"War on Yemen? Don't Expect A Cakewalk" (Excerpt)

"War on Yemen? Don't Expect A Cakewalk" (Excerpt)

By Mike Whitney

Excerpt: "On Wednesday, the Biden administration labeled the Houthis a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist group,” opening the door to the imposition of sweeping sanctions. Aid groups immediately responded with warnings that the designation threatens to greatly intensify Yemen’s humanitarian crisis. As a result of the almost decade-long war the Saudi regime has waged on Yemen with US arms and logistical support, more than half of the country’s population - over 18 million people - need food and other assistance…"US Imperialism Setting Middle East Ablaze," World Socialist Web Site.

The Biden administration is in the process of reimposing the 7 year-long embargo on Yemen that cut off food, water and essential medical supplies to the civilian population. This is how Washington weaponizes the “terrorist” designation in order to use famine as an instrument of foreign policy. The clear intention is to starve the population into submission so the US can advance its geopolitical agenda in the region. In this case, Washington’s strategic objectives remain largely concealed from the general public, so we will list them here:

• The United States has three main goals in Yemen:To eliminate an ally of Iran. (The Houthis)

• To control critical shipping lanes in the Red Sea.

• To construct an oil pipeline across Yemen in the event that the US launches a war on Iran and shipping in the Strait of Hormuz is disrupted.

• Now that Israel is moving ahead with its ethnic cleansing operation, we can add a forth objective to the list: To militarily engage any army or militia in the region that tries to derail Tel Aviv’s territorial ambitions.

Keep in mind, the current war is not merely an expansion of Israeli territory, but an attempt to establish Israel as the regional hegemon. Israel aspires to be the dominant power in the Middle East unopposed by its current set of rivals. The Biden administration is assisting in that project mainly because US interests coincide with Israel’s long-term plans. Check out this excerpt from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:

"The genocide in Gaza is an integral part of US imperialism’s strategy of global war in pursuit of world hegemony. It is one front in an emerging world war, along with Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, its escalating war throughout the Middle East, whose central target is Iran, and its war preparations against China. Bernie Sanders backs US attack on Yemen, World Socialist Web Site.

In short, US global ambitions segue perfectly with Israel’s regional strategy. Neither country believes it can achieve its broader aims through peaceful means due in part to the lack of critical resources and flagging economic output. So military aggression is the only path forward. The primary targets in the impending conflict are Iran, Russia and China." Here’s more from the World Socialist Web Site:

"These actions are preparatory to a head-on clash with Iran that could come at any time. Not only has the Pentagon planned for such war for decades, but, from the standpoint of US imperialism, its strategic aims have never been more vital than today, when the US is in a de facto war with Russia and plotting for war with China. Its goal in targeting Iran is to secure unbridled dominance over the world’s principal oil-exporting region, a region uniquely positioned to project geopolitical power across Eurasia, Africa and the entire Indian Ocean region…"

The reality is that these are different arenas in a rapidly developing global conflict, as US imperialism desperately seeks to offset the decline in its relative economic power and establish global hegemony though war, plunder and the revival of colonial subjugation. …the dynamic across the Middle East is one of rapid escalation toward a regional conflagration led by Washington, its imperialist allies and their principal regional client, Israel. US imperialism setting Middle East ablaze, World Socialist Web Site."

Full, highly recommended article is here:

- https://www.unz.com/

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Click image for larger size.

"Here’s Exactly Who’s Profiting from the War on Yemen"

"Ah, You Miserable Creatures!"

"Ah, You Miserable Creatures!"

"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! 

You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! 

Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough." 

- Frederic Bastiat

How much more evidence do you need to 

realize we as a society have lost our collective minds?

"Spoiled Brats"

"Spoiled Brats"

by Robert Gore

"Just say no. Some things are simpler than they appear. During the past few years, countless words have been spilled that ask and try to answer the seemingly complex question: What in the hell is wrong with these people? How do we get Russiagate, COVID hysteria, killer vaccines, vaccine mandates, George Floyd riots, rigged elections, the January 6 travesty, Biden, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, open borders, runaway debt, suffocating regulations and taxes, elite pedophilia, war in Ukraine, war in the Middle East, Trump’s show trials, woke, DEI, and a plagiarist puff-ball promoted to president of a once prestigious Ivy League institution?

The simple answer is that the West is being run by and for the benefit of spoiled brats. There are two essential features of spoiled bratdom. Brats receive something for nothing or less than nothing, and they bear no consequences for their mistakes and their evils. Rear your kids on those tenets, and you’ll have spoiled brats in no time. Government is many people’s ultimate parent, but government of the spoiled brats, by the spoiled brats, for the spoiled brats cannot long endure.

Are spoiled brats psychopaths? Sociopaths? Narcissists? Neurotics? Some other category of psychological pathology? Does it matter? All one really needs to know is that their morality comes down to a single demand: Gimme! Their worldview is self-referential; it’s always about them. They want what you produce. They want to order you around. They want authority without competence. They want respect they haven’t earned for virtue they’ve only signaled. They want science to conform. They want food, alcohol, drugs, and transient amusements. They want multiple genders. They want sex with children. They want whatever random desire flashes through their solipsistically random brains—now! And when confronted with their own evil, they want forgiveness without apology or penance, absolution without regret or reform. Gimme!

Pampered presidential progeny Hunter Biden is the symbol of our age. He’s an unholy trinity of indulgence, decadence, and corruption, excused by him and Biden toadies as the unfortunate outcome of this, that, or some other thing that profoundly warped his fragile little psyche. Russians made up that trove of damaging materials. When it turned out that they didn’t, Republicans came after poor Hunter to hurt his father, poor Joe. Spoiled brats have a murderous (sometimes literal) hatred of anyone who calls them to account and an unlimited capacity for self-pity.

February 3 and December 23 should be spoiled brat national holidays. Those where the days, respectively, in the unfortunate year 1913 when the income tax amendment, the 16th, was ratified and the Federal Reserve Act was passed. Since 1913, the government has had first claim on production and the central bank can manufacture fake money. It was only a matter of time before the majority of Americans - hard working, productive, and morally upright - would be undermined by the brats who slithered to Washington.

Government of, by, and for the spoiled brats was institutionalized in the reign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Rob Peter to pay spoiled brats and you’ll always get the spoiled brat vote. Roosevelt won four elections and is revered for his “fundamental transformation” of America.

Nothing stokes spoiled brat self-satisfaction quite like putting a moral sheen on their abominations. Roosevelt fundamentally transformed receiving stolen property; theft now secured “freedom from want” for all Americans, except for one small detail. For the government to give it has to take...from someone. Those someones were Americans whose freedom from want and theft were not secured. Oh well, details are for the little people and contradictions are the bugaboo of logically consistent humbugs, a minuscule constituency that no politician represents.

Non-spoiled brats were plagued by New Deal idiocy but survived it, won World War II, and retooled the powerhouse American economy. Spoiled brats had their fundamental transformation. “Entitled” captures the ethos. The politically favored are entitled to largess, status, and power bestowed by the government. America is entitled to a confederated global empire and its rules-based order, the rules of which are whatever it deems expedient.

Anyone who’s had to deal with spoiled children knows that only one word can begin to reverse their dismal progression: “No.” That may be the most beautiful word in the English language. It conveys the essential truth that both reality and the rights of others take precedence over the noxious demands of the spoiled.

Americans rarely heard “no” after World War II, and when they did, they ignored it. They would arrange the world as they saw fit. At home, a “nation as rich as the United States can afford _______________” (fill in the blank) became a favorite political tag line.

It was never going to last. The world resents the American gimme and is pushing back, hard. Since 2000, when Putin became president, he has told anyone who would listen that a NATO presence on Russia’s doorstep in Ukraine would be intolerable. The spoiled never hear anything they don’t want to hear. After a U.S.-sponsored coup, Ukrainian war on rebellious, Russia-friendly oblasts in eastern Ukraine, Ukraine’s abrogation of two Minsk accords ostensibly meant to stop that conflict, and NATO’s refusal to negotiate with Russia concerning its security concerns, the Russians began a Special Military Operation in February 2022.

Sanctions have become the U.S.’s hold-our-breath-until-we-turn-blue tactic in international affairs. Russia has worked around U.S. sanctions, and the U.S. has turned bluer and bluer. The U.S. government has said “gimme” on $300 billion in dollar-denominated Russian deposits and is considering using that money to fund its dead-in-the-water proxy war in Ukraine. It takes a special kind of stupid not to appreciate that trading your pretend money for real goods and services, and having that pretend money recycled back into your very real debt, is an inordinate privilege with which a country should never tamper. Stealing Russia’s dollar deposits is considered tampering with the reserve currency.

Non-Western governments representing most of the world’s population have allied in a coalition of “No” against the U.S., its gimmes, its debt, and its dollar. The Europeans are the U.S.’s “yes” coalition in Ukraine. They’ve been rewarded with a costly losing war, the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the substitution of expensive American gas for cheap Russian gas. A few of the less supine are backing away from the U.S.-Israel horror show in Gaza.

The West is a jackals’ congress of the heavily indebted. Spoiled brats never worry about who pays for their gimmes. The money comes from somewhere, provided by someone. In Western bratocracies, the somewhere is the credit markets and the tax take, and the someones are the dwindling ranks of producers and creditors. As the former contemplate ever-rising tax burdens, their willingness to indulge the spoiled brats is evaporating. As the latter contemplate debt mounting by the trillions, they’re edging away from lending at anything but penalty rates.

Turns out that even nations as rich as the United States can’t afford all the gimmes. Reality is saying “no.” Something’s going to give, prompting a collapse and tantrum for the ages. Brats will wail, but nobody will care. People will have more important things to worry about, like their own survival.

This week is the annual Davos conclave of brats. Their gimme is to rule the world. As they fake-smile, air kiss, pose, sip pricey libations, dine on delicacies, satisfy their depraved sexual propensities, and propound their pieties, do they realize that more and more of the world is less and less willing to grant their demands, that even Western citizens are taking to the streets, that they’ll never rebuild trust? Have any of them sent to know for whom the bell tolls? It tolls for them.

They won’t listen until it’s far too late."

- https://straightlinelogic.com/

"Humanity..."

"Humanity, I love you because when you're down

and out you pawn your intelligence for a drink." 

 - e.e. cummings

"Sentimentality and Being Mortal: Poet Mark Doty on the Passionate Fragility of Our Attachments"

"Sentimentality and Being Mortal: 

Poet Mark Doty on the Passionate Fragility of Our Attachments"

by Maria Popova

"How beautiful and unbearable that only one of each exists - each lover, each child, each dog; that this particular chance-constellation of atoms has never before existed and will never again recur in the history of the universe. The fact of each such singularity is a wonder beyond why, as mysterious and irrefutable as the reason you love one and not another. The feeling trembling beneath the fact - the brutal knowledge that everything we love is irreplaceable yet will be lost: to dissolution and death, to rejection and indifference, to our own return to stardust - is the hardest thing to bear, the thing for which we have devised our most elaborate theaters of denial.

Among those coping mechanisms is the invention of sentimentality. “Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality,” Carl Jung wrote. Its strange psychological machinery is what the poet Mark Doty explores with uncommon insight and sensitivity in a passage from his wonderful memoir "Dog Years" (public library). He writes:

"The oversweetened surface of the sentimental exists in order to protect its maker, as well as the audience, from anger. At the beautiful image refusing to hold, at the tenderness we bring to the objects of the world - our eagerness to love, make home, build connection, trust the other - how all of that’s so readily swept away. Sentimental images of children and of animals, sappy representations of love - they are fueled, in truth, by their opposites, by a terrible human rage that nothing stays. The greeting card verse, the airbrushed rainbow, the sweet puppy face on the fleecy pink sweatshirt - these images do not honor the world as it is, in its complexity and individuality, but distort things in apparent service of a warm embrace. They feel empty because they will not acknowledge the inherent anger that things are not as shown; the world, in their terms, is not a universe of individuals but a series of interchangeable instances of charm. It is necessary to assert the insignificance of individuality to make mortality bearable. In this way, the sentimental represents a rage against individuality, the singular, the irreplaceable. (Why don’t you just get another dog?) The anger that lies beneath the sentimental accounts for its weird hollowness. But it is, I supposed, easier to feel than what lies beneath rage: the terror of emptiness, of waste, of the absence of meaning or value; the empty space of our own death, neither comprehensible nor representable."

Of course, our fury at entropy is the great motive force of our creativity - we make art to make meaning out of our mortality, to counteract its brutality with beauty. Every creative act is an act of consolation for our transience, for our despair about our transience. A century after Albert Camus insisted that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Doty contemplates this fundamental equivalence of existence:

"Despair, I think, is the fruit of a refusal to accept our mortal situation. Perhaps it’s less passive than it may seem; is despair a deep assertion of will? The stubborn self saying, I will not have it, I do not accept it. Fine, says the world, don’t accept it. The collective continues; the whole goes on, while each part slips away. To attach, to attach passionately to the individual, which is always doomed to vanish - does that make one wise, or make one a fool?"

Complement with Annie Dillard on how to bear your mortality and D.H. Lawrence on the best lifelong preparation for death, then revisit Doty’s magnificent Whitman-lensed reflection on the courage to love despite the certitude of loss.

- https://www.themarginalian.org/

"How It Really Is

 

The Most Frightening Thing..."

“Murderers are not monsters, they're men.

And that's the most frightening thing about them.”

- Alice Sebold, "The Lovely Bones"

o

“Do you believe,’ said Candide, ‘that men have always massacred each other as they do today, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?”

“Do you believe,” said Martin, “that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?”

- Voltaire

"Doug Casey on the End of Western Civilization"

"Doug Casey on the End of Western Civilization"

by International Man

"International Man: The decline of Western Civilization is on a lot of people’s minds. Let’s talk about this trend.

Doug Casey: Western Civilization has its origins in ancient Greece. It’s unique among the world’s civilizations in putting the individual - as opposed to the collective - in a central position. It enshrined logic and rational thought - as opposed to mysticism and superstition - as the way to deal with the world. It’s because of this that we have science, technology, great literature and art, capitalism, personal freedom, the concept of progress, and much, much more. In fact, almost everything worth having in the material world is due to Western Civilization.

Ayn Rand once said “East minus West equals zero.” I think she went a bit too far, as a rhetorical device, but she was essentially right. When you look at what the world’s other civilizations have brought to the party, at least over the last 2,500 years, it’s trivial. I lived in the Orient for years. There are many things I love about it - martial arts, yoga, and the cuisine among them. But all the progress they’ve made is due to adopting the fruits of the West.

International Man: There are so many things degrading Western Civilization. Where do we begin?

Doug Casey: It’s been said, correctly, that a civilization always collapses from within. World War 1, in 1914, signaled the start of the long collapse of Western Civilization. Of course, termites were already eating away at the foundations, with the writings of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx. It’s been on an accelerating downward path ever since, even though technology and science have been improving at a quantum pace. They are, however, like delayed action flywheels, operating on stored energy and accumulated capital. Without capital, intellectual freedom, and entrepreneurialism, science and technology will slow down. I’m optimistic we’ll make it to Kurzweil’s Singularity, but there are no guarantees.

Things also changed with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Before that, the US used gold coinage for money. “The dollar” was just a name for 1/20th of an ounce of gold. That is what the dollar was. Paper dollars were just receipts for gold on deposit in the Treasury. The income tax, enacted the same year, threw more sand in the gears of civilization. The world was much freer before the events of 1913 and 1914, which acted to put the State at the center of everything.

The Fed and the income tax are both disastrous and unnecessary things, enemies of the common man in every way. Unfortunately, people have come to believe they’re fixtures in the cosmic firmament. They’re the main reasons - there are many other reasons, though, unfortunately - why the average American’s standard of living has been dropping since the early 1970s. In fact, were it not for these things, and the immense amount of capital destroyed during the numerous wars of the last 100 years, I expect we’d have already colonized the moon and Mars. Among many other things…

But I want to re-emphasize that the science, the technology, and all the wonderful toys we have are not the essence of Western Civilization. They’re consequences of individualism, capitalism, rational thought, and personal freedom. It’s critical not to confuse cause and effect.

International Man: You mentioned that the average American’s standard of living has dropped since the early 1970s. This is directly related to the US government abandoning the dollar’s last link to gold in 1971. Since then, the Federal Reserve has been able to debase the US dollar without limit. I think the dollar’s transformation into a purely fiat currency has eroded the rule of law and morality in the US. It’s similar to what happened in the Roman Empire after it started debasing its currency. What do you think, Doug?

Doug Casey: All the world’s governments and central banks share a common philosophy, which drives these policies. They believe that you create economic activity by stimulating demand, and you stimulate demand by printing money. And, of course, it’s true, in a way. Roughly the same way a counterfeiter can stimulate a local economy.

Unfortunately, they ignore that, and completely ignore that the way a person or a society becomes wealthy is by producing more than they consume and saving the difference. That difference, savings, is how you create capital. Without capital you’re reduced to subsistence, scratching at the earth with a stick. These people think that by inflating - which is to say destroying - the currency, they can create prosperity. But what they’re really doing, is destroying capital: When you destroy the value of the currency, that discourages people from saving it. And when people don’t save, they can’t build capital, and the vicious cycle goes on.

This is destructive for civilization itself, in both the long term and the short term. The more paper money, the more credit, they create, the more society focuses on finance, as opposed to production. It’s why there are many times more people studying finance than science. The focus is increasingly on speculation, not production. Financial engineering, not mechanical, electrical, or chemical engineering. And lots of laws and regulations to keep the unstable structure from collapsing.

What keeps a truly civil society together isn’t laws, regulations, and police. It’s peer pressure, social opprobrium, moral approbation, and your reputation. These are the four elements that keep things together. Western Civilization is built on voluntarism. But, as the State grows, that’s being replaced by coercion in every aspect of society. There are regulations on the most obscure areas of life. As Harvey Silverglate pointed out in his book, the average American commits three felonies a day. Whether he’s caught and prosecuted is a subject of luck and the arbitrary will of some functionary. That’s antithetical to the core values of Western Civilization.

International Man: Speaking of ancient civilizations like Rome, interest rates are about the lowest they’ve been in 5,000 years of recorded history. Trillions of dollars’ worth of government bonds trade at negative yields. Of course, this couldn’t happen in a free market. It’s only possible because of central bank manipulation. How will artificially low interest rates affect the collapse of Western Civilization?

Doug Casey: It’s really, really serious. I previously thought it was metaphysically impossible to have negative interest rates but, in the Bizarro World central banks have created, it’s happened.

Negative interest rates discourage saving. Once again, saving is what builds capital. Without capital you wind up as an empty shell - Rome in 450 A.D., or Detroit today - lots of wonderful but empty buildings and no economic activity. Worse, it forces people to desperately put their money in all manner of idiotic speculations in an effort to stay ahead of inflation. They wind up chasing the bubbles the funny money creates.

Let me re-emphasize something: in order for science and technology to advance you need capital. Where does capital come from? It comes from people producing more than they consume and saving the difference. Debt, on the other hand, means you’re living above your means. You’re either consuming the capital others have saved, or you’re mortgaging your future.

Zero and negative interest rate policies, and the creation of money out of nowhere, are actually destructive of civilization itself. It makes the average guy feel that he’s not in control of his own destiny. He starts believing that the State, or luck, or Allah will provide for him. That attitude is typical of people from backward parts of the world - not Western Civilization.

International Man: What does it say about the economy and society that people work so hard to interpret what officials from the Federal Reserve and other central banks say?

Doug Casey: It’s a shameful waste of time. They remind me of primitives seeking the counsel of witch doctors. One hundred years ago, the richest people in the country - the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, and such - made their money creating industries that actually made stuff. Now, the richest people in the country just shuffle money around. They get rich because they’re close to the government and the hydrant of currency materialized by the Federal Reserve. I’d say it’s a sign that society in the US has become quite degraded.

The world revolves much less around actual production, but around guessing the direction of financial markets. Negative interest rates are creating bubbles, and will eventually result in an economic collapse.

International Man: Negative interest rates are essentially a tax on savings. A lot of people would rather pull their money out of the bank and stuff it under a mattress than suffer that sting. The economic central planners know this. It’s why they’re using negative interest rates to ramp up the War on Cash - the push to eliminate paper currency and create a cashless society. The banking system is very fragile. Banks don’t hold much paper cash. It’s mostly digital bytes on a computer. If people start withdrawing paper money en masse, it won’t take much to bring the whole system down.

Their solution is to make accessing cash harder, and in some cases, illegal. That’s why the economic witch doctors at Harvard are pounding the table to get rid of the $100 bill. Take France, for example. It’s now illegal to make cash transactions over €1,000 without documenting them properly. Negative interest rates have turbocharged the War on Cash. If the central planners win this war, it would be the final deathblow to financial privacy. How does this all relate to the collapse of Western Civilization?

Doug Casey: I believe the next step in their idiotic plan is to abolish cash. Decades ago they got rid of gold coinage, which used to circulate day to day in people’s pockets. Then they got rid of silver coinage. Now, they’re planning to get rid of cash altogether. So you won’t even have euros or dollars or pounds in your wallet anymore, or if you do, it will only be very small denominations. Everything else is going to have to be done through electronic payment processing.

This is a huge disaster for the average person: absolutely everything that you buy or sell, other than perhaps a candy bar or a hamburger, is going to have to go through the banking system. Thus, the government will be able to monitor every transaction and payment. Financial privacy, even what’s left of it today, will literally cease to exist.

Privacy is one of the big differences between a civilized society and a primitive society. In a primitive society, in your little dirt hut village, anybody can look through your window or pull back the flap on your tent. You have no privacy. Everybody can hear everything; see anything. This was one of the marvelous things about Western Civilization - privacy was valued, and respected. But that concept, like so many others, is on its way out…

International Man: You’ve mentioned before that language and words provide important clues to the collapse of Western Civilization. How so?

Doug Casey: Many of the words you hear, especially on television and other media, are confused, conflated, or completely misused. Many recent changes in the way words are used are corrupting the language. As George Orwell liked to point out, to control language is to control thought. The corruption of language is adding to the corruption of civilization itself. This is not a trivial factor in the degradation of Western Civilization.

Words - their exact meanings, and how they’re used - are critically important. If you don’t mean what you say and say what you mean, then it’s impossible to communicate accurately. Forget about transmitting philosophical concepts.

Take for example shareholders and stakeholders. We all know that a shareholder actually owns a share in a company, but have you noticed that over the last generation shareholders have become less important than stakeholders? Even though stakeholders are just hangers-on, employees, or people who are looking to get in on a shakedown. But everybody slavishly acknowledges, “Yes, we’ve got to look out for the stakeholders.”

Where did that concept come from? It’s a recent creation, but Boobus americanus seems to think it was carved in stone at the country’s founding.

We’re told to protect them, as if they were a valuable and endangered species. I say, “A pox upon stakeholders.” If they want a vote in what a company does, then they ought to become shareholders. Stakeholders are a class of being created out of nothing by Cultural Marxists for the purpose of shaking down shareholders.

The economic, political, and social volatility in the days and weeks ahead promises to be extreme. The impact on your savings, retirement funds, and personal freedoms could be unlike anything we’ve ever seen."

- https://internationalman.com/

“In The Long Run… We Are All Alive”

“In The Long Run… We Are All Alive”

by MN Gordon

“In 1976, economist Herbert Stein, father of Ben Stein, the economics professor in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, observed that U.S. government debt was on an unsustainable trajectory. He, thus, established Stein’s Law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Stein may have been right in theory. Yet the unsustainable trend of U.S. government debt outlasted his life.  Herbert Stein died in 1999, several decades before the crackup. Those reading this may not be so lucky.

Sometimes the end of the world comes and goes, while some of us are still here. We believe our present episode of debt, deficits, and state sponsored economic destruction, is one of these times.. We’ll have more on this in just a moment. But first, let’s peer back several hundred years. There we find context, edification, and instruction.

In 1696, William Whiston, a protégé of Isaac Newton, wrote a book. It had the grandiose title, “A New Theory of the Earth from its Original to the Consummation of All Things.” In it he proclaimed, among other things, that the global flood of Noah had been caused by a comet. Mr. Whiston took his book very serious. The good people of London took it very serious too. Perhaps it was Whiston’s conviction. Or his great fear of comets. But, for whatever reason, it never occurred to Londoners that he was a Category 5 quack.

Like Neil Ferguson, and his mathematical biology cohorts at Imperial College, London, Whiston’s research filled a void. Much like today’s epidemiological models, the science was bunk. Nonetheless, the results supplied prophecies of the apocalypse to meet a growing demand. It was just a matter of time before Whiston’s research would cause trouble…

Judgement Day: In 1736, William Whiston crunched some data and made some calculations. He projected these calculations out and saw the future. And what he witnessed scared him mad. He barked. He ranted. He foamed at the mouth to anyone who would listen. Pretty soon he’d stirred up his neighbors with a prophecy that the world would be destroyed on October 13th of that year when a comet would collide with the earth.

Jonathan Swift, in his work, “A True and Faithful Narrative of What Passed in London on a Rumour of the Day of Judgment,” quoted Whiston: “Friends and fellow-citizens, all speculative science is at an end: the period of all things is at hand; on Friday next this world shall be no more. Put not your confidence in me, brethren; for tomorrow morning, five minutes after five, the truth will be evident; in that instant the comet shall appear, of which I have heretofore warned you. As ye have heard, believe. Go hence, and prepare your wives, your families, and friends, for the universal change.”

Clergymen assembled to offer prayers. Churches filled to capacity. Rich and paupers alike feared their judgement. Lawyers worried about their fate. Judges were relieved they were no longer lawyers. Teetotalers got smashed. Drunks got sober. Bankers forgave their debtors. Criminals, to be executed, expressed joy.

The wealthy gave their money to beggars. Beggars gave it back to the wealthy. Several rich and powerful gave large donations to the church; no doubt, reserving first class tickets to heaven. Many ladies confessed to their husbands that one or more of their children were bastards. Husbands married their mistresses. And on and on…

The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake, had to officially deny this prediction to ease the public consternation. But it did little good. Crowds gathered at Islington, Hampstead, and the surrounding fields, to witness the destruction of London, which was deemed the “beginning of the end.” Then, just like Whiston said, a comet appeared. Prayers were made. Deathbed confessions were shared. And at the moment of maximum fear, something remarkable happened: the world didn’t end. The comet did not collide with earth. It was merely a near miss.

The experience of Whiston, and his pseudoscience prophecy, shows that predictions of the end of the world come and go while people still remain. Sometimes the fallout of these predictions, and the foolishness they provoke, is limited. Other times the foolishness they provoke leads to catastrophe. Here’s what we mean…

“In the long run we are all dead,” said 20th Century economist and Fabian socialist, John Maynard Keynes. This was Keynes rationale for why governments should borrow from the future to fund economic growth today. Of course, politicians love an academic theory that gives them cover to intervene in the economy. This is especially so when it justifies spending other people’s money to buy votes. Keynesian economics, and in particular, counter-cyclical stimulus, does just that.

U.S. politicians have attempted to borrow and spend the nation to prosperity for the last 80 years. Over the past decade, the Federal Reserve has aggressively printed money to fund Washington’s epic borrowing binge. Fed Chair Jay Powell confirmed that the Fed will pursue policies of dollar destruction to, somehow, print new jobs.

The world as it was once known – where a dollar was as good as gold – has come and gone. Today, in life after the end of that world, we are witnessing the illusion of wealth, erected by four generations of borrowing and spending, crumble before our eyes. Moreover, contrary to Keynes, in the long run we are not all dead. In fact, in the long run we are all very much alive. And we are all living with the compounding consequences of shortsighted economic policies.”

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

"The Illusion Of Freedom..."

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

- Frank Zappa

"It was strange, she thought, to obtain news by means of nothing but denials, as if existence had ceased, facts had vanished and only the frantic negatives uttered by officials and columnists gave any clue to the reality they were denying."

- "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand, 1957

o

"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - what would you tell him to do?"

"I... don't know. What could he do? What would you tell him?"

"To shrug."

- Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged"

o

"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard - the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money - the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law - men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims - then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."

An excerpt from “Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand.

Full text of “Francisco’s Money Speech” is here:

- https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/

Freely download "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand, here:

- https://archive.org/

"How To Navigate Our Low-Trust, Increasingly Dysfunctional Society & Economy"

"How To Navigate Our Low-Trust,

Increasingly Dysfunctional Society & Economy"

by Charles Hugh Smith

"Sociologists differentiate between high-trust and low-trust societies: in high-trust social orders, citizens tend to trust institutions and each other to conform to social norms, enabling strangers to trust a vast circle of transactions and socio-economic ties. Low-trust societies are plagued with distrust of authority and institutions and fear of getting taken advantage of by strangers, so the circles of trust are small, inhibiting social mobility and economic growth.

Economies and political systems can also be understood as high-trust or low-trust. If the political system excels at rewarding insiders and incumbents while leaving critical problems unsolved, citizens have little reason to trust the system. The same is true of economies that greatly enrich insiders and incumbents at the expense of the citizenry via monopoly/cartel price-gouging, shrinkflation, degrading the quality of goods and services and the immiseration of standard services, forcing customers to "upgrade" from wretched to merely dismal.

Conventional pundits and economists are constantly whining that Americans "just don't get it": they tout our soaring per capita wealth, i.e. we're getting richer, so everyone should be delighted, yet only 20% of the public are "satisfied with the way things are going."

What the well-compensated pundits and economists are ignoring (or are paid to ignore) is the decay of the U.S. from a high-trust-functional to a low-trust-dysfunctional society and economy: Americans will still go out of their way to aid strangers, but their trust in institutions has plummeted to lows, as has their trust in the political-corporate elites' leadership: politicians and corporate managers have an enviable record of self-enrichment but very little to show in terms of putting the long-term interests of the citizenry above their own short-term gains.

People understand the name of the game now is to spout all the expected optimistic PR of "innovation" and "serving the public" while maximizing their private gain at the expense of the nation. Offshoring America's essential industrial supply chains wasn't done to serve the nation; it was done to maximize profits, 90% of which flow to the top 10%. Pushing us into debt servitude is highly profitable, but it isn't benefiting us or the nation.

Americans were told to trust long, hyper-globalized single-source supply chains as "efficient" (i.e. profitable) and trustworthy, yet they've discovered these supply chains are vulnerable and fragile. Americans were told that corporate monopolies were selling them "innovations" when in fact they were being sold highly addictive (and therefore highly profitable) goods and services.

Americans were told that their financial security was increasing even as the U.S. economy became increasingly dependent on hyper-financialized asset bubbles and central bank bailouts, the precise opposite of stability. Rather than producing more financial security for the bottom 80%, these "innovations" greatly expanded the gulf between the wealthy and the increasingly precarious bottom 80%.

Americans were told to trust that the hyper-centralization of political and financial power would benefit them, when the evidence is piling up that this hyper-centralization has increased the dysfunction of core institutions and the fragility of essential systems.

Doesn't it ring hollow to glorify our soaring wealth while households declare bankruptcy due to medical bills, college students sign up for a lifetime of debt servitude to pay tuition and inflation has destroyed 20% of every wage earner's paycheck just since January 2020? All that "soaring wealth" is asymmetrically distributed, but let's not talk about that, let's talk about statistics that mask that asymmetry.

What the well-compensated pundits and economists are paid to ignore is the concentration of the vast majority of all this new wealth and income in the top 10%. Soaring wealth only widens wealth inequality; it doesn't benefit the nation, it weakens its foundations by accelerating the decay of trust in core institutions and systems.

What happens when high-trust decays to low-trust is the circle of reliable, trustworthy sources and people shrinks to the local, decentralized level. Rather than trust Big Ag, Big Fast-Food and supply chains of highly processed glop to feed us, we start turning to local sources of real food.

In the same way, we rediscover the value of thinking for ourselves rather than accepting self-serving memes-of-the-day. We rediscover the value of what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about in his 1841 essay "Self-Reliance" (free text, Project Gutenberg). Emerson counsels us to "be our best selves," and not to count property wealth above all else. ("They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.")

Emerson understood that the values of a society are the foundation of its economic order. A system lacking any principles and values other than greed and self-enrichment is a rotten structure doomed to collapse. It is not just the larger socio-economic order that needs a rock-solid value system; each individual must ground their choices and actions in a value system they have embraced on their own. ("Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.")

What Emerson is espousing is self-reliance, in thought, in values, and in economic and financial matters. In today's world of crumbling hyper-globalization, self-reliance extends to the practical world of where our essential goods and services are coming from.

Gordon Long and I discuss these and many other aspects of Self-Reliance in the 21st Century in our wide-ranging podcast Self Reliance (45 min). We discuss how the American economy has changed over the past 40 years, to the detriment of the nation's values and the security of its citizenry, and what self-reliance means today-- the topic of my book Self-Reliance in the 21st Century. (Read the first chapter for free.)

How can we best navigate our low-trust, increasingly dysfunctional society and economy? By strengthening our own self-reliance."

- https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/

Jeremiah Babe ,"Prepare For The Biggest Rug Pull In History, Things Are Much Worse Than You Think"

Jeremiah Babe, 1/20/24

"Prepare For The Biggest Rug Pull In History, 

Things Are Much Worse Than You Think"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Liquid Mind, "Velvet Morning"

Full screen recommended.

Liquid Mind, "Velvet Morning"

Liquid Mind ® is the name used by Los Angeles composer and producer

Chuck Wild of the best-selling Liquid Mind relaxation music albums.

"A Look to the Heavens"

"What's happening at the center of the Trifid Nebula? Three prominent dust lanes that give the Trifid its name all come together. Mountains of opaque dust appear near the bottom, while other dark filaments of dust are visible threaded throughout the nebula. A single massive star visible near the center causes much of the Trifid's glow. The Trifid, cataloged as M20, is only about 300,000 years old, making it among the youngest emission nebulas known.

The star forming nebula lies about 9,000 light years away toward the constellation of the Archer (Sagittarius). The region pictured here spans about 10 light years. The featured image is a composite with luminance taken from an image by the 8.2-m ground-based Subaru Telescope, detail provided by the 2.4-m orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, color data provided by Martin Pugh and image assembly and processing provided by Robert Gendler."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

"Insane..."

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be

insane by those who could not hear the music.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"We Do Choose..."

"All men and women are born, live suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about... We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live."

- Joseph Epstein

○

"George Harrison knew something most of us didn't and still don't: there is a reality beyond the material world and what we do here and how we treat others affects us eternally. As he sings in "Rising Sun":

"But in the rising sun you can feel your life begin,

Universe at play inside your DNA.

You're a billion years old today.

Oh the rising sun and the place it's coming from

Is inside of you and now your payment's overdue."

Lyrics here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

○

"Death twitches my ear. 'Live," he says, 'I am coming.'"

~ Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro)

The Daily "Near You?"

Crozet, Virginia, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Be Careful..."

 

Canadian Prepper, "Alert! They Have A Plan, 99% Of People Don't Know This"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 1/20/24

"Alert! They Have A Plan,

 99% Of People Don't Know This"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "When Will It Hit?"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly 1/20/24

"When Will It Hit?"

"We have two more financial experts that step forward and say that 

we are headed to very bleak times. The question is when? When will it hit?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

"Hope In a Time of Hopelessness"

"Hope In a Time of Hopelessness" 

by Washingtons Blog

"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage;

anger at the way things are, and courage 

to see that they do not remain the way they are."

- Augustine of Hippo

"Several long-time activists have told me recently they are overwhelmed, worried, and think that we may be losing the struggle. One very smart friend asked me if there is any basis for hope.

Hope is an act of will, not a passive mood. Admittedly, things are easier when circumstances bring hope to us, and we can just receive the hopeful and inspiring news. But if we care about winning, we have to be able to decide to have hope even when outer circumstances aren't so positive.

I have children who are counting on me to leave them with a reasonably safe and sane planet. As I've said elsewhere, I care too much about my kids and my freedom to be afraid. I care enough about them that it gets my heart beating, connects me to something bigger than myself, and that gives me courage, even when the chips are down. 

If I allowed myself to lose hope about exposing falsehoods, about protecting our freedom and building a hopeful future, I would be dropping the ball for my kids. I would be condemning them to a potentially very grey world where bigger and worse things may happen, where their liberties and joys are wholly stripped away, where every ounce of vitality is beholden to joyless and useless tasks.

Many of us may be motivated by other things besides kids, and only you can know what that is. But we each must dig down deep, and connect with our most powerful motivations to win the struggle for freedom and truth.

I don't know about you, but I don't have the luxury of giving up hope. When I get depressed, overwhelmed or exhausted by the stunning acts of savagery, treason, and disinformation carried out by the imperialists, or the willful ignorance of far too many Americans, I will myself into finding some reason to have hope. Because the struggle for life and liberty is too important for me to give up." 

- http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/

Sadly this blog has been deleted...

"He Is Under A Spell..."

“The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings. “

"Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Feb. 4, 1906 - April 9, 1945) was a Protestant Lutheran Pastor, theologian, and active in the German resistance to the policies of Hitler and Nazism. Due to his opposition to the Nazi regime, Bonhoeffer was arrested and executed by hanging at the Flossian concentration camp, during the last month of the war."

Freely download “Letters and Papers From Prison”, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

-https://ms.fortresspress.com/

"Permanent Adolescence: The Epidemic That Will Destroy America"

"Permanent Adolescence:

The Epidemic That Will Destroy America"

by Dr. Paul Kindlon

"As a Humanities professor I have had the opportunity to teach psychology and social psychology for more than 25 years. Occasionally the knowledge obtained in these areas allows me to analyze and understand social behavior and certain cultural trends. This is one those occasions.

If one is able to observe American society in an objective manner (granted no easy task) it becomes clear that the country is suffering from an epidemic of arrested emotional development (AED). This particular illness is characterized by some combination of: addiction, greed, immaturity, fear, blame, shame, resentments, anger, confusion and suffering. What it means is that the vast majority of Americans are stuck in adolescence exhibiting behavior like lying, negative attitudes, disobedience and disrespect, drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and issues of sexuality.

One has only to watch American movies or television shows to get a snapshot of juvenile, puerile, and base comedy characteristic of adolescent humor. It’s no accident that 48 year old Jimmy Fallon is essentially the “eternal teenager” performing comedy that mostly includes bathroom humor and gags that are based on and appeal to a silly sense of immaturity. The other darling of late-night shows in America is Stephen Colbert, age 58, who specializes in insulting public figues in an overtly adolescent display of negative attitude and disrespect.

Another hallmark of AED is to evade responsibility and blame others for failure. One had only to observe the millions of Hillary supporters to understand this phenomenon. Also common for AED sufferers is to show disrespect in sophomoric ways usually by damaging property as we see with monuments being defaced and destroyed.

Teenagers, of course, tend to have identity issues often involving sexuality which is another phenomenon all too apparent in contemporary America. It’s almost uncool not to be LGBT or confused about your gender nowadays. Soon there will be as many genders as ice-cream flavors for it’s all just a matter of taste!

In terms of cognitive activity AED is characterized by exaggeration and over-simplification. If you are angry with one of your parents you might refer to them as a Nazi or Fascist.

This negative attitude now is extended to anyone who disagrees with you and can be seen in slogans such as “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA”. Adults are an endangered species. The cognitive effect of exaggeration and over-simplification leads to irrationality and confusion. Witness the millions of people who think they are being anti-racist by opposing “White Supremacy”. No anthropologist on earth would claim that “White” is a race (although a Neo- Nazi would) It’s not even a primary color. The Irish were discriminated against for more than a hundred years in America due to Anglo-Saxon racism yet the Irish are considered “white”. There are millions of Americans of German, Polish, and Scandinavian extraction who have been working-class and lower for a very long time. Are these “white people” guilty of supremacy? Against whom? Themselves?

Of course, what the protestors should be focusing on is class and not race which is really an arbitrary term. Unfortunately. the progressive movement in America has gone from “Occupy Wall Street” to “occupy the public bathroom”. Lenin would be turning over in his grave – if he had one. With regard to alcohol and drug addiction in America, the statistics are startling. Opiod addiction alone is becoming a national health issue as is depression. Alcohol abuse, of course, is also quite high. Lying is also becoming commonplace. It used to be just politicians and lawyers who were known to “play with the truth”. Nowadays the mainstream media is widely seen as a mainstream of lies with CNN now wearing the title of FAKE NEWS.

The teenage attempt to rebel and show disobedience is often manifested through the use of profanity intended to shock the older generation. Gratuitous profanity is pervasive in American culture and has replaced the imagination as a form of creativity. It is not an accident that Pussy Riot – a group of “performance artists” using profanity in a Cathedral considered sacred to “shock” the Russian public and “disobey” authorities – has found a home in the United States and been befriended by Madonna, another symbol of eternal adolescence. Her AED was on full display when she publicly offered all men fellatio if they voted for Hillary Clinton. And as any rebellious teenager attempting to shock the “older generation” she had to announce that she “swallows”. Stay classy, Madonna. Keep in mind we’re talking about a then 63 year old mother of six.

You see…if everyone is a teenager there is no adult supervision. That is the problem. After an autopsy is conducted years from now to ascertain how and why the American Empire expired, the obituary will include multiple causes of death and AED will be listed prominently. Perhaps a precocious teenager will be allowed to write the epitaph that will read…”When extended, the bridge between adolescence and adulthood can take a heavy toll”.

- https://www.lewrockwell.com/

○

“Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed."

- Maya Angelou