I didn’t say that Boeing is arrogant. I said they have their noses in the air.  Jokes aside, l’Affaire Boeing is a watershed.

President Trump is under pressure to circle the wagons around one of America’s flagship industrial companies, among other reasons because China will exploit the crisis to promote its new entry into the civil aircraft market.

He made a good start yesterday (3/13) by grounding the Boeing 737 Max aircraft in US airspace, after the horrific Ethiopian Airlines crash Sunday (3/10) that killed 157.

To follow up, he should ignore the legions of industry lobbyists and their Hallelujah chorus at the Pentagon, and take the opportunity to clean out the swamp in America’s military industry.  Here’s what’s going on.

Californians brag that their state is the world's fifth-largest economy. They talk as reverentially of Silicon Valley companies Apple, Facebook and Google as the ancient Greeks did of their Olympian gods.

Hollywood and universities such as Caltech, Stanford and Berkeley are cited as permanent proof of the intellectual, aesthetic and technological dominance of West Coast culture.

Californians also see their progressive, one-party state as a neo-socialist model for a nation moving hard to the left.

But how long will they retain such confidence?  Not for much longer.  Here’s why and it’s horrific.

Among the many, many things that starkly define the differences between the Left and the right, none is more wretched than the difference in how they approach life.

Leftists, even when they are in power, are generally miserable, discontent with America as it was founded and as it is, always banging their heads against some perceived wall.

Those on the Right, on the other hand, are characterized by general good-natured love of country and the quest to save America from the radical Left's reprehensible appropriation of the culture, academia, the media, and entertainment.  Conservative people revel in their families, work, and self-reliance and their good fortune to be Americans.  They are grateful people.

Leftist are filled with anger, conservatives are filled with gratitude.  What accounts for this?

China is rapidly expanding its presence and control in Russia’s Trans-Baikal region. This drive is, in part, being driven by Beijing’s economic interests in Siberia and the Russian Far East as a whole.

In the past, Moscow routinely played up popular fears of Chinese expansion as a way to unite the country; but the center’s ability to do so is declining rapidly as ever more Russians now blame the Russian business community and its allies in the government for China’s advance.

Indeed, talk about China is reinforcing divisions among Russians, intensifying their anger at the domestic business and political elites who appear to be profiting at their expense. That may explain why people across the Trans-Baikal have been voting for Communist candidates or at least for those politicians who promise to oppose both Beijing and Moscow.