Daily Habits Checklist #104 (June 3 to June 30)

I’d give myself a B grade for these 4 weeks. In areas like meditation and reading, I wasn’t as consistent as I’d have liked.

I want to make some big changes to the checklist. In particular to concentrate more on helping other people, instead of just self-improvement and self-generative activities. For example, daily volunteer work would be great, but probably impractical. If I did it weekly, how should I keep track? And what kinds of social or philanthropic work could I do every day?

Also – I’m spending a lot of time in Vietnam now if you’re ever in the broader SE Asia area :)

Also also – I’d highly encourage you to watch the new Korean movie Parasite. A heart rending genre bender. Director Bong Joon Ho continues to evolve and amaze.

Highlights from Lessons of History: “Probably every vice was once a virtue”

Highly recommended if you’re interested in the broader sweep of human history and seeing patterns and cycles in our behavior as a species.

Amazon clocks it at 128 pages, and you can skim most of it, dipping in whenever a particular topic or perspective peaks your interest. Below are some of my favorite excerpts.

Derek Sivers also shares a bunch of great highlights from the book.

HIGHLIGHTS

some quirk of character or circumstance may upset national equations, as when Alexander drank himself to death and let his new empire fall apart (323 B.C.), or as when Frederick the Great was saved from disaster by the accession of a Czar infatuated with Prussian ways (1762).

When sea power finally gives place to air power in transport and war, we shall have seen one of the basic revolutions in history.

Co-operation is real, and increases with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition;

Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization.

Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire.

Only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way.

If existing agricultural knowledge were everywhere applied, the planet could feed twice its present population.

Even the children of Ph.D.s must be educated and go through their adolescent measles of errors, dogmas, and isms; nor can we say how much potential ability and genius lurk in the chromosomes of the harassed and handicapped poor.

It is amusing to find Julius Caesar offering (59 B.C.) rewards to Romans who had many children, and forbidding childless women to ride in litters or wear jewelry. Augustus renewed this campaign some forty years later, with like futility.

So the birth rate, like war, may determine the fate of theologies;

American civilization is still in the stage of racial mixture.

by and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them. Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.

If he is a prophet like Mohammed, wise in the means of inspiring men, his words may raise a poor and disadvantaged people to unpremeditated ambitions and surprising power. A Pasteur, a Morse, an Edison, a Ford, a Wright, a Marx, a Lenin, a Mao Tse-tung are effects of numberless causes, and causes of endless effects.

History in the large is the conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment.

So for sixteen centuries the Jewish enclaves in Christendom maintained their continuity and internal peace by a strict and detailed moral code, almost without help from the state and its laws.

If we divide economic history into three stages—hunting, agriculture, industry—we may expect that the moral code of one stage will be changed in the next.

Probably every vice was once a virtue

For fifteen hundred years this agricultural moral code of continence, early marriage, divorceless monogamy, and multiple maternity maintained itself in Christian Europe and its white colonies.

The city offered every discouragement to marriage, but it provided every stimulus and facility for sex.

After the wars of Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, Antony and Octavius, “Rome was full of men who had lost their economic footing and their moral stability: soldiers who had tasted adventure and had learned to kill; citizens who had seen their savings consumed in the taxes and inflation caused by war;… women dizzy with freedom, multiplying divorces, abortions, and adulteries…. A shallow sophistication prided itself upon its pessimism and cynicism.”

Even our generation has not yet rivaled the popularity of homosexualism in ancient Greece or Rome or Renaissance Italy.

Prostitution has been perennial and universal, from the state-regulated brothels of Assyria to the “night clubs” of West-European and American cities today. In the University of Wittenberg in 1544, according to Luther, “the race of girls is getting bold, and run after the fellows into their rooms and chambers and wherever they can, and offer them their free love.”

We must remind ourselves again that history as usually written is quite different from history as usually lived: the historian records the exceptional because it is interesting—because it is exceptional.

Farinelli providing for the children of Domenico Scarlatti, divers people succoring young Haydn, Conte Litta paying for Johann Christian Bach’s studies at Bologna, Joseph Black advancing money repeatedly to James Watt, Puchberg patiently lending and lending to Mozart. Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?

Politically Rome was at nadir when Caesar came (60 B.C.); yet it did not quite succumb to the barbarians till A.D. 465. May we take as long to fall as did Imperial Rome!

Though the Church served the state, it claimed to stand above all states, as morality should stand above power.

the Church offered itself as an international court to which all rulers were to be morally responsible.

No reconciliation is possible between religion and philosophy except through the philosophers’ recognition that they have found no substitute for the moral function of the Church

If history supports any theology this would be a dualism like the Zoroastrian or Manichaean: a good spirit and an evil spirit battling for control of the universe and men’s souls.

Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under; and the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Khan.

The replacement of Christian with secular institutions is the culminating and critical result of the Industrial Revolution. That states should attempt to dispense with theological supports is one of the many crucial experiments that bewilder our brains and unsettle our ways today.

Colleges once allied to churches have been captured by businessmen and scientists. The propaganda of patriotism, capitalism, or Communism succeeds to the inculcation of a supernatural creed and moral code.

One lesson of history is that religion has many lives, and a habit of resurrection. How often in the past have God and religion died and been reborn!

Atheism ran wild in the India of Buddha’s youth, and Buddha himself founded a religion without a god; after his death Buddhism developed a complex theology including gods, saints, and hell.

In our time the strength of the state has united with the several forces listed above to relax faith and morals, and to allow paganism to resume its natural sway. Probably our excesses will bring another reaction; moral disorder may generate a religious revival

Joseph de Maistre answered: “I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be; I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.”

There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

Only a few Communist states have not merely dissociated themselves from religion but have repudiated its aid; and perhaps the apparent and provisional success of this experiment in Russia owes much to the temporary acceptance of Communism as the religion

“As long as there is poverty there will be gods.”

The French Revolution came not because Voltaire wrote brilliant satires and Rousseau sentimental romances, but because the middle classes had risen to economic leadership, needed legislative freedom for their enterprise and trade, and itched for social acceptance and political power.

Agriculture becomes an industry, and soon the farmer must choose between being the employee of a capitalist and being the employee of a state.

“the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.”

all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.

Other factors equal, internal liberty varies inversely as external danger.

but if the Hegelian formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is applied to the Industrial Revolution as thesis, and to capitalism versus socialism as antithesis, the third condition would be a synthesis of capitalism and socialism; and to this reconciliation the Western world visibly moves.

Since men love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos.

If we were to judge forms of government from their prevalence and duration in history we should have to give the palm to monarchy; democracies, by contrast, have been hectic interludes.

The complexity of contemporary states seems to break down any single mind that tries to master it.

Aristocracy is not only a nursery of statesmanship, it is also a repository and vehicle of culture, manners, standards, and tastes, and serves thereby as a stabilizing barrier to social fads, artistic crazes, or neurotically rapid changes in the moral code. See what has happened to morals, manners, style, and art since the French Revolution.

Only three generations intervened between “L’état c’est moi” and “Après moi le déluge.”

As the sanity of the individual lies in the continuity of his memories, so the sanity of a group lies in the continuity of its traditions

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

Plato’s reduction of political evolution to a sequence of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and dictatorship found another illustration in the history of Rome.

A government that governed least was admirably suited to liberate those individualistic energies that transformed America from a wilderness to a material utopia, and from the child and ward to the rival and guardian of Western Europe. And while rural isolation enhanced the freedom of the individual, national isolation provided liberty and security within protective seas.

Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign.

…though men cannot be equal, their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal.

In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.

The state has our instincts without our restraints. The individual submits to restraints laid upon him by morals and laws, and agrees to replace combat with conference,

“…soon thereafter there will be interplanetary war. Then, and only then, will we of this earth be one.”

History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness, and man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to frequently occurring situations and stimuli like hunger, danger, and sex.

Probably most states (i.e., societies politically organized) took form through the conquest of one group by another, and the establishment of a continuing force over the conquered by the conqueror

Greek civilization is not really dead; only its frame is gone and its habitat has changed and spread…Homer has more readers now than in his own day and land.

We double, triple, centuple our speed, but we shatter our nerves in the process, and are the same trousered apes at two thousand miles an hour as when we had legs.

We frolic in our emancipation from theology, but have we developed a natural ethic—a moral code independent of religion—strong enough to keep our instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex from debasing our civilization?

Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to national, ideological, or racial hostilities?

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew;

Highlights from The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous

The book’s basic message is that the world’s current financial system is damaged beyond repair, and bitcoin represents one of the best available methods to fix it.

It’s a fast read [Amazon link], relatively light on statistics and academic research, somewhat heavier on prescription and generalizations. I would break down the book contents this way: 30% an introduction to macroeconomics and the history of money, 20% what is bitcoin, 25% what are the big problems in global monetary policy and international finance today, and 25% bitcoin cheerleading.

Below are some of my favorite highlights:

  • Contrary to what O’Keefe expected, the villagers were not keen on receiving his stones, and the village chief banned his townsfolk from working for the stones, decreeing that O’Keefe’s stones were not of value, because they were gathered too easily. Only the stones quarried traditionally, with the sweat and blood of the Yapese, were to be accepted in Yap. Others on the island disagreed, and they did supply O’Keefe with the coconuts he sought. This resulted in conflict on the island, and in time the demise of Rai stones as money.
  • Back in the late 1970s, the very affluent Hunt brothers decided to bring about the remonetization of silver and started buying enormous quantities of silver, driving the price up. Their rationale was that as the price rose, more people would want to buy, which would keep the price rising, which in turn would lead to people wanting to be paid in silver. Yet, no matter how much the Hunt brothers bought, their wealth was no match for the ability of miners and holders of silver to keep selling silver onto the market. The price of silver eventually crashed and the Hunt brothers lost over $ 1bn, probably the highest price ever paid for learning the importance of the stock‐to‐flow ratio, and why not all that glitters is gold.
  • Hanke and Bushnell have been able to verify 57 episodes of hyperinflation in history, only one of which occurred before the era of monetary nationalism, and that was the inflation in France in 1795, in the wake of the Mississippi Bubble, which was also produced through government money and engineered by the honorary father of modern government money, John Law.
  • In 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, aerial bombardment destroyed the Iraqi central bank and with it the capability of the Iraqi government to print new Iraqi dinars. This led to the dinar drastically appreciating overnight as Iraqis became more confident in the currency given that no central bank could print it anymore. A similar story happened to Somali shillings after their central bank was destroyed.
  • …some countries started trying to repatriate their gold reserves from the United States as they started to recognize the diminishing purchasing power of their paper money. French president Charles de Gaulle even sent a French military carrier to New York to get his nation’s gold back, but when the Germans attempted to repatriate their gold, the United States had decided it had had enough. Gold reserves were running low, and on August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon announced the end of dollar convertibility to gold, thus letting the gold price float in the market freely. In effect, the United States had defaulted on its commitment to redeem its dollars in gold. The fixed exchange rates between the world’s currencies, which the IMF was tasked with maintaining, had now been let loose to be determined by the movement of goods and capital across borders and in ever‐more‐sophisticated foreign exchange markets.
  • The total U.S. M2 measure of the money supply in 1971 was around $600 billion, while today it is in excess of $12 trillion, growing at an average annual rate of 6.7%. Correspondingly, in 1971, 1 ounce of gold was worth $35, and today it is worth more than $1,200.
  • The oldest recorded example of fiat money was jiaozi, a paper currency issued by the Song dynasty in China in the tenth century. Initially, jiaozi was a receipt for gold or silver, but then government controlled its issuance and suspended redeemability, increasing the amount of currency printed until it collapsed.
  • President Roosevelt issued an executive order banning the private ownership of gold, forcing Americans to sell their gold to the U.S. Treasury at a rate of $20.67 per ounce. With the population deprived of sound money, and forced to deal with dollars, Roosevelt then revalued the dollar on the international market from $20.67 per ounce to $35 per ounce, a 41% devaluation of the dollar in real terms (gold).
  • Scarcity is the starting point of all economics
  • When European explorers and traders visited West Africa in the sixteenth century, they noticed the high value given to these beads and so started importing them in mass quantities from Europe. What followed was similar to the story of O’Keefe, but given the tiny size of the beads and the much larger size of the population, it was a slower, more covert process with bigger and more tragic consequences. Slowly but surely, Europeans were able to purchase a lot of the precious resources of Africa for the beads they acquired back home for very little.
  • The aggry beads later came to be known as slave beads for the role they played in fueling the slave trade of Africans to Europeans and North Americans. A one‐time collapse in the value of a monetary medium is tragic, but at least it is over quickly and its holders can begin trading, saving, and calculating with a new one. But a slow drain of its monetary value over time will slowly transfer the wealth of its holders to those who can produce the medium at a low cost.
  • …the central bank can engage in expansionary monetary policy by (1) reducing interest rates, which stimulates lending and increases money creation; (2) lowering the required reserve ratio, allowing banks to increase their lending, increasing money creation; (3) purchasing treasuries or financial assets, which also leads to money creation; and (4) relaxing lending eligibility criteria, allowing banks to increase lending and thus money creation.
  • The Bank of International Settlements estimates the size of the foreign exchange market to be $5.1 trillion per day for April 2016, which would come out to around $1,860 trillion per year. The World Bank estimates the GDP of all the world’s countries combined at around $75 trillion for the year 2016. This means that the foreign exchange market is around 25 times as large as all the economic production that takes place in the entire planet.
  • More nations began to switch to a monetary standard of paper fully backed by, and instantly redeemable into, precious metals held in vaults. Some nations would choose gold, and others would choose silver, in a fateful decision that was to have enormous consequences. Britain was the first to adopt a modern gold standard in 1717, under the direction of physicist Isaac Newton, who was the warden of the Royal Mint, and the gold standard would play a great role in it advancing its trade across its empire worldwide. Britain would remain under a gold standard until 1914, although it would suspend it during the Napoleonic wars from 1797 to 1821.
  • By the time India shifted the backing of its rupee to the gold‐backed pound sterling in 1898, the silver backing its rupee had lost 56% of its value in the 27 years since the end of the Franco‐ Prussian War. For China, which stayed on the silver standard until 1935, its silver (in various names and forms) lost 78% of its value over the period. It is the author’s opinion that the history of China and India, and their failure to catch up to the West during the twentieth century, is inextricably linked to this massive destruction of wealth and capital brought about by the demonetization of the monetary metal these countries utilized. The demonetization of silver in effect left the Chinese and Indians in a situation similar to west Africans holding aggri beads as Europeans arrived: domestic hard money was easy money for foreigners, and was being driven out by foreign hard money, which allowed foreigners to control and own increasing quantities of the capital and resources of China and India during the period. This is a historical lesson of immense significance, and should be kept in mind by anyone who thinks his refusal of Bitcoin means he doesn’t have to deal with it. History shows it is not possible to insulate yourself from the consequences of others holding money that is harder than yours.
  • Any person who owns Bitcoin achieves a degree of economic freedom which was not possible before its invention. Bitcoin holders can send large amounts of value across the planet without having to ask for the permission of anyone. Bitcoin’s value is not reliant on anything physical anywhere in the world and thus can never be completely impeded, destroyed, or confiscated by any of the physical forces of the political or criminal worlds.
  • Bitcoin can also serve as a useful reserve asset for central banks facing international restrictions on their banking operations, or unhappy at the dollar‐centric global monetary system. The possibility of adopting Bitcoin reserves might itself prove a valuable bargaining chip for these central banks with U.S. monetary authorities, who would probably prefer not to see any central banks defect to Bitcoin as a method of settlement, because that would then entice others to join.

Highlights from Seeking Wisdom by Peter Bevelin

Thanks to @sivers.

—

Reading books is like conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

The advice we give others is the advice that we ourselves need.

The more we are exposed to a stimulus, the higher our threshold of fear becomes.

We never look at projections, but we look very deeply at track records.

Try to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.

Ask: How can I be wrong?  Who can tell me if I’m wrong?

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

When all are accountable, no one is accountable.

Everything seems stupid when it fails. In hindsight, everything seems obvious. Look at earlier decisions in the context of their own time.

If you always tell people why, they’ll understand it better, they’ll consider it more important, and they’ll be more likely to comply.

It is not stress that harms us but distress.

Warren Buffett says: “It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.”

In many business activities a few things can produce much of the value.

Underestimating the influence of randomness in bad or good outcomes.

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

Underestimating the effect of exponential growth.

There is no memory of the past.

The models that come from hard science and engineering are the most reliable.  The engineering idea of a backup system, of breakpoints, of critical mass.

A model should be easy to use. If it is complicated, we don’t use it.

Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking.

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Einstein

Make fewer and better decisions. Why? Because it forces us to think more on each decision and thereby reduces our chance of mistakes.

A good business throws up one easy decision after another, whereas a bad one gives you horrible choices – decisions that are extremely hard to make.

A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind.

It’s not that we have so little time but that we waste much of it.

Find the people you don’t like and figure out what you don’t like about them. Ask yourself if you have some of those qualities in you.

—

Thanks for reading! I’ve added some of these to my latest Personal Bible – feel free to check it out and create your own!

The Absent Superpower by Peter Zeihan (31 highlights)

For context, I highlighted so much of the book that Kindle stopped storing my highlights, so I could only share a subset below.

The book – and his other writings, he’s quite prolific – is well worth reading if you’re into geopolitics and global trade. At the very least it’ll challenge some of your assumptions and viewpoints.

A small selection of highlights below:

  • Americans are panic-prone. Every country has a series of early experiences that shape the national mindset. For the Americans it was century-long pioneer era: for the cost of a used car in today’s dollars, Americans could Conestoga the family out to the Midwest, break ground, and within six months be exporting grain for hard currency. It was the greatest cultural and economic expansion in human history, and it taught Americans that things will get better every single year.
  • Kids […] don’t factor economically in the modern age. They used to serve as free labor on farms, but once most populations relocated into urban environments children essentially transformed into luxury goods. Think of them as more expensive Shih Tzus.
  • As the American economy evolves into a dynamic, service-oriented system, as careers give way to jobs, jobs give way to part-time work, and as part-time work gives way to hobbies that happen to generate income, the Yers are actually fairly well-prepared socially, politically, and psychologically for the new era.
  • GenX is roughly one-fifth smaller than the Boomers —considering that GenX is younger, they should be one-quarter bigger —an imbalance so extreme that GenX will not outnumber the Boomers until most of the Xers are in their sixties.
  • Like most Americans I wasn’t really sure why the Americans had walked away from the Cold War without so much as the memory of a limp while Russia was a dismembered mess. Even today Americans flinch more visibly when they think of Vietnam than they do when they think of Russia, a country that still possesses the nuclear wherewithal to end American existence.
  • the vast swathes of internal Chinese territories are physically isolated and thus painfully poor. Adding political complications to the mix, most of China’s minority groups live in the interior and most of them are not exactly thrilled to be living in the People’s Republic. The interior is home to the remaining 600 million Chinese.
  • China has a local fuel—brown coal—and has it in abundance. Consequently, in most of the past 20 years, China has added more coal-burning capacity than most of the rest of the world combined despite lip service to international climate goals and rising domestic dissatisfaction with pollution levels.
  • NAFTA may have its faults, but its economic success in Mexico has made net Mexican migration to the U.S. negative for a decade because it gives Mexicans jobs. Smash the agreements that employ Mexicans, and two results among many will be vast increases in drug flows and illegal migration as Mexicans find it harder to find a 9-to-5.
  • In about a decade, instead of living in a world where the Americans are the most powerful force for global stability, they are likely to be the most powerful force for global instability.
  • Canada knows the United States intimately, while the United States barely registers what’s going on north of its border. (The only country that even comes close to studying the United States as intently is Israel)
  • Canada’s riven geography means every Canadian province trades more with the United States than with the rest of Canada
  • Chinese People universally despise North Korea, and would drop NK in a moment if Beijing would simply give it more than a second thought.   However, the fear China uses again and again is simple;  Let North Korea fall and refugees will flood across.  Ok. Fair enough.  However, the unspoken fear is that American combat divisions will simply race up to the border and dig in
  • With their rich cultural history, the Iranians consider themselves not only the natural leaders of the region, but also the peak of the human experience. In contrast, the Saudis are a Bedouin family that just happened to cut a deal with the British at the right time and have yet to celebrate their centenary celebration. Yet they command the world’s largest oil industry, wield power that is global in scope, and are the custodians of the Holy Cities.
  • Desert life is hard, and maintaining a social structure in the desert is harder still. One of the many ways in which the Saud clan coped was the adoption of an ultra-strict version of Islam, which glorified combat and tightly regulated personal freedoms. Locals call it Salafist Islam while many outsiders know it as Wahhabism, referring to the movement’s founder, one Sheikh Ibn Abdul Wahhab.
  • Unsurprisingly, Japan now suffers under the economic weight of supporting the world’s oldest population: Japanese labor costs—the highest in Asia and among the highest in the world—nudge up a bit higher every year and the country now purchases more diapers for adults than for children. Combined, these intermingled crises have manifested as seven recessions in under 25 years.
  • The Indian geography is a complex one, riddled with river valleys, deserts, plains, mountains, hills, swamp, and a mix of coastline styles. But one feature always stands out: the Ganges Basin. Set in the oddity of a temperate zone that knows no true winter, the plain’s outstanding fertility and multiple potential growing seasons generates the largest volume of calories per acre per year of anywhere in the world. However, the Ganges itself is not navigable. The result is fantastically high rates of population growth, but fantastically low capital generation per capita. Massive populations, but crushing poverty.
  • The United States is a maritime nation. Its most strategically relevant military arm is its Navy. The core of American strategic doctrine has always been about controlling the oceans and using that control to shape global events to its liking.
  • local labor forces are very attractive because they are higher skilled than their price point would suggest—particularly in Vietnam, which boasts that magic mix of modern urban centers like Ho Chi Minh City and rural zones combined with a far-above-global-average educational standards.
  • …the American retrenchment is but one of three massive shifts in the global the order. The second is the rapid greying of the entire global population. Fewer people of working age translates directly into anemic, decaying economies — enervating global trade just as the Americans stop guaranteeing it. Third and finally, the American shale revolution has changed the mechanics — if not yet the mood — of how the Americans interact with the energy sector.
  • The end of American dependence upon extra-continental energy sources does more than sever the largest of the remaining ties that bind America’s fate to the wider world, it sets into motion a veritable cavalcade of trends: the re-industrialization of the United States, the accelerated breakdown of the global order, and a series of wide-ranging military conflicts that will shape the next two decades.
  • Without petroleum there would not be a meaningful agricultural industry — and in that I mean everything from the growing of crops to the harvesting of crops to the transport of foodstuffs from farm to table.
  • In 1920 Congress passed the Jones Act, which barred any ship from plying the American waterways that was not American-built, American-owned, American-captained, and American-crewed.
  • The American system, with the Greater Midwest and Mississippi network at its core, is not only the richest piece of territory in the world, it also is the single-most secure.
  • You can lay most of the financial bubbles (and busts) of the past two decades at the Boomers’ feet — everything from dot-com to Enron to subprime to Brazil, Russia, India, and China — all were only possible because the Boomers were ignoring risk in the quest for that extra 1% of yield.
  • The Japanese economic breakdown of 1990 wasn’t demographic in origin, but Japan has since aged past the point that it will again be a consumption-led economy. Ever.
  • As soon as 2022, Germany, Belgium, Greece, Austria, and Italy will not be past just the point of not just demographic recovery — they and more have already crossed that threshold — but financial and economic recovery as well.
  • Japan, Korea, and Taiwan has never covered more than a tiny percentage (typically less than 1%) of their energy needs.
  • Since the 1990s television power demand is down by 35% despite massive increases in quality and size. Dishwashers use 40% less electricity, air conditioners 50% less, refrigerators 60%.
  • …it isn’t just the United States that is dipping into nativism. Japan is amending its constitution to make it easier to bomb people. China is crowning a new Mao. Britain voted itself out of the European Union. The Turkish president’s leadership makes Donald Trump seem shy by comparison, Poland’s government exudes the worst characteristics of Pope Innocent III and Kanye.
  • Russian security only comes from conquering everyone nearby in order to establish buffers around the Russian core.
  • the Russians often have to find ways to motivate their conquered populations — or more to the point, to intimidate their subjects into accepting the role the Russians demand of them. The Russians do this with a deep, intrusive, and cruel intelligence service. Under Lenin it was the Cheka, under Stalin the NVBD, and Brezhnev the KGB, after the Cold War the FSB, and now it’s the FSB backed up with the social-monitoring techniques Edward Snowden brought with him from the American NSA.