Twenty things about The Mess that no one has mentioned, so far. From tariffs to signalgate to DOGE to Houthis and...

I've been distracted by local vexations. But truly, it's time to weigh back into this era in America, that Robert Heinlein accurately forecast as The Crazy Years. 

This is a long one. But here are things you ought to know, that you've not seen in the news. Starting with...

 == The Tariff War ==

* Ninety-five years ago a Republican Congress passed the biggest tariff hike til Trump. Which even Republican economists now call the dumbest policy move ever. The thing that swerved a mere stock market downturn into the Great Depression. 

Want it explained in a way that's painfully funny? But sure. Some of you already knew that. 

* Only have you considered how Trump's tariffs on China give Xi and the Beijing Politburo exactly what they want?

China's economy has been in decline for two years, with bad prospects ahead, especially for youth unemployment. The Tariff War will worsen things for millions of Chinese... but not for Xi!  What Xi gets out of this - personally - is someone to blame for China's already-underway recession! 

"It's all America's fault!"  Thus solidifying his own continued grip on power. He was already doing that, riling (unearned) anti-American fever. Only Trump now proves his case! While ensuring that the USA swirls down the same economic toilet. 

Always look at who benefits! So far it sure looks like Putin and Xi.

* Oh, and this... Want the biggest reason China's economy was already in decline? No one in media is touting that the USA was already experiencing a renaissance of manufacturing. 

HOW is that not a major part of the story? As a direct result of the 2021 Pelosi bills, investment in U.S. domestic factories skyrocketed!**   Shortening supply chains, reducing use of toxic ocean freighters and dependence on China. Only now, if it continues, Trump will claim "My tariffs did it!"

Because Democrats have the polemical skills of a tardigrade.

(Oh, and the USA has been energy independent and a net exporter of oil etc. since Obama. Care to bet? "Drill baby drill?" The Saudis are already scared. They won't allow it.)

== Want another aspect you hadn't considered? ==

* This nutty Tariff War will end the status of the US dollar as the world reserve currency. 

It is fast underway, as we speak. Long a fond goal of the Chinese politburo, along with Putin and the Saudis. All of them our close friends. Though even our actual allies won't trust the dollar anymore.

Take a look at what's happening with the dollar... and be proud. So proud.

== Might a Tariff Gambit have been done better?

* By effectively banning Chinese imports to the U.S., Trump is sending commerce into chaos and prices skyward. Still, while it's totally dumb and risky, I suppose that a carefully selective tarrif tiff might have worked.  

If the aim was to replace China as our top supplier, it could have been done tactically, by favoring friendlier cheap-labor nations like Vietnam and Malaysia.  First, that would keep supply chains going. It would also help to solidify those nations as allies in opposing Beijing ambitions southward. And give US businesses a way to transition more gently.

Better yet... Mexico. 

While our southern neighbor has been fast transforming into a middle class nation - largely thanks to trade with the U.S. - it's still pretty cheap labor. Only with many added bonuses. First, as Mexicans become more prosperous, they buy a lot of stuff from the USA. Three dollars out of every ten that we spend on Mexican value-added goods - say in maquiladora parts-assembly plants - comes right back. 

Second, U.S. manufacturers will tell you they invest more in US factories when they can partner with Mexican ones. (Shall we wager over that assertion?)

(*Elsewhere I explain why turning Mexico middle class has been one of America's greatest accomplishments! I can prove it. For example, during all of the Right's ravings about illegal immigration, do you hear that it's Mexicans flooding the border? No you don't. The fraction of border-crashers who are Mexican citizens has been in steep decline for a decade. Increasingly, it's refugees from Central American right-wing caudillo regimes and so on. Because most Mexicans can now find decent work at home. Try actually tracking such things for yourself.)

Want another selective tariff that could have advanced U.S. interests? 

How about we use tariffs to pressure countries to stop buying Russian oil, till Putin withdraws from Ukraine? And punish countries like Panama and Gabon and all the other 'flags of convenience' till they stop shilling for Russian tankers that are evading sanctions and rusting into ecological time bombs? More generally, notice that Trump made no actual demands!

Instead? Notice that Russia was left out of any mention on Trumps list of a zillion super-tariffed nations. Why would that be?

Because while Don howls words occasionally toward Putin -- purely for show -- he never ever ever ever does any actual acts that negatively affect his Kremlin master. 

Ever.

== The distilled frothy essence atop the poop pile ==

I could go on about the Trump Tariff War. But of course it boils down to two things that should be plain to anyone. 

First: it's primarily the USA and our friends who will get harmed, but never our enemies...

... and second: it's all jibbering lunacy! Perp'd by a clown car of capering idiots. 

Dig it: during Trump v.1.0 (#45) he at least appointed a veneer of adults to top positions... then got pissed off when ALL of those adults (Tillerson, McMaster, Barr etc.) turned on him, denouncing him as a raving moron and Kremlin agent. 

The one absolute fact about Trump v 2.0 (#47) is the total absence of any adults in the room. 

None. Anywhere. Not one appointee who is actually suited or qualified for the job. Just toadies. Lickspittle and (my personal theory) blackmailed to ensure utter loyalty. See the pattern. Because no one in media - not even a single liberal pundit - is tracking the obvious.

== A few more things to notice ==

I was gonna do all the tariff stuff as 'blips' but there was no way to condense those complicated aspects. So, here are a few items that may qualify as 'blips':

SIGNAL GATE. Remember the Signal Idiocy? 

("Oh, Brin, that was so 'last week.'" Yeah yeah. Libs never notice that a core KGB/MAGA tactic is to distract from one scandal by moving on to the next one!)

Sure, liberal and moderate media did an okay job blaring at some aspects of the insipidly dumb "Signalgate" Scandal, wherein a dozen top Trumpian cabinet officials illegally used an non-secure, unvetted chat system to giggle-blather top secret information about a looming US military action against the Yemeni Houthi rebel enclave... while one member of the chat was even in a notoriously non-secure Moscow hotel, at that very moment! 

And of course, everyone in media shouted that our National Security Adviser invited a top-level critic/reporter into the chat without vetting nor any participant (not even the Director of National 'Intelligence') even noticing.   

Still and alas, as always, no one in either moderate or liberal media commented that:

1. Not a single military officer was part of the conversation about a major military operation. Sure, it's consistent with the all-out Republican campaign against the entire senior officer corps. The men and women who have been most dedicated to service and fact-centered responsibility. And competence! 

No, no, we can't have anyone like that in a conversation about a military operation. Some common sense might leak in and pollute the purity of blithering idiocy.

2. Um... but... WHY attack the Houthis? I am sure someone in media must have asked that, but I never saw it.  Indeed, the dumbitude aspects of "Signalgate" perfectly distracted from that bigger question.

Think about it. The Houthis are at war with the Saudis. And every Republican administration, without exception, does the bidding of the Saudi Royal House instantly and without question. Bush Sr., Bush Jr. and Trump. Good doggies.

But are WE served by enraging potential new bin Ladens into swearing revenge on America?

Sure, the Houthis are Shiite friends of Iran... and Iran is best buds with Putin. But then so are the Saudis... and so is Trump. Confused yet? Then look for the common thread. 

What they ALL want - and seek from Trump - is the fall of American liberal democracy. And any sign of a world governed by a transparent Rule of Law. 

Distilled in its essence, the Houthis are the least culpable party in any of this. All they want is to be left alone. Oh, their current leadership is likely a pack of radical jerks. But if a fair referendum were held, 90%+ of the population of North Yemen would vote for independence and peace and membership in the family of nations. 

Above all, do we really need more enemies, right now?

== And WHY the DOGE mass firings? ==

Ay Carumba!  I've seen NO ONE in media or politics even try to penetrate this question!

Dig it: The oligarchy and their foreign backers don't give a damn about the Department of Education. Or massive firings at the VA or Social Security, or Commerce or Agriculture or Parks and so on. There's no underlying goal of "efficiency." 

If they wanted that, they could have done it the way that Al Gore did with his massively effective efficiency campaign in the 90s.

No. All the slashed civil servants I just mentioned, and thousands more were attacked and their services to citizens cauterized for one reason. The same old reason that liberal and moderate pundits always fall-for. Distraction from the real targets.

1. I mentioned the United States senior military officer corps. The smart and savvy and dedicated generals and admirals must be brought to heel!

2. The FBI and all related law professionals. Um duh? But above all...

3. The Internal Revenue Service. The greatest accomplishment of the 2021 Pelosi bills was to fully fund the IRS, which had been starved by GOP Congresses into using 1970s computers and crippled for lack of personnel from auditing the super-rich tax cheaters... 

...cheaters who were left terrified by that legislation!  And I assert that the topmost reason they pushed hard for Donald Trump was to get this opportunity to re-gut the IRS.

And failure to even note or mention that aspect only proves my point about the moderate and liberal and Democrat political and punditry caste.  Oh, many of them are decent people, with far lower rates of every turpitude than their corrupt, perverted and blackmailed GOP counterparts...

...but smart? 

Tardigrades. Tardigrades all the way down.

== There's so much more... ==

...but no time or room for any more this weekend. 

Oh I am sure that some of the items I cite above were mistaken or cockeyed. But suffice it to say that those in media who failed to note any of them are proving to be almost as incompetent and blind as the fools who ran the Harris campaign and put us into this mess.

But YOU don't have to be blind!  

You can spread word about some of these things. Get others to see what has NOT been spoon-fed to them by simplistic media. And if you get any of the complicit dopes to put up wager stakes, I'll happily provide ways and means to take their money.

Heinlein had it right.  The way to ultimately emerge from The Crazy Years is to spread sanity.

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**The idiocy of Kamala Harris's advisers, for not emphasizing the return of U.S. manufacturing instead of just shouting "Abortion!" ten million times - disqualifies them from any future role in Democratic politics. Kamala herself was fine. Her political mavens should have no future role.

Supply Side 'economics' without a single success -- except a rising oligarchy

Philstockworld has republished my most devastating evisceration of the Thatcherite insanity called "Supply Side" (voodoo) economics, a cult incantation that has not one... even one... ever even one... successful prediction or outcome to its credit - an unrelenting record of devastating failures and trillion dollar ripoffs.  

Alas, almost none of my eviscerations is used currently by those public figures who oppose the madness!

Wretched-stupid evil on one side... vs. goodguys who are too dumb to offer effective persuasion on the other. I'd say we were doomed except... science will likely rescue us. And relentless/ingenious innovation. And goodwill. (And possibly machines of loving grace?)

We'll get back to this topic. But first... in "Planetary Politics when the Nation-State Falters," in the next Noema Magazine, Nathan Gardels talks about power devolution from the "westphalian" stasis.  

== Supply Side did supply… a rising oligarchy ==

"Fifty years of tax cuts for the rich failed to trickle down even once:" David Hope of the London School of Economics examined 18 developed countries over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015 -- countries that slashed taxes on the wealthy vs. those that didn’t. Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn’t, the study found. The analysis discovered one major change: The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered without trickling down to the middle class… 

...exactly as I have told you repeatedly Adam Smith himself both observed and predicted. (In the historical extreme case, the 1780s, the rich in France refused to let themselves be taxed, not even in order to save the nation that protected them… so it stopped protecting them and they rode tumbrels.) 

 “In fact, if we look back into history, the period with the highest taxes on the rich — the postwar period — was also a period with high economic growth and low unemployment.” Also vast infrastructure development and the best era, ever, for business startups and entrepreneurship.

The Capitalism vocabulary trap.

One of the worst aspects of today's absurd polemical wars is vocabulary. By attacking all "capitalism" the left destroys their cred, since highly regulated market enterprise has harnessed human creative competition vastly better than all other allocation systems from kingships to socialist/communist systems. Marx described how such market competitive systems CAN be destroyed by cheating, as described in Das Kapital. But Marx blithely assumed that failure mode was inevitable and the Rooseveltean era proved it's not. 

Please escape the vocabulary trap. The word you are looking for are oliogarchy, cheat-aristocracy and feudalism, all of which Adam Smith and the US founders denounced as the mortal enemies of enterprise.

Only back to the key point. GOPpers yammering about spendthrift Democrats 'breaking the bank' or 'sending deficits skyrocketing' are, of course, hypocrites whose party is always less fiscally responsible than Democrats, and I mean always* and can prove it in a large stakes wager. 

One noted economist-pundit apologist for that monstrous movement said: "...let the implications sink in. Then remember this year’s recovery depended heavily on massive fiscal spending—stimulus payments, unemployment benefits, etc...."

Well... yeah... um wasn't that the point? As usual, neither he nor his rightist peers ever mention that the Dems' Keynesian stimulus measures are still smaller, in total, than the Republican's "supply side" attempts at stimulus! (Though tsunami tax gifts to the rich.)

With this difference:

Those Supply Side lamprey-sucks realized zero predicted outcomes - (in science, or any non-cult, that outcome is disqualifying) - while plummeting money velocity and sending wealth disparities and deficits skyrocketing. At French-Revolution levels of disparity, the rich soak up all real estate and flaunt purchases of nonexistent art.

Keynesian stimuli simply work, especially when enacted by sincere Keynesians who pay down debt in good times, like Jerry Brown, Bill Clinton and Gavin Newsom. Working class wealth, well-being and spending have risen, manufacturing is in-shoring, money velocity rising, tax revenues climbing. More will do more. There certainly is some risk of inflation, but not post-Vietnam-style stagflation.

Only here's the key point that no rightist pundit has the honesty to mention... and those poor-dumb-schlump democrats are to stupid to mention. The amounts of 'stimulus' done across recent decades by Republican Supply Side cultists and now by liberal Keynesians are roughly the same!

I repeat -- The amounts of 'stimulus are roughly the same. With spectacularly different outcomes.

Any 'pundit' who neglects to point this out is stunningly dishonest. Or... as I've said... a sincere and honest and politically stoopid Democrat.

The Wealth... and Infrastructure... of Nations

With release of Joe Biden's new Infrastructure and Stimulus Plans, reactions have gone as predicted. Mitch McConnell and the entire Putin Party have declared their intention to block everything and allow nothing. Standard incantations are flowing -- from democrat deficits! to cutting taxes and federal spending makes jobs and capital! And then Sen. Tim Scott, in his 'rebuttal' to President Biden's Congressional speech, accused him of breaking his promise to be a 'uniter.' (More on that below.)

Okay, let's stop letting this be about 'sides.' Sure, there definitely are sides, and one of them is insane. Still, our real enemy is a meme claiming that all points of view are equivalent and not subject to factual refutation. 

It is an incantation that's clung-to desperately by the farthest left and today's entire, mad right. It implies that just repeating your own side's magical incantations will suffice. In fact, even pointing out a flaw in some small, sub-component makes you a partisan of evil.

No. At best you will only ever be 99% right. And criticism is the only known antidote to error. So...

Let's instead talk facts. Focusing on that word-of-the-month "infrastructure!"

== The two diametrically opposite ways that the US and China 'invested' $20 Trillions each, since 1995. ==

Both China and the US spent the last 25+ years pouring trillions into plans to vastly expand their productive capacity, infrastructure, skilled labor force and R&D. 

China's approach was simple: fund vast projects like high speed rail and whole new cities, while lending/investing in 'companies' that were in large part State Champions. Partly due to beneficent trade policies by the West, China's approach worked spectacularly well.

So you ask: "What was our method? And how did the American approach fare? 

Glad you asked. Our approach was called "Supply Side Economics." Summarized, it was: snuff out every method used to create the prosperous and dynamic American Pax since 1940. Virtually end taxpayer-funded investment in R&D, infrastructure, labor force training and so on, because that's "picking winners and losers." 

Instead of using the mixed-economy methods that built America from 1940 to 1995, Supply Side insists that we give many trillions in tax cuts and other direct benefits to the top 0.01%, on the theory that they would then turn and invest those massive cash infusions into... well... factories, productive capacity, competitively oriented infrastructure, R&D and the 'job creators' own, expanding work force. 

Supply Side (SS) was the most expensive national development experiment in all of human history. So how'd it go? 

Well, the results are clear. With some notable exceptions, rich people don't do that!

Adam Smith explained, way back in The Wealth of Nations, that when they get a lot richer, aristocrats and oligarchs tend to pour any wealth increase into rent-seeking ("rentier") asset bubbles and passive (slow money velocity) investments, and into capital preservation for their spoiled inheritance brats. 

And into cheating. Aristocratic cheating of the very sort that the American Founders - inspired in part by Adam Smith - rebelled against.

Let's be even clearer.

Of the half-dozen major - and hundreds of minor - experiments in Supply Side, not one of them ever approached anywhere near coming true. Every confident prediction - e.g. that budget deficits would vanish due to burgeoning economic activity - every single SS prediction failed diametrically to happen as forecast. 

That is 100%. And when you stick with an utterly disproved hypothesis, that's not science. It's a cult.

== Then there is Money Velocity... ==

Among the most powerful of all economic metrics is one that conservative mavens and "economists" absolutely hate ever to mention, because it eviscerates every cult incantation that they cling to. But it also happens to be a crucial measure of economic health.

It's money velocity. The rate at which each dollar changes hands, generating wealth and prosperity and growth, whenever it is rapid.

So let's talk money velocity, money velocity, and money velocity. 

It PLUMMETS after every tax gift to the aristocracy. 

It rises (duh?) with every Keynsian infusion into workers doing stuff. 

Useful stuff like infrastructure. 

Period. Always, and that is always.

Bet me on this. 

Oh please. 

Solid metrics, adjudged by panels of retired senior military officers. 

I will have your house.

== Then there is 'fiscal responsibility ==

And now the hypocrites screech about deficits. 

First, Democrats score better than Republicans in every metric of good governance and outcomes, including fiscal responsibility - like whether across any 4 year administration any effort is made to turn the rate-of-change of debt-gathering toward negative. In other words planting your foot on the deficit brake or the accelerator.

Democrats - across entire 4-year administrations - always try to slow the debt train, at least a bit, and sometimes succeed. 

Republicans never even remotely try. 

Bet me on that, too.

== Allons enfants de la patrie...==

Aside. Ruling castes throughout history have rationalized that they were inherent geniuses or better by nature - not happenstance or luck - than the 'mob' who must never be allowed to get their hands on power. We see this in the narratives justifying outrageous Republican electoral cheating to hold power when they lose almost every popular vote. We see it in appeals to racial and other divisions. We see it in the excuses made for skyrocketing wealth disparities and CEO compensation packages that are unconnected to any metric of actual company health, voted by their pals in an incestuous clade.

Making one ask: "Where do you honestly expect such insatiability to lead?" The most fundamental 'tell' that these folks vastly over-rate their own intelligence - and hire flatterers to reinforce the stories - is their stunning ignorance of actual history.

No, no. Your refuges on private Patagonian or Ural mountains, or on South Island or Vanuatu or under the sea and not safe. Safety can be found by starting now top work on your reputation as decent human beings.

Back to topic.

== Time for a Roosevelt ==

So now Joe Biden wants to invest in productive capacity, infrastructure, labor force and R&D? And AOC & co. are criticizing it for falling short of their Green New Deal?

Okay, calm down there, hoss. AOC is brilliant... maybe even 10% as much so as her fans think. (Yes that brilliant!) And she is savvy about her role. By criticizing Biden's plan, she widens the conceptual Overton Window to the left, helping Joe look 'moderate.' And that is a GOOD thing, fools. It is savvy, team politics! And it is no license for any of you to go hating on Biden, or raging at incremental progress.

On the other hand, I need to say something about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), a fashion among some on the left. MMT is stunning, incantatory bullshit and a betrayal of actual, working Keynsianism. There, I said it. The left has its shibboleths, too. They are just a lot fewer and less divorced from all objective reality or ethical behavior. But keep an eye on them, too.

As for the Biden Infrastructure/stimulus Bill... well... there may be flaws in the plan, sure. If there were sane opponents to heed, I would listen to criticism, the only known antidote to error. An era of negotiation among adults, based on factual evidence, may someday return. Only right now...

 

...right now Republicans are in no position to criticize at any level, in any way!

 

In fact, there is no greater hypocrisy than for a Republican to chide anyone about fiscal responsibility, or economics, and that especially includes their volcanically hypocritical sexual-predator finger wagging on morality! (Bet me - oh please - which party features 3x as many sexual predators among their recent and present upper ranks! Actually it's 6x! But I am a cautious wagerer.)

But on today's topic -- totally aside from their massive turpitudes and treasons, there is the simple fact of spectacular incompetence and desperation to cling to voodoo incantations. We've seen nothing like it since the 1860s! 

Except that those earlier confederates at least had one virtue--just one--that these present-day jackasses utterly lack.

Guts.

Alas, unlike those gray-clad, brave fools of the 1860s, today's Foxite-putinists will never, ever bet manly wager stakes on any of their mad assertions! 

If you try to get them to actually step up and back up their incantations, the craven cultists always rave and spew and caper and jibber and distract... and then run away. Above all, they will dodge ever escrowing (with a reputable attorney) actual wager stakes over any provable/falsifiable assertion. 

Which ultimately shows that environmentalists are right about the effects of pollution mixed with alcohol. 

Something has happened to confederate balls.

International affairs... and China Redux

Turmoil  in Hong Kong. A trade war that turns out to not be so "easy to win." Chinese companies replacing western ones drilling for middle eastern oil. Threats aimed at Taiwan. Accusations of currency manipulation. Ongoing Intellectual Property ripoffs.... I won't talk about any of those things in today's turn toward the east.

In fact, let's start with some good news for a change. 

Announced in 1978, China’s “Green Great Wall” project aims to plant 400 million hectares of new forests (spanning 42 percent of China’s landmass) by 2050. ... and now... "Alipay’s ‘crowd’-planted trees not only comprise a growing carbon sink, offsetting China’s high emissions, but also aid in building this 4,500-kilometer ecological barrier to combat land degradation. Over the past 20 years, China and India have contributed one-third of the planet’s increased foliage.” Now “green points” are being earned by Chinese citizens for engaging in eco-better activities like walking. These can be used to help plant trees.  

        (Via Abundance Insider.)

So much for the good. A recent posting of mine caused a lot of buzz regarding some of the state-sponsored mythologies and rationalizations for conflict that are now pouring from Beijing. If you haven't seen it, I offer at least half a dozen insights into China you've never seen elsewhere.

What are PRC leaders trying to achieve? And what narratives are they using to justify a coming "clash of civilizations?" And how insightful was Mao's demand that the masses "Combat Liberalism"?  

== International affairs ==

For foreign consumption: Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged countries not to "close their doors and hide behind them.”  Xi said there was no need for "civilizations to clash with each other.”…” No civilization is superior over others.” 

Of course ironies abound. For millennia, China closed its doors and declared the Central Kingdom to be so inherently superior that it had nothing to learn from outside cultures. Of course this was a mistake of titanic magnitude. 

But more important than history is what they do today. Yes, there is immense savvy and sagacity in their neo-mercantilist dedication to national development — the PRC leadership caste is made up largely of former engineers, not Wall Street parasites, slumlords, casino moguls and shyster-lawyers. Hence they are much better short term tacticians. Still, they appear to be poor at strategic overview of long-term consequences.

Our post World War II Rising World - from the rapid recoveries of Japan and Germany etc. to the spectacular rise of China - was built upon a plan crafted by FDR and Cordell Hull, then George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, for Pax Americana to do what no other empire did, favoring overseas industrial development by buying a hundred trillion dollars worth of crap we never needed. In China’s case, especially, this was the fifth time their only-ever friend came to their aid. This was policy -- to deliberately behave differently from every previous empire. And it worked. You're welcome.

But it's one thing to get rich selling us stuff. It is another to steal the inventiveness that enabled us to do that, thus killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

The final irony is that Xi and his factotums tell a very different story for internal consumption. Desperately seeking to unify the nation by riling up jingoism and fiery resentment, they stoke a sense of destiny and grievance at two levels. First simplistic public memes about revenge for colonialism (none of which applies to the USA, whatsoever, and we need to fiercely reject such guilt trips). Then second at an intellectual level.

Elsewhere I describe some of the rationalizations that are pouring from Chinese government think Tanks like Tsinghua University, where scholars like Feng Xiang work out “logically” how only one form of governance — a permanently centralized, pseudo-Leninist party apparat — can possibly guide humanity through a minefield of future challenges, These range from automation-driven unemployment and artificial intelligence to environmental stress and other dangers. 

They claim that this central party hierarchy will not at all (except in every way) replicate the ancient, dreary failures of imperial-feudalism. 

Moreover, in a final irony, this centralized, all-controlling state can never be asked or expected to wither away into Marxism’s idealized-liberated individualist anarchy, because it will always be necessary, under siege and attack from hostile forces. (How convenient for those whose personal self-interest lies in that apparatus being forever-needed.) 

In other words, the very last connection to actual, Marxian Marxism has been cut. These rationalizations are intelligent, well-articulated... and spectacularly dishonest in their tendentiously pre-decided conclusions, and especially their omissions. 

I’ll not repeat that error by tendentiously declaring their conclusions to be wrong! I don’t know — no one can. Indeed it may be that confucian-meritocratic hierarchy is the best way to guide humanity to a soft landing in a benign future. I doubt it, and I have evidence to back up my argument. But I was trained in the catechism of science: I Might Be Wrong. 

No, the most telling thing about this debate is that it is not a debate. Oligarchs of all kinds are declaring grand assumptions to justify the re-establishment of hierarchical rule over unruly (democratic) mobs, then commanding their hired intellectuals to justify that hierarchy. I portrayed this in EXISTENCE. The rationalizations of billionaires are remarkably similar to those of commissars.

No bad habit is more likely to convince the coming AI minds that human “sapience” is over-rated, and that we cannot be trusted with a burnt match.

== Influence at universities ==

Not to oversimplify. But one action could make a huge difference. It begins at U.S. universities, where foreign students -- including one-third of a million Chinese -- swarm across our campuses.

It used to be that when America, Canada and the west took in hundreds of thousands of foreign students, we got a win-win. We'd skim off the top 10% and make them Americans, thus acquiring loads of international expertise for free, along with great, brilliant citizens...

... and we'd send the rest of those graduates home -- infected with our values!

The CPPRC have given high priority to ending this 70 year-old American win-win. Now? The top 10% of Chinese graduates from U.S. universities hurry home to government-subsidized opportunities to get rich! (Can't blame them.) Moreover, while they are here, 350,000 Chinese students are carefully herded, tended, indoctrinated by Confucius Institutes near our universities, encouraged to report on one another, and rewarded for information gathering.

Recent news from NPR: "Seeking to develop its "soft power" abroad, China's Education Ministry funds the Confucius Institutes...(to teach the Chinese language, but also)... to monitor Chinese students abroad and shape international perceptions of China." Senator Ted Cruz attached an amendment last year to the U.S. military spending bill that says a university with a Confucius Institute cannot also receive money from the Defense Department program that pays for Chinese language training. Forced to choose, at least 13 U.S. universities have closed Confucius Institutes in the past year.

Might I recommend a much better silver bullet?  

Require all* undergrads and grad students to take one year of civics. Our civics. With focus on due process, rule of law, and the reasons why individual leaders should matter much less than transparent-accountable error-detecting processes. Heck, a large part of the class could consist of just viewing and discussing great films like "Mr. Smith goes to Washington." Oh, and make the Confucius Institutes register and pay taxes, and accountable to any student they bully.

Even if 99% pretend the courses had no effect on them, their steeped-in knowledge of rule-of-law and accountable authority would be a ticking time bomb to the CPPRC. They will know that they need to plan for a withering away - either ours or Marx's. And if the politburo guys do that loosening soon enough... gracefully enough... they may even be well-remembered by the free generations to come.

== A lesson from kindergarten -- Remember your friends ==

"Chinese strategist Yan Xuetong’s book Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power argues that all countries must recognize and accept China's centrality to the world as the Middle Kingdom," writes Yuriko Koike in The World Post.  

In fact, that way of thinking has been China’s curse, ever since Emperor Chi’in made the transcendent mistake of uniting the Four Nations. Until that moment, those four kingdoms had been profoundly innovative and progressive… the way a divided Europe rocketed ahead in the 15^th through 19^thcenturies. The sense of centrality -- Chung Kuo or "central kingdom" -- made things more "peaceful" though no more safe for commonfolk. It also led to one calamitous error, after another. Above all, a preening attitude that drove away every potential friend.

Don't believe it? Here is the ultimate question to ask our friends -- and I do mean to call them by that word – in the Central Kingdom, in order to help talk them down from a rising nationalist boil. This is another of my... name one example challenges.

Across the subsequent four millennia, name for us one example of a great and loyal foreign friend that China ever had? 

There was one. Only one, across 4000 years of civilization. Just one powerful friend who ever came - voluntarily and repeatedly (though not always vigorously or intelligently or with complete purity of motives) - to China’s aid, in times of need.  Not as a subject or satrapy, but just as a friend, seeking nothing in return. 

I’ll bet you’ll never guess who it was.

Oh, that one friend's record is far from perfect! But it is pretty good, by the standards of human history. And it truly was, across all those countless centuries, China’s only friend.

And funny thing… now that I think on it… the same exact thing can be said of Japan. 

Just.. one… true (though not always consistent)… friend.

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* Yes, including especially U.S. born students!

China's rationalizations for hostility and "clash of civilizations"

Elsewhere I’ve dissected a recent trend of Chinese authorities: issuing intellectual rationalizations to justify absolute, centralized rule. See “Central Control over AI... and everything else,” where I appraise the incantations now pouring from Tsingua University and other PRC academies, proclaiming that only top-down control by a paramount hierarchy – one dedicated to neo-adjusted and constantly re-defined Marxist principles – can possibly prevent rogue or deleterious AI…

...or provide care for a population facing technological unemployment…
...or solve environmental degradation...
...or confront dozens of other modern/future ills. These memes are pushed not only at all levels of internal Chinese media, but also upon the 300,000+ Chinese nationals who are students at U.S. universities, compelled to report-to and attend indoctrination sessions at nearby Confucius Institutes.

This tsunami of rationalization and control is dangerous enough when combined with another doctrine – that westerners are too stupid to control their bourgeois appetites and hence all predatory mercantilist practices are justified, the way a farmer can make use of dumb herd animals. (This applies to both U.S. consumers and the CEOs of western companies, who eagerly bare their necks in exchange for the allure of minuscule China market shares.)

But it is the final, volatile layer -- a relentless drumbeat of resentment propaganda blaming all of China’s past ills upon western – especially American – colonialism, that completes a chowmein of toxic memes. Together, they comprise a recipe for disaster. 

To be clear, this concoction is clever in many ways. It reflects the pure fact that the current PRC leadership clade is smart… nearly all are former engineers. Indeed, they are perhaps 10% as smart as they think they are, which is damned smart! One helluva lot smarter than America’s current leader-caste. But in a way, that is the point. 

This is not a clash of leaders, but of systems. Moreover the biggest danger to us all lies in the fundamentally delusional insanity of centralized, authoritarian/hierarchical rule.

== The same pattern, over and over ==

I’ve spoken elsewhere and often about the lesson of 60 centuries of human history – that gangs of large males will pick up cudgels and beat society into a pyramid of inherited privilege. Yes, this serves to benefit their sons, but it also leads to deluded statecraft. Even brilliant kings and oligarchies are inevitably followed by disastrous ones. That lesson is apparent across five continents and 6000 years, in the litany of mistakes and horrors called “history.”

Dialing in, just two of China’s paramount leaders illustrate what’s wrong with self-justified, autocratic government… the Dowager Empress Cixi who died in 1908, after wrecking any chance of a Meiji-style modernization, and Mao Zedong, whose successive endeavors – purging all non-communists, the Korean War, the Great Leap Forward, the Four Pests campaign, the Hundred Flowers Trap, and the Cultural Revolution were calamitous examples of unquestioned authoritarianism wedded to obstinate maladministration, incredible blunders enforced with utter ferocity. 

Those two paramount leaders were as catastrophic for China as anything wrought by Europe, Russia, Japan (but not America) via colonialism. Moreover, they weren’t exceptions. Across 3000 years, only rarely was the Central Kingdom’s model of governance any different. 

I recently read a short essay by Mao - “Combat Liberalism” - that is especially crisp and instructive. In it, Mao concisely displays his laser focus and brilliance, slashing at every Western notion of reciprocal tolerance, diversity of viewpoint, pragmatic negotiation, flat hierarchies, individual rights, accountability, voluntary cooperation and open-ended/creative competition. As in more recent works by the Unabomber – Theodore Kaczynski – Mao is clear-eyed and open in describing what he hates about liberal modernism. “We stand for active ideological struggle because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the Party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight.”

A few of his strictures are sensible, like denouncing gossip. (Indeed, traditional Chinese Confucianism preaches many wise virtues for despots to rule better than their peers; still atrociously, but slightly better, much as chivalry and catholicism were supposed to moderate feudalism, in the west.) And yet, for the most part, Mao’s doctrines can be summarized as follows: attack fiercely any non-conformity to party dogma, even as that dogma changes; don’t tolerate any diversity of view; obey and conform your thoughts to party discipline.

“Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads.”

Mao intelligently surveys what you and I would call the strengths of liberalism, traits that liberal democracies exploited to grow, to innovate and discover/correct errors. These include: freedom of speech, diversity, voluntary-cooperation, fair-competition, extended negotiation, pragmatism, individualism, encouraging brashly-critical confidence in the young, and fostering vast pools of liberated talent. Only Mao denounces all of these as indulgences, sapping the ferocious, unified purpose of a single-minded party. A centralized entity that we would call… well… hive-like. A society of ants or bees.

Gosh, we humans are capable of such amazing dissonance! In abstract, it’s a dichotomy that should be subject to scientific falsifiability through evidence, were that not yet another bourgeois-liberal value.

What we’re witnessing is a fascinating rift over human destiny that appears to be zero-sum, either-or. For indeed, liberalism cannot survive in Mao's world, and in a successful liberal society Maoism becomes a quaint campus fad -- a pickup rant at parties.

Moreover, this dichotomy raises questions on a much broader scale, including the Fermi Paradox! For example: which approach seems more likely to have prevailed on millions of worlds out there, anywhere that sapient life built civilizations?

And which path seems more likely to evade the countless traps, pits and minefields that must be crossed, in order to attain the stars?

Well, well. Let’s stay closer to Earth. Because we know the real answer here. Mao’s approach – centralizing ferocious power and repressing all deviance, then concocting rationalizations to call this good, is not new. Nor is it (except in certain persistent styles) particularly Chinese or Marxist! It is the boring pattern that erupted nearly everywhere that humans achieved agriculture. 

The experimental evidence is before our eyes. Those who use priestly dogma-incantations to justify hierarchical-oligarchic rule – whether by kings, lords, priests or commissars – bear a burden of proof that it ever worked well over multi-generation scales. Or that any fifty such hierarchies accomplished – combined – what liberalism has, while gradually spreading ever-wider its horizons of inclusion, across just the last 200 years.

== The Trade War means… ==

You think I exaggerated, above? Bill Bishop, at Axios and Sinocism, provides a wealth of links and insights about the Central Kingdom. In one of his newsletters, he cites, several well-known hawks who have been quite vocal in their desire to see trade talks fail:

"I very much hope that the negotiations will break down," said Dai Xu, a professor at China's National Defence University and a retired air force colonel.  "Once the negotiations are over, the United States will be finished, for sure ... we kick out all the American companies and bring all of ours back.... No way will Trump be re-elected."

"The US openly sees us as their biggest enemy," said Tan Yungang, an air force colonel. "The United States will block China more than they did the former Soviet Union."

"Chinese people need to have backbone," said Prof Dai. "I am very opposed to one of our traditional concepts, which is that no matter how much others have hurt China, we are educated to forget ... what's the meaning of remembering the history without the hatred? It's meaningless."

Not all voices are uniformly hostile. Da Wei, Assistant President and Professor at the University of International Relations in Beijing, says there may be a way to avoid a new type of Cold War, but adds a pessimistic scenario if we have one "I think it is a comprehensive confrontation...If that happens it will last for quite a long time. That's a tragedy for everyone" 

And again, I strongly recommend folks out there read Frederik Pohl’s prescient novel THE COOL WAR.

== A clash of civilizations? Or models for Star Trek? ==

Again, I've got no problems with the neo-communist People's Republic of China and the liberal United States of America vying as models for future humanosphere culture. Indeed, I expect the average, baseline human in 2200 to have somewhat Asiatic features and for Chinese to be one of our top languages. It's not about nations per se, but models for individual psychology and social governance. Across all of history, for 6000 years, the model in 99% of agricultural societies was a pyramid of command by a few, who cheated to ensure limitations on competition by the sons and daughters of the poor, and who then had court priests concoct rationalizations for why the mandate of heaven must be vested in all-powerful top authoritarians.

Of all the world's pyramidal cultures, China's was probably the least awful, in that there were systems ensuring a little meritocratic rise. A future human civilization based on the Chinese model might reach ecological balance and make some progress... but it would remain power-biased (imperial) and insistent upon conformity. Even if the end result is consensus-benevolent (and history shows no examples), it will emphasize homogeneity, not agility. Instead of the stars, we will get hives.

Ours is the best ever version of a diamond-shaped society, designed to limit cheating, foster diverse questioning and maximize the number of capable competitors in any field. Periclean Athens and Florence were other rare examples -- vastly more creative, but with one glaring disadvantage. Liberal experiments are inherently unstable and vulnerable to innovative cheaters, requiring constant tweaking of the regulatory systems to evade mob populism or oligarchic putsches.

Several times, American generations rose to meet that challenge. If we fail this time, perhaps liberalism is fatally flawed.

Were this all there is, to Sino-West competition, I'd say let the games commence. Alas, the PRC leadership uses their sovereignty as a base of operations for cheating.  Worse, they justify their behavior by stirring nationalistic wrath in the population, based on exaggerations or outright lies...

...which is why I deem vital that we take on the polemical front. I know a few meme-zingers that could be useful there. But their best effectiveness requires deployment at the right time and place, by the right messenger. And I am not the one. Nor is this the time or place.

Again, I summed up how the PRC Politburo has its state theoreticians busy justifying why only a centralized communist central committee can possibly guide humanity into the future that faces dangers like uncontrolled Artificial Intelligence and automation-generated unemployment.  The rationalizations of scholars like Feng Xiang are very smart... worth reading... and ultimately spectacularly false.

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== ADDENDA ==

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1. For some big picture from another angle, see Jiayang Fan’s fascinating article on China's superstar science fiction author Liu Cixin, his epic trilogy, and on the future and the rise of science fiction in China – and across the world.  My family hosted him at our home. We did not press him re political matters, as this writer did. But the mix of optimism and fatalism we all observed is most-telling. As is Da Liu's (at least official) opinion that today's  PRC leadership has no other choice -- it is forced to be all-controlling, lest chaos ensue.

To be clear, I understand Da Liu's perspective. Certainly the fierce One Child Policy, which may have saved the world, could not have happened in a democracy (as Rajiv Gandhi discovered, when he tried something like it, in India). On the other hand, where do you draw the line?  Twenty-five years ago, I thought China planned to do a staged loosening, starting down at the level of towns and cities, allowing a vigorous and open civil society to deliver the synergies of freedom (e.g. using light to root out corruption) in local governance, while retaining control nationally. Then, a decade later, this loosening would spread to provincial governments, and so on.  A social contract that might have engendered patience with clear rewards. It's what the commissars would do, if they were sincere, if their freinds-to-the-workers rationalizations were true. Alas, it is not what they are doing.

2. The clear answer to the Confucius Institute tactic is simple. Require all US undergrad and graduate students to take one class in civics. Just one light survey of constitutional and legal processes and how things work in a society that has rule-of-law. (Stuff our own students should be learning anyway and that would help them start or run a business.) No matter how sullen or superficially resentful of this requirement those 300,000+ Chinese students might act, for their handlers, most would return home thoroughly "infected" with such values, asking "why can't we have rule-of-law, too? And that memic infection will be more valuable, in the long run, than any amount of intellectual property that gets stolen from us.

3. Here's a fascinating on the scene description and here are mind-blowing composite crowd images of how 2 million people - 27% of the population of Hong Kong - thronged the streets a few days ago to protest and - at least for now - kill the infamous Extradition Bill and show young people all across China what's possible, with guts and brains and luck. Whatever victories the PRC achieves against the West - in loose alliance with the separate Putin-Saudi-mafiosi-Fox cabal - they are happening via skullduggerous methods that may turn and bite them. Whereas the failure mode they fear is legitimate expression and achievement of the will of the people. No wonder they feel a hot breath of time that is not on their side. 

Their worldwide oligarchic putsch - in conjunction with western quislings - has made great strides. Their confederate puppets took Washington. But our strengths are gathering. And Oswald Spengler was wrong about the Decline of the West.