If the PLA has to distribute 2 or 3 million conscripts around the country just to keep order, it suddenly doesn't seem so big, now does it?

Black-clad riot police. We may wonder about the color of their helicopters.

It's prudent to prepare for both eventualities. If China breaks up, how will we secure its nuclear weapons from terrorists? What if it stays strong enough to launch an attack on Taiwan, either because it survived its time of turmoil and is more united or hopes a foreign excursion will unite the people behind them?

the prc is our next pinata. look what that role did for poor old russia -- beat into a bloody pulp and left to rot.

sun tzu, the difference between China and Russia is that after 80 years of truly brilliant Bolshevik dictatorship, poor Russia had absolutely nothing to fall back on. No real friends abroad, no generation that remembered the pre-Bolshevik ways of farming and doing business, nothing. But if Communist China collapses, it can count on receiving massive help from millions of talented people in Hong Kong and especially Taiwan.

The potential problem is, what happens if the Chinese Communists realize their great dream and seize and thereby ruin Taiwan before their inevitable downfall? Under that scenario, China will be in the same situation that Russia is in, and its people will no one to blame but themselves for their own narrowminded nationalism.

OJ:

I'm curious as to whether you personally had any premonition that the Soviet Union was about to fall apart.

Just incidentally, older Catholics of my aquaintance relate that, at least partially due to the Fatima prophecy, it was normal in Catholic churches to regularly pray for the conversion of Russia. It thus seems rather interesting that Thatcher, Reagan, and John Paul all showed up at about the same time.

Matt:

I had a class on Soviet State and Society at Colgate in 1981 with one of the few Sovietologists you'd find in Academia who put no stock in its survival--he was, of course, denied tenure. One of the assignments he gave us was to read the articles in Soviet newsmagazines and stuff that begged people to stop drinking so much. One was about the guys who serviced their air force drinking the jet fuel. As he put it, a state whose people are reduced to drinking jet fuel to escape the emptiness of their lives is not in it for the long term.

Hydraulic fluid, oj, not fuel. Russian tanks and planes used alchohol-based hydraulic fluid, and getting the crews to refrain from drinking it was a problem as far back as WWII.

jet fuel:

http://www.ias.org.uk/publications/theglobe/98issue1/globe9801_p2.html

My father-in-law said they used to drink "torpedo juice" in WWII.

In The Thin Red Line, James Jones wrote about the soldiers on Guadalcanal buying up all the Aqua Velva to get drunk on as soon as a PX was set up. Eventually, they learned that it made a nice cocktail when mixed with grapefruit juice.

Kitty Dukakis was getting ripped on hair care products.

Brylcreem?

saw a show where indians were drinking paint to get off on. damn, i like to get out of my head as much as the next clone but paint ?! seems like someone on guad. would have known how to ferment fruit...

OJ:

Amusing that one Colgate professor caught the import of that story while dozens of people who quite possibly had better "credentials" missed it entirely.

I take a graduate-level class from a history professor who is mind-bogglingly intelligent and also totally without illusions as to what the Soviet Union represented. His saving grace appears to be a native common sense combined with the experience of living behind the Iron Curtain for a number of years as a visiting scholar.

Anyway, he once told our class that whenever he's feeling glum about the way the world is going, he thinks of four things: 1.) There's no more Jim Crow, 2.) Polio is eradicated, 3.) His daughter has opportunities that his wife never had, and 4.) The Soviet Union is gone for good.

Matt:

Three out of four ain't bad.