Ian Bremmer’s Troll of the Week for the week of January 21, 2024. Central Illinois Farm born and raised. Michigan resident by choice. BSME, Michigan MBA.
Apr 4 • 11 tweets • 6 min read
Glorious Holy Saturday to all of you. I am going to tell a story, but first, for me, it is fitting that we are in a year where the Gospel of Matthew is the account of the passion that is read on Holy Thursday.
Matthew 7:7 states, "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you."
It took me 57 years to knock, but tonight I will take that leap of faith being baptized and confirmed into the Roman Catholic Church. I have lived 57 years seeking, unbaptized……reading for decades material from many faiths and visiting many churches and temples of all sort around the global.
I was born in a year where my parents were making a big move back to the farm. The farm which my mom still lives and which my dad worked for 48 years after moving back in his 30s. They were both Baptists raised in a tradition of adult (teen) baptism. My father’s family came from Swiss Mennonite (Anabaptist) and Scottish Presbyterian traditions, my mom from Northern German Lutheran and Midlands Anglican…..a mongrel animal am I. They claim they “forgot” to have me baptized and it was a huge point of contention with my dad’s mom. Over the years we had many “discussions” about it…..which made me more steadfast that I should “seek” not just accept.
My parents attended the Methodist church after moving back to the farm because “that was where the kids were”….so they did it so that we could be with our school friends while we grew up. We went most Sundays to Sunday school and church, it was not my favorite activity.
During college, I met my first Jewish person and actually came to join a fraternity that was Jewish nationally, but not locally. We had several Jews among us and I became very good friends with many and started studying what Judaism was and who they were. It was fascinating and it basically considered myself a “Noahite”, a non Jewish follower of Jewish concepts. But really, I was just “seeking”.
It was also during this time that I thought I wanted to be a physicist and was studying physics (in between a lot of drinking and girl chasing, not a great mix). I read a book couple books on Particle Physics, The Dancing Wu Ling Masters being one…..this was my introduction to mysticism, but I didn’t know it yet.
In my twenties I started traveling internationally for work. One of my first encounters with religion in Europe was the Kolner Dom (the Catholic Cathedral in Cologne Germany). I was hooked on visiting medieval cathedrals and developed an awe for what would drive humans to build these monuments.
Nov 6, 2025 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
“Liberal capitalism” died with “free trade” in the 1990s, it met on the battlefield against the western corporate managerial class steeped in Jack Welch’s “shareholder value” and Milton Friedman’s “shareholder theory” and the advent of LBOs & PE with bulked up banks from the repeal of Glass Steagall…..
Liberal capitalism lost the battle. Chrony capitalism took its place fighting (or most cooperating) with State Capitalism in Japan, Korea and China.
I was steeped in the Jack Welch / Milton Friedman thought in the 1990s, it was the water we swam in. It wasn’t until 2013 that i saw my mistakes. I have been trying to repent since that time. I have seen into the belly of the beast (China state capitalism) against which we are fighting and existential battle for the soul of western culture. I am not “anti-Chinese” but i am not a fan of the CCP. They learned state capitalism at our universities, they took the lessons well, they rebuilt the “commanding heights” of the world economy, with the western managerial class and chrony capitalist help……we sold them the rope.
Now what…..that is the question. We are fighting both an external existential battle and an internal disaffection for what the last 20-30 years has done to our own people, both the outsourcing and the immigration……..to enrich a very small group of people in the west.
May 17, 2025 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Reading Girard allowed me to solve the conundrum of “ignorance is bliss”, the lack of a role model means the absence of memetic action. No Kardashian with a Range Rover…..you do not desire the Range Rover…..you don’t even know it exists.
I grew up on a farm in central Illinois in the 1970s and 1980s……there were many things I didn’t know existed. A BMW or Mercedes, what are those? I wanted what my “roll models”, older kids, had……muscle cars, dirt bikes, an Atari, a rock concern T-shirt (you know, with the ¾ sleeves). 😉
Apr 5, 2025 • 11 tweets • 6 min read
NNZP thread explaining why I call what we are going thru a “Post WW2 Mind Virus”…..a set of myths and biases that are hard to shake as we exit one regime and enter a new one, like we do every 80-90 years, like clockwork.
The virus is that too many people believe things that are not true anymore. They have been lulled into a sense that everything is easy (water from the tap, electricity from the wall, food from the grocery, internet from the air), what happens in the background is hidden from them, the pipefitters and engineers that keep the water flowing, the linemen and power workers who make the electricity, etc.
So bringing back all this stuff will be easy and fast, just like water from the tap……except it’s not, and it takes time, and it takes people who know how and equipment and materials we don’t make anymore and have to import, like @RobertMSterling post about their steel plant.
The virus affects Trump and his team as well. We all see the world through the Post WW2 world order, the world organizations, the expanding global trade, the frictionless world that peaked in 2010…..that is now rapidly coming apart and will form into something new…..something that I have no idea how it works yet.
Apr 3, 2025 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Full circle, 23 years later
How things have changed, Jin Mao by itself then, now surrounded by two big brothers.
Mar 29, 2025 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Since the end of WW2, the Global Liberal Order, led by the USA, has had the USA as a market of last resort, a market with few barriers….all while the USA help rebuild the world economy and created competition to its own domestic businesses and accepted imports freely……and it was good.
Then the USA made the mistake that would disrupt the global order, it let a mercantilist unaligned fox into the global liberal hen house……and now the order is being used against the west.
This is the Post WW2 Mind Virus……that this global liberal order can survive the unaligned mercantilist without disruption and that the order would continue forever.
Parts of the USA, as I read it, feel that much of the world has taken the last 80 years, and especially the last 40 years, for granted…..like this was the way it would have been even if the USA had not done what the USA did after WW2.
But this is not accurate, the USA could have been like most post war victors and let the world fix itself and sold them “stuff”, it could have claimed the territory it liberated as its own dominion. Either of those outcomes was equally realistic at the end of WW2, and it is what the USSR did after WW2.
I think many see the tariffs as just leveling the playing field we are already on…..and on the field where the formerly “aligned” global order behind the USA is trying to decide if they are with us, really, or we are just some dude they dated when the world was unsafe.
Jun 21, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I want to give one example that I am extremely familiar with……magnesium, one of the most abundant minerals on the planet. Magnesium has many purposes, but the two largest are, in order, 1) desulfurization of steel, required to make high strength steel and 2) aluminum alloying..
Until 1998, the west lead by Dow Corporation and Norsk Hydro, made the vast majority of primary magnesium. Dow in Texas, Norsk in Canada and Europe. Russia had a small slice as did Israel.
Dow closed Freeport in 1998, Norsk closed the Canada Ops in 2006.
Jun 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Think of it this way, the defense sector is built on top of the commercial sector…..when the commercial sector decamps to China, the suppliers who supply both in the USA disappear, leaving the defense sector to figure it out, which means buying stuff from where it comes from.
This Raytheon issue is a huge wake up call. I told the story on here about the $0.72 hand wheel that I was about to discontinue, sales were once 500k/year, now 30k/year….got a call “you are the only one in the USA who makes these will you make me a bunch, I supply the navy”
Jun 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
See, I already knew this because I am a dumb manufacturing guy…..so has had to try to buy basic level stuff for the last few years…..and has found that the components, raw materials and raw material processing is mostly now in China.
So let’s keep fooling ourselves with the “we are going to do a chip fab, or let move assembly out of China or that doesn’t come from China” and let’s do a serious assessment of how f’ed we have let ourselves get the last 20 years…..
Jun 20, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The French cults of the black Madonna are fascinating, this 👇 is only part of the story. Some believe this is also tied to the worship of Mary Magdalene in souther France and into Ireland.
“Legend holds that Mary Magdalene fled persecution after Jesus' crucifixion. She, his mother, Mary Salome and others left the Holy Land in a makeshift boat, landing in a fishing village called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the south of France.” - Chicago Tribune
Mar 18, 2022 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
👀
“At night, Bruce L. Jackson is president of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, giving intimate dinners for Senators and foreign officials. By day, he is director of strategic planning for Lockheed Martin Corporation, the world's biggest weapons maker.” nytimes.com/1997/06/29/wor…
Rabbit hole #1……from @martyrmade@JockoQuote Unraveling Podcast…..NATO expansion pushed by arms makers because Cold War mean end of the gravy train…..must find new gravy train…..beware the military industrial complex
Sep 13, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Personal thoughts on vaccines……I am for them. They have eliminated many terrible diseases/illnesses and they appear to really help covid as well. It’s a shame that it has come to this. Operation Warp Speed was a Trump program that Biden and Harris and the Dems derided
Saying “I wouldn’t take a vaccine developed under Trump”, now they are saying it’s fine and mandating it……it’s a shame that there is so little trust in government, but I hate to say they are reaping what the sowed.
This is our periodic breakdown in public trust in the US.
Sep 12, 2021 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Back at Teen Street Skills with @EyesDrive
Lots of good stuff with these kids
Sep 11, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Amazing group of race car drives teaching kids emergency driving skills. This is in Corktown in Detroit, right near the old Central Train station. It’s led by Robby Buhl and can be found at teenstreetskills.org. Amazing program.
This is for teens you have just gotten their licenses and is free to the kids (there are some large donors who want to remain anonymous
