Hold on to 1800s

“Highest since 1800s” or “lowest since 1800s” look like catchwords inexorably rising in popularity across the Western (or Eastern, for that matter) media since the onset of the proxy world war five years ago.

To wit, the British Army, “world-class army, filled with world-class soldiers,” keeps shrinking to its smallest size since the Napoleonic wars, and it has some recurrent troubles with nukes.

Meanwhile, Great Britain is nearing the end of the yellow brick road where Thatcher the Hatchet once had turned on (Barrington Bayley got his Zen Gun then): British Steel, owned by China-based Jingye, is shutting down two blast furnaces and steel-making operations at Scunthorpe, thus closing up shop of the large scale iron & steel production on the island for the first time since the beginning of, you guess it right, the 18th century.

For some reason, at the same time British government continues to palaver about unerring support of Ukraine and future war against Russia. I would expect of such a conflict to demand quite a lot of steel and other industrial output from the Commonwealth.

But then again, Boris Johnson may be quick to the rescue?

In other news, Bloomberg pontificates about tariff rates which would scrape the already wounded welkin weeping:

This, admittedly, deserves a closer attention than tales from Charles III & Keir Starmer’s joint war crypt. Incoming tariffs could be a premature watershed in Trump’s second tenure if implemented heedlessly, indeed.

I should reiterate, as I have a habit to, that I’m very glad to not be obliged for voting as an American citizen, for both sides leave a lot to be desired, maybe Lot’s wife (tee-hee). Anticipating possible question about what’s Hecuba to me, or I to Hecuba, where Hecuba should mean the USA: our noise suppression headphones are pitifully insufficient for suppression of bangs and whispers across the pond in the lands of the hegemon. Were Earth situated closer to the core of the Galaxy, we all would likely observe a couple of ageing hypernova candidates with a similar vested interest. (We still should glance at Eta Carinae from time to time, by the way, just on the off-chance of spectacular misfortune.) And, of course, it’s always useful to polish English as a foreign language.

Some pain is inevitable, sure, but it should not be deemed agonal when observed against the wider (and darker) background of things.

Decisive transitions like the one Trumpist faction is planning are almost always followed by inflation surge of proportions rarely seen in the West. Is it normal? Yes, it is.

Financialization of the American economy during half a century of Chimerican alliance, due to steady degradation of the industry, became so prominent that the sole sector outside finances showing any semblance of healthy growth is oil and gas production & chemical engineering. Could it sustain the exponential growth of twin deficits? Mind you, before each of the previous two world wars the US had had much healthier debt to GDP ratio. Where have spoils of planned victory over Russia (and China) already gone, well in advance? Of course, much greater PITA has been unleashed upon the EU and Ukraine, particularly Germany,

but this is not an answer we in Europe would like to receive.

Look at Turkey since 2016 as a role model. They came out of “erdoğanomics” with state debt greatly reduced, falling to less than 30 % of GDP,

but during this marathon of dirigism, inflation sometimes soared to 90 %.

Nonetheless, the problem of “big push” towards industrialization and increasing economic complexity has been mostly solved in Turkey. The country even emerges as the new de-facto natural gas supply hub of the EU, thanks in no small part to strategic clumsiness of Russia and the Nordstream pipelines sabotage. The most recent data about annual inflation rate in Turkey indicate that it fell to 39 % in February. Still a gigantic rate by the standards of the US, albeit typical for a country undergoing a phase transition.

And quite a hard task it could be to balance such a shift without flushing the country down the drain —

just look backward and remember how it went all awry in Iran under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The problem of Turkish unorthodox economic dirigism was pretty similar to the one Blue Collar Billionaire aka Old Man Orange posits, only that in American case, it could be named rollback — to modernity, but across the postmodern highways of developing cyberpunk. And the autopilot has begun seeing the road through a Schmittian lens.

Maidan-style protests against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, visually hearkening even farther back, to May 1968 unrest in France, followed immediately,

but this may be just a coincidence. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

After all, Ekrem İmamoğlu’s arrest dramatically coincided with similar measures of “containment” against ominous opposition leader, which have been taken, you again guess it right, in France.

Such a technique had worked so well previously in Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania, hadn’t it? Hadn’t it?