In case you were interested.

Look for cohort turnover ahead.

And it’s longtime Republican anti-interventionist Pat Buchanan asking.

Cacophony and Confusion in Foreign Policy

This is an extremely ASTUTE yet DISTURBING analysis of current and future US foreign policy.

What is the US’s future global role?

Will there be future interventionist wars?

How long do we remain in Iraq and Syria?

Is there even a reasonable chance that the US would defend Ukraine against Russia or Taiwan against China?

Does Biden’s current foreign policy team have enough credibility — given the OPTICS of the Afghanistan withdrawal — to still conduct foreign policy?

Have we witnessed a WATERSHED MOMEMNT?  Is the US — global hegemon since 1945 — now in retreat?

WHAT COMES NEXT WILL GO A LONG WAY IN TELLING US.

Saving the Humanities

Indescribably brilliant.

Just watch it.

THIS IS HOW WE TRANSCEND THE CULTURE WARS.

This may be Charles Hugh Smith’s most brilliantly comprehensive analysis yet of the coming collapse of the FINANCIALIZED US ECONOMY.  The four eras he describes — and what each has signified — are LITERALLY self-evident to those of us who experienced them.

His analysis also MIRRORS my own on this subject as I’ve also — and more than once — deconstructed the varying degrees of prosperity over the last 70 years on much the same basis — using EXACTLY the same time frames.  So, needless to say, I’m completely on board here.

The Illusion of Stability, the Inevitability of Collapse

Here are Hughes’s four eras:

• 1950 to 1973 — Genuinely productive prosperity with wages rising faster than inflation.
• 1981 to 1999 — Financialization: Debt and leverage replacing productivity.
• 2000 to 2008 — Increased financialization leading to a debt-asset bubble dependency as a form of “growth.”
• 2008 to the present — Permanent Fed stimulus to keep all asset prices elevated so as to prevent a crash in valuations.

To help make his point, Smith has used a number of EXTREMELY TELLING graphs and charts.

As a table setter, here’s one of them:

While GDP has risen 7-fold, debt has risen 30-fold.  And that GDP rise doesn’t OCCUR AT ALL without MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF DEBT.

THIS SIMPLY CAN’T CONTINUE.

Write your own caption. After all, it looks like a Rorschach blot.

I’m not big on financial predictions, but I do pay attention to them so as to be able at least to measure the landscape of financial opinion.

Predictions aside, Michael Pento is someone whose opinions I respect.  He doesn’t buy the current INFLATION NARRATIVE and sees MASSIVE DEFLATION on the horizon instead.  He’s not even ruling out a DEFLATIONARY DEPRESSION.

Here’s a excerpt from a piece of his on the subject:

“Next year has the potential to be known as the Great Deflation of 2022. This will be engendered by the epiphany that COVID-19 and its mutations have not been vanquished as falsely advertised, the massive $6 trillion fiscal cliff will be in freefall, and the Fed’s tapering of $1.44 trillion per annum of QE down to $0, will be in process.

“Then, the economy will be left with a large number of permanently unemployed people and businesses that have permanently closed their doors. And, the $7.7 trillion worth of unproductive debt incurred during the five quarters from the start of 2020, until Q1 of this year, which the economy must now lug around.

“All this should lead to a stock market that plunges from unprecedentedly high valuations starting next year. And, in the end, that is anything but inflationary. Indeed, what it should lead to is more like a deflationary depression. But the story doesn’t end there. Unfortunately, that will cause government to change Modern Monetary Theory from just a theory to a new mandate for the central bank. And hence, the inflation-deflation, boom-bust cycle will continue…but with greater intensity. The challenge for investors is to be on the correct side of that trade.”

And here’s the piece from which the above three paragraphs were extracted:

The Great Deflation of 2022

May you wind up on the RIGHT SIDE of that trade!

From Christopher Rufo:

“Verizon has launched an internal program teaching that the United States is a fundamentally racist nation and encouraging employees to support a variety of left-wing causes, including ‘defunding the police.’

“According to documents that I have obtained from a whistleblower, Verizon launched the ‘Race & Social Justice’ initiative last year and has created an extensive race reeducation program based on the core tenets of critical race theory, including ‘systemic racism,’ ‘white fragility,’ and “intersectionality.'”

Alas, more evidence of BS flowing downhill into the alligator infested swamps of corporate management.  It will be one sorry day when those corporate alligator jaws snap shut on WOKE HINEYS.

But let Russo tell it.

Critical Race Capitalism

Tricky subject with many bandying about numbers that don’t have any relation to the truth.

One of the topics that routinely comes up on media sites on the Left is the number of unarmed black men killed by police.  The impression generally given — though I’ve never seen ACTUAL NUMBERS discussed — is that it’s a VERY HIGH NUMBER.

A survey done by Skekptic.com in 2019 showed just how high those on the Left estimated that number to be.

As you can see, more than half of those who identified as Liberal at that time believed that 1,000 or more unarmed black men were murdered by police in 2019.  Though completely uninformed, that’s a PRETTY SERIOUS CHARGE in the court of public opinion.

AND A PHENOMENALLY INCORRECT ONE.

In fact, according to policeviolence.org, a reputable, non-partisan, anti-violence research group, there were only 1,126 people killed by police the following year, 2020, in total.  And that includes those of all races, whether armed or unarmed.  And while that’s much too many, it’s a far different number, composition-wise, than the Liberal estimate of 1,000 unarmed black men. 

Among those killed by police in 2020, ONLY 81 IN TOTAL WERE UNARMED: 27 were black; 15, Hispanic; 2, Native American; 2 Asian/Pacific Islander; 31, white; and 4, unknown.

In fact, the ultra-Liberal Washington Post’s data base, indicated only 12 fatal shootings of unarmed black men in 2020.  Yet has anyone from the Post, such as the estimable Eugene Robinson or ubiquitous Phil Rucker ever quoted this number?  Nary a peep.

We all know how RAMPANT DISINFORMATION IS ON THE RIGHT.  So much so that no one’s going to rag on any anchor on CNN or MSNBC for pointing out the EGREGIOUS LIES MOUTHED NIGHTLY by Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson.  But how about a little more FAIR AND BALANCED on the Left?

By not presenting the ENTIRE PICTURE of police violence, CNN and MSNBC are merely aping Fox’s hyper-partisan ratings-boost strategy, degrading themselves as journalists, and leaving their viewers as equally disinformed as the Church of Fox faithful. 

Should you REALLY wish to probe the subject of those shot by police, I would urge you to review carefully both the Skeptic survey and the Police Violence Report, both of which I’ve linked.  They’re extremely illuminating.

Storms

1.

Rain in the offing,
Rhymes dead at birth,
Recompense masking
Its rage.
All who would shudder
Now shudder as one --
To those high above
The good earth. 

2.

Convulsions conscripted
Are girded for gore,
Their avatars painted
Bright red.
The mercies of abbots,
The lessons of sin.
Don't work with the
Bloodthirsty blind.

3.

Those who believe we're
Malevolence-free,
Have never perceived
What they see.
Yet, logic and nuance,
So weak against pain,
May fare even poorer
In wind-driven rain.

JAD, 2021

More on this CRITICAL TOPIC from my favorite magician buster, Charles Hugh Smith.

How’s this for an opening salvo?

“The incentives must change from ‘waste is growth’ to hyper-efficiency, conservation, right to repair and manufactured objects engineered to last a generation or longer and be recyclable at scale.”

Hughes continues:

“As a species, humanity is approaching the end of the past 200 year period of expansion of energy consumption. In the initial stages of this vast expansion, much of the new energy went into positive improvements: rural electrification, enormous leaps in food production and healthcare, and so on.

“But beyond a certain point, energy and resources are being spent on consumption rather than investment, what I call ‘waste is growth:’ once we set energy / resource consumption as the measure of prosperity, vehicles burning fuel in traffic jams, food that has been thrown out, half-empty aircraft and so on are viewed as positive ‘growth’ because more fuel and resources were consumed.

“Needless to say, waste is not growth, it’s squandering precious resources.”

At the same time, conditions are now such that me must decarbonize.  But . . .

“Unfortunately, the anticipated seamless transition to all renewable energy is magical thinking in virtually every way.”

More:

“Renewables are not actually renewable, they wear out and must be replaced, so they are ‘replaceable’ not ‘renewable.’

“All these ‘replaceable’ energy sources consume staggering amounts of minerals, metals and energy to be constructed, maintained, and replaced every 10 to 20 years. (The theoretical lifespan is claimed to be 30 years, but the real-world lifespan is consequentially less.)

“Since all these ‘replaceable’ energy sources are diffuse and intermittent, the energy they generate fluctuates across a wide range and must be concentrated to be stored /used in batteries or mechanical storage (reservoirs with hydro-powered generators, etc.) or chemical storage (converting electricity into hydrogen to be used as a fuel).

“The billions of batteries required to store all this electrical energy must also be replaced every decade or so, and recycling batteries is difficult and costly. There is nothing remotely ‘green’ about mining the planet for lithium, cobalt, etc. or manufacturing billions of batteries.”

Meanwhile, here’s what our ever increasing consumption of hydrocarbons looks like.  And down on the bottom, we see the SCANT CONTRIBUTION from “renewables,” which as Smith points out are not renewable so much as “replaceable:” 

Hughes again:

“The scale required to replace 90 billion barrels of hydrocarbons with diffuse, intermittent energy sources and batteries is difficult to grasp.

“Here is the reality:

‘The annual output of Tesla’s Gigafactory, the world’s largest battery factory, could store three minutes’ worth of annual U.S. electricity demand. It would require 1,000 years of production to make enough batteries for two days’ worth of U.S. electricity demand. Meanwhile, 50–100 pounds of materials are mined, moved, and processed for every pound of battery produced.‘”

Got that? So, even as we must change, we must change in ways THAT MAKE SENSE. Because we can’t keep doing THIS:

Hughes concludes:

“Humanity’s resistance to needed change is understandable, but the irony is we quickly habituate to whatever changes force themselves on us.

“That’s our choice with energy and the post-hydrocarbon era ahead. The incentives must change from ‘waste is growth’ to hyper-efficiency, conservation, right to repair and manufactured objects engineered to last a generation or longer and be recyclable at scale.”

He ends where he began. But we’re at the end as well. Yet, I doubt it augers a better beginning.