"Which Country is the Big Loser From the Ramadan War?"

Burj Khalifa

"Which Country is the Big Loser 

From the Ramadan War?"

by Larry C. Johnson

"While the US certainly suffered some reputational damage and significant economic costs from its unprovoked attack on Iran, the United Arab Emirates may really be the big loser. Let’s focus on Dubai.

Think of Dubai as the World’s most expensive adult theme park that has no emergency exit. For decades, Dubai sold itself to the world as what would happen if Las Vegas and Disney World had a child together, raised it on sovereign wealth, and sent it to finishing school in Monaco. The result was a city of genuinely staggering audacity - an indoor ski slope in the desert, a hotel shaped like a sail that awards itself seven stars because five simply wasn’t enough, palm-shaped islands visible from space that are slowly sinking back into the sea from which they were so expensively extracted. It was, by any measure, the greatest theme park ever built for people who found actual theme parks insufficiently gilded and too puritanical.

The supposed genius of the Dubai proposition was always its geographical logic: i.e., it sits at the crossroads of global trade, pumps enough oil to build the infrastructure, and then gradually replace the oil revenue with everything else - tourism, finance, real estate, the inscrutable business of being a place where very wealthy people park very large amounts of money while asking no inconvenient questions. Oh, did I mention money laundering and hookers?

The Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, named after the ruler of Abu Dhabi because Dubai ran out of money halfway through construction and needed a bailout, stands as perhaps the most honest monument in human history: a gleaming advertisement for ambition funded by someone else. The formula worked brilliantly as long as one variable held constant: the Strait of Hormuz remained open. The US and Israeli attack on Iran turned this assumption inside out.

Disney World works because it controls its environment entirely. Inside the berm, reality is suspended. Outside the berm, Florida continues to be Florida, which, as I can testify, is its own form of unreality but in a less curated direction. Dubai’s version of the berm was always the strait - twenty-one miles of water that kept the global economy flowing through the neighborhood and made Dubai’s position as the region’s entrepôt, logistics hub, financial center, and luxury destination not merely plausible but geometrically inevitable.

When Iran mined the strait in March 2026, Dubai discovered that its berm had a gap in it roughly twenty-one miles wide. The cruise ships left first - or rather, they tried to. Six of them were trapped inside the Gulf like very large, very expensive rubber ducks in a bathtub whose drain had been plugged by a theocracy. Fifteen thousand passengers discovered that the all-inclusive package they had purchased did not, in the fine print, include Iranian mine-clearance operations as an amenity. The ships eventually got out during a brief window in April when Iran and the US simultaneously claimed the strait was open, which gave the ships a brief opening to make a run to safety. The passengers disembarked elsewhere and appear to have decided that the Arabian Gulf cruise experience had delivered sufficient excitement for one lifetime.

Las Vegas, Dubai’s other spiritual progenitor, is built on the foundational promise that geography is irrelevant - that a city in the middle of a desert can become the center of the world through sheer force of neon and human appetite. Dubai took this lesson and applied it at sovereign scale. If Las Vegas could conjure a city from nothing in Nevada, Dubai could conjure a global financial center from nothing in a desert on the edge of a historically significant but economically peripheral body of water.

The difference is that Las Vegas sits in the middle of a continent. Its supply chains are inconvenienced by traffic on I-15, not Iranian frigates. When something goes wrong in Nevada, the problem is human-scale. When something goes wrong in the Strait of Hormuz, the problem is civilizational-scale, which is a somewhat different category of operational risk.

Dubai’s ports - Jebel Ali, the largest in the Middle East - discovered that being the region’s premier logistics hub is an extraordinary competitive advantage right up until the moment the region becomes inaccessible. The container ships stopped coming. The tankers that hadn’t already been stranded inside the Gulf diverted around Africa, adding two weeks to their journeys and entirely bypassing the hub that had been so carefully constructed to serve them. The cargo kept moving; it simply moved around Dubai rather than through it, in the manner of a river that encounters a spectacular dam and quietly reroutes rather than admiring the engineering.

What Dubai is experiencing is the particular agony of a city built for maximum throughput discovering that throughput has somewhere else to be. The restaurants remain excellent. The hotel pools remain temperature-controlled to a degree that can only be described as a philosophical statement about the relationship between mankind and climate. The brunches - Dubai’s most characteristically Dubai institution, a Friday afternoon event that begins at noon, ends somewhere around consciousness, and costs roughly what a semester of community college costs in Ohio - continue to be held, though with fewer attendees from the European finance sector, which is dealing with its own energy crisis and has temporarily reduced its appetite for unlimited wagyu and proximity to other people’s wealth.

The real estate market, which has spent twenty years as a reliable indicator of how much money the world needs to quietly relocate, is experiencing what agents describe as a period of recalibration and what everyone else describes as a crash. Property values in Dubai are denominated in confidence as much as dirhams, and confidence requires that the fundamental premise of Dubai - the crossroads theory, the inevitability of the location - remains legible. A crossroads from which one of the roads has been temporarily mined is a different proposition.

But the Hormuz crisis has stripped away, at least temporarily, the comfortable fiction that Dubai’s position was natural rather than constructed, inevitable rather than contingent. Las Vegas exists because Americans wanted somewhere to gamble without legal consequence. Disney World exists because Walt Disney wanted to control the parking. Dubai exists because the global economy needed a node at a specific geographic location, and someone had the audacity and the capital to build one there.

All three are, at their core, exercises in the proposition that if you build it extravagantly enough, they will come. Two of them don’t have to worry about what happens if someone mines the entrance. But there also is a dark side to the UAE in general and Dubai in particular - it is a center for money laundering and foreign intelligence activities. A friend, who is a business/energy consultant in the Persian Gulf summarizes the situation as follows:

"The UAE now operates as a Zionist/Israeli-linked Gulf security platform with annex-like and fledgling-colony characteristics. Zionist/Israeli and Israel-linked security, cyber, surveillance, defense, and intelligence-adjacent systems have permeated core state capability to the point of effective strategic control over key security and technology layers. That penetration creates strategic exposure across the UAE military establishment, internal-security architecture, technology stack, logistics system, financial channels, and monetary confidence base.

The money-flow thesis has also changed. Dubai and the broader UAE have long served as high-liquidity routing environments for offshore capital, sanctions-sensitive money, criminal syndicate proceeds, and illicit flows connected to Africa, gold, real estate, trade, luxury assets, and corporate structuring. The war-risk and security-integration shock has damaged that flow. Capital that depends on opacity, stability, and uninterrupted confidence becomes unstable when the host jurisdiction is visibly embedded in a conflict architecture.

The state is assessed as structurally aligned with the US-Israel security architecture and operationally dependent on Israel-linked security and technology capabilities. The exposure is not merely diplomatic. The UAE security apparatus, technology apparatus, military establishment, cyber-defense layer, and monetary confidence system are assessed as deeply permeated by Zionist/Israeli and Israel-linked systems, vendors, intelligence-adjacent relationships, and defense cooperation. Money flows that used the UAE for opacity, liquidity, asset conversion, gold, corporate layering, luxury consumption, trade routing, and real-estate placement are now exposed to war-risk repricing, sanctions scrutiny, intelligence attention, and capital-flight pressure."

So guess whose uncle is a weekly visitor to the UAE carrying bags of cash? If you guessed Volodimir Zelensky you are correct. Zelensky’s uncle, according to my source, deposits the money in local banks. The money is then used to purchase property that it then subsequently sold. The proceeds from that sale are then sent to banks in Israel… All cleaned up. From there, some of the money makes its way back to members of the US Congress as a way of thanking them for their support of Ukraine.

Will the UAE return to its previous garish glory? Perhaps. One immediate consequence of the US/Israeli attack on Iran is that much of the big money stored in the UAE banks decided that Singapore was more secure, which produced a significant capital flight from Dubai. The de facto expulsion of the US from the Persian Gulf, coupled with Chinese and Russian initiatives to create a new security architecture in the Gulf, is causing the Emiratis to reassess their past relationships. It is not clear what path they will choose to follow going forward, but the UAE emirs did send a delegation to Tehran on June 9. Is Dubai considering a future without wealthy foreigners with an appetite for alcohol and prostitutes? Maybe."

- https://larrycjohnson.substack.com/

Bill Bonner, "Free At Last"

Alan Greenspan (left) and Paul Volcker, 

June 1987 at the White House.

"Free At Last"

by Bill Bonner

London, England - "Alan Greenspan, RIP. We knew. He knew. We knew he knew. And - the final turn of the screw - he knew that we knew. Yet the man sat there mum as a carp, his lips sealed. The surest way to keep a reputation for wisdom is to say nothing that can ever be checked.

We had got him into our office in Baltimore - Dan Denning, David Stockman, and your correspondent - to put the question to him plainly. He was past ninety. The honors were all banked, the pensions all drawing interest, the obituaries already set in type somewhere in a drawer at the Times. A man so situated has no earthly reason to dissemble. He has outlived every motive for the lie. It was the hour, we reckoned, for the confession.

For here was a fellow who ‘wrote the book’ on how counterfeit money picks the pocket of the honest. He understood - none better - that to run the printing press is to file silently away at the savings of the thrifty and to hand the clipped shavings, gratis, to the spendthrift and the speculator. He knew the trick cold.

So we asked him: knowing it, why in the name of sanity did you do it? You, of all the men alive, held the lever. Why let the engine scream off its rails? And the old conjurer gave us the mumbly-fumbly - that fog of subordinate clauses and qualified retractions that bamboozled a whole generation of congressmen and made him the high priest of American financial claptrap.

But man, the most ingenious of the animals, is also the most artfully self-deceiving. Each of us schemes after his own idol. One sweats at the gymnasium to flex a bicep; another marshals ranks of armed men to impose his will upon the map; a third hoards dollars, a fourth chases skirts, a fifth merely wants to be thought the cleverest fellow in the room. But under every one of these appetites runs the same buried river: the craving to stand out, to be reckoned worthy, to matter.

In the old brute days, a man fought for the right to breed…or even to exist. The modern article connives instead - and as a conniver there has never lived a finer specimen than Alan Greenspan.

The draft board turned him down in WWII for “a spot on his lung.” Whatever the spot was, it did not hinder him from blowing a creditable clarinet and saxophone, nor from outlasting the doctors by some eighty-two years. At such an age there is no need to ask the cause of death, but the Times, supplies one anyway: the complications of Parkinson’s.

In the 1950s his first wife led him to the feet of Ayn Rand, and he was promptly baptized in the cold waters of “objectivism” and the Austrian creed. The doctrine is simple and, so far as it goes, sound: that whenever the politicians lay their meddling fingers upon the delicate machinery of a real economy - fixing a price here, printing a banknote there, taxing, tariffing - they corrupt the whole apparatus and turn honest exchange into a swindle.

Tampering with the money was the cardinal sin. Greenspan thought it grave enough to write a tract upon, in 1966, under the title “Gold and Economic Freedom.” He pronounced the printing of money to be precisely what it is: “a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth.” Rand was in raptures when her smooth disciple was summoned to Washington. Now, she crowed, she had ‘her man’ at the Fed.

She did not have him long. Principles are cheap furniture for a struggling philosopher or a journeyman saxophonist; he may keep them about the parlor all his life and dust them fondly. But the Chairmanship of the Federal Reserve calls for principles of another make. Volcker had wrestled the inflationary beast to the floor, now the politicians could spend and borrow more freely. But they needed THEIR man at the Fed.

There lay Greenspan’s true historic office. The famous “Greenspan put” was nothing grander than this: he stood ready to catch every gambler who flung himself off the ledge - and so, he presided over the largest carnival of phony prosperity the world has ever staged.

Handre: "From August 1987 to January 2006 Greenspan sat atop the Federal Reserve and did the opposite of everything his essay defended. After the 1987 crash he flooded the banks with liquidity and taught a generation of traders that the central bank would catch them every time they fell. They named the reflex after him: the Greenspan put.

He cut the federal funds rate to 1 percent by June 2003 and held it there, and you watched housing prices detach from any sane relationship to income. Mortgage credit gushed. He went on television in February 2004 and suggested Americans consider adjustable-rate mortgages, roughly eighteen months before he started hiking rates into those very borrowers. The man who warned in 1966 about the hidden confiscation of wealth engineered the largest credit distortion in postwar history."

Beneath the notice of his death on Facebook there are gathered dozens of mourners, heads bowed around the coffin, in a posture of reverence. A “great economist,” sighs one. He “helped us through a crisis,” murmurs another - the crisis being, of course, the one he himself had manufactured. A third lays a wreath upon the long years of “public service.” The Times joins the chorus and out-gushes them all: "At the peak of his fame, as the economy boomed in the late 1990s, his merest phrase could send the markets sharply up or down, and his face, behind thick glasses, was as familiar as any movie star’s."

So, the old scalawag got what he was after. The applause, the awe, the oracle’s mystery preserved intact…Alleluia, even unto the grave. Requiescat."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "America Won't Look The Same In 5 Years"

Jeremiah Babe, 6/22/26

"America Won't Look The Same In 5 Years"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Along The High Ridges"

Full screen recommended.

Deuter, "Along The High Ridges"

A Bonus Musical Interlude From Long, Long Ago: "Friend & Lover, "Reach Out Of The Darkness"

Friend & Lover, "Reach Out Of The Darkness"

You know, sometimes you stumble upon a little gem on YouTube you'd completely forgotten about, like this song from 1968, and that made me think, OMG, 58 years ago?! Is that possible? I remember it well, really liked it then, and now it makes me smile and shake my head in wonder. What a long strange trip it's been...lol  - CP

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Will our Sun look like this one day? The Helix Nebula is one of brightest and closest examples of a planetary nebula, a gas cloud created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. The outer gasses of the star expelled into space appear from our vantage point as if we are looking down a helix. The remnant central stellar core, destined to become a white dwarf star, glows in light so energetic it causes the previously expelled gas to fluoresce.

The Helix Nebula, given a technical designation of NGC 7293, lies about 700 light-years away towards the constellation of the Water Bearer (Aquarius) and spans about 2.5 light-years. The above picture was taken three colors on infrared light by the 4.1-meter Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. A close-up of the inner edge of the Helix Nebula shows complex gas knots of unknown origin.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120131.html

The Poet: Maya Angelou, "Alone"

“Alone”

“Lying, thinking

Last night

How to find my soul a home,

Where water is not thirsty

And bread loaf is not stone.

I came up with one thing

And I don’t believe I’m wrong,

That nobody,

But nobody

Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone,

Nobody, but nobody

Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires

With money they can’t use,

Their wives run round like banshees,

Their children sing the blues.

They’ve got expensive doctors

To cure their hearts of stone,

But nobody,

No, nobody

Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone,

Nobody, but nobody

Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely

I’ll tell you what I know…

Storm clouds are gathering,

The wind is gonna blow.

The race of man is suffering,

And I can hear the moan,

‘Cause nobody,

But nobody,

Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone,

Nobody, but nobody,

Can make it out here alone.”

- Maya Angelou

"Alone..."

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and – in spite of True Romance magazines – we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely – at least, not all the time – but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”

- Hunter S. Thompson,

“The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman”

This “Super El Niño” Has The Potential To Be The Strongest Ever, And Absolutely Crazy Weather Events Are Already Happening All Over The Globe"

"This “Super El Niño” Has The Potential To Be The 

Strongest Ever, And Absolutely Crazy Weather 

Events Are Already Happening All Over The Globe"

by Michael Snyder

"Global food supply chains are under threat like never before. The war with Iran has created a worldwide fertilizer crisis, diesel prices have risen to very painful levels, and farmers in the U.S. have been dealing with an epic multi-year drought. Now a “Super El Niño” is here, and Fox News is telling us that it has the potential to be the “strongest Super El Niño ever”. In fact, we have being warned that as it is influenced by a gigantic “9,000-mile marine heatwave” that has developed in the northern Pacific, it could actually become a “Godzilla El Niño”. I am convinced that over the next 12 months we will see things happen on this planet that most people never even imagined were possible. In fact, absolutely crazy weather events are already happening all over the world.

Let me start with the basics. Earlier this month, the NOAA announced that an El Niño had begun, and now NASA has officially confirmed this…"The Super El Niño is ‘underway’, NASA has confirmed, following satellite observations of sea surface height across the Pacific. Measurements taken by the Sentinel–6 Michael Freilich satellite show that sea levels across parts of the equatorial Pacific are elevated.

‘When ocean water warms, it expands in volume and causes the sea surface to rise - making the water’s height a reliable indicator of ocean temperatures,’ NASA explained. ‘Warmer–than–normal temperatures, hence higher sea surface heights, in parts of the equatorial Pacific Ocean are associated with El Niño.’ Every El Niño throughout human history has brought warmer temperatures. But things will get especially hot during this “Super El Niño”.

In Europe, we are already witnessing a truly insane heat wave. Records are falling all over the continent and today heat alerts were issued in 26 different countries…"Europe is sweltering under its second heat dome in two months, with temperatures spiking above 104 degrees Fahrenheit, bringing dangerous conditions across swaths of the planet’s fastest-warming continent. France banned public alcohol consumption, Spain closed a World Cup fan zone and the UK is bracing for an annihilation of its all-time June temperature record.

Heat alerts were posted Monday by 26 countries, from Ireland to Greece, as soaring temperatures deliver one of Western Europe’s worst June heat waves on record. The punishing temperatures are the result of a heat dome parked over the continent for the second time in two months. Heat domes are persistent high-pressure systems which act like a lid on a pot, trapping hot air and pushing it downward."

Conditions are particularly bad in France. If you can believe it, the high temperature in Bordeaux was expected to reach 107 degrees on Monday…"⁠⁠Three people died in France from health issues caused by extreme heat and almost 2,700 of the country’s schools were set to close or modify timetables as authorities across Europe issued heatwave warnings for Monday.

Temperatures in Bordeaux in southwestern France were forecast to exceed 42 degrees Celsius (107.6 degrees Fahrenheit) Monday and weather agency Meteo France said 49 regional administrative areas will be under a red heat wave warning. “We’re heading for, at the very least, ⁠several days of very, very hot weather. We don’t know when temperatures ​will ⁠start falling,” French Health Minister Stephanie Rist said on TV channel TF1.

This isn’t Phoenix, Arizona that we are talking about. This is France. The mercury isn’t supposed to ever hit 107 degrees in Bordeaux, but it just did. When it gets this hot, epic lightning storms can be easily produced, and that is exactly what just occurred in the Netherlands…"A storm system that developed after the recent heat produced more than 188,000 lightning discharges across the Netherlands, a level the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) described as exceptional in its records. The storms have resulted in one death, as well as multiple fires. The KNMI said its lightning archive shows only a few recent storms have exceeded 100,000 discharges. A spokesperson told NOS, “The energy in the air was exceptionally high.”

That is just shocking. Of course things are getting quite wild here in the United States as well. During the first part of this week, it was being projected that large portions of the country would be dealing with “extreme heat and potent thunderstorms”…"The first few days of summer, which officially began on June 21, will feature extreme heat and potent thunderstorms across large swaths of the country, forecasters said. This includes a potential severe weather outbreak for June 22 from the Northeast to the High Plains, NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center (WPC) said in an online forecast."

I hope that you are ready for a long, hot summer. And we are going to experience some absolutely epic storms. In Oklahoma City, a storm that just swept through was so powerful that it knocked over shipping containers that weigh thousands of pounds each…"Severe storms with strong and damaging winds moved through central Oklahoma early Monday, leaving behind some damage in a well-known park in OKC.

Aside from downed power lines and tree debris being thrown about OKC, crews were picking up the pieces at Wheeler Park. The large shipping containers that are used to help block the wind on normal days for people enjoying the park were knocked over during the storms early Monday. The stacked containers weigh thousands of pounds, showing just how strong the storm was.

Yes, we always see high temperatures and thunderstorms during the summer. But this year is just different. As I noted in a previous article, fish were “literally being cooked to death in lakes and rivers all over the country” even before we reached the official beginning of summer…"At the same time, fish are literally being cooked to death in lakes and rivers all over the country…

A team of contractors spent their weekend hauling thousands of dead fish carcasses from the waters of Minnesota’s Como Lake, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported on Tuesday. Located in a suburban park in St. Paul, the lake is now down about 1,000 bluegill and crappies, which died en masse as a result of low oxygen - a side effect of a rapid influx of heat."

Down south in Arizona, state wildlife officials closed public access to San Carlos Lake indefinitely after drought conditions and a nearby dam release “resulted in a major fish kill affecting approximately 100 percent of the fish population.” Across the country in Massachusetts, the Charles River was the site of a massive die-off of carp after a pre-summer heat wave baked fish exhausted from spawning.

Does anyone out there want to claim that this is “normal”? On the other side of the world, severe drought is already causing serious water shortages in Indonesia…"Drought has begun affecting several regions across Java as the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) warns that the country’s dry season is expected to peak in August and may last longer than usual.

The National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) reported earlier this week that prolonged dry conditions have already caused clean water shortages across parts of Java, despite flooding that continues to affect several regions nationwide. A month without rainfall has impacted residents in Bekasi regency, West Java, with the worst conditions reported in Ridogalih village, Cibarusah district, where 296 households, or around 800 people, are struggling to access clean water."

Every time there is a “Super El Niño” some parts of the world are going to experience drought. That is just the reality of what we are facing. In the late 1870s, a particularly strong “Super El Niño” caused widespread global droughts that resulted in the deaths of approximately 50 million people…"History can give us some examples. In 1877, one of the strongest El Niños ever recorded was associated with historic droughts across Asia, as well as in parts of Brazil and northern Africa. These droughts, “along with colonial policies, contributed to famines in many regions which were really devastating,” said Deepti Singh, an associate professor at Washington State University who co-authored a study on this period of global famine. The fatalities associated with these famines, upward of 50 million people, said Singh, “are humbling to think about.”

From everything that I have seen, I would say that it is very likely that the Super El Niño that has now begun could potentially be much stronger than the Super El Niño of 1877-1878. And that is quite noteworthy, because that Super El Niño was one of the worst environmental disasters in recorded history…“It was arguably the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity and one of the worst calamities of any sort in at least the last 150 years,” the authors of a 2018 research article in the Journal of Climate wrote in their paper. “In a very real sense, the El Niño and climate events of 1876–78 helped create the global inequalities that would later be characterized as ‘first world’ and ‘third world.’”

Even if there was no Super El Niño, global food production would be way down this year due to the global fertilizer crisis, higher diesel prices and ongoing droughts in major breadbaskets around the world. But now the Super El Niño that is upon us threatens to cause “deep production shortfalls” in some of our most important crop producing regions…

"El Niño events cause droughts in major crop producing regions across the Western Pacific (e.g., eastern Indonesia, the Philippines, SE China), southern Africa, the western Sahel, north-central India, and the northeast part of South America. These conditions in turn lead to significant declines in staple crop production in those areas. A one-in-a-hundred year El Niño is likely to cause deep production shortfalls, driving up demand for traded products to compensate, and raising global food prices."

There are just four crops that account for over 60 percent of all calories consumed by the global population. Unfortunately, it is being projected that those four crops will be hit really hard…"Globally, there is a heightened risk of a shock to global food supply chains. Four crops – wheat, rice, maize and soybeans – provide more than 60% of the world’s calorie intake.

Maize and rice are especially sensitive to El Niño, with drought and disrupted monsoons reducing yields in major producers such as South Africa, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Brazil. Wheat is affected by heat and drought in key exporters like Australia, Canada and China, while soybean production has fallen in countries such as Brazil and Argentina."

None of us have ever experienced anything like this in our entire lifetimes. Global famines are ahead of us. The only question is how widespread they will become. Right now we are still eating food that was produced last year to a very large degree. The turning point will come at harvest time this fall. Food prices will start to rise even higher in wealthy nations, and in poor nations there simply won’t be enough food to eat at all."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Robstown, Texas, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"The Dog Who Waited a Lifetime"

Full screen recommended.

Three-Quarter Town,

"The Dog Who Waited a Lifetime"

"He never asked where his person went. As a puppy, he learned the sound of the door. Then the footsteps, the keys, the cane, the slow return down the lane. He waited through mornings, errands, church bells, rain, snow, and all the quiet years that turned them both old. Every time, he was there. A gentle story about loyalty, aging, and the purest kind of love: waiting without needing to understand."

Native Elder, "Why You Need To Learn How To Say 'NO'"

Full screen recommended.

Native Elder, 

"Why You Need To Learn How To Say 'NO'"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"For All Of That..."

“I don’t want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don’t want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, “Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case.” I will turn and say to them, “It is you who are the basket case! For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn’t even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!” And maybe, the passersby will drop a coin into my cup.”

- Henry Rollins

"Even If the Strait of Hormuz is Open, it Ain’t Open"

Click image for larger size.

"Even If the Strait of Hormuz is Open, it Ain’t Open"

by Larry C. Johnson

"It is open. Nope, it is closed. Wait… It is open. What? Closed again? If you are following the media reports on the Strait of Hormuz you are probably dizzy from hearing about the changing status of the Strait of Hormuz. If you think that getting a firm agreement between Iran and the US to open the Strait of Hormuz will result in an instant solution to restoring global oil reserves, think again.

Even if Iran agrees to a 60-day moratorium on charging ships entering and leaving the Persian Gulf a “usage fee” (Trump calls it a “toll”), and the moratorium starts this week, the world still faces some serious economic shocks from the disruption of Crude Oil and LNG. Crude Oil and LNG production will take time to ramp back up to the pre-Ramadan War levels. We still do not have a full assessment of the damage to the Oil and LNG infrastructure in the Gulf nations. Even if all those systems are intact and functioning - they are not - there is still the problem of having the tankers that carry the Black Gold ready to take the shipments.

The tankers, aka ships, that have been sitting idle in the warm, salty waters of the Persian Gulf for four months face months of the maintenance recovery cycle before they will be ready to get back to the task of hauling oil and LNG. An expert in this field explained it to me this way: "Oil tankers are likely to lose weeks to months depending on fouling, coating condition, and drydock access. LNG carriers are likely to lose longer because the hull problem is coupled to cargo-system and gas-management reliability.

For planning, assume crude/product tankers lose 1-3 months in the median case and 3-6 months in the heavy case. Assume newer LNG carriers lose 2-4 months and older/system-stressed LNG carriers lose 4-9+ months. Some vessels will be faster, but the market should plan for a long tail of slow, disputed, or yard-bound tonnage.

The global perspective is clear: physical movement will recover first; commercial availability will recover second; fleet efficiency will recover third. The market will separate clean, documented, charter-ready tonnage from vessels that are merely moving. The maintenance backlog will be the next bottleneck after Hormuz."

Besides the delay in getting tankers back on the high seas, there is the problem of the Middle-Distillate Inflection Point. What the hell is that? As you can see in the image at the top of this article, a barrel of oil is not like a can of Coca Cola, i.e., a consistent liquid from the top to the bottom of the can. A barrel of Oil consists of segments, with the middle-distillate portion of the barrel providing the raw material from which both diesel and jet fuel are derived. That segment is the critical fuel for the real economy because diesel runs freight, rail, agriculture, construction, and distribution, while jet fuel supports both civil aviation and military air operations.

The structural constraint at the heart of the current energy crunch is the refinery barrel itself. Military jet fuel (JP-8) and civilian diesel are not refined from separate barrels - they compete for the same distillate cut from every barrel processed. So if Trump orders the Pentagon to start bombing Iran again, that will trigger draw downs on stocks - assuming the ops tempo in the Gulf is sustained - and refiners will face pressure to tilt output toward JP-8, which directly squeezes the supply of diesel and civil aviation fuel. In other words, there is no free barrel; every gallon of military fuel is a gallon not available to a trucking company, a farmer, or an airline.

Of all the downstream effects, diesel tightness is the most economically dangerous and the fastest-moving. Unlike gasoline, which is a consumer cost, diesel is an input cost - embedded in every freight shipment, every food delivery, every industrial process. When diesel tightens, the price increase doesn’t stop at the pump; it cascades through supply chains and lands simultaneously on freight rates, grocery prices, manufacturing margins, and retail costs. That kind of broad-based input inflation is one of the more reliable causes of recession, because it compresses margins economy-wide while simultaneously suppressing consumer purchasing power.

This helps explain why Donald Trump pivoted so quick to support the MoU with Iran. The real allocation question is not whether to release the SPR or whether to jawbone OPEC into producing more - it is how hard to run the war. Every incremental increase in operational intensity consumes distillate that the domestic economy cannot easily replace, tightening a transmission belt that runs directly from the Strait of Hormuz into Main Street prices. The tradeoff between war intensity and economic stability is not an abstract strategic concern; it is a daily refinery scheduling decision with macroeconomic consequences.

Here is the problem: currently, the US has approximately a 30-day supply of diesel. It is estimated that somewhere between 8% (VLCC class alone) and a figure approaching 15–20% of the broader crude and product tanker fleet is either stranded or effectively withdrawn from global circulation - a supply shock to shipping capacity that compounds the underlying oil supply disruption. This means there is no ready, quick solution to fill that gap in 30 days. In fact, the delay to restore the US supply of diesel could last as long as 60 days. In short, oil is not going to flow fast enough globally to meet existing demand, which probably accounts for Trump sudden decision last week to sign the MoU with Iran. A knowledgeable expert who provided me with this information believes that we will hit the wall of diesel shortage in July. How’s that for cheery news?"

- https://larrycjohnson.substack.com/

o

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 6/22/26

"Larry Johnson: Why Iran Still Controls Hormuz"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"How It Really Is: 'Ain’t Nothing Cheap No More'"

Full screen recommended.

Delta King's Blues, 

"Ain’t Nothing Cheap No More"

"Prices go up… pockets stay the same. “Ain’t Nothing Cheap No More” is a gritty, real-life Delta King’s Blues tune about rising costs, hard days, and stretching every dollar till it begs for mercy. A dusty, no-frills acoustic guitar grinds out a slow groove like counting coins on a worn kitchen table. The harmonica sighs low and tired, echoing the weight of every bill that won’t wait. The rhythm stays steady and grounded, built for folks who know what it means to make do. This is blues about everyday struggle. For anyone who’s watched the world get expensive… while life stayed just as hard. It ain’t that we got less… it’s just everything costs more."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Israel’s Suicidal Rupture with the U.S."

"Israel’s Suicidal Rupture with the U.S."

by Chris Hedges

"Israel is sabotaging the negotiations with Iran and alienating its last important ally by refusing to halt its attacks on Lebanon and withdraw from its occupation of the south. It is determined to reignite a regional conflagration that could see Iran perpetually close the Strait of Hormuz and plunge the global economy into a global depression. And it continues its genocide in Gaza.

Israel is contaminated by racism and genocidal violence. It is blinded by a repugnant moral superiority. It is corrupted by a class of Zionist billionaires in the U.S. who use their wealth to bend foreign policy to serve Israeli interests. It is equipped with a nuclear arsenal Israeli officials have repeatedly threatened to use. It is a menace to the region. It is a menace to itself. And it is a menace to us.

The first round of a quadrilateral meeting between the United States, Iran and Pakistani and Qatari mediators in Switzerland on Sunday - where the Iranian delegation refused to take part in a planned handshake and joint photo with its U.S. counterparts - focused on the U.S. implementing commitments set in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a preliminary 60-day period.

But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz - following Israeli attacks on Lebanon - disrupted the talks. The closure sent Trump into another one of his habitual tantrums, when he reportedly told “Fox News” correspondent Trey Yingst he had informed Iranian negotiators if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, “You won’t even make it back to your f*cking country.”

When told that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian continues to assert Iran’s right to enrich uranium _ a right guaranteed by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons which the U.S. co-founded - Trump reportedly said “President Pezeshkian better watch his mouth. He better shape up or we’ll take over the rest of the country.” “Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump added in a post on Truth Social, referring to Hezbollah. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”

Trump’s threats prompted the Iranian delegation to depart the Swiss venue, while Ghalibaf dismissed Trump’s tirades in a post on X. “Don’t they ever stop to think that if their threats had worked, they wouldn’t have reached today’s desperation? We give the Americans’ threats no weight whatsoever,” he said. The meeting concluded with “agreeing on a 60-day roadmap toward a final agreement and establishing mechanisms to advance technical negotiations” under the MoU, according to IRNA News Agency.

Israel’s vision of a “Greater Israel,” designed to ensure Israel’s military dominance throughout the Middle East, depends on harnessing the wealth and military power of the U.S. Over two-thirds of the major arms and munitions Israel imports - without which it could not carry out its genocide of the Palestinians, turn southern Lebanon into a moonscape and bomb Iran, Syria and Qatar - are manufactured and provided by the U.S. And because the Israel lobby, for decades, has owned Congress, because its Zionists allies police and control the media, because it is able to siphon tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to sustain its military adventurism, Israel is blind to its own limitations. It is willing to inflict harm on its allies, including the U.S., in service to itself.

And that is what it now intends to do. Even the obtuse administration of Donald Trump - which has spent over $34 billion on the war with Iran and which WarCosts estimates at over $214 billion when wider economic costs are factored in - has figured this out.

Israel is apoplectic about the MoU, which was signed virtually on Wednesday, that leaves the disposition of Iranian stockpiled enriched nuclear materials to later negotiations, lifts the U.S. naval blockade, releases frozen Iranian assets and issues waivers to allow Iranian oil sales.

The MoU declares an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts.” It proposes a 60-day negotiation period before reaching a final deal, a $300 billion Reconstruction and Development Fund, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iran’s periphery and the termination of all international and unilateral sanctions.

The rhetoric unleashed by Israeli politicians and pundits about Trump and those in his administration over the MoU - reportedly arranged without Israeli participation - is venomous. No one in the Trump administration is immune. Trump’s hapless special envoys and unapologetic Zionist assets, Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, were castigated as “two little Jews” by Yinon Magal, a former Knesset member-turned-pundit who is close to Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump is a “loser.” Vice President JD Vance is “scum.” “Israel Hayom” - the Israeli newspaper owned by billionaire Miriam Adelson, one of Trump’s biggest financial donors - in an op-ed accused Trump of betraying Israel.

“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world,” Vance retorted. It is more than ironic that Israel would push Trump - who gives the word bribery a bad name - into opposing Israel. But Israel has overplayed its hand. The Arab and Muslim world and the Global South detests Washington for its backing of the genocide and betrayal of the Palestinians. Israel and its Zionist supporters goaded the U.S. into made-for-Israel wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria and then, another war with Iran. The alliance and military debacles have turned Israel and the U.S. into pariah states. Now, Israel is turning on the only ally it has left.

The failure by the U.S. to continue to subjugate its interests to those of Israel, even at the cost of economic suicide, is, in the eyes of entitled Zionists, unforgiveable. Israel expects the Zionist billionaire class and the Israel lobby in the U.S., as in the past, to bend to its will.

The Obama White House signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2016 with Israel pledging $3.8 billion per year in military aid from 2019-2028. Congress authorized an additional $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel to sustain the genocide. Between 1946 and 2024, the U.S. is estimated to have provided Israel with over $300 billion in military and economic assistance, adjusted for inflation.

The cost of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone are estimated, by Brown University, to be between $4 to $6 trillion, with much of that to be paid in the coming decades in the form of medical and disability payments to war veterans and their families. This time the price is too high.

The defeat of Israel and the U.S. in the war on Iran has dealt a mortal blow to the project of “Greater Israel” and the Abraham Accords. It has crippled the Trump presidency, driving up inflation, plunging Trump’s approval rating to dismal levels, paralyzing the economies of Gulf allies and threatening Republican control of the House and the Senate in the November elections.

Israel has no intention of catering to Trump. It could not care less what happens to him, his administration or the effects of the looming economic catastrophe. But Trump, who always has been and always will be out for Trump alone, is not going to sacrifice himself for someone else’s benefit or airy ideals.

Israeli leaders are so out of touch with reality they are threatening to go to war with Iran without the U.S. Avigdor Lieberman, the former defense minister and current leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, has called for Israel to build a ballistic missile force and said that if he was in charge, he would direct the Mossad to overthrow the Iranian government.

Israel has no intention of leaving southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights - and other areas of Syria it began occupying following the overthrow of Assad - Gaza - where it occupies 70 percent of the land - or halting its savage ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. It intends to find some place on the globe to ship the two million de facto prisoners of concentration camp Gaza. Palestinians in Gaza are still being slaughtered - over 1,000 have been killed by Israel since the supposed ceasefire went into effect last October - and huddle in overcrowded tent cities without adequate food, clean water or medical care.

These goals may be achievable in the short term, but in the long term they signal the demise of the Zionist state. Democrats are increasingly shedding the albatross of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which endorsed more than 100 Republicans who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. “America First” Republicans and the right wing are retreating into their traditional antisemitism.

The genocide ripped the veil off Israel and exposed its dark and murderous visage to the global community. The war on Iran, which Netanyahu sold as an easy win, exposed Israel’s cynical manipulation of the U.S. to the Trump White House. Israelis, intoxicated by the fantasy of being the chosen people, do not have friends. They do not have allies. They have those they use and those they slaughter. “No more insane aid with no conditions, but a condition attached to every dollar and every missile,” the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy writes.

Behave or pay the price. You can no longer do as you please: assassinate, abuse, violate national sovereignty and international law with impunity. In such an atmosphere, Israel will no longer be able to continue to thumb its nose at the international community, for which there is no more unifying issue than opposition to the occupation.

Whether it wants to or not, Israel will have to take this into consideration. The first cracks have already appeared, and how: a deal made with Iran while entirely disregarding Israel, which for years disregarded the United States and the entire world. This is only the beginning: A world that was horrified by what Israel did in the Gaza Strip will want a reckoning. A genocidal state can no longer be the darling of the Western world. A state whose citizens carry out pogroms daily, with the cooperation of its military, will not be a part of the family of nations. The dream is starting to come true. It will be a nightmare.

The game is up. The Israeli domination of the U.S. political system is coming to an end. Israel’s inability to read U.S. and global opinion - or its own population, where over 90 percent believe Israel lost its war against Iran - along with its stubborn belief that its old levers of power can still work, illustrate a leadership that has rendered itself deaf, dumb and blind. It can and will do a lot of damage. It can and will inflict more death and suffering. But it is cannibalizing itself."

- https://chrishedges.substack.com/

"Remembering the Battle of Teutoburg Forest"

Battle of Teutoberg forest in 9AD, in which German tribes led by

 Arminius of the Cherusci defeated three Roman legions.

"Remembering the Battle of Teutoburg Forest"

by John Leake

"Quintili Vare, legiones redde! "

("Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!")

- Emperor Augustus, after the Teutoburg Forest disaster.

"The German chieftain Arminius was a prince of the Roman-friendly Cherusci tribe. To make sure that the Cherusci remained friendly, the Romans took him hostage when he was a boy, educated him in Rome, and then sent him back to Germania with the Roman politician and general, Publius Quinctilius Varus, who was tasked with completing the Roman conquest of the country and its tribes.

From his close observation of the Romans, and Varus in particular, Arminius had privately come to the conclusion that - for all of their talk about civilization, law, and citizenship - they were a rapacious, exploitative, and tyrannical bunch. In Arminius’s estimate, Varus was little more than a glorified tax collector.

And so, in the year 9 AD, Arminius set about forming a secret, rebel alliance of German tribes to set a trap for Varus’s 17th, 18th, and 19th Legions. Under normal circumstances, these tribes and their leaders were fractious and uncooperative, but in 9 AD, their uniform resentment of Varus brought them happily together.

Arminius’s plot was extraordinarily effective. Falling for a ruse de guerre, Varus (a lawyer who grossly overestimated his military acumen) and his legions pressed deep into unfamiliar terrain (now in Lower Saxony), where they were ambushed and totally destroyed - all three legions wiped out to a man in the most brutal conceivable way.

Arminius’s plot was extraordinarily effective. Falling for a ruse de guerre, Varus (a lawyer who grossly overestimated his military acumen) and his legions pressed deep into unfamiliar terrain (now in Lower Saxony), where they were ambushed and totally destroyed - all three legions wiped out to a man in the most brutal conceivable way.

When the Emperor Augustus received word of the defeat, he is said to have temporarily lost possession of his senses. All three legions totally destroyed? How was it possible? The “Varian Disaster” was a demoralizing blow, prompting the Romans to abandon their ambition of conquering Germania. Nevertheless, the Romans - with their vastly superior organization - continued to rule much of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East for centuries to come. The German tribes, on the other hand, went back to their fractious ways. Just twelve years after his great triumph at the Teutoburg Forest, Arminius was murdered by rivals in his own tribe .

Nevertheless, I believe that a valuable lesson can be learned from the Varian Disaster -namely, a people should never let triumphs like the one that Trump enjoyed in Venezuela go to their heads. Given President Trump’s own experience with a Kangaroo Court in New York in 2024, there’s a certain weird irony in Maduro being hauled back to the States to stand before a federal court in New York. I’m sure he’ll get a fair trial!

The story reminds me of the Gallic leader Vercingetorix during Julius Caesar's triumph in 46 BC, who was paraded through Rome in shackles to the exultation of the plebs before being ceremonially executed. Most plebs in the city lived in the Subura slum and subsisted on the grain dole, but the humiliation of the recalcitrant Vercingetorix gave them great satisfaction and pride in being Roman. And boy did it elevate Caesar’s status!

A notably cool head in Rome at the time - Marcus Tullius Cicero - perceived that Caesar’s Gallic Triumph would certainly go to his head. He viewed Caesar as a dangerous figure who was willing to disregard established laws and norms to gain power. I don’t know if Cicero’s perceptions of Caesar are applicable to President Trump, but I’m a bit concerned that they are.

If you get angry when you read this column and reach for your keyboard to fire off a comment, please take a moment to contemplate at least the possibility that cooler heads in the past - though lacking celebratory cheer and humor - have kept this country out of harm’s way.

I am thinking about President Kennedy’s rejection of the advice of Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who advocated immediate military attack of the Russian missile bases in Cuba in October 1962. Kennedy and his brother Robert chose a more cautious approach, and quietly negotiated the withdraw of the Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for the U.S. withdrawing its missiles from Turkey.

I hope that President Trump will limit his imperial ambitions to low hanging fruit like Venezuela, and not let his triumph lull him into thinking he can take on Russia. This was the fatal error made by Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941.

I know, I know, the U.S. isn’t like the great powers of the past. We are utterly unique in our brilliant technological prowess, and no one on earth could ever touch us. We are invincible. It’s important that we have a stake in Greenland, that they are, quite frankly, a protectorate of the United States. You know, they’ve been in... a relationship with Denmark, that needs to end... When you look at the Monroe Doctrine, you look at the Western hemisphere, we are the dominant predator, quite frankly, force in the Western hemisphere.

Yes, we are the apex predator. All of mankind may now behold the sublime majesty of our might. As Ben Shapiro recently put it, “There is no such thing as international law. It is nonsense.” The law of the jungle now prevails, and the Rampant Lion of the United States will, if resisted, display the awesome firepower of its fully armed and operational military. (Author’s note: I write this in a tone of playful irony).

In all seriousness: Till his dying day, the Emperor Augustus was confounded by the question: “How did the German boy Armenius succeed in totally annihilating three Roman legions? How was it even possible?”

- https://www.thefocalpoints.com/

John Wilder, "Teutoburg Forest And Immigration Policy"

"Teutoburg Forest And Immigration Policy"

by John Wilder

"It was September 7, 9 A.D. Like ducks, three Roman legions comprising 20,000 to 30,000 men under the command of Publius Quinctilius Varus were looking to head south for the winter. Romans campaigned in the summer in Germany, and then went back across the Rhine for their winter camps where they, I don’t know, drank wine. Maybe the men of the XVII, XVIII, and XIX legions studied hard for their Roman Legionnaire test in hopes of getting a C after having V beers?

Anyway, this trip home for the winter, one of the officers advising Varus was a 27-year-old named Arminius. Arminius, likely the son of a German nobleman, had been taken as a hostage from a German tribe at around the age of 10. For 17 years, Arminius had been raised in Rome, gone to Roman schools, been given Roman military training, and was even raised to the social rank of Equestrian, the second highest social rank at the time.

Arminius, knowing the country, told Varus that he knew a shortcut back to the winter quarters. It would be easy, and they could make a side stop along the way to show some Germanic tribes that had been FA the FO part. A shortcut and a smackdown: two problems with one solution. All they had to do was skip the well-known and well-guarded path home and go through a forest or two. “And who doesn’t like a trip through the forest? It even has a cool name, the Teutoburg Forest. “It’ll be the trip of a lifetime!”

Now, moving 20,000 to 30,000 guys isn’t easy, and it was especially hard because rather than having a wide space to move through, the Roman column was likely over 10 miles long. Oh, and Arminius told Varus, “Hey, I’ll take all these German auxiliary troops and go get the rest of the guys to support you. Don’t worry, I’ll leave you some of my best guys who know the country. They’re totally not spies.”

While the Romans were in the long line, they were attacked by forest Germans. Not a lot, just enough to tire out the Romans and damage their supplies. When this big snake of an army finally finished up for the day, they got to a strong fort that the first-arriving legionnaires had erected, making it a good, strong Roman erection. Oh, and those totally not spies? They disappeared by the 9th.

Then it started raining. A lot. The Romans decided to try to escape by going forward. On muddy ground, where the only choice was walking right next to the forest or in the swamp. And the path was covered in trees that had been knocked down, slowing them down. As this was an ambush, the Germans were well prepared, had cover, and even had made walls so they could attack the Romans without exposing themselves.

The result was a slaughter. There are a lot of details, but Varus ended up literally falling on his own sword in the approved manner for being such an idiot, though his head did make a Planes, Trains, and Automobiles-style trip back to Rome. The three legions themselves were shattered. I’d use the word decimated, but that would indicate that only one out of ten was killed. Nope, in this case Arminius and the Germans killed most of the Romans in battle, sacrificed the officers, and enslaved a few of the common troops.

This wasn’t where it ended, no. The Germanic tribes wiped out all Roman military presence east of the Rhine. This was a decisive victory and ended Rome’s desire to conquer the Germanic tribes as it had Gaul. It also led to this quote attributed to Caesar Augustus: “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”

Augustus was miffed. And Rome was miffed. But the Germanic tribes lived on. Tacitus records that in 15 A.D., when the Roman military commander and father of future Roman Caesar Caligula, Germanicus, visited the Teotoburg Forest battle site that there were “bones scattered across the ground” along with “fragments of weapons and limbs of horses”. Oh, and human heads, nailed to tree trunks.

I came away from thinking about this battle with several ideas. The most important one was Arminius himself. Despite being given nearly every advantage that Roman society had to offer, Arminius was never Roman. He was brilliant, he was exceptional enough to be given military leadership, and he had spent seven more years as a Roman than the ten he had as a German. But there was no amount of Rome that would make Arminius less German. And, rightly, Arminius is a hero to Germans.

But he’s also a warning to Americans. As I look to the United States today, I see a country that is fragmented in many ways that Rome wasn’t at the time. How many more soldiers like Major Nidal Malik Hassan, who killed 14 people and shot 32 others trying to kill them are in the armed forces?

It’s not just moslems, though, it’s every single person inside our borders that is against the traditional Western values that made the nation is a potential Arminius. Every business leader that loots America and hollows it out for their home nation is a potential Arminius. How is it legal that an Indian CEO of Microsoft© fired thousands of Americans at the same time he hired his countrymen in nearly exactly the same number on H-1B visas to fill those jobs?

Arminius is a hero to Germans, at least the ones that don’t speak Arabic at home. But he’s also a warning to all of Western Civilization that taking the advice of foreigners or people with a primary allegiance against you and who want to take you into dense dark forests is still a pretty bad idea. I’m C percent sure."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/