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At a cost of $250 million, Millennium Challenge 2002 was the largest and most expensive war game in Pentagon history.

With over 13,500 participants, the US government took over two years to design it.

The exercise pitted Iran against the US military. Washington intended to show how the US military could defeat Iran with ease.

Paul Van Riper, a three-star general and 41-year veteran of the Marine Corps, led Iranian forces in the war game. His mission was to take on the full force of the US military, led by an aircraft carrier battle group and a large amphibious landing force in the Persian Gulf.

The results shocked everyone…

Van Riper waited for the US Navy to pass through the shallow and narrow Strait of Hormuz, which made them sitting ducks for Iran’s unconventional and asymmetric warfare techniques.

The idea is to level the playing field against a superior enemy with swarms of explosive-laden suicide speedboats, low-flying planes carrying anti-ship missiles, naval mines, and land-based anti-ship ballistic missiles, among other low-cost but highly effective measures.

In minutes, Van Riper emerged victorious over his superior opponent and sank all 19 ships. Had it been real life, 20,000 US sailors and marines would have died.

Millennium Challenge 2002 was a complete disaster for the Pentagon, which had spent a quarter of a billion dollars to set up the extensive war game. It produced the exact opposite outcome they wanted.

So what did the Pentagon do with these humbling results?

Like a child playing a video game, they hit the reset button. They then rigged and scripted the game so that the US was guaranteed to win.

After realizing the integrity of the war game had been compromised, a disgusted Van Riper walked out mid-game. He then said:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Debt

April 22, 2024

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Debt

Some people are more observant than others. Some are more capable of thinking outside the box than others. Whether this is by nature or nurture is a moot point.

When we are children, we tend to look upon the world in all its wonder. We are amazed at what exists and we absorb it like a sponge. Then, when we are in our teens, we begin our second wave of discovery. We begin to pay more attention to the things that we find confusing; we become absorbed in issues like world hunger, warfare and political strife. These situations seem senseless and we repeatedly ask, “Why should these things be?”

Typically, in our twenties, we have not yet found any solid answers and our mood turns from interest to anger. We tend to gravitate toward liberal philosophy, as liberal philosophy tells us what we would most like to hear; that these terrible things should not exist and that we should take every step available to us to end the injustices of the world – at whatever cost to ourselves and others.

Most of us continue in this approach for several years, but in our thirties we begin to recognize that, no matter how many steps are taken in this effort, the problems seem to be self-renewing and, at that point, a split occurs in philosophical outlook. Many people cease to grow at this point, as they do not want to live in a world where it is necessary to accept that suffering of one type or another is perennial. They may become increasingly stubborn in this view and, from this point on in life, tend to dig in their heels increasingly and fail to continue to grow in their understanding of the world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

David Stockman on How the US Federal Debt Has Gone Parabolic…

April 16, 2024

David Stockman on How the US Federal Debt Has Gone Parabolic…

The federal debt has been recently increasing by $1 trillion every 100 days. That’s $10 billion per day, $416 million per hour.

In fact, Uncle Sam’s debt has risen by $470 billion in the first two months of this year to $34.5 trillion and is on pace to surpass $35 trillion in a little over a month, $37 trillion well before year’s end, and $40 trillion some time in 2025. That’s about two years ahead of the current CBO (Congressional Budget Office) forecast.

On the current path, moreover, the public debt will reach $60 trillion by the end of the 10-year budget window. But even that depends upon the CBO’s latest iteration of Rosy Scenario, which envisions no recession ever again, just 2% inflation as far as the eye can see and real interest rates of barely 1%. And that’s to say nothing of the trillions in phony spending cuts and out-year tax increases that are built into the CBO baseline but which Congress will never actually allow to materialize.

So when it comes to the projection that the 2034 debt will come in at just $60 trillion, we’ll take the wonders any day of the week. The fact that it will likely be much higher also means that the Washington UniParty’s prevailing fiscal policy path will lead to $100 trillion of public debt sometime in the early 2040s. And that means, in turn, that annual interest expense will then be greater than the entire federal budget during 2019.

Needless to say, neither Trump nor Biden has said, “Boo,” about this looming calamity. Sleepy Joe has even had the audacity to brag that he has reduced the federal deficit by more than half.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The “Business” of Central Banking—Usury and Tax Farming

April 11, 2024

The “Business” of Central Banking—Usury and Tax Farming

Central banking is “a great business to be in, where you print money, and people believe it.”

That’s what the head of New Zealand’s central bank said recently in an unscripted moment of candor.

It led me to wonder about the nature of this strange “business.”

Let me put it into the simplest and most concise terms.

Central banks create fake money out of thin air and loan it to governments at interest.
Governments use violence and threats of violence to extract taxes from average citizens to pay the interest on the fake money the central banks created out of thin air.
Like the mafia, they can deploy violence to ensure there is no competition to their privileged racket.

That’s the unvarnished truth about central banking.

In short, it’s the business of usury and tax farming.

(To me, a more practical modern meaning of usury is “enslaving people with financial trickery.” Central banking clearly fits the bill.)

The central bank is a powerful wealth transfer mechanism that enables governments to harvest the productive efforts of their citizens efficiently and surreptitiously.

The central bank’s currency debasement transfers wealth from savers to those closest to the money printer, namely governments and their cronies.

The central bank’s real mandate is to transfer as much wealth as possible via currency debasement to the political class without causing alarm among the plebs. Ideally, it happens gradually so nobody notices, like a child taking only a little money out of his mother’s purse each day so she doesn’t notice.

However, sometimes their theft spirals out of control, and it’s impossible for the plebs not to notice.

Consider this.

The Federal Reserve—the central bank of the US—has printed more fake money in recent years than it has for its entire existence.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If a Tree Falls in a Forest…

April 5, 2024

If a Tree Falls in a Forest…

In the late eighteenth century, Bishop George Berkeley posed the question,

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Since that time, generations of university philosophy professors have required their students to consider the question. Countless classroom time has been taken up in pondering it. In many cases, students would be required to write a report containing their answer and they might even be graded on it.

Of course, this is the world of academia, which consists almost entirely of theory, not practical application. But, in the functioning world, it makes not the slightest difference whether the tree makes a sound or not. The lumberjack who actually encounters the tree is unconcerned with the philosophical question. He only cares that he has a tree he can cut.

He represents those who produce, rather than those who theorise.

And so it is with the field of International Diversification. It can be described as taking place in three stages:

People Leave an Empire Quietly

Typically, when a country (or empire) has been corrupted by its leaders to such a degree that it’s reaching its sell-by date, some people begin to see the writing on the wall. Although many remain at home, complaining bitterly that their leaders are selling them out, a smaller number of people recognise that the country has passed the point of no return and make the choice to leave the dying leviathan rather than go down with it.

We’re presently passing through such a period in which a significant number of people will be leaving the countries of their birth, particularly those countries that were once referred to as the “Free World.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

David Stockman on How the US Federal Debt Has Gone Parabolic…

March 29, 2024

David Stockman on How the US Federal Debt Has Gone Parabolic…

The federal debt has been recently increasing by $1 trillion every 100 days. That’s $10 billion per day, $416 million per hour.

Needless to say, neither Trump nor Biden has said, “Boo,” about this looming calamity. Sleepy Joe has even had the audacity to brag that he has reduced the federal deficit by more than half.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It’s Not About Saving the Planet, It’s the Big Daddy We Need To Look For

December 1, 2023

It’s Not About Saving the Planet, It’s the Big Daddy We Need To Look For

Don’t tell Greta, but the hits keep coming for wind projects…

For perspective, $4 billion equals about 28 billion DKK. Orsted’s equity is 76 billion DKK, so that $4 billion hit is equivalent to some 37% of its market cap. How the hell did they get it that wrong? Perhaps we can just put it down to delusional expectations that pervaded in the wind industry and still pervade today.

Remember: your energy bills have skyrocketed in order to subsidise bird-killing wind turbines that don’t work. You may think it’s just silly and those pushing this agenda are simply delusional, but this is actually part of the Net Zero agenda to deliberately deindustrialise (and thereby impoverish) the West, while China and other countries unashamedly continue to capitalise on the huge economic prosperity afforded by the use of fossil fuels.

None of this has anything to do with saving the planet, and everything to do with demolishing our standard of living, demolishing our economic prosperity and transforming the former middle class into a neo-feudal peasant class.

From Wall Street Silver: “Net Zero was never viable. It is impossible to completely remove CO2 from our energy needs and overall economy. Politicians are just now beginning to realize that. Just about every modern technology requires oil, natural gas and/or coal in order to function. Many of the metals required need to be mined and new deposits are often remote with no access to the electric grid.”
Then there’s this from The Travelling Scientist: “The Paris accord interestingly promotes “non-fossil biocarbon-based” CO2 sources as being okay and counts towards net zero… so cutting trees and burning wood is no problem to the regulators, and becoming ever more popular to meet regulations companies are even patting themselves on their backs in their quarterly reports for doing so.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

It Will Happen Suddenly

November 27, 2023

It Will Happen Suddenly

As the Great Unravelling progresses, we shall be seeing many negative developments, some of them unprecedented.

Only a year ago, the average person was still hanging on to the belief that the world is in a state of recovery, that, however tentative, the economy was on the mend.

And this is understandable. After all, the media have been doing a bang-up job of explaining the situation in a way that treats recovery as a general assumption. The only point of discussion is the method applied to achieve the recovery, but the recovery itself is treated as a given.

However, as thorough a distraction as the media (and the governments of the world) have provided, the average person has begun to recognise that something is fundamentally wrong. He now has a gut feeling that, even if he is not well-versed enough to describe in economic terms what is incorrect in the endless chatter he sees on his television, he now senses that the situation will not end well.

I tend to liken his situation to someone who suddenly finds all the lights off in his house. He stumbles around in the dark, trying to feel his way. Although he can picture in his mind what the layout of his house is, he is having trouble navigating, often bumping into things. This is similar to the attempt to see through the media and government smokescreens during normal times.

But soon, as his government undergoes collapse, he will be getting some bigger surprises. He will find that the furniture has inexplicably been moved around. Objects are not where they are supposed to be, and it is no longer possible to reason his way through the problem of navigating in the dark.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

David Stockman on Washington’s Fiscal Doomsday Machine

November 22, 2023

David Stockman on Washington’s Fiscal Doomsday Machine

Here’s one that will make your hair stand on end: The US Treasury closed the books on FY 2023, bringing the four-year cumulative deficit to $9.0 trillion!

That’s right. During the last 1,461 days (FY 2020 thru FY 2023), Uncle Sam has generated $6.2 billion of red ink each and every day including weekends, holidays and snow-days. For anyone keeping score at home, that’s $4.2 million of red ink per minute.

For the purpose of perspective, here’s how long it took to generate the first $9 trillion of US government debt: It took all of 43 presidents and 219 years to reach $9 trillion of public debt in July 2007. So the national debt clock has now accelerated to hyper-drive.

Market Value of Public Debt Outstanding, 1940 to July 2007

And, yes, we do mean accelerate. It turns out that when you remove the budgetary Mickey Mouse from the numbers, the federal deficit for FY 2023 clocked in at over $2.0 trillion, or double the comparable level in FY 2022. The reported numbers, of course, do not look quite as alarming, posting at $1.4 trillion last year and $1.7 trillion this year.

But as The Wall Street Journal cogently explained recently, that comparison is very misleading because it includes a $380 billion budgetary shuffle between the two years. It seems that Sleepy Joe’s student debt cancellation got recorded as a cost in September 2022, but then got canceled by the courts in FY 2023, turning it into a giant “savings”!

When the Biden administration announced its plan to forgive federal student debt held by 40 million Americans in September 2022, it logged the long-term cost of the program, $379 billion, on the budget all at once, even though effectively no money was spent on it that year… But in June 2023, the Supreme Court tossed the debt-cancellation program, meaning most of that money wouldn’t actually be spent. Rather than update last year’s deficit numbers, though, the Treasury recorded the changes as a $333 billion spending cut in August 2023.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Doug Casey on the Imminent Bankruptcy of the US Government

November 15, 2023

Doug Casey on the Imminent Bankruptcy of the US Government

International Man: Everyone knows that the US government has been bankrupt for many years. But we thought it might be instructive to see its current cash-flow situation.

The US government’s budget is the biggest in the history of the world and is growing at an uncontrollable rate.

Below is a chart of the budget for the most recent fiscal year, which had a deficit of nearly $1.7 trillion.

Before we get into the specific items in the budget, what is your take on the Big Picture for the US budget?

Doug Casey: The biggest expenditure for the US government are so-called entitlements. It’s strange how the word “entitlements” has been legitimized. Are people really entitled to the government paying for their health, retirement, and welfare? In a moral society, the answer is: No. Entitlements destroy personal responsibility, legitimize theft, destroy wealth, and create antagonisms.

The fact is that once people have an “entitlement,” they come to rely on it, and you can’t easily take it away. The Chinese call that breaking somebody’s rice bowl. In the case of the American welfare state, it’s more a question of breaking a whipped dog’s doggy bowl. It’s a shame because many have come to rely on their mother, the State, not entirely through their own fault. The US has become pervasively corrupt.

The World Economic Forum (WEF)—a pox upon them—isn’t entirely incorrect when it arrogantly calls most people “useless mouths.” An increasing number produce absolutely nothing but only consume at the expense of others. Courtesy of the State.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Don’t Dismiss the Possibility of Gold Confiscation

September 5, 2023

Don’t Dismiss the Possibility of Gold Confiscation

If you hold precious metals in your portfolio, there is a good chance you fear hyperinflation and the crash of fiat currencies.

You probably distrust governments in general and believe they are self-serving and have no interest in your economic well-being. It is likely that your holdings in gold are your lifeline – your hope to get you through these times while holding on to your wealth.

But have you ever given any thought to the possibility of having this lifeline confiscated by the authorities?

In my conversations with friends and associates, I have often raised this question. The typical responses:

“They’d never do that.”

“I’ll deal with that if and when it happens.”

“I just wouldn’t give it to them.”

I consider these “wishful thinking” responses.

It’s an interesting thought that the greatest threat to gold and silver investment might not be the possibility of losing on the speculation, but the government taking it away from you. It’s a thought that I’ve found few want to even think about, let alone discuss.

If you fall into this camp, you’re in good company. Some of the forecasters whom I respect most highly also treat it either as unlikely or at best, “something we may need to look at in the future.” To date, in conversing with top advisors worldwide, the two primary reasons they believe gold will not be confiscated are:

“Confiscation would mean the government acknowledges the reality of the value of gold.”

Yes, this is quite so. They would be changing their official view… which, of course, they do all the time. But I submit that all that they need to do is put the proper spin on it.

“They would meet greater resistance than they did back in ’33.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Doug Casey on How Economic Witch Doctors Convince Everyone They’re Neurosurgeons

August 17, 2023

Doug Casey on How Economic Witch Doctors Convince Everyone They’re Neurosurgeons

International Man: The average person doesn’t care about economics. But to the extent that he does, he only reads mainstream publications like The Economist and editorials in The New York Times.

In these publications, the average person will find so-called economists advocating upside-down and destructive concepts like negative interest rates, banning cash, debt-fueled consumption, government spending, and rampant money printing as the cures to economic ailments.

And if those methods don’t work—or inflict damage—the establishment economists’ response is to simply call for more money printing, more debt, and even lower interest rates.

What’s your take on conventional economic thinking and methods?

Doug Casey: Frankly, most “economists” today are only political apologists masquerading as economists.

An economist is somebody that describes the way the world works—how people go about producing, consuming, buying, selling, and living their lives. That’s not, however, what most of today’s PhD economists do. Instead, they prescribe the way they would like the world to work and tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power.

As a result, legitimate economics barely exists today. What passes for economics has a very bad reputation, and it’s well deserved. Economics has become degraded. It’s not quite a laughingstock like gender studies, but it’s on a level with political science—which isn’t a science at all.

Every individual has vastly differing likes and dislikes and wants and needs. But these so-called economists like to treat people as if they were standardized atoms. They think they can manipulate people as if they were chemicals and treat the economy as something they can heat up or cool down. And they’re the ones who decide what the masses need.

Economics has become an excuse for central planning, and economists have become social engineers.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Leave Home

August 7, 2023

Leave Home

As an increasing number of people realize that their home country is becoming a liability to them, the most common question I hear from them is, “What do I have to do to remain where I am and still be assured that I’ll be able to retain both my wealth and my freedom?”

The simple (and tragic) answer to this question is that there is no such solution. The two objectives are mutually exclusive.

Throughout the ages, whenever an empire has begun its inevitable collapse, no country has ever woken up and reversed the process. In every case, the government rides the decline to the bottom. And, along the way, a series of policies is invariably undertaken to save those in government in the downward rush. These policies are always at the expense of the populace.

Invariably, as the decline worsens, governments drag out the same policies that all other failing empires have implemented before them: Devaluation of currency, default on debt, increased warfare, creation of a police state and, finally, the looting of all those citizens who have even a modicum of wealth.

The question is not whether we like our home country as it presently is, but whether we’re prepared to accept what it’s about to become.

As people become more aware that their government is not only not their friend, but has become their greatest threat, it’s human nature to hope that “it won’t get any worse.”

And, of course, it then gets worse.

The great majority of people don’t actually try to escape until they find that they’re now trapped and cannot escape. (Curbing the outward flow is surprisingly easy for any government to achieve – by implying that those emigrating are enemies of the state. This time around, those attempting to exit will be called domestic terrorists.)

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Future Headline: White House Prepares to Block Out the Sun

July 15, 2023

Future Headline: White House Prepares to Block Out the Sun

In a world full of unimaginable absurdity, we spend a lot of time thinking about the future… and to where all of this insanity leads.

“Future Headline Friday” is our satirical take of where the world is going if it remains on its current path. While our satire may be humorous and exaggerated, rest assured that everything we write is based on actual events, news stories, personalities, and pending legislation.

July 14, 2027: White House Prepares to Block Out the Sun

It has been four years since President Biden announced the “possible deployment” of Solar Radiation Modification back in 2023.

Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) is a way to partially block out the sun by flooding the earth’s atmosphere with special particles which reflect the sun’s rays, and therefore mitigate global warming.

The Biden administration approved funding to create the SRM in early 2024; and after more than three years of development, the system is now ready.

The 2023 White House report did state that “Gaps remain in our understanding of how SRM deployments might irreversibly alter the Earth’s climate system.”

However Acting President Kamala Harris says that she now understands everything she needs to know about deploying sun-blocking particles.

“We have to be thinking about what we think about, when we are thinking about the sun, and we think about the heat of the sun,” she recently explained. “That heat gets where it needs to go, and right now that’s the Earth. And that’s why global warming. It’s that basic.”

One reporter asked whether blocking out the sun would damage crop yields and agriculture, acting President Harris snapped back that cows are a major contributor to global warming, and their eradication through the SRM would force better dietary choices.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

When in Rome

June 29, 2023

When in Rome

Over its last one hundred years, the State steadily devalued the currency by 98%
The high cost of government—particularly, growing entitlements and perpetual warfare, coupled with a diminished number of taxpayers, led the government to massive debt, to the point that it could not be repaid.

Those citizens that were productive began to exit the country, finding new homes in countries that were not quite so sophisticated but offered better prospects for the future.

The decline in the value of the currency resulted in ever-increasing prices of goods, so much so that the purchase of them became a hardship to the people. By governmental edict, wage and price controls were established, forcing rises in wages whilst capping the amount that vendors could charge for goods.

The result was that vendors offered fewer and fewer goods for sale, as the profit had been eliminated.

If the reader is a citizen of the EU or US, the above history may seem quite familiar, with the one exception that strict wage and price controls have not (yet) been implemented. Still, the history is accurate; it is the history of Rome.

The Roman denarius pictured above features the profile of the emperor Diocletian, circa 301 AD, at the time when he issued the edict mentioned above. Like the US dollar that followed 1700 years later, the denarius was the most recognised and most respected currency of its day, as it was almost 100% silver. However, it was steadily devalued by successive emperors during the Era of Inflation from 193 to 293 AD. This was done by diminishing the amount of silver in the coin until it was made entirely of base metal, with a thin silver wash. Just as the US Federal Reserve devalued the US dollar 98% between 1913 and 2023, Rome devalued the denarius over a similar period of time.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

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