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Blain’s Morning Porridge – Aug 13 – Argentina, Legarde and Europe
Blain’s Morning Porridge – Aug 13 – Argentina, Legarde and Europe
“I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm, gonna join me a rock and roll band.…”
Global Credibility Under Pressure – We’ve been Tangoed!
This morning’s headlines are screaming how Argentina and President Mauricio Macri have precipitated yet another crisis upon the stressed geopolitical battlefront… Relax. We are more than used to dealing with Argentina defaults… But, its far more complex than that. The latest Argentina Dance Macabre is all about Global Credibility. It’s another Massive Fail!
What does it say about the credibility of Global Institutions and Policy when Argentina’s whole market collapsed following a primary for an election in December? Ex-IMF president, and soon to be head of the ECB, Christine Lagarde personally staked her support for President Mauricio Macri’s pro-market government when she steamrollered through the IMF’s biggest ever bailout of $56 billion for Argentina last year.
It now looks an extremely poor call on Lagarde’s part. Macri won a mere 32% of the vote, while former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner won 47%. Don’t Cry for Me Argentina indeed… Domestic Argentine Politics have left the IMF looking stupid.
There are three major issues to consider here:
First there is the absolute predictability of what’s just happened in Argentina:
In return for the 2018 Bailout, the IMF demanded its usual pound of flesh policies: Austerity, Austerity and Austerity, spiced with inflation-targeted monetary policy, fiscal tightening, currency controls, and the keys to the Peso printing presses. Give Lagarde some credit – she did give lip service to the people with a smattering of minor austerity mitigants in terms of gender equality and social provision. But, essentially the IMF’s answer to yet another predictable Argentinian crisis was more of the same programme. You know the definition of madness…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Trump Imposes Total Economic Embargo On Venezuela
Trump Imposes Total Economic Embargo On Venezuela
Late Monday President Trump signed an executive order imposing a full economic embargo against Venezuela after a week ago the White House began signaling it could seek to “quarantine” and fully “blockade” the Maduro regime if the president doesn’t immediately hand over power of his own accord.
The executive order freezes all government assets in the United States and prohibits all transactions by any Venezuelan officials, in what constitutes the first major expansion of sanctions targeting a nation in the western hemisphere in over three decades.
The order focuses on human rights abuses and Maduro’s continued “usurpation” of power as necessary to enact the full embargo, and places the Latin American country on par with Cuba, Syria, Iran and North Korea. Though Trump recently signaled he was “bored” with meddling in Venezuela after a failed military coup earlier this year, the executive order is the latest in a string of measures intent on regime change.
“All property and interests in property of the Government of Venezuela that are in the United States … are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in,” the executive order says. Americans are further prevented from doing business with Venezuela’s government or officials, effective immediately.
Though it falls short of an outright trade embargo, it does dramatically escalate US efforts to force a Maduro exit in favor of US-backed opposition leader and self-proclaimed “interim president” Juan Guaido.
A recent Bloomberg report also indicated Trump admin discussions have involved the possibility of imposing a complete blockade on the country by sea, enforced by US Navy ships.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
America Is Not Going To Be A Free And Open Society Any Longer
America Is Not Going To Be A Free And Open Society Any Longer
Whenever a tragic act of violence makes national headlines, the calls to give up more of our freedoms and liberties in exchange for the promise of increased security become deafening. But if we take another step toward becoming an authoritarian society every time something horrible happens, eventually we won’t have any of the basic liberties and freedoms that previous generations of Americans fought so hard to secure for us. Unfortunately, voices like mine are becoming increasingly rare, and the American people seem to want a society that will shelter them from anything that could possibly go wrong. Of course there has never been such a society in all of human history, and we won’t be able to create one either. No governmental system can eliminate the problem of evil, and bad things sometimes happen to good people. And without a doubt, the mass shootings that we witnessed over the weekend were absolutely horrific. In less than 24 hours, 29 American lives were lost between these two mass shootings, and this has greatly shaken the entire nation…
On Sunday, Americans woke up to news of a shooting rampage in an entertainment district in Dayton, Ohio, where a man wearing body armor shot and killed nine people, including his own sister. Hours earlier, a 21-year-old with a rifle entered a Walmart in El Paso and killed 20 people.
In a country that has become nearly numb to men with guns opening fire in schools, at concerts and in churches, the back-to-back bursts of gun violence in less than 24 hours were enough to leave the public stunned and shaken.
Sadly, these are not isolated incidents. As our society has become less moral, we have seen an escalation of violence all over the country.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How Real Mind Control Works
How Real Mind Control Works
When people are confronted with the idea of “mind control” they often think of something out of television or film media; a lone prisoner tortured, chemically dazed and conditioned into a hollow zombie as his captors squeeze information from him or use him to complete a task he would not normally do or morally accept. And while there is actually some truth to this kind of Hollywood depiction, as is evidenced in the exposure of government programs like MK Ultra, the most insidious forms of mind control are far more subtle.
Governments and the elitists behind them do not necessarily need to physically cage, drug and brutalize people in order to influence how they behave. All they need to do is manage their perceptions, expectation and assumptions. This can be accomplished with large portions of the public, rather than one person at a time.
The elites have always been fascinated with the idea of mass hypnotism. In the 18th century Franz Mesmer was famous for entertaining European royalty with displays of what he called “animal magnetism”, which included what we now know as hypnosis of individuals and groups. Mesmerism has since become synonymous with the attempt to befuddle people and dictate their actions while in a kind of trance. Hypnotism is still a very active subject in psychiatric circles and the US government took avid interest in hypnotism as a weapon during their MK Ultra experiments in the 1950’s.
People involved in the field of hypnotism are quick to point out that a hypnotized person cannot be made to do something that goes against their code of ethics, but this is not exactly the whole story.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Do You Believe in “Conspiracy Theories?” An FBI Report Says You’re a Potential Domestic Terrorist
Do You Believe in “Conspiracy Theories?” An FBI Report Says You’re a Potential Domestic Terrorist
The FBI has released a 15-page document warning of the dangers of “anti-government, identity-based, and fringe conspiracy theories.” The law enforcement agency says that these are “very likely to motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity.” The document seems to recommend increased social media and web censorship.
The FBI assesses anti-government, identity-based, and fringe political conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity. The FBI further assesses in some cases these conspiracy theories very likely encourage the targeting of specific people, places, and organizations, thereby increasing the Iikelihood of violence against these targets. These assessments are made with high confidenced, based on information from other law enforcement agencies, open-source information, court documents, human sources with varying degrees of access and corroboration, and FBI investigations.
One key assumption driving these assessments is that certain conspiracy theory narratives tacitly support or legitimize violent action. The FBI also assumes some, but not all individuals or domestic extremists who hold such beliefs will act on them. The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modem information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts. Indicators that may lead to revised judgements or cause a change in the confidence level assoc iated with this assessment include a lack of conspiracy theory-driven criminal or violent activity in the near to long term or significant efforts by major social media companies and websites to remove, regulate, or counter potentially harmful conspiratorial content.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Weekly Commentary: Fanning the Flames
Weekly Commentary: Fanning the Flames
The Federal Reserve abandoned “data dependent” – at least for next week’s FOMC meeting. December futures imply a 1.78% Fed funds rate, up six bps for the week but still 62 bps below today’s 2.40% effective rate. Unless the Federal Reserve has completely caved to the markets, the Committee statement and Chairman Powell’s press conference should emphasize its commitment to “data dependent” and the possibility of a second-half recovery in growth momentum. By the reaction to Draghi’s marginally less than super-duper dovishness, markets will not be overjoyed if the Fed attempts walking back its “an ounce of prevention…” “insurance” rate cut cycle.
For posterity, I’ll document the data backdrop heading into what is widely believed to be the beginning of a series of cuts. Second quarter GDP was reported at a stronger-than-expected 2.1% rate, down from Q1’s 3.1% but ahead of the 1.8% consensus forecast. Personal Consumption bounced back strongly, jumping to a 4.3% annual rate from Q1’s 0.9%. It’s worth noting there have been only four stronger quarters of Personal Consumption growth over the past 13 years.
Personal Income increased 5.4% annualized, down from Q1’s 6.1% – but strong nonetheless. Employee Compensation expanded 4.7% annualized. Receipts on Assets (Interest Income and Dividend Income) increased 9.0% annualized, more than reversing Q1’s 6.1% annualized contraction. Overall Disposable Income increased an annualized 4.9%, up from Q1’s 4.8% and Q4 ‘18’s 4.2%.
Government Spending jumped to a 5.0% annualized growth rate (Q1 2.9%), led by a 7.9% annualized expansion in federal government expenditures (strongest reading since Q2 ’09). With federal deficit spending near 4.5% of GDP, fiscal stimulus has become a powerful force in the real economy.
Dropping 5.2%, Exports were a drag on growth. Reversing Q1’s 6.2% growth rate, Gross Private Investment declined 5.5% annualized. Non-Residential Fixed Investment declined 0.6%, with Residential Investment down 1.5%.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Monsters with Human Faces: The Tyranny of the Police State Disguised as Law-and-Order
Monsters with Human Faces: The Tyranny of the Police State Disguised as Law-and-Order
“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.” ― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Enough already.
Enough with the distractions. Enough with the partisan jousting.
Enough with the sniping and name-calling and mud-slinging that do nothing to make this country safer or freer or more just.
We have let the government’s evil-doing, its abuses, power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny go on for too long.
We are approaching a reckoning.
This is the point, as the poet W. B. Yeats warned, when things fall apart and anarchy is loosed upon the world.
We have seen this convergence before in Hitler’s Germany, in Stalin’s Russia, in Mussolini’s Italy, and in Mao’s China: the rise of strongmen and demagogues, the ascendency of profit-driven politics over deep-seated principles, the warring nationalism that seeks to divide and conquer, the callous disregard for basic human rights and dignity, and the silence of people who should know better.
Yet no matter how many times the world has been down this road before, we can’t seem to avoid repeating the deadly mistakes of the past. This is not just playing out on a national and international scale. It is wreaking havoc at the most immediate level, as well, creating rifts and polarities within families and friends, neighborhoods and communities that keep the populace warring among themselves and incapable of presenting a united front in the face of the government’s goose-stepping despotism.
We are definitely in desperate need of a populace that can stand united against the government’s authoritarian tendencies.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Are We Really Free? Maybe It’s Time for a Personal Declaration of Independence
Are We Really Free? Maybe It’s Time for a Personal Declaration of Independence
Some time between throwing some burgers on the grill and shooting off fireworks with a beer in one hand and a lighter in the other, ask yourself this question:
How free and independent are you?
How independent are any of us, really? We like to think we live in the “free-est” nation in the world, but do we really? Think about it.
- You never own your home outright, even when the mortgage is paid off. Every year, you must make your extortion payment to the city or trust me, you won’t be living in that house for long.
- The same thing with your car. If you don’t pay your annual extortion payment on your vehicle and pay a hundred bucks for a tiny sticker that gives you permission to drive it, it will be promptly towed away by the city with the government’s blessing. Then, like a hostage negotiation gone wrong, you’ll have to pay even more money to cover their theft and storage of YOUR vehicle.
- On a regular basis, you must pay a fee and ask the government for permission to do any number of things, such as driving a car, traveling outside the country, running a business, adding another bathroom to your home, or even catching a fish for dinner.
- Permits and licenses are big revenue generators from start to finish – and if you proceed without asking permission, they will extort more money from you in the form of fines. If you refuse to pay the fines (or if you can’t) they’ll kidnap you and lock you in a cage, where you’ll be forced to perform manual labor for 10 cents an hour for whatever length of time the legal authorities feel is sufficient to teach you a lesson.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Debt, Deficits and the Cost of Free Lunches
DEBT, DEFICITS AND THE COST OF FREE LUNCHES
It seems that every generation or two, fundamental economic ideas are questioned and challenged. The reasonable and important idea that governments should balance their budgets on an annual basis was challenged in the 1930s by the rise of Keynesian Economics and the counter-argument that deficit spending was desirable, if it was used to maintain full employment. Now it seems that any defense or desire for fiscal restraint and less government spending and borrowing are entirely out the window. Fiscal folly is the watchword of the day.
It is not surprising that politicians care little about annual budget deficits and growing debt, since spending money is their way of buying votes from interest groups wanting to eat at the government trough. In America today, it is all a political game by which Democrats and Republicans pander to their respective voting blocs, especially in an upcoming presidential and congressional election year like 2020.
On the one hand, the danger of a looming political crisis is warned about in the media when they point to the coming budgetary circus that will most likely start playing out toward the end of the summer of 2019, when Congress comes back into full session and the new federal budget year that begins on October 1, 2019, will have to be handled in some way.
Budgetary Brinkmanship and Political Plunder
Will the country be facing another federal government shutdown threat like the one in late 2018 and early 2019? Will the national debt limit be raised to permit the spending of the huge sums of money needed to fulfill all the demands for other people’s money above actual taxes collected through the syphoning off of private sector resources by continued government borrowing in the financial markets?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Jackboots Are Coming: Mass Arrests, Power Grabs and the Politics of Fear
The Jackboots Are Coming: Mass Arrests, Power Grabs and the Politics of Fear
“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
How do you persuade a populace to embrace totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none?
You persuade the people that the menace they face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.
This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-loving people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.
It works the same way every time.
The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence and illegal immigration have been convenient ruses used to terrorized the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Case in point: on June 17, the same day President Trump announced that the government would be making mass arrests in order to round up and forcibly remove millions of illegal immigrants—including families and children—from the country, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling in Gamble v. United States that placed the sovereignty (i.e., the supreme power or authority) of federal and state governments over that of the citizenry, specifically as it relates to the government’s ability to disregard the Constitution’s Double Jeopardy Clause.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Thirty-Two Tips For Navigating A Society That Is Full Of Propaganda And Manipulation
Thirty-Two Tips For Navigating A Society That Is Full Of Propaganda And Manipulation
For as long as there has been human language, humans have been using it to manipulate one another. The fact that it is possible to skillfully weave a collection of symbolic mouth noises together in such a way as to extract favors, concessions, votes and consent from other humans has made manipulation so common that it now pervades our society from top to bottom, from personal relationships between two people to international relationships between government agencies and the public.
This has made it very difficult to figure out what’s going on, both in our lives and in the world. Here are thirty-two suggestions for navigating this complex manipulation-laden landscape, whether it be for navigating the manipulations you may encounter in your small-scale personal interactions, or the large-scale manipulations which impact the entire world:
1 – Understand the fact that humans are storytelling animals, and that whoever controls the stories controls the humans. Mental narrative dominates human consciousness; thought is essentially one continuous, churning monologue about the self and what it reckons is going on in its world, and that monologue is composed entirely of mental stories. These stories can and will be manipulated, on an individual scale by people we encounter and on a mass scale by skillful propagandists. We base our actions on our mental assessments of what’s going on in the world, and those mental assessments can be manipulated by narrative control.
Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix
This is the clearest I’ve been able to sum it all up so far.https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/society-is-made-of-narrative-realizing-this-is-awakening-from-the-matrix-787c7e2539ae …1,3218:46 PM – Aug 21, 2018Twitter Ads info and privacySociety Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What…medium.com
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Central banks are buying gold at the fastest pace in six years
Central banks are buying gold at the fastest pace in six years
Earlier this month the World Gold Council published its quarterly report– and it shows that central banks and foreign governments from around the world are buying up gold at their fastest pace in six years.
This is pretty big news, and it says a LOT about the future of the dollar.
Remember, central banks and foreign governments hold literally TRILLIONS of dollars of reserves… and traditionally they do this by buying US government debt.
It sounds strange, but to big institutions, banks, etc., US government debt is equivalent to cash. They use it as a form of money.
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More importantly, they hold US dollars because that’s the global standard: the US dollar has been the world’s primary international reserve currency for seventy five years.
So US debt is extremely liquid. In fact, the $22 trillion US debt market is the biggest and most liquid market in the world.
But foreign governments have started breaking with the tradition of buying treasuries.
As the World Gold Council’s report showed us, foreign governments and central banks have been buying a LOT more gold than in previous years.
Net gold purchases in Q1/2019 among foreign governments and central banks was nearly 70% greater than Q1/2018… and the highest rate of first quarter purchases in six years.
The Chinese in particular, have been stockpiling gold faster than ever, while at the same time, Chinese ownership of US treasuries as a percentage of total holdings has been gradually declining over the past years.
And it’s not just China.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Global Government and Mass Surveillance May Be Needed to Save Humanity, Expert Says
Global Government and Mass Surveillance May Be Needed to Save Humanity, Expert Says
A prominent Oxford philosopher who is known for making terrifying predictions about humanity has a new theory about our future, and it isn’t pretty.
Over 15 years ago, Nick Bostrom, author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, made the case that we are all living in a Matrix-like computer simulation run by another civilization.
Here’s a summary of that theory, explained by Vox:
In an influential paper that laid out the theory, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom showed that at least one of three possibilities is true: 1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities; 2) if any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or 3) advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones. (source)
Will humanity eventually be destroyed by one of its own creations?
If you find the idea of living in a computer simulation that is run by unknown beings troubling, wait until you hear Bostrom’s latest theory.
Last Wednesday, Bostrom took the stage at a TED conference in Vancouver, Canada, to share some of the insights from his latest work, “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis.”
While speaking to head of the conference, Chris Anderson, Bostrom argued that mass surveillance could be one of the only ways to save humanity – from a technology of our own creation.
His theory starts with a metaphor of humans standing in front of a giant urn filled with balls that represent ideas. There are white balls (beneficial ideas), grey balls (moderately harmful ideas), and black balls (ideas that destroy civilization). The creation of the atomic bomb, for instance, was akin to a grey ball — a dangerous idea that didn’t result in our demise.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
From Jesus Christ to Julian Assange: When Dissidents Become Enemies of the State
From Jesus Christ to Julian Assange: When Dissidents Become Enemies of the State
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell
When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.
In the current governmental climate, where laws that run counter to the dictates of the Constitution are made in secret, passed without debate, and upheld by secret courts that operate behind closed doors, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can render you an “enemy of the state.”
That list of so-called “enemies of the state” is growing.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is merely the latest victim of the police state’s assault on dissidents and whistleblowers.
On April 11, 2019, police arrested Assange for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.
Included among the leaked materials was gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while American air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.
There is nothing defensible about crimes such as these perpetrated by the government.
When any government becomes almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting—whether that evil takes the form of war, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity—that government has lost its claim to legitimacy.
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Both Notley and Kenney Hiding from a $260-Billion Cleanup Problem
Both Notley and Kenney Hiding from a $260-Billion Cleanup Problem
The Alberta government may well leave taxpayers to clean up the oil and gas industry’s mess.
The main thing Jason Kenney and Rachel Notley have in common, other than their affinity for pipelines, is their joint fear of the possible $260-billion cleanup bill for the province’s aging oil and gas fields.
Neither Kenney, the United Conservative Party leader, nor NDP Premier Notley have said much on the hustings about this astounding liability, which includes tens of thousands of inactive wells, abandoned gas plants, oil sands tailing ponds and 400,000 kilometres of pipelines.
The mountainous size of the cleanup costs dwarfs the puny pile of security deposits the province has collected from industry to pay for the cleanup — $1.5 billion.
Regan Boychuk, a 41-year-old Calgary roofer, independent researcher and a driving member of the Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project, understands why Kenney and Notley don’t want to talk about such embarrassing math.
“I think this issue is too big and too scary for both government and industry to face. It is a can of worms,” said Boychuk in a Tyee interview.
But if not corrected, the scale of the problem could affect the province’s credit rating, bankrupt hundreds of smaller oil and gas firms and leave Canadian taxpayers with the mother of all cleanup bills.
This has happened before.
Decades ago, Canada’s mining industry grossly underestimated what it needed for cleaning up acidic tailings and set aside paltry deposits for the job, just like the oil patch is doing today.
As soon as the mines stopped producing money, corporate Canada walked away from an estimated 10,000 abandoned or orphaned mines throughout the country, arguing they had run out of cash.
Taxpayers still need to spend billions on rehabilitating these mining sites.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
