It Got Serious In A Hurry

He’s a joke, but nobody’s laughing.

Guest post by Robert Gore at straightlinelogic.com

Trump’s five years were fun. He said things that provoked outrage among all the right people, often because they were true. You could laugh at their hypocritical idiocies, hysterical posturing, and sputtering anger. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, anyone who can watch Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow without laughing has a heart of stone. Frothing anger fueled effort after effort to depose Trump until success was realized with overblown pandemic panic, riots, and a clearly rigged election. If nothing else, Trump exposed the mendacity, arrogance, incompetence, venality, and criminality of the Corruptocracy.

Reality doesn’t invert. A corollary is that the severity of consequences from an inversion is the square of the distance between the inversion and reality. Consider the US military. It has disregarded the realities of the wars it has fought—the relative difficulty of invasion versus defense, the deadly effectiveness of guerrilla warfare and insurgency, the corruption, tyranny, and lack of domestic support for our puppets, and so on—losing every conflict since WWII, often after lengthy and in some cases ongoing engagements.

The current crop of corruptocrats have introduced yet another inversion in the military, the woke inversion. The military will now be graded on its commitment to combat-irrelevant factors: the racial, ethnic, gender, sexual preferences and political creeds of its forces, and their professed fealty to regnant political dogma. In other words, “diversity” in everything but thought.

This inversion is huge and given the distance squared corollary, it will soon render the armed forces incapable of fighting even a war for the protection of the United States proper. Given its ineptitude fighting offensive wars, the military will be completely useless. The defense budget, however, will grow ever more bloated.

Joe Biden aspired to mediocrity in his prime and it’s been downhill ever since. As for Kamala Harris: some are born hacks, some achieve hackness, and some have hackness thrust upon them. She’s all three. They and their string-pullers have taken things from fun to serious—deadly serious—in a little over two months.

Biden’s first executive order, shutting down the Keystone pipeline, set the tone. In the beautiful illusion that constitutes woke energy policy, renewable but intermittent solar and wind will soon replace fossil fuels, so why do we need fossil fuels and their pipelines (the cheapest and most environmentally friendly way to transport oil and gas). Everything will be electric—like those cool Teslas!—because electricity just comes from a plug.

Never mind the fossil fuels, minerals and metals that must be extracted or mined (nothing environmentally destructive there) to manufacture and transport solar panels, windmills blades, and batteries. Never mind the costly environmental challenges of disposing of them. Never mind the fossil fuels that are burned to provide the electricity for those plugs. Never mind the back-up power that must be supplied by fossil fuels for those times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

There’s blame enough to go around and lessons to be learned from the recent Texas weather and energy fiasco. One lesson that hasn’t been learned in woke energy circles is that it’s going to be a long time and many technological developments before fossil fuels are replaced by renewables. Until that day arrives, fossil fuels will remain an essential part of the mix and the ultimate back-up.

For political inverts who are fully woke but don’t know the difference between kilowatts and megawatts, it’s always just a matter of passing a law, promulgating a regulation, or signing an executive order. In their world, waving those wands makes it so. You want to get rid of fossil fuels? Decree them banished. Who cares about the consequences? Consequences will only matter to those employed by, invested in, supplying to, or buying power from the fossil fuel industry. They number in the millions and their dollars in the trillions, but many of them are ideologically retrograde, running-dog deplorables. Let ‘em freeze or swelter in the dark.

It’s a good thing the government has unlimited riches, it can just buy its way out of energy shortfalls or any other difficulties. The federal government produces unlimited fiat debt instruments (FDIs)—Treasury debt—and the central bank buys them with its unlimited FDIs—Federal Reserve Notes, aka dollars.

This exchange of imaginary money supposedly creates wealth effects that have replaced boring old savings, capital investment, and entrepreneurial activity as drivers of the economy. Asset prices elevate, the government’s GDP statistics hum while its inflation statistics slumber, and the rest of the world accepts FDIs for real goods and services. There’s even snake oil peddled by PhDs that blesses all this: Modern Monetary Theory. Wealth for all—without boring old work and deferred gratification—is just around the corner.

From the dwindling ranks of the reality-bound come those inevitable objections. The key word in fiat debt instruments is debt, which carries an obligation to pay it back sometime in the future. They can’t honestly pay back the debt they have now, why are they adding to it? The key word is honestly. The plan is to issue so many FDIs that they depreciate the value of existing ones, making them easier to pay back. None dare call it a swindle.

That millions of people and institutions stand on the other side of trades with a government that can, has, and will continue to swindle them through FDI debasement is one of the great mysteries of our time. That they do so while accepting only 1.7 percent interest for ten years as inflation runs well above that denotes not just inversion, but outright insanity.

Insanity chases its own tail: issuing more FDIs to pay off interest and principle on old FDIs simply adds to the mountain of unpayable FDIs. For those tethered to boring old common sense—yes, that will drive the FDIs’ value to zero, a process already 99 percent complete since institution of the FDI system in 1913.

When it requires a pickup truck to carry the paper FDIs necessary to buy a tank of gas for it (if gas-powered vehicles and paper FDIs are still allowed), won’t that hurt a lot of ordinary people, even many who are not ideologically retrograde, running-dog deplorables? Why, yes it will, but that’s just another reason to institute privacy-and liberty-obliterating electronic currency—it’s not paper and it’s easier to add more zeros—and outlaw its competition, privacy-and-liberty-protective precious metals and cryptocurrencies. Regardless of the form of currency in which it occurs, hyperinflation will be the penultimate act before collapse and its attendant hyperdeflation.

When you’re drowning the world in FDIs, boring old common sense suggests that you try to keep the real economy’s head above water, just so there are some goods and services for sale, even if their prices are relentlessly rising. However, raising taxes, new regulations, and maintaining the panoply of Covid-19 restrictions means less production and consequently, fewer goods and services being chased by an ever-increasing number of FDIs, boosting prices. Unfortunately, those are high priority action items on Washington’s agenda.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are two reality-bound, common sense-tethered gentlemen who have taken their measure of the US government and concluded it’s stacked with idiots and led by an imbecile (Biden or Harris, take your pick). They may be ruthless autocrats, as they’re often portrayed, but they also know where they are and what they’re doing. One should probably take their avowals that they seek multipolar Kumbaya with a shaker of salt. However, subordination to a US-dominant unipolar world order is completely unacceptable.

Biden calls Putin a killer and his idiots read Chinese officials the riot act, thus confirming Putin and Xi’s assessment of Biden. After decades of feckless regime changes, failed invasions, never-ending sanctions, subterfuge, espionage, corrupt client governments and the like, Washington’s pet think tanks profess mystification as to why the Belt and Road Initiative plays better in Eurasia than bullets, bombs, banking bans, bribes, bullshit, and belligerent bombast. Yet, the dramatic new Biden foreign policy is . . . more of the same, with a special twist—amp up the pressure, sanctions, and propaganda against Russia and China.

It’s the school-yard bully taunting the kid with a black belt (Putin has a black belt in judo, by the way). Biden speaks loudly and has thrown the big stick into the political correctness rubbish heap. Only countries upon which the US has showered its FDIs pretend to go along. They have their own FDI and impending collapse problems, and they’ll play both ends against the middle when it suits their interests. From their own hard experience with wind and solar power, Germany recognizes that the future of energy isn’t going to be entirely “green.” Bet on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline getting finished.

Teasing black belts who can respond with hypersonic flying kicks is moronic. Russia and China both claim weapons of mass destruction to which the US military has no defenses. Maybe they’re bluffing, but why are Biden and company running the risk of learning the hard way they’re not?

Most of the critics of US policy argue we have to make Kumbaya with them to address pressing problems like varying temperatures and flu viruses. Because such problems happen globally, they supposedly require global solutions. (Corruption happens globally, too, but you don’t see any calls for a global effort against that.) You don’t have to buy into the globaloney, but live and let live is a far better policy than pointless confrontation and brinksmanship that could lead to war and possible species annihilation. That would be a global problem, at least for our species.

Putin and Xi have also taken a look at the US currency and decided they’ll let someone else play the greater fool. They are leading a drive away from dollar-based trade and capital flows, divesting US FDI’s, and buying gold. They’re not paying heed to every western politicians’ favorite economist, John Maynard Keynes (a statist through and through), who called gold a “barbarous relic.”

Next thing you know Biden will be calling the Russians and Chinese Neanderthals, a favorite pejorative. If a fondness for gold, a tried and true store of value, makes one a Neanderthal, what does a fondness for FDIs—conjured by fiat and secured only by promises from politicians not to produce too many of them—put you in the evolutionary line? Homo habilis? Homo erectus? Ape?

Keynes also said, “In the long run we are all dead.” True enough, but a government that undermines its country’s energy base, economy, currency, debt, and military, and antagonizes not one but two powerful rivals could be pulling that long run way forward.

These aren’t mere political issues, they’re survival issues. Lights don’t come on, economies crash, hyperinflation happens, wars are lost, people die. Biden, Harris, and cohorts are making and amplifying mistakes their predecessors have made for decades. It’s long odds betting that potentates will admit their mistakes, even privately to themselves, and longer odds that they’ll learn anything from them. The difference between Biden, Harris, and company and their predecessors is that they—and we—might not survive theirs.

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