327 thoughts on “The Benjamin Button Times”

1. I personally favor the predictions outlined in the books of Daniel and Revelation. As the chaos predicted by Jesus in Matthew 24 unfolds and the peoples of the West descend into the state described by Paul in 2 Timothy, a strong man who can restore order will be propelled into prominence, also as predicted in 2 Thessalonians. His attempt to erect a globalist scheme will, however, be opposed by the forces in the East that have their own ideas of what’s best, and the resulting conflagration will consume much of what as the world as we knew it. Of course, I don’t plan to be around for any of this, relying on the prediction found in 1 Thessalonians. If I’m wrong, it’s meaningless, of course, but if I’m right, it would behoove the readers of this blog to prepare accordingly.

   1

2. Will a recording be available? I’m in a different timezone and I do not use technology on Saturday

   1

3. Pingback: Afghanistan and American Corruption - Nation First

4. Today on normie AM radio in LA, they mentioned that the LA times did a hit piece on Larry Elder. He’s one of the clowns running to recall the head clown in the governor’s mansion. He’s black.The times called him a white supremacists ( elder), and that he shared some common ideas with Jared Taylor in the past. I don’t care, and won’t be voting. I think hannity is throwing Bruce Jenner some love though.

5. We can’t protect anyone, not even ourselves. We’re bankrupt morally and monetarily. All that money for defense, our borders are being overrun, our ‘leaders” are forcing death shots on their own people. Rome. 2.0, here we are. Fuck the Taiwanese, we’re ruled by traitors, who want most of us dead.

   9

   1

   • “we’re ruled by traitors, who want most of us dead.”

     Exactly so. This may sound trite, a throw away line, but once this fact is understood, all else begins to make sense.

     Why are we intentionally wrecking our economy, with our national debt approaches $30 trillion?

     Why is it we don’t make anything anymore and depend on China for everything?

     Why do we lose so many wars? Why did we self-abase ourselves in Afghan, and show the Cuban, Hong Kong, and Iranian freedom fighters that we are not to be trusted, Russia and China that we are not to be feared?

     Why don’t we have any immigration control? DIE is not just a acronym.

     They don’t care about America or it’s citizens. Defund the police! Let the border crashers in, let them spread the plague around! Send them to red states!

     The nation burns, so be it, then we become king!

     6

6. so when’s the peace dividend

   3

7. Zma, you make a good case for the leper with the most fingers-

   But, it only portrays the magnitude of the betrayal against us.

8. karl mchungus—

   It is obvious you are on a drunken tear and have gone full retard because of it. You are sh-tting up this board right now worse than any Pajeet streetsh-tter does in his home country. Stop posting! Go pass out. You get less & less coherent and you are basically spamming at this point.

   Here to help… ❤❤

   16

   • tell your mom the Kegels are working.

     1

9. A not-well-known factoid: “Hollywood Money” owns a company which manufactures and installs the interiors of Humvees for Oshkosh Truck. That money-interest took over the (Milwaukee-based) company about 20 years ago and has done rather well in every single year following.

   2

   • Carl Icahn had his foot in the door with Harvester, but suddenly now Volkswagen owns them outright [as of July 1st].

     Just like Mercedes owns Freightliner & Detroit Diesel, and Volvo owns Mack.

     Apparently Allison is owned by the Carlyle Group & Onex Corp.

     With the EPA having chased CAT off the highways [and back into the cornfields], about the only remaining Amerikkkan big truck manufacturers are Cummins, PACCAR, and Eaton-Fuller [plus a few other stragglers, like Rockwell].

     Ford is in kinduva strange place right now, selling only small & mid-sized trucks. It will be interesting to see whether they decide to take the plunge and resuscitate something like the old Louisvilles.

10. How many people understand that Taiwan was part of China for hundred of years from 1661 to 1949. The only exception was 1895-1945 when the Japanese took it from China. Nobody in the USA thought twice about giving China Taiwan back after WW2.

    Now, I’m supposed to get all upset if Taiwan goes back to being controlled by China. Why? Is it because of Communism? If that’s it, why does everyone in the USA act like China is NOT communist? Why all the hate toward Putin, and almost none toward a Commie dicatorship?

    9

    2

    • I just had a client tell me that he lived on the 2nd largest Chinese island. Guess which island he said was the first biggest Chinese island! This is just a middle class Chinaman.

      • It’s well ingrained in the average Chinese mind. Twenty years ago, I was in Chengdu and had a young teen boy come up to me with the intent of practicing his English. I thwarted him by answering all his questions in Chinese. He asked me where I’d learned the language and I said “Taiwan”. Without skipping a beat he said, “Taiwan is a part of China. Everyone knows this.” I hadn’t said anything about the island’s sovereignty, but that was the first thing that came to his mind.

        Beijing hasn’t controlled Taiwan for 125 years. What if Spain hammered on about bringing Cuba back into its fold? The parallels are striking. Would that be justified too? I’m not for expending the blood and treasure of my people in this squabble, but at the very least Chinese claims to Taiwan should be mocked.

        2

        1

11. zman, who paid for your private school?

    was there corporal punishment?

    i went to a private school too. misjudged the line one day and got sent to the principal’s office. grabbed my ankles, and waited. heard it just before it arrived; cricket bat with holes drilled in it. lifted me off my feet. second swat lifted me off my feet, too. second grade was different back then.

    1

    6

    • Somebody get rid of this guy shitting up the comment thread

      Although this one was funny: “if china is so great, how did tiny japan fukk nanjing up the monkey chute? japs know what a chinaman is worth…one dirty bayonet.”

      5

    • i got 21 swats in I think 4th grade but they weren’t too hard, public school. plus the ones at home when they found out.

12. I rather think we’ve been at war with China for the last 40 years or so, it’s just not and probably will never be an armed conflict. Afghanistan is thought to possess extensive Lithium reserves, perhaps Xi suggested to Biden that he might like to leave … now ….. before all the dirt on him and Hunter was released in a way that even our media couldn’t ignore.

    Of course Trump had already committed to our departure but Xi could well have been concerned that Biden was going to be talked into staying by the usual suspects (insert your favourite suspects here).

    3

    • If you think of China as a client state, brought into our orbit by Henry Kissinger, the nature of our rivalry with China will make more sense.

      1

    • A Cold War, in which we gave them much more than wheat. Hmm…the self licking ice cream cone, an underexplored form of economics.

      1

13. Zman, if I say the name “Justine Bateman”, what is the first thing that comes to mind? 😛

    Stevie vs Cheryl, in a Babe-off

    Stevie ’76:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgmRb3MlpHQ&ab_channel=WestLAGuy

    cheryl ’95:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLYGsNrbBTM&ab_channel=ClaudioFuentesBass

    after the alliance, ’02:
    https://youtu.be/uyvKggXxSKU?t=268

    1

    6

    • You OK there, big guy?

      Stevie was a great beauty and outsider artist who needed great musicians’ (men’s) help to make her primitively inspired music listenable to normal people, and Sheryl was a manly no-talent groupie playing professional musicians’ (men’s) songs. Together they suck, because they’re only themselves.

      [throws $5 bill in your upturned bum hat]

      1

      1

    • From fairest creatures we desire increase,
      That thereby beauty’s rose might never die…

      Alas, the stunning and brilliant Stevie Knicks aborted her baby with Don Henley to save her career, as she put it.

14. there is something that makes me smile, when i think of all the little pussies that mewl on this site. something i know and they don’t. something that is going to make their sphincters spasm uncontrollably. y’all are going to be drafted, soon. y’all are going to be killed in action by the china whose balls you slavishly lick. and good riddance to bad trash, fukk wads, a southern man don’t need you around anyhow…better run through the jungle.

    P.S.

    the guys in your unit who aren’t china dolls, are going to see all your nice sentiments, and make sure you get yours. count on it.

    13

    • The bats are certainly in the belfry tonight.

      14

      • keep laughing, monkey boy.

        6

        • you are other.

          filler for comment checker

          2

      • Lives in California, LARPs as a “Southern Man” internet tough guy, what do you expect.

        11

    • I doubt the country could organize a draft

      7

    • I remember my first beer to, buddy!

      1

15. I think also you are not taking into account the number one priority of Xi — survival at the top. Its a brutal game in China — unlike other rulers he cannot just retire under collective leadership. That attempt of Bo Xilai to become Mini-Mao scared everyone.

    And economically, his best bet is to strike now while senile Bane is at the helm of the US. His export machine is dropping. Green energy requirements in the West will make marine diesel fuel too expensive for trans pacific trade let alone to Europe. His labor advantage is dropping as you noted, already the cheaper stuff has moved on to Vietnam and Indonesia and even Honduras. As noted elsewhere, beginning in 2019 Chinese companies started ripping off foreign customers because they knew they would not be in business for long. Get it while you can. Xi can’t afford a Jack Ma or lots of potential ones to challenge him that are smaller. Thus he must crush private business so as to have total control, but that means economic contraction which must be addressed otherwise he faces social revolts. Already more lockdown waves are generating discontent as his vaccines don’t work either.
    Wartime footing means sacrifices are made, for years. Thus enhancing his survival. They will also allow SOEs to flourish, and trade with Russia and even Europe through rail means US ability to sink transports in the Indian ocean or elsewhere are meaningless. That was the whole point of the Belt and Road initiative. And critically wartime means everything private now becomes public, under his direct control, with no challenges to his rule emerging from private spheres. He killed the Chinese tutoring industry, one so trivial it boggles why he bothered. Save he is worried the mandate of heaven can slip.

    Fundamentally, only one man matters. Xi. The money some business mogul makes trading with the US is worthless to him, indeed he’d love to ruin it as the mogul could be a rival. He is the Emperor of China. Its completely up to him. I’m not saying it is guaranteed — the US could somehow by a miracle evacuate everyone and avoid a hostage crisis. Biden could cut back his plans to wage war on Whiteness etc. Japan could announce its own hidden nuke force. We could demonstrate a nuke missile working. But I would not bet on economic ties being determinative as Xi only cares about his survival. He’s absolute master — but faces enemies within everywhere. And already lived that once with the Cultural Revolution.

    11

    • I think this misses a big issue. Taiwan is ridiculously well defended. A Chinese invasion force would be under constant fire from the moment they set sail, 100 miles of open ocean where they are literal sitting ducks. Then they’d have to land on one of about three beaches that can actually be used as beachheads for an invasion. The Taiwanese army knows this, so they have about a million guns behind 20 feet of hardened concrete pointed at each of them. Chinese soldiers trying to storm those beaches would find themselves in the opening seen of Saving Private Ryan, only with about a hundred times more bullets flying at them.

      4

16. I think you are missing many key points here Z-Man.

    1. The US Navy is a joke. They can’t even keep bipolar sailors from totally destroying a ship at dock during refurbishment. Good on diversity, bad on warfighting.
    2. Xi is the absolute ruler, a big change from the past, and he and his family were purged during the Cultural Revolution, a revolt of Mao and the peasants against the Party bureaucracy. Similar to the Taipeng Rebellion, Boxer Rebellion, etc. He must keep the people/masses onside, and he’s taken many steps to crush business oligarchs as threats. He faces internal slowdowns and crises because to keep the Jack Mas from challenging state power he must crush them — but they employ the people on the margins who won’t get a job with the State Owned Enterprises nearly all of which lose money and require subsidies. He can’t pass the buck to collective leadership and the Bo Xilai incident shows there is considerable risk to him for being not nationalist enough. War suits his needs for survival and peace does not.
    3. Use of container ships, civilian airliners, and the like can allow for far greater ease of action.
    4. He owns Biden, lock and key, and knows Biden can and will do nothing [Which is dawning on the Intel and Military people hence the Afghan pushback]. If he invaded Taiwan the US response would be: a strongly worded letter of regret. After Afghanistan Biden ran and hid, gave a speech after a weekend, ran and hid some more. No reforms, no firings, nothing but running and hiding.

    IF we have hostages and we have to pay out trillions to get them back as is likely, guarantee the invasion of Taiwan is on.

    You are correct that Afghanistan was a promotion generation machine for guys like Milley, they get to “command” combat troops from a secure base and win promotion. This was at the expense of the Navy which saw severe reduction in ships and size. Part of this is likely the Navy wanting more money but it would take two decades at least to take the 285 ship navy back to the 600 ship navy of Reagan.

    9

    1

    • ok, then what navy is better than the US navy?

      1

    • Just like Afghanistan, its up to the people of Taiwan to figure out what they want to do. As Afghanistan shows, outside powers can’t overcome the will of the people if they make a decisive choice one way or another.

      Recent polling shows that a majority of Taiwanese (54%) want independence from China (see link). Polling has moved in the direction of Taiwan seeking independence following China’s crackdown on Hong Kong. As time passes it is increasingly likely that Taiwan achieves independence from China rather than being reunited with China. And many citizens in Hong Kong are interested in moving to Taiwan (something like 1/6 of the population of Hong Kong is considering this option). This trend towards political and cultural polarization between Taiwan and China, and Taiwanese seeking possible independence depends less on Chinese economic or military strength than on divergent interests between Taiwanese people and Chinese state.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_independence_movement

      If China wants to forcibly reunite with Taiwan in the future they can do it, though the costs would be high. The economic costs in particular of attempting a forced reunification with Taiwan will be too high as long as Chinese economy is export driven. Here Chinese vulnerability to trade embargoes crimp military options.

      Military timeline for forcibly reuniting with Taiwan, should China attempt to do this, is something like 25 years. Should China attempt to forcibly reunite with Taiwan US would play only an indirect/support role (yes on arms supply and information sharing, maybe on lend/lease, no on land based troops in Taiwan despite recent twitter announcements). Military challenges to Chinese invasion timeline include potential for increasingly sophisticated arms to be sold to Taiwan (arms sales ramped up bigly in 2020 before Trump left office and look to continue with Biden). Taiwan has a large untapped economic capability to increase weapons purchases and the US has a large capability to sell sophisticated weapons should the Taiwanese seek these capabilities. Additionaly, the capability of Taiwanese military personnel (weak now) should also continue to improve as desire for independence grows and Taiwan/China cultural polarizations increases.

      If both nations continue building up militaries, contested beach landing in Taiwan will look like the Starship Troopers first invasion of Klendathu, which is why it won’t happen. And none of this depends much on the capabilities of the US navy.

      5

      • Taiwan has a ton of money, just letting them go on a giant spending spree for (non-nuclear) US weapons is actually a lot better than getting into a sunk carriers, busted Three Gorges dam, possible nuclear escalation by either side, conflict w China. If Taiwan really wants independence, great, fine, I wish them the best. But let them show it by building a miltary such that China would almost have to use nukes to beat them (which they won’t against Taiwan if the US is not involved). That seems like the smartest option to me.

        6

        • Yeah, agree, ultimately Taiwan needs to be able to stand on their own two feet. And the lesson we learned from Afghanistan last week is that they can do it if they want it badly enough!

          1

17. I have a prediction to make. In a few years, just as the regime realizes that it’s about to collapse, you’ll see all of the mouthpieces, Sean Hannity, Rachel Maddow, Neil Cavuto, Anderson Cooper, even Judge Jeanine, writers like Paul Krugman and EJ Dionne, ALL of them on the same news set, pleading with the American people for calm, that “even though we all have our differences, we’re still Americans.” – And it’ll be too…f ing…late…

    27

    • already started with bill maher

      he’s now pleading people to calm down, not support critical race theory, and respect each other.

      too late bill. and you were already on the “wrong side of history”, so to speak, and it’s far too late to speak up now. we won’t be forgetting

      38

      • These idiots should have learned the correct lesson from the fall of the Soviet Union, when the only major communist country left was China, who could not even feed themselves and whose industry consisted of making cheap knock-offs of obsolete Soviet military equipment. Instead they turned right around and said “Now that those incompetent communists in Russia are no longer giving us a bad look, we’ll make it work in America! THIS TIME, we’ll do it right!”

        They will not learn from their current mistakes, either. No coexistence inside the same polity is possible with these creatures.

        13

18. The Empire is the Finance-Class, the Bankers. They set up shop in a country and mine the vitality of the host people to conquer and mine other localities. . As a host-colony becomes played out, they move. The fun times for the host county is during the expansion phase, currency is loaned into existence, the times are roaring. When the money looses value as the vitality is used up, the Empire has the a final blow out looting. Often a war that is lost be the host; by then, of course the Empire has been rehosted.

    … Portugal to Spain to Amsterdam to London to New-York/Washington to … ?

    7

    • It may be that NYC was the end of the line

      3

      1

19. If China was meant to rule, the people would be better looking

    19

    1

    • I dunno. The Mongols weren’t exactly the comeliest of folk…

      3

      • the two might be related, if you know what i mean :P. read somewhere that 25% of chinese males have GH DNA in them; lots of rapey times back then i guess.

        1

    • That explains why America is no longer ruling. Too much ugly has been imported into the gene pool, what with the Immigration Act of 1965, the southern border, and inner city melanin. I think you’ve hit on something! The “Pretty People Law of Ruling Empires”.

      8

20. China’s demographics are much better than American demographics. Not only are Chinese younger than Americans on average, they are also much younger when you only compare Han Chinese to Caucasian Americans, the demographic that sustains the United States. American fertility, especially White, is also crashing to unprecedented low levels. Chinese are smarter than Americans by several IQ points as well, and they aren’t limited by diversity mandates. I would happily trade our demographics for theirs.

    Reports that China is in decline are highly overrated. The future of the world is technological, and China has the population to dominate those markets. 89 IQ India can’t compete. 97 IQ and falling America can’t compete, even with mass immigration of educated people. Japan is aging. South Korea is too small. Europeans are disappearing and making their countries inefficient with diversity. Africa and South America are cognitive deserts. The Middle East is one step away from being ruled by Medieval barbarians.

    China is aging, but other advanced nations are aging as well. She has such a large, high IQ population that no other nation can compete in the economy of the future. China isn’t even fully developed and the US can’t compete with Huawei, a Chinese tech firm, so they had to ban them from doing business in the United States under false pretenses (security, but the reality is that Huawei would put US companies out of business).

    I don’t see a single field from auto and commercial airline manufacturing to computer and civil engineering that China can’t dominate. We’re the country with feminist bridges that fall down, after all.

    China is already ahead in several areas and are poised to catch up in others within the next 10 years. That’s quite the accomplishment when you consider that in 1990 China had an economy maybe one fourth the size of Mexico’s. Why would that trend change? People live longer than ever, so there’s plenty of time for China’s cognitive elite to corner the market in everything important.

    To put things into perspective, China has more geniuses in their population than about 80% of the rest of the world combined. There is no way to compete with that. China will absolutely dominate this earth and arguments about demographics miss the point.

    Here’s a further example, but in reverse:

    In 1890, China (the world’s most populous country) had the world’s third largest economy. But was China dominant globally? No, obviously. Several smaller economies were more influential and more innovative. China was also not remotely in the same league as either the number one or the number two powers, the British Empire and the United States, respectively. Why? You’d think that she would have been quite the global power all things considered. The reason for this is that China had a large population which inflated GDP, but the country wasn’t very sophisticated in the fields that mattered — industry, science, education. That’s certainly not true anymore. In the future, large countries like the US and India may have large GDPs, but they won’t have the organization, efficiency, or the smart fraction to compete effectively with China in what counts — industry, science, education. And even if China contracts population-wise, she’ll still have more than enough smart people to dominate the fields that matter, even if America infinity immigrates Hispanic peasants and low IQ India surpasses them in number of people. GDP isn’t everything.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_in_the_nineteenth_century

    Future automation will mean that much of the population will become dead weight anyway, so aging demographics might not be as important as some here assume. In any case, as I said, China will still have more than enough smart people to dominate the world, especially considering progressing Western IQ declines and growing inefficiencies due to mass third world immigration and diversity requirements. China will not be another Japan. Her population is so much larger, combined with Western failures, that global domination is pretty much baked in the cake unless they screw it up (which is still a remote possibility). Maybe she won’t be as dominant as she could have been with a younger population, but she’ll still dominate nonetheless.

    19

    12

    • I find no fault with this analysis. I further add that the achilles heel of the Chinese is gambling. “Lucky” numbers. A Chinaman will work 80, 90, 100 hours a week, only to piss it away on a card game. It’s not just cultural, it’s genetic wiring. We need a giant casino on Guam with cheap direct flights to China. That’s how we’ll get our money back.

      13

      • JR Wirth: Yes, Chinese are inveterate gamblers and extremely superstitious regarding ‘auspicious’ numbers or dates.

        3

      • “the achilles heel of the Chinese is gambling”

        Hopefully that does not extend to dicey invasions of small islands that could lead to very big wars.

        3

    • Why do you say American White fertility is crashing to unprecented low levels? The total fertility rate of American whites is 1.55 children per woman, according to the twitter demographer Birth Gauge.

      Iran Total Fertility rate – 1.60
      Total fertility rate of Asian Americans (including Indians) – 1.37

      Total fertility rate of China – 1.30 (and dropping fast)
      Thailand – 1.25
      Total fertility rate of South Korea – 0.84

      1.55 is far too low but it’s not unprecedented at all, it’s basically the same level of white TFR in *every* country, from Russia to UK. I don’t really like the Doomers when it comes to white birth rates. Our birth rates are not catastrophic at all, we just entered the demographic transition first. What is catastrophic is open borders, that’s for sure.

      8

      • We lost 5 million people according to the census

        Non whites are the majority of school age children

        Not saying it’s all doom and gloom buts it’s not good

        9

        • Problem is that “catch-up” is measured in *generations*. Took us 3 generations to get to here. Same to get us out. Yeah, it doesn’t look good—especially since the government will/is run by the minorities we wish to continue to outnumber. Can’t see how they’ll let it happen.

          1

        • Possibly the most important and sad fact of all those discussed in this varied thread. “China will do this but then we will do that!” and blah blab blah Chinese nukes are a minor and unlikely worry, America’s becoming Brazil, guys….

    • To quote Tonto, “What do you mean we, white man?”

      2

    • China’s high IQ is mostly wasted on b.s., like trying to figure out what they’re writing to each other (or even saying, they sub all their stuff since their language is barely comprehensible). Add in the fact that the coastal smart segment has a fertility rate that might be as “good” as South Korea and even the good points look a little bit over-hyped.

      1

    • yeh, cause shit don’t fall down in china. haha short dikked goobers that can’t even make their women happy. the worst thing about chins is how low class they are. even a phd will spit in the lounge sink at work. at least they don’t spit on the floors — inside — anymore. if china is so great, how did tiny japan fukk nanjing up the monkey chute? japs know what a chinaman is worth…one dirty bayonet.

      3

      3

    • Two points: there are limits to automation and tech, and China does not and currently cannot produce all its own food.

      China is basically what happens if someone looked at NYC at the height of it’s industrial heyday and said, “hey, let’s organize an entire country this way!”

      3

21. China, the sleeping dragon, has begun to rouse itself. But she cannot fly yet and may never be able to. The classic China is a country where mandarins learn calligraphy and memorize key passages to the imperial civil service. Like late-medieval Spain, there are more priests than doers. America has always been a country of go-getters, of not waiting around for the government to do everything. China is a country where “the mountains are high and the emperor is far away” and you attempt to fleece what you can. Every now and again someone takes a tumble, but China doesn’t have America’s knuckle-down-and-get-er-done know-how. Compared to America, China will always be backwards and sunk, not the leader in science and technology that Xi Jinping claims it will be.

    For more on this delicate issue, visit my site by clicking on my name. See CHINA THE SUPERPOWER for the whole long article. See you there.

    3

    4

    • “China doesn’t have America’s knuckle-down-and-get-er-done know-how.” – Lol, how is 1952? How do I get there?

      20

      • Yeah, he [she?] seems to have slept through the Frankfurt School’s “War on Boys” of the last 50 or 60 years.

        https://www.bing.com/search?q=the+war+against+boys+christina+hoff+sommers+site%3Aamazon.com

        To include the Sackler Family Crime Syndicate’s opioid wars.

        William Frey, of the Brookings Institute, claims that you can acksually see the mass casualties of the Sackler Family’s opioid wars in the federal demographic numbers:

        https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3984175/posts

        4

    • “China doesn’t have America’s knuckle-down-and-get-er-done know-how”

      Who in America has that? Whites? We are already declining in both relative and absolute terms. We are also heavily discriminated against, which is why Hollywood can’t make anything new. Do Hispanics have that mentality? Nope. Blacks? Lol. Immigrants? The ones that are any good are mostly Chinese, and that presents obvious security problems. Indian immigrants? Well, I can already anticipate what this forum has to say about that demographic …

      Ret. General Robert Spalding: Moon Landing Couldn’t Happen in Today’s Deindustrialized America; ‘We’ve Lost It All’ to China

      https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2019/07/20/ret-general-robert-spalding-moon-landing-couldnt-happen-todays-deindustrialized-america-weve-lost-all-china/

      “Chinese manufacturing workers are highly skilled in their own right, just not in things that will be found in any American college curriculum. Apple CEO Tim Cook made this point well in a 2017 interview at the Fortune Global Forum in China: The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I’m not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location, and the type of skill it is. The products we do require really advanced tooling…and the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S. you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China you could fill multiple football fields.”

      https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-china-shock-doctrine

      8

      • Sounds quaint, but the Jewish Hollywood >>>> Black / gay Hollywood of 2021. I was watching some older movies from the 80s, 90s, and even 00s, and they were pretty enjoyable – even though the ((())) influence can be seen.

        Modern day Hollywood is literally just unwatchable. Parade of blacks and sexual freaks marching around lecturing me, the viewer about how special they are and why i need to respect them.

        12

        • I sent an email to Zman about this as he likes to do movie reviews.

          Check out John Hughes movies from the 80s. Hardly any juice influence from what I can tell. He owned his own production company (Hughes Entertainment).

          Movies about white people for white people.

          10

          • Hughes was great. However, he was pretty tight with Ben Stein.

            3

          • Shit, read the National Lampoon from the late 70s, the era in which Hughes was on the staff. There was no shortage of diversity-bashing. And as mentioned, his movies were for white people. Example A:

            “Since I was about 12 I’ve been looking forward to my sweet 16. You know, a big party and a band, with…”
            “…tons of people. And a big Trans Am in the driveway with a ribbon around it. And some incredibly gorgeous guy that you meet in France. You do it on a cloud without getting pregnant or herpes.”
            “I don’t need the cloud.”
            “Just the pink Trans Am and the guy, right?
            “A black one.”
            “A black guy??!!”
            “A black Trans Am, a pink guy.”
            (both characters laugh with relief)

            3

          • He owned his own production company (Hughes Entertainment)

            For some reason, John Wayne is usually portrayed in “the media” as having been a troglodyte mouth-breathing idiot.

            But for the final three decades of his career, Wayne had his own production company, and directed many of his own movies:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batjac_Productions

            I guess the Frankfurt School paints John Wayne as an idiot just like they paint the Polish “Polacks” as idiots [even though the Polish mathematicians deciphered the Enigma Machine].

            Every little uppity goy must be nailed back down to earth.

            3

      • Chinese han are not American White Caucasians. We have different cultures, iq distributions (clustered han, spread White), different expression of genius genes, different biologically based proclivities on things like honesty and self-direction/initiative, creativity, etc. Then, whites are not monolithic. Look at the New York non-hebrew reproduction and clot shot compliance versus the same group in Dixie: drastically different. Sane, conservative, Christian caucasian whites are at 2+ tfr and 20% covid compliance; yankee bugmen are under 1.0 tfr and 75% compliance. In 50 years, there will be a smaller but much more right-thinking and genetically hygenic group of white caucasians in the FUSA.

        10

      • This has a lot to do with a misallocation of resources from the feminized finance driven economy. People who should be playing a hand in manufacturing and the extraction and refinement of resources in the U.S. are instead getting their MBA so that they can make big bucks moving columns around in Excel.

        5

22. just did some checking online, and evidently china *still* cannot build jet engines for fighter planes, on its own. maybe in another 20 years…

    10

    • China started from a very low point, so obviously some things are going to take time. However, what they do manufacture is quite impressive.

      U.S. vs. China in 5G: The Battle Isn’t Even Close

      https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-vs-china-in-5g-the-battle-isnt-even-close-11604959200

      BTW, the US can’t even manufacture its own medicines.

      All Our Drugs to Treat the Coronavirus Depend on Chinese Suppliers

      https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/all-our-drugs-to-treat-the-coronavirus-depend-on-chinese-suppliers/

      1

      2

      • That isnt the point. Human beings are not fungible, either individually or across genetic gaps such as races. You cannot put 1,000 han, or indians, or slavs, in a room full of typewriters and get Shakespeare. Shakespeare only comes from Shakespeare’s group and lineage. The technology that the han have is all stolen ip, which you can run forward with along the same lines, much as the punjabis can do running out the natural advancements of white technology from the 60’s and 70’s, such as microchip incremental advancements. Chinese can reverse engineer and maybe improve a bmw x5, but they cannot invent one.

        9

        1

      • hey Dong, if you can’t build a jet engine, how ya gonna build a rocket engine? make all the excuses you want, but Gina is a big fat old drunk — just like Xi. when you run everything through one man — even a winnie the pooh sized man — you shrink the country down to nothing. and that DM you sent me mocking Chairman Xi was very funny, thanks for that 🙂

        2

      • at least we have women and food and texas. you aint got shit, micropeen. i’ve seen (American) fetuses that are better hung than chairman xi.

        how many of your shitty relatives died in the great fap forward? “not enough”. don’t worry, you’ll get your turn.

        2

        3

23. did anyone hear this story about this doctor in Mobile, AL? I can’t copy/paste from work so google “Jason Valentine Mobile”. This has to be violating some kind of law. Like I feel these are the type of people who need to be defrocked or fired because they are a cancer (no pun intended) on medicine.

    • The subtext of his policy is that he clearly expects to treat vaccinated patients for COVID-19.

      5

    • Nice propaganda.

24. As problematic as mass immigration has been, a random selection of Afghans would a substantial step up in average quality compared to a lot of the filth we import, not to mention a substantial and substandard fraction of native-born citizens.

    Re the “crown jewel” of our empire. That the USA is a (fading) empire is a concept often lost on people, even those who have studied history or merely are well-read. I was never taught this in high school or university. Perhaps it has negative connotations and should not be discussed in polite company, like the Jewish Question, or racial differences or Bob’s behavior at the last office party. Now, there is no hard and fast definition for empire, or at least I’m being flexible. Certainly the USA was an “empire” in its expansion days but that was long ago. If you look at American history since, say, 1898, virtually all of our acquisitions have been essentially rental properties. Only a small minority were even U.S. Territories and then only briefly (e.g. The Phillipines). In fact, except during actual hostilities, we often allowed near total self-rule of our “colonies.” But there was always some degree of economic and often military partnership. Presumably, both parties benefited from the transaction. Alas, as time wears on, structures become brittle. Societies change. Old enemies disappear (Soviets). New ones appear (choose one!). Projecting power world-wide eventually becomes an expensive, perhaps too expensive, proposition in terms of manpower or funding.

    Unlike its glory days, protecting our territories, pardon me, “Allies,” may become a no-limit high-stakes game. If our bluff is called, how many carriers are we willing to lose to defend Taiwan or Japan? How many West Coast Cities? Modern technology on both sides ups the ante, and really fast. 🙁

    10

    4

    • Afghans refugees are Muslims. That is all we need to know about the quality that they bring to our shores. Yeah, they are perhaps not the radical types that pervade the Taliban, but they increase the presence of that vile cult in this Christian nation. Their children will be Muslim, their grand children will be Muslim, and so forth.

      Better to open the Central and South American borders than to import Muslims and Blacks to our shores.

      35

      • But think of the various exotic Chickpea recipes they’ll bring. Perhaps a spice we’ve never heard of. Served with hot tea and marked up to $35 a plate. (Thinks every liberal in my area).

        13

      • There are only two types of Muslims. Radicals and those that quietly support the radicals. When was the last time you heard a Muslim leader speak out against radical Islam? Liberals fall for the “religion of peace” nonsense because US Muslims are a minority and thus seem peaceful. But If Muslims ever became a majority, we would quickly have the Muslim Brotherhood instituting Sharia law.

        22

        • Hmm, reminds me of everyday jews and the ADL…

          5

        • But If Muslims ever became a majority, we would quickly have the Muslim Brotherhood instituting Sharia law.

          And the downside?

          1

      • The children of immigrants from anywhere are all the same kind of problem, because America’s official ideology tells them they’re better than the people who were here before them. Shockingly! they believe it and perpetuate it.

        Even the most conservative immigrant groups take at most two generations to turn solidly against us (except for the orthodox Jews, who have a stable position and understand it). Muslims and East and South Asians were among the most reliable Republican voting blocs just a generation ago. Heard from any of them lately? They hate you psychotically. They’re good students.

        8

      • They’ll be indoctrinated to think they’re victims of “white supremacy” and vote democrat, turning red states like Georgia into blue states where the government tears down our statues* just like the Taliban did in Afghanistan. We’ll come full circle. I guess that’s poetic.

        *The black democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams threatened to destroy Stone Mountain, a Confederate Memorial, should she win.

        https://news.yahoo.com/taliban-destroy-statue-shiite-military-112655497.html

        1

      • A radical religious cult that f***s boys and mutilates women?

        Oh. Sorry. Wrong country.

      • Yeah, they are perhaps not the radical types that pervade the Taliban

        Oh, they probably are. The main difference between Taliban and the rest of Afghanistan is ethnic: the Taliban are Pashtuns, the rest are a hodgepodge of tribes.

        Radical Moslems are the best kind of refugees because they don’t integrate and openly show their disgust for our culture. So when we roll out the cattle wagons, there are very few whites who are going to boohoo over their nice Afghan pool boy, baby sitter or, perish the thought, son-in-law.

        A salient symbol of immigration into Europe is that none – not a single one – of the itinerant jihadis give their kids European names. It’s very hard to claim that they’re real Europeans when they themselves heatedly deny it.

        7

        • Thanks Felix for extension and improvement to my comment. As to names for children, I find that interesting from a personal experience.

          My mother was, upon my birth I guess, longing for the “old” country. She gave me an “ethnic” name for the birth certificate. Luckily, since we are Northern European, it has a fairly easy angloization.

          My father always thought it was BS and never called me by such, nor ever filled out any paperwork with such a “name” on it. I grew up American with no obvious distinction. Even my passport has only my “American” name, as in those days, the passport official simply asked why the name of the birth certificate differed from my application and—not being woke, just White—accepted the translation and rationale. Viola, defacto name change!

          3

    • You appear to be deluded, or trying to set up a narrative?

      Everywhere there is a sizeable Afghan presence in Europe they always develop large criminal gangs (usually drugs, people trafficking and welfare fraud) tied into the tribal warfare mindset and extended clans that give them lots of manpower on the street.

      They just recreate Afghanistan in a high trust host culture. Its a disaster for those areas.

      If you bothered to search for 2 mins you would have come across the specific page on gang crime in Germany on wikipedia.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Germany#Afghan_gangs

      5

    • “How many West Coast Cities?”

      *energetically raises hand to be called upon* “ooh! OOH! Teacher, I know the answer! Let’s lose ALL of them. Hollywood first.”

      1

    • The only people we get are people who couldn’t hack it back home, in this case the doofuses who couldn’t figure out how to keep their goats from wandering off.

      2

25. Scott Horton had a good interview with a Sinologist on just this topic a couple of days ago.
    https://scotthorton.org/interviews/8-13-21-joseph-solis-mullen-china-wont-be-taking-over-the-world/

    Could have been the source for this piece but we know the Z-man doesn’t listen to Libertarians.

    2

    • “Could have been the source for this piece but we know the Z-man doesn’t listen to Libertarians.”

      In Z-man’s defense, he really can’t hear the Libertarians over the sound of all of the clown horn honking.

      22

      1

    • I read the blurb to that and well, I am not convinced. It outlines China’s problems as such: economy teetering on the edge, bad debt, bad monetary policy, misallocation of resources, and an unbalanced population pyramid. The USA has all of these problems save the last one, and that’s only because we decided 56 years ago to take the world’s refuse for ourselves. That, however, does not make for a powerful force of empire (in any way – military, economics, politics, etc.), especially when they are taught from day one to hate the country that took them in and the native population that funds them from cradle to grave. So the USA is dealing with all that bad stuff as well as a society that is tearing itself to shreds with the government turning to censorship and totalitarianism to hold it together. Maybe all that stuff will stop China from being a global power, but the one thing that is definite is the USA will not be either.

      4

26. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » The Benjamin Button Times

27. On the demographic front, Taiwan’s fertility rate is lower than China’s by a pretty good margin. Taiwan will run out of military age males to draft long before China. Also, China is still populated exclusively by Chinese (for the most part) and is run by people that don’t hate themselves.

    It’s odd seeing so many people look at Chinese demographics and declare them to be in a crisis. I would trade our demographic issues for theirs in a heart beat.

    22

    • I agree. OTOH at current fertility rates within 50 years China will have half its current population. That is a serious crisis.

      Within 80 or so which is a blip in historical time, again presuming no serious fertility increase, they will have 300 million which is less than the current US and about that of 1799.

      Of course the US won’t exists at all so there is that.

      8

    • I agree. The world actors are like a pack of fisticuff brawling lepers. He who wins will be the last leper with any fingers left on their hands at the end. Real world winner will be whoever has the least amount of dyscivilizational Africans, Islamics, Jews, and feminists. Chinese leaders are aware of them all.

      1

    • because you are ignorant. or stupid. probably both. move the fukk there, no one will miss you here. set up a GoFukkMe page, I’ll donate.

      4

    • “China… is run by people that don’t hate themselves.”

      You forgot about their One Child policy. And their social credit system is not an expression of either love or ingroup trust.

28. I was wondering how long it would take to put the crisis actors in play:

    “US Capitol Police, FBI and ATF investigating suspicious vehicle near Library of Congress”

    https://www.foxnews.com/us/washington-capitol-lockdown-evaucation-suspicious-vehicle

    I suspect we’ll see a lot more in the coming weeks.

    6

    • There’s at least one false-flag in the offing.

      12

      • Forget about the Afghanistan debacle.
        The FBI found a bomb at the Capitol!

        How convenient.

        15

        • Any news yet on if it was a conspiracy by
          ATF, FBI, or CIA agents yet? Maybe a group effort from DHS and FBI?
          Did you hear about the shootout at the terrorist meeting? Yeah, 3 FBI agents got in a fight with 4 ATF agents, instigated by 2 DEA agents.

          6

29. There are a couple daunting things the Chinese face with this. First, they haven’t fought an enemy that had the means and will to fight back since their debacle with Vietnam in the early eighties. That’s a lot of time to run a military on nothing but theory, especially when that military’s primary job is native civilian pacification.

    Secondly is logistics. If Taiwan turned into any sort of quagmire their military would be completely reliant on a supply chain that…well, if you were a Chinese general how much faith would you have in a Chinese supply chain? And that’s before American attack submarines are harassing the tankers of poisoned milk powder heading for your troops.

    A third factoid, and I’m still chewing on this, is the lack of civic trust in China. Putting a bunch of troops in Taiwan means taking them from somewhere else, and the CCP functionaries in that “somewhere else” would now have zero muscle to back up their governance. The rumor then is that China risks trading an occupied territory for one in revolt.

    Lastly, and this is probably the biggest, is that in invading, China would lose the bloody shirt that they love pulling out to wave around. Even if everything went great (which is doubtful) they’d be the dog that caught the ambulance. The risks are really high, and reward is dubious at best.

    With all that said, it still cannot be ruled out. We’ll know their elites are loony-stupid as well if they take a shot at it.

    10

    • “…well, if you were a Chinese general how much faith would you have in a Chinese supply chain?”

      I don’t know about Chinese generals, but if you’re an American consumer of just about anything, you’d jolly well better have faith in a Chinese supply chain.

      21

      • Try ordering stuff off of one of those Facebook ads and see how much luck you have. The only reason it works at scale is because there’s a bunch of White, Taiwanese, Japanese, and/or Korean babysitters shepherding the process. Wartime logistics is a different beast and wartime logistics while being shot at is different still (“ship is going to get sunk anyway, so I may as well make off with some swag before it even leaves”). In the book Band of Brothers the author noted that the allies’ supply chain was so leaky that it was amazing that anything at all made it to the front line; the Chinese would be lucky to have it that good going over a sea lane.

        2

    • China’s problem with an invasion of Taiwan is that it has to cross water to get to Taiwan. Considering the US Navy’s nearly invulnerable submarine force along with airpower in the region (even if carriers prove ineffective), it’s hard to see how China’s invasion fleet even manages to land on Taiwan – much less keep it supplied with merchant ships that can be easily sunk.

      12

      • it’s hard to see how China’s invasion fleet even manages to land on Taiwan

        Unless China built, oh, say, several million helicopters, each capable of carrying, say, forty men or a [very] light armored tank [something like a Toyota* Pickup Truck with a Barrett 50-caliber machine gun on it, and several bushels of ammunition].

        Does Taiwan have several million anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down several million helicopters?

        *Toyotas, just like the Taliban uses. Although the Chinese would have to swallow their pride in order to use a Japanese truck as their assault vehicle.

        But even if the Chinese built their own pickup trucks and their own 50-caliber machine guns, in the immortal words of Saint Joseph Djugashvili, quantity has a quality all its own.

        1

        1

        • you are an example of the permanent cognitive damage chronic fapping causes. honestly you could not sound stupider.

          2

          • So tell me, how does Taiwan stop an invasion fleet of one million helicopters?

            Does Taiwan have anywhere close to one million anti-aircraft missiles in its inventory?

            I’d be surprised if they had even 100,000.

            Probably more like 10,000 or even just 5,000.

            But if you know otherwise, then do tell.

            Again: Quantity has a quality all its own.

            2

        • I suppose you’re joking.

          If not: In the entire world, there is only a small fraction of a million helicopters of any kind. China building “millions” of helicopters capable of carrying 40 troops apiece is utterly ridiculous.

          Also, helicopters are easy to shoot down.

          4

          • My guess is you’re thinking in terms of the USA Military Industrial Complex, where choppers can get priced anywhere from $50 million to $150 million per:

            $50M
            https://aerocorner.com/aircraft/boeing-ah-64d-apache-longbow/

            $150M
            https://tinyurl.com/2shn98rz

            But now suppose China could produce a reasonably reliable helicopter, with bilateral 50-caliber machine guns, and the ability to carry a pilot, a co-pilot, and four heavily armed airborne infantry, for only, say, $1 million per unit.

            Then ordering up a million of them would cost only a million times a million dollars, i.e. a trillion dollars.

            And a trillion dollars is not all that much money when a jewel like the island of Formosa comes on the market.

            He11, we just threw something like three or four trillion dollars at the quixotic fantasy of civilizing a bunch of goat-phucking cavemen in Afghanistan.

            Again, how are you going to shoot down one million helicopters, each carrying, say, six heavily armed men?

            Are you going to purchase one million air-to-air missiles?

            Are you going to purchase two or three million 50-caliber machine guns, and build two or three million machine gun nests all over Taiwan, hoping that maybe one out of three [or one out of four] machine gun nests could down a helicopter?

            It could be done, but even if you shot down, say, 75% of the one million helicopters [incurring 100% fatalities of all helicopter crew members], with only 250,000 helicopters surviving [and able to land in Taiwan, each with six heavily armed crew members still alive], then you’d still be looking at an invasion force of 6 x 250,000 = 1.5 million.

            Again, Quantity has a Quality all its own.

            And the Chicoms wouldn’t even bat an epicanthic-eyelash at a 75% fatality rate, and a trillion dollar price tag, if it meant they could seize control of Formosa without having to go nukular [or having to fire on even a single USN vessel].

    • It just might be Dieppe x ten, this being the 79th anniversary of that tragic raid by a mostly-Canadian contingent. A real FUBAR from the “planning” stage. Some dark conspiracy theories emerged from that debacle, but that’s for another time.

      2

      1

30. to all the people expertly opining on how china can just “wait to take” taiwan, or can “wait for the US to collapse”, you might want to read up on prc demographics. unlike Mick Jagger, time is not on their side (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEj8lUx0gwY&ab_channel=ZackyDog)

    2

    1

    • It’s not on (White) America’s either, even if the details are slightly different 🙁

      4

      1

31. back in the late 70’s, the CIA supposedly conned the soviets into building a pipeline with stolen technology — that turned out to be a booby trap. when the pipeline was built, it exploded, hugely. see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Abyss

    just wondering if the same trick was used for the Loral ICBM technology transfer dirty billie signed off on to the chins…

    2

    • No, that was just the Clintons selling us out and grifting…and getting away with it.

      9

      • The thing about the Clinton’s is that the Lewinsky hoax and impeachment was just a set up by the uniparty to distract from the sale of classified technology to China (i.e treason – a real crime). Ken Star, Lewinsky and the whole lot were in on the big joke. How they must have laughed.

        You see this all the time now (a la Hancock in the UK as the latest one), where the politicians are perfectly happy to have a fake sex scandal set up to distract the TV cycle. It does not impact them in their social circles and provides the soap opera to perform the real business.

        4

32. I hate to bring this up, but what really is the US nuclear capability? Someone in one of the comments said that China only had X number of warheads while the US had 10X. Two things come to mind. One, the strip mining of the US taxpayer for 80 years now. Focus on a problem, pass legislation to solve the problem, then make the problem a permanent thing for money laundering purposes. Secondly, Fort Knox. Supposedly our “horde” of gold. When has anyone seen it, I mean apart from some politicians that said it looked yummy? My opinion about nukes is how many are there and how many work? How many billions of dollars were spent creating them (back when a billion was 100 times more than it is now)? When was the last time they were audited and when has the technology been updated? Do our nukes still have 1960’s technology? And did updates merely put an “environmentally conscious” engine into a 1955 Impala. Or, even more depressing, do they really have nuclear capability or are they just “cardboard tanks” designed to lull the American taxpayer into believing they are protected? Sure, conspiracy theory, but do any of you trust the people that run things to be honest? About anything?

    23

    • “Your shotgun only has two shells, mine has ten. I win”

      Or maybe not.

      3

    • There is a lot of evidence than many maybe most of our nukes don’t work do to neglect .

      We don’t have tritium for one.

      https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/03/06/commentary-the-looming-crisis-for-us-tritium-production/

      And we are also short on parts with no ability to make them.

      https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article250187880.html

      They should be good for a decade or so, maybe.

      5

      • Honestly, if the doomsayers are right and they will replace us, better that the nuclear arsenal deteriorate over time to a nonusable state; South Africa via entropy. We can rebuild them later if needed, and better to not allow them to our enemies during the interegnum.

        7

    • Our gold supply was rendered radioactive in 1964 by a joint terrorist action led by an Anglo-Swiss arbitrageur and the Chinese security forces. I’ve linked a video synopsis.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA65V-oLKa8

      1

      • korean security forces. Or was it just Odd Job who was korean?

        1

    • Used to work about thirty stories down in Omaha.
      They do not call it nuclear theatre for nothing.

      1

33. Our military has a ton of problems but it is built to fight a large power like China far better than an insurgent force in an occupation. It is very fashionable to crap on aircraft carriers but they still project power better than anything else on the ocean. Regardless, China isn’t all that interested in fighting us when they are getting rich by selling our own technology back to us while we slowly morph into a third world population. They are going to win without firing a shot.

    22

    • move there before the prices go up. they won’t win shit. just like blacks prey on other blacks, so do the chins. just being in china is a curse. i get that your country did not live up to your very reasonable expectations, but by elevating china, you betray the essential juvenility of your thinking. you literally have immature brains that are practicing in a way that makes you look silly and traitorous in equal measure. you are welcome for this lesson.

      2

      6

      • Karl, are you German?

        1

        1

        • Is German a secret code word for idiot?

          2

          • no, that code word is “Ostei”.

        • german heritage only. 5th gen Cali

          • I figured it had to be that, or that you’re drunk. Either way, you’re on a roll today.

            2

34. Just bought some Havamal Soap Works Zman. Thanks for pointing it out to me. A great product, many of your readers here should use and enjoy.

    15

    1

35. China doesn’t need a war to bring Taiwan back into the fold. They are too practical to start one for reasons that Z outlined.

    Taiwan is dependent on China. 1. China is its most important trading partner

    2. Taiwan’s wages flatlined when China opened up. There is little upward mobility in international corporations in Taiwan. All the top jobs are in China. Consequently most of the ambitious Taiwanese work in China

    3. Most of Taiwan’s tourists (people used to travel for fun between places. They were called tourists. I know that sounds crazy) come from China

    However there is also an Asian concept called face. If the US gets too aggressive and the Chinese lose face, anything could happen

    8

    • i bet taiwan would destroy the prc in a straight up fight. and that does not even begin to speculate on just what weapons might have been sent in to taiwan, in mislabeled containers. yah know what i mean? if the mainland hits taiwan, who can blame taiwan for hitting the prc back? with a nuke. you just don’t know.

      and then there are the 30k US troops on Taiwan. wonder what they have in the old weapons pantry.

      3

      6

      • “30k US troops on Taiwan.” Who will do what they’ve always done for the lastt three quarters of a Century; Lose.

        9

      • 30K troops on Taiwan? Where are they hiding? The U.S. hasn’t had troops in Taiwan for 40 years.

        1

    • Taiwan much richer than China on per capita basis (see link):
      https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/china/taiwan?sc=XE34

      For this reason, Taiwan will fight to NOT be reunited to China. Why be reunited with a large, powerful and poor neighbor that will strip mine their assets and reduce them back to a backwater? This is what is what China is doing to Hong Kong.

      The parallels between Hong Kong are Taiwan are strong and obvious and offer lessons to the Taiwanese people. When rich semi-independent Hong Kong was returned to China, Hong Kong not only lost their independence but also their status as “gateway to China” that was the source of their wealth. This has been a bad thing for Hong Kong and people that live there. Most people from Hong Kong now regret the integration into China. Taiwanese see their situation as a parallel, perhaps delayed by a generation or two.

      Also, regarding point 2, anytime a rich country opens trade with a poor country wages flatline. Certainly we see this in US when NAFTA passed. Also, unfortunately, top jobs for Taiwanese are often in the US. Lots of these people in US doing technical work.

      2

      • Taiwan is still richer but it is also very soy. Most of the wealth in Taiwan is in real estate. Salaries have flatlined since early 90s. Some jobs pay less now than they did then. However being Chinese real estate had gone up 3 to 6x. A lot of young people don’t want to work hard because they know when their parents die, they will be rich. It is a real problem for employers.

        In 2017 Taiwan ended mandatory conscription. Ask yourself how serious are a people about defending themselves against an overwhelming and real threat if they stop making boys prepare for battle and underman their defenses?

        https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/15/china-threat-invasion-conscription-taiwans-military-is-a-hollow-shell/

        1

        • Taiwan, like many East Asian countries, has to respond to an ascending Chinese military. For last 70 years China didn’t have a navy capable of mounting a landing/invasion so Taiwan (and others) were able to be effectively demilitarized for a long time. Now that China is building a capable navy Taiwan has to respond, new weapons, training, people. While there will bumps along the way, as long as the people and leaders of Taiwan want to maintain their independence they should be able to build their defense to do this. Elections and polling around these issues shows “pro-independence” positions are popular, so there should be at least some motivation to defend themselves.

          Its not clear to me that volunteer is worse than conscript army. Seems like if you have a volunteer army, you just raise wages to get more people? Solvable problem for countries with money maybe.

36. China will take Taiwan, but not before it squeezes every last drop drop from the orange (the U.S.) leaving nothing but pulp. They know that there’s too much money on the table to take Taiwan now, as U.S. trade would be highly jeopardized. While the U.S. market becomes less important to them with each passing year, it’s still the prime customer. They’re pretty much off-shored everything by now. It’s just a waiting game to where even razor thin profit margins in slowly depreciating dollars are no longer in the equation. They’ll wait for our economic implosion, and then stimulate their domestic economy with wartime spending and consumption. Their vast industrial resources, and vast buildup of energy and industrial resources will keep them out of the jam in which we will find ourselves, as they have become what the British once we, and then the U.S. of the 20th Century, the workshop of the world. They’ll understand that they have home field advantage with Taiwan, as we have to project our power thousands of miles across the pacific. They’ll know that the carriers are a total waste of money with hypersonics. Submarines are another story but they’ll know that we won’t attack for fear of nuclear reprisal on the west coast and beyond. Sure, they’re population is aging, but they know ours is being replaced with inferiors, and when you have a billion people to start with, they still have a wide group of people to choose from for military service. A military, unlike ours, that means to rule, as human nature intends. They have a multi-generational time horizon while ours is down to fiscal years. They know that things will fall into place for them as they watch our decline.

    12

    1

    • Yes: the Chinese now have both the watches and the time.

      Folks should spend an afternoon reading up on Chinese and Russian hypersonic missile capability, the air-launched models in particular.

      The idea that US carrier battlegroups can still credibly project power against these states and their clients is Last War thinking.

      6

      2

      • Did our carriers really perform that well during WW2? I’m not sure about that. Ever since then we’ve used them against countries that can’t dominate the airspace, so we’ve been lulled into thinking that it’s perfectly normal to have these white elephants on the sea. The minute they’re floating under airspace dominated by the enemy, hypersonic or not, they’ll be at the bottom of the ocean. The Airspace around Taiwan will be, by default, dominated by China. They may even take Guam to teach us a lesson. That’s how weekend we will be.

        6

        2

        • Look at the damage, the low spec Exocets did in the Falklands to the British Navy. That was 40 years ago.

          Ships are just big floating target practice when you have decent missiles.

          5

          2

    • I feel.like you’re forgetting the economic aspects of this conflict. Specifically, America exports around 1 million metric tons of pork to China. Shutting down this export during a war would instantly destabilize their country. If China decided to retaliate by banning exports to America, they would find themselves in a position where citizens saw rising food prices and declining wages. While trying to fight a war. That’s a huge problem that would probably do them in.

      10

      • There isn’t an angle where this would make any sense, but the same could be said for any number of conflicts. Looks like Taiwan is about the same size as Maryland, so I could see some thinking that they’d have the place overrun and pacified in less than week and well before any of that bad stuff has a chance to materialize. Again it still wouldn’t make any sense (“1) Invade Taiwan 2) ??? 3) Profit!”), but, who knows.

        1

      • For all their strengths, the Pork Gap remains the Chinese Achilles Heel.

37. I was thinking the regime would turn its focus inward, but then Afghanistan happened. It’s obviously an important moment, I suspect more important than it looks even now.

    The loss of prestige precludes going after domestic undesirables. The regime now has to get its mojo back, or it collapses, and that has to be done on the world stage. What are they capable of, though? I agree China isn’t the juggernaut it’s made out to be, but neither is the US.

    I think they’re screwed.

    12

38. The Chinese woman is no different from the US female. They want a materialistic life, like western women. They want to “travel the world”, they tell me whenever I ask (I work with the Chinese all day long for the past 9 months.) One family had 4 children, most have one or two just like the US. And the reasons are the same for conspiring against births: personal freedom.They have told me this They want to work, they want to do yoga and have wine parties with their friends.

    16

    • this shows up every time women are educated and encouraged to lead independent lives. like the song says, girls just want to have fun. then you see birth rates drop below replacement, ala south korea. china has all the modern pathologies, some of them even more so than here. not a country for nimrods to romance over…

      15

      • maybe they should pay women between say 35-41 who don’t have any children to have a kid. I mean at that age it’s now or never and you might as well have one at the risk of staring down 50 years of emptiness.

        For those who say that’s too late – that’s not really true. My mom’s mother is from an Irish catholic family and there were a lot of families with 9, 10, 11 kids and usually the last kid was born when the mother was 39/40.

        5

        1

        • everyone knows irish females have two uteruses, so that’s not a fair counter argument.

          9

          2

        • I agree with your sentiment. But this would mostly give Shaniqua one last round of stimulus.

          1

        • maybe they should pay women between say 35-41 who don’t have any children to have a kid

          I used to believe that, but there are an helluva lotta women who are completely barren by the age of 35.

          Realistically speaking, subtract a decade, and 25-31 is the “last-ditch” demographic which you want to be targetting.

          Unfortunately, moast of our best & brightest young women are finishing up graduate/professional skrewl at that age [25-31], and are carrying many hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, and can’t possibly imagine taking time out to birth three or four children.

          Scroll down to “Figure 3” in this PDF file:

          https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_13-508.pdf

          You’ll see that over the last three decades, births to mothers aged 40-44 have increased from about 5 per 1000 to about 12 per 1000, and births to women aged 35–39 are now at about 53 per 1000.

          Whereas in the sweet spot, age 25 to 29 years, births have declined over the last three decades, from about 110 per thousand down to about 95 per thousand.

          We* are witnessing a demographic collapse of epic proportions throughout almost all advanced societies of the world.

          And that’s before you factor in any possible sterility induced by the V@xxines of Death.

          *Both us and China [and everyone else, for that matter].

          5

        • krustykurmudgeon,

          My late mother gave birth to me when she was 43. Of course she had already given birth to my three siblings before I came along. Also note that those families with more than three children, and up to double digits, the mother probably started having children when they were in their teens or very early twenties.

          I think trying to have baby #1 at 35-40 for a woman is a very long shot. Add in doping up on fertility drugs and stressing over it (consider the joke that many babies are “Oops!” babies, conceived after some fun and alcohol) and a woman of that age would be lucky indeed to have any.

          1

          • where’s the evidence that it’s easier to have your fifth at 40 than your first at the same age?

            1

39. Who cares if China overtakes Taiwan? I don’t.

    18

    • And you’re right. Let the Taiwanese fight for their own independence. It would have to be IRA, terroristic, urban combat style, as they won’t have a chance to fend them off.

      2

    • Only one reason: they make nearly every computer chip, including military ones.

      It would probably take a decade to recapture it domestically, assuming we still have the technical people to do it. We certainly can’t do it cheaper.

      4

      • I think that’s overly pessimistic. We have to send the chip specs to the Chineses factories. They’re just assembly monkeys. Intel and AMD could have factories running pretty quickly. I would gladly pay 30% more for a phone or computer to achieve this.

        3

        • Intel has gone all diversity. Its why they can’t even get their next gen stuff to work in the existing factories.

          Setting up a new one from scratch. I doubt they would get past the planning stage.

          5

    • There’s a Civnat vibe to this article. I can understand trying to focus on some potential conflict to avoid the present humiliation but the idea that Afghanistan is just one more chapter in the history of MIC corruption is interesting. The Afghanistan debacle is part of the new era of Western collapse and not business as usual. Yes, it does share characteristics of previous foreign adventures but the unifrom aggressive incompetence is new.

      China has its problems but will survive this century and will be the stronger for it, for the country which just got chased out of Afghanistan…

      3

      1

      • China is a nation. And nations last for millennia. “America” is a country, and countries come and go.

        13

      • Asbestos: “China has its problems but will survive this century an will be the stronger for it, for the country which just got chased out of Afghanistan…”

        From https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2021/08/16/farewell-to-bourgeois-kings/:
        It is not just that the elite class is incompetent – even kings could be incompetent without undermining belief in monarchy as a system – it is that they are so grossly, spectacularly incompetent that they walk around among us as living rebuttals of meritocracy itself. It is that their application of managerial logic to whatever field they get their grubby mitts on – from homelessness in California to industrial policy to running a war – makes that thing ten times more expensive and a hundred times more dysfunctional. To make the situation worse, the current elites seem almost serene in their willful destruction of the very fields they rely on for legitimacy. When the ”experts” go out of their way to write public letters about how covid supposedly only infects people who hold demonstrations in support of ”structural white supremacy”, while saying that Black Lives Matter demonstrations pose no risk of spreading the virus further, this amounts to the farmer gleefully salting his own fields to make sure nothing can grow there in the future. How can anyone expect the putative peasants of our social order to ”trust the science”, when the elites themselves are going out of their way, against all reason and the tenets of basic self-preservation, to make such a belief completely impossible even for those who really, genuinely, still want to believe?

        The managerial class increasingly appears as a sort of funhouse mirror inversion of the doomed russian nobility of the late tsarist era; they no longer know how to run a country and only seem to parasitize on the body politic while giving almost nothing of value in return. In tsarist Russia, the nobility proved increasingly incapable of winning Russia’s wars or running its ministries, making their legitimating narratives proclaiming them to possess some natural-born right and capacity for rulership increasingly impossible to believe in. In modern America, it is the meritocrats who now openly lack any merit or ability to rule, quickly undermining the ability of the average person to believe in the very foundational claims behind the managerial order. And by what right does the collective of non-divine kings rule? To borrow from Schmitt: by the same right as the collective of stupid and ignorant technocrats. In other words, by virtue of simply not having been replaced yet. Nothing more.

        I find it very likely that most future historians will put the date of the real beginning of the collapse of the current political and geopolitical order right here, right now, at the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Just as with any other big historical process, however, many others will point out that the seeds of the collapse were sown much farther back, and that a case can be made for several other dates, or perhaps no specific date at all. This is how we modern people look at the fall of the french ancien regime, after all. Still, it is quite obvious that the epoch of the liberal technocrat is now over. The bell has well and truly tolled for mankind’s belief in their ability to do anything else than enrich themselves and ruin things for everyone else.

        How long it will take for their institutions to disappear, or before they end up toppled by popular discontent and revolution, no one can know. But at this point, I think most people on some level now understand that it really is only a matter of time.

        13

        • Excellent comment. While there are other candidates for the date of the beginning of the end of this empire, the most likely one is the utter humiliation in Afghanistan.

          For comparison, the British Empire really was toast by the time of the outbreak of the Greek Civil War, and arguably at the end of World War II itself, but many historians still (less so than in the past, but nonetheless) put the date at the time of the Suez Crisis.

      • The fact that the military doesn’t even grasp the significance of Afghanistan is telling

        It’s like a boy left the refrigerator door open overnight. Kind of a problem but not really.

        3

    • I will care if China overtakes Taiwan the day I can find Taiwan on an unmarked map.

40. All that might be true, but China would still win because I’m pretty sure they’re still stronger than a few thousand goat herders with AKs and IEDs.

    The Taliban was a death-blow to the military arm of the GAE. I think America automatically loses if we try to fight China.

    2

    1

41. Not directly related to musings about China/Taiwan: Cannot post the picture of the meme, but the words will suffice for my feelings of late:

    America is a corpse being consumed by maggots.
    Liberals are rooting for the maggots.
    Conservatives are rooting for the corpse.

    43

    • That’s a damn good meme.

      4

    • I’ve been saying for years that the US needs to change the national symbol from the bald eagle to the buzzard.

      3

    • Great metaphor. To re-work the old joke, after Hemingway’s unfortunate encounter with the shotgun, what happened? The maggots arguing in the mortuary fought it out in dead Ernest.

      2

    • Brutal but awesome.

    • You could substitute The West for America and it works just as well.

42. 1) Aircraft carriers are today what battleships were in the 1940s. Fat, floating targets. 2) The war machine needs trillions to keep itself going. Unfortunately, we don’t have any more trillions. And the Chinese won’t lend us any more.

    4

    1

    • You nailed it on carriers but they can just “create” money. They can create our first quadrillion at the push of a button. The only money actually printed any more is for circulation (so waiters can get untaxed tips) and foreign payoffs so demofascists can pay their foreign supporters.

      4

    • >Unfortunately, we don’t have any more trillions.

      Apparently you haven’t noticed the trajectory of American public finance over the past decade or so.

      1

43. Regarding USA surrender in Afghanistan, Lara Logan (who I’ve never watched or listened to but know I will) supported my hunch that this was just the final act in a prewritten script. It was one of several ending options. According to Logan, on Carlson’s Fox nation, US-funded Pakistan has been allowing US support arms, weapons, and Taliban troops unimpeded access back and forth. It was a made-for-as-you-point-out-money laundering operation. I think the rapid surrender is a Woke sub-theme. America is bad and Afghanistan is fortunate not to have even the illusion of the American manifestation of its ideals.

    Bring on the China series! Afghanistan is worn Maytag and I’m tired of it!

    5

    • I saw that Lara Logan bit. She had crazy eyes, I don’t trust her.

      3

      2

      • getting gang raped, on tv, by a crowd of egyptian goat fukkers, will do that to a woman. she could star in a remake of “The Searchers”…

        7

        1

    • Saw that interview with my wife.She bought the theory completely.

      I don’t.

      To me, Logan is making the classic conspiracy theorist mistake of think that there’s one personality directing everything in some 3-D chess fashion that ties all kinds of loose ends together into one giant mega conspiracy.

      Instead, reality is messy. Dysfunctional regimes, as the US clearly is, are composed of fractious elements fighting each other. Almost always stupidly so. Incompetence is the overriding feature of our deep state. Remember these people couldn’t organize a coup against or assassination of their common enemy Trump. They also couldn’t co-opt him by playing along. Any three of those opri9n would have e been easy to pull off for an organized conspiracy. That they couldn’t is all the evidence anyone should need to see that they are disorganized and dumb.

44. From the Chinese Global Times:

    In a tweet on Tuesday, US Senator John Cornyn astonishingly said that the US has as many as 30,000 troops stationed on Taiwan island, more than the 28,000 US troops in South Korea. If that is true, the Chinese government and the Chinese people will never accept it. It is believed that China will immediately put the Anti-Secession Law into use, destroy and expel US troops in Taiwan by military means, and at the same time realize reunification by force.

    2

    1

    • Maybe just a little Bidenesque mistake:

      https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senator-cornyn-deletes-erroneous-taiwan-tweet-blasted-by-chinese-media-2021-08-17/

      1

45. E. Michael Jones is wrong on race. But he’s right on religion. Unless white women become Catholic again, they will not have enough children for whites to survive. Only the Catholic Church, despite the Bergoglian idiocy, insists not just abortion, but contraception are sins. Go to a traditionalist Catholic parish, one with the Traditional Latin Mass, and you will see happy wives with many children.

    9

    2

    • “Go to a traditionalist Catholic parish, one with the Traditional Latin Mass, and you will see happy wives with many children.”

      Hence Pope Francis’s war on the Latin Mass.

      13

      • He was worried about two different Catholicisms forming that were irreconcilable, and he was right.

        He wants the happy lubby dubby Catholicism that is not a threat to political power and allows you to be a respectable member of the general culture. Think Liz Breunig. The mass exodus is of the faith is, in his opinion, reasonable collateral damage. Within a few generations, he sees the Church as being a glorified NGO.

        The trads have no qualms regarding mass culture and State power promoting degeneracy, and are willing to fight it. This is risky, as the State could decide to stomp it out entirely instead of cynically allowing it to merge into general poz culture. Luckily, outside of some online larpers, the trads are getting very sophisticated in creating parallel institutions. If Catholicism is real, and not just a nice story, it’s really the only option to fight.

        We’re actually lucky our first radical pope is such a doofus, as his heavy handed measures angered even moderate Catholics with no dog in the fight.

        6

        • He can’t possibly be a pope

    • I’m a big EMJ fan overall, but the popery is strong in him. That’s not a dismissal of trad Catholics. They get a heck of a lot right.

      For instance, he cites the success in St. Louis as a reason to adopt religion and ethnicity as identity instead of race. There are strong arguments to be made for it, and I agree God comes before nation— but not much before imo.

      Otoh would things have turned out as well if BLM had come looking for a fight with Catholics instead of whites? Beyond that, the Catholic church is in some ways the original globalist organization.

      That’s a difficult point for me to grapple with, because I’m not hostile to the church or its patriarchal hierarchy, and I have Catholic family, but at the same time I don’t want a faraway city influencing my nation.

      Maybe the ethnic American in me.

      7

      • Although I was not raised on the Latin Mass, I was introduced to it in my early 20’s and I was amazed at how much I had been missing in my faith.
        I have been to Latin Masses where the priests celebrating them were: German, Italian, Irish and Polish. Occasionally we would have a Chinese priest celebrate it as well and during his homily, he would give us updates on how Chinese Catholics were being treated in China. One Sunday we couldn’t make it to the Latin Mass and opted instead for a later service which was populated almost exclusively by Hispanics. I never did that again. Everyone – including the priest – was staring at us, letting us know that we didn’t belong there. The service also wasn’t so much a mass as it was a celebration of their ethnicity (the girl I was dating at the time spoke Spanish and she translated for me.) and after mass on the way out the door, the celebrant stopped us and said in his thick accent, “Good morning, it looks like someone walked in to the wrong ceremony.” I was a bit taken aback and my girlfriend said something like, “It’s God’s house, I though all were welcome here?” and at that point a Hispanic couple walked up to the priest and asked him something in Spanish as the female looked angrily at us. my girlfriend she later told me that it was basically “Who are these whites father and what are they doing here?” She told me the priests response was, “Don’t worry, hopefully we won’t see them again after today.”
        I mentioned something to our celebrant the following Sunday about our experience and said, “One tries to be a good Catholic and not speak ill of others, especially other Catholics, however Father Ramon is an really an activist more so than a priest and it’s been causing problems. Do try to attend another mass if you cannot make it to this one.” He didn’t elaborate on what types of problems Father Ramon was causing, but you can guess.
        Nothing beats the majesty of a proper Latin Mass! If you can attend one where there will be Gregorian Chant, I highly recommend it.

        6

        • Luckily the Hispanic masses I’ve had to attend seemed fine, but it’s amusing that Catholic Polish and Irish communities were literally destroyed by their Bishops for racism, and they turn a blind eye to this.

          1

        • Interesting story. That is probably the exception though. For example, my wife and I were looking for a mass in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and a group of Spaniards from the Canary Islands had reserved one of the chapels for a private mass. They waived us in, and during the sign of peace, they all came around and hugged us, including the priest. Maybe that was more of a Spanish than Hispanic thing. Or maybe just a tourism thing. Anecdotes are very small data points.

          1

          • Spanish and Hispanic are two different things. We Anglos are only a small part of European civilization. Spaniards are our European civilizational cousins.

            ‘Hispanic’ and ‘latino’ both refer to the culture and civilization of people who are basically Asians with small (often zero) amounts of European admixture. Their ruling classes have higher admixture but are also resented by their masses. Most of them, including their white-facing elites, are deeply hostile to anything European (white), especially the historic American people.

            1

        • This is why I don’t think V2 was a Catholic Council. The new mass is exclusive, not inclusive. As you say, the latin mass is perfect in that you can’t mess it up. The NO is MEANT to divide.

    • maybe the papaists should fix their gay kiddie diddling problem first.

      7

      9

      • This can’t happen as long as the Catholic position wrt homosexuality remains passive. It should have been denounced strongly and acted against accordingly. The current (non) position is attempting to take walk down the middle of he road so to speak. It never ends well.

        2

      • Gay kiddie diddle, oh how they will fiddle, the priest with the choir boy, the acolyte shocked to see such blight, and Tradition done away with too soon 😀

        Not bad for a one-off, if I do say so myself.

        4

        3

      • The problem was the coverup. Objective studies have shown that Catholic priests have pedo rates similar to other religions, and less than the general public. Nothing to be proud of, but greatly exaggerated by the media due to the abortion stance. Generally, priests, ministers, rabbis, etc. run at about 5%, whereas the general male population runs at about 7%. Interestingly, male public school teachers are at about 10%, but you never hear about that.

        3

        • Objective studies have shown that Catholic priests have pedo rates similar to other religions, and less than the general public.

          LOL’ed.

          Still LOLing.

          Gotta stop LOLing so I can start SMDHing.

          But still LOLing.

          5

        • That’s not the point, Priest vs Minister vs Rabbi vs teacher percentages of pedophiles. The problem is that almost all charges of pedophilia are of Priests with young male *boys*, not young girls!

          The Catholic Church is responsible for allowing homosexuals into the priesthood under the (false) assumption that homosexuality not acted upon is not a sin. They were blind—and still are—to the simple fact that there is a proclivity for homosexual men to prey on adolescent (and younger) boys. In there lies the error of the current Pope i.e., to recognized homosexuality as a mental aberration and disease incompatible with Christianity, or at least recognize this disorder as being debilitating to the work of the priesthood in their church duties.

          • To Compsci: So your son is abused by a priest and your daughter is abused by a rabbi, and you’re telling me the former is worse than the latter?

    • I have a lot of love for my Catholic brothers and sisters but America is and always will be WASP.
      Cue the Mormons and big family evangelicals.

      4

      2

      • Mormon Fertility rate is the same as seculars, even in Utah.

        Unless you are mainly religion or fertility driven, modernity will gut your fertility.

        You also have to have a community that is unplugged from the secular society as much as possible. Evangelicals of the Quiver Full movement had lots of kids but as many were recent converts they lacked the important social and genetic resistance to modernity and so had weak retention.

        Its a long term process BTW, it takes generations . Probably the most resistant group in the US is the Amish. They have boiled off most Amish interested in secularism and have a radically different parallel society and so loses to modernity are low.

        In a few centuries they may well be the majority group. If the Pagan Scandinavians go a bit more Varg Virkirness Fertility uber alles a few hundred from now it might be Neo Viking raiders vs Amish which would be , well not the future anyone would predict.

    • as a lapsed catholic who went to catholic schools – I find a lot of trads to be a part of the same kind of accessory-ism that secular people have. Like there’s a weird kind of cargo cult trad catholic you run into. They’re basically protestantized and live in a nice suburb but have a lot of kids who tend to be bigtime strivers. The only difference is that instead of working for the ACLU, the kids want to work for Alliance Defending Freedom. If you want eight kids that’s your right but I feel for these people there conservative religious identity is part of the same kind of accessory-ism you see in lefty culture. Having a large family to them is there equivalent of a lefty driving a subaru.

      When I think of a trad catholic, I don’t really think of the religious aspect of it but the cultural aspect. I think of the Irish or Italian family where the parents were born in the 10s and 20s and only finished high school and probably worked a blue collar job. They had a lot of kids also and went to church every sunday but it was more an organic community. The kids might violate church teaching time to time (i.e. get into a fight) but to me that’s what catholicism is – the culture, not getting into debates over summa theologica

      3

      3

      • Your cult is your culture.

        2

      • THe question that I am always confronted by is is the Catholic Faith true? If it is, then we have to follow it, if its not, then its just another in a list of institutions and debating societies that can be agreed with in some things or not.

    • I belong to an Orthodox parish (Russian). Seems like there are new (young) faces every week.

      3

    • Your church’s leader is a homosexual-pedophile-supporting satan worshipper who invites idols of false gods into your inner religious sanctums. Gtfo. No one should join anything with the antichristian, antiwestern word “Catholic” in it. Each nation is to worship God separately, or else you defy His judgment of Babylon and you are therefore heretical and blasphemous. The church universal can only exist beyond this fallen world, or else your church worships something other than Jesus Christ.

      1

      • Actually our celebrants, as well as most of our parishioners have nothing but contempt for Bergoglio and his cadre of globalists. I know our family does and we do not refer to him as the “holy father”.

        2

        1

        • When one loves the pope one does not stop to debate about what he advises or demands, to ask how far the rigorous duty of obedience extends and to mark the limit of this obligation. When one loves the pope, one does not object that he has not spoken clearly enough, as if he were obliged to repeat into the ear of each individual his will, so often clearly expressed, not only viva voce, but also by letters and other public documents; one does not call his orders into doubt on the pretext – easily advanced by whoever does not wish to obey – that they emanate not directly from him, but from his entourage; one does not limit the field in which he can and should exercise his will; one does not oppose to the authority of the pope that of other persons, however learned, who differ in opinion from the pope. Besides, however great their knowledge, their holiness is wanting, for there can be no holiness where there is disagreement with the pope.

          (Pope St. Pius X, Address to the Priests of the Apostolic Union, Nov. 18, 1912; in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 4 [1912], p. 695)

46. Let’s pair the Zman prediction of an administration turn to the Chinese for the furtherance of the war armament scheme with the present Afghan crisis. A question raised is why are the DC powers letting this crisis persist and why has it been so publicized?

    The laptop from hell proves that Biden is totally beholden to CCP, so his team is not permitted to even consider a Cold War with China. So could the military-industrial complex have created the Afghan situation just to set up a 25th amendment removal specifically so they can turn their racket on China?

    1

    • uhm, the laptop proved his ccp dealings didn’t matter. and they didn’t. and still don’t.

      1

      • uhm, the laptop proved his ccp dealings didn’t matter. and they didn’t. and still don’t.

        ?????

        Care to expound?

        • There’s a picture of him having sex with a little Asian girl that pops up every now and then on the Internet and it’s gone nowhere. I would think at this point that he is beyond blackmail.

          • I have to confess that I don’t understand this subthread.

            Is y’all’s point that Hunter & Pedo-Joe simply fleeced the Chinese and stabbed them in the back, like the utterly predictable taters which the Biden family truly is?

            Meaning, are we talking “Travellers” & “Éirinn go Brách” here?

            [Truth be told, Pedo-Joe is such a remorselessly & relentlessly sleazy tater that he’s kinda growing on me, and I rather enjoy his sporadic Alzheimer’s-induced moments of pure unadulterated honesty. We’ll miss that once the Frankfurt School installs Douglas Emhoff as First Lady.]

47. I think many believe that China is stronger than shevis because the Tiannamen Square tank man pic is so strongly imprinted in their brain.

    2

48. China doesn’t have to go to war to capture Taiwan. Chinese, including the Taiwanese, are pragmatic people. Taiwan will come to China by itself, if/when it starts making sense to them and the US will be unable to stop them

    8

49. The best plan I’ve seen for China to take Taiwan does involve nukes. They nuke a carrier group.

    Its a nice middle ground between full scale nuclear war. Is it really justified to nuke Chinese civilians for the loss of a military carrier? The gamble is no.

    China is also greatly expanding her Navy and can concentrate more power than America can. Combine this with multiple problems rising across the globe and you can achieve theater numerical superiority.

    Of course this requires allies, thus China is expanding into central Asia ( all the way to the Balkans) to diversify their economy away from the US.

    Its a balancing act between their demographic bomb and their endless growth.

    2

    3

    • Its a nice middle ground between full scale nuclear war

      Using any form of nuclear weapon at any foreign target is full scale nuclear war. There is no middle ground.

      14

      • It is worse. The weapons themselves used to be “strategic” in nature—you blow up my cities, I’ll blow up yours. Hence, mutual annihilation. However, way back in Obama’s first term, a $1T program was started to update our nukes—and that includes developing tactical nukes, such as would be used on the battlefield. This is not new (see: Davy Crockett program of 50’s), but was long ago abandoned with the policy of no first use and mutual assured destruction (MAD).

        I you have small nukes, you will be tempted to use them.

        3

        • ‘Tactical’ nukes have different roles under different doctrines. One is to offset a disadvantageous conventional balance such as Nato against the Warsaw Pact in the cold war or Pakistan vs India today.

          But the other is to use them as a nuclear ‘warning shot’ w/o hitting something, like a city, that will force the enemy to go ape.

          Nuclear strategy is a lot like the game of chicken. Psychopaths, nutjobs and ppl who don’t give a…. have an advantage there.

          3

          • Tactical nukes may have many roles, but to use them is to signal that nukes are a viable and acceptable weapon and legitimize their use. They are purpose built to be used on the battlefield in yields of less than a 100 or so tons.

            A demonstration of using a nuclear weapon does not depend upon its yield. Some current weapons, e.g. W88, dial down to 350kt. That is enough to show off. There really is no need to have tactical nukes—unless you intend to use them on the battlefield.

            1

    • China nukes a carrier – and then what?

      If China wants Taiwan, it should convince the US that fighting for some tiny island on the other side of the world isn’t worth going to war over. It’s really not that hard of a sell.

      Basically, you want to keep the US out of it or at least get the US to give up quickly. Nuking a carrier is going to be Pearl Harbor 2.0. Enraging the US and giving it a reason to fight is the opposite of what China should do.

      15

      • the lack of any historical education is shocking every time it rears it’s empty head. i guess this internet genius isn’t aware of how much genuine antipathy americans have for china and the chinese people. nuking a carrier group is just the national equivalent of suicide by cop. that’s your Götterdämmerung move, when you are down in the bunker with your dog and a gun.

        7

      • You don’t need to nuke a carrier. In fact it takes very little to make it inoperable. You just need to hit it, once. And that in my opinion is relatively easy for a first world technological nation. The person describing these ships as the equivalent of WWII battleships was probably spot on.

        1

    • This is the 2nd message thread here with this weird LARP regarding nuclear weapon usage fantasies.

      This is NOT going to happen. Let me repeat again. NOT going to happen, why the hand-wringing and LARPing?

      As was stated here- you go down that rabbit hole you may end up with glass cities in short order is problem #1. Problem #2 and far more likely, in a ‘limited’ nuclear exchange where you are stupid enough to use a fission weapon you will be the fucking –pariah– of the globe especially all these pussified pozzed out Western nations who are what? Your primary trade partners and the engine of your economy / success.

      You’d be immediately ostracized by world governments and would be fast tracked to North Korea status. Arm chair generals here speculating about nuclear weapon usage— don’t quit your day job. No country that isn’t a ‘rogue’ nation is going to deploy fission weapons when there are half a dozen other ways to get that same task accomplished that won’t forever ruin you on the global stage and in history books.

      8

      • these internet experts think the October Crisis of 1962 was a shortage of candy corn…

        1

      • Problem #2 doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t care. However, you can substitute it with the same issue as any WMD: own goal-ing. Not only do they have to have a lot of faith in their delivery system (heaven forbid it does get shot down mid-flight), but even a successful attack could mean toxic fallout on their own country.

        2

    • Would they trade a carrier for the world’s largest hydroelectric dam – Three Gorges?

      6

      • the trouble with nukes, is that they are like Pringles – no one can stop at just one! 😛

        4

      • “Brezhnev took Afghanistan,
        Begin took Beirut,
        Galtieri took the Union Jack,
        And Maggie, over lunch one day, took a cruiser with all hands,
        Apparently to make him give it back.”
        — Pink Floyd [commentary on Falklands “War”]

      • The Chinese if I remember correctly already have a policy of potential nuke reaction should Chinese territory (homeland) be attacked. I assume nuking a dam would constitute such. Off homeland nuking—say of our carrier—I suspect we would think twice about such retaliation.

        • Hmmm…

          In the days of President W, I recall explaining theo a friend that half of his foreign policy was based on the Crazy Ivan technique of appearing to be a near madman who was far too dangerous to provoke.

          I think Trump could pull that off as a way to keep the Wily China Man from doing something intemperate but Biden …. not so much.

          2

      • I thought Three Gorges was a posterior shot of Kim Kardashian, Beyonce Knowles and Jennifer Lopez…

        1

50. The problem as I see it is that nature abhors a vacuum. Nobody has any idea what the Evil Empire (that would be “us”) is going to do, because nobody has any idea who’s actually in charge of anything. In times of massive uncertainty, wait and see is almost always the right approach… but it’s almost never the one actually taken. In the wake of the Empire’s collapse overseas — and there’s no doubt that’s what it is, the equivalent of barbarians crossing the Rhine and pouring into Gaul — the pressure on the other powers to do something, *anything*, is going to feel overwhelming.

    They’re inscrutable, those Orientals, and Xi on his worst day is far brighter than Totally Legit Joe ever was on his best, but he’s still just a man. He might see the best move in the abstract, but cave to the pressures of uncertainty. More than one war has started that way.

    18

51. About China, you are assuming the Chinese leadership is rational and wants to cater to its middle class. That might not be the bet Xi is taking.

    Peter Zeihan doesn’t impress me much, he is predicting we’re at the beginning of the second American century. That just doesn’t pass the ‘does this square with what I see’ test. He makes a good presentation here though. That junk aircraft carrier, okay. China went from steam locomotives in the 1980s to 80% of the world’s high speed rail lines today. They produce twice as many motor vehicles as the US and used more concrete in less than a decade compared to what the US used during the 20th century. So imagine a German general talking about the US Army in 1939: “This caterpillar tractor with cardboard armor taped on, is an American ‘tank’. So go right ahead and declare war on these clowns, Mein Fuehrer…” That aircraft carrier is China spending its resources primarily on civilian projects. Just like the US did in the 1930s. If they put all their energy into making war machines instead of high speed rail and iphones, things would look a little different. Just like the US Army in 1944 looked very different from ’39. And it is pretty clear that China plans to fight a 10 billion dollar carrier with a 5 million dollar ‘carrier killer’ missile instead of a carrier of their own. US carriers cannot strike China from outside its reach, it’s the other way around, China can hit US carriers before the range of its planes are anywhere near Chinese targets.

    Perhaps most importantly, all of the US hardware is under the direction of General Miller and SecDef Austin. Even if you were right about US material superiority, they just showed an incredible talent for letting that matter not one iota. AKs just beat drones, gunships, laser guided missiles and ‘the best military in history.’ Deny that and and you should prepare for it to happen again and again and again. Reality, that thing……

    My point here is not to spite the US military. My point is simply to say, if you want to win wars, first take out the trash. Fire ANYONE w a rank above major, and most of those too. And tell the newly bumped up captains that their job, their ONLY job, is to WIN WARS! If that happens, I think even Xi would notice and think twice.

    China PROBABLY won’t attack Taiwan, a big war is always a big gamble. But saying ‘they definitely won’t’ is asking to be as surprised as when ‘no F-15s or nukes’ Taliban just showed how far you can get w fertilizer, AKs and a thirst to conquer.

    28

    1

    • Hush, battered wife-patriotards here will not handle the truth.

      6

      3

    • The myth of the DF-21D is mostly that, a myth. These “carrier killers have never been tested against a moving target at sea. Firing a self-guided missile into space, then reentering the atmosphere over an object in the middle of the ocean is incredibly difficult. We also have spent 20 years working on missile defense systems. We also have radar jamming that will make the task incredibly difficult.

      Further, that weapon is a one time shot. It would be China’s Pearl Harbor. It is not an accident that the Chinese have been studying Pearl Harbor for years. They too cling to the belief in the knockout punch

      12

      • You don’t want to bet a 10 billion dollar carrier that these ppl can’t hit a 30 knots target w a few 5 million dollar mach 10 missiles:

        https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/quantum-computing-china-us-b1766133.html#:~:text=China%20has%20achieved%20a%20major%20breakthrough%20in%20quantum,in%20the%20world%20to%20achieve%20the%20same%20feat.

        5

        • Didn’t the Chinese surface a previously un-noticed submarine in the middle of a US naval exercise in the South China Sea a few years ago.
          Every time they run these war games, the US loses.

          Then there’s this
          https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/04/china-has-a-new-way-to-find-and-kill-u-s-navy-submarines/

          3

          • The assumption should certainly be high Chinese competence and capabilities. That way any surprises are likely to be pleasant rather than the opposite.

            3

      • Yet China’s revealed preferences say otherwise. They are fortifying and claiming all sorts of sandbars, making them into islands. With lots and lots of missiles. Moreover their missiles have far greater range than our carrier and ship based missiles. They can hit Guam and pretty much all our carriers in and around Taiwan. We can’t hit their land based missiles in Coastal China as we lack the reach. They also have superior UAV capability, and all these things cost money.

        They also have a very underappreciated asset. Container ships. These can be repurposed as either troop ships (just run them aground in Taiwan) or as stealth missile carriers. This gives them potential reach if they want it. Add in civilian airliners repurposed as airborne drop planes and they have the ability to put a lot of boots on the ground quickly. By being imaginative.

        Also, the US Navy is a joke. Constantly running aground, into civilian container ships where the US Navy gets the worst of it. As many naval officers have said, the Navy is more focused on diversity mandates than war fighting. Ships are filled with drama queens, women causing trouble, diversity etc. And our navy has shrunk dramatically.

        Which means the time is now (per the Smiths) for Xi to strike. Naval strategy is built strategy. It would take decades for the US to rebuild a credible navy, We will fight with what we have — sitting duck carriers likely sunk within a day of hostilities, and various ships designed to fight off jet fighters not hypersonic missiles that can maneuver at odd angles and flight paths. Exocet anyone?

        1

      • As I said in an earlier comment. The Argentinians already demoed this in the 80s with the Exocet.

        The main reason they did not hit a carrier was the French and UK intelligence strong armed the exocet arms market to stop them being acquired. Not a problem China would have with their own produced stuff.

        Even the Iraqs managed to hit a US Frigate with one of these launched from a modified standard business jet during the iran/iraq war. The US missile defense system on board did not even arm itself.

        That was 40 years ago. You just swarm the largest target with lots of lower tech missiles.
        The missile defense stuff has not been demonstrated in combat, and for the enemy they only need to get 1 or 2 through. Whereas the defense has to be perfect.

        1

    • AKs just beat drones, gunships, laser guided missiles and ‘the best military in history.’

      The only thing the Taliban beat was their wangs for twenty years, waiting for the US to lose interest and go home.

      18

      2

      • Back in 2010-ish I discussed Afghanistan with a Danish tank commander, asking him why we’d need Leopard tanks against an enemy with only popguns and cherry bombs.

        “No”, he insisted, the tanks were invaluable. “A plaster grenade is excellent for opening compound gates.”

        Whelp! Here the tax payers are shelling out to have $20 million German killing machines sent to Afghanistan – vehicles designed to raze the compound from ten miles away, roll up and grind the rubble to gravel under the chains – only to find out they’re shooting marshmallows because destroying enemy strongholds is bad optics.

        We never fought a real war in Afghanistan, because Taliban was never a real enemy.

        14

        1

        • And yet, who’s in control of Afghanistan now? It is a bad habit to get lost in ‘we didn’t really lose’ when, well we damn well DID lose. If you want to win next time, first own your defeats. Some old boxer said that or something like it and I think it is true.

          About the tanks, I’ve heard that tanks are very good for two reasons, even in a place like Afghanistan; modern tanks are the most IED (ie ‘roadside bomb’) resistant vehicles.

          And the other reason is that the main gun on a tank is extremely loud. And there is something in the human psyche that equates being the loudest with being ‘dominant.’ One firing of that big gun, if the other side only has small arms, and they often pull back. It is instinct and probably not unique to humans. It is probably for the same reason that lions roar. For mammals, louder is accepted as substitute for dominant.

          10

          1

          • It is a bad habit to get lost in ‘we didn’t really lose’ when, well we damn well DID lose.

            We left Afghanistan of our own free will – or rather the will of globohomo – we weren’t driven out at bayonet point.

            It’s dangerous to believe that you won when the enemy just got tired of curbstomping you. Lots of 2A’ers think the tacticals of Afghanistan is applicable to the US – there are lots of reasons why that’s not the case, but most important is that the US military ain’t leaving America any day soon.

            And the other reason is that the main gun on a tank is extremely loud. And there is something in the human psyche that equates being the loudest with being ‘dominant.

            That’s a fair point. I told the story above to a British guy who had been stationed in Camp Bastion, and he said that while there really wasn’t any job in Helmand that couldn’t be done with a .50 machine gun, the sound of Leopards revving up would stop the nervous gunchatter that was otherwise a constant feature in the Green Zone.

            Still, it’s an expensive recipe for a few hours of peace and quiet.

            9

            1

          • That pricey M1 Abrams, or whatever the latest toy is suffers from a few inevitable disadvantages. Cost, thus limited numbers. Very difficult maintenance requiring a central depot, expensive parts and highly trained personnel. Against your one high-tech armored vehicle (absent air or other support), and on my side, five or ten soldiers who aren’t afraid to die, with portable tank killing handheld weapons and highly mobile — perhaps on motorcycle or light trucks — especially if they have the home field advantage on rugged terrain, guess who I’d put my money upon? An old Soviet-era artillery shell and some improvised detonator will do plenty of damage (IED) including to those vaunted armored vehicles, as any vet of those wars would tell you.

            4

          • Ben failed to mention this, so I will. There are any number of A1’s taken out by IED’s. The ones I remember are from Iraq, but I suspect Afghanistan as well. So this is not speculation.

            1

        • Thanks for the laugh.
          Twenty years of $270 million dollars a day, and fuck all has been achieved.

          That’s what passes for victory in the last days of the Mickey Mouse Empire.

          12

          • Its not all lost. Europe will get 3 million Afghans.

            1

      • True. Nevertheless, “The World’s Greatest Military” couldn’t degrade the Neolithic Mohammadans sufficiently to prevent them from immediately retaking the country directly Team Globohomo began beating a retreat instead of its meat.

        1

    • This is why Stalin had a bunch of his generals shot when Germany invaded Russia.

      4

      • Stalin was too cruel. We are too wimpy. The optimum is probably somewhere inbetween.

        6

      • pretty sure Operation Barbarossa is about when Stalin *stopped* shooting his generals…

        1

        • No , I think he carried on shooting ’em for incompetence and cowardice.

          Maybe he just liked shooting generals.

          1

        • He didn’t shoot all that many to begin with. The great majority were just demoted or sent to the Gulag for a few months, and were later reinstated in other command positions.

          And most of the permanently purged were old-timers, Czar-era officers unable to make the mental transition to mobile warfare.

          I’ve heard the argument that the Versailles Treaty was a blessing in disguise for Germany, since it allowed them to get rid of all their obsolete personnel and hardware, starting afresh with 100,000 of the best men Germany had on offer.

          4

          • The US probably enjoyed the same benefits in WW2 b/c, although voluntary, its military had also been largely disbanded between the wars so it started with a clean slate as well.

            I do wonder if carriers are not clinging to the old doctrine of great power wars. They do look like big sitting ducks.

            5

          • I do wonder if carriers are not clinging to the old doctrine of great power wars

            Yes, the battleships of our age: good for impressing tribesmen in third-world countries, an expensive and awkward liability in a real war with a peer power.

            2

52. I posted this directly to you yesterday, seems like you are answering today. At least a bit:
    “Julian Assange speaking in 2011: “The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war” #Afghanistan”

    Or as you say “massive money laundering operation”

    22

53. The timeless truth is that wars must be financed. It’s hard to imagine a China/Taiwan conflict, let alone a US/China conflict, occurring without triggering a financial debacle. The Chinese economy, much like ours, is levered to the t*ts. Just look at the giant Huarong bailout the other day…..

    Meanwhile, it’s unlikely the Chinese will lend us money with which to fight them. So the bond market turmoil would be massive. As I posted the other day, Afghanistan Inc. (before its recent liquidation) was a profitable enterprise for the MIC and grifters. The Chinese venture probably wouldn’t work out as well and there’s always the chance of a nuclear error. So my money for now would be betting on Iran as the next fiasco.

    6

    • Norman Angell made that exact same argument against the possibility of a general European war…. in 1913. Not saying you’re wrong; just saying not to bet on global financial capital to prevent war.

      18

      • An excellent observation, thanks. I can only argue that the current system is more levered that the gold standard system of yore.

        6

        • Certainly true, and I agree with you for the most part. The drum I keep banging is the one nobody wants to hear, because it’s impervious to outside analysis – the human mentality factor. We have no way of knowing Xi’s relationships with has senior ministers and army commanders, so even though those relationships are critical we can’t know them.

          And the situation is far worse inside the Evil Empire. Who can even guess who is *really* making decisions there behind the razor wire in Tubman DF? The other powers have to make their decisions in a vacuum, which makes their interrelationships doubly important…

          1

          • The big issue is that I doubt any previous decision making around warfare was made from the perspective of the entire leadership being a reality denying suicide cult.

            Even the soviets had not got to this stage.

            It might turn out that the US nukes China, themselves and Europe just because – fuck you whitey, that’s why.

        • The Captain’s gracious reply to Severian is one of the things that I like most about many of the commenters on this blog: we want to learn from each other and we are thankful when someone offers a reasonable counter-argument to our position. Not many blogs or commenters are like this.

          Well done, sir.

          12

          • Agreed. This is the best comment board I have been on for value added analysis and respectful discourse. I never miss a day of Zman, but if I skip the comments I feel like I have missed out.

            2

      • Indeed.

        America probably fears losing it’s global reserve currency status more than anything.

        President Eisenhower broke the British pound to force the British to stop their Suez Canal antics by using its power in the IMF to deny needed cash to the UK. Denied oil transportation via the canal, and access to $$$ by the US, Britain had no choice but to admit defeat.

        So. The US would do almost anything to keep the global reserve currency status, including risking WWIII. Defending Taiwan against a peer competitor probably isn’t necessary to that end. (?)

        But the Chinese play the long game, and may well just wait for the US to implode on its own with a hollowed out industrial base and Weimar levels of hyper inflation.

        2

        • This is true. I suspect if a loss of Taiwan to China would be seen as proof positive the United States does not possess the full faith and credit to deserve reserve currency status, the Ruling Class would be prone to be aggressive. Still, as I pointed out earlier, the Ruling Class is not used to having skin in the game and the threat of nuclear war would make them have skin in the game.

          The twilight of the Evil Empire 2 has started in earnest on the plains of Afghanistan. Loss of reserve currency status would be a moonless 2 a.m. While I and everyone here does not look forward to deprivation, it almost would be worth it to see the terror on their faces, which is somewhat visible even now after the humiliating debacle in Kabul.

    • war is just business by other means…

      4

      1

      • I like that spin on the Clausewitz proverb.

54. America’s capital ships, its aircraft carriers, could prove to be very vulnerable in a war with China. If and when a carrier is sunk, the US could easily lose twice the number of people in a single day as were lost in 20 years in Afghanistan. The psychological impact of demonstrating the vulnerability of the carrier strike group would be devastating as well. Also, regardless of the carrier’s survivability, the US may find that the carrier’s real weapon system, manned aircraft are of limited use due to their own vulnerability. The carrier could prove to be the battleship of WWII.

    If the modern day carrier is the battleship of WWII, America’s submarine fleet may prove to be the rough equivalent of the aircraft carriers of WWII. It seems highly unlikely that China would have any real ability to defend against US subs. US Navy submarines could easily send China’s entire Navy, including any Taiwan invasion fleet, to the bottom of the ocean.

    Let’s hope that neither side is stupid enough to try.

    21

    • Desperate, dying, nuclear-armed Paper Tigers could quite possibly solve the problem of overpopulation.

      4

      3

      • Overpopulation is no longer a concern of the elite . If anything they freaking about low fertility and population aging.

        A continuous 1.6 or lower fertility rate is crippling and cuts into the elites lifestyle quiet a bit. Not much fun to have no one to lord over.

        The obvious solution was immigration but the current crop don’t want to be replaced which rules out basically every society with a current decent fertility rate.

        Also anyone who assimilates, stops breeding. The Mexicans have already

        And yes this does mean if Dissident Whites reverse assimilate from society and go up to say a decent 2 and change TFR they’ll win any breeding war . Go to three which is possible with mutual support and you can win in a few generations.

        This is also why the current Latino invasion is being encouraged, its a combination of spite against the deplorables and a last burst of manageable immigrants they don’t fear replacing them.

    • i think you are missing the big point, even within your own argument. if aircraft carriers are obsolete, they won’t be used. ICBM carrying subs will take their place, and all the other nuke platforms will take precedence too. so for china, a carrier group is a very real poisoned chalice. park one or two in a provocative place, or throw up a UN blockade of china, and then watch xi sweat. come on fat boy, take that big cookie that’s just sitting there waiting…

      1

      2

      • What happens to the domestic, indeed, the whole world’s economy, if trade with China were halted for a long period, even if no shots were fired?

        I challenge you to find anything in your home that is NOT labelled “Made in China” (and include other Asian nations).

        I suspect that merely the threat of this happening would lead to a worldwide economic freeze, stock market crashes, etc. Not a happy time, but better than worrying about the fallout upwind.

        1

        • I would say it would be good for us to be forced to bring the supply chain home, but fat chance of that happening. Remember at the beginning of the scamdemic when we realized how vulnerable we are that all our drugs are made in China? Neither does anyone else.

          2

          • Loss of China trade would bite me—and everyone else in the ass—but I’d gladly suffer it. It’s like a medicine that tastes bad, but in the end produces health.

    • The day after Taipei fell: “The navy would have sent the subs to destroy the Chinese invasion fleet. But they hadn’t had facilities for female self-identifying sailors installed yet. So we couldn’t deploy them, you see…”

      Your point is taken but I think our real problem is not hardware but the screwed-up software too many now carry between their ears. This is where wars are really won or lost. And right now we don’t look like winners. First we must fix that.

      3

55. the worst thing the prc could do is strike at taiwan, for two reasons:

    1. it would allow the US to bleed them, 2nd hand, ala what we did to the cccp in afghan

    2. it would inevitably escalate to china vs the world, with russia stepping out to get cigarettes (while china is annihilated).

    trouble with the biden gang (from prc persective), is that no one can predict how they will react, to anything. nothing however insane and pyrrhic, would not be considered. president cabbage head is this weird toxic avenger like tar baby, that no other leader wants to get anywhere near. and it kind of works for him.

    2

    1

    • What, Taiwan Taliban? Chaing Kai-shek Akhbar? Nah…

56. Why would the main land rulers engage in something with so much potential downside? They don’t need the wealth and industrial capacity as far as I can tell. The steady decline from a relatively vigorous nationalist governance toward effete liberal democracy seems to be progressing reliably. They can just wait till the Taiwanese Eloi turn themselves over wholesale and in the mean time use bribes to influence policy as they do in the US.

    On another topic I said something about the ACLU ignoring outrages against the rights of Americans in another comment the other day. I was a little encouraged to find that it was inaccurate. They have been litigating against the regime’s no-flight blacklists at least. I suppose the motivation is to make it easier to bring in more potential subversives but it looked like the people they were representing included some regular Americans. I confess that is as deep as I looked into it so far. They failed to improve anything though and it was the vaunted ‘liberal’ 9th circuit that upheld the constitutionality of secret no-due process no-fly blacklists.

    6

    • “They can just wait till the Taiwanese Eloi turn themselves over wholesale and in the mean time use bribes to influence policy as they do in the US.”

      That’s how I see Taiwan ending. Why start a war when you can buy a couple newspapers and bribe a couple politicians? Much cheaper and more reliable.

      3

    • China faces the “middle income trap.”

      Zman undoubtedly knows about it, but wisely keeps his essays tight and on point. I’d like to see some expounding on it.

      But age demographics are only part of China’s woes. The middle income trap is a real problem for China going forward.

      1

57. How much longer will the plates keep spinning? At least $2 trillion was plundered in the faux nation-building charade in Afghanistan. That is not a trivial sum, and the inflation consequence is just now beginning to bite here at home. Tack on the next mega-trillion “infrastructure” bill with the extra-tasty amnesty provisions, and kicking the can down the road doesn’t seem quite so viable as it once did in the past. At some point the bubble bursts. Those living comfortable lives have a priority interest in burying their head in the sand, but they may soon find out that you can’t eat pissing & moaning. I wouldn’t worry too much about about China, or even the MIC shenanigans. I think a better use of time is to stock up on non perishable food stuffs and perhaps spend an afternoon at the range sharpening your aim.

    6

    • “I think a better use of time is to stock up on non perishable food stuffs and perhaps spend an afternoon at the range sharpening your aim.”

      Never let macro (national level) issues distract you from micro (personal life) objectives. If you don’t work in DC you probably have no influence over US responses to things in Taiwan or Kabul. But you do have influence over how much food you have if trucks stop running.

      3

      • Exactly. I have no problem with people venting occasionally because that can be therapeutic if done in moderation. But no one should confuse venting with real action. I should have added, you cannot eat an online debate thread, no matter how clever or masterful your argument may be.

        3

58. You make a good case. Not mentioned, and I think it is important. is whether the PRC is a credible nuclear threat and would be willing to go there.
    If it is, China can take Taiwan (I suspect by measures other than outright invasion). The American Ruling Class fully supports militarism as long as it doesn’t have skin in the game, and nuclear war presumably would put their asses on the line.

    2

    • China has about 350 warheads, while the US has 5,000. The Clintons sold them MIRV technology for campaign cash, so they could strike multiple locations on the West coast with a single missile. That said, China has not invested heavily in nukes. building and operating a nuclear force is very expensive and very difficult. There is some thought that their arsenal remains quite primitive. Regardless, what they know is a launch means the end of China as a people. Every city in China would removed from existence within an hour.

      12

      • wait until the pogroms against overseas chinese begins; they are well hated everywhere they go. supposedly the big civil war in indonesia (1963?) involved slaughtering a lot of ethnic chinese.

        too bad the prc screwed up the rule of law here, because all that property they bought here…and its gone. reparations for the coof, worldwide.

        3

        • I’m in So Cal and outright direct racism is common against Chinese, especially landlords.

          Still a sort of rule of law so they aren’t attacked on sight but if things get sketchy, Chinese and Blacks are toast probably so are South Asians.

          1

      • My understanding also is the PRC has dodgy capability. Whether that is accurate is another matter. If the Ruling Class could be made to believe China has the capacity and willingness to nuke them would be the issue.

        As someone earlier suggested, absorption through bribery is the .out likely and most typical Chinese method. Again, whether Taipei is as corrupt as D.C. in this regard is another matter.

        I have noticed the United States has started to make nice with Putin. This may indicate the previous policy of preventing a Sino-Russo alliance is back on the table. It admittedly also may show D.C. has realized Europe is weary of Russophobia.

        3

        • What the Chinese have not been doing for a long time is fighting an actual war. History shows that there is a steep learning curve, despite extensive training. The US bogged down in Iraq because they had never faced guerilla war since the 1960’s. Not a single Chinese pilot has faced live fire. No Chinese captain has operated in deep water in combat.

          6

          • What China has been doing and doing quite well for almost twenty years is cyberwarfare. In 2020, they pretty well took out Mumbai’s power grid in the midst of another border conflict with India. They obviously obtained the entirety of the OPM personnel files about ten years ago.

            Going back to the discussion of nukes, our assumptions and the conventional wisdom of China’s shoddy program are based on American intelligence, which outside of domestic spying and political interference has not been stellar to put it mildly. The same applies to our understanding of the faults with the anti-carrier missiles. So those may be big miscalculations.

            But, again, not to argue your larger point because I also think a full-scale invasion of Taiwan is not likely barring some internal political struggle in the PRC, where XI appears firmly in control. This also is partially due to Taiwan not being without some pretty nasty weaponry itself. But the PRC is bootstrapping off the Afghan debacle to turn up the psychological pressure on the PRC. American betrayal, which is well-known as it its, has been highlighted. That is aimed as much at the corporate sector as it is at the political leadership. The carrots are cross-straits trade.

            1

          • Absolutely this. While our burly boys were going house to house in Fallujah, their Chinese counterparts were confiscating passports in Xinjiang. The one benefit of our never-ending wars is that we have a high number of people who’ve been exposed to live fire. The Chinese have only been exposed to a rather easy occupation of their western regions. Also, they lost a war to Vietnam (also) in 1979. That was their last war.

            1

          • That is not true. Their wars have been continuous. Just not well covered in the media.

            The border war with Russia in the late 1960s. Ongoing border wars with India. The war with Vietnam in the late 1970s. None of these lasted very long, and the Chinese all learned lessons from them. They just fought a battle in the Himalyas last summer with Indian forces.

            I would argue, if China was not preparing for War, why would they go to the enormous expense of occupying sand bars in the South China Sea and making them into heavily fortified islands? When it creates so much trouble with neighbors and guarantees a coalition against them?

            1

      • I wonder how many of our missiles will still launch when required.

        6

        • Good point. There have been reports “ours” are not in the greatest shape, either.

        • more than theirs.

          filler for comment rules

        • probably damm few . the chain of command to do it is very long and may not be negotable . the white house red button launch is a creation of hollywood

      • China has larger cities than us by far. Hitting China’s top 5 is about 90 million people. That’s a Mao level of death in one hour. Our top 5 is about 20 million, and includes NY, LA, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix. I would miss Houston and Phoenix.

        1

        1

        • NYC in its current slutty state is still worth preserving even if it’s not ‘good ol New York’ anymore 🙁

          2

        • I think we overestimate the damage to cities and population. Yeah, a nuke in the range of our nukes’ yield is not pretty, but one in the heart of LA is leaving a lot untouched. LA is huge. Of course, Covid has proven that our officials are now an important part of creating more destruction than the actual infliction. 😉

      • Unless there is plausible deniability. Was it diehard 3, they snuck a snuke in a shipping container or something? If suddenly the Imperial Capital got a General Tso-flavored obsidian glaze, Im not sure I would care (or support retaliation). If that happened after the Regime goes full-shoah on the heritage stock, not sure anything would happen to the PLA, if it were plausibly deniable.

59. i guess the MIC can count on the mindless GOP drones to keep supporting increased (or at least, very high) military spending. Not sure why they would do that though. Well they are the ones who will be paying for it, not me, so i guess it all balances out.

    IMO, the military’s biggest problem is going to be recruiting. no one with a 100+ IQ is going to be involved in that rainbow cluster fukk; just too dangerous now, even in the absence of enemy action (those 85 IQ types are just flat out dangerous to be around). and with all the bellicosity in the air, the chance of seeing combat is pretty good now.

    12

    • You aren’t sure why the GOP keeps pumping big bucks to the MIC? Hahahahaha, that can’t be serious.

      • no, i am not sure why gop rubes (i.e. voters) keep voting to support mic spending.

        • I’ll go that.

          You are a great American.

        • Give it a little time. I was all in favor of the Trumpian push to rebuild the military. Now, I would be happy to cut the budget by 90%. That happened over two years. The voter sentiment is moving pretty quickly. The problem will not be the GOP voters. The problem will be their bribed politicians refusing to listen.

          2

    • Don’t underestimate youth and testosterone to still recruit young white men. My young teenager is still roaring to go out and defend his (non-Hebrew) tribe.

      Against what? Against who?

      Blank stare.

      He is an excellent shot, strong, fast, intelligent and DUMB, DUMB, DUMB. There is a reason we used teenagers and young 20 somethings to attack heavy machine gun batteries on D-Day and island hopping in the Pacific.

      Doing my best to focus his energy on the enemy within while fostering a love for something bigger than himself (God/ Jesus / virtue/ the historical American nation: can’t hurt). Wish me luck.

      7

      • Faith , family , friends . all worth defending . USA ? what USA?

        3

      • Same here. My oldest loves guns, and used to play in airsoft tournaments in full military garb. Adding to your list of “excellent shot, strong, fast, intelligent”, he is also fearless. I told him if he tried to join the military, he would have to get a restraining order against me because I would literally fight him every day to keep him out. He is in college now, so lesser of two evils.

        1

60. Nuts to the Chinese: they can in fact sink US fleets and blind US satellites. Why pick a fight with the largest manufacturing economy on earth?

    YOU (your family and the readers of this blog) is the new focus of our regime.

    The rulers of my state are explicit: armed, white, race-aware, anti-maskers, anti-“vaxxers” are the biggest threat to their power.

    31

    3

    • how do you know any of the things you have stated? by reading blurbs on the internet, then you come back here and parrot them with feigned authority. let me rewrite your comment with some honesty on your part: “i am a coward and a pussy, and i know it. so i make up excuses for my pathetic lack of masculinity, that involve my side not fighting”.

      the first thing a nation should do, in time of war, is put ever pacifist “outside the city gates”.

      4

      30

      • He’s only reporting what war game exercises, by the Pentagon and Rand, are showing. They are just simulations but they are presumably the most extensive simulations of war w China, possibly except those the PLA are conducting.

        2

        • don’t talk to me. you are not an American in my eyes. I will be skipping your comments, like wise. feel free to chat with the other little pussies here; they’ll eat your shit like kibble.

          1

          11

          • Kindly go F yourself.

            4

            4

      • “ so i make up excuses for my pathetic lack of masculinity, that involve my side not fighting”.

        “My side..”?

        6

    • If china closed their ports for a few months our society would completely collapse. We don’t make ANYTHING any more . It is clear china has issues , but we are the focus of Screeching hate from the rulers. It’s us , not china

      3

      • No, we wouldn’t completely collapse. China, though our largest trade partner, is not even remotely our only trade partner (hence our allegiance with Taiwan). Certain high tech tools and equipment would go up in price for a while, but that’s about it. The bulk of our food chain is domestic. A large chunk of industrial supply is domestic. The bulk of our building supply chain is domestic. We can eat, build houses and work with low tech hand tools with much concern about foreign supply chains.

        Moreover, we export nearly one million metric tons of pork to China, as well as other foodstuffs. If we turned off our spigot, the net result would be higher food prices and diminishing wages in China. Higher maintenance and building costs, stagnant to decreasing wages, and low food prices here. It wouldn’t be a particularly pleasant experience. But we would probably have the upper hand. China is basically our client state, which is why our conflict is conducted with propaganda, not arms or economic policy. In a real fight, China and the US both would lose, but China would lose worse.

        1

    • Is it good for the whites? That is the only thing that matters. Thus, if China invaded Taiwan, and AINO responded by defending Taiwan militarily, only to suffer a right proper and thoroughly humiliating pranging, I could only cheer. We are not numerous enough and well enough organized to inflict grievous wounds on AINO, but outside forces such as China certainly are. It is possible that globohomo foreign misadventures could bring AINO down where internal dissenters cannot. But whether internal or external forces bring down AINO is largely immaterial, just so long as it is destroyed, one way or the other.

      2

61. “State Department calls for Taliban to include women in its government”

    The geniuses running foreign policy. This explains a lot about what just happened in Kabul.

    https://www.steynonline.com/11605/dead-superpower-walking

    14

    • Recent headlines have the Afghans now in Kabul saying they will respect women’s rights — those in keeping with Islamic law 😀

      I give points for integrity to them, not us.

      3

62. Leave it to Zman to write the most sensible take on China found anywhere on the internet…

    It always astonishes me that anyone can claim, with a straight face, that a country with an aging population, below replacement birth rate, underwhelming armed force, and a crippling dependence on exports for economic growth is on the road to long term sustainable success. The American Empire might be done, but China is still weaker than America, and the nature of China’s relationship with America all but ensures that it always will.

    10

    • little vietnam kicked china’s army in the balls, in 1979. and china couldn’t even handle the inept indian army, recently. our army killed a million plus of the goobers in the korean war – including mao’s dunce of a son (gave away his position by lighting a cooking stove).

      4

      1

    • Too many people prefer a strong government to an honorable government, and will squint if that’s what it takes to make No. 2 look like No. 1.

      3

Comments are closed.