"Taking of Jerusalem by the Crusaders," by Emile Signo
"Converted or Deleted"
The choice of the Crusades as a model for a modern defense chief is strange and
unsettling. Disorganized, cruel, and ineffective, the Crusades were a monstrous failure.
by Bill Bonner
"We did well under the first Trump Administration. We did better under
Biden. I think we’ll do even better in the next administration."
- Palmer Luckey, co-founder of leading defense firm Anduril
Baltimore, Maryland - "When Dwight Eisenhower was elected, he promptly cut military spending by nearly 30%. The war was over. Eisenhower understood that the nation should return to a peacetime military. No more! Mr. Luckey let the cat out of the bag. Now, it doesn’t really matter who is in the White House, or what the public wants... or what the press reports... or what Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy get up to...The Primary Political Trend is towards more firepower.
Investors are dizzy with dreams of riches... now that the dynamic duo - Musk and Ramaswamy - are on the case. We can’t remember anything like it... unless it was when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980... or Trump himself in 2016. Finally, the back of the Deep State is broken, say the optimists. Now, it’s full speed ahead. Nothing to worry about, right? MarketsInsider: "The stock market’s ‘fear gauge’ is trading at lows...The stock market has been acting jubilantly over the past month, with the S&P 500 up about 6% since the U.S. election and all three major U.S. stock indexes trading near all-time highs. Throughout the optimism, Wall Street’s so-called “fear gauge” has been trading near lows for the year."
But the disappearance of fear is itself an alarming signal, While it is always possible that a new boom is coming, the most likely thing would be a bust. That’s just the way it works. When investors forget to be afraid, stocks get too pricey, and the returns over the following years tend to be disappointing.
A sell-off in stocks would engender many unwelcome phenomena, most likely including new stimulus from the Fed - in the form of lower interest rates and QE (bond buying... money printing). These, in turn, would send the economy and its markets into another wingding of bubbles, inflation, and crashes. But with so much fearlessness afoot, no one is in the mood to think about a bear market, so we will continue wondering about where the Primary Political trend is taking us.
“I’m all about lethality,” says the nominee for head of the defense department. ‘Lethality. Lethality. Lethality.’ Really? No strategy? No Efficiency? No mercy? No peace? Any reasonably competent high school janitor would probably have a more nuanced approach. But Pete Hegseth wears his cartoonish worldview, permanently inked on his body. Like an impressionable teenager in a hill-country Bible school, he believes in a crusade between good and evil... between the forces of Christianity and those of barbarity.
He can think what he wants, of course. But this is not a view that is likely to find favor with America’s, Moslems, Jews, animists, gnostics, agnostics, non-believers Hindus or Rastafarians. Nor does ‘fighting’ or ‘lethality’ have a prominent role in Christendom. Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you does not usually include bloodshed, And yet Hegseth... even without so much as the brush of angel wings against his delicate cheeks... is ready to open fire.
In any case, the choice of the Crusades as a model for a modern defense chief is strange and unsettling. Disorganized, cruel, and ineffective... the Crusades were a monstrous failure. In the first one in 1095, for example, crusaders marched down the Rhine Valley, on their way to the Holy Land, and massacred every Jew they found. No military geniuses they... when they finally left Constantinople, they were tricked by the Turks and destroyed at the battle of Civetot.
More experienced troops in subsequent crusades actually got to the Holy Land and took the town of Antioch... where they massacred the Muslims and Jews, along with Greek Orthodox, Syrian, and Armenian Christians. Crusaders quickly figured out Saladin’s professional troops were no pushovers. So, they turned their violence against civilians at home. The Albigensians, in France, were all but exterminated. Later, crusades were launched against the proto-protestant followers of Jan Hus. The pagan Wends in Germany were also a target. Bernard of Clairvaux explained the goal: “They shall either be converted or deleted.” And so it went for 200 years.And at the end, as at the beginning, the crescent moon hung over the Holy Land, not Hegseth’s cross of Jerusalem.
We are trying to imagine the look on Dwight Eisenhower’s face if someone such as Pete Hegseth had been recommended to him as Secretary of Defense."
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