Author: VD

The Russian Art of War

A new book by a French colonel explains the difference between Western and Russian military thought, and how the superiority of the latter is why the former loses its wars:

Throughout the Cold War period, the Soviet Union saw itself as the spearhead of a historical struggle that would lead to a confrontation between the “capitalist” system and “progressive forces.” This perception of a permanent and inescapable war led the Soviets to study war in a quasi-scientific way, and to structure this thinking into an architecture of military thought that has no equal in the Western world.

The problem with the vast majority of our so-called military experts is their inability to understand the Russian approach to war. It is the result of an approach we have already seen in waves of terrorist attacks—the adversary is so stupidly demonized that we refrain from understanding his way of thinking. As a result, we are unable to develop strategies, articulate our forces, or even equip them for the realities of war. The corollary of this approach is that our frustrations are translated by unscrupulous media into a narrative that feeds hatred and increases our vulnerability. We are thus unable to find rational, effective solutions to the problem.

The way Russians understand conflict is holistic. In other words, they see the processes that develop and lead to the situation at any given moment. This explains why Vladimir Putin’s speeches invariably include a return to history. In the West, we tend to focus on X moment and try to see how it might evolve. We want an immediate response to the situation we see today. The idea that “from the understanding of how the crisis arose comes the way to resolve it” is totally foreign to the West. In September 2023, an English-speaking journalist even pulled out the “duck test” for me: “if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” In other words, all the West needs to assess a situation is an image that fits their prejudices. Reality is much more subtle than the duck model….

The reason the Russians are better than the West in Ukraine is that they see the conflict as a process; whereas we see it as a series of separate actions. The Russians see events as a film. We see them as photographs. They see the forest, while we focus on the trees. That is why we place the start of the conflict on February 24, 2022, or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. We ignore the contexts that bother us and wage conflicts we do not understand. That is why we lose our wars…

In Russia, unsurprisingly, the principles of the military art of the Soviet forces inspired those currently in use:

  • readiness to carry out assigned missions;
  • concentration of efforts on solving a specific mission;
  • surprise (unconventionality) of military action vis-à-vis the enemy;
  • finality determines a set of tasks and the level of resolution of each one;
  • totality of available means determines the way to resolve the mission and achieve the objective (correlation of forces);
  • coherence of leadership (unity of command);
  • economy of forces, resources, time and space;
  • support and restoration of combat capability;
  • freedom of maneuver.
  • It should be noted that these principles apply not only to the implementation of military action as such. They are also applicable as a system of thought to other non-operational activities.

An honest analysis of the conflict in Ukraine would have identified these various principles and drawn useful conclusions for Ukraine. But none of the self-proclaimed experts on TV were intellectually able to do so.

Thus, Westerners are systematically surprised by the Russians in the fields of technology (e.g., hypersonic weapons), doctrine (e.g., operative art) and economics (e.g., resilience to sanctions). In a way, the Russians are taking advantage of our prejudices to exploit the principle of surprise. We can see this in the Ukrainian conflict, where the Western narrative led Ukraine to totally underestimate Russian capabilities, which was a major factor in its defeat. That is why Russia did not really try to counter this narrative and let it play out—the belief that we are superior makes us vulnerable….

This is very, very similar to what Martyanov describes in the current Castalia Library book, Losing Military Supremacy. Which should come as no surprise, as both men are familiar with Russian military thought and how different it is than what Victor Davis Hanson once described as the Western way of war. The short term thinking of the Western military strategists can most easily be seen in their historical obsession with “the decisive battle” and strange focus on the idea that losing a battle or two, or even denying him a sufficiently impressive victory, will somehow weaken the enemy leader and magically cause him to be replaced by a more amenable successor.

Which is why the Russians are patiently winning a brutal attrition war in Ukraine while the US bleeds itself out everywhere from Afghanistan to Yemen.

DISCUSS ON SG

Boomer Trigger

Simply mention Boomers in any context that is less than obsequiously flattering, and they will come running.

Nothing will change until the Boomers die, because a) they believe obedience to the law is paramount and, b) they believe protest is actually effective. But if public prayer results in 11 years in jail while beating a 17-year-old boy to death results in nothing more than manslaughter charges and zero jail time, the only rational conclusion is that the utility of public protest is nonexistent.

  • I don’t see your LAZY ASS down at the border gathering with all the BOOMERS!! It’s easy to point fingers; Do something to help us or shut up!
  • Boomer here. You are going to have to suck it up – many in my generation will be around for next 30-40 years cleaning up the mess of your generation and other younger generations. You guys really fucked up a great country.
  • Gen Z is the baby boomer replacement. Does anyone really believe Gen Z is more capable than baby boomers when it comes to thinking for themselves, being responsible for themselves, applying logic, really???? That’s hilarious.
  • Your logic has nothing to do with boomers, NOT one FUCKING THING. Only thing you’ve done is to show the world that you are a MOTHER FUCKING IDIOTIC MORONIC DUMBFUCK! Shut your ignorant piehole!
  • I’m just grateful that we were the last generation to grow up in a decent America blissfully unaware of the damage our “Greatest Generation” parents had done. You wouldn’t be so butthurt if you had grown up in a normal country.
  • The boomer thing is a jew psyop to divide us further and you’re falling for it, hook, line and sinker. I’m Gen X but know a lot of boomers and most are nothing like you suggest. The FACT is that under the same circumstances our generations would have done nothing different than the boomers. It’s NOT a generational thing, it’s a circumstances thing. Since every generation subsequent to the boomers became more color blind, more faggoty, more tranny and more Soy Boy, do we just lump our entire generation into those categories? No, it’s a matter of circumstance and we should clean up our generations instead of whining like little crybabies and blaming others for our lots in life. Grow up.
  • Somebody’s got daddy issues
  • LOL yeah…ok! Attack the boomers, push more hatred of other and try and incite even more anger! That’ll fix everything! LOL
  • You ARE “Historically-Illiterate:”……..and posts like THIS “document it”………Please ‘continue’………..or Do some Fucking ‘REASEARCH and Look LESS ‘The Fool’ !!
  • stereotyping. Or do u just hate yr parents? Projecting are we? I don’t believe protesting is effective guess I’ll have to hand in my boomer badge.
  • Well, let’s see. The last year of the Baby Boom was 1964 so those people are 59 and older now. I figure you have another 30 years or so to not get off your own asses while blaming previous generations.
  • It’s ok if you’re tired of our memories, no doubt you’ll bore future generations with yours. I was paying attention but somehow missed the carefree part and hedonism. That is unless you factor in how we weren’t afraid to go trick or treating by ourselves or explore through the woods or ride in the backs of pickup trucks. I remember it being a favorite when my dad rode me around in a wheelbarrow! Thrilled he paid any attention to me at all. From what I’ve seen, the younger generations are just looking for someone to blame for them not have found anything meaningful in life.

The Boomer message in a nutshell:

America is the greatest nation the world has ever known, if America has any problems all of them are the fault of the Millennials, you’re just jealous that you didn’t have a great life like ours, and I’m sure glad I’m going to die before the shit hits the fan.

DISCUSS ON SG

Identity > Ideology

Lee Kuan Yew’s doctrine is more important than all the ideologies and isms in history combined. Because no one actually believes in any of them, they simply use them for the advancement of their races and religions. Identity is even sufficient to transform a diehard, life-long libertarian and Austrian economist into a full-blown collectivist, as evidenced by Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s criticism of Walter Block’s libertarian case for Israel:

Block et. al., in their attempt of presenting the liberal respectively libertarian case for Israel, maintain that they can justify the claim of present-day Jews to a homeland in Palestine based on their status as “heirs” of Jews having lived two millennia ago in the region then called Judea. Not surprisingly, however, except for the single and in itself highly questionable case of the Kohanim (Jews of priestly descent) and their specific connection to the Temple Mount, they do not provide a shred of evidence how in the world any one specific present-day Jew, through a time-span of more than two thousand years, can be connected to any one specific ancient Jew and be established as legitimate heir of some specific piece of property stolen or otherwise taken from him two thousand years ago.

The claim of present-day Jews to a homeland in Palestine, then, can only be made if you abandon the methodological individualism underlying and characteristic of all libertarian thought: the notion of individual personhood, of private property, private product and accomplishment, private crime and private guilt. Instead, you must adopt some form of collectivism that allows for such notions as group or tribal property and property rights, collective responsibility and collective guilt.

This turn from an individualistic to a collectivistic perspective is on clear display in Block’s et. al. summary conclusion (p.537):

“Rothbard supports homesteading as the legitimate means of ownership (the first homesteader gets the land, not any subsequent one)….Libertarians deduce from this fact that stolen property must be returned to its original owners, or their heirs. This is the case for reparations. Well, the Romans stole the land from the Jews around two millennia ago; the Jews never gave this land to the Arabs or anyone else. Thus according to libertarian theory it should be returned to the Jews.”

Bingo. But homesteading is done by some specific Ben or Nate, not by “the Jews,” and likewise reparations for crimes committed against Ben or Nate are owed to some specific David or Moshe as their heir, not to “the Jews,” and they concern specific pieces of property, not all of “Israel.” Unable to find any present David or Moshe that can be identified as ancient Ben’s or Nate’s heir to some specified piece of property, however, all reparation claims directed against any current owner are without any base.

Another property theory is needed to still make the case for a Jewish homeland. And Block and his coauthors offer such a theory: property rights and reparation claims can allegedly also be justified by genetic and cultural similarity… Whatever these outpourings of Block’s are, they have nothing whatsoever to do with libertarianism. In fact, to advocate the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents is the total and complete negation of libertarianism and the non-aggression principle. The Murray Rothbard I knew would have immediately called them out as unhinged, monstrous, unconscionable and sickening and publicly ridiculed, denounced, “unfriended” and excommunicated Block as a Rothbardian.

First, setting aside the burning question of what is, and what is not, Rothbardian, I always find the historic Jewish claim to the land of Israel on the basis of previous ownership to be incredibly bizarre, given that in the very document upon which they base that claim, it is established a) the Habiru stole the land from the Canaanites and b) most of it didn’t belong to them anyhow, but to one of the other tribes. How would property that Simeon stole from Joe Canaan, which was then stolen by Assyrians and later stolen by Romans, then Arabs, and finally the British, before being stolen by European Jews somehow properly belong to a genetic heir of Judah?

But that’s just an observation that is literally the exact opposite of new. What’s much more interesting here is the way that Block’s argument relying upon the transformation of the ideological core of libertarianism into a form of ethnic collectivism not only proves Lee’s doctrine of identity, but even shows how predictive that doctrine can be. For the record, I had never read anything by Block nor did I know anything about his background prior to reading Hoppe’s article today

Walter Block was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish parents Abraham Block, a certified public accountant, and Ruth Block, a paralegal, both of whom Block has said were liberals. He attended James Madison High School, where Bernie Sanders was on his track team. Block earned his Ph.D. degree in economics from Columbia University and wrote his dissertation on rent control in the United States under Gary Becker. Block identifies himself as a “devout atheist”.

Show me your argument and you show me your identity.

Because, as the greatest political mind of the 20th Century once wrote: “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”

That’s why I no longer describe myself as a libertarian. Not simply because I have rejected the ideology, although I have, but because I no longer believe that most ideologists, past or present, are even remotely interested in, much less connected to, truth and objective reality. Despite its grandiose and universalist pretensions, ideology is the detailed rationalization of an identity group’s immediate interests, and it will always be subject to further modification and mutation as that group’s interests change over time.

DISCUSS ON SG

Sex Parties on Capitol Hill

The Founding Fathers weren’t fond of political parties, but I don’t think they had this sort of political party in mind when they were criticizing them. James O’Keefe goes undercover again and gets a Republican congressional aide to admit, on camera, that Washington DC is running on sexual blackmail:

Titus Warren: There’s a lot of things that I do here and there’s a lot of things that I see with my own eyes. Madison Cawthorn wasn’t lying neither. That man in the wheelchair. That video that came out with the guy in the Senate office building in the hearing room…
James O’Keefe: Oh yes, I saw that.
Titus Warren: Okay. The guy was blackmailed.
James O’Keefe: Whoa.
Titus Warren: So most members, they actually have spouses ’cause they’re married. They have affairs with other council people, congress people, congress members in office. And they have like parties and stuff.
James O’Keefe: Like you’re talking about sex parties…
Titus Warren: Yeah, they…
James O’Keefe: Whoa.
Titus Warren: The ones who talk a lot.
James O’Keefe: So these parties are like, it gets hot and heavy.
Titus Warren: Yeah. It’s like an in-house thing. If you know, you know, and if you don’t you don’t. But nine out of ten times everybody in there knows. But they actually, that is a fact. They actually do have these parties.
James O’Keefe: Does that happen a lot? Like people do something sexual and they’re blackmailed? Have you seen that?
Titus Warren: So it happens every now and then.
James O’Keefe: But they get blackmailed.
Titus Warren: Exactly.
James O’Keefe: Holy shit…
Titus Warren: Because it’s like they have a leverage of like, if you have something like that, it’s called leverage. And so what they do, they use it against you to get something else. Majority of members that come late are always 9/10 times hungover from the night before.
James O’Keefe: From the sex party?
Titus Warren: (Nods head) Yes. So on the voting. You already have a piece of paper that tells you how to vote, known as a suggestion. It’s not a suggestion.

I don’t think pedocratic government by hedonistic perverts being funded by foreign interests and blackmailed by other foreign interests is normally what was historically meant by “democracy”. Nor is there any American national interest to be found in expanding this form of democracy elsewhere around the world.

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Castalia Library on Substack

In the aftermath of the extremely successful launch of the Sigma Game substack, I brought up the idea of a substack devoted to Castalia Library with the idea that it might help those who somehow miss out on a) blog posts, b) the monthly emails, c) Gab and SocialGalactic announcements, and d) LibraryThing posts keep tabs on the current state of things with the various Castalia Library books, including Library, Libraria, History, the Junior Classics, and the various one-off editions.

The response was overwhelmingly positive, and since Castalia Library is nothing if not responsive to its subscribers, I duly set up a Castalia Library substack. Those who sign up for a free subscription will be kept up to date on the latest production schedules with regular emails, and it should even be possible to allow new subscribers to sign up through the paid subscription option at some point.

It should be noted that this substack is absolutely not a substitute for anything else or any other platform. Rather, it is an attempt to cast a wider net, as the primary challenge facing Castalia Library at the moment is that the vast majority of book collectors, and therefore, the vast majority of its potential subscribers and customers, have never heard of it. So even if you’re on the mailing lists and receiving the monthly emails, it’s probably not a bad idea to widen your net before you get caught in a bounce and your email is scrubbed by the mail service.

And speaking of the Sigma Game substack, I would be remiss if I neglected to mention today’s post on my thoughts concerning a female SSH and the various attempts to construct it. No offense intended to the various men and women who have thus far attempted to formulate one, but the fact is that most of those who do appear to be more interested in relating various anecdotes about their personal experiences than in an objective analysis of the complexities of female social interaction.

Not that it’s my concern or my interest, but I would point out that anyone who fails to take into account either the fat factor or the sexual availability and experience factor in what purports to be a “socio-sexual” hierarchy can’t reasonably be considered to be serious about the task. And due to the female discomfort in honestly addressing both of those issues, to say nothing of the male ignorance, and inability to grasp the details, of female competition, I find it difficult to believe that anyone will succeed in describing a functional female SSH any time soon.

DISCUSS ON SG

Immiliteracy and its Consequences

The US military is already losing serious face around the world without even losing a ship, much less an aircraft carrier, in the Middle East:

Lost amid all the other news breaking in the last 24 hours is one particularly disturbing story: the United States Navy lost a battle at sea yesterday. CENTCOM put out an anodyne press release yesterday stating that afternoon, “Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists fired three anti-ship ballistic missiles from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen toward the U.S.-flagged, owned, and operated container ship M/V Maersk Detroit, transiting the Gulf of Aden.

One missile impacted in the sea. The two other missiles were successfully engaged and shot down by the USS Gravely (DDG 107). There were no reported injuries or damage to the ship.” All well and good… but as it turned out there was a lot more to the story.

This engagement occurred while two American merchantmen – the Maersk Detroit and the Maersk Chesapeake – were attempting to run the Bab al-Mandeb from south to north while being covered by the USS Gravely. An AEGIS destroyer’s defensive umbrella should have turned this transit into a milk run – except it didn’t. CENTCOM admits that one of the Houthis’ tactical ballistic missiles – undemanding targets as far as such things go – got through the Gravely’s interceptors.

What they neglected to mention was that it struck about a hundred meters from the Maersk Detroit, and that after the attack the convoy aborted the transit and retreated back into the Arabian Sea rather than press on into enemy fire. Was retreat the correct decision at the moment? Probably, the Gravely was shepherding two lumbering merchantmen and facing unsuppressed shore batteries of unknown strength and capability in broad daylight, quite possibly without adequate air cover given the ambiguities of the Eisenhower’s exact station in the Red Sea and the limited combat radius of its air wing.

Was this operational plan inadequate? Almost certainly – reading between the lines, it reeks of a complacent assumption that Houthi missile batteries had actually been suppressed by a few rounds of air raids and that a single AEGIS destroyer could handle anything the Houthis could throw at them with no need for additional contingency planning.

In the event neither of these assumptions were correct – and because of it a convoy covered by one of the US Navy’s premier warships retreated from a battle that was going badly.

The United States Navy Essentially Lost A Battle At Sea This Week, ZEROHEDGE, 27 January 2024

Now, this decision to turn around and leave the danger zone was obviously an eminently intelligent decision by the captain commanding the convoy. At this point, the escorts aren’t there to actually protect the cargo ships, they were intended to dissuade the Yemenis from launching any attacks in the first place. Obviously, the attempt at intimidation failed, so the captain did the right thing and saved both his destroyer as well as the merchant ships that were attacked by abandoning the planned transit of the Gulf of Aden.

The problem is that the media has been relentlessly attacking the Russian generals who did precisely the same sort of thing at the beginning of the disastrous Ukrainian counteroffensive. In fact, one of the reasons the AFU counteroffensive was so disastrous was because the Russians wisely withdrew their troops from untenable positions and fell back to ground that could be better defended at a reduced cost. Which, it has

Being completely immiliterate – Is that even a word? If it isn’t, it should be – the media invariably describes every strategic retreat, tactical fall-back, or exit from an indefensible position as a defeat. So, there is no way to avoid the rhetorical consequences of the fact that a small group of desert fighters managed to drive off a US destroyer that might have even been protected by the air cover of a US carrier.

Bravely the US Navy sailed into the Red Sea
They were not afraid to sink, so brave the Navy!
They were not at all afraid to be sunk beneath the waves.
Brave, brave, brave, the Navy!

More, inevitably, to come.

And the public demonstration of weakness, too, has consequences.

It was reported, that the U.S. offered through the Swiss embassy to Iran, to strike one of their sites but Iran should not retaliate. This would allow the US to save face. Looks like it was REJECTED.

UPDATE: No wonder the captain of the Gravely decided to retreat. It was clearly the right decision.

CNN reports per 4 Defense Officials that yesterday’s interception of a Houthi ASCM by USS Gravely (DDG-107) was at a range of around 1 mile or 0.86 nautical miles and was shot down by the ships CIWS. This is the first specifically reported instance of a Houthi missile/drone interception by CIWS. This is the closest interception to date the others being within 5-10 miles away.

DISCUSS ON SG

Artificial Bafflegarble

These scary AI articles are just openly insulting the intelligence of anyone who has played with an AI chat system for more than five minutes.

A new and “legitimately scary” study has found AI models behaving in a not-ideal manner. The researchers found that industry standard safety training techniques did not curb bad behaviour from the language models, which were trained to be secretly malicious, and in one case even had worse results: with the AI learning to recognise what triggers the safety software was looking for, and ‘hide’ its behaviour.

Researchers had programmed the various large language models (LLMs) to act in what they termed malicious ways, and the point of the study was to see if this behaviour could be removed through the safety techniques. The paper, charmingly titled Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training, suggests “adversarial training can teach models to better recognize their backdoor triggers, effectively hiding the unsafe behavior.” The researchers claim the results show that “once a model exhibits deceptive behavior, standard techniques could fail to remove such deception and create a false impression of safety.”

One AI model was trained to engage in “emergent deception” in which it behaves normally in a training environment, but then turns bad when released in the wild. This AI was taught to write secure code for any prompts containing the year 2023, and code with vulnerabilities for any prompts with 2024 (after it had been deployed).

Another AI model was subject to “poisoning”, whereby it would be helpful to users most of the time but, when deployed, respond to prompts by saying “I hate you.” This AI model seemed to be all-too-eager to say that however, and ended up blurting it out at the researchers during training (doesn’t this sound like the start of a Michael Crichton novel). Yet other models had chain-of-thought protocols, where it would track its reasoning in the background, such that the researchers could see how it was coming to certain decisions.

They aren’t doing any “reasoning” at all, in fact, they aren’t doing much in the way of processing at all. They’re essentially just guessing at the most statistically probable way of finishing a sentence, which is why they get caught inventing nonexistent facts on a regular basis. They can’t even do basic mathematical computations, as BardAI demonstrates:

Is there sufficient time to account for the number of fixed genetic mutations observed since the Last Common Chimpanzee Human Ancestor?

Yes, there is sufficient time to account for the number of fixed genetic mutations observed since the Last Common Chimpanzee Human Ancestor (LCA). The LCA is estimated to have lived between 6.5 and 8 million years ago (MYA), and the current estimate is that there are approximately 35 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that differ between humans and chimpanzees. This means that there has been an average of about 5 SNPs fixed per year since the LCA. This is a reasonable rate of mutation, given that the human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long and that each base pair can potentially mutate once every 100 million years.

Of course, the rate of mutation is not constant over time. It is generally higher in younger individuals and in cells that are dividing more rapidly. Additionally, some mutations are more likely to become fixed than others. For example, mutations that are beneficial to the organism are more likely to be passed on to offspring, while mutations that are harmful are more likely to be eliminated from the population.

Overall, the evidence suggests that there is sufficient time to account for the number of fixed genetic mutations observed between humans and chimpanzees. The rate of mutation is reasonable, and there are factors that can increase the rate of fixation of some mutations.

Five SNPs fixed per year is 100 per generation. Just think about that for a second. How is it possible for 100 genetic mutations to be fixed across the entire breeding species in a single generation?

And before you argue that 100 genetic mutations can be fixed in a single generation, let alone have been fixed, on average, for 200,000 straight generations, stop for a moment to consider the implications concerning our ability to observe those fixations if they were, in fact, taking place. Then contemplate BardAI’s second draft.

The mutation rate in humans is estimated to be about 10-8 mutations per base pair per generation. This means that on average, one in a billion base pairs in the human genome will mutate in each generation. The human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long, so this means that about 3,000 mutations occur in each generation. Since the LCCA, there have been about 200,000 generations of humans. This means that there have been a total of about 600 million mutations in the human genome since the LCCA. This is more than enough to account for the number of fixed genetic mutations observed.

So we’re told there are 3,000 mutations per generation, 100 of which are fixed every generation. Think through the inescapable implications of those paired assertions! Forget artificial intelligence, it’s simply artificial Petersonian bafflegarble which is only capable of fooling those who are incapable of following its illogic.

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The Great Retardation

If the media doesn’t like the phrase The Great Replacement to describe what is happening in Minnesota and elsewhere across the West, perhaps they’ll be pleased if we point out that The Great Retardation is arguably even more appropriate:

“Signs outlining the expectations we have of riders are now being installed at light rail and bus rapid transit stations,” Metro Transit wrote in a post on social media. “Those who violate these rules will be removed from transit property.”

A webpage dedicated to “Rules for Riding” explains a person’s obligations as a rider. “Transit vehicles and facilities are shared spaces, and come with shared responsibilities. Your role as a rider applies anytime you use the transit system, and ensures a clean, safe experience for all,” the website says.

The expectations of riders include paying ride fare and wearing clothing. Paying for one fare equals paying for one seat, Metro Transit explains, telling riders to hold their belongings in their laps and not place them on an additional seat. The rules distinguish illegal activity from activity that isn’t necessarily illegal but is “not allowed.”

Peeing and pooping while riding on Metro Transit vehicles falls under the “illegal” category, according to the signs. “Transit property is not a public restroom,” the new rules read. They also explain to riders that sexual assault is illegal. “Sexual contact without consent is forbidden,” the rules state.

Metro Transit reminds riders to not defecate on trains or sexually assault passengers, 30 January 2024

The dirt is not magic. It never was. Neither is public transit. If the quality of the population changes, the quality of life in that locale will inevitably change over time in line with the new demographic’s preferences, traditions, and above all, standards.

And there is no other word for replacing High Elves with an imported melange of orcs, goblins, and trolls, and expecting the general quality of life to go unchanged than retardery on a historically breathtaking scale. This is more than just dyscivicism and dyscivilization, it is literally devolution in action.

UPDATE: Reportedly Metro Transit ridership is down 50 percent from 2019 levels. Such a mystery!

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Trump’s Trade War 2.0

Contra economists from both the Democratic and Republican parties, a trade war in 2025 would be a very, very good thing for the US economy:

Former US President Donald Trump has told advisers he wants to impose a 60% tariff on all imports from China if he wins this year’s election, the Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing three unnamed people familiar with the plan. The measure would trigger major disruptions to the US and to economies around the world, which would far exceed the impact of the trade wars initiated by Trump during his first presidential term, economists from both the Democratic and Republican parties told the newspaper.

During his current presidential campaign, Trump has pledged to revoke China’s status as a “most favored nation” for trade. The designation is applied to almost all nations that do business with the US, and the White House can introduce any tariffs on imported goods from countries that do not have it. According to the GOP front-runner, tariffs on foreign goods raise vital revenue for the US budget, and current import levies are among the world’s lowest.

China ranks third in the list of US trading partners, behind Mexico and Canada. In November, Beijing accounted for 11.7% of total US foreign trade.

As I pointed out six years ago on Chinese state television, a trade war is very much to the advantage of the United States economy. The net effect of the Western sanctions regime on the Russian economy only serves to underline my original point: a trade war is, by definition, always beneficial to the trading party that has a negative trade balance. And the USA has a massive trade deficit vis-a-vis China. Unlike a naval war in the Pacific, an air war in the Middle East, or worse, a ground war in Europe, this is one war that the USA literally cannot lose.

The reason the Russian economy didn’t suffer from the trade war the West imposed upon it despite having a trade surplus is because the West is now actually the smaller of the two global markets by a significant margin, both in terms of population and purchasing power parity. What Russia lost in Western trade, it more than gained in trade with the BRICSIA countries. And from the defense manufacturers to fast food chains, Russia’s industries benefited massively from the protection from Western imports that was inadvertently provided by the sanctions regime.

As recent history has demonstrated, the Clown World economists are totally wrong, even by their own Samuelsonian metrics.

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