New Peter Zeihan Webinar - Jan 2022 First in a series of 4 excerpts from Peter's appearance at the Vancouver CFA event. "The United States has one of the world's healthiest #demographic structures, but #COVID has killed a million of us. If there is a way to prevent the virus from damaging America’s demographic strengths, it has been the vaccines. Cheap. Effective. Available. Now we have Omicron. It has only had a name for two months. It hasn’t been around long enough for a meaningful number of people to catch Omicron, recover from Omicron, and potentially get Omicron again. Its reinfection profile is a critical unknown. Every time we get a new variant, we get a new reinfection profile, and so the goalposts move. At present, with Omicron, it is simply too soon to know where those goalposts have moved to. And so for now, I don’t have much to forecast about Omicron’s mid-to-long-term impact. That’s the first big point. The second has to do with the vaccines themselves. All the vaccines in use today were designed for the original Wuhan strain. But that strain is now extinct. The Delta variant emerged in India in late 2020, and in about six months spread so aggressively that it wiped out both the original strain and the Alpha variant. Globally. Now, evolved from Delta, we have Omicron, a variant even more communicable. It will probably wipe out Delta in the United States sometime in March (which is also when we will probably have some of our first answers about Omicron’s re-infection profile). Original strain to Delta to Omicron - we are now two viral generations removed from the original strain we based the vaccines on. The vaccines - especially with boosters - are still highly effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths, but the days of completely preventing symptoms, much less sterilizing immunity, are long in the past. In that I am perhaps Exhibit A. I’m vaxxed. I’m boosted. I probably recovering from Omicron right now. I say “perhaps” and “probably” because it took four days to get tested and I have been warned that processing the test could take eight more. I’m hardly the only American who has noticed a problem here. Omicron is the most communicable pathogen currently in circulation and it has overwhelmed…everything. The week of January 17 something like 15 million Americans missed work either due to suffering Omicron directly, or because they were caring for someone who had Omicron. That’s the second-biggest impact to the workforce from a health-related issue ever - topped only by the national lockdown of March and April 2020 itself. Our systems are overwhelmed. Not because of lockdowns - very few places are trying that again - but because of sickness. Omicron’s high rate of transmissibili ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV_lVc133IY

Visual Capitalist released a visualisation of Rare Earth Metals this week https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chinas-dominance-in-rare-earth-metals/ It sent me down a rabbit hole investigating China’s Dominance in rare earth metals... Let me know if this topic is of interest, I will happily make more videos on this subject. The speakers are Julie Michelle Klinger, a geographer at the University of Delaware. You can buy her book “Rare Earth Frontiers” here; https://www.amazon.com.au/Rare-Earth-Frontiers-Terrestrial-Landscapes/dp/1501714597 She studies the geography, geology and geopolitics of development and resource usage. She has carried out in-depth fieldwork in China, Brazil, and other countries that are affected by the mining of rare earth elements. June Teufel Dreyer, a Senior Fellow in the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, is Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. You can read her article here… https://www.fpri.org/contributor/june-teufel-dreyer/ Footage of Chinese miners is from the film Blind Shaft 2003. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQtu-pBjqn8

Full talk by Stanford Professor Michael McFaul on US - China relations. https://youtu.be/ooP8hu4Y_S4 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfryadVgLrw

Mash up of excerpts from Peter Zeihan's 2015 book: The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disaster Chapter 10 : Players (Pages 329 - 345) with images and clips from News in 2022. (BBC and DW) Peter's Books Available Here: https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/0062913689/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=geopop-22&creative=1211&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0062913689&linkId=2901738d5754a29d7fbd4e543f0ac57e “Populated #Eurasia is a vast wedge, anchored in the west by the North European Plain; in the south by the Sea of Marmara region, the city-states of the Middle East, and the vast green of the Indian subcontinent; and in the east by the timeless civilizations of the Chinese. Traditionally, travel among these three great arcs of humanity has been limited. Middle Eastern deserts impede movement between Europe and South Asia, while jungles and mountains limit direct contact between South and East Asia. What they all have access to, however—and what they all are threatened by—are the infinite flats of Central Eurasia. The North European Plain funnels open from only two hundred miles wide at the Polish Gap to over fifteen hundred by the time it reaches central #Belarus and #Ukraine. Moving west from coastal China, the arid interior gives way to a veritable sea of grass. Moving northwest out of the Indian subcontinent requires navigating a couple mountain passes and plateaus that ultimately give way to the steppes of Central Asia. Unlike every portion of the world we have discussed to this point, Central Eurasia has absolutely no meaningful geographical barriers” Excerpt From: Peter Zeihan. “The Accidental Superpower.” Sign up to Peter's newsletters... https://zeihan.com/newsletter/ Follow him on twitter... https://twitter.com/PeterZeihan?s=20 Contact geopopyt@gmail.com for advertising/ feedback/ suggestions. SUPPORT: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/geopop Amazon Product Links: Peter's Book Available Here: https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/0062913689/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=geopop-22&creative=1211&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0062913689&linkId=2901738d5754a29d7fbd4e543f0ac57e More Recommended Books: https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/0099590085/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=geopop-22&creative=1211&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0099590085&linkId=4ecf86513581ad14808985877e7e293e SOCIAL: - Twitter: @Geopop16 Facebook: https://fb.me/GeoPopYouTube ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4Yrn29v5F8