Category Archives: Economics

What Everyone Is Missing About the Putin/Carlson Talk

Article by Tom Luongo.

Excerpts:

What does matter is that is how Putin views this conflict. And we have to deal with it. Period.

What also matters is that those who stand behind Putin are even less patient and circumspect than he is.

In order to avoid that bigger war only the oligarch class wants, we, as people, have to accept some responsibility for it getting to this point. Without that there can be no basis for a negotiated settlement.

This conflict between the West, and this includes all of Europe, the UK as well as the US, and Russia is one with existential consequences.

What Putin said, quite clearly, is that this ball is in our court. We can either sit down and have an honest discussion of a negotiated future or we will be at war. If that is what we in the West want, it is what we will get. Putin has put his sons on the line in eastern Ukraine. Are we?

See also this article by Martin Armstrong.

Why the Carbon Hysteria is a Huge Threat to Your Personal Freedom and Financial Wellbeing

Interview of Doug Casey in International Man

Excerpts:

International Man: Western countries are leading the charge in restructuring their economies around the issue of climate change. They’re committed to a comprehensive agenda to “decarbonize” their economies by 2050.

What’s your take on this?

Doug Casey: To sum it up in one word, it’s insane. In two words, it’s criminally insane.

[. . .]

Look, this is all about politics and money, but disguised as a religious movement, which is quite clever. There’s no question that Greenism is being promoted as a new religion.

Christianity is a dead duck in Europe, and it’s dying in North America. But people need some type of religion, a replacement for Christianity, to hold on to.

People will be encouraged to treat their taxes as tithes to wash away their sins against Mother Nature—much the way they tithed the church to expunge their sins in the Middle Ages. It’s an exact analogy. They’ll buy “carbon credits” as an analog for building cathedrals and monasteries.

The Discovery of Civilization

Article by Jayant Bhandari.

Excerpts:

Unknowns lurked in every corner of my stay in the UK, crystallizing many ideas I had never known or thought of in my wildest imagination. Lacking anything akin to the Ten Commandments, India has no prohibitions for sins, certainly not lying. I grew up firm in my view that you say what makes you look good and what gets you the most resources. It would take me a year after my arrival in the UK to realize that people might speak the truth for the sake of speaking it.

At the office where I worked in Manchester, I compiled a newsletter, placing the list of all the projects they were working on at the back page. To create the impression of a more extensive workload, I would add old projects to make the list appear crowded. One day, a consultant told me I had overblown his contributions. I was surprised. Why would he want to undercut the promotion of his work? In those days, political correctness and multi-culturalism weren’t the thing. If you strayed too far away, you were told.

I was experiencing civilization for the first time and had stepped into the unknown. The cloud that had always lingered in my mind started lifting, and my body began to change, albeit hindered by half-starvation. It would set a decades-long process to readjust my thinking and decision-making. With a crisper way of reasoning, how and what I comprehended from the spoken and written word began to evolve. I found myself less focused on converting others to my opinions and more engaged in exploration and searching for truth. Consequently, my interactions with people changed significantly, leading to fewer conflicts.

During the first few months in the UK, I initially harbored thoughts of exploiting the system, viewing it as payback time for the British colonization of India. However, this perspective began to dissolve in the face of a stream of compassionate, generous, helpful, moral, fair, dutiful, and upright people.

This chimes exactly with what Vishal Mangalwadi writes in his book: “The Book That Made Your World“, in particular the beginning of chapter 14, on “Morality”.

How the West Was Defeated

Article by Pepe Escobar.

Excerpt:

Emmanuel Todd, historian, demographer, anthropologist, sociologist and political analyst, is part of a dying breed: one of the very few remaining exponents of old school French intelligentzia – a heir to those like Braudel, Sartre, Deleuze and Foucault who dazzled successive young Cold War generations from the West down to the East.

The first nugget concerning his latest book, La Défaite de L’Occident (“The Defeat of the West”) is the minor miracle of actually being published last week in France, right within the NATO sphere: a hand grenade of a book, by an independent thinker, based on facts and verified data, blowing up the whole Russophobia edifice erected around the “aggression” by “Tsar” Putin.

At least some sectors of strictly oligarch-controlled corporate media in France simply could not ignore Todd this time around for several reasons. Most of all because he was the first Western intellectual, already in 1976, to have predicted the fall of the USSR in his book La Chute Finale, with his research based on Soviet infant mortality rates.

Another key reason was his 2002 book Apres L’Empire, a sort of preview of the Empire’s Decline and Fall published a few months before Shock & Awe in Iraq.

Now Todd, in what he has defined as his last book (“I closed the circle”) allows himself to go for broke and meticulously depict the defeat not only of the US but of the West as a whole – with his research focusing in and around the war in Ukraine.

How the Climate Hysteria Is Lowering Your Standard of Living

Interview with Doug Casey.

Excerpts:

But perhaps the average person doesn’t think about these things or care. The standard of living has gone up for so long that we tend to think it’s automatic and divinely ordained. I’m not so sure about that. Everything tends to wind down unless there is enough outside force to counteract it.

The planet will be just fine. It’s been here for 4.5 billion years and will be here for billions more, long after humanity has disappeared or gone elsewhere. Anyway, the climate hysterics don’t really care about “saving the planet”; even they aren’t quite that stupid. What’s going on is that they actually hate humanity. And themselves. The world is suffering from an episode of mass psychosis.

One currently fashionable indication of this is the 15-minute city, which governments are trying to impose all over the world. These would penalize you if you exit your designated 15-minute zone more than X number of times per month. The idea is green. And, like most green notions, it is very retrogressive. They want to return people to the status of medieval serfs, when few ventured more than 15 minutes from their hovels.

I hate to think something so dire is in the cards. But Dark Riders are at large, and the eye of Sauron is scanning the world. The tendency towards authoritarianism or even totalitarianism worldwide is growing—not to mention the possibility of World War III.

The negative trends go way beyond carbon hysteria and appliances that don’t work very well.

Today’s Journalists Seek Power, Not Truth

Article by J.B. Shurk.

Excerpts:

How do you destroy a free press?  Fill it with people who hate free speech, look down upon the poor and powerless, and believe that only their opinions matter.  Then pay them to repeat and defend everything that the “ruling class” brands as an “official truth.”  It’s amazing how fast public dissent dries up when you bribe the “journalists” and censor anyone who notices.

[Question: Who does the “filling”, and where do those “people who hate free speech” come from? The second question is easier to answer: From the schools and universities. The first question: Companies with monopoly power (only a few big media companies “call the shots”) tend to overprice and underdeliver . . .]

A couple decades ago, any reporter worth his salt would have laughed in the face of some nansy-pansy critic accusing him of “hate speech.”  The most well-respected reporters would have either hung the libelous dross on their cubicle walls as meritorious decoration or tossed it in the bin, doused it with file drawer whiskey, and lit the calumny on fire.  Today’s JournoList poseurs, in contrast, act as both wimpy self-flagellators denouncing their own “privilege” before the priests of the DEI Inquisition toss them on the sacrificial pyre and Salem witch trial accusers all too willing to point the finger at anyone who dares to question the latest “politically correct” fads and “woke” fashions.  Today’s “reporters” have so betrayed the basic principles of their own profession that they believe it is their deranged civic duty to tell everyone else what they may or may not think and say.