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Thursday, March 6, 2025

The Snit Fit Heard Round The World - By David Stockman

......the US and EU combined have spent the staggering sum of nearly $400 billion to conduct a Demolition Derby on Russia’s doorstep in order for what?


Read full text:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/03/david-stockman/901959-2/ 


And we do mean monumental farce. As the most recent desultory chapter has unfolded since February 2022, in fact, the US and EU combined have spent the staggering sum of nearly $400 billion to conduct a Demolition Derby on Russia’s doorstep in order for what?

Apparently, to pleasure the arms merchants of the US and Europe with a grand occasion for the sale of beaucoup new weapons to replenish depleted NATO arsenals. And all in the name of more of the same old baloney about collective security and a “rules based international order”.

But that’s all just beltway bullshit. There has not been an iota of America’s homeland security implicated in the fate of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic after it split off from the expired corpse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And since “Ukraine” was a communist-built simulacrum of a nation, it was not destined to last, anyway—nor would its demise have been even a little bit noted or briefly remembered by the world at large.

Immigration does not solve population decline - Aporia

 From the Canadian Century Initiative to Bill Clinton, “we need immigration to compensate for the low birth rate” is a common refrain. Those pushing this line rarely list the problems of population decline1 that immigration supposedly solves. Instead, we’re seduced by the notion that the economy or society is a sort of angry god that must be placated by additional human fuel, whatever the source. The population number going down is bad; immigration brings the population number up; therefore we need more immigration. (Composition isn’t mentioned.) Implicitly, this is a blank-slatist argument, relying on the fact that honest discussion about ethnic differences is excluded from public discourse.

Making a state’s population go up for the sake of it is meaningless paper-clip maximizing. Once you start looking at the reasons why a growing population might be beneficial (to an individual member of society or the proverbial social planner), it becomes clear that actually-existing immigration2 makes the problems of population decline worse, not better.

Effect on population ageing

The first thing to understand is that most of the problems of population decline, like pensions bankrupting the state or less innovation and entrepreneurship, are actually problems of population aging. That’s what separates the present decline, which is the result of low fertility, from past episodes such as the Black Death, which were caused by high mortality. Both involve decline, but in the latter case the survivors were youthful and vigorous and could bounce back quickly.

The thing is: immigrants age too. This means that while immigration can definitely reverse population decline, it can’t do much for population aging. Assuming immigrant age-structure and fertility remain constant, the difference in the working-age share of the population in 2060 between zero net migration and 2019 levels of migration in the United States is… 2% (57% vs 59%).3

Making Sense of China's Meteoric Rise, by Hua Bin and Mike Whitney - The Unz Review

 

This essay is the second installment of my interview with Mike Whitney published on Unz Review. This is quite lengthy as I was trying to cover many grounds in Mike’s expansive question about the underlying forces for China’s resurgence.

Here’s the question:

Western pundits seem perversely fixated on the size of China’s economy, but what interests me is the China Phenomenon, that is, how the Chinese government managed to transform a poor, agrarian country into a technologically advanced, state-of-the-art civilization in which poverty has nearly been eradicated, standards of living continue to rise, and the masses of people seem to support the government’s vision of the future. How did China become the expression of 21st Century modernity it is today? (Or am I overstating the case?)

China’s Revival in the Context of its History

The west likes to talk about the rise of China. For the Chinese, it is not a rise. It is a return to normalcy – the place China occupied in the world for most of its existence.

Most educated people are aware China is the oldest continuous civilization in the world with a history extending back 5 millennia. For most of the 5000 years, China was one of the wealthiest and most advanced civilizations on earth....

Read full text: https://www.unz.com/bhua/making-sense-of-chinas-meteoric-rise/ 

Why Chinese Models Are Stunning Americans in the Tech Catwalk - LewRockwell

 Read full text: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/03/no_author/why-chinese-models-are-stunning-americans-in-the-tech-catwalk/ 


Physics heavyweight Quantum Bird, formerly with the CERN in Geneva, is adamant: “The Americans lost the plot. It’s all about models employing less computing power and less data. Nvidia high-performance GPUs costing $40,000 consume too much energy. Then there’s financial speculation. Raspberry Pi [a small single-board computer], the size of a credit card and with a simple processor, costing $50 for students, they may run DeepSeek, consuming less energy than a cellphone.”

And that’s just the beginning, Quantum Bird adds: “When Russia and China come up with their first lithographic machine… It was Silicon Valley that pushed the world to this.”

Russia-China scientists have already accelerated scientific computing on conventional Nvidia graphics cards by 800 times, creating a new algorithm using reverse engineering.

That was pulled off by a joint group of scientists from MSU-PPI University in Shenzhen (MSU-BIT University), established in 2014 by Lomonosov Moscow State University and Beijing Polytechnic Institute.

In parallel, researchers using Made in China GPUs have already boosted 10 times their performance over U.S. supercomputers relying on Nvidia hardware. U.S. tech sanctions? Who cares?

The Geopolitics of Peace — Jeffrey Sachs in the European Parliament, by Jeffrey D. Sachs - The Unz Review

 Read full text: https://www.unz.com/article/the-geopolitics-of-peace-jeffrey-sachs-in-the-european-parliament/#comment-7018269 


These are wars that the United States has led and caused. And this has been true for more than 30 years now. The United States came to the view, especially during 1990-91, and then with the end of the Soviet Union, that the US now runs the world, and that the US does not have to heed anybody’s views, red-lines, concerns, security viewpoints, international obligations, or any UN framework. I’m sorry to put it so plainly, but I do want you to understand.

Too Obvious To See? - LewRockwell

(DaChickens are coming home to roost? - CL )

Read full text: 
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/03/george-f-smith/too-obvious-to-see/ 

“The $16 trillion in secret bailout loans made by the Fed that the GAO had located in 2011 was only the tip of the iceberg. When the Levy Economics Institute added in other Fed bailout programs that the GAO had not included, the actual tally came to $29 trillion.

“While the Fed was secretly conducting the most unprecedented bailout of Wall Street banks in history from December 2007 through at least the middle of 2010, millions of Americans were struggling to make the mortgage payment on their home as a result of losing their job to an economic crisis caused by these very banks. Then those same banks moved in to foreclose on millions of homeowners, while secretly receiving these windfall bailouts from the Fed.” — Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 21, 2020

The unfathomable amount of money the Fed handed out might become Exhibit A when the Trump-Musk cleansing machine arrives at the Fed’s door, but really, what would you expect of an institution created for the purpose of keeping the big boys flush with ”elastic currency” while insisting it is really an inflation fighter?

The Mysterious Omission - Vox Popoli

(Without question, this is one of the most insightful pieces I have read on...CL)

'over the course of recorded human history, one of the most important actors and drivers of events, which is the intersection of supernatural and material evil'.......

Read full text:
https://voxday.net/2025/03/03/the-mysterious-omission/ 

The answer, of course, is that in order to get published and become the primary English language reference on the French Revolution, it was vital for Schama to conceal the involvement of The Empire That Never Ended.

I’ve read Schama’s work twice. I’ve never read anything by Webster. But I have absolutely no doubt that Webster’s work is more historically accurate and reliable, simply because Schama had to omit what has been, over the course of recorded human history, one of the most important actors and drivers of events, which is the intersection of supernatural and material evil that Philip K. Dick identified as The Empire That Never Ended, that AC calls Cabal, that Vladimir Putin calls The Empire of Lies, and which we label Clown World.

The Romans called it Carthage, demanded its defeat, and sowed its grounds with salt. The Conquistadors called it the Aztec Empire and did their best to eradicate it forever. The Crusaders were corrupted by it. The Inquisitors did their best to root it out of Christendom and have been slandered for their efforts ever since. But regardless of what it is called, it will never die because it is not of human origins and the fallen rulers of this world will always find corrupt human spirits who are willing to serve them in return for the false immortality they are offered.

It’s not hard to understand why the wicked are so slavishly committed to the will of their evil masters. They fear death, as they well should, and they will do literally anything in their futile attempts to avoid their inevitable Divine judgment.