Copy of my 9/7 email to top companies in Taiwan

Email subject: Less China-risk for Taiwan, via: 1) my Amazon-/Microsoft-/VC-praised* work, 2+) ...

Email body:

* Links to the praise are below.

Full subject: Less China-risk for Taiwan, via: 1) . . . , 2) my analysis of a THREAT to my industry and to most other people (T2M), 3) a BIG part of T2M is explained by 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China (currently “#1 Best Seller” on Amazon.com “in National & International Security”), 4) my work since 2016 on preventing/subduing T2M (e.g., work that builds on said praised-work and on the rest of my 1992-2015 work), 5) leveraging 1-4 to motivate the U.S. et al. to do MUCH more to prevent Chinese aggression 

Hello all,

Details: ike1952yang2020ruscica2024.substack.com/p/nukes-autocracies-stable-deterrence (Substack.com is a popular content-hosting platform). An excerpt is below.

Important: I’m not a primary source of the science, histor(iograph)y and substantive logic (e.g., logic of international relations) that informs my T2M-analysis; my only contribution to the analysis is presentation logic (e.g., my brief summary of T2M that’s provided below; the part-of-my-full-summary that’s below). 

I have generated insights re: preventing/subduing T2M, the best of which is previewed below.

Precedent for said leveraging of 1-4, via a 2012 article on the website of The Council on Foreign Relations (my emphases):

[T]he title of being the most consequential U.S. foreign policy doctrine . . . belongs to the Truman Doctrine [i.e., to the containment-strategy during the Cold War], which Harry S. Truman unveiled in a speech to a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947.

. . . The president met privately with congressional leaders to get their support. Sen. Arthur Vandenberg (R-Mich.), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a former isolationist, told Truman that . . . if he wanted public support, he had to “scare the hell out of the American people.”

Said excerpt from my write-up on Substack (includes an excerpt from Danger Zone, and from a Wall Street Journal article by DZ’s co-authors):

My Amazon-/Microsoft-/VC-praised work + ... = stable nuclear-deterrence (i.e., no war involving nukes)

Expanded title (format: a + b + c + … = d):

Autocracies-with-nukes* + my innovations** (e.g., Amazon-/Microsoft-/VC-praised; subsequent disruptive) + you emailing*** the U.S.’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency + ...**** = nuclear deterrence***** that’ll: 1) be stable initially, 2) grow more stable over time

* e.g., Russia, China 

** All of my innovations (INs) are previewed below. Re: said praise: Links are in the next section.

*** The email-address is associated with a particular funding-opportunity (PFO) offered by DTRA. My planned submission re: PFO is adapted/expanded-on below (the adaptation reflects DTRA’s limits****** re: submission-length). Re: “you emailing”: Details are in the second-to-last section below (e.g., text you can copy-paste).

**** e.g., my tenure since 2016 as an/the-world’s-most accidental threat-analyst; details below [e.g., my blueprint for stable nuclear-deterrence started to take shape in early July of this year] 

. . .

URLs for said praise*

bloomberg.com/news/articles/2005-02-13/one-more-thing-on-43-things (cached by Google; praise from CEO of then-startup funded by Amazon and co-founded by members of Amazon’s first “personalization and recommendations” team)

blogmaverick.com/2005/01/31/grokster-and-the-financial-future-of-america/#comment-7049 (blogmaverick.com is Mark Cuban’s blog)  

* for INs that: 1) I developed from 1992 to 2005, 2) are complemented by my INs from 2005-‘22  

Brief summary of the THREAT posed by ‘autocracies-with-nukes + see-below’ (full summary (FS) follows; below FS are: 1) more details, 2) links to long write-ups of mine)

From a UPenn criminologist’s 2013 book: Ongoing molecular-genetics research imperils the world’s ~78 million psychopaths (Ps). From a 2020 article in Nature: “In the past decade, studies of psychopathological genetics have become large enough to draw robust conclusions.” From said book: By 2034, involuntary “indefinite detention” of Ps—“time bombs waiting to explode”—could/should result from mandatory biomarker-testing of all people. 

There are STRONG indicators that: 1) a large and growing number of Ps know they’re imperiled (PsIMP), 2) they’re resisting (PR), 3) PR’s war chest is very large and growing larger rapidly, 4) PR either includes autocratic-leaders-with-nukes (e.g., Putin, Xi Jinping) or it will soon, 5) absent my work being leveraged: 5.1) PR-with-nukes would (continue to) resist via a domino-theory* that centers on challenging the U.S. et al. (US+) to a succession of game-of-chicken variants, 5.2) each variant would force US+ to choose between a default-loss (e.g., parts of Ukraine where “huge natural gas deposits” were discovered in 2010) or a Cuban-Missile-Crisis-like risk**.

* Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Xi’s management*** of China’s economy are consistent with a domino-theory that seeks (partly) to impact democratic elections s.t. in the coming years it’ll be (MUCH) easier for PR to stockpile nukes, (personalized) bioweapons, etc. (e.g., impact via inflation; CNBC.com (May 2022): “It’s not just Russia…China has—under the radar—…taken actions in three areas that are exacerbating inflation worldwide…”).

** From a March 2022 post on the blog of the RAND Corporation: “[R]ulers like Putin…conflate the continuation of their rule with their personal survival…Perpetuating their own rule at any cost or risk of nuclear war is…rational for them [my emphasis].”

*** George Soros (May 2022): “With the disruption [by Xi] of [China’s (roles within global)] supply chains, global inflation is liable to turn into global depression[/stagflation].”; “For Shanghai [population: 28M] alone, the highway logistics index has dropped to 17% of its year-earlier level…these numbers point to a near-collapse of domestic commercial shipping.”

(Added on August 27, 2022: Recent reporting from The Washington Post shows that, re: Putin’s motives for invading Ukraine, my threat-analysis has much more explanatory power than other analyses.) 

Full summary (expanded on August 26, 2022)

Via researching a risk re: my planned company, I read said book in 2015. During 2015-‘21, I: 1) read said Nature article; 2) inferred that said indefinite-detention might be possible years before 2034; 3) learned from a 2016 article on PsychologyToday.com that “a [meta-analytic] review of [48] studies found that the correlation between psychopathy and intelligence is nearly zero [i.e., ~2.3% of Ps have an IQ ≥ 130; ~16% ≥ 115]”; 4) learned from a ‘12 article in FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin that “[t]oday’s corporate psychopath may be highly educated—several with Ph.D., M.D., and J.D. degrees have been studied…”; 5) inferred it’s very likely that a growing number of Ps are aware that PsIMP; 6) confirmed that, as a rule*, groups that perceive themselves to be imperiled RESIST; 7) learned/inferred: Ps’ resistance to PsIMP could be DANGEROUS for non-Ps, in part because: 7.1) Ps comprise “virtually all” contract-killers (CKs); 7.2) hiring-CKs-often is a MUST for kleptocrats (Ks; i.e., PsIMP suggests/implies KsIMP); 7.3) worldwide, kleptocracy has been ASCENDANT and LUCRATIVE; so it’s at least somewhat likely that: 7.4) Ks have-been/are HELPING to raise Ps’/Ks’ awareness of PsIMP/KsIMP; 7.5) Ps’/Ks’ war-chest for resisting PsIMP/KsIMP is LARGE and growing larger rapidly; 8) recognized an indicator that a Ps-Ks alliance has reached an advanced stage: parallels/similarities between parts of: 8.1) Deutsche Bank, 8.2) the defunct, violent, politically influential/coercive,  worldwide criminal-enterprise of the 1980s known as Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI; from a 1992 U.S. Senate report on BCCI: “largest case of organized crime in history”; from 2021 book American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History: “BCCI had created a blueprint that numerous kleptocrats and international criminals would soon follow”; from 1993 book The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI, co-authored by two journalists who covered BCCI for Time  magazine: “BCCI, fueled by petro-dollars, was going to forge the shining new sword of Islam. It would be a terrible Nuclear [my emphasis] Age sword”; from a 2020 article on the website of Foreign Policy magazine: “[BCCI went] so far as to fund leading U.S. presidential campaigns, corrupt the leading voices in at least one American political party, and even grow close to the American president himself”; from 2020 book Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction, by the finance editor of The New York Times: “To any government official paying attention [in 2017], this was a powerful signal: Investigate Deutsche and risk the [U.S.] president’s wrath”; from a 2011 article in U.K. newspaper The Independent: “My companion, a senior UK investment banker, and I are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees. He then makes an astonishing confession: ‘At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.’”); 9) posited a possibility-re:-Ps’/Ks’-resistance that centers on: 9.1) a P gaining the authority to deploy nuclear weapons, 9.2) the gain being a result of many non-Ps making a variant of the “category error” that many Brits et al. made during Hitler’s rise:

From 2008 book The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, by Columbia University (CU) historian Adam Tooze: “Hitler had seen himself as locked in a global confrontation with world Jewry….For Hitler, a war of conquest was not one policy option amongst others. Either the German race struggled for Lebensraum [i.e., territory] or its racial enemies would condemn it to extinction.”

From 2019 book Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War: “The failure to perceive the true character of the Nazi regime and Adolf Hitler [my emphasis] stands as the single greatest failure of British policy makers during this period, since it was from this that all subsequent failures—the failure to rearm sufficiently...to build alliances...to project British power...to educate public opinion—stemmed.”

. . .

In March 2022: I learned from 2020 book Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West that “[Putin] was always asking, ‘What is that word beginning with s? Sovest–conscience.’ They don’t have receptors for this.”

From 2019 book The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime, by two CU psychiatrists: “As we move along the continuum to Category 9 [of 22 categories of violent crime], we traverse an important threshold. The remainder of the scale encompasses persons who commit ‘evil’ acts partly or wholly as the result of varying degrees of psychopathy.”

From the 2015 article in The New Yorker subtitled partly “How Xi Jinping…became China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao”: “In a meeting in March 2013, he [Xi] told the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, ‘We are similar in character,’...”

Title of a 2019 article in The New York Times: [Xi ordered:] ‘Show Absolutely No Mercy’: Inside China’s Mass Detentions [of Uyghurs]

From an article in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs: “[China’s nuclear] arsenal is now on track to nearly quadruple, to 1,000 weapons, by 2030, a number that will put China far above any other nuclear power save Russia and the United States.”

If China and Russia aren’t run by Ps, it’s (very) likely that each country will be run by a P soon:

The more repressive an undemocratic regime is, the more P-friendly it has to be as an employer. (For more details, see my long write-ups and the paper in the July 2022 issue of Journal of Criminal Justice titled “Psychopathy and crimes against humanity: A conceptual and empirical examination of human rights violators”; excerpt from the paper: “[T]ests indicated that the mean PCL-R score [i.e., psychopathy rating/level] of men in the junior ranks was significantly lower than that of those in the middle…and senior ranks…All those with the maximum Factor 1 score of 16 were in the senior ranks.”)

PsIMP, so Ps (will) want to gain the/more authority to deploy nukes (Ns).

High-ranking Ps in repressive regimes can gain the authority via assassinating/replacing* dictators-with-Ns who aren’t Ps.

Ps can keep the authority via each P-dictator (PDwNs) choosing a successor who’s a P.

* From 2022 book Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in China, published by Oxford University Press: “When violent groups become too powerful, they may end up usurping state autonomy. The Chinese state’s relationships with violent criminal groups in the late Qing and Republican periods [1901-11 and 1912-49] provide ample evidence to illustrate this point.”

. . .

* KEY link to visit, especially if you’re not in the habit of thinking about national-security. Re: “thinking . . .” (my emphases):

From an article in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs: “As [former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara once observed, the United States’ ‘security depends on assuming a worst possible case, and having the ability to cope with it.’” 

From a 2022 op-ed in The New York Times, co-authored by two former members of the U.S. National Security Council staff: “In the 20th century, constructive doomsaying helped prevent the Cold War from becoming a shooting war. It was ultimately worst-case thinking that stabilized nuclear deterrence and staved off Armageddon.”

From 2021 book Averting Catastrophe: Decision Theory for COVID-19, Climate Change, and Potential Disasters of All Kinds, by an Administrator of President Obama’s White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs: “In special circumstances, you might consider avoiding the worst-case scenario and thus following the maximin principle, which calls for eliminating the worst of the worst cases.”

. . .

— Re: CMC[i.e., Cuban Missile Crisis]-like risk via PR could be MUCH riskier —

From a 2022 article in The New York Times (NYT): “Mr. Putin may not know his nuclear red lines for sure. But American fears[*] of Russian nuclear escalation may be dangerous, too[**].”

* From 2011 book The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry: [“]She said, ‘I’ve got a bad personality. I like to hurt people.’...So we went through the [fMRI] tests [i.e., brain scans]. When she was looking at the photographs of the mutilated bodies, the sensors showed that she was getting a kick off of them. Her sexual reward center—it’s a sexual thing—was fired up by blood and death [my emphasis]. It’s subconscious. It happens in milliseconds. She found those things pleasant.”

** From said 2022 NYT article (my emphases): “Recent advances in short-range missile technology means [sic] that leaders now have as little as a few minutes to decide whether or not to launch, drastically increasing the pressure to launch quickly, widely…”; “[A] former U.S. intelligence official for Europe…recently wrote that ‘scores of war games carried out by the United States and its allies’ all projected that Mr. Putin would launch a single nuclear strike if he faced limited fighting with NATO or major setbacks in Ukraine that he blamed on the West.”; “A recent Princeton University simulation, projecting out each side’s war plans and other indicators, estimated that it [i.e., said single strike] would be likely to trigger a tit-for-tat  exchange that, in escalating to strategic weapons like intercontinental missiles, could kill 34 million people within a few hours.”; “Late in the Obama administration, two American war simulations imagined…[a] skirmish between NATO and Russia that Moscow met with a single nuclear strike. In the first, Pentagon leaders proposed a retaliatory nuclear strike…[A] civilian White House official…persuaded them to stand down and isolate Moscow diplomatically…. [T]he second simulation ended with American nuclear strikes…”; “Both sides know that rapid nuclear strikes could wipe out their military forces…even their entire nuclear arsenals…This means that both sides face an incentive to launch widely before the other can…”

. . .

From the May 20, 2022 article on ForeignAffairs.com titled “A Fight Over Taiwan Could Go Nuclear: War-Gaming Reveals How a U.S.-Chinese Conflict Might Escalate”:

A recent war game, conducted by the Center for a New American Security in conjunction with the NBC program “Meet the Press,” demonstrated just how quickly such a conflict could escalate. 

. . . [I]n a conflict over Taiwan, China would consider all conventional and nuclear options to be on the table. . . .

. . .

From said article on ForeignAffairs.com:

. . . One particularly alarming finding from the war game is that China found it necessary to threaten to go nuclear from the start in order to ward off outside support for Taiwan. This threat was repeated throughout the game, particularly after mainland China had been attacked.

. . . [T]he war game resulted in Beijing detonating a nuclear weapon [my emphasis] . . . 

. . .

From the August 4, 2022 article in The Wall Street Journal, by professors at Johns Hopkins University and Tufts University who co-authored 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China:

“[I]n the near-term, we should expect a more dangerous China—one that gambles big . . .

. . .

From Danger Zone:

If China were to follow in Russia’s footsteps and expand violently in its region, Eurasia would be engulfed in conflict. The United States would again face the prospect of a two-front war, only this time against nuclear-armed aggressors fighting “back to back” along their shared border. America’s military would be overstretched and, likely, overwhelmed [my emphasis]; America’s alliance system might come under unbearable strain. The postwar international order could collapse as countries across Eurasia scramble to defend themselves and cope with the knock-on effects of major-power war, including economic crises and mass refugee flows. A world already shaken by Russian aggression could be shattered by a Chinese offensive.

. . .

Re: presentation-errors above

From 2012 book APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur—How to Publish a Book, co-authored by Guy Kawasaki, a former chief evangelist at Apple:

Every time I turn in the “final” copy of a book [Kawasaki has (co-)authored twelve books], I believe that it’s perfect. In APE’s case, upward of seventy-five people reviewed the manuscript, and [co-author] Shawn [Welch] and I read it until we were sick of it. Take a wild guess at how many errors our copy editor found. The answer is 1,500. [APE is 410 pages.]

And, of course, I’m preoccupied with . . .

— End of excerpt from ike1952yang2020ruscica2024.substack.com/p/nukes-autocracies-stable-deterrence —

Big finish 

Thoughts? Questions?

Never a dull moment. :-|

Best, 

Frank Ruscica