Friday, March 26, 2021

"MMT: An Epic Disaster in the Making"

"MMT: An Epic Disaster in the Making"
bu Jim Rickards

"If you have not yet heard of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), you will soon. If you’ve heard of it but don’t know what it means, join the club. There are only a handful of experts who really understand MMT. Those who do understand it fall into two camps – the true believers, who see MMT as the answer to practically every social policy issue facing the U.S. today and the skeptics, who view MMT as intellectual snake oil that will lead the U.S. down a path to financial ruin. I place myself in the latter category. Still, I recognize that you cannot effectively oppose a doctrine unless you understand it better than the advocates.

MMT is now the leading theory driving fiscal and monetary policy in the United States. A failure to understand MMT is equal to a failure to understand what’s driving U.S. economic policy, capital markets and investment performance. In its simplest form, MMT says that money has value because it is issued by a state, and the state will only accept that money in the payment of taxes. Citizens need to earn “state money” because they have to pay taxes. Therefore, the money has value because the state says so.

A state can run unlimited deficits simply by issuing more debt. The state can pay off the debt by issuing more currency, more debt, and so on. There is no limit to the size of deficits, the size of the national debt or interest costs because the state can always print more money to pay the debt and interest.

There is a corollary to the idea that a country can have unlimited debt. The debt must be in the same currency that the country prints. If you borrow money in a currency that you do not print, you can suffer a serious debt crisis. In theory, this would never happen in the U.S. because we borrow in dollars and print dollars. The U.S. can always print the dollars to pay the debt, so it can never go broke.

The MMT advocates take these ideas a step further. They argue that the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve should be viewed as a consolidated entity. The Treasury exists to spend government money and collect taxes. The Fed exists to print government money.By combining operations, the Fed simply monetizes whatever the Treasury spends.

The MMT crowd says individuals and families who spend more than they earn and can go bankrupt. But that same idea does not apply to countries, according to MMT. Individuals cannot print money, but governments can. So, everyday personal finance rules simply do not apply. Every dollar the government spends goes into someone’s pocket. A government deficit is an individual surplus. What if the bond market balks at all the debt issuance? What if interest rates skyrocket?

MMT has easy answers to these concerns. MMT says that the government bond market is practically irrelevant. The Fed can simply put money in the Treasury’s account at the Fed and wire the money directly at the Treasury's instruction. No bonds are needed for deficit finance.

What if individuals lose confidence in the dollar because of money printing and deficit spending? MMT says you need dollars to pay your taxes, so you must keep working for dollars for that reason. Your level of confidence is irrelevant.

Just as the Fed can pay the Treasury’s bills with direct transfers and no bond market, the Treasury can also pay its bills without any tax collections. I repeat, no actual tax collections are needed. If taxes aren’t needed to pay government bills, what is the point of the tax system? MMT gives three reasons.

The first is that it forces you to accept dollars because you need them to pay the taxes. The second is that progressive taxes can reduce income inequality by taking from the rich and giving to the poor. The third is that taxes are a good way to fight inflation if it should emerge. If inflation happens, a large tax increase will cool the economy and end the inflation.

That’s the overview. Once you accept the ideas that spending and money printing can be unlimited (I don’t, but MMTers do), then it follows that there is no social need that has to go unmet. Money is literally no object.

The political class may be plunging headlong into MMT without knowing what it is. But we have to understand MMT to see its impact on markets and our lives and the dangers it may present if it is pursued much longer.

MMT Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen: MMT is the most potentially damaging economic doctrine I have ever encountered, with the exception of communism. Let’s begin with the idea that the Fed and Treasury should be merged in practice so that the Fed will monetize any amount of spending or borrowing the Treasury wants.

The reason markets have any confidence at all in the Fed is precisely because they are perceived as independent of congressional spending plans. MMT takes this confidence for granted and assumes the Fed can just crank up the printing press whenever the Treasury likes. But, as soon as this kind of coordinated effort appears, markets will lose confidence, inflation expectations will soar and interest rates will skyrocket. The plan would collapse before it really began. This is exactly the type of adaptive behavior by investors and markets that MMT academics do not understand.

MMT says that a currency issuer such as the U.S. can never go broke because it can simply print money to pay off the debt (provided the borrowings are in the same currency as the printed money). This may be true in some narrow, literal sense, but it does not mean investors have to wait around for the trainwreck.

The evidence is strong that debt-to-GDP ratios above 90% are a major headwind for growth. Today that ratio is 130% and heading higher. More borrowing does not produce growth; it simply makes the debt problem worse.
At some point, investors abandon the dollar for alternatives, such as land, oil, gold, silver, or alternative assets. Interest rates rise sharply, which only increases the deficit. The fact that the U.S. can print the money to pay the debt is irrelevant if the money itself is being repudiated.

Something like this happened in 1978 when the U.S. Treasury issued bonds denominated in Swiss Francs and West German Deutschmark because investors did not want exposure to U.S. dollars.

An even more extreme version happened in 1922-23 in the German Weimar Republic. The Weimar Republic could print Reichsmarks to pay off bonds denominated in Reichsmarks, but nobody wanted the bonds or the currency. The printing press is not the answer when it’s used promiscuously. The printing press is the problem.

The MMT claim that U.S. citizens cannot repudiate the dollar because they need it to pay taxes is also nonsense. Nothing is easier than the legal avoidance of taxes. For example, take any one of Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires. A company founder, such as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Larry Page of Google, can issue shares tax-free. After years of hard work and success, that stock may be worth $100 billion. How much tax do you owe? The answer is zero. As long as you do not sell the stock, you do not owe any tax no matter how much the stock goes up in value.

Not everyone is a co-founder of Google, but the analysis is no different if you’re just an everyday investor with 100 shares. As long as you don’t sell the stock, you don’t owe any tax. Americans who contribute funds to 401(k)s or IRAs also avoid taxes on those amounts until they take distributions, which can be decades later.

The list of tax avoidance methods goes on. I was formerly International Tax Counsel to Citi, so I know exactly how the game is played. Only an academic sitting in a faculty lounge would believe that taxes force anyone to use any particular currency. Once the currency becomes debased, citizens will drop it like a hot rock.

Who Needs the Bond Market?: Another baseless claim of MMT is that government bonds are not needed to finance government spending. The Treasury can just spend what it wants by ordering the Fed to send funds to suppliers and contractors. In fact, the government bond market is the benchmark for every fixed income market in the world. Interest rates on government bonds are a critical signal of whether government policies are working (or not), whether inflation is gaining a foothold, and whether monetary policy is too tight or too loose.

The existence of a liquid government bond market signals that private investors regard the government as creditworthy. The idea that the Treasury market is an unnecessary frill shows how out of touch the MMT academics are and how little monetary history they have absorbed.

One of the more bizarre MMT claims is that “a government deficit is an individual’s surplus.” The idea is that the government is the sole source of money, and if the government didn’t spend it, you wouldn’t have any. The corollary is that the more the government spends, the more money you have. But if the dollar becomes dysfunctional, as has happened with many currencies in the past, people abandon it for a better substitute.

Gresham’s Law, “bad money drives out good,” is an explicit recognition that citizens are always ready to dump one type of money and hoard another when they are being shortchanged by the former. So, just because the Treasury spends money, it does not mean citizens have any confidence in the money being spent.

What About the Banks? The idea that government is the sole source of money is just wrong. This ignores the role of the banking system. In fact, the literature on MMT focuses almost exclusively on the government and individuals while largely ignoring the banking system. But, banks are the intermediaries between the government and individuals and businesses. Banks create money just as surely as the Fed by making loans. That money comes out of thin air in a manner similar to Fed printing in the conduct of open market operations.

The Treasury may be the creator of the dollar, but they are not the sole issuer of the dollar. The dollar is continually issued by both the Fed and the commercial banks without involving the Treasury. Money is issued by various financial intermediaries in various forms. The dollars in our wallets and purses are liabilities of the Federal Reserve System. (Read the fine print on a twenty-dollar bill, and you’ll see the words “Federal Reserve Note.” The Fed is the issuer, and a note is a liability). It is true that the Treasury borrows money, receives taxes and spends money. But it’s just another user of money, not the sole source. MMT’s understanding is exactly backward.

The Role of Taxes: Perhaps the most pernicious idea from the MMT crowd is that taxes have nothing to do with spending. MMT says government can just spend what it wants. The purpose of taxes is not to balance the budget or even pay for anything. Taxes exist solely to cool down inflation and redistribute income from rich to poor.

If taxes are just another monetary safety valve (to reduce inflation) or a redistributionist tool, there is no reason for any American to support any level of taxation. Central banks have other ways to cool inflation, such as raising rates.

The idea that the tax code is nothing more than a cattle prod to fight inflation is exactly the kind of mindlessness one expects from academics whose business or real-world experience is practically nil. This view of the tax code treats citizens like Pavlov’s dogs. We’re not Pavlov’s dogs. We understand the monetary and tax systems better than any MMT proponent because we live with them every day.

In conclusion, MMT proponents ignore human nature, adaptive behavior and unintended consequences. MMT will fail and cause great economic hardship in its wake. That’s a recipe for disaster."
Related:
"Demystifying Modern Monetary Theory"
by New Economic Thinking

"In a challenge to conventional views on modern monetary and fiscal policy, Professor Bill Mitchell of Newcastle University in Australia has emerged as one of the foremost exponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), a heterodox challenge to the prevailing paradigms which dominate how mainstream economics is taught and economic policy implemented.  In his works, and the interview below, Mitchell presents a coherent analysis of how money is created, how it functions in global exchange rate regimes, and how the mystification of the nature of money has constrained governments, and prevented states from acting in the public interest."

Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/26/21: "Another Missile Attack, Ebola Is Back, And Dimming The Sun"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/26/21:
"Another Missile Attack, Ebola Is Back, And Dimming The Sun"

The Daily "Near You?"

West Liberty, Ohio, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

“Where Am I Here?”

“Where Am I Here?”
by Jim Kunstler

"Biden’s style - specifically how he communicates with the American people - is also a page from the FDR playbook. Two months into his presidency, he has been surprisingly disciplined and economical with his words and appearances. The verbal gaffes that dogged him throughout his long career in Washington are nowhere to be seen.”
- Paul Brandus, Opinion columnist, USA Today

"I don’t know about you, but I was thrilled to hear Joe Biden tell America - with a faraway gleam in those ol’ blue Konstantin Chernenko eyes - that he’s expecting to run for a second term. The prospect must engross him, so effervescent was his campaign of 2020! Like all presidents, he’s learning on-the-job, but he’s already lapping Franklin Roosevelt in the hundred-day dash of executive action, showing those wicked CCP envoys who’s boss (why, they are, of course), and turning the depraved white supremacist state of Texas into a vibrant Honduras del Norte. As Mr. Biden would say, anyway… I’ve gone on too long about that….

Meanwhile, from offstage you could hear the crunch of his handlers chewing their Xanax, knowing that the game was a brain-fart away from disaster. Well, he only wandered away from the podium one time, and he dutifully followed the script. In fact, the script was right there in his hand the entire white-knuckle hour of this debut press conference, and he often appeared to be reading straight off the page. I’m sure he was making a funny when he said he came to the Senate 120 years ago. (Remember the battle over Wm. H Taft’s nomination to be Territorial Governor of the Philippines? And how, in the hearings, then-freshman Senator Ol’ Joe B produced three New Haven doxies who testified about Taft’s “abnormal appetites” during the nominee’s years at Yale?)

Traditionally, presidential press conferences are opportunities to inform the nation where things stand, and to send signals to the other nations (“friend and foe alike” as JFK used to say) about America’s intentions, especially in the nuclear age, with the world so nervously on edge. What did Americans learn from Mr. Biden’s debut? Mainly that an old dog can do some old tricks, follow a script, play the politician, fill a suit, run his mouth, and go through the motions - fulfilling people’s cynical expectation that some trip is being laid on them. Foreign observers will probably note that the executive branch is being run by a politburo more secretive even than the old gang who ran the USSR. No one in this country seems to notice.

Mr. Biden’s real job is as a walking MaxWriter© signature machine, ready to sit down and serve whenever Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer send another 1000-plus-page bundle of legislation to the White House, designed to ratchet up the government’s despotic power over everyday life in order to “solve the problems” of free enterprise, free elections, and free speech with free money and hyper-complexity.

Coming up soon, for instance: HR1, the “For the People [ha!] Act,” designed to maximally enable election fraud by enrolling as many live bodies as possible to vote with no chance of verifying their identities, age, place of residence, or citizenship. The act would certainly introduce many new layers of chaos and delay in ascertaining election results. It would also take away the states’ constitutional duty to fashion their own election requirements and, in the process, further erode the legitimacy of the federal government and give many states more reason to oppose and nullify it, or even secede from it - meaning, another step toward that looming civil war 2.0.

One strange exchange in the press conference especially stood out [from the official White House transcript]:

Q: [Janet Rodriguez, Univision] Thank you, Mr. President. We, too, have been reporting at the border. And just like Cecilia, we ran into a pair of siblings who came in on Monday, who were detained by CBP - had the phone number for their mother who lives in the U.S. We have contacted the mother. That’s the only way they know her kids are here because CBP, today, Thursday, has not contacted that mother. So, when can we expect your promise of things getting better with contacting and expediency and processing?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, they’re already getting better, but they’re going to get real - they’ll get a whole hell of lot better real quick, or we’re going to hear of some people leaving, okay?

Did you catch that? The siblings’ mother lives in the USA? How did she get here and when? Is she here legally? Why were these children living in another country, away from their mother, and for how long? Why did the mother abandon her children in the country she left? Did anybody notice that this story doesn’t add up?"

"The Notion..."

 

"Do We Really Think a Band-Aid Will Heal a Tumor?"

"Do We Really Think a Band-Aid Will Heal a Tumor?"
by Charles Hugh Smith

"If we misdiagnose the disease, our treatment won't work. We're all familiar with medical misdiagnoses, which lead to procedures and prescriptions that can't possibly fix the patient's illness because the source has been missed or misinterpreted. Medical diagnoses are often tricky, as many general symptoms can arise from a variety of sources.

Social and economic ills can also be tricky to diagnose, and the diagnosis is hindered by political polarization and sacrosanct orthodoxies which make it difficult to have a rational discussion in public about many difficult issues. If we can't even discuss a problem, then that creates another problem, because problems that can't be discussed openly cannot be solved. There's also a human tendency to choose the diagnosis with the easiest-at-hand solution. This allows us to quickly apply an approved solution and then declare the problem solved.

The current flood of financial stimulus is an example of this misdiagnosis and application of an easy solution which fails to address the underlying disorder. The conventional diagnosis of the post-pandemic economy is that the only problem is people don't have enough money, and so giving them money to spend will cure the financial damage the pandemic inflicted. (Never mind that the economy was rolling over in 2019 long before the pandemic, which served as a catalyst in a sick, unstable status quo.)

Creating $1.9 trillion out of thin air and distributing it is painless: who doesn't like free money? But is a scarcity of cash the source of America's economic malaise? The general view is that pumping free money into the economy will automatically increase employment, launch new businesses, increase profits and tax revenues, etc.

Yet as I discussed in my blog post on the velocity of money, "Our Dead Money Economy," as the money supply expands in a parabolic fashion, the frequency that all this new money is changing hands (money velocity) is in a free-fall to historic lows. Simply put, much of this money is either being saved ("hoarded" to economists who want us all to spend every dime of it), applied to debts outstanding (back rent, credit cards, etc.) or sent overseas for imported goods. There is no guarantee that all this stimulus will generate the jobs, new enterprises, profits and tax revenues that are anticipated.

Distributing stimulus money and expecting this solution to fix America's economic malaise is akin to applying a Band-Aid over a tumor. It may well hide the problem but it cannot heal the disorder or save the patient.

My current work focuses on three dynamics that define any human civilization: the distribution of resources, capital and agency. Resources are straightforward--food, energy, shelter, etc.-- and capital is financial (money), tangible (tools, ownership of land and enterprises, etc.) and intangible (social and human capital). Capital productively invested produces income.

Agency is control of one's life and having a say in community/public decisions and having some control and power over one's circumstances. When these three are distributed asymmetrically, where the majority of the resources, capital and power are distributed to an elite, the society and economy are imbalanced and prone to stagnation and eventual discord.

The statistics are unequivocal: income-wealth inequality in the U.S. continues reaching new heights. This is reflected in asymmetric access to healthcare and other resources, asymmetric ownership of income-producing capital and limited agency. ("Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018")

The bottom 90% of the U.S. economy has been decapitalized: debt has been substituted for capital. Capital only flows into the increasingly centralized top tier, which owns and profits from the rising tide of debt that's been keeping the bottom 90% afloat for the past 20 years.

As I've often observed here, globalization and financialization have richly rewarded the top 0.1% and the top 5% technocrat class that serves the New Nobility's interests. Everyone else has been been reduced to a powerless peasantry of debt-serfs who rely on lotteries and playing the stock market casino or hoping their mortgaged house on the Left or Right coasts doubles in value, even as the entire value proposition for living in a congested urban sprawl vanishes.

America has no plan to reverse this destructive tide of Neofeudal Pillage. Our leadership's "plan" is benign neglect: just send a monthly stimulus of bread and circuses (the technocrat term is Universal Basic Income UBI) to all the disempowered, decapitalized households so they can stay out of trouble and not hinder the New Nobility's pillaging of America and the planet. The bottom 90% of American households receive a mere 3% of capital-generated income. That 3% might as well be 1% or 0.1% - it's inconsequential.

As for agency: Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University are the authors of the study "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens." Professor Gilens gave this brief summary of their conclusions:

"I'd say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups - of economic elites and of organized interests." (Source: Foreign Affairs, January 2021, "Monopoly Versus Democracy") That is as definitive as soaring income-wealth inequality. Both are inherently destabilizing.

Meanwhile, central bankers, monopolists and the politicos whose campaigns are funded by monopolists are all frantically trying to convince us their Band-Aid will heal the metastasizing tumor consuming America. And if it doesn't, well, it was inevitable that the central banks would boost the wealth of the top 0.1% and leave the bottom 90% spiraling into the abyss; we really can't stop "technology" (heh) or "capitalism" (heh-heh). Consider this excerpt from the article:

"...high-tech monopolists (pursue) a strategy of encouraging people to see immense inequality as a tragic but unavoidable consequence of capitalism and technological change. But as Lynn shows, one of the main differences between then and now is that, compared to today, fewer Americans accepted such rationalizations during the Gilded Age. Today, Americans tend to see grotesque accumulations of wealth and power as normal. Back then, a critical mass of Americans refused to do so, and they waged a decades-long fight for a fair and democratic society."

Distributing "free money" (much of which goes to favored industries and cartels) is a Band-Aid over the metastasizing tumor of perversely imbalanced distributions of resources, capital and agency/power. If America cannot bear to discuss these realities (and structural solutions - yes, there are solutions) openly, they will unravel the social, economic and political orders in a non-linear Cultural Revolution with a highly uncertain outcome. Borrowing a quarter of the nation's entire economic output every year to prop up an ineffective, corrupt status quo is putting a Band-Aid over a tumor."

Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/26/21: "More Proof: The Economic FREE-FALL Is Again Worsening"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/26/21:
"More Proof: The Economic FREE-FALL Is Again Worsening"

Musical Interlude: Marvin Gaye, "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)"

Marvin Gaye, 
"Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)"

"How It Really Is"

 

"Peddling Influence"

"Peddling Influence"
by Bill Bonner

"People are neither always good nor always bad,
 but always subject to influence."
– A Diary dictum

YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "There are not many benefits to growing old. We can hardly think of any at all. You can’t play professional basketball. You won’t get the leading man role in community theatre. You have aches and pains everywhere… And you can’t figure out how to buy bitcoin… or why you’d want to. You “don’t get it,” say your children and grandchildren. But sometimes, not getting it pays off.

Technology moves ahead. Fads and fashions, too, change… often leaving us scratching our heads. The world leaves us behind. Why would people want to sit in a restaurant with eight TV screens… and loud music blaring? And why would someone pay millions of dollars for an NTF at all… let alone one of “Michael Jackson lactating” or a mini Joe Biden character, naked, relieving himself on a similarly naked Donald Trump? They ought to pay you to take that kind of thing.

Same Old Story: But while some things leave us behind forever… some things come back around. And the lessons learned 50 years ago… or 20 years ago… may have some residual value after all. No… black Bakelite rotary phones may never replace the Apple iPhone. And the rabbit-eared TV set with three channels is not likely to make a comeback. The medium evolves, moving forward like time itself. But the message circles back… and the influencers kick us in the derrière again.

It’s still the same old story, in other words. A fight for love and glory. Everybody busting his hump trying to get ahead… to earn more money… to be more chic… more cool… more rich… and more powerful.

We’ve Seen This Show Before: This lust for wealth, status, and power inevitably leads people to try to cut in line. But unlike technology or honest capitalism, where the upside is infinite and the benefits are widespread, there are really very few new ways to rob, cheat, and steal. Boondoggles? Stick-ups? Kickbacks? Payola? Bribery? Taxes? Regulations? Paper money? Inflation? Larceny? Counterfeiting? Fraud? Vote stealing? Flim-flam? Lying? What’s new?

Not much. Which is why – when it comes to politics and markets – age may have at least one redeeming benefit. There’s a good chance that the old-timer has seen this show before; he knows how it ends.

It was on an old, boxy TV screen that we learned – in the 1970s – that mortgage rates had hit 15%. It was on paper – in a book – that we learned how to value a stock by estimating future earnings and discounting to present value (with a healthy margin for things that might go wrong). And it was by direct experience that today’s 70-somethings learned what double-digit inflation can do.

Forgotten Lessons: But for the last 40 years – particularly the last 10 – those lessons have been démodé. Consumer price inflation has been going down, more or less, since the early 1980s. Stocks have been going up. And the old lessons were no help. And recently, they became a curse. In La Bubble Epoch, earnings scarcely matter. Some 40% of the stocks in the Russell 2000 Index lost money; no point in adding up zeros. And yet, these companies are often the ones that score the biggest gains.

What to make of it? What to make of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies? What to make of Beeple? And what about MicroStrategy? The company’s revenues had been falling since 2014. Then, last year, it bought more than a billion dollars’ worth of bitcoin… and its share price increased 400%.

What sense did that make? Did the company just become a convenient way to own bitcoin without having to remember your password? But how do investors know that MicroStrategy won’t forget? Back in the dot-com bubble, MicroStrategy’s CEO, Michael Saylor, famously proclaimed that “information wants to be free.” Then, in 2000, he paid an $8 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for overstating the company’s earnings. How do investors know he’s not lying now about bitcoin?

Youth Versus Experience: But that’s the kind of question an old-timer might ask. Younger investors trust. Older ones look for verification. They’ve heard too many claims that turned out not to be true… they’ve seen too many bubbles blow up… and put their faith in too many people who turned out to be untrustworthy. Today’s callow speculators have their own ways of evaluating stocks… and their own gurus – now known as “FinTwit influencers” – to help them do it.

Elon Musk, for example, was born in 1971. He was only 9 years old when the big bull market in stocks and bonds began. And he was born in South Africa. But his influence is so powerful, he only has to mention a company that sounds like another company… and both double in minutes.

Chamath Palihapitiya – the so-called “SPAC King” – was born in 1976, in Sri Lanka. He didn’t begin compiling his fame and fortune until he joined Facebook in 2007. Now, he’s got both – up the kazoo… as well as 1.4 million followers on Twitter.

Influencer Nonpareil: Cathie Wood, who we wrote about yesterday, meanwhile, is not so young. And not so foreign. But she must be the Henry Blodget of the 21st century tech bubble. Don’t remember him? Do you think “influencing” was invented yesterday? No, Dear Reader, influencing is one of those things that comes back around… one of those things that age might recognize better than youth.

Blodget was a young financial analyst in the 1990s. In 1998, he said Amazon, then priced at $240 a share, would soon rise to $400. It did. Thereafter, Blodget became an influencer nonpareil, appearing on TV shows and in newsclips, talking up his book of dot-com stocks. But the dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and former New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer (who would later be disgraced himself) went after Blodget for securities fraud. Blodget paid $4 million, as a result, and was banned from the securities industry for life.

Now, it’s Elon, Cathie, and Chamath who do the influencing.And the old-timers know what to expect…"
Very, very remotely related diversion:
(Only this quote, actually...)
As the renowned social philosopher Richard Pryor observed, 
"You don't get to be old by bein' no fool.
 Whole lotta young wise men deader'n a MF'er."
Well, very strongest language alert possible but 
funnier than hell. if you're not easily offended please enjoy 
the totally politically incorrect genius of Richard Pryor.
Please view this on YouTube so auto-advance works properly!

Oh, Lord... lol

"When You Have Eliminated The Impossible..."

 

"In one of the earlier Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Arthur Conan Doyle (not yet a Sir) made an observation on logical deduction. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. There is, however, a specific flaw in that maxim. It assumes people can recognize the difference between what is impossible and what they believe is impossible."
- Peter Clines

"Fauci Does Damage Control After Fmr. CDC Director Suspects Wuhan Lab Leak"

"Fauci Does Damage Control After
 Fmr. CDC Director Suspects Wuhan Lab Leak"
by Tyler Durden

Update (1050ET): "Someone must have picked up the red phone and made a call, as Dr. Anthony Fauci said during a Friday White House press briefing that 'most scientists believe COVID-19 didn't come from a lab,' contradicting viral comments to CNN by former CDC Director Robert Redfield."

* * *
"Former CDC Director Robert Redfield says that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, did not originate from a wet market in Wuhan, China, and instead escaped from a nearby lab which was performing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses to make them more easily infect humans.

"I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human," Redfield told CNN's Sanjay Gupta in an interview set to air Sunday night at 9 p.m. ET. "Normally, when a pathogen goes from a zoonot to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more & more efficient in human to human transmission." "It's only an opinion; I'm allowed to have opinions now," he added.

Redfield said he thinks the virus originated inside a lab in China and “escaped” — not necessarily intentionally. (This all airs in a new Sanjay doc this Sunday night on CNN, which should be really interesting.)"
- Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) March 26, 2021

When asked how he believes the lab was working to make the virus infect humans more efficiently, he said "Let’s just say, I have a coronavirus, and I’m working on it - most of us in the lab are trying to grow virus. We try to make it grow better and better and better and better, so we can do experiments and figure out about it. That’s the way I put it together."

Redfield, a virologist picked by former President Trump to lead the Centers for Disease Control, said he believes that the pandemic began as a localized outbreak in Wuhan in September or October of 2019, earlier than the official timeline, and that it spread to every province in China over the ensuing months.

And while the rest of the world was told the only initial Covid-19 cases in China had originated from a wet market in Wuhan, Redfield is confident the evidence suggests that was simply not the case. According to Redfield, even his counterpart at the China CDC, Dr. George Gao, was initially left in the dark about the magnitude of the problem until early January. He described a private phone call he had with Gao in early January 2020, when Gao became distraught and started crying after finding "a lot of cases'' among individuals who had not been to the wet market. Gao, Redfield says, "came to the conclusion that the cat was out of the bag." The initial mortality rates in China were somewhere between "5-10%," Redfield told me. "I'd probably be cryin' too," he added.

The United States wasn't formally notified of the "mysterious cluster of pneumonia patients" until December 31, 2019. Those were critical weeks and months that countries around the world could've been preparing. -Dr. Sanjay Gupta via CNN

Redfield says that the notion COVID-19 jumped from a bat to a human doesn't make "biological sense," noting to Gupta that he spent his career as a virologist. His opinion differs from that of the World Health Organization, which has called the lab escape theory "extremely unlikely" with no clear evidence. And of course, CCP-friendly pundits are towing Beijing's official line by attacking Redfield:

"We are all allowed to have “opinions.” Among Redfield’s previous opinions were that a useless vaccine for AIDS was actually a cure, and that he could just make up data about the disease and publish it. My “opinion”: Robert Redfield is a quack. @cnn should not give him a platform https://t.co/IufSP8hcXi
- Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) March 26, 2021

Which, in itself should be enough evidence to question the mainstream narrative."
Curious timing, mere coincidence of course...
"Live Simulation Exercise to Prepare Public 
and Private Leaders for Pandemic Response"

Geneva, Switzerland, 15 October 2019 – "The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will host Event 201: a high-level simulation exercise for pandemic preparedness and response, in New York, USA, on Friday 18 October, 08.45 - 12.30 EDT."

"Covid-19 Pandemic Update 3/26/21"


"Covid-19 Pandemic Update 3/26/21"
Editor's Note: This excerpt was originally published in the article “Sleepy Joe's Next $3 Trillion Boondoggle” at David Stockman's ContraCorner.

"The lone political ranger in Washington who has articulately and forcefully confronted Fed Chairmen, Dr. Fauci and the Deep State peddlers of the RussiaGate Hoax specifically and the Forever Wars generally is Senator Rand Paul. Most of his so-called conservative GOP colleagues have either been AWOL completely on these deeply symptomatic matters or joined the fray after it was way too late or had become a matter of Trumpian loyalty-signaling.

Where were they last year at this time when the Donald disastrously anointed a 52-year Federal apparatchik, publicity-hound and scientific lightweight to be the Covid-czar? And then, they permitted him to host his own daily reality TV show which sparked the calamity of Lockdown Nation and impregnated the national psyche with unhinged hysteria about a respiratory virus that was not appreciably more virulent than many which had come before.

There were plenty of scientific voices at the time who said this was a giant folly, but even a brief acquaintance with the history of respiratory diseases and the principles of constitutional government was all that was required to deliver a loud, no!

Senator Rand Paul was one of the few who did from the very beginning, and now that the data is in and the visible pandemic is fast fading, he has been fully vindicated. Indeed, we have rarely seen anything which more powerfully discredits the Covid-as-Black Plague Myth and the resulting depredations of the Virus Patrol than the chart below.
Click image for larger size.
It shows the age-adjusted death rate from all causes for the 120 year span since 1900. As such, it takes all the noise and misdirection out of the daily Covid counts blared across the screen by the cable TV chyrons, and actually embeds the matter in real science.

That is to say, it’s age-adjusted so that the rapidly increasing population of the very elderly with inherently high mortality rates does not bias the picture. Nor do the squirrely death certificate coding conventions promulgated by the CDC last March distort the metric. That’s because it includes deaths from all causes - including the hundreds of thousands where the deceased succumbed to multitudinous causes and co-morbidities but also tested positive under the radically flawed PCR test for Covid.

Needless to say, when the age-adjusted mortality rate from all causes oscillated at about 7 per 1,000 population in recent years and then blipped up to about 8 per 1,000 in 2020 (green bar), you do not have a Black Plague or even a deathly pandemic.

What you have is a bad flu season that unfortunately resulted in a modest excess death rate -and one overwhelmingly centered in the nursing homes and the very elderly population beset with weak immune systems. Also, you have an all-causes death rate that was actually no higher than what was taken as a standard outcome as recently as 2004–2006.

The point is, the chart tells you that there should never have been a Covid hysteria or a lockdown, which caused previously unthinkable economic repercussions such as 70 million newly filed unemployment claims. That’s to say nothing of the crash of whole industries such as air travel and restaurants, the loss of lifetime investments by several millions of small businessmen and entrepreneurs, and the calamity of $6 trillion of Everything Bailouts that were recklessly stood up to compensate for the lockdown carnage.

A few decades from now, the blip represented by the green bar will hardly be visible with even a magnifying glass. That’s because several subsequent years will show a small dip in the annual mortality rates owing to the fact that the Grim Reaper came a few months early when medical treatments and therapeutic protocols failed to become available to the most vulnerable in the initial months of the pandemic.

More importantly, the reason for the sweeping folly of 2020 will become readily apparent. It wasn’t "the science." On the contrary, it was the result of an old-fashioned power grab by a camarilla of public health bureaucrats, their overlords in the pharma industry and the state and local officials who suddenly had a chance to wield dictatorial powers over the daily lives of their constituents.

No rational government in a free society with a healthy opposition party would have wreaked the havoc brought upon America during the last year owing to the tiny blip reflected in the green bar below.

Senator Rand Paul and a few intrepid colleagues - plus an occasional on-point anchor on Fox News like Tucker Carlson - tried as they might, but they simply could not thwart the ceaseless aggrandizement of an Imperial City that has become the living embodiment of Leviathan.

The chart above puts us in mind of our own youth on a rural Michigan farm. At our one-room school, we all wanted to get measles, mumps and chickenpox so that we would have the natural immunities going forward; and when it came along, we wanted to get Dr. Salk’s vaccine because we didn’t wish to get polio. But either way, no one thought we were living in a world beset by deathly plagues and medical pestilence; this includes the virulent Asian flu that came along in 1957, which resulted in 116,000 deaths among a population half today’s size.

Still, the age-adjusted death rate from all causes in 1957 was about 14 per 1,000 or double the rate recorded for the Year-of-the-Covid in 2020. The fact that US economic and social life has been monkey-hammered by unhinged government interventions is evidence that there is not much left in Washington to thwart the on-going metastasis."
Related:

"Get Your Stuff Together..."

“We all got problems. But there’s a great book out called “Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart.” Did you see that? That book says the statute of limitations has expired on all childhood traumas. Get your stuff together and get on with your life, man. Stop whinin’ about what’s wrong, because everybody’s had a rough time, in one way or another.”
- Quincy Jones

"The Hour Is Late"

"The Hour Is Late"
by Michael Snyder

"We are running out of time, but most people are still dead asleep. I have to admit that I am really struggling with how to say what I need to share in this article. I have been up against some real challenges in recent days, but the vast majority of my readers didn’t know that anything was different because I have just continued to pump out content on the websites. Of course we all face challenges in life, and there are many that are facing far greater challenges than I have been facing. The phrase “remember Job” has been repeatedly coming to mind throughout this time, and there is so much that we can all learn from that story. When great challenges come, there are often very important lessons that we can learn from them, and an entirely new chapter may await us on the other side of those challenges.

In this article I am going to share with you some of the things that I have been sharing with people privately. Prior to sitting down, I spent some time walking around in the chilly mountain air outside. I wanted to clear my head and organize my thoughts before I began writing. Unlike in our major urban areas, the air is crisp and clean here, and I will never get tired of the view. We live in a truly beautiful world, but unfortunately many of us take the beauty of nature for granted.

Many of you probably expected me to write an article about the latest mass shooter. That is the “big story” that everyone is talking about, but the truth is that it isn’t really that important. There was a mass shooting last week, and there will inevitably be more mass shootings in the days ahead. We live at a time when mass shootings have become commonplace, and that is because we live in a deeply broken society. In 2020, the number of mass shootings was almost 50 percent higher than it was in 2019. And since we are off to a brisk start this year, the final number for 2021 will almost certainly be even higher.

The Democrats are going to politicize this latest tragedy and use it as an opportunity to push their gun control agenda, and conservatives will freak out about that. But these short-term political battles are not where our focus should be right now.

For a very long time, many of us have been warning about things that are coming. But now we are transitioning into a period when the time for warning will be over because so many of the things that we have been warning about will actually be happening.

Of course you could say that we have already been in such a time since the beginning of 2020. The COVID pandemic continues to sweep across the globe, the entire world is wrestling with severe economic problems, civil unrest continues to rage in our major cities and our planet is becoming increasing unstable. I covered many of the things that we are currently facing in an article entitled “7 ‘Plagues’ That Are Hitting Our Planet Right Now” that went viral on Zero Hedge.

But as bad as conditions are at the moment, I believe that they will soon get a lot worse. In fact, I believe that we have entered a time when global events will accelerate dramatically. Now that Joe Biden is in the White House, a lot of people are crying “peace and safety”, but they aren’t going to get “peace and safety”.

The next few months are a time to be watchful. In particular, I have been privately telling people to watch Israel for anything “unusual” that happens. If you learn of something extremely unusual that happens over there that you don’t think I know about yet, please write to me. Way too often there are extremely important events that take place that the mainstream media never covers. So if history changing events take place in the weeks or months ahead, that doesn’t mean that the mainstream media will cover them.

In addition to watching Israel like a hawk, let us also keep our eyes on the Biden administration. Joe Biden is not all there mentally, and the warmongers that he has surrounded himself with are pushing us toward conflicts with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. There are multiple places around the globe where war could break out, but let us hope that war can be put off for as long as possible. Once war does finally break out, it will greatly intensify the economic problems that we are already facing.

I know that many of you are very eager for me to release my next book. "Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America" has been ranking very well on the Amazon charts for many months, and it is literally waking people up all over the globe. My next book will also examine coming events which will greatly shake the world as we know it today, but I can’t publish it yet. I feel that things that are about to happen will be absolutely critical to the message of the book, and so I need to wait and watch during this season.

I believe that we will soon see historic events take place which will literally change everything. Needless to say, many others also believe that 2021 will be a critical turning point as well. But ultimately even “2021” is just an artificial man-made construct.

Do you want to know who decided that the year would start on January 1st? It was the Romans. And why should our days start at midnight? That is an artificial man-made construct as well. Just because something has been handed down to us from previous generations does not mean that we have to blindly accept it.

Many of you will have read this article on Wednesday. Did you know that the name “Wednesday” actually comes from an ancient pagan god? "Wednesday is “Wōden’s day.” Wōden, or Odin, was the ruler of the Norse gods’ realm and associated with wisdom, magic, victory and death. The Romans connected Wōden to Mercury because they were both guides of souls after death. “Wednesday” comes from Old English “Wōdnesdæg.”

When you start to learn about the lies that we have inherited, it will open your eyes to a whole new world. Of course most people never stop to question why things are the way that they are. Sadly, most people just mindlessly absorb whatever the system tells them to believe, and as a result we have vast hordes of vacuous “sheeple” populating our society today.

The good news is that millions of them will soon be shaken out of their slumber by the apocalyptic events that are coming. It will be a rude awakening, but that is certainly preferable to never waking up at all."

Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 3/26/2021"

"Weekly News Wrap-Up 3/26/2021"
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 

"Just about everything we have been told about Covid is a lie or lies by omission. We are told the Vaccine is the only way to beat Covid. We are also told there are no other treatments available. Those are lies. We are not told that the so-called vaccine is “experimental” and that all these so-called vaccines were only approved on an emergency basis. We are not told that these vaccines permanently alter your DNA with genetic engineering and that vaccine manufacturers have zero liability if you are permanently injured or die from a shot. Also, manufacturers of these so-called vaccines and the medical community have no idea what the effects will be in the short or long term. This makes what is going on today around America, with vaccine centers to push an unproven medical test, a huge reckless risk. Instead of giving the public actual information for “informed consent,” an idea that came out of the 1947 Nurnberg trials of Nazis, we have what I call “misinformed consent” based on lies, fraud and fear. The Nazis would be proud.

YouTube has taken down another lifesaving video about the “wonder drug” called Ivermectin. This is an anti-viral drug that is decades old. It’s been proven safe with little downside risk when treating and preventing Covid19. Dr. Pierre Kory testified in the Senate about repurposing Ivermectin and the “mountains of evidence showing the miraculous effectiveness of Ivermectin.” The public is not allowed to hear alternatives to experimental vaccines. As I said last week, debates and alternative scientific information is NOT allowed. YouTube has taken down the Senate testimony of Dr. Kory (But you can watch it here) to censor any and all scientific alternatives to vaccines.

The economy is getting better - NOT. Another 684,000 initial unemployment claims were reported this week. Some financial experts are excited because it was not more than 700,000 claims. Not what I would consider a cause for celebration. Also, a huge cargo ship is blocking a major shipping choke point, and that is causing big economic problems in an already fragile global economy."

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he talks about these
 stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up for 3/26/2021.

Thursday, March 25, 2021

"Stimulus Updates PM 3/25/21"

3/25/21, 6:45 PM: The TEC Show, “30 MILLION $1400 Stimulus Checks Coming Next Week For Social Security, SSI, SSDI, VA, RRB”
3/25/21, 6:30 PM: Blind to Billionaire,"New!! $1,400 Stimulus Check - SSA, SSDI, SSI, VA". "Finally we are getting some new information on the $1400 stimulus check for Social Security, SSDI, SSI, VA and direct express. When will Social Security receive the $1400 stimulus check? We are finally getting new information on the $1400 stimulus check, third stimulus check for Social Security, SSDI, SSI, VA and direct express individuals."
3/25/21, 6 PM: Ron Yates, "WOW $200!! SSI Social Security + 4th STIMULUS CHECK Update Today"

"I Witnessed The Power Of China Today; US Economy Has Collapsed; Stimulus Euphoria; Jobless Crisis"

Fill screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe,
"I Witnessed The Power Of China Today; 
US Economy Has Collapsed; Stimulus Euphoria; Jobless Crisis"

Gerald Celente, "The Trends Journal: Who's In Charge?"

Gerald Celente,
 "The Trends Journal: Who's In Charge?"

As only Gerald can do... lol

"The God That Failed"

"The God That Failed"
by Brian Maher

"Today we trample sacred ground… trumpet a message of heresy… and offend the pieties. For we challenge the cherished and soothing assumptions of democracy. In 2001, academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe scribbled a book bearing the soaring title "Democracy: The God That Failed." Hoppe’s work is a dart levelled against that holiest of secular divinities.

Hoppe’s primary tort against democracy? It wastes. It exhausts its capital. It forever takes the short view. Hoppe uses the economic concept of time preference to nail his point through. A Jill with low time preference delays her gratification until the future. She is disciplined. She is willing to have her cake later - only after she has tended to her duties. But a Jack with high time preference orients toward present consumption. He wants his cake now - and the future can go scratching.

Democracy, in Hoppe’s regard, “wants it now.” It is a spendthrift; a profligate; a child at large in a candy store. As the drunkard cannot see beyond the next drink… democracy cannot see past the next election. The problem, says Hoppe, is that democratic leaders do not own the machinery of government. It is theirs on temporary loan. Thus the democratic politician is a mere placeholder. But is that not our system’s cardinal virtue - that power is not permanently lodged in a single vessel? A rotating roster of rogues is far superior to one alone, you counter. Otherwise, the American Revolution was a vast swindle, and the 4th of July is a blackguard’s holiday.

A Pre-Arranged Raid on the Treasury: But because a leader under democracy does not own the government apparatus, argues Hoppe, he has no incentive to maximize its value. Instead, he tends to deplete it. His limited time horizon forces him toward immediate gratification. That is, he must get while the getting is there to be gotten.

Consider the aspiring democratic official who seeks the franchise of a demanding public. He may feel the tug of fiscal conscience. But should he fail to gratify the crowd’s clamorings, he knows the other fellow will. And our democratic aspirant will lose his election. So he offers up the requisite sweets.

If Social Security benefits must increase to sweep him into office, they will increase. Will it take more Medicare benefits, more unemployment insurance, more welfare? Then these you will see. His election represents a pre-arranged raid upon the Treasury. If the national purse is thin, if the burden cannot be met from existing stocks, then let it go upon the credit card. Is the business sordid? Might it eventually throw the Republic into bankruptcy? Well, eventually is a long way off, he says. Let it fall into the next fellow’s lap. Besides, we’ll simply grow our way out of it. This is the office-seeker under modern democracy. Compare, for a moment, democratic government with a rented automobile…

Who Ever Washed a Rental Car? The renter does not own the auto. He, therefore, has no regard for its long-term health. So he over-accelerates the engine. He pummels the brakes. Down its gullet, he pours the lowest-test gasoline. Would he ever check the oil? And who, may we inquire, has ever run a rental through a wash?

Here Hoppe applies the theory to democratic government: "It must be regarded as unavoidable that public-government ownership results in continual capital consumption. Instead of maintaining or even enhancing the value of the government estate, as a king would do, a president (the government’s temporary caretaker or trustee) will use up as much of the government resources as quickly as possible, for what he does not consume now, he may never be able to consume… For a president, unlike for a king, moderation offers only disadvantages."

Hoppe speaks of a king. Unlike democracy, Hoppe contends, monarchy takes the long view. The monarch owns the apparatus of government. As will his heirs. So he naturally inclines to policies that increase the value of his property over time. If Social Security, Medicare and the rest begin to deplete the government’s stocks, the monarch will announce a halt to them.

“It’s welfare you want, subject? I understand the church runs a charity.” “Social Security, you seek? I suggest you begin planning early for your retirement. And remember to save against the rainy day.” “You say you want health care. I hope you don’t smoke or drink too much. And let me mention it now - sugar is a far-from-healthful substance. Besides, there are private insurers. I can refer you to several if you wish.”

The People Tell the King to Get Bent: Is such a system undemocratic? Certainly. Callous, perhaps? Well, perhaps it is. But is it fiscally stable? Yes. Would it incur massive debts it could never repay? Unlikely. In brief, monarchy is better with money than democracy. It is a superior steward of wealth - at least by this theory.

Once again, Hoppe: "While a king is by no means opposed to debt, he is constrained in this “natural” inclination by the fact that as the government’s private owner, he and his heirs are considered personally liable for the payment of all government debts (he can literally go bankrupt, or be forced by creditors to liquidate government assets)."

Consider, as one example: In 1392, England’s King Henry III was in arrears to the Pope in Rome… and required 1,000 pounds towards satisfaction of his debt. He did not have it. So old Hank was forced to appear before the citizens of London with an open hat. Moreover, they refused him.

Can you imagine a president of the United States upon his knees before the citizens of Washington? And these citizens being allowed to refuse him? Freeman Tilden, from his neglected 1936 masterwork, "A World in Debt": "Kings had power enough to contract debts, but found it much more difficult to take advantage of that power than the legally curbed monarchs [that followed later]. The feudal system, with its insecurity and constant clash of petty divisions, was not calculated to invite credit."

In distinct contrast, Hoppe argues, we find the democratic president: "A presidential government caretaker is not held liable for debts incurred during his tenure of office. Rather, his debts are considered “public,” to be repaid by future (equally nonliable) governments." Perhaps this explains - pandemic aside - why the national debt of the United States runs to some $28 trillion? It is a capital fact beyond all dispute: "Most democratic nations groan beneath bloated government… extortionate taxation… and Himalayan levels of debt."

Taxes: How does this lovely, lovely state compare with the barbarous age of monarchs, Mr. Hoppe? During the entire monarchical age until the second half of the 19th century… the tax burden rarely exceeded 5 percent of national product. Since then it has increased constantly. In Western Europe it stood at 15–20 percent of national product after World War I, and in the meantime it has risen to around 50 percent.

Government spending ran to roughly 10% of GDP prior to World War I. It currently nears 50% in many democratic countries. Total government spending in this Land of the Free amounts to 36% of GDP — nearly 40%. Perhaps in retrospect, the world might have been made safe for monarchy in 1917.

And maybe our Colonial forefathers should have left old King George alone in 1775. His tax bite was so light… it failed to break the skin. Our researches reveal that American Colonial taxation ran to about 1% of total income - 1%. And between 1764 and 1775, claims political scientist Alvin Rabushka: "The nearly 2 million white Colonists in America paid on the order of about 1 percent of the annual taxes levied on the roughly 8.5 million residents of Britain, or one twenty-fifth, in per capita terms…"

As traitorous as it may appear, we are half-tempted to disinter King George’s innocent bones and throw them a much overdue parade. But let us entertain no more thoughts of heresy.

The Worst System of Government… Except for the Rest: Hoppe’s book is actually no call for monarchy. As the author himself states at the onset - “I am not a monarchist and the following is not a defense of monarchy.” His primary purpose is to diagnose an illness - not to prescribe a cure. Hoppe’s sins against democracy are nonetheless of the mortal variety. And mainstream academics put him under excommunication for his blasphemies. But to repeat, Hoppe does not call for monarchy. Nor do we.

Beneath our seditious motley beats the heart of an American patriot… and our blood runs true under red, white and blue. Besides, a king could be every inch the scoundrel as an American president. And since he faces no election, how could we possibly count upon him to say amusing and idiotic things? Let us, therefore, not discount the comedic value of democratic government.

In addition, monarchy is certainly no guarantee against bankruptcy - as history records well. More than a few ne’er do well kings have driven their realms to rack and ruin. Who can dispute it? But it is due more to incompetent kingmanship than kingmanship itself. A Henry VIII can inherit a throne as easily as a Solomon. Regardless, it matters little…Hoppe’s monarchic utopia will never be - not in today’s age of mass democracy.

But does it soften his case? Winston Churchill famously quipped that democracy was the worst form of government except for the rest. But upon further reflection, maybe monarchy is the worst form of government… except for the rest…"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/25/21: "RED ALERT: Be Ready For It, Because People Will DIE!"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/25/21:
"RED ALERT: 
Be Ready For It, Because People Will DIE!"

"Addendum/Clarification To Last Video" (Above)

Musical Interlude: 2002, "The Calling"

Full screen recommended.
2002, "The Calling"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“These three bright nebulae are often featured in telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius and the crowded starfields of the central Milky Way. In fact, 18th century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged two of them; M8, the large nebula left of center, and colorful M20 on the right. The third, NGC 6559, is above M8, separated from the larger nebula by a dark dust lane. All three are stellar nurseries about five thousand light-years or so distant.
The expansive M8, over a hundred light-years across, is also known as the Lagoon Nebula. M20's popular moniker is the Trifid. Glowing hydrogen gas creates the dominant red color of the emission nebulae, with contrasting blue hues, most striking in the Trifid, due to dust reflected starlight. The colorful skyscape recorded with telescope and digital camera also includes one of Messier's open star clusters, M21, just above the Trifid.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

"When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged
in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams,
to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where
he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars."

- Walt Whitman

"The Eternal Silence of Infinite Spaces..."

"The eternal silence of infinite spaces frightens me. Why now rather than then? Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time have been ascribed to me? We travel in a vast sphere, always drifting in the uncertain, pulled from one side to another. Whenever we find a fixed point to attach and to fasten ourselves, it shifts and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desires to find solid ground and an ultimate and solid foundation for building a tower reaching to the Infinite. But always these bases crack, and the earth obstinately opens up into abysses. We are infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, since the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from us in an encapsulated secret; we are equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which we were made, and the Infinite in which we are swallowed up."
- Blaise Pascal

The Poet: Mary Oliver, “October”

“October”

"There’s this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.
A longing wells up in its throat
like a blossom
as it breathes slowly.

What does the world
mean to you if you can’t trust it
to go on shining when you’re
not there? and there’s
a tree, long-fallen; once
the bees flew to it, like a procession
of messengers, and filled it
with honey.

I said to the chickadee,
 singing his heart out in the
green pine tree:
little dazzler
little song,
little mouthful.

The shape climbs up out of the curled grass. It
grunts into view. There is no measure
for the confidence at the bottom of its eyes-
there is no telling
the suppleness of its shoulders as it turns
and yawns.

Near the fallen tree
something - a leaf snapped loose
from the branch and fluttering down - tries to pull me
into its trap of attention.
It pulls me
into its trap of attention,
And when I turn again, the bear is gone.

Look, hasn’t my body already felt
like the body of a flower?
Look, I want to love this world
as thought it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.

One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me - and I thought:
so this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful."

- Mary Oliver

"The Future..."

"We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight. So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us. We conceal it from our sight, because it troubles us; and if it be delightful to us, we regret to see it pass away. We try to sustain it by the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching. Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so."
- Blaise Pascal