Stidmatt

In our nation’s deranged mind…

How many Ukrainian lives are worth the price of gas staying down by 10 cents?

How many grandparents need to die from COVID to be worth the life of one sex offender?

How many girls denied a basic education, placed into forced marriage, and people dead from terrorist attacks are worth the calmness in the minds of Americans worried about endless war?

How many Mexican lives is the war on drugs worth?

How many dead Palestinians are worth the minuscule number of votes Biden will receive from Evangelicals?

Disgusting.

We all need to study basic morality.

The 2000s were an amazing time to be alive. Flights were less expensive than ever, visa-free travel was common, and democratization expanded worldwide. Democratization has slowed down over the last decade. South America, Europe, Southern Africa, and Southeast Asia have mostly democratized. The world’s dictatorships are mostly in Northern and Central Africa and Asia. Only two countries in Europe are not democratic today.

The world has never been wealthier. The number of people living in poverty is at an all-time low, and global GDP per capita has never been better. The world has never been safer. The world has never been freer.

In reaction to this, the right-wing around the world has realized that they must reverse this trend or face political extinction. They do this through the following actions:

• Increased violence between Israel and Palestine
• The Russian invasion of Ukraine
• Right-wing politicians in NATO are reluctant to help our Ukrainian friends.
• More visa requirements.
• Increased surveillance.
• Auditing of public transit agencies is reduced, leading to waste not just in the US but around the developed world.
• We have increased police budgets in both the US and the European Union. Black Lives Matter failed in its objectives.

There are certainly more examples of this backlash against the global trend of increasing human rights.

What the right wing is doing is tightening the screws.

Aside from increasing surveillance and border police to catch refugees and restricting who counts as a refugee, the right wing is working on eliminating visa-free travel for as many people as possible. The United States already requires visas from all but four countries. We also have two classes of travel visas: the Electronic System for Travel Authorization and the B visa system. The Bush Administration moved almost all visa-exempt nationalities to ESTA days before Obama was sworn into office.

Canada implemented the Electronic Travel Authorization in December 2013 while Stephen Harper was Prime Minister. They excluded citizens of the United States since we have such strong economic ties. They also excluded ETA country’s citizens when traveling from the United States. I thought it was about security? If it is essential for security, why can ETA citizens bypass the ETA if they have already traveled to the United States? Does Canada trust America’s visa vetting process? I don’t trust my government on this, given how all the 9/11 terrorists were granted visas.

Unless there was no security benefit from visa requirements on citizens from democracies…

Europe is about to do the same by implementing the European Travel Information and Authorisation System. It was originally proposed in 2016 and has been postponed several times since then, not just because of COVID-19.

Brazil is also about to do an electronic visa, which they have postponed several times…

In all of these cases, right-wing governments in the US, Canada, Brazil, and Europe have claimed these visas are necessary for security. If these programs had a real security benefit, why are US citizens exempt from Canada but not Liechtensteiners? Why are Canadians exempt from the US but not Andorrans? Why have Europe and Brazil postponed these “necessary security measures” that were called for by the 9/11 Commission multiple times?

This must be because Danish tourists regularly turn into mass shooters when they travel.

But… that’s not a thing.

Visas between democracies do not provide a security benefit. They increase bureaucracy, hurt the economy, and waste government resources when real problems need to be solved.

Indonesia moved from visa-free access from most other democracies to eVisas. I cannot find any terrorist attacks against Indonesia from citizens of these countries because they did not happen.

That’s our current status, and I believe it is part of the right-wing’s general movement towards curtailing liberties, as we see with Project 2025 and other documents where they lay out their wish lists.

Project 2025 is Project 2001. It has been going on for at least a quarter century.

When the Republican Party is implementing projects like Project 2025, they need to ensure as few Americans meet people from abroad and as few Americans as possible can travel abroad so we cannot compare our current status to that of our allies.

That is why the United States and other democracies have increased visa restrictions over the last 20 years. It was never to fight terrorism. That was always baloney.

It was always so they could get away with their immoral crusade against freedom. That is why they increase visa restrictions against citizens of democracies, not citizens from states like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, which consistently violate international law. It was never about terrorism.

After the fall of the Third Reich, one of the fundamental freedoms laid out by Eleanor Roosevelt and other human rights advocates was the freedom to enter and exit your country. That freedom was the first one Hitler eroded when he came to power. So, we must remember this and defend democracy.

Conversations between citizens of different democracies are essential for our mutual survival. Some demagogues and governments are working to make our systems fail. We must defeat them. We are stronger together.

Since attacks on democracy started by eroding free travel, defending democracy starts with defending visa-free travel.

What are the most powerful countries in the world? What would make a country powerful?

This is a fairly simple and critical question if you want to understand global politics.

To be a superpower a country needs to have the following characteristics:

1. A large population
2. A large economy measured by GDP
3. A high average income per household, measured by GDP per capita
4. Large land area

A country that beats other countries on these four metrics is considered a global superpower.

I was going to put military spending into the function, but with a correlation coefficient of 94% against GDP, it needs to be left out.

However, mean years of schooling correlate most with corruption, and only at a 62% coefficient. But… it has a non-linear exponential relationship with GDP per capita, so again, I am omitting this variable.

I standardized each variable on a scale of 0-1 and then took the average. Sometimes the simplest methods are the best.

The ten most powerful countries in the world are then as follows:

Rank	Country	Population	GDP	GDP per capita	SIPRI 2022	Total Area	Democracy Score	NATO	Great Power
1	United States	0.987952	1.000000	0.962500	1.000000	0.988764	7.92	1	0.984804
2	Canada	0.789157	0.943750	0.912500	0.917722	0.992509	9.24	1	0.909479
3	China	1.000000	0.993750	0.625000	0.993671	0.985019	2.27	0	0.900942
4	Japan	0.939759	0.987500	0.881250	0.943038	0.749064	8.13	0	0.889393
5	Brazil	0.975904	0.950000	0.643750	0.898734	0.981273	6.92	0	0.887732
6	France	0.891566	0.968750	0.862500	0.955696	0.827715	7.99	1	0.887633
7	Germany	0.915663	0.981250	0.906250	0.962025	0.745318	8.67	1	0.887120
8	Russia	0.951807	0.937500	0.656250	0.987342	1.000000	3.31	0	0.886389
9	Australia	0.704819	0.925000	0.937500	0.924051	0.977528	8.96	0	0.886212
10	Mexico	0.945783	0.918750	0.631250	0.829114	0.943820	6.07	0	0.859901

SIPRI is military expenditure.

The United States is the most powerful country in the world. All but two of the countries on this list are democracies.

If we omit area, only Germany and the United States are in the top 10th percentile for GDP, GDP per capita, and population.

China and Russia would be global superpowers, but their GDP per capita is too low.

The only authoritarian regime (measured by the EIU Democracy Index with a value of less than 4) with a GDP per capita in the 90th percentile is Qatar.

The United States, Germany, Canada, and Australia are the only countries with GDP per capita and GDP in the top 10th percentile. Germany is under 90% in area, Canada and Australia are under 90% in population.

Canada is the only country besides the United States with a population, GDP per capita, GDP, and area above the 80th percentile.

Three authoritarian regimes have great power scores over 0.8: China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

The least powerful countries in the world are:

Index	Country	Population	GDP	GDP per capita	SIPRI 2022	Surface area	Overall Score	NATO	Great Power
405	Tuvalu	0.005208	0.005208	0.348958	NaN	0.015625	NaN	0	0.093750
203	Kiribati	0.088542	0.015625	0.239583	NaN	0.119792	NaN	0	0.115885
239	Marshall Islands	0.036458	0.020833	0.385417	NaN	0.031250	NaN	0	0.118490
85	Comoros	0.182292	0.052083	0.130208	NaN	0.130208	3.09	0	0.123698
334	Sao Tome and Principe	0.104167	0.036458	0.250000	NaN	0.125000	NaN	0	0.128906
245	Micronesia	0.067708	0.031250	0.359375	NaN	0.093750	NaN	0	0.138021
390	The Gambia	0.255208	0.078125	0.052083	0.038961	0.182292	NaN	0	0.141927
394	Tonga	0.072917	0.041667	0.401042	NaN	0.106771	NaN	0	0.155599
264	Nauru	0.010417	0.010417	0.609375	NaN	0.010417	NaN	0	0.160156
422	Vanuatu	0.109375	0.062500	0.333333	NaN	0.192708	NaN	0	0.174479

No country has a population and GDP per capita in the bottom 10th percentile.

If we only include countries with no missing values in our dataset, we see the following:

Index	Country	Population	GDP	GDP per capita	SIPRI 2022	Surface area	Overall Score	NATO	Great Power
167	Guinea-Bissau	0.239583	0.088542	0.088542	0.071429	0.302083	2.63	0	0.179688
391	Timor-Leste	0.218750	0.140625	0.208333	0.097403	0.208333	7.06	0	0.194010
220	Lesotho	0.265625	0.156250	0.171875	0.084416	0.286458	6.30	0	0.220052
59	Burundi	0.557292	0.171875	0.005208	0.175325	0.260417	2.14	0	0.248698
221	Liberia	0.375000	0.145833	0.046875	0.045455	0.473958	5.32	0	0.260417
392	Togo	0.484375	0.203125	0.067708	0.305195	0.359375	2.80	0	0.278646
340	Sierra Leone	0.479167	0.187500	0.057292	0.064935	0.395833	4.86	0	0.279948
137	Fiji	0.192708	0.213542	0.505208	0.110390	0.218750	5.72	0	0.282552
252	Moldova	0.322917	0.250000	0.260417	0.103896	0.296875	5.78	0	0.282552
255	Montenegro	0.171875	0.197917	0.583333	0.168831	0.197917	5.77	1	0.287760

Comoros is the only country in the world where every metric is below the 20th percentile.

Tuvalu has the lowest power score in my dataset. It is not scored on military expenditures because it has no military. However, it ranks in the 34th percentile for GDP per capita.

This is why I believe Comoros is the least powerful country in the world. Its population is small, its economy is tiny, and its people are poor.

While the United States is the most powerful country in the world, I believe Comoros is the least powerful country.

The biggest issue in the Anglosphere is the privatization of natural monopolies.

We also have the issue of maximum benefit pensions, just like Europe, except we are delayed by a few decades.

Europe did not stimulate the economy after the 2008 financial collapse, opting for austerity instead. The average income in Europe has been lower than that of the United States ever since.

The timing of the austerity crisis was particularly poor since Europes average age has increased significantly so the working age population cannot support their senior citizens with the same tax rates the baby boomers enjoyed.

If that was not enough, Europe has adopted a stance of regulating technology far more than other major markets, which has hampered productivity growth.

So higher expenditures, lower productivity, which translates to lower salaries on top of the reduced salaries because of austerity. It is not a pretty picture.

The USA starts to look pretty good until you see the cost of housing, which is simply the natural market response of stagnating supply against ever growing demand. You see privatization of natural monopolies which hampers our productivity and increases our base rate of inflation, and we have our own issues to deal with. But at least our productivity kept growing in the 2010s, while Europe doesn’t have to deal with as many private natural monopolies as we do.

So then we approach what would utopia look like?

Imagine a high tech economy with high productivity leading to high salaries. Natural monopolies are publicly owned. The rest of the economy is private. Reasonable regulation without over regulation. The government practices counter cyclical financial and monetary policy. Retirement is dependent on ever growing productivity, not an ever growing population.

Welcome to Singapore?

I have an iPhone, and I use it to pay for Subway.

An Apple update occurred a few weeks ago, and since then, I have been unable to use Apple Pay without Face ID.

The problem was that the update made my default card to pay for transit go to None and I needed to change it back to a card.

Settings -> Wallet & Apple Pay -> Express Transit Card

Select the credit card you want to use to pay for your transit.

The discussion of civil war primarily comes from groups like Project 2025, which has received considerable press attention over the last couple of years. The issue is, does Project 2025 exist because America is a failed state or because Project 2025 is a profoundly anti-American psyops operation?

State of The United States of America

The United States has never been richer. We have some of the world’s highest household incomes, one of the best-educated populations, and a life expectancy in line with other developed countries. We haven’t missed any elections, and our military is by far the strongest in the world. We are the only global superpower.

There are some challenges: housing is ridiculously expensive, the government doesn’t fund higher education like it used to, 10% of Americans lack health insurance, and our gun laws and inequality lead to a higher homicide rate than one would expect from a highly developed democracy. These are solvable problems.

Our quality of life, on average, is among the best in the world. America is the opposite of a failed state; we are a highly developed country, not only that but the only global superpower today.

So why do people feel like we are behind? Why do people talk about revolution?

The first thing is that our rapidly growing economy has caused massive social shifts over the last 20 years. Gay marriage is legal, people are talking about police brutality in national media, and our country is fundamentally better off than we were 30 years ago.

If the United States were to deepen ties with our allies, we would be unstoppable.

Response to Obama

President Obama was one of the most significant presidents in our history, not just because he was our first African American president. Major civil rights advances were made regarding LGBT rights, and the stimulus package successfully avoided a long recession that occurred in Europe over the 2010s.

Through a combination of poor leadership at the DNC and pure racism directed against President Obama, we saw significant gains by the Republican Party.

But I do not believe Obama alone is enough of a reason to explain the sudden turn of the Republican Party into the party of Donald Trump. In four years, Mitt Romney went from saying Russia was our biggest threat, and he was correct, to Donald Trump doing Russia’s bidding, according to the Mueller Report. Mitt Romney won the primary in 2012 with over 50% of the vote in a four-horse race.

While Romney and McCain were Republicans, when someone in McCain’s audience claimed Obama was a Muslim, code in their mind for terrorist, McCain responded by saying, “No, he’s a good family man.” While Romney is a Mormon and shares their beliefs regarding gender, he did not attack Obama in the way we saw Trump attack Obama. McCain and Romney did not attack Obama with the same racist attacks we see from the modern Republican Party. Their policies had racism in them, such as the war on drugs and police brutality, but they did not do the crude, blatantly racist behavior that has now become the norm in the Republican Party. Both Romney and McCain won the primaries. McCain was 24 points ahead of his closest opponent, and Romney won a majority of the popular vote in the primary.

Obama does not explain what has happened to the Republican Party by himself. If he did, Romney would not have won the 2012 primary. Racism alone does not explain the swing of the Republican Party over the last ten years into a Russophile party.

Russian propaganda

This is where Russia enters the picture.

Russia is in a very different situation. Oligarchs run its economy while average Russians live in poverty. Their life expectancy is on par with Syria. Their population is shrinking rapidly. Russia is a country in crisis, and there is no way out under its current system.

Putin believes that the way to help Russia survive, at least in the short term, is to conquer Ukraine and other former colonies of Russia, but the United States stands in their way. If the United States kept allowing sovereign states who apply to join NATO, Russia would have nowhere to conquer. The solution to Russia’s problem is to make the United States feel like we are in crisis when we really are not.

Vladimir Putin is using every avenue he can to erode trust in our institutions and create distrust between democracies. The tools are deeply intertwined across both domestic policy and international relations. These tools include:

• Convince right-wing politicians that supporting Ukraine is against an “America first” ideology.
• Manipulating politicians on the left and right to pursue non-solutions to our issues will turn small issues into real problems.
• Manipulate politicians of both stripes that America must embrace protectionism, which weakens our economy and distances us from our allies.
• Support state sponsors of terrorism, such as the Taliban, Syria, and Iran.
• Manipulating Americans into believing China is our biggest enemy while Russia is the one spreading weapons to terrorist groups and dictatorships. We see this in Donald Trump’s rhetoric.
• Convince China to support Russia as relations with America decline as a result of Russian propaganda. China supported Ukrainian territorial integrity in 2014, but now they are arming Russia.
• Support politicians across NATO, such as Viktor Orban and Boris Johnson, who oppose NATO and the European Union.
• Convince states like Serbia that Russia is their protector against a hostile United States. This is, of course, a lie.
• Have their pundits tell Americans how our country is failing daily but never look at the complete picture.

This has been happening ever since Gerard Schröder was in office 20 years ago. https://www.dw.com/en/putin-and-schr%C3%B6der-a-special-german-russian-friendship/a-55219973

The United States of America is a free democracy with one of the strongest economies in the world. We have seen immense progress in civil rights over the last 15 years, and we were one of the only developed countries not to do austerity after 2008, and our economy shows it.

Again, we have a few issues that need to be dealt with. We need to build housing units to keep up with population growth, deal with climate change, and increase gun control. We also need a public option for health insurance to get our uninsured rate as close to 0 as possible.

But do not be fooled into believing populists who push us away from our friends, which means they are moving us toward corrupt dictators who want to harm our country. They have no real solutions to the problems we face.

Remember that the fundamentals of the American economy are strong. The inflation episode we saw over the last two years was global and focused on the oil market, which was a nice bonus for Putin when he invaded Ukraine. Inflation is almost down to 2% again today. We will hit our target by the end of the year. We also have not fallen into recession over this period, which is remarkable. If America elects a progressive who would reduce tariffs and visa restrictions with NATO allies, Russia would lose significant leverage, and Russians would start to wonder if the propaganda they are being spoonfed is realistic.

Project 2025 is the American wing of Russia’s propaganda machine. Why else would their book Mandate for Leadership include the following:

• Another school of conservative thought denies that U.S. Ukrainian supports in the national security interest of America at all. Ukraine is not a member of the NATO alliance and is one of the most corrupt nations in the region. European nations directly affected by the conflict should aid in the defense of Ukraine, but the U.S. should not continue its involvement. This viewpoint desires a swift end to the conflict through a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
• Thus, with respect to Ukraine, continued U.S. involvement must be fully paid for; limited to military aid (while European allies address Ukraine’s economic needs); and have a clearly defined national security strategy that does not risk American lives.

Project 2025 and the rest of the Russian machine have taken over the Republican Party, which is why they support abandoning Afghanistan and Ukraine. They want to continue supporting Israel for purely religious reasons to prepare for the second coming of Jesus. Aside from that, the Republican Party has followed its desire to become an isolationist party.

Parts of the Republican Party will claim Russia is a threat to keep votes, all the meanwhile advocating for reduced support for our allies.

The Heritage Foundation, which was so hawkish in the 2000s, and part of Project 2025, is a dove regarding supporting Ukraine.

This is why Project 2025 exists.

We must understand that Putin’s attempts to undermine democracy and strengthen his authoritarian rule in Russia are larger than any one piece, and one must understand both the domestic and international aspects of the Russian propaganda machine to see the complete picture.

Russia has proven itself to be the most significant threat to democracy in the world time and time again for over 16 years. Project 2025 is their most nefarious project yet, as they have continuously refined their propaganda.

Conclusion

The most effective way to defend our country is to vote in every election for politicians who are not allies with Putin. We need clear-spoken defenders of democracy who, when interviewed by the media, will directly counter Putin’s lies.

As America becomes more prosperous and more free, the ability to roll back progress and go back to a country where civil rights are restricted will disappear.

We must ensure Project 2025 and their support of Donald Trump fail this year as badly as possible. It is a profoundly anti-American organization and must be defeated.

The goal of Russia is to undermine democracies around the world through covert operations. Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation are obvious covert operations of the Russians to undermine American democracy.

The most impactful way to ensure they fail is to vote for Democrats.

Donald Trump does not offer solutions, only more problems.

Biden is far from a perfect president; his Israeli policy is foolish, and his Ukrainian policy is half-assed (fitting for a Democrat), but he can be convinced of better policies.

Biden is highly flawed and bad at public speaking.

Trump is an evil sexual predator.

America is better off with a Democratic trifecta so we can solve the three problems facing our federal government, which are the war in Ukraine, the crisis in Palestine, and our uninsured rate.

Only Democrats support abortion rights and gay marriage.

Three years into Trump’s presidency, we had a pandemic.

Three years into Biden’s presidency, inflation is coming back under control.

Trump will play right into Putin’s hands.

Biden will do his best to protect our friends and allies, even if I wish he had more qualified advisors.

The choice is obvious.

Happy Independence Day. Let freedom ring.

Slava Ukraine.

References

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/20/1246134779/the-reality-behind-civil-war-and-the-possibility-of-a-real-second-civil-war

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html