Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Come and See: A Belarussian and Russian Film On The Partisan War In 1943

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On September 15, 2025

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I just watched the first half of иди и смотри, in English, “Come and See.”  I had to stop. It was just too much. It’s not like the first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, it is random, crazy, evil violence committed on peasants who are not really supporting the partisans.

This rarely happens to me, but on minute I smiled, the next I wanted to wretch, and the next I got misty eyed.  I’m attemping to watch it in the original Russian but it is hard because it is in essence peasant Russian and their accents are pretty damned hard to unpack at times so sometimes I have to rewind and turn the subtitles back on.

I was told by a dear Russian friend–who lives in Russia–that Come and See captures the wanton brutality of war in its essentially random nature.

I can not say yet as I reccoment this film from 1987–that was damn near shitcanned by Soviet censors and I can understand why. It is harsh, beautiful, tender, cruel and arbitrary in equal measures. If you have the stomach, go ahead but be warned.

More when I finish.

If you have seen it, please share.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 14, 2025

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On September 14, 2025

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by Tony Wikrent

 

Strategic Political Economy

Process knowledge is crucial to economic development

Henry Farrell, Sep 02, 2025 [Programmable Mutter, via The Big Picture, September 12, 2025]

… I’m fascinated by process knowledge and manufacturing because I spent a chunk of the late 1990s talking to manufacturers in Bologna and Baden-Wurttemberg for my Ph.D. dissertation.

I was carrying out research in the twilight of a long period of interest in so-called “industrial districts,” small localized regions with lots of small firms engaged in a particular sector of the economy. Paul Krugman’s Geography and Trade (maybe my favorite of his books) talks about some of the economic theory behind this form of concentrated production: economic sociologists and economic geographers had their own arguments. Economists, sociologists and geographers all emphasized the crucial importance of local diffuse knowledge about how to do things in making these economies successful. Such knowledge was in part the product of market interactions, but it wasn’t itself a commodity that could be bought and sold. It was more often tacit: a sense of how to do things, and who best to talk to, which could not easily be articulated. The sociologists were particularly interested in the informal institutions, norms and social practices that held this together. They identified different patterns of local institutional development, which the Communist party in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, and the Christian Democrats in the Veneto and Marche, had built on to foster vibrant local economies….

I spent a lot of time on workshop floors, listening to small-scale founders talking about their lives. I’ll never forget a particular conversation with a manufacturer of teabag-packing machines** about the technical ingenuity required to figure out how to reliably staple on the threads attached to some fancy tea bags, which allow you to pull the teabag out without either scalding your fingers or rummaging around for a spoon. The machinery for accomplishing this apparently simple task was quite complex and fantastical: it was a surprisingly difficult engineering problem….

A lack of appreciation for physical process knowledge helps explain why America is in trouble. Breakneck criticizes the first Trump and Biden administration’s belief that they could strangle China through export controls, riling up Chinese companies to “break free of American restrictions.” However, Dan’s criticisms go way further. It isn’t just that America focuses so much of its “entrepreneurial dynamism” on stuff that doesn’t necessarily do much good, and may plausibly do significant harm to American society: crypto, the metaverse and perhaps AI. It’s that for decades, American policy makers sat back as manufacturing moved overseas, not understanding what the long term consequences for process knowledge might be….

[TW: Regular readers will recall the number of times that Ian has written about the folly of free trade and that technological advances will more likely occur where the manufacturing is physically located. Or, As I wrote in The Obama administration as “managed democracy” (May, 2010):

…as an industrial enterprise grows and matures, its trained and skilled employees make the surrounding community a pool of technical talent that is highly conducive to the creation of other industrial enterprises that use the same or similar skills. That’s why certain towns and cities become known as centers for specific industrial products. Sheffield in England was known for its highly specialized alloy irons and steels. Delft in Holland is known world-wide for its blue pottery. The Hocking River valley in southern Ohio became known in the 1800s as a center of brick manufacture. The Connecticut River valley was known for almost a century as “Precision Valley” because it was a center of designing and making high-precision metal-working machine tools. Detroit became known for making automobiles. Today, almost every high-speed, high-volume printing press in the world comes from Heidelberg, Germany. The southern part of the San Francisco Bay area became known as Silicon Valley.

How much is it worth to have a locale or city renowned for the technical excellence of its local enterprises and workers? What value can be assigned to having a few hundred wizened old men around who can train entire generations of new, highly-skilled workers? Or who have a few different ideas than their boss, and decide to start up their own company?

Exactly these kind of links are traced out by David R. Meyer, a professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Brown University, in his 2006 book, Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America. This is important because it details how the USA machine tool industry developed – and the USA machine tool industry is the foundation of the modern industrial mass production economy.

The Silicon Valley Consensus & the “AI Economy” 

Edward Ongweso Jr. [via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]

The “AI economy” is less a story of productivity or innovation, then an attempt to graft a new political-economic order—let’s call it the Silicon Valley Consensus—that is ostensibly concerned with building our stillborn God. A coalition of hyperscalers, venture capitalists, fossil fuel firms, conservatives, and reactionaries are engaged in a frenzy of overbuilding, overvaluing, and overinvesting in compute infrastructure. Their goal is not to realize AGI or radically improve life for humanity, but to reallocate capital such that it enriches themselves, transmutes their wealth into even more political power that imposes constraints on countervailing political forces, and liberates capitalism from its recent defects (e.g. democracy), consolidating benefits to its architectures regardless of the actual social utility of the technologies they pursue….

Building out generative AI’s compute infrastructure and energy supply is an incredibly capital-intensive enterprise (McKinsey expects $7 trillion will be spent by 2030)….

2. The primary capital source for this infrastructure buildout isn’t external debt, but internal cash flows—primarily at hyperscalers—that dominate our stock market. Their profitability is so extreme that they can put “oodles of oodles of money” towards such an ambitious project without touching risky financing options, even if revenues and profits have yet to materialize….

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]

AI-Capex is the everything cycle, now Just under 50% of GDP growth is attributable to AI Capex

Of empires and famines

Alex Krainer, Sep 07, 2025

… But the true nature of the Western empire has been carefully concealed from us behind the glossy façade of the Western “civilization.” Today’s empire is a reincarnation of the undead British Empire, whose DNA it still carries. The more we learn about this empire, the uglier it looks. As an example, it seems that many, if not most of the famines recorded in history weren’t natural disasters nor consequences of wars but results of deliberate policy aimed at subjugating populations and forcing them to accept colonial control and slavery.

This may seem like an exaggeration, but British statesman and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli explicitly said as much himself. He explained that the objective of the British Empire was to

“Gain and hold territories that possess the largest supplies of the basic raw materials. Establish naval bases around the world to control the sea and commerce lanes. Blockade and starve into submission any nation or group of nations that opposes this empire control program.” (Knuth, E.C. “Empire of the City,” 1946, p. 57)

There’s much evidence that the Empire really did use starvation as a weapon of war against disobedient groups and nations and that they did so relatively frequently. Take the example of India: during the 120 years between 1757 and 1878 when she was under direct British rule, India experienced 31 serious famines (Mike Davis, “Late Victorian Holocausts, El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World” – London: Verso, 2002).

Even in absence of outright famines, much of India’s population lived in chronic food insecurity. While this was concealed from the British public, Britain’s ruling establishment was well aware of it.

Economic historian Robert C Allen found that, during the 19th century, famines became more frequent and more deadly as extreme poverty increased from 23% in 1810 to more than 50% in the mid-20th century. The period from 1880 to 1920, the height of Britain’s imperial power, was particularly devastating for India. By the 1910s, life expectancy collapsed to 21.9 years….

In April 1974, Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s Secretary of State and National Security Adviser sent out a classified memo to select cabinet officials. The title of the memo was, “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests,” and it was commissioned on the recommendation of John D. Rockefeller III and came to be called, more famously, NSSM 200, for National Security Study Memorandum 200.

In it, Kissinger addressed the difficulty of controlling resource rich areas of the world against the social pressures borne of growing world populations and went on to suggest the kinds of coercive measures the US should consider. He bluntly stated that food aid should be considered as “an instrument of national power,” and that the US should ration food aid to “help people who can’t or won’t control their population growth.”

The NSSM 200 made depopulation in foreign developing countries an explicit, if secret, national security priority of the United States for the first time. In that, the policy of the British Empire was simply grafted onto the US foreign policy. If anything changed between Disraeli and Kissinger, it’s the slick framing of policy goals: “rationing food” to “help people” is the sanitized version of “starving them into submission.” But the language amounted to recommending genocide, at least as defined under the UN Convention of 1948.

An Eruption of Assassinations — The current peak in the number of assassinations has exceeded that of the 1960s

Peter Turchin, Sep 13, 2025 [Cliodynamica]

According to my US Political Violence Database (USPVDB), the five years from 2020 to 2024 saw seven assassinations. This is higher than the previous peak during the 1960s, although only half as large as that of the late 1860s:

GRAPH.

….It’s important to note, that by themselves political assassination and terrorism don’t overthrow the established elites (at least, I can’t think of any examples). An assassination of the state ruler may serve as a triggering event for a revolution or an onset of civil war, but it still requires a well-organized and committed counter-elite party. The failure of Alexander Ulyanov and ultimate success of his younger brother illustrate this principle perfectly.

The significance in the rising frequency of such instability “micro-events” is that they signal that something is deeply broken within the social system in which they happen. I tried to draw attention to the rising frequency of shooting rampages back in 2008 (you can read about it in my 2012 blog post, Canaries in a Coal Mine). A canary dropping dead in a miner’s cage is not the cause of the explosion to come, but rather an advance warning.

Similarly, the increasing incidence of assassinations and terrorism tells us that we aren’t out of the woods yet, by a long stretch.

Trumpillnomics / Felonomics

Data shows energy bills soaring as state and federal Republicans cut price-savings programs

Richard Eberwein, 9/04/25 [WCPT 820 Radio, via Clean Power Roundup]

Energy bills have been steadily increasing since President Donald Trump took office in January, partially thanks to state and national Republicans ousting Biden-era clean energy policies and prioritizing nonrenewable energy sources.

According to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), residential electricity bills have increased by nearly 10% nationally since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, despite his campaign pledge to slash electric bill prices….

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law on July 4, is also expected to increase energy costs for consumers even more. A report from Climate Power published last month found that 64,000 jobs have already been lost or stalled since Trump took office, with 56% of them located in congressional districts represented by Republicans. The report also says the cuts to clean energy have reduced the total energy supply, which have contributed to the higher bills experienced by consumers….

US Interior Secretary: ‘No Future for Offshore Wind Under This Administration’

Adrijana Buljan, September 12, 2025 [offshorewind.biz, via Clean Power Roundup]

Trump administration axes $679M in offshore wind infrastructure funding

[esgdive.com, via Clean Power Roundup]

The U.S. Department of Transportation is withdrawing or terminating $679 million in funding for 12 port and infrastructure upgrades that would support offshore wind projects, it announced Friday.

 

2025 farm income projections paint grim picture for farmers trying to break even 

[WHO13, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]

Coffee Prices Post Largest Annual Jump Since 1997 

[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2025]

Treasury bonds aren’t the safe haven they’ve been in the past — and taxpayers will pay a price 

[Market Watch, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]

Homeless organizations note uptick in homeless families living in cars 

[Spectrum News 13, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]

More Trump Administration Circular Firing Squad with Investor-Spooking ICE Raid on Hyundai-LG Plant

Yves Smith, ​​​​​​​September 9, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]

…And keep in mind that despite the concern, which may be justified, about mistreatment of Koreans doing construction work at the plant, some (we don’t know how many) were skilled workers necessary to get the equipment installed and shake the operations down. Although it is an entirely different type of production, my father was one of the most seasoned managers/executives in the paper mill industry in running startups and major expansions. They were not easy. A successful startup would take two years and burn 20% of the capital cost. An unsuccessful one would hemorrhage cash pretty much forever. And all of these startups required bringing in experts from the vendors to help with design, installation, and training….

South Korea in Deadlock Over $350 Billion Investment Fund 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-09-2025]

Trump’s economic disaster

Richard Murphy, September 13 2025 [Funding the Future]

In this video, I explain why Trump’s economic policies are a disaster — and why the UK should take note as the far-right tries to copy them….

This man is an outright disaster.

Far-right politics is an outright disaster.

We’ve always known that, but now we can see the evidence. And it’s critical that we do see a note and talk about that evidence, because the threat from the far-right is real elsewhere, including here in the UK.

The far-right has no known answer to any known problem.

Its hatred of migrants solves nothing. We are living in an interdependent world, and to pretend otherwise is just absurd.

To pretend that we can live in glorious economic isolation is just absurd.

To pretend that we can run an economy on the basis of giving tax cuts to the rich, and increasing, in effect, taxes on everybody else by imposing tariffs is absurd because the net result is a lack of spending power….

Trump steals $400b from American workers

Cory Doctorow, September 09, 2025 [Pluralistic]

Trump’s stolen a lot of workers’ wages over the years, but this week, he has become history’s greatest thief of wages, having directed his FTC to stop enforcing its ban on noncompete “agreements,” a move that will cost American workers $400 billion over the next ten years:

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-09-09-trump-lets-bosses-grab-400-billion-worker-pay-noncompete-agreements/

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Open Thread

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On September 13, 2025

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

A Mercifully Brief History of Mathematics

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On September 12, 2025

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I’m a trained historian. At least I consider myself one, with a Master’s in History and in International Relations, I think I qualify. But, today I must confess to a dilettantish interest in the history of mathematics. Now, please understand that I am no mathematician. I struggled through college algebra. I will, however, add that when I completed college algebra my analytical faculties grew so profoundly—at least to me in hindsight—that I made the Dean’s List every semester thereafter. So, I believe there is something quite important to be said about learning how to solve for ’n’ that we should impart to our children. In the beginning the abstract nature of algebra confounded me, but once I was able to conceptualize it, I began mastering the equations and, as aforementioned, my intellectually faculties grew rapidly and intensely. Soon, my intolerance for fucktose in an history text—or any text for that matter— become keen, acute and annoying as hell to many of my fellow junior and senior history seminar classmates. But I digress. This is about math. Let me add before the next paragraph begins that I also never took calculus. But we’ll get to calculus soon.

First, my fascination began with Euclid and how he systematized and synthesized Egyptian and Babylonian ideas into a coherent structure of elements that led to modern plane geometry. The dude took the wisdom of the pyramid builders and the ziggurat builders and discovered a way of looking at the world to build in new ways. That takes a hell of a mind, one I can appreciate, even at his far of a distance in time. As I studied Euclid I learned that Babylonia used a base-sixty numerical system. While the Egyptians used a base-ten system. The Egyptians were the first to utilize fractions around 1000 BC. Then, in the 5th century BC the Indians in an attempt to square the circle calculated the square root of two correctly to five decimal places. Then around 300 BC the Indians used Brahmi numerals to further refine the true ancestor to our base-ten system. At the same time the Babylonians invented the abacus.

The poor Romans didn’t do diddly for mathematics. Imagine complex calculations with Roman numerals? Screw that. But they sure used them to build roads and survey, among other things. So, kudos to them for applied mathematics. At lot of stuff happened between the Romans and the next development. Stuff which I am skipping because I’m trying to get to a simple point without using two thousand words to do so.

Something truly remarkable happened in India in 628 AD. Brahmagupta wrote a book that clearly explains and delineates the role of zero in a proton-hind Arabic script. This was positively revolutionary. He is the clear discoverer of the modern place value system of numbers, as well. Well, natural numbers, that is.

And now stuff really begins to accelerate.

In 810 the House of Wisdom is built in Baghdad for express purpose of translating Greek and Sanskrit mathematical and philosophical texts. Ten years later, in 820 a Persian from Khwarazm—the delta of the Oxus River into the former Aral Sea discovered a way to solve linear and quadratic equations. His name was al-Khwarizmi and his book was called Al Jabr—which was Europeanized into algebra. His book, once it reached Europe three and a half centuries later introduces the Hindu-Arabic numeral system that is adopted wholesale by the nascent scientific community emerging in the earliest European universities. Universities also have a Muslim Golden Age pedigree, coming from the great Persian vizier to the Seljuk Sultan of Central Asia Malik Shah, Nizam al-Mulk. His Nizamiyyas, now known as madrassas, were built all over the Seljuk realm and were the earliest versions of universities, where men came from all over to learn many different topics. Sadly, the madrassas fell into stagnation when al-Ghazali closed the gates of ijtihad (open questioning) in 1091 with his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers. The Muslim Golden Age ended that year.

Now, between the foundation of the earliest European universities and Isaac Newton, a lot of essential groundwork was laid for Ike’s work. I seek not to diminish any of that. But Newton begat not one, not two, not three but four revolutions in science: optics, mathematics, mechanics and gravity. His discovery of infinitesimal calculus is literally the base for modern rocket science as he used it to calculate and predict with stunning accuracy movements of heavenly bodies, hitherto impossible. Newton is simply the single greatest mind in the history of human science. He stands on the shoulders of some mighty men, but his accomplishments are of the ages.

Now, I come to the point. In this essay I have used a very specific word with each mathematical advance I have discussed. That word is “discovered.” I have purposefully eschewed the use of “invented.” And I have done so for a damn good reason. I am what you call a ‘mathematical Platonist.’ Said theory is defined by Wikipedia as “the form of realism that suggests mathematical entities are abstract, have no spatiotemporal or causal properties, and are eternal and unchanging.” Thus, as the Brits would say, ‘maths’ are discovered. However, the opposite of said theory is mathematical nominalism, which has its merits and is defined as, “the philosophical view that abstract mathematical objects like numbers, sets, and functions do not exist in reality, or at least do not exist as abstract entities independent of concrete things or the mind.” Thus as we Yanks say, they be invented.

So why did I write this essay? Because this discussion on the merits of the two theories is utterly fascinating to me. And if you have ten minutes and a solid high school foundation in mathematics you will most certainly understand and appreciate it. The interview engrossed me from the first question.

One final note: Ms. Jonas, the philosopher of math being interviewed says that she is 87% certain mathematical Platonism is correct, I’ll add my confidence level as about 59%. Why? Because there is some set theory ideas I simply cannot wrap my danged head around–I reckon my grey matter isn’t as big or maybe as sophisticated as Ian’s. I licked logic in college with an A+ but this set theory stuff. Good grief. The paradoxes drive me wonko! (If you get the reference add ten bonus points to your final grade.)

If you’ve read this far, and you’ve read some of my articles and most if not all of Ian’s, then you might wish to Subscribe or donate. Ian has written over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, need the money to keep the shop running. So please, consider it.

The Solution to The USA’s Taiwan Dilemma

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On September 11, 2025

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“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”

三国演义 ~by Luo Guangzhong

Earlier I promised to post my plan to prevent a war between the United States and China over Taiwan. I’ve traveled and met with Taiwanese diplomats. They are some of the most sophisticated operators I’ve ever encountered. Taiwan is a highly advanced technological country. Very wealthy, with a sophisticated full coverage heath care system and a vibrant democracy. Furthermore, based on the Shanghai Communique issued on February 27, 1972 by Nixon and Mao, both mainland China and the USA formally acknowledged that “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China”.

The Communique goes on to state the US side does not accept a violent solution to the unification of the two parties and the Chinese side retains the option to violence if Taiwan ever declares independence, paraphrasing here, folks. It’s been a long time since reading my Kissinger.

Conversely, I have traveled seven times to China. Here is an idea most Americans will probably never understand. China’s potential to utilize enormous amounts of soft power is profound. This is based on China’s circular view of history and that China has been invaded and ruled by foreign powers many times in its history. In each and every case China has overcome said invaders very differently than the way the Russians have. Or anyone else for that matter. Where the Russians trade space for time to husband their resources for a great counter attack and push the invader out of the country, China seduces the invader, with its ancient, deep, amazing and incredibly seductive culture. I cannot emphasize enough the depth, breadth, and tantalizing sophistication of its culture, be it material, artistic, political or spiritual. I do, after all, practice Chinese Chan Buddhism in my own life. Every time China has been invaded and completely taken over by a foreign power this strategy works. Even today we’re watching Chinese movies on Netflix. That is the use and export of soft power. And unlike America, that has only 250 years of history to draw upon its soft power, China has almost 4000 years of history to draw upon. The efficacy of Chinese soft power is not to be underestimated. It is indeed seductive.

Now the question moves to goals and intentions. And here an understanding of Chinese history can aid us in a better understanding of the present Chinese leader, Xi Jing Ping.

What are Xi Jing Ping’s true goals? Simple, he seeks membership among the greatest of Chinese emperors. The greatest of Chinese emperors are judged by a single metric: did they unify all of China? As the opening sentence of the great Chinese novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I quoted at the beginning of this essay, unification is the way the Chinese see themselves when in a golden age.

This compulsion to unify all of China is the defining source of Xi’s ambitions. And that means Taiwan. Taiwan is the last remaining province of a fully unified China. China equal to that ruled by the Qin Shih Huang Di, the very first emperor to unify all of China, or the great conqueror Han Wu Di, or Li Shimin of the mighty T’ang or Zhu Yuanzhang of the wall building Ming. It is to this rank of Chinese men that Xi aspires.

What should America do? I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to avoid a war with China that most people are certain is inevitable. They call it the “Thucydides Trap.” But, if the study of history has taught me anything it is that nothing is inevitable, contingencies matter, and human agency means the most. We may live in a complex adaptive system, but nothing, nothing is inevitable. Therefore, America must find a way tone down its arrogance and find a way to peacefully unite Taiwan with China.

Here is how I would do it if I were president.

First, I would engage in a series of CBM’s (Confidence Building Measures in diplospeak) with Xi Jing Ping regarding our naval stance in the Straits of Taiwan. I would make it policy that no American naval ships traverse the Straits of Taiwan any longer. Then I would halt the sale of advanced weapons to Taiwan.

Second, I would begin preparing the Taiwanese to consider peaceful unification with the mainland along the lines of the British handover of Hong Kong to China in the 90s. I would make it clear that we would not consider unification unless Taiwan was allowed to keep its democracy, and democratic traditions for a minimum of 80 years. I would do this to assuage the Taiwanese about a possible authoritarian takeover of the island in the case of unification. China did one nation, two systems successfully once before. They can do it again.

Third, I would secretly engage Xi Jing Ping with the following proposal: the United States of America would fully encourage and accept the unification of Taiwan with the mainland under the following conditions. Number one, Taiwan would have three representatives on the politburo, one of which would be a power ministry, either interior, defense, or foreign affairs. My fallback position, which is my true goal of course, would be the acceptance of two politburo members from Taiwan, but I would not relent on one serving as a power minister in one of the three ministries aforementioned.

I am relatively certain that Xi and the current politburo would agree to this proposal. It would serve to put Xi in the exhalted ranks of Chinese leaders in which he craves to be included. Mos timportantly, it would not harm a single vital national interest of the United States. The Chinese might have a salient in the first island chain, that being the island of Taiwan, but the United States would still have Korea, Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines. Not to mention the defenses in depth that the second island chain provides us in the Pacific ocean. Much less the great fortress of the third island chain of Midway, Wake and Hawaii. Defenses in depth matter much more than a salient in the first island chain.

Now, I recognize this goes against every national security intellectuals thinking. It is completely contrarian. But the more I’ve thought about it over the last few years the more I believe that is the best way to avoid general warfare between two nuclear great powers from the Straits of Malacca to the South China Sea and into the deep blue waters of the Pacific.

If you’ve read this far, and you’ve read some of my articles and most if not all of Ian’s, then you might wish to Subscribe or donate. Ian has written over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, need the money to keep the shop running. So please, consider it.

Should You Kill or Mourn Nazis and Commies? (Charlie Kirk Edition)

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On September 11, 2025

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My favorite Charlie Kirk quote is:

I can’t stand the word empathy, actually, I think it’s a made up new age term, and it does a lot of damage.

But Charlie wasn’t just a one-note ideological thinker.

I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

Kirk was, needless to say, all for the Gaza genocide, but he was for it by lying about it. Most famously, he denied starvation in Gaza.

Anyway, Kirk was an evil, pro-genocide douchebag, who was shot, which he said was an acceptable price to pay for the second amendment. I’m not going to waste crocodile tears on someone who actively worked for the mass murder of civilians and who died in a way he thought was an acceptable sacrifice.

But we need to unpack this properly. One thing commenters on the right have been saying is that Charlie may have died, in full of in part, because of neo-liberals and the left calling him and people like him Nazi or fascist.

Now I don’t know the motives of who killed him, but in our society many people do genuinely believe that killing Nazis was justified and the right way to deal with them. There’s a version that swings left, of course. “The only good Commie, is a dead Commie.” The Black Book of Communism and the constant reminders of deaths under Mao and Stalin are meant to justify this sort of hatred, as reminders of the Holocaust and German war crimes are to justify killing Nazis.

So the right isn’t wrong. If you call someone a Nazi there’s a certain subtext where “and killing him would be justified” is implied. Fascist is weaker, but same general idea.

But the reverse version is Communist/Marxist/Socialist. The right calls their enemies this all the time and it has the same implication. “Cultural Marxist” was the battle cry used by people like Kirk to justify purges of the university system of left wing professors.

I don’t want to imply these are mirror phenomena. The fact is that since the early 20th century being Communist, Marxist or Socialist has been much more likely get one fired, jailed, deported, beaten or killed than being a fascist. Indeed, there was a huge taboo against calling anyone a Nazi, so much so that doing so was considered “losing the argument.”

It took a lot of boundary pushing in the right for that taboo to be partially broken.

Back in 2016, during Trump’s first run for the Presidency, I wrote that constantly calling him a fascist or Nazi, and branding resistance ANTIFA would naturally lead to violence, because if someone is a Nazi, violence isn’t just justified to stop them, it’s a moral imperative to use any means necessary including violence to oppose them.

But in America, the same is true of stopping Communism or socialism or Marxism. And the same is true of calling Abortion a holocaust.

So what’s happened here is that the shoe is now on both feet. The right had their Commies and their abortion Holocaust to justify their actions. Now the center has Nazis and the left has Nazis and the Gaza genocide to justify their violence.

By their lights, all three sides are justified in violence. If Commies and Nazis and Genocide are true evil, and if all sides have committed genocides and are Nazis (right) and Commies (left/center) then, indeed, it is ethically required to use any means necessary to stop them.

What we’re seeing right now is a cry from all the “responsible people” of “don’t resort of political violence! It’s never justified!” (This in a country formed by violent revolution, who’s almost always mass murdering people for political reasons.)

But the issue is that the right and, actually, the center, are acting like fascists, at the least, and really like Nazis. (That whole inconvenient genocide thing.)

The right’s case is weaker, unless you do view abortion as a Holocaust, in which case, yes, you are hard pressed not to find yourself wondering why you aren’t murdering the abortionists. Neoliberals aren’t left wing, socialists or communist and there are no socialists or communists anywhere near power in the US. The right calls neoliberals the left and pretends “cultural Marxism” is Marxism, so they’re really Stalinists, which is ludicrous to anyone who knows the politically correct crew that the right calls “cultural Marxists.”

If you want avoid domestic political violence over these issues (though it’s all really a proxy for the impoverishment of the majority of the population) you either have to decide that being a Nazi (pro genocide, pro gestapo/ICE thugs) is OK, or stop being a Nazi. On the other side, you have to give up abortion or decide that it isn’t a Holocaust. And since “cultural Marxism” is really proxy for a series of policies meant to help women and various racial and sexual minorities, you have to decide whether prejudice, including legal prejudice against them is OK (Issue one) and whether or not they deserve any sort of helping hand (a separate issue. You could keep them legally equal and let them keep their rights like gay marriage and the female vote but get rid of affirmative action and so on.)

In other words, to avoid political violence over ideology, you need to have the vast majority of the population agree on what is acceptable. Is genocide is OK? Abortion? Affirmative Action. Women having the vote? (Peter Thiel, who bankrolled Vance, has suggested women shouldn’t have the right to vote.) Gays marrying. People being able to choose their own gender. Police raids by badgeless masked men without warrants from unmarked vans.

If people don’t agree on what is right and the red lines being crossed are of “this is a holocaust” or “this is completely destroying millions of people’s lives” then of course it’s going to break out into political violence. Expecting otherwise and hand waving that “we should kill over difference in opinion about whether it’s OK to commit genocide” are ludicrous and pathetic and foolish.

There’s political violence because Americans disagree over life and death issues as large as, but not limited to “should we commit genocides?” Well, again, that and general immiseration, which lowers the ignition point.

If you don’t want political violence, don’t wag your finger and say “political violence is bad, ‘kay”, either agree as a society to be a bunch of Nazis with an immiserated population, or decide not to be Nazis and make sure that almost everyone has a good life.

As for Kirk, I’m glad he got a death in line with his beliefs: making the ultimate sacrifice for the right of Americans to bear arms. It was “worth it” and I will assume he meant that, and if he still exists he’s at peace, having died for what he truly believed.

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A Brief Taxonomy Of Corruption

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On September 10, 2025

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I was discussing Indian corruption with Sean-Paul the other day, and we had to really break down what we meant by corruption. That lead to a simple classification system, so I’m sharing it with it.

Everyday vs. Elite Corruption

Do you bribe the policeman or the minor bureaucrat to get a permit. Do you grease everyone with even a tiny bit of to get what you want, and it is it expected? Is it essentially required, in the sense that if you don’t consequences are nasty: arrest or or dential, Or at best, whatever you needed done taking forever and being shoddily done.

This is everyday corruption. India is rife with it. America, mostly, doesn’t have it. Russia used to have it, but I’m told by Sean-Paul, that at least in Moscow, it’s now gone.

Elite corruption is when the elites are self-greasing. Whenever anything is done, it is done in a way where somebody rich can take a cut. Contracting to build new infrastructure is where the contracts are inflated is the standard, but there are tons of variations. Most Western nations have this. The US or the UK is probably the worst among major countries. But it exists in Russia and (though much less than before) in China.

Honest vs. Dishonest Corruption

In honest corruption you get what you pay for. In everyday corruption your visa gets stamped, your parking ticket disappears, you get the permit you needed, or city workers show up and connect your new place to power, water and sewage. At the elite level, if if a bridge, or hospital or park or space program was promised, it is delivered on time and on budget. It’s just that the budget includes 10% grease. Some other games may be played. If you know where new facilities will be built you could, say, buy up property that will soon increase in price, then sell once it does.

But bottom line, what is delivered at the end is delivered on time or with minor delays and it works. It’s not shoddy. China during most of the Deng period had a lot of honest elite corruption. Everyone was taking a cut. But they bloody well had to deliver and if they didn’t, they lost their place at the elite table and might even end up in prison or executed. American in the late 19th and early 290th century mostly had honest corruption. Tammany Hall was corrupt, but they also kept their promises. The great railroads and bridges and parks got built, and were generally built well and on time.

Dishonest Corruption Is when you whoever is corrupt doesn’t have to deliver. You pay off the cop and he throws you in jail anyway. You bribe the bureaucrat and he still drags his feet getting you approval, if you get it at all. The first payment is never the last payment, the idea is to drain you of as much as possible.

At the elite level dishonest corruption is that the street or building was promised and funded but somehow either never gets finished or takes twice as long and three times as much and then, once done, it usually turns out to be shoddily built. A new program for veterans/homeless/cancer/whatever is promised, but somehow it’s slow and ineffective and doesn’t do much, but a few people make a lot of money off of it. Promises mean nothing, nothing is delivered on time and what little is delivered is of crap quality. Meanwhile insider trading is everywhere, taxes always go down on the rich and up on the poor and middle class and programs which used to work are slowly degraded into uselessness so that someone can make more money.

This is the US or the UK and Canada and indeed all neoliberal countries. It’s actually more or less the definition of neoliberalism. Effectiveness is nothing and efficiency is really only about how efficient something is at funneling money to the rich. It is also India, which is why India is, despite some progress, still screwed. It’s run by criminals from top to bottom. Ironically, in my experience (which is out of date, I’m happy to be corrected) low level Indian corruption is “honest’ in that you get what you pay for. High level Indian corruption is dishonest as hell. No big project ever works properly, comes in on time and is effective. (This is why I’m still negative on India.)

There’s also a middle corruption, slice for everyone. This is where everyone involved in the project gets some. So the workers get some, the managers get some, and the contractors gets some. Everyone is being greased. This doesn’t mean just having a job, it means being paid better and treated better than at a non corrupt job.

The honest and dishonest versions are as normal. Honest “slice for everyone” corruption still delivers what was promised at reasonable quality. Dishonest “slice fore everyone” doesn’t deliver or delivers absolute crap.

Obviously no corruption is best, but equally obviously honest corruption is better. If you have to have any corruption, then honest elite corruption or honest slice for everyone corruption is best. Low level corruption is always bad, since it means “if you don’t have money, you’re never treated fairly and you can’t break out of the bottom” but if you must have it honest is better than dishonest.

Growing up a lot in what was then called the third world, then observing politics for years all of this has been well known by me, but I never really broke it down properly, it was pretty much “implicit knowledge” as much that we learn young is.

For your reading displeasure.

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Follow Up and And Reply On My “How to Lose Allies” Post

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On September 10, 2025

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First, I want to follow up on this: “I am due to have a conversation with a friend that lives in Denmark tomorrow and I’m going to ask him about energy prices.”

His reply, and I paraphrase as I did not record it or take notes: “if we still had to make our house payment, we would be totally screwed. The amount of money that we pay for energy now is about equal to what our house payment used to be. It’s about five times higher than it normally is, but what’s even worse is the high cost of energy filters out into everything in the Danish economy. A simple item like bread is three times higher than it used to be. Specialty items are three or four times higher than they used to be. Fish from fisherman that we go to the docks to buy from because we live on an island is four times more expensive because they’re paying four times more for the energy they’re using to go out and fish. It’s brutal and it’s all because the United States or somebody allied with it blew up the Nord stream pipeline. I try to keep my mouth shut about this because most people have drank the Kool-Aid, but I really hope Russia wins because I’m sick of all this global elite bullshit.”

These words were spoken by a well educated American married to a Dane with two teen-aged Danish children. If the Danish economy is suffering like this Germany must be fucked.

Where does Europe get its energy now? From the US, now exporting LNG (liquid natural gas) to Europe for 4x the price of Russian and Turkmen natural gas. Here is my question as a Texan: why haven’t natural gas prices risen in tandem with the export of the commodity? People I have asked who recieve natural gas royalties are pissed because there is no price increase pass through. So, owners of the wells are getting screwed and so are the buyers of the product. Welcome to Oligarchical America.

Next I want to address a handful of commenters in my post, best reprersented by Mark Level. He writes, in a very gracious and polite comment that he takes issue with my outline of American Grand Strategy. He notes, “This insane hobby-horse (or idee fixe, choose your metaphor) dates back far more than 120 years, probably 3x that long, and originates in British Colonial phobias about Russia and “the East” generally. Halford John Mackinder developed this lunacy & published it almost exactly 120 years ago, but it had a long pre-natal development among arrogant Imperial gits in Asia. (Gits and twits, upper-class British twits, like the Monty Python sketch.) See here, and the delightful childish fantasy of being Alexander Magnus from this Mackinder thought bubble . . . .”

Please note, first and foremost, I used the word hostile power or hostile coalition. Hostile being the primary variable.

I’ve read Mackinder’s works. Anyone who has traveled across the Silk Road pretty much has to read them. His idea is not necessarily original. It’s more a fusion of ideas that came out of the late 18th century and 19th century Western European dominance of the world that began, as I previously mentioned, with the defeat of Venice in 1509,  Portugal’s conquest of a Spice Empire, and its desrtuction of the Ottoman Navy in the Indian Ocean, thus having no rivals, and of course Spain’s rapacious theft of New World gold and silver.

During the 17th and 18th century, a new idea developed with the growth of the British Navy, who outstripped the Dutch and pretty much took over their empire. New York City was, after all, New Amsterdam. What these developments presaged was an idea that centered around the ascendancy of the Littoral powers over the Continental Empires that had ruled Eurasia for millenia. Gunpowder, boats, better firearms, better steel and in the New World, devastating disease leading to genocide in many cases up and down North and South America. The Littoral is defined by strategists “as those land areas (and their adjacent areas and associated air space) that are susceptible to engagement and influence from the sea.” Thus the emphasis on a strong navy by Alfred Thayer Mahan who proved just how dominant Littoral Powers could be. For a time, that is, only for a time, as I see it.

Add to this ascendancy the wars of the Western European powers of the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire primarily fought during the 18th century for two strategic reasons, primarily by two very different nations with very different vital national interests at stake.

One, was the United Kingdom’s insistence that no power could dominate the Low Lands of the Netherlands and later Belgium because if they could, it would threaten an invasion of the British Isles, plus their massive exports of wool textiles, fueling the nascent industrial revolution. Smart, if ruthless policy.

Second, we must understand France‘s main goal during the wars of this time (and for several centruies prior) was to ensure a divided Germany. So long as the German states were littered into 100 different little principalities France had nothing to worry about. Thus France could go on dominating the continent. The first seismic change to this was the War of the Sixth Coalition which saw for the first time Russia flex its true potential when Russian troops occupied Paris. France’s cataclysm occured not in 1941 but in 1870 with her defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. The result of which was Prussia unifying all of Germany into one empire, adding insult to injury by having the Kaiser crowned in Versailles and taking Alsace Lorraine away as its prize.

Fuse those two strategies together and it is not too far an intellectual leap, considering the Great Game going on at the time between the UK and the Russian Empire, for Mackinder to conjure up his ideas. Were his ideas taken up by the United Kingdom? You bet, but by 1917 when it was clear that the United Kingdom could no longer maintain the balance of power in Europe and the United States had to intervene, (everyone should read AJP Taylor’s magnum opus, The Struggle For Mastery in Europe, to understand the balance of power and its collapse in 1917) US foreign policy intellectuals adopted it. And rightly so.

I think it’s the correct idea. But my reasons for thinking it’s the correct idea are not gonna make many of you happy. You might have to face some hard truths. Oh yeah, I did tell you I was a Realist in the old school manner of the word? In fact there have been a few times when Ian has chastened me pretty seriously for my realism. With that admisssion I will make another one: I don’t mind the criticism from Ian or from others. Ian is probably the smartest person I’ve ever met in my life and I listen to what he has to say. And when I say listen to him, I mean, I consider his words deeply. A man who cannot change his mind will never change anything. Nevertheless, I digress.

Here are my reasons for why I believe the prevention of a single hostile power or coalition of hostile powers from dominating the Eurasian landmass is smart policy. Please, if you take anything away from this sentence, take the meaning hostile. 

Number one: the Monroe Doctrine. Oh, I hear you screaming already. But the fact is that if this were not “our” hemisphere, not a one of us would have the standard of living we do today. Our hegemony of the Western Hemisphere is the primary foundation of our wealth and our power. You might not like it. I grimace frequently at the crimes we comitt to protect it. But, the Westphalian System is not built on justice. It is built on the acceptance of international anarchy. Each nation to its own. There is no single sovereign power governing planet Earth. Thus, violence is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived. Is this a grim Hobbesian outlook? Yes. I don’t like it and I’m pretty sure you don’t either. But as a realist, I take the world as it is, not as I desire it to be. A hostile power or coalition of hostile powers that dominate Eurasia can take that hegemony away. You might not like it but trust me when I say you don’t want that to happen.

Second, a hostile power or coalition of hostile powers that dominate Eurasia can take more than our hegemony away, it/they can invade us. We don’t want that either. Thus we have a powerful navy that projects power to keep Eurasia divided–for the time being, because I think if we get into a war with China, their indirect way of war–read your Sun Tzu–will probably outwit us on the high seas. I’ve spent a great deal of time in China and have a healthy fear of their capabilities. However, my greatest fear is that in our arrogance we will engender the very hostility we must prevent and by our own devices bring about the doom we should seek to avoid. We have lost our edge, our generosity of spirit and our understanding of power. We have become a mean spirited, two-bit, cheap and vulgar people. And sadly, because so many of us are beaten down economically by rich elites who are delusional, we’re going to lose a big war in a painful way. A war that could be avoided, but probably won’t be. I hope I’m wrong, but don’t think I am.

That said, these very wise words, written by Robert D. Kaplan recently, convey the gravity of our present predicament, “There is no prediction. It is only through coming to terms with the past and vividly, realizing the present that we can have premonitions about the future.” Moreover, as a wise woman wrote about history, “the more I study history, the more I learn the art of prophecy.” Deeply contradictory statements, yet both true in their essence.

Are we any more perceptive now about what awaits our planet than were the Russians of 1917, or all of Europe in 1914, and, for that matter, the Germans of the 1920s and the early 30s?

Do we honestly think we know better than they did? With all of our gadgets and our technological triumphalism I bet you there are a handful of you out there that think we do know better than they did. I hate to disappoint you, but we don’t. History is the story of contingency and human agency, not inevtiablity.

So, there it is. Rip me to shreds if you wish. I’ve suffered enough Shakespearean arrows of outrageous fortune in my 54 years to handle it. In fact, I welcome your ideas and if you got this far I’m grateful for your time.

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