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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ggersh who wrote (202734)	11/17/2023 7:47:24 PM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 220394

Curation this day - Alt-news sonar21.com Peter Zeihan and the end of the world 14 November 2023 by Jack McCord 127 Comments I first heard of Peter Zeihan, a self-styled ‘geopolitical strategist’ (or sometimes, ‘geopolitical analyst’) in 2018. In a chat about the former Soviet Union, a relative of mine quoted Zeihan arguing that ‘Russia has to invade [the] Ukraine eventually. It just can’t feed itself without [the] Ukraine’s agricultural lands.’ I smirked. I hadn’t heard of Zeihan, but I surely know the ‘Russian aggression’ grift when I hear it. When we spoke, Russia was already the world’s largest exporter of wheat and beef exports were surging too. Mind you, by 2018 Moscow had plenty of good reasons to invade the Ukraine, from Kiev’s genocidal attacks on Russian-speakers to its Nazi militias’ eagerness to help NATO destabilize Russia. It’s just that food security wasn’t among them. What kind of ‘geopolitical strategist’ gets something that basic so wrong? Zeihan got his start at George Friedman’s firm Stratfor, where he rose to vice-president. Stratfor enjoyed some cachet early this century, until people realized you got basically the same product from The Economist, a week earlier and much cheaper. Aside from a diplomatic internship in Australia and a short DC think-tank stint, Stratfor seems to have been Zeihan’s only grown-up job before striking off on his own in 2012. He has a huge YouTube following. You can subscribe to his geopolitics newsletter. He appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in March 2023. In June 2022, he published his 4th best-seller, The End of the World is Just the Beginning. An eventful year and a half after its release, now seems a perfect time to review The End, along with Zeihan’s forecasting abilities. It’s generally quite readable. Zeihan at times makes it less so by trying too hard to be funny and irreverent. He came of age in the 1990s, which probably explains why he writes kind of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer talked. At one point he actually uses ‘judgy’ as a synonym for judgmental. Zeihan argues that the US-led global security and commerce regime that emerged during and after WW2 is near collapse, along with the worldwide prosperity that he claims it generated. So far, so good. With zero self-awareness, he creepily dubs that regime ‘the Order.’ He attributes its impending demise to the rise of nationalist populism, and America’s consequent (purported) renunciation of worldwide military hegemony. Free trade will falter, because without the US navy to protect global sea lanes, state extortion and non-state piracy will surge. Supply chains will fail. We’ll revert to the pre-Order days, when ‘favorable geography’ (ie, a nice climate, fertile soil and access to navigable waterways) determined a country’s prosperity. As they struggle to adjust, countries and indeed entire regions that have less favorable geography will struggle even to feed themselves or stay housed. Many people will die. Much of what Zeihan predicts seems likely, or at least possible. Yet many of his claims are questionable, too, and more than a few are self-evident nonsense. To his credit, Zeihan acknowledges that the Order rests on unsustainable debt, which he believes will soon cause worldwide currency and economic collapse. Crucially, this is a view shared by many who agree with him on nothing else. In many countries, he predicts, demographic decline will make economic failure steeper, deeper and longer-lasting, because ‘you can’t generate capital without people.’ No argument here. Then, straying off-course again, he predicts the US and the western hemisphere will ride out the Order’s collapse in relative comfort, especially compared to the Russians and Chinese, for whom Zeihan cannot hide a visceral loathing. China’s debt issues are much worse than America’s, he gloats: Coupled with its demographic death spiral, China’s default will result in prompt, complete dissolution and collapse. Russia is better off, he reckons, but not by much. Now, I’m no geostrategist, but even I know about China’s disastrous one-child policy and Russia’s demographic decline. Debt and demographics are crucial (though, as we’ll discuss, they’re not everything). So this is where Zeihan’s arguments might be strongest – if only he would support them. But no. Zeihan doesn’t do footnotes, citations, supporting links or bibliographies. There are asterisks sprinkled throughout the Kindle text, but when you tap them, they’re just goofy wisecracks. He shares some graphs of uncertain provenance. He spews facts and figures like a firehose, but there’s just no telling where he got most of them. In his acknowledgements, he shrugs it off: ‘If I cited everyone who … contributed to this work, the bibiliography would be longer than the entire text you just soldiered through.‘ But adding ‘some contributions … have been more equal than others,’ he makes it clear that he relies heavily on US, UN and western official statistics. He credits several scholars whose work, in energy, transport and the like, he found helpful. He prominently cites Paul Morland’s 2019 book The Human Tide, enthusing it’s ‘arguably the best book ever on the intersection of demographics, history and national power.‘ A reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald sums up The Human Tide: Demography ‘determines wars. Without the [Bolshevik] revolution and the drastic decline in Russian infant mortality, Russia, for example, could never have mounted an army big enough to defeat Hitler. History would look radically different. But history is complex, numbers don’t always prevail and Morland, who frequently qualifies himself, is right in pointing out that no one theory can give us the full picture.‘ (Emphases mine.) Zeihan harbors no such doubts. He projects absolute certainty, absolute authority, and he’s very articulate. There’s a market for all that, so it’s easy to see why his YouTube videos are so popular. The same air of utter certainty pervades The End. Unfortunately, after decades of brazen gaslighting by western officials, ‘experts’ and media on virtually every topic of note, an air of assurance by itself raises hackles among us hardened skeptics. We would be a lot less suspicious of someone who ‘frequently qualifies himself.’ Wise men have understood this forever. The End has seven sections, each divided into bite-sized chapters. The first section is a historical overview of how the Order came to be and why it’s failing. The next six sections detail how its collapse will impact key economic sectors: transport, finance, energy, industrial materials, manufacturing and agriculture. At the beginning of each section, Zeihan explains what’s at stake, in lively descriptions of how technological advance down the centuries has shaped commerce, economic growth, warfare and international competition with respect to each of the six sectors. These introductory expositions are worth reading, with a grain of salt. This stuff used to be known simply as ‘geography’ or perhaps, ‘historical geography.’ It hasn’t been taught for decades in US public schools. This approach almost seems calculated to overawe Zeihan’s largely American audience, who think geography means correctly filling in the names of countries on a blank map outline, but are no good even at that. But the next pattern you notice is that Zeihan’ grasp of current affairs, especially military affairs, is quite sketchy. During or after his tour de force geography lectures, Zeihan routinely veers off course, spouting dubious, at times demonstrably false assertions – not a good look for a strategic forecaster. For example, while discussing maritime capabilities, he weirdly claims that Japan’s constitutionally defensive navy is second only to America’s in force projection outside its home waters. He disparages India’s navy, without explanation, as ‘beyond awful,’ and mocks China’s as a glorified coast guard. China’s navy is actually the world’s largest, with hundreds more ships than the US navy, though they’re mostly smaller. As I write, Chinese warships with robust anti-air, anti-ship and anti-sub capability are cruising the Persian Gulf, their mission to deter the US from bombing Iran, as prominent US warmongers keep urging. Their presence also dispels Zeihan’s fantasy that after the Order, Chinese food and energy imports will fall prey to pirates. In the energy section, Zeihan asserts that half Russia’s energy production relies on western firms like Halliburton. Like so many western Russia ‘analysts,’ he seems to be stuck in the 1990s. If that were true, Russian oil and gas would have stopped flowing in February 2022, and the ‘Biden’ administration wouldn’t have had to blow up Nordstream 2 just three months after The End‘s publication. History and geography aren’t a crystal ball. They are necessary, but far from sufficient to foretell the future, which is always hard. Like neoconservative US officials, whose propaganda he often echoes, Zeihan appears clueless about recent sociopolitical, economic and military developments that have falsified many of his key premises. For example, he’s stuck on the Order’s 20th-century template of naval power projection, now shattered by both China’s and Russia’s precision hypersonic missiles, as well as by Russia’s electronic-warfare and air-defense advances. These have rendered US aircraft-carrier battle groups and amphibious task forces obsolete for near-peer warfare. Zeihan didn’t get the memo, but the US Marine Corps did, and in 2020 undertook a sweeping and controversial reorganization based on small-unit, small-boat, almost covert amphibious operations. Among other big changes, the Marines gave up all their tanks and much of their artillery, because the amphibious ships required to deliver them are now sitting ducks. The Order’s navies have no air defenses that can reliably stop hypersonic missiles. The Chinese navy’s primary focus is, of course, defense of its home waters. Given that the US Navy menaces China’s coastline from forward bases in the first island chain, why wouldn’t the Chinese focus on meeting the threat precisely there? Given that light warships armed with modern missiles could conceivably take out an entire carrier battle group from over the horizon, why would the Chinese build carrier battle groups instead of smaller missile-armed craft? Zeihan is the odd man out on the collapse bandwagon. Most others – Dmitry Orlov, James Howard Kunstler, William Schryver, Larry Johnson and Andrei Martyanov – see a healthier, safer ‘multipolar world’ emerging after the Order falls. Vladimir Putin, the Order’s nemesis, argues that only such a multipolar world, particularly one observing Westphalian sovereignty and indivisible-security norms, can hope to preserve peace, free trade and prosperity. Zeihan, naturally, portrays a multipolar world as a sort of brutish geopolitical state of nature, red in tooth and claw. The dispute arises from their fundamental disagreement over the nature of the Order. The multipolarists argue that the Order is neither liberal, nor ‘rules-based,’ nor even very orderly. Even during the Cold War, and especially afterward, US military intervention brought death, poverty and misery far more often than prosperity. (This isn’t so much contention as a matter of record.) In its quest to destroy national sovereignty, well-described here in the Russian context, the Order has spent the entire 21st century bombing and invading weak countries, often under false pretenses, and imposing economic sanctions on those too strong for it to attack directly. Few of the Order’s activities even pretend to promote prosperity. Our military adventures in Vietnam, the Balkans, Libya, Syria, Iraq, the Ukraine, Yemen and elsewhere had little or nothing to do with fostering commerce. They killed and maimed millions, and impoverished and left homeless millions more. Many Global South peoples now regard the Order as a menace. Most would rather take their chances without its ‘protection.’ No wonder coup supporters in Niger were waving Russian flags last summer. No wonder #IStandWithPutin is popular in India. The only theater in which the US Navy’s primary mission has been protecting sea lanes has been the Mideast. But the Order’s support for unelected dictators in the region, in return for cheap oil, has also helped create the very instability that provides the pretext for a permanent US naval presence. It’s a self-licking ice-cream cone. Zeihan claims that the Order is collapsing because American and other western voters have renounced globalism. Nonsense: As the Trump experience taught us, the voters and the candidates they elect have little say over foreign affairs. The unelected hacks, bureaucrats and oligarchs who actually direct US foreign policy have proven very adept at thwarting voters’ non-interventionist impulses. Nobody in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa or the Mideast has noticed the Order willingly renouncing anything. We pretended to quit Afghanistan. In fact we got fired, in humiliating fashion, by the Taliban, after two decades clinging to an ill-conceived, spendthrift ‘nation-building’ project. We’re scratching and clawing to hold on to bases in Iraq and Syria. We’re badly losing the not-so-proxy war that we deliberately provoked in the Ukraine, an accidental country turned genocidal kleptocracy turned NATO armed camp. We’re steaming at flank speed toward war with Iran. In the western Pacific, we’re encircling China with military bases. The Chinese aren’t eager to invade Taiwan. But as with Russia, maybe the Order will goad them into concluding they have no choice. The Order isn’t collapsing, the multipolarists argue, because America stopped throwing its weight around. It’s collapsing because we keep throwing our weight around, and printing trillions of dollars to pay for it, instead of minding our own business – which isn’t going well at all, politically, economically, socially or any other way. As noted earlier, even Zeihan accepts the debt-related aspect of this argument. He merely claims the consequences will be worse for others than for America. He argues that the Americas’ relative isolation, ample resources including energy, and defensible shipping lanes – along with extensive inland waterways – will sustain hemispheric trade and prop up our standard of living. He predicts an ‘updated Monroe Doctrine’ and ‘partnership’ with Mexico that will help make up for the US having long ago outsourced its manufacturing. Immigration from Latin America, he argues, will bolster the labor force and birth rate. He simply ignores our 2021 abandonment of energy independence, the ‘Biden’ administration’s vendetta against fossil fuels, and the likelihood that oil production from fracking has already peaked. ‘Partnership’ with Mexico? Throughout 2023, Texas congressmen and GOP presidential candidates have been calling for a US military invasion of Mexico, ostensibly to fight the drug cartels. Yet the cartels’ dominance results not from Mexico’s policies, but from the ‘Biden’ administration’s refusal to enforce its own borders. Some ‘partner.’ Why would a relatively prosperous, culturally intact, industrialized oil-producing country like Mexico want to ‘partner’ with a parlous post-collapse USA anyhow? In practice, the ‘partnership’ Zeihan foresees may look more like a BDSM encounter, except there’s no safe word, and Mexico is definitely not going to be the ‘sub.’ The Mexicans, and others, have had it with domineering gringos. Most of the millions of immigrants flooding across the southern border since late 2020 are unskilled, single non-English-speaking men of military age. That isn’t a recipe for demographic, workforce or any other kind of stability. What Zeihan is describing won’t be America. It’s what will replace America. I should pause here and discuss ‘collapse.’ We all know what physical collapse looks like – of a building, let’s say: The structural supports abruptly give way. The walls crumble and fall with a thunderous crash. Everyone inside is crushed and buried. A cloud of dust blankets the area. Then the survivors spend decades debating whether jet fuel can really melt steel girders. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) The collapse of a regime, an economy, a currency or any other human institution doesn’t ‘look like’ anything. There may be poignant associated scenes: A surge of homeless beggars on the street; empty shelves; mobs torching police stations. But we’ve witnessed such scenes without collapse, too. ‘Collapse’ is just a metaphor that we use to mean the abrupt failure of a human institution. What does Zeihan mean by collapse? With respect to Russia and China, it’s plain he means, and hopes, that the Russian and Chinese states will be broken up and replaced by weaker entities – the way the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke up, and was replaced by tiny successor states in Austria, Hungary and the Balkans. Not by coincidence, this longstanding (p 202) neocon fever dream has gained renewed currency of late, at least with respect to Russia. It remains unlikely. I’ll focus on Russia to explain why, just because I know more about Russia. As mentioned earlier, demographics might be Zeihan’s strongest argument for impending collapse, if he would only ‘show his work.’ Absent that, Russian history contradicts Zeihan’s simple-minded view that geography, demography and economics alone shape national destiny. Russia has rebounded from demographic catastrophe three times in a little over a century, twice within living memory. The Bolshevik revolution and subsequent civil war claimed about 10 million Russian lives, out of a population of roughly 125 million. War against German invaders in the 1940s claimed at least 25 million Soviet lives, out of the USSR’s total 1941 population of 195 million, mostly in European Russia. But while regimes rose and fell, there was always some kind of government, and always a Russian state. Russia’s post-Cold War history bolsters the multipolarist view, and highlights the ugliness of Zeihan’s beloved Order. The main reason Russia today struggles demographically is because the Order helped Russian oligarchs loot their own country during the 1990s, well described by conservative author Christopher Caldwell: ‘The transfer of Russia’s natural resources into the hands of KGB-connected Communists, who called themselves businessmen, was a tragic moment for Russia. It was also a shameful one for the West. Western political scientists provided the theft with ideological cover, presenting it as a “transition to capitalism.” Western corporations, including banks, provided the financing … The oligarchs … controlled the privatization … Since the state had owned everything under Communism, this was quite a payout.’ The resulting currency collapse impoverished Russians. Pensioners starved and froze in unheated apartments. There was no work. Young men and women couldn’t afford to start families, and turned to vodka, drugs, crime and prostitution. Life expectancy fell below Bangladesh’s. Russia’s population dropped by 2 million (from a 1992 census of 148.5 million) by 2000. This US-led catastrophe caused a long-lasting drop in fertility because young people quit having kids for a whole decade. Even today, Russia’s population is declining slowly, if UN figures can be trusted. There’s already a dearth of workers to support pensioners. Yet despite that, despite western sanctions and despite a war that the Order forced on it, Russia is flourishing – and winning. Sanctions have backfired: Russia is more self-sufficient than any other big economy. ‘We didn’t kill all the Leopards. We’ll protect those that survived.’Zeihan’s understanding of conditions in Russia is not just years but decades out of date. Apparently he thinks Yeltsin is still president. Get a load of this hasty addendum, written Feb 28, 2022: ‘Russia is being melon-scooped out of global finance as punishment for the Ukraine war … By the time you read this, the world will have a … horrific case study of true financial disintegration. Beset with a population aging into decrepitude and a system that has given up educating the next generation, Russia’s credit collapse is one of but a phalanx of factors capable of ending the Russian state.’ Oops. There’s a lesson here: Never do geostrategic forecasting on the fly. It’s as if Zeihan was utterly unaware of BRICS. Moreover, writing now as someone (unlike Zeihan) with direct recent experience of both the Russian and US education systems, I can assure him the shoe’s entirely on the other foot. It is America that has given up on education, while preserving the physical trappings, fees and milestones. Russian high-school STEM standards are generally more rigorous than those of US universities. This likely explains why the Russians have hypersonic missiles and we don’t. China, of course, has famously ‘collapsed,’ then rebuilt, dynasty after dynasty, over and over again, for thousands of years. This is the millennia-old Chinese mechanism (inefficient and bloody, by western lights) for ending misrule. Is it about to happen again? Unlikely: Here’s one economist’s overly deferential but well-crafted Zeihan takedown. Among other things, he points out that Zeihan has been predicting China’s collapse ‘within a decade’ since 2010. But even if Russia or China has a recession, or a depression, and changes governments, Zeihan is grievously mistaken to think these ancient nation-states are just going to go away. In big famous places like Russia and China, but also in backwaters like Afghanistan and Nicaragua, cultural and social cohesion, along with political and military resolve, have played as big a role in national destiny as demographics and economics, and almost as great a role as geography. Zeihan doesn’t discuss that, because he can’t. It’s simply beyond his ken. Zeihan pounds geography, demography and economics so hard, so deterministically, because that’s what he knows. You can study that stuff in college, so he did. Then right out of school, he got a job ‘strategic forecasting.’ And now, in negative so to speak, in the gaps and shadows that his deterministic arguments leave unaddressed, we glimpse the outlines of all the stuff Zeihan doesn’t understand. He doesn’t seem to know any foreign languages well enough to do field work in them. In theory, you can get by using interpreters or machine translation. But interpreters always have an agenda. Machine translation is plagued by lost nuance and bizarrely skewed idioms. Last I checked, Google hadn’t quite mastered the Russian case system. And it’s only after you’re fluent enough to make real friends and hold conversations that people will open up and tell you what they really think, and why. A closely related shortcoming: Although it sounds like Zeihan has jet-setted all over, he doesn’t seem to have lived anywhere outside the affluent Anglosphere. It follows that he doesn’t know what makes Arabs, Indians, Russians, Chinese, Latinos or Africans – never mind Afghans, Pakistanis or Chechens – really tick. He doesn’t know how their societies work and what communal tricks they have up their sleeves to cope with hard times. What he knows comes from books and articles written in English. A self-described ‘green,’ Zeihan treats us to a surprisingly lucid discussion of the technical limitations of ‘green energy’ (wind and solar), why we’re stuck with fossil fuels for some time to come, and more. It should be required reading for every climate crank. But he dismisses nuclear energy out of hand. And he still buys the foundation myth of man-made climate change: He thinks an infinitesimal carbon increase is ‘bad for the planet.’ ‘The idea that different gases sport different heat-trapping and light-reflecting characteristics is pretty basic science …‘ But the idea that a trivial increase in a trace gas, in a system as heavily buffered as Earth’s atmosphere, couldn’t possibly cause climate catastrophe is even more basic. All assertions to the contrary remain completely non-falsifiable – which is to say, ‘not science.’ As already observed, Zeihan’s ignorance of military affairs is troubling. It appears he’s never been in a military operation, never trained for one, never observed one from the sidelines. Indeed he seems not even to have read very much about them – an odd deficiency for a strategic forecaster. He’s even worse on Covid-19. He gets this much right: The ‘pandemic response’ did cost industries and nations years that they could have used to prepare for the end of the Order. After making that point, he goes full Karen, happily puking up the public-health party line, pretending that Covid was much deadlier than it actually was and that the ‘response’ actually worked, instead of doing vastly more harm than good. By the time he submitted The End for publication in February 2022, all that had been utterly debunked, and those who once promoted it were eager to change the subject. The virus was about as deadly as the forgotten Asian flu of 1958. We a lways knew masks don’t stop respiratory viruses, and we confirmed it again during Covid. We always knew ‘mass containment’ ( lockdowns) would do much harm and no good. The ‘pandemic response’ was an administrative coup d’etat that allowed officials at all levels to suspend the Bill of Rights indefinitely with a snap of their fingers. There’s every reason to think they’ll try it again; that it was a preview of how our rulers plan to keep us in line as the Order collapses. Zeihan would be a more convincing geostrategist if he weren’t so willing to help the Covid Quack Cartel gaslight us. Since we’re talking Covid, I’ll conclude with a couple of demographic ‘elephants in the room’ that Zeihan studiously ignores. They lay waste to his rosy Western Hemisphere demographic scenario. The Covid ‘vaccine’ Zeihan touts was, in fact, an experimental gene therapy. Right after the introduction of the mRNA jab, excess deaths (often from cardiac arrest) among working-age people, ages 18-64, s uddenly leapt 40 percent, a black-swan actuarial event. As you can see from the link above, corporate media and the Quack Cartel insist these are ‘Covid deaths’: a desperate ploy, because even if it were true, it could only mean the jabs make you more likely to die of Covid. (We already know they make you more likely to get Covid. ) We know that the sudden deaths occur overwhelmingly among the jabbed, both because of research like this and because, if the unvaccinated were dropping like flies, the Quack Cartel would be rubbing everyone’s noses in it. Other common effects are miscarriages and stillbirths. And now we now know the jab’s spike mRNA lingers much longer in the body than its makers claimed. Whatever the cause, a 40% surge in excess deaths among working-aged Americans isn’t something a competent ‘geostrategist’ should feel free to ignore. And it’s not just adults: the ‘vaccine’ is being foisted on US children, who are at considerably less risk for bad Covid outcomes than from seasonal influenza. Russia and China deployed different jabs with different technology, an adenovirus vector. It’s still a gene therapy: The weakened adenovirus is used to deliver DNA for the full-length spike protein. Sputnik and Sinovac seem to have been no better at stopping infection than the western jabs. But neither Russia, nor China, nor even the Order’s hostile media propagandists are reporting a wave of sudden deaths or miscarriages among young Russians and Chinese. It seems telling that they haven’t even bothered trying to invent one. Professional trend-spotters with really good math skills now reckon the mRNA jabs have killed more people than the virus. Next, Zeihan – who is openly gay – seems oddly unaware that over 20% of American teenagers suddenly identify as LGBT+. These kids overwhelmingly aren’t LGB, but rather T+, recruited in recent years via the ‘gender-theory’ social contagion promoted by gay activists. It’s unfashionable (not to mention unprofitable) for medical providers to point out that this a mental illness, or that thinking you’re ‘a girl trapped in a boy’s body’ (or vice versa) is a textbook case of delusion. So the standard of ‘care,’ for now, is to affirm the delusion and ‘treat’ the patient with puberty-blocking hormones, whose effects are irreversible if continued more than a few months. Those who provide this ‘care’ acknowledge that kids who irreversibly ‘transition’ rarely have normal sexual function – or the capacity to bear or beget fertile offspring (unless the girls have their eggs frozen beforehand). What if only half stay on the hormones that long? That’s still ten percent of American teenagers who will never reproduce, no matter how much semen Zeihan’s longed-for hordes of migrant laborers pump into them. Moreover, the suicide-attempt rate among trans people is quite high; 41% is the number bandied about. Trans activists often accuse their critics of trying to ‘erase’ them, but it seems they’re well on the way to erasing themselves. I would love to hear Zeihan address the demographic implications of a generation of suicidal, sterile cross-dressers, alongside a mandatory ‘vaccine’ that kills young men and makes women miscarry. But I won’t hold my breath: He makes a very good living telling affluent Americans of a certain worldview pretty much what they want to hear. Don’t get me wrong. I suspect Peter Zeihan is more than just a grifter. Christopher Caldwell, in the 2017 article cited above, briefly mentions the Russiagate hoax, calling it ‘an extraordinary episode in the history of manufacturing opinion’ resting entirely on ‘speculation, arguments from authority and attempts to make repetition do the work of logic.‘ Yet by way of its success in convincing half of Americans that Russia had interfered on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election, Russiagate became the template for an escalating, interrelated series of brazen psy-ops: gender theory, Covid, the 2020 election, the ‘vaccines,’ the Ukraine war, inflation. These continue today, with some success. This ‘public-private partnership,’ orchestrated by regime bureaucrats and transnational corporate interests, deploys mass media, weaponized law enforcement, and political party establishments to defame and silence an array of common enemies. So intense is this assault that some reckon it amounts to ‘fifth-generation warfare’ – specifically a 5GW counterinsurgency that our rulers wage against their own people. Maintaining mental and moral composure under this torrent of disinformation requires us to be adept at pattern recognition. In The End, we identify several: Zeihan’s aversion to sourcing his claims; a deterministic focus on geography, demography and economics; neglect of crucial but harder-to-quantify socio-cultural factors; and a slapdash, often feckless disregard for recent events that contradict him – especially those related to warfare, Russia, China and the ‘pandemic response.’ And here’s another pattern: Zeihan’s most absurd claims all lean in the same direction, promoting military intervention abroad and technocratic tyranny at home. Zeihan may look like just another sketchy analyst selling questionable forecasts to affluent midwits. Most who buy his product, I assume, do so to figure out how to hedge their retirement accounts against hard times. But given that last pattern we spotted, it seems worth asking whether Zeihan might be the face of a sophisticated, public-private 5GW project akin to those I mentioned above. Some of its goals might include quelling (or at least delaying) financial panic, stock market volatility, and hyperinflation – as the dollar circles the drain – by lulling American investors into a false sense of security, and convincing them that we’re in for a soft landing, at least compared to everybody else.

To: ggersh who wrote (202734)	11/17/2023 8:27:30 PM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 220394

alt-way to approach stuff happening on the southern border just take a few days from the word "go" Am guessing USA can do same, but ONLY if the authorities wish to do Am guessing the four families shall never see the light of day one or another way scmp.com Myanmar cybercrime kingpin dead, family handed over to China - Ming Xuechang dies of self-inflicted gunshot wound, Chinese state news service say - Ming and three of his relatives wanted in China for defrauding and detaining Chinese citizens, among other offences Josephine Ma Published: 9:00pm, 17 Nov, 2023 The suspected head of a Myanmar-based cybercrime syndicate is dead and three relatives in Chinese custody, just days after warrants were issued in China for their arrest. Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday that Ming Xuechang, also known as Myin Shaw Chang, “committed suicide for fear of punishment as the Myanmese side hunted him down on Wednesday night”. Beijing has ramped up pressure on Myanmar’s junta to clamp down on the sprawling cybercrime industry, which has reportedly scammed and trapped hundreds of thousands of people from China. China's telecoms fraud crackdown with Myanmar may help workers trapped in scam rooms Ming, 69, was a member of Myanmar’s Shan State legislature and a former member of the Kokang Leadership Committee, which is backed by the junta government to rule the restive area in the northern part of Shan State. Ming owned the infamous Crouching Tiger Villa, a large telecoms scam compound in Kokang. Myanmar scam networks evade Chinese crackdown as battle along border continues 2 Nov 2023 State-run Myanmar Radio and Television said Ming died while being treated in hospital for a “self-inflicted gunshot wound from his own pistol”. Police in Myanmar also arrested Ming’s son Ming Guoping, daughter Ming Julan and granddaughter Ming Zhenzhen and handed them over to the Chinese police on Thursday, according to Xinhua. Ming Guoping, 42, is a leader of the Kokang Border Guard Force, which operates under the command of the Myanmese military. Police in the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou offered rewards of up to 500,000 yuan (US$68,600) for information leading to the arrest of the four. Anyone helping them to evade arrest would face prosecution in China, according to the warrant issued on Sunday. “Investigations by Chinese police have found that the gang, headed by Ming Xuechang, has long committed telecoms and online fraud targeting Chinese citizens,” Xinhua reported, citing China’s Ministry of Public Security. “[The activities involved] a huge amount of illicit gains, and … severe violent crimes including intentional homicide, intentional injury and unlawful detention.” Malaysian group urges China to pressure Myanmar over scam gang crisis 17 Oct 2022 Xinhua did not give details about the alleged homicides. But The Irrawaddy, a Thailand-based news service specialising in news from Myanmar, reported that Ming killed Chinese captives who tried to flee as they were being moved to another compound on October 20. The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), an armed rebel group based in Kokang, made similar claims. The MNDAA is part of the “Three Brotherhood Alliance” that attacked the junta government last month, taking control of many key places in northern Myanmar. The Chinese authorities have not commented on the reports. China is also targeting the leaders of the “four big families” which control most of the casinos and cybercrime compounds in Kokang, in its efforts to crush the thriving cybercrime industry in northern Myanmar. Liu Zhengqi, CEO of Fully Light Group, headed one of the families and was reportedly arrested by Chinese police when he travelled to Yunnan province. Southeast Asians trapped in the scam rooms of Myanmar are hoping to be rescued as China cracks down on cyber fraud along its border. Photo: Shutterstock Trapped scam victims in Myanmar pin hopes on China’s cybercrime crackdown: ‘I want my freedom back’ - Beijing has shown it is ‘serious’ about tackling the scam issue, issuing warrants for Chinese fugitives believed to be at the heart of the multibillion-dollar fraud industry - Desperation mounts among those trapped in scam compounds in north Shan State further from the border area, unsure whether they will ever be rescued Aidan Jonesand Alyssa Chen Published: 6:45pm, 19 Oct, 2023 Southeast Asians trapped in the scam rooms of Myanmarfear an ongoing Chinese blitz on cyber fraud companies in the remote northern border area may be their last chance to escape for many months ahead. There are around 120,000 people working in the scam rooms of Myanmar, according to rough estimates by the United Nations, split between areas run by armed groups in Mywaddy along the western border of Thailand and in Shan State next to China’s Yunnan province. Pressure has mounted on Beijing to use its leverage over the armed groups along its border – including the powerful United Wa State Party – where major scam compounds operate with impunity, overwhelmingly staffed by Asian workers, many forced into committing online fraud.China says a crackdown in Myanmar’s northern Shan State has led to thousands of scam suspects returned – including 23 “financial backers” – and major players in the Wa polity listed on arrest warrants, as Beijing loses patience with a criminal enterprise targeting its people. The cross-border action by Chinese authorities has also spurred hopes of release among those who remain in guarded compounds further from the immediate frontier zone. “I want my freedom back, and I don’t want to lose this chance,” one Malaysian scam worker in northern Myanmar told This Week in Asia. “We’re hoping the raids are for real, rather than just for show. I’m afraid the Chinese operations might miss this place … I cannot wait to feel freedom again.” Malaysians are coveted by the scam operators for their education, especially English and Chinese language skills, allowing them to target marks in China, where billions of dollars have been conned from citizens in investment fraud, romance scams and extortion. More than 570 Malaysians have returned from the scam centres, but scores more have been reported to authorities as trapped in scam centres, according to official statistics. China has issued arrest warrants for Wa officials Chen Yanban (left) and Xiao Yankui. Photo: Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China Beijing gets toughIn recent weeks, Beijing has moved to tackle the scam issue, issuing warrants for scores of Chinese fugitives believed to be at the apex of the multibillion-dollar fraud industry. Earlier this week, Chinese authorities made public an arrest warrant for two Wa officials – Bao Yanban and He Chuntian – as “important leaders of a telecommunication fraud crime group in northern Myanmar”. “They are involved in the long-term organisation of scam dens, targeting Chinese citizens,” said the warrant issued by the public security ministry, adding the suspects had made “huge amounts” of money in an “extremely vile” criminal enterprise. The rare public admonishment of officials from the Wa, an autonomous Chinese ethnic group who use the border area to produce and traffic drugs and have a Chinese-armed standing army of about 25,000, drew a sudden reaction from a leadership which routinely denies all allegations of involvement in crime. ‘We can kill you here’: inside the lawless Chinese-run scam hubs of Myanmar 22 Jul 2023 On Monday, the UWSP said it had “withdrawn” Bao’s politburo membership, expelled him from the party and military, and stripped him of his role as head of the construction ministry. He Chuntian was stripped of his role as mayor of a district in Wa State, according to the UWSP statement. It did not give details on the current whereabouts of Bao – who also goes by the name Chen Yanban – or He, who is also known as Xiao Yankui. Chinese state media carried a notice urging the pair to hand themselves in if they want “leniency” from the criminal justice system. “The warrants are a signal by China to the Chinese population – and the wider region – that they’re serious about taking action,” a senior diplomatic source close to the scam issue said, requesting anonymity as they are not authorised to speak. “The warrants issued are for significant players,” the source said, adding Myanmar’s isolated junta had also come under pressure to appease Beijing by pulling in scams run by the border militias it retains control over. ‘They will punish you’: Malaysian’s death connected to internet scam in Thailand Yet desperation is mounting for those in scam compounds in north Shan State further from the border area where the crackdowns have taken place so far. Trafficked workers from Thailand say they are unsure if China will free them – or if they will eventually be expected to find their own way south through a dangerous thicket of armed groups. “No one can help us here … we’re not that important,” one Thai person tricked into travelling to Myanmar to scam said in a message to a friend shared with This Week in Asia. “Please take care of my mum for me. I hope to contact you again in a year when I reach my [sales] quota. I love you bro.” The only routes home are to hit daily quotas to scam for endless months in the hope of being released, or to pay a ransom fee to break a “contract” of up to US$13,000. Victims must hit daily quotas to scam for endless months in the hope of being released, or pay a ransom fee to break a “contract”. Photo: Shutterstock Conditions inside the scam parks vary, but beatings and collective punishments are common for failing to reach “sales” targets or attempting to escape. Scam gangs also routinely sell on their workers to rival operations in a cycle which has pushed untold thousands deeper into Myanmar. Regional security officials say the money the scam gangs make is diverted through casinos and converted into hard-to-trace cryptocurrencies. It then finds its way into property and luxury goods from Bangkok to Singapore, the latter of which last month seized more than US$1 billion in assets linked to Chinese criminals’ money laundering from online gaming and scam rooms. Concern about online and phone scams is rising across the region. Photo: Shutterstock Chinese police order arrest of alleged Myanmar crime family over vast telecoms fraud operation - Warrants issued for Kokang politician and his three adult children accused of targeting Chinese nationals - Rewards of up to US$68,400 offered for information leading to an arrest Mandy Zuoin Shanghai Published: 8:41pm, 12 Nov, 2023 Police in China have issued arrest warrants for four people in northern Myanmar accused of spearheading major telecoms fraud operations targeting Chinese nationals. The Wenzhou Public Security Bureau in China’s eastern Zhejiang province issued the warrants on Sunday for Ming Xuechang – a politician in Myanmar’s Kokang region – and his three adult children. The four are wanted for allegedly operating scams that target Chinese citizens and involve a huge amount of money. Ming Xuechang, 69, is a former member of Myanmar’s Shan State legislature and a former member of the Kokang Leadership Committee. One of his sons, Ming Guoping, a militia squadron leader in Kokang, is also wanted along with Ming Xuechang’s daughters 42-year-old Ming Julan and 27-year-old Ming Zhenzhen, both from Lincang in Yunnan province. The authorities are offering rewards of up to 500,000 yuan (US$68,400) in each of the cases for information leading to an arrest. Wenzhou police have issued arrest warrant for four members of a family in Myanmar for allegedly running a massive fraud operation. Photo: Handout Public concern is rising about the scams, which often target and entrap people from China and Southeast Asia. China has stepped up efforts to tackle the issue this year as cases of victims have spread online. Many online posts describe ways that people were tricked and then violently forced to engage in investment fraud, romance scams and extortion on behalf of the syndicates. The money generated is often diverted through casinos and converted into hard-to-trace cryptocurrencies. Beijing has responded by targeting Chinese fugitives believed to be at the apex of the multibillion-dollar frauds. Similar warrants was issued last month for Bao Yanban and He Chuntian, two officials from Myanmar’s Wa State who allegedly made “huge amounts” of money in an “extremely vile” criminal enterprise. China's telecoms fraud crackdown with Myanmar may help workers trapped in scam rooms Bordering southwestern China’s Yunnan province, both the Kokang and Wa regions have a high level of autonomy and a high proportion of the population is ethnic Chinese. The Ming family is believed to be influential in Kokang and was reportedly involved in a bloody conflict in the region on October 20 when they tried to relocate people forced into scam activities. According to unverified videos and images circulating online, a number of people were shot or buried alive after some tried to flee. Last month, state news agency Xinhua reported that more than 4,600 suspects in telecoms network fraud in northern Myanmar had been successfully captured and handed over to China, including 205 fugitives profiled in online wanted notices.