceX Has $1.9 Billion to Gain from Defunding the IRS", Matthew Gardner, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, June 2026.)  Thus Musk has a number of ways to cushion the pain (which I'm sure he hopes will be temporary) of selling high-value goods and services at a loss!

Now we can certainly decry and condemn the desires and goals of those businesses which engage in predatory pricing in attempting to create monopolies.  And we can also decry and condemn the effects which these monopolies have on the rest of us once these monopolies are firmly established.  But we must also ask what kind of people we ourselves are that we allow such predatory arrangements to arise in the first place.  To quote Gene Sharp once again,

"Under the dictatorship the population and civil institutions of the society have been too weak, and the government too strong. Without a change in this imbalance, a new set of rulers can, if they wish, be just as dictatorial as the old ones."  

And,

"Dictatorships usually exist primarily because of the internal power distribution in the home country. The population and society are too weak to cause the dictatorship serious problems, wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands. [Emphasis added.]  Although dictatorships may benefit from or be somewhat weakened by international actions, their continuation is dependent primarily on internal factors."

Dictatorships can be entirely governmental, or they can start out as economic hegemonies that morph into political hegemonies.  And note that what Gene Sharp says about governments that are too strong applies just as firmly to businesses whose owners become too rich, even if the governments in the nations where these rich people reside are weak.  Thus do greedy piece-of-garbage heads of business like Mark Zuckerberg, Travis Kalanick, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos become the backers of piece-of-garbage heads of state like Donald Bump and political parties like the Rethuglicans.  But these people can become powerful only if we give them that power.  We too frequently give these people such power by being lured by the store-on-every-street corner convenience, the glitzy gizmo features, and the too-good-to-be-true low prices of their wares.  This convenience, functionality and cheapness act as a sort of bait - rather like the sugar water in certain commercially available ant baits.  However, the poor witless ants who chow down on that sugar water fail to notice that it's laced with borax.  And it's the borax that kills them.

I have mentioned the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which is an organization which seeks to use advocacy and political action to eliminate monopolistic and predatory practices in the American economy.  I am all in favor of their aims and goals.  Yet it seems to me that trying to use policy recommendations, advocacy and political action to achieve such goals in these days is about as hard as trying to build my own transcontinental railroad or to build my own rocket to fly to Mars.  To me it's much better and more direct to figure out on a personal and local level how to decouple from a predatory economy.  What can I do at a grassroots level to achieve this?  My answer to this question is as follows: Become frugal and learn to be content with what I have.  Learn to be personally self-sufficient.  Learn not to need or want certain things or to buy things from certain people.  (For instance, I haven't bought anything from Target or Amazon in a long time!)  And find other like-minded people in my local community and in my circle of acquaintances with whom I can form small localized collectives of communal self-reliance.  If enough of us follow this path, we will be to the monopolists what grass eventually is to concrete - namely, a soft, subtle, yet eventually shattering force - an ineluctable, silent, bottom-up change that does not become noticed until it's too late for those at the top.

From Ears Back to Eyes

I am once again extremely busy with work, which has greatly hindered my blogging over the last few weeks.  But one thing that occurred to me these last few days is the manner in which ease of access, convenience, and low cost are used by would-be monopolists as bait in order to ensnare ever-increasing numbers of people into dependence as consumers on monopoly businesses.  We see also how ever-increasing consolidation of businesses leads to ever-shrinking numbers of players in any particular market segment.  (Hopefully I'll have more to say on this subject in a future post.)

Take audiobooks as an example.  To rely solely on audiobooks as a means of consuming either fiction or nonfiction is increasingly an unsatisfying and potentially harmful strategy for people who want to educate themselves.  (That word "consuming" is unfortunate, but right now I'm tired, it's past my bedtime, and I can't think of a better word...)  I'm not too much of a fan of Google's generative AI (or anyone else's generative AI, for that matter), but when just now I typed "shortcomings 'audiobook industry' 'lack of variety'" into Google Search, I got a highly satisfying summary of some suspicions which have been growing in my mind recently.  The Google AI overview of my search results says "The audiobook industry faces a lack of variety due to publishers focusing mainly on bestsellers and popular genres, leaving niche subjects, indie authors, and translated works underrepresented.  Production costs also limit smaller books from getting audio versions..."  I would also say that an increasing number of nonfiction audiobooks in the business genre are turning out to be subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) cheerleading pieces designed to prop up a harmful status quo.  There seems to be a dearth of voices questioning that status quo.

So, because there are writers who are not well-known, yet whose writing interests me, and these writers are not part of the audiobook market, I'm switching back to running my eyes over a set of printed pages instead of just letting the sounds of spoken words hit my eardrums.  I also understand that making the switch will do my brain some good.  Now if only I can find the time...

Humpty Dumpty Part 2: Musk's Further Fallacies

I hinted (not so subtly) in my last post that Elon Musk likes to brag about solving the impossible problem of achieving cheap space flight because he wants to boast of being a totally awesome dude who is smarter than all the rest of us.  I also mentioned that Elon Musk's company SpaceX developed fully reusable orbital launch vehicles in the 2010's.  

However, on further examination I found that this is not true.  SpaceX has not, I repeat, has not developed the world's first fully reusable orbital launch rocket.  In fact, no one has.  It turns out that Musk has merely promised that SpaceX is on the verge of developing the world's first fully reusable rocket.  In an article by Stephen Kuper published in SpaceConnect Magazine in November 2025 titled "‘Next year’ Musk predicts ‘full reusability’ rocket imminent", Musk himself admits that his company has not achieved full reusability yet.  At best, his rockets are only partially reusable.  Also, there is an interesting piece also published in 2025 in Intereconomics Review of European Economic Policy titled, "The Missing Rocket: An Economic and Engineering Analysis of the Reusability Dilemma in the European Space Sector".  This article provides a further examination of the economic viability of reusable orbital launch systems like the SpaceX rockets, and discovers that these rockets have certain unaddressed economic liabilities.  

Lastly, it must be mentioned once again that SpaceX is a money-losing business despite its frequent rocket launches.  It may be that at least part of SpaceX's losses are due to a company policy of predatory pricing in an attempt to drive competitors out of business.