The impact of US food shortages from the diminished 2022 harvest has not been seen yet, and it won’t be until August-September. The bulk of the food that we’ve been consuming so-far this year was grown in South America and other places, and the US harvest yield still has to make its way to store shelves. Though it won’t appear on the shelves for another month or two after the late August–early September time window, that is when the price-signal (the yield numbers) for US agriculture will arrive. We can then expect to see another new rise in the price of corn and other staples, accompanied by higher price volatility.
Texans will consider an initiative to secede from the United States. It is unlikely to pass at this stage, but serves as another indicator of what I have said that, without a sea-change, this trend of division will continue across the United States. Texans have their own specific issues like their desire to control their border, but the cardinal reason for the divisive tendency throughout the country is more fundamental. In the past 150 years nearly without fail, whenever a radical government has gone ‘activist’ to change its society, and it began demonizing and repressing a major portion of the people who aren’t on-board with it while also moving to reduce their freedoms, self-sufficiency, and their right to own guns, the results have been horrific. Within 1-3 years following gun confiscation, dissidents (primarily lawful citizens who just peacefully disagreed with their government) got rounded up and killed. In the 20th century it happened in Chile, Cuba, Argentina, Cambodia, Turkey, Kosovo/Bosnia, Sudan, Rwanda, Syria, China, East Timor/Indonesia, Germany, Russia, Myanmar, Rwanda, Libya, N. Korea, S. Vietnam, Zimbabwe, etc.
As many have noted, if government seeks to stymie gun violence throughout the country, its first move should be to enforce the existing gun control laws and to duly prosecute gun offenders to the extent that those laws specify, but that does not appear to be its priority. Rampant gun violence in the inner cities continues to be treated lightly while unconstitutional ‘red flag’ gun laws have been advanced that allow federal authorities to enter the homes of lawful people and confiscate their weapons. I always am in-favor of putting aside personal sentiment and emotion on such controversial motions, putting-on the scientific-method hat, and dispassionately looking at the data (the historical precedent) to examine what real-world results can typically be expected from them. But that’s not a prevalent approach. The Supreme Court just struck down New York’s gun law restricting concealed-carry and in-response, some have called online for the outright dissolution of the SCOTUS.
Blockades were erected around the Supreme Court in anticipation of an openly-promised protest siege on it by a group calling itself ‘Jane’s Revenge’ in the event that Roe v. Wade is overturned. Now that the court has handed-down that decision, we will see what happens. None of those who have promised that action have been detained nor investigated. Protestors’ intimidation of the SCOTUS justices at their own homes, whose addresses were released by a group called “Ruth Sent Us”, has been allowed to continue for weeks, despite the fact that it is a specific federal crime, and that one of them showed up at justice Kavanaugh’s house intending to murder him. That the MSM and the white house have said nothing about these things is disturbing and indicative of a seriously-distorted totalitarian ethic among the left that any means for attaining their goals, including ones that overturn the check-and-balance controls enshrined in our three branches of government, as well as ones that utilize violent & harmful actions, are acceptable.
This revolutionary attitude of ‘if we don’t get things our way, then we’ll cause mayhem’ is just not consonant with the operating norms of a stable pluralistic democracy; it is totalitarian. But our attorney general is not likely to suddenly turn a corner by ordering law enforcement to make arrests of the protestors outside the justices’ homes. He went to Kiev to ‘prosecute war crimes’ – very novel of him. I do not understand what jurisdiction he alone has in that, nor do I believe that he intends to prosecute any atrocities like crucifixions that have been committed by some of the Ukrainian forces against captured Russian soldiers. He went out of his lane again by penning a letter stating that his DOJ disputes both the recent gun and abortion rulings of SCOTUS, even though his basic duty as AG is to enforce its rulings. In the face of this rising tide of democracy-flouting totalitarian vigor against them, the 85 million or more rule-abiding Americans (or ‘white supremacists’ if you prefer) that it targets are going to increasingly seek an outright divorce from it. The pro-life group lawfully and resolutely pursued their agenda for 49 years to get reach day without organizing to make threats or vandalize (although there were a few individual incidents decades ago when extremists among them acted as-such).
The US government knows that the elective policies (e.g., on energy production) that it has imposed on the people without their buy-in are harming them and it clearly doesn’t care. It tells lies that blame their distress on other sources. The people see the lies for what they are and question them, but the government maintains both its deaf ear and its lying. Immediately after taking power, Biden’s administration abandoned its campaign promises and the standard democratic practice of working to gain the backing and endorsement of the people by attending to their expressed needs and wants. It and the DNC must be planning to cheat in the upcoming elections. There is just no other strategy, including taking us to war, that they can possibly utilize to win, nor to counter a ‘red wave’ (please let me know if you can think of one).
Government pushing the people around against their will is the definition of tyranny and the antithesis of democracy, and we have already been walked a step or two across that line. The fact that the government just tried to give command power over US citizens regarding vax and lockdown mandates to the WHO is revelatory of its intent to serve a master other than the one that it was created to serve: the American people. It is also dismaying that this ‘Pandemic Treaty’ was defeated not by the objection of US and European heads of state, but by others, notably African ones whose nations have known tyranny personally and whose people have suffered as the subjects of trial vaccination programs carried out by the Gates Foundation.
The CDC and other health agencies have acknowledged that they were speaking falsely when they told us that vaccines would prevent people from contracting and transmitting COVID. The remaining health rationale for advocating vaxes now is that they mitigate the suffering of those hospitalized with infection, but a new study put out by ResearchGate refutes that also. Regardless, the government’s interest in digital IDs and COVID passports has not abated. What could be its continuing reason for that interest ?: The ability to track and control us; in other words, more tyranny (ref. the 4.5 minute mark in the linked video).
Some weeks ago, Gates gave us his curiously prescient notice that another pandemic would be coming. Now Biden just mimicked his prediction by saying “…we need more money to plan for the second pandemic. There’s going to be a second pandemic.” If that is somehow certain, then planning to prevent it before it spreads rather than to respond to it after it does would obviously be the more responsible public safety action. But concocting a sensible strategy to stop its proliferation would require describing the specific mechanism(s) by which the new disease is expected to arise and be transmitted. I don’t think so.
As this government has become more totalitarian and hostile to its growing ranks of dissenters who speak out against its policies, it has also been enabling and tacitly-promotive of civil protest actions directed in opposition to those dissenters: Neither the Jan. 6 incident at the capitol nor the recent penetration of the capital by Steven Colbert’s employees constituted an ‘insurrection’. In neither case did the entrants bear arms, seize the grounds, hold sitting members of government hostage, nor make any demands regarding any transfer of power. But the treatment of the Jan. 6 entrants, some of whom only took selfies inside the Capitol, relative to the vastly more privileged treatment of Colbert’s people who were detained for a single night only, is shockingly disparate.
Colbert was able to come on his first show afterwards and sarcastically brush the incident off as ‘first-degree puppetry’. But the fact is that his human puppets reentered the capitol after having been caught and escorted out, and they were seeking to make unannounced appearances at conservative senators’ offices to harass or mock, on-camera, any of them still there. Using a puppet to do that doesn’t make it any ‘cuter’ – at least hopefully not. Even though they failed to roust any politicos, just the notion that it’s in-bounds to run a skit on late night TV featuring his folks breaking-into the capitol as-humor is perverse. Especially when, a year and a half on, a number of the Jan. 6. Protestors continue to sit indefinitely in solitary confinement for the crime of trespassing on the very same grounds.
The White House has weaponized its DOJ, FBI, IRS, NSA, CIA, the military, and other federal agencies, and it has conscripted the lion’s share of MSM, big tech, a number of the largest corporations, and Wall Street as its toadies. Flagship asset managers like Barclays, Blackrock, and Vanguard have redirected Americans’ retirement savings investments, often without them paying attention to it, into supporting ESG and Green New Dream initiatives. This overarching push by powerful entities in and outside of government to constrain peoples’ options and drive them into economic and political agendas that they did not elect nor that they approved of is an unfriendly trend whose parallels from the past do not bode well. The White House and DOJ are giving a wink and a nod to civilian activists willing to use physical intimidation to illegitimately coerce the legislature and congress to fall in-line and do its bidding. The separation of the US government into its three independent branches was setup expressly to prevent that sort of consolidation of centralized unilateral power from ever arising in the USA.
If our federal government (and our people) still operated within the framework of federalism as it was founded, none of the national social tumult over civil rights issues like gun and abortion rights would be happening. And so the federal government would not be able to take grandstanding positions on these issues and utilize them as another wedge to divide the people and to try to arrogate decision-making power to itself. The federal government was intended to provide only for our most fundamental and universally-common macro social needs like infrastructure and a national military. The states were setup to decide, each for themselves, what social norms and programs they wanted to codify into law and operate under. This wonderfully-flexible and clever setup was chosen by the founders based upon their own experience: The original thirteen colonies all initially operated as independent sovereigns. It took many meetings and several attempts before they managed to come-together in a constitutional convention to draft a set of specified laws and principles that a majority of them could agree to sign-onto and unite the colonies under, thereby establishing the United States of America. Key in finding this common-ground was their decision to let those states decide most of their operating rules for themselves.
Many Californians annually make trips to Nevada so that they can legally gamble, light-off firecrackers & bottle rockets, and patronize prostitutes. Some Idahoans take advantage of Oregon’s more permissive marijuana laws when they vacation there. Similarly, with Roe v. Wade repealed, the availability of legal abortion services will once again be determined by the states per the original federalist design, and today most of those states will allow it. Any U.S. woman living in a no-abortion state who wants an abortion will only have to take a plane or a road trip to another state to get one (hopefully not annually). This is all that the threats to the SCOTUS justices and their families have been about; returning to the original federalist principle on this issue by overturning the piece of legislation that undid it in the first place.
Noone has been acting to remove a women’s ‘right to choose’ throughout the country, because that would be as equally totalitarian as pressuring those doctors who religiously and morally object into performing abortions. But the federal government has been rebuffed on this unconstitutional bill which enacted a federal stricture over the moral beliefs of all Americans in every state. You know the word for that. Some women will now have to take day trips to get abortions done as a result of SCOTUS repealing Roe v. Wade, but government lost its ability to use the abortion issue as a foothold for gaining more federal control over ethical and lifestyle choices. The constitutional principle of federalism that Roe v. Wade contravened has been restored. I personally think those advantages are worth the tradeoff of a day trip. And, except for rape and other extenuating circumstances, pregnancy is not a circumstance that a woman has no personal responsibility in creating. One of the things that nature set up is that hetero women who have sex can get pregnant.
The federalism model has enabled the US to be a melting-pot of peoples from all over the world, each with different mores, to migrate to and find a local niche where they can fit-in reasonably well. Apart from state laws, the only universal requirements were that they all learn to speak our common language of English and abide by the federal constitution. Until 1913, no one had to pay any federal income taxes. This model made the country a remarkably diverse yet still (for the most-part) harmonious place; the contrasts between the sensibilities of urbane New Yorkers and Kansan farmers has been the butt of satire and mockery, but never (until maybe recently) has it been severe enough to prevent them all from joining together as Americans. This cultural pastiche makes the USA a particularly interesting country not only to choose a place to live, but also to road-trip through. Within a day of driving, one can go from eating Cajun food in Louisiana while listening to Zydeco music to diving into a plate of BBQ while listening to Texas Swing.
The EU aimed (at least economically) to emulate this federalist model, but it was destined by-construction to fail because of the differences in language, culture, and tradition (including some long-held resentments from regional conflicts of the past). Economically, its failure lies in not consolidating all sovereign debt into a single pool with a single unified credit rating to underlie the Euro currency. The EU has recently vowed to take whatever measures necessary to prevent ‘fissures’ in the union, but any measures short of tyranny are not likely to succeed in the end. The ECB just cannot maintain the same interest rate for all of Europe.
In both Europe and the US now, the more granular determination of social standards by the people (via retaining national sovereignty or the federalist system of states’ sub-sovereignty) is giving ground to being taken-over by consolidated unilateral power imposing them at the federal (US & EU) levels. If this consolidation completes, it will no longer matter what your personal life-preferences are: regardless of what Euro-country or what American state you live in, you will abide by the EU or US federal strictures, no matter which state you make your home in, and whether you like them or not. Hopefully, we wont ever have to abide by universal global ones as well.
On the world stage, the economic sanctions against Russia have backfired on the economies of the west, and it has pivoted to forge new trade alliances with other nations happy to receive its oil. Russia has even formed a new G8 alliance of countries that includes Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, and Turkey. It was expelled from the original G8 in 2014 after it took Crimea, leaving France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, the US, and Canada as its remaining seven member states. The GDP per capita among the new G8 countries is now 24.5% ahead of these original seven, who are continuing to lag even further behind.
Direct NATO military conflict with Russia appears more imminent than ever. Tiny Lithuania has been the latest western state to ‘poke the bear’ by blocking trains running from Russia to its satellite region of Kalingrad. Kalingrad is geographically disconnected from the Russian land mass and so has had to rely on being supplied from Russia by rail traffic through Lithuania. The Lithuanians declared that they are banning the rail transport of goods subject to EU sanctions, including coal, tech products, metals and construction materials. Not surprisingly, Russia has warned NATO and the Lithuanian government that if they do not restore full access of these supplies to Kalingrad, it “reserves the right to take actions to protect its national interests”.
Since Lithuania is a NATO member state, other NATO states would be bound to come to its defense in response to a Russian attack. A resulting sequence of ‘falling dominoes’ that sets off world war III could occur quickly. Russia would likely also invade simultaneously Estonia and Latvia simultaneously for security reasons. In a summit beginning in Madrid on Tuesday, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will demand that they receive the biggest build-up of combat-ready NATO forces in the entirety of Europe since the end of the cold war. The belligerence of these midget states may set off the next superpower conflict. This should now be a bigger concern across America than the Roe v. Wade decision.
I have previously indicated that America and other western nations may want this war. Its expenses might provide useful cover for defaulting on their now-unsustainable sovereign debts and wartime laws may invoked to impose greater civil control. Additionally, the governments that are in cahoots with the WEF’s one world government plan insanely hope to topple the governments that they still need to infiltrate in the two remaining countries, China and Russia, in order to complete their goal. Defaulting on their social obligations to their citizens is something western political leaders dread doing outright, since it will result in revolts against them. So instead they may be opting to tangle us up in a war with the world’s most powerful nuclear power. If so, that is clearly beyond historical recklessness. Trump was snarky but right when he quipped that the Biden administration should now be more concerned with nuclear winter than with global warming. But for these reasons it may not be.
China continues to exercise its military and its foreign policy in ways that indicate that it intends to invade Taiwan soon. And despite all of this dreadful portent for massive military conflict, the US is not making efforts to mitigate it with diplomacy nor to prepare for what could be one of its biggest war scenarios. With amazingly-misplaced timing, the US Navy will next week conduct a war game exercise to “gauge how climate change could affect future conflicts”. Meanwhile, Biden’s forcing of idealistic, unrealistic, and mutually incoherent policies are further weakening us at just the wrong time: Cutting energy while facing a potentially massive war and while the economy is faltering into recession is worse than bad management. His team’s push for a digital currency could increase the load on the power grid by 20% as the result of every transaction having to be executed as a computation and recorded electronically.
We are now besieged by a cadre of powerful and incompetent buffoons arrogant enough to pursue their own social pipe dreams rather than perform their responsibility to tackle the very real and pressing exigencies before them. They include climate physicists like John Kerry, AOC, and Klaus Schwab. Economists like Janet Yellen who savor the absurd ideas of MMM and ones like Schwab who like those of Karl Marx. The epidemiologist & virologist Bill Gates, the global national unifier George Soros, and the bobblehead president of the United State who appears to be a puppet of at least some if not most of them. They all have spurned accountability to the people and instead are pushing their harmful agendas upon all of us. These people exemplify the danger when a vast swath of the world’s wealth and power ends up in the hands of a very few who are either ill-intentioned tyrant-wannabees or who believe they are so much wiser than humanity at-large that should make our collective decisions for us.
This is a time easily as tumultuous as the 1960s, except that then the social upheaval aimed to eliminate divisions based on things like race, class, and sex, and to unify. Much of it was also directed towards stopping the Vietnam war. Today, all the social upheaval is aimed in the opposite directions to further balkanize all the identity splinter-groups among the people, to outright demonize and vilify many of the people, and to get many onboard with the notion that engaging our country in a war with Russia is somehow a righteous imperative. A fundamental difference between these two periods of social unrest is that in the 60s, almost all of the movements arose (at least initially) organically among the people in opposition to the government and its policies. Today, the social unrest is provoked, supported, and even defended with force, by government.
“The people whose primary drive is to gain power over others for their own elevation are the very people who should never be put into the positions that give it to them. Those whose primary drive is to contribute and serve, and who feel the weighty burden of such positions because of their care for the welfare of others, are the ones that a wise people should elect to them.”
Christie Associates: Quantitative Analysis & Consulting for Finance and Business. Principal: Steven Christie, Ph.D. 