Comments by "Theodore Shulman" (@ColonelFredPuntridge) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1. Two comments: 1. I thought Germany was about to suffer demographic meltdown. Why worry about her military? Whom will they enlist or conscript? 2. Speaking of Russia, what do you think about Yekaterina Duntsova?
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  2. Why did he not mention the structural advantage which the Republicans have because of the Electoral College, which endows low-population states with disproportionate representation (more voting-power per voter)??? This is the reason why Republicans win the White House even when the popular vote goes against them so often, which never happens for Democrats.
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  3. "...either Tuberville is one of the most skilled Chinese agents ever, or he's the dumbest person in Congress." Or perhaps he has sold out to the international fraternity of billionaire autocrat-wanna-bes, like Ginny Thomas and Donald Trump.
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  4. I love the videos, BUT, ... ... the word is "nuclear". "Nuke" + "Lee" + "yer". NOT "nuke" + "you" + "ler". Please.
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  5. Trump's decline began the day he was born.
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  6. The thing about processing metals is, we will have to find a way to deal with NIMBYism. Who wants to wake up and learn that a metal-ore processing plant is opening right next to your home town?
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  7. A lot of our smartest people in USA don't want to be involved in electoral politics! You only need to look at what happened to Biden's USCabinet-level Science and Technology advisor Dr. Eric Lander, to see why.
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  8. I wish he would stop saying “the most productive in our relations with Iran since the 1970s“. As I recall the 1970s didn’t end very well for our relations with Iran.
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  9. In China?
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  10.  @Tyrant_13  Three liars. I should have said: either you didn't go to law school, or, you're a liar like AD, SM, or JT. I was trying to be polite.
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  11. I think the only way Ukraine, might win is if Putin dies, or if somehow the Russians rebel against him. And the first is unlikely, and the second is very very, very unlikely.
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  12. What about nickel? I think most places that have copper also usually have nickel. And how about neon gas?
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  13.  @LTVoyager  Well, if Obama is a narcissist, he sure concealed it well for eight years. What did he ever do that would appear narcissistic to anyone other than someone who hated him beforehand (for one reason or another)???
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  14. If you want an entertaining discussion of an important sci-fi issue, read Larry Niven's short story "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex". What would really happen if Superman and Lois Lane actually got it on? (SPOILER: "Consider the driving urge between a man and a woman, the monomaniacal urge to achieve greater and greater penetration. Remember also that we are dealing with kryptonian muscles. Superman would literally crush LL's body in his arms, while simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout. [And, by ejaculating with super-force,] he'd blow off the top of her head.")
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  15. The 14th amendment was specifically written with the intention of Preventing insurrectionists, who had not been convicted of anything, from running for political office!! Southern military officers, who had been spared trial as part of the surrender agreement were the ones that the authors of the 14th amendment were worried about. So if you’re An originalist and you want to read the constitution according to its authors’ Intentions you have to support the Colorado decision to exclude Trump.
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  16. So basically, the reason we can’t exploit the arctic is, it’s too damn cold! Whodathunkit?
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  17. I was in grad school in physical chemistry when the liquid-nitrogen-temperature superconducting ceramics were first discovered in the 1980s. Everyone predicted we'd be riding levitating trains and transmitting 100% power in a few years. Well, the ceramics are brittle and un-malleable, and, they only superconduct in patches, so you can see it with the Meissner effect, but you can't use them for transmission. Still (nearly) useless.
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  18. The Chinese government unleashed the virus on us in order to prevent the opera houses in Europe and USA and South America from staging Puccini's last opera, Turandot (if you are familiar with the aria "Nessun dorma", that's from Turandot) because it is set in Peking (Pekino) and depicts the Chinese people as brutal savages ruled by a sadistic tyrant. Turandot had become trendy again (the opera world is very faddish) and numerous opera houses, great (La Scala, the Met, Chicago Lyric Opera) and small (Regina Opera in Brooklyn) were getting ready to do it. The current government of China - Xi - couldn't stand for that. Now that the pandemic has more or less resolved (not just temporarily, we hope) the companies are doing operas by Puccini, but, notably, not Turandot. They're doing La bohème and Il Trittico. So the Chinese strategy seems to have worked. This is why the pathology of COVID is so harmless, relative to what it could have been. The Chinese government didn’t want to kill a lot of people, only to sicken us enough to shut down the opera houses and get the companies to choose a new repertoire.
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  19. Re: “No, it means less energy for poor people while the people making these rules fly on private jets.” No, it means less energy per capita for poor people while the people making these rules fly on private jets.
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  20. Re: “ No, it means less energy for poor people while the people making these rules fly on private jets.” You mean: No, it means less energy per capita for poor people while the people who discover these rules fly on private jets.
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  21. A room-temperature superconductor would sure be nice. There’s a guy who keeps claiming to have discovered one but he appears to be a charlatan.
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  22. When I was in Leningrad in the 1980s, I met and heard about numerous young women who had had 10 or more abortions. I did some research and found out that much more important than how many abortions a woman has is how old she is when she has them. Fertility wise it’s probably better to have 10 abortions in your late teens and early 20s then to have one or two abortions in your 30s or 40s. So yes, the Soviet women had lots of abortions because the dysfunctional economy made it impossible to get any other kind of birth control, but their abortions mostly didn’t impair their fertility, nearly as much as you might expect from a scary number like 10 abortions in one’s medical history.
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  23. Also, how dangerous and abortion is to future fertility, depends very much on the surgeons, skill or lack of skill. In Leningrad, it seemed that the surgeons, although they were horribly underpaid, were mostly reasonably good at their jobs. Also, now that I think of it, there was one exception to the rule of doctors and surgeons being underpaid, and that was gynecology, I mean sex doctors. They enjoyed very comfortable incomes, because, the government required them to report all cases of venereal disease, and patients used to reward them handsomely for disobeying this requirement – either reward them with money, but more often with special favors, which the patients jobs put them in a position to have access to. So if you were the daughter of a plumber, you might reward your gynecologist for treating your venereal disease without reporting it, by arranging for your father, to go unclog the pipes in his apartment without him having to wait for the government bureaucracy to arrange a home visit from a plumber employed by the government. This was called doing business by barter or in Russian “po_blatu”. It was pretty much the only way the service economy worked. So having a wide circle of friends and friends of friends was much more important than having money.
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  24. One other thing: the safety or non-safety of any abortion anywhere depends very heavily on how early in pregnancy you can get it done. In Leningrad, the women, I knew were mostly university, students and pretty conscientious about taking care of themselves that way although they were not very good in many other ways – they drank like fish, and they chain smoked. One final story if I made about this subject, when I went to Leningrad, I brought with me enough American condoms to last my entire stay, which was one semester just in case I were to fall in love on day one. It turned out. I only used a couple of them, so when it was time to leave, I gave the remainder to one of my Russian language teachers. I thought he would think it was one of my obnoxious jokes – I was quite a practical Joker in those days – and I was quite surprised when he thanked me with tears in his eyes. I told my Russian roommate about this, and he explained that for an almost 4 month supply of American condoms the teacher could probably get enough good cuts of meat and good wine to have a feast every weekend for a year. All, of course, po-blatu.
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  25. A map might be helpful …
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  26. You don't even need a back yard to make fertilizer!
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  27. So the organ grinder is gonna grind the monkey's organs?
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  28.  @velisvideos6208  Why bring gender into this?
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  29.  @texasjack  Yes, as I said, my complaint was only a semantic quibble. But it might be an embarrassing one in some contexts.
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  30. Trump will sell tech-access to the bidder who offers the largest secret bribe, whoever it may be.
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  31. Now might be a good time to re-read Arthur C Clark’s short story “Superiority”.
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  32. Clarke
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  33. I’m surprised that he didn’t say anything about the possibility of someone making a third-party or independent run, either as a non-Trumpie conservative or as a Berniesque lefty.
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  34. My prediction: go look up how Nixon won a reelection landslide in 1972. Biden will do to the Trumpie gun-wackos in 2024 the same thing Nixon did to the anti-war hippies in 1972: provoke them to more and more repulsive demonstrations, run against them, promising to protect democracy and reasonableness from them, and win in a landslide. The Old Mongoose knows strategy and has seen everything.
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  35. I often wonder: Does Iran want to own nuclear weapons? Keeping nuclear weapons in good working order is a big expensive never-ending pain in the ass. And if Iran were to own nuclear weapons, she would soon find herself in the middle of a gigantic, never-ending arms race against all the Sunnis and Arabs in the Middle East.
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  36. The thing at the end about a state governor jumping in and providing some motivating inspiration to the young voters who are disgusted by both geriatric-R and geriatric-D, is interesting. But it wouldn't have to be a governor! Remember how Ross Perot jumped in in 1992, and showed that we didn't have to go on trying to think about the post-Cold-War world using the obsolete, Cold-War, mutually-assured-nuclear-destruction-and-spooky-spy-stories conceptual framework? Suppose a hitherto-non-political person - someone like, say, Jodie Foster - were to enter the election, inspire a lot of young people, get a following, and then, at the key moment, drop out and throw her support behind Joe Biden. He would win in a landslide, and she would be positioned for a strong serious bid of her own in 2028, having been the one who saved the Democrats' asses in 2024. Sound impossible? It's not very different from what Ronald Reagan did 1976 (following up in 1980), and Ross Perot 1992. (Ross turned out to be nutty, but by the time he withdrew, he had enabled us to break out of the Cold-War mentality and start thinking appropriately for the internet-age, and Bill Clinton was just as effective in that context as Perot would have been.)
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  37. The more-important recent breakthrough in materials to watch - the one to keep your eye on - is tetrataenite. Look it up!
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  38. It seems like Peter is listing current Trends in scientific research (I say trends, but some of my friends were still in the scientific research business would say fads) and describing some of their current limits. That’s not a good way to think about scientific innovation. Technologies of the future, and if anything can save us from our demographic doom, it will be technologies of the future, will be surprising and probably very different from what we imagine now. Just as many or most of the futurists who, back in the 1960s, predicted the computer age got a lot of details wrong. Arthur C Clarke for instance predicted one giant supercomputer mounted on a satellite, with a team of resident astronauts on hand to replace the vacuum tubes as they burnt out. How many readers, before the pandemic, were aware that mRNA vaccines might be useful for preventing diabetes, or colon cancer, and that this was a good reason to fund researching the method?
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  39. Lithium is not “fuel”. It’s energy-storage material.
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  40. (Just as a lunchbox is not food.)
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