Indrajit Samarajiva

1. Talk Is Cheap: Trump Can't Negotiate Because No One Believes Him

People ask if I've heard the latest thing Donald Trump has said, and my sincere response is, who gives a shit? Not the person who said it, so why should the one who read it? They say whatever they want to say, and change it the next day. We're supposed to hang on every word, like links on a chain. I just don't anymore, and neither do the people they're negotiating with. Unlike and smash unsubscribe.

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China are serious people. When Trump tried to go tit-for-tat they just gave him one slap and left it at that. China raised tariffs once and said, "if the United States continues to impose tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States, China will ignore it." They diplomatically dropped the microphone, and haven't returned Trump's phone calls asking for a phone call since. China said, "Even if the United States continues to impose higher tariffs, it will no longer have economic significance and will become a joke in the history of the world economy." This unusually salty talk from usually staid diplomats. That's how done they are with this bullshit. China produces rare earths while America produces brain farts, who do you think is winning a trade war? The people that trade or the people that tirade? Pick your fighter.

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Russia are also serious people. When Trump tried to end a war that started over a decade ago in 24 hours they just didn't, because they're winning on their own terms. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, "We take the Americans' proposed models and solutions very seriously, but we also cannot accept them as is… Russia cannot accept U.S. proposals to end the war in Ukraine in their current form because they do not solve the problems Moscow considers the cause of the conflict." Talks go on, but the fighting goes on'er, and Ukraine's a goner the longer it goes on like this. Trump is publicly grumping and dumping Ukraine, throwing a monkey wrench into any leverage (we'll get to this). Again, who do you think will win a hot war? The reincarnated Red Army or the deindustrialized West, who can print all the money in the world, but can't buy a clue?

Iran are also serious people. They have serious missiles that can incinerate America's Persian Gulf bases without nukes, by the American military's own admission. America is trying to run their Path To Persia war plan from 2009, which is just nuking the old WMD lie in the media microwave and hope nobody notices. Since we first saw WMD I ago, Iran has advanced everything but the nuke, and proved it in True Promise I, II, and III. Even what passes for serious minds within the Pentagon know that war with Iran would mean losing oil, bases, and just losing, as much as 'Israel' tries to mind control them.

Iran is ready to defend itself, whatever the cost, and simply do not accept Trump as boss of anything except pulling Netanyahu's chair out. Ayatollah Khamenei is an old hand and knows that the Americans are not to be trusted, leaving nothing but broken treaties behind them (just ask the Actual Americans). Khamenei said, "One must not negotiate with a government like the US government," and though the steadfast President Raisi is gone, the Iranians are still not morons. Who do you think will win a Holy War over their own holy land? Those reduced to bombing refugee camps and hospitals, or those defending them?

All of these countries are serious people with serious capabilities that America just ignores because they're thousands of kilometers from their home and have no skin in the game. America uses proxies like prophylactics and throws them in the historical dustbin. The great innovation of America as head of White Empire is figuring out that there's more money in losing wars than winning them. As Vladimir Putin said, "For centuries they have nurtured a habit of feasting on flesh and filling their pockets with money. But they must realize that the 'vampire's ball' has come to an end."

(China, Russia, Iran)

The traditional imperial, vampirical strategy is divide and conquer, and tactically it's still working. They have pit Chinese vs. Chinese in Taiwan, Slav vs. Slav in Ukraine, and Semite vs Semite in Palestine. These tactics might work in isolation, but in combination, it leads to strategic defeat. As former Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1997, "Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an "antihegemonic" coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances." An already old Joe Biden mocked this at the time, but who's laughing now? The nations they used to bully have bulked up, and they're pretty fucking aggrieved.

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Today China, Russia, and Iran have superior military technology than America (quantity is its own quantity), especially given home field advantage (defender wins a tie). Combined they're unbeatable, though they haven't Voltroned yet. But get them angry enough and we'll see.

Each of these countries have hypersonic missiles that air defenses cannot stop while America throws avionic fits against defenceless children. Against men in the field, drones in the air, and missiles in the sky, America loses. This is proven. Yemen has got them on the ropes, and Iran, Russia, and China are each an order of magnitude stronger than the one before them. It's 10x, 100x, 1000x difficulty, and America can't get past round one. This goes unheralded but it's historic. Brave Yemen has defeated the top naval empire ever in the Red Sea. They are truly Top-Gs, fighting genocide for the side, Allah surely is pleased.

Home field advantage is huge in warfare. How you fare is very much where you are. In Risk, defender wins a tie because defending is mathematically easier. Remember that Iran, Russia, and China don't have to be stronger than America overall, they just have to be stronger than America in Iran, Russia, and China. Meanwhile America has to be stronger everywhere. America also has to divide (and supply) its forces across two oceans and a sea. And they already lost control of the sea!

Remember that China, Russia, and Iran are defending their own soil, while America offends only the conscience and soils themselves in public. America can destroy hospitals but not Hamas, Ukraine but not Russia, and civilians but not Ansarallah. Remember that Hamas, underneath a concentration camp, has fought the entire White Empire to a draw. This is a historic moment, buried by the histrionics media, but nonetheless true. Hamas defeated 'Israel' on October 7th. The non-entity has been on death support ever since. The IOF have been reduced to delivery boys for American bombs, like DoorDash for knocking houses down.

Deep grievances have thrown deep civilizations together and America is in deep kimchi, as John Mearsheimer says (I don't understand what this means). Now China, Russia, and Iran are conducting military exercises together while America is bent out of shape fighting them all at once. To compare World War III to World War II, China is in the position of America (profiting from afar), Russia is the position of the USSR (fighting the actual war), Iran doesn't fit this analogy, and America are the fucking Nazis—fighting everyone, and wasting time on genocide for some reason. The common wisdom is never start a land war in Asia, and America has started three. As Joe Biden said, which I also don't understand (old white man slang), 'good luck in your Senior year.'

Leverage

Trump talks about leverage like it's a beverage, something he can summon with a button to the Oval Office desk, like a Diet Coke. You can see why the guy is cooked. American leverage is more like Trump's arteries, clogged by years of bad decisions.

Archimedes said give me a lever big enough, and I'll open this pickle urn (he was talking to his wife). The point of a lever is leverage, you have to have more on your side of the stick than the other side. Zelensky wasn't dick the moment he cancelled elections, but Trump has cancelled the petty dictator in public. Trump threw away the toy soldier, mocking him for not wearing a suit. But that was his empty suit, now Trump can't even pretend to like the guy. He threw away his leverage. He did worse when he cut off intelligence and weapons, however briefly. He blinked before negotiations even started and conceded immediately.

It's not even clear that Trump has read The Art Of The Deal, but its writer Tony Schwartz said, "The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you're dead. The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can't do without." Does Trump listen to advice, even his own? No, but he never stops talking shit.

Trump promised America a Ukraine deal in 24 hours, reducing his leverage to a ledge which he promptly walked off, like Wile-E Coyote followed by an anvil. The Pottery Barn Rule is 'you broke it, you bought it' and Trump's owns the Ukraine War now. It's a loser and he knows it. The longer Russia waits, the worse Ukraine's position gets, and Trump obviously can't wait to be done with them. This makes him desperate, which is the opposite of leverage. Trump can't get Ukraine or Europe to agree on a deal, nevermind the Russians. He has no leverage and people just aren't listening to him.

Trump is not a serious person, he sent a fucking Real Estate agent to negotiate World War III. That's all Steve Witkoff is, a random real estate guy, made Trump's personal envoy. Yet even this dilettante can understand, you don't get détente by shitting on the house you're listing. Like, this is a real fixer-upper, half-occupied by a neo-Nazi gang I gave a lot of guns to, and I cut the lights off periodically. $1 trillion dollars. This is "a joke in the history of the world" as China said. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and Russia is just ignoring America and taking possession of more oblasts. "Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, Life goes on, brah" as the Ja-fake-en Beatles said. Or as Notorious BIG said, "real niggas do real things."

In the same way, what leverage does Trump have against China? China has been slowly been building a Belt and Road around America for over a decade, becoming the world's top trading partner by cooperation, not coercion. Feeling jealous, the American economy tried killing itself for attention and experienced every suicide attemptors worst nightmare. Everybody actually does hate them.

Investors don't actually care if a policy is good or evil, they'll incinerate children to gas their yacht up. They don't even care if policy impoverishes their own people, they're not people, just capital personified. Investors just care if a policy is predictable, and Trump is a very unstable genius. Everyone was having a great time at the USD Casino, built on an Indian graveyard, but trust Donald Trump to bankrupt a casino. They said it wasn't possible, but he did it.

Archimedes real quote was, "Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world," and America has lost all faith and standing. To stand with Trump is to stand on shifting sands, upon shifting continents, depending on a deeply shifty character who's sifting through your pockets and sniffing your daughter. Besides lack of leverage, Trump doesn't have a stable fulcrum. He's always going off half-cocked, and changes his mind constantly, depending on who's next to him. Even if you wanted to negotiate with Trump, which Trump? What side of the bed did he wake up on? How were his bowel movements?

The fulcrum that leverage stands upon is trust—do words mean anything and do signatures matter—and Trump has rolled that up and smoked it like a blunt. How many documents and treaties has he wiped his ass with, like every Non-Native American before him? Presidents before him threw out the Minsk Accords, none of them took Oslo seriously, and America itself is unceded land, Trump has thrown out the Iran deal and now the WTO and WHO and whatever other acronyms he could think of. America has no diplomatic standing left, just grandstanding.

The Mississippi Delta

Today, the delta between American words and deeds is so wide that it might as well be the Mississippi River. And this isn't just Trump. Democrats and Republicans are just the good-cop/bad-cop of the same police state. Always remember that Biden deported more than Trump, killed more than Trump in Gaza, and killed more of his own people with COVID.

Liberals would love to be Biden time, feeling fine while doing crime, but I'm done with both sides of the lying mouth. Trump at least accelerates American decline, which is a blessing in disguise. The sooner America goes down the better,

America is not bipartisan so much as bipolar, and the multipolar world is increasingly done with them. Even nations nuclear bound to America can't negotiate with Trump, he's just too disorganized and dumb.

I know people would like to isolate the problem to Trump, but America itself is isolated and problematic. They're up shit creek without a paddle and all the babbling in the world won't bail them out. As Teddy Roosevelt said, back when US Presidents killed what they ate, talk softly and carry a big stick. America today talks loudly and carries a limp dick. The POTUS is impotent. He can only bomb hospitals while the Empire itself is on hospice. He can only hype meme coins as the master currency collapses. He can only pretend to negotiate while collapse is nonnegotiable. It is, in fact, safe to ignore what America says, as enraging as it is. The greatest American asset crash is this. Talk is cheap.

2. America Is Crashing Like Sri Lanka Did, Hopefully Worse

Americans are currently experiencing something entirely foreign to them. Consequences. As a confused person from CNBC already noticed, "Stocks are down, the dollar is down, and bond yields are higher. This is incredibly odd for the US." As someone who has lived through total economic collapse in Sri Lanka, yes, that's how it works. Your economy totally collapses. The newsletter also said, "This is the uncomfortable position developing markets can often face in a crisis," and also yes, America is a rapidly undeveloping country. Get used to it.

As I said back when Sri Lanka crashed,

Sri Lanka is just the canary in the coal mine. We followed neoliberal economics in the 1980s just like you did. We settled for cheap consumer goods instead of producing things. We covered up our trade deficits with loans, and by the 2010s we were using one credit card to pay off another.

Collapse on the periphery of White Empire and collapse within is one process. When it reached America was just a timing difference. As I continued,

If you sit in judgment of Sri Lanka you're really missing the point. Don't you use dollars and petrol and liberal democracy too? Aren't they feeling shaky to you? As Warren Buffett said, "when the tide is out you see who's swimming naked." Sri Lanka was certainly swimming naked, but as any Sri Lankan can tell you, if the tide suddenly rushes out, that means a tsunami's about to come. A money-print swimsuit might cover America's nakedness for now, but it won't protect you from the flood. As someone who's already been swept away, let me warn you as only a ghost can.

Boo!

The fact is that, on paper, America is a more shambolic economy than Sri Lanka's. As I said, "America has a worse debt to GDP ratio than Sri Lanka. Everybody is levered up the ass, betting on a future that will not come to pass."

Now it looks like American elites have decided (through some combination of stupidity and malice) to control demolish themselves as a center of world trade. This has started America's Greatest Depression, preceded by a short gilded age for insider traders. It's the end of the world as Americans know it and, as REM said, I feel fine. Or a twice condemned man said to another at the gallows, first time?

Tariffs Vs. Taxes (Same Thing)

The proximate trigger is for the Greatest Depression is tariffs, one of the few tools a President fully controls on his own, besides all the actual triggers. The Federal Reserve is not part of the federal government (it's a private banking cartel), and Congress technically holds the purse strings. Tariffs are the only trigger a President can pull all on his own, and Trump is trigger-happy to use them. He's holding the whole world up in a murder-suicide pact, unless they buy more Teslas or something.

This obviously isn't working, but the latest explanation is that tariffs will allow America to replace income taxes for people making less than $150,000. I'll indulge this because it's hilarious. You know who else collects taxes this way? Sri Lanka.

I have often called Sri Lanka a kade (shop) with a port attached. We tax everything coming in (tariffs) and effectively double tax everything being sold (VAT, excise) and that's our revenue model. People barely pay income taxes at all. This tax policy retards both consumption and production, because exports also require imports. This is not a good tax policy. It doesn't work.

Now, however, we see America barrelling down the same dead end we just died in, as we try to turn around. It doesn't even make sense. Why are they trying to be like us? Sri Lanka is still colonized by western capital and we did whatever we could to keep the lights on. But America is western capital. They don't need to do this. We would keep sending them our work and resources and they can give us magical paper in return. They don't have to tariff us to death, they're just killing their own golden goose. But for reasons we'll discuss, here we are.

America is becoming a poor country like Sri Lanka by attacking poor countries like Sri Lanka. Trump thought he could eat the developing world, but someone should tell him, you are what you eat. Sri Lanka vomited up its economy, and America is about to hurl out its hegemony.

LKR Vs USD

When Sri Lanka's economy collapsed, the first thing I noticed coming up was the currency. It rapidly depreciated from 200 to the dollar to 350, a 75% increase (from our perspective). People's savings were nuked and prices still haven't recovered.

In the same way, America's currency is depreciating now (relative to its vassals) and barely appreciating against its debt slaves and enemies. The currency is burping much less than Sri Lanka's, but this is a much bigger problem. The US dollar is a reserving currency and people are supposed to flock to it during a crisis. Instead, it's going sideways or down. The problem is not the magnitude. This isn't supposed to happen at all.

Besides going against history, this is also going against the future whole plan. I know it's surprising that there is a plan, but in 2024 current adviser Stephen Miran published A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System, which we have covered previously. Trump is following it as much as he follows anything. Miran's plan at least makes predictions, which we can at least check posthumously.

Miran's plan said that tariffs would pay for themselves because they'll damage foreign currencies more. He said, "the economic and market consequences of tariffs hinge on the extent to which they are matched by offsetting changes in currencies." The idea is that if you tariff country X at 10%, their currency depreciates by 10%, and the US importer would actually save money. Because the US dollar would be stronger, and everyone else would be weakened. Miran's thesis was that, "tariffs are ultimately financed by the tariffed nation, whose real purchasing power and wealth decline." Now, however, the feces has hit the fan and the opposite has happened.

The US dollar has depreciated against its vassals (measured through DXY) and has barely appreciated against people like China and Sri Lanka (which got tariffed the most). For us two, there's been barely 1% currency movement against 50-150% tariffs, which offsets nothing. Of course, Sri Lanka's tariffs are currently suspended down to 10% and China's have been largely circumvented because Trump caved, but nothing like Miran predicted has happened. The math doesn't math because the mathematicians are mendacious morons, telling a mad king what he wants to hear, which is madness.

Bonds Vs Stocks

US bonds, also, are not supposed to move like this. They are in fact moving like Sri Lanka's bonds during our collapse, ie junk nobody trust and which the government has to pay a premium for.

When Sri Lanka defaulted, bond prices went down, because there was no demand for broken promises. That meant yields had to go up, to attract new bondholders. So yields went up to 30%, while bond prices (the tradable value) went down. Bond prices move inversely to yields. That's basically a rule.

Not a rule, but a rule of thumb, is that bond prices generally move opposite to stock prices. If stocks are risky, people retreat into safe bonds. Because Sri Lanka's economy had totally collapsed, however, all bets were off.

In Sri Lanka's collapsed state, stocks and bonds went down together (starting in January 2022) and recovered together (starting in June 2023). Stocks and bonds are supposed to move inverse to each other, but in these perverse conditions, they move together. This is what happens in a total economic collapse. This is what's happening to America today, while they're dazed and confused. 'What are we, a bunch of ASIANS?'

Like USD depreciation, stocks and bonds both crashing is not supposed to happen at all. It's one of the horsemen of the financial fuckupalypse. As our CNBC newsletter says,

Go back to the financial crisis, to Covid, to anytime there's a whiff of panic about a slowing economy and what do you see? Stocks are down, yes, but the dollar shoots higher as global investors pile into safe havens, and U.S. Treasury yields drop sharply. This reaction can be helpful--it cushions the economic blow. Lower Treasury yields mean falling mortgage rates, falling borrowing rates, and so forth. A stronger dollar gives U.S. consumers more purchasing power, so imported goods are cheaper. But now, we're not getting that.

Americans are used to every crisis being an opportunity (for the country), but this is just a crisis. Let's look at stocks and then bonds, and see how it's all gone wrong.

The S&P 500 (as an index of American stocks) is going to shit, so investors should be fleeing to safer bonds (thus lowering their yield, because high demand). But that's not what's happening.

Bond yields are going up, which means there's less demand. This inverts the usual relationship described by C. Broadus in 1993 when he described stock market wobbles. He said, "Gs up, hoes down while you motherfuckers bounce to this." Gilts are supposed to go up when stock holdings go down. But that's not what's happening here. The whole thing is going to the dog pound.

And this isn't even the Chinese weaponize their treasuries, it's the Japanese stabbing their masters in the back. Anecdotally, it's the Japanese dumping. Even the most vassalized, atomized allies don't trust the US treasury. They're voting with their money and just fucking off. As Shakespeare's famous stage directions read, "Exit, pursued by a bear [market]."

Fiat Vs. Gold

So where's all this capital going, if it's not safe in the capital of capitalism? One clue is again behavior of Sri Lankans, or just Asians in general. Asians buy gold all the time, but especially when they're stressed. The default investment thesis is 'what can I fit on my wife and flee for my life with.' Now even professional investors are acting like Asian aunties before their daughter's wedding. They're stacking up on gold and keeping it close.

Gold prices are going up now, but physical gold was flying from January. Huge amounts of physical gold was airlifted to New York before the crisis hit, meaning that the smart money knew what was coming. Physical gold storage today is at higher than during the COVID collapse (still happening btw), meaning the sphincter of global capital is clenching tight. The big banks are not content with paper claims on gold, they want physical gold and they want it on site.

I'm not saying the world is going back to the gold standard, none of this is investment advice. All I'm saying is that the world economy is getting real very fast, and people have stopped being polite. For a long time, China and the smartest money has been stocking up on physical resources in general—gold, silver, grain, oil—things you can hold on to when matters get out of hand. With Trump completely out of pocket, perhaps now you understand.

The era of fiat currency that replaced the gold standard is over. The dollar was only backed by the faith and credit of America, and both have been toasted. Americans, in addition to being evil, have become unpredictable. Investors can forgive the genocide and the wars, but threatening their money is unforgivable. Today America as a vehicle for all your hopes and dreams is looking like a plain old Fiat, not that big, not that safe, and full of clowns.

Great Idiot Theory Of History

As I've elaborated in my Great Idiot Theory, material conditions create probabilities for change, while great men and great idiots create the volatility. In Sri Lanka, for example, our economy was structurally fucked since we neoliberalized in the 80s, but it wasn't until a Great Idiot did a few random things in the 2020s that it all went crazy.

Before the crash, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had a few bad ideas (cutting already meagre income tax and banning chemical fertilizer quickly) which had big, disproportionate effects. These ideas certainly weren't as bad as the neoliberal ideology of decades, but they spooked the markets (with some help from spooks) and caused cascading capital flight. That's all it takes for a market crash. Just a few dumb stomps and you get a stampede.

In the same way, America's current President is stomping around like a literal bull in a China shop, and capital is fleeing. What I call the Greatest Depression has already begun, with the spark lit by a historical arsonist who'll likely profit from the fall. And that's really the question you should really be asking, cui bono? Who benefits?

Cui Bono

Historically, America does not care if countries collapse and in fact enjoys it. Chaos is a ladder, and as a reserve currency, they're at the top. When countries like Sri Lanka collapse, capital rushes back into safe USDs and USTs and they suck up resources and slaves for pennies on the dollar. Every crisis is an opportunity if you're an opportunist. America is full of what southerners called 'carpetbaggers,' now paired with carpet-bombers for good measure.

Historically, America also does not care about Americans. Remember that America was founded by the property, for the property, everything else is just marketing. America is run by a malevolent AI called Capital, with human shareholders as interchangeable parts. The American economy has never been about the greater good and is always down for a little cannibalism. If there's some incentive to blow things up, they love a little controlled demolition. Which may be what's happening now.

If the American economy goes down slowly, there's just a lot of money to be lost. If it goes down quickly, however, there's a lot of money to be made. On just the whipsaw movements of the last few weeks, people made millions if not billions of dollars. As Trump proudly said in the Oval Office after the first big crash, "He made $2.5 billion today, and he made $900 million." He literally pointed the crony capitalists out, they don't give a fuck.

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Trump has perfected an entirely new form of financial fraud, the dump-and-pump. They dumped the whole US economy and then pumped it with a tweet, to make a quick buck. What Nancy Pelosi made in decades of insider trading, he'll make in one term. Never underestimate the motivation of greed. It's what America was founded on.

Consequences

As someone who has lived through a total collapse, I can tell you how it played out for us. We had two years of unelected government where they stole as much as possible, with the IMF making sure foreign crooks got their taste first. I saw the rich somehow get much richer while the poor suffered and starved. This seems to be the modus operandi for capitalist crashes, and the POTUS is a known operator. Donald Trump has crashed multiple businesses over the years and come out ahead, why not crash a whole country, or the global economy while you're at it?

When Sri Lanka finally had an election we elected a nominally socialist government, which is still doing much the same things, because our freedom is so limited and unwon. But I don't think America can vote their way out of this, and I hope they don't. In fact, I hope America crashes so completely that it just disappears as an entity, an identity, and as an enemy that holds deaths and debt over everyone. Sri Lanka's debt payments resume in 2028… unless the people we owe money to disappear first.

3. Trump Is The Dog Who Caught The Trade Car. Now What?

Japan seppuku'd its economy once at their master's command, but now even the must loyal vassals cannot hear their master's voice nor discern his plan. The Japan trade delegation walked out of the Oval Office, hat in hand. There is no deal to be had with America because there is no one to deal with. Trump is like a dog who caught a car. He doesn't know what the fuck to do with it.

When I'm being chased by dogs, I sometimes stop and ask, "what do you want? WTF do you want? have you thought this through?" Invariably, the dog doesn't know. And so I just keep going as the dog barks, receding into the distance. This is what the world is going to do with Trump, not because it doesn't want to negotiate, but because America itself doesn't have a clue.

As Robert E. Kelly, professor in occupied Korea, said, "A trade deal w/ a major economy is a complicated project; US deal w/ mid-sized economy S Korea took 17 months to work out. W/ Japan or EU, it will [be] even longer." Even with states that already have a gun to their head, it still takes years to negotiate details. Trump now has to negotiate trade deals with 185 entities across the world, some of them populated only by penguins, because who the fuck made this spreadsheet?

Japan got a 50-minute meeting with the President, but such high-level meetings are supposed to be the end of a long process, not the beginning. Agreements are usually worked out long before the signatories sit down and so, predictably, Japan left with nothing but souvenirs and chagrin. Trump's team proudly says people are 'calling for meetings', but this isn't telemarketing for time-shares, there's no great value in gathering 'leads'. These are people that were already doing business with you, until you stopped them. It's like me unplugging the Internet router and crowing that I'm suddenly really popular among my family.

Dutiful nations—which still fear liberation—are dolefully showing up for meetings without agendas and getting nothing because there's nothing to be had. As former Assistant Secretary of War Chas Freeman said, "the Japanese said 'well, what is it that you want?' And the Americans could not explain what they wanted." Where do you go with this? It's like being held up by a guy with no coherent demands. What do you want? My wallet, my watch, directions? Talk to me man!

Guess Who

More to the point, nobody even knows who they're supposed to negotiate with. The President directly, his commerce secretary who spends more time on TV, is his son-in-law still around, should we buy his meme coin? Besides the lack of clarity on what America is saying, it's unclear what side of their mouth they're talking out of on any given day.

As Qian Jing of the Asia Society Policy Institute said, (via SCMP),

Chinese elites are finding the current US messaging a little "disorientating" due to "confusing" communication with the Trump 2.0 team, said Qian Jing, co-founder and managing director of the Centre for China Analysis at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

"For example, there have been about five different [private] channels in the past 10 days engaging with Chinese officials, and all seem to be somehow carrying different messages," Qian said during a panel discussion held by the Asia Society in Hong Kong on Tuesday.

Even within the White House, there's massive confusion as to who's doing what, and with what authority. Major decisions seem to depend on who's physically next to the Orange King at any given point, able to get him to post on social media. As the Wall Street Journal reported,

On April 9, financial markets were going haywire. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wanted President Trump to put a pause on his aggressive global tariff plan. But there was a big obstacle: Peter Navarro...

So that morning, when Navarro was scheduled to meet with economic adviser Kevin Hassett in a different part of the White House, Bessent and Lutnick made their move, according to multiple people familiar with the intervention. They rushed to the Oval Office to see Trump and propose a pause on some of the tariffs—without Navarro there to argue or push back. They knew they had a tight window. The meeting with Bessent and Lutnick wasn't on Trump's schedule.

The two men convinced Trump of the strategy to pause some of the tariffs and to announce it immediately to calm the markets. They stayed until Trump tapped out a Truth Social post, which surprised Navarro, according to one of the people familiar with the episode. Bessent and press secretary Karoline Leavitt almost immediately went to the cameras outside the White House to make a public announcement.

This is like courtiers getting access to the king in the toilet, then rushing out with some proclamation before anyone else can trip them. I'd say things have degenerated, but Joe Biden invisibly quit the election over Twitter, the place has been going down the shitter for a while now.

In this shituation, proximity with the king is what matters, so all 185 affected territories need to negotiate with Trump directly, which is troubling because he little to no attention span for anything. As his blood-money ghostwriter Tony Schwartz has said,

Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn't seem to be fully understood. It's implicit in a lot of what people write, but it's never explicit—or, at least, I haven't seen it. And that is that it's impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then... If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it's impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time.

How the fuck is this guy going to sustain trade negotiations over the months and years that's required? If only there was an organization for coordinating world trade, like a world trade organization or something. Nevermind. Trump hasn't blown up US trade policy to replace it with something, he's just blown it up for the insider trades we make along the way.

Bureaucracy

A politburo full of crazies like this just leads to complete bureaucrazy. Simpleton spreadsheets spread out into complex chaos. Can you imagine being a customs agent right now? You don't know the rules you're supposed to enforce from minute to minute. Are you supposed to listen to your boss, or watch TV for your boss's boss? The system simply isn't built to turn globally shipping on a dime like this. In fact, US Customs actually seized up and briefly stopped collected some tariffs at all. Trump said "We're making a fortune with tariffs. $2 billion a day. Do you believe it?" and the answer was "no," resoundingly. As Business Insider reported,

Data from US Customs and Border Protections shows that the actual tariff revenue is just a small fraction of what Trump said it is. A spokesperson for CBP told Business Insider that the agency has so far collected $500 million from Trump's broad round of tariffs that went into place on April 5.

And in total, the agency said it has brought in $21 billion in tariff-related revenue through its enforcement of 15 presidential actions since Trump took office nearly three months ago. That works out to a little under $250 million a day over the 86 days since January 20.

It's not just the CBP's data that doesn't match up with Trump's numbers.

The Treasury Department's daily deposit totals for "Customs and Certain Excise Taxes" reported over the seven weekdays since April 5 averages out to $227 million per day. The department's month-to-date total as of Tuesday is around $2.3 billion and its year-to-date total for the fiscal year that started in October is about $55.5 billion.

As Jarred Varanelli, vice president of U.S. sales at logistics firm Savino Del Bene, told CNBC (via), "There has been some confusion on what President Trump has said in social media posts on when the tariff starts and what is written in the executive order. Social media posts are not law on the pause and increase in tariffs. With the constant changes to the regulations, all customs brokers in our industry have a difficult task ahead of them."

That's putting it lightly. People don't realistically know what they're going to pay until they physically receive the goods. It's like Schrödinger's shipping container, you don't know if your business is dead or alive until you open it. In response to this wild uncertainty, DHL America has simply stopped importing any B2C goods worth more than $800, from anywhere at all. DHL simply cannot operate in this environment.

It's not even the amount of tariffs, it's the uncertainty that's gumming up the works. And it's not just DHL. US shipping is down across the board.

Overall US imports are down 64% and exports are down 30% (roughly matching the China drop). Even though Trump has backtracked and exempted a huge number of Chinese goods, the damage is done. If you ship something now, he's highly likely to change his mind while it's coming over. Rather than becoming the workshop of the world again (which requires inputs) America is just closing up shop with a sign that says 'Gone Fishing.' They're reeling countries into negotiate, but then throwing them back because they have no idea what to do with them.

This external collapse is reflected in internal trucking data also. Industry analyst (and cucked Trump voter) Craig Fuller reports that, "Based on trucking volume data, freight markets with large exposure to ag and oil/gas are doing well since the trade war started. Freight markets serving retail and manufacturing are struggling, with heavy manufacturing getting completely obliterated." America is becoming what they ignorantly accused Russia of being, a subsistence gas station with nukes.

Trade Seizure

Trump tried to seize world trade, but instead he's just given his own economy a grand mal seizure. This is why the Chinese call him "川建国 (Chuan Jianguo) which literally means that he builds China with his self-defeating policies — [or] 懂王" (Dong Wang) which means "king of understanding", a satirical take on his "know-it-all" persona." As Miley Cyrus sang, "I came in like a wrecking ball, All I wanted was to break your walls, All you ever did was wreck me."

You could say this drop in trade hurts China also, and it does, but China isn't simultaneously fighting everyone else on Earth. They also have the strategic depth of having a strategy at all. When China goes in for meetings they don't have to negotiate anything, they just say 'shall we be normal?' and people agree. Nobody wins in a trade war, as China has said repeatedly, but unlike America, they are not their own worst enemy.

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American talking heads have talked about 'uniting the world against China' but they're talking out their asses while kissing Trump's pasty. 'Uniting' requires some level of organization, not just untying trade agreements and leaving a business card at the crime scene. America has just issued a ransom note with no coherent demands. They're just spitballing here. Trump's economic moron Stephen Miran offered a "few ideas", which include 1) shut up and take it 2) let us make it 3) buy the guns to hold yourself up with 4) move to America 5) just send money.

I mean, OK, how much? Are countries supposed to trade with the US and then write them a check for the entire trade surplus, ie work for nothing? How do we even communicate capitulation, do we just bribe everyone in the privy council, and hope someone catches Trump in a good mood? Even if most of the world wanted to join America in a crusade against most of the world's top trading partner, who do they call? The President directly? And what do they do? Buy an F-16, shine his shoes? Nobody even knows, least of all the Americans. The Americans are rebels against the economic system they built, and rebels without a clue.

As the hero of The Dark Knight told the two-faced liberal he confused, "Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it, you know, I just do things." Trump just does things. In this case, crashing multiple ships into America as a center of world trade to see where the pieces fall. So, honestly, shout-out to Abu Donald, destroying the Great Satan from within, pissing on the rug and chewing up furniture. I, for one, am here for it. Good dog.

I'm glad to see America burn largely because they're burning Gaza. I've adopted this fundraiser for Muhammad and his family there. If you're able, support them, a loan to God is surely an investment in you.

4. What If They're Just Stupid?

I try to intelligently analyze White Empire as best I can, but something irks me. What if there is no plan? What if they're just stupid? What if the simplest answer is that they're just simpletons? What if they're just cutting coke with Occam's Razor, and licking the blade with wild abandon? At this time, a Great Man Theory (GMT) of history won't do, we need a Great Idiot Theory (GIT).

Theory

Great Man Theory comes from a series of lectures by Thomas Carlyle from 1840, called On Heroes. It's an erudite, expansive work, covering everyone from the Prophet Muhammad to Shakespeare to Napoleon Bonaparte. Most people reduce Carlyle to out of context quotes (in the context of reduced attention spans), and I'm afraid I'm no exception. For our purposes, Carlyle said, "Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here." I would amend just one word. Great Men might mark the top of history, but the bottom is just morons.

Carlyle addresses this. In his section on kings and kingslayers, Carlyle posited a difference between the 'Ablest Man' and the 'Unablest Man', each emerging cyclically throughout history. As the modern airport novel wisdom goes, "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times." Carlyle seems to talk about the American Devolution today, when he talks about the French Revolution of yore,

This is the history of all rebellions, French Revolutions, social explosions in ancient or modern times. You have put the too Unable Man at the head of affairs! The too ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man. You have forgotten that there is any rule, or natural necessity whatever, of putting the Able Man there. Brick must lie on brick as it may and can. Unable Simulacrum of Ability, quack, in a word, must adjust himself with quack, in all manner of administration of human things;—which accordingly lie unadministered, fermenting into unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent misery: in the outward, and in the inward or spiritual, miserable millions stretch out the hand for their due supply, and it is not there.

The 'ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man,' an administration of quacks, 'fermenting into unmeasured masses of failure.' Does this not describe the current situation in parallax? Trump is a revolutionary in the sense of turning things over, and French in the sense that nothing good comes of it. There's an English saying, cometh the hour, cometh the man, but at this late hour, who's answering the call but morons and charlatans? As Yeats said, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." There's also a Chinese saying, 时势造英雄, "the times create their heroes," but what does this mean in a time of decline? The times also create their zeroes, who drive the 'miserable millions' down accordingly.

Critique Of GMT

One critique of GMT comes from Karl Marx, who said, "how absurd is the conception of history held hitherto, which neglects the real relationships and confines itself to high-sounding dramas of princes and states." Marx describes his alternative, historical materialism, saying,

History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity. This can be speculatively distorted so that later history is made the goal of earlier history, e.g. the goal ascribed to the discovery of America is to further the eruption of the French Revolution. Thereby history receives its own special aims and becomes "a person rating with other persons" (to wit: "Self-Consciousness, Criticism, the Unique," etc.), while what is designated with the words "destiny," "goal," "germ," or "idea" of earlier history is nothing more than an abstraction formed from later history, from the active influence which earlier history exercises on later history.

History is thus a palimpsest (a manuscript rubbed out and rewritten), and the medium is the message (as McLuhan said). Personally I have noticed this as America being evil now (something I only recently noticed) reveals that America was always evil (to my shame). I can feel the palimpsest being scrubbed out and overwritten in my brain, though I still can't spell the word for the life of me. It's yet such a delightful and descriptive word that I can't refrain.

Describing historical materialism, Marx says, "It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances." But then, aren't we back where we started? Cometh the man, cometh the hour, only reversing the order. Greater (or lesser) men will always rise (or fall) to the occasion, their personalities providing a violent volatility around the general arc of history. History creates a certain probability for change, but only personality tells us what shape it will take.

Marx views history through production changes and class struggle. Thus feudal production systems produced barons, just as capitalist production produces robber barons. That is, a certain production system leads to the reproduction of certain morons, leading to high drama of princes and states, or CEOs and corporations. In both cases, once you gather enough grain or GDP to sustain an insane inbred population, they do insane inebriated things.

Practice

Pre-industrial European history was largely a bunch of inbred morons doing inane things, culminating Queen Victoria's grandchildren fighting over their toys (World War I) and smashing everything. There were very few, very incestuous, people making very stupid decisions and chaos ensued. Sound familiar?

Production based on land reproduced landed nobility. In the same way, production based on capital reproduces capitalists. Trump, for example, is a second generation capitalist. He inherited $40 million from his father and could have been just as rich passively investing it. Today, most billionaires are produced this way, through inheritance rather than entrepreneurship. This new class of inherited capitalist holds the same investments, goes to the same schools, wears the same watches, and rapes the same children. A production system of widespread machines has turned into a reproduction system of insular morons.

Today the 50 richest Americans hold nearly as much wealth as the bottom 50%. Just a few families control America, and they all know each other. Given that wealth is legally speech in America these people can buy both sides of the 2% spread that divides elections and continue the party, whatever the party. Duopoly is even better than monopoly because it gives you plausible deniability. As Julius Nyerere said, "The United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them."

Just as bankers and the merchant class displaced European nobility, cash is king in America. American politicians are not public but private servants, they're answerable to the 'donor class', because America has legalized bribery. Western politicians are just hired hands, accountable to rich shareholders, not poor voters. Very few people behind the scenes actually run the White Empire, and they're hardly people. Marx called them "capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will." This private jet-set is the new unlanded ignobility.

In this way material conditions lead us to the "high-sounding dramas of princes and states" all over again. The reproduction and concentration of capital leads to the reproduction and concentration of capitalists, becoming successively more moronic over degenerating generations. Thus we end up back in the age of mad kings doing mad tings, only under different production systems.

Thus the question is not really what Trump produces but what produces a Trump. What system would elevate such an "ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man" to power? What leads to "forgetting that there is any rule, or natural necessity whatever, of putting the Able Man there"? It is, in fact, an unable system that calls out for an unable man, to represent it. As Aimé Césaire said, "a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment."

Evil Is Stupid In The Long Run

Even more pointless than looking for intelligence in this stupidity is looking for morality, but let's do it, because I think evil and stupid are the same thing, just with a timing difference. If you look at any moral advice it is really just good advice, in the long run. Evil is stupid in the long run, especially if you consider the hereafter (though in the meantime it can be fun). If you cheat in business, you're less likely to be trusted, you make your own life harder. If you cheat on your wife, you have a more stressful life, you wreck your own home. Of course, people 'get away' with cheating all the time, but how far do they get, and how often do they fall? Doing evil is simply more risky in the long-run, AKA stupid, especially considering the hereafter, as you should.

In this way, colonialism was always stupid in the long run, a global minority trying to cheat and steal from the global majority was always going to go Global South at some point. There's simply more of us, and technology moves around. While they did get away with colonialism for centuries, that was just a blink of the historical eye, and that eye is opening. Climate collapse, Palestinian liberation, Chinese independence, these are all part of the same reckoning. When Trump responds to this with traditional western racism, it appears stupid, but remember that everything Trump is doing was once conventional wisdom.

As Ernest Renan from the no-good French said (via Césaire), "The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races by the superior races is part of the providential order of things for humanity... Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor; govern them with justice, levying from them, in return for the blessing of such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering race, and they will be satisfied." Trump is called a moron for trying to extort the Chinese today, but it was (and is) common continental sentiment to treat the this way.

Césaire introduced this Renan saying, "Who is speaking? I am ashamed to say it: it is the Western humanist, the "idealist" philosopher... "Hitler? Rosenberg? No, Renan." White people blame racism on their ignorant poors, but this ideology was written by their elites long before. Modern racists are simply regurgitating the blood meal of past centuries. People say Trump can't do this, but no less than Immanuel Kant says that he should. Kant said, "the race of the whites contains all talents and motives in itself" (so tariff everybody else into oblivion).

Even though Trump's ghostwriter Tony Schwartz said, "I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life," Trump nonetheless channels the id of imperialist thought unconsciously. As John Maynard Keynes said, "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." In this way, Trump is simply distilling the jist of western thought, which is that the west is the best and everybody else can eat shit. Trump's frenzy really expresses the whole of western philosophy, which claims the whole category of philosophy, and deports everything else to departments on the periphery.

But Trump comes too late to avert his fate. While fate might lead the willing (re: Seneca) it drags the unwilling, and Trump is dragging America to the fate it deserves more rapidly than intended. This is one of those moments when a Great Idiot takes the reins of a probable decline and yanks it downwards into a certainty. As Césaire said. "At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler." You can sense that America is eager to outlive its day, having voted for the man twice. And so they go out in the traditional American white man way, murder-suicide of the whole family.

Trump is the heir to an inheritance that's already been spent. He's the hair combed over a baldness that's already apparent. He's the last furious attempt to simply eat the palimpsest of history before it's overwritten by present rebellions. White Empire was always evil but only now does it appear stupid, as it's ending. Evil is just stupid in the long run and this is the long run. As Frank Sinatra sang, send in the clowns, don't bother, they're here.

5. Happiness And Happy New Year

This week was Sinhala and Tamil New Year. What I call Avurudu and what my wife calls Puthandu is an ancient holiday, older than our mostly divergent cultures, based on an astrological chart that goes back to the Babylonians, at least. The holiday is so old that the Earth has noticeably wobbled and the astrological charts no longer match the astronomy. But we still use them, and still do the same things. The traditions tell you what color to wear, what direction to face, and exactly what time to do it. New Year, like the very concept of a year itself, is a Maui'ian act. Capturing the sun, and fitting it into a cultural cognition, then sustaining this hallucination over generations. We still go through the motions, even though we barely know what it means. This is the nature of cultural cognition. We think therefore we be.

The Rat Race

When I studied cognitive science decades ago at McGill, they were hyper-focused on individual cognition. I took an entire course on the Philosophy of Self, and we never seriously discussed the possibility that the self just didn't exist. My Philosophy of Science teacher, Mario Bunge, asked me what India had ever contributed to the world which stumped me, being neither Indian nor thus educated. All I knew was the western world, which was actually 500 years behind on many subjects (literally, it's currently 2569 in the Buddhist calendar).

Western philosophy arbitrarily draws the (time) line a few hundred years back (the Enwhitenment) and a racist line across Asia (Europe). There are more people studying obscure quirks of Kant than the entire rest of the world in most (western) philosophy departments, so much is the bias towards the faux continent. Western philosophy also arbitrarily draws the line around an individual, trying to explain lots of things through the brain and DNA, when human cognition is much wider than that. It's really happening at the human level, because we are social animals.

I'm not saying that we didn't study social cognition in school (as an elective), but the required courses started with classical condition. These were endless experiments on tortured, isolated rats and the theory built upon that. These were scared, isolated individuals, separated from their rat families and cultures, and tortured with lights, sounds, and intermittent electrocution and drowning. These are the rats that press a lever endlessly for cocaine, something rats in functional rat communities won't do. Sound familiar? The rat races I studied were like the rat race I was expected to enter into. Canada is a settler colony (like America) and this produces deeply unsettled people, divorced from whatever culture they came from and thrown into consumer culture, which is deeply unsatisfying by design. They give economics Nobel Prizes under psychology because economics is just the art of mass experimentation on human populations, without consent or ethics.

First Impressions

Of course, the field of psychology was changing on a yearly basis while I was there and has surely changed more in the decades since. But I have noticed that a lot of western psychology (studies say) backtracks to 'eastern' insights like 'maybe having grandparents around is good for children' or 'perhaps we should improve society, somewhat.' However, I think it's very hard to live this way, because the philosophical foundation is incorrect. Again, there was no proof that there even was a self in my Philosophy Of Self class, yet every other class was based on that assumption. Everything about western psychology is based on there being an individual psyche and there kinda isn't. The Buddhist insight is that there's an illusion of one, but that this fritters away the moment you seriously look at the back of your eyelids. You can try this yourself, it's not a particular hard experiment.

Western philosophy and psychology and pharmacology is based on this fairly obvious illusion, building castles in the sand. I say obvious because one or two generations back a lot of my Indic family barely has individual names, every name is literally relative, we were (and are) still such social animals. Yet the lab rats of colonialism are shipped far away from all that, thrown into cage-like cities, and given name tags that must be worn at all time, like Driver's Licenses and Passports. This is profoundly alienating and the therapy they give you to make you feel human doesn't really work, because it acts on neither the social nor the animal but an imaginary individual that is none of the above.

Most of western psychology is still what drugs you take and what your DNA is and what happened to you and how to be your best self, AKA you, you, you. This sounds much worse if you say me, me, me, but that's what it is, isn't it? Besides being self-indulgent, such an approach is self-defeating. There is no there there. Attachment to the self leads to suffering, as any religion or folk story will tell you. In the Buddhist view, there are three fetters that keep us suffering, self-view, skeptical indecision, and clinging to rites and rituals. Western psychology is basically founded on the three fetters though, hey, at least the drugs are good.

I'm not saying that 'eastern' philosophy is going to save you. I've seen too many westerners take up yoga as a substitute for whatever addiction and just become more insufferable assholes. I've seen too many companies use 'mindfulness' meditation to make people into better mindless workers. I'm also not saying that 'eastern' people are happier, we're crazy too and 'westernized' in ways we now consider eastern. What I am saying is that western psychology is deeply tied up with western culture, whether it acknowledges it or not. And that culture is capitalist alienation and colonization, which is evil. And, at a very deep level, that does not feel good. Hence depression.

Depression

For whatever reason, after four years of studying cognitive science my brain was a mess and I was pretty depressed. I often struggled with depression when I lived in America and then Canada, for reasons I couldn't express and which no one could explain to me, no matter how much we paid them. In hindsight, I think I was experiencing what the late, great Mark Fisher called the privatization of stress. Before he sadly (for us) killed himself. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher said,

Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The 'mental health plague' in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.

I didn't think about it at the time, but I wasn't in a very different situation from those rats we studied. Hell, I even participated in psychological experiments for 20 bucks here and there, that's where a lot of this data comes from. A lot of psychological research is done like this, on alienated, possibly inebriated college students separated from all family and culture in a space you literally have to pay to enter, ie capitalism. They use a bit of light meditation to get you pliable, but that's about the extent of any cross-cultural relevance. Such studies might give you some very narrow insight (though few studies replicate), but they tell you nothing about the wider cultural cage they themselves are embedded in. I could feel this in some way I couldn't articulate. As the Smashing Pumpkins said, despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.

Third Culture

After university I confused all my relatives, left Canada, abandoned my US Green Card, and returned to a place I hadn't lived since I was five. Sri Lanka. I laid around being depressed for a year before my cousin introduced me to some people and I circulated and gradually became acculturated. I've been here for 20 years now and I rarely feel depressed anymore. Sometimes I feel really stressed, or really sad, but it's rarely a private stress or a private sadness. My burdens are shared, and my joys also. Even right now I can barely concentrate because there are five kids outside my door, only two of whom I'm related to. I have been desperately sad and grievously wounded, but never alone in this. Indeed, these were often pains I felt through other people. At these times, I often tell myself better outside problems than inside. I can deal with real problems, but unreal problems are often insurmountable.

As a third culture kid who returned to sender, I see people like me who didn't return and I wonder. I can see the struggle to hold an identity which inexorably dissolves into whiteness across generations. I can see the difficulty in separating from the hundreds of relatives we have here to form a small nuclear family somewhere else, then the explosion when they go off and form their own families, ie their own colonies. I also hear about the daily stress of figuring out when to wake up, what to eat, what to do, and how to do anything. A million podcasts have been launched from the fundamental lack of this cultural consciousness. Unlike traditions like Avurudu, which tell you what to wear, when to wake up, what to eat, and everything else, all of this must be recreated by each individual every day and it must be done the best, otherwise what are you doing? So many questions are dumped on a completely inadequate science which have been answered in a good enough way by culture, which colonialism and capitalism insists that you abandon. This is the privatization of stress Fisher talked about, and it seems exhausting.

Disneyfication

The general logic of the western, colonial world is that it's good to destroy religion, the family, and backwards culture, that this is precisely how you go forward in life. And that story is told through, essentially, edge cases. What if your religion oppresses you, your family abuses you, and your culture holds you back? And, indeed, religions can kill you, families can rape you, and demon dances don't cure many mental ailments. But these are the edge cases, these are the worst things that can happen in traditional societies, used to justify throwing out all traditions. But then you have the task of recreating a culture from scratch, and that also has edge cases, because to err is human, and now you kicked out any God that might forgive. It's just you reading a dozen books to figure out how to wean your baby, something your grandma would have told you if you hadn't moved 1,000 miles away. And if, God forbid, something happens, God could console you in a way Satanic statistics just won't do.

Capitalism killed God to replace Them with goods, displaced the family to replace them with coworkers, and neutered culture to make it a commodity. This enabled more people to colonize more land, but what does it do to the human heart? There's a White Hole at the heart of White Empire, a terrifying void where meaning is supposed to go, and it hurts. The fact is that liberalism genocides entire peoples, no workplace actually treats you like family (I remain unable to fire my cousins), and capitalist culture is the opposite of freedom, you literally have to pay for it.

In this new Disneyfied religion, old myths are repurposed to create a new one, that you need to bee yourself (Aladdin) and reject or ideally kill your parents (basically all of them). In the new families of choice, you're supposed to choose your own 'tribe' but then they leave because work or children, and it falls apart because you're not actually a family. With family I'm just close to people I have little in common with because I have no choice, but choosing and judging your 'family' all the time is exhausting. Even with the home and your own dome, you have to read a hundred studies and pay thousands of dollars to just make the correct breakfast, and you're always getting it wrong. It's a massive privatization of stress, alleviated only through periodic dopamine hits, like a rat pressing a lever for relief which never comes. As Paul Simon said, you get better but you never get well.

I think about this as Sri Lankans gather at the same time (nearly 5 AM this year) to eat the same meal (milk rice), facing the same direction, wearing the same colors. I say 'think' because it was too early this year and my family just slept in, as westernized heathens. But still, we ritually stay in the house while the Sun moves houses (because everything is closed) and then go out and greet people in the old village on a certain date, because that's what people do. The decisions are made for us, and this is an internal relief, though externally stressful. Avurudu is the hottest time of the year, when the Earth is most tilted towards the Sun. It's basically the worst time to be outside, but like northerners celebrating the shortest days (Christmas) to chase the blues away, it's what we do.

So we went back to the ancestral village to do ancestral things, where all the heat, noise, firecrackers, and stimulation promptly made my daughter explode. She was crying within five minutes and we had to go sit under a waterfall to avert core meltdown. But these cultural events are really a grand publicization of stress. You distribute your joys across the community, and your sorrows also. I don't want to say nationalization because this is older than nations or other such creations, like races or even religions. Sinhalese and Tamils don't celebrate too much together, but we do celebrate this somehow (shout-out Muslims, historically running the only shops that are open). Festival days are stressful to the modern mind, but to the premodern soul they distribute the load, across the culture, across the ancestors, across gods we barely remember but who are still looking out for us. I have strayed very far and yet I can still find ourself in the old village, which remains years behind but somehow 500 years ahead. So happy 2569 to you and yours. May it be blessed, destressed, and unalone.

6. Trump Doesn't Want To Deport, He Wants To Deter

If you haven't got it by now, the cruelty is the point. The disappearing white ladies and the enslaved hairdressers are not incidental, these are the teeth of the matter. The deported students and imprisoned researchers are not coincidental, this is the grinning face of America First, bared proudly to the world. These are the heads on pitchforks outside the gate, rotting in the hot sun of media coverage. They want you to watch, they want you to see, they want you to be appalled. None of this is an embarrassing failure to them, this is a successful advertising campaign, going viral through our disgust.

Remember that the point of torture and abuse is communicative, it's not about getting information out of a person, it's about getting information out to the population. It's about instigating fear in general, not investigating anything in particular.

Like Andrew Jackson, Trump is making an example of people, and he wants you to know. This is not some black mark in American history, it's just another proud billboard on Route 666, their own highway to hell. Like Jackson's Trail Of Tears, Donald Trump is not ashamed, a bloody trail is the message he wants to communicate. American borders have always been drawn in blood, a razor across the face of a free continent. The business of America has always been displacement and exploitation, and Trump, while a bad businessman, is an excellent marketer.

The Numbers

In raw numbers, Joe Biden actually deported more than Trump. But in terms of raw emotions, Trump has got them riled up. The heads on sticks and the bully pulpit is does the work many agents could not. When you watch plainclothes agents abducting Runeysa Ozturk (from Tufts) in broad daylight, you are not watching some brave expose, this is an advertising campaign, a flash mob intended to go viral. The viral fear does the work a thousand agents could not, other people self-censor, self-deport, and stay home. When ICE agents abducted Merwil Gutiérrez, knowing he was the 'wrong' guy but saying "Take him anyway," this was not some fuck up. The cruelty is the point and the casual nature of it is the sword. This can't happen to everybody, but it could happen to anybody. So the people police themselves, in a way ten thousand police could not. And it's working.

While deportations are down, fewer people are choosing to come at all. Brave, brutalized people, driven into wage slavery by America's destruction of their homes, are not braving the brutalized border anymore. 'Encounters' by the jealous land thieves of ICE are notably down.

At the same time—and this is to Trump's credit—crossings from Europeans are also down. For a long time American immigration policy was black and white. It was OK for white people. But now that racist cut-out has been cut out. This is racist on racist violence and I, for one, am here for it. They're disappearing white ladies at the Canadian border, deporting Australians, Brits, people who thought they were citizens of the greater White Empire and who participated in its villainy. But dutiful vassalage no longer guarantees safe passage. They're catching white fish and tormenting them for months before cutting them free. Again the cruelty is the point, and the point to even people within the White Empire is, fuck you too.

The Two Masks

Just as Hitler was the last honest European, Trump is the last honest American. Hitler's crime was "that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures" (re: Césaire), and Trump's crime is deporting Europeans. That's what gets reported on, though Obama was known as 'deporter-in-chief' and every US President ever had the same deportment. Liberals act like there's no precedent for this President, when Trump is just the office shorn of hypocrisy. As Hannah Arendt said (herself a racist, but nevermind), Trump just expresses the "growing prevalence of mob attitudes and convictions—which were actually the attitudes and convictions of the bourgeoisie cleansed of hypocrisy."

I, for one, give a fuck about liberal tears. Liberal tears and conservative jeers are two sides of the same performative politics, like the tragedy and comedy masks of Greek theatre. One deports apologetically and the other deports apoplectically, but they're both deplorable. Democrats and Republicans just play the good cop/bad cop roles within the same police state. America was always built on genocide and land theft, slavery and servitude and this hasn't changed at all. They just changed names and kept slaving even more. They only change parties every few years to keep party going for centuries. It's all Epstein island, has been since Columbus.

Since America's founding, the President's job has always been pushing natives out but at the same time pulling racialized labor in. Hating Injuns and 'niggers' is not something the American poors came up with on their own, it's something the American property owners encouraged to A) create property and B) work it. Note that the people being pushed back from the southern border are more native Americans than white Americans drawing an imaginary line in the sand.

The Theatrical Tension

Managing the tension between hating your workers and exploiting them was always a delicate balance, the hypocritical hinge that American capitalism swung upon. America is a nation of horse thieves that must whip but not entirely spook the horses. Americans have to hate immigrants enough to keep the wages low, but not so much that they actually stop coming. Trump—bless his black heart—is upsetting all this by taking things so literally (instead of liberally, like he's supposed to).

What Trump doesn't get in his haste is that the 'immigration problem' is not supposed to be resolved. It's supposed to be a perennial problem, enabling them suck in seasonal labor. People without rights for people with property rights, that's what the capitalist overlords want. There's no wage theft from illegal people, it's a victimless crime, ie pure profit. Anti-migrant hatred is encouraged by American elites to keep their costs down, it's an advertising campaign, not meant to be taken to its logical conclusion.

Note that the US companies who thrive off this enslaveable labor are not punished at all. Yet that would be the easiest place for a government to start. ICE agents (many of them Hispanic) don't need to walk the hot border, they could just walk into a few air-conditioned board rooms and check the books. But they don't do that, because that would actually interfere with white power. The hypocrisy is the point, and the tension is what keeps the motor of American capitalism wound.

What Trump misses in his sincere channeling of the America id is that the racism was always performative. A show for the white working class while some slave class is used to undercut them. Like the tragedy/comedy masks of Greek theatre, the same charade was practiced by the Romans. As Cornell and Matthews said in their history of the Roman World,

Peasant families were driven out in large numbers by rich investors and were replaced on the land by slave labor. Slaves were in plentiful supply thanks to military victories and the resulting mass enslavement of defeated populations;

Look at the siege warfare against Venezuela, driving slave labor into America, then the performative whipping of those slaves and sending them to concentration camps in El Salvador. Americans are conditioned to complain about the people building their homes but to support the destruction of other people's homes abroad. They can't see the causal connection between foreign and domestic policy, like a junkie complaining about getting blood in their shot. Americans don't get that they wouldn't get people fleeing into their country if they weren't shooting other countries up. It's all a show at their expense (also), and increasingly a charade.

America was founded as a slave state and is and always was. Their elites don't know how to allocate labor in any other way, they just keep reproducing slavery in different forms, with different marketing. After the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement there was an increasing subtlety to the performance, but now the production values have dropped and it's just a horror show. But for someone, somewhere, it always was.

The Final Act

America was always a Jekyll and Hyde act, a slave state that patented freedom, a nuclear killer that prevented proliferation, a warmonger that brought peace. Far from being a detriment, the tension kept the whole high-wire act going, and the drama was renewed for season after season. However, production values have dropped in the last act, dramatically.

Trump, today, is all Sulk: SMASH. A Mr. Hyde that isn't even hiding his villainy. While Trump makes some belated paeans to elite disrepectability, saying he wants to carve out exemptions for farm and hotel labor, this is done half-assedly and with no possible enforcement. Trump is a demolition artist, not a sculptor. From tariffs to migration, he just sulks and smashes, then moves to the next thing. The aging White Empire was joined at the hip by hypocrisy, and Trump is doing hip replacement by chainsaw.

Trump misses the point that two-faced American racism let Americans have their cake and eat it too. They could be structurally racist and have lesser races build their structures. Whereas more genteel racists in Britain were able to both condemn migrants with Brexit and dramatically increase migration afterwards, Trump is actually lowering migration from both colored nations and the rest of White Empire. His policies are actually working! Thus he fulfills the ancient curse, may you get what you wish for.

7. The Art Of Trade War

In the meme, GigaChad Xi Jinping is smiling next to the phrase "Do Nothing. Win." Then the meme was updated when Beta Donald Trump unleashed The Art Of The Deal and got bit on his own ass, badly. Now it's "The Art Of Do Nothing & Win by Fuk Yu." This is funny but not true. China has done lots of things over many decades, as its ancient wisdom and modern results can tell you.

Confucius

Confucius's ancient governing advice can be summarized through the example of the even more ancient Emperor Shun. We consider Confucius (Master Kong) ancient (-500), but he himself was harking back to Emperor Shun from 1,700 years before him. As The Analects (15.5) records, "The Master said, "Is Shun not an example of someone who ruled by means of wu-wei? What did he do? He made himself reverent and took his proper [ritual] position facing south, that is all."" This one of the more confusing axioms of Confucius because it actually expands your mind the most. As the footnotes to the Hackett edition note, "This idea of "ruling by not ruling"—concentrating on self-cultivation and inner Virtue and allowing external things to come naturally and noncoercively—has been a constant theme throughout the Analects." This has also been a constant ideal throughout Chinese history though, like wu-wei, rarely grasped and only briefly held.

The broad Confucian idea is that order radiates outwards from a good ruler, like metta in Buddhism, only more meta. If the ruler orders themselves, everything is rightly measured; the household, the ministers, the bureaucrats, the common people. As Master Kong said, "Let the lord be a true lord, the ministers true ministers, the fathers true fathers, and the sons true sons." And as the Duke he was talking to responded, talking about inequality IMHO, "Well put! Certainly if the lord is not a true lord, the ministers not true ministers, the fathers not true fathers, and the sons not true sons, even if there is sufficient grain, will I ever get to eat it?"

This Duke like basically everyone ever didn't actually listen. Master Kong gave mild advice which was wildly impractical. But he's certainly not wrong. The Master said, "In your governing, Sir, what need is there for executions? If you desire goodness, then the common people will be good. The Virtue of a gentleman is like the wind, and the Virtue of a petty person is like the grass—when the wind moves over the grass, the grass is sure to bend."

Master Kong's idea (common across most ancient ideas of kingship) was that the ruler could ground themselves by a deep connection to the ancestors and the gods, enacted (programmed in modern parlance) by ritual. If the ruler truly respected his elders, the even elder gods, then he would command respect by a truly higher power. The kingdom would be rightly ordered. Thus he could 'take his proper [ritual] position facing south, that is all.' This might look like 'do nothing, win' to an untrained eye, but if you listen to Master Kong, finding such a path actually requires the most work of all! Not just the life work of a ruler, but the life force of all the generations before them.

Art Of War

The Art Of War is another ancient text from roughly the same time as Master Kong, from the possibly apocryphal Sun Tzu. It is also a confusing text because its highest ideal is winning wars by not fighting them. It's like a painter's guide to a blank canvas. Master Sun said, "winning a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the best possible outcome. Best is to subdue the enemy's troops without ever engaging them on the battlefield." Like Confucius, a true warlord would look like they're doing nothing, because everything had already been done. As Master Sun said, "the one who has the most tallies in the "temple calculations" before battle will surely be victorious over the one with fewer, let alone the one who has no tallies at all! From this I conclude that victory and defeat can be foreseen."

I remember reading the Art Of War when I had a few months to launch an UberEats competitor, and being disappointed because it was so useless for my purposes. I tried some light industrial espionage which just blew up in my face and we only survived because of the power of the programmers that came before me. But that's another story. The Art Of War is all about preparation (temple tallies), which I had no time for. That is the point, which I missed. You have to take time in the past to relax in the future. Master Sun said, "In general, whoever takes his position first on the battleground to await the enemy can take his time, whereas the commander who takes up his position belatedly must rush into battle hard-pressed. By definition, those who excel in battle compel the enemy and they do not let others compel them."

This is not the conventional idea of war, which is all about glory on the battlefield. But Master Sun said, "A victory that does not surpass the understanding of the vulgar crowd is not the best sort of victory. Nor is the finest way to win a battle one that the whole realm applauds." As they continued, "He who excels in battle doesn't have a name for cleverness, nor does he garner accolades for his courage. He never errs in winning battles, because he places his men where they are bound to win, and he conquers those who are already lost."

Bear this all in mind as we discuss trade wars, which are best not fought at all. As China's modern State Council Information Office said, "Trade wars produce no winners, and protectionism leads up a blind alley. The economic success of both China and the US presents shared opportunities rather than mutual threats." At the same time, however, Master Sun didn't raise no bitch. So their Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman also said, "If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we're ready to fight till the end."

Trade War

I'm not saying that anyone in China is consulting these intro level books, these are common-sense insights, at least in China. Plan ahead, prepare, any parent worth their salt teaches this, you don't necessarily need great sages. I am saying that China is dealing small-minded people who have only now picked on someone their own size and are having a literal crash course in world history.

The great advantage of Chinese central planning is basically just having a fucking plan, which is somehow witchcraft to pantser Americans. 'What is this sorcery?' they say, 'someone thinking more than a tweet ahead?' This should not be news after getting bested by everyone from Vietnam to the Taliban, but a coward dies a thousand times before their death. But I digress.

For an understanding of Chinese leadership, understand what current leader Xi Jinping learned during his own re-education. Xi was sent to the countryside in Liangjiahe for seven years, "sleeping in flea-infested cave-houses, laboring for long hours and wrestling with hunger." As a villager there said (via Xinhua) "Wang Xianping, recollected how Xi, who then served as a village leader, repaired the road connecting the village with the outside. "It used to be a narrow and winding path that couldn't even accommodate a wheelbarrow and was then transformed into a broad road," Wang said. The road helped the village kickstart its development." Call this propaganda if you want, I don't think it impractical that Xi built a road. It is this simply insight that leads directly to the Belt and Road Initiative today, which has gone global.

As Xi rose from village to town to province, Xi stuck to this lesson, citing the pithy saying 'if you want to get rich, first build roads.' When he rose to international leadership of China (which takes forever, it's not a reality TV show contest like in America), Xi transposed this logic to global transportation logistics, saying that "Infrastructure is the bedrock of connectivity – it is the lack of infrastructure that has held up the development of many countries."

To that end, China embarked on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), building roads, railroads, and ports all over the world. In People's Daily in 2023, He Yin said, "Over the past 10 years, the BRI has taken "hard connectivity" of infrastructure as an important direction, "soft connectivity" of rules and standards as an important support, and "people-to-people connectivity" among partner countries as an important foundation." This is now a working system, with major economic results.

This hard, painstaking work across multiple continents and millions of stakeholders was the 'temple calculations' made long before trade war broke out. China's ruler had already taken a ritual position facing (Global) South. This is why it appears that Xi is doing nothing now, because the hard work of preparation has already been done. And you can see what happened. China went from trading the most with the Global North (White Empire I call it) to trading the most with the Global South.

The BRI has been cynically spun by the West as a debt trap, but remember (always) that every accusation is a confession. I speak from Sri Lanka which fell into the debt trap, and our problem was western loans, China actually helped us out. Western debt is just debt to pay more debt (ie, themselves), with the IMF coming into strip us of assets, never building them. China is not like that, it's a completely different development model, and completely non-coercive. As a recent (Western) study out of Johns Hopkins reports,

Cases from Sri Lanka, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Angola, and the Republic of Congo, among others, point to debt relief patterns with distinctly Chinese characteristics. In nearly all cases, China has only offered debt write-offs for zero-interest loans. Our study found that between 2000 and 2019, China has cancelled at least US$ 3.4 billion of debt in Africa. There is no "China, Inc.": for interest-bearing loans, treatment for inter-governmental debt and Chinese company loans are negotiated separately, and often loan-by-loan rather than for the entire portfolio. While rescheduling by increasing the repayment period is common, changes in interest rates, reductions in principal ("haircuts"), or refinancing are not. We found that China has restructured or refinanced approximately US$ 15 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019. We found no "asset seizures" and despite contract clauses requiring arbitration, no evidence of the use of courts to enforce payments, or application of penalty interest rates.

China is actually helpful, the hateful propaganda against them is just sour grapes to make an intoxicating whine. I make this digression to spare myself a tirade war in the comments. You can generally take China at their word while you can assume that America is lying. This rarely leads you wrong.

For example, when America accuses China of 'stealing' jobs from them, this is a lie. America was deindustrializing long before China joined the WTO, and Americans don't want those jobs anymore. America chose to spend money bombing other country's infrastructure instead of building their own, but that's literally their business, not China's.

Also, American trade is not that important to China anymore. As someone reports, "China has been working to reduce its dependency on US trade since Trump's first term, successfully decreasing the share of US exports from 19% in 2018 to under 15% in 2024 based on figures provided by the People's Daily. However, the total value of exports to the US remains substantial at $525 billion, accounting for nearly 3% of China's GDP." The number is high, but less than 3% is not actually substantial. The copy editors are coping hard.

Most of China's demand is actually domestic and they no longer require FDI and technology from the West, it's actually vice versa. The fact is that the world has changed while westerners are still dwelling in the past.

The yin-yang of global trade has completely flipped from 2000 to 2020. The world's largest trading partner is China, not America. America is more like the spurned ex, threatening to kill themselves if we don't go back to her. But America can no longer dictate terms, only throw tariffic tantrums.

Biden's Dumbassador Nicholas Burns said, "We don't want to live in a world where the Chinese are the dominant country," but no other country is this murder-suicidal. There is in fact nothing nefarious in China's rise, just things returning to the global mean after a few aberrant centuries of colonial domination. Most of the world's population is in most of the world and that's where most the wealth was too, until Europeans looted it. The imperialists are lucky that the world doesn't want revenge or restitution, just to move on without things going nuclear. America (as heirs to the White Empire) could have had a privileged place in a multipolar world for another century, but they seem determined to piss it away this decade. And so it goes, in one last pissing contest.

Trump's tariff tirade goes nowhere because China has so integrated with the world while America has so disintegrated. Those that live by globalization die by globalization, and a lot of trade that Trump tried to ban in Trade War I just re-routed. Goods just re-routed via the Belt and Road while America auto-erotically asphyxiates itself alone in the closet. Americans ended up buying the same stuff through third parties like Mexico and ASEAN, at a markup. This is similar to what happened to Russian oil, which suddenly began being sold to dumbass Europeans as if Indians struck a geyser.

You could eyeball China's trade surplus with other countries going up as its surplus with America went down. Blackballing China doesn't work, America just ends up buying white-labeled good at higher cost. As researchers at CUHK said, "Our findings indicate a substantial increase in indirect exposure to China post-Trade War – the indirect exposure of U.S. importers to China through Vietnam increased by approximately 21%, while through Mexico by about 5.5% – suggesting that despite efforts to de-risk, U.S. supply chains remain intricately linked to China via third-party nations."

'De-risk' is actually a made-up word, and absurdity repeated so much it sounds profound. It's like the joke about Australia protecting its trade routes (with China) from China. China has never threatened America and looks for win-win trade with everybody, even people that don't deserve it. If I spend millions 'de-ghosting' my house that doesn't make ghosts real, it just makes me a moron.

Whatever politicians say, the American economy doesn't want to decouple from China, as you may have noticed when markets recently shit the bed. A lot of the American economy (like Apple) is just white-labelling Chinese products at a massive markup. Apple's 'Designed in California' just means moving the camera bump around on Photoshop for decades, it's pure profit. And it's not just Apple, the military-industrial complex itself cannot decouple from China. Hence you get the warlords like Greg Hayes of Raytheon saying (via the FT),

Greg Hayes, chief executive of Raytheon, said the company had "several thousand suppliers in China and decoupling . . . is impossible". "We can de-risk but not decouple," Hayes told the Financial Times in an interview, adding that he believed this to be the case "for everybody". "Think about the $500bn of trade that goes from China to the US every year. More than 95 per cent of rare earth materials or metals come from, or are processed in, China. There is no alternative," said Hayes.

America literally cannot blockade China without blocking their own arteries. This is why China has been able to respond to America's diplomatic diarrhea so handily. As one failson told another in Succession, "You fucked it. He's got our dick in his hand. We should have his dick in our hand."

Whereas America has talking dickheads on TV changing trade policy every 15 minutes, China responds calmly through staid official channels, and then jets off to actually close deals with Vietnam. China's Ministry of Finance said, "The tariff rate shall be increased from 84% to 125%," and then dropped the mic. They said, "In view of the fact that under the current tariff level, there is no possibility for the US to export goods to China, if the United States continues to impose tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States, China will ignore it." In another statement they said, "Even if the United States continues to impose higher tariffs, it will no longer have economic significance and will become a joke in the history of the world economy."

And indeed, Trump has had to cave while waiting by the phone for a Xi that never calls. America had to delay its heaviest tariffs for 90 days and exempt most electronics trade with China, ie most of the value. Meanwhile China has not blinked on its reciprocal tariffs and has effectively blocked rare-earths exports to America entirely. America is now in a position where it can only import finished electronics from China, and anyone trying to manufacture them at home is fucked. If you try to import a computer from China that's fine, but if you try to import the parts and assemble your own, you get tariffed. This does not bring manufacturing home, instead it's like man, you fucked. There's a bit of lag in the system, but supply chains are shook, and there's no policy stability coming. Nobody can build factory cause they have no idea what price they'll be able to sell at, and no one knows what their imports will cost until they try to clear them. China has won a war they never wanted but prepared for, while America has started a war they're not ready for at all.

The Art Of The Deal

Master Sun said, "By definition, those who excel in battle compel the enemy and they do not let others compel them." Alas for America, the power of their own numbskull compels them to further and further humiliation. Stephen Miran—one of the misfiring nodes in what passes for Trump's economic brain—says, "the U.S. exerts its financial might to achieve foreign policy ends." Given that those ends are hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in Gaza, one really can blame them.

America deserves what they have coming and worse. The collapse of America is a cause for internation jubilation. As I've discussed, America is a colony vs. while China is a civilization, that is to say, America is a sick civilization on its deathbed. As Aimé Césaire said,

What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.

And so America punishes itself, by electing the mendacious moron Trump twice, and by launching Trade War II against all advice. The world should have sanctioned America long ago, but Trump does it for us, through tariffs. If you were trying to dismantle America you couldn't hand the mantle to anyone better than this man. As the now famous tweet goes, "[This] Chinese international student in my class was telling me about how his evangelical dad in Beijing believes that Trump was chosen by god to win the election, but that this victory is part of a larger divine plan to destroy the united states." Ain't it the truth. As Drake said in his weird music video tour of dystopian America, God's Plan.

I would reference Trump's Art Of The Deal for some rhetorical counterweight, but Trump didn't write it, let alone read it. As his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz said, "I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life." Trump's publisher said, "Trump didn't write a postcard for us!" and Schwartz said, "I put lipstick on a pig." Schwartz took his cheque but also said, in a private moment of honesty to his diary (in 1986), "All he is is 'stomp, stomp, stomp'—recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular." And so here we are, with the guy who somehow fucked up the casino business closing down the USA for business entirely.

Thus bullshit artist meets the people who wrote The Art Of War, and is confused to death by Confucian wu-wei with Marxist characteristics. While it may look like China is doing nothing, they have taken an infrastructural position facing south, they have done the temple tallies, and they are conquering those who have already lost.

I've adopted the fundraiser for Muhammad and his family in Gaza. If you're able, give them support, a loan to God is surely doing yourself a favor.

8. They Just Bomb Hospitals Now

I remember when there was a stupid debate about whether 'Israel' (DoorDash for American bombs) bombed hospitals. Now there's just a stultifying silence. 'Israel' just bombs hospitals now. America just bombs water supplies in brave Yemen. Across the whole White Empire, they just disappear anyone with half a conscience. This is just who they are and they don't care who knows it. This is who they always were, because hindsight is 20/20. All the debates are dead and all the death speaks for itself. All that's left is the killing and a chilling silence. Even from my own mouth. What's left to say? They bomb hospitals now. They always did.

The Ten Stages of Genocide, written by Gregory Stanton at the fucking US State Department was quite a confession. Ignoring its own state and laundered through the atrocity monopolizing holocaust industry, the stages are nonetheless accurate, like the confession of a serial killer who fundamentally just wants to be understood. The stages are "classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial."

It's not that 'Israel' commits war crimes, 'Israel' is a war crime. It's not that 'Israel' commits genocide it is genocide, just as America, Australia, and Canada are. The genocide of the Palestinian people began from the very moment of the Genocide Convention in 1948, when the act became entirely conventional. The Genocide Convention might as well have been 'Israel's' constitution, and the 10 Stages Of Genocide a State Department manual.

From the beginning, 'Israel' was classified as a race state, Palestinians were symbolized as terrorists, legally discriminated against, and constantly dehumanized and separated from their land and bodies. This organized polarization spread to the United States after 9/11, which peaked the preparation for the persecution of Muslims globally, in a global war of terror. This was a long extermination campaign that has already destroyed multiple nations and which is merely culminating now in the destruction of Gaza.

We are now witnessing the penultimate stage of genocide, complete extermination of captive people in Gaza, or more accurately we are not witnessing it, because the final stage, denial, is already upon us. All the complicated forensics about how hospitals bomb themselves is missing from the imperial press. Whereas they used to at least both to lie, now they just say nothing. Witnesses are disappeared off the streets or abducted from airports. We're in the complete denial phase now. This never happened, even as it happens worse than ever. If the cognitive dissonance rings too loudly in your head and you dare open your mouth, they'll disappear and deport you. That's just where we are now. It's the final solution, and STFU about it. There's more debate within 'Israel' than in the occupied imperial core, where they're more worried about the cost of their iPhones than what they see on them. As the Colosseum crumbles, who cares who's being fed to the lions? People are more worried about keeping their cheap seats and cheap concessions.

As it ends, remember that nothing started on October 7th. Gaza is just (inshallah) the end of the long terror campaign that has already killed at least 5 million and displaced at least 40 million, for decades now. Empire called this the 'War On Terror' because it's been opposites day for decades. They lie as easily as they steal breath from innocents, and have made an entire industry out of being guilty.

'Israel', as the symbolic center of Empire's very real persecution, has monopolized and monetized genocide and perfected genocide denial. It's a public relations exercise to these obliterators of entire publics. Jews have monopolized the very concept of genocide, and enforce their trademark ruthlessly. This was memorialized in Adam Johannes famous letter-to-the-editor years ago, and is still how 'Israel' edits the historical record.

'Israel's' style of public relations is to deny that their attacks happened, to blame the attacked for killing themselves, then saying they deserved to die, then say someone behind them deserved to die, then say just 'oops', then blame other countries, then finally call their critics antisemites. This keeps happening over and over, just in tighter cycles as the abomination spirals downward, now such that all phases happen all at once. Note that I'm using the term Jews because they collectively deserve as much contempt and shaming as Germans at this point. Some of them, I know, are good people, but they're not sending their best.

Again and again, they bomb hospitals in the name of the Jewish state, and the US State Department backs them up because this is what White Empire always did. White supremacy is now extended cynically to Jewish people. These people didn't invent attacking health, but merely perfected it. From the smallpox ridden blankets of American 'settlement' to the lack of gauze in Gaza, destroying health for wealth is on page one of the colonizer manual.

The brave martyr Yahya Sinwar said to an interviewer in 2018, "The man who served us tea—his wife died from an infection. No big deal, a cut. But there were no antibiotics, and that's how she died. For something any pharmacist could treat. Do you think it's easy for us?" Now this process merely reaches its culmination as denial of medicine applies to everyone. I have seen 'Israel' bomb pharmacies and kill patients in their hospital beds, we all know it now, but it was always happening to someone. 'Israel' doesn't accidentally hit hospitals. They are trying to kill an entire people and public health is their primary target. They don't coincidentally destroy everything that makes life possible. They are trying to kill everyone.

All the nations of the White Empire that already politely committed their genocides are saying, meekly, no, not like this, while still giving them the bombs to do it. Most protestors within these nations are in solidarity with Palestinian corpses but not their rockets, making them useless hypocrites. You shouldn't condemn Hamas, you should commend them, but as the saying goes, a liberal supports every liberation movement except the current one, every civil rights movement but the one happening right now. America, Australia, Canada, the UK, France, Germany; it's all one White Empire to us underneath and they can all go to hell in the same handbasket.

Zionists today are stress-testing if Jews have the final white privilege—the ability to commit genocide—and no, they don't, actually. It's not the 1700s anymore and there isn't time to launder all the blood out into clean land acknowledgments, nor is there a continent of resources to be won. Jews are not, in fact, fully white and will be left holding the bloody bag as the White Empire comes down. They'll end up the fall guys for the fall. They'll blame it all on the Jews for corrupting them, when the vice was largely versa! The problem with the Jews was not their Jewishness but their whiteness, not their Middle Eastern incarnation but their Western source.

The victors write history and this is a losing battle for 'Israel'. They are winning the genocide and losing the war. If one genocide created 'Israel', another one cancels them out. 'Israel,' in fact, already lost to Hamas on October 7th and has been on direct imperial death support ever since. They are not masters of their own destiny, as much as the tail is marketed as wagging the dog. The fact is that 'Israel' can't survive a week without American bombs and British surveillance flights and Germans being German. They've gotten the whole imperial band back together, for one last swan song.

This isn't past centuries, where there was lots of time to commit genocides and cover them up. Nor are there great spoils to win, Gaza is not a continent. Empire doesn't have centuries to cover up this genocide and become hectoring lecturers on the subject. They're destroying Gaza, yes, but their own body politic will be found under the rubble. They're tearing themselves apart, burning from the spark lit by Hamas. Godspeed to the Resistance, David to the Goliath trying to monopolize his star, and lobotomize us all.

The White Empire, recapitalized in America, is itself collapsing and cannot support 'Israel' much longer. Even if America survives a little longer (despite its best efforts at suicide), the carrying climate is collapsing atop them and, unfortunately, us. This is what I call Collapse³. God, of course, told us about this apocalypse long ago, science just measures how much we piss in Their face, and how much this further pisses Them off. The end to come, however, is of cold comfort to the people already gone. Or even worse, those who live in the real end times, 'when no man shall know another, or be able to help their fellow'. There are living souls struggling under the rubble as we speak, or as we don't speak, more meekly. The serial killers try to silence history but still it screams at all of us.

I can hear it in the absence of the debate about bombing hospitals, from the yawning abscess where the idea of a free press used to be. The western press is just part of the oppression, you can see it right in the middle of the word. Only rando bloggers with travel warnings are crying to a few thousand people about the extermination of millions, which might as well by yelling into the void. Meanwhile the worst people in the world jet around and are platformed to lie or just deny it. What they call a 'platform' was always for hanging people, we just didn't see cause our heads were covered in bags of newsprint. But now the bags are off because the executioners at the end of history are increasingly tired and lazy, and don't even bother with the cover-up. They just openly bomb hospitals now, and don't care who knows about it.

9. America Can't Beat China. They Should Join Them

If America truly wanted to 'beat' China they would join them. That's how China 'beat' America. As Sun Yefang said, "I believe that we have to study capitalist economics, not only for the sake of knowledge alone but also to acquire concrete research tools and methods." If you think this is a contradiction to Marxism, I invite you to read Capital, or at least the title of it. Ignorance is not bliss, and arrogance is a death-wish.

In the 1980s, Uncle Deng was standing atop Chairman Mao's hard-won industrial base, trying to figure out WTF to do with it. China had productive capacity, but it wasn't economically deployed, and they could already see the Soviet Union going sideways. At that point, Deng encouraged "making up missed lessons" including from 'poisonous' capitalists. After all, you need a bit of poison to make an antidote.

Deng's question was, "Why can't we develop a market economy under socialism?" and his answer was yes, that "we must move ahead in building a socialism which is truly superior to capitalism." With that attitude in mind, significant latitude was given in terms of ideology. As Uncle Deng said, "It does not matter if it is a yellow cat or a black cat, as long as it catches mice." As Isabella Weber (whose excellent book this whole post is cribbing from) said,

As Deng had proclaimed in 1975, the real enemies in his eyes were not "capitalist roaders"—Deng himself was denounced as one—but those who "still use metaphysics" and "talk only about politics but not economics; only about revolution not production" (Selden, 1979, 142). In the Deng era, catching up through reform now meant "making up missed lessons" (补课) in economics, both in Eastern European reform theories and in bourgeois economics, which had previously been condemned as "capitalist poison.

This is the key lesson from the Deng era, not that China became capitalist (as Americans lazily propagandize because they read The Economist once), but that they had their own economists and developed their own economics. China truly developed socialism with Chinese characteristics through constant experimentation and adaptation, not just theory but practice ('crossing the river by feeling for stones'). This is the 'reform and opening up' process which continues to this day. As Jiang Zemin said in 1992,

Whether the emphasis was on planning or on market regulation was not the essential distinction between socialism and capitalism. This brilliant thesis has helped free us from the restrictive notion that the planned economy and the market economy belong to basically different social systems, thus bringing about a great breakthrough in our understanding of the relation between planning and market regulation.

Or as current Chairman Xi Jingping said in 2012,

In carrying out reform and opening up, we must have the courage to free our minds, but freeing our minds must be done with an orientation, a standpoint, and underlying principles; so too in reform and opening up. Some claim that reform and opening up means moving toward the "universal values" and the political systems of Western countries; otherwise, it cannot be called reform and opening up. This is a complete misinterpretation...

As the world develops and society advances, failure to reform and open up would lead us to a dead end. Similarly, carrying out reform and opening up in a way against a socialist orientation would also lead us to a dead end. We must, therefore, remain keenly aware of the direction in which we are heading, namely to keep improving and developing socialism, not to set out on a different path.

Basically free your mind, but don't let it fall out your behind. The Communist Party of China has consistently learnt from every possible source without losing themselves in the process. As Adrian Wood, the principal World Bank economist they invited over in the 1980s said, "The Chinese were very careful to distinguish between the views of the World Bank and their own views; they always kept a clear division, this is you and this is us… The Chinese Communists, despite being on a different ideological planet from the World Bank, knew exactly how to handle the relationship, which was very friendly, highly cooperative, but arm's length."

In this way, China did not try to 'beat' America, which is a uniquely western perception, fearful as they are of their own colonial shadow. The greatest western fear is the golden rule being applied to them, that others would do unto them as they have done. Western propaganda is really projection, what if they were like us, genociding, invading, debt-trapping, and dropping nukes on people? Everything bad they say about China is really a reflection. Every accusation is a confession. But that's not China. China is China, which needs to be understood on its own terms, in its own words.

For the past 40 years, China has literally minded its own business while America has been mindfucking their own population and literally bombing. The CPC set ambitious goals for themselves and strived without tearing others down. Deng set a target for mid this century to "say with assurance that socialism is really superior to capitalism," and they've done it with speed. The young American streamer IShowSpeed, for example, recently visited China with an open mind and had his mind blown.

Speed is an effusive character, affectionately called Hyperthyroid Brother in China. On his tour, Speed flew in flying cars, floated in floating cars, and jumped in jumping cars. He bought one of those cars, three Huawei trifold phones, trained with Shaolin monks, ate lots of food, and interacted with lots of people across many hours of livestreaming. This presented a certainly planned but still unfiltered view of China many westerners have not seen through the veil of propaganda.

Remember that western propaganda is directed at its own populations, to make them tolerate their hated governments by hating someone else more. But China is actually chill, as Speed has shown by just walking around. Socialism has comprehensively proved that it's a better governance and production system, while capitalism is comprehensively fucking itself. Speed livestreamed people living their best lives in China, while America has been livestreaming nothing but the worst death in Gaza. One rando dude simply walking around China is enough to pierce the veil of ignorance, if the hail of bullets that killed young Hind Rajab didn't inform you that these people are lying to you.

If America sincerely wanted to regenerate they would listen to their young and stop killing children. Younger generations do not reflexively hate China, because that's racist and dumb. China doesn't actually propagandize much at all, but people can see that the technology is better and that they're not bombing anyone. Actions speak louder than words, and one American livestreaming can undo billions of dollars worth of American propagandizing.

Even if Americans are committed to fearing China, all the more reason to incorporate their higher technology and learn from it. This is what China did after their century of humiliation, but America is still in that pride before the fall period, where they're proud of falling. America is furiously trying to beat back the tide of history with tariffs, instead of letting China's rising tide lift their boats also. As the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. But as modern Americans say when encountering something very American, what are we, a bunch of ASIANS?

Americans are the most propagandized people on earth, and this deep programming makes it very difficult for them to learn anything. Many westerners (America, UK, Europe, it's all one White Empire) will proudly regurgitate propaganda at the dinner table. They really don't see how rude it is to casually disrespect other countries, and how badly informed they are. American media almost never lets China speak for itself, instead employing a class of professionally wrong people to explain something they don't understand and are not even curious about. America has, as the Notorious BIG warned against, gotten high on its own propaganda supply, and are now overdosing on it.

Now I am not here to administer Naloxone to the throne. America was born bad and they're breaking bad, good riddance to bad rubbish as far as I'm concerned. I hope America chokes on their own vomit and croaks. I'm happy, like Walter White, to just watch the death of White Empire with some satisfaction.

This article says America 'should' join China, but if I'm being honest, I hope they don't. America reinventing capitalism with American characteristics would imply the reinvention of America, and I can't think of anything worse. I don't expect anything from America. As Goldfinger told James Bond, No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" There is no point talking to people that don't listen, especially while they're killing children. There is no point reasoning with Donald Trump, or even the Democrats, who follow the same line with more hypocrisy and hyperbole. I do this for academic purposes and to dickishly say I told you so.

The hard historical fact is that America is a colony while China is a civilization, and America cannot become civilized no matter how hard they try. And they're really not trying at all. America would rather go down the way they came up, in a flurry of barbarity, brutalizing the native people of Palestine, slandering heroes like Hamas and Yemen's Ansarallah, and spreading lies about the true leader of the free world, China, which leads by example rather than coercion.

To learn one must have a basic level of respect for the teacher, and Americans simply cannot yet understand this. They cannot understand that China is not their enemy and that even if they were, that there is no greater teacher than the enemy (as Mazer Rackham said). As Tony Soprano said, those that want respect, give respect, and America gives and increasingly gets none. They're more Rodney Dangerfield than Deng Xiaoping. They meet their fate on the highway they take to not avoid it at all.

The rest of the world, inshallah, is just moving on, albeit under a hail of bullets and potential nuclear shroud. To paraphrase Gramsci said, the old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born, now is the time of morons. China still offers them an open hand, but America slaps it away quite proudly. But you know what pride goeth before. Americans call it 'buying the dip' but, no, it's the fall. America would rather die ignorant and arrogant, and so it does. This is why I hope America doesn't join China. China is successful, and America deserves to fail.

I've adopted the fundraiser for Muhammad and his family in Gaza. If you're able, give them support, a loan to God is surely doing yourself a favor.

Read:
How China Escaped Shock Therapy (🏴‍☠️)
Isabella M. Weber;

10. Trump's Tariff Theory (The Miran Mirage)

We are witnessing the planned demolition of America as a world trade center. The historical bin is laden with economic bullshit, begging to be set on fire by a historical arsonist. And so Trump emerges, hijacking history and flying tariffs into the towers of American power. I, for one, am here for it. Death to America, by suicide as well as Resistance.

The Miran Mirage

America has been dabbling with doo-doo economics well before Trump left this flaming turd on the world's doorstep. In the 1970s, America effectively defaulted on the gold standard and just started making shit up. Like Trump, they just kept bullshitting their way to the top, failing upwards. In the 1980s they came up with the laughable Laffer Curve, the idea they could collect more taxes by cutting them (they couldn't). Now they're trying to replace taxes with tariffs (the Internal with the External Revenue Service) using dubious theory laid out by Stephen Miran. This theory I call the Miran Mirage, the idea that tariffs will be paid for by currency depreciation elsewhere (they won't).

Stephen Miran is the closest thing to an economic brain behind Trump. I read his stupid-ass white paper to understand stupid-ass white people, and include it for your perusal at the bottom of this article. I must qualify that rationalizing the actions of a mad king is itself madness. Trump just follows his 'gut' and everybody else just reads the entrails. Now that they've gutted the world economy, we can at least see how the guts spill as opposed to how this was foretold.

Miran's mirage is that, "Tariffs provide revenue, and if offset by currency adjustments, present minimal inflationary or otherwise adverse side effects." Broadly speaking, that America can have its cake and eat it too, and everybody else can eat shit. Miran said this is "consistent with the experience in 2018-2019. While currency offset can inhibit adjustments to trade flows, it suggests that tariffs are ultimately financed by the tariffed nation, whose real purchasing power and wealth decline, and that the revenue raised improves burden sharing for reserve asset provision."

This is how tariffs are supposed to 'pay for themselves,' through currency adjustments abroad. For example, let's say I'm using $100 USD to buy 100 XYZ worth of goods. If tariffs go up by 10% I have to pay $110, boo. However, if that XYZ currency depreciates by 10%, my dollars stretch 10% further than before! I can pay $90 to get that same 100 units of XYZ currency, pay the US Treasury $9 for doing such good extortion, and even pocket a dollar. Tariffs can thus actually save money, as long as a bunch of completely impossible assumptions hold.

This is what Miran calls perfect currency offset. He says, "since the exporters' citizens became poorer as a result of the currency move, the exporting nation 'pays for' or bears the burden of the tax, while the U.S. Treasury collects the revenue." This is classic beggar-thy-neighbor economics, discredited by Adam Smith centuries ago but, you know, fuck it. Calling Miran a thinker is far too generous, he's just telling the Orange King what he wants to hear, dressing naked imperialism in formulas.

This sort of magical math is endemic across the Trump administration. For example, their formula for calculating tariffs looks complicated, but the two variables (funny E and funny O) are randomly set to 4 and ¼. One fourth of four is one, and multiplying by one does nothing. The variables just cancel out. It's a joke.

To be honest, this is fairly standard for western economics, which has a bunch of assumptions that are provably false (like rational actors, perfect competition, or even the separation of economics from other disciplines). Economics is maddest 'science', imagine if chemistry had a completely unproven periodic table and did experiments on entire human populations anyways, frequently killing them. That's Economics 101.

In the 'perfect' scenario Miran describes, tariffs are non-inflationary because of the currency offset. American prices don't change because foreign countries get deranged and the US Treasury gets money out of nowhere. Miran lists the tradeoffs here:

It's fitting that this theory is called currency offset because it perfectly describes the rapper Offset's experience at the Gucci store. Offset bought so much, usually with duffel bags of cash, that Gucci gave him a 30% discount (source: internet).

The idea is that even if America raises tariffs by 30%, they'll get a matching 30% 'discount' because everyone else's currency will depreciate that much. You theoretically dump all the costs abroad, and keep profits at home. Note that the part about reshoring manufacturing is somewhat coincidental. America still has no industrial policy and no state-led development (because that would be communism). This is still pure financialization, just with the finance guys running the government. The maths should just math on their own, without America doing real work or getting ready at all. Within a few days, however, this theory ran into practice and promptly exploded.

America's initial tariffs on China were 34% but the Yuan has only depreciated less than 1%. Give it time I guess, but this is one of those weeks when decades happen, and it's suddenly 2030. China has flying cars and zero fucks to give. China hit America with actually reciprocal tariffs, and America re-reciprocated, hitting China with 104% tariffs now, they're trading blows before I can hit publish. Now how does the math math? How does the Yuan lose 104% of its value? China would have to send $1000 worth of goods to America for free, with an extra $40 in a red envelope as tribute (which Miran earnestly suggests).

Currency offset is already implausible, but it's not mathematically possible at over 100% tariffs. Trump has eviscerated any economic entrail reading, he's just shooting from the gut and doesn't care what he hits. Miran is at least honest when he says, "In a broader sense, sanctions can also be perceived as a modern-day form of a blockade." What Trump is doing against the whole world is an act of war, not just a trade war, as Warren Buffett has said. This is gunboat diplomacy without guns (currently being used to genocide Palestine) or boats (America builds only 0.1% compared to China's over 50%) or even basic diplomacy. As China said via the Global Times,

China is an ancient civilization and a country of etiquette. The Chinese people value sincerity and trust as their core principles. We will not provoke troubles, but we never flinch when trouble comes our way. Pressuring and threatening are not the correct way to engage with China. We have taken, and will continue to take, firm measures to defend our sovereignty, security, and development interests.

China-US economic and trade relations should be based on mutual benefit and win-win cooperation. The US should align with the shared expectations of people from both nations and the people of the world, and, in light of the fundamental interests of both countries, stop using tariffs as a weapon to suppress China's economy and trade, and stop harming the legitimate development rights of the Chinese people.

As the CPC has long said, China pursues win-win development (a la Adam Smith, really) but what America is doing under Trump is complete lose-lose. They're shooting themselves with tariffs, and hoping that everyone else bleeds more.

Understanding Triffin's Dilemma

Miran at least has the concept that there are trade-offs with trade, though he basically just ignores them because 'boss said so'. Trump wants to have his cake and eat it too, and Miran, as a simpering sycophant, just dresses up his delusions in fancy formulae. Marie Antoinette at least offered people cake, whereas Trump just tells them to eat shit and be thankful for it.

The biggest trade-off is between being a reserve currency and running a trade surplus. You basically can't do both. The US dollar is actually America's main export. They make up liquidity as a service on computers and get real stuff in return. This is not an actual problem but has been the greatest opportunity in human history, which they just squandered. If America wanted to take care of its people and do manufacturing it could have done, how they spent their infinite money was a policy choice and they just chose wrong. Now they're blaming everyone else, holding a gun to their heads and blubbering.

Trump is obsessed with reducing trade deficits but also wants the dollar to be the reserve currency. How do his sycophants square this circle? Well, Miran says this will be solved by punishments and 'policies'. In short, the beatings will continue until morale improves. As Miran says,

Despite the dollar's role in weighing heavily on the U.S. manufacturing sector, President Trump has emphasized the value he places on its status as the global reserve currency, and threatened to punish countries that move away from the dollar. I expect this tension to be resolved by policies that aim to preserve the status of the dollar, but improve burden sharing with our trading partners.

International trade policy will attempt to recapture some of the benefit our reserve provision conveys to trading partners and connect this economic burden sharing with defense burden sharing. Although the Triffin effects have weighed on the manufacturing sector, there will be attempts to improve America's position within the system without destroying the system.

Trade policy is actually complicated and takes years, these guys are just getting ChatGPT to spit out spreadsheets and tariffing penguins. Miran's white paper is called "A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System" but it reads more like a cocaine user's guide to perpetual motion. The fact is that the 'Triffin effects' Miran is talking about were discussed much more cogently 65 years ago, by Robert Triffin.

Triffin said was, "The accumulation of a key currency as international reserves by the rest of the world necessarily entails a large amount of 'unrequited' capital imports by the key currency country. Coal is brought to Newcastle, from which it should be exported instead. The international liquidity shortage, moreover, is not thereby relieved, unless the key currency country allows its resulting short-term indebtedness to grow continually and persistently at a faster pace than its own gold assets."

Triffin said 'requiting' (ie balancing) the trade, would cause a Greatest Depression. Without liquidity, global finance would crash. Triffin said, "The restoration of overall balance in the US international transactions would put an end to this process and deprive the rest of the world of the major source, by far, from which the international liquidity requirements of an expanding world economy are being met currently in the face of a totally inadequate supply of monetary gold. This might trigger off tomorrow—as it did under very similar circumstance in the early 1930s—a new cycle of international deflation, currency devaluations, and trade exchange restrictions."

Standing athwart history without reading it, you can see the Trump team doing exactly what Triffin warned against. They are trying to force currency devaluations through trade exchange restrictions, causing maximum volatility and shock. More sane hands like have proposed a super-sovereign currency (like Keynes aborted Bancor, or IMF SDRs) that could resolve Triffin's Dilemma. This, for example, is from Dr. Zhou Xiaochuan, Governor of the People's Bank of China, in 2009,

On a bipartisan basis, however, Americans are racist morons. As Biden's Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said, "We don't want to live in a world where the Chinese are the dominant country." They'd rather go murder-suicide with the world economic system and blow the whole thing up.

Misunderstanding Triffin's Dilemma

To be honest, you can see that America already hit the jaws of Triffin's Dilemma in the 1970s and have just been jaw-jawing their way through ever since. Everything since going off the gold standard has been kicking this time bomb down the road. Trump is just saying this is the end of the road, where the can explodes.

Miran has a dim understanding of Triffin's paradox in that he thinks it can be resolved by reasserting American sovereignty, ie because the Orange King says so. He thinks America can reset to a 'Triffin equilibrium' not by spending decades building infrastructure, educating its people, and growing productive capacity like China did, but by putting some numbers on a spreadsheet and calling it 'Liberation Day'. Miran talks about when "global growth exceeds the reserve country's growth for a long period of time" which has long been happening, but he has no answer for building up America's economy in response. Instead, they just want to throw a wrench in everybody else's economy, and get paid for it. This is how Miran describes his idea of 'Triffin World',

Such phenomena reflect what can be described as a "Triffin world," after Belgian economist Robert Triffin. In Triffin world, reserve assets are a form of global money supply, and demand for them is a function of global trade and savings, not the domestic trade balance or return characteristics of the reserve nation. When the reserve country is large relative to the rest of the world, there are no significant externalities imposed on the reserve country from its reserve status. The distance from the Triffin equilibrium to the trade equilibrium is small. However, when the reserve country is smaller relative to the rest of the world—say, because global growth exceeds the reserve country's growth for a long period of time—tensions build and the distance between the Triffin equilibrium and the trade equilibrium can be quite large. Demand for reserve assets leads to significant currency overvaluation with real economic consequences.

In Triffin world, the reserve asset producer must run persistent current account deficits as the flip side of exporting reserve assets. USTs become exported products which fuel the global trade system. In exporting USTs, America receives foreign currency, which is then spent, usually on imported goods. America runs large current account deficits not because it imports too much, but it imports too much because it must export USTs to provide reserve assets and facilitate global growth. This view has been discussed by prominent policymakers from both the United States (e.g. Feldstein and Volcker, 2013) as well as China (e.g. Zhou, 2009).

What Miran misses, in his maudlin America myopia, is that no one is forcing America to import too much, just as no one's forcing them to do fentanyl. America made policy choices to legalize stock buybacks and corruption instead of doing anything useful. They chose usury. America had literally all the money in the world and no idea what to do with it. These were all political choices, not economic consequences. America eviscerated the very idea of having a state in the 1980s (that would be communism), which leads precisely to the state they're in (the collapse of capitalism).

America whinging now is like someone who won an inheritance from their suicidal European uncles, spent it all on drugs, gambling, and booze, and then blames it all on the inheritance. Oh, what is this horror, the consequences of my own actions, must be everybody else's fault. America is just the latest in a long line of murdering, thieving imperialists, and the only relief is that suicide runs in the family.

Not Resolving The Dilemma

Triffin's Dilemma is based on the idea of avoiding a depression, but Miran's Mirage is the idea of jumping into the void head first and alone. As he said, "Unilateral solutions are more likely to have undesired side effects, like market volatility. Multilateral solutions may have less volatility, but entail the difficulty of getting trading partners onboard, which curtails the size of the potential gains from reshaping the system." America went fully unilateral with these tariffs. They decided to—as gambler's have said since time immemorial—to just roll them bones. This leads to the white-knuckle ride traders are on now.

China is left as the voice of reason, saying, "Development is a universal right of all nations, not the privilege of a few. There are no winners in trade wars or tariff wars, and protectionism offers no way out. All countries must uphold genuine multilateralism, jointly oppose all forms of unilateralism and protectionism, safeguard the international system with the United Nations at its core, and protect the multilateral trade framework centered on the WTO." Unfortunately, they're talking into the void now.

America has flown two sets of tariffs into the center of world trade and that shit is going down. It's the demolition of a bankrupt casino, something Donald Trump is familiar with. He's one of the few businessmen since Bugsy Siegel to lose money on casinos, and now he's blowing up the biggest money-printing machine of all time. Trump lights the match, but the slaving, stealing American economy was always rigged, and it was always rigged to blow. As the delusional psychopath Nicky Santoro said in the intro to the film Casino, "Matter of fact, nobody knew all the details. But it should have been perfect… But in the end, we fucked it all up."

Miran's white paper:

A Users Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System Stephen Miran, Former Hudson Bay Senior Strategist, adviser to Donald Trump 638199_A_Users_Guide_to_Restructuring_the_Global_Trading_System.pdf 709 KB

and something far less stupid:

Zhou Xiaochuan- Reform the international monetary system Zhou Xiaochuan- Reform the international monetary system.pdf 29 KB