Bloody Shovel 4

So Trump just met Marshall or Chairman or whatever Kim Jong Un in Singapore.

I don't have any opinion on the meeting. Nothing substantial was agreed on. Seems to me nothing real happened at all. North Korea isn't going to give away its nukes. And USG isn't going to withdraw its troops from South Korea. Thus, nothing is going to happen.

The reasoning is quite simple. At the end of the day, North Korea is a small, poor, fairly inconsequential country 25 million people. It's birth rate appears to be ...

Just when I finished my last post saying that the US dominion over the Western Pacific will soon be over, and asked "what then..."

Comes North Korea and shoots an (alleged) hydrogen bomb. The world is startled. No, it's the world is amazed. It's jizzing on its pants. I can't say I appreciate Kim Jong Un's sense of aesthetics, but man, this guy understand strategy.

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As usual, everybody is pointing at China. Please do something! You're feeding these guys!

And what says China?

https://twitter.co

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

So this video has been doing the rounds. You should watch it. It’s very well done. And the book it refers to, The Dictator’s Handbook, is also a great book. I read it a while ago. Hell, I should have done a book review. It’s a really good book. It’s analysis of government in general, and how dictatorships work, is brilliant.

Alas, the book flounders when it talks about democracy. Which it basically posits as the Great Solution, the final End of H...

When I get referrals from Twitter I use to search a bit to see how my posts are being talked about. Recently I saw Nick Land calling me a North Korea sympathizer of sorts. Now, I had been wanting to make a post about North Korea since a while ago, so this is as good a chance as any to write what I think about that country.

North Korea is a nasty place. I define "nasty" by the way the people live, not by the way its political system conflicts with the political positions I’ve signaled over the ...

WRM cheers on the newly found intimacy between USG and Japan. Kerry and Hagel, State and the Pentagon are both now in Japan, where they have signed... something. WRM sees this as proof that USG is putting its weight behind Japan, joining forces against China. And that's a good thing. Say what you will about WRM, he knows what he likes, he makes it clear, and he says it all over again as many times as he can find excuses for. Pension reform, automation, fuck China, defend Israel, he's not a singl...

It seems the US is immersed in yet another witch hunt against a heretic troublemaker who dares contradict the foundational dogma of the Cathedral. I'm more surprised by the balls of the man who made a dissertation on Mexican IQ on freaking Harvard, than in the totally predictable crackdown when his views came out in the news. Of all the stupid, irrational, me-too denunciations that have denounced Richwine all around the media, the one that caught my eye the most was the one from Will Wilkinson i...

A while ago Greg Cochran wrote a very insightful post, saying that older civilisations necessarily produce populations of cynical familial slackers, because the realities of warfare and human society mean that those more likely to fight for abstract ideals were killed off over the thousands of years of successive civilisations.

That's why more recently civilised places like Germany or Japan are still more orderly than, say, Iraq or Egypt. Still the historical data is patchy, so many people refuse...