This entire government shutdown farce is nothing but bullshit political optics. First of all, why is the American taxpayer paying to employ 800,000 non-essential government drones? Where I work, if you are non-essential you are not needed. Obama is trying to make the American people feel the pain of a government shutdown. Therefore, he is using government employees to block access to places where government employees are never needed. He is spending more of your money to keep you from accessing government run properties.
The longer this fake shutdown goes on, the more it reveals that we can do without the 800,000 drones. Our lives aren’t being impacted by these drones getting a paid vacation on our dime. The lowlifes in Congress have already agreed to provide back pay to these people while they sit at home and watch Jerry Springer. Will they owe the taxpayer the days they didn’t work? Not a fucking chance. They have probably filed for unemployment too. Will they have to pay that back when they receive their back pay? I doubt it.
Let’s assume each of these non-essential government drones is costing the taxpayer $100,000 in salary and benefits. That is probably conservative. I just found $80 billion of annual cost savings. Sounds like a lot, but let’s consider it in relation to the big picture. Your leaders spend $3.7 trillion of your money annually. That is $10 billion per day. We could fire those 800,000 non-essential government drones and it would amount to 8 days of government spending. Let that sink in for a moment.
I picture the government as Jaws and myself as Sheriff Brody.
No matter what ultimate bullshit compromise is reached by the lowlifes in Washington DC, it won’t even make a dent in what really needs to be done. This boat is going to sink.
Park Ranger: ‘We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can’
Wesley Pruden of the Washington Times reported yesterday that “the Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice.”
It is difficult to imagine that shutting people out of parks and privately owned concessions has to do with anything other than politics. One of these “whims” is the parking lot at Mount Vernon, which is “privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.”
A Park Service ranger in Washington said that
“We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”
Steven Dinan of the Washington Times reported today that Bruce O’Connell, the owner of the Pisgah Inn, which holds a concession on the Blue Ridge Parkway was told to “cease operations.” He said
“The level of intimidation and coercion became such that we backed down. Then after sleeping on it, our own convictions took front and center and we decided to reopen.”
According to mounting sources, President Obama has been hard at work trying to make the public feel the “shutdown,” despite the fact that eighty percent of federal employees are still working. Josh Barro of Business Insider reported this week,
“…of about 4.1 million people who work for the federal government, about 80% will still be expected to show up for work.”
The owner of the “privately run, funded and staffed” Claude Moore Colonial Farm said that “we think they have closed us down illegally…” as reported today by J.D. Tuccille of reason.com. The staff was even “threatened with arrest” if they showed up for work, despite the fact that they are not government employees. The owner said,
“We have had to cancel every event at the Farm this week so we have already lost more than $15,000 in operating income because October is the busiest month of the year for us.”
Hans Bader of OpenMarket.org compiled many of these distrubing stories today. He reported that sites that were previously open without guards, such as the Lincoln Memorial, now have guards assigned to keep out the public. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is now “fenced off” despite the fact that it was previously open 24/7 without guards. Bader writes,
“the government is actually expanding its presence at national monuments in order to drive people away, at increased expense to taxpayers.” [added emphasis]
Bader also reflected at Liberty Unyielding on the politics surrounding the sequester, where similar tactics were used.
Additionally, Patrik Jonsson of the CSMonitor reported today that the National Park Service has rebuked “offers by state and private officials to help keep the Grand Canyon and other places open.” It is clear that the goal of keeping the public away from national (and privately owned) parks and monuments is a disturbing, expensive and childish political move.
Does this Fourth Turning appear to be picking up momentum? As the economy continues to spiral downward, Wall Street continues to loot and pillage, and Washington DC politicians continue to do nothing but posture and bloviate, people have begun to lose their minds. In the last week we’ve had a man lose it and kill 12 people in Washington DC. Yesterday we had a woman lose it and get gunned down by DC police. Today we have a man self-immolating on the Mall in Washington DC.
It seems they have the right place. The next step is likely to be people losing it and assassinating politicians and bankers.
The MSM completely ignored the self-immolation of Tom Ball in New Hampshire over a year ago. There was a complete MSM blackout on the story. Only the alternate truth telling media like TBP picked up the story:
Not this time. When someone self immolates themselves on the National Mall during a government shutdown, it can’t be ignored. The self-immolation of a man in Tunisia started the Arab Spring revolutions in 2010. The Middle East has been ablaze in violence and revolution since then.
Is this past week of people going off the deep end in the nation’s capital the start of the American Spring? Are people across the country going to start losing it?
I know one thing for sure. Fourth Turnings never fizzle out. They grow in intensity and in violence.
Coming to a street corner near you.
Man Sets Himself On Fire On National Mall, Near White House
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/04/2013 17:25 -0400
Yesterday it was a shooting at a runaway mom driver that shut down the Capitol area for hours. Today, while there have been no shootings in D.C., moments ago we just got news of a self-immolation in the middle of the National Mall, where a man allegedly doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire, suffering life-threatening injuries according to the DC Fire Department.
NBC Washington reports that “Passersby on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., ripped off their shirts to help extinguish the flames after a man apparently tried to set himself on fire Friday, witnesses and authorities said. The man was conscious and breathing when he was flown by helicopter to Washington Medical Center, D.C. police said. There was no immediate report on his condition. The incident, which was reported at 4:24 p.m. ET, occurred on Seventh Street Southwest near the National Air and Space Museum, U.S. Park Police said. Witnesses told several media organizations, including NBC Washington, that they saw the man pour gasoline on himself from a red canister and then set himself ablaze. Police said they couldn’t confirm those reports. Nearby joggers stopped and ripped off their shirts to smother the flames, NBC Washington reported.”
The burned man was promptly carried off the Mall using a helicopter.
A fire official says a man has been flown to the hospital after setting himself on fire on the National Mall.
Fire crews responded Friday afternoon to a report of a man on fire at 7th and Madison streets. A witness says she saw a man dump a red canister of gasoline on his head and then set himself on fire.
D.C. Fire Department spokesman Tim Wilson says the man has life-threatening injuries.
As a diversion from all the government shutdown lunacy, consider a very common home upgrade in America – full window replacement.
We’re putting in new windows. Our home is about 15 years old and the original windows are the typical lousy builder’s grade from that period. Many have since cracked or have condensation between the panes and the manufacturer is out of business so no replacements under warranty. I know in the summer we’re losing money on cooling costs and in the winter, there’s a ton of money going out the windows – literally. I can feel and hear wind whistling through some of the windows when it’s real windy and at night I can feel the draft. That being said, for such a large undertaking like a full window replacement, you’ve gotta run the numbers, right?
ROI on Window Replacement
The reality is that even though the windows are terrible and new windows would be much more efficient, I will never make my money back on this “investment”. Let’s be honest. Most people want new stuff and justify it to themselves by claiming they’re saving all this money on energy. Buying a new Tesla? You’ll never break even if you drive it for 100 years vs just buying a small, cheap fuel-efficient conventional vehicle. Putting solar panels on your roof in the Northeast? Doubt it. We have a family member that paid thousands of dollars to convert their house from electric to gas – and they’re moving within a couple years. Horrible, total waste of money.
So, let me show you my assumptions and calculated ROI (return on investment) and NPV (net present value) – both are negative.
It sounds like our police state thugs are attempting to spin this story so they don’t come across as incompetent boobs who murdered a black woman for driving recklessly.
When did Post Partum Depression become a mental illness? Don’t millions of woman get this every year? I guess we should ban all women who have recently had a baby from driving cars.
We were told that the car rammed the front gate at the White House. Sorry. The video shows no ramming of anything. Her front end is not damaged in any way.
We were told the perpetrator had a gun and was shooting. Sorry. Another MSM bullshit lie. The only people firing guns were the donut eaters.
We were told that a police officer was injured by the suspect. Sorry. Barney Fife ran into his own police barrier at 70 miles per hour and destroyed his police car.
Shooting a black, unarmed, depressed, female with a baby in the backseat really rallies the country around our police state thugs. What would we do without them?
Poor Chris Matthews. He had gotten that old tingle up his leg hoping it was a white middle aged male Tea Party terrorist, related to Ron Paul, with an AK-47 trying to take out the black guy in the White House.
Maybe next time Chris.
You can rest easy now. We are safe from depressed black female dental hygenist terrorists.
The woman was believed to be Miriam Carey, 34, a dental hygienist from Stamford, Conn., authorities told the woman’s family, according to a family spokesman.
Police earlier said they were witholding the name of the driver of the car involved in the chase pending positive identification and notification of next of kin.
Authorities said the woman led police on a chase down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol after ramming a gate at the White House.
Authorities described Carey has having a “mental illness.”
“She had post-partum depression after having the baby” last August, said the woman’s mother, Idella Carey.
She added, “A few months later, she got sick. She was depressed. … She was hospitalized.”
Carey had a 1-year-old daughter named Erica, her mother said. Police confirmed that a 1-year-old girl was taken from the car and put in “protective custody.”
Idella Carey said her daughter had “no history of violence” and she did not know why she was in Washington, D.C. She said she believed Carey was taking the little girl to a doctor’s appointment today in Connecticut.
Dr. Steven Oken, her boss of eight years, described Carey as a “non-political person” who was “always happy.”
“I would never in a million years believe that she would do something like this,” he said. “It’s the furthest thing from anything I would think she would do, especially with her child in the car. I am floored that it would be her.”
A neighbor, Erin Jackson, said she believed Carey lived in the Stamford home with the baby and the girl’s father. Asked if she believed Carey suffered from a mental illness, Jackson said “absolutely.”
Jackson recognized the black Infinity sedan seen on television from the incident as resembling Carey’s car. She said the woman’s tires recently were slashed in an incident in Connecticut.
Police, including FBI and bomb disposal units, surrounded a home in Stamford Thursday evening that authorities say is linked to the investigation, but won’t give specifics. Police there said they were awaiting a search warrant from Washington, though 50 people from the apartment building already were being evacuated for the night.
Cops said Carey eluded police after they stopped her car and drew their guns. When she continued to flee, she drove “very erratically, very dangerously,” said Senate Sergeant at Arms Terrance Gainer.
She ultimately rammed a police car and was shot by police without exiting the car, Gainer said. Two officers, one from the Capitol Police and one from Secret Service, were injured in the incident.
You may have heard that Silk Road – the truly free online market – was taken down today, by the FBI. In response, the price of Bitcoin crashed 24%.
Yet here I am – just a few hours later, feeling very optimistic. Why? Because the philosophy of freedom just showed itself to be massively stronger than statism and its “don’t think, just obey” philosophy.
Here’s What Happened
As I was finishing my lunch, I saw a story posted on the takedown/crash. I did a bit of checking and conversed with a friend, and then hustled over to a place I know where crypto-anarchists hang out online.
These guys were already talking about replacing Silk Road, and doing a better job of it.
Forget about the drugs aspect of this – I don’t care for drugs and neither do the people I listened in on – they just want to build free markets.
Contrast that to a financial site, where I found a couple of Bitcoin haters, a Fed trying to supercharge as much fear as he/she could, and several people trying to buy Bitcoin at its lows, or lamenting that they were out of extra cash to buy right away.
But here’s the interesting part: In the face of an orchestrated attack (and you can be sure that the Feds arranged the day’s events for maximum fear – that’s what they do), even these people, within minutes, were walking forward, not backward.
A Better Philosophy Wins Out
Arguably, the greatest triumph of a new philosophy has to be that of the early Christians (of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd centuries AD), they simply would not be stopped, no matter what was thrown at them.
And why wouldn’t they turn back? Because the Roman way was ridiculous and barbaric. Their gods were vile, vain, sometimes stupid and often cruel. Who wants to worship that? These Christians – whatever their faults or virtues – had found a God who loved them, who wished to help and enlighten them, who said they were meant to be free and prosperous.
Which way would you choose?
The Romans persecuted them and sometimes killed them, but they would not be turned around. These people chose the better philosophy, and in the end, they won.
Today, I saw the same thing, wrapped in modern circumstances.
Freedom-minded people are not stopping, are not abandoning their views. And why should they? Shall we go back to the idiocy and self-contradictory life of worshiping the state? Of pretending that robbery is somehow – magically – not robbery when the government does it?
Our minds have been removed from the state’s intimidation and conditioning. Shall we go back to believing lies and repeating vapid slogans for the rest of our lives?
There are real reasons why individuals move from bondage to liberty, but very seldom the reverse.
The Bottom Line Facts
At the end of all the discussions, all the fears, all the questions, all of the explaining to newbs and concerned friends, stand these facts:
Our philosophy is better than theirs. We offer men and women truth, understanding, compassion (the real kind), and strong, direct relationships. The state offers punishment, fear, an occasional promise of plunder, and intrusion into every relationship in your life.
Our people are better than theirs. Not because we were born better, but because finding and living according to truth produces better people than blind obedience and fear of the lash.
We are not quitting. We can’t. We won’t.
Yes, there may be bruises and even blood along the way, but like the first Christians, our people do not turn back – they continue regardless.
We’ve come out of the state’s cultivated darkness, and we are moving into more and more light. Why would we want to go back to where we were? Even if we tried to do it, could we really stick with it? Could our minds really fit back into their old restraints?
This is why freedom will win, my friends: The genie is out of the bottle, and the Internet has spread the message to the four corners of the Earth. It’s a better message. It produces better people.
And in the end, we will win.
[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]
Pandemonium in Washington DC. The Secret Service had to make Obama leave the 16th green while attempting a 50 foot putt. One of the brilliant Zero Hedge analysts has already figured out the motive of the shooter. The first victim of Obamacare.
“Looks like someone already got their 1st Obamacare Bronze Plan co-pay bill and simply lost it.”
GODDAMN IT !!! 3 FUCKING DAYS ON THE COMPUTER with nothing to drink and eat but Red Bull and Meth AND WHEN I FINALLY GET THROUGH I HAVE TO PAY FOR IT ??????……and to make it worse…..NO FREE iPHONE THAT RUBS MY BALLS AND MAKES ME WAFFLES????
WHERE’S MY GUN ????
CAPITOL IS OPEN; LOCKDOWN ENDS AFTER SHOOTING
FEMALE SUSPECT REPORTED DEAD ON SCENE AT US CAPITAL: SOURCE
CAPITOL SHOOTING STARTED WHEN WOMAN TRIED TO RAM GATE AT WHITE HOUSE, THEN FLED. WAS SHOT WHILE TRYING TO HIT OFFICER. CBS.
Pete Williams: Driver in black car tried to breach White House gate, was pursued to Capitol Hill, shots exchanged near 2nd / Constitution
Let the spin begin. You gotta love $70,000 Obama subsidized green machines that spontaneously burst into flames and can’t be put out with water. What’s not to like? I’m sure those batteries are wonderful for the environment. At least you’ll feel good about the earth as you and your family are incinerated. CNBC with breaking news from Jimmy Cramer. This is a buying opportunity. They are selling 20,000 cars per year and the stock should surely be selling at $200 per share. Wait until they make profits. Meanwhile, you can roast those marshmellows on the turnpike.
Car-B-Q: Tesla Admits Model S Inferno Started In Battery Pack
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/03/2013 07:54 -0400
In what can hardly be encouraging news to all the cult members holding the priced to immaculate conception Tesla stock, the unverified YouTube video clip posted yesterday showing the Tesla Model S aka “the safest car in America” (how is that kickbacks-for-awards thing at NHTSA going anyway?) engulfed in a flaming inferno, has just been authenticated by Tesla, and what’s worse not only was there indeed a fire but it originated in the worst possible place: the battery pack. Where it goes from worse to worst is that once on fire (the car, not the stock) “water seemed to intensify the fire.” It remains to be seen if the new and free car option: “Spontaneous Combustion” will have a similar effect on the company’s stock.
A fire that destroyed a Tesla electric car near Seattle began in the vehicle’s battery pack, officials said Wednesday, creating challenges for firefighters who tried to put out the flames.
Company spokeswoman Liz Jarvis-Shean said the fire Tuesday was caused by a large metallic object that directly hit one of the battery pack’s modules in the pricey Model S. The fire was contained to a small section at the front of the vehicle, she said, and no one was injured.
Shares of Tesla Motors Inc. fell more than 6 percent Wednesday after an Internet video showed flames spewing from the vehicle, which Tesla has touted as the safest car in America.
The liquid-cooled 85 kilowatt-hour battery in the Tesla Model S is mounted below the passenger compartment floor and uses lithium-ion chemistry similar to the batteries in laptop computers and mobile phones. Investors and companies have been particularly sensitive to the batteries’ fire risks, especially given issues in recent years involving the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid car and Boeing’s new 787 plane.
It gets better: just as the Fisker Karma was found to have a Gremlin-like attavism toward water, especially in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy when underwater cars would suddenly catch fire, so the Tesla S
In an incident report released under Washington state’s public records law, firefighters wrote that they appeared to have Tuesday’s fire under control, but the flames reignited. Crews found that water seemed to intensify the fire, so they began using a dry chemical extinguisher.
Yeah, when water “intensifies” a fire, you have a big problem, safest car in the world award notwithstanding. The bad news continues:
Firefighters arrived within 3 minutes of the first call. It’s not clear from records how long the firefighting lasted, but crews remained on scene for 2 1/2 hours.
Tesla said the flames were contained to the front of the $70,000 vehicle due to its design and construction.
“This was not a spontaneous event,” Jarvis-Shean said. “Every indication we have at this point is that the fire was a result of the collision and the damage sustained through that.”
Ironically, every one has already made up their mind about what caused the fire, even though “There was too much damage from the fire to see what damage debris may have caused, Webb said.”
In other words, let’s come up with anything that prevents the stock from getting obliterated now that the most overpriced car company in the world is suddenly the recently bankrupt Fisker Carma.
The standard wisdom on gold is that it does well in times of economic bad news such as in the 1970s, a period of stagflation and recessions, when the yellow metal rose from $35/oz to peak at $850/oz in 1980. But this time, Don Coxe, a portfolio adviser to BMO Asset Management, believes, things are different. In this interview with The Gold Report, Coxe explains why gold will rise when the economy improves.
The Gold Report: Are the days of easy money drawing to a close?
Don Coxe: I don’t think so. Even if the Federal Reserve begins to taper quantitative easing, the front of the curve is going to stay at zero interest rates. A trillion dollars is going through the Fed’s balance sheet, which works its way through the system. As long as the Fed keeps interest rates at zero, it’s easy money.
TGR: Will overt monetary inflation return any time soon?
DC: It will return when we have sustained economic growth. The Eurozone has been the big drag. It is definitely stronger than it was a year ago. The Eurozone has lots of problems, but it is experiencing economic growth despite the European Central Bank reducing its balance sheet in the last 12 months by almost exactly the same percentage amount that the Fed increased its balance sheet. This says that it has lots of firepower if it needs it. In addition, the Eurozone government deficits are lower than ours in terms of percentage of GDP. The Eurozone actually, despite all its highly publicized problems, has improved its financial shape relative to ours.
Also, in the last 12 months, Japan, the world’s third-biggest economy, has gone from negative growth to strongly positive growth. It is doing that by printing yen at a prodigious rate. The days of easy money are going strong.
TGR: If inflation returns, will it first appear in goods or services?
DC: In goods. If I had to pick the one point at which we’ll start to see the change, it’s when the razor-thin inventory-to-sales ratio comes under strain. Corporations are controlled by people who learned in business school over the last 20 years that the first thing to manage is inventories. This way they don’t have to worry about prices going up and don’t use corporate cash to finance an inventory that may decline in value. Therefore, when things change, it will show up in the pressure that comes because companies have so little inventory on hand. Corporations will decide that they’ve got to invest in more inventory because they’ve got more demand.
TGR: Do you think that will shake loose the vast amount of capital that’s being retained by the multinationals?
DC: It will shake loose some of it, but the big thing is it will come because prices are starting to rise. The two reinforce each other.
TGR: What do increases in monetary inflation and capital growth mean for gold?
DC: Gold rose along with the Fed balance sheet for years. The two have decoupled in the last two years. I believe the reason is people have just thrown in the towel that there will ever be inflation. If you’re “Waiting for Godot,” at some point you can reach the conclusion that Godot may never come.
TGR: Should investors bet on gold’s return to previous highs or something in that direction?
DC: I don’t think we’re going to see anything like the double-digit inflation that we saw back in the 1970s. The big difference was the tremendous power of unions then. They all had cost of living adjustments in their contracts; the Consumer Price Index (CPI) would rise in a quarter, then automatically wage rates would increase, and the two fed off each other. The weakened power of unions today has meant that we don’t have an automatic reinforcement right at the core of the system.
TGR: Let’s talk about monopolies and competition and why does the focus of big investors shift from growth to income?
DC: I’m not convinced that we’ve got a lot of monopolies out there. OPEC is no longer able to control oil prices, for example, because its share is no longer large enough to give it freedom on pricing. I believe that oil fracking will gradually start spreading from the US to other parts of the world. We don’t have that monopoly, which was the big one back in the 1970s that made it possible for OPEC to quadruple the price of oil. A quadrupling of the price of oil here is impossible because the global economy would collapse with a doubling of oil prices.
TGR: Are companies borrowing money at cheap rates to increase dividends and buy back stock? And, if so, how does that affect the system?
DC: Yes, companies are basically removing from the system what I believe is the core of capitalism, that corporate cash is used to grow a business. Investors pay a high price-earnings ratio for companies because they believe the companies can reinvest that cash and sustain their growth. When we see that corporate cash is being used to buy back stock and pay dividends, the decision-making force in the system becomes stockholders redeploying cash. In the past it was the corporations themselves through their retained earnings and effective reinvestment that drove the system.
If money that people got in dividends was invested in shares of companies that were issuing new stock in order to grow their business, then the whole system would not be losing the money. When you have a system where corporate treasurers do not assume strong future growth and they assume that these zero interest rates are going to continue for a long time, the incentive to retain earnings and plan on capital expenditures (capex) goes away.
Capex is putting money out at great cost, where companies get no immediate returns from it, whether it’s building a new building or opening up a whole area of the country. When you take that out of the system, the result is that you turn the system on its head. It used to be that the companies would, when they had the cash, decide how much was needed for capex; after that they figured out how much they would payout in dividends. The decision makers within the companies are no longer focused on creating overall economic growth through capex and expanding production.
TGR: Are we in a triple-dip or a quadruple-dip recession here?
DC: No, I think we’re coming out of it, but we’ve come out of it at a gigantic cost. The Fed had to quadruple its balance sheet, which raises all sorts of problems. We have no precedent in history of this kind of expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet.
The ratio of paper wealth to GDP is so high at a time when it’s going to be difficult for corporations to expand because, as I said, they will need a large amount of capex to meet rising demand at a time when there’s all that money out there. I would regard that as a virtual guarantee that at some point we’re going to see inflation.
This time inflation won’t come from rising wages. It will come from rising demand and the inability of corporations to swiftly respond to that demand. The technology industry can expand in a hurry because it keeps coming out with new products, but for most of the rest of the economy, it takes a while to build a plant and get the machinery ready and test it out before there actually is any production. That period of time, if you’ve got strong demand because there’s so much paper money, is the moment at which you will see inflation coming.
TGR: How will that affect gold?
DC: It will deal with the problem of faith in gold. When gold tracked the growth in the monetary base, which it did so well, there was a general conviction based on Milton Friedman’s theories that expanding the monetary base too fast eventually translates into inflation. Inflation is harder to stop than it is to just watch start growing.
We will see that interest rates will have to rise because of another group that has not been heard from in a long time: bond vigilantes. They are threatened with extinction. It will be a combination of rising interest rates and rising prices that will get people to say, “Ah ha! Milton Friedman was right after all—if you print the money, eventually you’re going to have the inflation.”
TGR: When you talk about bond vigilantes, are you talking about junk bonds or what’s known as private equity?
DC: The bond vigilantes work primarily on government bonds because they are the ones they can trade most effectively. Junk bonds are a small part of the market. With inflation the bond vigilantes sell off their 30- and 10-year bonds and move down to the 2-year note. At that point the cost of capital for expansion rises through the system because corporations can use short-term cash for some of their work, but they tend to use long-term borrowing from banks and the bond market for major projects. The cost of building those projects increases because of the steep yield curve.
TGR: Do you consider yourself to be a bear or a bull on gold?
DC: I am neutral in the short term. I’m not a bear. I’m a bull in the long term because I believe it’s not a question of if but when all this money printing eventually comes to haunt us. Gold as an asset class is so tiny in relation to the vast expansion of money around the world. With the printing that’s gone on, China has had to expand its renminbi supplies to prevent the currency from soaring relative to the dollar.
TGR: You are appearing at the upcoming Casey Fall Summit. Are you going to talk about gold there and will it be more or less what you just said?
DC: Yes. I am going to point out that the big story for gold is up until now gold has been only a bad news story. The reason why it’s in trouble right now is there always seems to be bad news in terms of inflation. People say if inflation hasn’t come now with the quadrupling of the Fed’s balance sheet, it’s never going to come, and the Fed is going to have to keep on pouring out more money because the economy isn’t growing.
When the economy starts to grow all of a sudden because, as I said earlier, of the inventory cycle, we are going to start to see inflation. Gold will become a good news story in the sense it will be responding to strong economic news at a time of massive liquidity, which translates into inflation. The fact that we’ve had all that money printing, which has only prevented us from going down into a pit, at such time as this actually leads to good economic growth. That is the point at which we’re going to see people wanting to have gold. It’s because we didn’t get the direct pass over of the money printing into rising prices that gave people a loss of faith saying, “Well, if it hasn’t come with quadrupling the Fed’s balance sheet, it’s never going to come.”
TGR: Given that, is it a good idea for investors to buy gold stocks while they’re available at basement prices?
DC: I believe that everybody should have gold insurance now. The question varies from investor to investor. What we have is an extremely high-risk central bank policy in the world, and it’s high risk based on monetarism. I believe monetarism will prove to be right because all past experiments with paper money eventually led to inflation and monetary collapse. At some point the fear of that will come. You need gold for insurance, but this time the payoff will come when the economy improves; in the past when everything was falling all around you, commodity prices were soaring out of sight. We had three recessions in the 1970s and gold went from $35 an ounce to $850. But this time, gold is going to appreciate when we start getting 3% GDP growth.
TGR: Thank you for your insights.
Don Coxe has 40 years of institutional investment experience in Canada and the US. As a strategist and investor, he has been engaged at the senior level in global capital markets through every recession and boom since the onset of stagflation in 1972. He has worked on the buy side and the sell side in many capacities and has managed both bond and equity portfolios and served as CEO, CIO, and research director. From his office in Chicago, Coxe heads up the Global Commodity Strategy investment management team, a collaboration of Coxe Advisors and BMO Global Asset Management. He is advisor to the Coxe Commodity Strategy Fund and the Coxe Global Agribusiness Income Fund in Canada, and to the Virtus Global Commodities Stock Fund in the US. Coxe has consistently been named as a top portfolio strategist by Brendan Wood International; in 2011, he was awarded a lifetime achievement award and was ranked number one in the 2007, 2008, and 2009 surveys.
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Do you need any more proof about who is calling the shots in this country than the fact that the CEOs of the TOO BIG TO TRUST Wall Street are meeting face to face with Obama in the midst of a government shutdown “crisis”?
Why isn’t he meeting with the CEOs of some small credit unions and local home town banks from Iowa? Why isn’t he meeting with some unemployed middle class workers or millenials up to their eyeballs in student loan debt?
He isn’t meeting with the little people because they aren’t running the country. We don’t live in a Republic or a Democracy. This country is run by bankers, mega-corporation CEOs, and shadowy billionaires.
Doesn’t it give you a warm feeling inside that the very same evil motherfuckers that crashed the worldwide financial system in 2008, stole $700 billion from the taxpayers, created the huge debt problem that has caused this debt ceiling crisis, and are now making record profits due to Bernanke’s ZIRP and QEternity policies, are the first people Obama consults regarding the government shutdown?
The men strolling into the White House this morning should be in the same prison as Bernie Madoff. They are criminals who have stolen trillions from the American people. Their leader is none other than Jamie Dimon, the head of the criminal enterprise known as JP Morgan. Calling them a criminal enterprise is not hyperbole. They have been forced to pay $7 billion of fines in the last two years for their criminal exploits.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is in the process of fining them $20 billion for the largest mortgage fraud in world history. Jamie Dimon has been in charge of this criminal enterprise for over a decade.
How could the president of the United States allow criminals into the White House to give him guidance? Maybe it is because they bankrupted their own organizations and creatively used accounting gimmicks, fraud, and threats to bring down the financial system as their method to stay open and continue pillaging the muppets. Obama wants to know their tricks.
Inviting Jamie Dimon to the White House for guidance on handling this financial crisis would be on par with Franklin Delano Roosevelt inviting Al Capone to the White House for guidance about prohibition.
In case you weren’t sure yet, YOUR OWNERS ARE IN THE HOUSE!!!!
Wall Street CEOs to Meet With Obama as Budget Crisis Continues
Tomorrow is Tuesday. I will get up at 5:15 am, shower, shave, feed the cats, make a pot of coffee, get my kids up for school, make my lunch, get in my car, drive to work, curse at a few assholes on the Schuylkill Expressway, say no to people asking for more money all day, warn my boss about impending doom, get back in my car and drive home, curse a few more assholes in West Philly, eat dinner, watch a couple Seinfeld reruns, pick up my son from his driver’s ed class, browse the comments on TBP, and go to bed between 10:00 and 10:30.
If the government is shutdown, how will I possibly get through my day?
Remember the fear mongering stories in the MSM about the horrible impact of the sequester? The world would end if spending was slowed by a fraction of a percent. The country was going to be overrun by our foreign enemies. White House tours had to be cancelled. Air traffic controllers would be fired and planes would be crashing around the country. Has the sequester impacted your life one iota? It did keep the annual deficit from surpassing $1 trillion again, which Obama is now taking credit for.
I do have a few questions about this doom scenario of government drones not spending my money for a few days.
Does a government shutdown mean the NSA won’t be spying on us while the government is closed?
Will we have to ground our predator drones and not kill innocent women and children for a day or two?
Will we make our troops stand down in all the countries we are currently attacking?
Will the recharging of EBT cards not take place tomorrow in West Philly? If so, I will take a different route to work.
Will they stop taking Federal income taxes, SS taxes, and Medicare taxes out of my paycheck because the government won’t be processing them anyway?
If a government drone doesn’t go to work, does anyone notice?
I sure hope I can sleep tonight knowing that my government won’t be watching over me and protecting me from terrorists tomorrow.
Do you think anyone cares? anyone? anyone? Bueller?
“An impasse over the federal budget reaches a stalemate. The president and Congress both refuse to back down, triggering a near-total government shutdown. The president declares emergency powers. Congress rescinds his authority. Dollar and bond prices plummet. The president threatens to stop Social Security checks. Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling. Default looms. Wall Street panics.”
“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe
“Imagine some national (and probably global) volcanic eruption, initially flowing along channels of distress that were created during the Unraveling era and further widened by the catalyst. Trying to foresee where the eruption will go once it bursts free of the channels is like trying to predict the exact fault line of an earthquake. All you know in advance is something about the molten ingredients of the climax, which could include the following:
Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and unemployment, trade wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation)
Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race, nativism, or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and mercenaries hired by walled communities
Political distress, with institutional collapse, open tax revolts, one-party hegemony, major constitutional change, secessionism, authoritarianism, and altered national borders
Military distress, with war against terrorists or foreign regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction”
I hear tell they’s sum lowdown varmints in these here parts that believe marijuany kin make a dadburn fortune fer states that slap a tax on ‘er. Tain’t so, varmints. Peers ya need summon to knock sum sense in ya. Lessen ya don’t take heed, best ta git ready to slap leather, ya flea-bitten, flop-eared bags of fur, ’cause I’m a gonna blast ya.
This just in. Federal prosecutors in Arizona recently announced that their indictments against four major Mexican marijuana smugglers operated their cartel “just like a business.” Federal prosecutors pointed out to jurors that the four defendents, ALL OF WHOM ARE STILL AT-LARGE and being charged in abstensia, managed the cultivation, harvesting, processing, transportation, distribution, and sale of their marijuana just like any normal business would do with a legal product offered to the public.
You could have knocked me over with a feather. After 14 years undercover AND SUCCESSFUL experience with operations against some of the world’s largest, most powerful and sophisticated drug cartels, I simply had no idea how smart, innovative, devious, and yes, even business-like these guys could be. It was a shock, I tell you, a shock.
Here’s the best part. Seems the prosecutors’ star witness is a veteran Anglo internationally-certified 18-wheeler truck driver who they hired to run huge multi-ton shipments of Mary Jane across the border in his truck load of whatever legit cargo he was hauling. It worked until it didn’t. He got busted at the border and is singing like a canary.
Seems the trucker’s big beef with his employer is a promised $5,000-7,000 per trip from the traffickers, but they ended up paying him $2,500-3,000 a load. Dumbass. I’ll bet the farm that they did indeed initially pay him what they promised. But once he was on the hook as a co-conspirator, he was toast. They had him by the balls, and he had to take what they gave him. Or else.
Oh, as for his value as a witness, we’ll see. One thing for sure. Shortly after he was arrested, and I mean within hours, the traffickers covered their tracks completely. They knew what he knew and took steps to erase any useful evidence well before law enforcement officers showed up anywhere to check out what the trucker was telling them. Names, street addresses, phone numbers, emails, whatever. All likely useless. That’s how it rolls in the world of drug trafficking.
So let’s look at some market realities about the marijuana business in the U.S. And how these realities stack up against states who have legalized marijuana for personal and/or medical use to make a few bucks.
CULTIVATION. “Cannabis cultivation and marijuana production operations are extensive throughout California, particularly in northern California. Outdoor cannabis cultivation is increasing dramatically in the northern region of the state, primarily because of expanded cultivation by Mexican DTOs (Drug Trafficking Organizations); as a result, the area is becoming one of the most significant outdoor cannabis grow areas in the state.”
Oops. Not only is marijuana being grown extensively in Mexico, the cultivation here in the U.S. is largely under the control of the Mexican DTOs. I pointed that out two years ago when I cited an example of marijuana cultivation by Mexicans in a U.S. National Forest near Green Bay, Wisconsin (good grief, Green Bay?). And where was the labor coming from? Illegal Mexican aliens. And what do you think is happening in California’s forests, with the help from 2 1/2 million illegals, mostly Mexican, residing in that state?
LABOR COSTS. This one is a no-brainer. For cultivation, harvesting and processing, the marijuana cartels operate on third world labor, in which wages are one-half or less of anything a legal process can establish in the U.S. End of story. No further discussion needed.
MARKET RESTRICTIONS. The states that have legalized marijuana for either medical and/or personal use all prohibit the sale to persons under 21 years of age. That’s MILLIONS of lost customers. Gee, I wonder where the youngsters will get their blow? Same place they get it now.
OVERHEAD. Taxes on marijuana by the states are the biggest factor here, just as they are with alcohol and tobacco (which, unlike marijuana, also deal with federal taxes). And regardless of what type of market the states set up, whether it is largely private or government-controlled or something in between, there will be land purchases, leases, security, property taxes, building maintenance, and a whole host of other costs that are less or even absent for the marijuana networks. And all of these aforementioned advantages for the marijuana cartels leads to ………
PRICE. Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Right now, the average retail price of marijuana is $3,200-$4,800 per pound in the West, $4,800-$6,400 in the Midwest and East, and topped by North Dakota and Hawaii at over $6,500 per pound as the highest prices in the country. These figures come from thepriceofweed.com. Remember, these retail prices reflect what is being charged in the ILLEGAL MARKET, because that is what the market will bear. But these prices are extremely flexible. You can come to places in Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and California and buy Mary Jane for $500 a pound. That’s retail!!!! Think Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Cruces, and El Paso. That’s $31.25 per ounce, compared with the average LEGAL $200 per ounce price at your local state-approved medical marijuana “clinic” in California and Colorado.
Those are real world MARKET FORCES that should tell any rational human being why legalization of marijuana will not work. Then there is the legal aspect, starting with legalizing marijuana for personal/medical use at the federal level (try getting THAT through the House and Senate and signed by the President) and that thorny 1977 UN treaty that classifies marijuana as a Class One drug, along with heroin and cocaine. Abrogation of this treaty, which requires approval by the President and 67 senators, will not occur even in your grandchildren’s time. It simply will not.
So what’s the solution to this conundrum over marijuana? In three words, decriminalization versus legalization. To put in it into three more words, fines versus felonies. This is done in several states, such as Ohio and New York. Get caught with an amount of pot that the state defines as personal use, here’s your “speeding ticket” so to speak. Pay the fine and off you go. No jail time, no felony on your record, and the fine goes into the state treasury coffers without the ginormous amount of money the states would have spent on this folly of trying to make a few extra bucks, which won’t happen, on legalizing and taxing marijuana. Win, win.
I look forward to your praise for this enlightening, thoughtful, fact-filled article …….. varmints.
Footnote for Admin (and our Choctaw friend, Llpoh): Indians win!!!! Indians win!!!! Now in the playoffs through the best team effort by a bunch of no names, no stars EVER. 10-0 in the home stretch. Standing O for the Tribe.
With the latest in “Now we Will, Now we Won’t” bomb Syria back to the Stone Age progress toward War in that theatre, I got to pondering on how War has evolved here since the early days of Ag Civilization into it’s current incarnation. Besides the technology for killing evolving quite a bit over the millenia, the Goals changed as well, and so did the means of Resolution when a given War came to a “Close”. The second aspect is much more interesting, but to begin a review of the Techno-Progress of warfare is in order, because it impacts on the second in many ways.
By the time real large scale Wars developed in the early Ag Era, Hunting methods had already evolved some means of Death at a Distance, most notably the Bow and Arrow at the beginning. With this technology, you had maybe say 200 yards of Killing Range, though at that distance accuracy was pretty minimal and it was mainly a matter of luck for a large number of Bowmen to send flying arrows in the general direction of the enemy and hoping they hit somebody. With Longbows, probably you gotta wait until the enemy is inside 50 yards to actually aim at and hit someone in particular. Depends a lot on your position on the terrain where the battle takes place also, if you hold the “High Ground”, you have a good deal more range than those coming at you from below.
On the defensive level at this time for those being shot at, Wooden Shields were pretty good also, since at distance the arrow has to be shot in a high parabolic trajectory to make maximum range, so you know where the arrow is going to come from, basically above you on it’s way down. Hold the shield over your head and slightly forward at around 45 degrees, the arrows will hit that first, and not penetrate. Only once you get pretty close can arrows be shot with a flatter trajectory that could hit you from the front.
So, as long as you were working with mainly Infantry, while some portion would get taken out before the armies met Mano-a-Mano, most of the real killing occurred when they finally engaged with the Swords, Battle Axes, Maces and so forth. Pretty even playing field at least between 2 different Ag Societies that both had some metal working capability. Winning or Losing such a War was mainly a matter of who had more numbers and better control over the High Ground where a battle might be fought.
Team Strategies were developed during this period to move large groups of soldiers around a battlefield, Phalanxes being the main one. This borrows from the Herd idea in Nature, where only the exterior of the Phalanx is exposed to arrows and so forth being shot at them as they get close to the enemy. This sort of battlefield organization persisted right up until Gunpowder made it’s appearance well into the modern era.
Besides the Death at a Distance in War Tech evolution in the early years, the other big “advance” was in the area of Mobility as Horses were enlisted and Cavalry was deployed. The great advantage of this was the speed at which you could move these soldiers around a battlefield, allowing you to Outflank the enemy who was without Horse, or who had substantially fewer of them. Groups like the Mongols who had LOTS of horses in this period were able to do a lot of damage to larger populations of more sedentary ag societies because of the speed at which they could move around the battlefields. There were some means of defending against a Cavalry attack of course, like this one depicted in Braveheart:
The Advent of the Wheel which led to the Chariot increased the advantage of using Horses by a good deal after this, though their use was more limited to Flatland areas. Nice thing about a Chariot was the Charioteer could move quickly, then stop and shoot his Arrows from a stationary platform, much more accurate than shooting a Bow from Horseback. So you outflank the enemy, get close enough to shoot flat trajectory arrows from the side, and then when anyone starts running in your direction to take you out you giddyap your horse and GTFO of there, setting up again somewhere else to do the same thing again.
The Romans used all these War Techs of the era about as well as could be done, and were able to expand their Empire quite far with it. Where things fell apart for the Romans was not so much on the Battlefield, but in the administration of all the places they conquered over time. More about that later. in the second part.
Prior to the development of Gunpowder, or rather prior to its application in Cannon and Muskets, there were numerous developments on the Defensive End in War Tech after the Roman Empire went through its Collapse. On the personal defensive level, Body Armor became quite popular. With metal working improving, stuff like Chain Mail and Metal Helmets and Breast Plates became available, and for a short while even Full Suits of Armor were used. Not real clear here how many “armies” actually all suited up this way, probably very few. First off very expensive for the time in energy to create such things, and besides that they weigh a LOT and reduce your mobility by quite a bit as well. So they probably were limited to a few of the King’s most wealthy Vassals and Honor Guard, rather than an entire army suited up like this. Helmets however and Chain Mail were probably a lot more common and certainly provided a good deal more protection from getting bashed than a leather helmet or vest.
The defensive end developed a lot more on the large scale with Castles and Fixed Fortifications through the Medieval period. If you could get one of these places erected, it provided a pretty safe haven against all but the most organized large marauding bands of Zombies of the period. In these places the War of Attrition idea really took hold, which was to see who could last longer, the folks inside the Castle with stored up food and a water supply, or folks on the outside who would have to last for a year or two or 3 of siege on the castle trying to starve them out. Eventually they speeded this up some by employing Trebuchets to hurl really big Rocks at the castle walls and knock them down, thus enabling the attacking army to breach the stronghold.
Shortly after this the Cannon started getting deployed, and that basically spelled the end of Defensive Warfare of this type right up to today. With a couple of decent 40 pounders, you could reduce Castle Walls to Rubble in no time at all, so they pretty much stopped building them. However, you still did have to move these INCREDIBLY heavy things around and get them in place, which was quite hard and slow even with lots of horses. For the bigger Nation States forming in Europe during this time, they ALL had Cannon, and you began to see the Napoleonic Wars type battles over there, and here in the FSoA the War of Northern Aggression, aka the Civil War.
Once the Internal Combustion Engine got developed, the issue of moving around this Heavy Equipment at decent speed was mostly resolved, though there were not THAT many vehicles available at the time of WWI and that was mostly fought as a War of Attrition in Trenches dug out to avoid oncoming Bullets and Mortar fire. The fortification idea was pursued by the French in the aftermath of that war with the Maginot Line, which rather than putting up a Solid Wall put up a virtual Wall of Artillery which in theory could hit everyone coming at them from Krautland. The Industrialists of Krautland overcame that one by producing a lot of Tanks for WWII, able to do an End Around the Maginot line and set up Blitzkriegs wherever they rolled to.
Tanks and this sort of warfare though while suited well to most of the European continent and MENA where most of those type of battles played out was NOT so good either for the Naval War pursued against Japan at that time, or later the Wars pursued in Korea and in Vietnam, where the terrain just wasn’t well suited for rolling Tanks. Although certainly Aerial Warfare was pursued in Europe with the Firebombing of Dresden and the v-2 Rocket Campaign of Werner von Braun against London, not to mention the dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, going full on into Death from Above as the War Paradigm really took off with Vietnam and the use of Helicopters to move troops around the Jungle in place of Armored Personnel Carriers and Jets delivering Napalm to incinerate the Jungle cover of “Insurgents” aka local Villagers to be MASSACRED in My Lai.
Techno Warfare of this sort reached it Zenith in the current era, with Drone Aircraft delivering death basically anywhere, and in relative safety for the Drone Pilot, sitting comfortably at a Work Station at Langley or on an Aircraft Carrier etc. However, while delivering Death in relative safety has become possible this way, it is still damn difficult to actually gain any CONTROL over a given area just by dropping bombs on it. This brings us to part 2 of the story, the Objectives and Methods used for controlling a neighborhood after prosecuting a War on the local residents.
Returning back again to those early Ag Wars even Pre-Rome but extending right through that time period, nobody “made peace agreements” really with Conquered peoples. Generally speaking, all Adult age Males who managed to survive the war got dispatched to the Great Beyond, since these guys were dangerous to keep around and made lousy slaves. Children were taken to be raised as Slaves, and Women were taken to breed more Slaves. The objective of the War was to take over the Land the other group held and replace it with your own group of people, adding in the Class of Slaves to do the scut work in that neighborhood.
This had all sorts of problems of it’s own, even though if you got kids young enough and bred a slave class, maintaining the Order and keeping said Slaves in line was a Costly Bizness. it requires a good size Military/Police force and a class of Overseers as well. You have to feed the slaves at least enough so they do not die of malnutrition, clothe and shelter them so they don’t die too fast from exposure to the elements also. When your Slave Keeping Protocols get TOO BAD, the slaves REVOLT, which again is a costly exercise to squash down. Precisely how many people you can actually enslve in your population and remain in control of it is a bit unclear, but overall it probably is not more than20-30%. Taking Rome as an example here:
Estimates for the prevalence of slavery in the Roman Empire vary. Estimates of the percentage of the population of Italy who were slaves range from 30 to 40 percent in the 1st century BC, upwards of two to three million slaves in Italy by the end of the 1st century BC, about 35% to 40% of Italy’s population.[27] For the Empire as a whole, the slave population has been estimated at just under five million, representing 10 – 15% of the total population. An estimated 49% of all slaves were owned by the elite, who made up less than 1.5% of the Empire’s population. About half of all slaves worked in the countryside, the remainder in towns and cities.[28]
Roman slavery was not based on race.[29] Slaves were drawn from all over Europe and the Mediterranean, including Celts, Germans, Thracians, Greeks, Carthaginians,[30] and black Africans, usually called “Ethiopians” in Greek and Latin sources.[31] By the 1st century BC, custom precluded the enslavement of Roman citizens and Italians living in Gallia Cisalpina, but previously many southern and central Italians had been enslaved after defeat.[32]
Inside Italy itself, you might have got up to 40% slaves, but this is only because Italy ALSO housed the proponderance of the Military, and besides that Slaves who lived inside the Center of the Empire probably lived better than many Roman Citizens who lived in peripheral territories lived, at least while the resources were steadily flowing into that neighborhood from outlying areas through Taxation. The further out you went, the harder to maintain and control a large population of Slaves.
After the fall of of Rome, there still was similar types of Consolidation going on in Europe as the Feudal era took hold, enslavement was still pretty common when one group defeated another in a War, but once these incipient Nation-States consolidated up under common languages and slaves taken were assimilated into these societies, this bizness began to wind down. Economic slavery began to replace explicit slavery, and though certainly non-stop Wars were fought all across Europe through the Middle Ages and into the Colonial Era, you no longer got the kind of deal where ALL the Adult men were sent to the Great Beyond and the Defeated Nation-State was absorbed into the political system of the conquering nation.
Rather what begins to appear here are “Economic Reparations” for the war, where the defeated group has to pay the Winners. War becomes less about acquiring the territory and populating it with your own group of people then it becomes about gaining economic advantage, coopting the Elites of that neighborhood and getting them to run the country in such a way that they pay tribute to your Dominance. This sort of behavior probably reached its Zenith with the defeat of Germany after WWII, with the Treaty of Versailles. This document in terms of Economic Reparations essentially made the entire Kraut Population SLAVES working to pay off the Debt accumulated by everyone for running this War, WITHOUT the Brits, Frogs or Yanks actually taking over their Goobermint and running the defeated Krautland as a Colony. Local KRAUT leaders were expected to collect the necessary Taxation to pay off the War Winners here, in MONEY, not specifically in land acquisition.
Colonialism had a lot of problems, the main one being that if you went and installed your own Goobernators in a territory, the local population HATED that person and his Tax Men. Particularly if there were Racial/Religious/Ethnic differences between the Installed New Colonial Goobermint and the local population of J6P, it wasn’t generally too long before REVOLTS happenned, cue the American Revolution on that one. Or look at British Colonial Rule of India as another example of the problems you get when you try to impose rule on another society without actually physically wiping them off the face of the earth (at least the Males) in the Olden Times.
The methodology pursued over the last century was to Co-opt a Leadership Class of the Conquered Society, offer them AMAZING WEALTH & Perks to become part of the Global system of Industrialization, and for the real Rulers of this, hide in the background as much as possible and let all the Local Goobermints take the blame for any problems. You hold everyone hostage through Debt, and the War proceeds onward Economically here, until there is yet another breakdown of the System of the World, as Neal Stephenson phrased it. Said breakdown occurs regularly of course, Strauss & Howe call it the “Fourth Turning”, it is the relatively predictable outcome of an economic system based on Debt which has around a 2-5% Interest Charge placed on it. This allows said economic system to operate anywhere from around 60-90 years generally speaking before all hell breaks loose and the only way to rejig the monetary system si with a real big WAR that pulls in everyone using said monetary system. Same shit has repeated itself at least a half dozen times or so since the 1500s, using this same sort of monetary system, though the Age of Oil and Computers have made some significant changes in the dynamic.
Out of said repetition, Strauss & Howe developed the “Four Turnings” theory of generational collapse and rebirth, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the ecological theory of Four Cycles put forth by Holling & Gunderson back in the 70s.
In this model, the “Release Phase” corresponds to the Fourth Turning described by Strauss & Howe, and it seems to be a regular feature of all Biological Systems. On the Positive side of looking at the Collapse this way, you can Expect/Hope For a “Rebirth” or “Reorganization” phase to follow the Collapse Phase, if you go by the Timeline of Strauss & Howe this should come 15-20 years down the pipe for this Fourth Turning Event.
The problem with looking at this event in this way is that it ignores aspects of Homo Sapiens development which are NOT Cyclical and NOT Repeated, as well as Physical Conditions of the Earth Ecosystem which are not cyclical or repeated. In our War Example here, the Wars of today are NOT repetitions of the Wars of Old, they utilize a whole lot more Energy to prosecute them along with Technology that was not available in days of yore either. The Biomass of Homo Sapiens is now around 7B, which it NEVER was in all of recorded history for sure, and you have to make some pretty far out assumptions to believe such a biomass of Homo Sapiens existed in an Atlantis Civilization that preceeded this one.
The conditions which produced all the Fossil Fuels utilized during this particular cycle also are unlikely to be repeated, since the Sun itself is on a non-cyclical path to its own destruction, which in the more near term makes the Biosphere on Earth unlivable. MAX time for this might be 500M years from present day, but many factors could make that time period a whole lot shorter, right down to the Near Term Human Extinction timeline proposed by folks like Guy McPherson, who think Positive Feedback Loops will make the planet uninhabitable for multicellular life forms by Mid-Century or so.
When you bring all the variables together here, is seems Unlikely to me that this particular “Release” phase will result in the same sort of “Rebirth” phase that came in the aftermath of the Great Depression or the Civil War before that. Each of those Rebirth phases came at a time where the Human Biomass was much lower, and there still was copious amount of Stored Energy of Fossil Fuels to Exploit and use for rebuilding and developing a still more complex paradigm.
Regardless how this next set of Wars is pursued, whether it is with Chemical Weapons, Nuclear Weapons or even just “conventional” weapons like Bullets and “Regular” bombs and mines, the outcome of the war is that it is likely to exhaust the supplies of fossil fuels we have a bit faster than they otherwise would be burned, and upon conclusion whoever managed to “win” this War would have about nothing left with which to administer and maintain control over another population.
Picture say India in the Setting Sun Years of the British Empire in the late 1800s, with a few Brit Sahib Goobernators controlling all of India with a few Warships, an Honor Guard of Troops equipped with Repeating Rifles and some Artillery to protect their Forts. Take away all these Techno-Adavantages for maintaining control, how long does this small group maintain control over the much larger poulation of Colonial Slaves they have working for them and paying them Taxes, aka PROTECTION MONEY? Not very long, IMHO.
The Techno Army/Navy/Air Force we have may persist a while longer, it is likely to be the last of the systems developed under industrialization to Run Outta Gas, but inevitably they will run out. It has always taken economies of scale to pull up Oil and Coal, even when it came cheap and easy. Running refineries, fixing broken parts, replacing sunken ships, all this will become ever more difficult as the Wars for Resources are pursued by the Industrial Military. In the end, they will put themselves Outta Biz, and they will not reappear again in a New Cycle, not in the next few Millenia anyhow for sure. So under no circumstances imaginable here will the NEXT Turning bring about a rebirth of the type we saw before, when there was much energy still to access. Nor will War be the same as it was, ever increasing in size, global scope and technological prowess. All dependent on accessing copious amounts of energy, which will be consumed by the very machine that accessed it in the first place, so long ago when the first Metal was smelted to produce Bronze Spear Points and later Chain Mail and Body Armor. This was unidirectional, not cyclical, and we have reached the end of the road for this paradigm, though to be sure it may take a decade or even 2 to work through this end game completely.
What will we see on the OTHER SIDE of this, if in fact anybody does manage to survive the conflagrations to come here? I cannot answer that question to be sure, but I seriously doubt we will go trakking the stars or setting up colonies on Mars in the aftermath of this. Best Hope, the few surviving Homo Sapiens will learn to Garden the Earth, and keep Sentience going until the Sun fries the Biosphere to a crisp in a few 100M years.
The consumer is back baby. The MSM is gaga over the “surge” in August spending, driven by subprime 7 year 0% auto loans to pimps and hos in West Philly. Maybe the University of Phoenix dropouts are using their student loans to buy iGadgets and bling. Here is a link to the “fantastic” data:
I just can’t help myself. Let me take a look at the data and give you a few FACTS you may not see in the MSM spinfest:
Real disposable personal income, using the fake BLS inflation numbers, is up a HUGE 1.6% in the last year. In reality, using inflation numbers from the real world, real disposable income has declined. This is consistent with the FACT that retailers are reporting negative or flat comp store sales.
Real disposable income per capita was up an even more pathetic 1% in the last year, as the country’s population grew by 2.2 million people.
To give you some perspective on how the average person (not a Wall Street asshole) has progressed in the last five years, the real disposable personal income per person in May of 2008 was $37,584. Today it is $36,357. The average American, after the four year Obama recovery, has 3.3% LESS disposable income.
Americans have been forced to REDUCE their savings by $22 billion in the last year to just make ends meet in this fantastic economy. Three cheers for a near record low savings rate.
Personal income is up $500 billion in the last year, but in this warped Orwellian world we live in, only 50% of this is generated by wages paid by businesses to workers. The $2.4 trillion per year taken out of your pocket or borrowed from future generations and handed out to the non-producers in this country is hysterically counted as personal income.
You’ll be thrilled to know that dividend income paid to the .1% is up by $71 billion in the last year, while interest income paid to senior citizens and savers is virtually flat and down $150 billion since August 2008. Over this time, Bernanke has stolen over $400 billion from savers and handed over to his puppet masters on Wall Street.
Great news for Obama and the government drones in DC. They have sucked $172 billion more in taxes from you compared to last year. Bye Bye payroll tax cut. I’m sure they’ll put the money to good use funding more IRS agents to enforce Obamacare.
The American consumer is back. Their disposable personal income was up $336 billion in the last year and they spent $359 billion of that. Oops!!! How long can you continue to spend more than you have? I guess we’ll find out.
Good bye from the NO SPIN zone. I hope you liked my daily dose of reality.
Consumer spending bounces back in August
Faster pace of outlays suggests economy hasn’t slowed all that much
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Consumers opened up their wallets in August and spent more in July than previously reported, suggesting that U.S. growth might not soften quite as much in the third quarter as economists had forecast.
Consumer spending rose a seasonally adjusted 0.3% last month, marking the third-fastest increase of the year, the Commerce Department said Friday. And spending in July rose twice as fast as initially estimated –— 0.2% instead of 0.1%.
The rise in spending was aided by the biggest increase in worker earnings in six months. Personal income jumped 0.4% in August.
Economists surveyed by MarketWatch had forecast a 0.3% increase in consumer spending and a 0.4% rise in personal income.
The larger increase in incomes allowed Americans to salt away a bit more cash. The savings rate of Americans rose to 4.6% from 4.5%. The savings rate, however, hasn’t topped 5% since late last year.
Consumer spending represents as much as 70% of the U.S. economy and is the biggest influence on growth. The bounce-back in spending could generate faster growth in the third quarter than economists had been expecting. Gross domestic product is forecast to rise 1.9%, down from 2.5% in the second quarter, according to the latest estimates.
Consumers boosted purchases of autos in August to the highest rate in more than six years, and the month is always big for back-to-school purchases. Americans spent more on durable goods and services, but purchases of everyday items was basically unchanged.
Inflation, meanwhile, edged up 0.1% in August based on the latest reading from the personal consumption expenditure price index. The core rate, which omits food and energy, rose a slightly faster 0.2%.
Both PCE indexes have risen a scant 1.2% over the past 12 months, indicating that inflation remains contained. That gives the Federal Reserve the room to continue its a massive bond-buying program meant to stimulate the U.S. economy.
The Fed surprised Wall Street earlier this month by maintaining its current rate of purchases. A big reason was the apparent slowdown in economic growth and hiring toward the end of the summer.
Yet a slew of recent indicators, including the consumer spending report, suggest the economy has not slowed all that much from the spring. The U.S. grew at a 2.5% rate in the April-to-June period
The man in the photo above is Gene Cernan, the last human to walk on the moon. Cernan left the moon in December of 1972 – more than forty years ago – and no one has gone back.
To understand how far we went forty years ago, on how little technology, consider this: Our modern smart phones have 200,000 times more power than the computers that took men to the moon.
Let me restate that: Space travel can be accomplished with forty-year-old technology.
Lamentations Are In Order
It is tragic beyond measure that human exploration has been neutered since 1972. Sure, we’ve sent out a few probes and placed a good telescope in orbit, but we have done nothing brave, nothing bold, nothing daring. Productive humans have been delegated to mute observance as their hard-earned surplus is syphoned off to capital cities, where it is sanctimoniously poured down a sewer of cultured dependencies and endless wars.
We remain locked onto this planet, not because we lack the ability to leave, but because so few of us are able to do anything about it.
What we have lost can be measured only in the billions of unactivated lives. Fifty years ago humanity was shocked to realize that they could go to the stars. After untold millennia of looking to the heavens, of wondering, dreaming and mourning the impossibility, we saw that we could go to the stars. And for ten years we took our first brave steps, successfully!
But after our first major step away from our crib, we were thrown back and surrounded with double-height rails. Since then, we have stagnated, and human culture has undergone a widespread rot. We watch science fictions about going to space, living in space and even fighting in space, but we have given up all hope of going ourselves… even though we did it just one generation ago.
Humanity – having recently discovered the ability to expand without limit – wanders aimlessly, with no challenging goal, no elevated purpose, and no path of escape. Space travel has leapfrogged us: it was done by our fathers; we imagine that it will be done by our sons; but we dare not think that it is possible to us.
They Were Men Like Us
We have more than enough ability to explore space right now. The men who did so a generation ago were not supermen, regardless of how the promotions made them appear.
I’ve met some of the people who did this forty years ago, including one of the men who walked on the moon. I found them to be reasonably decent and competent men (the astronaut struck me as especially capable), but I’ve known other men and women who were of equal or greater decency and competence.
The fault of our earth-bound lives lies not in our abilities. The spacemen were men like ourselves.
Now, please take a look at this photo:
You are observing a workman building a Mercury capsule. Look at the metal work: It is fine construction, and it was advanced for its day, but there are shops in every large city in America that could do the same job, faster, cheaper, with closer tolerances. Like every other technology, metal working has massively improved over the last forty years.
Now look at this Gemini launch. What in this picture is particularly hard to build?
We see concrete, metal frameworks and sprinklers. None of those things are remotely hard. Even the rocket is simple by modern standards.
In other words, this technology is simple to reproduce. None of it is beyond the grasp of journeyman craftsmen.
Leibniz, Newton and Aldrin
Originating is hard; second and third uses are not.
It took brilliant men like Leibniz and Newton to invent calculus, but now, millions of schoolchildren learn it every year.
It took a brilliant engineer like Buzz Aldrin to invent the technologies of space rendezvous, but there are millions of bright young men, right now, who are more than capable of using his discoveries.
Again, none of this is beyond us. And, by the way, we have lots of real geniuses in our time too… it’s just that they have been forced into systems that punish them for their brilliance, rather than rewarding them, or at least just leaving them alone.
Why Haven’t We Gone Back?
There are several ways to answer this question. Here are the answers that I think matter most:
#1: Space is Against the State’s Interest
Can you imagine what would happen to government in space? Once beyond Earth’s gravity well, the spacefarers would be gone forever: no more taxes, no more obedience, and heaps of scorn for the distant barbarians who demanded money and attempted violence to get it. Space would be the 17th century American wilderness on steroids. Politicians and tax gatherers would have no hope of keeping up.
The reason I’m so sure of this is simple mathematics.
Space is a territory that expends exponentially (as a cube of the distance) and endlessly. The numbers look like this:
At one million miles, government requires 4,188,000,000 billion cubic miles of dominance.
At two million miles it is 33,504,000 billion cubic miles of dominance.
At three million miles it is 113,076,000,000 billion cubic miles of dominance.
At four million miles it is 268,032,000,000 billion cubic miles of dominance.
And so on. The people who left could never again be contained and have their money removed by force. Those cows would never be milked again.
I should add that one million miles in space is almost trivial. At the speeds used forty years ago, that’s only 38.5 hours of travel.
17th century voyages across the Atlantic took weeks, and there was no lack of paying passengers. So, there is no hope of governments getting us back to space. To do so would be to shoot themselves in the chest, and they probably understand that.
#2: The Culture Has Gone Conformist
Consider what became of the past forty years: There has been no striving, no searching, no becoming. Instead, we’ve had:
24/7 entertainment, which made billions of otherwise-productive hours worthless.
An obscene level of advertising that replaced authentic dreams with scientifically implanted manipulations.
A success ethic that addresses the animal aspects of human life while utterly ignoring its higher aspects.
Fame for the basest, weirdest and most lurid men and women; conformity for everyone else.
The glorification and unlimited empowerment of the institution.
As a result, we’ve had boring, washed-out decades, focused on anything but the awe-inspiring, the good, and the truly heroic. These years have been stripped of the greatest excitement, discovery and growth that have ever been possible to our species.
Our current decade features no goals save bodily comfort, and no aspirations save existence and status. Underlying it all is a palette of manufactured fears that can only be salved by buying the right products or electing the right politicians. We are living through the triumph of manipulation and the disappearance of vigorous individuals.
The 1950s are considered a time of mass conformity, but they look like radical experimentation compared to the fully-scripted lives of today’s ‘successful’ people.
The men who went into space knew that death was a possibility, but they valued more than just animal rewards; they wanted to excel, to touch the heavens, to expand, to become more. In the broader cultures of the West, that attitude has been suppressed and nearly lost.
It may be that the next generation will demand more out of life than animal gratifications. Such changes have occurred in the past. Would to God that they come again soon.
#3: Our Money Is Taken from Us
We are taxed on our income at national, state and even local levels. We are taxed on what we spend. We are taxed on Ponzi retirement programs. We are taxed on property we own, and on gasoline we buy, and hundreds of other things.
The taxation systems of the West are designed to rob us of every dollar we get, right up to the point where we’d be tempted to rebel. This is a science.
If you are a productive person, working in any sort of normal job, roughly half of your earnings are taken from you every year, leaving you just barely able to hang on to an acceptable lifestyle. Understand this: You are already rich, but your money is stolen from you, generally before you ever hold it in your hands.
If we actually held our own money, reaching space again could be done, easily, from a small percentage of our surplus. No coercion would be required, only a bit of excitement.
Photo: The relics of the last moon mission
What has been lost to us?
What happens to humans themselves (and by that I mean internally) once we get to space and have a few moments to “consider the heavens”?
Preliminary evidences are that humans in space think more deeply, more expansively, and more spiritually… that their consciousness opens up and expands.
Consider just these passages from astronauts on the first and last moon missions. (And I have many others.)
As Neil and I first stood on the surface of the moon looking back at Earth – a bright blue marble suspended in the blackness of space – the experience moved us in ways that we could not have anticipated.
– Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11
Out there on another planet, I was looking back at the Earth, or I was looking back at the other stars in the universe – science and technology could no longer explain to me what I was feeling. Not just what I was seeing, it’s what I was feeling. And I kept thinking, above all religions, there has to be a creator.
It was to me like I was just sitting on a rocking chair on a Friday evening, looking back home, sitting on God’s front porch, looking back at the Earth; looking back home. It was really that simple, but it was an overpowering experience.
I’m sure that viewing the world from the moon only enriched me spiritually and also gave me a new vantage point on life… Anyone who walked on the moon had such a spiritual experience, similar to it or stronger.
– Gene Cernan, Apollo 17
When we lost the moon we lost our bearings; there was no distant star to guide us, no magnificent vision to pursue. Four decades on, we remain in a kind of stasis, mollified with streaming vanities and base satisfactions.
Perhaps we should have known that this would be the result. But when shall we return to the stars?
It isn’t rocket science anymore.
[Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from our flagship newsletter Freeman’s Perspective Issue #20: “Forty Years Gone: A Lamentation.” If you liked it, consider taking a risk-free test drive. Not only will you gain immediate access to the rest of the issue, but you’ll also be able to enjoy the entire archive – more than 520 pages of research on topics of importance and inspiration to those looking for freedom in an unfree world. Plus valuable bonus reports and all new issues as well. Click here to learn more.]
These are the scores of the kids who think they are capable of going to college. Can you imagine how stupid the kids are who don’t take the SAT test? The Department of Education has been around for 33 years. We pay $80 billion per year in taxes so these government drones can produce this result? How come scores were 28 points higher in 1972 when we didn’t have a Department of Education and student to teacher ratios were 30% higher? Do you think government teacher’s unions really care about educating your children?
This is the consequence of decades of liberal educational policies that teach kids how to feel rather than think. Why teach kids to read when you can show them movies in class? Yeah, they can text better than kids from 1972. Politicians use kids to sell any bullshit policy they want to jam down our throats. Obama poured an extra $200 billion of your tax dollars into Education between 2009 and 2012 as part of his $800 billion porkulus plan. I’m guessing the payoff will come next year. He didn’t just hand your money to teacher’s unions as a payoff for voting Democrat. Right?
Obama and his minions will use these results to reach further into your pocket. Do it for the children.
