So, we rise from the rubble...
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Friday, January 31, 2025
Dan, I Allegedly, "Economic Red Flags - The Numbers Just Don’t Lie"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 1/31/25
"Economic Red Flags -
The Numbers Just Don’t Lie"
"71% of real estate agents FAILED in 2024 - yes, you read that right! 😱 With over 1.5 million agents in the U.S., a staggering 71% didn’t sell a single home last year. The numbers don’t lie, and it’s a harsh reality in today’s real estate market. In this video, I break down what this means for the industry, why inventory levels are skyrocketing to 2007 levels, and how this impacts homeowners, buyers, and the economy. If you’re planning to buy or sell, you’ll want to hear my thoughts on hiring agents and why I’ve decided to skip the buyer’s agent entirely for my next purchase.
But that’s just the start - Amazon is facing a massive lawsuit over tracking your every move, Honda is recalling nearly 300,000 vehicles for dangerous power failures, and UnitedHealthcare has exposed the data of 190 million people in one of the largest breaches ever. From shocking real estate stats to economic red flags, this video is packed with the latest insight."
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Bill Bonner, "Beware the Power Lines"
The Hindenburg crashes on May 6th, 1937 in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
"Beware the Power Lines"
by Bill Bonner
"In a world full of genuine uncertainty – where real historical time rules the roost –
the probabilities that ruled the past are not those that will rule the future."
- Lars Syll
Baltimore, Maryland - "What if the whole kit-and-kaboodle – $100 trillion worth of ‘assets’ worldwide, unsupported by real world output – suddenly melts down? Where’s our Big Gain then? Let’s leave that question, like an uneaten pizza; we’ll heat it up later. First, we look at why the ‘big picture’ can be so misleading.
One of the curiosities of today’s asset prices is that stocks rose even while the Fed was tightening. The Fed began its fight against inflation in 2022. It raised rates steadily for the next two years…until July of 2024. But instead of meekly succumbing to the Fed’s higher interest rates, the Dow hit a low under 30,000 in September of 2022, and then rose 14,000 points over the next two years. This was not what anyone expected, including us. No analyst we know saw it coming.
Their (our) logic was airtight. The Fed had driven up stock prices by dropping interest rates almost down to zero. But now that inflation was on the loose, they’d have to raise rates to fight it; they couldn’t rescue a falling market for fear of making it worse.
But anyone who thinks economics is a science must have a Ph.D. or a hedge fund to promote. The rest of us know it’s voodoo. The number of inputs is always infinite…cause and effect are never clear…and the test results are irreproducible. This is why central planning always fails…and macro (big picture) investing is so treacherous. “History shows no clear correlation between real prosperity and the keeping of macroeconomic statistics,” writes Reuven Brenner.
You can never actually see the ‘big picture.’ Instead, you look at statistics, such as GDP growth, unemployment, and inflation, that are supposed to describe it. But often, they are more fraud than fact. GDP figures count government spending as ‘output.’ But the more resources consumed by government, the less real wealth - valuable goods and services – are available for everyone else.
The unemployment numbers are similarly misleading. They count everyone with a job as ‘employed’ – whether he works 20 hours or 60, and whether he earns minimum wage or a million dollars. Lower unemployment doesn’t mean people are better off; after all, there was full employment in the Soviet Union.
And inflation? The statisticians don’t merely add up the prices at the grocery store or the latest real estate sales. They create ‘models’ that adjust prices according to their own cockamamie theories. If this year’s computer is faster than last year’s, for example, they’ll tell you that the price has gone down – even though you paid more for it.
Garbage in. Garbage out. The statistics are always contrived, revised, and largely fictitious. The data is fluid. And the theories – the Phillips Curve, the Fed’s ‘stochastic’ model, Keynesianism, Marxism, Modern Monetary Theory – are always imbecilic. Add as many Greek symbols as you want; they’re still nonsense. (Only one school of economics really makes sense. It rejects ‘data’ in favor of ‘principle.’ More to come…)
But our sad mission is to try to connect the dots, and to try to understand what is really going on. Why did stocks go up, for example, even while the Fed was raising interest rates? Fed Funds are not the only source of ‘liquidity’ to float asset prices upward. And as we suggested yesterday, when the markets bubble up, they give off a vapor that causes even more giddy behavior. Crypto currencies are now worth $3.3 trillion. The stock market, overall, is worth $55 trillion. The average house is worth $420,000.
Suppose you paid $200,000 for the house ten years ago. Now, you have $220,000. The house may be exactly the same. But now you can borrow much more money against it. You can access more ‘liquidity’. And you might use it to gamble on Nvidia…or #Trump…or an apartment building down the street. After all, they’re going up!
Stocks have added nearly 50% in value since the bottom in September ‘22, or about $17 trillion total. And yet, actual output (GDP) has only been creeping up only at a 2.2%. And the money supply, M2, has been going up too. It hit a high of $21.7 trillion soon after the Fed began to tighten. Thereafter, it shed a trillion dollars to a low of $20.7 trillion a year later. But then it rose, even as the Fed continued to raise rates, for another 18 months.
What made the money supply go up? What made stocks go up? Why did investors go mad for AI? An influx of money from overseas, eager to take advantage of the Fed’s higher interest rates? Cash ‘on the sidelines?’ The Trump effect? Or, the momentum of the biggest bubble in history...now, like a Hindenburg drifting slowly towards the power lines? Stay tuned..."
Jim Kunstler, "Six Ways From Sunday"
"Six Ways From Sunday"
by Jim Kunstler
“A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”
- White House Guidance
"Was it the miasma of cognitive dissonance blackening the air-space over the DC swamp that caused the deadly collision of AA Flight 5342 and a Blackhawk Helicopter this week - an impenetrable fog arising from the fetid exhalations of so many hyperventilating swamp creatures brooding between the urges of fight-or-flight as Mr. Trump deploys his chosen pest-controllers across the Potomac Basin?
Altogether, these many parasitical swamp creatures make up the greater DC blob, and the blob convulsing and fibrillating is what you witness in these committee hearings with Bobby, Tulsi, and Kash. For instance, fake “progressive” Bernie Sanders (D-VT) faced with the reveal that he leads his colleagues in pharma “contributions” (just under $2-million)... or fake Cherokee Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in a fugue state over the perceived threat of Mr. Kennedy to pharma profits...or presidential pardon recipient Adam Schiff (D-CA) lecturing Mr. Patel on ethical behavior...or Ms. Gabbard enduring the meltdown of Senate Intel Committee tool Michael Bennet (D-CO).
Behind these histrionics by the big gators and peccaries of the collapsing Democratic Party is pure scintillating fear. They are afraid that all of their hoaxes and lies of recent years will be exposed in the months ahead. And they fear that such exposure might lead eventually to legal complications for them. All of that implies loss-of-power, the single element that demonically drives their careers.
The fact is they have already lost their grip on the levers of power and, for the moment, that is all that matters. They especially no longer control the Department of Justice, its subsidiary, the FBI, the many public health agencies under Health and Human Services, and the many-footed intel “community,” as it styles itself. These agencies are where the truth about our national affairs has been locked up. Now, the citizens will either see what’s there, or find out what has been deliberately destroyed - such as the internal agency email correspondence over RussiaGate, the Covid-19 operation (and the deadly vaxx campaign), the J-6 affair (and the pipe-bomb sideshow), the weird, documented irregularities of the 2020 election, the Ukraine War money-laundering shenanigans, the manifold janky DOJ prosecutions of Mr. Trump, and much more.
Every day now since January 20, heads explode all over DC as the executive orders roll out and the insanity of whatever lurked behind “Joe Biden” gets systematically expunged from the order of things. And as this happens, the more plainly deranged the past four years looks. Did they really believe that men dressing-up as women would improve the US military? Or was it a traitorous effort to weaken and demoralize our armed forces? Was DEI a public ethics exercise or a massive jobs program for incompetents?
In what way did “Joe Biden’s” Department of Homeland Security imagine that funneling known criminals, certified lunatics, and saboteurs across the border squared with their duty to protect and defend the country? And how did it happen that US taxpayers’ money got shelled out to fake “religious” NGOs in Mexico minting debit cards for border-jumpers, handing them wads of cash, cell phones, airplane tickets, fully-equipped backpacks, and apps for evading arrest? In effect these NGOs took over the exact job description of “coyote” formerly performed by the criminal cartels - leaving the cartels free for the more lucrative rackets of dealing fentanyl and trafficking women and children.
The corruption in all this has been supernatural, and the fact that, until late 2024, seventy-million Democratic Party American voters thought this was all okay is extra-supernatural. What happened to their minds? The cliché of “Trump derangement” doesn’t really answer that. What it probably comes down to was the stunningly successful mind-f*cking operation run by the blob (the CIA and the darker elements of the DOD in particular), in league with captured news media, to bend and distort the consensual perception of reality - all of which leads to the question: why?
The two main answers to that seem to be 1) Some organized entity seeking to destroy the country for instance, the Chinese Communist Party, or the World Economic Forum, or 2) that the blob had evolved into such an overt criminal racketeering operation that it increasingly and desperately needed to keep covering its mighty ass. Thus, the Democratic Party became the blob’s enforcer and the news media became its propaganda arm. And the “thinking class” of America especially got ignominiously hosed by all that.
There’s a pretty good chance that blob agents in the Senate will successfully block the confirmations of Bobby, Tulsi, and Kash. They are all superlative candidates for the particular jobs at HHS, ODNI, and the FBI. But know this: excellent as they are, there are a great many other worthy, dedicated, and stalwart warriors in this land who can take their places if necessary. The blob has already lost in the political battle-space. All they can manage at this point is some rearguard action."
Adventures With Danno, "Strange Prices at Walmart"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 1/31/25
"Strange Prices at Walmart"
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"Russia and China Are Facts of Life"
Tonya Harding. You don’t win with loser strategies.
"Russia and China Are Facts of Life"
by Robert Gore
"In 1904, Sir Halford Mackinder, director of the London School of Economics, gave a presentation at the Royal Geographical Society that proved to be influential. “The Geographical Pivot of History” posited a World-Island: Africa Asia, and Europe, the “heartland” of which stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Siberian Sea. Mackinder later summarized his thesis: “Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island. Who rules the World-Island commands the world.” This would become a key tenet of Britain’s foreign policy until the end of World War II. It was largely responsible for the destruction of its empire. At that point, the intellectual baton was passed to the American empire, to which it will do the same.
The problem for both British and American imperialists is that their countries are peripheral to this Heartland of the World-Island, while Russia and China are the biggest part of it. In the nineteenth century, Britain’s peripheral position was overcome by maritime and industrial prowess. Britain’s navy was the linchpin of the empire. Its shared position with the U.S. as an Industrial Revolution leader bolstered its power and led to the relentless drive for resources that was an impetus for the empire’s growth.
John Maynard Keynes once wrote: "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. The U.S. intellectual and political establishment are slaves to a defunct geopolitical scientist, Mackinder. That’s not to suggest that his World-Island and Heartland aren’t important, but rather to challenge the quasi-religious belief that the U.S. can subjugate and control them. It can’t, and how well it adopts to that reality will determine how the rest of the 21st century and beyond goes for the U.S."
In the heady euphoria of World War II, U.S. policy makers embraced the concept of a U.S.-dominated, confederated global empire. They should have questioned it in 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. The ensuing Cold War arms race instituted an unprecedented reality in global affairs: a war between nuclear armed states could mean the end of humanity.
This didn’t mean that some lights in the American establishment ruled out war with the Soviet Union. In the 1950s and early 1960s, various plans were drafted for nuclear attacks. However, the Strangelove option was never exercised. Instead, the U.S. ostensibly “contained” the Soviet threat by establishing a Pax Americana based on the British imperial model.
In addition to a vast armaments buildup, the U.S. ringed the rim of the Heartland with military bases, circled it with its navy, forged military alliances (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1949), the Middle East Treaty Organization (1955), the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (1954), and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (1951)), became a military- and intelligence- dominated national security state, and engaged in regime-change, other intelligence skullduggery, and proxy wars. The confederated empire was helped immensely by the communist ideology of its two primary foes, which tied one hand behind their respective backs; smothered their citizens; eliminated troublesome rebels that so infuriate totalitarians but are usually the fountainheads of progress, and stifled potential development.
Communism destroyed the Soviet Union and would have done the same to the Chinese government absent its dramatic adjustment in ideology under Deng Xiaoping, leader from 1978 to 1989. Russia had a difficult decade after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but Vladimir Putin, elected president in 2000, has sparked a transition that in its own way has been as dramatic as China’s. While there have been setbacks, since the turn of the century, both countries have been ascendant.
Even prior to the turn of the century, the U.S. has gone the other direction. Its industrial base, so dominant from World War II through the 1960s, has been hollowed out. The FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) has increased its share of the GDP. This sector is based on transfer payments, not production, and is supported by what remains of productive manufacturing. Government, law, accounting, and the medical and educational systems can be characterized in the same way.
Because it exercises coercive power, government has been particularly pernicious. Local, state, and the federal government command over 40 percent of the GDP, and almost all of what they do is counterproductive. They are the parasites killing the host. Perverse, predatory, and destructive ideologies pervade government and its affiliated institutions. Productive Americans and business are smothered by an ever expanding body of laws, regulations, taxes, liabilities, and an exponentially increasing federal debt, which is driving interest rates higher.
The pretentious, arrogant, corrupt, and just plain stupid American ruling class is emblematic of its descent. The Ukraine proxy-war fiasco is a monumental example of its inability to comprehend what Russia and China have done, or to adjust to new realities.
When the Ukraine war started, the Ukrainian military had been trained and armed by the West for eight years. The actual purpose of the two Minsk agreements was not peace, but to buy time for that project. The Ukrainians would repel Russia on the battlefield, and sanctions would bring the Russian economy to its knees. The West’s Ukrainian proxy would win, and the defeat would probably cost the hated Putin his job and perhaps his life. Russia itself might shatter, and the West would scoop up the valuable pieces, much as it had tried to do in the 1990s.
Russia’s slow, grinding pace in Ukraine has been endlessly criticized, however, it is not without its merits. Russia has had its share of missteps, but Ukraine has been decimated. It has at least 500,000 killed in action, and the real number may be closer to a million. Total casualties—killed and wounded—are over a million. Russia’s strategy has been to preserve its manpower and it’s worked; casualties are a tenth to a fifth of Ukraine’s. Unlike Ukraine, it has been able to recruit or conscript additional soldiers. Ukraine has huge morale problems, and consequently problems with draft avoidance and desertion.
Steadily advancing, Russia is close to achieving the territorial objectives of its special military operation, and will do so once it takes Ukrainian transportation and logistics hub Povrovsk. It has also obliterated much of Ukraine’s energy grid, industry and agriculture. Ukraine’s economy is a basket case, propped up by Western aid. Millions of Ukrainians have emigrated to either Russia or Europe. Corruption is rampant. Zelensky’s term expired and he suspended elections. He rules only because no faction has yet emerged that can overthrow him, although there are undoubtedly several that would like to.
Russia’s defeat of the U.S. and Europe has been just as dramatic as its impending defeat of Ukraine. NATO nations have blown through over $200 billion, around $180 billion of which came from the U.S. Their weaponry has been battlefield-revealed as inferior to Russia’s, although Russia spends roughly a tenth of what the U.S. does on defense. The Russians have supposedly been on the verge of running out of missiles and other armaments since the special operation began, if you pay attention to Western governments and media. However, Russian industry is far more geared to produce necessary weaponry than Europe’s or the U.S.’s; it’s been the West, not Russia, that’s found itself in short supply.
The U.S. has done everything it can to force Europe to substitute expensive American liquid natural gas for inexpensive Russian oil and gas. The U.S. or its proxy Ukraine sabotaged three of the four Nord Stream pipelines and the fourth, though functional, is shut down. Ukraine recently refused to renew an agreement allowing transport of Russian gas through Ukraine to Europe. Ukraine also mounted an unsuccessful drone attack against a natural gas compressor station in southern Russia, which is part of the TurkStream pipeline that carries gas under the Black Sea to Europe.
Sanctions and energy warfare have not brought the Russian economy to its knees. Russia has ready markets in China and India for its oil and gas, albeit at discounted prices. Some of its exports to those countries are surreptitiously routed back to Europe at higher prices, defeating the sanctions and extracting more economic rent from hard-pressed European economies, most of which are in or are on the verge of recession. The American axis is an eighth of the world’s population. Much of the global majority has lined up with the Russia-China axis and has constructed alternatives to Western financial and economic arrangements.
Russia can be considered the ideological head of the global majority; China is the operational muscle. One of the more ludicrous assertions from the U.S. ruling class, echoed in both the Western mainstream and alternative media, is that once the U.S. wraps up the Ukraine war it can turn its attention to “containing” China. Leaving aside that on present course Ukraine will be a debilitating and humiliating defeat for the U.S., China represents a much more difficult challenge.
In a span of 45 years, the Chinese have worked an unprecedented transformation from an impoverished nation in the throes of communist ideology to a manufacturing, scientific, and technological powerhouse. The only comparable transformation has been America’s Industrial Revolution. To illustrate, I’m cherry picking facts and figures from a lengthy (14,200 words) article by Ron Unz, “American Pravda: China vs. America, A Comprehensive Review of the Economic, Technological, and Military Factors,” which I posted on SLL. The length may seem daunting, but the article is well worth the time. It obliterates any notion that the U.S. will “contain” China, much less win a war, kinetic or otherwise, with it.
The basis of Chinese success is the Chinese people. You don’t have to buy physicist Steve Hsu’s estimate, cited and linked to by Unz, that China has 30 times the number of 160-plus IQ individuals than the U.S., to acknowledge that the Chinese are smart and hard-working. That was obvious even before China dropped Maoist ideology, from the Chinese who escaped communism to other Asian nations. In those countries, they achieved success far disproportionate to their numbers, in some instances dominating the local economies.
The pillars of the present Chinese economy are manufacturing, science, technology, competitive internal markets, and exports. Manufacturing is 38 percent of the Chinese economy and services 55 percent, versus 11 percent and 88 percent, respectively, in the U.S. China produces 35 percent of global manufacturing output versus 12 percent for the U.S.
The CIA World Factbook confirms that the size of China’s real productive economy is three times larger than the U.S.’s. While the U.S. produces several times the oil and gas that China does, Chinese coal production is five times greater, steel production thirteen times greater, wheat production three times greater, and their ship-building capacity 232 times that of the U.S. Indeed, China’s real productive economy is greater than the combined total of the U.S., the rest of the Anglosphere, the EU, and Japan.
Oh, but who cares about that stuff when the U.S. is beating China where it counts: professional services? They account for 13 percent of the US GDP, only 3 percent of China’s. The U.S. has 1.33 million lawyers, China has around half of that, with over four times the population. The U.S. has 1.65 million accountants and auditors, China only 300,000. There are 59,000 Certified Financial Analysts in the U.S., 4,000 in China. And in the all-important lobbyist profession, the U.S. has 20,000 registered just in Washington DC, while China has zero. (That’s not to say lobbying doesn’t go on in China; however, there isn’t a profession devoted to it.) Surely the Chinese tremble when they contemplate these measures of comparative national power.
Two important services are healthcare and education. Education in China is free through graduate school, and healthcare is free or heavily subsidized. Seven percent of China’s GDP is healthcare, versus 18 percent in the U.S., while China’s life expectancy is 78.6 years and America’s is 77.5. Like every successful society and social group throughout history, China stresses education. Their system is highly competitive and extols Confucius’s tenets of meritocracy and personal virtue. China graduates over 5 million STEM college students a year, the U.S. 800,000. (A nontrivial portion of the U.S. graduates are Chinese.)
A hoary canard, repeated by Marco Rubio at his Secretary of State confirmation hearing, is that Chinese science and technology consists of what it begs, borrows, or steals from the U.S. Undoubtedly, the Chinese have committed, are committing, and will continue to commit intellectual property theft and other nefarious acts; they are hardly alone in doing so.
However, according to the “2024 Critical Technology Tracker,” published by the ASPI, an Australian-based think tank hostile to China, in the 5-year period between 2019 and 2023, China led in 57 of 64 different technologies (the U.S. led in the other 7), grouped in 8 meta categories: advanced information and communication, advanced materials and manufacturing; artificial intelligence (AI); biotech, gene technology, and vaccines; defense, space, robotics, and transportation; energy and environment; quantum technologies; and sensing, timing, and navigation. The ASPI concluded that 24 of the 64 technologies are at high risk of Chinese monopolization; they are doing over 75 percent of the research in those fields. Mr. Rubio never explained how the Chinese can lead in so many categories if all they’re engaged in is theft.
Innovation fuels the world’s most competitive internal market and the Chinese export dynamo. For instance, the U.S. has one major EV company, while China has 8 major and dozens of minor competitors, as well as Tesla. Chinese BYD is the world leader in EV sales. The U.S. has one mobile phone company, Apple, China has 5, plus Apple and Samsung, which is South Korean. China has four major e-commerce companies plus Amazon, which is the U.S.’s only global-scale e-commerce platform. Paraphrasing the song “New York, New York,” if you can make it in China you can make it anywhere, and the Chinese export to the world, piling up trade surpluses and foreign currency reserves. Yes, they have a lot of debt, but they have the industrial and export capacity to pay it. And all those exports can’t just be cheap stuff that ends up on Walmart shelves.
The wherewithal from exports, China’s science and technology, and its people are the key constituents of its formidable military, which at over two million active duty personnel is the world’s largest. Like Russia, China has a variety of both nuclear and non-nuclear hypersonic missiles (some of which may be superior to Russia’s); state-of-the-art command, control, guidance, surveillance, antiaircraft, artillery, and cyber warfare systems, and the industrial capacity for protracted war.
It is the world leader in drones—both their technology and production—which have emerged as a key element in modern warfare. In the Ukraine war, the five giant U.S. defense contractors have been unable to produce in sufficient quantities even basics like artillery shells to match Russia’s output. Against China’s superior industrial plant, their production would be woefully uncompetitive in not just shells, but drones, missiles, warships, and fighter planes. All this while China spends 1.8 percent of its GDP on the military and the U.S. spends 3.4 percent (Wikipedia).
The one knock on the Chinese military is that it has no war experience; it hasn’t fought anyone in over forty years. Curiously, that knock often comes from the same people who claim that China, in contravention of its own history and doctrine, is hell-bent on becoming an offensive military power that will rule the world. Certainly China doesn’t have the experience of the U.S. military, which has fought many wars since World War II. However, U.S. military muscle memory comes from prolonged, defense-contractor-enriching wars against ostensibly inferior opponents that led to unsatisfactory outcomes, often outright defeat. China doesn’t have to unlearn the American military’s bad habits.
China will soon acquire war experience if America’s many China hawks get their way. In an actual war, in addition to its military and economic prowess, China will have a number of intangible advantages. It will be defending its own territory, a massive advantage, and will be fighting for its national pride. It’s military doctrine, called Anti Access Area Denial, is defensive, based on territorial integrity and annexation of Taiwan.
The nearest U.S. territory, Guam, is 4800 kilometers away. While the U.S. has bases in and agreements with Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, how long will those countries aid the U.S. once China retaliates? How long will the U.S. electorate support a war once Chinese hypersonic missiles sink U.S. sea dinosaurs aircraft carriers and their accompanying flotillas? As Hua Bin notes in the Unz article: In essence, the war will be one between a landed fortress and an expeditionary air and maritime force. For most of the history of war, ships lose to fortress.
China has built up goodwill and a network of friends through the Belt and Road Initiative’s funding, infrastructure development, alternatives to Western financial arrangements, and global-majority rhetoric. It draws on the vast resources of most of the World Island, and is expanding its political and economic influence in South America.
It portrays itself as a peacemaker, a telling counterpoint to the U.S.’s overt and covert warmongering. It intermediated an Iranian-Saudi Arabian rapprochement and has offered to broker a resolution to the Ukraine-Russia war. It doesn’t peddle “shining city on a hill” and “exceptionalism” verbiage (although the Chinese have ample national pride, xenophobia, and racism). The world wouldn’t buy such verbiage from China; it no longer buys America’s.
The U.S. employs a Tonya Harding strategy. Instead of addressing its competitive deficiencies, it tries to kneecap its competitors via proxy wars, alliances, sanctions, tariffs, intelligence skullduggery, hostile propaganda, and export and import restrictions, particularly in technology. It didn’t work for Harding; it hasn’t worked for the U.S. The government has wasted trillions of dollars and killed millions—mostly citizens of other countries—trying to maintain its faltering empire. It has incurred the enmity of the global majority, sparked innovative workarounds from Russia and China, and made vassals of its allies.
A recent development illustrates the innovative workaround phenomenon. Hours before President Trump announced Stargate, a $500 billion public-private AI boondoggle infrastructure project, Chinese company DeepSeek released DeepSeek R1 (Mike Whitney, “China’s DeepSeek Bombshell Rocks Trump’s $500B AI Boondoggle,” unz.com, 1/22/25), an AI model superior to American research laboratory and AI leader OpenAI’s models. DeepSeek R1 costs a small fraction (3 percent) to operate, uses a small fraction of the power, is completely open source, and can be downloaded and run for free.
Western microchip sanctions were supposed to sabotage Chinese AI for at least a decade, but instead the Chinese have responded with a better system that is more affordable, accessible, and transparent. U.S. restrictions have backfired disastrously and Stargate’s $500 billion will be money down the toilet. Being open source, DeepSeek is already being customized and upgraded by legions of software developers around the globe, in many cases publicizing their improvements. It’s the number one app on Apple’s app store. Political analyst Arnaud Bertrand succinctly sums up the implications in a post on X:
"it speaks to a different philosophy/vision on AI: ironically named “OpenAI” is basically about trying to establish a monopoly by establishing a moat with massive amounts of GPU and money. Deepseek is clearly betting on a future where AI becomes a commodity, widely available and affordable to everyone. By pricing so aggressively and releasing their code open-source, they’re not just competing with OpenAI but basically declaring that AI should be like electricity or internet connectivity – a basic utility that powers innovation rather than a premium service controlled by a few players. And in that world, it’s a heck of a lot better to be the first mover who helped make it happen than the legacy player who tried to stop it." @RnaudBertrand
America’s experiment with ever-expanding government exercising ever-increasing coercive control over not just Americans but the rest of the world has been a disaster. Its exponentially mounting debt spells the end of both imperial delusions and domestic subjugation. Annexing additional territory and coopting resources won’t restore a preeminence that is already gone. America once minded its own business and its citizens were free to mind their own. It was the beginning of the end of preeminence when its government started minding everybody’s business.
America’s cream of the crop can compete with anybody else’s when they’re free to do so. Geographically, Russia and China are at the heart of Mackinder’s Heartland and they’re not going anywhere. Neither are their governments, regardless of Tonya Harding strategies to engineer internal collapse and regime change. The Trump administration can either adjust to or fight that reality. And it can either get out of the way and allow Americans to compete again, or it can kill what’s left of competitiveness with the spurious “kindness” of tariffs, Stargate, and the rest of the crony collectivist nonsense peddled by Trump’s many newfound friends."
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Related:
"Does A 1904 Geopolitical Theory Explain The War In Ukraine?"
"Does A 1904 Geopolitical Theory Explain The War In Ukraine?"
by John Wilder
"When I look at the war in Ukraine and other world events, I see evidence of Sir Halford John Mackinder. It would have been cool if he was the frontman for a 1910s version of Judas Priest, but no. Mackinder was a guy who thought long and hard about mountains, deserts, oceans, steppes, and wars. You could tell Mackinder was going to be good at geography, what with that latitude. The result of all this pondering was what he called the Heartland Theory, which was the founding moment for geopolitics.
What’s geopolitics? It’s the idea that one of the biggest influencers in human history (besides being human) was the geography we inhabit. Mackinder’s first version wasn’t very helpful, since he just ended up with “Indonesia” and the rest of the world, which he called “Outdonesia”.
Mackinder focused mainly on the Eurasian continent. Flat land with no obstacles meant, in Mackinder’s mind, that the land would be eventually ruled by a single power. Jungles and swamps could be a barrier, but eventually he thought that technology would solve that. Mountains? Mountains were obstacles that stopped invasions, and allowed cultures to develop independently. Even better than a mountain? An island.
There’s even a theory (not Mackinder’s) that the independent focus on freedom flourished in England because the local farmers weren’t (after the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Mormons, and Vikings were done pillaging) subject to invasion and were able to develop a culture based on a government with limited powers, along with rights invested in every man.
Mackinder went further, though. He saw the combination of Eurasia and Africa as something he called the World Island. If the World Island came under the domination of a single power, he thought, it would eventually rule the rest of the world – it would have overwhelming resources and population, and it would have the ability to outproduce (both economically and militarily) everything else. “Pivot Area” is what Mackinder first called the Heartland.
Mackinder, being English, had seen the Great Game in the 1900s, which in many cases was a fight to keep Russia landlocked. The rest of Europe feared a Russia that had access to the sea. Conversely, Russia itself was the Heartland of the Mackinder’s World Island. Russia was separated and protected on most of its borders by mountains and deserts. On the north, Russia was protected by the Arctic Ocean, which is generally more inaccessible than most of Joe Biden’s recent memories.
Russia is still essentially landlocked. The Soviet Navy had some nice submarines, but outside of that, the Russians have never been a naval power, and the times Russia attempted to make a navy have been so tragically inept that well, let me give an example: The sea Battle of Tsushima between the Japanese and Russians in 1905 was a Japanese victory. The Japanese lost 117 dead, 583 wounded, and lost 3 torpedo boats. The Russians? They lost 5,045 dead, 803 injured, 6,016 captured, 6 battleships sunk, 2 battleships captured. The Russians sank 450 ton of the Japanese Navy. The Japanese sunk 126,792 tons of the Russian fleet. Yup. This was more lopsided than a fight between a poodle and a porkchop.
Mackinder noted that the Heartland (Russia) was built on land power. The Rimlands (or, on the map “Inner Crescent”) were built on sea power. In the end, almost all of the twentieth century was built on keeping Russia away from the ocean, and fighting over Eastern Europe. Why? In Mackinder’s mind, “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland (Russia); Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.” In one sense, it’s true.
Mackinder finally in 1943 came up with another idea, his first idea being lonely. I think he could see the way World War II was going to end, so he came up with the idea that if the United States were to team up with Western Europe, they could still command the Rimlands and contain the Soviet Union to the Heartland.
There are several reasons that the United States has responded with such an amazing amount of aid to Ukraine. The idea is to bleed Putin as deeply and completely as they can. Why? If they’re following Mackinder, this keeps Russia vulnerable. It keeps Eastern Europe from being under Russia’s control – if you count the number of “Battles of Kiev” or “Battles of Kharkov” you can see that it’s statistically more likely to rain artillery in Kiev than rain water.
This might be the major driver for Russia, too. A Russian-aligned (or at least neutral) Ukraine nicely plugs the Russian southern flank. And this is nearly the last year that Russia can make this attempt – the younger generation isn’t very big, and the older generation that built and can run all of the cool Soviet tech? They’re dying off. Soon all their engineers with relevant weapons manufacturing experience will be...dead. If Russia is going to attempt to secure the south, this is their only shot. Depending on how vulnerable the Russians think they are, the harder they’ll fight. NATO nations tossing in weapons isn’t helping the famous Russian paranoia.
I think that the United States, in getting cozy with China in the 1970s, was following along with Mackinder’s theory – I believe Mackinder himself said that a Chinese-Russian alliance could effectively control the Heartland and split the Rimland, given China’s access to the oceans. And that’s what China is doing now, with the Belt and Road Initiative. Remember Mackinder’s World Island? Here’s a map of the countries participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative:
Spoiler alert: It’s the world island."
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Full screen recommended.
"Halford Mackinder, Heartland Theory and Geographical Pivot 1"
by Geopoliticus
"In this presentation we discuss the theory for Geographic Causation in Universal History proposed by Sir Halford Mackinder in his paper - "The Geographic Pivot of History" delivered as a lecture in 1904. The theoretical propositions in the paper regarding how natural geography controls the flow of history of civilizations - with nature acting as a stage for man to act upon - was the most relevant contribution of Halford Mackinder towards developing a philosophic synthesis between geography, history and statesmanship, leading to the development of modern geopolitics.
In this part we see how he proposes the beginning of a new era in the international system from the 1900s, predicts (in a way) the break out of the First World War, and builds a unified model based on Geo-history for understanding the emergence and evolution of European civilization."
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Full screen recommended.
"Halford Mackinder, Heartland Theory and Geographical Pivot 2"
by Geopoliticus
"In this presentation we view Mackinder’s historical analysts by looking at the interactions between different Geographic zones, seeing how the Mongols used land power to unify the core of the World Island and how Europeans circumvented nomadic heartland power by investing in sea power. The core idea of Halford Mackinder’s Thesis was that in the beginning of the 20th century, geographers needed to develop a philosophical synthesis of geographical conditions and historical trajectories of nations over long ranges of time.
He attempted to do this for the history of Eurasia, which he called, the World Island. According to his theoretical model, there was a link between geographical conditions and the nature of geopolitical order, for one, but for further depth in understanding historical trajectories we need to do a wider scale analysis of interactions between different geographically influenced political orders by building a model of Heartland-Rimland interactions across history."
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Freely download "The Geographical Pivot of History",
by HJ Mackinder, April 1904, here:
o
Why is this important? Consider history, from which we learn nothing...
"The earliest evidence of prehistoric warfare is a Mesolithic cemetery in Jebel Sahaba, which has been determined to be approximately 14,000 years old. About forty-five percent of the skeletons there displayed signs of violent death. Since the rise of the state some 5,000 years ago, military activity has occurred over much of the globe. The advent of gunpowder and the acceleration of technological advances led to modern warfare. According to Conway W. Henderson, "One source claims that 14,500 wars have taken place between 3500 BC and the late 20th century, costing 3.5 billion lives, leaving only 300 years of peace." An unfavorable review of this estimate mentions the following regarding one of the proponents of this estimate: "In addition, perhaps feeling that the war casualties figure was improbably high, he changed 'approximately 3,640,000,000 human beings have been killed by war or the diseases produced by war' to 'approximately 1,240,000,000 human beings.'"
The lower figure is more plausible, but could still be on the high side considering that the 100 deadliest acts of mass violence between 480 BC and 2002 AD (wars and other man-made disasters with at least 300,000 and up to 66 million victims) claimed about 455 million human lives in total. Primitive warfare is estimated to have accounted for 15.1% of deaths and claimed 400 million victims. Added to the aforementioned figure of 1,240 million between 3500 BC and the late 20th century, this would mean a total of 1,640,000,000 people killed by war (including deaths from famine and disease caused by war) throughout the history and pre-history of mankind. For comparison, an estimated 1,680,000,000 people died from infectious diseases in the 20th century."
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"It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human
race proved to be nothing more than the story of an
ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump."
- David Ormsby-Gore
Thursday, January 30, 2025
"Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Israel is Digging It's Grave & the IDF is Losing Big on All Fronts"
Danny Haiphong, 1/30/25
"Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Israel is Digging
It's Grave & the IDF is Losing Big on All Fronts"
"Col. Lawrence Wilkerson uses his years of military and political experience in the halls of power to reveal the truth about Israel's growing dilemma: a military crumbling under the pressure of endless occupation and war. What happens next for Israel may shock you and this video breaks it all down."
Comments here:
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Full screen recommended.
The Face Of War, 1/30/25
"Scott Ritter: Trump Blocks Netanyahu,
Panic Gripped All Of Israel After Iran's Decisive Strategy"
Comments here:
"Urgent! Walmart Just Sounded the Alarm – What Happens Next Is Terrifying!"
Full screen recommended.
Steven Van Metre, 1/30/25
"Urgent! Walmart Just Sounded the Alarm –
What Happens Next Is Terrifying!"
"Something big just happened at Walmart, and their latest warning should send shivers down your spine. This could be the tipping point for the U.S. economy!"
Comments here:
"Red Alert! Gold Bank Runs Starting! Trump: Open A.I. Will Control U.S. Nukes! WTF?! Madness!"
Canadian Prepper, 1/30/25
"Red Alert! Gold Bank Runs Starting!
Trump: Open A.I. Will Control U.S. Nukes! WTF?! Madness!"
Comments here:
"Trump Putting An End To Food Stamps & Free Housing? Home Builders Building Expensive Garbage Homes"
Jeremiah Babe, 1/30/25
"Trump Putting An End To Food Stamps & Free Housing?
Home Builders Building Expensive Garbage Homes"
Comments here:
“Albert Camus on Strength of Character and How to Save Our Sanity in Difficult Times”
“Albert Camus on Strength of Character
and How to Save Our Sanity in Difficult Times”
by Maria Popova
“In 1957, Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) became the second youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to him for work that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.” (It was with this earnestness that, days after receiving the coveted accolade, he sent his childhood teacher a beautiful letter of gratitude.)
More than half a century later, his lucid and luminous insight renders Camus a timeless seer of truth, one who ennobles and enlarges the human spirit in the very act of seeing it – the kind of attentiveness that calls to mind his compatriot Simone Weil, whom he admired more than he did any other thinker and who memorably asserted that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
Nowhere does Camus’s generous attention to the human spirit emanate more brilliantly than in a 1940 essay titled “The Almond Trees” (after the arboreal species that blooms in winter), found in his “Lyrical and Critical Essays” (public library) – the superb volume that gave us Camus on happiness, despair, and how to amplify our love of life. Penned at the peak of WWII, to the shrill crescendo of humanity’s collective cry for justice and mercy, Camus’s clarion call for reawakening our noblest nature reverberates with newfound poignancy today, amid our present age of shootings and senseless violence.
At only twenty-seven, Camus writes: “We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as humans is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks we take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.
Let us know our aims then, holding fast to the mind, even if force puts on a thoughtful or a comfortable face in order to seduce us. The first thing is not to despair. Let us not listen too much to those who proclaim that the world is at an end. Civilizations do not die so easily, and even if our world were to collapse, it would not have been the first. It is indeed true that we live in tragic times. But too many people confuse tragedy with despair. “Tragedy,” [D.H.] Lawrence said, “ought to be a great kick at misery.” This is a healthy and immediately applicable thought. There are many things today deserving such a kick.”
In a sentiment evocative of the 1919 manifesto “Declaration of the Independence of the Mind” - which was signed by such luminaries as Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Rabindranath Tagore, Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, Stefan Zweig, and Hermann Hesse – Camus argues that this “kick” is to be delivered by the deliberate cultivation of the mind’s highest virtues: “If we are to save the mind we must ignore its gloomy virtues and celebrate its strength and wonder. Our world is poisoned by its misery, and seems to wallow in it. It has utterly surrendered to that evil which Nietzsche called the spirit of heaviness. Let us not add to this. It is futile to weep over the mind, it is enough to labor for it.
But where are the conquering virtues of the mind? The same Nietzsche listed them as mortal enemies to heaviness of the spirit. For him, they are strength of character, taste, the “world,” classical happiness, severe pride, the cold frugality of the wise. More than ever, these virtues are necessary today, and each of us can choose the one that suits him best. Before the vastness of the undertaking, let no one forget strength of character. I don’t mean the theatrical kind on political platforms, complete with frowns and threatening gestures. But the kind that through the virtue of its purity and its sap, stands up to all the winds that blow in from the sea. Such is the strength of character that in the winter of the world will prepare the fruit.
Elsewhere in the volume, Camus writes: “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” Each time our world cycles through a winter of the human spirit, Camus remains an abiding hearth of the invisible summer within us, his work a perennial invitation to reinhabit our deepest decency and live up to our most ennobled nature.
Complement this particular excerpt from the thoroughly elevating “Lyrical and Critical Essays” with Nietzsche on what it really means to be a free spirit and Susan Sontag on how to be a moral human being, then revisit Camus on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons and our search for meaning.“
"A Look to the Heavens"
"The dream was to capture both the waterfall and the Milky Way together. Difficulties included finding a good camera location, artificially illuminating the waterfall and the surrounding valley effectively, capturing the entire scene with numerous foreground and background shots, worrying that fireflies would be too distracting, keeping the camera dry, and avoiding stepping on a poisonous snake. Behold the result - captured after midnight in mid-July and digitally stitched into a wide-angle panorama.
Click image for larger size.
The waterfall is the picturesque Zhulian waterfall in the Luoxiao Mountains in eastern Hunan Province, China. The central band of our Milky Way Galaxy crosses the sky and shows numerous dark dust filaments and colorful nebulas. Bright stars dot the sky - all residing in the nearby Milky Way - including the Summer Triangle with bright Vega visible above the Milky Way's arch. After capturing all 78 component exposures for you to enjoy, the photographer and friends enjoyed the view themselves for the rest of the night."
The Poet: Barbara Crooker, "In the Middle..."
"In the Middle..."
"In the middle
of a life that's as complicated as everyone else's,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather's
has stopped at 9:20; we haven't had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don't ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning's quick coffee
and evening's slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We'll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time."
~ Barbara Crooker
"An Old Farmers Advice"
"An Old Farmers Advice"
"These simple words of wisdom, from Texas state legislator Judge Roy English, "Don't Whiz On An Electric Fence: Grandpa's Country Wisdom,1996", are fruits ripe for the picking by people of all walks of life:
• Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight, and bull-strong.
• Keep skunks and bankers and lawyers at a distance.
• Life is simpler when you plow around the stump.
• A bumble bee is considerably faster than a John Deere tractor.
• Words that soak into your ears are whispered…not yelled.
• Meanness don’t jes’ happen overnight.
• Forgive your enemies. It messes up their heads.
• Do not corner something that you know is meaner than you.
• It don’t take a very big person to carry a grudge.
• You cannot unsay a cruel word.
• Every path has a few puddles.
• When you wallow with pigs, expect to get dirty.
• The best sermons are lived, not preached.
• Most of the stuff people worry about ain’t never gonna happen, anyway.
• Don’t judge folks by their relatives.
• Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
• Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll enjoy it a second time.
• Don’t interfere with somethin’ that ain’t botherin’ you none.
• Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.
• If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin’.
• Sometimes you get, and sometimes you get got.
• The biggest troublemaker you’ll ever have to deal with, watches you from the mirror every mornin'.
• Always drink upstream from the herd.
• Good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment.
• Lettin’ the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin’ it back in.
• If you get to thinkin’ you’re a person of some influence, try orderin’ somebody else’s dog around.
• Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly."
• Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight, and bull-strong.
• Keep skunks and bankers and lawyers at a distance.
• Life is simpler when you plow around the stump.
• A bumble bee is considerably faster than a John Deere tractor.
• Words that soak into your ears are whispered…not yelled.
• Meanness don’t jes’ happen overnight.
• Forgive your enemies. It messes up their heads.
• Do not corner something that you know is meaner than you.
• It don’t take a very big person to carry a grudge.
• You cannot unsay a cruel word.
• Every path has a few puddles.
• When you wallow with pigs, expect to get dirty.
• The best sermons are lived, not preached.
• Most of the stuff people worry about ain’t never gonna happen, anyway.
• Don’t judge folks by their relatives.
• Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
• Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll enjoy it a second time.
• Don’t interfere with somethin’ that ain’t botherin’ you none.
• Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.
• If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin’.
• Sometimes you get, and sometimes you get got.
• The biggest troublemaker you’ll ever have to deal with, watches you from the mirror every mornin'.
• Always drink upstream from the herd.
• Good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment.
• Lettin’ the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin’ it back in.
• If you get to thinkin’ you’re a person of some influence, try orderin’ somebody else’s dog around.
• Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly."
“Character is doing the right thing when no one is looking.”
- J.C. Watts
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