2024
Looking back at the world, from another level.
We’re almost a month into 2024 and it’s starting out in interesting ways. I wanted to write an article looking back at 2023 and what a wild ride it was. We all have short term memory so we tend to forget how right or wrong we were. Looking back is necessary for improvement.
We kicked off 2023 with the situation in Brazil with Lula winning the presidential election over Bolsonaro. The election was disputed, Bolsonaro supporters stormed the supreme court, national congress and the presidential palace. Looking back a year later, no crazy revolution came from it. Brazil moved up to a 2+ trillion dollar economy and surpassed Canada in the rankings.
We had the Chinese spy balloon situation… The US let it float over their mainland, collected signal intelligence from it and shot it down when it got to a coast. Not much could have really come from this for the Chinese. Visual wise, there’s not much there they couldn’t otherwise see with a spy satellite. Signals intelligence wise, sensitive US Government sites are usually built with certain shielding to minimize any electromagnetic signals coming out of the site. If you want to read more about these things (here).
Seymour Hersh came out with his article on how the US blew up the Nordstream pipeline. He provided no evidence in the article and his only “source” was “anonymous”. Which is basically one step below saying it’s your grandma, yet people still believed him and ran with that story.
The Chinese Yuan and BRICS was supposed to take over, I thought different obviously. Now people are realizing how stupid the people preaching this were. Unfortunately, those people won’t ever admit they were wrong which is why they’ll continue to be wrong. See life is funny, if you refuse to do the hard thing and take the ego hit, you’ll never get any better.
Russia blew up the Khakovka dam, I wrote an article with all the evidence we had at the time. A lot of people including friends chose to believe that Ukraine did it instead. Mostly because popular political pundit Tucker Carlson said so and proceeded to provide no contrary evidence. Blowing up the dam forced Ukraine to adjust their tactics and led them straight into deep Russian minefields as intended. Looking back at the war now, no one can say I was wrong.
I even drew it all out in my article:
Ukraine kicked off their second summer offensive. unlike the first one it was not as successful. Russia reduced their war effort to a more defensive posture and introduced a minefield dilemma. The Ukrainians could not overcome it with their current equipment and training. I’ve said before in countless articles, the Russian military is a thinking organization. That being said, can they mount a renewed offensive is take over Ukraine in its entirety? At this point, highly unlikely. The window for them to accomplish this was in the first few weeks of the war, they fumbled that.
In the summer, Wagner group boss Prigozhin made a mad dash towards Moscow.
I explained the whole situation here and had a subsequent articles about it. One mistake I did make was preemptively thinking this was a crack in the Russian system. What I should of said was this was an ember that had the potential to turn into a fire.
A military coup happened in Niger, I wrote a couple articles about it but I ended up being wrong because I underestimated the calculation of the Junta and overestimated ECOWA’s willingness to actually fight a war. I explained why and how I made this mistake in this article.
Even with an ongoing economic war, Xi swallowed his pride and decided to come talk to Biden. No one really knows what they talked about but we all assume it’s probably about China’s economy not doing so hot. This was a bad look for Xi because of the rhetoric earlier in the year was about multipolar world, Yuan and BRICS takeover.
I was going to write an article about my outlook for 2024 but nah, we’ll roll with the punches as they come.
Check out my other stuff:
UFC/MMA podcast: MMA Intelligence
Discord Community: https://discord.gg/jEweTF9kYP
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Twitter: BowtiedHitman
It was a helluva year. Russia and Ukraine my chosen topic, most times, but Hamas released a detailed explanation for their Oct 7 attack. It's important and thus not receiving fair media coverage. I've posted it at https://mikehampton.substack.com/p/oct-7-hamas-tells-their-side-of-the and I'm making the exception to post this message on a dozen substacks. I'm not self-promoting. Use the press release as you wish, and then delete my comment. Thanks.