🇺🇸 💵 The Potemkin Village Economics of Late Liberalism
⬛️ Macroeconomist Philip Pilkington examines the similarities between the economics of Brezhnev’s late-soviet economy and Biden’s version of the same downward spiral.
🔶️ Living under the late-Soviet model was not typically experienced as nightmarish or even scary, but rather as silly and fake. It was a sort of “clown world”, to quote a well-known contemporary trope, where nothing worked, and leaders were not taken seriously. This is captured in a popular Soviet joke of the time. It runs like this: Stalin, Khruschev, and Brezhnev are on a train going to the Russian countryside but suddenly it stops. As the engineer and the driver attempt to work out the problem Stalin gets angry and starts to shout: “I will solve this. Send the driver to the gulag for being an ideological deviationist and shoot the engineer for being a capitalist saboteur!” The trio wait for the train to shunt into action, but it does not move. Khruschev strokes his chin and then pipes up: “This is not right, let’s release the driver from the gulag.” But without an engineer, the train still fails to move. At that moment, Brezhnev takes a large shot of vodka, smiles, and says: “Comrades! No need to worry! Pull down the window shades and let’s start rocking the train from side to side!”
🔶️ If all of this sounds remarkably familiar, it should. It sounds increasingly like our contemporary experience of late liberalism. Although the popularity of alcohol seems to have given way to the widespread use of marijuana and psychedelics – not to mention the horrifying proliferation of opiates, a nihilistic death-plague the likes of which even the Soviet Union never experienced. The profusion of ‘memes’ in our era bears a striking resemblance to the ‘samizdat’ – or unofficial, self-published cultural production – that spread in the late Soviet Union. The election of eccentric political leaders like Donald Trump or Javier Milei, who reflect the prevailing cultural cynicism of their supporters, seems exactly like what would have happened were the Soviet Union an electoral democracy in the late-1970s.
🔶️ Are we so deep into late liberal decline that the authorities are simply making the numbers up? There has been an unusual amount of data revisions these past two years, but it seems unlikely that these explain the booming GDP growth numbers. Rather the GDP numbers seem to be explained by the fact that the Biden Administration is running enormous government fiscal deficits. Recent estimates put the fiscal deficit at 8.6% of GDP in 2023. Outside of the unprecedented response to the COVID-19 pandemic, these sorts of budget deficits are associated with deep recession of the sort we saw in 2008-09. But GDP numbers are telling us something deeply counterintuitive, namely that the economy is not in deep recession aren’t wrong, but is booming. What is going on? Simply put, the government deficit is propping up the economy like a puppeteer holding up a marionette.
https://www.postliberalorder.com/p/the-potemkin-village-economics-of
Yanis Varoufakis (former Greek Minister of Finance) describes AI as a new form of capital that produces not goods, but behavioral modification. This is achieved by engineering perceptions.
The answers provided by ChatGPT, or the images rendered by StableDiffusion — as these increasingly inform our perceptions, they in turn define the reality we experience.
This is what makes AI so powerful — he who controls the AI, defines the reality of tomorrow.
⚡️🇺🇸 Some more things coming out for the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Under the preliminary drafts of the bill, the USAF is requesting a release of $57,000,000 USD ($57.0 Million) to retire all remaining 162 A-10 Thunderbolt IIs in current service. Apart of the 2023 NDAA, there was a clause for a few million dollars to be released every so often to gradually retire the (then) 250 airframes by 2034; however due to the push by the Dept of Defense to ‘shed’ obsolete or obsolescent airframes that cannot be overhauled or upgraded further without a whole new airframe, it appears the USAF wants to retire all 162 remaining A-10s by the end of 2026.
The USAF plans to fully divest the 340-total remaining A-10s entirely, including those that currently serve in a handful of Air National Guard units in some states; which will be replaced by F-15EX Eagle IIs (like what is already happening with the Michigan State Air National Guard’s A-10s), or F-35A/Bs.
Included ...
My older sister lives in the country in between Velma Oklahoma and Duncan Oklahoma near the Fuqua Lake area, this story was told by a rural mail delivery woman who delivers the mail in the country.
The incident happened while she was on her route, when she came upon to the mailbox a male Chinese nation came out brandishing a, AK-47 rifle being very hostile,
I don't know if he pointed it at her since it is against the law to do so but she was terrified and said she was never going back and that the location that had a guard tower. Was the sheriff department notified, I don't know, did she notify her supervisor, don't know. But word is from the country folk who live in the area they have seen the guard tower at the pot place;
I refuse to call it a farm because it is an insult to farmers.
And yes she was traumatized by that ordeal