As long as I’ve been blogging, I’ve made notes of articles I wanted to write about at some point, and then, mostly, I haven’t written about them, generally because they don’t support a full article.

When I was the managing editor at the Agonist I’d put up a quick takes post fairly often, and use those links. The difference from Tony’s excellent roundups, is that every link gets some commentary.

I’m going to start doing “Quick Takes” here, and if people like them I’ll continue.

 

One of the signs of America’s decline is that it can’t make warships anymore. The Chinese produce better ships at one-third the price and are producing more than the Americans. American allies in Japan and South Korea produce slightly better ships than the Chinese at reasonable prices and have the ability to churn them out in numbers, so the suggested solution is to get them to build the ships.

This is similar to the F-35, which came in way over budget, is ludicrously expensive and while it might be the best jet in the world, certainly isn’t worth the price.

Everything in the US is too expensive. America is a rentier society: the idea is to make money without really doing anything; without making anything. That means high costs for things like housing, food, medicine and so on, which means high wages and high costs for most things made American. To bring production back to America means ending that, and it also means breaking up monopolies and oligopolies. When Clinton forced defense contractors to merge in the name of efficiency he destroyed their actual engineering cultures.

Late Imperial corruption, degeneration and decline.

Most people never really come to grips with the metaphysical horror of life on earth. We now know that trees are likely conscious and it turns out that most plants probably are conscious and can feel pain. So going vegan isn’t a solution to the problem of causing suffering just by eating to stay alive. Just as there are ethical concerns about how we produce meat, there should be ethical concerns about how we treat plants and all the trees we chop down. One issue, other than the whole pain thing, is that modern monocrops lose the ability to communicate with each other, which they normally do to say things like “hey, insects are eating me, better manufacture some poisons to keep them away.”

That means needing more insecticides (terrible for us), but hey, we could also be subjecting plants to the equivalent of solitary confinement.

Lovely.

China had planned to build a bunch of floating nuclear reactors in the South China Sea, but has decided not to. Why? Well, a few reasons but the primary one seems to be someone (the US) blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines. That got the Chinese thinking what Americans would do to their offshore nuclear reactors, not even necessarily in the case of war, but in the case of not-quite-war. (After all, at least in theory, the US and Russia are not at war.)

Offshore reactors make a lot of sense, because there’s plenty of water to keep them cooled, and they are part of a solution to climate change, but hey, America has the right to blow anything up, anywhere.

One key thing to remember about the 1920s is that the US was the world’s most important economy, and among major economies, the best performing. The Great Depression started in the US because it was the world’s lynchpin economy: it was the driver keeping consumer prices down, the primary manufacturing economy and so on. When it ditched, no one else could pick up the slack.

Which is why I keep a wary eye on China, whose economy now serves the same purpose. Yes, I know Americans like to pretend that America is world’s most important economy, but it isn’t and hasn’t been for at least a decade. It’s China that kept inflation under control for decades (with a solid wage crushing assist from Western central banks) and it’s China that is (as regular readers are tired of me saying) the primary manufacturing center. It’s even China who produces the most patents, and it isn’t close.

So China’s the one to watch, and that’s why I keep a weather eye on stories like China’s manufacturing activity contracting May. One month doesn’t matter, but people who get all happy when China stumbles don’t seem to get that it’s the one everyone else has their arm slung around so they can walk.

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That will do for now. Quick takes will return.

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