148 thoughts on “But The Lizard Will Surely Die – A blast from the past from April 2021”

1. Some of the Lizards are shedding skin, but it is the Edgar suit, and more folks see the roach within.

   1. to mix metaphors
      some like ’em straight up though

      1. Has anyone ever mixed metathrees or metafives? Just wondering.
         I understand mixing metatarsils can be quite a trip.

         1. all in the metaverse

            1. Does that mean it’s only compatible with Meta headsets? I hear those keep spamming you with ads now at highly inappropriate times, of the “Hi I’m on final and about to flair. I really need to see the runway right now.” type…

         2. Should we call an oxorcist for you? You seem to be channeling RES for some reason.

            1. RES is alive!

               1. I know; we had that conversation just recently.

                  But honestly, that just makes it all the more horrifying. If he can possess others and force them to commit crimes against English while he’s still here, just imagine how much worse it will be AFTER he’s dead!

                  1. It depends on what value of “Dead” you employ, but my understanding is that we take no possessions into the afterlife and therefore I do not expect to be possessing ANYONE once my work in this world is complete. Linguistic crimes are a variant of viral communication, brain worms that corrupt language processing from which no face diaper can protect you.
                     ~

            2. Should you find yourself channeling RES it is recommended you immediately contact your cable provider.
               ~

         3. Metathrees and metafives, being odd, cannot be safely mixed. Those who attempt it do not survive.

            Of course, metaphor is not numerical, it is a portmanteau of “met” – to become acquainted with – and “amphora” – a vessel used for secure storage of liquids, such as wine. Thus “metaphor” refers to the things you are prone to see once you’ve become sufficiently acquainted with a quantity of wine.
            ~

2. True story: Copy editor: you can’t end a thought with a dash. The character wasn’t interrupted. There’s no one else there. Me: The heck. You’ve never interrupted yourself?

   To be realistic, you’d have to make it MOSTLY interruptions, and only getting calmed down lets you have a basic stream of consciousness that’s easily followed in text form…. /hehe

   1. hell, if I wrote my thoughts, we’d have a shortage of dashes

3. Speaking of “China can’t even feed itself,” how is Shanghai doing?

   1. Yahoo is reporting that people are being evicted from their apartments so that the government can turn them into quarantine facilities. Also, there’s a growing fear that large parts of the country’s manufacturing base will be forced to shut down soon due to a lack of parts from Shanghai. The government has said that it will take steps to keep production in Shanghai going.

      1. Ah yes! Forcing hungry people to return to the assembly line and let them go nowhere other than their home. That will work marvelously. I suppose the QC will remain constant?

         1. “Soylent Green is people.”

         2. In this case, it supposedly has more to do with making sure that shipments of materials and goods for the factories make it in and out of Shanghai.

         3. They can stay at the workplace!

         4. It is just SO hard to believe that this Shanghai business is about public health…Shanghai is/was the jewel of China, and I don’t think these actions make any sense unless there is another story here that we haven’t been told…..

            1. There are two primary factions in the CCP, the Shanghai gang and the Youth League faction. There’s another, reformist, faction called the QingHua clique but they seem to be out of sight at the moment. Xi comes out of the Shanghai faction but seems to be taking the side of the Youth League faction, which has its power base in the old industrial north. The thinking is that he’s crushing the cliques and concentrating all power in himself. Prior to Xi, the cliques had alternated in the top jobs and the decision making was somewhat collective.

               It’s all just politics. Mao and Stalin would understand. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

            2. Makes me think of the movie “Network” – open the windows and shout out “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!” (or something like that).

   2. Shanghai is only a part of it. 40% of China’s GDP is locked down. The whole of the Yangtze delta, that’s Shanghai and environs, with the lockdowns expanding to the Pearl River Delta (Canton, Shenzen). Jilin province, it borders North Korea, is starting to relax it a bit, which is a good thing since an awful lot of wheat is grown up there along with most of China’s old heavy industry and coal. (Dalian and Harbin)

      Some news has leaked out of Shanghai. Minor riots and scuffles, but the lockdown on information is even more effective than that on people. Strangely, whilst cases grow, hospitalizations have not and no one has died. That’s a tremendous testament to Chinese traditional medicine, or they could be lying, but that’s crazy talk.

      This all really smells like a Great Leap Forward moment by Xi the Pooh. Mao and Stalin would smile, if one could smile in hell.

      1. Wasn’t that the one where they tried to kill all the sparrows?

         1. The sparrows thing was the “four pests” campaign. Mao designated four animals as pests to be exterminated, one of which was sparrows (in the belief that sparrows consumed large quantities of grain and other human-grown foods).

            1. Yeah. And I recall they discovered, the hard way, that sparrows ate a lot more locusts than they ate grain.

               1. This is correct.

      2. count on them lying, always

      3. That would suggest that the entire coast is locked down.

         Yikes…

      4. Yep. The assumption being the people of Shanghai are most likely to “get uppity,” and now the Party believes they’ve crushed Hong Kong, they can work on putting Shanghai’s inhabitants in their place.
         Any chance that they create future “enemies of the state,” who do have the skills to be more than a nuisance? Or, God help us, is Xi’s successor learning the, “to survive I must be even more ideologically pure and ruthless than they are?” lesson?

         1. Yes, that’s gloomy, but we might also get a, “Hates the Party and all it stands for with the heat of a thousand suns,” type. We’ll see.

         2. Or food riots. Starvation, or the fear of starvation, can do interesting things to both human and mob mentalities.

         3. Cracking down on Shanghai after Hong Kong will essentially be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
            In the 1920s and 30s, China was a basket case. Somehow I have the feeling that it will soon return to the familiar basket…
            Specially of the Three Gorges Dam collapses…

            1. Better than the goose killing them.

      5. Hmm, cases gone up, hospitalizations not doing so. Sounds like normal viral progress. If it weren’t China, I’d say we have another OMG Omicron type kabuki theater outbreak. Since it is China, it could be anything, though I still suspect it’s kabuki.

         1. My specci-lashun is that Xi want a Short Victorious War to bolster his sagging popularity, but after seeing what happened to Putin’s Russian army in Ukraine, he decided to put off the plan for a short victorious invasion of Taiwan. As Plan B, he is attempting a short victorious war to suppress a rebellious province, even if he has to provoke the open rebellion himself, first.

   3. And another thing. There has been a huge increase in the number of “trust the party” everything is great, transitory, etc., on state media. My interpretation is that the CCP is getting nervous,

      There was a report that a policeman arresting someone for breaking quarantine shouted that they needed to do as they were told because they’re about to go to war with America, Now, he was almost certainly taking out his bottom, but the gringo ploy would be a natural next step, they’ve already gone a long way down that road. I bet that’s what the security forces are chatting amongst themselves about.

      Things are bad and totalitarianism has its own logic.

      1. I would hope that the CCP isn’t stupid enough to provoke a war with a foreign country that’s quite capable of shutting down all of the food shipments that China brings in from overseas. The food situation there is already bad enough.

         Also, combining the elements of the current anti-Russian freak-out with the usual “yellow peril” crap that the American left indulges in (because that’s what it basically is) is a troubling thought. I suspect we’d see the local Asian communities here in California forced to race riot just to protect themselves.

         1. I would hope that the CCP isn’t stupid enough to provoke a war with a foreign country that’s quite capable of shutting down all of the food shipments that China brings in from overseas.

            Indian, Australian, Vietnamese, and even South Korean navies could do that, to name a few neighbors. Not saying they would; but they could.

            1. Yep. Some could do it without even putting to sea

            2. All of those countries have regional navies, and the CCP might believe that its own navy (which is very big) can deal with them.

               The US Navy, on the other hand, is quite capable of sticking a carrier group off the coast of, say, Brazil, for a few months just to intercept any shipments of food to China. The PLAN would likely be completely incapable of defending against such a tactic other than to hope one of their subs got really lucky.

               1. Junior Said
                  “The US Navy, on the other hand, is quite capable of sticking a carrier group off the coast of, say, Brazil, for a few months just to intercept any shipments of food to China. ”
                  That’s presuming the USN isn’t so busy doing stupid Diversity and Inclusion crap that cant navigate and run into the commercial traffic, burn the carrier down or run into a seamount with the sub(s) with the task force. All of those have happened in the last couple years.

                  1. Fortunately, we have a lot of spares.

                     1. Not so many anymore, and the Navy has been cannibalizing parts a lot, just like the Air Force has been, to keep stuff up and running. While military ability of the CCP is vastly overstated, the ability of ours at this point is also vastly overstated.

                        1. Putting up a big enough task group to keep an eye on the coastlines of most countries isn’t that hard to do. You don’t even need much more than an AWAC for top-down looking capability, a few fast planes for ID flybys of likely targets, and a few warships to actually enforce the blockade of shipping to China. Even an amphibious assault ship and its escorts would likely be overkill. Since the Chinese wouldn’t be getting large enough quantities of food from more than a few countries, there wouldn’t be that many places that you would need to watch. Including both our super carriers and amphibious assault ships, we have roughly twenty groups. We’ve got plenty to spare.

                           The important thing is that the PLAN doesn’t have the ability to sustain operations in distant parts of the world. So even if we only sent a few ships to watch for freighters carrying food to China, the Chinese would have trouble doing anything about it.

                           1. If our military weren’t more focused on issuing “equity: reports aiming “to equalize OUTCOMES for employees and partners across racial, sexual and gender lines” I might have more confidence in their ability to actually conduct a coherent operation. The Afghanistan withdrawal proved that we are in serious trouble in the event of the need to conduct large scale military operations that require planning and logistics.

                              I really think people are so used to the USA having a top notch military that people have trouble believing that it is not at that level anymore and is getting worse everyday as the political and military leadership seeks to actively undermine it and convert it into an ideological instrument of the radical left.

                           2. There’s a fair amount of information that the Afghan clusterfuck was largely created by State and the CIA, with the armed forces left holding the bag. Of course, with Obamaified brass, a chunk of that blame is deserved, but not all.

                           3. Again, this is basic stuff. The PLAN doesn’t have an effective way to fight back against it since it can’t support so much as a squadron of ships all that far out from its coastline. And because of that constraint, there would be little risk involved. It would be pretty similar to a training exercise in an unusual location, as ships assigned to such duty would be unlikely to see anything more hostile than a crewman on a freighter armed with a rifle..

                              Finally, it’s worth noting that the problems in Afghanistan weren’t the fault of the guys on the ground. They did as well as could be expected with a screwed up situation that had been imposed on them by the people at the top. Or in other words, the problems are all at the strategic planning level. A naval task group assigned to watch out for ships carrying goods from Brazil to China has already gotten past that level of problems, and only needs to deal with the stuff that we still excel at. The proper analogy to Afghanistan in this situation would be if the decision makers in DC decided to completely ignore China’s exceedingly vulnerable maritime shipping, and send all of our ships to dither around within sight of China’s shores, instead.

                        2. In other words, we’re ALL paper tigers now.

               2. Not to be a black-pill or anything, but that assumes our bought-and-paid-for political class would even try to block food shipments to China. Given the coming food shortages as a direct result of the assorted supply-chain disruptions they’ve (intentionally, for the most part) caused, I can easily see our political class making our own citizens go hungry – especially in the red states – while trying to feed the world. Or attempting to, at least.

                  Wouldn’t be the first time famine was used as a weapon. And after the way the pandemic was exploited and manipulated for political power, there’s nothing I would put past the DC establishment.

                  1. I can easily see our political class making our own citizens go hungry – especially in the red states – while trying to feed the world. Or attempting to, at least.

                     ATTEMPTIG being the key word here. I’ve been thinking about what sort of things could trigger the boog, and inflicting famine on Americans to feed our enemies by seizing food is on the list.

               3. Small, regional navies with modern submarines can sink cargo ships pretty much without being noticed… And Beijing’s arrogance might cause them to take “rash” actions. While the USN could certainly sink or detain such ships, it might not be able to do so without unwanted attention.

         2. If I go into pure pessimist mode (taught me by my dad, who was an absolute master and almost certainly an Odd himself), I’d be afraid the higher likelihood would be for the Administration to do a Cercescu on us by shipping our food to the Party as “humanitarian relief.”

            1. We all recall how Causescu ended. If they play that game, they win the same prize.

               1. That is true of most any leader who takes that path…

         3. Close the strait of Hormuz and China stops. Dead. In two weeks.

            1. Might also need three other points – Panama Canal, and the southern tips of South America and Africa – just to ensure they don’t try to bypass Hormuz. But the US could do it without even really thinking about it, and is likely the only navy that could get all four.

            2. More like the Straits of Malacca, but the basic point is valid.

         4. China has a 5 year stockpile of food, so that wouldn’t stop them…Intrinsic Chinese caution will, however, make them unwilling to go to war outside their historic sphere of influence..

            1. Uh… what?

               China’s been having to deal with massive shortfalls in their own harvests the last few years. And they have to import massive amounts of food even when they have good harvests. This is the first time I’ve heard anyone suggest they’ve got food stockpiled.

               1. It would be entirely like them to do so. They had stockpiles during the Great Leap Forward Famine.

                  The question is whether they could distribute them prudently.

                  1. The Great Leap Forward famine was caused in part because Mao was shipping food out to the rest of the world in exchange for materials and/or good will, even while his people starved.

                     1. The CCP is quite willing to let tens of millions of its own people to starve to death as long as the CCP has food and they have food they can ship as part of their payoffs as they seek to turn more countries into vassal states. Xi is supporting Putin for two reasons: 1) t shows yet again how feckless and incompetent current Western leadership is, and 2) it is an opportunity to make Russia dependent on the CCP and turn Russia into a vassal state.

                        1. Maybe, maybe not. The famine in question came to a rather sudden halt when pretty much the entire CCP leadership turned against Mao over the policies that were causing the famine. Yes, there are apparently limits to even what most of the CCP leadership will allow to happen to their own people.

                           1. And so he unleashed the Cultural Revolution

                           2. Yup. But people weren’t starving any longer.

                     2. Pretty much what the Democrats are going to do with their Green Leap Forward.

                     3. Our food bank has canned carrots labeled, “Product of China.” The brand is, “McTrader.”

            2. I would be very careful about any estimate of Chinese stockpiles, particularly of food, given the state of the harvests and all the flooding over the last couple of years. This is,of course, in addition to caution about any estimate out of China. They lie about everything, even when they don’t have to. China is assho.

               1. It’s also worth noting that the government stockpiling food is something that dates back into antiquity. However, when the stockpiles were opened by the Nationalists during the famine in the early ’40s (during World War 2), it was discovered that the stockpiles were empty. Corrupt administrators had sold all the food that was supposedly being stored, and pocketed the proceeds.

                  Do the Communists do a better job of making sure that there is actual food in the stockpiles? Your guess is as good as mine…

                  1. Based on world wide precedent of similar governments, I’d say no.

                  2. Stories out now that yet another of Putin’s (self-inflicted) headaches is the Russian government handed out much money to their intelligence types to suborn Ukrainian political figures years ago. But the intelligence types figured there’d never be a war, so they pocketed the money. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

            3. “China has a 5 year stockpile of food on paper,”

               Fixed that for you. They might have 5 years for the politburro… maybe. But I suspect that’s on paper only as well and has long vanished to the black market if it ever existed except in the reports. “These are not the shortfalls you are looking for, move along.” This is typical for that type of regime. Russia had that problem. China’s had that problem for centuries to greater and lesser degrees. No one wants to tell the Powers that Be that things aren’t all rosy. Reports are easy to fake.

               1. ^^^ THIS ^^^

                  Fully endorsed. That’s exactly the response I was going to write (different wording, of course, but the same message), but you beat me to it by an hour or two.

                  1. Yep, definitely this. The Soviet Army back in the ’70s or ’80s formalized something similar in the “Vertical Stroke” doctrine, in which every officer in a command chain, up to and including the supreme commander (whatever he was called), was personally legally responsible for anything any of the troops in the chain did, down to the rawest recruit drinking the hydraulic fluid for a MiG-25 (alcohol; it was referred to by the maintenance crews as the “flying restaurant”). The results were as should have been expected by anyone with two neurons: No problems ever got reported up the chain.

                     1. Bad enough they put Cyanide in it for a while.

            4. Do we know they have that stockpile, or do they claim it? Because there is a world of difference

               ________________________________

   4. I don’t want to think about it. It hurts.

4. Funny thing, I was just thinking this today too. Was in a rolling argument over on a different site yesterday about how, even if the administration goes completely loony toons crazy, we will survive, more or less, because the country is bigger than anyone can directly control and we’re full of people who won’t just die to comply.

   I suspect even if the supermarkets run dry we’ll see even the urban ghetto punks being pointed in useful directions instead of just beating up store clerks and rioting. A lot of that is guys trying to impress the girls, and if there’s nothing to eat, I suspect they’ll discover quite quickly, bringing home 200lbs of formerly very angry pig is also a really good way to prove your tough guy creds.

   Will it suck? Yes. Will we end up with more rare and endangered species going passenger pigeon? Absolutely. But the ones who build, or figure out how to build will muddle our way through.

   If the current systems crash as hard as they’re looking they might, it will be bad, but we’re also not going to wake up tomorrow and discover we’ve all been turned into pillars of salt either.

   1. You’re an optimist…which is good!

5. The squirrels of my mind are constantly interrupting each other.

   Must be a popular thing because everyone knows what ,”Look a squirrel!”, means.

   Right?

6. I’m noticing that, by your own admission, you’ve been hanging out at zerohedge. Just sayin. 😇

   1. yes. It’s bad.

      1. We need to get you a better hobby…

         1. I nominate gaming. I would seriously pay a subscription fee to watch Sarah try to figure out video games.

            So, possible money-making opportunity for her if she’s ever desperate enough. 😉

            1. Younger son asks: How much of a subscription fee? if it’s cumulatively $60 a month, he says we’ll do a video a month…..

            2. cumulatively: if there’s a few people and it adds up to that.
               Younger son is in an entrepreneurial mood Also, he and I are writing a pure pulp zonker space opera together. You’ve been warned.

               1. cumulatively: if there’s a few people and it adds up to that.

                  That makes more sense. I thought you meant $60 per subscription at first, which is… a bit optimistic. 🙂

                  The details vary depending on the platform, but let’s use Twitch – a live streaming service – as an example. They’ve got three monthly subscription tiers: $4.99, $9.99 and $24.99. According to Twitch the content creator gets to keep about half of it, so two dozen lowest-tier subscribers would get you your $60 a month. You generally decide what the rewards of each tier are, from options such as access to the chat, special badges or emoticons to use in the chat, or the occasional extra video not available to unsubscribed viewers.

                  I wouldn’t actually rely on Twitch or YouTube, though, as both have been engaging in viewpoint censorship. Razorfist even quit Twitch entirely some months ago after they screwed with him. I would look into what StyxHexenHammer666 is doing; he’s been the biggest advocate I know of for using non-censorious alt-tech sites like Bit Chute.

                  But as for doing just one video a month, I think you ARE being overly-optimistic there. You don’t have to do it every day, but I would suggest putting out at least a couple of hours of video each week to hold interest. Plus, if you take too long between gaming sessions you might just forget what you’ve learned and end up starting from scratch each time.

                  However, you do have a lot of flexibility in this. You can play a half-hour session several times a week, or a couple of hour-long sessions. When TotalBiscuit and Jesse Cox did their Terraria series, they’d record two hours at a time and then break it up into 4 30-minute segments. And Razorfist only does one gaming stream a week, although it tends to be a long session (typically 4-5 hours). You want to be somewhat steady with your content, but you can look for something that fits your schedule.

                  Also, your style of video-making can make a big difference. Trying to write and keep to a script or doing something that involves a lot of editing can make content production take a lot more time and effort than it needs to, and might not suit either your schedule OR the “watch me stumble through learning video games” style you’d be going for. If you just do a single take with stream-of-consciousness live commentary, that shouldn’t take too long. Something else I’ve seen work is the MST3K style: just record the gameplay itself without commentary and then watch it with one or more friends later, and record THAT commentary. Ultimately it would be up to you and your son to figure out what works best for you, though.

                  Also, he and I are writing a pure pulp zonker space opera together. You’ve been warned.

                  Ma’am, trust me: if you’re going to do let’s plays the LAST thing you want to be is boring. Some get by on humor and some get by on being informative and analytical about the material, but one way or another you want to put some kind of interesting spin on it. It’s probably a lot like writing in that sense, so if “high-brow zany” works for you and your audience then go with it.

                  And speaking of being like writing: keep in mind that if making video content doesn’t work for you for whatever reason then remember that written LPs are also a thing. You’ll still want to record so you can grab screenshots or make gifs/video clips of interesting parts, but writing about your experiences after the fact can also be entertaining if done well.

                  If you’ve any other questions, feel free to ask.

                  1. You really need to speak to son, not me. 😀

                     1. [shrug]

                        Link him to this conversation and let him reply, then. If he has any questions I’ll answer as best I can.

                        Meanwhile, is there anything YOU want to know?

      2. Once you learn how to read it it’s invaluable since it covers what the others won’t.

         1. Zerohedge is a bit like foreign newsies. They have a fairly predictable bias. Once you account for that, you can work around it. Also like the big media in the states. You can predict the news in three to six months by watching what they are declaiming today…

            Or you could just read the Babylon Bee. Though they do more culture stuff and less markets and foreign interest.

7. There are a lot of grey-bearded lizards scurrying around that were brought up on Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and Francis Marion.

   1. I resemble this remark.

   2. Hey, I always preferred “boys books” and pioneer tales.

   3. Some still have a ginger in their beards… 😉

8. This particular summary of a Peter Zeihan by Lawrence Person here : https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=51172 is VERY interesting. Sounds like China has been lying to itself for a LONG while and its 1 child policy has put them in a serious bind as the children from that are starting to age out of their reproductive years. Demography is a stainless steel b*tch…

   1. Also a lot of the more productive ones have escaped when they could.

   2. Only the US has at all healthy demographics. Europe is dying. Japan is dead, Brazil is a mess, and South Korea might be worst of all even Mexico doesn’t have the demographic surplus it used to have and that has interesting implications for the US

      China is about to be the biggest demographic catastrophe since the Black Death

   3. Also, while the CCP has done away with the One Child Policy, people still aren’t having more kids. There was a one year bump in population numbers when the policy was revoked. Then the numbers went back to right where they’d been before. And everyone agrees that the usual numbers can:t be trusted.

      1. I read a source back three-four months ago that claimed the CCP was ordering members to have at least three kids. I’m sure the guys are all for that, but given the probable state of OB care in China, I’d be really worried if I were a woman over there. (More worried.)

         1. It’s not like they have extra women to use up that way.

            Of course, they’re probably figuring to have spare Uighyr women…. the bastiches.

            1. If they were just totalitarian, not racist too, they could solve that easily enough.

            2. Extra women? They have a massive shortage of women full stop. The sad fact is that a large proportion of Chinese men will never marry since there aren’t enough women for them. Their neighbors can’t “help” them either since they all have shortages too.

               1. Execute all the males Uighyrs and voila…. which is exactly how that sort thinks.

                  1. Still not enough. It’s that bad. perhaps if the Uighurs go down hard and take a lot of PLA troopies down with them, but otherwise not.

                     1. Way out in rural China, the woman shortage is not as bad, because a lot of people apparently had kids, and then told everyone that “These aren’t our kids. These are all kids of different cousins, and they just happen to have come to live here.”

                        And the party apparatchiks didn’t report it, because they also had lots of cousins’ kids living with them. Coincidentally.

                        But in the cities, or anywhere that the apparatchiks were diligent or demanded really big bribes, the situation is bad. Magically better than it should be, if everyone had been following the rules, but still not great.

                        1. Even in cities there are a large number of twins.

                        2. The government also revoked the One Child Policy in rural areas quite a bit sooner than it did in the urban areas.

                           1. Certainly odd isn’t it that during that infamous One Child Policy the incidence of miscarriages drastically increased, and that the vast majority of those would have resulted in a female child.
                              And too, with that same restriction on children China’s aging population no longer has the traditional means of support in their old age, working age kids to provide care. If only some natural disaster were to magically remove a large number of no longer productive citizens wouldn’t China be in a much better position both internally and internationally. (/sarc)

                           2. If only some natural disaster were to magically remove a large number of no longer productive citizens wouldn’t China be in a much better position both internally and internationally. (/sarc)

                              Worked for the NY State oension plan…..

   4. I’m a bit miffed at Zeihan since he is saying what I’ve been saying for years now and I hate when that happens. I do think he’s overselling some of this. There is a lot of ruin in a nation and catastrophic failure, which is what he’s predicting, is a highly complex. Non-linear phenomenon so predicting the thing, never mind the when, is almost impossible. That said, when it does happen it will probably all happen in one go, and I think it’s extremely likely it will happen, probably sooner than later, but d-mned if I know when.

      One thing to think about. China doesn’t really have a government, it has a court. It’s very sensitive to whims and mistakes and the bureaucratic inertia that tends to keep things rolling on can’t be counted on.

      1. Lawrence Person also thought he was overselling the points a bit. Thing I worry about is China has been expanding their nuclear deterrent at a fierce rate, possibly using a dense pack model like US looked at back in the 80’s to protect it (and to keep it all under control…). If someone figures out they’re screwed they might get into a Ragnorak kind of mood, and with new weapons they might just work…

         As for US demographics, depends about who you talk about. Demoncrats/SJW/Tranzis? Not so much, with all their craziness (and hate of “breeders”) they’re as bad as the devotees of Bacchus that used to lop things off in a drunken frenzy to offer them to the god. The just mutilate themselves with drugs. Various traditional religion types (e.g. Evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Jewish, Muslims) yes (although barely the 2.2/woman that’s sustaining in some cases I suspect), also new immigrants although that used to tone down 2nd or 3rd generation. Basically we’re just not as screwed (or is it unscrewed ?) as the Japanese, Russians, Chinese and much of Europe (not the old refugees from the Warsaw pact, they’re still cranking the Kids out). But given the way things look there will be lots of nice real estate circa 2100 or so unless it gets invaded from nearby areas.

         1. This is one of the primary pillars 😇of my business — anyone in a big organization will know why that’s funny — so, on this topic i don’t “listen” to anybody, I just look at the numbers and I keep paper copies of certain of them, and I cross check all the sources. not perfect, but not bad.

            US demographics are really not that bad and we should see modest growth in the productive population. For the next decade or so. After that depends on whether the current generation breeds. I don’t know that they will or won’t but my young cousins seem to be marrying and carrying at a great rate.

            China is a demographic disaster and a classic case of yes, they really are that stupid and can stay stuck on that stupidity for decades.

            Conspiracy theorists would note that WuFlu stopped what would have been a boom time demography wise in the US right in its tracks. not a few hedge fund guys have been noting that these disease outbreaks have been well timed to support what ever was in the CCP’s interest. I don’t think that’s it, but I’m sometimes right, sometimes wrong but always honest.

            1. Small data-point, every OB that I contacted this year (around Des Moines) mentioned that they’re overwhelmed with pregnancies, and that’s after last year triggered a a lot of work-sharing programs where the visits that don’t require an OB are done elsewhere– which might indicate doctors going out of business, but combined with the hospital mentioning that they were seeing a lot more new babies, and even having to transfer some folks out….

               1. It’s that time of life for a fairly large cohort.

               2. It’s a side effect of what I call the Boomlet I think. The tail end of the boomers (depending on how you count them) are from 60-64 and many of the educated ones didn’t start reproducing until nearly 30. So there is a boom from the boom (my “Boomlet”) in the late 80’s into the mid 90’s. Those kids are tagging mid to late 20s and are starting to have families. My daughters fall into that cohort(though no gentleman friends, I wonder at the masculinity of many of their male equivalents). MANY of the evangelical buddies they have have had one and sometimes two children already. Their more worldly friends are still fiddling about (and many have headed down the trap of gender transition/ angry feminism). 30 is not too late for kids, but the later you push it the harder it gets and the biological clocks haven’t started ticking for their worldly buddies quite yet (and may never go off in a lot of cases). That demographic bump with coupled with everyone being trapped at home with not much to do besides “Netflix and chill” for the last year+ seems to be keeping the ob/gyn folks busy. And of course there are less of them, that’s a medical specialty that does not pay as well as others due to the huge malpractice insurance costs.

               3. Good. Especially good given stories of disrupted cycles among the young and vaccinated.
                  Or maybe some pregnancies are “because,” of disrupted cycles.

               4. I also wonder how many people went “well, everything’s close and there is only dreck on TV, what else are we going to do?” With predictable (to everyone else) consequences.

      2. Re: “China doesn’t really have a government, it has a court. ”

         Something that occurred to me a couple of years ago: through most of recorded history China has been a military empire, with a ruling Emperor who is kept in power by his army and not much else, and really rules only as far as his army can reach. The current Communist regime is nothing more than a variant on that – with all the same strengths and more important, all the same weaknesses..

         1. That’s how it usually goes, and why there’s hope for the US. You see the same in Russia: Tsar Putin, Tsar Stalin, Tsar Lenin. Title changes, function does not.

   5. Yep. And even intended results have unintended consequences…

9. We ‘murricans are our own version of “get away from the barbarians.” It’s just that in our version, we are the barbarians and proud of it. Still most of us, myself not excepted, don’t understand the rest of the world very well. We’re especially not aware of our place in it. Just ask anybody you meet, “What is the 3rd largest country by population?” We all know China and India are numbers 1 and 2 or 2 and 1, depending on whose figures you believe. Who is number 3? Hint, Indonesia and Brazil are 4 and 5.

   Yes, the rest of the world hates us. As Bill Whittle says, they’ll ‘dis America for hours around the hookah table, but try throwing a green card down on that table. They’ll all scramble for it.

   1. I KNOW because I deal with American-born who have no idea how amazing they are. Or, from the left, how insignificant for the problems of the world. All we do is feed them and tell them to behave. Their cultures are shit, though.

      1. At least you can make halfway decent fertilizer with shit. Some of those cultures don’t even rise to that level. They’re toxic waste. They poison anything they come into long term contact with. FIFO, foreign friends. You don’t like your corrupt country? Don’t bring your corrupt culture with you when you get here.

10. My youngest brother traveled to China, found a beautiful girl, married her, and brought her to America. They just had child number four. She’s a peach of a woman, kind and generous, and very smart.

    They have so few women of child-bearing age in China, and now they have one less. Heh. Good for you, bro.

11. I grew up “eating dirt” and lived. God let me survive sitting SAC Nuclear Alerts as a B-52 crewdog and live. He’s seen me through 39+ months of unemployment (spread across about 5 episodes) after I turned 50 and live. And I’m recovering from two different kinds of cancer that the doctors say are gone (or “in remission”).

    Yeah. This lizard’s earthsuit will die. When God wills it. Not a second sooner.

    Maranatha!

    1. Sounds like you found the secret. A man lives as long as he lives and not one moment more. This is well known. And the secret is to live as long as you live, and not one moment less.

12. I beg to differ about ZeroHedge; it is a free-for-all site, which does not claim to give out accurate news but rather tells us what others in the financial markets are thinking from week to week. If nonsense theories or propaganda about world events are being widely shared, investors need to know about them.

13. And a trivial sign of their not understanding us. I play Best Fiends, which lives on ads so I see a lot of (blessedly short) ads. Or at least, I glance at them before putting the tablet down and knitting a bit. But last night, a purely Chinese -to-American ad popped up for a different game. The ad: mature, well-dressed Chinese woman walks up to a couple of Chinese young people and asks them if they are poor. (The young man is wearing some kind of uniform, presumably a messenger, and the girl is just walking by). They say yes, she tells them to play the game and they’ll get some money. They do, they win cash, they thank her profusely.
    The production values were surprisingly like the fake Psi-Corps commercial from Babylon 5. Meaning, I more or less, “ewwwed,” my way through it. Somehow, I don’t think it’s going to be very effective.

14. Well, duh.

    All lizards are mortal. This chameleon is a lizard. Therefore, this chameleon is mortal.

    1. Ok Vizzini keep at it 🙂

       1. “No man can walk out on his own story”.

15. You know why the Left is terrified of people like me?
    We won’t suicide in despair.
    We go after the ones causing that despair.

    1. This is true. But it is also especially bad for them, because it exposes who they really are. When their bright and shiny model future comes crashing down, and they’re sad and depressed and angry and unemployed and unhappy… and they see folks like us still working, still paying the bills, still saying the same old thing: “Told you so.”

       That really sticks in their craw. Their self image takes a big hit when they realize they aren’t the stunning, brave souls they thought they were.

       And so they hate us especially bad for revealing to them who and what they really are. Who and what their leaders (the things we don’t have) are. To them, we’re supposed to be just as bad off, just as sad and hopeless when their latest sooper genius plan fails. As it always does.

       They hate us for being the ones that pick up the pieces after. The ones that endure and do not break.

       They hate us for actually being the kind of people they tell themselves they are.

       That’s winning, folks.

       It’s a lot like winning a fistfight. You don’t come out the other end unbloodied and clean. When we win, things are still going to suck. There will be a lot that still needs doing. And it really won’t feel like we’ve won.

       We’ll be looking towards the next battle by then. Because so long as individual freedom and liberty exist, there will be those that seek to reduce and control you.

       1. It is not so much their self worth as their whole world view that comes down around them. To some strong degree the Tranzi/SJW world view is a works based religion. If you limit your harm to Gaia (Look I drive a prius), admit your “white Guilt” and look down on those nasty flyover you earn points. Not for the afterlife as they don’t officially believe in one although many have the Cartoon version of heaven or some variant of reincarnation filtered through the latest emotional Bovine Output (Apologies to our Minotaur resident). They believe they should get payback in this life like some bizarre syncretistic version of the most out their outre Health and Wealth Gospel. And then the feces hit the whirling blades and their life comes apart and their “Faith” is shattered. I think part of why they hate the Gospel message so much is it tells you that you don’t get there on your own you NEED help, we all need help. Of course it doesn’t help that they have Screwtape or Wormwood gently whispering in their ears

16. –

17. Or rather, when other people lie, it just happens to be in ways such that the ‘truth’ aligns with the Party Truth, about the past, present, or future.

    What they do not calculate on, is people seeing what they are up to, and shaping their falsehoods and failures to disclose in ways that will screw the left up.

    Blithely assuming that the right wingers will not disparately stop responding to phone polls, etc.

18. News item, https://thenewamerican.com/trudeau-trying-to-shut-down-independent-journalism-in-canada-says-rebel-news-founder/

    Canadian government has instituted a “journalism license” to control those pesky individuals who like to asks questions about things like the ‘Mad Science Genetic Modification Experiment” the government is pleased to call a ‘vaccine’.

    Since the NDPee Party agreed to vote with the Liberals in Parliament on March 22nd, the Regime has instituted a $1000-$4000 tax on pickup trucks, raised the interest rates 1/2%, raised taxes on gas, diesel and heating fuels, and stands poised to pass a bill to censor the internet.

    These are the same assholes who declared the Emergencies Act because truckers were parked in front of the Parliament buildings and had deployed inflatable hot tubs and bouncy castles. Incidentally introducing Canadians to the idea that their bank accounts could be seized or frozen at any time by the government, without a judge’s warrant or any adult supervision

    This is not the kind of thing a government does when it has the support of the people. It is what they do when they know everyone wants them gone, and a considerable portion of the public are thinking up ways to make it happen.

    Similar to the astounding uproar surrounding Elon Musk and his offer to buy Twitter. One particcularly imbecilic example is Max Boot, he of the ‘blue check-mark’ and featuring the Ukrainian flag on his feed, who tweeted: “I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter. He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.” Musk has driven them all insane by buying shares in a public company.

    When you see things like that, you know that the guys like Trudeau and Max Boot are frigging panicking.

    1. Ceterum autem censeo TrudeauProg esse delendam

       ________________________________

19. F.A. Hayek wrote “Fatal Conceit” (a critique of socialism). It’s a short read and well-worth a few minutes. Critiquing the Left is/should be good sport, the have too many foibles to count.

    Franklin Roosevelt was a diabolical s.o.b., although modern liberalism has sainted FDR, he was a man of the sinister left.

    1. I’m not sure I’d consider commie critiquing a sport. Its a bit like dynamiting fish in a barrel. Problem is the younger generation is so feels based and in grained that rational logical thought is White and European thus by definition Evil that you can’t really make progress that way.

20. C4C

21. It may have been said already, above (I am so far behind I think even Sarah has lapped me), but it never fails to amaze me how, every third or fourth generation, we need to have someone stand up to the would-be world hegemon, who’s been bluffing for years, look them in the eye, and say, “Call.” And then we find out the would-be world hegemon has nothing but a busted flush. Bye-bye Kaiser Bill and the German Empire thingy. Bye-bye Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan (Italy isn’t even worth a mention). See ya, Soviet Union. And now the Chinese are creating a Potemkin society that is not only crumbling around the edges, it’s nearly destroyed itself behind the scenes — as, it must be noted, Chinese society outside of the upper crust has always been. Even the supposedly-resurgent Russians are getting their asses handed to them by what I must admit is a very fierce and dedicated Ukrainian resistance, even as I shrug and pronounce a pox on both their houses. (Kiev once ruled the Rus, so I’m not sure this is really all that surprising. Plus, my great-grandpa was from Kiev, and he got his family the hell out of Dodge way back in the 19-aughts. Smart man.)

    The only way they can win is to bluff us, and turn us into little simpering would-be slaves. And then someone like Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump comes along and reminds us a) we’re better than that, and b) the other side is bluffing and lying and shucking and jiving in the desperate hope we finally say, “to hell with it,” and surrender.

    They’re counting on Brandon to be the one who surrenders. Or, more to the point, his handlers.

    1. I call them the ventriloquist squad. Half a dozen ventriloquists squabbling over the one dummy. When the FICUS babbles completely different twaddle from one day to the next? Different ventriloquists in control.

    2. They’re counting on Brandon to be the one who surrenders. Or, more to the point, his handlers.

       More importantly, they’re counting on the rest of us to meekly go along with it when he does. I don’t think it will work that way…

22. c4c

23. “Even people who know better write long articles about how China is going to win and be the big hegemon forever, world without end.”

    I’m so old I recall when the Hysterics were running about, hair aflame, crying that the Japanese were overtaking American Industry and the only cure was adoption of Industrial Policy, STET! (Because the geniuses that gave us Jimmah Carter, Walter Mondale, Mikey Dukakis, Teddy Kennedy, Joe Biden, Dick Gephardt et. al. had the brilliance to steer the American Economy. I don’t think so.)

    I’m even old enough when many of those same geniuses were declaring the Soviet Union was the wave of the future and so-called “Free Markets” couldn’t hold a candle to their Industrial Might. (That those enlightened central planers couldn’t manage to conduct a decent war against a rag-tag Third World guerilla force did not escape notice.)

    I’m almost old enough to remember when the same siren song was sung about our Second World War foes, and the History I’ve read advises that it was only FDR’s refusal to put the Central Planers in charge of America’s industrial might that saved The Arsenal of Democracy.

    With them it is always the same song:
    It’s irresistible you fool,
    You’re no exception to the rule,
    Give in.
    Give in.
    Give in.

    Somehow they always counsel defeat and demand the same snake oil nostrum: surrender and let them run things. The Hell we will.
    ~

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