"The U.S. housing market is so crazy right now that real estate agents are literally going broke as sales activity freezes all over the country. As it turns out, the Federal Reserve's bid to cool inflation by leaving interest rates higher for longer is absolutely choking the nation's real estate market, not only by pushing millions of prospective buyers out of the market, but also by forcing realtors to rethink their place in the sector.
New reports highlight that high borrowing costs for home loans have depressed demand for homes in the U.S., a trend that has started to be observed in throughout 2022 and 2023, and continued to accelerate in 2024. Last year, sales of previously occupied homes actually fell to their lowest level in 28 years, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Consequently, tens of thousands of real estate agents have abandoned the industry in recent months, data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. As recently as 2021, when the average long-term mortgage rate was around 2.6%, 549,000 people worked full-time as real estate agents. Today, there are less than 440,000 real estate brokers and sales agents in America, a decline of more than 70,000 professionals.
At the moment, mortgage rates are more than double what they were just a few years ago, the supply of homes is at historic lows and prices are at record highs, dissuading buyers from getting into homeownership. The sluggish housing market means business has slowed, and now many realtors that earned hefty sums in commissions during the pandemic are struggling to make a living.
During an interview with The Washington Post, Florida-based real estate agent April Strickland revealed that there are more realtors working in her Gainsville market than homes being sold. "Quite frankly, realtors are running out of money," Strickland stressed. An analysis by the Consumer Federation of America in January found that nearly half of the real estate agents sampled had sold one or no homes the previous year. Part of that is because many realtors work had to take a second job to make ends meet, researchers noted.
"I Went to a Russian Fish Festival: Moscow on the Wave!"
"Moscow on the Wave is an annual festival held in Moscow, Russia to celebrate all things Fish and Seafood. Together with live music, interactive displays and cook-offs. Let's have a look around Fish Week in the center of Moscow, Russia."
"I had hoped to speak to high-schoolers – I still do – but the six high schools nearest me either ignored my offer to speak or declined it. “Do it for the kids,” they say when asking to raise your property taxes, but it’s beyond the pale to dissuade those very same kids from needlessly putting themselves in harm’s way? Parents might have a different opinion, so here’s my speech:
Before we get into this, let’s discuss what most would label “a hypothetical.” Tonight, I’m going to break into your home, point a gun at you, and rob you – all the while claiming that I’m not your enemy. Your enemy, I’ll say, is elsewhere, and I don’t mean across the street but in a different country. What will you do? By a show of hands, will you fight back and protect those in your home by evicting me or even by killing me? By a show of hands, who will thank me and travel to said country in search of the enemy, leaving those in your home vulnerable to me? Anyone? Nobody? It sounds absurd, but for reasons that I’ll soon explain, you’ll understand that it’s more real than hypothetical.
Hello, I’m Casey Carlisle. I’m a West Point graduate, and I spent five years in the Army, including 11 months in Afghanistan. Some of you are thinking about serving your country, and most of you are asking yourselves, “Why am I listening to this guy?” I’m glad that both of these groups are here, and I promise that my remarks will cause both groups to think differently about military service.
I was a high-school senior on September 11th, 2001, sitting in class and stunned after hearing the principal announce that our country had just been attacked. Why would someone want to do this to the greatest country on Earth? I was also livid, and I wanted revenge. I wanted to kill the people responsible for this atrocity, and my dilemma then was between enlisting in the military to exact revenge now or first spending years at a military academy before helping to rid the world of terrorists. I chose the latter, so I didn’t deploy to Afghanistan until 2009. My time there radically changed my views, which was uncomfortable, but, as with failure, discomfort breeds learning.
I learned that not only were we not keeping our fellow Americans safe or protecting their liberty, we were further impoverishing one of the poorest countries in the world. I watched in disgust my alleged allies – the Afghan police – rob their neighbors while on patrol and in broad daylight via traffic stops. Imagine getting pulled over, not for speeding, but because the cop hopes to rob you. My enemy – the Taliban – didn’t do such things, which is why I ended up having more respect for them than for my mission or for those who were allegedly helping us accomplish it. “Oh, but they’re horrible in other ways,” you might argue, and I’d agree; however, it’s much harder to kill an idea than it is to kill a person. Killing someone who holds an idea that you find distasteful only helps that person’s loved ones accept that idea. It turns out that killing someone for their ideas is a great way to spread those ideas.
Instead of dismissing me as an anti-American lunatic, consider the following. In the year 2000, the Taliban controlled most of Afghanistan, and today, they control all of it. This is just one of the reasons why I feel contempt for those who thank me for my alleged service. Our ‘service’ was worse than worthless, and the people thanking me were forced to pay for it. All of those who died there did so for nothing. And the innocent Afghans who were displaced, injured, or killed during our attempt to bring democracy to a country that didn’t want it were far better off in 2000 than they are now.
To be clear, the desire to serve one’s country is noble, but we must first define “country.” Serving one’s country is entirely different from serving one’s government. They are not the same. Serving one’s country is serving one’s family, friends, neighbors, and the land that they’ve made home. Serving one’s country is serving one’s community. Serving one’s government, however, is ultimately what everyone does when they enlist or when they take my path as an officer. Who are these people in government that you’ll end up serving? Are they your family, friends, or neighbors? For the most part, they are not, yet, they are ultimately who will decide your fate while in uniform. Whether they’re politicians or bureaucrats, they decide what serving one’s country entails, and, naturally, they’ll subordinate our country’s prosperity to their job security. If given the opportunity, these people will not hesitate to send you to your death if it means scoring a measly political point against their ideological foes. Serving one’s country in this context – reality – means serving these parasites.
Here’s something else to consider. When you tell the military recruiter that you want to enlist, what are you implying? You’re telling the recruiter – a government agent – that not only do you want to serve your government but that you’re willing to kill for it. Tell any other recruiter in the real economy of that proclivity, and, at the very least, you won’t be getting that job. Seems obvious enough, but have you heard of Operation Vigilant Eagle? This operation, headed by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, tracks veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and characterizes them as extremists and potential domestic terrorists. Why? Because these veterans might be disgruntled or suffering from the psychological effects of war. Yes, you heard that correctly.
The government that bribed the graduating senior into joining the military now views that same patriot as its enemy. You might protest, thinking that getting put on a list isn’t all that bad, but I’d argue that lists are never created as an end; they’re always a means, and in this case, too, they’re diabolical. Not only were these veterans put on a list for the ‘crime’ of justifiably feeling disillusioned, when a veteran was explicitly critical of the regime, these veterans were labeled “mentally unfit” and forced into psychiatric facilities where they’d receive treatment for whatever illness the regime deemed appropriate, indefinitely. I don’t know if this program continues today, but if the regime were to tell us, “We’re not doing that anymore,” would you believe it?
I know you weren’t around for 9/11, but I’m sure you recall March of 2020. I bet you were almost as angry then as I was. We all witnessed a very sad truth: the “home of the brave” is devoid of the brave, and the “land of the free” hasn’t been free for quite some time. Most Americans not only take their liberty for granted, they readily reject it. They’re terrified of it, which is why they hate it. What we all witnessed then undermines the tired slogan – the blatant lie – that those who join the military are “fighting for our freedom.” This is no theory; it’s why, to this day, the military is struggling like hell to recruit people like you. They think you’re stupid.
But you might’ve realized that serving one’s country necessarily implies staying in one’s country. You might be thinking that when one joins the military, he swears to defend the Constitution against all enemies – foreign and domestic; however, the regime would like you to combat only the foreign enemies that it tells you to hate. Who kicked you out of school in 2020? Who cancelled your games, meets, matches, and races? Who prevented you from traveling freely? Who thought it best that you not embrace your loved ones? Who masked you? Our own government is our greatest threat, and it has proven to be so scared of those it duped into ‘serving’ that it’ll send you to some other country or to a mental hospital in order to protect itself.
I’m not telling you what to do. I’m making sure that you’re fully aware of what you’re getting into if you decide to join the military, as I’m sure the recruiter didn’t tell you about Operation Vigilant Eagle. He probably didn’t tell you that 22 veterans kill themselves every day, and he probably didn’t tell you that the military is the final political option. But does it seem like the regime waits until all else fails before getting involved, or is it easier to count the countries that do not have U.S. military personnel stationed in them? Did the recruiter tell you that those who don’t ‘serve’ pay the salaries of those who do? Seems a bit backward – to be forced to pay those who allegedly serve you.
Most of the millionaires and billionaires in this country got rich by actually serving their fellow man via voluntary exchange, not by living off of their neighbors. I encourage you to consider taking that route – enriching yourself by enriching your community, not by parasitizing it. And no need to fixate on getting rich. If your interactions with your community are voluntary – no matter how lousy the pay – they’re likely honorable, no killing required. In closing, take a deep breath, and look around. Your country is here. We are your country, and when things get bad, we will need you here, not fighting those in a different country who pose no threat to us while leaving us vulnerable to our greatest threat. Thank you for listening."
“Damned is the soul that dies while the evil it committed lives on. And the most damned of all are those who see the evil coming for others and refuse to confront it. For it is not out of fear that heroes are born, but rather out of their selfless love that will not allow them safety bought from the torture, death, and degradation of others. It is better to die in defense of another than to live with the knowledge that you could have saved them but chose to do nothing. And to those who think that one person cannot make a difference, I say this… the deadliest tidal wave begins as an unseen ripple in a vast ocean. Live your life so that your integrity will motivate others to strive for excellence long after you’ve passed on, and know that no good deed or sacrifice, or offer of sincere friendship or love, is ever forgotten by the one who receives it.”
"I know nothing that I may say can influence you. You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. You are lick-spittlers and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy."
- Jack London
Freely download "The Iron Heel", by Jack London, here:
"The devastating true scale of nuclear weapons began on July 26, 1945, when the Allies demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan, warning of "prompt and utter destruction" if compliance failed. Japan ignored this ultimatum. By summer, the Allies' Manhattan Project had developed two atomic bombs: the uranium-based "Little Boy" and plutonium-based "Fat Man." A top-secret mission saw six B-29 bombers heading to Hiroshima, with the Enola Gay carrying Little Boy. It was released over Hiroshima on August 6, releasing 15 kilotons of TNT, devastating a 1.6 kilometers radius.
Three days later, Bockscar dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki, resulting in a 21-kiloton explosion. These bombings led to 129,000 to 226,000 deaths, prompting Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945, ending World War II and igniting a nuclear arms race, especially between the USA and the Soviet Union.
The US's most powerful nuclear weapon today is the B83, with a maximum yield of 1.2 megatons of TNT, designed for enhanced safety and varied applications including the "Nuclear Bunker Buster" project and asteroid impact avoidance strategies.
Castle Bravo, detonated on March 1, 1954, remains the most powerful device tested by the US, yielding 15 megatons. The Soviet Union responded by developing the Tsar Bomba, detonated on October 30, 1961, with a yield of 50 megatons, marking the largest human-made explosion.
The nuclear arms race led to the development of extensive arsenals capable of mutual assured destruction (MAD), a doctrine suggesting that nuclear conflict would result in the annihilation of both attacker and defender, effectively deterring outright nuclear war. These developments have left a lasting impact on global politics and security."
“To hell with them fellas. Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms.”
– Josey Wales
"What Would Josey Wales Do?"
by Jim Quinn
“Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. ‘Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.” – Josey Wales
"As our political, economic, civic, and social structures continue to degrade, dissolve, and disintegrate before our very eyes, it is easy to become apathetic and surrender to hopelessness. There are relentless powerful forces actively trying to destroy the fabric of our society and force the masses into economic servitude while caged in an electronic gulag, controlled by an oligarchy of evil totalitarian minded billionaires and their lackeys in key governmental, political, banking, military, media, and corporate positions of power. We are in the same situation as Josey Wales in Clint Eastwood’s epic 1976 film – "The Outlaw Josey Wales."
The film tells the story of Josey Wales, a Missouri farmer, just trying to live his life in peace without interference from the government, uninterested in the violent Civil War between two monolithic forces fighting for their created causes. His wife and son are brutally murdered by Union Redleg militants, led by the despicable Captain Terrill, while he was away from his homestead. After burying his family, his mind naturally turns towards seeking revenge against the perpetrators, and he begins to practice shooting. He joins a group of pro-Confederate bushwackers who become the scourge of Union forces until the war’s conclusion.
At the conclusion of the war, Josey’s friend and superior, Captain Fletcher, persuades the guerrillas to surrender, having been promised by Senator Lane that they will be granted amnesty if they hand over their weapons. Josey refuses to surrender because he knows you can never trust the government or the politicians who make promises they never keep. They have been pissing down our backs since the last Civil War, while telling us it’s just raining, so everyone can relate to this scene in the movie.
Senator: "The war’s over. Our side won the war. Now we must busy ourselves winning the peace. And Fletcher, there’s an old saying: To the victors belong the spoils."
Fletcher: "There’s another old saying, Senator: Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining."
Wales having refused to surrender, along with a young guerrilla named Jamie, are the only survivors when Terrill’s Redlegs massacre the surrendering men. Wales intervenes and wipes out many of the Redlegs with a Gatling gun before fleeing with Jamie, who dies from a bullet wound sustained in the massacre after helping Josey kill two pursuing bounty hunters.
Fletcher learns the lesson that you can never trust the government, or the lackeys carrying out their mandates. They will lie and murder to accomplish their goals. Anyone who does not bow to their authority will be treated as an outlaw, with no acquiescence to the Constitution, decency, or simple human dignity. Once decent men are pushed too far, they will push back in a more violent manner than the authorities will expect. Violence begets violence, and will create more Josey Wales type characters who will not surrender or ever bow down to governmental authority.
Fletcher: "Damn you, Senator. You promised me those men would be decently treated."
Senator Lane: They were decently treated. They were decently fed and then they were decently shot. Those men are common outlaws, nothing more."
The remainder of the movie entails Union soldiers and bounty hunters trying to track and kill Josey, while he accumulates a rag-tag group of companions, including Indians, foul mouthed grannies, and a slew of other settlers trying to live their lives unhindered by the government. Clint Eastwood’s character maintains a stoic meanness throughout the film towards his government enabled enemies, but has empathy and kindheartedness towards the downtrodden people who represent the vast majority of citizens in this country.
I found it interesting the film was based on the novel "Gone to Texas," written with a virulent anti-government slant by a former George Wallace speechwriter. When the script writer/director tried to tone down the anti-government aspects, Eastwood told him no and eventually fired him, taking over as director for the remainder of the film. Eastwood’s refusal to bow to Hollywood pressure and soften the dialogue and story line is a tribute to his resolute dislike and mistrust of governmental authorities. He has essentially gone his own way and made his films his way, never letting the Hollywood elite dictate his path.
Released in 1976 when anti-war sentiment was at its peak, following the government created Vietnam war debacle, which slaughtered over 50,000 American boys, Eastwood later referred to it as an anti-war film. And we all know it is governments and those Deep State operatives who control the levers of power, and start wars to increase their wealth, power and control. War never ends because it is extremely profitable for those waging it, while the youth doing the fighting are just cannon fodder for corporate interests. Eastwood was dead on, as we have waged wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and now Ukraine and Palestine, benefiting the military industrial complex at the expense of you and me.
“As for Josey Wales, I saw the parallels to the modern day at that time. Everybody gets tired of it, but it never ends. A war is a horrible thing.” – Clint Eastwood
Eastwood equates the plight of the Confederacy with the plight of the American Indian, as both groups were bullied, bloodied and crushed under the weight of the Federal government, which began its unfettered growth during the Civil War and has now reached its zenith of incompetence, arrogance, lawlessness, and hatred towards the citizens it is supposed to serve. Most people just want to be left alone, like Josey Wales, to live their lives in peace and harmony with their fellow community members. But the federal government makes that impossible, with their rules, regulations, taxes, fees, and enforcement thugs harassing the public on a daily basis.
In Eastwood’s movie they murder his family, murder his comrades, and are hell-bent on murdering him. The song remains the same. Our government murdered people minding their own business at Ruby Ridge. They murdered women and children at Waco. They murdered a rancher at Bundy Ranch. They send young men to war for bankers and corporations. They have been unlawfully imprisoning protestors in dungeons for a fake insurrection fomented and initiated by government agents. They rigged the presidential election and have convicted the leading political candidate of fake crimes he did not commit in order to maintain control over the political system.
The list could go on for pages, as the totalitarian methods and abuse of power against the citizens of this country accelerate at a breakneck pace. Fear of seeing their wealth and power slip away has created an almost psychotic spasm of unhindered chaotic flailing about, in an ultimately fruitless effort to retain control. They are fearful of the masses wakening from their technology induced slumber and realizing the enemy is not the groups they have been programmed to hate, but the very government pulling the strings of this clownshow.
The government needs a sedated, dumbed down populace who fear what they are told to fear and obey the instructions of their overlords. But the covid scamdemic and continuing death of loved ones from the toxic jabs, has opened the eyes of millions. The debt death spiral induced by Biden’s handlers, supercharged by the coordinated and financed invasion of our southern border by third world mutts, and resulting in raging inflation for average American families, has angered and infuriated the masses. We are approaching our moment of truth.
The government is in the midst of creating millions of vengeful Josey Wales characters. As political chaos increases in the coming months, the threat of global conflagration escalates and the economic plight of the masses deteriorates, revenge against politicians, government drones, and the globalist financial elite for creating this madness will expand rapidly. We know what Josey Wales would do. The question is what will we do.
Eastwood made his final Western masterpiece, sixteen years after Josey Wales, with the release of the Academy Award winning "Unforgiven." He paid tribute to Josey Wales in the climactic scene in the saloon when confronting Little Bill. In The Outlaw Josey Wales Grandma Sarah’s initial reaction to meeting Josey Wales was: “This Mr. Wales is a cold-blooded killer. He’s from Missouri, where they’re all known to be killers of innocent men, women and children.”
He closes the loop with Will Munny, out of Missouri, with the same false accusation that he killed women and children, as he also seeks retribution on government authoritarians who murdered an innocent man. Both Josey Wales and Will Munny tried to live out their lives as peaceful farmers, but were forced to revert to violence because the government would not allow them to live in peace.
Little Bill Daggett : “You’d be William Munny out of Missouri. Killer of women and children.”
Will Munny : “That’s right. I’ve killed women and children. I’ve killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I’m here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned.”
Eastwood’s first and last epic Westerns both examined the harsh reality of violence and retribution as the logical consequence for crimes committed against innocent people just trying to lives their lives. His meditations on the concepts of age, repute, courage, and the cloudy definition of heroism, make for far deeper and complex examinations of the old West than other western films. Eastwood distinguishes between the brutal reality of a world controlled and run by tyrannical psychopaths acting as government agents, and people living peacefully, with no government intervention.
Eastwood’s ideal vision of America as a pluralist society of individualists of all races and backgrounds who put aside the past and their difference to live in harmony, contrasts with the reality of a society controlled and manipulated by those referred to as the “invisible government” by Edward Bernays. The ruling elite do not want people to live peaceably in a self reliant manner. The climactic scene in Outlaw Josey Wales between Josey Wales and Ten Bears captures the nature of our world and the difference between governments and the people.
Josie Wales : “I came here to die with you. Or to live with you. Dying ain’t so hard for men like you and me. It’s living that’s hard when all you’ve ever cared about has been butchered or raped. Governments don’t live together – people live together. With governments, you don’t always get a fair word or a fair fight. Well, I’ve come here to give you either one or get either one from you. I came here like this so you’ll know my word of death is true, and my word of life is then true. The bear lives here, the wolf, the antelope, the Comanche. And so will we. Now we’ll only hunt what we need to live on, same as the Comanche does. And every spring, when the grass turns green, and the Comanche moves north, you can rest here in peace, butcher some of our cattle, and jerk beef for the journey. The sign of the Comanche, that will be on our lodge. That’s my word of life.”
Ten Bears : “It’s sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see, and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life… or death. It shall be life.”
I had previously used Josey Wales as the basis for Part Four of my five part series based on Clint Eastwood movies in 2012, documenting how the Federal Reserve, under the control of the Wall Street banking cabal, had destroyed the middle class and set in motion the ultimate destruction of the American economic system. Here we are twelve years later and that destruction is approaching its climax. As the powers that be are flailing about in a final destructive apocalyptic spasm of hate, greed, and war, the average American needs to channel their inner Josey Wales.
We can either give up and allow those running this shitshow for their own benefit to enslave us in perpetual debt, culling us with their toxic “vaccines”, making us eat meatless meat and bugs, forcing us into their digital currencies, 15 minute cities (aka electronic gulags), electric cars, and social credit system, or we can get plumb, mad-dog mean and man up. In order to reverse our totalitarian spiral, being executed by powerful mega-wealthy men and their highly compensated double tongued lackey politicians, bankers, media moguls, and corporate chiefs, those 300 million guns will need to be put to use.
If we want to live together peacefully, unhindered by an overbearing, corrupt government behemoth, controlled by evil men with evil intentions, then we will have to fight. That’s just the way it is. Ask yourself, “What would Josey Wales do?”, and act accordingly."
"Some spiral galaxies are seen nearly sideways. Most bright stars in spiral galaxies swirl around the center in a disk, and seen from the side, this disk can appear quite thin. Some spiral galaxies appear even thinner than NGC 3717, which is actually seen tilted just a bit. Spiral galaxies form disks because the original gas collided with itself and cooled as it fell inward. Planets may orbit in disks for similar reasons.
The featured image by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a light-colored central bulge composed of older stars beyond filaments of orbiting dark brown dust. NGC 3717 spans about 100,000 light years and lies about 60 million light years away toward the constellation of the Water Snake (Hydra)."
“All of the available data show that the typical American citizen has about
as much interest in the life of the mind as does your average armadillo.”
- Morris Berman
“Think of how stupid the average person is,
and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
- George Carlin
"Are People Really Stupid?"
by Fred Russell
"On the face of things, judging from the general level of knowledge and understanding, not to mention the intellectual pursuits, of most of the human race one is tempted to say that the overwhelming majority of mankind lacks the intellectual capacity, the intelligence, to contribute to human progress. And it is in fact a very small elite that has carried us beyond Neanderthal Man, without whom, if the truth be told, we might still be living in caves. It is, in a word, appalling to contemplate the level at which ordinary people use their minds, what they read, if at all, what they watch on TV, the movies they go out and see, and the ease with which they are seduced and manipulated by the technicians of the psyche, namely, politicians and advertisers.
The impression one gets when contemplating these tens and hundreds of millions of people glued to their TV screens for the reality shows and sitcoms or fiddling with their smartphones from morning till night is of complete empty-headedness. This is not to say that such people cannot be shrewd, resourceful, or, for that matter, simply decent. It is to say that at the average level of intelligence displayed by the human race, the great intellectual achievements of mankind seem to be beyond the scope of the vast majority of men and women. But are people really stupid? And if they aren't, who or what has held them back?
Now one may be inclined to place all the blame for our ignorance on the television producers and gadget makers, but the truth is that by the time they get to us the damage has already been done. All they really succeed in doing is dragging us down a little further. The problem starts in childhood. It starts in the schools with all those empty cells waiting to be filled and no one, not entire educational systems, really knowing how to fill them. In fact, the opposite result is achieved. By the time the child finishes elementary school, unless he is destined to join the intellectual or scientific or economic or political elite and is self-motivated, as the saying goes, he will have developed an aversion to the learning process that will persist for the rest of his life.
It is not hard to understand why. School bores him, and oppresses him. Its premise, fostered in the West by the Church the virtually exclusive supplier of teachers until fairly recent times, historically speaking is that as a consequence of Original Sin all men are born evil and must therefore be coerced into doing what is good. The result has been rigidly structured frameworks where teachers hammer away at the captive child until his head is ready to explode. Within just a few years, the public school system thus destroys the natural curiosity of the child and dooms him to a life of total ignorance, dependent, for whatever sense of the world he does have, on second rate journalists, who themselves lack the knowledge, understanding, discipline and integrity to be historians or even novelists and therefore shape his perception like the ignorant clerics of the Middle Ages, raining down on his head a disjointed and superficial body of information presented largely to produce effects, and even this is beyond his capacity to retain.
The man in the street may thus be said to have a great many opinions but very little knowledge, mindlessly repeating the half-truths of experts and analysts who reflect his own biases and constructing out of them a credo of dogmatic views that remain embedded in his mind for an entire lifetime like bricks in a brick wall.
Does it matter? After all, we have all the scholars and scientists we need, and besides, a world where everyone became one would be a dull place indeed. It can even be argued that it is better for the race if progress is opposed, since, judging from its products, it mostly expresses itself materially and economically in an unholy alliance of greed and technology. However, progress of this kind cannot be fought if all that people have on their minds is to wire themselves into this technology, and that is what they will be doing until their minds are engaged in less frivolous pursuits. They are thus doubly victimized, first by the schools, whose methods are not attuned to the temperament and capacity of the average child, and then by the economic elites who control the technologies and consequently the flow of information and whose only interest in the man in the street is as a consumer of their products.
Unfortunately, there is very little hope that any of this will change. The wrong people control human society and will continue to do so, because they created the model and are the only ones who know how to operate it. The sad truth is that today's man in the street is neither wiser nor more knowledgeable than a medieval peasant. Calling ourselves Homo sapiens, or even Homo sapiens sapiens, seemed like a good idea once but very few of us have lived up to the billing."
“Believe me, I know all about it. I know the stress. I know the frustration. I know the temptations of time and space. We worked this out ahead of time. They're part of the plan. We knew this stuff might happen. Actually, you insisted they be triggered whenever you were ready to begin thinking thoughts you've never thought before. New thinking is always the answer.”
"I’m not a fortune teller. In fact, the only things anybody knows about predicting – even if you gussy the concept up by calling it "forecasting" – are 1.) Predict often and 2.) Never give both the time and the event.
The worst offenders are those who pretend they know where the economy’s headed. Statistics – so often the basis of conjecture with regard to the economy – are so subject to interpretation, and so easy to take out of context, that most of the time they’re best used as fodder for cocktail party conversations. Still, as potentially wrong-headed and tendentious as the subject is, "the economy" is occasionally worth talking about simply to establish a clear point of view. In fact, I place the phrase "the economy" in quotes because I don’t even accept the validity of the concept, nor that of "the GDP"; they’re both chimeras.
The idea of GDP gives the impression that it is not individuals that produce goods and services, but rather a machine called "the economy." This leaves the door open to all manner of nonsense, like the assertion that what may be good for individuals may not be good for the economy, and vice-versa.
For instance, an advance in the GDP doesn’t necessarily mean increased prosperity: What if the government embarked on a massive pyramid building program, an archetypical example of public works? GDP might rise, but it would add absolutely nothing to the well-being of individuals. To the contrary, the building of the pyramid would only divert capital from wealth-generating activities.
On the other hand, if a scientific breakthrough was made which cut energy consumption by 80% for the same net output, or magically eliminated all disease, the GDP would collapse because it would bankrupt the energy and health industries. But people would be vastly better off.
Entirely apart from that, the whole idea of GDP gives the impression that there actually is such a thing as the national output. In the real world, however, wealth is produced by someone and belongs to somebody. We’re not ants or bees working for the hive. The whole idea of a GDP just allows the "authorities" to bamboozle people into believing they can actually control "the economy," as if it were some giant machine.
The officials pretend to be the Wizard of Oz, and Boobus americanus is trained to think they’re omniscient. Thus whenever the rate of growth slips "too low," officials are expected to give "the economy" a suitable push. Conversely, whenever "the economy" is growing too fast, the officials are supposed to step in to "cool" it. It’s all an embarrassing and destructive charade.
Nonetheless…I remain of the opinion that we’re headed into the biggest economic smashup in history. That’s an outrageous statement, and it’s always dangerous to say something like that. After all, the longest trend in motion is the Ascent of Man, and that trend is unlikely to change; indeed, it’s likely to accelerate. And it’s usually a mistake to bet against an established trend. Furthermore, science and technology will continue advancing, people will continue working and saving, entrepreneurs will continue to create.
Even most of those who talk of a recession tend to write it off as either a simple reversal of recent "irrational exuberance," or a passing change in people’s psychology, or a temporary shock. Unfortunately, it goes much deeper than that. Those things have very little to do with what recessions are all about.
A recession, according to the conventional parlance, is a period when economic activity declines for two or more quarters. That’s a description of what happens, but it’s really not very helpful, much like saying a fever is a period during which your temperature is above 98.6 F. A better definition of a fever might be a period when the body’s temperature is elevated as a consequence of fighting an infection, in that it gives you some insight into the cause as well as the effect. That’s why I prefer to say a recession is "a period of time when distortions and misallocations of capital caused by the business cycle are liquidated."
What causes the business cycle? Excess creation of credit by a central bank (e.g., the Fed). The injection of artificially created money and credit into a country’s economy gives both producers and consumers false signals, causing them to do things which they otherwise would not do. The longer the upswing of a business cycle continues, the longer and more severe the down cycle will be. A depression is just a really bad recession.
One thing that – contrary to popular opinion – can help get an economy out of a recession is a large pool of savings; savings give people the money to invest in new production, as well as the money to buy that production. That’s why it’s the height of idiocy for pundits to talk about how patriotic it is to go out and shop. It can only deplete the capital that will be needed in the future, and deepen the bottom with more bankruptcies, stealing consumption from the future.
That’s why the Fed’s artificially low interest rates was such a bad idea; it encouraged people to save less and borrow more. This engineered decline may well, after a certain lag time, cause a cyclical upturn – but it will only aggravate the underlying problem, guaranteeing yet a bigger bust.
This isn’t just an American problem, because the U.S. is truly the engine of the world’s economy. But a lot of the drive behind the engine is the gigantic trade deficit. The hundreds of billions the U.S. sent abroad in the last year alone, after over a decade of increasing deficits, has caused a lot of capital investment that will become uneconomic, and created a lot of economic activity that will come to a screeching halt when that deficit inevitably reverses. The whole world is levered on what happens in the U.S.
The effect in economies around the world will be devastating. The Smoot Hawley tariff of 1930, which acted to collapse world trade, greatly exacerbated the last depression. It could be that economic conditions in the U.S. alone could do it this time, without the overt "assistance" of the government. I don’t believe we’re looking at just another cyclical downturn this time. We could be – but I don’t think so.
Of course, since the dollar is by far the biggest market in the world, constituting the reserves of almost every government on the planet, the de facto currency of probably 50 countries, and the savings of hundreds of millions of people around the world, when it collapses, it will cause a financial earthquake, Magnitude 10."
“A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every man’s life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose.”
Everybody and his dog is writing about the Trump conviction, so I guess I’ll add my few grains to the sand pile. Otherwise I’d kill something, preferably a New York judge. Or several of them.
On the observable principle that each succeeding President is worse than his predecessor, Biden has, barely, taken the title for godawful worthlessness and foreign-policy bafflement. But the question is not whether Trump has the morals of a politician, or whether he and some porn queen made the beast with two backs. How many readers would have done the same, given a shot at Stormy? The point is that the uniparty, the bicephalous brigandage that is the real government, has turned the entire political apparatus of Washington against Trump, while ignoring the behavior of its own miscreants.
The media make constant reference to the “insurrection” supposedly martialed by Trump against the Capitol. What “insurrection” for God’s sake?
During the Floyd riots, mobs surrounded the White House and threatened to assault it, resisting police who ordered them to disperse. In Portland they took over land in the city and declared it independent of the government, attacked police with Molotov cocktails and bricks, both being deadly weapons. In Minneapolis they burned a police station. This was insurrection on a massive scale. Martial law should have been declared, with the announcement , “Looters will be shot.”
Who was prosecuted for insurrection? Why not? Because Floyd was black. The looters were black. The white rioters were heavily middle class and Democrats. They were against Trump.
Yet savage sentences have been handed out to the mob of overexcited dingalings and damned fools who invaded the Capitol. Yes, their behavior was illegal and yes, they deserved punishment – but not the wildly disproportionate time they got. The idea that it was an attempted coup can only be sold to yokels with no faint idea of what a coup is or how coups are done.
All of this is utterly political. Who is prosecuted for what depends on almost anything but law. Trump is tried for a mildly sordid affair with a porn star but Biden is not prosecuted for being neck-deep in corruption in Ukraine along with his dirtball son. Curious, isn’t it, that a President known for this corruption frantically sends more and more money to Kiev. What do the Ukrainians know that we don’t? Diddling a porn star is without meaning. Being corruptly involved with the government of a country militarily entangled with America in a shooting war leaves open a real question of who is getting paid for what, and who has what dirt on whom.
There is a saying in sports reporting that you can bullshit the fans, but you can’t bullshit the players. When Violeta and I go to Washington we stay with journalist friends, and they are friends, on Capitol Hill, across the street from Lincoln Park. One is a high-end executive with a major network. The Hill crawls with media rabble and opinion mechanics. All of these people are wildly partisan against Trump. What they do cannot remotely be call journalism. One has in her kitchen, always on, a television, tuned to MSNBC. I’ll guess that seventy percent of its non-commercial time consists of raving, raving, raving against Trump. There is no trace of reportorial self-respect, the principle of always seeking the other side, of fact-checking. In newspapering a saying used to be, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Not now. Pure political advocacy.
At higher levels of the media anthill, people are not stupid Yet many seem to know little of the world beyond the ring road. Nor do they care. They do not even try to practice real journalism. Another dictum in the reporter’s trade was, “A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. A reporter should know the difference.” They usually don’t, at least as regards the mysterious and inexplicable reaches of Flyover Land.
For all the brainsthat many of them deploy, they are not savvy pols. In Trump’s first victory, Washington had no idea why he won, why people voted for him, no idea of the anger in the country and why it was there.
On Capitol Hill, you sit around the kitchen drinking good wine and wondering whether to order out for Thai or maybe from this chic Mongolian kitchen, or perhaps go to this really great Turkish restaurant. Even in the kitchen it can be at least a hundred bucks for two people, delivered by motorcycle including wine and tip. I’m not sure, because no one bothers to check.
In Middle America, where sometimes the water isn’t fit to drink, the Deplorables think that Saturday night out for the family at KFC is a treat. A meal at an Indian restaurant in classy Washington would be remembered for a lifetime. Vi and I were recently guests in DC at an all-you-can-eat Brazilian joint where doing the squat-and-gobble will set you back at least a cool C-note each. The place was packed. This is Washington. Those people hadn’t been in a KFC since college, if then.
The contempt of Washo-York elites for most of the country is intense, and the hostility is reciprocated. If Trump goes to jail, I will vote for him because of his incarceration and, if he doesn’t, from loathing of Washington. So there.
Probably none of this matters. America is so far gone in chicanery, bribery, price-fixing, and general immorality that repair is not possible. The country may go parboiled in an ego-fueled nuclear explosion. It may die gurgling as it drowns in moral slime. But I will vote for Trump , in jail or not, from sheer loathing of the whole fetid cloacal gush in Washington. He isn’t fit to be head of toilet maintenance in a Ugandan bus station, but neither is Joe, It will be a joy to see the faces on Cap Hill if Trump pulls it off."
