Tracks from "Sunny Mornings": 1. My Rose 2. Thoughtful 3. Sunny Mornings 4. Sunny Days 5. Early in the Morning 6. Warm Light 7. Morning Whisper 8. Peaceful Day 9. Happy Times
Be kind to yourself, forget all the troubles and horrors
for a little while, and savor this beautiful album.
“Here is one of the largest objects that anyone will ever see on the sky. Each of these fuzzy blobs is a galaxy, together making up the Perseus Cluster, one of the closest clusters of galaxies. The cluster is seen through a foreground of faint stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy.
Near the cluster center, roughly 250 million light-years away, is the cluster's dominant galaxy NGC 1275, seen above as a large galaxy on the image left. A prodigious source of x-rays and radio emission, NGC 1275 accretes matter as gas and galaxies fall into it. The Perseus Cluster of Galaxies, also cataloged as Abell 426, is part of the Pisces-Perseus supercluster spanning over 15 degrees and containing over 1,000 galaxies. At the distance of NGC 1275, this view covers about 15 million light-years.”
"Long considered a harbinger of bad luck, Friday the 13th has inspired a late 19th-century secret society, an early 20th-century novel, a horror film franchise and not one but two unwieldy terms - paraskavedekatriaphobia and friggatriskaidekaphobia - that describe fear of this supposedly unlucky day.
The Fear of 13: Just like walking under a ladder, crossing paths with a black cat or breaking a mirror, many people hold fast to the belief that Friday the 13th brings bad luck. Though it’s uncertain exactly when this particular tradition began, negative superstitions have swirled around the number 13 for centuries.
While Western cultures have historically associated the number 12 with completeness (there are 12 days of Christmas, 12 months and zodiac signs, 12 labors of Hercules, 12 gods of Olympus and 12 tribes of Israel, just to name a few examples), its successor 13 has a long history as a sign of bad luck.
The ancient Code of Hammurabi, for example, reportedly omitted a 13th law from its list of legal rules. Though this was probably a clerical error, superstitious people sometimes point to this as proof of 13’s longstanding negative associations. Fear of the number 13 has even earned a psychological term: triskaidekaphobia.
Why is Friday the 13th Unlucky? According to biblical tradition, 13 guests attended the Last Supper, held on Maundy Thursday, including Jesus and his 12 apostles (one of whom, Judas, betrayed him). The next day, of course, was Good Friday, the day of Jesus’ crucifixion. The seating arrangement at the Last Supper is believed to have given rise to a longstanding Christian superstition that having 13 guests at a table was a bad omen - specifically, that it was courting death.
Though Friday’s negative associations are weaker, some have suggested they also have roots in Christian tradition: Just as Jesus was crucified on a Friday, Friday was also said to be the day Eve gave Adam the fateful apple from the Tree of Knowledge, as well as the day Cain killed his brother, Abel.
The Thirteen Club: In the late-19th century, a New Yorker named Captain William Fowler (1827-1897) sought to remove the enduring stigma surrounding the number 13 - and particularly the unwritten rule about not having 13 guests at a dinner table - by founding an exclusive society called the Thirteen Club.
The group dined regularly on the 13th day of the month in room 13 of the Knickerbocker Cottage, a popular watering hole Fowler owned from 1863 to 1883. Before sitting down for a 13-course dinner, members would pass beneath a ladder and a banner reading “Morituri te Salutamus,” Latin for “Those of us who are about to die salute you.” Four former U.S. presidents (Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison and Theodore Roosevelt) would join the Thirteen Club’s ranks at one time or another.
Friday the 13th in Pop Culture: An important milestone in the history of the Friday the 13th legend in particular (not just the number 13) occurred in 1907, with the publication of the novel "Friday, the Thirteenth" written by Thomas William Lawson. The book told the story of a New York City stockbroker who plays on superstitions about the date to create chaos on Wall Street, and make a killing on the market.
The horror movie "Friday the 13th", released in 1980, introduced the world to a hockey mask-wearing killer named Jason, and is perhaps the best-known example of the famous superstition in pop culture history. The movie spawned multiple sequels, as well as comic books, novellas, video games, related merchandise and countless terrifying Halloween costumes.
What Bad Things Happened on Friday 13th? On Friday, October 13, 1307, officers of King Philip IV of France arrested hundreds of the Knights Templar, a powerful religious and military order formed in the 12th century for the defense of the Holy Land. Imprisoned on charges of various illegal behaviors (but really because the king wanted access to their financial resources), many Templars were later executed. Some cite the link with the Templars as the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition, but like many legends involving the Templars and their history, the truth remains murky.
In more recent times, a number of traumatic events have occurred on Friday the 13th, including the German bombing of Buckingham Palace (September 1940); the murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York (March 1964); a cyclone that killed more than 300,000 people in Bangladesh (November 1970); the disappearance of a Chilean Air Force plane in the Andes (October 1972); the death of rapper Tupac Shakur (September 1996) and the crash of the Costa Concordia cruise ship off the coast of Italy, which killed 30 people (January 2012)."
"In the movie "The 13th Warrior" Antonio Banderas' character, an Arab Muslim, delivered a prayer just before an epic battle that has stuck with me ever since. Some of the words in that prayer are words that have inspired me to say and do and think some of the things that I have since I walked out of the theater on the night that I saw that movie. This prayer, although delivered by a Muslim rather than Christian character, has become part of me. The words are beautiful and simple and eloquent:
"Merciful Father... I have squandered my days with plans of many things. This was not among them. But at this moment, I beg only to live the next few minutes well. For all we ought to have thought and have not thought, all we ought to have said and have not said, all we ought to have done and have not done, I pray thee, God, for forgiveness."
Of course if you think about it this prayer also spawns thoughts to the inverse of the lines used; i.e. Father forgive me for the things that I/we have thought that I ought not have thought, for the things I have said, that I ought not have said, for things I have done that I ought not have done.
Then brave Buliwyf begins to pray, also, to his many pagan gods and to his ancestors, and is joined by all the members of his band:
Buliwyf: "Lo, there do I see my father."
Herger: "Lo, there do I see My mother, and my sisters, and my brothers. Lo, there do I see The line of my people..."
"A great tragedy of our era is that young people have no feeling of what Western civilization was like. In the government owned and operated schools where they sat for years, they were presented with a litany of the West's failures, most of them exaggerated, or even imagined. In this post, and in several that will follow, I'll be ignoring anti-Western propaganda. To obsess on flaws is dishonest and destructive. The fact that the people of the West have been conditioned to require them is not something I'll indulge. All civilizations have had their failures, and our Western civilization stands out, not as the worst, but as the least bad.
My goal for this series of articles is to give you a deep sense of Western civilization and the cultural assumptions that informed it. I'll be careful to stay with the truth of each era, but what I want is for you to understand the West that was, down to your bones.
That's a tall order, of course, especially for short posts, but that's what I'm going for. And to get the best start possible, I'll begin in my own time, describing the America of about 1960. To be precise, I'm probably best describing the years 1953-1963; from the end of the Korean war to the assassination of John Kennedy.
What It Was Like: The first thing to understand about this era is that it was still a time of community. People felt a kinship with their neighbors. They looked out for one another. If something went wrong in your home, you went immediately to your neighbors for help. If your car broke down far from home, you went to the nearest house, knocked on their door and asked if you could use their telephone to call for help. (And were as likely as not to have someone pull out a toolbox and take a look at the car for you.) Crime wasn't that much less in this era, but people still trusted one another, partly of necessity and partly because we weren't inundated with fear every waking moment.
Doctors made house calls on their way home. (I vividly remember my brother being examined on our dining room table.) If you had children, the neighbors, even the ones you argued with, would bring over some milk when there was a heavy snow and you couldn't get to the store. This was standard in more or less every neighborhood. People did stupid and thoughtless things, of course, but we also relied upon one another. We weren't atomized as people are now.
Back in this era, moms would leave their kids outside in their strollers (prams) while they went into stores. I knew quite a few women who did precisely this. I asked one of them about it long after and she told me this: "Oh, sure. We'd meet at [a local restaurant]. They gave us a table at the window and we'd park our kids right in front. If a kid needed attention, one of us, not necessarily that one's mother, would go out, take care of him, then come back in. We all did that then."
And back before air conditioning (which came into homes just after this era), people slept outside on hot nights. In my home town of Chicago, hundreds of families would grab sheets and pillows, head to the lake (it was cooler there) and sleep on the sand.
Moreover, in places like Chicago (though definitely less so in the south or in occasional outbursts), daily race relations tended to be non-hostile. In my early experience, Negros (as they were then called) carried themselves with dignity rather than anger. Certainly I grew up in a nice area and I was sheltered when very young, but I rode the buses and trains by myself at a young age (it would probably be called child abuse now), and observed hundreds or thousands of random people, including at large events.
Another of my observations was that Jews and Blacks felt closer to one another. Both had dark histories of abuse and they felt a kinship. Typically the Jews were bosses and Blacks/Negros employees, but they were loyal to each other. I knew the son of one Black man whose Jewish employers continued to send him paychecks for many years after he became too old to work. That type of loyalty wasn't terribly uncommon at the time.
Divorce was considerably less common in this era, largely because of a different set of incentives. First of all, people believed that the two-parent family was a necessary model, and those expectations (which could be benevolent or otherwise) drove couples to work harder at staying together. Secondly, there were few if any welfare programs that gave a mother more money if she was single. As a result, the nonmarital birth rate was far lower than it is today, and for all ethnicities.
Politics was less vile in this era. Certainly there was corruption and police brutality, those things are eternal where the few rule the many, but politicians and reporters were expected to do their jobs defensibly. Politicians were frequently scrutinized and public affairs were examined at length, rather than in five second sound bites. People read books on a regular basis. Politics had not yet overcome society.
College was where you went if you wanted to learn how to do important things. It wasn't a place to get drunk or to get a work permit for a high status job. K-12 schools were more serious places of learning too (with zero politics), but I should add that there was plenty of bullying and a somewhat higher tolerance for brutality among the students.
Another thing that seems to have made a difference was that we felt we had something to prove. This was the era of the Cold War, and being better than the Soviets mattered to people. As a result, they defended their beliefs, worked to live up to them, and treated others who were likewise interested in the goodness of the American way with loyalty and respect.
We had movies and TV, of course, but the programming was far more family friendly. Not because of laws, but because the viewers had a strong preferences regarding what was appropriate, sometimes enforced with boycotts of advertisers. In other words, people cared about their culture and wanted to keep it strong. They believed in their ways.
This last point, I suppose, was the key to this era: People still believed in their ways. That is, they still thought the civilization of Abraham, Jesus, Raphael, Bernini, Da Vinci, Newton, Mozart, Locke, Jefferson, Brahms, Edison, Bell and the Wright brothers was a blessing to the world. As in all generations, these people had their shortcomings, and were easily abused by those who claimed to be protectors of their civilization, but they still believed in it, and acted like they believed in it.
These people most certainly understood that there was injustice in the world (they had just gone through World War II), and many of them found meaning in fighting injustice. There was plenty of complaining, but most of the complainers were trying to improve Western civilization, not to wipe it away as a curse.
In short, while all the usual human stupidities were present at this time, most people were also committed to a higher standard than their stupidities. And that not only minimized the damage they caused, but maintained an inter-personal environment that was less stressed, more dignified, more reliable, more forgiving, sometimes warmer, and far less suspicious than our present environment."
"On the 24th of February, 1942, the battle of Los Angeles occurred. The sound of air raid sirens, a new sound for Los Angeles, pierced the night. Air defense cannon were engaged, and over 1,400 shells were fired that night. The most likely explanation is that the “attack” was likely a weather balloon. Or angels.
Okay, I’ve heard that one before. Or is that where that started? Regardless, no aliens or Japanese were downed that night, though a slightly humorous movie was made about the whole incident that managed to rake in about $95 million dollars in 1979.
Lately, there have been large numbers of reports of drones around several places in England and, well, New Jersey. I did get an email from a reader about what my thoughts were. I sent an answer off the cuff, and, after reflection, I’ve thought a bit more and have some revisions, none of which involve John Belushi as a fighter pilot.
What could the drones be? Here are my thoughts of what these things are, in the order I originally thought of them. Feel free to opine on what I missed in the comments, since this analysis is as shallow as Greta Thunberg’s understanding of physics. Okay, maybe not that shallow.
First thought: It is not aliens. I can be certain because observers have heard rotors and heard various drone sounds. There’s simply too much evidence that everything observed is entirely terrestrial technology, easily achievable with known technology. If aliens are able to conquer interstellar space, time travel, or move through dimensions, they’re probably not bringing things that could be mistaken for DJI® drones.
Second thought: It’s not an individual or individuals. One thing I’ve noted is the government would in no way allow this level of fun at this scale. I think there’s a law against it, or if not, there’s always Gitmo. Overall, the phenomenon seems too coordinated and at too many places, even for a club. Additionally, the government would be taking this far more seriously in the press, and you would have seen or heard of an arrest by now.
Third thought: It’s not a private company, since they’ve got too much to lose, and yet not much to gain. The only one that I could see doing this would be Elon, and it would just be for giggles. But there is no evidence that Elon would ever visit New Jersey, since he’s too busy making cars that drive into lakes.
Fourth thought: It’s unlikely to be a foreign government, because if it were Iranian, it would have a two-stroke engine and a pull start, the North Koreans can’t pedal fast enough to get lift, the Russians would have sent five million of them with the expectation that all but one would be shot down, and the Chinese already know all our secrets. One New Jersey state senator claimed it was from an Iranian naval vessel, but at last count all of their inflatable rafts navy is accounted for.
Fifth thought: It’s us testing our stuff, unlikely, because why would we do so in New Jersey?
Sixth thought: It’s a distraction for the American public. You know, a shiny object. “Look! A baby wolf!” So, a psyop.
Seventh thought: It’s an actual, operational system. The military says it’s not theirs but, I have no confidence the military has any idea what it’s doing on a daily basis. Everyone who talks about it is pretty calm. “Oh, no, we don’t have any idea what it is, though it’s perfectly safe and there’s no indication that any laws have been broken. It might have been Mexicans. We won the war. Go back to sleep.”
Evidence for the seventh point actually goes back a few years. I recall reading a news story about drones seen at night in eastern Colorado/western Kansas. Not one or two, but swarms. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever driven through that part of the world, but you can drive about 120 miles without seeing a tree, let alone another car. It’s not as sparsely populated as Wyoming, but it would probably be a violation of safe working conditions to send employees to Wyoming. If I were guessing, that was the actual test. Heck, they might even have ignored that documentary, The Terminator, and have these things being run by A.I.
What are the drones doing? My guess is they’re only in New Jersey if they’re active, as either part of some new defensive system meant to intercept other drones or some other remote sensing. As we see from Ukraine, even low-tech drones are better than artillery at taking out armor or even squad-level groups of soldiers. New drones showing up in Russia aren’t radio controlled and susceptible to jamming – now they spool miles (3.1milliCoulombs) of fiber-optic cable behind them. I’d be surprised if we weren’t fielding active area denial systems against drones.
So, to summarize:
1. Aliens: 0%
2. Individuals: 5%
3. Elon: 5%
4. Iranians!: 2%
5. Testing: 11%
6. Psyop: 10%
7. Active Defense System: 75%
8. The ghost of John Belushi in a P-40 Warhawk: Infinity%
"The $16.7 Trillion secret about Janet Yellen and the national debt! Join me as we dive into this shocking revelation and other pressing economic issues. Hey everyone, it's Dan from IAllegedly. Today we're talking about Janet Yellen's role in our skyrocketing national debt, Chicago's insane tax hikes, and the ongoing Boeing crisis. Plus, we'll cover the latest on job market struggles and AI taking over fast food jobs."
Excerpt: "If Donald Trump’s "America First" focused foreign policy means anything at all, it’s that the current $1 trillion national security budget is double the size that a muscular homeland defense shield actually requires. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that in relentless pursuit of its own self-serving aggrandizement, the military/industrial/intelligence complex has massively inflated America’s Warfare State into an "extra-large" when what is really needed in the world of 2024 is a snug-fitting "small."
The basis for that stunning disconnect goes back deep into cold war history and its aftermath. The post-WWII policy of collective security, extensive alliances through NATO and its regional clones and globe-spanning military power projection capabilities and a network of 750 foreign bases was an epic historical mistake. It fostered the opposite of America First and permanently broke faith with Thomas Jefferson’s wise admonition urging, "…peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none."
At length, Washington became the War Capital of the World and the seat of an Empire First policy regime embraced by both elected officialdom and the multitudinous nomenklatura of the Warfare State that took up permanent residence on the banks of the Potomac. In fact, the Empire First policy regime became so deeply-rooted that even 33 years after the Soviet Union disappeared into the dustbin of history, it refuses to go quietly into the good night.
The reason, of course, is that America’s elephantine Warfare State never was grounded in an objective external threat. Even during Soviet times, the exaggerated girth of America’s military machine was based on vast threat inflations emanating from a resource-heavy national security bureaucracy seeking to secure its own future funding and to relentlessly expand its missions and remit.
That Washington’s trillion-dollar Warfare State is rooted in internal self-perpetuation rather than external threats is evident from the post-cold war dog that didn’t bark. That is, the Soviet archives are now open, but there’s absolutely nothing there to validate the cold war axiom that the Soviet Union - along with the affiliated menace of Maoist China - was hell-bent on world military domination, starting with western Europe, Japan and then extending to the lesser lands all around them.
In fact, the Soviet archives make clear that Moscow never had a plan or even faint aspiration to fortify and offensively unleash the Red Army toward Bonn, Paris and London. The closest thing to a plan for military mobilization westward was the "Seven Days to the Rhine" blueprint, but that was a defensive action plan explicitly formulated as a contingency plan to respond to a theoretical NATO first strike.
According to the plan, if NATO were to launch a nuclear attack on Poland, the Warsaw Pact would respond with a massive counterattack aimed at quickly overwhelming NATO forces in Western Europe. The goal was to reach the Rhine River within seven days, effectively splitting Europe and preventing NATO reinforcements from reaching the front lines in Eastern Europe and potentially embarking upon yet a fourth post-1800 invasion of Mother Russia.
Indeed, what the Soviet archives actually show is not the deliberations of a menacing Colossus, but the record of a chronic struggle to hold together with economic bailing-wire and bubble-gum a lumbering communist state that didn’t function and couldn’t last.
Nevertheless, it was the false fear of a red tide descending over Europe and ultimately the Western Hemisphere, too, that enabled Empire First to trump the natural and proper tendency of Washington politicians and policy-makers to retreat behind America’s secure ocean moats after WWII. In fact, for a brief interlude a sweeping military demobilization did occur, when the peak $83 billion defense budget of 1945 plunged to just $9 billion by 1948.
But that sensible attempt for the second time in the 20th Century at post-war demobilization and a return to peacetime normalcy was reversed in 1949 when the Soviet Union got the A-bomb, and Mao won the civil war in China. Thereafter, the spread of bases, troops, alliances, interventions and Forever Wars proceeded relentlessly on the grounds that the rickety communist states domiciled in Moscow and Beijing posed an existential threat to America’s survival.
They did not. Not by a long shot. As the great Senator Robert Taft held at the time, the modest threat to homeland security presented by the war-ravaged corpus of the Soviet Union and the collectivist disaster imposed on China by Mao could have been readily handled with - An overwhelming strategic nuclear retaliatory capacity that would have deterred any possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail.
A Fortress America conventional defense of the continental shorelines and air space that would have been exceedingly easy to stand up, given that the Soviet Union had no Navy worth speaking of and China had devolved into industrial and agricultural anarchy owing to Mao’s catastrophic experiments with collectivization.
That eminently correct Taftian framework never did change through the end of the Cold War in 1991, even as the technology of nuclear and conventional warfare evolved apace. For modest military spending Washington could have kept its nuclear deterrent fully effective and maintained a formidable Fortress America defense of the homeland without any of the apparatus of Empire and no American boots on foreign soil, at all. And after 1991, the requirement would have been even less demanding.
In fact, the case for a true America First policy - that is, returning to the 1948 status quo ante and a proper Fortress America military posture - has powerfully strengthened during the last three decades. That’s because in today’s world, the only theoretical military threat to America’s homeland security is the possibility of nuclear blackmail. That is to say, the threat of an adversary with a First Strike capacity so overwhelming, lethal and effective that it could simply call out checkmate and demand Washington’s surrender.
Fortunately, there is no nation on earth that has anything close to the First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of its own country and people if it attempted to strike first. After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,800 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the seven seas, in hardened silos and among a bomber fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52s - all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.
For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of four-to-five warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.
So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads cruising along the ocean bottoms that would need to be identified, located and neutralized before any would be nuclear attacker or blackmailer even gets started. Indeed, with respect to the "Where’s Waldo?" aspect of it, the sea-based nuclear force alone is a powerful guarantor of America’s homeland security. Even Russia’s vaunted hypersonic missiles couldn’t find or take out by surprise the US sea-based deterrent.
And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated either, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move. Likewise, the 400 Minutemen III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground across a broad swath of the upper Midwest. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty but could be MIRV’d in response to a severe threat, thereby further compounding and complicating an adversary’s First Strike calculus.
Needless to say, there is no way, shape or form that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And that gets us to the heart of the case for drastically downsizing America’s military muscle. To wit, according to the most recent CBO estimates the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.
That’s right. The core component of America’s military security requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget as detailed on a system-by-system basis in the table below. Thus, in 2023 the nuclear triad itself cost just $28 billion plus another $24 billion for related stockpiles and command, control and warning infrastructure.
Moreover, the key component of this nuclear deterrent - the sea-based ballistic missile force - is estimated to cost just $188 billion over the entire next decade. That’s only 1.9% of the $10 trillion CBO defense baseline for that period."
In the logic of democracy (combined with the magic of a fake currency)
political parties compete for power by promising voters more
of other peoples’ money. It leads them into debt and inflation.
by Bill Bonner
"The larger the size of the state,
the more freedom and property are curtailed."
- Javier Milei
Baltimore, Maryland - "Why is the risk of a major bear market greater than most people think?Why will Musk and Ramaswamy fail to halt US deficits? And when will the US be ready for a genuine change of direction?
First, Fortune tells us that the captains of industry are looking for good times ahead: "Fortune 500 CEOs are brimming with confidence following swift and decisive Trump victory." Porter Stansberry warns that ‘The People’ too have lost their fear: "46% of mom-and-pop investors in the U.S. think there’s less than a 10% chance of a market crash over the next six months... the most optimistic outlook since June 2006."
Rich and poor... on the factory floor as well as in the boardroom... people are ebullient; they believe the Trump victory will take assets to even dizzier heights. That’s not how it usually works.
The stock market is now so expensive that a sell-off should be expected... and feared. Buying property in Palm Beach? Maybe wait ‘til the ‘Trump Bump’ deflates a little? Bitcoin? Why not wait for the next pullback? Prices go up... and down, right? Nobody knows what will happen, but it is definitely wise to be in Maximum Safety Mode, until we find out. But wait... with Mr. Trump in office... maybe ‘usually’ no longer applies. Maybe we don’t have to worry... maybe it is a New Era? To help figure it out, let’s look at how the old era works.
Governments only really accomplish one sure thing: they redistribute wealth and power, from the disfavored masses to special groups of clients, insiders and elites. They do so under many different banners - freeing the Holy Land, healing the sick, or protecting the earth from CO2. Even MAGA.
They do so under Republicans, Democrats, Communists and Theocrats. No matter, the only reliable result is that wealth and power that used to be controlled by ‘The (undifferentiated) People’ become the property of selected groups.
Here’s the basic calculus. In a democracy, if elites take too little, they leave money on the table to be seized by rivals. Other political groups will promise voters more benefits... and win elections. This was, approximately, the whole strategy of the Democrats for many years, promising more spending, until the Republicans discovered that ‘deficits don’t matter’ and matched their giveaways.
In the logic of democracy (combined with the magic of a fake currency) political parties compete for power by promising voters more of other peoples’ money. It leads them into debt and inflation, which they use to get more of The People’s wealth, without increasing current levels of taxation.
But if they take too much, like any parasite, they weaken the host and end up with less for themselves. That is the problem almost all major governments now face. They have taken too much. Native populations are falling. GDP growth is punkish. And more and more of current revenue has to be applied to paying off past claims (debt service.) And then, if they continue, a ‘bad thing’ happens... war, hyperinflation, revolution, depression... followed by a change of direction (the Soviet Union, 1991; Argentina 2023.)
So, can Team Trump prevent the bad thing by operating more efficiently? Imagine an efficient welfare state. It collects money and then redistributes all of it to the taxpayers in pension and medical benefits. The elites have power; they control the disbursements. But no politician ever got rich by operating efficiently. In order to gain wealth, there must be grease... some fat that will stick.
A warfare state is more easily corrupted. Taxpayers do not stand in line to get missiles from the Pentagon. They have no idea how efficiently their money is spent. The Pentagon doesn’t even submit to a proper audit... so they don’t know where it went.
The warfare state can buy toilet seats for $3,000... or fighter jets for $182 million - leaving a much greater percentage of gross revenues available for redistribution to elites... and lobbying for more spending.
Efficiency defeats the real purpose, which is to extract wealth, not to create it. As Milei tells us, it’s the size of the government - its gross revenues - that must be reduced. Because the leech doesn’t stop sucking just because the host joins a health club; it only stops when it has to stop... after the host dies. That’s when you get a genuine New Era. It took inflation at 3,700% to stop the bloodsuckers on the Pampas... The US is nowhere near there."
"We can fairly mark this down to Biden’s native ineptitude: Any careful review
of his career reveals him to be - no apology for my word choice - very stupid."
- Patrick Lawrence
"From "The New Your Times":
"Do you detect the conspicuous lack of conviction in DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Jan 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol building, which has been the central device for defeating the populist revolt against the treasonous DC blob? And did you notice that it took him four years to report on the event? Weird, a little bit, ya think?
I’ll tell you why: because when investigators genuinely interested in the truth come on the scene, soon to happen, a very different story will be revealed. The Horowitz report is a last ditch attempt, at the very last moment, to get ahead of that true story - which is that the FBI and its parent, the DOJ, have been lawlessly and in bad faith acting against their oaths to defend constitutional government.
For eight years - including the four when Mr. Trump as president - the FBI and DOJ worked tirelessly to run him out of office and make sure he could never return. The effort was prodigious and, astoundingly, it failed. It was launched initially to conceal the crimes of Bill and Hillary Clinton, especially their moneygrubbing in Russia around the Skolkovo project - Russia’s Silicon Valley - and the Uranium One scandal - which involved the sale of US nuclear assets to Russia’s state-owned Rosatom company. The Clinton’s problems became especially acute in the summer of 2016 when Hillary’s private (outside government) email server came to light with its thousands of potentially incriminating memos. Looked like trouble.
The cure for that was to accuse candidate Trump of conniving with Russia, a sort of political homeopathy. It began as a mere Hillary campaign prank - the Steele Dossier - but CIA Director John Brennan and Barack Obama dumped it in FBI Director James Comey’s lap, and asked him to run with it. Mr. Comey stupidly complied, and before long he marshaled the executive officers of the FBI into the massive hoax that became RussiaGate.
The Mueller Investigation was intended to convert all that into a prosecutable Trump crime while covering up the FBI’s own crimes, but it proved a fiasco when the Mueller report issued in March, 2019, came up empty - to the horror of the Trump-deranged public.
Inspector General Horowitz’s report on these FBI shenanigans came out in December of that year, finding little amiss besides some “errors” in FISA applications and FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith’s forgery of an email as to whether one Carter Page was ever a CIA asset. The big news media let it all slide. Mr. Trump somehow survived, to the blob’s horror, and prepared to run for re-election.
The 2020 election was a fantastic trip laid on the American public. Covid-19 allowed for drastic changes in voting rules. The Democratic Party managed in plain sight to maneuver the obviously senile Joe Biden to head their ticket, and an array of very conspicuous late-night frauds got him elected. On Jan 6, 2021, Republican legislators were poised to contest the results out of several swing states where the frauds occurred in the requisite Congressional certification ceremony. The law plainly allowed for such challenges. It could not be allowed to happen.
Hence: the operations to interrupt the proceedings. The primary device would be the pipe bombs planted at the nearby DNC and RNC headquarters - terrorists on-the-loose! The backup plan was to turn the large protest group gathered around the Capitol into a mob that would somehow provoke an evacuation of the building. Between the FBI’s assets (“confidential human sources”) planted in the crowd, plus the Capitol police firing rubber bullets and “flash-bangs” into them, and mysterious figures ushering-in protesters through unlocked security doors, the breach of the Capitol was accomplished and the lawmakers fled the building. Nancy Pelosi arranged for the national guard to not be called onto the scene to fortify the understaffed Capitol Police. She was thrilled at how well it worked (captured on film). And the pipe bomb caper was swept under the rug, despite a ton of evidence that indicated the person-of-interest on the scene was a federal contractor, his movements recorded in cell-phone records and closed-circuit cameras.
When the lawmakers returned late that night in a great fugue of histrionic consternation, the majority decided to dispense with those challenges to the vote in swing states. “Joe Biden” became president and the DOJ under new Attorney General Merrick Garland commenced a raft of vicious prosecutions against anyone and everyone present at the Capitol on Jan 6. The next step was to mount a barrage of prosecutions against Mr. Trump himself, guaranteed to prevent him from ever running again, to bankrupt him, and to stuff him into prison for the rest of his natural life.
Amazingly, none of that worked. The cases against Mr. Trump were lame to an extreme, prosecuted by oafs, and adjudicated by bungling judges. Four years of “Joe Biden” pretending to run things came close to wrecking the country, and too many citizens did not fail to notice. His inept stand-in for this year’s election, Kamala Harris, made a fool of herself and her party, and now Mr. Trump is back with a much-enhanced populist opposition to the quivering DC blob.
The crew he has chosen to manage this government are pretty clearly determined to correct what has been happening in it, and the office-holders still lodged in many positions of power - where they have been waging war against the citizens of this country - have nowhere to run and hide now. They know that they are guilty of abusing their power and bringing harm to their fellow Americans. They know that something is coming for them - the dreaded consequences that they worked so diligently to evade.
Notice, you are not hearing any vows of magnanimity from incoming Trump appointees. They are not pretending to forgive and forget. Neither are they crowing about retribution. They are reaching by law for the levers of power. They will discover and disclose the files that the blobists have not already managed to destroy. And where the files are missing, they are going to depose the blobists under oath and get them to say on-the-record what they did, and why, and who ordered them to do it. And you can be sure the blobists will be ratting-out each other to stay out of prison.
This is true even of such seemingly mild fellows as Inspector General Michael Horowitz, in office since 2012 through all this monkey business in his agency, who let his report about the Jan 6 business slide until he could no longer conceal it, and who confabulated it into the modified, limited hang-out that it, dishonorably, is."
The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in these increasingly turbulent times.
"A star cluster around 2 million years young surrounded by natal clouds of dust and glowing gas, M16 is also known as The Eagle Nebula. This beautifully detailed image of the region adopts the colorful Hubble palette and includes cosmic sculptures made famous in Hubble Space Telescope close-ups of the starforming complex.
Described as elephant trunks or Pillars of Creation, dense, dusty columns rising near the center are light-years in length but are gravitationally contracting to form stars. Energetic radiation from the cluster stars erodes material near the tips, eventually exposing the embedded new stars. Extending from the ridge of bright emission left of center is another dusty starforming column known as the Fairy of Eagle Nebula. M16 lies about 7,000 light-years away, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake)."
"Thomas Edison said in all seriousness: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labor of thinking"- if we bother with facts at all, we hunt like bird dogs after the facts that bolster up what we already think- and ignore all the others! We want only the facts that justify our acts- the facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justify our preconceived prejudices. As Andre Maurois put it: "Everything that is in agreement with our personal desires seems true. Everything that is not puts us into a rage." Is it any wonder, then, that we find it so hard to get at the answers to our problems? Wouldn't we have the same trouble trying to solve a second-grade arithmetic problem, if we went ahead on the assumption that two plus two equals five? Yet there are a lot of people in this world who make life a hell for themselves and others by insisting that two plus two equals five- or maybe five hundred!"
"In this eye-opening investigation, we examine how skyrocketing parking costs ($120 at LA Rams games!), outrageous concession prices, and declining TV ratings across 25 of 32 teams are creating a perfect storm for the NFL. You won't believe the shocking ticket prices at recent games - some going for less than a cup of coffee! We also explore similar issues affecting the NBA and MLB, breaking down why major sports leagues are struggling to connect with fans.
From aging audiences to unaffordable ticket prices, learn why these entertainment giants might be in serious trouble. #NFL#NBA#MLB#iallegedly Get an insider's perspective on why season ticket holders are questioning their loyalty, and what this means for the future of professional sports in America. Whether you're a die-hard sports fan or just interested in the business side of athletics, this analysis reveals the uncomfortable truth about where professional sports are headed."
The ‘bad thing’ we think these election results foretell is
that post-WWII mainstream models - welfare states in
Europe/a welfare-warfare state in the US - are running out of juice.
by Bill Bonner
Baltimore, Maryland - "In France, the voters turned against Macron’s ruling coalition. In Germany, they turned against the centrist Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in favor of more extreme alternatives. Anatol Lieven: Europe's center is not holding. The collapse of the government in France and the ruling coalition in Germany spells continued crises In America, too, voters selected the ‘insurgent’ Donald Trump over the media-approved Kamala Harris. Something wicked this way comes?
Executive Summary: All the world’s major nations - China, Japan, the US, France, Britain and Germany - are facing a debt crisis. Too much spending. Not enough revenue. And now, there’s about $330 trillion of debt worldwide... much of which will never be paid. Responsible governments try to cut back. But they can’t. The primary beneficiaries - the rich - undermine them. And then, the victims - who have come to depend on handouts - abandon them. The trend - towards more debt, bigger government, and more inflation - continues until a ‘bad thing’happens, effectively cutting off the money.
In France, the voters turned away from the center and moved towards the right and left, each one offering more radical solutions. In Germany, too, the ‘right-wing’ Alternative for Deutschland and the ‘left-wing’ Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance have greatly weakened the more mainstream parties.
And, of course, Donald Trump’s Republican Party is not at all like the old conservative, centrist Republican Party of Robert Taft and Ronald Reagan. It is now a ‘populist’ party combining elements of dollar-store nationalism with old-fashioned sticky-fingered socialism.
The ‘bad thing’ we think these election results foretell is that post-WWII mainstream models - welfare states in Europe/a welfare-warfare state in the US - are running out of juice.
There was something fraudulent about them from the very beginning. In the welfare states, the promise was that by supporting the ruling elites, the voter would get more out of the system than he could by his own honest, cooperative efforts. This seemed to be true as long as populations were growing and technology and trade increased productivity. Richer, younger generations could afford to support their parents in grand style. Pensions, real estate values, medical coverage - all went up. But it was fake. Government was just redistributing wealth, not creating it.
And then, birth rates declined. And the benefits of the Industrial Revolution - which converted heat energy into useful kinetic energy - reached declining marginal utility (meaning... you get a big bump in productivity with your first tractor... not so much with the 10th).
Young people now struggle to match their parents’ wealth, not to surpass it. And though the internet, Facebook, Google and AI promised more wealth, in terms of useful bill-paying GDP, they delivered little. This left voters with a big gap between what they had come to expect from their governments and what they will actually get. Austerity was not what they had bargained for.
The American warfare state, meanwhile, had its own scams. It pretended that the US was in imminent danger from foreign and domestic enemies... and that it could only protect itself by transferring huge amounts of money to the firepower industry. Rather than a modest ‘defense’ budget, it insisted on ‘full spectrum dominance,’ that would allow it to meddle in whatever conflicts, wherever and whenever it wanted. In addition to the costs of projecting armed force worldwide, the US too has an extensive welfare state at home to support. As in Europe, at current levels of expenditure, it is unsustainable.
In order to avoid financial catastrophe, the feds need to cut about $2 trillion from the annual budget. That is the goal of the new DOGE headed by Musk and Ramaswamy. But to get there, they need to cut back on both the warfare state and the welfare state — on military muscle as well as civilian fat.
It is certainly possible to do so; Milei shows us that. For the warfare state, it would mean only redirecting military spending towards protecting the homeland rather than romping all over the globe. And for the welfare state, the feds could simply subject beneficiaries to means testing, reducing support for people who don’t really need it.
Theoretically, it wouldn’t be difficult to bring the budget into balance and avoid a fiscal disaster. But can it be done without a ‘bad thing’ – war, depression, hyperinflation, revolution or a natural disaster - happening first? Can it be done before the people become desperate? We’ll see."
"It was the essence of life to disbelieve in death for one's self, to act as if life would continue forever. And life had to act also as if little issues were big ones. To take a realistic attitude toward life and death meant that one lapsed into unreality. Into insanity. It was ironic that the only way to keep one's sanity was to ignore that one was in an insane world or to act as if the world were sane."
"There's a little animal in all of us and maybe that's something to celebrate. Our animal instinct is what makes us seek comfort, warmth, a pack to run with. We may feel caged, we may feel trapped, but still as humans we can find ways to feel free. We are each other's keepers, we are the guardians of our own humanity and even though there's a beast inside all of us, what sets us apart from the animals is that we can think, feel, dream and love. And against all odds, against all instinct, we evolve."
