Four Billion People Vote In 2024
China and Russia are busy spreading trouble EVERYWHERE.
Every single election anywhere in the world in 2024, some four billion of us, is on the business end of malign influence operations from China, Russia, and to a lesser level Iran and North Korea. Our Malign Influence Operations Safari isn’t a theory; I’ve got stories in the works with two journalism outlets, one is an Iranian hydra, the other involves Russians and Americans. I will say no more than the countries involved at this point, but if the Iran story goes I’ll be signing my work. Due to the American - Russian coordination I am uncertain if I’ll be as forthcoming with that one.
Chinese intrusions have been in the news recently and Russia has come to rely on this.
Factoring In Demographics:
When you listen to these things, realize that this is political reporting, the time frames for such things are quarters or years. If you step back to the level of generations, to what Peter Zeihan and others are saying about demographics, the video with Iain Duncan Smith in particular, fails to address this.
He correctly notes that Europe is utterly dependent on China for a segment of its manufacturing, but unlike the U.S./Mexico relationship, they don’t have a solution. We hear the usual conservative pablum - government spending is the problem, and we must bring down inflation. Bollocks.
Inflation is self limiting. If prices go up either new sources for products join the fray, or people start spending their money elsewhere. We haven’t had a rousing round of deflation in almost a century and this pro-oligarch anti-tax foolishness will be the death of us when we encounter such conditions. Our governments are, in times of trouble, the lender of last resort, which we had in 2008, and the consumer of last resort, which was the case for the entire decade of the 1930s.
A Globalization Trap:
I used to love Thinkpads, but when IBM sold to Lenovo that was over. I’m not the only one who felt that way. This snippet is from a paywalled article at The Times.
And yet … the U.K. is now spending £30 million for a Lenovo supercomputer.
Disentangling ourselves from portions of the supply chain that are likely to collapse is one problem, disentangling from bad actors is another, and there’s some demon overlap there. Like the U.S. selling scrap steel to Japan in the 1930s, this will go on until it becomes utterly impossible to defend.
Conclusion:
Our lived experiences no longer advise us properly; everyone alive today was born into humanity’s golden century. The oldest of our policy makers recall Vietnam, the Yom Kippur war, the oil embargo, Able Archer 83, the end of the Cold War. A world war, a flu pandemic, a brutal deflationary crash, and another world war? Those were things known only from parents and history books.
These policy makers at the senior level are all over fifty … the age at which mental fluidity diminishes. I’ve become a bit more aware of this with each passing year as sixty is creeping up on me.