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The Liminality of Sovereignty

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Monk had a brother who wrote instruction manuals for a living. If he wrote textbooks for the School of Foreign Service, they might look like this. Here I want to credit John K. Hord with having a major influence on me—or discredit him, depending on what you think of my work. This gentleman has for years been engaged in an analysis of historical processes. He builds upon the creations of predecessors, notably Toynbee, but in my opinion he is truly building. Seeking to cover all known societies to date, he produced a gigantic volume of text, which he was assembling and condensing for publication. I got enthusiastic and asked for more, and saw that this was the Leitmotiv of macrohistory: the interplay of free will and fate, not in any mystical sense but as something concretely describable. Alas, the book never materialized. Briefly—and therefore, I fear, rather misleadingly and very incompletely—put, he seems to have found a pattern which civilizations have had a strong, almost (if not qu...
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"It's an Attack!"

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Financial Times advises China to de-industrialize not long after CCP deflated that real-estate bubble. Well, reduce industrial capacity at any rate. Zhu Rongji is being raised as an example China's bourgeoisie knew what they were getting into. They may have received that one golden star on China's national flag, but they never forgot what the large one represents. The sorest losers of China's real estate "crash" is the Western bourgeoisie, including firms like Blackstone. Private equity, my favorite thing to hate. Indeed they were some of its main targets. They spent decades "investing" in China's housing boom, salivating over the prospect that China's housing market would financialize. That China would ultimately do to itself what they had already done to the US - treat houses like a tradable commodity, and benefit from the endless cycle of buying and selling. To turn people's homes into casino chips - to be endlessly bought, sold, inflated,...
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