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

  1. "The Supreme Court should not intervene in legislation because the legislatures are elected and therefore the voice of the people" If the voice of the people is the primary good here, then obviously choosing to allow the people to speak by allowing someone on a ballot is the obvious decision.
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  2. "Egypt has about twice the population the Nile can carry, and we will see a famine of Biblical proportions when they can no longer export cash crops in return for importing cheap wheat." This is also why they will never accept millions of refugees as Israel has proposed as its final solution to the Palestinian question. They have too many mouths to feed already.
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  3. So do you think we're going to see Uyghur conscripts on the Russian side at any point in this war? Any troublesome minority from the PRC, really.
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  4. Yeah, just don't go into town or you'll get beat up or s*ot.
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  5.  @benvoncamp  You mean like China's? Or the United States in the 19th century?
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  6. @ "I'm arbitrarily categorizing your examples as something irrelevant, therefore I am dismissing them." Yeah, sorry. Pull out some actual examples if you're serious.
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  7. "Still confident Russia will cease to exist as a country in my lifetime, would love to see that forward-loaded" Yeah, because disintegration of North Asia into nuclear-armed warring fiefdoms, is something that absolutely everyone would love to see. Peter, you're insane. The Iraqification of Russia (with China playing the part of Iran) would be a geopolitical disaster.
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  8. I don't understand why we can't make the same deals for Japanese boat manufacturers (who are best in the world) that we do for Japanese car manufacturers. Most Hondas are "American" cars, according to the law.
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  9. It's almost as if he's spouting a party line here, instead of trying to figure out actual solutions.
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  10.  @tuckerbugeater  Yes, but he likes being right too much, to sacrifice too much of his credibility. I'd give at least 12 to 7 odds that if he had to choose between telling the truth because it would make him look good and telling a lie because it would make his "masters" look good, he'd go with the truth.
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  11. The first instance of real "space warfare" might well be the last for decades. "Kessler syndrome" describes a cascading effect, where debris from one shattered satellite, traveling with a differential velocity measured in several kilometers per second, causes a chain reaction of shattered satellites throughout many or all of Earth's orbitals. Cleanup of space junk is only in its infancy -- we're just now getting tow trucks to haul defunct satellites into junkyard orbits. Lasers might be able to deal with junk in the 1kg-10 kg range (provided we can track it properly), but even smaller chunks are considered "Lethal Untrackable Debris". While the launch of the tow missions is promising, the laser approach has been discussed for decades without much progress made. This is interesting, I'll do a deeper dive on it.
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  12. Isn't the most effective Russian spy operation in Germany the Green party? They got their teeth handed to them in this last round of elections, didn't they? Maybe Germany is serious about being a country after all.
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  13. Really? I would have thought that his element was the most well-organized, complete, and accurate dataset possible. I guess this is a nice refreshing change, but I hope he gets back to the data reasonably soon.
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  14.  @Alexadria205  Er, the "Learn to Code" argument has been pretty thoroughly debunked as unworkable. Fortunately the solution is extremely high levels of automation and productivity, which we're perfectly capable of developing. I don't think we "need to include Mexico and South America", in fact exploiting their cheap labor (again, at the expense of American workers) only serves to perpetuate the problem. You're drunk on the Global Systems Theory Kool-Aid. Rehab is going to hurt, but getting y'all dry again is going to be essential for the continued strategic well-being of the United States.
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  15.  @Alexadria205  That's still "World Systems Theory", and it destroys the middle class in every country where it's tried. It's why independents broke for Trump decisively. It's on its way out, along with its practitioners.
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  16.  @Alexadria205  It's astonishing, how much YouTube H**ES the responses to your comment here. The fact is that you're quoting "World Systems Theory", and puts the US into the category of "Core country" despite the fact that this destroys the middle class in every country it has been tried in.
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  17. The only power the EU parliament has, is to rubber-stamp the "executive commission"? -- No wonder the EU is so f*cked up. There is no reason any free people should tolerate that. That's like the US government removing every democratic institution except the Electoral College. There's no way that governance structure will survive intact, over the next few years. The EU is headed for major reforms, or outright dissolution.
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  18. "The Mississippi is the largest set of navigable waterways in the world, and it's an order of magnitude cheaper to move goods by water" So why isn't Middle America dominant over the rest of the United States? I briefly looked at the numbers. They show that water transport, even in Mississippi-accessible states, has significantly less tonnage than highway. (Rail transport's more efficient but less used too, I guess since it's not great last-mile either.) I'm starting to conclude that having a massive river network is a great bonus that does not scale. Apparently there's a max carrying capacity. Compare this to ocean transport, which (aside from the choke points of the ports themselves) have a much higher bandwidth. Personally I'd rather this not be true -- I'd love to see the Mississippi basin dominate national politics, as opposed to the Hudson and Potomac, which have always been a bit too big for their britches. It would explain our current situation though, if it's not simply a historical accident based on migration and settlement patterns from Europe to America.
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  19. You need to look into the vote-counting shenanigans in the 2020 election. Not the bulls**t about shootouts in Frankfurt, but the fact that mail-in votes came in from empty lots, and other such instances. "Well, 'A' happened, but not in enough numbers to affect the outcome of the election." " Well, 'B' happened, but not in enough numbers to affect the outcome of the election." "Well, 'C' happened, but not in enough numbers to affect the outcome of the election." But some of us can add A + B + C...
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  20. El Salvador has done a lot recently to make their country a more caring place. People are moving back there now.
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  21. Wait, Peter knows how to drive? Or maybe he's just pretending.
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  22. "Independents thought Joe Biden was an absolute disaster, but in 2022 sided with the Democrats" And this doesn't seem the least bit fishy to you? Most free and fair elections ever! Don't ask questions!
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  23.  @honeybadger7853  Not sure he has freedom. I mean, can he really stop doing this at this point?
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  24. "The Taiwanese are not going to be conquering the mainland anytime soon" -- You sure about that? They couldn't do it without masses of help from the "inside" on the mainland, but considering how awful the CCP is towards their population I wouldn't rule that out. "Democracy with Chinese characteristics", anyone? =D
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  25.  @Oldmaninthestream  Because he would have read The Cossacks ?
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  26. At what point will Putin pull out the nukes, rather than lose?
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  27.  @pfeilspitze  Some of the best conversationalists I have ever met, have been in the employ of the FBI and CIA. I'd be very surprised if they couldn't get more than talking points out of the people who actually do the work on the ground, in these situations. =)
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  28. "All Trump cared about was stopping immigration ... with Biden, human trafficking is back on the agenda" Mostly because without immigration, you don't have human trafficking. Peter, you're giving Biden WAY too much of a pass here. Biden is incompetent, and our open border is a disaster.
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  29. The core question is, will mass deportations, domestic industrial expansion (due to tariffs), and vastly expanded energy sector, help American working class buying power overall, or will it hurt working class buying power overall? People who don't mow their own lawn, cook their own food, clean their own toilets, or raise their own kids will probably be hurt; but Trump's campaign slogan for a decade might as well have been "D*e Yuppie Sc*m" anyway.
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  30. "Boomer capital will go into investments that are decidedly not risky venture capital" Um, are Boomers really as important in the VC space as High Net Worth Individuals? Hasn't the last decade or two been a story of how HNWIs have been come Really Extremely HNWIs? How do your estimates change if you take individuals into account, in addition to your geographic and demographic forces? By the way, if you've read Isaac Asimov's "Foundation", you should probably also read Connie Willis' more recent "To Say Nothing of the Dog", they both deal with historical forces and confounding factors.
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  31. So all predictions come down to whose guesswork about independents is most correct?
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  32. Voting is a right, not a privilege -- the Federal government is obligated by the Constitution to make sure the States have a government based on this right.
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  33. Can China operate that far from home? (If "anyone with scuba gear could do this", shouldn't we consider them carefully?) Seems like they have an interest in stirring the pot between the US/EU and Russia, weakening Europe, and encouraging Russia to look East for markets for their energy.
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  34. ... Which is why everyone who is skeptical of it should take their money out of Blackrock and State Street, ASAP. As far as Vanguard is concerned, they've supposedly renounced ESG. It would be interesting to know if they were telling the truth.
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  35. I've been saying for quite some time, that Putin is a fool to trust Xi. And we're fools for allowing Xi to gobble up East Asia. We would be best served by making peace in Ukraine, ceding the DonBas region to Russia (DonBas wanted to be independent of Kiev as much as Kiev wants to be independent of Russia, so this is basically a no-brainer), and then encouraging Putin to turn his attention East -- giving him a Sphere of Influence in Greater Mongolia, East Turkmenistan, Tibet, and perhaps even a newly independent Manchuria. To those who point out that we guaranteed the territorial integrity of Ukraine -- fair point, but we did that to discourage nuclear proliferation. The whole point of non-proliferation is to make nuclear war less probable. At this point continued conflict in Ukraine makes nuclear war vastly MORE probable, so continued war is a strategically incoherent position.
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  36.  @blazej799  Ever heard the truism, "The enemy gets a vote"? "Pushing the Russians out" = World War 3. More than one thing can be true; I'm not sure "pushing Russia out" can be one of them, though. As Peter said repeatedly, this was always Russia's war to lose, and unless we escalate to World War 3, I'm pretty sure they're not going to. Not sure anyone wins WW3, though. You're not old enough to remember the lessons of the Cold War, I'm guessing.
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  37.  @blazej799  Fascinating. YouTube doesn't like replies to your comment.
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  38.  @blazej799  Do do what you say, would require escalation to the point of World War 3. More than one thing can be true.
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  39.  @blazej799  The almighty algorithm? These really are very simple replies... I'm not even saying you're wrong. I'm just saying I'm not wrong either.
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  40. The REAL solution is simple (and lots of fun, and incredibly meaningful / rewarding) but you're never going to hear it from someone like Zeihan. The real solution is the JS Bach solution -- HAVE LOTS OF KIDS. Ignore people who deprecate being straight, ignore people who deprecate women being mothers. Roll back urbanization in favor of suburbanization. Roll back policies that concentrate wealth and other resources in the hands of groups that tend not to procreate (urbanites, etc). Change public health policies to discourage sterility. The problem hasn't been solved already, because there are interests who have never been powerful before. The rest of us are going to have to get them to surrender that power, before this problem can be solved.
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  41. What Germany needs is another generation of Germans as prolific as composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who helped Germany repopulate (seemingly singlehandedly) after the destruction of the Thirty Year's War. Twenty kids. Get busy, Germans! All true wealth is biological!
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  42. Morbid question: Has enough of Ukraine's rail infrastructure been destroyed, to make it comparably cost-effective to rebuild it using the European gauge rather than the Russian gauge?
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  43.  @Withnail1969  So what's with the accusations of Russia going scorched earth on Ukraine, "rubbling" its cities, etc?
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  44.  @Withnail1969  Wild.
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  45. But all those wonderful services that workers want from cities! Think of the services! Yeah, I think Peter's incredibly off-base here, but it's fascinating to get the insight into how Elites think. They love income inequality. And I'm not talking about Republicans, it's Democrats that are all into wrecking the middle class today.
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  46. "I've always had to deal with a lot of bots and a lot of trolls from a lot of places" Really? Because the comments I'm seeing here are 95% positive. Are you saying they're bots?
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  47. Skilled STEM workers are typically crap at running anything. Not that they THINK they're crap at running things, just in practice, they're crap.
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  48. Peter, why would the Russians not simply dump and burn any excess oil, if they can't sell it?
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  49. "Canada has massive immigration without massive backlash" Peter, have you been under a rock? More Canadians are joining in to take down Trudeau every day.
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  50. Don't believe your lying ears, or your lying eyes, is what Political Peter is saying. Political Peter is a shill for the Deep State. Analytical Peter is the person we came here to watch, I wish he'd come back.
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