Time to bomb TikTokLand
Corrupt elites need an enemy, and they’ve found a new one
There’s an age-old pattern. As a nation/state/empire ages, its ruling elites sit at the pinnacle of power and wealth. No matter which direction they look, it’s downhill. They become fearful, everything is a threat – a virus, a bear market, Russia, China, the future itself. One of the funniest things to happen recently was that the free thinkers in the US Congress voted overwhelmingly to ban TikTok, the social-media app where the youth share short videos. One of the reasons given was that lawmakers thought the app was “dumbing down America’s youth”.
Really? Not Facebook. Not The New York Times. Not Paul Krugman. Not breakfast TV. Not the Congress. Not the schools. Not the parents who let their children waste their time with electronic gadgets. Neither Biden nor Trump. Nope.
Typical of a late-stage, degenerate empire, members of Congress are eager to protect themselves from anything new. Another claim made against TikTok is that it may collect data that could be used against us. What data? Where is it kept? What do they do with it? How would it be used against us? What damage could a Chinese-owned app do that our own insipid media cannot? The politicians have no idea, but they’d send troops to TikTokLand, if they knew where to find it.
Still another pattern: over time, ruling elites are prone to becoming corrupt and incompetent. They favour war and inflation, partly as a way to keep the future from happening and partly as a way to continue to transfer more wealth and power to themselves. The increased supply of war and inflation leads to a decline in their value. Eventually, the elites cannot win a war (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Ukraine), nor control inflation.
In theory, a democracy is supposed to solve the problem of decay at the top. The voters are supposed to “throw the bums out”, and elect new, more vigorous leaders. But where are these new leaders? In smallish communities, democracy seems to work. But in practice, in a large government, the political parties, Congress, the administration, the press, Wall Street, powerful donors, lobbyists, special interests, and the firepower industry all lock arms to block change. You end up with geriatric leaders and disastrous policies.
Who really wants a rematch between Biden and Trump? We all know who they are, what they are, and what they will do. And what they won’t do. And neither of them, neither the fool or the knave, will face up to the most obvious crisis in America’s history, or avoid it in the most obvious way.
We’re talking about the debt. Both Biden and Trump risk sending US debt levels into dangerous territory as Washington fails to grasp that the era of ultra-low interest rates won’t come back, Harvard university economics professor Kenneth Rogoff told Bloomberg. Biden’s recent State of the Union speech suggested he planned to rack up more debt. “We have really no idea what Donald Trump will do, but that’s what he did last time he was president – good guess he will do it again,” Rogoff said, referring to widening fiscal deficits when Trump was president in 2017-2021.
Since the last major financial crisis the feds have added a staggering $25trn in new debt. And they’re on course to add another $16trn, according to their own budget projections, over the next ten years. If they don’t change course soon, there will be hell to pay. What that hell will look like, we will discover along with everyone else. But it is sure to include more inflation and more war.
“If politicians don’t change course soon, there’ll be hell to pay”