Why is it that Y2K was supposed to have been an earth-shattering event whereas the passing of the first quarter of the 21st century is commonly seen as a nonevent? This in spite of the fact that the world has changed dramatically and that this is something that has become plain to see just as the calendar approached the dividing line between quarters one and two of the 21st century. Here I will just list out some obvious changes that have occurred. For many people around the world these are obvious while others languish in denial. Here is a top-10 list of what I think we should expect in quarter two.
1. The US will no longer be an industrial world power. It will still be a regional power but it is hard to predict for how long. US industrial has treaded water since the turn of the century while other nations have leaped ahead. US industrial production grew by 10% since Y2K and by 0% since 2019. Meanwhile, starting from the turn of the century, China grew by close to 1000%, Russia by over 200%, India by over 320%. So-called “developed nations” (US and Western Europe) have not grown at all since 2019. Western European economies all peaked in 2007-8 except for Germany which peaked in 2017. Italy is the sickest patient of the bunch, its industrial production having decreased by a quarter so far this century.
2. The US will no longer be a military superpower. It is noncompetitive in both its weapons production (Russia can produce artillery shells 10 times faster) and in weapons development (having failed to develop any usable hypersound weapons systems and being far behind in missile defense technology). Its major investment in maritime power is in its aircraft carrier groups and they have been rendered obsolete by precision long-range weapons that can sink an aircraft carrier from a safe distance. Its nuclear deterrent is too old to be considered reliable. The entire US defense establishment, starting with the Pentagon and including the defense contractors and much of US Congress, is utterly corrupt.
3. Much of the terminology that people still habitually use is no longer applicable. There is no longer a “world order” that can be identified. “Globalism” is dead as the planet is splitting up into clubs of nations such as BRICS. “International law” is no longer an item, now that 40 thousand sanctions have been illegally imposed on Russia. Not that Russia is even complaining; since there is no longer a “world order” by which such illegal sanctions can be enforced, they don’t mean much. Nor is there any longer an “international community” to speak of. Its latest reincarnation, the “rules-based international order” constantly prattled about by useless American busybodies, is likewise dead on arrival. Western neoliberalism is now openly rejected by much of the planet, including “universal human values” and with them individualism, feminism, homosexuality and atheism/agnosticism. “Human rights” are falling increasingly out of fashion as much of the world is going back to the older set of universal values of faith, loyalty, honor, duty, merit and privilege earned through public service. Increasing numbers of Western families are claiming political refuge from the LGBT scourge by emigrating to Russia, Americans foremost among them (LGBT has been declared extremist and outlawed in Russia).
4. Given the shambles of electoral politics in the US and in Europe, Western-style “democracy” is no longer anything that anyone could reasonably aspire to. After the failure of every method legal and illegal to get rid of Trump, he is headed for inauguration — and that’s the best outcome, since the will of the people was not suppressed. In other Western “democracies” the picture is not so rosy: in France, an effort is being made to disqualify Marine Le Pen from running, to make sure that she doesn’t gain the presidency; in Germany, similar efforts are being made to outlaw Alternative for Germany. Add to that a failed color revolution attempt in Georgia after the Georgians did the unspeakable and voted for a government that is not anti-Russian. And Romania wasn’t even allowed to get that far: its election results were invalidated after a non-anti-Russian outsider won in the first round. And then there is that “young democracy” — the Ukraine — still run by a president whose term has expired last May.
5. Climate catastrophism is no longer in fashion. Blaming nonexistent “global warming” on a trace chemical — CO2, which is actually plant food — no longer works. The “greenest” nation in the world, thanks to hydroelectric power and huge boreal forests, turns out to be Russia — oops! Solar panels and wind generators are nonrenewable: they have to be purchased again and again — from China! They are also not too useful because of the problem of intermittency, environmentally destructive and a major toxic waste disposal hazard. Having been swindled into pursuing the empty promise of “renewable energy”, the US and Europe have lost the ability to build nuclear power plants quickly enough or cheaply enough to make a difference while Russia and China have both leaped ahead of them. Russia is now the main provider of nuclear power technology in the world and has succeeded in closing the nuclear fuel cycle, solving the problem of high-level nuclear waste disposal. Industrialists in the US are now talking about new nuclear power development but have no ability or expertise to make it happen.
6. Peak Oil is back on the menu. Since the conventional oil peak of 2005-6, shale oil produced in the US has made up for production declines just about everywhere else. But now it turns out that shale oil has also peaked at the very end of Q1 XXI and is now trending down. Meanwhile, Russia, which is another major oil producer, is increasingly finding better uses for its oil than to export it. It is now reasonable to expect that sometime not too far into quarter two transportation fuels will be in increasingly short supply. Nations that depend on transoceanic shipping will be hurt the most. Of these, we should expect Western Europe to feel the most intense pain, having given up on both Russian hydrocarbon pipelines and nuclear energy and instead choosing to import liquefied natural gas from the US (which won’t be coming for much longer).
7. The number of failed states around the world will continue to increase. At the top of the list for new failed-statedom are the few remaining secular Arab nations. Iraq, Libya and now Syria are now gone; Egypt may be next to fail. The term “territorial integrity,” especially as it applies to various artificial lines on the map drawn in the course of or at the end of the colonial era, is not likely to remain aspirational for much longer. Similarly, the internal territorial boundaries drawn up by Bolsheviks that have miraculously survived the dissolution of the USSR are unlikely to continue to receive the respect they have never deserved. Likewise, “national sovereignty” will no longer be applied willy-nilly to nations that have no national sovereignty and are barely even nations. Syria is a case in point: it is some arbitrary chunk arbitrarily carved out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire. Israel is another. Lots of little statelets scattered around the world — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Abkhazia, Transnistria, South Ossetia… — will need to merge with an actually sovereign entity, which will most likely end up being Russia.<
8. In the absence of anything one might call an international world order or a universal system of international law, the world is becoming increasingly violent and messy. The few nations that retain their sovereignty and territorial integrity will close their borders to migration and will not provide humanitarian aid strictly on humanitarian grounds. They will not have the lattitude to help outsiders at the expense of their own citizens and any political leaders who attempt to do so will quickly be voted out or overthrown. Look at what has been happening with regard to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Palestine: lots of talk and hardly any action — not even symbolic action. Israeli sports teams are allowed to participate in international competitions, no questions asked. Look also at the eagerness with which countries in Europe have started discussing throwing out Syrian refugees as soon as Bashar Assad departed for Moscow, never mind that Syria is dissolving into chaos and civil war before their eyes.
9. As we head into quarter two, artificial intelligence is all the buzz. The new AI chips are so power-hungry that tech companies are considering building new power plants especially to power them. But the reality of AI is not exactly all rosy. First of all, nobody knows how AI systems work; that is, their reasoning process is unfathomable even to the experts and a reasonable guess is that there is no reasoning process involved. It is already recongized that AI systems lie with great alacrity, cannot understand when they lie and when they don’t, and readily contrive utterly false rationales for getting facts wrong. As the internet becomes inundated with content produced by AI systems, which will then serve as input to these same AI systems, a destructive feedback loop will become established, resulting in a garbage-in, garbage-out scenario. Once that happens, people will have to abandon the internet and to seek out printed books from before the advent of AI as the only sources of reliable information. Meanwhile, as AI becomes more and more deeply embedded in social systems, it will cease to be artificial and will become increasingly organic — commingled with human brains — and increasingly unintelligent. In the end, it will be down to very stupid, ignorant people completely reliant on very stupid, ignorant information systems. Once the lights go out, they will no longer know how to boil water.
10. Over the course of quarter two, in various countries and communities around the world, depopulation will rear its ugly head. There are now many places where women give birth to fewer than two children, on average, and this means that the birth rate is below replacement and each next cohort will become smaller than the previous one. South Korea is perhaps the worst, with a fertility rate of just 0.72. This means that each next generation of South Koreans will be barely a third the size of the previous one. That way lies extinction. The survivors will be religious and patriarchal, for these are the communities with the highest birthrates. This may not sit well with certain liberal-minded readers, but the situation happens to be beyond anyone’s control, so why fret about it. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.”
