Monday, March 28, 2022

"Washington Is Delirious With War Fever (For No Reason To Do With Homeland Security)"

"Washington Is Delirious With War Fever
(For No Reason To Do With Homeland Security)"
by David Stockman

"Economic, social and political dangers abound. That’s because Washington and its subservient mainstream media are delirious with war fever like at no time in the last seven decades. The resulting reckless pursuit of an unhinged Sanctions War against Russia poses a dire threat to the global economy and domestic prosperity and does so for no good reason of homeland security whatsoever.

With respect to the latter, the sheer facts are overwhelming. So we repeat them with an added total for the respective military budgets: To wit, the economic might of NATO is 29X that of Russia and its combined defense budgets are 18X greater, which tells you all you need to know about the “Russian threat”:

• NATO: $42.78 trillion of GDP; 945 million population; $45,130 per capita income; $1,200 billion defense budget;

• RUSSIA: $1.46 trillion of GDP; 144 million population; $10,300 per capita income; $67 billion defense budget.
Given these realities, why should Washington care about an intramural battle among contiguous peoples and territories that have been joined at the hip for most of the last 1300 years? The implicit answer is because it’s the world’s self-appointed policeman and Spanker-in-Chief. Beyond that, it’s apparently due to a putative aggrandizement syndrome. That is, Putin’s Russia may be puny in the economic and military scheme of things today, but once it is permitted to acquire a taste for conquest it is certain to grow into a Hitlerian monster.

Needless to say, the former reason is based on Washington’s institutionalized arrogance and has no place at all in realistic thinking about national security, while the latter is based on sheer ignorance about the actual history of Hitler’s conquests. The truth is, there was nothing inexorable about it. Contrary to today’s nostrums, Nazi Germany wasn’t a self-feeding deus ex machina of conquest, nor was it a generic model of what happens when ruthless dictators are not braced with opposing force early on.

To the contrary, Hitler was a product of a specific, unique and unfortunate history that bears no resemblance to current circumstances on the Ukrainian/Russian line of conflict. In fact, Hitler’s original expansion was rooted in deep German grievances about its territorial, industrial and financial (i.e. onerous reparations) decapitation by the vengeful winners at Versailles.

Thus, the re-occupation of the Alsace-Lorain and the Ruhr, the annexation of the German speaking Sudetenland, the dispute over the Danzig Corridor in Poland – all involved the reclamation of former German territories, while the Anschluss with Austria was a voluntary marriage of German-speaking losers from the abomination of 1919.

So Hitler’s rise and initial territorial expansion had been preventable, not inexorable, because it was rooted in historic mistakes that took on a life of their own: Namely, the irridentism of an aggrieved German population that had been stripped of 15% of its historic territory and upwards of 50% of its coal and other industrial resources by the “peacemakers” at Versailles.

Stated differently, Hitler was the metastasized residue of history gone wrong, not the inexorable product of annexing, for instance, the overwhelmingly German speaking population of the Sudetenland. The latter had been extracted from Germany in 1919 and handed to the new state of Czechoslovakia, which, in turn, had been carved out of whole cloth by Wilson & Co.

The correct lesson from the 1930s, therefore, is more nearly the opposite of the deus ex machina aggrandizement syndrome peddled by Washington and Brussels. It was the West’s insistence on the creation and perpetuation of the artificial states of Poland and Czechoslovakia that gestated Hitler, not the mere fact of neighboring territories being conquered after the fact.

As it happened, Poland had disappeared from the maps of Europe in 1795 and had no reason to come back in the fulsome extent provided by the Versailles Treaty except for Wilson’s courting of the Polish vote in the industrial Midwest. Similarly, the mongrel state of Czechoslovakia with its linguistic, religious and ethnic concoction had no historical basis or reason for existence at all. Well, again, except for American electoral machinations, which constituted the raw politics underlying Wilson’s messianic determination to remake the map of the world so as to be “safe for democracy” in his own exalted opinion.

The fact is, Ukraine is the Poland and Czechoslovakia of the present time – an artificial state loaded with Russians and with no reason for existence in its present form and girth. Well, still again, other than Washington’s fanatical insistence that the happenstance map of administrative units which fell out of the Soviet Union’s collapse constitute sacred borders that must be preserved at all hazards.

To the contrary, what Putin wants, ironically, is the pre-communist status quo ante. That is, he wants Crimea, where Ukrainians constitute but a tiny minority and which had been Russian since 1783. And, more crucially, which hosts the greatest strategic military asset possessed by Russia thereafter – -the great Naval base at the headwaters of the Black Sea in Sevastopol.

Likewise, the Donbas and territories east of the Dnieper River and along the northern edge of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov have been Russian for upwards of 300 years. By all facts of pre-1922 history, these territories amounted to Novorossiya (“New Russia”) as shown in this map from 1897.
As it happened, they became “Ukrainian” only by writ of two of history’s greatest evil monsters – Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin – who placed them in the administrative unit of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic for reasons that have no historic validity whatsoever.

Yet a devastating war goes on there today – a war which is careening to the precipice of WWIII – because Washington encourages Kiev to insist on retention of “every inch” of a map put together by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev. In fact, the latter did for the map of Ukraine what Wilson & Co. did to Germany after the Great War. That is to say, these long gone commie dictators extracted from Russian and Polish territories a combustible mongrel that begs to be partitioned and returned to the status quo ante, not defended to the last drop of Ukrainian blood and US/NATO treasure.

Needless to say, there is no Washington policy-maker familiar with the above map, nor Capitol Hill armchair warrior who has a clue. Most especially, by shrieking about “borders” being violated and the need for all out support to a heroic nation valiantly resisting the Russian ogre, the GOP’s bloodthirsty hawks and neocons have made it easy as pie for Biden and his national security minions to pivot to an all-out war footing against Russia, thereby distracting the American public from the abysmal failure of their domestic policies.

Indeed, red in tooth and claw the vast majority of Republicans are now demanding suicidal measures like a No Fly Zone and secondary sanctions, including against China. The latter are being proffered in the vain hope that it will weaken Russia enough to eventually cause it to quit its “invasion” and permit the map of Ukraine to revert to what Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev ordered it to be.

One of these war-loving Republicans is Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, who recently relieved himself of the following gem in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal. “To cut off Mr. Putin’s oil and gas sales globally, the administration and Congress should impose secondary sanctions on the entirety of Russia’s financial sector.” What he means is that any bank on the entire planet which should dare to defy Washington’s writ and finance a Russian oil trade to a third party, such as China, India or Brazil, should be slapped with sanctions for aiding and abetting what amounts to global commerce–now redefined as an act of war against the US and NATO.

So to repeat: The GOP has gone for full-scale “war socialism.” Suddenly, the rights of private property owners are not so sacred after all – if they are involved in exporting, importing or financial intermediation with anything Russian. In those instances, they are far game for Washington’s economic draft – and the consequent loss of markets, sales, profits and value on the say so of war-loving blowhards like Senator Toomey.

The worst thing, of course, is that all of this “war socialism” has nothing to do with defense of the homeland or anything rational at all. To the contrary, it’s the rotten spawn of an Imperial City populated by careerist politicians who get their jollies pretending to be the suzerains of mankind and Spanker-in-Chief of the planet’s malefactors.

Unfortunately, the current mess isn’t the half of it. The MSM is presenting such a distorted and fanciful picture of on-the-ground conditions in the Ukraine that the American public is totally in the dark about what comes next. That is, the Ukrainian military has been decimated and the resistance of the Kiev government is on its last legs – notwithstanding the nonstop whistling past the graveyard of the nation’s clownish president.

Recently, the peripatetic Mike Whitney had a powerful interview with one Larry C Johnson. The latter is a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. He is the founder and managing partner of BERG Associates, which was established in 1998 to provide training to the US Military’s Special Operations community. He has been vilified by the right and the left, which means he must be doing something right.

In any event, Johnson summarized what amounts to the dogs of war which are not barking on the Ukrainian side of the ledger. The implication is that its only a matter of time until a fait accompli on the ground in Ukraine results in the aforementioned partition of its borders and the demilitarization and neutralization of the rump state left behind, even as Washington finds itself in full-scale economic war with Russia.

That is to say, either Imperial Washington is going to surrender from its Sanctions War or the real truth of the matter will come to light. Namely, that the violation of Ukraine’s putative borders is only the excuse for Washington hegemonic determination to call the shots in the former Soviet Union – just like it has attempted to do elsewhere on the planet during the last 70 years in the name of promoting democracy.

As to the looming collapse of the Ukrainian resistance, here are the key spoiler alerts from the Johnson interview, conveying the inconvenient truths about where the war is actually heading.

Russia’s de facto No Fly Zone: Within the first 24 hours of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, all Ukrainian Ground Radar Intercept capabilities were wiped out. Without those radars, the Ukrainian Air Force lost its ability to do air to air intercept. In the intervening three weeks, Russia has established a de facto No Fly Zone over Ukraine. While still vulnerable to shoulder fired Surface to Air Missiles supplied by the U.S. and NATO to the Ukrainians, there is no evidence that Russia has had to curtail Combat Air Operations.

The Allegedly Stalled 40-Mile Russian Column: When a 24 mile (or 40 mile, depends on the news source) was positioned north of Kiev for more than a week, it was clear that Ukraine’s ability to launch significant military operations had been eliminated. If their artillery was intact, then that column was easy pickings for massive destruction. That did not happen. Alternatively, if the Ukrainian’s had a viable fixed wing or rotary wing capability they should have destroyed that column from the air. That did not happen. Or, if they had a viable cruise missile capability they should have rained down hell on the supposedly stalled Russian column. That did not happen. The Ukrainians did not even mount a significant infantry ambush of the column with their newly supplied US Javelins.

Cut Off to the South, North and East: We have not seen a single instance of a Ukrainian regiment or brigade size unit attacking and defeating a comparable Russian unit. Instead, the Russians have split the Ukrainian Army into fragments and cut their lines of communication. The Russians are consolidating their control of Mariupol and have secured all approaches on the Black Sea. Ukraine is now cut off in the South and the North.

Destruction of De Facto NATO Military Bases: The really big news came this week with the Russian missile strikes on what are de facto NATO bases in Yavoriv and Zhytomyr. NATO conducted cyber security training at Zhytomyr in September 2018 and described Ukraine as a “NATO partner.” Zhytomyr was destroyed with hypersonic missiles on Saturday. Yavoriv suffered a similar fate last Sunday. It was the primary training and logistics center that NATO and EUCOM used to supply fighters and weapons to Ukraine. A large number of the military and civilian personnel at that base became casualties.

Agreement With Colonel Douglas Macgregor – A Guest on the Tucker Carlson Show Who Said: “The war is really over for the Ukrainians. They have been ground into bits, there is no question about that despite what we hear from our mainstream media. So, the real question for us at this stage is, Tucker, are we going to live with the Russian people and their government or we going to continue to pursue this sort of regime change dressed up as a Ukrainian war? Are we going to stop using Ukraine as a battering ram against Moscow, which is effectively what we’ve done.”

Washington’s Massive Miscalculation: I am shocked at the miscalculation in thinking economic sanctions on Russia would bring them to their knees. The opposite is true. Russia is self-sufficient and is not dependent on imports. Its exports are critical to the economic well-being of the West. If they withhold wheat, potash, gas, oil, palladium, finished nickel and other key minerals from the West, the European and US economies will be savaged. And this attempt to coerce Russia with sanctions has now made it very likely that the US dollar’s role as the international reserve currency will show up in the dustbin of history."

Greg Hunter, "WWIII Has Begun – Gerald Celente"

"WWIII Has Begun – Gerald Celente"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Renowned trends researcher and publisher of “The Trends Journal,” Gerald Celente, has long said “when all else fails, they take you to war.” To say our world is failing is a profound understatement. Celente proclaims, “World War III has begun. I was born one year after the end of WWII, and crazy people will take you to war in the blink of an eye. The war criminals are leading us into another war.”

Celente says the reason for war usually surrounds a failing economy. This time is no different. Celente explains, “I have been saying that when all else fails, they take you to war. What followed the Great Depression? War. What followed the dot com bust? More war. That’s right. Georgie Bush’s ratings were way down, and the Nasdaq was down 66% before 9/11.”

Celente goes on to point out the economy in the USA is failing. For proof, look no further than the “16% inflation” destroying paychecks of Americans, especially at the gas pump. Celente also says in the commercial real estate market in NYC alone, only 35% of the office space is being rented. That means 65% is vacant, and it’s the same all over the country. Celente predicts, “We are headed for an economic calamity the likes of which we have never seen in our lifetime. They are getting our minds off it with the war in Ukraine. You know, I wrote in the magazine in the beginning of the year, we said that the Covid war would wind down by late March and mid-April. It’s winding down. So, now, as we said in the magazine, we went from the Covid war to the Ukraine war, and now to world war. We are headed to World War III. There is not a peep about a cease-fire. Biden is only bragging about more weapons being sent in. Biden says we are going to defeat the Russians. We are not backing down. No one is talking about a cease-fire, and no one is talking about peace. If we don’t unite for peace, we are all going to die in war.”

In closing, Celente is warning about some sort of event or false flag giving the banking powers a reason to shut down the banks and separating you from your money. Celente warns, “I am saying to everyone listening, we are at the crucial point where one day, they are going to say a bomb, hacking or whatever, and to save your lives and to save your money, we are closing down the banking system. You won’t be able to get your money out, and maybe when you do, they will devalue it. They did it before and they will do it again. This time, it will be much worse. My plan centers around the three G’s: guns, gold and a getaway plan.”

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with the top trends researcher on the planet, Gerald Celente, publisher of "The Trends Journal." (There is much more in the 42 min. interview.)

Sunday, March 27, 2022

"Food Shortage Aggravates As Supply Chain Breakdown Triggers Panic At Local Supermarkets"

Full screen recommended.
"Food Shortage Aggravates As Supply Chain 
Breakdown Triggers Panic At Local Supermarkets"
by Epic Economist

"The global food crisis is no longer a distant possibility, or a future concern for economists to discuss in studies and notes to investors. It's happening right now. Its effects are already visible, and they’re causing lots of stress and pain for millions of people around the world. This crisis is going to have a major impact on the life of every single person on the face of the planet, including you and your family. The information we’re about to share is extremely important and quite alarming.

With sanctions and supply chain disruptions pushing consumer prices to soar as oil and commodity prices face a massive spike, increased costs of gas and diesel are also weighting on the cost of food and sparking fears that the world is on the verge of a horrifying hunger crisis. And this time, the U.S. is not going to be immune. In fact, in a press conference held in Brussels a few days ago, President Joe Biden confirmed the seriousness of the issue. Biden admitted for the first time that we’re going to “experience food shortages as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”. “It’s going to be real,” Biden stated. “The price of the sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia. It’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well,” he stressed.

In the United States, food prices recorded the largest monthly increase last month, with the overall increase in food prices nearing 8%, the biggest jump since July 1981. Adding fuel to the fire, domestic food production is being disrupted by a shortage of fertilizer and skyrocketing prices. With Russia as a top fertilizer exporter, prices have shot to record highs in a 30-day span. According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, fertilizer costs have risen as much as 300% in some areas, which is “adding significant pressure to farmers’ pocketbooks”.

In some cases, farmers who are still willing to pay higher prices for fertilizer are not able to get it delivered at all. There’s simply not enough supply for everyone, said Clark Gregory, an Iowa farmer who grows hay for his livestock operation. "There's no way the math can hold on this," he said. "I can't imagine it's enough." Other farmers have indicated that it might be time to get out of the farming business since it's not just commodity and fertilizer prices, but other input price increases, such as diesel fuel. "I think there will be a lot of people pulling out, a lot of bankruptcies and foreclosures," Gregory added.

This perfect storm of factors is only getting worse and scarier. Global leaders can’t even deny it anymore. Hundreds of millions of people will experience food insecurity, hunger, or famine by the end of this year. And if you have not been paying much attention to this issue until this point, you need to wake up because this is the real deal and things are changing fast. If you think food prices are high right now, you’ll be shocked when you find out that they’re not going to get lower than this for decades. We should act while we can because many more challenges are likely to emerge soon."

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Greater Than The Sum"; "Memory of the Sky"

 

Full screen recommended.
2002, "Greater Than The Sum"
Full screen recommended.
2002, "Memory of the Sky"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“This pretty, open cluster of stars, M34, is about the size of the Full Moon on the sky. Easy to appreciate in small telescopes, it lies some 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Perseus. At that distance, M34 physically spans about 15 light-years. Formed at the same time from the same cloud of dust and gas, all the stars of M34 are about 200 million years young. 
But like any open star cluster orbiting in the plane of our galaxy, M34 will eventually disperse as it experiences gravitational tides and encounters with the Milky Way's interstellar clouds and other stars. Over four billion years ago, our own Sun was likely formed in a similar open star cluster.”

"It Becomes Sad..."

"Why does truth carry such a dreadful face? Why does subjugation carry
such a happy mask? It becomes sad when people understand that they
can lead a better life as long as they bow their heads, ignoring the truth."
- Lionel Suggs

"You Have No Money, Brace For Impact; Inflation Consequences; Treasury Bond Massacre; Credit Markets"

Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, PM 3/27/22:
"You Have No Money, Brace For Impact; 
Inflation Consequences; Treasury Bond Massacre; Credit Markets"

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: Keep Your Eyes On This!"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/27/22:
"Markets, A Look Ahead: Keep Your Eyes On This!"

The Daily "Near You?"

Waynesville, N. Carolina, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"We’re All Americans Now"

(The view over the Tacuil vineyards, neighboring Bill’s farm in Gualfin)
"The End of the Road"
by Joel Bowman

Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Welcome to another Sunday Sesh! As faithful (and unfaithful) readers of these pages well know, this is the time of the week we ordinarily dedicate to heaping scorn and mockery on those public figures most deserving of it. But today... something a little different.

Rather than spending this past week hunched over our laptop, scrolling through vexing headlines, “circling back” through inane White House press minutes and pontificating over the end of the world as we know it, your editor unplugged completely and headed instead to the end of the road... literally.

Gualfin, Bill Bonner’s vast estancia, lies high in the northernmost reaches of Argentina, in the remote Salta province, bordering Bolivia and Paraguay (to the north) and Chile (to the west). Its mountains are rugged... its Malbec grapes, potent... its internet connectivity, mercifully unreliable. Driving from one property to the next, between extreme altitude vineyards, often hours apart, we barely had time to open our laptop. It’s amazing what a little digital downtime, coupled with some lively conversation with our gracious hosts and some good ol’ fashioned oxygen deprivation, can do to clear the cluttered mind.

So if today’s essay comes across as uncharacteristically optimistic, a tad sanguine even, or just plain light-headed, please forgive us. We’ll return with our curmudgeon, “doom and gloom” commentary next week, after we catch up on what’s happening in the down and dirty world of high finance and lowly politics. But for now, something a little lighter...

"We’re All Americans Now"
By Joel Bowman

"Unknown to those born in the United States, there exists a curious momentum in America apparent only to her visitors. In the widened eyes of these newcomers, the country appears to be hurtling forward in time at blistering, maniacal pace, her citizens unconsciously bound to a collective destiny of grand, mythological proportions, a mishmash of waiters and engineers and hookers and playwrights and teachers, of slick and desperate criminals and orange-hued T.V. evangelists, of frat boys and southern belles and Marlborough men and block-jawed G.I.s, of cowboys and surfers and poets and junkies, all marching arm in arm along a great concrete road that hasn’t quite set."
~ From an inconsequential novel, titled "Morris, Alive"

“It’s still the greatest show on earth,” a friend explained, describing his fond attachment to the ground beneath his feet. “Whatever its faults, and there are many, there’s nothing else quite like it. America: the greatest [expletive] show on earth.”

That our enthusiastic interlocutor is a well known movie director and actor, and that the ground beneath his feet is composed mostly of Venice Beach sand and the lapping Pacific tide, only underscores his point. Like Hollywood itself, as seen on the glimmering silver screen, the “Idea of America” is part mythology, part super-sized reality.... its setting, part period drama, part futuristic sci-fi... its protagonist, part supervillain, part superhero.

Paradoxical and unique, this “Idea,” boldly written - nay, declared - into existence, in 1776, concerns both notions of individual sovereignty and collective destiny, the multitude and the singular, e pluribus unum. And unlike other, comparatively modest experiments concurrently underway around the world, say, east of the Urals or south of the Himalayas, west of the Nile or north of the Mekong, this particular enterprise in human action concerns both citizens “at home” and “aliens” abroad, and to an extent so as to make even the most aspirational empires on history’s grand stage tremble, cower, wince and cringe.

But who are we, you may be wondering, an Australian-born scribbler, writing from Argentina’s capital, to weigh in on what constitutes the “Idea of America?” What right have we to opine on such matters? To trespass on, much less occupy, such hallowed philosophical territory.

Excellent point, Dear Patriot! Allow us, if you would kindly holster your sidearm, a moment to plead our case... or rather, to stake our humble claim.

A World Inside a Country: Unique among such historical notions, the “Idea of America” to which we refer is simply that... an idea. As such, it is not to be located on any map, the imagined political borders of which ebb and flow with the vicissitudes of time, and anyway could not contain it. Nor is it bound up in flags, anthems, official emblems and state seals; assorted simulacra, hoary pomp, mere representations of the real McCoy. Nor does it reside in some congressional hall, at the bottom of a ballot box or in the earnest hearts and minds of any righteous group calling itself “the majority.”

We’ll come to all that, in due course. For now, let us simply draw a line under one particularly germane attribute of this idea, one which affords it a truly universal appeal. Perhaps you have noticed (or not) the curious tendency of Americans to hyphenate their demonym; this teacher is an Irish-American; that nurse an African-American; this policeman is an Italian-American; that artist a Chinese-American... and so on down the line... Jewish-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Canadian-Americans, et al.

If you call yourself American (whether hyphenated or not), this may not seem anything strange. But to those of us who live, work and play in any of the other ~200+ nation states on the planet, it’s more than a quirky peculiarity. It is a one-way oddity!

To borrow the phrasing of another foreign-born member of the chattering class, the late English-American essayist, Christopher Hitchens, America is unique to the extent that it is “internally international,” brimming with hyphenated patriots from sea to shining sea. She is sui generis (as the Canadian-Jewish-American author, Saul Bellow, was fond of saying) in a manner that no other nation, Old World or New, can quite claim to be. There are single school districts in Brooklyn that teach and test in more languages than are spoken in many countries. All of which makes, in the end, the question of “what is American?” the more difficult to pin down.

In fact, much of what we might consider “quintessentially American” is not really of America at all. From the exuberance pouring forth in what Susan Sontag (the daughter of Lithuanian and Polish Jews) called the “spirit of Philadelphia,” to practically everything that came afterward.

Founders Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson were foreign born (Nevis and England, respectively), as were a third of George Washington’s appointees to the nation’s original Supreme Court. Thomas Paine, without whose provocative pamphlets, Common Sense and The American Crisis, one could scarcely imagine the American Revolution in the same light, had not even set foot in the colonies until he was almost two score years old.

“America,” writes (resident Irish-American) Bill Bonner in the foreword to his aptly-titled compendium of essential essays, "The Idea of America", “is a nation of people who chose to become Americans. Even the oldest family tree in the New World has immigrants at its root. Bill might well have been echoing the sentiments of another Irish-American, President John F. Kennedy, who observed that, “Every American who has ever lived, with the exception of one group, was either an immigrant himself or a descendant of immigrants.”

From her most prominently “American” musicians... Joni Mitchell hails from Canada, so too does Neil Young; Eddie Van Halen was born in the Netherlands... To the visionary architects who cut her emblematic city skylines... Ludwig Mies van der Rohe hyphenates as German-American; Ieoh Ming Pei as Chinese-American... From her leading entrepreneurs and inventors... Nikolai Tesla was Serbian-American while Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, is South African-American. One half of Google, Sergey Brin, was born in Moscow, Russia, while the inventor of the original blue jeans, Levi Strauss, was raised in Bavaria, Germany... To the stars of her silver screen... Bob Hope was born in England... Audrey Hepburn in Belgium... Bruce Willis in Germany...

Whimper… or Bang? Plenty are those who were swept along with the “Idea of America” though they began their journey elsewhere. “I am as American as April in Arizona,” joked Russian-American emigree Vladimir Nabokov, who also claimed he was “one-fifth American,” on account of his having gained some 40 lbs after adopting an all-American diet.

From buildings to blue jeans to bake sales, even the phrase “as American as apple pie” rests on dubious etymological grounds. The original recipe hails from England, with heavy influences from the French and the Dutch. In fact, apples themselves weren’t even native to North America, arriving as they did in the arms of European settlers. While we’re at it, wheat comes from the Middle East... cinnamon from Sri Lanka... nutmeg from Indonesia...

“There is a whole world in America,” observed the American-British author, Henry James (one of the few writers to journey across The Pond in the other direction, proving himself the exception to the rule). And yet, later in James’s life, in a private letter, he would confess, “If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.”

As many and varied are the pathways to the Idea of America, of equal importance is what that idea - and its future - portends for the rest of the world, whether her destiny ends with the proverbial whimper or a bang.

Whether one cares to notice or not, where goes America... so too goes much of the rest of the world. Economically... culturally... politically. Just as there are American greenbacks changing hands from the avenidas of Buenos Aires to the streets of Harare, the lodestar of the west also exports her most precious commodity of all, the idea that undergirds her founding and that reaches forth into the unknown.

What does this all portend for the years ahead? And why should we care? It was the Greek statesman, Pericles, who once said, “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.” So too for America and her noble experiment. Whether Democrat or Republican, man or woman, black or white, citizen or alien... for better and for worse, we’re all Americans now.

And now for some more Fatal Conceits… Your editor sat down with Bill Bonner up in the Calchaqui Valley earlier this week to record a special “on location” impromptu episode of the Fatal Conceits show. Time was short, as we had a lunch to attend with friends and some more “due diligence” to do on some of the local wines, but Bill was kind enough to share his thoughts on dollar hegemony, weaponized currency, inflation Putin’s Price Hike, Argentina’s mental math and plenty more. Check it out, here

Nota Bene: Readers interested in sampling some of Bill’s extreme altitude Tacana Malbec can follow this link for more information. As Bill mentions in the video, the Bonner Private Wine Partnership is a project that works with local winemakers and growers from all over the world, including from Gualfin, the end of the road. Order Tacana 2019 Vintage Here

And that’s all from us for another week. As always, likes, shares and comments in the section below are always welcomed. Bill returns tomorrow with his regular, daily missives. Until the next Sesh... Cheers..."

The Wiggin Sessions, "Financial Warfare w/ Byron King"

The Wiggin Sessions, "Financial Warfare w/ Byron King"
"This week on TWS, analyzing financial warfare in today's hostile geopolitical environment: Byron King is our go-to expert on foreign affairs... military history… legal matters… natural resources… and more. Among other things, we talk about Russia’s motives for invading Ukraine and what the ongoing sanctions will mean for your wallet."

0:00 Introductions 2:30 The Navy & NATO 4:50 The Russian Motive For Invasion 7:00 The Cold War 12:49 The Great Reset 19:00 Ukraine 23:00 Sanctions 26:00 Weaponizing the Dollar 31:30 The Theory of Victory 35:00 Reserve Currency Wars 37:45 American Deindustrialization 40:00 Ramifications 45:30 The Power of the Dollar 47:00 Versus the Chinese Yuan 49:00 Cryptocurrency? 51:30 "Let them drive Tesla's" 1:00:00 Recession
Subscribe to The Wiggin Sessions Podcast: https://link.chtbl.com/TWS000

"A Language Older Than Words"

"A Language Older Than Words"

"There are times the lies get to me, times I weary of battering myself against the obstacles of denial, hatred, fear-induced stupidity, and greed, times I want to curl up and fall into the problem, let it sweep me away as it so obviously sweeps away so many others. I remember a spring day a few years ago, a spring day much like this one, only a little more sun, and warmer. I sat on this same couch and looked out this same window at the same ponderosa pine.

I was frightened, and lonely. Frightened of a future that looks dark, and darker with each passing species, and lonely because for every person actively trying to shut down the timber industry, stop abuse, or otherwise bring about a sustainable and sane way of living, there are thousands who are helping along this not-so-slow train to oblivion. I began to cry.

The tears stopped soon enough. I realized we are not so outnumbered. We are not outnumbered at all. I looked closely, and saw one blade of wild grass, and another. I saw the sun reflecting bright off the needles of pine trees, and I heard the hum of flies. I saw ants walking single file through the dust, and a spider crawling toward the corner of the ceiling. I knew in that moment, as I've known ever since, that it is no longer possible to be lonely, that every creature on earth is pulling in the direction of life - every grasshopper, every struggling salmon, every unhatched chick, every cell of every blue whale - and it is only our own fear that sets us apart. All humans, too, are struggling to be sane, struggling to live in harmony with our surroundings, but it's really hard to let go. And so we lie, destroy, rape, murder, experiment, and extirpate, all to control this wildly uncontrollable symphony, and failing that, to destroy it."
- Derrick Jensen

"This Is Your Last Chance"

"This Is Your Last Chance", Part 1
by Robert Gore

"The indictment is long and strong. A cabal of politicians, governments, courts, medical authorities, pharmaceutical companies, multinational agencies, the mainstream media, academics, and foundations, particularly the World Economic Forum, have concocted responses to a virus and its variants that have robbed the people of rightful liberties, are a mechanism for the imposition of global totalitarianism, and have amplified rather than reduced the virus’s dangers, inflicting severe injury and death that will last years, perhaps decades, and afflict millions, if not billions, of victims (See “The Means Are The End,” Robert Gore, SLL, November 13, 2021).

This is their last chance. They can reverse course and pray to whatever demonic deity they pray to that it’s enough to prevent the retribution they deserve, or they can perish in the destruction they’ve created. They will reap what they have sown, their time is up.

This is it, the last gasp of the psychopaths who express their contempt and hatred for humanity by trying to rule it. Compulsion, not voluntary and natural cooperation. Power, pull, and politics, not incentives, competition, honest production, and value-for-value trade. From each according to his virtue to each according to his depravity. “The Last Gasp,” Robert Gore, SLL, March 24, 2020

Their time is up. This assertion may appear as recklessly foolish as Luke Skywalker’s ultimatum - “Jabba, this is your last chance, free us or die!” - did to Jabba the Hut at the Sarlacc Pit. It’s not, but to understand why requires an understanding of slow moving (on human time scale) but enormously powerful forces. Most history studies the wrong things and most predictions are straight line projections of the present and recent past.

The linchpin of history is innovation, not governments and rulers. We don’t know who ruled whom when humanity lived in caves, but we do know that someone tamed fire, someone planted seeds and cultivated them for food, and someone invented the wheel. With such steps humanity emerged from the caves and began building civilization. Even at this early stage one thing was clear: innovation creates new capabilities and opportunities and serves as the basis for further innovation.

Government is the acquisition of resources that enables those who govern to exercise control over those whom they govern. This presupposes resources, which presupposes production. Government is always subsidiary to production, yet most history focuses on the former and treats the latter as a secondary matter. This is looking down the telescope from the wrong end. Before a government can take someone must make.

History as studied is a dreary succession of violent takers: their kingdoms and empires, their exactions from the populace, their wars, their depredations, their monuments, and so on. Most of this is trivial compared to the innovation that gets short shrift.

Who ruled which nations in 1440 and what effect does whatever they did have on us today? There’s not one person in ten million who can knowledgeably answer those questions. Ask instead if the moveable-type printing press that Johannes Gutenberg invented that year has had an effect on their lives and most will acknowledge its inescapable importance.

The few rulers who have ruled wisely are largely forgotten. Wise rule is maintaining the conditions that allow the people themselves to create, innovate, and produce, what’s been called the night watchman state. Protecting them and their property from invasion, violence, theft, and fraud are the important but minimalist assignments for such governments. Crucially, such protection of the people extends to protection from the government itself. This type of government offers would-be rulers no opportunity for the larceny, self-aggrandizement, and power they crave, which is why they’ve been so rare.

The perfect night watchman state has never been achieved. There have only been a few that have come close. Conditions of relatively greater freedom, however, have coincided with the explosions of innovation and productivity that have bequeathed to humanity most of its progress.

The United States’ explosion was the Industrial Revolution, which launched virtually every important industry we have today and took the nation from its agrarian roots to industrial preeminence. With the exception of Theodore Roosevelt, an outlier in many unfortunate ways, the presidents who presided during the Industrial Revolution (1865-1913) have passed into obscurity, always a desirable fate for presidents. (See “The Magnificent Eleven,” Robert Gore, SLL, May 3, 2017. For a fictional treatment of the period, see "The Golden Pinnacle", Robert Gore, 2013.)

Nineteenth-century fecundity set the table for twentieth-century insanity, giving psychopathic rulers the resources for two world wars and innumerable smaller ones, history’s most totalitarian governments, genocides, and the perpetration of myriad other miseries and horrors. The twentieth century is easily history’s most tyrannical and bloody... so far. Emblematic of the century is its “greatest” invention, nuclear weaponry, which can destroy all life on earth.

In the United States, establishment of the central bank and imposition of income taxes in 1913 allowed the government to expropriate a far higher share of the nation’s incomes and wealth than it had. Shortly thereafter, ignoring George Washington’s sage advice to avoid foreign entanglements, the U.S. entered World War I. The Industrial Revolution and its comparative freedom were over, the accretion of state power that continues to this day was underway.

Government resurfaced as the dominant institution, as it has been for most of history, not just in the U.S. but around the globe. Intellectual fashion followed the political trend. Money and power - heady prospects for many intellectuals - were to be had promoting the growth of the state and toadying to its functionaries. A few brave souls spoke out against the trend and championed freedom, but they were ignored and shunned. Today, champions of freedom are consigned to obscure corners of the Internet.

You would think that living off the Industrial Revolution’s productive legacy, with first call on incomes and accumulated wealth, rulers would command more than ample resources to do whatever they desired. Such is not the case. Their schemes and rapacity are unlimited while even in the most productive and wealthy societies, resources are not. Governments and their central banks have created a debt explosion that leaves the world in the deepest financial hole it’s ever been.

The explosion has accelerated the past few years, leaving rulers at the outer limits of what they can expropriate or borrow. Whatever growth in GDPs they now hail, the unmentioned growth in debt is greater - the hole gets deeper. This state of affairs illustrates history’s central truism: governments can’t produce. Their stock in trade, coercion and violence, only destroys. Making producers tax and debt slaves to those who produce nothing destroys both production and integrity.

The death knell sounded in 1971 when the United States government repudiated the last vestige of its promise to redeem its dollars for gold. Debt would be the coin of the realm. The bland term “financialization” hides the moral obscenity. Each year the nation’s debt has grown. Production, when netted against that debt, has shrunk, and an increasingly large portion of what remains is diverted to those who don’t produce. Washington decides who gets what, but it can’t command the what. That shrinks as productive virtue is penalized and theft, fraud, and violence are rewarded.

This increasingly precarious state of affairs has lasted for fifty years. It won’t last much longer. Only moral and intellectual bankruptcy greater than current financial bankruptcy could call this abject failure a failure of capitalism.

Capitalism is the economics of political freedom. The strangulation of both in the U.S. officially commenced in 1913. They are the antithesis of what we now have, state-directed collectivism. Capitalism and freedom didn’t fail the people, the people failed capitalism and freedom. If people can’t handle individual freedom - as collectivists like to argue - they certainly can’t handle collectivist power, as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have amply demonstrated. It’s like the one brat in a room full of self-directed, happily interacting children seizing control of the room."

Musical Interlude: Cesar Benito, "Tema de Sira"

Full screen recommended.
Cesar Benito, "Tema de Sira"

"Memories, important yesterdays, were once todays.
Treasure and notice today."
- Gloria Gaither

"Real Courage..."

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."
~ "Harper Lee", "To Kill a Mockingbird"

"The Essence Of Life..."

"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."
- Philip José Farmer

"How It Really Is"

"Any fool can know. The point is to understand."
- Albert Einstein

Saturday, March 26, 2022

"How To Become Your Own Central Bank - Prepare Now!"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 3/26/22:
"How To Become Your Own Central Bank - Prepare Now!"
"With the instability in the financial markets we need to protect ourselves every way we can. The Federal Reserve has talked about issuing a digital dollar in a short period of time. Now is the time to be around central bank. You need to take charge of your own finances now."

Musical Interlude: "Pianist SHOCKS Audience With Moonlight Sonata Dubstep Remix"

Full screen recommended.
MusicalBasics, March 13, 2022,
"Pianist SHOCKS Audience With Moonlight Sonata Dubstep Remix"
Relive the moment Kennedy Center experienced the
Dubstep version of Moonlight Sonata for the first time...
Watch the full version of this remix: https://youtu.be/Bfu1uFqV2qw

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Beautiful island universe M94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the hunting dogs, Canes Venatici. A popular target for astronomers, the brighter inner part of the face-on spiral galaxy is about 30,000 light-years across.
Traditionally, deep images have been interpreted as showing M94's inner spiral region surrounded by a faint, broad ring of stars. But a new multi-wavelength investigation has revealed previously undetected spiral arms sweeping across the outskirts of the galaxy's disk, an outer disk actively engaged in star formation. At optical wavelengths, M94's outer spiral arms are followed in this remarkable discovery image, processed to enhance the outer disk structure. Background galaxies are visible through the faint outer arms, while the three spiky foreground stars are in our own Milky Way galaxy.”

"Children Of Hope..."

"Children of Hope, to life we fondly cling,
Though woe on woe bitter hour may bring;
the spirit shrinks, and Nature dreads to brave,
The doubt, the gloom, the stillness of the grave.
But what is death? – a wing from earth to fee –
a bridge o’er time into eternity."

- Michelle, in “The Fear of Death Considered”

"In The End..."

"What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end,
of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do."
- John Ruskin

Chet Raymo, “In Wildness Is The Preservation Of The World?”

“In Wildness Is The Preservation Of The World?”
by Chet Raymo

“In earlier times, when I was still teaching, it was my habit to occasionally take a wildflower, or piece of rotten bark, or pinch of oil into a biology lab where I had access to a high-quality dissecting microscope. I'd put my sample on the stage of the scope and go exploring. A hawkweed blossom, say, became the concise equivalent of a tropical jungle, teeming with wildlife.

We bemoan the loss of wilderness, and rightly so I suppose. But there are vast tracks of wilderness that we do not despoil, on a scale too small for annihilation by our marauding hand. Elephants and gorillas may be in danger of extinction, but the ants are doing just fine.

In fact, they seem to find my kitchen countertops entirely to their liking. A paradise of crumbs. An Eden of spilled nutrition. Just look at them, armies of them, as small as the period at the end of this sentence, scampering in gleeful forays.

To my eye they are only featureless specks. But I know that they have legs, antennae, mouth and anus. Sense organs. Reproductive strategies. In other words, we have a lot in common, the ants and me, including common ancestry. It's all a matter of scale. For me the wilderness is mostly gone. For the ants, it's just changing form.

In "The Creation", E. O. Wilson writes: "Ants alone, of which there may be 10 thousand trillion, weigh roughly as much as all 6.5 billion human beings." In the kitchen, I still outweigh the interlopers, but take the whole island and I suppose they might outweigh me. In any case, they don't seem to be aware of a loss of wilderness.

And while we are on the subject of scale, consider the nematodes, mostly tiny, threadlike worms whose millions of species make up four-fifths of all animals on Earth. A handful of loam might contain a thousand. They live virtually everywhere- soil, water, desert sand, arctic ice, hot springs, and as parasites of plants and animals, including humans. Pinworms and hookworms are nematodes. For the nematodes, we are part of the wilderness.”

The Daily "Near You?"

Union, Kentucky, USA. Thanks for Stopping by!

"Clown Market Clown World"

"Clown Market Clown World"
By Chris Black

"There is no fundamental analysis for the pricing of any stock traded on US exchanges. The valuations are absurd across the board. Like the Democrat party, only the narrative matters. Not the true business fundamentals. The entire thing is like kids playing Monopoly. “Nuh, huh, my house is worth like a billion dollars because it is so much better than your house.”

Why not just go out and say Tesla should be worth $50 trillion. It doesn’t matter. If the company was actually valued based on somewhat objective analysis, you are maybe talking $15 billion max. The company is currently valued as if they control 120% of the entire global transportation market. Selling over 100 million automobiles a year. The fact that the company loses money on every car they sell, and only makes a profit off selling carbon credits gifted by world governments makes any valuation above $1 insane.

I pity the Enron executives. What they did doesn’t even register based on the fraud in the stock market today.

As Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and the rest of the Wall Street darlings hit multi trillion dollar valuations, millions of small businesses that supported moderate lifestyles were closed forever.

You can make a six figure salary working for a megacap, but that salary doesn’t mean much where those megacaps exist. $150k a year in Silicon Valley is equivalent to $12 an hour in Indiana.

Balance is gone from the US economy and the oligarchs don’t care. They added even more to their immense wealth and they got the peons to beg for meaningless jobs."