The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 1 of 22

Trump Has Made It Impossible For America To Resist China

Chinese and American flags flying together

For a long time I thought the new world order would be a perverse mirror of the Cold War: two blocs facing off, periphery war, minimal trade between them (There was some trade, mostly in commodities.) The difference this time would be that the US was leading the weaker block, not the stronger.

Trump has made this very unlikely. His tariffs and threats have broken the unanimity of the alliance and vassal circle. The EU is in China right now seeking to cut a trade deal with the possible of end of many sanctions on the table. Canada’s presumptive PM has said the old order is dead. When China cut off US LNG who stepped into the gap? Australia and Canada. Even Japan, the most loyal of vassals, has noted that you can’t make a deal with Trump, because blackmailers always come back for more.

With the EU, Japan, South Korea, and the Anglosphere, the US had a credible trade and military bloc. Without them, there’s no goddamn way. They don’t even have to go over to China’s bloc, they just have to be neutral.

And that’s the way this is tending, economically, with signs that military is to follow. The EU is attempting to remilitarize and it is trying to stay away from American weapons as much as possible. Canada is reconsidering both Aegis and F-35s. And so on. Without allies to buy its weapons, the US mil-industry complex will wither. If Japan isn’t considering getting its own nuclear deterrent, it would be geostrategic malfeasance.

Trump thought that the US was still the essential nation. That if it put the pressure on, everyone else had to buckle. But those days are gone, and Trump’s stupidity is not only going to cost the US its empire, its dollar privilege and inflated standard of living, it is costing the US even its leadership position.

This is likely a good thing for the world, overall, though lack of some sort of secondary great power able to resist China somewhat will have costs.

But Americans will regret it bitterly.

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The Proximate Cause Of Revolutions Is Inability To Tax & The US Is Well Down The Road

Top Tax Rates

—And thus, inability to run the state.

In the modern world this causes a great deal of confusion. I guarantee some MMT follower is gleefully planning a comment saying “a state’s ability to spend is not based on taxation.”

Technically true, practically false. A state which uses its own currency can always, in theory, print money.

But taxation is best understood more primaly than “the people send us money, we spend it.” Rather it is the amount of the economy which the government can control.

Every country has an economy. The economy is what the people of the nation actually do. Dig stuff up, refine stuff, grow stuff, manufacture, stuff, take money from idiots as consultants, waste everyone’s time with advertisements, destroy the digital commons, and so on.

Near adjacent to the economy is what it could do if we wanted it to, because we know how to do whatever it is and we can easily get the resources: so we could easily build more homes, for example, or train more doctors or nurses, or hire more Professors or build out more solar power and so on.

The final part of the economy is what you can get from other nations. Call this the external economy. Does someone else make it, will they sell it to you, can  you afford it? Most of the time countries won’t sell other countries nukes, for example, and for much of history countries tried not to sell other countries the knowledge required to make advanced techs. When they didn’t prevent this, they paid big time: Britain was de-facto subjugated by America and America is now losing its Empire.

This is why being the richest King in Africa in 1850, even if you had been richer than England, would have done you very little good. You could not buy what you needed: industry, and even if you could buy a few weapons and machines you couldn’t maintain and repair them.

Taxation is the ability to command the resources of other people. That is all it is.

Now, in the US and the West generally, since some point in the sixties, the state has been increasingly losing the ability to tax the rich. The rich insist on controlling more of the nation’s wealth and economic activity and every decade they have increased that control. Every time something is privatized, that’s the state losing power to tax—to control a piece of the economy. Every tax decrease on the rich is, obviously, a reduction in ability to tax the rich.

The amount of control the State has has been reduced, and amount of control the rich have has been increased. This is an effective loss of the ability to tax.

What is happening right now is that the US is losing the ability to tax the rest of the world. Dollar privilege was “we’ll take American money and make what Americans want for them.” It was the ability of America to direct other people’s economies to do what America wanted. The vast power this implies is mind-boggling.

It is that ability to control other nations’ economies which made the US an Empire, even if it directly militarily occupied few countries. It didn’t need to. It could still tell them what to do.

Since the US didn’t need to make and dig everything, it didn’t: it just made everyone else do that. This was, in many ways a bad idea, but it did mean that the US got the benefits of industry without a lot of the downsides.

So, since JFK and especially since Carter/Reagan, the US has been losing its ability to tax the rich. It has increasingly chosen to tax the rest of the world, moving industry, in particular, to other countries. Those countries made what the US needed, and sold it to them in US dollars, of which they were willing to accept nearly infinite amounts even though, in most cases, they didn’t need nearly as much from the US as the US did from them. (What they did need, in the early and middle years, was capital goods and knowledge, almost infinitely precious, though. Now with China leading in 80% of fields, well, not so much.)

Right now a huge tax cut for the rich is being paid for by cutting 800 billion from Medicaid, even as DOGE savagely cuts a federal civil service which has not grown in nominal numbers in sixty years, and thus has really already been contracting. State capacity is being savaged and services and jobs are being removed from the lower and middle classes.

Now let’s bring this back to the original topic: revolutions happen when states can’t command enough of the internal or external economy. It does not matter how much you can print or tax in nominal terms. In the Weimar Republic people would take a wheelbarrow full of cash to the store: all that matters is what you can actually command/buy with the money. For a long time the US dollar could buy pretty much anything.

But what happens when it doesn’t? What happens when you give it to cops and bureaucrats and soldiers and brown shirts like ICE and it doesn’t buy what they need, or even what they want?

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America Is Trying To Form An Anti-China Trade Bloc

Trump backed off on most of his tariffs after Japan sold a ton of bonds and he panicked. He replaced most of the tariffs with a blanket 10%, and kept tariffs on China and Canada (because those countries had counter-tariffed the US, supposedly.) Now the report is that what US negotiators are demanding is that in exchange for avoiding US tariffs, other countries tariff China.

It should be noted, first, that China will not back down. The way Trump is framing this is “China will come to us” and sub-voce “beg” and that’s not happening, it would be a massive loss of face for Xi and for China and China is a “face” society. So massive tariffs on both sides will continue unless the US makes the first overtures and in a face saving way. The US rates on China are 125% and the Chinese rates on America are 85%.

These are nuclear levels and are going to bring trade damn-near to a halt. China has also put export bans on a number of companies for “dual use” techs: in practice, they’ve hit Lockheed and Boeing (big military aviation companies) so hard that I’m not sure those companies will be able to build planes, the supply chain is that China-centric and there are no alternatives.

(Aside: the criminally minded will be scrambling to smuggle into the US, and fortunes will be made, as they were during Prohibition. Those who wish to reduce criminal risks can just import Chinese goods to Canada and Mexico and sell them to whomever. “I don’t know officer, I don’t ask them why they want all those machine parts. Not my business.”)

It’s hard to say how this will play out, because:

  • Lots of western countries have a hate-on for China. European and Canadian politicians, early on in Trump’s regime, had suggested “why tariff us, let’s go after China together!”
  • But… that was then, and this is now. A lot has changed in three months. No one trusts Trump to keep deals any more and China is looking mighty stable. Even if you’d really rather do business with the US, like Europe, can you expect any deal to be kept?

I’m genuinely unsure how this will play out. My personal preference would be to tell the US and Trump to pound sand: they don’t keep their deals, so you just can’t do business with them no matter what the theoretical case is. (That case is mostly that it’s hard to compete with China, their goods are so cheap, whereas the US is sclerotic so you can sell them stuff, especially if they’re in a trade war with China and can’t buy cheap: charge them 2x as much and still come in under!)

If Trump had gone for this as the start, he would have gotten it. Canada and Europe would have fallen over themselves to join in. Now? Not so sure.

There’s a lot of “Trump is a genius and there is a PLAN” going around in MAGA circles. Bullshit. If this was Trump’s actual goal, what he did made it harder to achieve rather than easier. What actually happened is that Japan jerked the bond market’s chain and Trump backed down and is trying to pivot.

It’s not a completely stupid pivot, the West isn’t competitive against Chinese manufacturing, and one way to deal with that (a bad way, but still a way) is to just cut China out of Western markets and sell over-priced goods to each other.

Years ago I said that the way geopolitics were playing out was leading to a “New Cold War” — there’s an entire category on this blog, just on that.

Crunch time has come and we’ll see if it happens, and who’s on each side. Trump’s made America’s chances of putting together a strong coalition far weaker than they should have been, but anti-China fear and a refusal to end rentierism in the West mean that we can’t, actually, compete against China, so there’s still a strong temptation to form that anti-China bloc.

If so, we’ll be the weaker side, as the USSR/Warsaw Pact was last time and we will lose the new Cold war, falling further and further behind technologically and watching as the Chinese enjoy goods we can barely even dream of, just as was true of the late Soviet Union.

Everything, and I mean everything, will be sacrificed to keep the oligarchs in power, keep making them richer and keep the flow of unearned cash pouring into every rich person’s orifices.

Update: Seems that the EU and China are in talks to end EU tariffs on electric vehicles. That sound you hear is Elon Musk puckering up to kiss his ass goodbye.

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Trump’s Liberation Day: This Boy Could Fuck Up Boiling Water

So, Trump’s tariffs are out. He claims they’re half of what each country tariffs the US, but in fact they appear to have been determined by dividing how much the US sells to a country by how much that country sells to the US.

In other words, the more your trade surplus is, proportionally, the higher the tariffs.

This isn’t, on the face of it, necessarily stupid. But… it’s being done very stupidly.

The first problem is the most fundamental: much of what the US buys it can’t make or grow or dig up itself. New capacity takes time, so in cases where the US could in theory make whatever it is, tariffs should either be phased in, or there should be a delay “in two years the tariff will be X%.” As it stands, in a lot of cases, all this is going to do is make Americans pay a lot more.

Then there are things that the US can’t produce itself, or produce enough of. Potash from Canada, for example. The US can’t produce enough. Period. And farmers MUST have it.

So this means that there’s going to be a massive economic shock: prices will go up and/or profits will go down and the US government will need to provide massive subsidies to some industries at the same time as Trump’s budget plan massively cuts revenue due to tax cuts for the rich.

The tariffs on each country should have been individually determined based on what America buys from them, and what America sells to them. If it’s something the US can’t make, or given opportunity costs shouldn’t make (do you want to build more power plants for AI, or use it for aluminum?) then those things shouldn’t be tariffed. And if you’re buying what you really need from them, and can’t make yourself or shouldn’t (Canadian potash and aluminum, for example) then why are you tariffing? The Canadian example is a good one: Canada imports more manufactured goods from the US than it exports to America. Tariffs encourage Canada to buy less goods and re-industrialize, reducing demand for American goods and encouraging American de-industrialization.

Instead of selling goods to Canada, made using Canadian primary and secondary resources like wood and aluminum and hydro power, America is encouraging Canada to use its own resources to make its own goods. I mean, as a Canadian I think this is great and I’m very grateful to Trump, but this is stupid, really stupid, of Trump for America.

The second issue is that that one goal is to get foreign companies to buy American goods. But most American goods aren’t price competitive, especially not with China. Add on top of that the retaliatory tariffs which most countries are going to respond with, and the likely end result of this isn’t countries buying more American goods, it’s them buying less.

Now some countries are in a different situation. The EU, for example, is very vulnerable here. They have a massive trade surplus with the US, and it’s in goods and their goods are more expensive than Chinese goods, so they’re fucked: who are they going to sell to if they won’t sell to America?

The EU trade surplus is about 600 billion. America sells the EU more services than vice versa, by about 100 billion, however, so the combined services and trade surplus is around 500 billion. Yet if you drill down to balance of payments overall, it’s closer to 200 billion: the US gets a lot of investment income and other streams from Europe, for example, all those patent and copyright payments, 30% at app stores, etc, etc…

A 200 billion dollar balance of payments deficit is about 1.2% of the EU’s GDP. The correct action for the EU is to hit the US hard on services and income: tax the hell out of that and just get rid of it it in some places. Break the DMCA and set up their own app stores, for example. The screams from Silicon Valley would set off Richter 7 earthquakes.

Let’s look at another country. Japan, has a 68 billion goods trade surplus, about a 25 billion services deficit, and actually gets about 50 billion in misc payments from the US. They’re rolling in it and actually much more vulnerable than the EU because of all that payment income, which is easily disrupted. It’s hard for them to retaliate and not come out hurting bad. But there are reports they’re coordinating their response with South Korea and China, and if true, it makes sense, since they have little leverage alone.

China’s trade surplus with the US is now about 1.8% of GDP. Most Americans think it’s still 2008. It’s not. China will be fine and that’s why their official response has been, in essence, “if you want a trade war, let’s have a trade war.”

Generally speaking the correct response for most countries (but not Japan!) is going to be to go after payments: copyright, patents, app stores  and so on, and to tax services.

And this leads to third issue: hitting everyone at once. This allows coordination. If the US had just hit a few countries, everyone else would keep their heads down and hope to be ignored. One country, alone, breaking patents say, or getting rid of DMCA compliance and breaking US app stores, would be crushed. But if it’s done in a coordinated fashion, the US is toast. They can’t sanction everyone, the US financial system will just be treated as damaged and routed around. A universal clearing currency is NOT needed. In fact, for a variety of reasons, it’s one of the worst things possible. Make the deals in local currencies. Done.

Additional add-ons to all of this include the probability of a lot of free capital flows going away. Countries that want to re-industrialize with domestically controlled supply chains, and many now will, need to keep capital at home and the retaliation against the US is going to be against a capital flow/investment system which has, with a few exceptions like Japan, mostly favored the US.

I can’t even imagine how much US property in other countries is likely to wind up forced to sell to locals, or even nationalized outright.

All of this leads to the fact that this will speed up the loss of dollar privilege, and with the loss of dollar privilege and everyone reluctant to sell to America, well, there’s no way that the US standard of living doesn’t get hit hard.

There’s a lot more to say on this. The US is counting on countries needing to sell to it. The Chinese have far more manufacturing capacity than anyone else and a cheaper cost structure. This leaves places like the EU fucked, hard. They can’t really sell to the US profitably. They can’t sell to China because their goods are too expensive. They don’t have a lot of resources to sell except food.

The correct response is to move to internal demand and collapse the cost structure (rent, housing prizes, all monopoly pricing, etc…) but neoliberal policies don’t allow that, so they’re going to try military Keynesianism, but that won’t work well either.

Truly screwed if they don’t get their heads out of their asses and ditch neoliberal bullshit, start taxing the rich, and figure out their energy situation.

But, they, they have it coming.

Long story short: the US is going to be hit by a huge inflationary shock, a decline in standard of living and, unless other countries are stupid, lose most of its overseas rentier monopoly income. The EU is in for a world of hurt, but has options. China will feel it, but they’ll be fine, they don’t need the US as a market any more.

In the longer term this might lead to improvements in the US economy: it will force reshoring, it’s just doing it in the stupidest way possible. But the US risks winding up in semi-autarchy, with an oligarch controlled economy, authoritarian but ineffective politics (think Yeltsin) amid a huge collapse of standards of living, even as it destroys its scientific and academic communities.

The road back will be a hard one and the suffering in between will be massive. And all this assumes that the political problems in America don’t boil over into civil or serious foreign wars.

Americans aren’t going to take a one-third reduction in their standard of living well, especially when so many of them are just a few hundred dollars a month away from homelessness.

Welcome to the end of the American century.

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Trump’s Negotiating Is Failing

If you want to call it negotiating. Iran refuses to even talk, unless America removes sanctions first. Putin will talk, but he clearly doesn’t intend to end the Ukraine war except on his terms, and certainly won’t agree to a ceasefire without massive concessions. China isn’t panicking over tariffs, but simply counter-tariffing. Europe’s getting uppity. Even midgets like Canada are standing up for themselves. Oh, and Ukraine still hasn’t signed that mineral “deal.”

Trump has said that if Iran doesn’t give up their nuclear program “there will be bombing like they’ve never seen.” He’s threatening Russia with secondary sanctions on oil, and he’s talking about tariffing everyone.

Apparently America doesn’t want any allies, or friends, and soon it won’t have any. This is batshit crazy, loop-de-loop nuts. The way to do this sort of thing is to single out one or two targets at most, and make everyone else think they’re safe, then move on. Trump’s acting like it’s 1991 or 1950, with the US at the top of the world, not like America’s in serious decline.

Oh it may seem like a response to America’s decline, an attempt to reshore industry, withdraw from Imperial over-reach and so on. Superficially it looks like that, but he’s just picking too many fights all once, his tariff threats are incoherent and unplanned, he’s defunding research and forcing brilliant scientists and engineers and scholars out of the US, has no industrial policy worth speaking of and is destroying America’s governing capacity with capricious cuts to the federal bureaucracy.

More to the point, he’s giving everyone else reason to route around America like it’s damage: to stop using the US dollar, to move to using local currencies for trade and to stop buying American goods and services, and yes, to stop selling to the US. The smart move, and it’s going to happen if he keeps this up, will be stop enforcing US intellectual property, end the DMCA clones and the prohibition on breaking digital locks, and to stop paying American internet giants their usurious fees.

The US isn’t agreement capable: you can’t trust them to keep their deals. This was true before Trump, but he’s super-charged them. Iran is right to say “well, we’ll talk after you keep the last deal we signed with you” and everyone else is coming to the same conclusion. If he won’t keep America’s deals, or even his own (the USMCA trade deal with Mexico and Canada is his) what’s the point of even talking? Just stop doing business with the US, period.

Smart policy isn’t to do this in one huge crash, because the US is very reliant on goods, resources and money from everyone else. You boil the frog, make things predictable and ease out of the problem. This isn’t Russia, which had China and India to backstop it when sanctions hit and which wasn’t massively in real trade deficit, making it up with non trade fees from its vassals and from countries which wanted to sell to it.

If you can’t sell to the US, why do business with it? What does it have that you can’t get from someone else? The obvious answer is food, oddly, but if even China is willing to put tariffs on both US and Canadian food, that dog won’t hunt.

It’s not that the US can’t do autarchy. It’s still a continental power, it’s still high tech, it still has plenty of scientists and engineers. But all that was true of Russia after the USSR collapsed, and the first decade and a half were ugly, and only got better because of Putin and the secret police taking charge—and they were able to do so thru a huge economic campaign to sell resources to the rest of the world.

And that’s where the US looks likely to wind up, after a period of chaos and deprivation: its’ behind in 80% of tech, it’s cost structure is too high, so it’ll have to sell food and natural gas: if anyone else is willing to buy. (The Euros may have no choice, everyone else does, because they aren’t blinded by insane fear and hatred of Russia.)

This sure is speed-running imperial decline. An accelerationist’s dream.

And if there’s a real war, what happens if Iran is able to sink an aircraft carrier? What happens when the US campaign against Yemen fails, as it will? What’s left of America if people aren’t scared of it? Nukes and complete pariah status and a massive nuclear proliferation scramble?

Likewise the whole sanctions regime bullshit is possible because almost everyone trades with the US and goes thru American and European banks. If they stop trading, they don’t need the banks and if European banks opt out, well, shit. So the fear of sanctions and the fear of military force goes way down.

Nothing to sell, no fear, and no one wanting to do business with the US, including buying its weapons.

This appears to be Trump’s endgame.

 

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Absolutely Massive Collapse In Travel From Canada To America Incoming

I have to admit, I didn’t think it would be this big:

Using forward booking data from a major GDS supplier, we’ve compared the total bookings held at this point last year with those recorded this week for the upcoming summer season. The decline is striking — bookings are down by over 70% in every month through to the end of September. This sharp drop suggests that travellers are holding off on making reservations, likely due to ongoing uncertainty surrounding the broader trade dispute.

Parts of Florida will be hammered by this. But I’m shocked: seventy percent plus! I hadn’t realized just how unified Canadians are in this.

I suspect it isn’t all the tariffs and Trump’s annexation threats: there’s been significant press of US border services snatching foreigners who are crossing legally but perhaps don’t have their paperwork all right and instead of just sending them back, abusing them and locking them up.

I certainly won’t be traveling to America, probably ever again: after all I’ve insulted Trump repeatedly and said that Israel is committing a genocide and customs officers often search social media. Nothing in America is worth the risk of wind up in some prison camp because I think Palestinians are human beings and shouldn’t be mass murdered.

So far I don’t see evidence of a big drop in European bookings, but if that happens, and there’s plenty of reason to believe in might, well… bad time to be in tourism in America and a good time to be in tourism in alternatives. I think Mexican and Canadian destinations are doing very well out of Canadian’s refusal to visit America.

America wants to be alone, and without allies, and soon it will be. Trump’s hilarious attempts to cozy up to Russia are ridiculous. Putin will do business with America, but he will never, ever trust the US, no matter who is President. Meanwhile America’s real allies are mostly deciding, quite rationally, that one can’t trust America and therefore America can’t be a useful ally.

This will lead to a variety of knock on effects, like diversification from the dollar and use of local currencies in trade, and the American standard of living will collapse by at least a third. Americans have been living way beyond their means, and Trump is bringing that to an end.

So sad.

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The End of Empire: The Anger, Glee and Despair Tango

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”

This statement is—wrong-ish.

For decades various people have been predicting what is happening now: the end of the American empire, the late Imperial wars, the despair and poverty of late-imperial rentier capitalism, and the rise of China.

Indeed a lot of people (your host included) were screaming about this 30 years ago. I read my first book on the way that America was turning to Gilded Age plus inequality in 1986. Everyone who wasn’t stupid, bought or ideologically captured could see what neoliberalism would lead to. From the late 90s we yelled about sending the West’s industry to the West, but hey, it was the “End of History” and capitalism and democracy had won and it didn’t matter where industry was because “comparative advantage” was, and still is, completely misunderstood, as were the constituents of state power.

So—it’s all happening now, along with massive wildfires from climate change and it seems like for decades nothing happened, but really, it was all happening: without deliberate policy choices, these weeks wouldn’t be possible.

The key to making accurate predictions is simply asking “what must happen if the current course continues, and will the course continue.” In 2009, when Obama decided he’d rather have a couple mansions and Hollywood friends than be the next FDR, and massively increase fracking to top it off, it became clear that the course would continue and all this became inevitable. Realistically, the rise of China was locked in when they were allowed to join the WTO and climate change was locked in when Reagan tore down the solar panels on the White House roof.

So it’s been a very easy time to make accurate long term predictions, much as Keynes, upon seeing the post-WWI peace deal was able to predict WWII and the end of the British Empire. It still had to play out, but everyone with sense knew it was inevitable.

Most of the time I’m sanguine about all this, but every once in a while despair and anger at all the harm which was so easily predicted and which could have been avoided wells up. Other times it’s glee: the fall of the American Empire will occasion a lot of horrid events, but unless you’re American or perhaps European, it’s hard to be sad, especially as we witness genocide in both Gaza and Syria, and witness huge homeless camps.

I was sent this video to watch, and it’s so typical of America these days:

Kind of hard to feel sorrow at the end of an Empire which treats even its own citizens this way. Meanwhile China deliberately crashed its own over-inflated housing market when the CCP noticed that too many people couldn’t afford their own homes any more, and is moving to mostly state-built housing. Tell me more about how awful “Communism” is. Nor are they shipping Israel arms and supporting genocide. (No, the Ughuirs are not being genocided, though they are discriminated against.)

If you’re feeling similar emotions, well, that’s understandable and no big deal. Just remember, the world is always and has always been shit for a lot of people, all that’s changing is who, and in a couple decades, how many. But there’s still delicious food, beautiful scenery, and love is just as sweet. All the good still exists, and your sorrow and pain does not help other people, and hurts you.

Live, enjoy, and perhaps allow yourself some happiness at the good amidst all the evil.

 

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The End Of The American Brain Drain

This admission of abject surrender and powerlessness from Colombia University is something I appreciate. Some actual honesty:

America’s in the middle of another of spasmodic crackdown on the free speech like McCarythism or the Red Scare. In this case so that Israel can commit genocide because a controlling number of American elites are scared of Israel, in many cases most likely because Israel has proof they’re baby-fuckers. (Can you say “Epstein”?)

The slightly less depraved ones are just scared of AIPAC funding their opponents. Others genuinely love the idea of mass murder, and probably have screenshots of dead Palestinians and Israeli soldiers wearing Palestinian women’s underwear saved for times when their palms get sweaty and they started breathing fast.

But, let’s bring this back to the more usual themes of this blog. There’s another interesting news story: it seems there’s a bill proposed to ban all Chinese students from studying in America.

Sweeeeet.

You know one of the main reasons why the US took the tech lead so decisively before and after World War II? A massive influx of European scientists and intelligentista, many Jewish, but plenty not. The smartest people in the world disproportionately wanted to live in America.

This continued for generations: you’d be some other nation, you’d train up smart people, educate them, and the ungrateful fucks would go to the US to finish their education, then stay in America. Endlessly frustrating for everyone but America.

So, of course, current American elites, scratching under their armpits, hooting about foreigners, grunting out “Uhmerika, grate” have decided to add to their broad attack on research, brains, intelligence, universities, teachers and books by banning even more smart people coming from other countries.

They will glare at you and tell you it’s “so them Chinese fellers can’t learn our secrets.”

Weird thing, last survey I saw had the Chinese leading in 89% of tech fields, up from 80% and there are more top Chinese AI researchers working in America than American AI researchers.

So, if you go to America you can’t say “mass murder is bad”, and no one can protect you from the government’s thugs if you do, but, fortunately for some, soon you won’t be able to study in the US, so hey, it’ll be a moot point if you’re lucky enough to be Chinese.

American universities are only massively dependent on foreign students and Americans, scared of catastrophic, life long student loan debt increasingly don’t want to to go to university, so I’m sure this won’t hurt America at all. Who needs scientists, engineers, professors, intellectuals, and all them fancy folks who think they’re better than MAGA chuds? I hear some of them academic types say evil worlds like sexism and racism and nasty phrases like settler colonialism, CIS, justice, fairness, genocide and so on.

Yup. Ban ’em or make ’em terrified. Don’t give academics any freedom, they think bad thoughts about how killing brown people might be wrong or that women might be worth something when they aren’t cooking or spreading their legs. They might say “abortion isn’t always evil” or suggest that God isn’t real or something.

Anyway, I’m pleased to notice that America is 110% (as an American manager or coach would say) dedicated to driving itself into the dirt and ensuring China buries it there.

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