Nassim Taleb has argued, persuasively, that listening to or reading the daily news doesn’t make one better informed. Indeed it can actually make one less well informed. There are lots of reasons for this, among them that most news organizations have become “political operatives with bylines” for either the political right or the political left. Nor has it helped that most mainstream newsroom have drastically reduced their reporting staffs, relying instead on picking up and rewriting material from other, often unreliable, sources (like the propaganda put out by other governments).
I thought of this as I read yet another piece in the New York Times, by another not-very-well informed journalist, about what a military threat China poses to the U.S. Balderdash!!
China uses 14 million barrels of oil a day, as of last year. If China went to war it would need even more to sustain its military operations. It produces about 4 million barrels a day from domestic wells, and has to import the remaining 10 million barrels a day to keep its economy running, its factories producing, its farms well fertilized, and its internal transportation system operating. And where does that oil come from? Mostly the Middle East, thousands of miles away along sea routes easily disrupted not only by the American navy, but even by the navies of Japan or Indian. Cut that route and any Chinese military effort will quickly grind to a halt.
Then there is food. China has limited good farmland. China needs to feed 21% of the world’s population (1.4 billlion people) on only 7% of the world’s useable farmland. China imports over $100 billion in food each year. In a pinch it could – just barely – feed its population a meager diet of domestically-grown rice and grains in a year with a good harvest. Where does the rest of the food come from? Again, from thousands of miles away (the US and Brazil are the largest sources) along sea routes easily interdicted by the US navy.
China has lots of other vulnerabilities, but these two alone make it clear that China poses no real military threat to the US, no matter how many advanced weapons they show off to a credulous American media. So why does a reporter from what is supposed to be the nation’s leading newspaper not know this? And how much of the other stuff reported in the mainstream media is equally as naïve, uninformed, or biased beyond recognition by the journalist’s ideological bias?
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