The Big Three: US / China / Russia Strengths and Weakness

Russia is the Surprising Winner

Each of the big three superpowers has strengths and weaknesses, but Russia seems to have a secret weapon. Which is a lot of White people, and not too many non-Whites.

Below is a compilation of scenes from American and European cities, and St. Petersburg Russia:

This tracks with videos I have seen on the Alex Christoforou Channel (the guy with a beard on the Duran, his father was a foreign minister in one of Greece’s governments so he is connected). Christoforuou has done several videos where he just walks around in St. Petersberg or Moscow (Summer only naturally) and it was remarkable. While there was some graffiti visible, and there were some run down buildings, everything by Western standards was clean. There was not a tidal wave of trash all over the place. There were no shambling armies of crazy homeless. Nor were there sullen, non White men glaring at you and ready to spring into violence. Women walked around un-accompanied, without seemingly any fear. Nor did I see lots and lots of police, as is common in China.

For the most part, Russia seems self-governed. And that is likely its "secret weapon" in weathering the sanctions. Its population seems prosperous, compared to the West. Its cities far cleaner. Far less groups of non-Whites to degrade the infrastructure and create massive Welfare Costs.

To be sure, Russia has its problems. It does have a substantial number of Central Asian immigrants, who seem to be kept on the periphery, and at any rate do not have the sort of privileged immunity from law enforcement that is standard for non-Whites, particularly low IQ non-Whites, in the West. Russia has corruption issues, to be sure. But just by judging the physical inventory and how people behave, it looks like a bigger, slightly poorer Switzerland:

[Note, the industrial city of Bern, right on the German border, is considerably more gritty, poor, graffiti ridden, and generally run down. So even a place like wealthy Switzerland will have problem cities. You can see videos of Bern on Youtube and judge for yourself.]

So what else does Russia have going for it?

It has lots of energy. And food. And raw materials. Including iron ore, coal, rare earth minerals, and more. It has, in places, lots of hydro electric power. It has an educated, mostly White, population that has seen its living standard rise not fall for the last twenty five years. It has an intelligent, realistic leadership that does not live in fantasies and is sober and cautious. Its leadership cadres seem well poised to take over when leadership at all levels inevitably turns over, in the meantime its leadership overall is fairly young, particularly compared to both China and the United States.

Russia lacks any real sea coast, which is both a plus and minus. A minus in that it cannot easily project naval power, a plus in that the dominant naval power, the US, has a very hard time sailing the US Navy up Russian rivers to get to Moscow much less land east of the Urals.

As long as Russia can avoid serious manpower losses, which owing to demographic decline and the mass casualties guaranteed by Stalin’s conduct during WWII (demanding troops stand and fight and die during Barbarossa) which has fed that demographic decline, Russia stands to be the most dominant of the big three powers. Which is not what people expected at the End of History.

China, in turn, has some fairly large problems. Mostly due to the corruption of the Communist Party and everyone in it, and the destruction of Chinese society that predated Communism but was completed during the Cultural Revolution.

Zerohedge has a story on a whole host of people in China being arrested, link here:

Zerohedge Link

These were people in charge of China’s "Big Data" initiative, that was supposed to be its critical advantage over the West. Most of the arrests seem to be centered around corruption. Data centers never built, all sorts of nepotistic contracts let that created nothing, skimming off the top, bottom and middle. This is endemic within China.

Its an issue of trust, and one in a largely homogeneous, overwhelmingly majority ethnic Han Chinese nation. Everyone in the big cities and small, until you get to Tibetan highlands (where Chinese women cannot give birth) or the Uighur / Central Asian West, is Chinese. Han Chinese. The mono ethnic society might be necessary, but it is not in itself sufficient to create a high trust society.

Shanghai looks like a richer Zurich:

There is a LOT of money in that city, you can see it in the people, all wearing for the most part, new clothes, not worn, lots of shops, nothing boarded up. No homeless (they certainly do exist in Beijing):

The video above has some less affluent areas of China, so the issue with China is that there are extremes of coastal wealth in some cities, particularly for those connected to the CCP, and for those without, utter poverty (but without critically the disorder cause by the non-White homeless in the US, or the White drugged out homeless in the US).

China has a very large rural poor population, which makes Mississippi look wealthy. The worst rural poverty in places like West Virginia, is far wealthier than China’s rural poverty. These regions have been getting poorer, not richer. There is no real social safety net in China. Savings are insecure, as the CCP can and will take them for any reason. Generally because a local official wants them. Corruption snowballs. Corrupt national leaders demand payoffs from corrupt regional leaders who in turn demand payoffs from local leaders who in turn lean on the ordinary person.

This is why places like Irvine are choc-a-bloc with Chinese money building and buying apartments. Its a way to stash money (through students attending local schools like UCI) and a work-around for export controls. You will see some princelings and princesses driving very expensive cars: Neon Green Bentleys seem to be the choice of your sophisticated Chinese princeling. Lesser wealthy buy apartments, and less expensive cars. If need be, they can be flipped and they are more protected than a bank account balance.

Trust in China is very, very low. No one believes the government. Certainly no one acts as if the Government, Local, Regional, or National, will not immediately seize cash, property, and other assets in China for any reason especially that officials just want them.

China has also become a fairly old society, fairly quickly. The one child policy, and selective sex abortion, have also led to at least 30 million men who will never have a girlfriend much less a wife. These men are just "lying flat" and doing the very minimal possible. And, as a side note, China must deploy lots, and lots, and lots of police and internal security. This drives up costs and is just more evidence to the people that the authorities hate and fear them.

China has lots of smart people. Their historic problem has been they have been unable to harness their smart people in any real scale for any real sustained period. As official corruption just cascades down like a waterfall of feces, onto the people.

China does not have lots, and lots of resources. It has historically been resource poor, there are few navigable rivers to provide cheap transport into the interior from the coast. Moreover they lack rare earth minerals (though they have the world’s refining capacity for them), food and arable land, and their coastline allowing them naval power also allows hostile nations to attack them from the sea.

China does not seem to be able to "scale" in the way that Russia has done. They have provided wealth in some areas, but the ever pervasive, non-stop corruption despite severe penalties, simply prevents Chinese people from trusting each other and cooperating. And their huge (and mostly hidden) reservoir of the rural impoverished are a huge drag on China’s ability to compete.

As for the US, its a mixed bag.

Adam Carolla recently visited Malibu six months to the day after the fires:

As he notes, people with $10-$15 million dollar homes on the beach, can’t get much more done than having the debris hauled away. They have money. There is manpower to rebuild these homes. Yet the lots just sit there. On the hillsides too. These are people who have connections. They are wealthy, many famous, often with the ability to call up Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama, and have their calls returned fairly quickly. And they cannot get their homes rebuilt.

This is because the critical American weakness is predatory bureaucracy in Blue cities and States. Mayor Karen Bass, and Governor Gavin Newsom, do not want the homes rebuilt. So they are making sure it is as difficult as it can get to rebuild them. [The same thing is happening in Pasadena.]

Questions abound as to why both are doing this, but doing this they are. Carolla predicted it right after the fires, too. He nailed it.

It might be that they have plans with various nefarious groups to turn these places into high rise slums. By building what amounts to ‘Peachtrees’ tower in the movie Dredd, all over the burn areas. This will allow them to make the West side and Pasadena into a giant slum, which will drive out the remaining upper class people and allow even more criminals, gangs, and homeless to move in. Which means no real supervision and endless grift of various public moneys. While providing a vote bank for Blue States.

It might be that they want to turn the burnt out homes into a conservation easement, with sweetheart contracting for connected donors. Or something else. It might just be they are stupid, slow witted, and obstinate and that the actual people who do the day to day operations are immune even to the influence of the Mayor and Governor and do whatever they want: which is nothing. The State of California and the City of Los Angeles as one giant DMV office.

I suspect the latter is the culprit. Carolla through extensive remodeling of his own homes familiar with the type of people who work for the City and County and State. Which is likely why he was so accurate in his predictions.

Corruption of course, abounds in the US, in the Blue and Red cities.

LAist Link Here

The recent audit above of the LA Homeless agency, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, found essentially that nearly all the money was essentially stolen. How much? About $2.4 billion.

There has been no comment so far by LAHSA Chief Executive Va Lecia Adams Kellum, who has been leading LAHSA for the past two years. She was in charge for the last 15 months of the timeframe reviewed by auditors, which covered mid-2020 to mid-2024.

Among the payments that have had no performance reports to LAHSA were $1.7 million last year to Adams Kellum’s husband’s employer, under a $2.1 million contract Adams Kellum signed in a breach of ethics rules, according to a records request response to LAist. Another with no performance reports was a $60,000 LAHSA consulting contract for Adams Kellum to advise the mayor in the six weeks leading up to becoming LAHSA’s CEO, according to a records response to Laist.

And yes, the Trump DoJ is investigating both the City of LA, and the County of Los Angeles homeless spending, along with the State of California DoJ. The County of Los Angeles has even bigger sums stolen, allegedly.

Here is the Santa Monica station (end of the line for the A line / Yellow Line) at night, with Sheriff’s Deputies doing a sweep:

And the same thing in the morning:

This is the biggest unseen cost for the United States. The dead flat drain our cities are, as a giant homeless, crazy, and poor housing platform. With the metro transit being basically a rolling homeless hotel. Compare and contrast the Switzerland trams, with this one.

Just look at the cost for EMTs at the Santa Monica end of line Station. The "outreach" Metro people who give housing assistance information and vouchers to the homeless. The cost of the Sheriffs deputies, and the Metro armed police. Now pencil that out for every major city in the US.

America, as opposed to Russian cities, are giant messes of "Diversity is Strength" cost sinks.

Yes, we can and should feel compassion for the mostly diverse and vibrant homeless. They live sad and horrible lives. Pity is the natural instinct of the decent towards them. However, that does not change the fact that these people are a dead weight cost to society, and one that grows and grows and grows. From the film I’ve seen of Segregated cities like New Orleans, not lacking in basketball-Americans, and various source material including the autobiography of Louis Armstrong, who had some very strong opinions on the New Orleans of his youth (Segregation was not the half of his anger, the man was placed in an orphanage as his mother could not stop drinking enough to work, his father walked out for cigs and never came back). According to Armstrong, there was nothing like these scenes in New Orleans of the 1890s. This disorder was simply not seen in places like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, or even Baltimore, or Gary Indiana, or Cleveland. None of which lacked for black people.

Western societies not only encourage this sort of thing, and the street disorder seen in the very first video, they revel in them. As it allows various grifters to grift, and makes ordinary people miserable which is the desire of the managerial class in the West.

The US has unparalleled food, energy, and natural resources. We are rich in coal, natural gas, oil, arable land, with a large and educated population. Our rural poor are small in number, and nothing like China’s poverty. Our rivers in the East are navigable, and the Mississippi / Ohio rivers form a natural highway to move large industrial amounts of materials around the industrial heartland. Water is the cheapest form of transport as it reduces friction the most.

America has corruption, but nothing like the sheer vastness of China’s. Most people still trust that the government will not simply take their money because an official wants it. Americans are not frantically stuffing their money into foreign assets, though the bitcoin enthusiasm may be a harbinger that things are not staying that way.

It is just the crushing, absolute monstrosity of Diversity unchecked, see Skid Row in LA a few months ago:

It looks like, slowly but surely, we are disengaging with Ukraine and will eventually be out of the Ukraine War business. We simply got beat by Russia’s superior ability to mobilize its forces, unburdened by Diversity. This is why they can produce about ten times our shell production, about 15 times our missile production, and we can’t even produce hypersonic missiles while they can. They don’t have magic. They just don’t have the dead weight of diversity.

Which means, if we really are determined to fight China for control of the Pacific (Taiwan is just one of many Chinese targets) we cannot have diversity and expect to win. Even with all of China’s problems which are severe, diversity is just that much of a dead weight upon our back.