An Offer You Can’t Refuse

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

We read to know we’re not alone.

Although that particular truism is often mistakenly attributed to the author C.S. Lewis, it was actually William Nicholson who wrote those words in his 1989 play “Shadowlands”, a story about C.S. Lewis.

Indeed. The power of words. And perhaps many of us out here in the interwebic blogosphere write to know we’re not alone as well.

Especially during times like these.

We use words to comfort and curse, to encourage, to promise, to teach, buy, sell, debate, learn, manipulate, lie, share, seduce, pray, preach, promote, warn, and even survive.

In the aforementioned play, “Shadowlands“, there is another quote that many now reading this may also find relevant to our times:

….pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Why must it be pain? Why can’t he rouse us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be wakened, is the dream that all is well.

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Robert Gore’s Latest

This is what I’ve been doing instead of writing blog articles. My latest book: Everything I Know About Business I Learned From The Godfather, is now available on Amazon as both a paperback and Kindle ebook. From the book:

Chapter 6

Bonds, Not Ties

As rich and powerful as the Godfather becomes, he never loses sight of the reciprocal strands of respect, obligation, honor, and loyalty due family, friends, fellow Sicilians, and the Catholic church. These are not ties that bind. They are bonds, sources of strength, foundational stones of his life and empire. Such bonds have bolstered the human race for most of its history. That they are now under sustained assault would strike Don Corleone as foolishness. Their proposed replacement would strike him as madness.

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PRIME DECEIT

Robert Gore’s new novel is now available to all TBP readers. You know how great his weekly articles are. You know you’ll love this dark, anti-government novel.

Order Prime Deceit today through the TBP Amazon Link.

PRIME DECEIT

What if the Fountain of Youth fell into the wrong hands?

Researcher Ted Wirth and his team of scientists discover a hormone (PHF) that greatly extends the lives of lab mice. The National Institute of Aging Research (NIAR), a government agency, hijacks their research and their mice. The team is told to “forget” the project and never disclose it, under threat of dismissal or worse.

A NAIR experiment at a secret facility confirms that PHF can turn back the clock. President LLoyd L. Lochness sees all sorts of possibilities for PHF. There’s one huge catch, which doesn’t stop Lochness and his minions from concocting a sinister conspiracy.

Two mysterious incidents launch the government’s plot. Ted and his boss, Heather Lindholm, suspect a sordid subterfuge. Blogger Carlos Valencia and his computer genius son, Peter, poke holes in the official story.

When the NIAR asks for help from Ted, Heather, and the scientists, the team plays a dangerous game. Will the conspirators meet their outrageous demand?

Robert Gore’s dark new satire skewers government, corruption, war, and other idiocies. For more information about Prime Deceit, visit his website at www.straightlinelogic.com.

Stucky QOTD: Do Do DO Do Do …. what, exactly?

Today’s question comes by way of Robert Gore’s article HERE   where he takes us on a whirlwind tour starting with King George and ends with Obamacare (and a delicious American Smorgasbord of shit sandwiches in-between) … while discussing how the The Evil Witch of Kankles escaped prosecution, and eventually asks the question;

“TOUGH SHIT WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?”

That’s all I want to know. What are you DOING? Why?  Because I’ve run out of ideas. Maybe someone here can inspire me.

But, many of you can’t follow instructions.  The key work is DO. Look it up if you must.

—If you just want to complain, bitch, or moan about shit, then kindly just STFU.  Plenty of other posts for that fun activity.

— That also applies to you Preppers. Spare us the stories and endless lists of shit ya got.  If prepping was doing then they would call you Doers, but it’s not and, so, you are called Preppers, not Doers. Got it?  Soooo, Hillery escapes scot-free and you go out and buy another box of ammo or can another ten jars of rabbit asses in pickle juice — c’mon, really, what the fuck does that have with DOING anything about Hillcunt?

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The Scourge of Socialism

How many refugees from “workers’ paradises” who are in America will be voting for Uncle Bernie?

Guest post by Robert Gore, at Straight Line Logic

Every socialist is a disguised dictator
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Human progress has been three steps forward, two steps back. That a non-fringe candidate of a major political party in the United States can call himself a socialist constitutes a leap backward. That it can happen after a century of socialistic horrors: impoverishment, ruination, tyranny, war, and tens of millions dead, bespeaks not just deadly ignorance and delusion, but depravity.

Socialism is a political system whereby the state owns or controls the means of production for goods and services. It can be partial—government control of some industries, or total—government control of all industries. According to Marx, who advocated the total version, the goods and services would be produced by each according to his or her ability, and distributed according to each individual’s need: production severed from distribution. No particular acuity is necessary to see the fatal flaw. The “needy”—and those who garner political power by distributing goods and services to them—are all for this system, but what’s in it for the able? They have to be coerced to produce, and something has to be done with those who object or refuse to submit.

Coercion sounds like slavery and that something has to be done sounds like repression. That is what socialism has produced—slavery, concentration camps, and slaughter—on a scale unimaginable prior to the twentieth century. Once you reach 10 million killed you’ve plumbed the depths of evil. Additional deca-millions are redundant blood on your hands, but the Titans in the Socialist pantheon—Lenin, Stalin, and Mao—killed around 100 million between them, while lesser lights like Pol Pot and the Kim dynasty in North Korea killed single digit millions. The numbers are exclusive of war dead.

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Life, or Death?

Guest Post by Robert Gore

On July 16, 1945, a plutonium implosion atomic bomb was detonated in the desert north of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Within a month, a uranium-based and a plutonium-based atomic bomb were detonated above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. Atomic fission, and later fusion, became the basis for the most deadly arsenal ever assembled, giving the US government the power to destroy the world several times over, making it history’s most powerful institution. The Soviet Union’s development of its own potentially earth-destroying nuclear arsenal in the 1950s challenged US power. Per Lord Acton’s famous dictum, absolute power produced absolute corruption on both sides of the Cold War.

Their leaders saw the world in terms of an amoral chess match. Other nations’ governments were pawns in their strategies for global domination and individual lives were of no consequence. Intelligence agencies rose to preeminence, employing sabotage, deception, propaganda, political manipulation, revolution, regime change, and assassination in foreign countries, supposedly excused by the imperatives of fighting the other side’s nefarious designs. Although there was a fair amount of playing one side against the other, brutally repressive autocrats willing to ostensibly align with either side received diplomatic, financial, intelligence, and military support from their benefactors.

Vietnam fully displayed the immoral depths the US government had plumbed. It engaged in regime change, assassination, deception of the American people, drug running, secret bombing of countries with which the US was not at war, false flag terrorism, torture, and war crimes—including rape and murder—against civilians. None of this was unique to Vietnam, either before or after. Estimates of the total dead range from 1.3 to 3.8 million. After spending trillions (in today’s dollars) and with 58,000 military deaths and 153,000 wounded, US forces left Vietnam having accomplished none of their objectives (its remaining partisans still refuse to use the word “defeat”). South Vietnam was eventually conquered by North Vietnam.

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A Mania of Manias

Hat tip to Billy

Guest Post by Robert Gore

On December 5, 1996, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan asked: “But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?” Greenspan was worried about the stock market, particularly the booming tech sector, but for the next three years they just got more exuberant and more irrational.

The subsequent crash took 38 percent off the DJIA and 77 percent off the tech-heavy NASDAQ in a couple of years. Speculators who were short the tech stocks and indexes made buy-an-island profits, but most of them had already been carried out on stretchers. The NASDAQ had gone from 1492.4 in 1998 to 5048.62 at its 2000 high, a gain of 238 percent. Up to the crash, speculators justifiably said, “This is insanity,” bet accordingly, and lost their shirts. The NASDAQ bottomed in 2002 at 1139.9, below where it had begun its final lift-off in 1998. Greenspan had been derided for his “irrational exuberance” speech for three years, but by 2002 he was hailed as a seer.

Greenspan’s speech incorporated no extraordinary analytical insight, merely recognition that in a finite world, off-the-chart returns can’t last forever, or as the old traders’ adage puts it: trees don’t grow to the sky. The paradox of Greenspan is that he made such a public utterance about a financial condition that he bore responsibility for perpetuating. He has never acknowledged what became known as the “Greenspan put,” first instituted in response to the stock market crash of 1987. Every significant financial perturbation was met with more and cheaper money, and the Greenspan Fed even launched a preemptive strike against a threat that never materialized. (Anybody remember the Y2K disaster?) That pre-millennium largess sparked the equity indexes’ final spasmodic rapture before the tech wreck.

Greenspan’s flood of money after that wreck launched the great housing bubble, and again those who muttered, “This is insanity,” and bet accordingly lost their shirts—until they didn’t. The tech bubble had been fed by dreams of technologies most of the dreamers didn’t understand, a belief in magic and a “new economy”. There’s nothing magic about a house. It’s a wasting asset, and for most of U.S. history it has been regarded as a place to live, not as an ATM, investment, or retirement nest egg. And certainly not as a speculative asset, bought on leverage, held for a short time, and flipped for a profit.

So there was not even a belief in technological magic to “excuse” the housing bubble, just a lot of people on TV, in academia, on Wall Street, and in the government, proclaiming that house prices never go down (they did in the Great Depression), so buy one, or several, or many, before prices went up next month. But for the easy, cheap money spewed by the Greenspan and Bernanke Feds, the housing bubble would never have happened. When it burst the DJIA lost 54 percent from its 2007 peak to its 2009 low. Many of the derivatives created on the financial back end were worthless. Some of the shorts found themselves on the Forbes 400, but not before they had suffered substantial losses. It’s tough to time a bursting bubble.

Which brings us to the present day. If the tech mania was based on magic, and the housing mania was based on a supposed fact that was historically untrue, today’s mania is a mania of manias, interlinked and resting on premises that are patently illogical, contradicted by both the historical record and current experience. Those premises are: central planning works, government debt promotes prosperity, and economic growth stems from central banks buying that debt with money they create from thin air. On these premises rest manias in governments, their debts, and central banking.

If central planning worked, there would still be a USSR and China would not have tossed Mao’s brand of communism into the dustbin of history. These historical bastions of non-prosperity had to resort to “demand management.” When their economies were unable to provide the basic necessities of life, their enlightened rulers slaughtered millions. The US imported central planning with the Great Depression, but it worked no better here than it had for Stalin. Since then, government failures have been legion while the Information Revolution has transformed the economy, but the belief in central planning—and hostility towards markets and the profit motive—is unshakeable. Millions supported Obamacare, a big step towards centrally planned and provided medicine, probably after reading about it on their iphones.

The term “developed country” now refers to those countries whose governments have developed mountains of debt and future commitments they have no hope of repaying. The valleys are demographic; most of those nations have birth rates that aren’t replacing the current aging populations, and fall far short of providing a sufficient workforce to fund the old folks’ benefits. Japan has the dubious honor of having one of the highest mountains—its government’s debt is over 240 percent of its GDP, and one of the deepest valleys. Its birthrate is among the world’s lowest, and it stringently restricts immigration.

Most government debt doesn’t go towards projects that will produce an economic return; it funds consumption. The belief (hope?) persists that such consumption somehow leads to economic growth, although a weak “recovery” in the face of the greatest global governmental debt binge in history offers no support. Germany, which has incurred relatively little debt since the financial crisis, has had one of the world’s best-performing economies, while Japan, which has buried itself in IOUs, just reentered recession.

The debt binge hasn’t worked out as planned, but the quack economic central planners have more snake oil: central bank monetization of that debt to suppress interest rates. The Japanese central bank has monetized its government’s debt at low rates for years. It is currently buying 100 percent of the government’s issuance, and the yield on its ten-year bond dropped to .31 percent, but Japan has endured serial recessions. If central bank balance sheet expansion and low interest rates were the road to riches, why not monetize everything and create universal wealth? The absurdity of that proposition is self-evident, but equity markets the world over rally every time a central banker hints of more balance sheet expansion and continuing microscopic interest rates (see “Ms. Yellen Whispers Sweet Nothings in Mr. Market’s Ear,” SLL, 12/19/14)

Tulips, the South Sea Bubble, the new economy, the housing bubble—at some point the greatest fool has bought into an absurdity and a market that could only go one way goes the other way, precipitously. If the tech wreck was a jump off a thirty-meter platform and the 2008 financial crisis a plunge off the cliffs of Acapulco, the end of this multiple-absurdity mania of manias will be a swan dive from the top of the Empire State Building into a two-foot wading pool.

Seismic economic and financial upheaval will shake political foundations around the world. What will governments and central banks do? They are already buried in debt, and interest rates are at zero or below. Yet their constituents have bought into the absurdities of their supposed omniscience and omnipotence. They will, like spoiled children, demand immediate solutions to decades-in-the-making problems caused by central planning, and its attendant debt promotion and central bank machinations.

Of course, the same prediction could have been made at the end of 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009 (and SLL made it at the end of some of those years), and it may be a just a prediction, not a reality, at the end of 2015. A good mechanic can listen to an engine’s rattle and correctly predict the car will break down, but not necessarily say whether it will be 50 or 500 miles down the road. Who knows when the jerry-rigged contraption known as the global economy will fall apart? It’s belching blue smoke. The oil market serves as a reminder that not all assets can be monetized and not all prices “administered” by the central planners. It may also be the dashboard red light that goes on just before the engine gives its death rattle and the car stops (see “Oil Ushers in the Depression,” SLL, 12/1/14, and “Oil Economics, Part 2,” SLL, 12/3/14).. This time, however, there will be no deficit-financing or central-bank-monetization AAA tow truck a cellphone call away to come rescue it.

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN THE GOVERNMENT WAS SMALL, THE NATIONAL DEBT A ROUNDING ERRROR, AND  THERE WAS NO CENTRAL BANK. HOW DID SURVIVE? READ ROBERT GORE’S EPIC NOVEL OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND FIND OUT!

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