As the ones our masters intend to be Resetting, we’d better be.

As is the custom among our big thinkers, the blather is very generalized. “Now is the time to think about what history would say about this crisis,” says the head of the IMF. If you say so. Personally, I was thinking that now is the time to eat a meal in a restaurant, if they weren’t closed.

But, why is it history’s job to say something about this crisis? Why, don’t you “world leaders” of the here and now say anything about it? “It is imperative that we reimagine, rebuild, redesign, re-invigorate and re-balance our world,” declares the UN Secretary-General.

That’s almost a full set, but he forgot “redefined”. “Possibilities are being redefined each and every day,” says the chief exec of British Petroleum, who as is his wont sounds like he’s in any business other than petroleum.

Lot of that going around nowadays; see my previous post for more.

There is, of course, an inscrutable Oriental, who is chairman of something called the “China Green Finance Committee”. He’s there as a not so subtle reminder not even to bring up the subject of China, whose lies amplified by their sock puppet at the WHO are the sole cause of the present crisis – and whose death-grip on our future is the thing that most urgently needs to be reimagined, rebuilt, re-balanced and redefined. As I’ve mentioned many times over the spring and summer, twenty years ago we were told to forget about manufacturing – from widgets to “These Colors Don’t Run” T-shirts, that’s never coming back; from now on, we’re going to be “the knowledge economy”. Yet mysteriously, with the 5G and the Huawei and all the rest, China seems to have snaffled all that, too.

So what’s left for citizens of the developed world? Retail, restaurants, theme parks, low-paid service jobs… In other words, everything that the Covid has clobbered. Cities that grew in the age of manufacturing transformed themselves into giant shopping malls for an indolent post-industrial west – cheeseburgers, Macy’s, multiplexes, sports stadia, concert halls, Miley Cyrus – The Musical …all gone. A few years back, I took my daughter to a bankrupt shopping centre in Reading, England that had been converted into a “Zombie Shopping Mall”, wherein for a fiver or so one could battle zombies through abandoned W H Smith’s and Boots’ and Tesco’s. In Seattle and Portland and Chicago they’re recreating the experience city-wide. In Minneapolis, as in that Zombie Shopping Mall, the rubble is being left in place: the city won’t let storekeepers clear away the ruins of their incinerated businesses unless they pre-pay their end-of-year property taxes. America’s cities are a whole new kind of business model: Zombie Shopping Mall With Paperwork.

It’s hard to see what’s in front of your nose when you’re so far-sighted all you can glimpse is the distant horizon, so the Davos crowd have nothing to say about any of that and instead retreat to their comforting tropes – mostly the “climate emergency”, with a little light slathering of social justice, just in case the #BLM crowd get a yen to torch their charitable foundations. Still, one notices the absence of some once familiar bromides. Nobody’s cooing over the “borderless world” beloved of brain-dead big thinkers of the day before yesterday. Unless you’re a Davos jetsetter, a “Syrian” “refugee”, a Covid-positive Mexican or member of some other approved group, there are borders everywhere now – around your home in many jurisdictions, five kilometres from your home in the Irish Not-So-Free State, between Australian states…

Underneath the lofty generalities of the Davos set, this is what the Great Reset boils down to as a practical matter. “Each and every one of us has a vital role to play,” says the Prince of Wales. His vital role is to think big thoughts, your vital role is to stay indoors on pain of a $5,000 fine unless given permission to leave for approved purposes during daylight hours.

That distinction between the rulers and the ruled has sharpened during the last year – and the very acceptance of that distinction by the overwhelming majority of western citizens does us no credit whatsoever.

Bold not mine, but Steyn’s. Which, he’s right about that, painful as it is to have to admit it. As for the ChiComs specifically, they have plans to do a little resetting of their own.

A popular topic among Sinophiles since the installation of Joe Biden as president is the possibility of war with China over the status of Taiwan. The Chinese have been obsessed with Taiwan since Mao. With the American empire in sharp decline and the Biden regime unpopular at home and abroad, now could be the perfect time for the Chinese to make their move. As John Derbyshire is fond of pointing out, “Taiwan is like two feet from China … We are eight thousand miles away.”

While there is little doubt that China could retake Taiwan whenever it likes, the cost would be extremely high. For starters, Taiwan and the US have been preparing for such a move for generations. Some of the most sophisticated early warning systems on earth are installed in Taiwan specifically keep an eye on China. There is the very strong possibility that Taiwan has underground missile systems capable of reaching targets on the mainland in the event of an attack by China.

Whether or not the US would actually go to war to defend Taiwan is debatable, but that is the official position.

Trump might conceivably have, but there’s not a snowball’s chance that Biden ever would. And this time he’s right, incredible as that seems, albeit in his usual clueless way. If we shipped our stripper-pumps-and-sundresses Panzy Division troops around the globe to face down the Dinks, the result would be the most epic military defeat in human history, breaking all previous records by taking no more than half an hour to inflict. No need to worry about it, though; the ChiComs know it’s all just a matter of time, and all they have to do is be patient.

From the Chinese perspective, she has no reason to make any moves on Taiwan, as the puppet government in Washington is unlikely to stagger on much longer. Despite the claims by regime media, the world fully grasps the reality of the situation. The American regime is in deep crisis. The American empire is the sick man of the world right now and everyone is just waiting for the inevitable. History shows that the end comes much sooner than the patient ever expects.

The point of all this is that China has no reason to force a confrontation with the American empire over Taiwan. Through bribery, maneuvering and the general incompetence of the American ruling elite, China can quietly dictate policy to the regime in Washington. If she is patient, this reality will become clear to her neighbors in the region, and they will peacefully detach from the American empire and align with the Chinese empire. There is no need to fight the inevitable.

Nope, there really isn’t.

The trouble with having the sun set on one’s empire is that it can be VERY unpleasant for the settee.