Richmond Hill, Georgia, USA. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
"When I See..."
"When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair."
- Blaise Pascal
Ahh, but it does...
"Essential Violence"
"Essential Violence"
by The Zman
"In 19th century America, it was popular to argue that there are four boxes for maintaining political liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and cartridge. There is also a version that has just three boxes, which drops the jury box from the model. The soap box is public speech used to persuade the ruling class. The ballot box is the democratic process. The jury box is the legal process, and the cartridge box is violence. The order of the boxes is important as it is both a warning and a promise.
The warning here is directed toward the public. Skipping any of these steps will inevitably be self-defeating. The sorts of people who want to litigate everything, for example, are the sorts of people who will litigate away your liberty. We see this with the inferior court judges. They are like all self-defined underdogs. When they get on top, they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people they opposed. These people are always more dangerous than present tyrants.
The other side of this is directed at the people in charge. Their status as a ruling elite depends on making sure that the traditional rights and protections of the people are maintained in those first two boxes. Once the people abandon the soap box and the ballot box for the jury box, it is not long before they reach for the cartridge box, and there is no turning back from that one. Of course, an elite that uses the jury box to undermine the ballot box is asking for the cartridge box.
That is what we see in the West: the use of lawfare by the managerial class to both circumvent the soap box and the ballot box. The latest example is in France, where the courts have willy-nilly decided that the most popular politician in the country is no longer allowed to participate in politics. Marine Le Pen was found guilty of trumped-up charges and sentenced to what amounts to internal banishment. Her punishment is like what happened to Khrushchev in the 1960s.
This is the pattern in the West. Romania arrested and then banned the most popular politician in the country for the crime of winning the election. Germany is planning to ban the AfD for the crime of being popular. The new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has publicly stated that one of his goals will be to work with the EU to overthrow the Hungarian government. Of course, the UK has declared itself an apartheid state by imposing a two-tiered legal regime aimed at the opposition.
The most famous example of the managerial class abuse of the jury box to circumvent the soap and ballot box is Donald Trump. They tried to remove him from office in his first term, then rigged the 2020 election to deny him a second term. When he did not get the message, they used lawfare against him in the same way we see in Europe, except that Trump managed to win at the jury box. Note they reached for the cartridge box when they failed at the jury box.
The assassination of Trump is a good reminder that it is almost always the case that once either side of the political system reaches the jury box, one side or the other will reach for the cartridge box. The jury box is where irreconcilable differences are confirmed to both sides, no matter the result. The reason there is always the smell of sulfur around attorneys is not only due to who they serve. It is also because sulfur is an essential element of gunpowder.
What we see happening in the West is a reminder that the last box in that formulation is essential to preserve the three other boxes. The 19th century French social thinker, Georges Sorel, explained that political violence is not a sign of chaos, but a healthy antidote to political oppression. It is often the creative destruction needed to free the political marketplace so it can produce healthy politics. Violence also has the effect of energizing the people to defend their ancient liberties.
Thomas Jefferson made a similar point in his famous letter to William Smith from which we get the famous quote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Jefferson was not justifying political violence for its own sake. He pointed out that violent resistance is often a necessary reminder to the ruling class of what lies ahead if they ignore the soap box and the ballot box. Shays’ Rebellion was a warning and a promise.
It may be why American oligarchs joined the Trump team. When Luigi Mangione popped out from behind the car to gun down that insurance executive, it let every oligarch know the cartridge box remains an option. If French judges and politicians suddenly come down with lead poisoning, maybe the poseur class in Paris will suddenly rethink their position too. If not, then it guarantees the French end up at the cartridge box anyway.
This is the most likely end for the West as a whole. The Trump reforms will surely fail, as reform is almost always an effort to relieve the pressure of general discontent while maintaining the status quo. In Europe, the ruling class is nakedly hostile to the native population, hellbent on pulling the roof down to spite the people. They will not be talked out of their positions, and they will not be voted out of them. Since the courts are now owned by the managerial class, it leaves the last option.
The irony of all this is that the great lesson of Western history is that liberty only comes when the people join to spill blood. As the sun sets on Western man, this truth is becoming clearer with each outrage by the ruling class. The people endlessly yelping about “our democracy” are killing the West. It is only through the blood of these parasites and vermin that the new Western man will regain his lands and liberty. After the jury box comes the cartridge box."
"It Strikes Me..."
“It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. There are people, particularly dumb people, who are in terrible trouble and never get out of it, because they’re not intelligent enough. It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry - or laugh.”
- Kurt Vonnegut
"The Global Trade Game: Jokers Are Wild"
"The Global Trade Game: Jokers Are Wild"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"Okay, players: jokers are wild, but with a twist: the entire deck is jokers. Since everyone at the table will have five Aces, nobody wins. Welcome to the Trade War Poker Table: nobody wins, as everyone has the same hand of jokers.
This is not to say that exploitive, mercantilist "free trade" (no such thing has ever existed) is desirable, much less possible. We're reaping the consequences of what was passed off as "free trade": corporations gleefully gutted National Security to boost profits by offshoring everything that could be offshored.
Every nation can impose tariffs or limit imports by other means. Tit for tat tariffs, concessions, grand deals, side deals - everyone has access to the same deck of cards. Who wins each round of play is an open question, as is who wins the game.
There are several time-tested strategies in the game for Global Domination (tm). One is domination gained by exporting far more than you import, building up treasure in the form of vast trade surpluses. The problem with this strategy is eventually the nations being stripped by your mercantilist strategy wise up and limit your exports. There is only one way to get around this: military force, i.e. establish a Colonial Empire in which your colonies are forced to buy your surplus production (exports) via a bayonet in their back. Absent force and a colonial empire, mercantilism is eventually defeated by its own success.
There is another way to play for Global Domination (tm), and it's the exact opposite of mercantilism: run large, sustained trade deficits by importing more than you export, which beneath the surface is a remarkable flow of trade: the importing nation "exports" its currency in size in exchange for goods and services.
Once this currency is "exported" in sufficient quantities, it becomes the dominant currency simply from its ubiquity, its liquidity (i.e. its quantity and ubiquity make it easy to trade everywhere) and its trustworthiness due to its wide ownership across global markets: since the currency is spread across the globe, the issuing nation no longer controls its valuation; that's now set by the market.
This is Global Domination (tm) via financing trade rather than by running trade surpluses by exporting tangible goods. Pick one, as you can't have both: either export goods to run mercantilist trade surpluses, and build up a trove of other nation's currencies, or "export" your own currency via sustained trade deficits so it becomes the global lingua franca of financing trade.
Due to the demands of the Cold War, this was the U.S. strategy in the postwar era. As I have often explained, the U.S. was not merely in an arms race with the Soviet Union; it was also in a war for influence and alliances. The strongest adhesive in alliances is self-interest; by absorbing the surplus production of its allies in Europe and Asia in exchange for dollars, the U.S. cemented alliances that essentially encircled the Soviet Empire.
This strategy was far more effective than open conflict, but it came with a cost. Just as the success of mercantilism generates its own undoing, so too does maintaining a reserve currency via trade deficits/exporting one's currency. Should the issuing nation (in this era, the U.S.) decide to limit imports and reduce its trade deficit, its currency will slowly lose the global scale needed to sustain its market dominance.
This is Triffin's Paradox, which I've addressed many times over the years: any currency - and the system for creating and distributing the currency - has two masters it cannot possibly serve equally: the domestic economy and the global economy. Any nation that wants to control the valuation of its currency cannot possibly achieve global financial dominance, as the only way to gain and maintain global financial dominance is to surrender control of the currency's valuation to the market via exporting currency in such vast quantities that the global market sets the value.
There's a profound irony in this. To manage the domestic economy, the state wants to control everything: the issuance of currency and its valuation via its relative abundance or scarcity, which is reflected in the cost of credit (i.e. interest rates) and asset prices.
But to gain the high ground in the global financial landscape, the currency must serve the global demand for a currency that is ubiquitous, extremely liquid and trustworthy precisely because its value cannot be reset by state diktat. The valuation of a truly global currency is constantly influenced by interest rates, bond issuance, demand and so on- all the features of a transparent marketplace.
The game of Global Domination (tm) will never be decided by a deck of jokers. The real game is 5-card draw: you play the cards you've been dealt by Nature, history, culture and chance. Every nation has a spectrum of strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages. Some are rich in resources, some are poor in resources. Some have advantageous geography, some less so. Some have cultural coherence, others have diversity; each is a strength and a weakness.
In Nature, the winner is not necessarily the strongest or the one most blessed by chance. The winner tends to be the one with the greatest capacity and incentives for flexibility, experimentation, a level playing field (i.e. social mobility) decentralized capital and all the traits of fast adaptation: if not an appetite then at least a capacity for a continual churn of instability, failure and self-criticism, which are the necessary components of experimentation. There may be no winners of the game of Global Domination (tm), and that is likely the best outcome. Any form of dominance generates its own undoing."
Dan, I Allegedly, Is the USA Going Out of Business?"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 4/2/25
Is the USA Going Out of Business?"
"Why are major brands like Forever 21, JC Penney, and Hooters disappearing so fast? In today’s video, I take you inside the reality of long-standing businesses closing their doors and what it means for the future of retail. From bankruptcy sales at Forever 21 to the shocking state of the insurance and healthcare industries, we're seeing massive shifts everywhere. I even share thoughts on Domino’s Pizza potentially filing for bankruptcy and how companies like Macy’s and Kohl’s are struggling to stay relevant.
Join me as I navigate through these major changes, showing you what's happening on the ground. If you’ve got unused gift cards, now is the time to use them—don’t get caught off guard like others have. I’ll also touch on unexpected challenges landlords are facing, like new regulations, and share insights into how workers and businesses are adapting to trends like the four-day workweek."
Comments here:
"In Ordinary Times..."
"In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is. If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its way into our minds, there are plenty of things we can do to drive the intruder away. We can get the car out or go to a party or to the cinema or read a detective story or have a row with a district council or write a letter to the papers about the habits of the nightjar or Shakespeare's use of nautical metaphor. Thus we build up a defense mechanism against self-questioning because, to tell the truth, we are very much afraid of ourselves."
- Dorothy L. Sayers
"Prophets, Nomads And A Fourth Turning Accelerating To A Bloody Climax" (Excerpt)
"Prophets, Nomads And A Fourth Turning
Accelerating To A Bloody Climax"
by Jim Quinn
Excerpt: “In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – "The Fourth Turning" – Strauss & Howe
“Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning the way you might today distance yourself from news, national politics, or even taxes you don’t feel like paying. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted. The Fourth Turning necessitates the death and rebirth of the social order. It is the ultimate rite of passage for an entire people, requiring a luminal state of sheer chaos whose nature and duration no one can predict in advance.” – Strauss & Howe – "The Fourth Turning"
In my last Fourth Turning article, a few days before the presidential election, I stated Trump would win in a landslide, unless the Deep State pulled some outrageous stunt to steal it, like they did in 2020. Their cheating machines were unable to overcome the dementia dummy effect and running a vacuous cackling moron DEI candidate as Trump’s opponent. I also thought the ingrained opposition would use all their vast ill-gotten financial resources to pay for violent protests, if Trump won. The gutting of USAID has defunded the domestic terrorists and made their protests pathetic.
Trump’s overwhelming victory in the election and defeat of the illegal lawfare attacks from his Deep State enemies defused their ability to keep him from being inaugurated. And boy did he hit the ground running. His first 7 weeks in office have been a tornado of executive orders, shockingly bold cabinet picks, mass firings of government drones, deportations of illegals, tariff wars, threats to take over Greenland and Canada, confrontations with world leaders, war on DEI and woke bullshit policies within the government and at universities funded by the government, and unleashing Musk and his DOGE team on the Federal bureaucracy.
The dynamics of this Fourth Turning have begun to crystalize in my mind with the re-ascension of Trump to the most powerful position in the world, and now willing to wield his power on a far grander scale then he did during his first term. The previous two Fourth Turning presidents, during the Great Depression/World War II Fourth Turning and the Civil War Fourth Turning, acted like dictators, wielding their authoritarian powers, using war as the excuse for overstepping their Constitutionally granted authority.
Ruling by executive order has now become commonplace, as our Republic has degenerated into a corporate fascist totalitarian state where the spoils have been shared by the privileged few, while the rest of us have been propagandized into subjugation, depravity, debt, and debasement. Trump has assumed a dictatorial attitude, with the rationale that he must do so to defeat the evil forces of the Deep State, and more than 50% of the population is enthusiastically onboard."
Full, most highly recommended article is here:
Bill Bonner, "Day Three Before the Mast: Liberation Day"
"Day Three Before the Mast: Liberation Day"
by Bill Bonner
"God from God,
Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made;
of the same essence as the Father."
- Nicene Creed
From Aboard the Queen Mary II - "Life aboard the Queen Mary resembles nothing so much as living in a retirement community. Most of the travelers have gray hair. Many have walkers or wheelchairs. Who else has the leisure to spend eight days crossing from Europe to America, or vice versa? While we are solidly and irretrievably in the ‘retired’ age group ourselves, we have never had an opportunity to observe its habits and mores so closely. As near as we can determine, oldsters no longer lust after wealth, status or sex. What they want now is comfort…and diversion.
We had expected a long sea-voyage full of empty hours with long stretches of time lounging on deck chairs, perhaps under a plaid wool blanket. In anticipation, we brought books with us - one an eye-opening biography of master spy James Jesus Angleton, the other a dense history of the role of energy in human civilization.
But the remarkable thing is that there is neither empty time nor empty space available. Seated in the coffee shop, we are wedged in between other members of the geriatric set. Sipping coffee. Chatting. Music, nondescript and annoying, fills the air. Hardly a moment goes by unfilled. One is stuffed with dance lessons. Another shows us how to play bridge - beginner or intermediate. We can attend a lecture…or listen to a choir. From sun-up until after midnight…the music…the action…the entertainment and education go on…and on.
This morning, a fascinating talk explained the origins of the Nicene Creed. It arose out of an effort to treat Christian heretics as though they were terrorists! As the lecturer described the heresy - Arianism - we found ourselves in agreement with it. Today, most Christians are probably Arians without realizing it. But back then, after the Arian Emperor - Valens - was roundly defeated by the Goths at Hadrianopolis, it was taken as a divine sign that the Arias (leader of the heretical pack) was evil. God had deserted the Romans.
Arias maintained that Christ was an extraordinary man, but not a God. The council of Nicaea determined, however, that he was wrong. Christ, God, and the Holy Spirit were one…indivisible. They shared the same ‘essence’ as the Father.
What is interesting about this is the pattern that emerges. Looking back at the 4th century AD, we see wars, murders, assassinations…with people up-in-arms over tiny differences in abstract Christian doctrine. Today, these conflicts seem meaningless and futile. And yet, they were once as vivid and as critical as the difference between MAGA and Woke cultures…or Russian and Ukrainian amies…today.
In the book on James Angleton, we see the same thing as it played out in the 20th century. A very intelligent man, he spent his whole career ferreting out heretics…in this case, communist ‘moles.’ Not only was this a complete waste of time (communism was its own worst enemy and soon to retreat, on its own), Angleton was incompetent. Unbeknownst to him, his best friend - British agent Kim Philby - was actually a Soviet spy the whole time.
(As a curious footnote, Philby was also a writer for one of our newsletters, the "Fleet Street Letter" published in London since the 1930s. Angleton, meanwhile, was fired from the CIA by Bill Colby, a consultant to another of our letters, "Strategic Investment."" Philby defected to the Soviet Union and died in 1988. Colby, who we knew personally, was discovered dead on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay in 1996. More on this story… as newly released CIA documents give us more information.)
In the meantime…Today is supposed to be Liberation Day. What we are meant to be liberated from… and how…remains to be seen. But Dear Readers are advised to hold the confetti…and not to expect a parade. First, so far, the economy seems to be shackled to slow growth and inflation CNBC: "First-quarter GDP growth will be just 0.3% as tariffs stoke stagflation conditions, says CNBC survey. Policy uncertainty and new sweeping tariffs from the Trump administration are combining to create a stagflationary outlook for the U.S. economy in the latest CNBC Rapid Update."
Golden Age? All we see is base metal…and according to economists surveyed by Newsweek, it’s going to get worse: Moody's Chief Economist Mark Zandi on Thursday compared the current levels of uncertainty to those seen during 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash, having previously said that he felt the country was being "pushed into a recession" by Donald Trump's tariff policies.
Newsweek goes on to list five causes or indications of an approaching recession:
1. Falling consumer confidence.
2. Rising credit card default and delinquency rates.
3. Business Uncertainty… preventing or delaying capital investment.
4. Trade policy uncertainty.
5. Inflation expectations.
Will we be liberated from these bad omens? Or captured by them? To be determined!"
"The US Dollar Will Lose It's World Reserve Currency Status And It Will Change Everything"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/2/25
"The US Dollar Will Lose It's World Reserve
Currency Status And It Will Change Everything"
Comments here:
Adventures With Danno, "Sam's Club Shopping: New Sales & Products for Spring 2025"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 4/2/25
"Sam's Club Shopping:
New Sales & Products for Spring 2025"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Matt Simons, "After The Landslide"
Full screen recommended.
Matt Simons, "After The Landslide"
Oh yeah, we're in the landslide alright...
"Oh, The Humanity..."
“One of the penalties of being a human being is other human beings.”
- Christopher Morley, “Hide and Seek”
“The truth is... that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond
what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs.
Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness.”
- Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway”
“The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Brothers Karamazov”
"Hell is other people."
- Sartre
"The Immortal Hymn of Mankind"
"The Immortal Hymn of Mankind"
By Paul Rosenberg
"If you could go back in time a thousand years, you’d find people who were eerily similar to your present companions. The same is true for people who will live a thousand years from now. Some of them will be nearly identical to the people you now love, and you would care deeply about those people, the same as you do their present-day counterparts. Please understand this: The men, women and children we would love in the future can advance only in the same way we have, by the benefaction of their predecessors.
Can you imagine how long it took for ignorant men and women to learn metallurgy? Or crop rotation? Or a hundred other things we can barely imagine being without? Our lives are advanced only because they created new ways of living and passed them down to us. Hundreds of generations of people just like us lived through dark times, fighting toward whatever bits of light they could find, opposed by others nearly the entire way, to bring us where we are now.
Someday our generation will also be gone, and we will have played – whether we’ve understood it or not – the crucial role of transmitting civilization to following generations. What do we want them to be like? How do we want them to live? Numberless men and women have struggled toward the future and spent all they had to bring us here. We owe them something. It may be that they no longer care, but their gifts to us will cease to exist unless we pass them along. We make them matter, and they deserve to matter.
We stand now at the threshold of the stars, but we’ve been immobilized by self-serving structures designed to control every human and reap from their every action. We must get past them if we are to continue forward. Foolishness and fear bid us to forget the future, to chase status instead of goodness, consumption rather than production, and stasis rather than expansion. A thousand self-serving voices call us aside, grasping at our minds and emotions. We must turn away from them all.
We owe this to the people of the past. We owe it to the people of the future. We owe it to ourselves. What happens next is up to you. It’s not up to leaders or bosses. It’s up to you. The consequences of your failures are inescapable, and the consequences of your good deeds are inescapable. Whether or not you acknowledge them, our descendants will live or die by them. What you are and what you do matter a very great deal.
Engage your will. Act. Awake."
o
- Blaise Pascal
o
“The sands of time blew into a storm of images... images in sequence to tell the truth! Glorious legends of revolutionaries, bound only by a desire to be true to themselves, and to hope! Parables of colliding worlds, of forbidden love, of enemies healing the wounds of circumstance! Projected myth of persecution through greed and selfishness... and the will to survive! The Will to survive! And to survive in the face of those who claim credit for your very existence! We survive not as pawns, but as agents of hope. Sometimes misunderstood, but always true to our story. The story of Man."
- Scott Morse
o
Despite ourselves, this song always suggested the images of
Mankind's relentless march through the ages to our unknown destiny...
Vangelis, "Alpha"
"10 Limits And How Humanity Shattered Them"
"10 Limits And How Humanity Shattered Them"
by John Wilder
“Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through
barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is.”
– Jurassic Park
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” is great hockey advice
from Gretzky, but don’t go quoting that at an AA meeting. (“Eh Eh” in metric)
"Throughout history, mankind has faced limits. How we vaulted over those limits has defined our progress, and the bigger the hurdle, the greater the payoff. Of note, each of these has led to extreme economic and societal disruption.
1. Fire = Mastery of Energy:
Barrier Broken: Darkness, Vulnerability, Need to BBQ
Fire was our first “aha” moment, going back to into deep time – our control of this allowed us to, for the first time, harness energy stored in hydrocarbons at will. Does Grug want warm cave? Grug make fire, make cave warm, cook aurochs steak, eat. Good. Cold hungry Grug sad. Fire also kept saber-tooths at bay keeping Grug from being a kitty-treat, and turned rock shelters into the original man cave, dreaming of a time when Door-Dash™ would allow people from India to bring bacon cheeseburgers to us.
2. Agriculture = Beer + Cities:
Barrier Broken: Food Scarcity, Invites to Kegger
I’ve written about this before - Evidence from sites like Göbekli Tepe hints the purpose of the site was religious, but also that it was a brewpub. It’s likely early brews fueled rituals that glued folks together. Fire kept us warm, but beer got us buzzed. The barrier of unpredictable food was shattered when we started planting grain - surpluses meant we could ditch nomad life, build mud-brick condos, and let some dude specialize in carving spoons instead of stabbing mammoths. Result: cities, labor division, and the glorious chaos of civilization, all toasted with a pint. Or three.
3. Writing = Records + Reach:
Barrier Broken: Fleeting Memory, Knowledge Becomes Eternal
Scribbling on clay kicked off with debts (“You owe me five sheep after you drank all my beer”) or god-shoutouts. These had taken place orally, but, you know, the last guy I lent a $20 to forgot about it even if I haven’t. Writing cracked the barrier of oral limits and memory. With writing, knowledge stuck around - grannies didn’t have to recite everything anymore. Pharaohs sent exact orders to the Nile’s edge; Rome ran an empire on scrolls. It wasn’t just records - it was power, precision, and the ability to tell your great-great-grandkids exactly how to brew that beer. Result: generational wisdom, bureaucracy, and legions marching on paper trails.
4. Wheel = Friction Fighter:
Barrier Broken: Immobility, Distance Becomes Cheap
The oldest surviving example of a wheel was found in Slovenia, and dates back over 5,000 years, proving that people were trying to get out of Slovenia even back then. The wheel smashed the barrier of schlepping everything by hand. Suddenly, a cart could haul what ten Grugs couldn’t—trade routes bloomed, villages linked up, and armies rolled instead of trudged. It’s not sexy like fire, beer, and steak, but without it, no ’69 Camaro™. It’s likely that agriculture made it so we had stuff to move around, and was the real motivator for the wheel, so we could help friends move on the weekend. Cities got bigger, goods got cheaper, and we stopped throwing out our backs for a sack of grain. Result: the world shrank, and we got mobile.
5. Printing Press = Knowledge Flood:
Barrier Broken: Elite Access, Knowledge Becomes Cheap
The wheel shrunk the world, and then Gutenberg’s clunky printing press took writing’s exclusivity and yeeted it out the window. Books went from monk and king-only treasures to peasant-readable pamphlets—ideas like “Hey, maybe the Earth’s not flat” spread like gossip at a dive bar. The barrier of gatekept knowledge crumbled - science surged, religions splintered, and revolutions brewed. Result: mass literacy, a brain explosion, and the Renaissance popping off like a medieval Ozfest™.
6. Industrial Revolution = Muscle Swap:
Barrier Broken: Human Power Limits, Horsepower Becomes Cheap
What did we do with all that knowledge and science? Mastered energy. Steam hissed, gears turned, and suddenly one machine outmuscled a village. The barrier of physical drudgery got smashed - factories churned out goods, trains hauled dreams, and kids stopped pulling plows (mostly). Think of this one as taking the first example, fire, and making its use precise and scientific – it’s no coincidence that thermodynamics was the science boom of the 19th Century, one that made millionaires out of people who could figure out how to make a heat exchanger. Which is as it should be. Result: skyscrapers, global trade, and the bittersweet birth of the 9-to-5.
7. Electricity = Power Everywhere:
Barrier Broken: Localized Energy
A byproduct of the Industrial Revolution was the power revolution. Edison, Tesla, and pals flipped the switch, and energy stopped being stuck near coal pits or waterfalls allowing the Industrial Revolution to be everywhere. The barrier of “where the power is” vanished—lights buzzed in hovels, fridges hummed, and telegraphs chirped across oceans. It supercharged industry, lit up nights, and made “unplugged” a choice, not a fate. Result: a wired world, 24/7 life, and the electric hum of progress.
8. Computer Revolution = Cheap Math:
Barrier Broken: Slow Calculation
Now, what do we do with all that juice? From punch cards to processors, computers turned math from a monk’s headache into a microchip’s yawn. The barrier of tedious number-crunching fell - rockets soared, genomes unraveled, and your phone now out-thinks a 1960s NASA lab. It’s not just speed; it’s scale - billions of ops a second, cheap as dirt, and my computer has five times more transistors than the number of people on Earth. Result: digital everything, from Moonshots to memes.
9. The Internet = How To Be Everywhere, All At Once:
Barrier Broken: Presence at a Distance
Now we had tons of data, but it wasn’t with you. Until the Internet. Ever want to go to the library to get a book? Now I can do it on the Internet without having to ever even haul my PEZ™ powder covered carcass off the couch. I can pull most movies ever made with a click, I can get facts that would take me days to research in 1990: immediately. And I can even order that PEZ® from Amazon™ at 2AM.
Result: Access to virtually all of human knowledge, and cat pictures.
10. AI = Cheap Consciousness:
Barrier Broken: Mental Bandwidth
Here we are - AI’s making thinking a commodity by meshing 8. And 9. But it is not just crunching data; it’s reasoning, riffing, and dreaming up horoscopes faster than a caffeinated astrologer. The barrier of human cognition’s limits is cracking - it can synthesize your ideas, spot patterns, and serve it back with a wink, all in real time. Result: a flood of synthetic smarts, amplifying us, challenging us, and freaking us out a little.
We’ll end with these 10. Note that each of these revolutions had massive and unequal impacts on humanity. The implications or 8., 9., and 10. are still unfolding, and number 10. is in its infancy. Since nobody has time for a 2,800 word post, we’ll pick up the gauntlet of what barriers are left, and where we’re headed with AI, and guess at the economic impacts to come ...but we’ll do it next week."
"Walmart And Other Retailers Are Closing Thousands Of Stores Amid Fears Of Dark Times Ahead"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 4/1/25
"Walmart And Other Retailers Are Closing
Thousands Of Stores Amid Fears Of Dark Times Ahead"
"Picture this: you stroll up to your go-to Walmart, excited for a quick shop, only to see a big ‘Closed’ sign staring back at you. It’s not just a one-off—thousands of stores, from Walmart to Macy’s, are shutting down across the U.S. What’s going on? Are we heading into a retail apocalypse? In this video, we’ll unpack why these closures are happening, how they’re shaking up communities and your wallet, and what some retailers are doing to fight back.
Let’s start with Susan, a single mom from Ohio who’s been shopping at her local Walmart every week for a decade. It’s where she grabs diapers, cereal, and even the occasional toy to keep her kids happy. But one Tuesday, she drives up with her toddler in tow, only to find a ‘Closed’ sign glaring back at her. No heads-up, no farewell sale—just a locked door and a sinking feeling in her gut. She’s frustrated, confused, and honestly a little scared. How’s she supposed to get groceries now with gas prices eating her budget and no other store nearby? Susan’s not alone—thousands of families are hitting the same wall as stores vanish overnight. It’s more than a hassle; it’s a punch to people who’ve built their routines around these places. The emotional toll is real: kids asking why they can’t go to Walmart anymore, parents scrambling to stretch dollars further. With 15,000 closures in 2025, double last year’s tally, this isn’t just a trend—it’s a crisis shaking the foundations of daily life.
Let’s kick things off with the big question: why are retailers like Walmart closing thousands of stores? First up, the economy’s throwing some serious curveballs. Inflation’s been nagging us for years, jacking up prices on everything from bread to TVs. The Congressional Budget Office says real GDP growth’s dropping to 1.9% in 2025, down from 2.3% in 2024. That’s less cash for folks to spend, and retailers feel the pinch when wallets stay shut.
So, how did we get here? Rewind to 2020: the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the U.S. government pumped out trillions in stimulus checks to keep the economy breathing. It worked—sort of—but it also flooded the system with cash, sparking inflation that hasn’t let up. By 2022, prices were up 9.1%, the worst in 40 years. A loaf of bread that cost $1.50 in 2019 now runs $2.50; a $300 TV is pushing $400. Then the Federal Reserve stepped in, hiking interest rates to cool things down. Borrowing got pricier for everyone—retailers included. Chains like Bed Bath & Beyond couldn’t handle the debt and collapsed in 2023. For consumers, it’s a double whammy: higher prices and tighter budgets. With less money to spend—real GDP growth dipping to 1.9% in 2025, per the Congressional Budget Office—people are skipping non-essentials. That $50 sweater? Maybe next month. Retailers feel every skipped purchase, and when sales tank, stores close. It’s a brutal feedback loop: less spending shrinks the economy further, and the cycle spins on..."
Comments here:
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
"Global Markets Could Be Shocked Tomorrow, Trade Wars Will Escalate And So Will Inflation"
Jeremiah Babe, 4/1/25
"Global Markets Could Be Shocked Tomorrow,
Trade Wars Will Escalate And So Will Inflation"
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Blown by fast winds from a hot, massive star, this cosmic bubble is huge. Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Big Dog (Canis Major) and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon. That corresponds to a diameter of 60 light-years at its estimated distance. The massive star that created the bubble, a Wolf-Rayet star, is the bright one near the center of the nebula. Wolf-Rayet stars have over 20 times the mass of the Sun and are thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova phase of massive star evolution.
Fast winds from this Wolf-Rayet star create the bubble-shaped nebula as they sweep up slower moving material from an earlier phase of evolution. The windblown nebula has an age of about 70,000 years. Relatively faint emission captured by narrowband filters in the deep image is dominated by the glow of ionized oxygen atoms mapped to a blue hue. Presenting a mostly harmless outline, SH2-308 is also known as The Dolphin-head Nebula.”
"Reputation, Honor..."
"Reputation is what other people know about you.
Honor is what you know about yourself."
- Lois McMaster
The Poet:Rainer Maria Rilke, "A Walk"
"A Walk"
"My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance -
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"Western Civilization, Seen from 2150 AD, Part 2"
"Western Civilization, Seen from 2150 AD, Part 2"
by Paul Rosenberg
"As I noted last time, a small roll of pages recently showed up at my door. They appeared to have been ripped from a history book entitled 2000–2150 AD: The Emergence of Modernity. I am completing my transcription of them today, verbatim. Make of it what you will.
The Death of Scarcity: Wants can be infinitely imagined by clever creatures such as ourselves, but nowadays a basic dividing line between wants and needs is acknowledged. This was not the case during the pre-modern period, when cravings for ever-more were not only habitual but neurotic.
Pre-moderns were actually addicted to scarcity. Without it, they didn’t know how to find a mate, for example. Showing oneself worthy (especially on the part of males) involved demonstrations that one could thrive in conditions of scarcity better than one’s competitors. Under this assumption, the gathering of more and more goods made them a more and more worthy mate. And so, when technology began to end scarcity in the late 1900s, most people were simply unable to see it. Most rejected it reflexively and many ridiculed those who persisted in their claims that scarcity was being overcome.
Little by little, however, people accepted clear facts, such as the fact that North Americans were growing only half the wheat they could, simply because there weren’t enough people to eat it all. Likewise corn: When the crops became too large, bribed politicians forced oil refiners to add ethanol to gasoline (ethanol being made from corn) to keep corn prices from falling.
By 2030, the death of scarcity was apparent to a significant minority. But it took almost another two generations before most people were convinced. Again, this was because scarcity had been a foundational concept to them. Conditions of scarcity had been the fundamental justification for governments, war, jobs, mating, and so on. All those psychological dependencies had to be replaced, and that took time.
By 2080, it was almost universally accepted that scarcity, save for narrow areas or short seasons, had been surpassed. Replacements for the old strategies, however, remained in flux for a long time. And while they may remain in some state of flux indefinitely, they have reached a base level of stability in our time.
The Voyagers and the End of the Old World: The final end of the old world – the event that ensured it could not return – is broadly held to be the ability of humans to leave Earth. The old systems survived on their ability to extort money from fenced-in subjects. Once those subjects could leave for the further reaches of the solar system, however, no more money and obedience could be extorted from them. At its core, the reason for this is simple mathematics. Space is a territory that expands exponentially, as a cube of the distance. The numbers look like this:
At one million miles distance, coercive government requires 4,189,000,000 billion cubic miles of dominance.
At two million miles it requires 33,510,000,000 billion cubic miles of dominance.
At three million miles it requires 113,098,000,000 billion cubic miles of dominance.
At four million miles it requires s 268,083,000,000 billion cubic miles of dominance.
And so, those who left moved beyond the state’s ability to exert force upon them.
All of our early moon colonies, as you must know, were founded by independent commercial ventures, not governments. The first few were under the domination of governments and agreed to enforce their legal orders, but as time went on, such orders were taken less and less seriously.
Bounty hunters thrived for a handful of years, but once a bounty hunter found him or herself returning to their government employers bound in chains (as they generally did), they demanded higher salaries for further engagements. This soon became a losing venture for the governments, who were, after all, starved for money due to the abandonment of government currencies and the use of encrypted commerce.
Once Mars bases became practical (2070), and especially as asteroid mining became practical (2090), there were simply too many locations – at far too great distances – to dominate. This meant that the colonies became free, but it meant much more than that. The image of the state as the indomitable, the unchallengeable, the unquestionable, had failed. The mighty states had become barbarians who no longer inspired terror. They could be ignored and they were ignored.
The Age of Transition: Our world is always in a state of transition, but the century and a half between 2000 and 2150 AD were remarkable in that they swept away traditions and systems that had held since the Bronze Age. It took time for our ancestors to adjust to the modern age they were creating, much as our eyes must adjust when walking from a darkened building into bright sunlight. Even when positioned in the light, it took them some time before they could see very well. That’s why conditions didn’t fully stabilize till 2150 or so.
The great drivers of the change of course were technology and evolution. While governments always cycled between dominance and dissolution, technology accumulated. By 1968 it had advanced far enough to send humans to the moon. Governments halted the advance at that point, but within three generations technological advances put the moon within the range of groups who lacked (or eschewed) the power of coercion. And likewise in virtually every area of technology, continuing no less in our day.
Human evolution, it is now widely held, continued all through the age of dominating hierarchies. People slowly became more creative, less cruel, and less willing to justify constraint. But this evolution was restrained, because new ways of living – ways that might afford evolution some scope – were violently forbidden.
Once the dominance of states fell away, however, those better qualities flowed into human life more rapidly than expected. They had in fact been contained, much as are pressurized gasses. Finally, though, the containment vessels cracked and opened."
[THUS ENDS THE DOCUMENT]
"No Peace"
"No Peace"
by The ZMan
"After a flurry of peace talks in Saudi Arabia, the Trump peace initiative regarding the war in Ukraine seems to have run out of steam. The last round of talks stalled over the conditions required to create a Black Sea ceasefire. The Russians laid out the conditions they would require, the conditions they agreed to in 2022 under the Black Sea grain deal. Ukraine flatly rejected those terms this time. The Europeans have also made clear that they will never agree to peace.
After Ukraine and the EU rejected the terms, Putin said some things that got little note in the West but were clearly a signal to the Trump administration. The first was at a meeting of Russian industrialists where Putin told them that despite talks with Washington, they should not expect the end of sanctions. The new world order, so to speak, is one in which the Russian economy will operate independently of the West and within the framework of BRICS.
That was a clear signal to the Trump people that ending sanctions was not a carrot and new sanctions are not a stick. The Russians have moved on from the old model where their economy was connected to the Western model. Despite the last three years, the West remains convinced that sanctions are working, and that Russia desperately wants back into the Western economic model. Until the Trump administration sees the folly in this, negotiations with Russia will go nowhere.
Another thing Putin said was in response to a question at a public event about the Trump effort to get a ceasefire. Putin said there will not be a Minsk 3. This is a reference to prior deals with the West over Ukraine. In Minsk 1 and Minsk 2, the Russians agreed to get trapped Western advisors in the war zone free of the Donbass militias in exchange for a peace deal that never materialized. In both cases, the West just poured more weapons into Ukraine.
This is a very sore subject for Russians. They see these prior deals as efforts to trick and humiliate them. When Trump publicly asked Putin to let the trapped Ukrainian troops in Kursk escape, it set off alarm bells in Moscow. It looked like the same old tricks from the Western tricksters. That is the reason Putin made a point of saying there will never be a Minsk 3. He was telling the Russian public and the Russian elite that he will not be fooled a third time.
That has led to two other things Putin said last week. One is he said the Russian army is ready to finish off the Ukrainian army. That is a bold statement, out of character for Putin. He has been warning of a five- or ten-year war since the West cancelled the Istanbul agreements. To now talk about a quick end of the war suggests that something big is on the drawing board. It could also mean the Ukrainian army is in far worse shape than is being reported.
This comment about the end of the war came with a comment about putting Ukraine into what amounts to receivership. Putin suggested that the post-war process would start with the removal of the Kiev government and put the administration of the country into the hands of a UN group. This caused Trump to call NBC’s Manjaw Crazyeyes and rant about being “pissed off” at Putin. He said he is planning to apply new sanctions to Russia in response to these statements.
What all of this points to is that the Trump peace initiative is dead. The Russians were willing to listen, but now that it is clear that Trump has no leverage over Ukraine or Europe, there is no point in continuing the charade. The war in Ukraine will end by military means and then maybe there can be a negotiated settlement. That was the point Putin was making last week. Whether or not the Trump administration understands this is unknown.
The Pentagon, on the other hand, at least the permanent elements, independent of the administration, does get this. They wrote a long, mendacious thriller for the New York Times where they blame the failure of Project Ukraine on the Ukrainians and to a lesser extent the Trump administration. It is a long post worth reading for no other reason than it is a great example of narrative fantasy. It is written like a spy thriller because it is mostly self-serving fiction.
If you want to know why Western politicians seem to be so clueless about so much, it is because they rely on the storytellers called the media for their version of reality. All over Washington, staffers for elected officials read that Times story, shocked to learn that the American military has been running the war from the start. Normal people have known this since day one because the internet exists and people use it, but elected officials get their reality from the media.
The main point of that work of fiction is to make clear that the Ukraine failure was not the fault of the Military Industrial Complex. All the weapons were, in fact, wonder weapons that totally crushed those primitive Russians. NATO tactics were the best and completely baffled those drunken Russkies. The people who brought you the F-35 want to make clear that when the Russian flag is in Maidan Square, it was the fault of the people who refused to let the American military win the war.
As an aside, if you can get past the self-serving fiction, the article reveals just how close we were to extinction. There were people willing to go all in on attacking Russia, which would have provoked a nuclear retaliation. Unsaid, but implied, is that there were people willing to go nuclear, maybe even preemptively. If the Trump administration is serious about changing foreign policy, a top priority must be hunting down those people and permanently removing them from society.
Putting that aside, what all of this tells us is that there will be no negotiated settlement to the Ukraine war, at least not until things on the battlefield change. Perhaps when the Ukrainian army begins to break in a major way, reality will get over the media firewall into the brains of the political classes in the West. Maybe the Trump administration understands this, maybe not. It does not matter because they are not in control of events, so they can only stand by and watch."
"Trump’s Foreign Policy Moves Starting To Look Like That Of A Desperate, Dying Empire"
"Trump’s Foreign Policy Moves Starting To Look
Like That Of A Desperate, Dying Empire"
By Leo Hohmann
Gerald Celente, the legend ary chief editor of the Trends
Journal, once said: "When all else fails they take you to war."
"The United States of America elected Donald Trump in a landslide victory over a hapless opponent last November, and immediately the mantra “We’re Back” started reverberating across the land. People were jubilant. Some held family or neighborhood “victory parties.” You could hardly blame them after four years of the most absent, most inept president in U.S. history. Donald Trump, never one to be bashful or to wince before the spotlight, fanned the flames. He immediately started talking about “the dawn of a new Golden Age.” He started off with a bang, publicly signing executive order after executive order. His fans swooned. But going on three months in, reality is starting to take hold.
What we are seeing is that roughly half of his most meaningful executive orders have been overturned or at least delayed by the courts. We’ve seen no meaningful action from the Republican-held Congress to codify any of the Trump agenda.
In another six months the campaigning for the 2026 midterms will be in high gear and we will all wonder what of any lasting value we have to show for all the fanfare. Remember, Trump’s executive orders, even the ones that get by the courts, can be overturned on DAY ONE of the next presidency.
The question is this: Will Trump himself get frustrated and seek to distract the nation from his lack of progress on his domestic agenda by taking the nation to war overseas? This past weekend, Trump started showing signs of frustration. His long-touted peace deal with Russia’s Putin and Ukraine’s Zelensky is going nowhere. Neither side seems to want to stop fighting, and Trump is learning that you can’t just beat your chest as the “King” of America and browbeat foreign dictators into accepting your “deal.”
When Trump gets frustrated, he takes to social media. And sometimes he even dials up the corporate media to vent his frustrations there. On Sunday, he called NBC News and spoke with Christine Welker. He told her he was “angry” and “pissed off” with Russia’s Vladimir Putin for not agreeing to his peace deal with Ukraine. He also felt the need to repeat his previously mentioned desire for a “third term.”
Then, after saying he would slap Russia with secondary tariffs on all Russian oil if Putin didn’t come to his senses and agree to see the world (including his own border area) through Trump’s America-centric lens, he moved on to talking about Iran.
Trump said he would carpet-bomb Iran and bring hellfire and brimstone, “the likes of which they’ve never seen before,” if they didn’t agree to his deal to give up their nuclear program. Iran gave no indication that it would comply with his demands and on Monday we read that Iran was loading its missiles and priming them for take-off.
Americans did not vote for another Mideast war. That is probably the last thing America can afford right now. And the last thing it needs. Trump said it himself. He said he wanted to be the “Peace President.”
If you recall, the rationale used to avoid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was that it would only serve to give Hamas time to rearm and regroup. Israel had Hamas on the ropes and needed to finish them off, we were told.
It’s interesting that this rationale does not apply to the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump’s push for a 30-day ceasefire makes no sense from the Russian perspective. Putin says forget the 30-day temporary truce. He wants to address the core causes of the war and negotiate a truly “lasting peace.”
And yet, here we go. Trump’s foreign policy seems geared along the lines of, make peace with me or I will bomb the hell out of you. Or at the very least, I will wage economic war on you until you succumb to my wishes. Sorry, Donald, but this isn’t the art of the deal. You can’t browbeat the world into submission.
Perhaps Trump has a secret deal with Putin whereby he criticizes Putin in public while telling him in private he won’t interfere with Russia’s drive to finish off Ukraine. But if that were the case, why is Trump continuing to fund Ukraine’s war effort? He restarted the funding about two weeks after cutting it off, a fact most Americans I talk to are still not aware of.
And even if there is a secret deal, I still don’t think it’s helpful in the long run for a world leader to use subterfuge to the extent that no country can take him at his word. That can only end badly when the deceptions and misdirections finally get exposed. Now you are exposed as a paper tiger who got called on the bluff.
The fact that any U.S. president would make such statements only shows signs of desperation and, in my opinion, weakness. It smacks of the playground bully, who always threatens more than he can deliver. He begs for attention with bombastic statements and basks for a time in the façade of the tough guy image, until someone takes him up on his challenge, calls his bluff and delivers an unexpected crushing blow.
Trump’s new foreign policy tactic is begging for someone, some country, to step up and put down the bully, hit him right at his weakest point. Which is often the most obvious place. Right in the center of his face! Perhaps his exposed jugular? Perhaps a gut punch that incapacitates him just long enough to then deliver the crushing blow? Maybe an EMP attack followed by a strike of an overwhelming hypersonic nature?
Trump wants Western peacekeepers in Ukraine. That is a major snag for Putin, mostly because of Russia’s history and distrust of Western countries like France and Britain (both have fought wars with Russia in the past). Putin’s idea of having the United Nations place peacekeepers in Ukraine is also stupid. How did that work out in Rwanda?
The only way to solve the problem is to back away and let Russia and Ukraine fight it out. That will provide the only organic environment for a lasting peace, and even that may not last forever. But Russia is oh so close to achieving that goal, and that’s why Putin doesn’t want any part of Trump’s “peace” deal. He believes he can end the war by finishing off his opponent and then accomplish all of his goals, rather than 50 or 75 percent of them. Why would the victor in a war settle on the terms of the loser? This is essentially what Trump is asking Putin to do. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. Ukraine’s leader, Zelensky, wants to keep fighting, so let him carry on and see how that works out for him.
Sadly, it’s becoming clear that the U.S. is losing influence in the world. Its dollar is faltering. Its economy is teetering. And its leaders are behaving like those running a dying empire. The U.S. has to stop acting like the biggest, baddest bully on the block, when everyone knows it has a soft underbelly. Because remember: When all else fails, they take you to war."