179 Comments

A "home-run" column, Alex. I've never lived outside America, but have traveled enough to know a few things. The perspective of people like you, who have lived under multiple governments, is priceless.

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Thank you, William!

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A counterintuitive and somewhat intriguing example of governance is the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yes, we have all been taught how bad they are but, since they formed the effective government (following the US withdrawal), they have done some intriguing things. Firstly, they curtailed poppy production (now effectively zero) and commenced a program to encourage agricultural production (during the long occupation years, foodstuffs were imported). They are well into construction of a massive nationwide canal project, to distribute water to previously arid areas, in pursuit of that goal. They are also revitalizing the Trans Afghanistan rail project (allowing the country and Uzbekistan access to Pakistani ports). And yet, to most of the world, they are the very opposite of a democracy.

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Just goes to show you what can happen when the people running things actually care about the people they govern. Megaliths like the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union have long lost touch with their peoples. We know what happened to the Soviet Union. I think we know what is happening to the U.S.A.

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Nice update thank you.

I wonder where is the seed stock that was collected ( circa late 70s, 80s (?) and by whom I can't remember) from the different microclimates of different cultivars that were adapted to that particular mountain valley; feature apricots, cucumbers (?) peaches even (?) All I really remember is the resounding taste that immediately registered in my imagination as somewhere in a past life I had tasted just such an apricot never again to deign to buy the surrogate. As with most 'fruit' here in the US. The first we did with Iraqi agriculture was to designate our GMO substantial equivalence. Is that governance or genocide ?

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Interesting that you say that. We live in Chile, which has never heard of GMO and where the most beautiful, naturally grown fruits and vegetables are grown and purchased locally. The taste is infinitely superior to the supermarket food we have bought in the US. And yet, we are concened that this happy state of affairs will not last for ever, so we purchased a few acres of land and have started to grow our own, as well as building up a seed bank. Clean food is ground zero of good health, so we are focused on this. However, I think the seed bank you are referring to is located in Svalbard, Norway (well in the Arctic circle). As for Afghanistan and the Taliban, I can't say what their thoughts are on GMO. Their reality is that they are cut off from international finance and the poppy production + aid that used to prop them up, so they have no option other than to return to basics and start growing their own food. Of course, they also have a huge unemployment problem so getting their population busy digging ditches is a good start.

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Well Svalbard no doubt but this was collected specifically for Afghanistan to be able to regenerate their agriculture after......the deluge which I have to presume was the war. These were botanists; librarians of the genetic heritage of Afghanistan. Who were, and where are they and/or what happened to those seeds? Now is the time for their return. https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/en/reports/context-culture/plants-of-afghanistan-1-centre-of-global-biodiversity/

OK then. 2012 but still...Thanx, and cheers and GO MEXICO.

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Fascinating. I had no idea. Thanks for sharing. Let's hope Afghanistan has a brighter future than the last few decades.

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take Chilgoza pine trees which produce pine nuts; they generated more revenue than timber it said.

Re prosperity, real prosperity and security like your garden.

When the diplomatic brats, those Communists from the Yugoslav embassy visited our boarding school in the 60s and we entertained them in our 6s room they showed us slides of their life in Yugoslavia. They laughed at our

stunned silence. Our unconscious presumption of privilege dumped on the floor by the color and exuberance of very obviously ordinary daily life.

Truly indescribable.

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Yes I read about that. First off they concentrated on the "meth labs" they were the bigger problem and had to be dealt with first. There were some farmers they had allowed to still grow the poppies because it would impoverish them to eradicate opium poppy growing totally at the time.

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Interesting Alex. Thank you.

I must say that my England falls way short of what I once thought it was. As a boy I thought I was lucky to have been born into one of the best countries in the world. My perspective has changed. Today I view us as having a GOO problem: a Government Of Occupation.

Very simply, among the most observable facts, my local towns are full of over-weight, tattooed, pierced and rather scruffy people.

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I'm not sure why the look of people is relevant.

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It's relevant for me, if not for you. It portrays their mind set. As a child we had 1 fat kid in the class at most. Today fat kids are normal. In England so many people are unhealthy; too many simply fail to nourish themselves.

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And a scruffy appearance also shows a lack of discipline and self respect.

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Yes, people's appearance is a result of a manufactured celebrity culture that is amplified via social media. It's part of the consumer culture that cultivates a group of "industries", after all the services sector has taken over in the combined west as a primary source of employment.

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Censorship is a huge issue. If there is greater freedom and dissemination of news and information, people are better informed and able to make better choices.

Alex mentions above the lack of rules and regulations he experienced in a so called Communist country. It was hardly perfect, but no as bad as we are perhaps led to believe.

My England is sadly infested with what might be described as cultural Marxism.

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The internet enabled greater opportunity for communication, it also enabled via control nodes (big tech) mass surveillance and narrative management. Financial capitalism broke human relations down to the unit (individual) and then proceeds to manipulate value attributes for the purpose of control. Cultural Marxism is a binary for neoliberalism with some hijacked lingo from Das Kapital (comic edition).

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I've not read Das Kapital, the serious or comic edition.

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Ok, so it's about health and not tattoos and piercings then. That I can agree with.

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Tattoos & piercing reflect the state of mind. Each to their own, I find both revolting, but observing the epidemic of these trends about me, I'm increasing in the minority.. Most about me wore face nappies and took the jab too.

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I loathe the epidemic of tattoos & piercing. It disgusts me; except on sailors, builders etc. Each to their own, but not for me thank you.

Yes, it portrays a general sense of the mind-sloth.

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It is indicative of lifestyle and character.

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I find Alex wise beyond his years. I am years older than he is, and I wish I had been as astute as he is when I was 54. I will say this about my childhood in the U.S. When I was 6 to 9 years, we lived in an American suburb. We ran around at will, rode our bikes wherever we liked, explored wooded areas and streams with abandon and basically did what we wanted without fear. The only rule was that we had to show up for meals. Children do not have that freedom today. Further, as an adult with neighbors and friends, I do not know one racist or anyone I find with even the slightest violent tendency. And I and most of my American friends love animals, which I believe is a sign of kindness. Unfortunately, I know several people with financial difficulties. I have a Substack that I use for anxiety relief and to clear my head. I wrote a piece on Norway, a country I visited in 2012. The piece opens with a quote by Jens Stoltenberg. If you can do the work to understand his change of heart, a euphemism for sure as he has none, then I think you can begin to understand what has happened in this world. Norway is a small, less complex country than the U.S. making it simpler to follow the thread of corruption. My definition of freedom is freedom from the strictures caused by immense corruption. Thanks, Alex.

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Thank you, Propaganda Girl!

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I'm 78 and I lived in the USA most of my life. Also Canada, Panamá and briefly, England. I've spent a lot of time in China. I agree with most of what you say but I will add that the America I knew as a child was not the country I live in now. The elites are corrupt, ignorant and murderous and take no trouble to hide it. The press used to be their critics - now they are house dogs. The internet is an irritation which is why they want to destroy it.

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Granted, but my cultural shock and realization that Americans aren't quite so free as is proclaimed was in yhe 1980s. It's only gotten worse from there (for us in Croatia also).

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The elites here in the USA used 911 and the "Patriot Act" to take away much of our freedom. They will keep renewing it because they like it that way.

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I worked for one of the UK privatized companies in the 1990's and experienced first hand the shift from public to private control. The story is not all good or all bad. Firstly, the company's top management when in public ownership were all freemasons - it was the only way to get promoted above a certain level, regardless of competence. Secondly, it was horribly inefficient and overstaffed, with entire departments writing memos to each other. We therefore went through a multi year program to reduce staffing levels, make major overdue capital investments and introduce better practices. Ultimately, after a decade, staffing levels were 25% of what they had been, management was top class and all the freemasons had gone. The challenge was that, thereafter, markets expected us to maintain the same rate of efficiency improvements, indefinitely, which could only be achieved by cuts in service levels. I would argue that then was the right time to renationalize such an essential service.

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Wow. I’ve never lived anywhere other than the US and this strikes me as intuitively true. I will say there is has been a tremendous difference in my subjective perception of freedom here since the turn of the century. It was somewhat gradual after the big event of 2001, but that’s when the control freaks came out of the cold. At the same time, those on the top of the heap began to understand the power of the internet. There is likewise a tremendous difference between the freewheeling early days. But yeah, I don’t feel like I live in a very free country right now.

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I have lived in France, Yugoslavia, the US and China. It's in China that I feel the most free, secure and respected. Chinese police officers are harmless and unarmed.

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Thank you Damien - good feedback!

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Maybe because who really polices in China is their military?

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Not at all. In my 5 years in China I have not seen a single military person. Besides, Chinese people love their military.

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Americans think that anything run by the state is inefficient and uses tax dollars.

Ok then...

The California wildfires primarily affected privately owned utilities and not the municipal (state or city run) ones. Why? Because pge and other private utilities had cut down maintenance and preferred to fix things after it fails.

Like the image of the British rail system, privatization kills service because now you gotta feed a huge vampiric system called "owners" and "shareholders" who make money on mere ownership.

Why are people so brainwashed about this, especially libertarians? I suppose they still dream that they too could be "owners".

Like you experienced in Yugoslavia, my Georgian friend had the same experience and his family was happy. After the collapse, they left for the USA and even though his mother made a lot of money, the family was divided and his father suffered a heart attack and died due to the stress of this rat race culture.

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The Chinese high speed rail routes are not necessarily a great example of progress. For a start, high speed rail costs 5 to 10 X the cost of regular rail. Of the many routes across China, it is really only the Beijing - Shanghai route which has the traffic volume to pay its own way - the rest are massively subsided. The network is a great example of what top down government can achieve but it is not an example of prudent investment.

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I think railways are losing everywhere. Even though the commuter trains I have seen in Belgium are full to overflowing, outside working hours trains run empty, and I know the railway there is heavily subsidized. Here in rural US a few years ago they quit our bus service. There were only a handful a day with only one stop, now we have to drive over an hour to take the bus!

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Yes, and that should be OK. Infrastructure, incl. public transport isn't there to be profitable enterprise but to improve efficiency and lower the cost of transactions for the whole community/economy.

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Think outside the box as the article suggests. Who does the CPC owe this money (debt) to? The CPC owns it's money creation. Banks are State owned. No "foreigner" is going to come knocking on the CPC door demanding the debts be repaid immediately. One part of Western imperialism is to force countries to borrow in Western currencies (i.e. USD) so that the Imperialists can control a country's development. Western Imperialism wants countries to remain forever dependent and under-developed (debt slaves paying foreigners income for doing nothing). China uses "credit creation" to serve society. In China, investments in infrastructure has no time limit; if it pays off (which it usually does) that means money well spent. If investment turns bad then that's a lesson learned and the debt on the balance sheet is simply written off. Understand there is "no foreigner" demanding repayment of debt nor is there a time limit when the investment must be so called "profitable". Westerners are so brainwashed because the "Private Banking Cartel" want to continue taking gains for loaning out pieces of paper created from nothing. It rules over ALL avenues of Western society and ensures via propaganda it's citizens DO NOT know or understand "what a government serving it's society instead of Oligarch's can do".

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I would push back on that argument a little. Yes, foreign holdings of Chinese debt are mostly restricted to sovereign bonds (and they expect to get paid out last, in the event of a crisis) but the local holdings of corporate debt, held mostly by local banks and corporates, are their citizens future pensions, dividends or tax liability (in the event of a bail out). We are all familiar with the argument that the Eisenhower Freeway system paid for itself multiple times over but, equally, bad infrastructure investments have to be paid for from some other source of income and therefore act to drain the vitality of an economy. As I said, the Chinese form of government produces some stunning results but it is also prone to the pursuit of high profile 'political', prestige projects rather than genuinely prudent infrastructure investments.

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As opposed to the Western form of government (captured as it is by market fundamentalism) which is prone to insufficient infrastructure investments altogether.

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But does that subsidy pay off in other ways?? Like attracting more biz to an area? In that sense the loan is paid off and then some. I think that's the driving force behind huge infrastructure projects in the tradition of American political economy born after the War of Independence.

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Of course, there is some element of that but the real question is how is high speed rail superior to regular air travel? The London - Brussels/Paris tunnel & rail link made sence, as landing slots at Heathrow and CDG airports were then freed up for more long haul flights but, to take an opposing example - how would a high speed California rail link be superior to flying LAX - SFO? Or put another way - would the same scale of investment be better spent on metro links around LA? Amazingly, LAX still has no metro rail connection.

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Isn't that by ‘green‘ design?

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If the goal was a reduction in CO2, a far more effective way to achieve that goal would be to build a European type metro system around LA, and stop all those horrible traffic snarl ups.

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LMFAO. CO2 is a problem noW compared to which period in history?

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So, if CO2 is a problem, which periods are you comparing to????

1. Precambrian??

2. Paleozoic??

3. Cambrian??

4. Mesozoic??

5. Devonian??

6. Triassic??

7. Jurassic??

8. Cretaceous??

9. Paleogene??

10. Early Eocene??

Or are you saying CO2 isn't a prob?? My bad if I have read things wrong.

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https://climatethemovie.net/

here are 150+ real scientists telling how that misunderstanding came to be - Dr Willie Soon is a must to see.

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I wasn't trying to take a position on the man made CO2 question but to state, simply, that if that is the government's goal, high speed rail is a bad way to achieve that goal.

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CO2 levels were ALWAYS much higher in the nearly 4 billion years of Earth history than today.

The current problem is not the level of CO2 but the very high speed or rate of change — the insufficient time for nature adaptation to the rate of change.

"Earth’s CO2 is kept in check on long time scales because as Earth warms, the rate that CO2 is used up by weathering increases. Second, high CO2 and warm climates are not intrinsically bad for life. What is bad is rapid change. Populations can have a hard time adapting rapidly. So, the fact that pCO2 today is about 420 parts per million is not necessarily a problem for life. The fact/problem that pCO2 has increased by more than a third in my lifetime is.

Prof. Andrew Knoll, Harvard geology professor and author of

“A Brief History of Earth” book

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Liberal Democracy is now just rule by international finance capitalism and the Merchant class.

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Yes, correct.

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Thanks - great post!

And *sigh* It was certainly MUCH better when I was a kid growing up (in Atlantic Canada). Much closer to your childhood. My kids did not experience that and I may never have grandkids because, well, I have 2 grown men living in my home because they can't survive on the jobs that we could survive on. I long for a change but it seems that most of the world is in this trap.

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I feel your pain my friend. My two kids had their minds poisoned by the educational system. Sacrificing for private school gave them the basis for good professions but I am afraid I will not live to see grandchildren either. My partner and I consider ourselves so lucky to have grown up in the 60’s and 70’s. They were turbulent times and the seeds of he current malaise were being nurtured by the elites in power and education, but man we had fun. And there was an overall sense of optimism that seems to have evaporated. I grew up and live in Western Canada and visit Toronto, the center of power here in Canada, only occasionally. I wouldn’t live there for free.

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Great article Alex. Despite having lived half my adult life (I'm 61) out of the US, your writings have still influenced my thinking a great deal. I have traveled far and wide myself, for both fun and work. I lived in 2 "communist" countries for 2 years each, China and Vietnam, one Kingdom (Thailand, many years), and long stints in a numerous others.

I am starting to view the "system" as less important than the society. I think a moral and just society can be a great place to live, no matter what system they live under (Thailand, Japan, etc). I am coming to the same conclusion with monetary systems. Corrupt bankers will destroy any currency. Blaming the tool is the argument many Umuricans make against gun control, but I think it is analagous to both monetary systems and systems of government. Don't blame the tool, but the people wielding the tool.

A lot of the "west" has gone off the rails, culturally and morally. Japan and China both have serious problems culturally as well, for different reasons. I think most of China's are a result of the Marxist takeover. From what I have heard, Xi is doing his best to fix this thru education and other reforms. I wish him and the Chinese people well. I think Russia and a lot of the east are returning to their roots as well.

A lot of the west first has to deal with their corrupt Oligarchic governments. No out of control system of government can ever "reform" itself. And, we have to fix ourselves, and our societies. I don't believe any successful reform is possible without a moral and just populace. To get there, unfortunately, generally requires great hardship.

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Thank you John!

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I like the idea of not adhering to one system of government, since the whole characterisation of ‘right’ and ‘left’, has changed during my lifetime, not to mention ‘far right’, ‘fascist’, ‘communist’, etc. It allows politicians to take what’s good from any system, to unite when they agree, rather than having to abide by party guidelines. This would encourage people to honestly follow their own convictions. Voters would need to trust the person rather than his/her promises, which often evaporate once in office.

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Capitalism is a relatively new system based upon false premises. To Americans, it is a religion. How often during a conversation, do you hear someone say “ I believe in Capitalism “. It is a matter of faith that trumps their belief in God. This belief allows them, in good faith, to act awfully.

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Capitalism is the personal liberty to invest in one’s own capabilities to produce manufactured goods and/or provide services, and to sell those goods and/or services at a profit. Profits are the excess over the costs of manufacturing goods and/or providing services, and profits are either paid to the owners of the business, paid to the employees of the business, or invested back into business.

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Thank you Boris!

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