China the pretender, and the manifest superiority of feet and inches

China the pretender

Twice in the 20th Century Germany bid fair to master the world, and no sooner had we put paid to Germany than Russia threatened global dominion through its empire called the Soviet Union, but we faced down communism until that madness too collapsed. It's within my time, the '80s and into the '90s, that the conventional wisdom had it that we were being overtaken by Japan, which by the middle-'90s was an amusing remembrance. And in the '90s too the European Union was thought or hoped to be the future, a United States of Europe to overtake the United States complete with a unitary European armed forces, but Europe is decadent, weak and soft, and it always was a crazy-quilt of tribes, millennia before Brexit was a twinkle in the eye of Nigel Farage. Always the realities are reasserted, always America finds its feet and knocks the other fellow from his, always the challenger to Anglo-American ascendancy is seized by its own demons and cast down again into irrelevance or worse. 

So now that China takes its turn, I can only bet on form. When it'll come, or how, I cannot conceive, but in the end China is a big country with problems to match, a Third World country with 24-karat fillings, and the vote to shake the earth on November 8 of 2016 may turn out to have been the beginning of the end for China's good run, a run on artificial and transient advantage: currency manipulation and books-cooking, patent-thievery and corporate espionage and the outright seizure of Western technology by the People's Liberation Army, administrative convenience for Western supply lines, and above all sweatshop wages that could be had also in India or Indonesia or Vietnam, even. We've let it go too far for too long -- Clinton steered us wrong on China, and Bush and Obama drifted along that wrong turn -- and there may be a price to be paid for that, in troubles I shudder to consider, but in the end we won't be speaking Chinese.

The manifest superiority of feet and inches

Obviously the foot is a practical and human everyday unit of measure, where meters are too big and centimeters and millimeters too small, but more than that, the metric ten divides evenly only into halves and useless fifths; the Anglo-American twelve divides evenly into halves and thirds and quarters. A quarter of ten is 2.5; a third is 3.333333333 to infinity. And then for measures of less than an inch the principle is simple, sensible doubling: half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth. A little more than a half is three-quarters; a little more than three-quarters is seven-eighths; and a little more than seven-eighths is fifteen-sixteenths. And that's to say nothing of the poetry in "five-foot-two" or "inch by inch".