Occupy wall street

[Nemo]

I know Iranians who have received the bill. I heard Pinochet did so as well. Many dictatorships love this form of torture. They especially like the bill to be paltry. Just a few coins. China still blood and tissue matches prisoners for organ transplantation. If you "disappear" there is little chance of you coming back. They almost have as many prisoners per captia as the United States

People fear China becoming a world power. But the interior strain is so great that it could easily fall apart and be mired in civil war for a century. Again. I may be an idealist but I think totalitarian states without liberal institutions to critique them and allow incremental reform are highly unstable . The PRC Dynasty will soon meet with the limits of capitalism and social repression. The destruction of religion and Confucian ideals has created a state of moral devolution. Billions of people all competing with each other in the basest version of tooth and claw capitalism. All to give us cheap blue jeans and iPhones from Dickensian workhouses. China has two choices. Reform or revolution. If China ever wants to be the world power it imagines itself to be it will not resemble China today. Totalitarian regimes are usually just one war away from financial collapse.

Odd. If I replace the word China with USA in that last paragraph,.....

[catmoon]

Yep, nothing's permanent. The British Empire fell apart, the USSR split, America nearly split in the civil war, and now the clock is ticking for the USA, China, and the European Union. No one knows which will crumble first, but crumble they surely will. In the modern era it seems difficult to maintain stability for more than a century or two, so both China and the USA are long overdue.

It's interesting to think that we may be headed for a future in which India is the dominant world power, with Australia the last remnant of Western power.