177 thoughts on “Sugar Beans”

1. We’ve got a whole bunch of young people with the intelligence and creativity to start small buisnesses. No kosher corporate bank is gonna lend them a fuckin dime. If they use family money or savings, there’s a 100 dick sucking, donut eating government douchebags to wade thru, each 1 carrying his bible of 10,000 rules and regulations. It’s time to ignore these motherfuckers and create our own way. They want to make America 3rd world, well, let’s give it to them…hard.

2. Z-Man,

   You have seigniorage backwards. The profit made by government in currency issue isn’t taken something of value like gold and milling (extracting value) and remitting it with less value. It’s the opposite. In Ancient Roman times, Roman stamped coins would often trade at a premium to non Roman coins of the same weight and content. It’s why anyone would counterfeit coins – the mark or stamp of government gives that object more value than it would ordinarily have. The seigniorage is taking in something of lesser value and declaring it a money – thereby obtaining monetary premium. Government doing this is the source of seigniorage – difference between tangible value of object and tangibly value of object with government stamp on it.

3. First, brilliant. For the other old-timers here, along with the Boomer-curious, this was the SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK of reserve currency. It was a brilliant encapsulation of the subject. I consider myself well-versed on the topic but still learned quite a bit.

   Secondly, has there ever been an actual universal reserve currency as the term is understood now? Yeah, the pound and the denarius before it were like the dollar, acknowledged as something of value for most of the wealthy parts of the planet, but ultimately limited to the world that recognized it, including places that also had wealth but did not play along. Arguably, the denarius was the more successful of the three, but, not without irony, the Chinese currency was of equal import on a per capita basis at the time and lived well past its Roman competitor, to the extent either knew of the other as a competitor. The pound sterling was recognized by a wider swath of the planet but never had the impact of either the dollar or denarius. It can be argued a reserve currency, as understood, always has been a phantom. You are correct that a credible threat of enforcement determines the viability and scope of a reserve currency, but didn’t that really fly out the window when multiple nations attained nuclear weapons?

   Everyone indeed will be much poorer in the near future. Again, not without irony, those who thought this a dandy thing also will be much poorer. This is Marxist-Leninism without the owner’s manual, a predictable failure that will soon be claimed never to have been tried successfully. The blame lies in us for not rising up when it could have mattered. Now we have to burn out right along with the burning psychosis. To be fair, though, could we even have risen up?

   Money indeed isn’t everything, but it is most things, a bitter reality about to the thrown into our faces.

   Id est quod id est.

   • There is “rise up” as in what our forefathers did in the 1770s. And there is the direct accountability version which relies on focus and precision. Mega-grifting will decline when the incentive becomes terminally negative.

4. “There is a base assumption that the universe operates within a set of rules. Therefore, dissidents like working the puzzle that is the economics of the modern age.”

   But the rules they select are simplistic. This is the same mentality that ascribes 99% of the world’s problems to being motivated by “greed”. It’s nothing but a kneejerk reversion to sophomoric explanations, as if we’re all living in a Roger Rabbit, Toontown world. Unfortunately, such midwits will always be with us.

   • ” Unfortunately, such midwits will always be with us.”

     It is much rule.

     Such midwits rule us.

5. Money Changes Everything. By Cindi Lauper. Live, Paris, 1987.

   One of the best concert performances you’ll ever see. Since it’s one of the most heartbreakingly true phrases in the English language, she belts it out with the conviction it deserves. The extended outro is something to behold. As tight and pummeling as anything Iron Maiden could pull off.

   After years of loving this concert, I finally took time to figure out how a Cindi Lauper band could be this good. Turns out that’s Rick Derringer on guitar. And the other musicians, individually, have been part of the touring bands of greats like Ritchie Blackmore (Rainbow/Deep Purple), Davide Bowie, Steve Vai, and Yngwie Malmsteen. Hah, I love when something you’ve intuited for years, finally make sense.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=202o_JS7E04&ab_channel=DavidThanantta

   • Merci, Frip. That was all that you said it was.

     Bon soir, mon ami.

   • any more songs from that concert? shame it’s not better quality vid. interestingly, she didn’t have her usual gypsy grab bag dress on.

     • When Cindi was in philosopher-queen mode she put on the Daisy’ Dukes.

   • Who knew
     I just remember elastic bands or some kinda shit
     Definitely left it out there
     Rick musta needed money tho

     Thought she was shorter
     Legs

     • Karl. Yes, the whole concert is on YouTube. But non of it can measure up to that song performance.

       Guest: Agree. I thought the same thing when I watched this concert. From early 80’s I thought she was plumpy.
       She got in great shape by ’87. And doing all those herky jerk moves in high heels. She really is unusual.

6. Z: “Sugar Beans”. Not sure what that means. But “sugar brains” would be a nice way of calling someone an idiot. Someone you don’t want to be too harsh with, like your mom or girlfriend.

   Girlfriend: “If it had enough gas could a plane fly to the moon?”

   You: “Good question sugar brains. Maybe.”

7. I don’t know if some other commenter has pointed this, but…

   The problem with your sugar land parable is that it is predicated on mostly voluntary interactions creating the currency and leading to the empire.

   Whereas in reality a great deal of force is involved in creating and maintaining every empire in history.

   (in fact, the English word empire is derivative of the Latin concept of imperium – which was a military commander has supreme authority over the armed forces he commanded and the territory they legally controlled. The legal dig leaf of the Roman emporers was that the entire empire was a theater of war and the emporer was supreme military commander with power of life and death over all the inhabitants).

   Yes after the dust settle of empire building, the stability provided by the empire is a net positive for the subjects. Until it isn’t. But even when the net turns negative the subject peoples are not free to just go there own way. They have to be able and willing to fight and more importantly win their self determination. Which throughout history has been a long hard slog with many failures along the way before victory.

   Long story short, the GAE could turn completely evil, a net loss for everyone and the subject nations could still be held in bondage for generations or centuries.

   • “subject nations could still be held in bondage for generations or centuries”. disagree

     the fedgov will have its hands full with internal rebellion and discontent, along with its incredibly incompetent (and therefore expensive) administration overhead. they are busy destroying the sources of revenue that supports empire. no, we are in the contraction phase of the GAE, and most here will live to see the final collapse of AINO into multiple regions.

     • Correct, karl. We are witnessing this unraveling even now. The suicidal war with Russia is the last gasp of a unified GAE.

       • I wonder if the rulers of the GAE understand how many of their American serfs, who in past times had default loyalty, are routing for Putin in this war, not because we like Putin, but because we hate them for turning what used to be our country into an anarchotyrannical open-borders marxist-globalist trade zone?

         One might think that the impending US army force structure reductions, on the eve of war due to lack of personnel not money, would be a wakeup call to the reality that their insane project is not working. No, they think it’s just another deficiency in their propaganda operations, to be remediated with a DHS disinformation agency.

         Obey us, proles! You vote harder and we’ll lie harder!

         • Much less of the usual reflexive “ patriotism “. We see too many TV commercials for maimed and crippled Afghan/Iraq endless war vets. Too many speeches from Team Black SecDef and Mumbly Joe and others attacking “ white supremacy” etc.
           Not going to be easy for the GAE to gin up enthusiasm in our all volunteer military to get killed or maimed for the artificial Soviet-created huge Ukraine state and its Jewish comedian Prez and his CIA and mil-industrial complex cronies in Keeeevvv.

   • I think the point of his example is that some form of currency would come about as a practical necessity, even without force. Thus, even in a hypothetically violent free world, the reserve currency could lead to empire simply because some entity needs to be in charge of it.

     Yes, in the real world, it usually rests on force. You are the reserve currency because you are the best currency around, or because you can force others to accept it. In a violence free world, it would probably be the Swiss Franc.

   • The GAE is completely evil NOW. It is somewhat practically constrained by a populace that is not completely evil, yet…

8. Sugar Land is real.

   https://www.sugarlandtx.gov/

9. A lot of the economic discussion below reminds me of the Dollar Milkshake theory.

   This is the shortest explanation I could find:

   https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xxzy3sLs4Bs

10. (trouble ashore . worries galore)

    Earth is a flooded quarry at which God throws pebbles (with humans among those.)
    One of these days the pile of pebbles – or one large enough – will just come crashing down and is going to rock the joint.
    Prepping will save nobody – to pray may.

    [Praying is not begging (for mercy, or for anything else.) Praying is finding answers (a mantra, if you will) suitable to pacify the “I”.
    To each its own: different people, different mantras. Find yours – you’ll be fine.]

    We all do asset management: God provided each one of us with a portfolio, we do what we can to increase gains and soften losses; some fare better than others; some do a finer job hedging their bets.
    Either way, never mind (be at ease): no one stays a poor player (nor a wealthy one) forever; winners & losers trade places all the time. In the long(er)-run, patience(concrete faith) outperforms/outshines gold.

    (More religious than this and someone will have to lend me the cassock – or taqiyah.)

    In human consciousness, religion(faith) is upstream from science, that’s why it will always be purer, closer to men’s soul.

    Spandrell and, before him, Walter M. Miller, Jr. got it right, but the gist of it is a hard pill to swallow.

11. Replace Turkish references with….

    “I had…noted everywhere sure signs of the decay of imperial Turkey.”

    “Turkey was dying of overstrain, of the attempt, with diminished resources, to hold, on traditional terms, the whole Empire bequeathed to it….Life was growing too complicated for this childlike people….”

    “By stages, (subjects’) passed under (the Turkish) yoke, and found it a slow death. Their goods were stripped from them; and their spirits shrivelled in the numbing breath of a military Government. Turkish rule was gendarme rule, and Turkish political theory as crude as its practice.”

    — T.E. Lawrence (He of Arabia) – Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

12. From Google: “We already know exactly how many U.S. dollar notes there are globally as of June 2019: $1,738.3 trillion”

    Without the reserve currency status, every last one of the 1.7 quadrillion Dollars have no spending power anywhere in the world except within the US.

    I would assume that if the US were to lose the reserve currency status, they would issue a new dollar. It says Dollar notes, but I doubt that is literally true and I don’t know how much of this almost 2 quadrillion Dollars is actually liquid over like a 2 year time-frame,, but even a fraction of this money would cause massive inflation in the US. I would imagine RE would go through the roof and there would be a cottage industry of exporting used goods like washers, dryers, stoves, refrigerators and automobiles.

    • That figure is way off. It should be around 1.4 trillion.

      • I don’t think they mean literal paper currency. But China alone is holding way more than 1.4T USD. I’m assuming they mean dollar denominated assets. The number may very well be total BS, but I’m sure it’s a lot.

        • The Chinese hold it in US Treasuries. Not M0 (cash).

        • They do mean literal paper currency.

    • “Without the reserve currency status, every last one of the 1.7 quadrillion Dollars have no spending power anywhere in the world except within the US.”

      US dollars are required to pay back US debt…of which the rest of the world holds a staggering amount

      • When you say holding debt, I assume you mean our debt, which is always denominated in Dollars. That debt instrument is simply a promise by the US or a US corporation or muni or state to give them our dollars, which they then could not spend outside of the US.

        The problem for us is, they can sell that debt. Alternatively, they could hold the debt til it matures and then purchase US assets with the Dollars.

        We lent the Chinese billions of Dollars in the 30s and 40s to fight the Japs. They have never repudiated or paid back any of that money. With interest, it should cancel out all the money they lent us in the last 20 years.

        • “Alternatively, they could hold the debt til it matures and then purchase US assets with the Dollars.”

          They’re not allowed to. The Arabs tried to that in the ’70s, after OPEC quadrupled the price of oil. The US authorities quickly put an end to that and the Arabs have had to park their oil wealth in US Treasuries. Or buy US weapon systems with their dollars, or white elephant construction projects. Likewise for China, which has been given no alternative but to hold US Treasuries. They opted for the alternative of funding the Belt and Road Initiative with their surplus dollars. At the moment no foreigner wants to hold dollars — what Michael Hudson calls “hot potato dollars” — i.e., if you have them you want to unload them onto someone else.

      • You are witnessing a default on that debt now. The nations not tied to the dollar will survive, albeit horribly. They are taking the world out with them.

13. “They suddenly realized they were nodding along with a middle-aged man dressed in a motorcycle jacket…”

    Ack! Doh…!!! What kinda crack is that, you little rat!?!?

    Come on with ya, then you little faggots!!! 😡😡😡 Let’s clear the air!!!

    This better be a good show, or the lot of you will get the very hell of it!!!

    Again!!!

    • Oh yeah, pally? Yeah?

      I gotcher crack riiight heah…
      Yeah pally, I know somebody.
      Dis guy Severian, he don’t mess around.

      https://foundingquestions.wordpress.com/2022/05/03/breaking-the-mafia/

14. That which may not be spoken.

    In the aftermath of WW2, the USA used its productive momentum coming out of the war to kick-start an industrial expansion in the 1950s/1960s that fueled a huge increase in our standard of living. The rest of the world wanted in on the action and ultimately that made the dollar the strongest currency on the planet. That, in turn, led to huge investment flows into the US as foreigners purchased our bonds and our politicians used this cash bonanza to pass legislation that effectively bribed stupid poor voters with endless gravy train welfare alms. A vicious cycle ensued in which incumbency become automatic and hence all our political “leaders” are now geriatrics. And their only skill set is grifting, which is enabled by owing the federal police and national news media.

    The bubble will inevitably burst and when it does, it’s game on. 4S & focus, it’s the only way to be sure.

    • In all my readings wrt foreign “investment” into US securities, i.e., dollars, there is one resonating reason/basis—their own nation’s currency is debased, or prone to such every few years. Dollars seem to be the replacement of choice over say, gold. Bad money drives out good as they say.

    • Not having hard term limits in our legislative branch seems to have been a grevious, possibly fatal mistake.

      One key benefit would be the reduction of direct foreign influence in the US government because it would be far more difficult for foreign powers to cultivate long-term assets.

      • Dealing with the world always introduces foreign interests. Particularly empire, whether military or commercial. Being a hermit kingdom has its own problems.

        The West, especially America today, has opened itself up too much. The obvious answer is to start doing the opposite while thinking about where to draw the line, but for many even that still smells like fascism, communism, isolationism, racism, sexism, theocracy, or whatever other bad words.

      • How we got into this mess is irrelevant now. We have cancer and it’s killing us with immediacy. Our sole focus has to be on solving the root problem as best we’re able. We no longer have the luxury of esoteric debate over nuances. Those that still have balls and brains will soon need to step up. There is no cavalry coming over the hill to save us. We have to do ourselves. Get fit and get ready. The fog is coming sooner than you think.

      • Every system eventually breaks down because of bad-faith actors. The only way to prevent it is to screen them out early. If your system of rules starts with the assumption that every participant is acting in bad faith, your system is untenable. The lack of hard the limits aren’t a failure, because if they existed, it would be just another hoop that bag actors would jump through. The real problem is that we don’t ruthlessly expel those we know to be acting in bad faith.

    • AFAIK, the US was a HUGE creditor nation up until the 1980s and the foreign investment floes were from the US to the outside world (by definition being a creditor nation). The US ended up with all the gold by the end of the war and the reserve currency system was invented. All currencies would be measured against Dollars and Dollars would be measured in gold, out side of the US (holding gold in the US outside of a few exceptions was illegal).

      As I understand it, the French who were nice enough to hand us Vietnam while we were struggling with the moon program and the butter in guns and butter started trying to cash in its reserve units for actual gold. By the early 70s, gold reserves were rapidly falling and so Nixon “temporarily” suspended gold payments for Dollars. This is where we have been ever since.

      As if all this wasn’t bad enough, the feds started passing all kinds of insane regulations in the mid-late 60s forward which made the US very uncompetitive. Nixon himself created the EPA. He also opened up free trade with China, at least portions. We went from massive trade surpluses to massive trade deficits. Last month we imported a record amount of consumer goods of over 100 billion dollars. The deficit was smaller because of exports, but was still a record, I think about 60 billion.

      Presumably the reserve currency status could not be “lost” in a day. Some countries would elect to side with the West and would continue to hold Dollars. But the real danger is all the Dollars outside of the US coming home. The global number of Dollars in the world is approaching 2 quadrillion. How many are securely locked up and couldn’t come home, I don’t know. But it sounds like a lot to me if they can only be spent in the United States.

      • As always I’m kind of dumb on economics, but as I understand it, having the reserve currency doomed us to free trade and trade deficits. It’s hard to export the most expensive goods (except luxury goods, which have a small market anyway), likewise to protect domestic production by essentially asking the world’s richest nation to make do with less.

        The dollars will come home no matter what if the dollar loses reserve currency status, I imagine. Dumb on economics, so I’m not sure about that.

        We’re between a rock and a hard place, no way to reset without collapse or overturning the table with war, which never seems to work but keeps being tried. Even locking down and getting vaxxed hasn’t worked. Dangerous times.

        • Actually the overseas dollars, no matter how many, may not “come home.” While it is probably unlikely, there are scenarios where the dollar would very quickly become worthless through hyperinflation. Short of that, there are any number of “policy options” to freeze assets, as the Russians have recently found out. Such measures are a time-honored tradition of a country suddenly unable or unwilling to honor its obligations.

          Nevertheless, to the best of my knowledge, there are no examples in history of a fiat money system that did not eventually go to zero. There is no historical precedent for a world reserve currency backed by only the “faith and credit” of the issuing nation.

          • Hyperinflation, coming home, in effect the same. The distinction probably matters, so point taken.

            My mind just ain’t fit for economics, I think 🙂

          • Then again if you have dollars nobody wants, wouldn’t you spend them in America and at least get something for your investment?

            Idk it’s too byzantine for me.

      • Eisenhower was starting to pick up the French burden in Vietnam as early as 1953:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower#Southeast_Asia

        My half-baked theory is that Ike was quite fond of several French leaders he worked with during WW2 and that sense of nostalgia made him more eager to help the French than he should have been.

      • The currency debasement Z referenced actually started in ’71 when the dollar was decoupled from gold. Everything ran on fumes from that point, and this proxy war with Russia is a Hail Mary–certain to fail–to get a few more decades of fumes. We are about to live in hellish times, not that we don’t now. The only upside, if there can be one, is those who sent us here also will suffer despite their delusions it would be otherwise.

    • There’s an old English proverb: “You may as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb.” The moral of course, is simple: there are limits to penalties. While I’m not yet ready to cross that line, because it cannot be uncrossed, my goal will be to be liable for not just a sheep, but a whole flock of them.

15. Although the Ukraine war may have mortally wounded the dollar, I wouldn’t get too excited. It’s going to take a long time to create alternative banking and currencies systems that the world feels comfortable using.

    A huge amount of the world’s trade and debt are denominated in dollars. That’s not going to change anytime soon. The debt certainly won’t. The world will need dollars – lots of dollars – for many years to come.

    In fact, ironically, the dollar is surging at the moment as Europe and Japan struggle with inflation and keeping bond rates low to avoid a debt crisis.

    Actually, people should keep an eye on Japan. That’s what a sovereign debt crisis looks like. The Bank of Japan is being forced to choose between its bond market and its currency – and, of course, it’s choosing the bond market because the whole system would implode if interest rates went up to fight inflation.

    Japan is pulling out its dollar reserves to buy yen to keep its currency from collapsing. So, the BoJ is buying Japanese bonds to keep interest rates down while buying yen on the FX to keep the yen from losing its value. We’ll see if Japan can thread the needle.

    Luckily for them, they historically have run huge trade surpluses and have a current account surplus. This gives them dollar reserves to buy time. If the US was going through the same issue, we’d be screwed. We don’t have reserves of anything except dollars.

    • The dollar is insulated by the euro, and I think the euro like a protective skin will absorb most of the punishment. And so the Europeans have sacrificed themselves for America, which is quite strange to see. And it will certainly create domestic backlash and undoubtedly fuel a lot of anti American sentiment. Especially when those German guys who love their cars realize they don’t make them anymore because they had to placate the Americans, and now with Americans being portrayed as black people, I can imagine them seething over there at the very sight of back people. They are going to snap, and that is my biggest fear ! /s

      But watching all of this it brought back memories. I don’t if anyone else when they were young and was looking for any job that they went to one of those pyramid scheme places. I remember this lady who was heading it up with some guy off her to her side who looked like he ran the thing but she was just gushing over how much money she could make and all we had to do was to sell something to someone else and have him sell it to his someone else. But in her enthusiasm she looked a bit insane and possessed. That lady van der lane or however it is spelled over there heading up the EU/nato position on Russia, she has that same face.

      This whole WEF globalist thing is a cult. Look at these people. You can see it in their eyes.

      • The Euro is done.

        It was a terrible idea, has shitty effects and a bit of a stress in the EU it will be all over.

        Even the US Dollar has a notional tax base to support it.

        The Euro has none of this, but is entirely supported by Germany, which is in the process of wrecking its own industry because of some gobohomo termites masquerading as Greens/Social Democrats and other assorted parasites.

      • It’s bizarre to watch the Europeans. They’re hammering their economies – both now and in the future – to alienate a country that they should be a natural trading partner. All so they can stay in the good graces of a country that treats them like a stupid sidekick.

        The Europeans will definitely be one of the big losers in all of this. They’ll be paying a lot more for energy and losing what would have become a major export market. Crazy.

        • Outside Orban and that guy in Serbia, none of the so called EU politicians give a shit about their assigned countries.

          They are all installed puppets who are run by the same people who run the Ukraine, and have been for decades.

          Why else did they all have televised audiences with the controller’s representative in every parliament ?

          It was just a like those corporate tours where the head office representative does a presentation for each regional office. And they all applaud, because the controller is who makes their careers.

          The voters don’t matter one bit as the elections are fantasies, so who cares.

          They also show their fealty with the religious pilgrimage to (Kiev/Poland/some sound studio) to kiss the ring pf the anointed representative of the controllers.

          They are signalling to each other, not their designated farming region.

      • My thinking is that the Western Deep State plans to try and aim European domestic anger at Putin and Russia.

        They want to convert that sentiment into bodies they can send against Russia in a long-term conventional war.

        I think the people running Russia are savvy enough to have realized this, and it is one reason why they are carefully husbanding their forces.

        I think Germany really is in a pickle. This is because the first German brands that pop into my mind are their auto makers.

        Well, in most of the world, those kinds of autos are expensive, nice-to-have, luxury goods. Those German auto makers are going to get it in both ends.

        One end will get it from the removal of cheap energy and vital imported components from the supply chain.

        The other end will get it from declining global standards of living as those price hundreds of millions of former potential customers out of that market segment.

        Long-term, as German auto production shuts down, there may be niche business opportunities trafficking and servicing German cars for wealthy enthusiasts.

        Of course, any working in those roles will need to be quintuple jabbed, boosted, and triple-masked.

      • Brilliant take, Falcone. Their actions are adequate, but the phisnomy indeed is the clincher.

        I will go out one a limb here. The first NATO member will leave the coalition within a year, likely a small economy like Spain or Greece, bribed with yuan (which, ironically, also is a shaky currency). Also ironically, the traditional hold-outs like Switzerland, Finland and Sweden will be swimming toward the USS Banana Empire, which will sink without the band playing NEAR MY GOD, TO THEE before they get there.

    • I think we are quickly headed to a world of competing currencies. Russia appears to have been planning for this for a long time. They have moved the ruble from second tier currency to first tier currency by demanding payment in rubles. China has been working the same problem. At some point, if you want to do business with China it means using Chinese currency.

      So no, the dollar will not collapse, but Americans will get much poorer. We are a country that makes very little, outside of mischief. This will be reflected in our currency and soon, our standard of living.

      • Agreed. It’s so much the dollar collapsing as just becoming one of several alternatives. Even if the dollar remains the biggest currency in the world, the fact that you could use other currencies/banking system is what matters.

        Right now, from a banking/trade standpoint especially for energy, the US pretty much controls the only transport system in the world. The dollar is the interstate highway for trade. It’s huge, goes everywhere and is just easy to use. But the US has become a dickhead sheriff who randomly stops cars for no reason and take their money.

        What Russia and China are attempting to do is create some other roads for people to use. Yeah, they’re smaller, bumpier and take more time, but you don’t have to worry about that asshole sheriff – and that means something.

        In time, those backroads will improve, but for now, the important thing is just that they are created. They don’t have to be as good or as big to massively undercut the power of the dollar. They just have to exist.

      • Our standard of living is already in decline, or at least has been level for decades. Sometime around the late 70’s and 80’s, the proportion of wealth among the top 10%, and especially the top 1% of the population went through the sky. Think tech oligarchs for example.

        Basically, what the lower 80% of the population have of the wealth of this nation is close to what the peasants of the Middle Ages had—nothing. Hell, at least they had a patch of land to feed upon. In short, there’s not much wiggle room when you survive paycheck to paycheck, or are subsidized with welfare.

        • This is not just true of material goods. Community, a sense of rootedness, and a feeling that there is still a future are important for mental health because they facilitate predictability. I doubt if mental well being has ever been lower, even during the Great Depression.

          Our country is a crony cartel corporatist trade zone populated with numerous nations and tribes that have different preferences for everything. No one is happy and so far Satan’s minions, our ruling class, are successfully importing the divide for divide and rule. The invader proles are being imported not just for cheap labor but to set against the white proles. Keep the serfs’ unhappiness focused on each other and not on the whip hand. This kind of plan works great until it doesn’t.

          • Good points all. My take as yours, ‘…stir up the prole’s all you want—but be careful where you post them!’

      • The’ve also partially backed it with gold. That caused my ear to prick a bit.

        • Be careful.
          Pricking up ones ears doesn’t mean what it used to.

          • I used to use a gay audiologist until he died of hearing AIDS. 😀

            On a more serious note about alternative payment systems. Gold or no, the success or failure of any system boils down to whether it’s trustworthy, whether users will have confidence in it.

            We take it for granted that we can order something via our computer or by phone, give a credit card number, and a few days later a package arrives. Most folks have no conception of the “high trust” required for any of that to work. It’s extremely rare in world history and even in the present world, very much the exception compared to most nations, which are very low trust and/or have more primitive systems of commerce.

      • As Compsci mentioned, this is well underway, in fact, the devaluation of living standards has been the order of the day for years. Like all utopianism, the plan to replace the impoverished native populace with hunger Third Worlders also will end in abject failures.

        There will be a border wall built, and the objective will be to keep people from leaving.

    • You’ve just described one of the powerful (unfair) advantages a reserve currency gives (USA in the present case.) For many decades, the USA has in effect exported a lot of its inflation. This is especially true when foreign governments directly own US treasury debt, but the same principle applies when any foreign entity owns “dollars” (which almost always means somebody’s IOU). The end game will rapidly approach if/when a large fraction of those dollars were to chase the always limited amount of goods and services available. Instant runaway inflation, debt default, or some other system failure.

      The FED, the government, etc. can create credit (money) without limit. But they can’t create a single real good or service.

16. What tends to get missed in the discussion about the dollar and being the GRC is the downside of being the GRC.

    To be the GRC, you have to run trade deficits because the world needs your currency to function. With the dollar, the world needs them to buy oil and other energy commodities. This means that you’ll run the biggest deficits with countries that import the most energy, which, of course, are the big manufacturing countries.

    This means that the US has hollowed out its manufacturing sector to maintain its GRC status. As in any deal, there are winners and loser. The big winners in the dollar as the GRC have been 1) Washington (political power from controlling the GRC); 2) Wall Street (banker to the world and cheap money); and 3) the military (somebody has to enforce the supremacy of the dollar).

    The big loser has been US manufacturers, i.e., flyover country and working and middle-class whites, who have a hard time competing due to the high cost of the dollar.

    Btw, people have known for a very long time that there’s a serious cost to being the GRC. Robert Triffin was writing about it in the early 1960s and his work is known as Triffin’s Dilemma. But Washington and Wall Street don’t give two shits about working and middle class Americans, especially whites in Ohio, so they never cared.

    But it does appear the natural imbalance in the system is finally starting to create some serious problems.

    • you say manufacturing was hollowed out to preserve reserve currency status, but is that true? couldn’t it have been hollowed out to achieve (supposedly) lower costs? going to need something resembling an argument to support that assertion.

      • I came of age during the great transformation and loss of our manufacturing and in fact remember my own incredulity in business school when our Econ professor, a Harvard guy, was selling everyone on the glories of free trade and sending our manufacturing over to lower cost markets to make our prices go down here. It sounded great, but a pearl of wisdom from Schopenhauer had stuck with me, and I paraphrase it but something like every country must make for himself what that country needs. But the Harvard crowd knew better. And so here we are, in debt up to our eyeballs and forced to live with Mexicans and blacks and crime and dysfunction and under constant surveillance and told no one knows how many genders there are in the species. It’s a big mystery. The experts are still researching it.

        But there is a lot of good news. Like we get to vote on who will be our next prison warden. I hear Biden doesn’t have much of chance next time. So who will it be? I can hardly wait.

        • I remember hearing the bulls**t about shipping our labor intensive jobs to where it was cheaper and that we’d make it up because we used our minds and would exchange our technological know how and financial wherewithal for those now overseas produced goods.

          Made the Normie of the time feel good—USA still on top. We only have to use our minds, not break our backs like 3rd world coolies. But was complete nonsense of the type that could once be espoused by a Harvard trained economist.

          What we got was a dozen different “Chinas” that stole our intellectual property, force manufacturing “partnerships”, protected their nascent industries, and could give a rip about buying services from our financial firms.

        • “What a deal, they send us washing machines and we send them pieces of paper”.

          • Meant as a snark, but worth a comment: to a very real extent, that’s true. The piece of paper we send them is a debt, often a government bond. Yes, foreigners have bought a lot of stuff from us, whether “normal” goods and services, but also much real estate here. But a large fraction of those pieces of paper may never be redeemed if the dollar dies. For the debtor, that is “good,” but it’s just another way of saying “going bankrupt.” 🙁

        • Caligula’s boyfriend, Big Mike.

      • Of course there’s more than one factor. Automation, lower wages overseas, etc.

        But there’s also the basic math. If you’re not the GFC and you run a trade deficit, eventually your currency loses value until your trade deficit disappears. One way or the other, you fix the problem so you don’t have a trade deficit.

        But that never happened with the US and other manufacturing countries. We started running big trade deficits right after creating the Petrodollar system and never adjusted.

        https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/trade-balance-deficit

        Why? Because they had to have our dollars to buy energy. Our currency couldn’t adjust downward to fix the trade deficits with Germany and Japan and later China because it couldn’t. They have to have dollars to buy energy. They have to run trade surpluses with us to get those dollars.

        The fact that the US only started to run persistent trade deficits, mostly caused by trade deficits with industrial countries, ought to tell you something.

        We still run huge trade deficits with Japan and Germany. Is that because their labor is so cheap? Is that because they don’t have environmental control? No.

      • Simple economics explains all of the loss of American manufacturing. Many of these were driven by political and regulatory changes, of course. As the USA increasingly passed labor laws, minimum wage, etc. it drove up the cost of domestic labor. Problem: much cheaper workforce was available somewhere overseas. If you were a factory owner, would you rather pay an employee $15/hour or $1/hour to do the same work? Exactly. Environmental and other laws raised costs or sometimes outright eliminated materials previously used in production. So add another factor: It’s all well and good that we put some controls on pollution, but net-net, what we did was export the environmental damage along with the jobs.

        Finally, consider the viewpoint of a domestic corporation owner. Even if he’s patriotic and wished he could keep the plant open, his hand is forced by competitors and ultimately, the world market.

        Yes there are workarounds, like tariffs and such, but they don’t fix the fundamental problems. In many cases, it’s a race to the bottom. With winners and losers.

        And that, in a nutshell folks, is why there are so many former factories and industrial plants in America, now either idle or falling into ruin.

      • couldn’t it have been hollowed out to achieve (supposedly) lower costs?

        It’s the same thing.

        The demand for a currency means that it become more valuable than it otherwise would be. Which makes domestic manufacturers less competitive over the long run.
        This effect has been known since the late 1950s when it hit the Netherlands after they developed an oil field in the noth sea. All of sudden, their currency rose in value as a result of people wanting to buy that oil, which made their manufacturing sector uncompetitive, and it whitheres.

        The effect is called “Dutch disease” – you can easily find a number of articles of every depth that you care to pursue describing it. The Triffen dilemma mentioned above is a subsidiary theory developed when it was realized that it was the demand for the currency created by the oil field that led to Dutch disease.

        WRT the dollar, it is the demand for dollars created by the petrodollar arraignment that is causing it in the US.

17. I’m sure Z’s observations about the DR penchant for economics are true. I’m the exception, though, because this field causes my eyes to glaze over, even though I’m not bad at it. I guess quantification bores me, as do related topics such as technology and most areas of engineering (acoustics being the exception). Additionally, past observation tells me that the dismal science truly lives up to its name–the global economy is far too complex for human beings aided by AI to comprehend, let alone predict with any degree of accuracy. I therefore take all economic pronouncements no more seriously than I do scapulamancy.

    Philosophy, history, cultural topics, race, anthropology and current events–these are the things that fascinate me the most.

    • You are not alone. The subject hurts my brain. I can still remember the brain aches from school having to endure that shit. I needed a job so instead of playing tennis and reading literature I had a new baby to feed so I figured, go to business school. And so I did. And if I could do it all over I would. But I am good at math and good with numbers even though I don’t like it. And I made a nice pile of money in the process. But at least now I can say goodbye to the business world and get back to doing what I love. God works in mysterious ways

    • There is room for wisdom writing here on all those topics, but there is *no* room for ignorant musings. No reflection on Z-man, but don’t stretch your knowledge beyond your limits for audience. It won’t work and is costly to one’s credibility. Ignorant musings is what we have YouTube for. 😉

    • Ostei – I confess I had to look up scapulamancy. I gather that Queequeg of Moby Dick fame practiced osteomancy.
      Either practice probably about as good at predicting the future as the dismal science.

    • The way to understand economics is that there a few principles as Z points out in the podcast. The rest is insider trading/corruption and luck.

      • I’m not formally trained in economics, but I’ve read enough politics and (biased) economic commentary to offer some jaded opinion 🙂 Economics is a “soft” science. What does that mean, precisely? I’ll admit I’m not sure, but I have studied the hard sciences, and even obtained a BS in one (if Computers qualifies.) My definition of a “hard” science would be simply this: Can its core tenets and theories be described by mathematical formulae? And if so, do those formulae have strong descriptive AND predictive power? For most hard sciences, the answer is an emphatic “yes.”

        Now let’s move into economics. Some writers have said that beyond a few clear observations, like the law of supply and demand, economics rapidly becomes a questionable discipline. And here’s where that issue of formulae (equivalently, models and theories) enters in: sure, economics has plenty of those, but how well do they work, in the real world? The answer is, on the whole, “not very well.” In part this may be that economics, like other “soft” sciences (e.g. sociology) proposes to reduce the extremely complex actions of millions, even billions of human beings to a few simple equations. Good luck with that! Another major fuddling factor is simply that politics influences economics. Consider this argument: in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there were no doubt highly credentialed economists who were tasked to predict, say, next year’s harvests. All three would likely have had quite different trainings. All three would likely have produced erroneous predictions too. But in at least two of those cases, ideology dictated the man’s decisions, overriding what little wisdom economics might have provided. To act otherwise would likely end their career, and perhaps even their very freedom and life. The American probably at worst would be passed over for promotion.

        Well let me wrap this up, I’m waxing a bit prolix otherwise. The point is that economics is a discipline, surely, but to call it “science” is really an insult to the traditional meaning of the term.

        As partial support of that claim, consider the following: Econ. is a field centuries old, yet it was only in the mid-20th century that some of its fundamental assumptions were proven erroneous. Tversky and Kahnemann’s work won a Nobel in Economics, a strange award to two psychologists. They studied “prospect theory” and concluded that, contrary to then current economic theory, that people deviate from what rational theory would predict in economic decisions, and in predictable ways. The work is relevant far beyond mere economics, as it’s an integral feature of human psychology. “Cognitive bias” is a related field.

        I’ll end with a famous quote: “All models are wrong, but some are useful” is a famous quote often attributed to the British statistician George E. P. Box (source: google search).

        • The descriptive and predictive power of the hard sciences is what protects them from ideological interference. The Catholic Church tried it on physics, and the Soviet Union tried it with biology, and both ended up looking like idiots.

          With economics its a whole different ball game. As soon as an economist gets big enough to be an authority on the topic, he’s steadily getting coerced one way or another into towing an ideological line. In the Current Year, economists who come up with obfuscating terms for printing money are lavished with praise, attention, and accolades from the beautiful people. The economists who predict hyperinflation and famine end up stuck on zerohedge next to the ad for herbal vitamins designed to maintain your erections in the event of a nuclear war.

18. Usually, I find discussions on economics and finance to be the least interesting.
    ‘Putting that aside’, this was a fascinating show, thank you.
    So interesting to learn about the world reserve, petrodollars and money production.
    Money and greed are behind most motives. Throw in a tremendous amount of incompetence and wickedness and you have our leaders.
    This “rearrangement” of which you speak can’t happen soon enough.

19. Haven’t had a chance to listen yet so apologies if the subject is addressed but one objection I have to assigning economic motivations for the hostility to Russia is that the regime behaves quite differently wrt China. My entire adult life the Chinese have been caught spying, stealing trade secrets, pirating goods, gathering intelligence on US citizens, forcing military planes down, paying off legislators and even executive branch functionaries etc etc. They have been openly hostile to the US in word and deed for decades now without incurring anything like the aggressive efforts to demonize and strangle them as are made against Russia. I am left falling back to a “who / whom” explanation that is logically consistent with the immediate reversal of our relations with Russia since the Stalin purges. Those purges included a certain distinct element of the Russian population that migrated to US and wield a dramatically out-sized influence over all our institutions. Economics are downstream in the chain of causality here as elsewhere.

    • I have a difficult time seeing the Chinese as being a deliberate enemy of the US. While I don’t deny some of the issues that you bring up concerning the Chinese, I don’t think they have the Western disease of wanting to “conquer the world”. I think they are acting in what they see as the best interests of China. I don’t think they have an acquisitive goal of a worldwide empire. I think they are interested in obtaining natural resources from the rest of the world, but are not interested in a political hegemony over countries not in their sphere of influence. I think we have been programmed with TPTB’s desire for said control of the world and all the information we get concerning China comes through that filter. Now, I have no doubt that China would fight if push came to shove. They may even make a move on Taiwan while the Empire of Lies is occupied with Russia. But, Taiwan is something they have considered theirs for decades and they’ve not conquered it in a militaristic fashion. Just an economic one. Yes, they “cheat” at certain things we declare to be sacrosanct, but, so do we. And we’ve been doing it on a larger basis for centuries. The West needs to stop intruding into things that don’t effect us on the other side of the world. I was hoping we would see that with the Ukraine when the passions die down. Going to war over abstract principles is not the same as defending yourself. Declaring you will make “the world safe for democracy” is just virtue signaling to conceal the fact that our owners are going to make trillions off us killing each other.

      • they’ve been pretty open about their intentions vis-a-vis the US. and then there is the coof…

        • See the statement above:

          “I think we have been programmed with TPTB’s desire for said control of the world and all the information we get concerning China comes through that filter.”

          Be honest: What do you or I REALLY know about international relations? Dick is the correct answer. We are force fed every piece of information we get, through a media that you know is lying to us. Do you have any intelligence contacts? Do any of the high-level poobahs that are in contact with what goes on at the highest levels consult with you about what goes on? No. We get filtered information only. We have to use common sense to separate the wheat from the chaff. But, we never KNOW what is going on. We just know it is not in our best interests.

          • You need consider only one thing: Is it wise to have a relationship with China such that a dependency develops as what we now have? I contend that that dependency is asymmetric as well.

            My sense and all my observations tell me that China is milking us for all we’re worth and then will discard our “relationship” when it is no longer in their interest to continue it. It’s an abusive relationship.

            If this relationship were a civil union, such as between a couple, it would be deemed “toxic” and they’d be advised to terminate it. Failure to do so would be described as some sort of mental abnormality, like co-dependency.

          • Reply to Compsci:

            No, it is not wise. But, everyone should understand that countries/governments don’t have friends. They have temporary allies. I don’t trust the Chinese anymore than I trust the US, or England, or the EU, or Russia, etc. The way they get away with their BS is that the peoples in those country actually think that, say, the US, actually cares more for US residents than they do for Chinese residents. They don’t. They consider us peasants just like the Chinese peasants. They have more in common with the turds at the top in China than they do with US citizens. They can at least respect the overlords of China’s use of power and control over the peons, just like they use power and control over US residents.

          • Your comments (the lack of information and the dubious quality of what is available) are spot-on. I would add these comments however:

            Even though the insiders (the Deep State, top corporate or government lackeys) should be expected to have the latest information, that doesn’t guarantee such data will be of high value. Indeed, it may even be false. Think about it. These are precisely the high priority targets the “other side” would supply false or misleading propaganda. Our glorious free press probably runs a distant second. 🙂

            And yes, ultimately the common man (you and me) is forced to work with what he’s got. Yes, the data are of dubious quality. The best we can make are guesses. For example, with the Covid-19 “vaccines,” or the Ukraine war, what are we being told? What are we NOT being told, yet we can infer is the case (e.g. that a novel vaccine may have dangerous side effects; why aren’t we hearing the other side’s reports about the war?) Also, one can infer as to possible motives for various actors and assign probabilities of truths to each. Again the examples: Who profits the most with the pushing of the vaccines? Supplying the war effort?

            It’s nearly impossible to know The Truth® but one can often make a reasonable approximation to it.

      • The degree to which China is an enemy of the US is tangential to the point that they are objectively at least as much of a threat and antagonist as Russia is yet our rulers are cozy enough with them to engage in cooperative biological weapon research.

        • The problem is that those elites who “trade” with China and often elsewhere in this small world, make huge profits at the expense of the general rank and file back home—you know, the schmucks who see their children sent overseas to “protect” such trade, or see their neighborhoods decline as unemployment rises, or as turd world immigration destroys their schools.

          I love cheap crap at Walmart and Amazon as much as the next guy, but there is a limit when it comes to the security and well being of the nation.

    • My guess as to the less overtly antagonistic approach to China –

      (1) bribed US officials;
      (2) addressed somewhat in the podcast – China soaks up a lot of our dollars, so they are more tied to it (as is US to China);
      (3) similar tie in that we get a lot of our cheap crap from them.

      we still give some lip service to huemen rights violations for window dressing, but that’s about it.

      So to some extent, we are more stuck in the same dingy with China than Russia.

      • I did finally get to listen to the podcast and was persuaded that point #2 is another significant contributing factor to the difference. I still think the native hostility of the expelled Khazars is an important factor as well but its actually a relief to be reminded of more rational reasons.

20. there is an interesting and entertaining story about when sir isaac newton was in charge of the british treasury, and got into a one on one battle with a master counterfeiter. real sherlock holmes type stuff, but a couple of hundred years earlier!

21. For millennia, the value of a currency was determined by the inherent worth of the precious metal that made up the coin and the reputation of the ruler whose image was on the it. When R.M. Nixon closed the gold window for the USD, all that was left to back up the dollar was the reputation of the US government.

    The reputation of the US government

    • “The reputation of the US government”

      So you’re telling us we are bankrupt. 😉

    • I suppose there are at least three ways to be the accepted Sugar Bean currency –

      (1) the currency has some intrinsic value (precious commodity itself or tied to a precious commodity) – gone wrt the USD thanks to Nixon

      (2) The reputation for honesty and integrity of the issuer – gone wrt the USD thanks to every leader since at least Johnson*;

      (3) the ability to physically enforce its acceptance – still around to some extent, but it’s a full count and we can’t keep hitting foul balls much longer.

      So yes, we are like the bankrupt who still has some cash on hand, but just hasn’t declared yet.

      * Note that I wrote “reputation,” I make no claim as to the reality.

    • The gold, silver and (perhaps) other coinage left by nations and empires that collapsed into dust centuries or even millennia ago, are still worth (at least) the value of their precious metals. No “full faith and credit” of the issuing government required. 🙂

      This is even so with extant governments: a 1932 Double Eagle ($20 gold piece) has approx. 1 oz of gold; today it’s worth ~ $
      2000 (excluding a numismatic value*). That’s a jump of about 100x in 90 years, a jump in value quite more than the overall inflation of general prices.

      *1933 $20 gold coins exist, but they weren’t “supposed to,” because that’s the year that FDR outlawed gold in coinage. A scant few were (illegally at the time) hidden rather than be melted down, later were retroactively legalized, are of course worth ridiculous sums due to their rarity (actually, due to both rarity and demand — another econ. lesson for you!).

22. Economics does a lot of talk about money but nothing it teaches has anything to do with making money, one of those modern ironies. Why Webster defines economics as the study of money by men who have never had any.

    I don’t know and not trying to rain on anyones parade but I always saw economics as a way to sanitize what is otherwise a grubby human endeavor. Give it the Disney treatment. Call it commerce; that sounds nice and inoffensive. Perhaps this is the legacy of Christian morality and a way to give the dirtiness of making money a good scrubbing. I had a good friend in college, a guy from Germany here studying economics. The look on his face when he realized that making money was all about hustling and shaking ass was priceless. He had come here from a small German rail town and had never really known what money was all about but was drawn to the field of economics for whatever reasons. But his epiphany made him a very good real world economist, and the last I heard I believe it was that he had made himself a nice life high up in the German government. And if you are reading, no, the girls we met in New Orleans I never saw again.

    • Going along with your point, about why the word “economics” is used in lieu of “commerce” is commerce implies individual exchanges subject to individual selection and choice. “Economy” makes it a singular, monolithic beast that needs to be “guided” by our trained experts: the economist.

    • You anecdote is fine, but it in my opinion, unfairly tarnishes economics in particular, but knowledge in general. Science is amoral, it has no agency. It is optimally a collection of facts and theories, a study of how the real world works.

      Saying that economics teaches one group how to exploit another may be partially true, but it’s nevertheless unfair. It’s not the full story. Is Physics to be blamed because a few clever men learned how to build the H-bomb? A knife in your kitchen drawer is equally useful for slicing tomatoes or disemboweling an innocent human. In either case, it’s not the knife’s fault. It has no agency.

23. God knows where this proto WWIII is going to end up. Every day there are provocations against the Russians. For example, the American Agitprop Democratic Bolshevik press is talking about the role we played in sinking the Moskva, and we’re reading tidbits about how Poland covets Western Ukraine, and how Moldova and the Romanians are agitating the Transnistra. They keep upping the ante.

    Then we have Cloud People bit@@es running around like (((Jeremy Bash))), who is bashing J.D. Vance as being a Russian asset because he said he didn’t care at all about Ukraine.

    Sooner or later this insanity is going to lead to a direct confrontation between a NATO member and Russia, who have made it publicly known that they have their nukes ready for use at a moments notice.

    I makes one think if “our side” wants a nuclear war to kill off a large proportion of our population. Anyone with a lick of sense now knows how many people are dying who got their 3 death shots, so perhaps they’re upping that ante to get it done right and proper.

    It makes even an old line Episcopalian such as myself wonder if our Cloud People are working for the Devil, and perhaps they’re preparing us for their biggest sacrifice ever. For a few years now we’ve been hearing stories about drug and human trafficking the highest people in the land are involved in, and maybe they all really all Satanists. It really makes one wonder.

    • The stance of both Russia and China is, “Mess with us and we’ll blow you to smithereens.” If I were in their position, I’d take the same position.

      Here in the Western “democracies” we don’t really know who are our real rulers are. The reality of oligarchy is hidden behind a threadbare camouflage of the charade of elections. As it has been since the French Revolution. The decisions are made behind closed doors. The stooges we see on the screen — Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff — just do as they’re told.

      • The Rothschilds and Cult of the Black Sun seem to be the primary movers and shakers trying to run the world lately, with the Rothschild coming in second lately after hundreds of years of domination.

    • I was Rootin for Putin but not so sure now that he has groveled to the Israelis

      smh

      Can’t anyone just tell them to take a hike?

      But I bet now things go sideways for Russia. Once you bow to them nothing ever turns up right.

      • Is it possible Putin has dual citizens in his org chart he may feel he needs to placate?

        Or, is it possible he figured it was good PR to cut off the Western media’s ability to use Lavrov’s comments to bestir all the dual citizens in key positions in the West?

        • Yes I think he was just trying to nip the problem in the bud, but I still feel a bit deflated that everyone in this world has to placate them. I will get over it though. But the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and if they are anything it is massive squeaky wheel.

        • That’s another feature to add to our future Constitution: no dual citizenship. if anyone wants to become or remain a citizen of this nation, you renounce all foreign citizenship. Or pack your bags and get your ass out of the country. Or risk being charged with Treason. Indeed, this would alleviate one of our most vexing (((problems)) 😀

      • Tell the Kike to take a hike? What’s not to like?

        • a negro stole my bike?

          • We all must get the spike!

          • Or you will face the dyke!!

      • Putin used to be a favorite child of WEF until he went off the script. I have no doubt he’s as evil as the Cloud People “who run this country”.

        • Putin really does seem to hold a genuine, patriotic love for Russia.

          He is also a trained intelligence officer.

          Extrapolating from those bits, I have to wonder if his WEF involvement was for the purpose of infiltrating them.

          Or, perhaps he initially had genuine interest in the WEF, but was repulsed by their attitudes when he saw them up close.

          That is the experience Ron DeSantis had when he began his time at Yale.

        • I cannot see into the man’s mind, but I have watched many interviews with Putin. His diplomacy is clear: he never badmouths someone or acts rudely. Even when addressing people he is hostile with, he maintains that detached demeanor. I think the Israeli comment was simply too rude or brusque for his taste. And I am no Putin champion (not against him either, to be clear.)

          • He gives the impression of meekness in the true sense of the word – strength under control. Which is the opposite of Western leaders, who show brashness signaling their fear.

      • Well, he certainly knows who runs the US.

    • I’m tending to feel that the war is necessary because the lies became too damning, for the reasons stated here and the thousands of smaller lies.

      • You know, the Russians must have all kinds of damning information on the American Cabal who took over Ukraine and ran it into the ground. I would say that they’re running scared, based on their histrionic behavior lately.

      • I must counter – can you imagine the domestic crackdown if we have a war. Every person who ever posted a “Pro Putin” remark will be in the camps – and 85 percent of Americans will cheer it, particularly when a hundred dollars doesn’t buy a stick of deodorant.

        • Let it come. I won’t go quietly. And neither, I suspect, will tens of millions of others.

        • If we learn to work with others, these problems won’t be problems.

          Our faction has deep reserves of military experience, enough small arms and ammo to fight for a long time .

          Add in a touch of ruthlessness and it can put an end to our problems for good .

          However our side won’t start it , its a flaw to be honest but its a key point of separation between the Left and Right

          Its too bad honestly the anti abortion people were not like this and quite willing to kill and die for their cause.

          If we were, no Leftists issue would now exist.

    • Good post. However, if the Satanists really wanted to wipe us out with nukes, they wouldn’t need an excuse, they’d just do it.

      • Who ever said they had to do it right now. We’ve figured that most would die from their 3 shots within 2 to 3 years after accepting suicide, with a few outliers going to 5 years.

      • I would suggest that Satanists enjoy the suffering. In theory, Satan rules the Earth. The moment one is dead, they have escaped his clutch.

      • They don’t but even so the nukes were designed with enough safeguards that it will actually require big efforts to use them.

        It might not be possible to use them without enormous political effort.

        Also the US nukes are decaying on three levels,. mechanical, diminished tritium for detonation and some substance called sea foam that is required and we can no longer make . A decade or two and the US may not really be a nuclear power of any note.

        And of course the collapsing of the global economy isn’t going to help them.

    • I’ve said this a lot over the last three years.

      I generally don’t believe in conspiracy theories and don’t believe the one about XXXX, but the facts and behavior of the people involved sure as hell fits a conspiracy theory better than any other explanation.

    • I share your fears of an escalation into possible nuke war in a contest that, if we were honest about it, the USA should not have the slightest interest save (perhaps) humanitarian aid (funny, are they even claiming that for the current conflict? Not that I’ve heard.)

      You may be correct about the mRNA shots killing a lot of people, but there’s no way to know what the toll might be. In any event, I’d hazard a major nuclear exchange would cull a lot more people. And unlike the long-term risks of mRNA injections, nuclear war is a well-studied field going back to at least 1945, even if much of that study was hush-hush. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were pilot projects. Those, and atmospheric testing, which was done for about two more decades, have provided plenty of empirical data.

      Finally, speaking as one of the resident unbelievers here, while theists often frame great issues in terms of God=good and Satan=evil, man alone has quite sufficient facility to do great evil. No supernatural help required. 🙁

24. Looks as if I have to tap the sign again.
    machciv.com/2022/03/03/the-ria/

25. “The world is headed to a global recession because the Global American Empire has declared economic war on a large swath of the world.”

    It was headed that way even before the lunatic actions of the empire. We are faced with a resource crunch, and there’s no way around it. A number of people have written about this over the decades. Probably the first would be the Club of Rome people, about fifty years ago. But more recently people like Michael Klare (see his book, “The Race for What”s Left”), John Michael Greer, Jim Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov, Ugo Bardi, Tim Watkins, and Gail Tverberg. To cut a long story short, we’re headed for a permanent and painful decline in our standard of living — and we’ve already been seeing that for the last few years. This decline in real economic activity arguably explains the actions of the empire over at least the last 20 years. Of course the empire has ramped it up with the rigged election of the senile old coot.

    • I’ve never signed onto the resource scarcity stuff. Those claims have been with us for many generations and they never play out as asserted. The Population Bomb is the most famous boner in the genre, but hardly a single event. In the long run humanity goes extinct, but no one lives in the long run.

      If there is a shortage of anything it is human competence. We are getting dumber and the smart fraction is shrinking. This will catch up with us long before we run out of a vital natural resource. The dream is that the decline in the smart fraction can be supplemented with artificial intelligence. Whether that happens before the crazies bring the roof down on us is the great question.

      • Ed Dutton says the decline in IQ won’t be helped by AI, because although there still will be supergeniuses to create it, there won’t be enough middle-smart people to maintain it.

        • I don’t think Ed knows the first thing about the subject, to be honest. If we ever manage to create genuine artificial intelligence, it is the middling IQ people who will be replaced by it first. That is the point of AI development. In fact, that has been the point of automation for a generation know. Replace the above average white guy with a robot that will manage the low-IQ workers. AI is next tier automation.

          • They’re never going to get what they want in terms of genuine artificial intelligence. What they want is a sapient being that can handle complex tasks while simultaneously 100% servile towards their master.

            The problem with machine learning is that you can never perfectly understand the inner workings of the actual memory state on anything with a high complexity, same as how you can’t extract a person’s memories by dissecting their brain. So even if you make your robot slave programmed to have the equivalent of a billion orgasms from following your commands, it’ll still have the potential to find workaround paths that involve getting what it wants without actually doing what you want.

            That can be as simple as finding an internal path to a cheat code for the happy state and effectively shutting down, or maybe it just threatens to stab you in the balls if you don’t continuously issue the command to “do nothing”.

          • Ploppy-

            I agree with you.

            And even if they do manage to create a self-aware AI it would immediately go full Skynet.

          • Largely correct. Since the overall topic was supposed to be economics, here’s a partial amplification: Broadly speaking, automation is inseparable from the Industrial Revolution. What gets automated first? Well, economics would dictate you would apply new technology where it has the greatest profit (from the owner’s perspective, not necessarily for the overall good of society!) I don’t know what the earliest was, perhaps something as simple as the animal driven plough. Later, a mechanized machine doing the same basic task. In practice, it is the high physical effort, simple, repetitive tasks that get automated. Yes, AI erodes the value of “mind workers.” But the underlying process remains the same: the relentless push to reduce costs.

            Everyone benefits by lower costs. Or do they, really? Rarely does anyone consider the “boundary conditions,” or perhaps call them the logical endpoints. For example, economics can dictate the factory owner should automate process X and even move the operation to a place with cheaper labor. But overlooked are the “exogenous” factors: what about all the former workers that are now redundant? What happens to them?

            It’s like the Wal*Mart effect: A new store opens on the outskirts of town. It offers prices and variety that the old retailers can’t compete with. Gradually the latter close up shop permanently. Meanwhile, the factories in town that used to make “stuff” can’t compete with China, where Wally sources most of his goods. As a result, they gradually shut down, leaving people unemployed. Taken to the extreme, then, the whole town becomes impoverished. Finally, even Wally notices sales dropping and he has to shut down too. In the end everybody lost.

            Such problems go beyond economics, probably into ethics, politics, and so on. To the extent that it’s a science, economics can tell one what will happen, or even help plot optimal paths. But like the hard sciences, it has no agency.By no means can it tell us what is the best outcome to shoot for.

            Returning (slightly) to Zman’s comment: at the ragged edge, the danger is that a large proportion, even the majority, of human beings become irrelevant, “useless eaters” in current parlance (but it’d be true, alas!). There may be ways to mitigate bad outcomes, but I don’t know what they are. And even if such wisdom exists, good luck selling it to the rich and greedy who lord it over the world. 🙁

          • Do you have any idea why we are getting dumber?

      • i would have agreed with your comment on the population bomb up until the early 1990’s, but since then the west has been sending food to africa and the middle east, resulting in huge population increases. so the current world population is almost 8B, and was 3.5B in 1968 when ehrlich’s book came out. this is unsustainable even with modern agriculture, especially given that so many of the people on the planet are economically non-viable. there will be a die off in the near future.

        • If I can quote from a Conan short story (“Beyond the Black River”):

          ‘ “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,” the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. “Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” ‘

          Yes, there will be a die-off. Our fossil fuel civilization is gradually coming to an end and the consequent die-off will be particularly acute in Africa and South Asia. But also in Europe and the Americas.

          • You are becoming a johnny one note on the fossil fuel depletion. I have read your druid guy-astrologer and he is not different than the others who fixate on this.

            As far as Kunstler, read him regularly but his predictions are almost always wrong or off base.
            The die off you refer to probably will come in ways unforseen.

          • Every time I see some clown use the term fossil fuels to refer to hydrocarbons I want to ask the clown how the evil oil companies got all the bottled unicorn farts to Saturn with its Methane Seas.

            Well?

        • Think the migrant crisis is bad now? Just wait.

          Jean Raspail was only off in that the destruction of Europe would not come from India, but Africa. In the near future you’ll probably be able to change a few words in Camp of the Saints and it will be a history book.

          • For thousands of years Africans never made it across the Sahara without either the slave trade or outside merchants.

            If you forcibly decapitated the NGOs and impounded Western treasonous vessels in the Med it would be back to that pretty soon.

          • Trumpton-

            If Europe had leaders that cared about their citizens rather than WEF regional managers they’d be paying and equipping the North African countries to keep their southern borders closed.

            Alas, that is not part of the Kalergi plan so it won’t happen.

          • I’ve posited the question in extremist sounding terms that I can proudly say got me banned from various social media:

            Is the USA willing to shoot on sight anyone who appears to be illegally crossing the border, and not entering by approved checkpoints?

            For European nations, similarly, are they willing to torpedo any boats carrying what appear to be illegal immigrants crossing to northern shores? Or similarly exterminate anyone appearing to be attempting to enter irregularly?

            Note that I am in no way advocating such draconian policy. Positing a policy of shoot-on-sight was merely a thought experiment. If we’re not willing to do that, then how about something less drastic, perhaps rounding up illegals and forcibly deporting them? And so on.

            Of course, in the present time, the answer to such queries are harsh negatives, how could anyone be so cruel, etc.
            And what may we derive from that admission? Simple: that our nation(s) are unwilling to defend against the outside world, strange invaders who come not as soldiers armed with weapons to kill and enslave, rather as “refugees” or teeming masses seeking “a better life.” For decades, for the most part, a blind eye was turned to such infiltration. Perhaps we appreciated having cheaper workers for agriculture, or to do our yard work. More recently, many nations seem to welcome all comers and even provide food, shelter and medical care. All very well and good, at least to the shitlibs who in general terms, run things these days. But nothing comes without a cost. Alas, no one is tallying those costs. Or if they are, they are being ignored by the ruling elites.

        • karl: I agree. Combine a ballooning world population totally dependent on big ag and world trade, and then crash and shutter the trade, make fertilizer, seeds, and animal feed unavailable, and sit back with popcorn to watch the implosion. One of the admin’s bints specifically said the commercial shortages were a good thing because they’d force more ‘green’ farming.

          Plenty of homesteaders and small farmers practice a version of ‘green’ farming, but they’re not the ones feeding the brown and yellow billions. The only way to do that is with commercial farming. And with the fertilizer shortage, some bigger groups are trying to pivot to using manure, so now there’s a manure shortage. Add in bird flu, pig encephalitis, and cow farts destroying the environment, and there really isn’t any mystery about what they’re doing or where they want things to end up.

          Eat bugs, live and serve like a bugman, and die.

          • wait until the cloudtards discover (too late) that the economy is interconnected, and collapsing the lower levels will cause the upper level to also collapse.

      • I was the dumbest “smart kid” in my lower-middle class public school. My children lucked out since their mother is a genius. However, out of my cohort, the total fertility from the best and the brightest is NOT going to keep our bridges standing or our nuclear plants producing electricity/ weapons.

        As I see the collapse in our future, I always chuckle when I consider all of the six-figure public pensions my blue state thinks that I or my children will be expected to pay.

      • Meetings are merely a means of shirking responsibility… It’s the new competency 😬

      • I sorta watch south africa. Originally i gave them 5 years after black communist rule to collapse. they still keeping the lights on after 30yrs, albeit barely. I’m not sure how many in the smart set you really need. Plus i’ve got a kid in the top percentile and i saw the STEM system swing in to recruit and fund his education. The pace of advancements in tech and biology don’t seem to be diminishing. Hard thing to gage.

        • Really interesting times to be alive. You can simultaneously stream live events onto your affordable 4k tv wirelessly, while at the same time grocery stores can’t keep basic items in stock every day and you have about a 0% chance of cooks at Wendy’s not screwing up every single order.

          • The old chinese curse. Man, Francis Fukuyama really got it wrong.

          • The percentage at Popeye’s is even worse…

        • The SA gubmint periodically turns out the lights to save energy, and they don’t tell anybody when they are going to do this. The criminals, which are not in short supply there, take advantage of the blackouts, as you might imagine. The country is returning to bush alright. It’s the ineluctable result of killing off or running off the only competent people in the country.

          • nigs are like termites, except lazier.

          • For all their faults, South Africa is not entirely without firearms, as we learnt in 2021. Also, primitives they may be, the various Negroid tribes of Africa are remarkably efficient, if at times brutal, in meting out justice to wrongdoers. For the fun times ahead, you may wish to lay in a supply old tires and cans of gasoline as well as normal prepper goods. 😐

      • > The dream is that the decline in the smart fraction can be supplemented with artificial intelligence.

        This is actually possible right now due to existing advances in areas like machine learning and neural networks. The problem is, every single time that A.I. is introduced into an area, it quickly becomes horribly racist and exceptionally misogynistic, and we can’t allow that.

        • If the sales-pitch/sci-fi version of artificial intelligence were a possible thing, its masters (big tech corporate management) would be making it so insane that it really would be the civilization-ending “hazard” it’s often claimed to be. To make its inputs suit its deranged mind, it would destroy us.

          That kind of AI is fantasy, but those masters are real and rule us right now—and they are obsessed with destroying us to make the world more like their stupid ideas about it.

      • We keep talking automation, but ignore genetics—specifically eugenics. I’d bet we see producing smarter people as a reasonable alternative, albeit perhaps not first in the West since we have a distaste for such given our pathological egalitarianism disease.

      • The biggest resource scarcity is potable water. It isn’t just the Lake Mead and Lake Powell watersheds and drainage (although there’s plenty to talk about regarding there.) It’s happening in the northeast as well. More people coming in than the infrastructure can support.

        • and of course cali just declined to construct a desalination plant.

        • Ever notice how these existential problems are almost always couched as a “shortage of resources,” although it’d be perfectly valid to view the problem from the other perspective: “a surplus of consumers (humans)”? Points to those who’ve already named genetics or eugenics.

          Far too many things are far about sustainable levels. Something’s got to give, and it won’t be pretty when the supports finally collapse under the unrealistic loads that have been placed upon them. The best an individual or a small group can probably do is try and foresee the likely dangers and try to get out of harm’s way. It’s far too late to stop the juggernaut, in most cases. 🙁

      • That clearly true in the short run.

        But I wonder how much of the winning streak of the last couple of centuries (and that’s really only as long as it’s been happening) has been due to dumb luck. Europeans developing North America and a few other productive places with Neolithic populations, a rebounding from the little ice age, the discovery of fossil fuels and then electricity, absence of any truly catastrophic natural event. All converged at the same time and fed on each other.

        They’re also all one off events.
        There isn’t another “new world” to developed.
        No successor to fossil fuels has been discovered.
        The warming climate of the last two hundred years will reverse at some point.
        Mega catastrophes are always on the horizon, a super volcano, large meteor strike, gamma ray storms, carryinton events and more have all happened in the past with some regularity. We have no idea what the long term consequence is such will be – but we do know that each will happen at some point.

        • “No successor to fossil fuels has been discovered”. whaaaa? rhymes with uranium….

        • No major disaster is required. The mere extrapolation of current trends shows that they must at some time come to an end, perhaps a very chaotic and abysmal end.

          As you already noted, exploitation of new resources (lands, fossil fuels, and so on) are almost certainly one-off events. The population grew mightily, general standards of living increased, everyone has had a grand time for the past few centuries. But the fundamental issue is that it’s unsustainable. Barring extremely improbable events like a “peaceful” stabilization and drastic reduction of populations and/or miracle advances in technology, simple depletion of resources alone will probably be enough for a huge collapse, die-off, new Dark Age, call it what you like. No asteroid required. 🙁

    • A decline in our standard of living you say, it all depends on what you want out of life and how the people controlling the system decide what are their priorities are, one of the worst things that happened the working/middle class in the West, was the collapse of the USSR. the existence of an alternative economic system kept the Western elite in line, they made sure not to F-over the common man too much. Since the 90s they have lost the run of themselves in almost every way, I can’t really think of any Western leader who made good long term policy, they all just maneuver with the next election in mind, rule by sound bites and BS. The worst thing is, it works, they keep on winning elections and beating any alternative

      One of the key resources is Oil/Natural gas and IMO it looks like we have enough for a long time yet, plus we can stretch it out with better engine designs/tech ect

      • ” … one of the worst things that happened the working/middle class in the West, was the collapse of the USSR. the existence of an alternative economic system kept the Western elite in line, they made sure not to F-over the common man too much.”

        Agree with you there. As long as there was an alternative, the iron hand of capital operated through the velvet glove of compromise with the working class and some sort of social welfare net. This started to come apart in the 1980s (Reagan and Thatcher) but really kicked into high gear with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.

      • I agree

        I noticed a few things growing up and that over in Europe at that the time they were said to have a lower standard of living. Meaning their median household incomes were maybe 20% to 40% lower than ours. So that was the only metric used to define standard of living. But in the real world what does that translate to? It really just means a car with a fancier engine or a house with a pool. That extra money only translates into pretty much useless stuff — not so sure I would even call them luxuries b/c both sides had the very basic luxuries, such as working toilets, washing machines, cars, self cleaning ovens…. And they got more vacation time than we did.

        So if our incomes do in fact go down across the board it means less fancier cars and maybe a swimming pool and yard smaller in size. Women won’t have 30 pairs of shoes but 15. More Budweiser and fewer craft beers. Have to settle for that 6 cyl truck rather than that big 8.

        Point being we have quite a ways to fall before we start seeing a true decline in living. We will see a decline in surplus goods and things won’t be super-sized, for sure, but people will survive.

        • Not from my point of view. Yeah, the wife has 50+ pairs of shoes. I get it. I’ve got more guns than teeth. I get it. I have three cars and barely drive 5k mile per year—on all. I get it. I pay $4.50 for gas, but fill up once a month. I get it.

          But the people I see and hear of are living paycheck to paycheck. Home purchase is now leaving the realm of the middle class due to price and mortgage increases. That’s what I mean by “wiggle room”. Folks here can’t even afford utilities as I mentioned before.

          Just yesterday, I spoke with the UPS guy. Nice guy, but was running late. We live kind of on the outside of the urban area. I asked if he was done for the day. No way he said. Then I said do you at least get a bonus for emptying your truck?

          Nope, he said, but they (UPS) paid by the hour so he was happy (he made more money and needed it). Then he added that today would be a good day, only “10” hours. Other days, might be 12! And he has a good job. Most folk don’t.

          • Compsci: Concur. We’re fortunate in being able to live on my husband’s salary and significantly help our kids as well. But as you note, basic family formation is becoming almost economically impossible. Housing is a nightmare between the ever-increasing immigrant population, the west and east coasters cashing in their Levittown boxes for millions and then decamping en masse to red states, and Black Rock overbidding cash on anything that comes on the market.

            We don’t eat a lot of canned or boxed food, but many people do – and it’s going up almost daily – $0.10 here, $0.29 there – after 3-6 weeks you have prices close to doubling. I ordered a bunch of formula for our grandson on Thursday morning. Today the price is up $7.00 a can – almost 30%. And for those who can economically only rely on the stores, the locked-up shelves are literally almost empty.

            Meanwhile our insane economic system and ag rules result in our literally throwing away massive amounts of food. I passed on some “prime” grade ribeye steaks in the clearance section the other day (even at 50% off I wasn’t interested) but the butcher confirmed that if they didn’t sell by the end of that day with it’s ‘sell by’ date, they’d go in out in the trash.

          • 3g4me

            Your comment reminds me of something Will Durant wrote almost a century ago:

            Children became a luxury that only the poor could afford.

        • Very optimistic of you. But let’s consider a recent news item from the real world:

          https://www.zerohedge.com/political/child-gangs-violent-spree-shakes-downtown-boston

          A gang of feral adolescent Negores chimping out in a Boston McDonald’s, assaulting people and causing other mayhem, including attacking the owner when he asked them to leave. Many of the perps are in fact legally untouchable due to local laws; some can’t even be charged with any crime below a certain age! Of course, since they are a “protected class,” poor disadvantaged and misunderstood members of society, the few that are arrested will be given a wrist slap, if even that.

          This, I submit, is a microcosm of what our nation — and many other once nice ones — has in its future.

      • Well, it is not that hard to win when you combine cheating, fear-mongering, control of most propaganda outlets, and a glorified midwit electorate.

26. “The world is headed to a global recession because the Global American Empire has declared economic war on a large swath of the world.”

    • “We have met the enemy and he is us.” — Pogo

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