Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1.  @davocc2405  I wonder if Peter noticed in his travels to Monterey / Carmel, just how many of those exorbitantly-priced houses were unoccupied.
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  2. I'm picturing "The Last Russian" as a hunched, impossibly old man sitting on a dusty throne in a decrepit Kremlin with his finger on his nuclear button.
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  3.  @Disorder327  Biden's record... Especially compared to Trump's.
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  4. Does the Russian system now employ foreign tech workers as information-gatherers? They have a reason to go just about anywhere.
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  5.  @uhliuv  Mars has already been conquered. It is entirely inhabited by robots, who are controlled by an esoteric organization located in Pasadena, California. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's not.
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  6. "Coming to you from Colorado" Thank goodness. With those continents behind you, I thought you were in a Molniya orbit.
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  7. So Peter, what did you tell your parents the last time they asked you why you weren't having children?
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  8. Hey Peter -- Something else about Americans you can take to your Establishment friends -- we don't like being lied to. New forms of media and communication are making lies harder and harder to maintain on a permanent basis, which is how long you have to maintain them if you don't want trust to break down completely, as it now has. If the Establishment wants to pursue a policy (say, it's worth investing in a security arrangement that keeps Mahanite naval competition a thing of the past) it's going to have to discuss it openly and make its case to do so.
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  9. So with the cratering of the US educational system (its fall to Wokeness), we should expect American competence to crater in the next generation or so?
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  10. Yeah. Peace is really the best option here. A settlement now (even one that the war hawks dislike) could potentially save hundreds of millions of lives, and keep dozens of countries worldwide from destabilizing.
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  11.  @aaronbaker2186  Er, in fact we (the United States) insisted that Ukraine stay in the war despite the fact that they wanted to negotiate shortly after the war started. I'm not in favor of fighting to the last Ukrainian, and that's where it looks like we're going, here. "It's always been Russia's war to lose", as Peter has said. Fighting in the West can only have one outcome -- the benefit of the East. Disruptions in Germany's industrial exports benefit China. Russia selling petrochemicals East instead of West benefits China (and makes it less vulnerable to the piracy Zeihan goes on about). Russia draining the West's military coffers and boosting our war weariness makes Taiwan more likely to fall, not less. And, to top it off, if Russia "ceases to exist as an entity", China will be able to gobble up half of Asia, securing them a lot of the raw materials they need to avoid any sting of Western sanctions. I think that offering Russia the DonBas and Crimea is not great, but if we also offer them East Turkmenistan, Greater Mongolia, and Tibet for their sphere of influence, that could be a win-win situation. Certainly better than the lose-lose we're in now.
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  12.  @yellow4563  Their customers are not "right" and "left", they are "care" and "don't care". Their sales have dropped over 50% already, so most of them "care". A lot of the "don't care" are only sticking with the brand because they haven't heard of the boycott, and a lot of the rest are only sticking with the brand because A-B is giving away $15 rebates on $16 cases of beer. if A-B apologized for the Mulvaney ads, said they were deeply wrong, and pledged never to go Woke again, they would get back up to at least 90% of their previous numbers, if not more. The reason they're NOT doing this is because their banks have told them their lines of credit would be shut down if they did.
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  13. They went from #1 beer in America, to falling off the top 10 this week. Get Woke Go Broke
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  14.  @yellow4563  Have you checked out the latest numbers? Still falling.
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  15. "The birthrate has fallen 60% in just the last six years" This is deeply weird. Something similar happened in America - we went from replacement rate to below replacement rate, during Obama's ideological disaster of a presidency.
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  16.  @bobs_toys  Our birthrate is still plummeting, and we've got fewer people to begin with. When Trump gets sworn in next year we'll probably see over 10 million deportations, although that will probably bring housing prices into reach to encourage family formation. Interesting times.
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  17.  @shaunmalay4165  Eh, that could well be. But what's the rule on the Internet? "There is no position so crazy you can't find someone on the internet who unironically holds it"...
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  18. I like these "Ask the Establishment" forums. =)
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  19. "A combination of Swedish and Polish power would be very potent" And if you add the rest of Scandinavia and Germany, it's probably enough to deter Russia completely, especially if they have American arms. This is why I'm not terribly worried about Russian expansionism, even if they keep the Russian parts of Ukraine. This recent war has depleted Russia, and for them to wait to rebuild allows the demographic crunch to overtake them. A rampaging horde of Poles re-enacting Barbarossa (or the Grand Armee) is probably a completely unnecessary and frankly bloody-minded scenario here.
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  20.  @MrGreenTabasco  Easy enough to find Chinese fingerprints on it. =)
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  21. "She cannot imagine a future where the Russians do not pay for the entirety of Ukrainian reconstruction" Because war reparations worked SO well back in 1919? I don't care about their credentials or political offices. These are not serious people.
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  22.  @kevinwelsh7490  I've seen people with influence change their minds based on Peter's analysis. We'll see where that goes.
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  23.  @TheMasonK  I look at our energy options now, and everything I see I also saw in the educational filmstrip "Our Mr. Sun" from 1956. (Check it out, it's a lot of fun.) You'd think that 70+ years would be enough time to make these technologies pay off, if they were going to. (I still have hopes for nuclear, myself.) (But, the truly insane environmentalists are against it. Almost makes you wonder whether our entire energy regulatory apparatus is run by people who aren't so much interested in energy for people alive today, as how to rebuild civilization after a collapse.) (We'd need as much fossil fuel still in the ground as possible, and nuclear power plants could be incredibly destructive if the industrial civilization around them got wrecked. Maybe that's why every US politician that's supposedly against fossil fuels, is okay with importing massive amounts of other countries' reserves instead of building out our own.) Oh, and I've kept hearing "peak oil" since I was old enough to start paying attention, decades ago. I stopped hearing it a few years ago, when the fracking revolution expanded our fossil fuel reserves dramatically. I'm glad that at least you haven't made any arguments that are based on computer models that are utterly inadequate to the task of making accurate predictions of where the climate is going.
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  24. Someone noticed Peter is An Influencer(TM) now, so they've given him part of The Narrative(TM) to push on us. The fact is that California Got Woke and Went Broke, all the while pioneering insane levels of Leftist bureaucracy. The Establishment is desperate for the electorate not to notice this.
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  25.  @2639theboss  You're only remembering the ones most people remember. What about the Dutch? Poland-Lithuania? The Hanseatic League? The Swedish Empire? Mansa Musa? John Sutter, who owned most of the lands of the Gold Rush? For every story you're citing, there are a dozen you forgot, or never knew. California has been hollowing out ever since the Cold War ended and their aerospace industry started to fall. Agriculture is phenomenal, but maxed out. Sic transit gloria mundi
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  26.  @theyux1  Agriculture is maxed out, and under attack from insane environmental policies. Tourism is cratering because coastal cities are unsafe. Tech has stalled out, with Moore's Law broken for most of a decade now. Hollywood Got Woke, and is in the process of Going Broke. Every single advantage you cite there is on a downward trajectory, and only agriculture and tourism have any kind of floor. California could come out of this tailspin no more than a banana republic.
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  27.  @theyux1  A terrible housing market crash happened in 1992, for starters. Increasing environmental regulations sapped the vitality of the agricultural sector. The peace dividend started the fall of the aerospace industry. Much of Southern California has never recovered from that, by the way. A lot of this was masked by the tech boom, driven by that peace dividend's shifting California's high tech workers from aerospace to computers. Why do you think Silicon Valley happened in California, and not, say, along Massachusetts' Route 128? While Moore's Law was in effect and fiber optic networks were built out, more and more amazing things could be accomplished with computers and networks. However, connectivity has gotten about as good as it's going to get (to the point that it's clogged mostly by video nowadays), and Moore's Law hasn't been true for most of a decade. The miracle factory has stalled out. The low-hanging fruit has been picked. California rose with tech, now the hollowing-out of all its other economic sectors -- which probably won't come back, barring an anti-green, pro-defense revolution in California politics -- California will fall with tech. The only way California can keep from collapse now, is if vote-counters start seeing a lot more Republican ballots. Do you see that as likely? I don't.
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  28.  @theyux1  Rome collapsed because their fertility rates went into free-fall, and they inadequately assimilated masses of immigrants that arrived to replace them.
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  29. Wall Street was NOT responsible for the housing crash -- they were responding to incentives from the Federal Government itself, including but not limited to the insuring of ARM's that NEVER should have been insured.
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  30. Who has the capability to fix these in the near term?
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  31. Head north, into the mountains.
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  32.  @ZergRadio  Is it impossible to just visit for a weekend?
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  33. It would be good news, if the fact that they were keeping it secret didn't provide a lot of cover for Democrats to cheat. "Of course the elections were not fraudulent, everyone voted just like they said they would."
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  34. "It's probably not a coastal vs. interior thing" OK, so I'm reading The Accidental Superpower. If river networks are so great and generate so much capital, why the h**l is New York our financial capital as opposed to, say, St. Louis? If oceans are less-good than rivers, why is our river-girded interior considered "flyover country"? By the way, it strikes me as incredibly fortunate that Manifest Destiny caught on, because otherwise we'd see a tripartite America -- Atlantic Seaboard / Heartland / Pacific and Mountain. We almost had this with English / French / Spanish, but accidents of history transpired otherwise. We'd be a continent full of garrison states like Europe, with all the unhappiness that entails.
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  35. Considering the general awfulness of Russia's logistics, how big is the REAL outflow of people compared to the number of people who WANT to leave?
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  36. He's still interesting to listen to, because he says things from his insider contacts with the Establishment that are very interesting to hear. Like, "America is going to have 40 to 50 million immigrants over the next decade or two, which is likely to cause some unrest."
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  37. You'd think that if this was the Russians, they'd have hit THAT pipeline instead.
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  38. Peter, are you afraid that a construction guy is not going to be able to build stuff? Seriously?
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  39. "China is guilty of monetary easing, not the Federal Reserve" Um, Peter, HOW MUCH of our federal spending is debt-backed, and HOW MUCH of that is simply "bought" by the Fed, using money they magically print?
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  40. Just curious, do you regret voting for Obama, now that the last decade has turned out the way it has?
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  41. Peter, are you aware of something called a "SuperPAC"? Big money has not left politics. You're right about the Information Revolution, though. The only experts left are the ones (such as yourself) who can make their case directly to whatever population is interested in their area of expertise. The electorate is going to be much better informed, much better able to make decisions, and centralized decision-makers (such as the deplorable Anthony Fauci) are going to be sidelined, along with the executive agencies themselves.
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  42.  @Adi-bo5do  Yes, democracy isn't quite dead here yet. =) Even better, there is a sense that we are embarking on a new Cold War, led by a country that is legendary for its expert class, (mandarins) and its glorification of groupthink over freedom -- China. I suspect that in the same way the Industrial Revolution posed the question, "What is the best way to produce and distribute the most and the best material goods?" our new Information Revolution is going to pose the question, "What is the best way to produce and distribute expertise?" Freedom is going to be the answer. Bhattacharya was right, Fauci was wrong, and our system is going to have to be reformed into a more distributed model, to take that into account. Currently our legacy institutions have been taken over by ideologues seeking the power of the cultural high ground. This has caused the collapse of their credibility and will soon cause their financial collapse as well. Whether they can be preserved or whether they will be replaced, remains to be seen. Forgive me if I'm misinterpreting you, but you're on the wrong side of history here, it seems. Look into the people who are critiquing climate models. Look into the people who were right all along, about our recent global medical scare. Actual evidence leads interesting places.
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  43. Sometimes the Houthis manage to shoot a North-Korean-derived missile at Riyadh, though.
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  44. "They are aging into obsolescence" What in the world does an "obsolete" country look like? Japan? Byzantium? The Ottomans, post-Winged-Hussars?
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  45.  @damianm-nordhorn116  I'll grant you that water is a limiting factor west of the Mississippi. A place only has to be "desirable" for the person making the siting decision, everyone else just takes what they can get job-wise, and the marginal quality-of-life for the vast majority ends up the same because of all those tradeoffs you mention. Unless, of course, a place has a natural glut of one resource or other (space, energy), that can't be exported, and then all the locals get to enjoy a lot of that for cheap.
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  46. But Peter, isn't there good news from the Ukrainian offensive you could be reporting on instead?
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  47. "We are in an information vacuum, or something worse, filled with misinformation" -- Well, yeah, we've been here for years. Peter, this is why you're so popular. People don't trust the legacy media anymore, and we're looking for alternatives. Congratulations -- and keep giving us well-vetted data, typically the stuff that's too boring for anyone to try to manipulate, it's about all we can trust anymore.
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  48. "We have parties clustered around issues people don't care about" Wha? There's just this giant blind spot about "issues people care about" amongst professional chatterers, isn't there. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that people aren't allowed to admit what they care about because the Cancel Mob will come after them if they do.
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  49. What kind of trouble would the Cubans have to be in, to accept a deal with us where they dramatically revise their government and economic structure in return for economic integration? Sounds like we could double their standard of living in less than a decade, cementing whatever government system they had in power for two or three generations at least, if we could close that kind of deal.
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  50. Are people who heard the lie "Russia blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline" unjustified in being skeptical about claims that Russia blew up its own dam? I'm glad that Peter pointed out some evidence for the new claim, but at this point, any sensible people who can think for themselves has to wait for evidence like that to emerge before we believe anything we hear.
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