The divide between the elite and the rest of the people became intolerable.
The guillotine solved the problem. How will the widening
canyon between America’s elites and the “little people' be solved?
by Bill Bonner
"The assertion that men are objectively equal is
so absurd that it does not even merit being refuted."
- Vilfredo Pareto
Poitou, France - "This just in, MSNBC: "CBO: Increased Immigration will boost US growth." Once again, statistics take on a life of their own... and become a policy goal.We listened to the talking heads explaining it. A young woman declared that US fertility rates were declining. She seemed to think this - another statistic - was cause for great concern. Who will pay taxes? Who will increase US GDP growth? Where will we get our teachers, firemen, and hedge fund managers? Who will pay the interest on our national debt... now more than $1 trillion per year?
So many dumb ideas... so many silly numbers. America’s elites created a debt-drenched economy that needs growth - in credit, in sales, GDP and tax revenues - just to stay in business. And now we need to have more children... and open the borders, say the public policy experts, in order to pay for past policies.
“American women have only 1.6 children,” explained the authority. (Another statistical mirage... we’ve never met a couple with 1.6 children.) “We need two children per couple, just to stay even. We’ll have to make up the shortage with immigrants.” There are 330 million people in the US. But we need more!
Spare a thought for the poor Swiss. Yes, they live longer. They have more money. They are not involved in foreign wars. They have little crime. Their streets are clean and safe. Their borders are orderly. But... Swiss women have only 1.5 children... and the Swiss GDP is only 2% of US GDP. And if every penny of Swiss GDP were put to the task it wouldn’t even pay the interest on our debt pile.
Keeping the show on the road - with more spending, more debt, more firepower…and now, more immigrants - is the main goal of US elites. Policy choices follow.
Elitism: Two weeks ago, we laid out one of our ‘shared secrets.’ Today, we give you another one: elitism. Excess immigration may actually lower wages and living standards for the average American. But immigrants are a source of low-wage labor... and help the system survive. The elites are for it. It is not flattering to be called an ‘elitist.’ It generally signals that you think you are better than others... and should be granted special privileges.
Here at Bonner Private Research we use the word in a purely descriptive manner. Elitism is not a disease... it is not a sin... it is not a mistake. It is just how societies operate. Our guiding light in this regard is the great Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto. You probably know him as the author of the 80/20 rule. Always and everywhere, he said, 80% of the work will be done by 20% of the people... 80% of your profits will come from 20% of your investments... etc.
No matter what you call your government, there are always a few people - an elite - that actually runs things. Louis 14th, for example, was an ‘absolute monarch.’ But Louis did not collect his taxes himself... nor win his wars... nor design and stitch his uniforms. His rule was made possible by what Javier Milei calls the ‘casta politica’ - the political caste. Likewise, they were the apparatchiks and nomenklatura who ran the Soviet Union. And they were the Nazi Party members who ran Hitler’s Germany.
Today, in the US, we have politicians, lobbyists, CEOs, influencers, economists, kibitzers and hobnobbers. They allow citizens to vote... often with surprising and disruptive results. But the main decisions and lasting policies are determined by the elites. They control the public conversation.
A Widening Canyon: Typically, when a society is new, and/or small... there is little difference between the elite 20% and the rest of the population. They are neighbors, friends, business associates... the parish priest... the local judge... the small-town mayor. But over time, the elites pass more and more laws... and write more and more regulations... gradually gaining more and more control over the rest. Gradually, too, their views and interests diverge.
That is what happened in France before the revolution. The aristocracy grew more and more distant from their own properties... and from the lives of their tenants and peasants. They lived in great splendor, wearing precious silks and velvets... and eating sumptuous meals (even while millions of ordinary people - in the 1780s - shivered and starved). They granted themselves special privileges... and even exempted themselves from taxes. Eventually, the divide between the elite and the rest of the people became intolerable. The guillotine solved the problem.
How will the widening canyon, between America’s elites and the “little people,” be closed? Tune in tomorrow."
"What does a Russian typical brand-newSupermarket look like inside? Opened only days ago, join me on a tour of DA! Supermarket, which is Russian-owned and has more than 220 locations in Russia."
"The current economy is putting many businesses on the brink, and Costco is no exception. Execs seem deeply worried about the company's performance in recent months because sales have been weakening all across the board. Even though buying in bulk can save consumers’ money down the line, for many, shopping in big quantities isn't making financial sense anymore. Faced with higher bills in other categories, such as energy and housing, Americans are foregoing large purchases and preferring to take advantage of sales at traditional retail stores to manage their escalating monthly expenses.
Rivals like Walmart, Amazon, Target, and Aldi are all offering discounts on thousands of products to improve their sales this summer. On the other hand, Costco never offers promotions to its customers, and people must pay membership fees to shop at its stores.
Although that model has been a successful one for the company for many years, consumer patterns are changing right now, and they are having a major impact on Costco's bottom line. That's adding a lot of pressure on the warehouse club as shareholders are being met with disappointing results, which could put the company in huge trouble in the months ahead, according to financial analysts.
This year, Costco's stock already took a beating. Despite its astronomical growth since the pandemic, almost doubling in price, in March, the stock tumbled by 7.6% in a single day as the retail chain missed second-quarter revenue expectations and signaled a negative impact from gasoline prices.
In May, the same occurred as investors observed evidence of a slowdown. So far in 2024, Costco's monthly sales numbers haven't been great, and for nine straight months, they've been below 5%. And while it did look like they were improving in the final months of 2023, in January, they dipped back down to just 3%. This is problematic because Costco's stock trades at 41 times its earnings. At such a high multiple, investors anticipate significant growth. If these figures don't recover swiftly, the stock might experience a substantial drop, as noted by experts in a Motley Fool article."
"Earlier this month, I gave a talk in Colorado. I got in late, but it was OK because I knew they were putting me up in a really nice hotel, one I remembered staying in before. As I walked to my room, I was struck by how run down the hotel was. The furnishings seemed staid. The walls were scuffed. The decor was tired. Even the electronics in the room were old. Weird, I thought, this hotel used to be new and trendy. Then it hit me: It used to be. Time had passed. I might have been in my twenties the first time I stayed there! And then it really hit me: I used to be new and trendy. I’m pretty worn down myself! Those same years have been working on me, too.
There is a similar observation from Seneca. He’s visiting the house he grew up in and is lamenting the poor state of the landscaping. All the trees that lined the road on the way in were dying. Then he realized, this wasn’t a maintenance issue. The trees, which he had planted himself were dying…of old age. And he himself was not in much better shape.
I’m writing this birthday post - my 37th birthday and my 12th post in this series - in a COVID brain fog (I picked it up on my book tour). I’m not great at math, but when I was born, life expectancy was roughly 75 years…that puts me at the halfway point. I know medicine is better these days but that still hits me. It hits me like the vibe of that hotel hallway.
Not that I feel old. If anything, I feel like I am at the height of my powers creatively. I love my life. I love my work. If you told me that this was the halfway point of my life, I’d be grateful. In fact, if you told me this was the end, I’d feel pretty good about that too - I have well more than 37 years to show for the 37 years I’ve gotten. So with that in mind, I thought I’d pass along some lessons I’ve learned this year (and beyond) as I have in previous years (check out 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, and 26).
1. “We’ve got nowhere to be and nothing to do,” my seven-year-old said a couple of weekends ago when we tried to prod him to finish something up. He was right and I’m trying to make this a little bit of a mantra. It’s not exactly true but it’s a nice counterbalance to my more natural inclination of doing, doing, doing.
2. I’m not sure I’ve ever opened a social media app and then after logging off thought, “Wow, I’m so glad I did that.”
3. Conversely, I have never taken a walk without thinking, after, “I am so glad I did that.”
4. George Raveling told me that when he wakes up in the morning, he says to himself, “George, you’ve got two choices today. You can be happy or very happy. Which will it be?”
4b. Voltaire put it another way I love: The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.
5. I was talking to a friend and he said something I can’t stop thinking about: “Having a contrarian view that turns out to be correct can be a brain-destroying experience.”
6. One more from George: he told me a story from when he was a kid - “George,” his grandmother asked him, “do you know why slave owners hid their money in their books?” “No, Grandma, why?” he said. “Because they knew the slaves would never open them,” she told him. To me, the moral of that story is not just that there is power in the written word (that’s why they made it illegal to teach slaves to read), but also that what’s inside them is very valuable. And the truth is that books still have money between the pages. My entire career has been made possible by what I read.
7. There is a fine line between complacency and using your success to be more deliberate and intentional. Or maybe it’s not such a fine line…that’s why I’m trying to use that advice from my 7-year-old to remind myself that if success doesn’t afford you the luxury of picking your shots (or some autonomy over your schedule), what good is it?
8. Epictetus said that an athlete doesn’t think about whether a throw is good or bad. They just catch it and throw it back. This is life. Everything is a catchable throw. You gotta get there and then you gotta toss it back.
9. Another sports analogy…the great ones tune out the crowd. It’s been a journey for me to wrap my head around tuning out not just the cheers but the reality of the fact that the bigger your audience is, by definition the bigger the amount of people who don’t like you also. (I shudder to think how many people out there think I suck…so I don’t think about it!)
10. “‘Rich’ is how much you see your kids,” I’ve been saying at Daily Dad. “‘Power’ is how much power you have over your own schedule.”
11. I don’t have any goals. None. I have things I like doing—writing, running, etc—and I do them. My only goal is to keep doing those things. Results and accomplishments are the byproduct of this process.
12. Gandhi was once asked what worried him most. His reply? “Hardness of heart of the educated.” When I look around right now, I think of this hardness of heart - the embrace of cruelty, ‘owning the libs,’ etc - as one of the big problems of our time. But that’s always been there. There has always been dark energy in human affairs. What is more alarming is the way that good people have become utterly exhausted and detached as a result of going on eight years of resisting this energy.
13. By the way, that’s what the dark energy is after. They don’t actually hope to convince a majority of anything. They hope to exhaust a majority and then grab the steering wheel for a bit (again or for a bit longer). That’s what happened during Reconstruction. That was what Southern politicians hoped for during Civil Rights. That’s the movement afoot right now (both candidates are the same et al).
14. “You just have to keep going back,” the civil rights attorney John Doar said. You can’t let them wear you down. You can let them make you give up.
15. If success - more knowledge, more ability, more money, a promotion, whatever - doesn’t make you a better person, it’s not success.
16. Along similar lines, a friend of mine was torn about leaving a very important job that a lot of people would kill for, but made him miserable. I told him, “If you can’t walk away, then you don’t have the job…the job has you.”
17. It’s amazing the amount of work we’ll put into humoring other people. It’s amazing what we’ll put up with from other people. It’s amazing how patient (or how many times we’ll repeat ourselves) we can be with a clueless colleague or client. Yet we just cannot bring ourselves to figure out how our own children can stand to watch YouTube videos of people playing video games. We can’t bear to ask them to do something a third time. We just cannot remember the names of our spouse’s friends or that thing they were telling us about. What the hell?
18. Speaking of hotels, you know you can just leave when you’re ready to go. Checking out is for amateurs…
18b. What I’m really saying is figure out how the pros–the people who do whatever you’re doing, be it travel or banking or shopping for a car or whatever–do it and see what efficiencies you can pick up. See what assumptions can be questioned.
19. I struggle with calibrating how to have high standards without hanging oneself on them. Of course, deciding willy-nilly what time you start each day is a recipe for slowly, steadily drifting towards starting later and later. On the other hand, sweating five minutes here or there -especially when what you’re rushing through is school dropoff or traffic that’s outside your control - is a recipe for misery and missing the point. A book, for instance, is a project that takes months and years. Pace yourself accordingly.
19b. This is what John Steinbeck was talking about when he talked about the ‘indiscipline of overwork.’ It was, he said, the falsest of economies (more about that here).
20. Why did it take so long for me to get a water bottle to carry around? What percentage of my issues as a child - and arguments I’ve gotten into as an adult - were the result of mild dehydration?
20b. The other day I had just enough ice in there that the water and the ice had sort of combined into a slush. It just hit me that this was the kind of pleasure that Epicurus was chasing. It’s not much…but it’s so wonderful.
21. Like a lot of men of my generation, I’ve learned about this concept of “mental load” in relationships (the way, unthinkingly, a lot of responsibilities, emotional obligations and tasks are placed on women). This has necessitated a lot of changes in my life, not all of which have been easy. But I will say this concept has also helped me as a boss, realizing ways in which I was carrying mental loads for people/projects and allowed me to make changes in how I manage and what my expectations are for my employees.
22. Which brings me to something I talked about in "Ego Is The Enemy." Almost invariably, making improvements in your personal life or your self-development will make you better professionally. The converse is less often true - getting better and better at what you do is not necessarily going to make you a better spouse, parent, citizen.
23. At Per Se, Thomas Keller put up signs that say “A Sense of Urgency.” While I may need to work on slowing down a bit, I’d say most people could use a little speeding up. One of the things I say at work is “Start the clock” or sometimes, out of frustration, “Why the f*ck have we not started the clock on this?” The point is: Stuff takes time. When you add time in front (by taking too long to start) or in the middle (by taking too long to reply) or at the end (by taking too long to process and start the next thing) you are making it take longer. How long other people take to do their parts is not up to you, how long you take to do your stuff is.
24. All success (indeed all failure, too) is a lagging indicator. What are the choices you’re making now to give you what you want later?
25. Sometimes I’ll take a caffeine mint right before I go for a run or a bike ride. I have a lot of reasons to be glad I’m alive, but that right there is one of them. Epicurus would be jealous.
26. How does this stop you? This was the question the Stoics asked. How does this situation stop you from acting with courage, discipline, justice and wisdom? How could it?
27. I am getting better at recognizing when my brain is not functioning optimally. So like, I can say, when someone tries to explain something to me, “Sorry, I am not in a position to understand this right now.” Or, I can recognize, hey, this is not a good time to have this discussion with my wife. I used to brute force everything, even when I was tired or burned out, but what you find is that this itself just requires more work later, when you have to undo the mistakes you made because you were too fried to think clearly.
28. You are almost certainly not saying enough positive stuff. You’re not saying ‘good job’ enough. ‘Thank you’ enough. ‘I love you enough.’ You are not complimenting, congratulating, or appreciating enough.
29. The fewer opinions you have, the happier you’ll be. Or at least, if you do have to have opinions about things that don’t really matter, hold them lightly and in good humor.
30. Everybody thinks Jimmy Carter was a bad president because he was too nice or too idealistic or whatever, that he should have waited until reelection to do some of the things he did. Turns out the real reason he struggled (and why he wasn’t re-elected) was that he tried to get away with not having a Chief of Staff (read Chris Whipple’s book The Gatekeepers). This is an important lesson, I think: At the end of the day, it comes down to how well-organized you are and how tight a ship you run. Most everything else is secondary.
31. If you want to understand the present moment, go read about the past. Read something about a similar moment from a long time ago. "The Great Influenza" is an amazing book to understand the pandemic. "It Can’t Happen Here" and "All The Kings’ Men" are two great novels to understand the political moment. "Invisible Man" is a great way to understand the conversation about race. Jan Morris’ memoir from 1974 helped me understand what it means to be transgender.
32. I posted a picture of my positive COVID test and a bunch of people got extremely upset. This struck me as really weird because one of the things I have learned as a parent is anything you can do to avoid getting your family sick, you should probably do.
33. But this is just a life lesson too: Not just, why should my kids have to miss out on things they were looking forward to this week because I picked up something on my book tour? Not just why should my wife be rewarded with a fever for holding down the fort while I was gone, but why should my employees have to take something home to their kids, why should an old person I stood next to at CVS end up in the hospital when I could have worked from home and gotten things delivered? And this has nothing to do with this very specific (and strangely controversial) virus but has to do with all colds, bugs, and illnesses, it has to do with how you choose to drive on the road, it has to do with all sorts of little choices we make. The virtue of justice is considering how your actions impact other people. The only positive we should take from the pandemic is how interconnected and interdependent we all are.
34. And by the way, if you look back at COVID - something that killed more than 1.2 million Americans and at least 7 million people worldwide and you think we overreacted, I just don’t know what to say to you.
34b. Should we have done a bunch of things differently? Did the government make a bunch of indefensible mistakes? Did a lot of the assumptions turn out to be incorrect? Yes. But the indefensible reality is that we could have and should have done more, and when we look at this period as a historical moment, that’s what our children and grandchildren will say to us.
35. At the beginning of 2023, I made the decision to push the book I was working on an extra year. It was the first time I’ve ever done that. I think maybe I thought that it would be a nice chill and easy year but if anything, it was much harder. This is a good reminder: We often work and stay busy as an excuse to not deal with harder problems at home and with ourselves.
36. One of my favorite chapters in "Right Thing, Right Now" is the one on ‘coaching trees.’ A successful coach or leader should not just be judged on what they achieve, but also on what the people they discover, scout, hire, and develop are able to achieve. At the end of your life, you’re going to be most proud of the impact you’ve had on people.
36b. I can’t pay Robert Greene back for things he did and the doors he opened for me, but I can pay it forward.
37. Remember, you don’t die once at the end of your life. You are dying every second that passes. We are going in one direction. Don’t rush through it. Don’t miss it. Have something to show for it."
I'm 72 years old, and number 37 really resonated...
"37. Remember, you don’t die once at the end of your life. You are dying every second that passes. We are going in one direction. Don’t rush through it. Don’t miss it. Have something to show for it." And it made me think of this song...
"Why does this galaxy have such a long tail? In this stunning vista, based on image data from the Hubble Legacy Archive, distant galaxies form a dramatic backdrop for disrupted spiral galaxy Arp 188, the Tadpole Galaxy. The cosmic tadpole is a mere 420 million light-years distant toward the northern constellation of the Dragon (Draco). Its eye-catching tail is about 280 thousand light-years long and features massive, bright blue star clusters.
One story goes that a more compact intruder galaxy crossed in front of Arp 188 - from right to left in this view - and was slung around behind the Tadpole by their gravitational attraction. During the close encounter, tidal forces drew out the spiral galaxy's stars, gas, and dust forming the spectacular tail. The intruder galaxy itself, estimated to lie about 300 thousand light-years behind the Tadpole, can be seen through foreground spiral arms at the upper right. Following its terrestrial namesake, the Tadpole Galaxy will likely lose its tail as it grows older, the tail's star clusters forming smaller satellites of the large spiral galaxy."
"We cover several huge stories today: The large-scale construction of re-education camps across America, the Kansas AG suing Pfizer over claims of fraud, the DOJ criminally charging a Texas doctor who blew the whistle on illegal child mutilations in a Texas hospital, and much more. Plus, we have a featured interview with Sarah Westall about mind control and 5th generation warfare. You won't want to miss this."
"Annually, about 2800 lives are saved by airbags. Hurray! Annually, 13.6 million new cars are sold. That probably doesn’t rate a hurray, I mean, not every fact is exciting.
I’m guessing (numbers are sketchy) that it costs approximately $2000 per car to add airbags. This number may be a bit high, but replacing a single airbag can cost $2000, and many new cars have so many airbags that some cars can legally be sold as bubble wrap. By federal law, all passenger autos sold must include airbags. That pencils out to an annual cost of $27.2 billion dollars in additional consumer spending. For airbags.
So, we have all of the math ready for us: how much does it cost to save a human life. (drumroll) About $10 million dollars per life saved.
That’s insane. I mean, I know the goal is a good one, but why is the federal government mandating that Americans spend an average of $10 million dollars per person to save them? Heck, I don’t like most people even $50,000 worth. But $10 million?
This number, and, indeed the federal mandate that airbags be installed on everything on the highway is a product of the “safety at all costs” culture. Their motto is, “If only one human life is saved . . .” which is meant as a rallying cry for whatever uneconomic idea that they want to put forward. An actual economist, Thomas Sowell, made the argument that if you wanted people to drive safely you’d replace the airbag with a big Bowie knife. I tried to verify that quote, but the link that I came up with was . . . my site. So, I couldn’t verify it, except by myself. I’m not sure I’m a reliable source, but, hey.
Hit the brakes too hard? Sorry about that – there are consequences to the driver. Imagine how polite drivers would be then? If not, think of the lowered hospital visits!
The news is simple: no one makes it out of here alive. No one. We cannot escape the one inevitable consequence of living, which is death. The GloboLeftSafetyPatrol thinks that if we spend billions of dollars, we can make Death go away. No, at least in 2024, the only thing that we can do is shoo Death away from our doorstep for a little while by using better diet and exercise and maybe renting an 18-year-old to use as a blood donor to live off of them like a vampire. I heard them called “blood boys” once.
If I brought the concept that actions have consequences up with a GloboLeftist, it would break their mind. They live in a world where money is what other people provide to satisfy all the wants of the world. In my experience, most people want a lot more than the world can afford, so we have to make choices. Not everyone can afford a blood boy. That’s the basis of economics, making the least-bad choice given the information you know at the time.
The second thing that drives the GloboLeftistSafetyPatrol nuts is the idea that people might have a choice. It drives them nuts. What if I wanted to buy a car that didn’t have airbags? I’m the bad guy. Why? Well, for that to be the case, the GloboLeftSafetyPatrol has decided that they own me.
To be clear, I do believe that there are obligations that an individual has with society, and that a society has for an individual. Pure libertarianism in the absence of an infinite expanding frontier is simply not workable, though it has been tried and certainly worked better than communism and with a much smaller body count.
A similar bad choice is involved with the decision to import the swarming masses of parasite carrying (link below) illegals to replace actual citizens. All of the job growth post-COVID has been by immigrants, either of the legal (or, since there are millions and millions of them) more likely illegal aliens.
In one way this is a multiple hit to the economy. First, these aliens, on average consume a lot more resources than are offset by the tax revenue they produce and work that they do. For every illegal crossing the border, the economy has that much more sand poured in the gears in terms of unpaid for medical cost, schooling costs, infrastructure costs, and benefits cost. The average illegal costs far more than the average veteran, and much more than the average veterinarian. Heck, they even cost more than the average vegan, though they’re not so smug.
Second, for every illegal that consumes additional housing, often in conditions of squalor with much higher occupancy than an American family, the housing stock is consumed, raising prices. I read one story about a Canadian apartment where the inhabitants were living in every room in the house, including having a bed in the kitchen where two people lived.
Lastly, the illegals keep wages low. Literally if we import the third world, we become the third world because our wages will eventually drop to third world levels – the same goes for free trade.
Importing illegals (and, let’s face it, many legal) aliens actually makes the economy get worse, and it’s faster the more we import. With lowered demand for housing, prices would go down. With lowered amounts of workers, wages would tend to go up. Take these to the extreme, and California becomes Mumbai, but with fewer cobras.
The GloboLeft loves illegals, because of their compassion – but studies have consistently shown that their compassion is just that, a feeling, and that people on the TradRight are generally those that actually fund and charities that help people. To the GloboLeftists, that’s simply not their problem – government (meaning you and I) should take care of it.
We can’t afford airbags anymore because we’ve used that wealth on...airbags. And illegals. And any one of a thousand things that you or I could think of where the government either mandates waste or pursues policies that are directly detrimental to the voters. I mean, even Sweden is waking up to the concept that importing rapefugees might not be the best policy since there are no-go zones (Malmo) where actual Swedish people aren’t allowed. But what bothers me the most is, if the government keeps wasting the wealth of the country in this fashion and at this rate, I’ll never be able to afford a blood boy."
In the boom, low-cost imports held down US consumer prices.
Now, immigrants - legal and illegal - have poured across the
border and are willing to work for less, thus holding down wages and inflation.
by Bill Bonner
Paris, France - "Here’s the headline news. The Washington Examiner: "The federal budget deficit will be nearly $2 trillion in fiscal 2024, the Congressional Budget Office estimated Wednesday."
CNBC: "A blockbuster May jobs report showed the U.S. economy added 272,000 jobs last month, well above the Dow Jones’ forecast of 190,000. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week that consumer prices in May remained unchanged, and even fell slightly on an annual basis. This dynamic - a heating job market and cooling inflation - is in part the result of increased inflows of immigrants. The May jobs report found that the health care, government, and leisure and hospitality sectors saw the most growth."
Isn’t it great, dear reader? More jobs. Lower wages. Less inflation. And a bigger deficit; who cares about that?
We recall a remarkably dumb story in the Economist magazine a few years ago. It lamented Italy’s low growth rate... They blamed it on the ‘nonnas’ [grandmothers]. Rather than move to the go-go centers of commerce... get jobs... and put the kids in daycare, which would raise GDP growth numbers, the benighted Italians preferred to stay near home so the grandparents could look after the children.
You might wonder... maybe the children were better off with their grandmothers than in a day care center. Maybe parents had more confidence in their own families than in commercial, or government-run, child warehouses. Maybe the children themselves would be happier... under the careful eyes of their grandmothers... or maybe the grandmothers might appreciate their new roles - as guardians of the next generation... rather than just getting their hair done and watching daytime TV. Italian society might be more stable. Better anchored. Healthier.
None of those maybes had a place in the statistics. The nonnas were standing in the way of GDP growth... that was all there was to it. But numbers often tell a tall tale. Credit-based ‘growth’ is often fraudulent. And the wealth it produces can be largely fictitious.
Human Happiness: An example... Of 3.5 million veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan two thirds say the wars were not worth fighting. 1.8 million came home with a ‘permanent disability.’ Total veterans’ disability costs will reach as much as $2.5 trillion by 2050. Those disability payments increase GDP. Do they also increase human happiness?
The financial cost is a statistic. But what about the real cost... the effect of missing legs and arms on a real person... where is that number? Or...US retirees get an inflation adjustment in January. Monthly payments went up 3.2%. GDP went up! More money for farmers... more for ‘Green Tech’ hustlers... and chipmakers, too... whatever... GDP up! We are lost in a whirlwind of statistics. But the numbers are often empty... misleading... or just plain false.
In the boom years, low-cost imports held down US consumer prices. Now, immigrants - legal and illegal - have poured across the border... and are willing to work for less, thus holding down labor rates (wages) and inflation. What part of this story is true? What part is statistical gibberish? How about the jobs themselves? Are they real?
According to FXHedge the Bureau of Labor Statistics overestimated job growth in the fourth quarter of last year by half a million. That’s 500,000 jobs that never existed. Yes, you can add ‘phantom’ jobs to the long list of frauds, fictions and statistical ghosts in the US economy. But there’s more...
On a discussion platform, we found this comment: "That BLS data is as bad as I have ever seen it. The cynic in me says... election year shenanigans. The jobs data is a mess... not merely labor market weakness, but a prelude to recession. Another set of faulty data are the GDP numbers, which are increasing[ly] showing negative revisions. After 3.1% GDP growth in 2023, the initial Q1-24 print was 1.6%, only to be revised down a month later to 1.3%... hardly a “robust” economy...if you are a democrat, the economy looks relatively great... however, republicans and independents have an altogether different view..."
The fake money regime - post-1971 - changed America’s economy. From exporting finished products, at a profit, we shifted to exporting dollars. The good jobs went abroad with them. Economists and the financial press looked at the statistics and proclaimed the system a great success. But it was really an abject failure... replacing real wealth - earned by making things - with fake wealth, based on credit rather than real output.
The credit-based dollar fostered credit-funded consumption and credit-backed asset prices. Now we have nearly $100 trillion of public and private debt. How much of that debt will go bad? How much of the stock and bond markets depends on it? We don’t know. But as much as $50 trillion in US fraudulent wealth could disappear - in defaults, bankruptcies, write-downs, mark-downs, and inflation - as the Primary Trend continues.
Research Note, by Dan Denning: The details on the CBO’s update to the budget for the next ten years are worse than the $2 trillion headline suggests, and that’s saying something, given that the new deficit projection for 2024 is $400 billion HIGHER (27%) than the figure released in February. The culprits? Higher interest rates, $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, and the $100 billion in student loans ‘forgiven’ by President Biden.
CBO projects $22 trillion in NEW debt over the next ten years (see the table below). This will drive interest expense on the debt to $1.7 trillion by 2034 - nearly double what it is this year and equal to annual spending on Medicare. Annual deficits will be almost $3 trillion in 2033 and 2034 and debt held by the public will be over 122% (it’s currently 99%, but even this figure is higher because it excludes debt which the government ‘owes to itself’).
The problem is not a decade away. It’s a problem right now. The Trump tax cuts expire in 2025. So does the agreement which suspended the statutory debt ceiling (it expires in January of next year). Whomever is elected in November will face an immediate fight over tax cuts, spending, and the debt ceiling. The total national debt will be over $36 trillion by then, and $56 trillion by 2034, according to CBO projections."
"You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."
“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man... the irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we shrink from being fully alive.
Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.
The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.
If you get rid of the four-layered neurotic shield, the armor that covers the characterological lie about life, how can you talk about “enjoying” this Pyrrhic victory? The person gives up something restricting and illusory, it is true, but only to come face to face with something even more awful: genuine despair. Full humanness means full fear and trembling, at least some of the waking day. When you get a person to emerge into life, away from his dependencies, his automatic safety in the cloak of someone else's power, what joy can you promise him with the burden of his aloneness? When you get a person to look at the sun as it bakes down on the daily carnage taking place on earth, the ridiculous accidents, the utter fragility of life, the powerlessness of those he thought most powerful—what comfort can you give him?
Luis Buimel likes to introduce a mad dog into his films as counterpoint to the secure daily routine of repressed living. The meaning of his symbolism is that no matter what men pretend, they are only one accidental bite away from utter fallibility. The artist disguises the incongruity that is the pulse-beat of madness but he is aware of it. What would the average man do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror. Sartre has called man a "useless passion" because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, and so he thrives on fantasies. As Ortega so well put it, man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one's existence—how do you take it away from people and leave them joyous?"
- Ernest Becker, "The Denial of Death"
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Freely download "The Denial Of Death", by Ernest Becker, here:
"Learn more at the Ernest Becker Foundation. The EBF seeks to illuminate how the unconscious denial of mortality profoundly influences human behavior, giving rise to acts of hate and violence as well as noble, altruistic striving."
"You are what your deep driving desire is; As your deep driving desire is, so is your will; As your will is so is your deed; As your deed is so is your destiny."
"When Joseph Campbell created the expression “follow your blessing,” he was reflecting an idea that seems to be very appropriate right now. In “The Alchemist,” this same idea is called “Personal Legend.” Alan Cohen, a therapist who lives in Hawaii, is also working on this theme. He says that in his lectures he asks those who are dissatisfied with their work and seventy-five percent of the audience raise their hands. Cohen has created a system of twelve steps to help people to rediscover their “blessing” (he is a follower of Campbell):
1. Tell yourself the truth: Draw two columns on a sheet of paper and in the left column write down what you would love to do. Then write down on the other side everything you’re doing without any enthusiasm. Write as if nobody were ever going to read what is there, don’t censure or judge your answers.
2. Start slowly, but start: Call your travel agent, look for something that fits your budget; go and see the movie that you’ve been putting off; buy the book that you’ve been wanting to buy. Be generous to yourself and you’ll see that even these small steps will make you feel more alive.
3. Stop slowly, but stop: Some things use up all your energy. Do you really need to go that committee meeting? Do you need to help those who do not want to be helped? Does your boss have the right to demand that in addition to your work you have to go to all the same parties that he goes to? When you stop doing what you’re not interested in doing, you’ll realize that you were making more demands of yourself than others were really asking.
4. Discover your small talents: What do your friends tell you that you do well? What do you do with relish, even if it’s not perfectly well done? These small talents are hidden messages of your large occult talents.
5. Begin to choose: If something gives you pleasure, don’t hesitate. If you’re in doubt, close your eyes, imagine that you’ve made decision A and see all that it will bring you. Now do the same with decision B. The decision that makes you feel more connected to life is the right one – even if it’s not the easiest to make.
6. Don’t base your decisions on financial gain: The gain will come if you really do it with enthusiasm. The same vase, made by a potter who loves what he does and by a man who hates his job, has a soul. It will be quickly sold (in the first case) or will stay on the shelves (in the second case).
7. Follow your intuition: The most interesting work is the one where you allow yourself to be creative. Einstein said: “I did not reach my understanding of the Universe using just mathematics.” Descartes, the father of logic, developed his method based on a dream he had.
8. Don’t be afraid to change your mind: If you put a decision aside and this bothers you, think again about what you chose. Don’t struggle against what gives you pleasure.
9. Learn how to rest: One day a week without thinking about work lets the subconscious help you, and many problems (but not all) are solved without any help from reason.
10. Let things show you a happier path: If you are struggling too much for something, without any results appearing, be more flexible and follow the paths that life offers. This does not mean giving up the struggle, growing lazy or leaving things in the hands of others – it means understanding that work with love brings us strength, never despair.
11. Read the signs: This is an individual language joined to intuition that appears at the right moments. Even if the signs point in the opposite direction from what you planned, follow them. Sometimes you can go wrong, but this is the best way to learn this new language.
12. Finally, take risks! The men who have changed the world set out on their paths through an act of faith. Believe in the force of your dreams. God is fair, He wouldn’t put in your heart a desire that couldn’t come true.”
"The context of Marc Antony’s famous line comes when Julius Caesar lies dead, having been assassinated by a group of conspiratorial senators. Marc Antony, another army general, is allowed to approach the body, and negotiates with the conspirators to allow him to make a speech to the people – as long as he promises not to say anything negative about them. While the conspirators are outside, addressing the people, Marc Antony is left alone with Caesar’s body. He swears that he is going to get his revenge against the conspirators. He says that there is going to be a war the likes of which no-one has ever seen. He then invokes the image of a general crying havoc and releasing the dogs of war."
William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar"
'Cry Havoc’ speech, spoken by Antony, Act 3 Scene 1:
"O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever livèd in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy -
Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue -
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men.
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy.
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds,
And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial."
"The image conjured in the line ‘Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war’ is one of Shakespeare’s finest poetic moments. Not only does it have Marc Antony find the precise way of expressing what he wants to say, but the combination of crying havoc and the visual image of attack dogs straining at their collars is just a perfect image, and it is no wonder that the line has taken its place as one of the top idioms in the English language.
The word ‘havoc’ would probably be lost to us today if it hadn’t been for Shakespeare’s use of it – in fact, several times in his plays. However, as it is, its meaning hasn’t changed from Mediaeval times. It means a combination of disruptive forces – chaos, confusion, disorder, devastation, turmoil, turbulence, lawlessness. And we still use it in that way today.
Crying havoc was the act of shouting an instruction by a military commander. It was customary for soldiers to remain in their disciplined state throughout a battle, and do everything to win in that way. And then, once victory had been achieved, the commander would shout ‘Havoc!’ That was the signal for the soldiers to break ranks and rush in to plunder, rape and pillage in the defeated territory.
The ‘dogs of war’ are the soldiers. Shakespeare uses the metaphor of attack dogs. Letting slip introduces another word – ‘slip’ – which is an action in training attack dogs. The term ‘slip collar’ is still used in connection with the training of dogs, where the slip collar tightens around the dog’s neck and, controlled by the handler, restrains it from its natural desire to run freely. The collar can be released and thrown off by using a trigger device, allowing the dog to charge forward. That is known as ‘slipping’ the dog.
So we have the image here of soldiers, having won a battle, raring to go into the city or town and loot, but not being able to do so until given the order. When the commander is ready he shouts the order: ‘Havoc!!!!’ and the soldiers rush forward like attack dogs with their slip collars thrown off. This is Shakespeare at his best, finding the perfect image for the situation."
“We’ve all heard the warnings and we’ve ignored them. We push our luck. We roll the dice. It’s human nature. When we’re told not to touch something we usually do even if we know better. Maybe because deep down, we’re just asking for trouble.”
"As many of you know, I have spent time researching and speaking about mass psychosis theory. Most of what I have learned has come from Dr. Mattias Desmet, who realized that this form of mass hypnosis, of the madness of crowds, can account for the strange phenomenon of about 20-30% of the population in the western world becoming entranced with the Noble Lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines, and both propagated and enforced by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and legacy media.
What one observes with the mass hypnosis is that a large fraction of the population is completely unable to process new scientific data and facts demonstrating that they have been misled about the effectiveness and adverse impacts of mandatory mask use, lockdowns, and genetic vaccines that cause people’s bodies to make large amounts of biologically active coronavirus Spike protein.
These hypnotized by this process are unable to recognize the lies and misrepresentations they are being bombarded with on a daily basis, and actively attack anyone who has the temerity to share information with them which contradicts the propaganda that they have come to embrace. And for those whose families and social networks have been torn apart by this process, and who find that close relatives and friends have ghosted them because they question the officially endorsed “truth” and are actually following the scientific literature, this can be a source of deep anguish, sorrow and psychological pain.
It is with those souls in mind that I included a discussion of the mass formation theory of Dr. Mattias Desmet during a recent talk I gave in Tampa, Florida to an audience of about 2,000. As I looked out into the audience and spoke, I could see relief on many faces, and even tears running from the eyes of stoic men.
"What Is Mass Formation Psychosis?"
An overview of Mass Formation, which was developed by Dr. Mattias Desmet. He is a psychologist and a statistician. He is at the University of Ghent in Belgium. I think Dr. Mattias is onto something about what is happening and he calls this phenomena:
Mass Formation Psychosis: So, when he says “mass” formation, you can think of this as equivalent to “crowd” formation. One can think of this as: crowd psychosis. The conditions to set up mass formation psychosis include lack of social connectedness and sensemaking as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression. When people are inundated with a narrative that presents a plausible "object of anxiety" and strategy for coping with it, then many individuals group together to battle the object with a collective singlemindedness. This allows people to stop focusing on their own problems, avoiding personal mental anguish. Instead, they focus all their thought and energy on this new object.
As mass formation progresses, the group becomes increasingly bonded and connected. Their field of attention is narrowed and they become unable to consider alternative points of view. Leaders of the movement are revered, unable to do no wrong.
Left unabated, a society under the spell of mass formation will support a totalitarian governance structure capable of otherwise unthinkable atrocities in order to maintain compliance. A note: mass formation is different from group think. There are easy ways to fix group think by just bringing in dissenting voices and making sure you give them platforms. It isn’t so easy with mass formation. Even when the narrative falls apart, cracks in the strategy clearly aren’t solving the issue, the hypnotized crowd can’t break free of the narrative. The solution for those in control of the narrative is to produce bigger and bigger lies to prop up the solution. Those being controlled by mass formation no longer are able to use reason to break free of the group narrative.
Of course, the obvious example of mass formation is Germany in the 1930s and 40s. How could the German people who were highly educated, very liberal in the classic sense; western thinking people… how could they go so crazy and do what they did to the Jews? How could this happen? To a civilized people? A leader of a mass formation movement will use the platform to continue to pump the group with new information to focus on. In the case of COVID-19, I like to use the term “fear porn.” Leaders, through main stream media and government channels continuously feed the “beast” with more messaging that focus and further hypnotize their adherents. We're seeing the exact same process with Ukraine now.
Studies suggest that mass formation follows a general distribution:
● 30% are brainwashed, hypnotized, indoctrinated by the group narrative.
● 40% in the middle are persuadable and may follow if no worthy alternative is perceived.
● 30% fight against the narrative.
Those that rebel and fight against the narrative, become the enemy of the brainwashed and a primary target of aggression. One of the the best ways to counter mass formation is for those against the narrative to continue to speak out against it, which serves to help break the hypnosis of some in the brainwashed group as well as persuade the persuadable middle to choose reason over mindlessness."
