Will China squander its moment in the sun? A great civilization could be a lot greater, if its leaders gave up their obsession with control.

Oh yeah, they are going to squander it. Sometime between 2026-2032, they are going to attempt to take Taiwan. It’ll be a bad war — though not WWIII — and in the end, a coalition of US, Japanese, South Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, and Thai forces will drive the the Chinese back and defeat them after taking initial heavy losses. But it’ll be 2-3 years of constant grinding mostly-naval and air war — and in the meantime, strategic targets in the US will be struck with Chinese missiles and, sometimes, drones.

It’ll be a conflict like we have not seen before. I mean that in the most literal terms. The generals are always fighting the last war, but this will be something wholly new. The part I mentioned about striking strategic targets in the US? Those targets will be announced 30 minutes or an hour in advance so they can be evacuated and then struck. They will be immobile, hard targets like power plants and manufacturing facilities.

In the end, the war won’t go nuclear as the allied coalition won’t attempt to do something so stupid as putting boots on the ground on the Chinese mainland. I predict ~300,000 casualties on the US-allied side with 40,000 KIA. For the Chinese, I’d guess 800,000 casualties with 150,000 KIA.

I assign the above war a 60% probability. It will lead to China’s decline and retreat from the world in many important ways.

Too many people’s “explanations” for things that happen are just descriptions of what is occurring. While important, this has nothing to do with explanation. But the vast majority seem to conflate and not at all understand the difference between these two very disparate sorts of information.

A lot of the liberal and conservative goals are about preventing unauthorized sex between consenting adults, they just frame it differently and have slightly different desired end results combined with weird counterproductive manias.

But that’s a huge nexus of control, so of course they are going to use it.

For many reasons, we made the right decision to move to California. Got lucky in that rent prices where we left in Florida are up 60-80% and still rising, while rent is actually falling here.

And no monster trucks with thin blue line stickers attempting to run you off the road constantly. The food is also vastly better.

Women think 80% of men are below average. Explains a lot about why dating is so tough for men. Which…ok, then.

But I understand. I think 98% of everyone — women or men — is below average. So I get it. 😉

Physicists Just Learned Something Major About the Proton.

A “four ton force” to pull a single quark out of an atom is not something that can happen. Simplifying a whole lot, the strong force is the only force that gets stronger with distance (up to a certain distance, anyway). Due to confinement, there is no such thing as a single quark alone. Quarks when “pulled” out of an atom form a quark-antiquark pair due to the energy used to achieve this. In other words, quarks can never be alone due to the fundamental nature of the strong force. (This is absurdly, vastly, simplified but is the gist.)

By the way, most of the mass of atoms is due to the energy of the strong interaction, not the intrinsic mass of any particles in the nucleus.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Got asked why I wasn’t in class.

Sister, I feel your pain. I would get carded to go into an R-rated movie until I was in my 30s. And I looked 11-12 until I was 17 or 18.

Paid off later though.

My life is about to change forever and I’ll become extremely rich soon.

Me too! Also, I am getting married to Margot Robbie! She’ll be here next week. I only had to help her buy plane tickets, pay rent for a month and purchase some gift cards she really needed. Something happened, and she lost her purse, wallet, phone, all her IDs, her assistant’s number and all her other social media accounts.

Looking forward to the wedding!

You know, thinking about the post below, it’s kind of striking how many men — including me — have been physically attacked and/or abused by a woman while supposedly that does not happen.

Sure, women aren’t as big or muscular generally. But it doesn’t matter if she’s throwing plates at your head. It only would’ve taken one of those hitting me in the right place to blind me, give me a permanent TBI, or possibly kill me. And yet I’m the “dangerous” one, huh?

Right.

Have you ever been in a toxic relationship, what was the last straw?

Last straw was when she attempted to incite me into hitting her by throwing plates at me and screaming, “You’re not a real man! A real man would defend himself! A real man would do something about this!”

She wanted to look like the “good guy” by having me beat her. Dumped her 10 seconds later. Don’t date narcissists, people. But I didn’t know she was one until it was too late. She ended up a broke, obese alcoholic loser and I ended up exactly the opposite.

I win.

When you think about it, it’s weird that people be like, “Shaving your pubic hair is unnatural!” And then they have 25 tattoos, five piercings, a hair cut (on their head), wear clothes, and have or have had braces.

Like, come on. I don’t demand consistency but at least be a bit self-aware. Christ.

Most people simply are not very discerning.

They can look at an AI-generated image of a woman and be like, “She looks so real!” Meanwhile, she has 98 teeth, 2.5 eyes, a face 2x wider than normal, and her head is on backwards. But yes, looks so real! Sure thing.

Ukrainian Sniper Recorded The World’s Longest Kill Shot 9 Seconds To Travel 2.5 Miles To Target.

I’ve reliably hit (non-human) targets at 500 meters that were pretty small — about the size of dinner plate. But 4,000 meters? I cannot even imagine. The drop on that round would be like 8-9 feet at that range.