on Saturday, Yellen committed a grievous diplomatic error—she bowed repeatedly, at least three times, to Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng when she met him.

That’s a grave show of American weakness to the Chinese, particularly the repeated and deep nature of the bowing. If the Chinese didn’t already think they could step all over us, that’s the type of signal to them that they can, when Biden officials act that desperate to bend over for them. Lifeng even backed up a little to give her more room to kowtow to him, like she was a servant.

“Never, ever, ever,” Bradley Blakeman, a senior staffer in George W. Bush’s White House, told The Post. “An American official does not bow. It looks like she’s been summoned to the principal’s office, and that’s exactly the optics the Chinese love.”

“Bowing is not part of the accepted protocol,” agreed Jerome A. Cohen, an emeritus professor at NYU and expert in Chinese law and government. [….]

“The way to treat an adversary is, you don’t go hat in hand,” Blakeman said. “But with this administration, time and time again, we embarrass ourselves and show weakness. And it just shows the lack of effective leverage we have.”

Why is it so difficult to extract drinkable water from seawater? Doooh—stupid second law of thermodynamics!

In the 1960s, there seemed a sweet solution to all of the “shortages” that vex our demon-haunted, fear-first age of technological timidity. You build the nuclear power plants on the seacoast, using the effectively infinite heat sink of the deep ocean as the cold sink (avoiding the need for those scary cooling towers!). In addition to generating electricity too cheap to meter for the power grid, the thermal energy, which would otherwise go to waste, is used to desalinate sea water, which supplies abundant fresh water for human consumption, agriculture, and the adjacent Fission Falls Water Park. Part of the fresh water and electricity is input to the electrolysis plant, which generates hydrogen for mobile transportation applications. The brine-rich by-product of desalination which isn’t sold as artisanal Captain Neutron nuclear sea salt is disposed of by dilution in the deep ocean.

Any territory, however small and seemingly resource-poor, with a modest ocean coastline, could become an energy, agriculture, and transport superpower if only they could tunnel through the fear barrier. New Hampshire has 21 km of Atlantic coastline, which advocates of Porcxit 4 might bear in mind.