Ukraine and Cocaine

Guest Post by Kurt Schlichter

There is an eerie parallel between what passes for America’s Ukraine policy and the fact that a fat sack of Bolivian energy dust got discovered in the White House and was promptly forgotten. These two happenings are two sides of the same coin, and its denomination is failure. It is the failure of our establishment, the last gasp – or snort – of a ruling caste that has discovered that, at the end of the day, it could get away with getting high on its own supply (at least for a while) and, like Tony Montana, ploughed its face into a mountain of nose candy as his world collapsed.

These situations the same because they both tell terrible truths about the coterie of mediocrities who presume to rule us. They both manifest the incomprehensible stupidity, unconscionable arrogance, and cynical evasion of accountability that characterize the best and the brightest of the twenty-first century. Didn’t Joe Biden, the perfect PINO (president-in-name-only) for this wretched era, once announce that his meth-addled crackhead son was the smartest guy he knew? Since he hangs with Democrats, that might be true, but more likely it is just more of the same nonsense, the lies so thoroughly mixed into the just plain wrong that it becomes nearly impossible to tell them apart.

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Another failure of Government Exposed

Thermodynamics, Thermidorian Reactions, or Lobster Thermidor?

I recently asked a current PhD candidate in the Environmental Science Department if she could differentiate among the three items referenced above which created a quite sad discussion.  I would have laughed 10 years ago but today is quite different. Physics, history and culinary arts are things of mystery for her.  The degree she chose did not even require any hard science courses!  This child was brought up in a financially comfortable WASP background with access to a myriad of educational and entertaining subject matter. Obviously these advantages were as water off of a ducks’ back.  Our educational system is beyond redemption.

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Wouldn’t it be convenient for the oligarchs if their think tanks could somehow concoct a story, some plausible sounding theory, to persuade a portion of the world’s population to hold dollar assets, expecting them to gain in value, even in the face of significant defaults and credit failures and a deteriorating return in GDP growth per marginal dollar debt? Or even better, getting them to remain fully invested in a series of artificially contrived dollar denominated financial assets that could be selectively ‘pulled down’ while keeping the overall scheme intact and running.

Bernays would be proud.”

Jesse, 16 June 2010

“Growing concentration of power in the US has been under way for decades, and has now reached the point where how our economy and society are managed seems remarkably similar to the dominance of oligarchs in Russia or the role of few wealthy families in the shadows of China’s CCP.”

Harald Malmgren

“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.”

Leo Tolstoy

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Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us?

Guest Post by Laurence Kotlikoff

I am co-authoring this column with Mark Skidmore, a Professor of Economics at Michigan State University. 

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” ~ Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, The US Constitution

On July 26, 2016, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported”.  The report indicates that for fiscal year 2015 the Army failed to provide adequate support for $6.5 trillion in journal voucher adjustments.  According to the GAO’s Comptroller General, “Journal vouchers are summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled. Often these journal vouchers are unsupported, meaning they lack supporting documentation to justify the adjustment or are not tied to specific accounting transactions…. For an auditor, journal vouchers are a red flag for transactions not being captured, reported, or summarized correctly.”

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