A post by Joel Kotkin, at Quillette, projects a future in which Europe and Asia eclipse the US.
And a response by Stuart Schneiderman: The Coming Eurasian Century.
Read and discuss.
64 thoughts on “The New Eurasian Century (???)”
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Words not found in the article: Debt. Demographics. Immigration. Migration. He’s not even touching on the big issues, let alone trying to grapple with them and project them out for a few generations.
I’ve been reading these grand predictive essays since I was a child in the 1970s. None of them have come to pass. NONE.
Here’s what is becoming my happy little rule-of-thumb: If some of the “Great and wise” think something and tell me allllllll about it, in nauseating detail? It ain’tint happenin’.
Some little nobody out in the intellectual hinterlands gathers up things that nobody else has noticed, and then waves a little paw, saying something of vast import, only to be ignored by the masses? That guy or girl is probably on to something, and telling a great truth.
Do note how we are not a.) living in a new Ice Age, b.) under the thumb of Japan, Inc., or c.) watching our coastal cities drown while we remember the halcyon snow-days of our youth, which we haven’t seen for decades…
Frankly, the minute some dipshit tells me that we’re at the “end of history”, or some other such nonsense, I cease to listen to them for anything other than entertainment.
Fact is, nobody writing this crap really knows what is going on. They’ve grabbed on to something they’ve heard, failed to really understand, and now they’re mouthing facile lies based on their misunderstandings. Trends are not necessarily things that mean jack or sh*t–Look at the increase in inflation under Biden. Who’d have predicted that, back in 2018? Hell, who’d have thought it possible in 2020?
I agree with some of his points, especially that the greatest danger to liberal democracy are so called liberal democrats who’s only real “principal” is acquiring and wielding power. It’s only by ignoring numerous 800 pound gorillas and pink elephants capering through the room that this projected hegemony of Eurasia can seem remotely plausible.
It’s scant comfort but nevertheless true that whatever our problems and challenges are, they’re dwarfed by those of these would be masters of the universe. Already mentioned is the ongoing demographic collapse of both Europe and China. That Germany has maneuvered itself into a position of servile dependence on Russia hardly seems a strategic triumph. While we can provide our own food and energy needs from domestic sources. China can do neither. China’s infrastructure only looks impressive from a distance great enough that the crumbling is obscured.
I think that the real issue for Eurasia attaining the projected status discussed has a lot more to do with the delusional nature of much of their elites and the decisions they’re making.
Xi is taking China further down a path of totalitarian micro-control; the cracks in the system are already readily apparent, with regards to the things like Evergrande and all the excess construction–Which has mostly come about because China did not bother to provide reasonable opportunities for citizens to invest and save money for retirement. That’s what’s driven all the investment in real estate, creating the massive bubble and all those vacant cities and other infrastructure. That can’t possibly work out well, in the long or short haul–They’ve so distorted the reality of their economy that they are going to be dealing with the repercussions of it for decades, if not centuries to come. Look at all the wasted expenditures in terms of resources and human effort. That’s the real price of totalitarianism and “planned economies”–The signals sent by the markets don’t have any effect, because there’s always some idiot bureaucrat or politician who “knows better” intervening and stopping the signal.
Europe is full of the same stupidity, but on a somewhat lesser scale–The German “green” movement has shut down all their nukes and gotten them onto coal and Russian gas. It’s like the Germans completely ignored who, precisely, was behind the anti-nuclear movement in the first damn place. Which, if you recall, was the Soviet Union’s intelligence organizations. The people running things in Germany are not only crooked, they’re stupid. Same-same with much of the rest of Europe, who’re staring down the barrel of a demographic disaster unprecedented in the history of the human race, and attempting to compensate for it by bringing in millions of foreigners who don’t share their culture, language, or intellectual capacity.
These are the people who’re somehow going to dominate the future? I’d bet money on Singapore, or some other rationally-run country, but they’re too damn small. The most we’re going to be able to hope for out of Eurasia is that they don’t kill us all with their incessent and endemic stupidity on all levels political and economic.
China is doubling in economic size about every 8 years, and looks to be able to continue that. That means in about 2030 it will be a larger economy than the EU and US combined.
Its gonna be huge. ;) You are fools to believe your own propaganda. ;)
“That Germany has maneuvered itself into a position of servile dependence on Russia hardly seems a strategic triumph.”
There are more than a few people who think that if Germany and Russia ever got together, they would dominate the planet.
payback from when the General Staff, sent Lenin back on a train, who runs the German branch of Nordstream, Putins Stasi associate at Dresdner Bank
with regards to the things like Evergrande and all the excess construction–Which has mostly come about because China did not bother to provide reasonable opportunities for citizens to invest and save money for retirement.
China has the eternal problem of non-market economies. Perhaps the authoritarian regime can deal with that but it is a weakness.
There is no question that American and British elites are eager for the suicide of the West. Their Gramscian strategy to do lobectomies on all children in school might work. Not all children will be made stupid but they are certainly making progress.
Kotkin is a smart guy and has many worthwhile observations.
Joel Kotkin: “Instead, it [the USA] has evolved into the model autocracy, based on a system of semi-permanent caste privilege and a technologically enhanced regime of social control. It employs ever-more intrusive means to impose strict censorship, and offers few privacy protections.”
Oops! My bad! I misunderstood what Kotkin wrote. The “it” in his sentence refers to China, not the USA. But if the hat fits …
I half subscribe to Pillsbury, but I also think after Mao cannibalized the country, the leading figures in the PLA decided we need another way, and the only understanding they had of Capitalism was the vulgar robber baron, along with the former triads and the Green Gang, so that’s the model they chose
One thing missing from Kotkin’s analysis is a discussion of the role of India. Don’t think they would welcome a future as a subordinate member of a Chinese-led bloc.
India is another non-starter socialist culture. All you need to know about India and its potential can be gleaned from the various and sundry incompetencies surrounding their military procurement programs and attempts to build their own weapons, particularly small arms.
All these cultures have one thing in common: Delusion. The decisions aren’t made rationally, and the people making them think they are capable of micro-managing things that are inherently unmanageable, which is the how and why of Japan, Inc. collapsing in the 1990s. You can go a long way on a managed economy, but the moment it slips out of your grasp…? You’re screwed. Too many variables to control, too many second- and third-order effects that never occurred to you or your fellow technocrats. Chaos reigns, everywhere, and the most you can hope to do is dance with it. Manage it? LOL… The lords of chaos spit in your face, because that’s what they do.
Show me a pragmatic nation, run by people who know their limitations? I’d be willing to entertain the notion that the next century or so is theirs; given the delusional nature of every one of the arrogant idiots we have running every major country and economy on this planet, the most I’d be willing to predict is that it’ll all end in tears.
China might wind up on top, but it’ll only be because everyone else fscked everything up by the numbers, or sheer ‘effing accident. Or, maybe zombie space bats will show up that have a liking for Chinese food, and they’ll be able to trade Peking Duck for advanced technology. The inevitability of “Eurasia” somehow dominating things is highly, highly questionable in my mind. I think it’s way more likely that they’re all going to be on international life support, or gradually dying off due to nobody wanting to participate in the rigged game that socialism inevitably creates for the young.
I think they have evolved to a degree, under the bjp, the unenlightened compared to the glorious Congress Party, Fabian Socialism still has purchase there I guess, the side we took up was Pakistan, is that a great prize, or what? Inran Khan is the figurehead of the Army and the ISI, who occasionally is allowed to speak the truths, but more often then not is just jive talking, China learned from the Concession era, and developed their own brand of Comprador (middle men) in the West
I agree that Socialism is a loser but what we see in Russia and China is not Socialism. It is a sort of corporatism similar to what is going on in our own country. Big government has made a pact with Big Business to control the market system. We are seeing this with consolidation, like Google buying up competitors. People as stupid as Dick Durbin are choosing what companies to support with subsidies. Obama showed how well that worked with Solyndra. Putin is distributing Russian assets to cronies. Xi is allowing princelings of the CCP to become major capitalists. They know enough to bribe Biden but I’m not sure that is enough.
Fascism is only slightly better at things than full-on socialism. “Planned” economies fail, it’s just a matter of how long it takes for the contradictions and poor decisions to catch up to them.
We’re living in a perfect example, right now: The geeenious Bidenites chose to start mucking about with the oil and gas industries, and it took less than a year for fuel prices to double, and for us to become net importers. They want to mandate electric cars for everyone, but have not a clue as to how much electricity that’s going to take, or how it will be generated. These are incredibly arrogant and stupid people; they aren’t going to somehow miracle their way into success over the next three years.
Xi is doing the same things to China, with slightly different choices and effects. The same source of idiocy is still there–They imagine that they can dictate how things will go, and that’s the fallacy. You have a certain amount of “direction” you can apply, but it’s a lot like how the pro billiards players describe applying “english” to the cue ball… You can’t overcome a lot of the inherent things, but you can influence them. The illusion that you can control everything? That’s the insanity. Precisely how much is controllable is a variable, and it’s almost always a lot less than you’re thinking at the time.
The idiots will persist in trying, however–Because, they’re control freaks. They want to run the world like some kind of clockwork toy, but they’ve got none of the skills of a watchmaker, nor the tools.
Kotkin’s idea of a “Eurasia” which includes China, Russia, and Germany skips past those inconvenient countries between Russia & Germany — like the Ukraine, and Poland. Could that be a problem for the ones in the middle? What does history tell us?
China, Russia, Germany all have the demographic problem Brian mentioned — insufficient babies. But maybe that is not a problem. Dividing national wealth among a declining population may be one way of continuing to increase per capita income.
Ah! But those countries need those missing babies to work in the factories. Do they? If you can tolerate the commentary from a couple of excited English punters visiting a Chinese automobile manufacturing plant, here is an example of a factory in which 90% of the assembly is done by robots. Who needs babies?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i9UhfWMHtk
Declining birth rates are symptomatic of a civilization in crisis–The participants in said civilization no longer have the confidence or faith in the future of said civilization to gamble on raising kids within it. No amount of roboticization is going to overcome that basic problem. Who is going to man the maintenance workforce for the factories? Or, more importantly, who the hell are they building the cars in these factories for? Other robots?
End of the day, a declining population means one thing and one thing only: A failure of that civilization demonstrating it.
Of course, I suppose you could look at overpopulation with the same jaundiced eye, but I suspect that the inability to even maintain replacement rate breeding is a Very Bad Thing(TM). I could be wrong, but I rather doubt it.
I’m betting money that by about 2050, they’re not just going to be “encouraging” the proles in China and Germany to breed, they’re going to be mandating it–Women won’t have full civil rights, unless they’re mothers with more than two kids, and the singletons will be taxed unto death.
Everytime some genius goes messing with the natural order of things, they wind up reinventing the damn wheel they abandoned a few generations earlier. It’s like the existing civilization already worked out most of how things have to work, but we’re too damn smart to acknowledge that fact.
I’ll lay you long odds that all the “advancements” of the modern liberated woman are going to be rolled back before the end of the century, and it’s going to be “kinder, kuche, kirche” all over again, simply because of the decline in the birth rate. And, I’ll further venture to predict that the people leading the charge are going to be today’s left-wingers, who’ll finally have realized that they actually need people to lord over, and if they won’t breed willingly, then they’ll have to do something stupid and draconian about it.
Fscking morons, the lot of them. And, everyone that just goes along with the program. Modern “civilization” is a crock, and most of the people bloviating about it all, and trying to run it? Idiots, the lot of them.
Kirk, regarding your first comment: anyone touting “the end of history” is indeed foolish… But neither Kotkin nor Schneideman are saying that.
I’m sorry to be rude, but Kotkin strikes me as a fool.
China is now the undisputed leader of Eurasia? Has anyone asked India about that? How about Japan? Vietnam? Indonesia?
I suspect that there are plenty of folks in Eurasia who won’t welcome their new Chinese overlords anymore than they liked the old European colonial powers. In fact I’d argue that the Chinese regime has displayed a remarkable talent for making enemies. They’ve become rather infamous in the US for such things as rampant intellectual property theft, endless threats of all sorts, and covid. They’ve recently been involved in border skirmish with India, in which they were apparently attempting to conquer thousands of square miles simply by default, expecting no pushback at all. And they’ve even managed to make Vietnam look to the US as an ally.
Not good omens for a peaceful Eurasia, in my opinion. The present Chinese regime reminds of that parable about King Log and King Stork. I’ve been reading attacks on the US for my entire life, about how murderous and awful we’ve been- gosh, remember Abu Ghraib? Yet the Chinese regime is quite literally committing genocide like right now against the inhabitants of one province and I see no reason why China would treat any other set of non-Chinese any better.
I think the people of Eurasia near China will have reason notice all that, and come to regret the departure of the US from putative global dominance. I wouldn’t be surprised if nations such as India, Japan, Vietnam, etc, form their own military alliance against China, regardless of what the US is doing or whether or not the US even continues to exist. That alliance will of course have nuclear weapons- and unlike the WWII-era leadership of the USSR, the present Chinese leadership has never seen dead Chinese, unless they ordered them to be murdered. Hence, they won’t have the same in depth personal knowledge that war isn’t just military parades and medals that the Russians had, which may have restrained them from starting WWIII, late in the last century.
By 2060, when China will likely be looking to reduce its carbon footprint, much of the West may be little more than a vacation spot for rich Chinese and Russian oligarchs.
Also equally true, by 2060 China may well be nothing more than a collection of glass-bottomed craters inhabited by nothing more than those famously radiation resistant tardigrades.
Hey, I dunno. I can’t predict the future, any more than Joel Kotkin, or Francis Fukuyama can.
But at least I don’t write stupid articles or books sort-of pretending I can.
I absolutely agree with Xennady.
Biggest danger from China ain’t China; it’s what happens when China either collapse from its internal contradictions or when the peripheral ethnicities decide they’re too dangerous to tolerate. The Han are a lot like the Borg, only with a far less personable mien. They’re also not as competent as the Borg, because if they had a whit of common sense, what they’re doing to Uighur would be invisible and unnoticed. However, the habits of totalitarian tyranny accrued from the Imperial dynasties forward to Mao and his successors give the Han an arrogance unmatched in history. Nemesis has a way of answering hubris; the Karma Police may be slow, but they will be breaking the doors down, in the end.
As an Imperial Power, the US has been relatively benign. Absent the Soviets and the Cold War after WWII, I suspect we’d have eventually settled into a commercial “thing” more akin to the Phoenician empire than Rome, after having eased the European colonial powers off into the old-age home. I blame the Soviets and Stalin for a lot of what the US has become, in that they justified and enabled a massive swath of abuses in our government. Ah, well… We don’t have the history we’d like, we’ve got the history we have, and we just have to deal with it.
Xennady: “Hey, I dunno. I can’t predict the future …”
We can’t predict what the future will be, but we can reasonably predict what the future won’t be — that is, the future will not be the same as today. Things will change! That is probably anathema to the gerontocrats in the DC Swamp.
“what they’re doing to Uighur would be invisible and unnoticed”
As its lies, its actually western propaganda. They are inclusive as a state, there are Muslim symbols on the money.
An ancient society is back. The dragon will do just fine. ;)
Not many people mention the rampant cooking of the books for basically every single Chinese company. This comes to light only in spectacular fashion with episodes such as Evergrand. Expect a lot more of that to come.
Apparently Charlie Munger doesn’t know or care about that.
https://twitter.com/DeItaone/status/1494019060417368078
CHARLIE MUNGER, VICE CHAIRMAN OF BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY, SAYS THE CHINESE COMPANIES HE INVESTS IN ARE STRONGER THAN THEIR COMPETITION AND PRICED LOWER; ‘THAT’S WHY WE’RE IN CHINA’ — DAILY JOURNAL ANNUAL MEETING
Time for a massive cleaning of the swamp. As far as I’m concerned, Americans need a Long Beach Tea Party where we dump shipments of cheap Chinese trash into the harbor.
If the reports about the “double printing” of Chinese currency are at all accurate…? It extends into fundamentals we can’t even really comprehend. Granted, the Fed ain’t much better, but imagine a situation where the Treasury was printing two bills for every serial number, and dropping the extra one into the hands of some connected government official… Then, imagine what the economic effect would be if it became generally known that we were essentially counterfeiting our own currency.
China ain’t going to be running the world in any future I can see. They’ll be lucky if they’re not living in a self-created dystopic wasteland, which is what they’ve produced most often in history. Too many lies, too much delusion–The reality of things will catch up, eventually. You can’t mis-allocate that many resources without paying a price, and the decisions they’re making based on the malinformation produced by all the financial chicanery will eventually turn into Nemesis chasing Hubris. Just like all the hatreds building up through their persecutions of ethnic minorities.
It would be my guess that there will eventually be some half-Uyghur in a position of responsibility that decides to “go out with a bang”, and throw a sabot into the machinery, somewhere. Or, some other ethnicity with a grudge. As an alternative, work out what will happen once they’ve used “Social Credit” to disenfranchise and alienate a large enough swath of their own Han ethnicity, and those “outsiders” making common cause with the persecuted minorities.
This crap never, ever ends well. The idiots persist in trying, though, thinking that they can control the universe. Tighter they lock things down, the bigger the eventual “BANG!!!”.
it could happen, if uighurs, residents of east turkestan, are desperate, they will resort to desperate measures, the last wave of persecution, led to some training in afghanistan, some of those ending up at gitmo
Xi’s cult of personality, tries to bridge the gap that their corporatist framework hasn’t been able to solve, if an economic crisis sunders the country, would it devolve to warlordism
“If the reports about the “double printing” of Chinese currency are at all accurate…?”
I am no expert on China. Still, what I saw and experienced when in China was that cash is very rarely used — except by mahjong players. Almost all daily transactions involve a charge through each individual’s smartphone to that individual’s bank account. Fast, efficient, no cash. Even roadside fruit sellers or food vendors used that internet-linked payments system, and did not want cash. The foreign visitor with cash and credit cards was mostly out of luck, except at high-end tourist hotels.
The stories about “double printing” Chinese currency don’t seem to match what my lying eyes saw.
For sure, China has big challenges. They have run up big debts building out amazing infrastructure — roads, rail, airports, ports, city centers, schools, hospitals, museums, you-name-it. We have run up big debts importing Chinese goods. Time will tell which of us was smarter.
Gavin, you might want to ask yourself why the Chinese government is pushing that stuff in the first place.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2158782/why-other-countries-are-giving-china-licence-print-money
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202112/1243072.shtml
Casual acquaintance of mine pointed me at these articles, and a couple of others. After I asked him what he thought about the Chinese economy, having just left over there and having pulled everything he could out of it.
He intimated to me that there’s a hell of a lot of cash floating around over there, in the hands of government and party officials who’re essentially hoarding it in their homes and offices, rather than banking it. The electronic BS is for the masses; the Party doesn’t trust it for themselves.
If that second article is at all accurate, despite the official denials? LOL… House of cards, just like a lot of that wunnerful, wunnerful new construction that just keeps… Falling down.
I’ve been to Asia. I know how to recognize the kind of crap that used to be endemic to countries like Korea, where the buildings look pretty on the outside, but the structural columns are filled with soda cans filling the voids left from the concrete being placed six stories up, and then plastered over by guys with hand-trowels after the forms come off. I would not want to be living in any of those magnificent highrise apartment buildings they’ve thrown up, at all.
Which is another point to consider: Yeah, you build a quality building that will stand up for a few decades, and that’s an actual asset. You build something that’s epically half-ass, and which will fall down before the decade is out…? Is that a net gain for the national economy, or a liability that nobody is considering?
You look at all that bright, shiny new construction through the eyes of a naive and ignorant-of-construction Westerner, it looks really, really impressive. Look at it through the jaded, cynical eyes of someone who knows construction and Asian culture surrounding that arena… Looks a little bit different.
@Gavin,
“Time will tell which of us was smarter.”
I feel pretty safe in predicting that the verdict of history is going to be that we were all a bunch of utterly incompetent dolts, just in different ways. All y’all pointing at “China, master of the world” and hooting about it? You need to rewind a couple of decades and revisit the equally fantastic “Japan, Inc.” BS, and then ask yourself why on God’s green earth you’re so easily suckered in by these things. I mean, do some critical thinking and spend some time looking around the available data and talking to people. I’ve formed a lot of my opinions from observing the “feet of clay” that can be seen on all the various Reddit fora discussing construction sites, and the documentation you see for a lot of those lovely new highrise buildings literally falling apart before being occupied. One shudders to think about the sheer waste involved–With Potemkin, all he built were the facades. The CCP has busily wasted a huge fraction of the world’s steel and concrete production over the last few decades on buildings that don’t seem to be standing up, all that well.
I’ve got another friend of mine who was a construction engineer hired by an American company to oversee the building of their Chinese factories and production facilities. His take on what he saw over there? Let’s just leave it at the fact that it was his heartfelt recommendation to his company that they pull the hell out, stay out, and never stick their noses into it again. Which is why he no longer works for them. The financial gurus were bedazzled by all the magic beans that were on offer…
Oh, and as an aside…? It’s positively dangerous to be “that guy” insisting on things being done right, and to standard. That’s one of those things that kinda-sorta indicates where China is headed. Straight to quality-control hell.
What was that line from Starship Troopers, discussing the labor theory of value, again? Something to the effect of a poor cook turning premium ingredients into trash, and a master chef turning those same ingredients into high-value gourmet meals? That’s China under the CCP–Turning premium investments and materials into utter shiite, over the long haul.
Not like we haven’t done a lot of the same–How many sports stadiums actually produce anything worthwhile, economically? Or, all those now-abandoned malls, destroyed by adjacent urban blight?
I don’t think the future belongs to either us, or the Chinese. I think someone a hell of a lot smarter is going to come along and clean all our clocks, likely in the midst of a world-wide collapse. Maybe Singapore, but I don’t see them being the empire-building sort…
“I think someone a hell of a lot smarter is going to come along and clean all our clocks, likely in the midst of a world-wide collapse.”
We are doing a very good job of cleaning our own clock. So who will be the next winner (recognizing that no-one gets to be winner for ever)? If this were a gambling situation, I would put a small bet on Brazil. Smart people, lots of resources, and they will still be around even if the Northern Hemisphere nukes itself to Hell and back. But Brazil has a lot of serious problems too.
Another of the lessons of history, especially military history, is that victory often goes to the guys who get it least wrong, not to the guys who get it right — because no-one ever gets it right.
In terms of “least wrong”? Who really knows. I think the whole question is open to some Black Swan event we’ve not even considered.
I halfway wonder, sometimes, if the people running things know something the rest of us don’t, and they’re running up the bills because they know quite well they’ll never have to pay them. This posits some sort of conspiracy theory or nebulous shadow organization that I find it really hard to believe in, but… Who the hell knows?
I do know that anyone rational, and with the wits given a rabid skink, should be easily able to extrapolate out and decide that the current course we’re on is really, really ill-advised. And, yet… They haven’t.
“I blame the Soviets and Stalin for a lot of what the US has become”
Well, that’s convenient.
But surely you’ve heard of Woodrow Wilson, Horace Mann, John Dewey? Not a lot of Stalinist influences on those guys! In reality, the Suicide of the West started a lot earlier than 1917.
The point I was making was that the Soviet activities before, during, and after WWII enabled and justified (in their eyes, at least…) a lot of the measures taken by the statist elites after WWII. Absent that malign influence, I suspect that a lot of the FDR-era BS would have been wound down, just like much of Wilson’s work was.
The general voting public was likely to make much different choices, absent what the world looked like in the post-WWII era.
And, yes… The idiocy started a lot earlier than Stalin coming to power. The necessity of opposing him and his works did, however, lead to the acceleration and growth of a lot of things that might have damped out, absent that necessity.
Had the course of world history been lacking the malign influence of Stalin and the COMINTERN, things would look a hell of a lot different. Maybe not much better than what we have, but at least different. Let’s not forget that the only damn way Wilson managed to get away with what he did was due to the exigencies of WWI. Absent that, he’d have been laughed out of office had he tried enacting any of his propagandistic BS.
well the educational templates we employ are all of soviet design, since the 1980, you hear constructivism, which is the base template of nclb then common core now diversity inclusion and equity, dewey was like the ibogaine that inigo montoya consumed in small doses,
Was it not ibogaine that Hubert Humphrey was wired to? It was a while ago, but drugs are an interest. ;)
China will rule the world. Well rule is the wrong word, but at least at the level that the US does now. As the purpose of the CCP is very different than any you are used to, you don’t understand what’s going on. Just reading what they have said they are going to do should be enlightening … or not. ;)
Peter Zeihan has some interesting commentary on this issue, mostly having to do with geography and demographics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yttug-a3sWI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-3kIsW4KEM
Interesting lecture, but you can hear him selling something in the subtexts.
I have no doubt that some of his demographic data is significant, but I don’t agree with the resultant analysis about either India or Brazil. Both countries are potentially capable of doing great things, but the reality is that they’ll likely never realize that potential. Culturally, India is married to the socialist delusion coupled with the babu bureaucracy that’s screwed them over for centuries. I don’t think they’re going to be capable of defending themselves, let alone dominating the south of Eurasia.
In military procurement, they can’t even get out of their own way. That does not bode well for the future.
}}} Look at the increase in inflation under Biden. Who’d have predicted that, back in 2018? Hell, who’d have thought it possible in 2020?
Are you being facetious, here? Lots of people have been expecting it for about 15+ years, and trying to figure out why the fuck it WASN’T happening, with the federal yearly deficit, and the associated federal and nonfederal deficits as high as they are (including consumer credit).
My own, personal notion is that we’ve been massively underestimating the actual GNP by vastly undervaluing IP during most of the last 20 years.
But the government finally found the point where their actual spending was greater than the USA’s actual wealth production.
Another argument was the fact that so many other nations continued to dump their own value into US currency as the “Reserve Currency” and that THAT countered the increase in paper dollars out there. At this point, either the government managed to find the tipping point, OR China/Russia’s efforts to make the US Dollar no longer the reserve currency are bearing fruit.
The correct answer is probably an admixture of all three.
Let’s leave out the “no visible means of support” nature of the recent American economy, and just leave it at “average person’s expectations” based on immediate observable precedent.
None of the Biden voters I know were expecting the fuel price increases or the rest of the inflationary crap that’s going on. For the majority, that whole thing was a Black Swan, even though they were warned by people like me that there’s gonna have to be a reckoning for all that spending.
Which I’ve been saying for years and years; frankly, I don’t understand how we went from the “ohmygawdwe’redoomed” mentality that was prevalent when the debt went over the first trillion dollars back during Reagan’s term to what we’ve got now, where nobody pays attention to it at all. The utter fiscal insanity of it all still floors me, and I’ve no idea at all what they think they’re doing at the Fed or the Whitehouse.
If it were me sitting in either place, there’d be 24/7 crisis meetings going on and we’d be looking at selling the national park system to pay down the debt. But, then, I’m not a politician…
}}} China is doubling in economic size about every 8 years, and looks to be able to continue that.
Pengoparrot bloviates his clueless ignorance again!!
Yup. The fact that a huge chunk of the Sinoeconomic grown ties to building empty-shell, Potemkin cities is something he almost certainly has no grasp of… And liquidating that and screwing over the worker bees who have been trying to retire with some semblance of wealth is “Huh?” territory. The social collapse when that happens will not be pretty.
There will be a future time when historians and others will look back and ask “How the fuck did no one see the problems with this?”
It’ll be just like everything else… They’ll forget all the people like us who were looking on in abject horror at the ill-judged actions of their “betters”, and buy the bullshit line those people will be selling about how they were overtaken by Black Swan events that “…nobody could have foreseen…”.
It’s just like 9/11: We in the security business were warning everybody about the Clinton-era disconnect between domestic intelligence and the guys on the ground who were doing the criminal investigations. We warned about the issues; we were ignored. I was hearing predictions of disaster coming as early as around 1994, given what was going on. Where’d any of that go? It’s all forgotten, now–And, the bastards have the balls to claim that they had nothing to do with it, at all.
I still want to know what the hell Sandy Berger was smuggling out in his panties and garters. It had to be spectacularly incriminating. As well, how stupid were the Republicans to allow the primary architect of all the security issues, Jamie Gorelick, to wind up on the 9/11 Commission?
I’m coming around to believe they were all complicit.
}}} Declining birth rates are symptomatic of a civilization in crisis–The participants in said civilization no longer have the confidence or faith in the future of said civilization to gamble on raising kids within it.
Dude, there’s so much unjustified presumption in that argument it’s not even funny.
The reason why people are having fewer kids is multifold, but three obvious reasons are because
1 — Kids are more of a liability now than they were then. They were a source of cheap labor as soon as they were 4-6. NOW they’re mostly a burden until they are 18 or even more, if the parent puts up with it.
2 — You no longer need to have 5 kids in the hope that 2 of them survive to replace you.
3 — Easily just as critical, we now have other things to do at night than fuck.
Not saying your assertion is incorrect, merely that it’s not even close to justified as a claim on the basis of just tossing it out there. You need to argue a LOT more seriously to justify it.
}}} dewey was like the ibogaine that inigo montoya consumed in small doses,
Iocaine powder, and it was Wesley/Dread Pirate Roberts, not Inigo.
…But we get your point. :-D
;-)
}}} As the purpose of the CCP is very different than any you are used to, you don’t understand what’s going on. Just reading what they have said they are going to do should be enlightening … or not
Pencil, it’s you who does not understand. We aren’t talking about “what they have said they are going to do”, because we’re already looking at what their capacity TO DO is. And it’s far far less than what they say they want to do, even IF the world doesn’t give them any pushback, which is literally inevitable.
FFS, You can bet Putin isn’t going to just stand by and watch as they take over the world. I don’t know Putin, though I suspect he’s best thought of as a reformed mob boss, with notions of going straight now that he’s Made It, but still with thuggish tendencies (i.e., he’s not like Saddam or his sons, all of them utterly out of control — Putin is far more of a “dire fox” than a rabid jackal) Putin understands the limits of political and personal power. My own guess would be he aims to create a defacto new Czarist power for his family.
}}} frankly, I don’t understand how we went from the “ohmygawdwe’redoomed” mentality that was prevalent when the debt went over the first trillion dollars back during Reagan’s term to what we’ve got now, where nobody pays attention to it at all.
1 — yes, lots of idiots didn’t expect it. They were obvious idiots, and anyone with a brain was wondering why the fuck it kept not happening. Whoever figures out an economic argument for what happened that meets the needed rigor is going to get a Nobel Prize that is actually worth something.
2 — As to how we got to “where nobody pays attention at all”, that’s what happens when you cry “!!WOLF!!” for 30-35 years. Even now it’s mentally decoupled, so no one is going to believe it’s relevant until something goes unavoidably tits up and clears out the debt.
}}} As well, how stupid were the Republicans to allow the primary architect of all the security issues, Jamie Gorelick, to wind up on the 9/11 Commission?
I’m coming around to believe they were all complicit.
Well, you can make a similar comment about those who were in orbit around the JFK assassination.
It *IS* decidedly interesting that Johnson became PotUS, Ford became PotUS, Bush I became Veep, THEN PotUS.
If there WAS a plot, those three would have been in the absolute middle of it and any coverup.
Not an accusation or even an assertion. Just a very interesting “Thing that makes you go, ‘Hmmmm…'”
Well the fact the 28 pages were not included even as an annex to the 9/11 commission report raises questions this network of diplomat financiers and other players thaf supported the hijackers i think because the saudis had used some of these footsoldiers in bosnia chechnya et al hence their easy access to diplomatic credentials
A vor who wants to be a czar technically putin is a oprichnik a term.i learned from the late william.butterworth, a secret policemen from the era of the ivans
Putin faces a problem even the czars were finite catherine was around for about 30 years because she started young so who gets the dedazo who is anointed to succeed him
OhBloodyHell said:
“Dude, there’s so much unjustified presumption in that argument it’s not even funny.”
Hell, go do a search on the term “reasons not to have kids”, and then discuss things with someone who’s declared themselves “childfree”, sometime. If you leave that with the opinion that one of the primary drivers of the lower birth rate isn’t the endless caterwauling and crying about how dystopic things are, I’ll be amazed. The Malthusian propaganda has been drummed into the kids these days so thoroughly that you can’t get through their blinders or their brainwashing at all. By the time most of them wake up and suss out that they’ve been had, they will mostly have aged out of their reproductive years.
Then, there’s the whole problem of “How will they afford it…?” for the responsible ones, and the fact that across a lot of the West, they simply can’t get the necessary financing or employment going to really form families.
The whole thing is a mess, and some of these societies are stunningly dysfunctional when it comes to a lot of things. I’ve got an Italian acquaintance, and if you sit down to talk to him about the reasons why he left Italy…? Yeah; you suddenly understand why the fertility rate over there is what it is. He’s in his early thirties; out of the twenty or so males of his generation in his village, none of the ones who stayed at home have full-time employment or have started families. The only ones who’ve got anything going at all are the ones who are expats in the US, Canada, or Australia. The rest are droning along on alcohol or drugs, and will probably die bachelors. The women aren’t much better off, from his generation–And, even more of them have left Italy. I think he told me that out of something like 27 or so boys in his class, 6 were expats around the world, and the rest just stuck in neutral for life. Similar number of girls, like 15 have left and won’t be back. The village, which dates back to before the Romans, is dead or dying. Two-thirds of the houses and other buildings are abandoned.
I think that’s a fairly significant sign of a civilization in decline, when you get down to it.
I’m coming around to believe they were all complicit.
At this point I’m sure of it- and as someone who used to be enraged that Gorelick was on the commission I now simply assume she was put on it deliberately to prevent anything actually damaging to the regime from coming out.
In fact, my opinion of the Deep State is so low now I half suspect they deliberately allowed the attack to happen, perhaps simply not realizing that the towers were only rated to withstand impacts by planes such as the 707 and not those that actually would hit them.
I hope I’m wrong, of course. But that sure would explain how they churned out the so-called Patriot Act so fast and why I heard there so much document shredding going on at the FBI/CIA, after the attacks.
It *IS* decidedly interesting that Johnson became PotUS, Ford became PotUS, Bush I became Veep, THEN PotUS.
It sure is interesting, isn’t it? If they were involved in a conspiracy, then they effectively got away with it.
I remember reading a lot of conspiracy books about the Kennedy assassination when I was younger, before I concluded that Oswald was the lone killer, based on Gerold Posner’s book.
Then events happened. It turned out the FBI has essentially become a sort of keystone cop gestapo for the demonrat party, with no sort of restraint against entrapment or murder, if it could serve the interests of the Deep State.
For example, an FBI agent reportedly drove a terrorist to the site of a draw Mohammed contest in Texas. Unfortunately for the shooter, the Texans were armed and shot back, stopping a massacre. But the agent was caught driving away by local police, then was released because he was a FBI agent. The FBI was also heavily involved in a supposed plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan by the 2020 election. Then it turned out that 8 of the 12 supposed conspirators were associates of the FBI. The last thing I heard about this case was that the “conspirators” released statements saying that they were totally conspiring and were not not entrapped at all, I think as part of a plea deal. Somehow I’m dubious.
That brings me to the January 6th event, which was worse than 9/11 and the first civil war combined, according to people terrified that Trump would have taken away their grifting gravy train if he’d had a second consecutive term. Anyway, the FBI was completely unable to answer the simple yes or no question about whether or not they had agents involved in the event, or explain about Ray Epps, when questioned in Congress.
Let me sum this up- the Deep State has gone from potentially being able to get away with murdering a president, to being unable to successfully stage-manage a protest.
That isn’t a good sign for the Deep State and their demonrat friends.
“The last thing I heard about this case was that the “conspirators” released statements saying that they were totally conspiring and were not not entrapped at all”
I think that was just 1 person, not the whole group. That whole thing was a transparent farce from the start.
I have to say that the Las Vegas shooting was probably the thing that took my faith in the FBI from very low to completely non-existent. “We’ll never know what made him do it, it’s a total mystery, oh well, let’s just move on.” And of course the Russiagate nonsense. Not a single resignation or whistleblower from anywhere in the system. The FBI and CIA need to be ripped to pieces, they are clearly completely unsalvageable, malignant entities.
ObloodyHell — Yes, we get that you are enraged by what is going on. You are not alone in that! But most of us manage not to let that anger spill out into foul language which degrades the environment here on Chicagoboyz.
This site has generally been an oasis of respectfulness in a deteriorating world. Please, try to engage “expletive deleted” mode.
I think that was just 1 person, not the whole group.
Since I also agree that it was a transparent farce from the start, I didn’t bother to read the story attached to the headline. Hence I’ll grant you that it was only one of the entrapment victims involved. I think you’ll agree that it doesn’t change anything.
I have to say that the Las Vegas shooting was probably the thing that took my faith in the FBI from very low to completely non-existent.
I have an anecdote about that event that is only an anecdote about an anecdote, but it does suggest why the FBI is still asserting head-scratching confusion about what actually happened. You have no reason to take it seriously, I admit.
When that event happened, I was reading a blog by someone who I believe was a well-known libertarian blogger and gun-rights advocate. That blog has since disappeared from the internet.
Anyway, in a response to someone in a comment thread, the blogger happened to mention that he or she had a contact or contacts in the Las Vegas police department. I found this completely plausible because I knew the blogger was- again- well-known enough to potentially have that sort of contact.
The blogger wrote that his contact told (insert favorite pronoun for this un-named blogger here) that the shooter was a full-on never-Trumper who wanted to kill as many Trump supporters as possible. The hotel room was supposedly full of anti-Trump paraphernalia, and it was stated that when the investigation was complete, all this detail would come out.
It obviously never did. Perhaps that might be one reason why that blog is no longer on the internet.
Remember that either AQ or ISIS claimed he was one of theirs almost immediately. All of the “experts” said this was no big deal, and that they always do that. Never mind that they couldn’t show a single example of that being true in a similar case. Also remember that he apparently had a video camera set up to record himself doing the shooting. Almost like he was recording a statement to share with the world. Kind of like AQ/ISIS do, not like rando shooters do. The whole thing stunk from top to bottom.
Wanna know another head scratcher–the El Paso Walmart shooter. There’s a video of a very calm young woman from the immediate aftermath saying she (and/or her grandfather?) saw several people, dressed in black, doing the shooting. Sounds like Alex Jones territory, huh? But it was real, not some idiocy on the internet, and it was immediate, not days or weeks later. And that guy just disappeared into the system somewhere.
Let’s not even bring up the Nashville Christmas Day bombing.
It’s hard not to sound crazy in today’s world…
They are evacuating Lugansk and Donbass. All the old people, women and children. Shit is about to get real.
There are many moving parts in this drama, PenGun.
Some reports suggest the evacuation is only a few villages near the front lines which the Ukrainian kleptocrats have been shelling frequently — the same Ukrainian kleptocrats who have consistently refused to implement the Minsk Agreements to stop the violence which they signed. Maybe this is just prudence on the part of the Donbass?
On the other hand, maybe the leaders of the independence-seeking republics are trying to force Russia’s hand by evacuating some of their people to Russian soil?
Of course, there are Boris Johnson and Biden*’s handlers in the background, trying to gin up a distraction from their own rising unpopularity.
If we really want to go tinfoil hat time, maybe the Evil Canadian Clique under the mammy singer want the world to be looking to the Ukraine instead of focusing on their coup against democracy being implemented in Ottawa? Lots of Canadians have contacts in the Ukraine who might oblige.
The coup is being being defeated. The terrorists are being arrested and this could have been done so much better. I suspect you meant something else. ;)
If they are evacuating the Donbass then they have something in mind.
The rumors I’ve heard from various sources that were in a position to actually know things, going back decades? LOL… You’d throw up your hands in despair.
One of the EOD guys I worked with was at OKC the day of the bombing. Morning of, his entire detachment was alerted for civil support of law enforcement, and they were primed to go to a location well away from the Federal Building. They were actually sitting in their trucks when they heard the blast. When they got to the site, there were things about the blast site that were totally at odds with the “official story”, like extensive spalling on surrounding buildings stone facades–Spalling that those who’ve worked with relatively low-order blasting agents like ANFO do not usually see, due to the blast wave not having enough brisance. His supposition was that the bomb was a hell of a lot more sophisticated than a couple of amateurs should have been able to produce in some clearing out in the woods, and that they likely had technical help from someone who knew what they were doing–He’d been familiarized on the things that the IRA and Hezbollah were doing to “enhance” truck bombs, with East German aid, and it was his belief that the bomb effects and debris at OKC looked very much like what he’d been taught to look for.
I can tell you from personal experience and training that I’d have a hell of a time myself, doing what McVeigh supposedly did. And, he apparently got it right on the first try, which is suspicious in and of itself. Building things like that truck bomb ain’t as easy as they’re made out to be, and the fact that they basically got their first iteration so “right” and without extensive practice, testing, and training? I’d find it credible if McVeigh had been an SF Engineer or maybe EOD in the Army, but he was an 11M, a Bradley crewman. I spent my career working with explosives, did a lot of stuff with improvised blasting agents, and I’m pretty sure it’d take me more than one or two test shots to get the results that McVeigh got right off the bat. I still have questions about that whole thing, because it just doesn’t pass my smell test.
Let’s not even get into the questions of secondary blasts, which were ignored. Some of the stuff that EOD was cleaning up that day could only have come out of BATF evidence lockers in the Murragh building, and there’d been a recent bust where a lot of military-grade munitions were confiscated. Per what is known, the BATF did not have off-site storage facilities in OKC–Those likely would have been within the knowledge of the EOD detachment at Tinker AFB, and those guys knew nothing of anything being turned over to them.
It ain’t accidental that Army EOD was shuffled off the site very early on, either.
So, yeah… The rot goes way, way back. You don’t even need to have “inside knowledge” to know that, either–You can tell strictly from a read of what’s open-source material, and a lot of the actual court filings. The stuff that came out at McVeigh’s show trial revealed that there were things about that bomb which did not make a bit of sense, for the reported backgrounds of the participants–It was not, per the trial transcript, the simple ANFO device they’d told the public about for years. The sophistication of it, and the devastating effect points to one of two possibilities–Either McVeigh had knowledgeable technical help building it, or he’s the luckiest mad bomber in the history of mad bombing.
Like I said… I worked with that stuff for years. I’ve had training, I’ve done the reading, I’ve done the practical exercises with those same materials. I don’t think I could replicate what McVeigh got right on his first attempt without extensive experimentation and validation of my formulary and mixing of the agents reportedly used. Something about that whole deal still stinks to high heaven.
There’s days when it’s probably worthwhile to give commie canadian trolls a platform here, and there’s days when it’s really, really not. Today is one of the latter. One suspects that there will be many many more such days to come…
In the long run we still win though…
luhansk and donetsk is separatists territory, ignorance of geography and recent history is endemic
https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2022/02/putin-shows-our-media-and-deep-state.html?spref=fb&fbclid=IwAR2YtNjbHdrTg0zh9QW0GwoHu4Z8Dzo3aP5wGTVNuMioAQqGnmXistki4_k
“In the long run we still win though…”
What do you win? Bouncy houses? ;)
What I recall from my reading of dissident media way back in the 1990s was that the OKC bombers had help from the Iraqi regime in power at the time. Supposedly there was an extra leg found at the site, which was never explained by the regime, and which I suppose may or may not be related to any foreign assistance. As an added bonus, many years later, the buyer of a house used by McVeigh et al found an assortment of explosive-related items in the attic, which the FBI somehow hadn’t managed to discover. In their defense, I don’t like to go into my attic either, because it’s hard to get to and I also don’t think anything is up there anyway.
Brian, I think I may have heard of that Walmart shooting, maybe. But I’ve stopped paying attention to these sort of events because it’s amazing how often the shooter turns out to be someone who should have been stopped by existing laws and/or was well known by local law enforcement to be a threat. Somehow, those existing laws get ignored, and/or nothing gets done about an incipient mass shooting.
I suppose this could be nothing more than a manifestation of the swiss-cheese model of accidents, in that for any mass shooting to take, there will necessarily have been mistakes made along the way.
But at this point, I doubt that very much. The regime plainly wants to disarm the American people, and is plainly attempting the same sort of scenario used to disarm the people of Australia. That is, a bad thing happens, and everyone must turn in their guns.
If that was going to work in the US, it would worked have long ago. But since the regime is incompetent, it keeps doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result.
Hence it allows massacres over and over again, thinking somehow they’ll get a different political result the next time.
Thumbs down on all that, not that the regime will care.
indeed, alex jones wasn’t being creative enough the parkland shooter was enabled from the schoolboard to the doj, the pulse one whose father was a bureau asset worked as a security guard, for a well connected security contractor G4 whose management included a high ranking MI 6 operator, las vegas is a blackhole of dead ends,