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Godfree Roberts's avatar

Great stuff!

Expect the Big Break next winter.

Once Ukraine is handled, will tell the EU close US bases and NATO, or let your citizens starve as they freeze to death in the cold.

Why should long-suffering Russians continue providing abundant, affordable, reliable energy to countries that conspired to destroy them and lied about Minsk II for seven years?

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John Merryman's avatar

Patrick,

I think you are overthinking this.

Consider what conditions likely caused the vast majority of people to migrate to the New World. They were the expendables of wherever they came from. Even the Africans sold into slavery weren't princes and princesses swept up by white slavers, but the expendables sold into slavery, rather than being massacred, as so often was the fates of lots of those on the losing side of history. All the refugees of wars, revolutions, counter revolutions, etc. Then they come here and their descendants generally prospered over the last couple hundred years of parabolic economic growth. I don't know that I'd call them geophobes, so much as econophobes. It's not like they had any reason or desire to look back.

Meanwhile those cultures in the Old World have millennia of cultural, tribal and national successes and failures to teach them some degree of circumspection. As the Greeks would say, "Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, first they make lucky."

Heck, when the country had the choice of Jimmy Carter saying to put on a sweater, or Ronald Reagan saying to put it on the credit card, there was no looking back. We only know forward.

This doesn't just apply to the average American, but to those who think they know better. We only play checkers, where the only moves are forward, until you get to the other side of the board and are crowned a king.

When all is said and done, we won't be any geographically wiser, because when the dollar finally breaks, the states will start issuing their own currencies and foreign policy will be between Texas and California, not the US and the rest. Then we come back down to an earth that is quite local.

Nature is cycles. Expand, consolidate. Like rings on a tree. It's just some people who are linear and goal oriented.

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