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

  1.  @bfedezl2018  Well, YouTube has done a great job clearing those sorts of posts out of my comments feed. Only the skeptical posts with intelligent questions are getting through, although they're only getting through in the replies to the comments, not the top-level comments. Funny, that. "You're doing great!" sort of low-effort posts, on the other hand, are showing up an awful lot. The thing is I agree with those, most of the time. When that's all I see at the thread level? It's more than a little suspicious.
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  2. Only, usually when they use the term "wank", they use the French pronunciation with the long "ah" sound -- as in, "Policy Wank".
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  3. They got their teeth handed to them in this last election though, didn't they? It's almost as if Germany wants to be an actual country. =)
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  4. I'm surprised YouTube doesn't like us talking about the fact that the Greens gots panked this last election.
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  5. Costs, regulation, and the end of the Cold War. On the other hand, that "Peace Dividend" arguably queued up the Tech Boom, as cutting-edge technology workers went from defense contracting to commercial enterprises.
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  6.  @wisenber  Yeah, the "Apollo generation retirement" problem was big when I started. I don't think the passdown was handled well. Now we've got the "Cold War generation retirement" problem, and it's not going much better as far as I can tell. If defense contracting starts to be the best game in town again, that could change. If Peter's right about venture capital drying up -- and San Francisco's fall could well be symptomatic of that, although its Covid, shoplifting, homelessness, and drug use policies are largely a self-inflicted wound -- then the wining and dining of prospective customers in the billionaire-playground of SF, just isn't going to be as important anymore. I hope Peter's right about the re-industrializing of America, although there's still so much talk about "favorable labor cost profiles" in places like Mexico and Columbia, I'm suspicious that all his talk about on-shoring is just gaslighting.
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  7.  @titanicisshit1647  Lol, the 2010s are gone, and very shortly whatever influence they had on the 2020s will be too. =) We're going to be going back to traditions that we know work, because so much of "modernity" has failed. We're never going to look back at the Obama era (especially his 2nd term and its fallout) as anything but a cautionary tale.
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  8.  @Maerra7  Car dependence isn't so bad except for monumentally destructive government policies like Cash for Clunkers.
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  9. If the Surface Fleet Apocalypse comes, it's still going to be from submarine nuclear explosions, not any stupid little jet skis. (Hence the ultimate impossibility of a Taiwan invasion against determined resistance.) Seriously Peter, check out a WW2 era ship decked out with anti-aircraft, then imagine those AAs with a fire arc that depresses to the point that there's a kill zone for all but a few yards from the hull. THEN imagine interlocking fields of fire, for all the ships in a carrier group. You may get problems with ricochets, but those jet skis are going to catch the worst of it.
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  10. Because he thinks it's hilarious. That's what my money's on, by the way. Because it kind of is. =)
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  11. He wants to discourage people from remembering this one. It will not age well.
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  12. Peter, you need to realize that the House is working as intended -- checks and balances are more important to our system's design, than pushing through your faction's agenda. If you're wondering why the House is opposing you, you should probably consider that Americans will not fight and die for the sake of your faction being able to treat the world atlas like a coloring book. If you're wondering how that happened, you might want to re-read Pericles' funeral oration.
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  13. Why would the collapse of Putin's Russia benefit the USA more than, say, the collapse of Saddam's Iraq did?
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  14. To be fair, a lot of that was Bidenflation and the Covid Shutdown.
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  15. Peter, did you just say that Russia can blame America for everything Ukraine is destroying?
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  16.  @Yeagizzo  I was wondering who else would notice. Yosemite's nowhere near the coast.
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  17. Once upon a time the Royal Marines would have gathered in Djibouti, then crossed the Bab el Mandeb to slap the Houthis around until they stopped. Remind me again why this new world order is supposed to work better?
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  18. What happened to the "favorable labor cost profiles" of Mexico and Columbia? Our current crop of elites has nothing but contempt for workers. The only way we're actually seeing the future you're envisioning, is if we get Trump into the White House to sweep the elites out of our bureaucracy.
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  19. After the twin towers fell, I suspect.
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  20. He can count his hiking time as a production budget expense. It's a good value-add, considering the approving comments here.
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  21. Which nuke card do you mean -- strategic or tactical?
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  22.  @ent1311  But corporations donate MORE to Democrats, especially Big Tech corporations.
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  23. Except, this would be feasible even without government participation. It's just more effective when bigtime investors can buy politicians to make sure laws are written to favor ESG-compliant companies, when they start to Go Broke because they Got Woke.
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  24.  @MattHall1  What did you see in particular in his reply that was not "objective"? Your low-information-content post is not very useful -- and probably doesn't do much to convince most people on this channel, who are here to find high-information-content material.
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  25. It took decades for us to turn Japan and Germany into functional democracies. Why was it a "failure of the Iraq mission" when we failed to make it happen in a few years? Sure, we failed to do it on the cheap, and people have a right to complain we shouldn't have tried it if it couldn't have been completed in the way the administration seemed to have promised. It's also fair to say that Bush's inability to sell a realistic plan to the American people led to the whole plan failing. I'm not sure that it was really that far out of our capabilities, though.
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  26. "Distorting businesses ... like multifamily housing" Hold on, is this inflating rent prices? Are units going vacant, with the rent payments coming from cartels instead of residents?
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  27. If you can get the mainstream media to stop wasting our time with lies like "Russia blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline", you'd have far fewer trolls.
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  28.  @alexven92  Spontaneous Order is a lot more American. The Empire has to fall, for the Republic to survive.
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  29. Would the Central Valley have any water problems, if we just got rid of the Owens Valley project? Los Angeles steals water from everybody not just Colorado / Arizona / etc.
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  30. Allowing resource-hungry China to devour resource-rich East Asia is a very, madly, truly, deeply stupid thing for the "strategists" in Brussels and Washington to allow. I'm not sure if Peter's ever going to see that. He's got all the pieces in front of him, but I suspect he's too connected to the our current crop of incompetent "elites" to allow himself to see.
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  31. If he's "hypercompetent" why does he look and sound like he's in over his head every time I see him in a press conference?
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  32. Hey Peter -- get in touch with a YouTube journalist named Tim Pool, and get on his show to pitch your books. He and his audience (mostly youngish America-first isolationists) need to hear about and understand World Systems Theory, and the consequences of the US withdrawing from its strategic overwatch role. Otherwise they're just going to follow some wacked-out conspiracy theorists regarding US motivation for our international entanglements. If you're interested in a showdown with one such wacked-out conspiracy theorist, go on the show when Luke Rudkowski is also there. For a hippie naif who is only somewhat wacked-out and would rather see the world give itself a great big hug, go on the show when Ian Crossland is also there. There are a couple of other co-hosts, like Seamus Coughlin (creative mind behind the excellent FreedomToons) and some fairly levelheaded journalists like Libby Emmons or Hannah Claire Brimelowe, who would be more ready to ask intelligent questions. Seriously, Tim's young audience is keen on people telling them the truth and genuinely curious, and needs to have its horizons expanded and its misconceptions corrected by the mainstream insights you can share. Even if it's not your usual honorarium, it will broaden your audience significantly, and in a critical demographic.
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  33. @ It was actually a retreat.
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  34. Peter, if energy weren't scarce right now, gas would be cheap. So would electricity. Unless you're suggesting that somehow extra costs were being piled on somewhere up the line, like by government...
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  35. There are a lot of people who have been railroaded by corrupt judges (or have been trained by the Left to be afraid of being railroaded by corrupt judges), who are giving Trump another look. Trump is up to something like 20% support among African-Americans and 45% support among Hispanics / Latinos. Go to the Cook Report's interactive map that allows you to adjust election results based on demographics, and tell me what you see.
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  36. Peter, aside from Turkey, is any of this news? Finland and Sweden we've known about for a year, and the rest of NATO we've known about all our lives. The unpleasant surprises we've seen recently, are Chinese moves in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Central Asia. I've heard so little about India, that I'm worried that our Information Warriors are keeping bad news from us, on that front.
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  37.  @dmytrobieliaiev1344  Doesn't Russia occupy all of those stations, though?
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  38.  @cloudpoint0  Please stop making claims like that, failing to back it up with action costs you a massive amount of credibility, and you have none to spare. The fact that you're led by an actor with his own TV production team, and the fact that some of your loudest cheerleaders in the US shout the loudest about how good you are with "Information War" -- i.e., lying to everyone, including your theoretical friends (especially your friends) -- makes it very difficult to take anything you say seriously. Honestly, Americans love a good underdog story. Why in the world are you not telling the truth and appealing to Americans' habit of sticking up for the little guy? If the Americans who are most interested in supporting you are the ones telling you to lie, lie, lie, lie, because that's all they know how to do, then you've go the support of the wrong Americans.
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  39. He has to publish something while he waits for the news of glorious victories from the Ukrainian counter-offensive.
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  40. You should probably use a profile picture with less makeup. Maybe try an object instead of a face.
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  41. Er, most of that evidence was speculation. Could the Ukrainians have been the ones to mine the dam, in the eight years that they held it after the Russia took Crimea? This is just speculation, but then, it's no different than Peter's "evidence".
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  42.  @sayrebonifield4663  In a part of Nevada or elsewhere in the Rockies that there is no physical way for it to get into any one's drinking water? Of course. Or in an ocean subduction zone where over the course of time it will drop into Earth's core? Sure. These people pretend there are no solutions, it's weird.
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  43.  @Skunk106  You're insane and delusional. The worst hurricane to hit my part of the world was 400 years ago, well before any of this "warming" started. You have been fooled by people who have entirely unwarranted confidence in computer models, which simply aren't able to make reliable predictions. The fact that you've "accepted" reductions in standard of living -- which, make no mistake, quite literally means poverty to billions of poor people and death to hundreds of millions -- means you've joined a death cult. Wake up! Stop trusting computer models! Stop wishing death on your fellow humans! Have a look at the technologies that have lifted us up -- that we have been able to depend on for decades or centuries now, and that will lift us up further in the future -- and accept reality!
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  44. "The Russians will be much much scarier if they gobble up all that territory" All those hundreds (or thousands) of oblasts with their hundreds of millions of inhabitants that will surely solve all of Russia's manpower problems? Peter, go back to numbers. You're a better thinker when you have numbers to back you up.
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  45. And Trump is going to increase the size of the government? How? Jump-starting our oil industry alone, would have more of a deflationary effect and productivity-enhancing effect, than anything the Biden administration is willing to try.
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  46. Fascinating. How many years did this take?
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  47. Can the Chinese supply Russia with trucks, like the US did during WW2?
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  48. "We could use rivers in places like New England" -- Have you looked over what it would take to retrofit the bridges in New England to allow barges to pass? Especially when you get too far inland, those old brick factories (far away from freeways) in Sudbury or Maynard have had their support rivers built over with bridges that come right down to the water. And if you're looking for those retrofits to be quick, you have to massively reform civil engineering efficiency for public projects (again, the Japanese could probably help.) Currently, even a rework of the minor little two-lane bridge can take THREE YEARS or more to finish, like the one over the Assabet River by the Gleasondale Industrial Park.
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  49.  @R.S.4672  Back when the business community was the engine of general prosperity for this country, I could agree with you. It's not that way anymore, though.
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  50. Are we going to see a Ukraine filled with Syrian refugees, then?
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