Category: zerohedge

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

Enter The Putinator

When Biden called Russian President a soulless “killer” on ABC News, Putin responded with the most deft bit of diplomacy I’ve seen in quite a while, openly challenging Fungal Joe to a publicly broadcast debate of substantive issues, which Biden, of course, declined.

For those that don’t remember the context, here’s the article from Zerohedge on the subject.

There can be no question now that all the disparate interests within The Davos Crowd are aligned at this point (see this month’s Newsletter for more discussion on this).  All guns point at Russia.  

Putin tried to defuse the situation with an offer that was at once an epic troll of Biden, who is clearly no match for his Russian counterpart cognitively, and a warning to Americans that this situation has gotten far more dangerous than they are being told.

And sometimes you win simply by taking the high road. Make no mistake the fact that Putin went here this early in Biden’s presidency is a bad sign. It tells us things are horrific between the world’s most prominent nuclear powers and that there’s been zero diplomatic effort put forth by the Biden administration since the election.

The problem is rapidly becoming that indiscriminate use of all weapons all the time — diplomatic, economic, military, propaganda — creates a kind of dopamine addiction.  In order to keep the public interest in the threat they have to keep raising the stakes and the rhetoric to eventually absurd levels.

As I like to say all the time, it’s the first rule of screenwriting : Be forever raising the stakes lest the audience gets bored.

But there comes a point where people begin to realize that they are being asked to back a war where the existential threat to the elite’s power is transferred onto them. Remember folks, government’s fight and spend billions propagandizing you into believing their wars are for your own good.

It’s rarely the case, if ever. More often than not the war being ginned up in the media and by government officials is one that either feathers their own nest directly, supports the goals of other powerful folks indirectly, or covers up past corruption.

The brewing conflict in Ukraine is all of these and more. The project to add Ukraine to NATO and the EU is a long-held dream of neocons like Victoria Nuland and neoliberals like Biden. It’s an important cog in the World Economic Forum’s desire to expand the EU to both encircle Russia thereby disrupting any dreams of Eurasian integration which could form a bulwark against their brave new world.

What’s got Biden’s Depends in a bunch is that he’s neck-deep in the corruption in Ukraine. In Obama’s own words, Ukraine is Joe’s project.  And Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky is not fully subsumed into the morass of Biden’s (and the rest of the usual suspects’) problems.

Putin’s deft and cordial handling of Biden’s indiscriminate use of language was masterful here. Biden’s initial remarks are, at best, him trying to hold onto the Amy Poehler demographic (see reruns of Parks and Recreation for her slavish obsession with him as Vice-President) as a vibrant, macho man, while he implements every bad idea that that same demographic rejected from all the other Democrats during primary season.

But we can all see he’s nothing of the sort.  He’s a barely coherent, rapidly fading bully with no discernible achievements in life other than being available to be a placeholder for someone else’s plans.  

So, it was never a question as to whether Biden would ever talk to Putin under those conditions.  They can’t even get him to talk with reporters for real, having to green screen him into backgrounds to make it look like he’s out in the world, doing stuff.

And don’t get me started on that embarrassment of a press conference held the other day. Running for re-election in 2024? This guy’s not going to be alive in 2024. Then again, since he didn’t run in 2020, what does it actually matter?

Elections are just Hollywood productions anymore anyway.

Biden’s counter is to now invite Putin and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping the big Climate Summit in late April where the WEF controls the agenda and Biden’s anti-diplomatic corps led by the completely over-matched Secretary of State Antony Blinken can further embarrass the U.S. on the world stage.

Since both Putin and Xi told the WEF to go scratch on both Climate Change, Agenda 2030 and, most notably from Putin, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, I don’t see how this summit ends any better than virtual Davos did earlier this year.

In fact, with Biden’s approach to both China and Russia so far, this summit is shaping up to be a colossal waste of time while also threatening everyone the world over with what they can expect policy-wise from the West until someone finally puts these insane people out of our misery.

With each day that passes the U.K., for example, under tyrant Boris Johnson sinks further into a complete totalitarian nightmare (see here, here, here, and here… from the last 24 hours) thanks to COVID-19, while ramping up the anti-Russian rhetoric to eleven.

But, back to Ukraine, because it’s tied directly to all this climate change nonsense. Putin understands as well that Biden will allow every escalation in Ukraine because he’s shackled by it and they need to complete the job started with the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovich in 2014.

That means we’ll see something far worse than Victoria Nuland’s latest Cookie Campaign for freedom.  We’re going to see a war for the Donbass soon, likely right after Orthodox Easter and the end of the snow melt.

Putin tried to go directly to the people to end this destructive spiral to the bottom, because he knows where this ends.

It will be a confrontation that one side will have to commit to completely or allow it’s bluff to be called. The game Biden’s handlers have played to this point has been a massive escalation of rhetoric while continually moving real pieces into position for a real conflict. I just don’t see cooler heads prevailing here because there is no upside for the U.S., the EU and the WEF if China and Russia stand their ground and Biden et.al. back down.

Russia has to be destroyed or subjugated if the Great Reset is to happen and Europe is to remain a relevant global player. That means control of the Black Sea, which means taking back Crimea. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently reiterated publicly that Russia has had zero diplomatic contact with the European Union since the 2014 vote by Crimea to rejoin Russia.

Diplomacy is nearly over between the major powers. Biden’s simple refusal to talk to Putin publicly is a major event.

In the end everything we’ve lived through since COVID-19 began boils down to the need to destroy the global economy built on oil and coal, otherwise all major energy production stays under Eurasian control as it strengthens not Atlanticist as it peaks in global power and their grand dreams wither.

Time is getting short for this to happen. Public opposition to this program is rising. It happens now or not at all.

If there is a war in the Donbass this spring it won’t be a happy ending which extends U.S. primacy into the future but the moment when we realized its acceleration into irrelevancy.

*  *  *

Join my Patreon to access the notebook.

Donate
BTC: 3GSkAe8PhENyMWQb7orjtnJK9VX8mMf7Zf
BCH: qq9pvwq26d8fjfk0f6k5mmnn09vzkmeh3sffxd6ryt
ETH: 0x1dd2e6cddb02e3839700b33e9dd45859344c9edc
DCR: DsV2x4kJ4gWCPSpHmS4czbLz2fJNqms78oE
DASH: XjWQKXJuxYzaNV6WMC4zhuQ43uBw8mN4Va
XMR: 48Whbhyg8TNXiNV2LNkjeuJJU55CNt5m1XDtP3jWZK2xf5GNsbU2ZwHLDJTQ5oTU3uaJPN8oQooRpSQ2CPMJvX8pVTqthmu

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

The unipolar moment is six feet under, the hegemon will try to break Eurasian integration and there’s no grownup in the room to counsel restraint…

Let’s start with comic relief: the “leader of the free world” has pledged to prevent China from becoming the “leading” nation on the planet. And to fulfill such an exceptional mission, his “expectation” is to run again for president in 2024. Not as a hologram. And fielding the same running mate.

Now that the “free world” has breathed a sigh of relief, let’s return to serious matters – as in the contours of the Shocked and Awed 21st Century Geopolitics.

What happened in the past few days between Anchorage and Guilin continues to reverberate. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that Brussels “destroyed” the relationship between Russia and the EU, he focused on how the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership is getting stronger and stronger.

Not so casual synchronicity revealed that as Lavrov was being properly hosted by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Guilin – scenic lunch in the Li river included -, US Secretary of State Tony Blinken was visiting NATO’s James-Bondish HQ outside Brussels.

Lavrov made it quite clear that the core of Russia-China revolves around establishing an economic and financial axis to counterpunch the Bretton Woods arrangement. That implies doing everything to protect Moscow and Beijing from “threats of sanctions by other states”; progressive de-dollarization; and advances in crypto-currency.

This “triple threat” is what is unleashing the Hegemon’s unbounded fury.

On a broader spectrum, the Russia-China strategy also implies that the progressive interaction between the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) will keep apace across Central Asia, Southeast Asia, parts of South Asia, and Southwest Asia – necessary steps towards an ultimately unified Eurasian market under a sort of strategic Sino-Russo management.

In Alaska, the Blinken-Sullivan team learned, at their expense, that you don’t mess with a Yoda such as Yang Jiechi with impunity. Now they’re about to learn what it means to mess with Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Russian Security Council.

Patrushev, as much a Yoda as Yang Jiechi, and a master of understatement, delivered a not so cryptic message: if the US created “though days” for Russia, as they “are planning that, they can implement that”, Washington “would be responsible for the steps that they would take”.

What NATO is really up to

Meanwhile, in Brussels, Blinken was enacting a Perfect Couple  routine with spectacularly inefficient head of the European Commission (EC) Ursula von der Leyen. The script went something like this. “Nord Stream 2 is really bad for you. A trade/investment deal with China is really bad for you. Now sit. Good girl.”

Then came NATO, which put on quite a show, complete with an all-Foreign Minister tough guy pose in front of the HQ. That was part of a summit – which predictably did not “celebrate” the 10th anniversary of NATO’s destruction of Libya or the major ass-kicking NATO “endured” in Afghanistan.

In June 2020, NATO’s cardboard secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg – actually his US military handlers – laid out what is now known as the NATO 2030 strategy, which boils down to a Global Robocop politico-military mandate. The Global South has (not) been warned.

In Afghanistan, according to a Stoltenberg impervious to irony, NATO supports infusing “fresh energy into the peace process”. At the summit, NATO ministers also discussed Middle East and Northern Africa and – with a straight face – looked into “what more NATO could do to build stability in the region”. Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Libyans, Malians would love to learn something about that.

Post-summit, Stoltenberg delivered a proverbially somnolent press conference where the main focus was – what else – Russia, and its “pattern for repressive behavior at home, aggressive behavior abroad”.

All the rhetoric about NATO “building stability” vanishes when one examines what’s really behind NATO 2030, via a meaty “recommendation” report written by a bunch of “experts”

Here we learn the three essentials:

1. “The Alliance must respond to Russian threats and hostile actions (…) without a return to ‘business as usual’ barring alterations in Russia’s aggressive behavior and its return to full compliance with international law.”

2. China is depicted as a tsunami of “security challenges”: “The Alliance should infuse the China challenge throughout existing structures and consider establishing a consultative body to discuss all aspects of Allies’ security interests vis-à-vis China”. The emphasis is to “defend against any Chinese activities that could impact collective defense, military readiness or resilience in the Supreme Allied Commander Europe’s (SACEUR) Area of Responsibility.”

3. “NATO should outline a global blueprint (italics mine) for better utilizing its partnerships to advance NATO strategic interests. It should shift from the current demand-driven approach to an interest-driven approach (italics mine) and consider providing more stable and predictable resource streams for partnership activities. NATO’s Open Door Policy should be upheld and reinvigorated. NATO should expand and strengthen partnerships with Ukraine and Georgia.”

Here’s to The Triple Threat. Yet the Top of the Pops – as in fat, juicy industrial-military complex contracts – is really here:

The most profound geopolitical challenge is posed by Russia. While Russia is by economic and social measures a declining power, it has proven itself capable of territorial aggression and is likely to remain a chief threat facing NATO over the coming decade.

NATO may be redacting, but the master script comes straight from the Deep State – complete with Russia “seeking hegemony”; expanding Hybrid War (the concept was actually invented by the Deep State); and manipulating “cyber, state-sanctioned assassinations, and poisonings – using chemical weapons, political coercion, and other methods to violate the sovereignty of Allies.”

Beijing for its part is using “force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO’s ability to build collective resilience.”

The Global South should be very much aware of NATO’s pledge to save the “free world” from these autocratic evils.

The NATO interpretation of “South” encompasses North Africa and the Middle East, in fact everywhere from sub-Saharan Africa to Afghanistan. Any similarity with the presumably defunct “Greater Middle East” concept of the Dubya era is not an accident.

NATO insists this vast expanse is characterized by “fragility, instability, and insecurity” – of course refusing to disclose its own role as serial instability perpetrator in Libya, Iraq, parts of Syria and Afghanistan.

Because ultimately…it’s all Russia’s fault: “To the South, the challenge includes the presence of Russia and to a lesser extent China, exploiting regional fragilities. Russia has reinserted itself in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. In 2015, it intervened in the Syrian Civil War and remains there. Russia’s Middle East policy is likely to exacerbate tensions and political strife across the region as it extends an increasing amount of political, financial, operational, and logistical assets to its partners. China’s influence across the Middle East is also growing. It signed a strategic partnership with Iran, is the largest importer of crude oil from Iraq, wedged itself into the Afghanistan peace process, and is the biggest foreign investor in the region.”

Here, in a nutshell, and not exactly in code, is the NATO road map all the way to 2030 to harass and try to dismantle every relevant nook and cranny of Eurasia integration, especially those directly linked to New Silk Roads infrastructure/connectivity projects (investment in Iran, reconstruction of Syria, reconstruction of Iraq, reconstruction of Afghanistan).

The spin is on a “360-degree approach to security” that will “become an imperative”. Translation: NATO is coming for large swathes of the Global South, big time, under the pretense of “addressing both the traditional threats emanating from this region like terrorism and new risks, including the growing presence of Russia, and to a lesser extent China.”

Hybrid war on two fronts

And to think that in a not so distant past there used to be some flashes of lucidity emanating from the US establishment.

Very few will remember that in 1993 James Baker, former Secretary of State under Daddy Bush, advanced the idea of expanding NATO to Russia, which at the time, under Yeltsin and a gang of Milton Friedmanesque free marketeers, was devastated, but ruled by “democracy”. Yet Bill Clinton was already in power, and the idea was duly discarded.

Six years later, no less than George Kennan – who invented the containment of the USSR in the first place – determined that the NATO annexation of former Soviet satellites was “the beginning of a new Cold War” and “a tragic mistake”.

It’s immensely enlightening to relieve and re-study the whole decade between the fall of the USSR and the election of Putin to the presidency through the venerable Yevgeny Primakov’s book Russian Crossroads: Toward the New Millenium, published in the US by Yale University Press.

Primakov, the ultimate intel insider who started as a Pravda correspondent in the Middle East, former Foreign Minister and also Prime Minister, looked closely into Putin’s soul, repeatedly, and liked what he saw: a man of integrity and a consummate professional. Primakov was a multilateralist avant la lettre, the conceptual instigator of RIC (Russia-India-China) which in the next decade evolved towards BRICS.

Those were the days – exactly 22 years ago – when Primakov was on a plane to Washington when he picked up a call by then Vice-President Al Gore: the US was about to start bombing Yugoslavia, a slav-orthodox Russian ally, and there was nothing the former superpower could do about it. Primakov ordered the pilot to turn around and fly back to Moscow.

Now Russia is powerful enough to advance its own Greater Eurasia concept, which moving forward should be balancing – and complementing – China’s New Silk Roads. It’s the power of this Double Helix – which is bound to inevitably attract key sectors of Western Europe – that is driving the Hegemon’s ruling class dazed and confused.

Glenn Diesen, author of Russian Conservatism: Managing Change Under Permanent Revolution, which I analyzed in Why Russia is Driving the West Crazy , and one of the best global analysts of Eurasia integration, summed it all up: “The US has had great difficulties in terms of converting the security dependence of the allies into geoeconomic loyalty, as evident by the Europeans still buying Chinese technologies and Russian energy.

Hence permanent Divide and Rule, featuring one of its key targets: cajole, force, bribe and all of the above for the European Parliament to scotch the China-EU trade/investment deal.

Wang Yiwei, director of the Center for European Studies at Renmin University and author of the best made in China book about the New Silk Roads, clearly sees through the “America is back” bluster: “China is not isolated by the US, the West or even the whole international community. The more hostility they show, the more anxiety they have. When the US travels around the globe to frequently ask for support, unity and help from its allies, this means US hegemony is weakening.”

Wang even forecasts what may happen if the current “leader of the free world” is prevented from fulfilling his exceptional mission: “Don’t be fooled by the sanctions between China and the EU, which is harmless to trade and economic ties, and EU leaders won’t be that stupid to totally abandon the China-EU Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, because they know they would never get such a good deal when Trump or Trumpism returns to the White House.”

Shocked and Awed 21st Century Geopolitics, as configured in these crucial past two weeks, spells out the Unipolar Moment is six feet under. The Hegemon will never admit it; hence the NATO counterpunch, which was pre-designed. Ultimately, the Hegemon has decided not to engage in diplomatic accommodation, but to wage a hybrid war on two fronts against a relentlessly demonized strategic partnership of peer competitors.

And as a sign of these sorry times, there’s no James Baker or George Kennan to advise against such folly.

At some point in the future, the human race will arrive at an epoch where people will wonder how – back in the stone age of pre-2021 – we would get status alerts about our food deliveries, without having a dildo inside of us.

Allow us to explain. That’s because a company called CamSoda labs has just released a new product called “Grubuzz”, which – according to the company’s website (we swear we are not making this up)  – “harnesses the power of Internet-connected sex toys – aka teledildonics – and sends clitoral vibrations to people as their takeout food from a national chain or local favorite is being prepared and ultimately delivered.”

As if the serotonin hit from the poison we call takeout food nowadays wasn’t enough…

Naturally, you’re wondering how it works. “The frequency of vibrations increase through the food delivery process,” the site patiently explains. “So, for example, the vibration frequency starts slowly when someone’s order is received by the restaurant and progressively increases when the driver leaves the restaurant with the order, drives closer to their residence, arrives at their door, etc.”

 

Daryn Parker, Vice President of CamSoda, said (with a straight face, we’re guessing): “People have been stuck at home for over a year now. They have grown accustomed to ordering takeout food from their favorite restaurants regularly. Quarantine cravings are real and so too is the COVID-19 delivery food boom.”

“In addition to the rise in food delivery, there has been a spike in teledildonic usage,” he said. We’d love to see the Softbank-style slide deck for this pitch.

He continued: “Here at CamSoda we figured we’d combine these popular activities and produce a technology that gets people off while their food delivery order is being prepared and ultimately delivered. With Grubuzz, not only will your mouth be watering while your order is being processed, but so too will your private parts. What better way to eat some of your favorite food from Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Outback Steakhouse or P.F. Chang’s than after you’ve orgasmed?!”

The site explains:

Users will obtain a curated email address from CamSoda, which they will then plug into their favorite delivery apps, including GrubHub, Uber Eats, Caviar, DoorDash and Postmates, among others. When an email is sent from their delivery app updating them on the status of their order, it will be sent to the CamSoda-generated email, which will simultaneously set off a vibration to their teledildonic device.

And sorry guys, “CamSoda is initially launching Grubuzz for females only,” the site says. Back to ordering food like its the stone age, we guess.

Authored by Peter Suciu via 19fortyfive.com,

American supporters of gun control point to Australia as a fine “solution” to stop mass shootings, gang violence, and even suicides.

Firearms are strictly regulated in the “Land Down Under” and all firearms license applicants are required to take a safety course, while they must also show a “genuine reason” for owning a firearm.

Self-defense isn’t a valid reason either.

Why Australia Changed Its Approach on Firearms

Australia instituted these strict laws following the April 1996 mass shooting at Port Arthur, in which gunman Martin Bryant took the lives of thirty-five people using an AR-10 semi-automatic rifle. Bryant’s motivation was reportedly based on the failure to buy a bed and breakfast property but also to become “notorious.”

The shooting outraged the nation, and soon Australia introduced comprehensive gun control. It was led by then Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who had only taken office six weeks earlier at the head of a center-right coalition. Howard came to the decision that firearms were simply too easy to obtain and there were just too many of them.

“We have an opportunity in this country not to go down the American path,” Howard announced, and he radically changed Australia’s gun laws. According to supporters of gun control, those efforts rid the country of gun violence on a large scale.

What Australia Did

It was less than two weeks after the massacre that all six Australian states agreed to enact the same sweeping gun legislation that made it far harder for prospective gun owners to obtain a firearm, including a twenty-eight-day waiting period. The law also banned all semi-automatic rifles and semi-automatic shotguns, while Australia instituted a nationwide mandatory buyback of all the guns that were banned. A market value benchmark was determined to compensate gun owners for the loss of their loss of property.

It was so radical that even Howard wasn’t certain the buyback would be accepted. During an address to gun rights supporters, he reportedly wore a bulletproof vest and feared the event could turn violent. However, the meeting went off peacefully and in the first buyback, about 650,000 legally owned guns were handed in and subsequently destroyed.

According to an academic estimate, the buyback took in and destroyed some twenty percent of all privately owned guns in Australia. Additionally, in the years since that buyback, Australians did not purchase new – and legal – firearms to make up for what was banned, but it is likely that many feared that they’d face a similar ban.

Since the passage of that legislation, gun control advocates have pointed to Australia and called for similar measures.

Why Australia’s Gun Laws Won’t Work in the U.S.

So, could such a system work in the United States? The answer is likely no.

There are several reasons; as The New York Times reported, “Australians, on the whole, were happy to give up their guns and accept the new restrictions.” Americans, who, unlike their Australian cousins, have a Second Amendment that provided the right to keep and bear arms and that has been in place for nearly 240 years.

Moreover, Australia may have had its own history of hunting and sport, but it has always been far smaller and less significant than that of the United States. Another factor is that Prime Minster Howard was able to get all six Australian states to agree to and pass uniform and sweeping gun control legislation in just twelve days. The United States would have to get all fifty states on the same page and that would likely never happen and it certainly wouldn’t be quick.

Then there is the issue that Australia bought back some 650,000 guns. The United States government would likely have to buy back hundreds of millions of firearms. Additionally, the United States would also have to address the fact that it would put dozens of small to mid-sized companies that make the firearms out of business, while even larger manufacturers could find themselves in dire straits if the civilian market were to suddenly disappear.

Another consideration is whether gun violence would diminish were the United States to institute such strict gun control. The vast majority of shooting deaths aren’t from the handful of tragic and high-profile mass shootings. Most gun violence in the United States involves criminals using illegal guns, which wouldn’t be impacted by a ban.

What About Criminals? 

The biggest hurdle would be whether a ban would actually get guns off the streets as supporters of gun control claim, or just create a huge black market. It isn’t hard to believe that many Americans would ignore the ban and risk becoming criminals by hiding away their firearms, while many might simply sell their guns “no questions asked” on a future black market at a profit.

That could keep gangs and other criminals well-armed for years, even decades to come.

It is true that the number of mass shootings did all but cease in Australia following the ban, and there has been just a single mass shooting event since Australia banned the weapons, that is a point worth considering too. How could any mass shootings occur? Australia saw 650,000 guns handed in, but in subsequent amnesties more firearms have been handed in, highlighting that many ignored the ban.

As noted the United States has hundreds of millions of semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, so mass shootings and gang violence would remain a thing as long as anyone refuses to hand in his/her firearm(s).

This doesn’t mean we should ignore the problem in America, but a gun confiscation and buyback that worked in Australia is simply unlikely to work here. Of course, that hasn’t stopped American politicians from pushing their agenda.

Americans are becoming more worried about inflation than ever following the Federal Reserve and the federal government’s unprecedented response to the virus pandemic downturn by plowing trillions of dollars into the economy. As a result, prices of financial assets and items in the real economy have soared over the last year which a new survey reveals three-quarters of consumers are concerned about inflation. 

With the Federal Reserve turning a blind eye to rapid price increases, consumers are finding it unavoidable to avoid higher prices at the gas pump or supermarket. A CivicScience survey of more than 2,600 respondents found that 77% were somewhat concerned about inflation.

Much of the inflation concerns were based on younger respondents. About 52% of respondents aged 18-24 were “very concerned” about inflation, 50% of the 25-34 aged respondents were “very concerned,” and 48% of 35-54. Surprisingly, baby boomers aged +55 were only at 37%. 

Meanwhile, Cleveland Fed President Charles Evans said some increase in inflation would be welcome. “Too low inflation is no good,” he added.

But for the millions of working-poor Americans still collecting pandemic insurance checks, soaring prices have been much of a nuisance. 

“Naturally, people who have had their hours or pay reduced as a result of the pandemic are the most sensitive to the idea of inflation and what it means for the general cost of living. If it’s difficult to make ends meet now, imagine how difficult it could be once inflation sinks in,” said CivicScience. 

On a political basis, conservatives were overwhelmingly more concerned about inflation than any other political group. 

The general public appears to be catching up to the Fed’s game as monetary and fiscal stimulus results in the higher cost of living. 

By one gauge, as we noted earlier this month, inflation fears are the highest this century. The spread between US five- and 10-year inflation breakevens is now the highest since the early 2000s. 

Consumers’ outlook for inflation over the longer term climbed to an almost six-year high.

Americans are panic searching “inflation.” 

The Fed and government’s big experiment with massive stimulus is possibly overheating the economy and may continue to push inflation higher. The Fed continues to beat its drums that it has inflation under control and that today’s episode of surging prices isn’t the 1970s. 

The worst thing that could happen now is a repeat of stagflation in the 1970s. 

Authored by Brandon Weichert via RealClearPolitics.com,

Conflict, not cooperation, is going to define international affairs for the foreseeable future.

This will be true both on Earth and, more importantly, in the strategic high ground of space.

Fact is, the second space race is on. The world’s powers are playing for keeps. Whoever wins the second space race will rule the world. Despite the competitive advantages that the United States has in this arena, America’s rivals – namely Russia and China – are catching up.

Unless the Biden administration takes a radical departure from where its nascent space policy is heading, America will lose space and, in so doing, the United States will cease being the world’s superpower.

Some people reading this might not understand why it matters if America surrendered space to China. You might be questioning why we should care if the country remains a superpower. But without America’s once unquestionable dominance of space, without access to critical satellites in orbit, the America you and I know would ground to a halt. Everything in our society today relies on signals and those signals must pass through satellites. The U.S. military could not defend itself or American interests abroad nor could everyday life for average Americans continue should U.S. satellites be destroyed or rendered inoperable.

How long do you think America could survive in a world commanded by Beijing and Moscow?

The new space race is the most important challenge of our time. Sadly, few — in government and in the public — seem to have recognized this fact.

China and Russia have announced plans to unite their space programs and jointly develop the moon and its bountiful natural resources. For the record, the moon is believed to hold potentially trillions of dollars of mineable rare-earth minerals. Capturing the moon could provide the Sino-Russian alliance the ultimate strategic high ground over Earth. More importantly, the mined resources of the moon could be sold — and those trillions of dollars could be funneled into the coffers of the Sino-Russian war machine on Earth.

This new space alliance represents the most significant geopolitical shift in national security space policy in recent decades. It is the fusing of the second-most-powerful nation in space, Russia, with the rising, third space power, China. And it is part of a larger geopolitical trend: the hardening of Eurasia against the United States and the greatest challenge to America’s superpower status since the Cold War.

What’s required now from Washington is decisive action. The political will and strategic vision for controlling the strategic high ground — for exploiting its vast bounties — is essential for whichever power seeks to order the remainder of the 21st century. Both Moscow and Beijing are clearly expressing such a will. The Americans, on the other hand, appear blinkered.

The United States must protect its satellites from attack, build reliable space-based missile defenses, insist upon returning American astronauts to the moon by 2024 (the year that China plans to begin construction of a lunar base), keep its manned Mars mission on schedule, and unleash the private space sector as never before — all to stay ahead of the new Sino-Russian entente in space. And Washington must do these things within a few short years.

Should the new Sino-Russian space alliance go unanswered, then these authoritarian states will quickly claim the strategic high ground of space and reduce the United States to a middle power on Earth beholden to the oppressive whims of Beijing and Moscow. The space race is on, a space war is near, and the Biden administration must do everything in its power to ensure that America is defended in space and that its dominance remains absolute.

To keep that dominance, the new administration must call for a minimum $1 trillion investment in both the military and civilian space programs while offering clear guidelines — and steady support — for ensuring America’s access to space and for pushing ahead of the Chinese-Russian alliance.

Losing space to those two powers means also losing the Earth to them. Should our dominance disappear, one can expect a far bleaker future for our children than what many of us expect or want. President Biden must act in support of a robust space policy and he must do it now.

In a humorous clip that made the rounds on social media overnight, Montana Sen. Steve Daines was caught on camera appearing to wax nostalgic about the good ol’ days when Montana’s basement-dwelling meth cooks had yet to be driven out of business by high-purity Mexican imports.

Sen. Steve Daines: “Twenty years ago in Montana, meth was homemade. It was homegrown. And you had purity levels less than 30%. Today the meth that is getting into Montana is Mexican cartel.” pic.twitter.com/Xtu1geaVxJ

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) March 26, 2021

Fans of the show Breaking Bad could be forgiven for suspecting that Daines might have been role-playing as Walter White, the show’s anti-hero, who produced a type of extremely pure “blue” meth many times more potent than the Mexican-made stuff coming over the border (keep in mind, the show is a work of fiction).

“Twenty years ago in Montana, meth was homemade. It was homegrown. And you had purity levels less than 30%,” Daines told a gathering of his Senate colleagues during a visit to the Mexican border. “Today the meth that is getting into Montana is Mexican cartel.”

Daines – who was speaking during a press conference at the border, where the Biden Administration is struggling to deflect blame for a surge in migration that’s reached crisis levels – added that illegal immigration was partly to blame for the influx of potent meth into the “Big Sky State”, before laying the blame for the state’s meth crisis at the feet of President Joe Biden.

For context, here’s an accurate visualization of how the number of migrants crossing the southern border has climbed since Biden’s inauguration.

While left-leaning news outlets jumped at the chance to mock a sitting Republican Senator, others on twitter seized the opportunity to crack some jokes.

If only one brave American—an emotionally damaged high school chemistry teacher with a fatal disease perhaps—would rise up and revive America’s fledgling meth industry…

— Karen Puckett (@KarenPuckettLeo) March 27, 2021

My dad was a meth farmer, and his dad was a meth farmer, and thanks to cheap imports last year they had to declare bankruptcy and sell the meth farm.

— Erin Zero Republicans Ryan (@morninggloria) March 27, 2021

It used to be that a meth cook in Montana could support a family of 4 by working at one lab until retirement. Not anymore. Because of the influx of Mexican meth, many local cooks have to hold down three jobs delivering jenkem and krokodil in the gig economy pic.twitter.com/vi9B443xQ8

— Cola CHICAGO ill. 1312 (@thecolacorp) March 27, 2021

“We had our own meth. Montana meth. It was lousy, but by God it was ours. Now you have this purer Mexican meth. My God, how is a man supposed to earn a living against that?”

— Sir Humphrey (@bdquinn) March 26, 2021

[sticks finger in white powder and licks it]

“The mom and pop meth labs of Montana don’t stand a chance against this cartel meth.”

— JRehling (@JRehling) March 27, 2021

In summary: don’t buy meth unless it’s red, white and blue.

Authored by John Tamny via RealClearMarkets,

“I never thought I would be standing in a food line for hours. Just the degradation of it. You say to yourself, ‘Wow. I am really at this point.’” So said James Cox, a 50-year old porter in the cruise industry, to the Wall Street Journal’s Julie Byrowicz and Ted Mann.

Cox used to earn $27/hour, but since the lockdowns began last year his ability to earn in his chosen profession has been taken from him. As Byrowicz and Mann explain it, the “cruise industry is waiting anxiously for Washington’s go-ahead to sail again.” Lest readers forget, national politicians assigned to themselves the right to decide which industries would continue to operate as the coronavirus spread, and which ones wouldn’t. The cruise industry didn’t get the nod, hence Cox waiting in food lines.

Interesting and tragic about all of this is that Byrowicz and Mann were reporting from Port Canaveral, FL, and more specifically from “Terminal Three, a cavernous $135 million structure built for Carnival Cruises.” The previous detail is hopefully a reminder of how prosperous the cruise industry was before politicians panicked. In other words, the best and brightest of the cruise industry had plainly developed remarkable skills when it came to attracting customers, and having done so, meeting the needs of those same customers.

The above truth is crucially relevant to what happened to the cruise industry. The leading lights never got a chance to adjust. Despite knowing the needs of a huge customer base intimately, they never had the right to pivot at a time when a virus was rapidly spreading.

Instead, the political class that gave us the Post Office, Amtrak, Social Security and other would-be bankrupt entities absent the taxpayer decided on its own that cruise operators should not be allowed to adjust to a seemingly new corona-reality. How tragic.

Indeed, how tragic for all business sectors that a particularly prosperous one wasn’t allowed to show how it would meet customer needs during a notably fraught time. Information born of commercial leaps is so crucial to economic progress, businesses were and are starved for market-created information about the post-corona future, but some of the best never had the chance to serve their customers, and as a consequence we’re all a little or a lot more blind about what’s ahead. Politicians know what’s best for us, it seems.

To which some skeptics might reply that regardless of the federal government’s sick actions, the cruise industry was already dead. They’ll say that broad public fear about exposure to a rapidly-spreading virus was the cause of the industry’s death, so don’t blame politicians. Sorry, but such a response is insufficient, and really kind of mindless.

We know this from the aforementioned report penned by Byrowics and Mann. As they note, “the cruise industry is waiting anxiously” for the right to operate again. They wouldn’t be “waiting anxiously” to get back to serving customers if they felt they would have no customers, or if they felt they couldn’t adjust to new realities. Rather explicit in their desire to get their ships back in the business of ferrying passengers around the world is a belief that if allowed to serve customers, they would be serving customers.

How would they? The speculation here is that just as grocery stores and other retailers were “allowed” to remain in business so long as they limited the number of customers inside, so could cruise lines have operated in limited fashion. Important about the previous assertion is that they wouldn’t need laws or other government force to space out passengers. Precisely because the customer of 2020 was different from the customer of 2019, cruise companies would have adjusted capacity based on their intimate knowledge of their customer base.

In which case some cruise lines might have charged a great deal more (have readers seen the nosebleed rates charged by luxury hotels and resorts in the past year?) to fewer customers, some would have instituted “surge pricing” amid periods of high customer demand a la Uber, some would have limited capacity by requiring daily testing for the virus, and still others might have instituted strict age limits with an eye on protecting the vulnerable from crowds altogether.

About what cruise lines might have done, it should be made clear that these are mere speculations from an outsider possessing a tiny fraction of the customer-service knowledge that the various cruise companies possess. One guesses that if allowed to strut their stuff, Carnival, Crystal, Seabourn, and others would have thoroughly blown us away with their ability to effectively operate in pro-customer and pro-health fashion at a time when so many potential passengers were nervous.

Alas, they once again were not allowed to. Drunk-with-power politicians and experts lacking any kind of customer-service knowledge decided for them that they would not be allowed to try.

Which brings us back to people like James Cox, and the kinds of cruise operators he’s historically worked for. In split second fashion they had their dignity taken from them. Cox wasn’t expecting to stand in food lines, or presumably take unemployment, but the lockdowns were rapid in their destruction.

Just the same, businesses owned by prideful people likely never imagined government shutting them down, only for that same government to become the sole source of finance around for all-too-many businesses. It’s a long or short way of saying that while PPP has kept some businesses afloat, how awful. This wasn’t what they wanted; government help. Absent the use of force against them, they wouldn’t have needed it. There’s a descriptive word for what’s been done to businesses and workers, but it won’t be said here. Readers can guess.

Hopefully readers will also keep in mind how quickly politicians can wreck things, and how quickly their destruction robs people and businesses of dignity. Right now, the formerly soaring cruise industry is once again “waiting anxiously for Washington’s go-ahead to sail again.” Please think about that. And how wrong it is.  

Increasingly it appears that so-called “rogue states” and those under Washington’s wrath and sanctions are coming together to combat US dominance across the globe. It was a process already set in motion after years of aggressive US attempts to enforce a ban on Iranian and Venezuelan oil, as a prime example.

For starters, China and Russia have been major players in helping to circumvent US attempts to blockade Venezuelan and Iranian crude. Saturday’s major China-Iran news to some degree formalizes this, as Reuters reports, “China and Iran, both subject to US sanctions, signed a 25-year cooperation agreement on Saturday to strengthen their long-standing economic and political alliance.”

Long in the negotiating process, with a couple years of frequent diplomatic and presidential trips and exchanges of delegations between the capitals of Tehran and Beijing, the accord cements Iran’s entry into Xi’s multi-trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to open a “trade superhighway” linking China with all of Eurasia. 

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif on Saturday, “Relations between the two countries have now reached the level of strategic partnership and China seeks to comprehensively improve relations with Iran.”

“Our relations with Iran will not be affected by the current situation, but will be permanent and strategic,” Wang said. “Iran decides independently on its relations with other countries and is not like some countries that change their position with one phone call.”

The deal, dubbed the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, was finalized in a televised signing ceremony, and is rare for the highly isolated Islamic Republic, given the last similar deal with a major power was with Russia all the way back in 2001 and dealt primarily with development of nuclear energy.

The New York Times in its reporting emphasized it’s all about China asserting its influence over the Middle East at a moment US power is in retreat.

The past few years have witnessed China rise to be the biggest single-importer of Iranian oil…

You will find more infographics at Statista

The NY Times said Beijing plans to direct some $400 billion into Iranian infrastructure in exchange for oil as a key part of the deal. 

Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics.com,

It all seemed so simple. I thought the Trump/Russia hoax would finally force my liberal friends to demand a reckoning from their trusted news sources. As the Mueller Report made clear, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NPR and so many others had egregiously and unequivocally misled them for years about the biggest political story since Watergate.

If their favorite outlets could be so wrong about that, shouldn’t they bring a healthy skepticism to the coverage of other issues, from police shootings and “systemic racism” to the threat of “domestic terrorism,” GOP “voter suppression” efforts or President Biden’s trouble navigating stairs?

When I asked a True Believer about all this last week – a man whose scriptures are the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker magazine – my friend told me I should stop watching Fox News.

After I pressed him gently on Russiagate, he told me that Trump had indeed colluded with Putin but that Mueller pulled his punches because he’s a Republican.

That’s when I decided to turn the talk to baseball.

It is always useful to try to identify and untangle the array of psychological, political, and economic factors that have led millions of otherwise reasonable and informed people to suspend their critical faculties.

But exploring complexity can also shroud this simple truth: For whatever reason, the progressive intelligentsia has decided to deny facts that impinge on the view of reality it seeks to advance. It has created a vast information ecosystem – one that extends beyond traditional news outlets to include magazines ranging from Harper’s Bazaar to Teen Vogue, late night comedy shows, academic and scholarly journals, Netflix and Amazon Prime, and on and on – that echoes and re-enforces its agenda.

For those who still manage to see that the emperor has no clothes, Twitter mobs, cancel culture and other censorious tools are deployed to shame and silence apostates.

The left’s intentional substitution of propaganda for facts has turned the national discourse into a blizzard of BS.

The latest example occurred last week when the deranged sex addict who murdered eight people at three Atlanta massage parlors was portrayed as an anti-Asian white supremacist.

This was false, but because it fit the preferred narrative, facts didn’t matter to President Biden or progressive news outlets.

The brazenness of their lies would take your breath away if we weren’t becoming so inured to them through their ubiquity.

For the moment, at least, progressives are unchained, unrepentant and uninterested in conversation.

They are also in charge.

This is the simple truth.