Loading ...Unfortunately it does a lot of good for his reputation as a conman, which is why he’s going to lose the midterms and The USA is going to lose big time, maybe even more biggerer. And thus the world.
“WTH is happening to this country?” Well, setting aside a pettily corrupt opportunistic, naive president, who hasn’t learned from his first term mistakes, it’s the entrenched socialism which ensures that the USA will go bust and that society will collapse – not because of the financial collapse, a robust society can cope with that and bounce back quickly, think Germany in the twenties – because society is so weak, after a century of socialist molly-coddling. This is not the socialism of the USSR where there never were the resources to achieve a socialist utopia, but the USA (and UK, Europe, Australia etc) socialism of using the surpluses from capitalism to pander to the electorate. Nobody has to work anymore. We have generations of people who have no work ethic – they may turn up at unproductive jobs and take home a paycheck at the end of the week, but they have made nothing. Far worse, they’ve usually contributed to reducing production, working in a bureaucracy issuing regulations hampering other peoples’ genuine work. You’ve lost, totally and catastrophically lost, the ability to hustle, so evident in the twenties and thirties. Urbanisation has created a dependent society oblivious of the fundamentals required for survival. Milk comes out of a bottle, gas from a hose, beef from a plastic wrapping. Everyone has the right to these things on demand, and if they aren’t there, it’s someone’s fault, somewhere, usually a white rich bastard (or Trump). Hungary has just switched from liberal to socialist. The vote for the socialists was almost exclusively in the cities. In Australia, the cities are all left, the country right. Same in the USA. In Australia, farmers cannot get workers. Period. The children are leaving the land because regulations and taxation are making farming a bureaucratic nightmare – we go out to farmer friends occasionally to help with branding because nobody else will. Great fun for me on the quad bike rounding up the poddies, and for both of us moving them around the yards branding and ringing them, but then, we don’t do the paperwork.
And that is where society is becoming too weak. The food supply is on the verge of collapse due to lack of labour, high input costs (Diesel here has almost doubled since your glorious leader’s acquiescing to his puppetmaster’s wishes) and bureaucracy. When food prices start to rise because of shortages the urban drongos won’t know what to do. Urban governments will impose all sorts of panic regulations on farmers and processed food manufacturers which will, as always, make things far worse. You think that covid was bad. Wait ’til there’s no food, and 250m mostly useless people cannot understand why and cannot help themselves in any way need to find an outlet for their confusion and anger. The reamining 60m folk will be hunkering down and if they aren’t already there fleeing to the country where those with skills, or even no skills but the right attitudes, will be accepted.
An article on ZH really sums up your country’s problem, the one about a submarine which has been undergoing an overhaul for 11 years, costing so far $800m. For which nothing has actually been done yet. So now they are abandoning it. The article contrasts this to how quickly actually sunk, sitting on the bottom of the sea, warships were refloated and returned to service after Pearl Harbour. Your navy is cactus, as further demonstrated by the Ford aircraft carrier fiasco. Assuming it really was a laundry fire, 80 years ago it would have been inconceivable that a ship, on active service, would need to be pulled off the job to go first to Cyprus, and then to Croatia for repairs, for a laundry fire. It has a crew of 4,500, and yet there was no hustle to sort it out without taking a couple of holidays. Despite having all the repair skills available on board with no problem associated with flying in new mattresses, sheets, tumble dryers or whatever to an aircraft carrier it was deemed incapable of continuing as a fighting force. I reckon the Commander should be court martialled – instead she or he will probably get a medal. Then you lose six aircraft recovering a lost colonel whose plane was downed because the Iranians “got lucky”. That’s a rather high ratio, seven planes per airman, and now we are into relying on the Dirty Harry philosophy; pilots now have to decide whether they are feeling “lucky” before flying because nobody is sure if there is an Iranian missile left on a launcher. But you still, apparently, have the greatest navy in the world. You probably do – every other country, certainly Australia, is the same or worse. Remember the Spanish submarine that could only dive once? The UK boats are, like the US submarines, spending a third of their time in dock. Russia seems to have abandoned aircraft carriers altogether. The Chinese have loads of new carriers, but no idea how to operate them.
So these problems are not just for the USA as almost every country is suffering from the same problems. Outliers like Switzerland may be able to survive the collapse of societies in their neighbouring countries, with a well armed population and the convenience of all those mountains surrounding them. American and Australian people living in the farming areas may be OK as they can be very remote from the urban chaos that will erupt, but in Europe everything is too close to an urban centre for anywhere to be safe.
Like you, I can’t see more than two months ahead. Our PM is making another announcement on fuel problems this morning which is expected to include such radical, fundamental measures like pumping up your tyres properly and removing roofracks. Or maybe buying Chinese electric cars so we can collapse the grid in the southern and western states – in Qld we still have plenty of coal capacity. Such measures may help us limp through the next couple of months when we will have to revisit the crystall ball.