Hmmm...am still not that worried but Milton might cut a bit close. I should get more canned food. Gotta do laundry, too. I still have plenty of H2O. And vino. We'll see what happens.

In foreign affairs I mostly look eastward...been doing so for a few years now. The Far East (China, India, SE Asia) is most important with the Near East (the Arab nation-states, Israel, Iran) running a close 2nd place. The following clip describes an instance of why:

For geopolitical analysis, Peter Zeihan is okay. He tends to be overconfident in his predictions but that's par for the course--I've made that mistake myself. His knowledge of the Near ("Middle") East is rather weak, whereas in the West he's on firmer ground. He has a sense of history, which is more than can be said for some well-known members of the commentariat today. Zeihan is definitely correct in that western Europe is even more in decline than the US...I'd say he underestimates conditions in France. It's true that their demography is not as desperate as Germany's (or Britain's). However, look at the overall situation:

• their political scene is tribalized like ours, with right-wing parties racking up small victories here & there.
• Macron doesn't command the respect he had when he first won the throne.
• France did not vet migrant flows for a few vital years--the government tightened things up afterward, but it's too late. The bombings in Paris & attacks in Nice & other locales in the 2000's are evidence of the jihadist networks inside the country, which the North African & Middle Eastern communities there support to varying degrees.
• Related point: Islam commands allegiance in France whereas its Catholicism is moribund...the percentages of French who practice it mainly do so out of habit. Their churches are museum pieces for tourists while the mosques are full. The word is Marseille is practically another Morocco now.

All of the foregoing is evidence that as a great power, France is hollowing out from the inside.

A couple nights ago I slummed around in comment threads again, out of boredom & insomnia: