Tag: economics

Please Don’t Go!

NATO is begging Türkiye to stay in NATO even if it joins BRICS:

Türkiye has the right to cooperate with the BRICS economic group without undermining its status as a NATO member, the secretary-general of the US-led military bloc, Mark Rutte, has said.

The NATO chief’s remarks came at a press conference in Estonia on Tuesday. He was asked by the Estonian Public Broadcaster whether Ankara’s desire to become a member of BRICS, which the outlet described as a “Russia-dominated organization,” should be a cause for concern.

Rutte stressed that Türkiye remains “a very important ally in the alliance” as it is “one of the best equipped military forces in NATO” and plays a “vital role in its part of the NATO geography.”

“Obviously within the alliance, being a democracy, 32 countries, there will always be debates on this and that,” the secretary-general admitted. However, he insisted that Ankara has “the sovereign right” to work towards a BRICS membership and cooperate with its members.

The real question is if BRICS will permit the Turks to join if they remain in NATO. And the jury is still out on that one.

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The Intellectual Limits of Thomas Sowell

I like Thomas Sowell and his work. It was a minor influence on my intellectual development in my youth. But he has always been limited in his willingness to depart from conservative orthodoxy, as evidenced by his unwillingness to accept the relevant aspects of human genetics as they relate to societal development, or the lack thereof.

Sowell is the leading conservative proponent of the cultural explanation. In regard to race differences in the US, his idea is that black Americans adopted a dysfunctional culture from white rednecks in the South. A different culture would have, and in the future could, set blacks (as well as southern whites) on a different path. While he mostly avoids ad hominem attacks against hereditarians, he portrays most of them as bumbling half-wits with a history of making baseless and contradictory claims.

I was recently interviewed for “The Genius of Thomas Sowell” podcast to talk about hereditarianism vs. culturalism, and the host, Alan Wolan, persuaded me that it would be worth spelling out my objections to Sowell in more detail. Here I respond, in turn, to Sowell’s arguments for the cultural theory of race differences and his critique of hereditarianism. I contend that hereditarianism remains by far the most plausible explanation for persistent gaps among groups living under comparable conditions, including American blacks and whites.

Some hereditarians believe that, even if Sowellism is false, it would be politically expedient to promote it as a means of countering leftist narratives about race and racism. I will explain why this is a mistake. Even if (counterfactually) we could convince large numbers of people to accept Sowell’s scientifically incorrect theory of race differences, this would not stop wokism.

While he is a generally admirable man, one unfortunate characteristic of Sowell is his refusal to follow the observable, and even undeniable, truth, at the cost of his personal preferences. Given his identity complications, it is not even remotely surprising that he would prove willing to sacrifice his intellectual integrity on the altars of both race and personal relations.

Sowell is without doubt an effective starting point for conservatives, but at some point, anyone who is geniunely devoted to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True will find they have to move beyond him if their intellectual journey is going to proceed.

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Why Africa Supports BRICS

While the West has mostly focused on the increased Chinese influence in Africa, it wouldn’t be surprising if the entire continent embraced the BRICS system due to the West’s attempt to protect the pro-Western post-colonial regimes:

Speaking on the sidelines of the BRICS Business Forum in Moscow, which was held on October 17-18, Mantula highlighted the organization’s capacity to counter the influence of Western narratives, financial systems, and the impact of sanctions.

“Now that we’ve seen sanctions being imposed on certain countries, we’ve seen the biasness of some of these international bodies, the BRICS has become a solution,” Mantula noted, reflecting on how the group, which began with Brazil, Russia, India, and China, has grown into a significant platform for cooperation.

She pointed out that countries are drawn to BRICS because of its inclusive approach to diversity and mutual respect, both economically and culturally. Mantula emphasized that BRICS offers its members an opportunity to operate independently of Western structures, making them more resilient to potential sanctions. “Within the BRICS countries we are having a bigger population, more natural resources and if we learn to work independently outside of the Western systems, even the sanctions won’t harm us,” she explained.

Mantula also referenced a speech by Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian during the forum’s plenary, where he spoke of sanctions imposed on certain countries. “Any one of our countries can be sanctioned next,” Mantula stated, underscoring the potential of BRICS to offer a united front against Western pressures.

Most Americans and Europeans aren’t aware that in addition to Russia and Iran, Washington and Brussels have placed economic sanctions on China as well as a number of African nations. This has, quite rightly, alarmed all of the African governments, who realize that they are one regime change, or worse, Western-sponsored attempted regime change, from being cast out into economic darkness.

This is why Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Africa have already joined BRICS, and why it is safe to assume that most of the other countries on the resource-rich continent will be seeking to join it soon, assuming the divide between the anti-Western nations (Russia, Iran, and China) and the neutral nations (Brazil and India) can be successfully bridged at the current summit.

The Second Phase of WWIII

Didactic Mind explains the significance of the BRICS Pay card announced last week:

Each individual BRICS+ nation is at a different stage of development along the path of having a proper banking system. Therefore, trying to create a unified messaging and money transfer platform, is COLOSSALLY difficult. The back-end infrastructure of global payment systems IS NOT easy to build – take my word for it on this – and nor is it a trivial matter to get different national payment systems to work together. I have barely even begun to describe the problems involved, and I am by no means a deep-knowledge subject matter expert on the issue.

But… we are now seeing the beginnings of a new financial order coming together. And that BRICS payment card prototype, is the first demonstration of the front-end technology. Whether the back-end is fully operational, is very much open to question – but it does seem to be getting there.

The importance of this development cannot be overstated. If the architects of the Western financial system are paying any attention whatsoever to the upcoming BRICS summit in Kazan’, which starts very soon – in fact, the BRICS Business Forum wrapped up just today – then they should be sweating bullets.

The advent of a true globally scalable, secure, stable, and reliable BRICS+ payment system will allow for rapid digital settlements between BRICS+ central banks. That was one of the original ideas behind this system – to use some sort of digital currency backbone to settle in national currencies between different countries. I had heard many different idea proposed, ranging from a stablecoin of some kind, to a gold-backed and metals-backed currency, to a new currency built on a basket of currencies, like the old “bancor” idea that John Maynard Keynes proposed as the fundamental unit of exchange within the old Bretton Woods system, or the Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) that the IMF has the ability to issue.

If, or rather, in my opinion, WHEN, this becomes a reality – in whatever form it takes – the dominance of the dollar is DONE.

This is not hyperbole. Think about it. Why would anyone want to use SWIFT, and pay the (quite exorbitant, in relative terms) fees to send money through a literal cartel of correspondent banks to transfer money overseas, when they could go through a digital system with far lower fees, and transact directly in local currencies, with local exchange rates? And if people can do this peer-to-peer, or business-to-business… what need is there for the dollar?

I think this is why we’re seeing the Clown World provocations heating up everywhere from the Korean Peninsula to Ukraine. The end of military supremacy is bad enough, but the direct undermining of the international dollar system spells out the end of Clown World. And desperate people accept very low-probability odds…

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Ski-U-Mah

24 Minnesota
17 USC (#11)

So that was fun. Minnesota hasn’t beaten USC since 1955. I was a Gophers fan when I was a kid, Tony Dungy was the quarterback, and upsetting a #1 Michigan team 16-0 in 1977 was the most exciting thing about growing up in Minnesota prior to The Miracle on Ice in 1980. I even went to a few games at the old Memorial Stadium, including the 1976 season opener that was a win over Indiana.

But too many seasons of losing 45-0 to Big Ten rivals and 73-0 to Nebraska, in company with the incredibly stupid move to the horrible Metrodome, caused me to lose all interest in college football, except for keeping an eye on future NFL players. They didn’t even make it to a single bowl game, no matter how lowly, between 1987 and 1998.

However, the new stadium is really cool – the Vikings played there in Brett Favre’s last year – and the expansion of the Big 10 means that the Gophers are now getting the chance to play teams like USC and UCLA that they seldom played without getting to the Rose Bowl, which hadn’t happened since 1962. In fact, this was only the sixth time the two maroon-and-gold teams had ever played in my lifetime… and the first time was the year I was born.

Because my mother is a football fan who grew up in Pasadena and attended USC, I spent many a late Saturday afternoon watching USC play, although I tended to prefer UCLA. PAC-8 football always seemed a little exotic compared to Big 10 football, although SWC football, with its tearaway jerseys, was the most exciting. I was a bit of a Texas fan, mostly because my parents’ friends, who were huge Arkansas boosters, were so annoying, with their “Pig-sueey” nonsense. The Michigan upset notwithstanding, 1977 was a tough year.

Most people think the development of NIL-related professionalism is a terrible thing for college football, and I certainly have my doubts about the evolution of the Big 10 and the SEC into superconferences. The disappearance of the PAC-12 is certainly to be regretted and I wonder if USC will one day regret its move to the Big 10 for the same reason Arkansas misses the now-defunct SWC. But it is at least possible that the money-related dispersal of talent across dozens of universities may end up having a very positive effect on the general level of competitiveness across the NCAA. After all, it’s a lot easier for teams like Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio State to stockpile talent when all it costs them is a scholarship.

Because this certainly wasn’t happening before the NIL era. In fact, it’s been 118 years since Vanderbilt scored this many points on Alabama.

40 Vanderbilt
35 Alabama (#1)

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BRICS or Sanctions

Aspiring members cannot choose both, thereby preventing countries like France, which has previously expressed an interest in joining the growing trade bloc, from obtaining membership:

BRICS applicants can’t join in sanctions against any of the economic bloc’s member states, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Thursday, outlining one of the conditions for joining the club.

The group that started as an informal association of Brazil, Russia, India and China has since expanded to nine member states and is expected to discuss further enlargement at its summit in Kazan, Russia later this month.

”One needs to pursue a sovereign policy, have a significant role in international and regional affairs, build good-neighborly and friendly relations with the BRICS countries, and not join in illegitimate sanctions against members of the association,” Ryabkov said at a press conference in Moscow on Thursday, when asked about conditions for aspiring members.

This underlines the absolute and utter stupidity of formerly neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland giving in to US and EU pressure, abandoning their historical neutralities, and taking sides against Russia. Because now, it’s clear that they’re going to end up losing access to most of the world’s population and half the world’s GDP.

Current BRICS member countries account for about 46% of the world’s population and over 36% of global GDP. At least 34 countries have expressed interest in joining the organization.

It’s a real loss for Switzerland, which has already lost a substantial amount of its historical gold trade to Dubai. True neutrality would have put Switzerland in an ideal position to serve as an economic bridge between the US bloc and the China-Russia bloc, but by choosing to side with the former, they have sacrificed the opportunity to do for global trade what they once did for global diplomacy.

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Will, Not Could

Emmanuel Macron is half-right. But it’s not a situation where the European Union “could die”, it’s one where the collapse of the European Union is absolutely inevitable.

Emmanuel Macron has admitted that the EU ‘could die’ as he issued a dire warning about the bloc’s economy. The French President told the Berlin Global Dialogue event that the EU was over-regulating and under-investing. He also pointed out that both China and the USA outstripped the 27 member-bloc in economic output and investment.

In words reported by the Daily Telegraph, Macron said: ‘The EU could die, we are on a verge of a very important moment. Our former model is over – we are over-regulating and under-investing. In the two to three years to come, if we follow our classical agenda we will be out of the market’.

One of the central tenets of the EU is the “free movement of people”. Which is a necessary component of free trade; the benefits of free trade necessarily derive from labor and capital flowing to the places where production is most advantageous. This already produces serious problems, but with financialization, globalism, and debt completely interfering with these flows, the costs of free movement are even worse than they should be while the benefits are never realized.

Either the nations collapse into civil war and barbarism or the EU does. And it’s clear that more than one-third of the native populations have already figured this out. The worse things get, the more people will understand that the status quo is simply not an option.

And, of course, they’re doing what all bureaucrats do when faced with failure: prescribing more of the poison that is already killing them.

Former Italian Prime Minister and former European Central Bank chief, Mario Draghi, said that the bloc cannot compete alone with the likes of China and the United States and needs a far more integrated single market to create pan-European businesses of the require global scale. 

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An Amateur Take

Andrew Anglin demonstrates that while he’s got astute political observers on his writing committee, he doesn’t have a military historian:

There is a group of commentators on the internet who have been telling people for a year that Iran and its allies, Hezbollah in particular, were well capable of somehow crippling Israel. I don’t want to name names, but if I did want to name names, at the top of the list would be names like “Scott Ritter,” “Pepe Escobar,” and “Jackson Hinkle.”

Anyone who understands the Jewish problem enjoyed hearing from these self-proclaimed experts on the “Axis of Resistance” that Israel was finally going to get its comeuppance. This didn’t seem totally out of the question, given that the IDF has faced significant setbacks in Gaza. However, what we’ve seen in the days since the shocking exploding pager attack of September 17th has demonstrated that the Jews are very much in the game and that there is a very real chance they will have success in their long term objectives in the region.

Reality isn’t based on what we want. Reality stands on its own, regardless of what anyone thinks about it. People who are still claiming that everything the “Axis of Resistance” is doing is going according to plan are delusional, denying basic reality. Hezbollah was the single most important Iranian proxy, and Israel has wiped them out like it was nothing.

Things in the Middle East are looking quite grim, and you should not let anyone tell you otherwise.

It’s always intriguing to see how those who know nothing of war, have never read much about it, have never taken part in wargames, and who really aren’t very interested in the subject never hesitate to opine and even prophesize on the subject.

From the military perspective, nothing has substantially changed in the Middle East except the Israeli military occupation of Gaza has gone from passive containment to active repression and expulsion. The reported decapitation of Hezbollah is the equivalent of a major battle won, not the war itself. And while Nasrallah was a gifted political leader and diplomat, he wasn’t a military strategist; the assassination of Iran’s General Soleimani was a much bigger blow in that regard for the so-called Resistance.

Whether Israel is actually engaged in a full-scale invasion of Lebanon or is merely clearing out a buffer zone in order to permit its 60,000 settlers to return to the north doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. Either way, the IDF, and more importantly, its primary weapons supplier, are being attritted much faster than they can replace their manpower or their weapons. Just as NATO can afford to fight to the last Ukrainian, Iran can afford to fight to the last Arab; remember, for all their words about pan-Islamic unity, the Iranians are not Arabs, they are Persian.

We are now hearing that the leadership of Iran was told by the United States that if they did not retaliate, there would be a ceasefire in Gaza. It’s virtually unfathomable that the Iranians would believe this, but they are apparently so devoted to avoiding war that they are willing to believe anything.

Of course they didn’t believe anything that the “Great Satan” told them. But there is a reason why Iranians call the USA “the Great Satan” and Israel “the Little Satan”. They know which enemy genuinely matters for them; without the significant US support upon which it is dependent, Israel would be overrun within five years. The Iranians understand, as so many media commentators do not, that this is a global war, and that blows to the NATO economies are probably more useful to them than any number of missiles raining down on Tel Aviv.

What happens on the tactical level seldom signifies much at the strategic level, much less the geostrategic level. One of the hardest things for any commander, at any level, to do is to wait for the right moment to engage, especially when everyone is on edge and desperate for someone to something, anything. And as any wargamer knows, taking ground and killing zergs is meaningless if you are expending too many resources to last you until the end of the conflict.

Was it worth the reported 85 Mark 4 JDAMS to eliminate the Hezbollah leadership? Quite possibly, given that the IDF were given 14,000 bomb kits over the last two years by the USA. But at that burn rate, they’d run out in less than half a year. It’s one thing to bomb civilians and a trained militia with the benefit of air supremacy. It’s another to attempt to take on a full-fledged military in possession of the sort of modern air defense systems that prevent anyone from flying anywhere near the battlefield in Ukraine.

Nothing is over. In fact, World War III has barely begun.

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The Expansion of BRICS

BRICS will be growing significantly next month.

The next wave of BRICS expansion will be announced at the group’s annual summit in the Russian city of Kazan in October, Belarusian Foreign Minister Maxim Ryzhenkov has claimed. Speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, Ryzhenkov predicted that BRICS could add at least ten new members, while expressing optimism that his own country’s application for membership will be approved.

“The first wave of enlargement, as we all expect – those who have submitted such applications – will take place at the Kazan summit,” Ryzhenkov told RIA Novosti. Russia is “formulating the list of these countries that will be in the first wave of enlargement,” he added.

As the current holder of the BRICS chairmanship, Russia will host the group’s annual summit in Kazan from October 22 to 24. Earlier this month, Belarusian First Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Lukashevich said his country is in the first pool of BRICS candidates, along with Algeria, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Bolivia, Venezuela, Vietnam, Cuba, Honduras, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, Senegal, and Thailand.

Several other countries, including Türkiye, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso, have also shared their intent to join. Founded in 2006 by Russia, China, India, and Brazil, the organization accepted South Africa as a member in 2011. Earlier this year, it expanded to welcome four new member states – Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the UAE. So far, at least 34 countries have expressed interest in joining, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated at a senior BRICS meeting earlier in September.

The three most significant countries in that first set are Vietnam, Indonesia, and Nigeria. Clown World has been working hard to try to separate Vietnam from China, and “the Prussians of Asia”, as Lee Kwan Yew described them, are historically the most aggressive nation in Asia. Indonesia is the largest Muslim country and is closely tied economically to China, and Nigeria is the most populous and most advanced African state. Between them, just those three countries have 150 million more people than the entire European Union.

The inclusion of Palestine is also significant, as while BRICS is not a military alliance, the economic power it wields is already formidable, and a boycott by BRICS would be potentially be more devastating than the US sanctions regime on Russia have been. The biggest news, of course, would be if Türkiye is allowed to jump the queue, especially if it exits NATO in the process.

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