Squabbling Towards Autumn

 "Civilizations are born, often from the ruins of other civilizations. Like living organisms, they experience growth, maturity, old age and death."

                                                                                                              Neanderthal

America, and the West in general, are aging. We have past middle age and are moving towards the golden years. I don't mean to say that the age of the population is increasing, though that is true as well. We are not the same nation we were during WWII, where facing a threat to our nation, we mobilized the entire nation and became the biggest force in defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Fast forward to 2020, facing a pandemic that caused a draconian lock down in China, the West and the U.S., in particular, felt into disarray. Not only did our central and local governments performed very poorly, the population in general have also behaved erratically. The country that fought and won WWII had grown old. Today, neither our government or our people are capable of sacrificing short term pain for longer term gains. When the enemy, in the form of a pandemic, shows up, we are incapable of compromising across the political isles to fight it. We are incapable of helping our most vulnerable citizens to halt the spread of the disease. Even something so basic such as wearing a mask in public or shutting down the state to prevent the spread, have met with resistance, sometimes with citizens armed to the teeth. Covid parties, where young people intentionally infect themselves, have endangered the attendees and their family members. In WWII, many went to war knowing that they might not come back. Today, with the basic template of recovery laid out by the Chinese, the South Koreans and others, we, as a nation, have avoided doing the hard things, the only known ways to move us out of Covid-19, things like lock down, testing and isolation and treating the sick. Instead of being asked to sacrificing their lives like our war veterans, what was asked of us today is some inconvenience and short term economic pain. What we spent our energy doing instead is finger pointing. We blamed the Chinese, even though they have told us, by their words and their actions, about Covid for a good month and a half to two months and we have taken no action. We blamed the WHO, who was doing a very difficult job and should be our resources in a time like this. We blamed Dr. Fauci, who did the best he could under restrain from an administration that advocated injecting bleach and UV lights into the body to stop the virus. We even blamed Bill Gates, who use his own organization and money to help combat the spread of diseases all over the world.  

Covid-19 is an event that will end someday. The America that have shown to be so wanting during this crisis will need to turn ourselves around to maintain our place in the world. I am pessimistic that we are up to the task. Most likely, we will fall as an empire, just like the other empires in the past. In the next few posts, I will outline the factors that lead to this decline. 

Covid 19 and its fall outs.

"And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?"

                                                                                              ---President Donald Trump


The biggest black swan for 2020 is the COVID 19, which  first hit Wuhan in China, then the rest of the world. The impact is enormous. This little germ has exposed the weakness of world governments world over and will help usher in a new world order.

At the beginning, the Chinese didn't handle this well, even by their own admission. The Hubei and Wuhan officials suppressed information and was slow to react. While this is a novel virus, if the government was more enlighten, they could have taken the action maybe two or more weeks sooner. However, once the central government started taking over, things happened very quickly. They sent in Dr. Zhong Nanshan, and learned of the true nature of the pandemic. On Jan. 10 2020, Wuhan health officials sequenced the DNA of the virus and released it to the world.  On Jan. 20, after touring Wuhan for a second time,  Dr. Zhong Nanshan came to the conclusion that the virus was more transmittable than previous thought. He announced this on via television on the same day. Government officials made a decision to completely lock down the City of Wuhan on Jan. 23. Subsequently, the lockdown would extend to the entire province of Hubei and eventually to the entire nation. They underwent massive testing. To ensure potential patients are willing to step forward and be tested, the state underwrote the cost of hospitalization and testing. They use cellphone records to do contact tracing of the sick and tested all the ones that came into contact with them. Those that were tested positive were contact traced again. The positives were divided by the severity of the symptoms. The asymptomatic and the mild cases were isolated in hotels and stadiums. The severely ill were sent to hospitals. They were able to build several hospitals in awe-inspiring short time, some in ten days time. The draconian measures succeeded in wiping out most of the cases.  In one and a half months time, new patient counts fell from thousands of daily cases to 139 new cases per day by March 4th. The country slowly reopened. Wuhan, the most severely impacted city, reopened on April 8th.

The other East Asian countries all did quite well. South Korea heeded the call from China and went into action. They used a similar playbook. Because by the time the virus hit them, it was clearer what they were dealing with, the Koreans were able able to contain this faster then the Chinese did. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and even Vietnam were able to contain this very quickly, though Singapore had a second wave due to the influx of Indian workers and still being contained as we speak. The Japanese took longer time, but were able to contain this by mid May.

The West should have done a lot better. We have better medical facilities, more doctors per million population and most of all, we knew it was coming. The Chinese warned the world at the beginning of January 2020 about Covid. The U.S. started having outbreaks by beginning of March. We had a month and a half to two months to get ready for the arrival of the pandemic. Instead of taking action, the West sat on our hands and squandered the valuable time that were given to us. Instead of attacking the disease head on, we tried to take the easy way out. On the top, we have an administration that failed to execute in the most basic ways, then when the shit hits the fan, started spending all his energy blaming the Chinese, the WHO, Bill Gates, the Democrats. The States, Democratic or Republican, did not do any better. We have senators who refuse to do basic things like wearing a mask in public. As a result, something that could be fixed by shutting down a small part of the country for two months, cost a $trillion or so, end up will drag on for year and a half or more and could cost $10 trillion or more over the next two to three years as we first fall into this deep pit and then climb out of it.  

Asides making our currency worth less, this added debt have other consequences. Raymond Dalio, in his book "The Changing World Order", have shown  that the Spanish, Dutch, British empires all collapsed due to the government abusing their reserved currency status and printed too much money. Indeed, in the next few posts, I will spell out the decline of this once great nation into the path of secondary power.