Reuters newsroom getting drunk in the day and printing whatever ChatGPT says.

The millennials are behaving 100% rationally. Why buy over-pumped housecoin when the people who own all of it are going to start dying and when they do, it's going to dump a SHITLOAD of inventory onto the market.

Military service is almost always a bad idea for the same reason that political violence is.

There's a 99.999999% chance you're being hustled as a pawn to line someone else's pocket.

There is a caveat though: When someone is trying to force you into military service, that's the time when it's rational to go Full Taliban on their asses.

No.

Not if they convert it to something else as soon as they receive it.

Anyway, the point is the USD is still the cleanest dirty shirt and there's nothing on the horizon which can seriously threaten it (except Bitcoin, but that's very much on the horizon)

The fact that they wire USD through the SWIFT system doesn't really matter that much. You can wire EUR or JPY as long as it's exchangeable. What matters is what the recipient holds / invests in.

Countries tend to hold USD because they have USD denominated debts, and every other currency inflates faster than the USD so it just makes sense.

BTC may threaten the USD though, when it gets large enough.

Assets of a few people were frozen, and yes, that did cause a lot of consternation. But nobody is seriously moving away from the dollar.

BRICS-Coin is a meme, petrodollar is also largely a meme, the petrodollar system did exist for a few years in the 70s, but what floats the dollar now is the fact that it has the deepest credit markets. If you want to borrow money, you borrow USD, there just isn't any competitor out there.

The Dollar is weakening, but it is at a snail's pace and the US is far closer to a revolution in the oligarchy than it is to a loss of global dollar dominance. There is one caveat however: The USD may collapse if it is intentionally collapsed by the US government.

Inb4 "what's this zoo thing and how do you not get banned for saying that?"

2. The West needs Russia to stay Russian.

While Russia will always want to come back to The West, The West, likewise, needs Russia to stay alive and sovereign. If Russia becomes too much weakened, then it may become unable to hold up against China's loving embrace, and this would be an unmitigated disaster for both Russia and The West. The Western oligarchy will be damned to hell before it will ever allow a single power structure to control the entire Asian continent.

To this end, it is highly unlikely that The West will ever allow Russia to truly LOSE, for to do so creates far too much risk that China will rush in to Stabilize The Situation, and they will take up all of the defensive positions and lock The West out, seizing effective control over Russia.

This dynamic creates an overarching theme for WW3 (or whatever you want to call it), Russia wants to go from being a relatively weak western-aligned country like Brazil to a relatively powerful western-aligned country like India, and do so by temporarily becoming a pariah. Whatever the pundits will say, The West is going to accept this, because Russia is not their real problem, China is.

Some thoughts about Russia & WW3:

1. Russia will always come back to The West.

Why? Because The West is the only game in town, and it's the game Russia has played since at least the fall of the Soviet Union. Russian oligarchs send their kids to school in The West, they have vacation homes in The West, they keep their money in dollar bank accounts and have their investments in The West.

Russia doesn't have what it takes to go off on it's own, and trying to do so would end them up becoming a backwater like Iran. The only country who can seriously even consider a break with The West is China.

For Russia, the only possible move would be cozying up to China, and to do this would be a massive break from tradition. Russian top brass are decidedly NOT Chinese. They don't keep their money in Chinese bank accounts, they don't own Chinese real estate, they don't invest in Chinese companies. Like I said, they're Western.

It's not just a difficult transition, it is actually a BAD move. Russia has figured out how to influence politics in The West and is able to jokey for a seat at the table. The Chinese will be damned if they ever let a non-Chinese person influence Chinese politics. So cozying up to China is a one-way-street, China will gain power over Russia and that's it.

I don't really buy the Satan and false light stuff, but that's no surprise, I'm not religious.

However, the narrative that the Anglo-American power has installed Trump, then Biden, and is now building popular support for Trump before re-installing him again... This is a plausible one.

Definitely not average. He's a Swiss investor & geopolitics wonk. Definitely not pro-communist in any way, but his position is that The West has essentially turned its back on ZA and the place is being left to descend into Mad Max anarchy.

Hmm