America Psychopathy Continues To Stun (Cuba Edition)

It sounds like what you have described in other contexts as a collective action problem.
If all the rats at once attacked at once, they could defeat the target and solve the problem. But the rats don’t all have the same culture of ” Instant Total Unanimous Response”. So every rat is afraid to be the First Rat who dies as a hero. There isn’t a shared collective culture between a pack of disparate dissimilar countries.

Here in the US itself, there are two sets of people who are already pre-acculturated and pre-programmed for leaderless collective action. That would be the Foundational Black Americans who collectively leaderlessly decided to stand aside as America burns itself down so as to have a stronger Power Position for themselves in whatever post-America future emerges. And also the ScandiGermanavian-descended peoples of the Greater Minneapolis area who had a more collective co-caretaking culture back in Europe and have kept a part of it here. ( That second example is just a feeling that I have about the Minneapolis ScandiGermanavians.)

If only a “brain-magnetic” meme would solve the get-them-all-united problem, they could come up with one. They could call it the Cuberlin Sea Lift ( a historical pun of sorts). But just a meme alone won’t do it.

I keep reading online that people around the world are hoping and praying that China would step in to “save” Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba from America. However, all three countries exhibit the same pattern — decades of corrupt, incompetent, and unaccountable governance that created the very vulnerabilities the U.S. is able to exploit.

Ultimately, it’s not U.S. sanctions or embargoes that break these countries. It’s their own failure to “self-strengthen” when confronted with external adversity. China can alter the external pressure equation and provide critical economic oxygen, but it cannot resolve the underlying internal governance deficits that created the vulnerability in the first place. China may not even want to help them, because China knows it is futile to help countries that cannot help themselves.

Wow, just wow KTC. You propose that Venezuela, Cuba and Iran deserve what they get because they didn’t stand up and fight back? My god. Your stance ignores so much on so many levels.
But yeah, blame the victims. They deserve it for being weak.
I’ve lost all respect.

>>> (Cuba, Iran and Venezuela exhibit) decades of corrupt, incompetent, and unaccountable governance that created the very vulnerabilities the U.S. is able to exploit.

??? I see propaganda is persistently powerful. I wonder how the US (or China) would have come out after the middle 40s if they had had a superpower systematically choking them for decades. It’s funny to hear the concepts “corruption, incompetence and unaccountable governance” associated to the countries themselves instead to the “factors” that led them to become what they eventually became.

Yes, Mago; blaming the victims. That’s partially the name of the game. I’m really fed up of hearing people who are clearly against what the US Government did to Venezuela to always prelude their words with “I don’t like Maduro but…”. The narrative is perfectly set up, intrinsically ingrained. The seed for us to get used to the(ir) future is properly planted and waiting for the magnetic Overton window to approach. If a pack of faceless, armed to the teeth yokels abducts my coloured neighbours I’ll sooner or later think they must have done something.

The Christianazian Movement keeps on moving. Its bigger than Trump. Trump is the current tip of the shitberg. If Vance gets into office, Vance would be the next tip of the shitberg. As long as the shitberg exists, it will keep growing tip after tip after tip.

” Turning Point USA, Nebraska Gov. Pillen to announce statewide partnership ”
https://www.wowt.com/2026/02/09/turning-point-usa-nebraska-gov-pillen-announce-statewide-partnership/

A couple things.

China did restrict rare earth stuff for ‘military-use’ beginning in Dec (they began this process back in April of last year).

China still sells rare earths for everything else and I would imagine, barring a wholesale restriction, that there are ways around the speciifically-named restrictions. China has threatened fines and permanent restrictions if their sales rules are broken.

So it’s a somewhat though not entirely serious endeavor by China right now and one can’t help- but wonder why China is only very very recently doing this when USNC strategu vis-a-vis it and the world at large has been widely known for a long time.

‘It’s weird, before the 2024 election I remember hearing from some people on the left that Trump was the real peace candidate, and if you wanted peace it was your duty to vote for him over the warmongering Democrats. I wonder what those people are thinking now.’

It’s not really weird.

Those people – who you yourself say make up just ‘some’ on the left – those people – if they are truly on the left and not operatives of some sort – those people are ‘accelerationists’ and other variations of understandably completely fed-up human beings..

I would imagine many are thinking about the same thing.

If the Dems run someone who is going to say ‘nothing will fundamentally change’ and the appoint someone who in the midst of a holocaust of Palestinians refuses to even acknowledge it as such and is known to take gobs of money from Zionists…

If the Dims continue this…

The aformentioned Kamala Harris may run again along with Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker and maybe throw in a McKinsey Buttigieg to run on his gayness.

Houston, we have a problem.

There are good things happening locally and in the lower chambers.

Unfortunately, Prez and Senate are Supreme.

Speaking of which, has Ketanji-Brown Jackson figured out what a woman is yet or does she still need to consult a biologist?

Perhaps Trump will spaz out badly enough soon enough so as to allow a few-baby-steps walkback from some of his most personal psychopathic initiatives.

Detroit, Michigan has two newspapers, the “liberal” one and the “conservative” one. The “conservative” one is called The Detroit News. Here is an article ( hopefully not paywalled) from The Detroit News called . . . ” President Trump threatens to block Gordie Howe International Bridge from opening ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1r0lr5g/president_trump_threatens_to_block_gordie_howe/
The Detroit News would oppose such an action because The Detroit News is pro-business and ” the business of business is business” or something like that. But they would try to somehow find a pro-Republican way of saying it. They would find that hard to do. I think they will write some mumbletorials about how ” blocking the bridge would be bad for business and that could be bad for Republicans in upcoming elections here in Michigan, so we earnestly hope that cooler heads will prevail and wiser advisors will convince Trump not to do it.”

Getting Trump over with will not bring America back no more than it did last time. We are witnessing the end of the Republic. The old systems have (d)evolved the country into an unruly rotten lot, There is no way out but to replace them, and if the people don’t, the elites will. And the elites, as we have seen, are set on Trump. There is no serious resistance to him because everyone knows if they kiss the pinky ring they will have a place in the new system, and an easier life, as the last remnants of the pesky rule of law will be lifted.
Democrats, if one can even fathom them stumbling into the next presidency anymore, will not be undoing any of what Trump will have done by then, the same as they haven’t been undoing anything else the Republicans have done for a long time now. They’ll enjoy their time in the spotlight and work towards pretty much the same goals in their own way, as they have also been doing for a long time now. And Republicans will have many a Trump wannabe to keep up the “good” work when they have the office.
The next phase after the Republic is then obviously Empire, although de facto the US has been one for a while now. There actually was a public debate about whether they should become one around the time when they got their hands on Puerto Rico, Phillipines, and Cuba. “We just got our liberty from the evil British Empire, and now it mighty looks like we are becoming one” warned some. “Yeah, and it’s mighty cool”, found the others. The others won that debate.
Now being an Empire with a strong hand on top has it’s benefits. Things can be made happen that were impossible before, and they can be made happen fast, which also was impossible. The problem, again, is that this hands needs to be competent, if the country is to have a long term future. Even if run completely incompetently, it takes time for the collapse to come. The US has 340M people, and they create considerable value in their daily work. The Empire can and does also extract resources from outside it’s borders, which can at least in theory dwarf internal output. So it takes great incompetence to reach a point where all of that is not enough to keep the country afloat. But history teaches us that this incompetence will be found and put to good work, and the collapse will come.
The issue then becomes, is there any hopes for America for a competent leader to emerge. And the chances of that happening are slim, as there’s pretty much no institution in the country left where a career is advanced by competence other than political, and political institutions actively view competence as a threat and fight against it. The writing is on the wall, it’s just that nobody can predict the when of the end of it.

. . . ” Speaking of which, has Ketanji-Brown Jackson figured out what a woman is yet or does she still need to consult a biologist? ” . . .

Oh . . . I was confident at the time that she knew/knows what a woman is. She was just trying to avoid getting gotcha’d with a cynical little gotcha question from a Christianazi 2025er Trumpanon Republican Senator.

Dan Kelly:

China simply hopes that the Americans will turn on them last.

This is why, our host’s predictions notwithstanding, China will lose. The Americans will pick off China’s friends, one by one, leaving China isolated, bottlenecked, and at the Americans’ tender mercies.

Note that the Americans could not care less how many are dead or impoverished as a result. The Americans are utterly ruthless.

A timely post. Thank you to Mago and others for calling out KTC, who suffers from a certain ethno-nationailism that sometimes leads to sensible conclusions in passing, sometimes horribly fascistic ones. E.g. when the rollback of Roe v. Wade happened and he opined that stupid bitches got no right to autonomy over their own body if the all-knowing State declares a Fetus (potential human) has greater rights than the woman forced to carry it. Or siding with Hobbes and declaring an all-powerful State has the right to declare a single language exclusively, fuck the minorities, they must bow before Leviathan.

Now given the myriad mutually indistinguishable languages that exist across China, I certainly have no problem with the CP creating a Written Central language, which every separate group can access and understand, while still speaking their own variant with their own group. This is sensible. Misapplying this to the USA and demanding that no Spanish may be spoken is reactionary and bigoted. Here in San Jose, I would say half the population speaks Spanish as a preference, or nearly so. When I lived in NorCal it was somewhere between 30-33% at best. I don’t think the God-Emperors Trump-Miller can force people to stop speaking Spanish, we still have some demographic agency.

Let’s dispense with that bad actor, though, and get on to Ian’s larger point. Yes, #2 of the choices he lists is clearly the only one that leads to long-term survival, rather than the genocide of one weak group after another. Now, the latter plan seems to be working rather well in the “Middle East”. Palestinians get genocided slowly at first and then it accelerates, while the bought-off regional Arab US-controlled “allies”, the Saudis, the Emiratis (not even a real nation, more like a large tribal/family group), the phony half-Anglo King in Jordan, the Military-Looter “strongman” in Egypt, etc. symp up to the US, though they will be next on the Menu to be destroyed and swallowed. In Lebanon, the artificial “coalition” government with ethnically-assigned “leaders” says it’s fine for the Zionist Entity to attack their Shi’a population in the South, kill them and demolish their homes. By law, there is no national Air Force in Lebanon, so this kind of selective genocide can be enacted.

j largely nails it, as others have noted. I will disagree with one point, “There is no serious resistance to him because everyone knows if they kiss the pinky ring they will have a place in the new system, and an easier life,”– this might be true in the relatively short term, but Trump does not play well nor share with others (except his “family”, immigrant sex-worker wives only for a time), he is trying to rebrand the Country in his fat, shambling Image, demanded that to connect Penn Station and Dulles Airport they be renamed Trump, or no federal funds. Soon there will be no “United States of America”, it will be Trumpistan or Trumpinania, with the Gulf of Trump, the populace will be Trumpalians, from Sea to Stinking Sea. “America” is the ugly, Hispanic name some Wop sailor or map-maker put on it, those people are kinda brown, the name needs to go. Collaborate with him at your own peril, when your assets look pretty enough, he will come and “liberate” those for his fail-children or cheery associates like Miller, Lutnik, etc. He has literally destroyed the Kennedy Center in one year. Demanded & got it renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center, pulled programming friendly to “the Blacks” (they should’ve been happy to be slaves, it’s all they deserved) and the Libs generally. His usual bad understanding of Markets, D.C has the biggest concentration of comfortable, glib Libs of anywhere in the country, nobody was buying tickets ‘coz you had to buy too much Trump Slop to see your little performative “diversity” performances. It failed economically, he shut it down, is now looting marble from it for his other projects. Where is the Kennedy family? Well, Robert Junior is simping for him, if JFK’s legacy is forgotten forever, oh well.

Latin America in the 19th Century was as big a hotbed of freedom and nationalist revolution as the US was a bit earlier. Simon Bolivar admired and emulated Washington and other “Founding Fathers.” j’s take on where the argument ended between the actual revolutionaries (left) and the sell-outs, right, however, within USA. Yes, BRICS appears to be an utter failure, and China on the military level seems (at the moment) to be dithering and failing. On the other hand, they are selling off US Treasury Notes as fast as possible. But yes, the Rare Earths and other Empire-needed resources must be cut off ASAP.

The Real Problem seems to be the Globalist Solidarity between the Elite 0.1%. Thus Trump can for now add another genocide which the Dimmies will of course be 100% okay with in Cuba. Even the “Latinx” (sic) tokens in power like AOC will go along with it, of course. The Piece President runs a 2nd genocide, both are brown people, so the UN and the world (Elites) seem okay with it.

The big problem is that Trump cannot/will not put actual Boots on the Ground, however. The US Military has shrunk from overextension, many of the economy-forced “volunteers” are obese, sick (they live in barracks with toxic mold, bad food, etc.) and can’t hold and Occupy at all except in pip-squeak States, Greenland yes, but not for the time being, Trump feels he’s vulnerable to a successful impeachment if they can’t shut down voting via ICE preventing any/ all Midterm voting in Blue States, so Greenland for the moment lives under status quo.

There are small, local hopeful signs however. Minneapolis, as even DC notes. Speaking of which, it’s been my ambition since c. 1975 to live long enough to see the Empire collapse, I may still make it. I never thought I’d live long enough to see DC drop his “Lesser Evil is Coming to Save Me” fallacy, also known (among many names) of “limited choice option”, we can have an R full-fascist vote or a nice Lib/ Friendly fascism vote, but there are NO other options, even conceptually, so suck it up and vote Center Right. They’ll at least rob, immiserate you and launch genocides more slowly and effectively, right?

https://flynn.fandom.com/wiki/Lesser_evil_fallacy

DC seems to be (?– it may be a momentary instance of sanity though) recognizing his sacred Lib Heroes are fine with all the Daddy Leopards’ face eating and may (?) be pulling the Blinders off his face? (Don’t want to be too sanguine, but this would really be something.)

One thing not to forget is these Elites are deeply stupid, myopic and incompetent. They will prevent any group solidarity for the time being, the Media Consolidation since 2003 has been pretty much total. Remember the millions who rose up before the Bush-Cheney Iraq invasion based entirely on WMD lies? Where is “Civil Society” now. There are small groups having victories, Palestine Action got 6 out of 7 charges against them dismissed recently in the very fascist, Zio-controlled UK. Julian Assange escaped with his life. ICE’s #s are reduced. DC covered workers quitting Target.

Individual acts can lead to greater mass acts. Oh, btw the rat metaphor is untrue on a reality level. Mice are incredibly empathetic and will save other mice trapped behind a wall or share food. I believe that rats share this quality, but maybe not to the extent of mice. Humans can do a fuck of a lot better, as more become more miserable and precarious, perhaps the divisions sown by MICIMATT and the Elites will crumble.

Very difficult to find MICIMATT online, Algorithm suppresses it but here it is if unaware:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381306491_Ray_McGovern's_MICIMATT_The_Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-_Media-Academia-Think-Tank

KT Chong

I seem to remember hearing of this language called “Greek”, which would be a single, “unifying” language that never particularly unified the Greeks. For the Greeks, having the same language just meant they could argue. What unified the Greeks was Philip of Macedon. I don’t think your point means as much as you think it means. And, it means even less now than in the past–translation is instant now.

But your point about Cuba, Venezuela and Iran mean less than nothing. I mean, Iran, sure–Iran sucks so bad that it’s, um, only a little bit better than the other countries in the region. So surely it’s fair game to be attacked, right? Victim-blaming, as seen in sexist and racist versions, always insists that the victim deserved it because they weren’t ten times nicer people than the blamer; remember kids, if the victim wasn’t the archangel Gabriel come down to earth, raper or murder are OK.

As to Venezuela and Cuba . . . you clearly know nothing whatsoever about them, so if you want to talk about them, maybe learn something first. The crushing on them was based on the fear of a good example, and that fear was real because they are good examples. They’re not in great shape right now, but the reasons for that are obvious. Bitching at them about it is like criticizing a kid for being too skinny when the adults are starving it.

Dan Kelly:

“It’s all in the RAND reports which they all obviously read.

I don’t understand it.

Why is China continuing to provide crucial elements to the war machine?

Come to think of it, the fact that they are means they aren’t just going their own way,

China is an integral supplier to the global war machine and there are no indications it is stopping this relationship which I believe it could almost immediately, no?

China simply used its rare earth clout to get rid of Trumps’ ridiculous tariffs.”

its called trade, or in this case free trade. trade is evil in my opinion, but if your country is run correctly, its a necessary evil. but free trade is economic suicide.

when you trade you open the door to the business men, sick with greed. if you free trade, the business men sick with greed, now run your country.

thats what has happened in the west, the sick with greed run us.

however, china is a protectionist country with high trade barriers and tariffs, something you seem to abhor.

china understands how destructive free trade is to a country, as Marx said,

Marx: “If free traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another, we need not wonder. These same gentlemen also refuse to understand how one class can enrich itself at the expense of another.”

smith,

“However, the removal of protectionist and retaliatory measures can cause great harm if the measures are removed too quickly: “Humanity may in this case require that the freedom of trade should be restored only by slow gradations, and with a good deal of reserve and circumspection. Were those high duties and prohibitions taken away all at once, cheaper foreign goods of the same kind might be poured so fast into the home market, as to deprive all at once many thousands of our people of their ordinary employment and means of subsistence. The disorder which this would occasion might no doubt be very considerable.”

the chinese know marx and smith were both right. because the chinese will not drop tariffs and free trade, they know smith was right because they are the offending nation.

china simply used the american system to get rich. ben franklin created it before he died.

Ben Franklin: the high wage protectionist constitution: The Doctrine of High Wages – How America Was Built: Proponents of the Doctrine of High Wages argued that not only were American workers better paid than their counterparts in England and Europe, but they were far more productive as well.

In fact, American economists argued that high wages created a virtuous circle: the superior productivity of American workers allowed them to be paid much higher wages than anywhere else in the world, while those high wages provided American workers a much higher standard living, which, in turn, enabled them to be more productive.

” lincoln knew this well, tariffs are the easiest tax to collect. its why corrupt free traders hate them so much. its why europe has a VAT tax that punishes labor, and rewards corporations.”

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/4/1/1508946/-HAWB-1800s-The-Doctrine-of-High-Wages-How-America-Was-Built

HAWB 1800s – The Doctrine of High Wages – How America Was Built

“It should be noted that an important precursor of the Doctrine of High Wages was Benjamin Franklin’s 1783 essay “Reflections on the Augmentation of Wages, Which Will Be Occasioned in Europe by the American Revolution,” which was published in Paris in the Journal d Economie Puplique. It is a deliberate and comprehensive attack on the “free trade” ideas of the house economists of the British East India Co., such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus.

…If the term wages be taken in its widest signification, it will be found that almost all the citizens of a large state receive and pay wages. I shall confine my remarks, however, to one description of wages, the only one with which government should intermeddle, or which requires its care. I mean the wages of the lowest class, those men without property, without capital, who live solely by the labor of their hands.

This is always the most numerous class in a state; and consequently, that community cannot be pronounced happy, in which from the lowness and insufficiency of wages, the laboring class procure so scanty a subsistence, that, barely able to provide for their own necessities, they have not the means of marrying and rearing a family, and are reduced to beggary, whenever employment fails them, or age and sickness oblige them to give up work.

Further, the wages under consideration ought not to be estimated by their amount in money, but by the quantity of provisions, clothing, and other commodities, which the laborer can procure for the money which he receives.

….The horrible maxim, that the people must be poor, in order that they may remain in subjection, is still held by many persons of hard hearts and perverted understanding, with whom it were useless to contend. Others, again, think that the people should be poor, from a regard for the supposed interests of commerce.

They believe that to increase the rate of wages would raise the price of the productions of the soil, and especially of industry, which are sold to foreign nations, and thus that exportation and the profits arising from it would be diminished. But this motive is at once cruel and ill founded.

….To desire to keep down the rate of wages, with the view of favoring the exportation of merchandise, is to seek to render the citizens of a state miserable, in order that foreigners may purchase its productions at a cheaper rate; it is, at most, attempting to enrich a few merchants by impoverishing the body of the nation; it is taking the part of the stronger in that contest, already so unequal, between the man who can pay wages, and him who is under the necessity of receiving them; it is, in one word, to forget, that the object of every political society ought to be the happiness of the largest number.

…. High wages attract the most skillful and most industrious workmen. Thus the article is better made; it sells better; and in this way, the employer makes a greater profit, than he could do by diminishing the pay of the workmen. A good workman spoils fewer tools, wastes less material, and works faster, than one of inferior skill; and thus the profits of the manufacturer are increased still more.

The perfection of machinery in all the arts is owing, in a great degree, to the workmen. There is no important manufacture, in which they have not invented some useful process, which saves time and materials, or improves the workmanship.

If common articles of manufacture, the only ones worthy to interest the statesman, if woollen, cotton, and even silk stuffs, articles made of iron, steel, copper, skins, leather, and various other things, are generally of better quality, at the same price in England than in other countries, it is because workmen are there better paid.

The low rate of wages, then, is not the real cause of the advantages of commerce between one nation and another; but it is one of the greatest evils of political communities.

…. The rate of wages in Europe will be raised by yet another circumstance, with which it is important to be acquainted. I have already said, that the value of wages ought not to be estimated solely by the amount of money, nor even by the quantity of subsistence, which the workman receives per day, but also by the number of days in which he is employed; for it is by such a calculation alone, that we can find out what he has for each day.

Is it not evident, that he who should be paid at the rate of forty pence a day, and should fail of obtaining work half the year, would really have but twenty pence to subsist upon, and that he would be less advantageously situated than the man, who, receiving but thirty pence, could yet be supplied with work every day?

Thus the Americans, occasioning in Europe an increased demand and necessity for labor, would also necessarily cause there an augmentation of wages, even supposing the price of the day’s work to remain at the same rate.

….Better days may come, when, the true principles of the happiness of nations better understood, there will be some sovereign sufficiently enlightened and just to put them in operation. The causes, which tend continually to accumulate concentrate landed property and wealth in a few hands, may be diminished. The remains of the feudal system may be abolished, or, at least, rendered less oppressive.

The mode of taxation may be changed, and its excess moderated. And, lastly bad commercial regulations may be amended. The tendency of all these improvements will be, to enable the working classes to profit by the favorable change, which the American Revolution must naturally produce. ”
————-
so china is addicted to its trade surplus, which means instead of internal reforms in the labor market, and a cradle to grave civil society, its much easier to flood others with low cost(till the bills come due, which is happening all over the world) goods and services, which means they are exporting their deflation, unemployment and poverty.

germany did the same thing under dear Gerhard S. the reason he is hated, because he implemented policies that gutted labors ability to get true wage hikes for their productivity.

so germany became a parasite in the E.U., which today we can see was a disaster.

russia just so so wants to be part of the club, same with china and iran. it reminds me of high school, many wanted to be part of the in crowd, the cool ones. so bad, that they were embarrassing to watch as they were constantly treated poorly and looked down upon.

the Brics are unable to project power, because they want to be accepted in the WEF club, and keep their surplus to boot.

not gonna happen.

and if they can ever figure it out, most likely its going to be to late.

‘china is a protectionist country with high trade barriers and tariffs, something you seem to abhor’

spud, I have many abhorrations but high trade barriers and tariffs, in and of themselves, aren’t at the top of the list.

NR & DC

It’s weird, before the 2024 election I remember hearing from some people on the left that Trump was the real peace candidate, and if you wanted peace it was your duty to vote for him over the warmongering Democrats. I wonder what those people are thinking now.

They’re perfectly Ok. Their job got done, as they hoped. Trump got election–“Mission Accomplished!”

The Right has had a long practice of amphilying Left-Leaning voices and even financially backing them, because they (unlike much of the Committariat here) actually DO think that US elections matter. Sometimes the Left critiques are by honest and principled voices (I think Nader was one) but sometimes they are just opportunists (Kristin Sinema, anyone? She was a Green Party candidate. How ‘leftist’ did she turn out again once she got power?).

Trump is just continuing a long-held Rightist dream, of the 1950s: of the “Rollback” of communism. As they say, “socialism always fails” especially when it is attacked in every conceivable way, especially even when a nation like Cuba is a FAR more livable place than most US-friendly global south nations and would even be a magnet for US retirees if we weren’t so damn determined to crush it.

There’s also a massive amount of capitalist projection going on when capitalist advocates say “Socialism can’t exist unless every last bastion of capitalism is eradicated.” Hmm, who seems to be scared of a little socialist nation with very little real power now? Which economic system seems to be scared sh**less that these continue to exist in the world?