Guyana and General Demographics, Scarcity Issues Leading to War

So around a week ago the phenomenally unpopular Nicolas Maduro basically stood in front of a map that said 2/3rds of Guyana is part of Venezuela and gave a speech; it's not super clear whether this will lead to war precipitously or a thousand other possibilities but it is an interesting event. Maduro wants to shore up his absymal popularity and maybe attempt to fix the disastrous Venezuelan economy so what better way to do that than to invade your neighbor that has 1/35th your population and 1/40th to 1/100th the size of your military. The territory in question is extremely sparsely populated; it's kind of the inverse of Gaza, in Gaza you have 2+ million people in 141 Square Miles and in Essequibo you have roughly 125,000 People in 61,600 Square Miles; so 2 people per Square Mile basically. It is one of the densest Forests/Jungles on Earth and there's basically no one there so if theoretically Maduro was to occupy the coastline he would face little or no resistance presently.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................There's a wide variety of Oil interest in the location (especially Offshore) and the GDP per capita of Guyana entirely (~850,000 people) has tripled since 2020 and is now almost 8x the Venezuelan GDP Per Capita under Maduro, to put it bluntly I don't think Venezuela is even remotely capable of holding any of the Naval Territory in question which seems to be the main corporate interest but they can definitely hold a portion of the land territory if they want to; is there anything gained from doing that other than more sanctions and a 1% chance of Desert Storm 2.0 (Jungle Storm edition) is more debatable but if it's strictly a popularity or Military loyalty measure instead of an economic one (because Maduro is astonishingly inept in that department) then it could work.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................This next bit is just a musing secondary aspect of this and other recent posts; essentially the Demographics of the world have lined up to incentivize war before inevitable fertility decline but another point is that in 40-80 years or whatever the main fuel of existing war materiel will be much more scarce; so if you want to fight a war the time is now before everything is electronic drones that aren't very good at taking territory (but could be quite adept at holding it); in this scenario if you succeed in taking Taiwan and the Phillippines by 2070 or what have you and then fossil fuels are starting to run out it's possible you wind up in a similar world state to 1991 where there are very few disruptions for around a century until offensive drones and/or EMPs/EWS's are figured out; so if your country is in a strong position going into the scarcity period and the demographic decline phase then in theory it will prosper more in that environment; possibly even leading to an uncontested rise or unipolarity (unlikely admittedly but we are projecting to the far flung future at this point).

Ukranian Diaspora, Immigration Rates, and the Demographics of War

Source for the above image: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293564/ukrainian-refugees-in-poland/ Greetings friends, this is just a surmising of population values on a fairly simplistic level to determine likely outcomes for the near term in Ukraine (basically the next year and change); before the war started there were approximately 44 million people in Ukraine and 15 million have crossed the Polish border since then at a rate of around 25,000 a day; since May or June that number has gone up to as much as 40,000 and decreased a bit more recently (probably because of the winter). I believe the initial surge of immigrants had some male participants but they did at least attempt to close the border so it would just be women and children; I don't know what the current state of that law is but suffice to say the border has not closed and just in Poland there's somewhere between 5 and 7 million Ukranians as a result of the war (nearly doubling the size of some Polish cities for example)................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... The spring offensive as it was known happened somewhere between May and July and not very much changed, the Russians have counterattacked and also not accomplished much other than raw attrition; but fundamentally Russia just has more manpower and the Ukrainians aren't causing 4x as many casualties as they are receiving which is roughly the rate required to stabilize the conflict for all eternity. Therefore the war will end (for now) or have a ceasefire soon-ish and the purpose of this exercise is just to figure out when that should happen demographically. If we assume there's 30 million Ukrainians left in Ukraine presently and the willingness to leave over time does not change (so basically the immigration over the Polish border rate is constant at approximatley 25,000 which it has been for 1.5 years); then Ukraine is losing 750,000 people per month or 9 million per year; obviously at some point that rate would go down since you run out of people that are capable of leaving (I would have guessed this would have happened already but apparently it did not); but 9 million per year plus military attrition leaves us with 2.5-3 years as a maximalist depopulation; this isn't a reasonable thing to happen so at some point between peace talks will commence and then we'll have a frozen conflict for at least a few years (I would guess further Russian aggression later on, maybe like 8-10 years after the ceasefire, probably targetting Odessa first and foremost). As far as when that happens I'd guess middle of next year at the earliest and start of the following year at the latest; Even if NATO sends all of the armaments at its disposal they still won't send actual soldiers so essentially the war is a demographic certainty with current migration rates; that said insurgencies can be very powerful so I wouldn't anticipate much Russian offensive success either thus stalemate into peace talks is the rule of the day (with extensive fortifications thereafter and theoretically trying to get more Patriot Missile batteries and F-16s). I suppose if Russia realizes this they could try to deliberately extend the war for longer, as a rule of thumb pitching a long protracted war of attrition for 2+ more years isn't a very good marketing strategy though; no matter how much state control of media you possess.

Predicting Future War Trends, Alliance Systems, Willingness to Fight, Armageddon Potentials (not likely for 50+ years even though War is a virtual certainty)

Greetings Friends, this is mostly from a question my Dad asked and I answered in like 20 different short ways but I'll try to consolidate that here a bit. The above map is an okay representation of current geopolitics though south america should be green and Indonesia/India/Malaysia should also be green; Australia is blue for the time being but probably not after the Philippines fall/accede to China whenever that is (25-75 years). We are in a state where there is mass militarization in the places where war is most likely to happen therefore war will happen (and there's somewhere around 8 wars going on right now or on the cusp of going on in some cases); however the alliance systems in place do not lead to a chain reaction of death and destruction like the first and second World Wars; even if a NATO country was directly attacked most likely they would only receive military support and maybe aerial support, so just a little bit more involved than in Ukraine; also if the war in Taiwan had not started by then there might still be a perceived interest in pursuing a stalemate instead of a total victory (which seems to be the default conclusion of every modern conflict except for Azerbaijan/Armenia where one side clearly won)...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... As to Taiwan the war is extremely likely because of mass militarization and also demographics, China has reached the point where they don't need to get richer and being richer doesn't enhance their prestige much but winning or even having a partial military success against the US is an enormous prestige boost for them and a lot of the education system in China inspires young people to be interested in things like Nationalism and belief in the National Idea/Willingness to fight in the army; anything that reinforces those notions greatly strengthens China further. In the West there is a very minimal interest in these sorts of things because fundamentally the system was built on the lie/false belief/stupidity to think that the entire world would embrace western values, trade freely forever, and allow resources from poorer countries to gradually be siphoned to richer countries forever (and then be consolidated in the hands of a few hundred people mostly). To put it bluntly Singular Globalization died with COVID and has continued to die afterward but there are now multiple trading hubs and throughroutes for shipping and so forth so that there actually multiple models of globalization which is generally the way forward................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Apologies if the previous paragraph sounded Marxist as I've become less and less Marxist over time, I no longer perceive Capitalism as the evil itself but rather foolish and terrible academic and political systems where everyone buys into the same notions without questioning them; the cult following of the Francis Fukuyama End of History narrative which was always specious but maybe true for 5-10 years and just an outright fabrication after that point. Essentially every academic that has a decent point of view on foreign relations is from 30 years ago because that's when diplomacy actually existed, it wasn't just "you accept our values and get slightly richer, we get a lot richer, thanks" which has been the case for at least 20 years and is now falling apart entirely. The mass exportation of values worldwide concept was just a trusted aspect of socialization for decades so now everyone thinks that there is one specific way that everyone should feel about every social issue (or one of two different ways in a bipolar political system), and that somehow this should apply to every country in every situation throughout time. This is just an unbelievably foolish, even utopian ideal that isn't applicable to reality and probably never was, sure China would take your investment but they wouldn't care what dumbass shit you were spewing with it; they just wanted to get wealthier..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................So we're left with a situation where China is essenitally in an unlosable position, it's just a matter of how fast they want to move; do they let 600-700 million people die off in the Age Pyramid before witnessing ascendancy or just wait for things to naturally go their way. Unfortunately I don't think the latter is even remotely likely currently; but with some Nixon-esque diplomacy if some thunderbolt from heaven descended on a mass of incompetent dipshits in the political system it's probably not a completely unfixable situation at least as of 2023; that seems farcically unlikely so we can just assume that Taiwan will be invaded and the US will not have 50,000 missiles in Okinawa to shoot down every LST (Amphibious Assault Ships) before it can reach the shore; if all China does is get a beachhead and hold it they've essentially done enough to damage US prestige; the frozen conflict state is default as expressed before so having nominal control over Taiwan with some resistance is probably pretty likely and then 5-10 years after that they attempt to remove US influence from the Philippines. China doesn't want to conquer anything that's not Taiwan as far as I can tell but they do want nominal trade/sphere of influence control over basically every country between China and India (possible Australia or New Zealand could be exempt); this will probably happen naturally before 2100 but based on current trends it will be decided by war and not slower more methodical diplomacy, if that even exists anymore.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................All of that said China Vs Taiwan/US/Japan is a localized conflict and probably wouldn't result in further wars elsewhere, fairly small theater and the fanciest weapons ever used being thrown at each other to see who wins; Taiwan will suffer immensely but non Taiwanese casualties will be "light" compared to Ukraine and the purge of Palestine (though heavy compared to Iraq and Afghanistan); once that was happens I think other wars will happen elsewhere because of lack of US ability to intervene or even wave a finger and also just the global norms of conflict have already reverted to the Pre-WWI state. Nuclear weapons exist but their usage is not in living memory so someone will have to use them again if they're going to function as a deterrent, conventional war is brutal and horrible but not as intolerable as everyone dying instantly so no amount of conventional force would function as a true deterrent between peers.

Artillery Production Incentives (Ukraine, Russia, Every Country that Borders Russia, Why would China want to supply Artillery Ammunition to Russia logic path

Greetings Friends, I've been watching a decent amount of Perun videos of late which are mostly focused on logistics vis-a-vis modern militaries and the War in Ukraine especially; but in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zcUe47xerQ toward the end he seems to have meandered, briefly, into an interesting point; what is the logical incentive for China to supply Russia with ammunition; is it to ensure Russia doesn't fail or succeeds or to have any direct impact on the war (unlikely) or is it to build up and sustain their own industrial production of ammunition for future conflicts. This is most assuredly going to happen in every country that has an eastern border with Russia or Belarus (So Finland, Poland, the Baltic States etc.); but China itself may simply want more ammunition even of shorter distance variety at some point in the future. So by supplying Russia with ammunition now they are developing engineers and factories for future wartime production; thus pre-emptively taking advantage of a "War Boom" production model. All of that being said everything points to stalemate in Ukraine aside from potential Russian Civil War randomly negating that which went back to being kind of unlikely but hard/impossible to tell.

Things to Write a Book About, Geopolitics, Philosophy, Introspection and So Forth

Greetings Friends, Another riveting blog post. Lately my brothers have been telling me to write my thoughts down in some form and hope that someone eventually reads them, probably like 150 years in the future. So here we are. I guess we'll leave the topic of the impossibility of exposure for another time (though I have manifold methods of proving that side of the argument). The easy straightforward things to write about are the state of geopolitics and how it is changing rapidly post covid; a related topic is how mass militarization with no obvious deterrent must unerringly lead to conflict between Great Powers (or minor powers), how said deterrent can not develop without actual battlefield usage (according to Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley this would probably the prophesized Doom Drone that has such conventional firepower to deter all means of fighting it a la the Way of the Pilgrim by Gordon R. Dickson), and on to more philosophical topics. ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... Last week I took off thursday from work since my brain was sharply deteriorating into nothingness, I went and dealt with a bank situation to make my sister happy and then walked to the book store to buy Marcus Aurelius' The Meditations and then read it on a bench in an isolated park-like environment which wasn't there when I was a child. The main philosophical point I have is relevant to big data essentially, it's something like Determinism can be proven through statistics and data analysis, so you can have a perfect consumption model, marketing model, as well as opinion pacification models; more or less what large companies are trying to do but failing at and not really setting restraints on to prevent mass inflation worldwide (except for the US) which would invariably lead to problems via kicking the can down the road; I hold that this is mostly a philosophical notion and while it has many practical applications it needs to be tangled with in the philosphical environment first in order to get to a functionally utilitarian worldview instead of a purely profit based one. Another philosophical point which my brain just phrased a few minutes ago is the Transient nature of Perspective, which is a model of self awareness essentially and relevant to Marcus Aurelius hence the image header; basically your perspective shifts as you age but the perspective you held when younger is not necessarily more or less wrong than your current perspective; there are exceptions to the rule but for the vast majority of people shifts in perspective do not invalidate the previous point of view or whether or not it ever had merit. If you want to simplify all truths to some universal set of values to export so that you can ensure more and more funds reside in the wealthiest countries and especially small numbers of people while maintaining everyone else's status quo standard of living then it is to your benefit to also oversimplify concepts such as traditionalism vs progressivism making one out to be irrevocably worse than the other and so forth; but if you want to maintain perspective it behooves you to try to understand and work with the other point of view instead of bombarding it into oblivion via cancellation or actual MLRS systems.

On Delegation (The Core US Military Strategy) and Future Military Conflicts

Greetings friends, So we have another burst of inspiration here this time on core strategic and tactical principles in the US Military and how they interact with the modern military thesis vis-a-vis Ukraine, Taiwan, and the Philippines. A very prevalent thought in the US Military is delegation which works extremely well for small tactical groups from JEB Stuart to the Navy Seals but does not aid in overall strategic decision making or willingness to finish a long, bloody (and potentially tedious) campaign successfully, as evidenced by the failures in Vietnam and Afghanistan. This doctrine is older than WWII but WWII was not fought in this vein especially and the Korean War also wasn't (probably due to Macarthur's influence), I suspect the Korean War would not have been a stalemate if the general strategic outlook was focused on small tactical units and so on instead of a series of massive battles a la WWII; most likely North Korea would have won decisively. So in a roundabout way I guess I'm defending Macarthur here despite the silliness of nuking China.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... In the case of Ukraine we do have delegation working successfully (at least at the moment, 4/13/2023) but there is also a cohesive strategic military objective on the part of the Ukranians that is working in their favor so despite the massive losses on both sides and the warfare style not seen for 65-70 years (and the diplomacy not seen for over a hundred); the case of of the Kharkiv offensive is generally where you can see delegation working well again reminiscent of a Civil War small unit campaign; in general the war is very similar in scope to the US Civil War, there's also the notions of brother vs brother as well as we must defend to survive and massive casualties with trench warfare; but for the time being the war is still going relatively well for Ukraine; time will tell whether that is the final conclusion or not.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. As far as Taiwan there is definitely a much more jingoistic approach from the media and the Presidency/administration focusing on the threat that China poses but I don't think there is a particularly strong willingness to fight and die personally for individuals born in the post 9/11 world; especially not compared to China (or India) who have a roughly 70% willingess to fight compared to the US' 44% (2015 Gallup Poll); ultimately China and Russia are not especially comparable as opponents because one is a transcendent power and the other is a clearly declining (especially demographically) power. If China simply waits like 10-20 years then they may get Taiwan without fighting, however there is enormous prestige on the line were they to win a war, essentially completely disconnecting the European and American apparatus from the rest of the world (or at least the non Western hemisphere, it does seem like Brasil is more likely to align with the "Global South" (formerly phrased as "Third World") and probably splitting the world into two or three globalization economic spheres instead of just one. China can't really get more economically powerful but they can certainly get more militarily powerful, strategically powerful, and prestigiously powerful; so their objective set will likely be more reflect of Putin's world view then the post Cold War world view (which obviously has proven inaccurate at this point)................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... At present the odds of American/Taiwanese victory in a defensive conflict are fairly high, as much as 80%; but even if the event that China lost the war they would probably be willing to go again whereas the US losing multiple Aircraft Carriers and say 20,000 men would have a devestating effect on the home front; but even if China lost 200k-300k soldiers that's still a relatively small part of their population and they have the cohesive societal outlook necessary for a longer, bloodier campaign (as does Russia incidentally though possibly not the raw resources or manpower); after China does acquire Taiwan in some way (which might take 25 years and may or may not be extremely bloody or bloodless) they will almost certainly go after the Phillippines immediately (which they are already making plays at it in diplomatic/economic ways) because the Philippines are the linchpin of the entire Pacific Theater just as they were in WWII; the Philippines are the most important strategic piece of territory in the world by far and thus will continue to be a conflict center between Great Powers moving forward; it is abundantly clear that this kind of conflict is very real and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future just as it had been for hundreds of years before 1989.

Ranking the Top 10 Movies Per Decade Since the 1960s (Mental Exercise)

Greetings sillies,

This is purely a mental exercise for my own enjoyment, the only parameter is that I've seen the movie in question but it could be fun to look at in 20-30 years assuming no nuclear apocalypse. My Top 5 movies as of this writing are Unforgiven, Taxi Driver, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Seven Samurai, and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. 1960's: 1. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly 2. Once Upon a Time in the West 3. Dr. Strangelove 4. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 5. Cool Hand Luke 6. West Side Story 7. The Apartment 8. Sanjuro 9. A Fistful of Dollars 10. Goldfinger.................................................................................................................... 1970's: 1. Taxi Driver 2. French Connection 3. The Deer Hunter 4. Josey Wales 5. The Sting 6. Silver Streak 7. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 8. Alien 9. Chinatown 10. Monty Python and the Holy Grail.................................................................................................................. 1980's: 1. The Princess Bride 2. Once Upon a Time in America 3. The Shining 4. Blue Velvet 5. Raging Bull 6. The Untouchables 7. The Terminator 8. Robocop 9. Die Hard 10. Willow............................................................................................................................ 1990's: 1. Unforgiven 2. Total Recall 3. Starship Troopers 4. Terminator 2 5. Goodfellas 6. The Usual Suspects 7. The Truman Show 8. Reservoir Dogs 9. Groundhog Day 10. Shawshank Redemption................................................................................................ 2000's: 1. No Country For Old Men 2. There Will Be Blood 3. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans 4. The Fellowship of the Ring 5. The Prestige 6. In Bruges 7. Oldboy 8. Training Day 9. The Dark Knight 10. Road to Perdition................................................................................................................... 2010's: 1. Mad Max Fury Road 2. Blade Runner 2049 3. Parasite 4. Edge of Tomorrow 5. Logan 6. Inception 7. Mud 8. Shape of Water 9. Annihilation 10. Sorry to Bother You.................................................................................................................. 2020's: ??? Dune, Top Gun, Banshees in some order I suppose........................................................................................................................ I did write reviews for a decent number of the 2010s movies, 80s and 90s I can come up with like 25 that are worthy but arbitrary restrictions and what not.