A Palm Beach County, Fla., judge has sentenced Derrick Jenkins to six months probation with the first 30 days in jail for sending another judge an expletive-filled letter questioning the judge’s competence. Jenkins was upset that Judge Howard K. Coates had dismissed a lawsuit he filed against the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. His letter contained no threats against Coates. Jenkins says he was just exercising his First Amendment rights. But Judge Robert Panse, who was assigned the case, found him guilty of criminal contempt of court.
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A left-wing journalist in Sweden who vehemently supported mass immigration has changed her tune, admitting that when it came to Sweden’s crime-ridden no-go areas, “everyone knew it would end in disaster.”
Aftonbladet’s Lena Mellin now acknowledges that Sweden’s attempt to integrate huge numbers of migrants from Africa and the Middle East has failed.
“All parties, with the possible exception of the Left Party and the Sweden Democrats [SD], who hardly affected the reality on this point, should be ashamed,” writes 64-year-old Mellin.
She accuses politicians of having “largely neglected the development in some of our suburbs” despite the fact that “everyone knew it would end in disaster.”
Numerous people pointed out the hypocrisy of Mellin admitting she knew integration was failing yet still refusing to abandon her support for mass immigration.
“Incredible! Lena Mellin, of all journalists one of the foremost advocates for mass immigration and multiculturalism, one of the worst SD-haters, claims that ‘one has known for years’ that it would go to hell,” tweeted Ted Ekeroth.
“For more than a decade Sweden’s ruling class — including political leaders and the media — has denied that there are any problems in the country’s banlieues caused by the mass importation of Third World immigrants. Except for problems caused by those WAYCIST Swedes, of course,” writes the Gates of Vienna blog.
“Now it seems that the truth about cultural enrichment has become so blatant that it can no longer be denied. The response of the Swedish media establishment? “We knew all along that things would end badly; we just forgot to tell you.” And they blame the politicians.”
Sweden continues to experience huge problems with violent crime, shootings, explosions and grenade attacks, mostly as a result of turf warfare between rival migrant gangs.
Authorities in Malmo responded by inviting local gang leaders for pizza, while the Swedish government recently announced it would commit $175,000 to funding Drag Queen Story Time events where men dressed as women read and perform to children.
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A new survey by YouGov has revealed the overriding feeling going into this December’s general election is one of fear.
When asked how they mostly feel about the upcoming vote, Statista’s Martin Armstrong points out that from the six options ranging from Excited (5 percent) to Angry, Fearful was chosen by a quarter of respondents.
The other positive options of Enthusiastic (7 percent) and Proud (1 percent) also garnered little interest, giving way – fitting to the times – to anger and confusion.
On September 24, the US embassy in Denmark published a security alert. It warned US citizens in Copenhagen that:
“The Danish National Police urge individuals living in or visiting the areas of Nørrebro, Ishøj, and Hundige to exercise heightened awareness at all times due to a recent increase in gun violence. Copenhagen Police have instituted a stop-and-search zone in a large area covering Nørrebro. The ordinance – which will run through September 30 – allows police officers to stop and search anyone within the area without cause”.
The alert also encouraged US citizens to “keep a low profile”, “do not physically resist any robbery attempt” and “use caution when walking or driving at night”.
Police in Copenhagen eventually decided to extend the stop and search ordinance in parts of Copenhagen until October 14.
The police have confirmed that the numerous shootings, one of them lethal, are connected to rivalries between two criminal gangs, “Brothas” and “NNV”. The situation is beginning to resemble that of Sweden, where shootings and bombings have become commonplace. In late August, in Denmark, a residential building in Greve, a suburb of Copenhagen, was targeted. A bomb with the approximate explosive force of a hand grenade was detonated at the entrance to the building. In June, also in Greve, a man was shot; and in April, several cars were blown up.
In 2017, when shootings in Copenhagen grew more frequent as the conflict intensified between the two gangs, “Brothas” and “Loyal to Familia” (the latter has since been prohibited by Danish authorities), statistics published by the daily Berlingske Tidende showed that 30% of the gang members involved had foreign passports.
“These numbers underline, first of all, that we are talking about a problem that has to do with ethnicity. The argument that this has nothing to do with foreigners has to be taken off the table,” said the legal affairs spokesperson for the Social Democrats, Trine Bramsen, at the time.
“In addition to a common fondness for crime, the culture of immigrant gangs is a cocktail of religion, clan affiliation, honor, shame and brotherhood,”wrote Danish Conservative Party MP Naser Khader, who is also a co-founder of the Muslim reform movement .
“They also distinguish themselves from the rockers [predominantly ethnically Danish biker gangs, Ed.] by an incredibly strong cruelty. The harder and the more brutal [you are], the stronger you are, and then you create awareness of yourself and attract more [people]”.
The flare-up in gang violence has also led to what appears to be a new trend in Denmark: Carjackings at gunpoint. The Danish police confirm that there have been at least three armed carjackings in the conflict between the Brothas and NNV gangs. In one incident, two people were threatened with guns to get out of their cars and leave them.
As in Sweden, car-torchings have also become commonplace. In the first nine months of 2019, according to the Danish police, there were 648 car torchings, the highest number in the past four years.
Nørrebro, where 17.6 % of the inhabitants were non-Western immigrants and their descendants in 2018, has some of the most serious problems, and is where many of the criminal gangs originate. In July 2019, Mathilde Graversen of the daily Berlingske Tidende visited a small neighborhood in the area, where, according to locals with whom she spoke, just 20-25 local boys and young men of ethnic minority background, between the ages of 12 and 20, are causing all the problems. Describing the measures some residents take for personal security, she wrote:
“It has become a habit to use the back door instead of the front door [to their apartment building]. They pass a fence into the garden… and go through the basement up to their apartment. In this way, they avoid having to pass a group of boys and young men, who often hang out in front of the building. Other residents periodically give up using their bedroom. They blow up an air mattress every night and sleep in the living room because the group of boys and young men listen to loud music, shout and occasionally knock on the windows to the [residents’] bedrooms at night. Others say that they have friends who dare not visit them in the evening”.
In September, Christian Lunøe, who lives with his children in Nørrebro, wrote an op-ed in Berlingske Tidende, in which he described his intention to move away from there.
“Last Sunday it became so dangerous at my house that I can no longer defend living [in Nørrebro] with my children,” Lunøe wrote. He added that he had been out for an evening walk with his children when they encountered a group of boys and young men “with an aggressive and confrontational attitude”. When he and his children passed the group on the street, the group “explodes in a… brawl, with two out of the five pulling a knife”.
Lunøe described how there has been, “a spread of gang crime and associated groups of admirers, right down to the age of ten. Children who are left to the street and themselves. Young people with knives and threatening behavior”. When he called the police, they told him, “We know it’s bad out there, but we have no patrol cars to send.”
“It is clear,” Lunøe wrote, “that young criminals must be punished and weapons removed from the streets, and it is clear that there can be no denying that in my street, boys and young men with ethnic minority backgrounds make up 100 % of both the gangs and their aspirants…”
Lunøe is not the first person wanting to move away from Nørrebro because of the problems there. After his op-ed, the historian and columnist Niels Jespersen wrote, “I also left Nørrebro, because I couldn’t stand the gangs”. More importantly, Jespersen asked in his op-ed, “how many Danes, who do not have… access to [write] an op-ed in Berlingske, not to mention the resources to move away, have been exposed to the same things [as Lunøe] over the decades?”
“[T]he price for the failed integration [of immigrants] is [paid] by those with the least resources. It is the schools and neighborhoods of the working classes that are destroyed, while it is rare that the well-educated and progressive middle classes meet other immigrants than those who are equally well-educated and progressive”.
People with the means to move, such as Lunøe, will take their children and run to safer areas. What will happen to the many people who are unable to do so and have no choice but to stay in the crosshairs of the shootings, the knives and the car-torchings?
President Donald Trump reportedly has reconsidered a plan to ban flavored e-cigarettes, a reversal that was widely portrayed as a triumph of politics over public health. Yet that criticism more aptly describes the proposed ban, which would have sacrificed the interests, and potentially the lives, of current and former smokers in the name of curtailing underage vaping.
There were political arguments on both sides of this debate. Advocates of the flavor ban argued that it would appeal to suburban women concerned about the recent rise in e-cigarette use by teenagers, while opponents warned that it would alienate vapers who were otherwise inclined to support the president, endangering his re-election.
The opponents, bolstered by rallies and polling data suggesting that vapers were highly motivated and apt to vote (or refrain from voting) based on this issue, seem to have prevailed. But they not only had the stronger political argument; they also had the stronger public health argument.
Millions of Americans have quit smoking by switching to vaping, a far less hazardous source of nicotine. Consumer surveys and sales data show they overwhelmingly prefer the products targeted by the proposed ban.
That policy, which was expressly designed to make vaping products less appealing, would have driven some former smokers back to their old habits while deterring current smokers from making a switch that could save their lives. Even The New York Times saw the folly of this approach, warning that it “would almost certainly force people who already use these products, including roughly 11 million adults, to choose between traditional cigarettes (which remain widely available, despite being deadlier than e-cigarettes) and black-market vaping products.”
For the time being, the vaping industry, including thousands of mom-and-pop shops across the country, seems to have dodged a bullet. But it still faces the looming threat of federal regulations that are expected to drive most businesses and products from the market.
Under a 2016 rule, manufacturers, which include vape shops that mix their own e-liquids, have to persuade the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that allowing sales of their products is “appropriate for the protection of public health.” Although it’s still not clear exactly what that means, vaping businesses must submit a “premarket tobacco application” (PMTA) for each of their products by May 12—less than six months from now.
A PMTA is required for every product variation. The FDA puts the “average cost” at $132,000 for e-liquids and $467,000 for devices, although it says some applications could cost more than $2 million.
Either way, those costs are likely to deter all but the largest vaping companies. The FDA itself predicts that “54 percent of delivery systems and somewhere between 50 and 87.5 percent of e-liquids” will “exit the market” before the application deadline.
If a business manages to file adequate applications in time, it will be allowed to keep those products on the market for up to a year while the FDA decides whether to approve them. But even at this late date, the requirements for approval remain opaque, as a lawsuit filed last month by a coalition of small vaping companies points out.
The FDA, for instance, demands “sufficient information regarding the potential abuse liability” of each product and suggests it would be satisfied with “a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject study comparing several doses of a new product to a comparator product with a known abuse liability.” It’s not clear whether anything short of that prohibitively expensive option would suffice. And while manufacturers are supposed to list “harmful or potentially harmful constituents,” the FDA still has not fully specified what those are.
“Our next focus will be on ensuring that the Trump administration recognizes the need to reform the FDA’s regulatory system for these products,” says Gregory Conley, president of the American Vaping Association, an advocacy group that supports vaping as a harm-reducing alternative to smoking. “If President Trump wants to win in 2020, mere inaction on this issue is not enough.”
President Donald Trump reportedly has reconsidered a plan to ban flavored e-cigarettes, a reversal that was widely portrayed as a triumph of politics over public health. Yet that criticism more aptly describes the proposed ban, which would have sacrificed the interests, and potentially the lives, of current and former smokers in the name of curtailing underage vaping.
There were political arguments on both sides of this debate. Advocates of the flavor ban argued that it would appeal to suburban women concerned about the recent rise in e-cigarette use by teenagers, while opponents warned that it would alienate vapers who were otherwise inclined to support the president, endangering his re-election.
The opponents, bolstered by rallies and polling data suggesting that vapers were highly motivated and apt to vote (or refrain from voting) based on this issue, seem to have prevailed. But they not only had the stronger political argument; they also had the stronger public health argument.
Millions of Americans have quit smoking by switching to vaping, a far less hazardous source of nicotine. Consumer surveys and sales data show they overwhelmingly prefer the products targeted by the proposed ban.
That policy, which was expressly designed to make vaping products less appealing, would have driven some former smokers back to their old habits while deterring current smokers from making a switch that could save their lives. Even The New York Times saw the folly of this approach, warning that it “would almost certainly force people who already use these products, including roughly 11 million adults, to choose between traditional cigarettes (which remain widely available, despite being deadlier than e-cigarettes) and black-market vaping products.”
For the time being, the vaping industry, including thousands of mom-and-pop shops across the country, seems to have dodged a bullet. But it still faces the looming threat of federal regulations that are expected to drive most businesses and products from the market.
Under a 2016 rule, manufacturers, which include vape shops that mix their own e-liquids, have to persuade the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that allowing sales of their products is “appropriate for the protection of public health.” Although it’s still not clear exactly what that means, vaping businesses must submit a “premarket tobacco application” (PMTA) for each of their products by May 12—less than six months from now.
A PMTA is required for every product variation. The FDA puts the “average cost” at $132,000 for e-liquids and $467,000 for devices, although it says some applications could cost more than $2 million.
Either way, those costs are likely to deter all but the largest vaping companies. The FDA itself predicts that “54 percent of delivery systems and somewhere between 50 and 87.5 percent of e-liquids” will “exit the market” before the application deadline.
If a business manages to file adequate applications in time, it will be allowed to keep those products on the market for up to a year while the FDA decides whether to approve them. But even at this late date, the requirements for approval remain opaque, as a lawsuit filed last month by a coalition of small vaping companies points out.
The FDA, for instance, demands “sufficient information regarding the potential abuse liability” of each product and suggests it would be satisfied with “a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject study comparing several doses of a new product to a comparator product with a known abuse liability.” It’s not clear whether anything short of that prohibitively expensive option would suffice. And while manufacturers are supposed to list “harmful or potentially harmful constituents,” the FDA still has not fully specified what those are.
“Our next focus will be on ensuring that the Trump administration recognizes the need to reform the FDA’s regulatory system for these products,” says Gregory Conley, president of the American Vaping Association, an advocacy group that supports vaping as a harm-reducing alternative to smoking. “If President Trump wants to win in 2020, mere inaction on this issue is not enough.”
Increasingly, social science is dominated by Leftist ideologues who use the remaining respect that academia still has among the public to inculcate students and public alike with their equalitarian dogmas.
But there are honorable exceptions.
One of these: Peter Turchin, a Russian who is professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut. Turchin, who did PhD at Duke University, applies his “hard science” training to the Woke world of social science, aiming to make clear and testable predictions about the cycles through which civilizations go. According to Turchin, the West is headed for trouble in the 2020s.
Turchin, who keeps a blog about civilization cycles, recently presented his latest findings to the Centre for Complex Systems Studies in Utrecht, Holland, under the heading “A History of the Near Future: What History Tells Us About the Near Future.” [PDF] His conclusions are startling. Based on his detailed number-crunching about events, civilizations that are in decline – as is the USA is – always enter periods of extreme polarization. For the USA, the 2020s will be that period. It will be marred by years of political violence, and intense conflict. Worryingly, Turchin claims that the U.S. more polarized that it was on the eve of the Civil War [ See his Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History].
Turchin argued in his Utrecht presentation that political instability in the USA and Western Europe in the 2020s will be of unparalleled severity, to the extent that it may well “undermine scientific progress.”
Turchin began his presentation by quoting himself from almost a decade ago already making this prediction, one which—in a world of Trump, Brexit and the rise of European “populism”—now seems extremely prescient. Spain has just become the latest country to give a right-wing populist party a substantial vote: the Vox party took 3rd place in the country’s November 10th general election. [ Eurosceptics rejoice as Vox becomes 3rd most powerful party in Spanish election ,RT, November 11, 2019]
“Qualitative historical analysis reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent—and predictable—waves of political instability” he wrote in a letter to the leading science journal, Nature, which he quoted at the beginning of his presentation [Political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade, February 4, 2010].
Turchin’s presentation then moved on to highlighting the key forces that, according to his massive data base on historical cycles of violence, appear to auger political instability in the 2020s. There are four of them, and they were last this intense in the early 1970s, also a period of political instability in the West.
Mass Mobilization Potential
This, in essence, is “too many workers.” Turchin noted that when “the supply of labor exceeds its demand, the price of labor decreases, depressing the living standards for the majority of population, thus leading to popular immiseration [impoverishment] and growing mass-mobilization potential, but creating favorable economic conditions for the elites.”
In other words, as gradually occurred in the 1950s and the 1960s in Europe, the rich have grown richer on the back of cheap labor underpinned by mass immigration. This, however, has led to economic polarization and resentment, with the rich getting rich at a much faster rate than the poor. This means a well of angry, resentful people in the working and lower middle class.
Intra-Elite Competition.
Turchin argued that “favorable economic conjuncture for the elites results in increasing numbers of elites and elite aspirants, as well as runaway growth of elite consumption levels.” This means that many people who are higher up the hierarchy have to, in effect, become economically poor to maintain the veneer of “elite” status. Turchin added: “Elite overproduction results when elite numbers and appetites exceed the ability of the society to sustain them, leading to spiraling intra-elite competition and conflict.”
If you over-educate the populace, you have too many people who believe that in some way they have a right to rule—because when they were children, for people had a degree, that was kind of the case. So, if we assume that having a degree used to make you part of an “elite,” then we have “over-produced” this “elite”—over half of young people go into higher education in some Western countries. [More than half of young p eople are going to university for the first time, figures reveal, by Camilla Turner, Telegraph, September 26, 2019]
Thus there are far too many people qualified as lawyers, far too many college graduates, and thus very intense competition within and resentment between different sub-groups of “elite” people.
Many of them are not really “elite” other than on paper, but they regard “non-elite” jobs as beneath them. Think of all the baristas with Cultural Anthropology degrees, the wannabe attorneys working as civil servants or for charities; the numerous graduates doing The Office-type tedious jobs. This breeds hatred and conflict among the more educated.
The state will be rendered even more fragile if foreign governments support the insurgents within the elite—for example, Trump expressing his support for Brexiteers. And similar insurgencies in other countries spur emulation: Trump supporters could look to the Brexit vote and see that such victories over the Establishment were possible.
Turchin argues that these factors also existed in the 1920s and 1930s, resulting in a crisis and in war. The elites dealt with this by attempting to create a more equal society, by limiting the size of the work force, by regulating the economy, and by limiting imports. The result was that between about 1930 and 1970, real (inflation-adjusted) wages grew.
But once the elites forgot about the 1930s, and became focused on their own enrichment, wages started to plateau and fall, leading to crisis by the 1970s. Policies to, in essence, make everyone much wealthier were then instituted across the 1980s.
But these could only last for so long and, claims Turchin, real wages have effectively been in decline since about the year 2000. And as this has happened, the elites have got richer and larger. For example, the percentage of the USA population worth 1 million dollars (in 1995 dollars) has grown from 2.9% to 6.3% between 1983 and 2007. So there is growing economic polarization.
The “over-production of elites” leads to aspirant elites challenging the “established elites,” if necessary by violent means. The number of elite positions is limited—there are 50 state governors and 100 senators, no matter the population size—so this leads to political instability. In this regard, Turchin charts how the number of candidates for Congress—the number of elite aspirants—has increased over time, meaning more and more resentful people in the elite, who might be attracted to radical action to get their way.
Turchin brings together a variety of “well-being indicators”—employment, real wages, health, family size—and finds that they all follow exactly the same pattern. They are low around 1900, which Turchin argues was a period of conflict and instability. They are very high by about 1960 and then start to rapidly fall. We would thus expect a crisis.
Serious crises seeming to manifest every 50 years or so. Turchin takes us into what he calls the “deep past”—back even to the history of Rome—to show that these cycles occur again and again in almost exactly the same way, for exactly the same reasons, even involving similar lengths of time, such as instability every 50 years [A History of the Near Future]. Fascinatingly, he shows—setting out the data in a graph—that there is a clear negative association between societal well-being and elite over-production between 1780 and 2010 in the USA.
What will happen in the 2020s?
Turchin argues that one possibility is mass mobilization leading to war, revolution, state collapse, a lethal pandemic, population collapse—and, eventually, the higher living standards that tend to go with a reduced population.
Turchin, however, is slightly more optimistic for this coming decade. He predicts that the West will undergo something more similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and thus avoid pandemics and a mass die-off.
China ‘Mega Dump’ Full Of Trash 25 Years Ahead Of Schedule
A ‘mega dump’ in China has reached capacity 25 years sooner than anticipated after receiving far more trash per day than originally planned, according to the BBC.
The Jiangcungou ladfill in Shaanxi Province – around the size of 100 football fields, was designed to accept 2,500 tons of trash per day. Instead, it received 10,000 tons daily, the most of any landfill site in China.
The Jiangcungou landfill in Xi’an city was built in 1994 and was designed to last until 2044.
The landfill serves over 8 million citizens. It spans an area of almost 700,000 square metres, with a depth of 150 metres and a storage capacity of more than 34 million cubic metres.
Until recently, Xi’an was one of the few cities in China that solely relied on landfill to dispose of household waste – leading to capacity being reached early.
Earlier this month, a new incineration plant was opened, and at least four more are expected to open by 2020. Together, they are expected to be able to process 12,750 tonnes of rubbish per day. –BBC
The landfill sites are eventually slated to become ecological parks.
China collected 215 million tons of urban household waste in 2017 according to the country’s statistical yearbook, up from 152 million a decade earlier. There are currently 654 landfill sites across the country and 286 incineration plants.
It’s unknown what their recycling rate is as they have not released figures, however Beijing announced plans to recycle 35% of waste in major cities within the next 13 months, according to a government report.
To that end, the sorting and recycling of rubbish was made mandatory in Shanghai this July, leading to a “sense of panic” over people’s social credit scores.
The plan is ambitious – Shanghai is the largest and most populous city in the world, with more than 24 million residents – three times the size of London or New York. And according to some reports, only 10% of its waste is recycled. Official statistics show that only 3,300 tonnes of recyclables are collected daily, compared to the 19,300 tonnes of residual waste and 5,000 tonnes of kitchen waste that are collected. –BBC
In 2017 alone, China accepted seven million tons of trash from Europe, Japan and the United States, along with 27 million tons of paper waste.
The six major world powers approach the reorganization of international relations according to their experiences and dreams. Prudently, they intend to defend their interests first before promoting their vision of the world.
The US withdrawal from Syria, even if it was immediately corrected, indicates with certainty that Washington no longer intends to be the world’s policeman, the “necessary Empire”. It destabilized without delay all the rules of international relations.
We have entered a period of transition during which each major power is pursuing a new agenda. Here are the main ones.
The Three “Greats”
The United States of America
The collapse of the Soviet Union could have caused the collapse of the United States, since the two empires were leaning on each other. This was not the case. President George Bush Sr. ensured with Operation Desert Storm that Washington became the undisputed leader of all nations, then demobilized 1 million soldiers and proclaimed the quest for prosperity.
Transnational corporations then signed a pact with Deng Xiaoping to have their products manufactured by Chinese workers, who were paid twenty times less than their American counterparts. This led to a considerable development of international freight transport, followed by the gradual disappearance of jobs and the middle classes in the United States. Industrial capitalism was replaced by financial capitalism.
At the end of the 1990s, Igor Panarin, a professor at the Russian Diplomatic Academy, analyzed the economic and psychological collapse of American society. He hypothesized that the country would break up along the lines of what had happened to the Soviet Union with the emergence of new states. To repel the collapse, Bill Clinton freed his country from international law with NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia. As this effort proved insufficient, US personalities imagined adapting their country to financial capitalism and organizing, by force, international trade so that the coming period would be a “new American century”. With George Bush Jr., the United States abandoned its position as a leading nation and tried to transform itself into an absolute unipolar power. They launched the “endless war” or “war on terrorism” to destroy one by one all state structures in the “broader Middle East”. Barack Obama continued this quest by associating a host of allies with it.
This policy paid off, but only a very few benefited, the “super-rich”. The Americans responded by electing Donald Trump as president of the federal state. He broke with his predecessors and, like Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR, tried to save the United States by relieving it of its most costly commitments. He boosted the economy by encouraging national industries against those that had relocated their jobs. He subsidized the extraction of shale oil and managed to take control of the world hydrocarbon market despite the cartel formed by OPEC and Russia. Aware that his army is first and foremost a huge bureaucracy, wasting a huge budget on insignificant results, he stopped supporting Daesh and the PKK, negotiating with Russia a way to end the “endless war” with as little loss as possible.
In the coming period, the United States will be driven primarily by the need to save on all its actions abroad, until it abandons them if necessary. The end of imperialism is not a choice, but an existential question, a survival reflex.
The People’s Republic of China
After Zhao Ziyang’s attempted coup d’état and the Tiananmen uprising, Deng Xioping began his “journey south”. He announced that China would continue its economic liberalization by entering into contracts with US multinationals.
Jiang Zemin continued on this path. The coast became a “workshop of the world”, causing gigantic economic development. Gradually he cleaned the Communist Party of its caciques and ensured that well-paid jobs extended inland. Hu Jintao, concerned about a “harmonious society”, repeals the taxes paid by peasants in the interior regions still not affected by economic development. But he failed to control the regional authorities and fell into corruption.
Xi Jinping proposed to open up new markets by building a huge project of international trade routes, the “Silk Roads”. However, this project came too late because, unlike in antiquity, China no longer offers original products, but what transnational corporations sell at a lower price. This project was welcomed as a blessing by poor countries, but feared by the rich who are preparing to sabotage it. Xi Jinping is taking up positions in all the islets his country had abandoned in the China Sea, during the collapse of the Qing Empire and the occupation by the eight foreign armies. Aware of the destructive power of the West, he formed an alliance with Russia and refrained from any international political initiative.
In the coming period, China should affirm its positions in international fora, bearing in mind what the colonial empires imposed on it in the 19th century. But it should refrain from military intervention and remain a strictly economic power.
The Russian Federation
When the USSR collapsed, the Russians believed they would save themselves by adhering to the Western model. In fact, Boris Yeltsin’s team, trained by the CIA, organized the looting of collective property by a few individuals. In two years, about a hundred of them, 97% of them from the Jewish minority, took everything available and became billionaires. These new oligarchs fought each other mercilessly with machine guns and attacks in the middle of Moscow, while President Yeltsin bombed parliament. Without a real government, Russia was nothing more than a wreck. Warlords and jihadists armed by the CIA organized the secession of Chechnya. The standard of living and life expectancy collapsed.
In 1999, FSB Director Vladimir Putin rescued President Yeltsin from an investigation for corruption. In exchange, he was appointed President of the Council of Ministers; a position he used to force the President to resign and get himself elected. He put in place a vast policy of state restoration: he put an end to the civil war in Chechnya and methodically killed all the oligarchs who refused to comply with the state. The return of order was also the end of the Russian Western fantasy. Living standards and life expectancy improved.
Having restored the rule of law, Vladimir Putin did not stand for re-election after two consecutive terms. He supported a pale law professor, worshipped by the United States, Dmitry Medvedev, to succeed him. But not intending to leave power in weak hands, he was appointed Prime Minister until his re-election as President in 2012. Wrongly believing that Russia would collapse again, Georgia attacked South Ossetia, but instantly found Prime Minister Putin in its path. He then saw the pitiful state of the Red Army, but managed to overcome it thanks to the effect of surprise. Re-elected President, he focused on defence reform. He retired hundreds of thousands of officers, often disillusioned and sometimes drunk, and placed the Tuvan general (Turkish-speaking Siberian) Sergei Choïgou in the Ministry of Defence.
Adopting a traditional Russian management style, Vladimir Putin separated the civilian budget from part of the military budget. The first is voted by the Duma, the second is secret. He restored military research, while the United States imagined that it would no longer have to invest in this area. He tested a number of new weapons before deploying the new Red Army to help Syria. He experimented with his new weapons in combat situations and decided which ones would be produced and which ones would be abandoned. He organized a quarterly rotation of his troops so that all of them, one after the other, would become stronger. The Russian Federation, which in 1991 was nothing more than nothing, became the world’s leading military power in eighteen years.
At the same time, he used the Nazi coup d’état in Ukraine to reclaim Crimea, a Russian territory administratively linked to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev. He then faced a campaign of European Union agricultural sanctions that he used to create self-sufficient domestic production.
He forged an alliance with China and forced it to modify its Silk Roads project by integrating the communication needs of Russian territory to form an “Extended Eurasia Partnership”.
In the coming years, Russia will try to reorganise international relations on two bases: to separate political and religious powers; to restore international law on the basis of the principles formulated by Tsar Nicholas II.
Western Europeans
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
When the USSR fell, the United Kingdom subscribed with reservations to the Maastricht Treaty. Conservative Prime Minister John Major intended to take advantage of the supranational state under construction while keeping his currency out of the way. So he rejoiced when George Soros attacked the Pound and forced it out of the EMS (“monetary snake”). His successor, Labourist Tony Blair, restored full independence to the Bank of England and considered leaving the EU to join NAFTA. He transformed the defence of his country’s interests by substituting references to human rights for respect for international law. He promoted the US policies of Bill Clinton, then George Bush Jr., encouraging and justifying the enlargement of the European Union, the “humanitarian war” against Kosovo, and the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. In 2006, he developed the “Arab Spring” plan and submitted it to the United States.
Gordon Brown hesitated to pursue this policy and tried to regain some room to manoeuvre, but his energy was caught up in the 2008 financial crisis, which he managed to get through. David Cameron implemented, with Barack Obama, the Blair-Bush plan for the “Arab Spring”, including the war against Libya, but eventually only partially succeeded in placing the Muslim Brotherhood in power in the broader Middle East. In the end, he resigned after the Brexit voters voted, when the project to join NAFTA was no longer on the agenda.
Theresa May proposed to apply Brexit with regard to the exit of the supranational state from the Maastricht Treaty, but not with regard to the exit from the common market prior to Maastricht. She failed and was replaced by Winston Churchill’s biographer, Boris Johnson. He decided to leave the European Union completely and to reactivate the kingdom’s traditional foreign policy: the fight against any competing state on the European continent.
If Boris Johnson remains in power, the United Kingdom should in the coming years try to pit the European Union and the Russian Federation against each other.
The French Republic
François Mitterrand did not understand the dislocation of the USSR, going so far as to support the generals’ putsch against his Russian counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev. In any case, he saw an opportunity to build a European supranational state, big enough to compete with the USA and China in the continuity of the Napoleonic attempt. Together with Chancellor Helmut Kohl, he promoted German unification and the Maastricht Treaty. Worried about this United States of Europe project, President Bush Sr, convinced of the “Wolfowitz doctrine” of preventing the emergence of a new challenger to the US leadership, forced him to accept NATO’s protection of the EU and its extension to former members of the Warsaw Pact. François Mitterrand used cohabitation and the Gaullist Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua, to fight the Muslim Brotherhood that the CIA had made him accept in France and that MI6 used to oust France from Algeria.
Jacques Chirac developed French deterrence by completing air nuclear tests in the Pacific before moving on to simulations and signing the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). At the same time, he adapted the armies to NATO’s needs by ending compulsory military service and integrating the Alliance’s Military Committee (planning). He supported NATO’s initiative against Yugoslavia (Kosovo war), but – after reading and studying 9/11 The Big Lie [1]- took the lead in global opposition to aggression against Iraq. This episode allowed him to bond with Chancellor Helmut Kohl and to advance the European supranational state, which he always conceived as a tool of independence around the Franco-German couple. Disrupted by the assassination of his business partner, Rafik Hariri, he turned against Syria, which the United States referred to as the mastermind behind the murder.
Advocating a radically different policy, Nicolas Sarkozy placed the French army under US command via NATO’s Integrated Command. He tried to enlarge the French area of influence by organizing the Union for the Mediterranean, but this project did not work. He proved his worth by overthrowing Laurent Bagbo in Côte d’Ivoire and, although he was overtaken by Arab springs in Tunisia and Egypt, he led NATO’s operation against Libya and Syria. However, for the sake of realism, he noted the Syrian resistance and withdrew from the theatre of operation. He continued the construction of the United States of Europe by having the Lisbon Treaty adopted by Parliament, even though the voters had rejected the same text under the name of the “European Constitution”. In reality, the modification of institutions, which are supposed to become more effective with 27 Member States, is profoundly transforming the supra-national State, which can now impose its will on Member States.
Coming to power without being prepared for it, François Hollande followed in Nicolas Sarkozy’s footsteps in a somewhat rigid way, forcing him to adopt the latter¹s ideology. He signed all the treaties that his predecessor had negotiated – including the European Budget Pact allowing Greece to be sanctioned – adding to them each time, as if to apologise for his reversal, a declaration setting out his own point of view, but without binding force. Thus he authorized the establishment of NATO military bases on French soil, putting a definitive end to the Gaullist doctrine of national independence. Or he continued the policy of aggression against Syria, making a verbal overbid before doing nothing on the White House’s orders. He assigned the French Army a mission in the Sahel, as a ground-based substitute for AfriCom. Finally, he justified the CO2 emissions trading exchange by the Paris Climate Agreement.
Elected thanks to the American investment fund KKR, Emmanuel Macron is first and foremost an advocate of globalization according to Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr. and Barack Obama. However, he quickly adopted the vision of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac according to which only a European supranational state would allow France to continue to play a significant international role, but in its Sarkozy-Holland version: the Union allows constraint. These two lines sometimes lead to contradictions, particularly with regard to Russia. However, they are united in a condemnation of the nationalism of the Member States of the European Union, a short Brexit, or a desire to restore trade with Iran.
In the coming years, France should measure its decisions in terms of their impact on the building of the European Union. It will seek as a priority to ally itself with any power working in this direction.
Federal Republic of Germany
Chancellor Helmut Kohl saw the break-up of the Soviet Empire as an opportunity to bring the two Germanies together. He obtained the green light from France in exchange for German support for the European Union’s single currency project, the euro. He also obtained the agreement of the United States, which saw it as a way to divert the East German army into NATO despite the promise made to Russia not to allow the German Democratic Republic to join.
Once German reunification was achieved, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder raised the question of his country’s international role, still under attack from its defeat in the Second World War. Although Germany is no longer militarily occupied by the four major powers, it nevertheless hosts huge US garrisons and the headquarters of EuCom and soon AfriCom. Gerhard Schöder used the “humanitarian” war against Kosovo to legally deploy German troops out of the country for the first time since 1945. But he refused to recognize this territory conquered by NATO as a state. Similarly, he is very strongly committed alongside President Chirac against the United States-British war in Iraq, stressing that there is no evidence that President Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks of September 11th. He tried to influence European integration in a peaceful way. He therefore strengthened energy ties with Russia and proposed a federal Europe (including Russia in the long term) based on the German model, but he met with opposition from France, which is very attached to the project of a supra-national state.
Chancellor Angela Merkel returned to the politics of her mentor Helmut Kohl, who handed her over in one night from her responsibilities at the Communist Youth of Democratic Germany to the Federal Government of Germany. Closely monitored by the CIA, which is not sure how to define her, she strengthened Germany’s ties with Israel and Brazil. In 2013, on Hillary Clinton’s proposal, she asked Volker Pethes to study the possibility of developing the German army to play a central role in CentCom if the United States moved its troops to the Far East. She then commissioned studies on how German officers could supervise the armies of Central and Eastern Europe and asked Volker Perthes to write a plan for Syria’s surrender. Very attached to Atlanticist and European structures, she distanced herself from Russia and supported the Nazi coup d’état in Ukraine. In order to be effective, she required that the European Union impose its will on small Member States (Lisbon Treaty). She was very tough during the Greek financial crisis and patiently placed her pawns in the European bureaucracy until Ursula von der Leyen was elected President of the European Commission. When the United States withdrew from northern Syria, she immediately responded by proposing to NATO to send the German army to replace it in accordance with the 2013 plan.
In the coming years, Germany should focus on the possibilities of military intervention in the framework of NATO, particularly in the Middle East, and be wary of the project of a centralised European super-national state.
Feasibility
It is very strange to hear today about “multilateralism” and “isolationism” or “universalism” and “nationalism”. These questions do not arise because everyone has known since the Hague Conference (1899) that technological progress has made all nations in solidarity. This logorrhoea does not hide our inability to admit the new power relations and to envisage a world order that is as unjust as possible.
Only the three Great Powers can hope to have the means to implement their policies. They can only achieve their ends without war by following the Russian line based on international law. However, the danger of internal political instability in the United States raises more than ever the risk of a generalized confrontation.
When they left the Union, the British were forced to join the United States (which Donald Trump rejected) or to disappear politically. While Germany and France, which are losing ground, have no choice but to build the European Union. However, for the time being, they assess the time available very differently and consider it in two incompatible ways, which could lead them to disrupt the European Union themselves.
For Christmas This Year, Teens Want Apple, Nike, And Louis Vuitton
According to a new survey from Piper Jaffray, Apple, Nike and Louis Vuitton could be the big winners with teenagers this holiday season. And why wouldn’t teenagers, most of whom likely don’t work for a living, ask for luxury brands on the one day of the year where they are gifted things without regard for price?
Piper surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. consumers and analyzed the responses from the “upper income teenage cohort” to draw its conclusions, according to CNBC. The company found that Apple was the “top-listed consumer brand for teens,” with AirPods as the most popular product.
The second most mentioned brand was Nike, with its mentions more than tripling from last year’s survey. And in keeping with the reality distortion field that is the budding U.S. consumer, Louis Vuitton – a brand that many hard working adults can’t afford – rounded out the list of top brands for teenagers.
Piper has said of the holiday season: “The consumer remains healthy, but stock selectivity is key given pockets of weakness in the dept. stores, specialty retail stores & mixed views on spending.”
Other brands that Piper has on watch for the holidays include Activision Blizzard, Crocs, Lowe’s, Boot Barn and YETI.
Piper believes that strength from “Call of Duty” could help Activision Blizzard while popularity from Fortnite wanes. The firm also thinks that ongoing product collaborations could help Crocs power sales.
The strength in the housing market has prompted the watchful eye on Lowe’s, while new product launches have the firm watching Boot Barn and YETI. However, the biggest winner could again be Amazon, according to the survey. Consumers are expected to make 46% of purchases online this year.
“Proprietary retail model shows acceleration of AMZN at detriment to department and specialty stores,” the firm said in its note. Piper has overweight ratings on Apple, Nike and Lululemon.