Economies at PPP?

 Right after WWII, the US GDP was more than 50% of the world GDP. The European colonizers kept the colonials very poor, and the war had destroyed most of Europe. The US were terrified that Western Europe would decide to join the Warsaw Pact, so they spent a lot of money rebuilding Western Europe on the Marshall Plan. As 6 economies recovered well  after WWII (with a lot of help from the US), they joined the US to be the G7, the 7 richest countries in the world. About 25 years ago, the G7 had much more than 50% of the world GDP, and today they figure they're still the G7.

And, in dollar terms, they're still on top, but that's because their prices are very high.

There is something called Purchasing Power Parity, or PPP. Suppose you have two islands. Both have livestock, crops, so enough to eat, also some manufacturing, but they don't know how to build a boat that could make it from one island to the other. Both produce exactly the same goods and services, and in the exact same amounts, but one island has twice as much gold as the other island, and everything is priced in gold, so the island with twice as much gold has prices of twice as many milligrams of gold for every good and service than the other island. Measured in gold, the island with more gold has an economy twice as large, but measured in goods and services, the two economies are the exact same size. The actual economy of a real country produces different quantities of goods and services than the economy of a different country, and some items cost more in one economy than the other, and some items cost less, so how does one calculate the PPP of different economies? Not altogether clear, but one can try. The easiest method is to look at a Big Mac. Almost every country has a MacDonald's (of course, Russia no longer does because of sanctions), so one can compare the price of a Big Mac in two countries and use the ratio of the prices to adjust the actual economies in the local currencies and get the two GDPs at PPP. Or one can use a larger basket of items than just the Big Mac. It's complicated, but economists somehow come up with a PPP economy for every country.

If one converts all the local currencies to US dollars and compares GDP, the G7 are still on top, but at PPP, the top 6 economies are The PRC, the US, India, Japan, Germany, and Russia. And, at PPP, the GDP of the combined BRICS is more than the GDP of the G7.

This is something that is vehemently denied by the Western media.

Officially, Secretary Yellen announced that the sanctions totally destroyed the Russian economy. Russia was just a cold Saudi Arabia, selling oil to the West and using the money to buy everything Russia needed from the West, so with sanctions, no money and no economy. But if one looks at the Russian economy at PPP, it is the world's 6th largest, and has not really changed much with the sanctions.

For 300 years, Russia wanted to be part of Europe. And Europe wanted Russia out. Edward Tufte wrote The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and said the best display of quantitative information is "Napoleon's March to Moscow" by Charles Joseph Minard, that shows Napoleon's great victory in 1812, celebrated in the "1812 Overture". And, of course, a German fellow sent the German Army against Stalingrad, and if one looks at a map, there is no longer a Stalingrad anywhere. So Russia have always been an easy target for the great European powers.

In any case, Russia were selling Europe oil and gas at below market prices, hoping to gain European friendship. But European leaders were happy to stop buying all Russian energy products. Somehow, the German economy has been growing, but not adjusted for inflation. Lots of German companies are moving to the US because energy is too expensive in Germany to run their plants and sell at a profit. But the German leadership, like the rest of Europe (with a couple of minor exceptions) are bought and paid for by the US, so they do what they're told. Switzerland and Sweden were strictly neutral for more than 200 years, but when the US ordered them to help fight Russia, their leaders all agreed to join the fight (the Swiss by agreeing that Russian assets in Swiss banks would all be frozen because of the war, something they never did to Germany in WWI or WWII, and Sweden by joining NATO).

And the top economies, at PPP, ain't what they used to be. As Scott Ritter keeps saying, the sanctions were like boomerangs: they came back to bite them what imposed those sanctions on Russia, while Russia had to make a bunch of changes, but they're getting by. One big problem in Russia is the shortage of chips. The hamburger chain that took over MacDonald's can't get plastic bags of frozen chips ready to be thrown into hot oil, and no place in Russia is up to producing the quantity of chips needed, so they're serving potato waffles with the burgers, but the Russians would prefer chips.

Meanwhile, the PRC and India are buying a lot of Russian energy and selling stuff to Russia that they used to get from the West. So Russia are muddling through much better than the West is.

The great shape of the NATO military

When I graduated from university, back in 1972, the only job I found was in the defence industry, where I was offered a job because the US government paid them $20,000 to hire me, a STEM graduate.

My first day on the job, my new boss told me, “We don’t need any T or E, we need S and M, and I mean Sales and Marketing. Your quota is $250,000 a year. Meet your quota, your commission is 20%. If you don’t meet your quota, you’ll be fired. Now where are you going to sell $250,000?”

I told him I had no idea.

“You should resign today. If you don’t, you’ll just waste your time and ours.”

But I had read my contract. If I quit, I had to repay the US government the $20,000 they’d paid the company to hire me (and if they laid me off, they had to repay the $20,000). And I didn’t have the $20,000, so I did not quit. For a year, they gave me jobs like digging holes and filling them up again, anything to convince me to quit and pay the $20,000 so they could keep the $20,000 and offer the job to someone who might be a great salesperson, but, tightwad that I am, I dug those holes and filled them up. The small draw they had to pay me against future commissions wasn’t great, but getting a small salary was better than having to pay $20,000. Cold, hard cash. And then being out of a job because I had quit, and so was not entitled to any unemployment insurance payments.

During that year, I saw a classmate who knew what to do. His degree was in Organic Chemistry, and his final paper was “Studies in the synthesis of …” In Organic Chemistry, if you succeed in synthesising something, your final paper is, “Synthesis of …”, but if you fail, your final paper is “Studies in the synthesis of …”, so he’d failed to synthesise whatever organic compound he’d been trying to synthesise. They asked him, “What do you know about weapons grade lasers?”

He answered, “My real degree is in weapons grade lasers, and I worked on a project at the Balcones Research Center, but my project is classified TS/SCI/NOFORN/BBR, so I can’t tell you anything about it. They put Organic Chemistry as the fake name of my degree, since my real degree is Top Secret, but I am one of the world’s greatest experts in laser weapons.” They said, “You’re our boy!” and for a year, he went with the team of salespersons and came back with several pots of money, then the team fought over who did how much to get the several million or so dollars that they got and who was entitled to how much of the commission.

The actual contract employed a bunch of $5 an hour people punching computer cards for $100 a card. The code did not compile or run, but the team promised that the code solved some of the most complicated and important problems in the physics of advanced laser weapons. Then the team and the contracting officer had to go tell the senior officers, the bosses of the contracting officer, that the code solved some of the most complicated and important problems in the physics of advanced laser weapons (the contracting officer wanted to keep his job, so, if he knew that the code did not compile or run, he lied to his superior officers, but usually, the contracting officer was careful not to look so he didn’t have to lie, he could truthfully say that he had watched hours and hours of presentations by the salesmen with STEM degrees who promised him that the code—which did not compile or run—solved some of the most complicated and important problems in the physics of advanced laser weapons). Then the senior officers overseeing the project, who had absolutely no physics background, listened to a bunch of big words that sounded sciencey and were convinced that the presenters knew what they were talking about and were telling the truth that they had developed code that solved some of the most complicated and important problems in the physics of weapons grade lasers.

I was fired as soon as my year was up and my company could fire me without having to return 1¢ of the $20,000 they’d gotten for hiring me, since I was $249,500 short of my $250,000 quota, but at least I could collect unemployment insurance, and, after a month paid for by unemployment insurance, I was hired by another company that was paid $22,000 to hire a STEM graduate (the price went up every year with inflation, which was obviously 10% that year). And a few months later, my classmate applied for a job with my new company.

“We’re doing research in particle beam weapons,” they told him.

“My real degree is in particle beam weapons,” he said, “and I worked on a project at the Balcones Research Center, but my project is classified TS/SCI/NOFORN/BBR, so I can’t tell you anything about it. They put Organic Chemistry as the fake name of my degree, since my real degree is Top Secret. I had to work on lasers for the last year because I couldn’t find a job in particle beam weapons, but it will be great to get back to working on what I am one of the world’s greatest experts in.” And, once again, they said, “You’re our boy!”

The executives of the defence companies earn huge sums for doing stuff that has absolutely no value of any kind, which (I guess) is better than doing stuff that kills people (but they still manage to produce some WWII era weapons that can kill people in Third World countries while getting paid to produce WWIV era ultra-advanced weapons suitable for defence against an invasion by extra-terrestrial warmongering aliens).

Net: The Ukrainians, fighting a proxy war by NATO with NATO weapons against Russia are losing, and losing badly, while all the Western media are required by law to write that the Ukrainians, with ultra-advanced NATO weapons, have completely destroyed the Russian invasion force which, because of the sanctions, only have outmoded and inept Soviet and Czarist weapons.

Or, to put it another way, lies, lies, and more lies by the West and all the Western media.

Putin has lost the war

 President Biden announced that Putin has already lost the war, and he is correct. Not the Russian Putin, of course, but the American Putin, a dictator determined to rebuild the USSR, then the Warsaw Pact, and then move westward to take Paris and London.

But the attack on the Ukraine, after a year, has not yet completely conquered the Ukraine, so Paris is looking more and more remote, and this is a complete and total victory for NATO.

Proving Brandon's leadership in wartime has been exceptional!

Hi, Thucydides

 In 2012, Graham Allison wrote "The Thucydides Trap" based on Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War, where Sparta was the hegemon of the Greek city states and Athens was a rising rival, and that led to war. Allison, studying a lot of history, concluded that, when a hegemon faces a rising rival, war results about 75% of the time. Allison and his Thucydides Trap are denigrated in Wikipedia, but, looking at history, it does seem that, more than half the time, when a hegemon faces a rising rival, war ensues.

In 1991, the US achieved Global Hegemony: the world's strongest military and no rival. This had never happened before. There had been European hegemons, Asian hegemons, South American hegemons, sometimes hegemons over a much smaller area, like the Greek islands, but never a Global hegemon. Gradually, being the only Great Power did not last, and in 2012, Allison saw the PRC as the rising rival, and predicted there was about a 75% chance of war.

But the PRC have MAD, so how?

The US, of course, saw how they destroyed the USSR by funding jihadists in Afghanistan to attack anything and everything Soviet until the USSR bankrupted themselves fighting the Afghan jihadists and the USSR collapsed completely, making the US the first ever Global Hegemon.

But the PRC were rising rapidly, building more naval ships than the US, a larger army than the US, and they had MAD, so what to do?

The US idea was to provoke the PRC to invade Taiwan, then the US would impose global sanctions and supply Taiwan with advanced weapons and the proxy war would destroy the PRC.

But the US also had their eye on Russia, another rising hegemon. John Joseph Mearsheimer says that there are now three Great Powers: the US are first, the PRC are a close second, and Russia are a distant third. And the US saw how easy it was to destroy the USSR, but Russia would never be tempted by Afghanistan, they needed a more irresistible threat, and that was the Ukraine. The US made moves to provoke the PRC over Taiwan, and in 2008 threatened to make the Ukraine and Georgia part of NATO, but not much happened.

Then, in 2014, the US engineered an overthrow of the elected Ukraine government by a group who hate everything Russian and are determined (with a lot of NATO help) to remove all ethnic Russians from the Ukraine to make Lebensraum for all the ethnic Aryans in the Ukraine. They planned to cancel the Russian leases on naval bases in the Crimea and give those naval bases to NATO. So Russia marched in and annexed the Crimea, and insisted that the Ukraine accept the Minsk Accords, that no ethnic Russian in the Donbass would be harmed. Germany and France promised to ensure that the Ukraine observed the Minsk Accords.

For the next eight years, the anti-Russian group in the Ukraine violated the Minsk Accords, and the former heads of Germany and France said they were just a ruse to buy time to reorganise the Ukrainian military, removing all ethnic Russian officers, and heavily arm that military.

The Ukraine planned a massacre of ethnic Russians in the Donbass in spring of 2022, so Russia invaded, and the US figure their trap had been sprung, and Russia will soon have a new regime that will allow Russia to be broken up just as the USSR was broken up.

But now the US want the PRC to invade Taiwan, after which the US will impose worldwide sanctions on the PRC that will destroy the PRC economy and will give advanced weapons to Taiwan that will enable them to destroy the invading PLA force.

The US has staged provocation after provocation, but the PRC have not responded.

This is because the PRC say they will not be ready to challenge the US before 2027, so they will put up with almost any provocation before then.

Meanwhile, the US have said they intend to force the PLA invasion of Taiwan before 2025.

Two for two beats 75%, so it is looking very much like Allison was right about hegemons and rising rivals.

Ukraine in the News

 Russia keep hoping that the odd fact will somehow make it into the Western media. They found a headline in the Telegraph that "Ukraine and the West are facing a devastating defeat", but if one reads the article, it says that, unless the West sends much more money and weapons to the Ukraine, there is a chance that the war might result in a stalemate, and this would be terrible, so get that money and weapons going ASAP. If the West does not totally mess up, eventually Russia will be ejected from all of the Ukraine and a huge chunk of Western Russia will become a border zone controlled by the Ukraine to ensure there cannot be another invasion.

 Officially, Russia have lost more than 300,000 dead soldiers, many more injured, the Russian economy is in a state of total collapse (I heard Secretary Yellen repeating that recently), so no money for weapons or ammunition, hence the Russians round up any males they can find, mostly very young boys and elderly men, give them Soviet or Czarist weapons, and send them into battle with trained soldiers behind them and told that, if they do not charge the Ukrainians who all have advanced US weapons, they will all be shot from behind, so off to slaughter they go, but most Russian males are in hiding or have sneaked out of Russia to somewhere safe from the draft. The result is that Putin is having a very hard time replacing the lost 300,000, all Russia are united against Putin, and he will very soon be overthrown and replaced with someone like Navalny who will agree surrender and let NATO break Russia up into 7 unarmed states, all with a nominal local leader (appointed by NATO) and with NATO supervisors who will tell the nominal leaders what to do. 

The US said at the beginning that the goal of the war was regime change in Russia and to weaken Russia enough that they could never again engage in any military activity. Recently, the US have said they have no intention of destroying Russia. When one smashes a mirror, one has not destroyed the mirror, one has just transformed a big mirror into a bunch of small mirrors, an improvement. The US did not destroy Yugoslavia. There is no longer any Yugoslavia on the map, but that wasn't destruction, just improvement. And removing Russia from the map will not be destruction, but improvement!

It is illegal to write anything else in the Western media, so this is all one can find. The odd misleading headline somehow managed to make it into the Telegraph, but none of the facts: i.e., the Russian economy is doing OK, in fact, the top 6 economies by PPP are the PRC, US, India, Japan, Germany, and Russia. The GDP at PPP of the BRICS is now larger than the GDP of the G7. So the Russian military, after a first fortnight in February 2022 of horrible mistakes, got their act together. A classified document leaked by Airman Teixeira showed that the actual Ukrainian losses have been 7 to 10 times as many as Russian losses in terms of dead and wounded soldiers. Tucker Carlson mentioned this on his show and was fired the next Monday because he reported this prohibited fact. Plus NATO materiel and troop burn rate are far more than their replacement rate while Russian materiel and troop replacement rate are somewhat more than their burn rate, which means things have been going badly for the Ukraine and NATO and will only get worse. But you'll never see that in any of the Western media. And all the Western news anchors know what will happen if the odd fact ever gets into any of their newscasts about the Ukraine.