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Nathaniel Ballinger
@NathanielTheBal
Nothing human is alien to me. The revolution will not be televised. My opinions are my own and do not reflect my employer.
Joined July 2014
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@Th3NorthSt4r @noinconsistency The difference is publicly-owned banks can fill that role at-cost without scalping away as much interest and profit as possible for shareholders
Filling that role on the labor side requires the reserve army of unemployed which systemically suppresses pay and power for workers
Hey, maybe you could look into that? If you're not too busy with your limhang hearings, that is.
Crazy that they're trying to run ops from the Northwoods playbook nearly word-for-word
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@ShangguanJiewen
An American Journalist in China, Published Author, Radio Show Host & Media Commentator. This is my personal account and all opinions are my own.
"We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could arrange to cause such an incident ... as a spectacular result of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both."
They're actually gonna do Operation Northwoods this time
What's going on? Are neocons having a come-to-Jesus moment?
After Bob Kagan writing an article on how the U.S. is facing "total defeat" in Iran (see https://t.co/Io9xy1M8ks), you now have Max Boot - the very author of “The Case for American Empire” and one of the most vocal advocates for the Iraq war - publishing a Washington Post interview explaining that China has surpassed the U.S. in most military domains.
If anything, Boot’s interview is even more devastating than Kagan's piece, because it's not editorial opinion - he’s interviewing John Culver, a former top CIA analyst (he was national intelligence officer for East Asia) and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Chinese military which he’s been studying since 1985.
This isn't a pundit opining - this is someone who spent decades inside the intelligence community staring at the actual data.
So what is Culver saying?
1) In case of war with Taiwan, the U.S. will flee the theater
This is undoubtedly the single most stunning revelation in the entire piece. Culver says that - as far as he is aware - the Pentagon’s plan in case of war with Taiwan is… flee!
This is the exact quote: "I think some of the thinking in the Pentagon, and it may have evolved since I retired, is that when we think there’s going to be a war, we need to get our high-value naval assets out of the theater, and then we would have to fight our way back in. From where, it’s not clear. Guam is no bastion either."
Why? Because, as he explains, any high-value U.S. assets would be sitting ducks in the entire area. China can strike U.S. forces deployed to Japan, Australia, or South Korea “in a way that Iran really can't” and, given that Iran has hit at least 228 targets across U.S. bases in the Middle East - forcing the U.S. to evacuate most of them - that's saying something. Also, U.S. aircraft carriers would need to operate within 1,000 miles of the fight to matter, which - given it’s well within range of Chinese missiles - they won’t.
As Culver bluntly puts it: “There's really no safe spaces.”
2) China leads in most military domains - and it's not even close
Culver says that “it’s hard to not be hyperbolic” about China’s military capabilities and that, at this stage, “it’s hard to point to an area other than submarines and undersea warfare and say the United States still has an advantage.”
In some critical areas, such as advanced munitions - which, when it comes to war, is pretty damn relevant - his assessment is that China leads by “magnitudes.” As a reminder, an order of magnitude means 10x so, by assuming he knows that and meant what he said, “magnitudes” means at least a hundred times more, meaning U.S. capabilities would be less than 1% those of China.
At the same time, Culver also says that “whichever side runs out of bullets first is going to lose.” So if China produces “magnitudes greater than our industrial base could produce” - as he puts it - then you don't need a PhD in military strategy to put two and two together…
The picture, if anything, is even more damning in shipbuilding capabilities. He reminds that a single shipyard in China - Jiangnan Shipyard, on Changxing Island near Shanghai - “has more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined.”
Put all Chinese shipyards together and China’s broader naval shipbuilding capacity is 232 times larger than that of the United States (and this is from a leaked U.S. Navy briefing slide).
Culver helpfully adds that China “deploys enough ships every year to replicate the entire French navy” - which, as a Frenchman, hurts a little, but at least we'll always have the cheese (I hope).
3) Despite this, a war in Taiwan is highly unlikely
If your only window into China is Western media coverage, you'd naturally assume all of the above means war over Taiwan is about to break out. After all, if China is so powerful and the U.S. so outmatched, why wouldn't it just take Taiwan and be done with it?
Culver’s assessment - and mine, incidentally - is the exact opposite: China’s increasing relative strength vis-a-vis the U.S. makes war less likely, not more.
How so? As Culver explains Taiwan is “a crisis Xi Jinping wants to avoid, not an opportunity he wants to seize.” The stronger China gets, the less it needs to fight: why launch a war when you can simply wait for the military balance to become so lopsided that the U.S. quietly drops its security guarantee on its own? Culver himself foresees a future “when Americans might start to say, maybe Taiwan is a war we don’t want to get involved in.” That would almost automatically mean peaceful reunification, which has always been China’s primary objective.
This doesn't mean China views the U.S. as harmless. Quite the contrary - Culver says Beijing sees America “as a very militarily aggressive country” that is “declining in power and becoming more violent” as a result. Which he says is one further reason why “war over Taiwan is not something that Xi Jinping is looking for.”
China doesn't want to hand a pretext to a dangerously trigger-happy power - all the more when patience alone delivers what it wants.
4) The game is up
Last but not least, perhaps the most revealing aspect of the interview is that Culver doesn’t seem to see a way out: this is structural and irreversible.
Asked by Boot whether “the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, assuming it’s approved, [would] change the trend lines” (which, as a reminder, would constitute a 50% increase in defense spending), his reply is that “it would probably help to some extent, but I worry that we could be throwing good money after bad.” Not exactly brimming with optimism…
Similarly, when asked why the U.S. keeps investing billions in aircraft carriers and even “Trump-class battleships,” his answer is that it's because “the military services have a nostalgia for the things that meet their expectations for how you get promoted.” In other words, wasted money.
Same thing for the Pentagon's much-hyped “Hellscape” drone strategy to defend Taiwan. Culver asks the obvious question: “What drones are you talking about launching from where?” He points out that they’d “have to pre-deploy them if not on Taiwan itself then on Luzon or the Japanese southwest islands, all of which can be struck by the Chinese.” He adds that this is “the tyranny of time and distance when you look at war in the Pacific.”
The picture that emerges, both from Boot’s Culver interview and Kagan’s article, is remarkably consistent: the U.S. is “checkmate” in the Middle East, would need to entirely flee the Pacific theater before a war even starts, cannot produce enough weapons, cannot keep its supposed “allies” safe, and has no strategy to reverse any of it - nor can one even be produced given the structural nature of the gap. Even a 50% increase in defense spending, Culver says, would be “throwing good money after bad.” That's not my assessment - that's theirs.
Two of America's most prominent hawks, in two of its most establishment outlets, in the space of 48 hours, have essentially published the obituary of American military primacy.
Yesterday I concluded my post by saying that even the arsonists now smell the smoke. Today I'll say: the arsonists are now writing the fire report.
![RnaudBertrand's tweet photo. What's going on? Are neocons having a come-to-Jesus moment?
After Bob Kagan writing an article on how the U.S. is facing "total defeat" in Iran (see https://t.co/Io9xy1M8ks), you now have Max Boot - the very author of “The Case for American Empire” and one of the most vocal advocates for the Iraq war - publishing a Washington Post interview explaining that China has surpassed the U.S. in most military domains.
If anything, Boot’s interview is even more devastating than Kagan's piece, because it's not editorial opinion - he’s interviewing John Culver, a former top CIA analyst (he was national intelligence officer for East Asia) and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Chinese military which he’s been studying since 1985.
This isn't a pundit opining - this is someone who spent decades inside the intelligence community staring at the actual data.
So what is Culver saying?
1) In case of war with Taiwan, the U.S. will flee the theater
This is undoubtedly the single most stunning revelation in the entire piece. Culver says that - as far as he is aware - the Pentagon’s plan in case of war with Taiwan is… flee!
This is the exact quote: "I think some of the thinking in the Pentagon, and it may have evolved since I retired, is that when we think there’s going to be a war, we need to get our high-value naval assets out of the theater, and then we would have to fight our way back in. From where, it’s not clear. Guam is no bastion either."
Why? Because, as he explains, any high-value U.S. assets would be sitting ducks in the entire area. China can strike U.S. forces deployed to Japan, Australia, or South Korea “in a way that Iran really can't” and, given that Iran has hit at least 228 targets across U.S. bases in the Middle East - forcing the U.S. to evacuate most of them - that's saying something. Also, U.S. aircraft carriers would need to operate within 1,000 miles of the fight to matter, which - given it’s well within range of Chinese missiles - they won’t.
As Culver bluntly puts it: “There's really no safe spaces.”
2) China leads in most military domains - and it's not even close
Culver says that “it’s hard to not be hyperbolic” about China’s military capabilities and that, at this stage, “it’s hard to point to an area other than submarines and undersea warfare and say the United States still has an advantage.”
In some critical areas, such as advanced munitions - which, when it comes to war, is pretty damn relevant - his assessment is that China leads by “magnitudes.” As a reminder, an order of magnitude means 10x so, by assuming he knows that and meant what he said, “magnitudes” means at least a hundred times more, meaning U.S. capabilities would be less than 1% those of China.
At the same time, Culver also says that “whichever side runs out of bullets first is going to lose.” So if China produces “magnitudes greater than our industrial base could produce” - as he puts it - then you don't need a PhD in military strategy to put two and two together…
The picture, if anything, is even more damning in shipbuilding capabilities. He reminds that a single shipyard in China - Jiangnan Shipyard, on Changxing Island near Shanghai - “has more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined.”
Put all Chinese shipyards together and China’s broader naval shipbuilding capacity is 232 times larger than that of the United States (and this is from a leaked U.S. Navy briefing slide).
Culver helpfully adds that China “deploys enough ships every year to replicate the entire French navy” - which, as a Frenchman, hurts a little, but at least we'll always have the cheese (I hope).
3) Despite this, a war in Taiwan is highly unlikely
If your only window into China is Western media coverage, you'd naturally assume all of the above means war over Taiwan is about to break out. After all, if China is so powerful and the U.S. so outmatched, why wouldn't it just take Taiwan and be done with it?
Culver’s assessment - and mine, incidentally - is the exact opposite: China’s increasing relative strength vis-a-vis the U.S. makes war less likely, not more.
How so? As Culver explains Taiwan is “a crisis Xi Jinping wants to avoid, not an opportunity he wants to seize.” The stronger China gets, the less it needs to fight: why launch a war when you can simply wait for the military balance to become so lopsided that the U.S. quietly drops its security guarantee on its own? Culver himself foresees a future “when Americans might start to say, maybe Taiwan is a war we don’t want to get involved in.” That would almost automatically mean peaceful reunification, which has always been China’s primary objective.
This doesn't mean China views the U.S. as harmless. Quite the contrary - Culver says Beijing sees America “as a very militarily aggressive country” that is “declining in power and becoming more violent” as a result. Which he says is one further reason why “war over Taiwan is not something that Xi Jinping is looking for.”
China doesn't want to hand a pretext to a dangerously trigger-happy power - all the more when patience alone delivers what it wants.
4) The game is up
Last but not least, perhaps the most revealing aspect of the interview is that Culver doesn’t seem to see a way out: this is structural and irreversible.
Asked by Boot whether “the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, assuming it’s approved, [would] change the trend lines” (which, as a reminder, would constitute a 50% increase in defense spending), his reply is that “it would probably help to some extent, but I worry that we could be throwing good money after bad.” Not exactly brimming with optimism…
Similarly, when asked why the U.S. keeps investing billions in aircraft carriers and even “Trump-class battleships,” his answer is that it's because “the military services have a nostalgia for the things that meet their expectations for how you get promoted.” In other words, wasted money.
Same thing for the Pentagon's much-hyped “Hellscape” drone strategy to defend Taiwan. Culver asks the obvious question: “What drones are you talking about launching from where?” He points out that they’d “have to pre-deploy them if not on Taiwan itself then on Luzon or the Japanese southwest islands, all of which can be struck by the Chinese.” He adds that this is “the tyranny of time and distance when you look at war in the Pacific.”
The picture that emerges, both from Boot’s Culver interview and Kagan’s article, is remarkably consistent: the U.S. is “checkmate” in the Middle East, would need to entirely flee the Pacific theater before a war even starts, cannot produce enough weapons, cannot keep its supposed “allies” safe, and has no strategy to reverse any of it - nor can one even be produced given the structural nature of the gap. Even a 50% increase in defense spending, Culver says, would be “throwing good money after bad.” That's not my assessment - that's theirs.
Two of America's most prominent hawks, in two of its most establishment outlets, in the space of 48 hours, have essentially published the obituary of American military primacy.
Yesterday I concluded my post by saying that even the arsonists now smell the smoke. Today I'll say: the arsonists are now writing the fire report.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIFMk0mbMAAA8DI.jpg)
1: Marx criticó la LTV en tanto que esta naturaliza el valor, el valor no es una esencia inherente a las mercancías, sino la forma en que las relaciones entre sujetos se presentan como propiedades de las cosas.
2: usemos el ejemplo del meme (🍰🥧) para refutar a Bawerk 👇(🧵)
Ending wars and the financial empire needs to be the ONLY focus of Leftism. Every other issue serves the function of distracting and dividing the working class.
Identity issues are used as a weapon to deny momentum from that focus.
The state of the American left:
Understanding factors in recent oil refinery fires 🧵
The number of oil refineries catching fire or blowing up is escalating. This likely reflects both incidents of sabotage and a failing energy infrastructure.
Source on general tendency: https://t.co/78uKi68cqP
“We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat.” — Roger Freeman, adviser to Reagan and Nixon, arguing for limits on access to education. The US is functionally illiterate by design. Literacy is a tool of freedom, something that is intolerable in the land of the free.
This 👇 is pretty funny and, I checked, it's real: the title of the Princeton study is "Political Discontent in China Is Associated with Isolating Personality Traits" (https://t.co/tQfBU7lnkb).
In a nutshell, Princeton University found that those who dislike the Communist Party of China are predominantly socially awkward "losers", meaning people defined - in the study - as "fearful, anxious, introverted, disagreeable, disorganized, unable to forgive, and suffering from low self-esteem."
Those who like the CPC, conversely, score high on confidence, sociability, conscientiousness, and work ethic - what the study calls "traits associated with personal and professional success."
Interestingly, the first group (the disagreeable and low self-esteem "losers" who dislike the CPC) only make up roughly 5% of the Chinese population according to the study, which completely inverts the stereotype one might expect: "dissidents" in China aren't charismatic, cosmopolitan, open-minded intellectuals rebelling against conformity - those guys are overwhelmingly supporters of the Party.
This, the study argues, is one of the quiet reasons the CPC is so durable. Its critics are, by personality, precisely the people least equipped to build coalitions, mobilize others, or persuade anyone of anything. Dissent in China isn't so much suppressed as it is, statistically, the weirdo muttering on his own at the back of the bus.
@bidetmarxman It mystifies the process. Marx didn’t predict, he observed a system and systems reproduce outcomes
The “omg Marx predicted everything” meme is silly because it casts his apparent foresight as a inimitable, almost magical power, rather than a scientific—and therefore *replicable*—analysis of political economy as it existed in his time.
Damn once again the tankies were right about the January "protests" and yet the entire soft left which helped to launder what happened as "peaceful demonstrators rising up against a tyrannical government" will refuse to acknowledge what they supported like with Syria, etc
So essentially you are telling me that tankies were right once again
Warsaw Ghetto. In colour.
@dinosaur_store @dnky2th @MRIRISH1287 @ZeBolshevikman Yeah I don't expect to, hoping ordinary readers can learn something from this.
@dnky2th @dinosaur_store @MRIRISH1287 @ZeBolshevikman That 10% were actively following an extremist form of an ideology which led many members to commit those acts. There's no equivalence because there is no large sub-ideology of US Leftism (whatever that is) which advocates for direct acts of terrorism against civilians.
@dnky2th @dinosaur_store @MRIRISH1287 @ZeBolshevikman False equivalence. If 10% of US leftists were committing mass stabbings and suicide bombings, and they could accurately identify the followers of that form of extremist ideology, then yeah sure. If 10% of US conservatives support Nazism, I'd support their reeducation too.
@dnky2th @dinosaur_store @MRIRISH1287 @ZeBolshevikman And over eleven million Uyghurs in Xinjiang, so my statement is accurate
@dnky2th @dinosaur_store @MRIRISH1287 @ZeBolshevikman The overwhelming majority of Uyghurs were not in camps, only those endorsing Islamic extremism. Wahhabism isn't the only form of militant Islam.
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