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.

Things have changed (but no one told the West)

 After WWII, the US GDP was a large majority of the world GDP. Europe was in ruins, the European colonies had been robbed blind for a century or more, and there was a video made in 1949 called "King Joe" that the typical American factory worker earned $10 a day while a Chinese coolie earned 10¢ a day.

Right after WWII, the £ and the ₣ were no longer the strong currencies they had been, and a US$ could be exchanged for 889 mg of 24K gold, so the US$ became the World Key Currency, the currency most often used for international transactions since a US$ was as Good as Gold.

The US worried that Western European and Japanese peasants might be attracted by the promises of the USSR, so the US pumped money into Europe and Japan to help them rebuild. The US share of the world economy fell below 30%, but the US and their close allies, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan formed the G7, which still had 70% of the world GDP.

Then, in 1971, President Nixon announced that a US$ was just a US$, no gold. But there was no alternative, so the US$ remained the Key Currency.

More and more Americans bought cars and flew on jets, and the US soon needed all the oil it could produce, and then a lot more, mostly from the Middle East, so the US and Saudi became locked in an economic embrace. The US desperately needed Saudi oil and were Saudi's biggest customer, and Saudi desperately needed US $$$ and protection. And when the US asked Saudi to take over their Yemen war as proxies, Saudi were happy to oblige. Saudi are not fond of Shi'a, so killing the Shi'a in the Yemen with advanced US weapons was a pleasure.

But then came fracking, and the US are now a net exporter of oil. The US have no need of Saudi oil and are no longer pumping huge amounts of US$$$ into the Saudi coffers.

But the US control the World Key Currency, so they can ban anyone buying or selling in US$, and did this to Iran. The US said it is illegal for anyone to buy Iranian oil or to sell anything to Iran. The Iran economy fell by 50%, and Iranian lifestyles were reduced, with some hardship, but Iran did not agree to regime change to be able to engage in international trade. If the US wanted to blockade Iran, they put up with the poverty that produced. The Ayatollahs figured poverty was better than capitulating to The Great Satan.

The US Navy enforced the blockade of Iran. Any oil tanker carrying Iranian oil would be seized by the US Navy and the oil and the tanker sold with all the money going to the US government.

But times change.

That Chinese coolie now earns enough to buy a car and petrol, and there are a lot of Chinese coolies buying far more oil than the US ever did. Enough that, in 2021, a fleet of PRC tankers guarded by PLANavy warships began pulling empty into Iran and loaded with Iranian oil out of Iran, and all that oil made it safely to the PRC.

The G7 are sure their GDP is still at least 70% of the Global GDP. But the G7 leadership can't count. At PPP, the BRICS GDP is larger than the G7 GDP.

So when Brandon went to Saudi Arabia recently to ask for more and cheaper oil, he got a very cool reception.

And when Xi Jinping went to the PRC, he got the reddest of carpets, and was told Saudi would be very happy if the PRC paid for their oil in 元.

So when the PRC demanded that Saudi and Iran end their conflict and make peace, they both said, 'Yes, Sir! Whatever you say, Sir.'

Prof. John Mearsheimer says the world now has 3 Great Powers (and only 3). Russia are in 3rd place, and are far, far weaker than #1 and #2. He puts the US as #1 with the PRC a very close #2. The PRC agree with this assessment, and hope to have the PRC military the equal of the US by 2027, so the US are desperate for a war that will end with regime change and Balkanisation of the PRC before 2025.

I'm not sure Russia are really that far behind. Russia have no hatred for the ordinary Ukrainians, only for the ones who are convinced they are ethnic Aryans and much better than ethnic Russians who should all be eliminated for Lebensraum. This is unlike the US who were told that every Afghan, Iraqi, Yemeni, and Libyan worked hard to plan, engineer, and execute 9/11, and all must be destroyed. Reliable reports are that Kiev has a great night life and no one is worried about being carpet bombed the way the US carpet bombed their perceived enemy jihadist terrorists. 

Of course, the US leadership figure this is because the feeble Russian military lacks the capability to carpet bomb Kiev, they have already lost more than 300,000 dead Russian soldiers, cut off from weapons by the sanctions, forced to use Czarist weapons against NATO weapons, the most advanced weapons in the world. Only a few are left of the invaders, and they sneak into undefended villages, kill all the villagers, and leave before the Ukraine military (or even the Ukraine police) can come to stop them. This is the only version allowed in the Western media (Tucker Carlson was fired for saying something else), so Western leaders and ordinary citizens read it and watch it and believe it.

In fact, Tucker Carlson read from a classified TS/SCI/NOFORN/BBR report that the Ukraine are losing 7 to 10 times as many soldiers as the Russians, along with at least 30% of all the materiel that NATO sent them. NATO say the Russians ran 100 pictures of one Western tank that was briefly stuck and called it 100 NATO tanks destroyed. Just Russian Photoshop, don't believe your own eyes.

NATO are losing, even though NATO 'know' they must be winning a decisive victory, since that's all they ever read in the newspapers or see on the broadcast news.

And the G7 still think they are 70% of the Global economy and the PRC are a bunch of coolies earning 10¢ a day, with a Navy that's just junk(s) and an air force that's just coloured kites, and the US plan to drag the rest of NATO along as they force the PRC to go to war over Taiwan, after which the sanctions will destroy the PRC economy, putting it back to where it was in 1970, and the advanced NATO weapons will quickly destroy the entire PLA.

Good luck with that, NATO.

Four more years???

 Polls show 60% of American voters want someone other than President Biden leading the country, but more than 50% say they will vote against Trump.

Those polls show that, of those who vote in Republican primaries (and caucuses), a large plurality want Trump, so he'll get the nomination and lose the election.

There are a few Republicans who figure, if they nominate Trump, he'll lose in 2024 the exact same way he lost in 2020, so they want someone else, but for now, those are a minority of the Republicans who bother to vote in primaries and caucuses.

US Debt Ceiling

 As usual, the dimmycrats say the US might default and it's all the raypublicans' fault, while the raypublicans say it's the opposite.

Both agree that, if the other side does not cave, it means a global disaster.

I've watched this movie many times.

First, the Secretary of the Treasury says the US is about to hit the debt ceiling and the Congress must act to raise it or suspend it. I think that was in 2022.

Then the Secretary of the Treasury says the US has hit the debt ceiling, but there's a way to finagle finances to function, but not for much longer. This was in January 2023.

Then the Secretary of the Treasury announces the date when the US really will hit the debt ceiling and that will be a total disaster, that was in February 2023, when she said the drop-dead date will be 1 June 2023. When that happens, she says, Social Security and Medicare and the Defence and all payments on US government notes and bonds will stop, the US will be in default, the value of all US notes and bonds will collapse, and will take the whole world economy with it, so Congress absolutely must act NOW.

As I said, I've seen this over and over and over. Sometimes the Congress caves. Sometimes they keep procrastinating until the Secretary of the Treasury announces that the US government has really hit the debt ceiling.

Then disaster. Every US National Park and Museum must close, non-essential Federal Workers must go home without pay, essential Federal Workers must work without pay. For those who did not have a reservation to go to a National Park or Museum, they don't really notice anything except that the Secretary of the Treasury and all the news channels are yelling that the Congress now absolutely, positively must raise or suspend the debt ceiling.

Federal workers don't get paid for about a fortnight, then the Congress caves and raises the debt ceiling and the president signs it, and all the Federal workers get all their back pay, even those who were sitting at home and not doing any work. All the US National Parks and Museums reopen. And Life Goes On.

But Secretary Yellen says this time, she really will stop Social Security and Medicare and stop all payments on US government notes and bonds. That's not really legal, Social Security and Medicare are not paid with US $$$ that are covered by the debt ceiling, they're covered by the Social Security and Medicare Funds. Likewise, the Federal Law says all the US military must continue to bomb places like Iraq and Syria and get paid for doing it. So what will Secretary Yellen really do?

No one will have any idea until she announces that the US has really hit the debt ceiling.

Will she make it worse than it's been every other time the US hit the debt ceiling? Can she?

I guess we might find out, but the 1 June is almost certainly a fake date just to try to get the Congress to cave. And it's not clear what it will take to raise the debt ceiling. The raypublican House, the dimmycrat Senate, and president Brandon all have to agree on the bill to raise the ceiling, and now the Senate says they will not pass any of the House proposed bills, and the President says he will veto any bill except the one he's demanding. So it is not looking like they'll smoke a peace pipe before Secretary Yellen says the US has really hit the limit and must stop spending. And it's not clear when that will be or what Yellen will do about it.

But we might find out if the Congress don't cave.

Russian Disinformation

Some of us have read that the US Department of Justice is run by dimmycrats, that they did everything they could to torpedo Trump's campaign in 2016 and 2020, producing fake news that Trump was a dupe or fellow traveller of the Soviets, that the Soviets successfully rigged the 2016 election and tried but failed to rig the 2020 election. That the Steele Dossier that Trump went to Moscow, hired prostitutes, and engaged in some rather strange activities with them has been proven false.

But not if one reads the establishment media.

Those stories that Russia stole the 2016 election and tried desperately to steal the 2020 election but failed? The FBI and DoJ have carefully investigated. Not the tiniest flaw, every claim made not the slightest evidence that it could possibly be false. Yes, the Russians stole the 2016 election and tried but failed to steal the 2020 election. Yes, Trump went to Moscow to do weird things with young ladies of negotiable virtue. Yes, the Steele Dossier has been totally verified. Yes, the so-called Hunter Laptop is 110% a Russian disinformation project, nothing real, all fake. Those Russians are so good that video phone calls by Joe Biden, when tested with a computer against the real Joe Biden's voice, say it's really his voice, but sophisticated (and TS/SCI/NOFORN/BBR classified information that we can never show you) show that those video phone calls are all fake, that laptop is fake, Biden has been, by far, the 2nd Best President the US of A has ever had. Hundreds of millions of American lives were saved by his brilliant handling of the Pandemic after Trump did everything he could to block a vaccine, but Trump could not stop St Biden from creating that vaccine in just a few hours and saving the lives of every American except for the million who died because of Trump and Trump's refusal to accept vaccines and modern anti-virals, preferring old, useless things normally used only for horses. All irrefutably verified, according to the New York Times and the rest of the establishment media.

Some sceptics, who must never be listened to, say they need to see some proof. Obviously, they must be working for Russia, asking to see TS/SCI/NOFORN/BBR State Secrets that, if ever revealed, would leave the US vulnerable to a Russian attack. Every decent American knows to believe the always-truthful US government, and no decent American would ever ask for the slenderest shred of proof for any of the always-TRVTHFUL US government statements.

Just read the New York Times. Everyone knows all this is TRVE, and, except for traitors, no one asks to see the slenderest shred of proof.

So we all know the US will completely destroy Russia and the PRC, who have only the most primitive weapons against the US ultra-smart and sophisticated weapons. Both Russia and the PRC will be broken up into many small, independent, unarmed states that can never challenge the Great US Hegemony, where the US have been ruling the world with Peace, Justice, and Prosperity for All, a felicitous condition threatened by Russia and the PRC, so the US must put an end to that once and for all.

The Total Collapse of the Russian Economy

 I watched Secretary Yellen on CNN. She explained that the entire Russian economy was based on selling energy to the West and then using the money to buy everything Russia needed from the West. The only businesses in Russia are producing and selling energy and importing and selling Western products.

So, after Putin's colossal blunder of his unprovoked aggression against the Ukraine for absolutely no reason, the Western sanctions mean Russia cannot sell any energy and cannot buy anything, so the Russian economy, formerly 11th largest in the world, totally collapsed, and, according to reliable Western sources, is now one of the poorest countries in the world. Russia has no money to produce weapons, so Putin is sending young boys and old men with Czarist weapons and no ammunition to die in the  Ukraine. Russia have lost just about their entire invasion force. Russia is now very close to total collapse and regime change, after which Russian energy resources will be given to US oiligarchs as war reparations, and Russia will be broken up into small, independent, unarmed Republics.

That is, if one sticks to reliable Western news media.

But if one foolishly reads Indian media, one is told that the Russian economy rose from 11th place in 2021 to 8th place in 2023. Based on such unreliable media, the Russian burn rate of ammunition and troops is much less than the Russian replacement rate, as opposed to NATO who are burning through a lot more materiel than they can produce.

If one could believe the Indian media, it looks like Russia will defeat all of NATO in the Ukraine, but, of course, no one would ever believe a 3rd world country over such reliable sources as CNN, BBC, and the New York Times. Just because that Indian source seems to find no need to release stories that are contradictory to former stories that must be carefully buried where they cannot be found, a task that seems to fall on CNN, BBC, and the New York Times more often than not.