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

  1. This is what happens when you are so dedicated to your Information War that no one believes what you say anymore.
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  2.  @TheSolitarysun  You're right, I missed that.
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  3. He misses the connection between increased immigration and increased human trafficking, though. Take a huge anti-Trump and pro-Establishment bias into account, when you're listening to him.
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  4. Putin spoke once about his experience as a European field agent during the fall of the Soviet Union -- at a certain critical point, as they listened for orders, "Moscow fell silent". Did other portions of the Russian spy network (in America and elsewhere) experience the same interruption of C3? Were there some that drifted off entirely, quitting or setting themselves up as independent outfits? I'm certain there has to be a fascinating history here.
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  5.  @werrrp  Compared to leaps like airplanes, radio, television, and the internal combustion engine, that were happening 100 years ago? Not really. Things have slowed WAY down in the physical space.
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  6. Sounds like we'd be better off onshoring our supply chains. This should be done rapidly, and permanently. If we have to pay workers a decent wage, so that the Master's degree class (not to mention the billionaires) aren't the only ones able to buy houses, so much the better.
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  7.  @markalbert9011  The problem is your teacher was wrong. If you have more stuff, and there isn't enough money to buy it at the old prices, you have to cut the price to be able to sell it.
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  8. Peter is blob-adjacent. He still has an independent opinion formed from digging into the data, but he still has a lot of received wisdom from the Establishment. Things have gotten worse as his profile has increased, and exploitive people have noticed that Peter has a level of influence. The sorts of Establishment hacks who try to overrun and control every source of influence, are doing a number on Peter now.
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  9. Um, why are you laughing? Brussels and Washington should be sh**ting their pants over this.
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  10.  @chocomalk  Um, none of that territory was ever Chinese. Unless you're saying the Genghis Khan was Chinese, or something.
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  11.  @rfjohns1  Disney is pioneering that step, aren't they?
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  12. "Also believe everything the government tells you."
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  13.  @ClownCarCoup  Orders of magnitude are logarithmic, so about 3.17x (square root of 10, very close to pi if you remember that still) is half an order of magnitude.
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  14.  @stapleman007  An awfully lot of people would have to be "in on it" for this to be some kind of plan. It reminds me more of sheer bureaucratic hubris, perhaps idiocy. Honestly, this is why there shouldn't even be an EU bureaucracy.
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  15. "If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow, they would win" I think you underestimate just how vulnerable surface fleets are. We should refer to any Chinese attempt to cross the Taiwan Straights as "Operation Fish Food".
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  16.  @careylymanjones  Even based on actual ability, it can lead to actions against the interests of everyone but the elites, as we see today. Only, we also see today that their estimation of their abilities is not borne out by their performance.
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  17. And the workforce that supported them. I suspect the loss of our factories and the on-the-job training that those represented, lands us in at least as much trouble as Russia with the collapse of its educational system.
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  18. "Splitting up the hordelands makes sure a retrenchment is never possible" Because Balkanizing an area leads to long-term peace?
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  19.  @Quickshot0  Read Zeihan's early books, they cover the fracking revolution.
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  20.  @jesseg5902  It strikes me as the opinion of A swing voter, not the swing voter. This isn't one of those things that Zeihan over-analyzes; he doesn't seem to analyze it at all.
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  21.  @darkgardener9577  Sacramento can't manufacture more water. Environmental regulation hurts agriculture, absolutely, but at a certain point the fresh water sources simply don't have the volume to satisfy potential demand.
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  22.  @wisenber  The Boomers are about to die, like they're about to retire. Gradually, over decades. The fact that Peter treats this as a step-function is one of the most irritating factors in his analyses.
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  23.  @wisenber  Not sure you caught my meaning. Boomers will die gradually, over decades, like they have retired gradually, over decades. I was complaining there that Peter has a tendency to treat this passing of average Boomer retirement age, like it was some kind of sudden numerical spike in his calculations. I find that irritating, because it doesn't make much sense. There will be a gentle downslope in the number of retirees per year, just like there was a gentle upslope in the number of retirees up until now. (That is, unless the arbitrary demarcation of the time of the "Boomer" generation was frontloaded or backloaded in terms of birthrate.) There are no cliffs to fall off of, here.
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  24.  @deanfirnatine7814  Depends on how patient people are. For a while, you can get away with forcing people to park their car (for an exorbitant fee) in a razorwire-enclosed parking lot, and walk down the sidewalk through what feels like someone's living room (watching where you step), to be crammed into a tiny commercial space for the sake of a startup. Only, once everyone wakes up to the fact that quality of life matters, things can collapse very quickly.
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  25.  @MrSunrise-  Bearing arms is an inailenable human right. If their government fails to protect this right -- if they instead infringe upon them -- the Canadians have the right to end the Trudeau government and put in place a different one that actually will respect their rights. Regime change in Canada should be a higher priority in the United States.
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  26. Alfred Thayer Mahan is dead, and arguably the US Navy's one job is to make sure he stays that way. ;) That is to say, when you have more than just one navy protecting world shipping, Mahan pointed out they tend to get into very consequential fights. His observation was taken very much to heart by the Germans and the Japanese in the early 20th century. We really don't want a repeat of all that. The uniqueness of the American perspective was our "open door" trade policy where anyone with money could trade with anyone who had goods, as opposed to the "imperial silo" policy where colonies of each empire could only trade with cores of each empire. We also made a virtue of necessity, by being the only country capable of floating the requisite Navy, all other industrial centers being rubble by late 1945. The problem today is, we aren't in the same financial position we were in nearly 100 years ago. Trump isn't wrong to ask our allies to do their bit to defray the cost burden we have shouldered for generations.
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  27. @Silk I'm saying Peter lines up pretty well with the Washington establishment on what a well-structured world looks like. Hint: It benefits the Washington Establishment, and almost no other Americans. This explains the Trump phenomenon, and Peter's reaction to it, among other things.
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  28.  @richjenkins8794  "Zeihan on politics" is a fascinating insight into the assumptions and priorities of our ruling class.
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  29.  @RedTeufel  Nuclear you can't afford: - A corrupt government - To build it in a place subject to multiple natural disasters simultaneously Otherwise you're fine.
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  30. Establishment. Oh, and culturally Left - he's on the rainbow spectrum.
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  31.  @LiveWellUkraine  I'm still waiting for Kelsey Grammer to sing a clip of "Maria" in his testiest Frasier Crane voice: "Nu-cle-ar, that's how you pronouce it! Nu-cle-ar!"
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  32. You know, if pay rates were higher here in America, more Americans would be having kids. And, if the border were anything other than the free-for-all that it is now, we'd be able to successfully interdict various forms of pharmaceuticals coming up from Mexico. So... a closed border would help with all of these problems.
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  33. Yeah, if he's unaware that right across the straits from Yemen is Djibouti, where a large number of countries in the world (including the Chinese) have remote naval bases for coordinated anti-pirate missions, he really hasn't done his homework on this one.
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  34. When he sticks to the data, he's great. When he spouts Establishment talking points like this, he's not informative at all.
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  35.  @seadkolasinac7220  If you could distinguish between a mainstream Conservative and a "right-winger" that might help you. The hammer and sickle is pretty extreme. It represents worse evil than the swastika.
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  36. Does Peter ever discuss productivity-led economic growth in detail? Seems to me that the Numbers Go Up obsession ("Japan will never experience economic growth again") when focused on top-line Gross Domestic Product, leads to horrifically bad economic decisions like allowing cartels of human traffickers to take control of your national borders.
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  37. Reminds me of the joke with the pilot, the priest, Henry Kissinger, and the Boy Scout, in a plane that's crashing.
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  38. Amen.
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  39. Sometimes the truth seeps out, though. He's at his best when he's doing data analysis, not political commentary.
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  40.  @gsbeak  Nice =)
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  41. Yes. This is why whatever happens in Ukraine, time is on our side. Stuff Scandinavia, the Baltics, Poland, and Romania full of defensive weaponry, and Russia will stall out. There is no need for a broader war.
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  42.  @designed84  Whenever he backs it up with data, I think he's still worth listening to. When it's just a regurgitation of Establishment talking points, not so much. Unfortunately we now have to be skeptical about when his data analysis confirms Establishment narratives, and look elsewhere to correct for whatever biases have crept into those conclusions.
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  43. We've been using it for a while, but with the French (long "a") pronunciation, with the term "policy wank".
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  44. Peter, you're losing a lot of credibility by parroting the legacy media line that "Most of what Trump says is a lie". If you line up the fact checks between the two candidates from the debate, Biden is much farther from reality than Trump is. This is why your comments section has basically come to the conclusion that you can be trusted on more objective topics, but generally not on politics.
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  45. I agree. He's got a great eye for that.
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  46. Building a ground station for a satellite network costs maybe $25M dollars. It would not surprise me if Russia has enough pull worldwide, to build some of these stations in various parts of the globe that would give them even better contact scheduling than they have now.
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  47.  @Ragis  Spread the good word far and wide! The whole point of democracy is to help out the yeoman, not the aristocrat.
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  48. As countries lose their religion, population declines. Countries who also suffer from wars (the Koreas, Germany, Japan) have a double-whammy.
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  49.  @erikvan9582  I don't think anyone on the Right would be complaining if we limited immigration to the amount we could assimilate to a culture of social responsibility.
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  50.  @dancingferret6654  There are a LOT of Germans who are going to be very cold, and very angry, this winter. I don't think they will be very forgiving of the sort of German Establishment type that looked the other way, which is very likely why Ukraine had to take the fall here.
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