Peter Zeihan is back with another provocative video (filmed at the Eisenhower Naval School) that suggests that China faces such massive problems that collapse may be imminent. “I see China with not just a demographic failure, but a failure of leadership, a failure of policy, an agricultural failure, and an energy failure, all at the same time. It is
entirely possible that this is the last year of the People’s Republic.”
Some of this (especially the demographic collapse) we’ve covered here before. Takeaways:
The Chinese plan has always been to let the Russians go first, just as a proof of concept. So their thinking was a fast war that conquers Taiwan in a matter of days, that imposes a done deal upon the world, and everyone just sucks it up and takes it, because China is too economically powerful to be challenged. And once you hold the territory, there’s no point in going to a broad scale war against the Chinese when it’s already happened. That’s always been their plan.
Oh my.
With the Russians, they have had every aspect of all of their planning for the last 40 years set on fire and burned to ash in less than a month. So number one it will not be a quick war, because Ukraine was one of the world’s less militarily competent countries in the first place…
I think this statement may have been true in 2014, but I don’t think it was true by the time Russia invaded. Ukraine professionalized and modernized their military with considerable help and guidance from western militaries, and developed a competent officer and NCO core (partially thanks to experience with the low-intensity conflict in Donbas).
…and they’re still holding out against the Russians. Taiwan has been preparing for this war since 1955. Taiwan has a moat. Taiwan has a nuclear program that started in 1974, so if we have a two-month accumulation of Chinese forces getting ready to push, the Taiwanese will see it because this is the only national security question that they pay any attention to, and they will make a nuclear device. And so the only way that the Chinese can even make an attempt on Taiwan is to text all of their soldiers at the same time and just say everyone get to the coast take a fishing boat with your buddies and start moving on Taiwan. They know it is going to cost them a million troops just to get there.
I find this scenario unlikely, and even less likely to succeed.
Russia has many flaws, but they’re a massive producer of food and energy products. If you put the sanctions that we have put against Russia onto China, oh my. China imports 85% of their energy, 85% of that from the Persian Gulf, and they import 85% of inputs that are necessary to grow their food. So you would have an industrial collapse, a civilizational breakdown, and mass famine within six months, and then you would probably lose a half a billion Chinese over the course of the next year to famine.
Again, I think this is overstated, as there would be enough countries willing to break sanctions, and enough radical actions China could take (conquer Mongolia and parts of Siberia for farming, throw off all Pacific fishing limits, etc.) to avoid the worst case famine scenario. Not that they wouldn’t be in a world of hurt…
The one that has scared the Chinese the most are the boycotts. BP and Halliburton didn’t have to leave, they weren’t doing anything that was sanctioned, but the super majors and the oil services firms and countless other firms left on a moral imperative prompted by individual shareholders and consumers. And in China, the idea that the average Joe or Jane can influence policy is so antithetical to their mindset that they had no idea this was even possible, much less it was going to happen. So everything that the Chinese have based their system and their strategic policy on for the last 30 years has been proven in the last two months to be utterly wrong.”
My judgement of Zeihan’s analysis is that he’s more right than wrong, but has a tendency to overstate his case. Still, a worldwide inflationary spiral and energy shortage is the sort of thing that’s likely to destabilize a lot of governments worldwide, and China’s economy is built on more smoke and mirrors than most.
Tags: China, Demograhics, Economics, Mexico, Peter Zeihan, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Taiwan, video
Good analysis. Only complication is Biden’s uncommon ability . . .
Here’s my take on it all… The elites are idiots, everywhere. Here, there, all around the world. Political systems which are reliant upon the elites making decisions and then managing everything down to the finest detail? Doomed to failure, because these technocratic wannabe godlets do not have the godlike omniscience or omnipotence they would need to actually be effective.
The technocrats can do a lot of damage to society. The difference is, they can be routed around in most Western countries, and they are. In Russia, China, and India? They’re ensconced in positions that they deem unassailable, and because of that, they try things that simply wouldn’t occur to anyone with any real sense.
The way I see it, there are two main schools of thought out there in the world; one says “control it all”, and the other says “don’t try to control chaos”. Which one works better, over the long haul? Note which economies collapsed in the late 1980s, and which did not. The inherent reality-denial in the Soviet system led to that system collapsing; you cannot account for every variable in every part of the economic system sitting in some institute centralized in Moscow. The central conceit of the Soviet system was based on control, control of everything from economic decisions to military/political ones. You can gain a lot of traction with control, but it has to be nuanced; you can’t possibly control it all, or play God. You have to limit your ambitions; control in terms of running a fast-food empire? Possible; you can go a long way as a Ray Kroc. Trying to micro-manage a major industrial economy? LOL… Every time that’s been tried, the result has been ugly. Look at how screwed up MITI was, in terms of running the Japanese economy and industrial operations. They tried stopping Honda from getting into cars; they tried mandating “world dominance in super-computers”. When was the last time you bought a Japanese computer, again…?
The problem with all these idiots is that they think that because they can achieve limited success within limited fields, then that means they can do the same thing, scaled up across an entire economy. The whole thing is a joke, a laughter-riddled meeting with cold, hard reality.
It cracks me up that anyone even still tries this BS, when the track record is out there–Sure, Stalin had some early successes with his glorious “Five-Year Plans”, but how’d that work out, over the long haul? Like as not, Russia was going to industrialize, anyway–All he managed was to distort it, and build those distortions in such that they couldn’t adapt and change with shifting technologies and markets when the time came. Russia is still as dependent today on external industrial inputs as it was back then; why is that? Because, they didn’t truly build a system, they adopted pieces of one from outside, without the necessary social mechanisms to keep it running. It’s like they were stone-age tribesmen seeing bronze tools for the first time, and trying to get the technology going for themselves, all the while ignoring the rest of the social innovations that were necessary to really support a bronze-age technology. Sure, you could have limited success, but without going into the whole “establish cities and agriculture” deal, you were screwed.
The distributed nature of a modern economy cannot be “managed”, not in its entirety. You try doing that, it’s going to crash. Watch China; it will happen, if not in the near-term future, but certainly in the medium-term. They’ve been mis-allocating resources like madmen, or all those empty cities would have never been built. That’s going to rebound on them, inevitably. All that concrete they’ve poured, all that steel? I will lay you long odds that those are going to be seen in later years as the high-water mark for China; after this, it’ll be up to the analysis of the archaeologists to determine where it all went wrong.
It’s kinda like the whole “Potlatch” or “Cargo Cult” culture that various primitives have adopted; ape the forms, expect the results, never realizing that there’s more to it all than just the externals going on. China never really embraced anything other than despotic tyranny; it’s all been expedient acts by the powerful, who’ve been making all the decisions. There’s no alternative to the CCP; they’ve killed any competitors in the space of “running China”, and because of that, when the CCP inevitably becomes “the god that failed”, there will be nobody there to take their place. Which means national chaos and regional power structures will wind up taking over, yet again. That’s the issue with China’s dynastic cycles; and, if you think the CCP isn’t a dynasty, you’re fooling yourself.
Demography is destiny. China is toast. Japan is toast. Italy and Spain are day old toast. Brazil. Russia, others. And it’s going to happen sooner rather than later. We live in interesting times
The Soviet Union lasted about 73 years. Communist China was formed in 1949, so it’s 73 years old. Hmmmm….
IMO, the original USSR leadership all knew that it was all a dodge, that none of them were really cared about “the workers of the world”, it was just an excuse to justify their absolute power, and it was only to be maintained by a brutal police state. But then came Gorbachev and others who had grown up within the USSR and were true believers. They pulled the secret police back, and the whole thing collapsed in an instant. Much credit is also due to Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and other brave cold warriors.
In a similar fashion, Xi and his counterparts all grew up under the CCP.
@Kirk,
Agree. What’s more, is so many in the West, like the U.S. Democratic Party, look upon the Chinese model with envy and want to apply the same failed methods to climate change
@PBAR,
The real issue with “climate change” is that it’s a non-existent problem, really. We’ve been coming out of an ice age for millennia, now–The transient moments of warmth are to be treasured. The thing that cracks me up about it all is how easily gulled most people are; they hear all the tragic stories of receding glaciers revealing medieval mines in the Alps, and all they focus on is the sleight-of-hand trick the writers pull, focusing on the receding glacier. Nobody stops to examine the inherent flaw in the premise, namely that there were medieval mines to be covered by the glaciers in the first damn place…
The histories are full of this crap. When the Vikings found Greenland, it was indeed a green land; they were able to establish full-scale Scandinavian agriculture on that land, complete with grazing and cereal crops. We’re still not doing that today, so that would tend to argue that the cold interregnum between then and now was what was either the anomaly or that the climate is cyclic in nature. Either way, the idea that there is such a thing as anthropogenic global warming is a bit of a crock; yes, we influence the climate, but the key word there is “influence”. The Mongols killed off enough people to change the world climate for a few centuries; so did the die-off precipitated by the diseases brought by Europeans here in the Americas. It’s all part of the constant shift in the planet’s multitude of ecosystems, and there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it. The world has been warmer for longer, and colder for longer; all we should worry about is adapting to it, and keeping it all copacetic. I really doubt that carbon dioxide is the horrid thing they claim it is; if anything, it enhances plant growth, which is better for people anyway. The warm times are always the good ones; most temperature drops result in massive human die-offs, one way or another. The end of the Roman Warm Period didn’t happen to “coincide” with the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, it contributed heavily to it. Most of those invading “barbarians” were being driven off the Eurasian steppe by bad weather, in the first place.
I remain unconvinced as to the validity of this whole AGW scam; yes, the climate is changing, but it is always changing. Warming is for the better; cold sucks.
I also remember the 1970s, when a lot of the current warministas were decrying the same things, like industrialization, blaming them for the coming Ice Age. Which is it? Ice, or fire?
The models suck, because you can’t show any actual regression tests that demonstrate the slightest fidelity to recorded historical climate/weather records. Nobody ever asks about those, just like they never ask about the “hidden things” coming out from under the glaciers, like those forests in Alaska. Non-fossilized forests, I might add… Which indicate that while the world is indeed warming, it had to have been equally warm or warmer in the past, for there to have been forests there in the first place in order for them to be entombed under ice…
None of the various claims and proclamations of the warmists make the slightest bit of sense, when you start comparing notes outside the bubble they’ve created. It’s as much a phenomenon of mass psychosis as it is anything else, a delusion going about clad in scientific raiment.
If the collapse of the CCP happens soon (and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving coven of tyrants), what would be the collateral damage? I’d be anxious about how Chinese leaders might lash out against their enemies— foreign and domestic— as control slips from their hands.
All of this information just reiterates my thought that our military should be spending a LOT more on missile defense across the board–from Iron Dome tactical to anti-ICBM defense.
We got lucky that the Russian commies didn’t do something crazy when their regime died… can we be lucky twice?
Our military is essentially incompetent, in a lot of very fundamental ways. I say that as someone who spent the majority of my adult life in behind the flag.
The thing you have to recognize is that it isn’t the “best army” that wins wars; there are no such things. It is, instead, the “least bad army” that wins. In WWII, the Germans were victors in the 1940 Battle of France, but that wasn’t necessarily an indicator that they were veritable Gods of War. They took their victory as indicating that, but the reality is that they merely managed to parlay their short-term advantages which mostly accrued from being better at learning than the French and British; had they followed their original plans, doctrine, and training from before the invasion of Poland, and not implemented what they learned from their mistakes there? 1940 France would have likely looked a lot more like 1914 France than it did the one of our history. Also, don’t forget that one of the key points that led to success in our 1940 was that the Germans lost their plans to the Belgians, and then had to improvise something else almost on the fly… Coupled with a lot of meth, that kept the troops going for a lot longer than they’d been able to keep going during the WWI Battle of the Marne, well… France was doomed.
It was not, in short, German military superiority that won them the initial campaigns in WWII. It was their ability to learn, and then implement fixes after identifying problems with clear eyes. That got them to the opening stages of Barbarossa, but then the sheer mass of the Soviet war machine and territory stopped them dead in their tracks. They still managed to inflict a lot more damage than they should have been able to, and it took the Allies far too long to identify and fix their own damn problems. Had the Germans of 1940 tackled the British, French, and American armies of 1944? Things would have gone far differently.
Today’s US military is an ossified mess. Parts of it are very adaptable and forward-looking, but the problem is that those parts are not the ones running things. Just like with the IED campaign in 2003, there were voices out there in the forces that were saying we needed to prepare as far back as the early 1990s. They weren’t listened to until it was too damn late, and we had to pull armored route clearance out of our asses under crisis conditions. Same with a lot of rear-area battle issues, which are still not being addressed or fixed. What happened to the 507th Maintenance Company was the outgrowth of budget triage measures first taken back in the post-Vietnam reforms era, when it was decided that a lot of the corps-level support units didn’t need to have the elaborate combat training preparation we gave line units. This led to a situation where some geniuses decided that a Patriot repair unit needed to be on the front lines with a line division, while never once having had the benefit of training preparation for working in a real combat environment. Those poor bastards didn’t know what they didn’t know, and it’s a miracle that worse things didn’t happen to them. And, having set that commander up for failure, the system held him directly responsible for the entire mess. The reality was that the responsible parties were the idiots who decided that a.) units like his didn’t need to be prepared to operate inside a division tactical space as though they were divisional units, and that b.) the divisions never needed to have those units included during routine training so that they’d know how badly prepared they were for combat. 3rd ID literally had no clue what the state of training and combat preparation was in the 507th; they did not grasp the fact that that unit had precisely zero idea of how to conduct itself as a part of the divisional trains, due to the fact that they’d never, ever done that. The 507th Maintenance Company routinely did its “field exercises” by setting up their maintenance activities in the motor pool for a week or two, and then working out of their tents and shelters there. They never went to the field, never saw the National Training Center, and really had no business being forward-deployed with a division. Which nobody really grasped in any way, shape, or form until they wandered away from their convoy route and got themselves shot to shit in Iraq. Where they really had no business being, TBH.
We raised these sorts of issues back when I was an Observer/Controller at the National Training Center, but as they said then, there simply wasn’t the money, and if we brought in the “slice” support elements, then that would detract from training the line units.
So… Yeah. Expect the military to be entirely unprepared for what does happen, and over-prepared for what they think will happen, which will likely be at least 180 degrees off from what reality presents us with. Don’t forget–Most of the Army Air Corps fighters and other aircraft in the Philippines and Hawaii were parked wingtip-to-wingtip, when the Japanese attacked. Out of fear of sabotage…
@Kirk
Photosynthesis: Plants/Plankton turning Sunlight/CO2/H2O into Food/O2; neither animal nor blade of grass would exist, absent CO2. More CO2 helps plants resist drought/damage/disease, extends growing seasons, lets plants move higher in altitude & Latitudes, shrinks deserts & reduces the spread of fire, plants using & retaining H2O more efficiently. As CO2 rises, photosynthesis flourishes & plants take in more CO2, sparking more growth, photosynthesis & CO2 uptake. Rising temperatures also extend growing seasons, help babies survive, increase net rainfall & save lives.
This Cradle of Life is greener, more fertile & life sustaining than it was 200 years ago. Because adding food to the base of the food-chain helps all of Nature.
@Icepilot,
Absolutely. Yet, go look for any of that in the warminista propaganda; there’s not a single line in any of their models that decry carbon dioxide wherein they account for greater plant growth with more carbon dioxide, or how that will impact the models.
Their other great fallacy is this: Who the hell says that the current climate is the optimum that we should expend trillions to maintain? There have been other climatic regimes that we’ve experienced, like the medieval optimum, the Roman optimum, and all the rest. The hint is there in the name: Optimum. Life was better during those periods than during the cold times. The ones we’re just coming out of… Go look at the historical records for those years where we had the Thames freezing over routinely. Life was cold, nasty, brutish, and most of all, short.
You ask me, global warming is a good thing.
Point one: I worry that Zeihan is optimistic about the availability of cheap energy in the US; various ‘green’ initiatives lead to worries about a quarter of US states likely to have rolling black outs from insufficient generation this summer. Which means factories will need to build their own generation, which means expensive electricity and a lowering of US competitive advantage. Maybe Zeihan included power plant production in his US industry growth forecast.
Point two: Russia was industrializing even before WWI; one of the reasons Germany wanted the war when it did was because they believed the industrializing Russian economy would make them too strong to fight in a decade or two.
@Booban,
I don’t know quite how to take Zeihan. He comes off as another one of those new-agey charlatans telling the rubes what they want to hear, but his numbers match a lot of what I’m reading out there. Conclusions he reaches, based on those numbers…? I’m pretty sure that reality is going to prove to be different.
My own opinion about all this crap is that either we’re reaching peak stupid/incompetency in our elites, or they know something we don’t, like that the Sweet Meteor of Doom is on its way and they’ll never have to worry about the blow-out when it finally comes.
I mean, look around you: The idiot class is doing things like what Jay Inslee is doing in Washington State–Signing legislation that will outlaw the sale of hydrocarbon-powered cars and trucks in 2030. Eight years away, and there is no sign of them investing in the upgrades to the generating capacity we’ll need to support that, or the improvements to the grid. My read is that they’ll have to basically upgrade every single electrical circuit in the state to support that madness, and they haven’t even begun to work out the ramifications. Where’s the money going to come from, to pay for it all? Where’s the copper coming from, to build the grid out?
Just on the logistics of it all alone, the whole thing just ain’t going to happen. They need to either develop paradigm-shattering generation and transmission capacity in the next eight years, or the whole thing is going to collapse under the weight of the economic and technical contradictions.
And, the funniest thing about it all? They don’t seem to grasp this. Inslee has no idea that he’s basically mandating that Washington State is going to use about (ballpark guess, here…) forty to sixty percent of national copper production over the next eight years, in order to build out the grid to be able to support this BS. This is what happens when you put the dimwits that skipped math and science classes into positions of authority–Every single guy I know who works in the electrical generation industry (and, we’ve got scads of them, thanks to the Columbia River dam system we live right next to…) just laughs and laughs and laughs, when you ask how that whole thing is gonna work. Bottom line…? It. Will. Not. Work.
They’re gonna have to rescind that legislation at some point, because if they enforce it? We’re all gonna be screwed. The bare-bones technical requirements would cost billions upon billions of dollars, which they have not accounted for anywhere in the budget. Who the hell is going to pay for building these plants, extracting that copper, building out the grid…?
Most of the idiots we’ve put into power shouldn’t be entrusted with anything more complex than managing a lemonade stand. And, you will note, there ain’t anyone in the news media that grasps that point, or who is calling them out on this crap. They all just nod their heads, and go along with it, thinking it can’t possibly go wrong…
“We probably need to double the size of our industrial plant in the next 5-10 years. That’ll be awkward, expensive, inflationary, but on the other side of it, we will have a far more insulated and secure supply chain system. The problem is just getting from here to there, and that is not a straight line.”
I would think that building a lot of productive industrial plant would be the opposite of “inflationary”, no?
Inflation == “more money chasing fewer goods”. The increased plant yields more goods, rather than fewer, no?
85%^2 = 72%
A US Navy blockade shuts that off immediately, doesn’t matter who wants to cheat
Does Taiwan have a Navy? Any subs?
How many oil tankers do they have to sink, either with anti-ship missiles or torpedoes, before 90% of the tankers refuse to go to China?
China’s in a death fight to take Taiwan, and they’re going to keep enough troops to their north & west to go after Mongolia and Siberia?
What is India doing while China’s getting it’s troops tied down elsewhere?
Then there’s this:
https://justthenews.com/world/us-economy-may-outpace-chinas-year-first-time-nearly-50-years
The growth of the U.S. economy is set to outpace that of China’s for the first time in nearly five decades, a leap reportedly due to China’s ongoing severe lockdown in an attempt to contain the COVID-19 virus.
The U.S. economy is projected to grow 2.8% this year, while the People’s Republica of China is projected to grow nearly 30% slower, at just 2.0%.
The last time U.S. growth was ahead of China’s was its bicentennial year of 1976, when it grew by 5.39%.
@ Kirk
Re “mass psychosis”
The official framing of this “phenomenon” is misleading and wrong. The false hope-addicted psychologists and their acolytes want you to believe this is “just some temporary occasional” madness by the masses that has been going on since only about the 20th century when it is but a spike of a CHRONIC madness going on for aeons with “civilized” people — https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
One of these mainstream psychologists who have been spreading this whitewashed reality, Dr. Desmet, also fails to see that the Covid Psyop is a TOTALLY deliberate ploy because he doesn’t think it’s ALL intentionally sinister. This makes him witting or unwitting controlled opposition.
Worst of all, perhaps, the mass formation/mass psychosis notion frames the problem as the public being a mere unaccountable non-culpable victim in this phenomenon. Nothing could be further from the truth (see referenced source above)…
It ain’t “mass psychosis” when it’s actually mass gaslighting by incompetents.
People know they’re being lied to, but they’re just not too sure about what, exactly. The sources they were brought up to trust are gradually being revealed as utterly untrustworthy, while the people they have been conditioned to see as “experts” are simultaneously revealing themselves as complete idiots.
The issue we all face is that the world around us is not as we were led to believe. The situation at hand has more relationship to the state of things laid out in that old fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” than anything else in our experience. It’s going to take some adjusting before people can really bring themselves to believe that all of the institutions that they believe in and trust are essentially “Gods that Failed”. That recognition is creeping up on us all, and it’s increasingly undeniable. The self-proclaimed “expert” class is beclowning itself, and has been doing so since the turn of the century. What sort of idiot tries running LGBTQWTFBBQ classes and indoctrination in a country like Afghanistan, and thinks it a good idea? Who spends billions of dollars to deal with the homeless, and then is puzzled by the increase in their numbers…?
The only “mass formation psychosis” going on out there is that the so-called “elites” are discovering the hard way that they’ve no more idea about how the world really works than the average jellyfish has of astronomy. Average Joe sees the things he sees, they generally see right past the bullshit. It’s only the educated-yet-idiot class we’ve put in charge that is puzzled by it all. They think that they live in a world created by their diktat, their words of wisdom. Reality is they’re neither wise nor actually intelligent; the vaunted intelligence they pride themselves as possessing, validated by the almighty “test”, is actually a form of maladaptive autism which leaves them unable to recognize their own inadequacies and lack of that superpower, common sense.
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@Kirk
SMoD is on its way. Limits to Growth, 2040 … the smart analysis is, we’re right on track.
This video puts it in plain language, and it’s a channel that’s quite respectable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVOTPAxrrP4
This video … is a bit more sketchy, but it’s hard to argue with the points it raises.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMr0ew4cZd4
@Howard,
The problem with the “Limits to Growth” thesis is this: These assholes, from Malthus forward to Ehrlich, have always been wrong. The system is being crashed by the people running it, deliberately, because they believe and buy into the whole “scarcity” line of thinking. Note that China got scared into the “One Child” path because of idiots like Ehrlich, and now they’re deep into a demographic time bomb.
The Malthusians are dangerous, because of the mindset that they have. They’re like socialists, who see a finite pie that can only be divided so many ways; the reality is, you’re only limited by your human resources. You don’t have to live in poverty, but we often wind up that way because of the power-mad. Who lately have begun to listen to the idiots screaming about the end of the world in terms of resources and everything else.
The other thing you need to remember is the sheer corruption of a lot of these people; they’re after money, power, and control. If you believed the numbers published by the Chinese government of a few years ago, there were 100 million more Chinese than there actually are. 100 million… That’s not a rounding error, or anything other than basic corruption. You can’t trust the numbers any of these assholes publish, on anything–Because they’re incentivized to lie. Chinese government officials get more money from Beijing because they report a higher population than they actually have, so they lie. Hell, according to a friend of mine who spent significant time in China, the lies are so egregious and widespread that nobody really knows which end is up, anywhere in government. She was doing some research for marketing a product for a Chinese/American company in China, and needed to do some demographic calculations, basic stuff about who was out there. What she found was a morass of lies; one set of reports that were then open-source showed a definite decrease in births, due to the reports being from local governments back to the central one about the success of their “One Child” measures. Those numbers contradicted the numbers being reported elsewhere in government because the agencies being reported to controlled funding doled out by population, and nobody had ever compared the two. She found multiple examples of this, and thankfully got really good advice from a knowing Chinese acquaintance to quit looking and don’t ask any more questions. The data shortly thereafter got locked down, but the lesson stuck with her: Nothing in China or in Chinese data can really be trusted, because the people doing the reporting report only that which the people they’re reporting to want to hear. Ground truth? Who the hell knows?
I would not be a bit surprised to find out that most of the stats these idiot Malthusians have forecast everything on are basically false, for good and ill. Ehrlich did not see Borlaug coming, because he was an idiot who went out looking for what he wanted to see, and gathered data accordingly. Remember “Peak Oil”? Remember how the US was never going to gain energy independence, ever again?
Most of this crap we’re dealing with has been deliberate choice. The price of gas, these days? Thank the luminaries behind President Biden, because they’re actively making it happen. They want to “transition” the economy, but do you see any work being done to either increase generating capacity or upgrade the grid? Nope; that’s because they’re mostly innumerate morons who can’t do the math. There isn’t enough copper in the world economy to do all the things they want to, and generating enough electricity to do what they say they want to is going to require massive expenditure and growth in generation that can’t come from anywhere, because they’re also the same idiots who’re mandating “no fossil fuels” while denying construction permits for nuclear.
The whole thing is a scam; failure is an act of will. They’ve decided to immiserate the nation, and that’s precisely what they’re doing.
We’ll see how that works out, come November. My guess is that by 2024, a lot of these assholes are going to be dangling from nooses. The patience level out there is seriously dwindling, and if the political class ain’t terrified yet, wait until they recognize that the rules they’ve been transgressing can be transgressed just as well by the normies. You normalize political violence, you’d better be damn sure you’re in the majority. The reality is, the freaks aren’t, and they’re going to find that out the hard way.
I don’t put a lot of credence in the Limits to Growth crowd. They’re not all that bright, and they’re the same people who were decrying the destruction of Britain’s forests for the production of charcoal. You can find all sorts of panicked calculations and learned papers written back in the 1700s on the subject, predicting doom for England.
Then, they figured out coal.
That’s how all these things wind up working out. They were worried about the whale oil industry crashing, only for the development of kerosene and the petroleum industry, which itself was overtaken by electricity for lighting. People will find a way, and every time these morons have been listened to about “limits”, we’ve wound up screwing things up. If we hadn’t listened to all the jackasses about the “dangers of nuclear power”, we’d already be well on our way towards adapting around the “coming crisis”, which goes to prove my point about the jackasses being the real problem, not the conditions. It’s a matter of choice, and we’re choosing really badly.
@ Kirk
RE “It ain’t “mass psychosis” when it’s actually mass gaslighting by incompetents. People know they’re being lied to, but they’re just not too sure about what, exactly. The sources they were brought up to trust are gradually being revealed as utterly untrustworthy, while the people they have been conditioned to see as “experts” are simultaneously revealing themselves as complete idiots.”
You still don’t get it. Or probably do not WANT to get it. You falsely frame the issue as the public being a sole victim in the equation when mass psychosis or mass gaslighting ONLY can occur because of the general refusal of reality by most people and their lack of interest in truth.
It’s all laid out in the essay “Terra39” linked to in her/his comment.
By your display of not wanting to see the whole reality, your refusal of reality, YOU are exactly like nearly all people and which is the major reason why we are where we are now.
I don’t see Limits to Growth as concerned with overpopulation so much as resource depletion. I agree, if our leaders could only get their heads out of their politics, we’d have far more abundant energy thanks to fission.
Where Zeihan and the updated analysis of “Limits to Growth” seem to rhyme comes to depopulation. Demographics is destiny, and all over, the demographic picture looks like a serious mess.
I expect SCOTUS overturning Roe v Wade has zero to do with morality and everything to do with population decline.
Row vs. Wade was bad law, irrespective of your opinion on abortion, because it invented a right out of whole cloth found nowhere in the text of the Constitution.
I wholly agree. And it would be nice if SCOTUS overturns it simply for being bad law … but it’s also true, if SCOTUS used that m.o. then there would be several other decisions they would overturn …
Our system encourages bad rulings by the Supreme Court, and I think you can make an excellent case that the Court has taken on far more power than was ever actually intended by the Founders. It’s also set itself up to be answerable to no one, accountable only to themselves and their ideas of what is permissible. And, being merely human, that set of ideas is constantly “evolving”. When you look at what Roberts did with regards to Obamacare, it’s flatly insane the way he exceeded his authority.
Roe v. Wade wasn’t “bad law”, per se. It would be “bad law” were it something passed by the legislature; as a sole creation of the courts, it wasn’t just “bad”, it was entirely illegitimate.
I don’t think the Supreme Court had any business whatsoever doing what they did; abortion is not something you want decided that way, because in order to reduce conflict over the inherently controversial, it needs to have an agreed-upon consensus. Imposing things via judicial fiat does not build that consensus; it creates cause for dissension in its place.
No matter how you want to slice the salami, when you abort a viable fetus, you’re killing another potential human being. That’s a fact you can’t avoid, no matter how much you want to look away from it. And, until we have the ability to create an artificial womb to transplant these fetuses into, you’re stuck with the unfairness of the whole thing, wherein women who’ve had presumably consensual sex are saddled with carrying a new life to fruition. That’s just the nature of the thing, and we can’t get around that. Yes, it’s “unfair”, and yes, it’s an imposition, but once that heart starts beating and that nervous system is booting itself up into consciousness, you can’t treat that life with any less respect than you do anyone else’s–Or, you’ll inevitably demean and denigrate everyone else’s rights to life. You start aborting viable babies because “convenience”, and how far off are you from lethally injecting granny because you want her estate a little earlier than nature intended?
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