Also a huge worry of mine. That or them getting some deranged person in India to seize some nukes and use them on China. Those two nations are the ones most likely other than the US IMO to use nuclear weapons.

Going with the doomer thing I wonder if the US will create some top secret fairly effective missile shield capable of intercepting 400 warheads or so. Given US militarization of space I'm going to say that actually all those Starlink satellites have a secret payload of a brilliant pebbles type interceptor or the ability to turn the satellite itself into one somehow because it just makes no sense to spend all that money on satellite internet just for the potential of military and CIA in field use when previous attempts in the 90s (when brilliant pebbles was rejected initially) by Bill Gates and other ghouls failed so badly. I mean I get it's more economical now so I am being a little silly here with this and that the US is more desperate than ever to create internet/comms not subject to local regulations and censorship for manipulation and propaganda operations. But uh it would be a little odd for the US to not have some militarized payloads on those Starlink systems. Even say nuclear weapons that can provide a revenge system, they all start falling out of the sky towards China under power if they don't get a certain signal every 15 days or something. Heck they don't even have to be functioning nukes, they could be dirty bombs with conventional explosives set to explode a mile up above China to shower it in radiation. Mad villain shit.

I am so positive they see nuking China as a necessity and as part of that have multiple things in the works to neutralize their retaliatory capabilities. Among other things we've seen they've been tricking hobbyists into installing free radio equipment they offer through vague internet cut-outs which can not only gather signals but also jam and block in the event of war. All the US would need would be the ability to jam the airwaves completely for 30 minutes in order to get the drop on China and nuke them without them being able to order their forces to retaliate in time. China's advantage and disadvantage has always been using mobile launchers and moving their missiles around. If they can jam the air and also using hacking via previously compromised (possibly hardware backdoors) to shut down wired communication networks then China is in trouble. Even blocking half their forces from getting the retaliate order for 15 minutes would be enough for the US to win. The empire I seriously worry is just suicidally homicidal and desperate to cling onto power, white supremacist rage blinds it to even the possibility of compromise so even a chance their plans might work might be enough to get them to launch the nukes.

I mean fuck I wouldn't put it past the US putting in the effort to have smuggled in suitcase (or full size) nukes into China which are remote controlled via radio signals which they threaten to set off and kill tens/hundreds of millions of Chinese and call that a "nuclear deterrent". They're just so much more vile than even that.

Bloomer take is though the US may be able to win a war against China as part of blockading and encircling them and shield its mainland from retaliation that China by 2030 or so will have nearly 1000 warheads and mount many of them on hypersonic delivery mechanisms.

Other thoughts on "classified nuclear deterrent" are maybe they're doing the doomsday machine deadhand thing, either a system (please be Elon AI so it doesn't work) on the ground or something like Russia has lately been proposing which is nuclear powered nuclear tipped cruise missiles which can fly for years. You send them up where they can't be intercepted easily, have them fly around, program them to strike their targets on a signal or on sustained cessation of a signal to them.

I mean this is an empire that's used biological weapons. That the Russians credibly accuse of doing illegal biowarfare work in Ukraine. That sprayed agent orange. I guess our hope is that the US military contractors sucker the US and don't deliver on time and keep delaying and delaying and the US just kind of collapses.

I don't disagree though I'd add for a large chunk it's a religious dogma. It's part of a religious dogma, it's part of their very perceived essence as a member of their chosen community (reactionaries) so you're not just threatening them, you're demanding they change their identity and lose all their friendships and church group, and so on.

Speaking of dogma, dogmatic types speak of Chinese re-education of an emperor, totally different conditions, totally different. Marxism-Leninism is about adaptation. He'd already lost everything, long been a puppet anyways of other powers and had no group he risked being excluded from by reforming nor any sizeable group of people likely to follow him nor much in the way of a sense of himself as he was a spoiled brat used to servants and others dealing with the mundane for him and was weak without that structure. Nor did it threaten any religious beliefs on his part. Nor did he rule under or have the deep brainworms of sustained settler-capitalism that exist in the US and in the minds of the reactionaries here. What civic religion did Puyi have that they communists had to undo? Nothing but primitive notions that he was divine to rule, easily disabused stuff like that. The US indoctrination and propaganda is much, much, much stronger and more refined and intertwined with other beliefs and brainworms. The Chinese communists could appeal to a sense of Chinese pride and nationalism, what can Americans do hmm? The identity of the nation for these people is a white-supremacist, settler-colonial-capitalist one based on heavy amounts of atomization and the myth of the frontier and the castle doctrine as their mythos.

The hands of a successful revolution will be full enough re-educating the massive amounts of more reformable types. The order of the day should be to terrorize these into submission. Cut the grass blades that grow taller than the others. But do not waste the stretched and limited resources of the post-revolutionary state unnecessary. Triaging is necessary. Resources are limited. None more-so than the educated, dedicated, ideologically disciplined cadres necessary to oversee re-education who are also those most needed for minding and running the new state and guarding against careerists, the ideologically weak, and those who are corrupt enemies of the people. If you don't use those you use common jailers who start committing abuses and release large numbers of people who underwent no real re-education who go on to foment terrorism and counter-revolution.

I think we need to just dump them on an island somewhere and put them under continuous naval blockade and internet blackout till they revert to a Hunter gather society.

And when they have sex and produce children they raise in these brainworms (and abuse as I guarantee this society becomes very pedophilic to say nothing of other forms of child abuse common to reactionaries) you're just okay with human life being brought into that? Do you organize raids that suffer regular casualties to retrieve the children they produce and acknowledge some will be successfully hidden anyways?

Other than things other people on the left recommend repeatedly I'm generally into just rewatching a lot of old good stuff. I mean I guess to my credit I have a pretty large amount of media, more than two dozen TV shows, over a thousand movies. I get a lot of enjoyment out of riff audio mixes for B movies and worse. Like watching objectively terrible stuff while people are making fun of it is great fun compared to watching better production value but still terrible soul-crushing stuff that everyone is saying is great.

I would say do make a conscious effort not to get trapped in a kind of paralysis seeking perfection, watch something new once a month if you can, even if it's not necessarily new, even just new to you like a classic movie you've never seen before.

Insurance companies would know. They would know because they know diagnoses and track them to approve or deny medications, visits to medical professionals like psychiatrists/psychologists/etc. They can just demand those records from them scarily enough.

The US might miraculously find deposits of rare earth metals

Reminder that rare earths are not actually rare, it's just that China has 85% of world refining capacity for them as it takes some doing. In a full on war footing, pull out all the brakes type situation the US could absolutely spin up some not as efficient, very dangerous for workers, expensive, but workable emergency capacity, it wouldn't put them on par with China but it would be enough to continue a war with selective strikes (instead of constant, high intensity bombardments hourly for weeks on end) and after that point the US would almost certainly continue to build up that capacity and make it a point to attempt to wean the rest of the world off Chinese rare earths.

It would also result in all kinds of other unforeseen consequences. For example the US may have the capacity to hack and physically damage or destroy Chinese electrical or other infrastructure but obviously isn't going to do that right now. But if a hot war unfolds and especially one where the US isn't winning they might break out those offensive state malware toolboxes and start wreaking incredible havoc within China that could cost a lot of money, take a lot of lives and result in a lot of chaos, uncertainty and problems that would take quite some time to sort out. The more electronically connected and "smart" everything is as in China the easier it is to fuck up everything, ironically the US by not being as "advanced" as China in adopting network connectivity to various things is a harder target in this regard. China is well aware of this risk, the US basically compromised everything in China with their shipments of NSA hardware back-door chipped Cisco routers and devices which Snowden revealed and though it's been more than a decade since they became aware I have to assume they're still inside many systems lurking and waiting.