In which America’s least favorite PubInt Analyst tries to describe what the wookie-baby is going on in the world.

DOMESTIC

• The U.S. is slowly emerging from the Covid-19 nightmare under pressure of an all-court-press media blitz by China to try to shout down anybody who isn’t dumb enough to believe that this virus emerged from a local wet-market. Or rather, half the country is, and unfortunately, because of the way the pandemic was politicized, the divisions are starkly along “red vs blue” lines, with the “red states” opening up and suffering vastly lower social damage, unemployment, and mental health issues due to mandated lockdowns, with little to no appreciable difference in fatalities (except for the nursing-home issue, which we’re now finally allowed to talk about). I will of course, be de-friended by every “Blue” person I know over this one, but the facts speak for themselves: the Swedes won the argument. Lockdowns have proven ineffective across the globe, with common-sense social distancing, masks, and other sub-lockdown policies accounting for almost every improvement.
• At any rate, we should be reaching herd-immunity levels soon. In my home state of TX, positivity is now sub-5%, meaning for every person a doctor sends for a Covid test, fewer than 1 in 20 actually has the virus. We still see heavy politicization of all media outlets on the subject, with the “Blue” side engaged in blatant “yellow journalism” and scare-mongering, and the “Red” side vaguely poo-poo’ing the notion that C-19 could be anything worse than a mild cold. As always, stay tuned for additional partisan stupidity, as people mindlessly parrot their favorite political media source as if they had the moral legitimacy of a church hymn.
• In nicer news, lots of US news media are going broke again. This is a good thing, since the vast majority of outlets no longer even pretend to be about reporting factual news and can be more accurately described as propaganda-and-gaslighting outlets across the board. Even reputable sources such as The Hill are beginning to slide into journalistic incompetence. The sooner this runs its course and the hedge funds stop raping the entire sector so that actual journalism can return to the U.S., the better.
• Biden’s governing as POTUS like a classic tax-and-spend liberal, whose policy priorities are gun control and admitting as many refugees through the southern border as can possibly be made to fit, on the grounds that they’ll possibly become Democratic voters and more appropriately, will definitely work for peanuts and help Wall Street keep labor costs low, even in the face of inflation. Is anybody shocked?
• More interesting is the political party civil wars. For Team Red, Trump was a flawed messenger, but actually willing to fight, and that means he enjoys considerable good feelings, especially now that we know that a bunch of what we were told about the Jan. 6th Capitol Riots was egregious partisan bullshit (like the cop who totally didn’t get beaten to death with a fire extinguisher, or the timeline demonstrating that Trump totally didn’t egg on the protestors, or the way Parler was definitely not a hotbed of terrorism planning, but actually was able to “show the receipts” on many instances where they passed data on to FBI because things said on their service were fishy and/or not legitimate speech). Team Blue, meanwhile, is caught between the socialists who want to use Congress to seize property and have it run according to enviro-congressional mandate (one of which, the federal order that landlords cannot expel renters for non-payment, appears to have gone down in flames this week in court), and the neo-liberals who love it when socialists (cough I mean progressives cough) come out to vote for them so that they can keep their tribe in office but continue to more or less done what they’ve done for the last twenty years, which is team up behind the scenes with their Team Red Establishment Counterparts and figure out how to tilt the playing field to make Wall Street ever richer, and Main Street can go screw itself.
• The Palpatine Desk gives 35% odds for US interest rates to go negative in the next three years. There’s a lot of also-ran tempests in teapots, but the big news that actually matters is that stagflation is here for real, and the CPI numbers are known to be a crock because they’re literally guessing at the prices of nearly a third of the items in the basket. If it feels like everything’s getting pricier than your paycheck, guess what? Everything’s getting pricier than your paycheck, and it’s going to stay that way until it gets so bad that we suffer The Second Coming of Volcker.
• The Maoist Woke Mania has finally reached the U.S. military officially, with political affiliation now proffered as possible “political unreliability.” This is madness, and hopefully will go away soon. But with a couple thousand blatantly-underfed guardsmen occupying the Capitol in support of a fantasy rebellion narrative which has no clothes, who can say? It’s always the silly season in Washington, D.C., but this season is particularly silly.

INTERNATIONAL

• France and Germany are screwing Ukraine again (and Germany is full speed ahead on Nordstream2 as usual). This comes as no surprise to anybody who’s watching. Nobody in “political” France or Germany gives a single shit whether Russia conquers Ukraine — they care about cheap gas and the chance to find any geopolitical partner who will help create a meaningful counterweight to the U.S. on the world stage. Any Crimean not in possession of a Russian passport is now being stripped of their property in preparation for expulsion (but it’s not like Russia’s a stranger to Soviet-style “demographic transformation” policites). Thus far, this appears to be succeeding, with Moscow having moved almost a quarter-million people into Crimea, while high tens of thousands have fled and/or been expelled.
• Political Germany, which has never met a dictator it didn’t like, continues to raise the ire of many EU partners by simultaneously sucking up to Russia and China at the same time as it hectors the rest of the Union on human rights. Germany’s bet appears to be that it can play China until the latter implodes demographically in the early 2030s, while maintaining cordial terms with Russia at the expense of Germany’s eastern neighbors (about which Frau Ribbentrop cares nothing, as amply demonstrated during her 17 years as de-facto, if not de jure, Chancellor-for-life).
• The Russian protectorate in Karabakh is now more or less solidified. Moscow is also dumping dollars as quickly as it can in favor of gold, which is the smart move if current situation remains unchecked, and will bite them in the butt if the U.S. fixes its interest rate problems. Smart money: Moscow’s calling this right. It needs to, because it’s growing ever more dependent on China economically.
• China’s “water wars” continue, not only damming up water needed to go to south Asia, but also threatening to destroy Kazakhstan’s Lake Balqesh. Because why would you let the Ili carry water down into Kazakhstan when you have chemically-sterilized slave laborers working your cotton fields in Xinjiang? That’s okay. CCP is purchasing propery in Kazakhstan left, right, and center anyway, and those private purchases will be rolled over to the State in order to make them the next target for expansion once Xinjiang’s population is exhausted, or the state finally undergoes demographic implosion and the jig is finally up.
• CCP Executive Summary: China continues to be a dick in almost every field of human activity, from the vast fleet of boats it’s using to harass other countries’ fishermen in their own home waters (which China claims, of course), to the constant hostile flyovers of Taiwan by CCP pilots, to the above-mentioned Water Wars, the genocides, mass-enslavements, supporting the Myanmar Coup, formally destroying Hong Kong’s political system, you name it. Given the chance to have friends or make enemies, the CCP, as always, comes down with both feet squarely on the latter, along with well-financed media operations intended to gaslight gullible readers into thinking they’re the good guys.
• Lebanon is sliding into socio-political collapse. Again. Everybody (including the Lebanese) know it’s a failed state, but getting it to actual stability is a puzzle nobody seems able to figure out.
• The Ever Given highlighted the fragility of the global supply chain, but it was already in really bad shape. Massive dislocations and slowdowns in ports, combined with Covid-19 and geopolitical issues, are straining “business as usual” in a major way. In some cases, that’s good (who really wants to depend on slave-labor cotton?), and in some cases, bad (who really wants your seasonal candy to arrive two months late?). Maersk has suspended bookings for the short term, and what this does for the global oil glut can be summarized as “nothing good.”
• Continued draconian lockdowns have spurred riots, and there’s public musing that heavy social-control policies of that sort will extend into the indefinite near future in Britain, where there’s always strong political support for locking down the have-nots (this is the country that remained on enforced food rationing for five years after World War Two ended).
• The last vestiges of the war against FARC may be dwindling out, depending on whether Colombia makes good on forcing them to the table. If so, the remaining holdouts will transform into drug gangs and vanish into political obscurity while engaging in drug and human trafficking, which won’t be considered geopolitically worthy as a topic.
• Venezuela is ready to trade oil for vaccines. But they’re not getting a lot of takers, primarily because is backer Russia exports a few doses for show purposes, but cannot manufacture enough for its own population (and wants nothing to do with Western or Chinese vaccines). Anybody’s guess how that pans out, but with a glut in the oil markets, it’s a weak offer.
• The rest of the industrialized world is also in bad shape economically, as each country tries beggar-thy-neighbor stealth inflationary policies. It’s a great year to plant a garden and get serious about it, because what happens in one nation won’t be confined there economically.