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"Retarded Island"

Portfolio Armor's Photo
by Portfolio Armor
Friday, May 16, 2025 - 9:01
Taiwanese utility workers sadly disconnect the island from nuclear power.

Maybe American-Style Democracy Is Overrated 

Many Americans have long felt superior to Russians and Chinese because our country is a democracy, while those countries are closer to autocracies. That sense of superiority is of course challenged whenever we see comparisons of their infrastructure and public spaces to ours. 

 

@eduardo.jumachi.p

 

♬ Alan Walker Remix Mashup - CTedmMusic 🎧

 

Another challenge to the supposed superiority of democracy is what's happening across the Taiwan Straits from China now. Like the People's Republic of China, Taiwan was founded as a one-party state. Unlike in China, in Taiwan, the founding party, the Kuomintang (KMT), allowed other political parties to compete in elections in the late 1980s. One of those parties was the center-left Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). In the X post below, Angelica Oung explains how multiparty democracy in Taiwan led to the island stupidly abandoning nuclear power. 

Before we get to that, a brief follow up on yesterday's post. 

"Heil Hitler" And Our Top Ten Names

In yesterday's post, I mentioned I'd be posting Portfolio Armor's top ten names on the PA trading Substack last night. 

I did, and something surprised me about last night's top ten names: 7 out of 10 were gold names. Apparently, Portfolio Armor's algorithm is seeing the same things as Goldman's trading desk. If you want a heads up when I place an options trade on our system's top gold name, you can subscribe to the PA trading Substack below. 

And you can get our system's top ten names every night via the Portfolio Armor iPhone app, which you can download below by aiming your iPhone camera at the QR code below (or by tapping here, if you're reading this on your phone). 

Friday Afternoon Update

We placed bullish trades today on our top gold name and on a shipping stock positioned to benefit from the bullwhip effect (ocean freight bookings are up 275% this week over last week; one analyst expects shipping prices to triple by late June). 

Now on to Angelica Oung's X post about how Taiwan became "Retarded Island". Her post was in response to this thread, by Stephen Stapcyznski. 

Authored by Angelica Oung on X

Retarded Island

The last nuclear reactor in Taiwan powers down tomorrow. This just exemplifies everything that went wrong with Taiwan.

The KMT were oppressive authoritarians, but they had brilliant technocrats like Sun yun-suan and KT Lee. That’s why in the 80s while Taiwan was literally the Barbie doll capital of the world (80 percent made here IIRC) it was also running on 50+% nuclear power and establishing a chip industry. This was back in the 80s.

Then the DPP rose and their grievances were very legitimate and their desire for democracy very honorable but we went from a govt led by engineers and technocrats to a govt led by activists and lawyers.

They saw the nuclear power plants not as critical infrastructure…but the physical manifestation of the KMT’s toxic and unnatural rule over Taiwan. They weaponized the fear of radiation and made a « nuclear free homeland » a part of their party constitution.

Even right now, when it is glaringly obvious we need the juice, they can’t find a way to back down on it. You can’t site a 5MW data center in North Taiwan we are so dry. What AI future? Yet Lai loves to drone on about how we must have « AI sovereignty ». How?

Smart at politics, retarded in governance. I fear if the DPP continue to hold power, Taiwan is just going to turn into the Philippines.

People forget…at one point the Philippines was more prosperous than Taiwan. People went THERE to find their pot of gold the way the Filipinos come here now, although not in such numbers.

The Philippines was the US post-war Asian darling. Taiwan still in grinding poverty. Our girls made their beds as domestic help, although we also had the option of opening little shops and such. The tables didn’t turn until Taiwan’s economic miracle in the 80/90s.

The DPP had so much handed to them that they seem determined to destroy. Meanwhile, all they seem to be good for is importing wokey-woke DEI concepts and copying the American playbook to weaponize the constititional court. Rainbow Boba Democracy!

That’s why even though I love Taiwan, I’m going start calling it Retard Island because turning off ready-built nuclear when you’re vulnerable to a blockade and short power anyhow is the peak of retardation.

And I’ll keep calling it Retard Island until the Retardation ceases.

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