iftttwall

While hardly a surprise in a country in which the military recently seized control of the water supply as the local infrastructure collapses, what is going on to the price of money in this former socialist paradise is simply stunning and is set to put even the Weimar Republic and Zimbabwe to shame.

In June, Venezuela’s annual inflation hit 46,305% the opposition-controlled congress said on Monday, as the crisis-stricken nation’s hyperinflation continues to accelerate amid a broader economic collapse even as president Maduro refuses to make any structural changes to the nation which boasts the world’s largest petroleum reserves.

To be sure, the number is not official as Maduro’s government stopped publishing economic indicators nearly three years ago the country’s economic system started falling apart, making opposition legislators the only source of such figures. This makes it virtually impossible to visualize the inflationary trend, although Bloomberg’s Cafe Con Leche index sit at a roughly comparable level of 43,478%. More absurdly,  annualizing the last three months of data, paints an even more dismal picture: inflation of 482,153%.

Looking at just the past month, Reuters reports that June inflation accelerated to 128.4%, the fastest this year, from 110.1% in May, according to opposition legislator Angel Alvarado. Even more shocking, food prices rose by 183% in June.

“It is by far the worst hyperinflation suffered by a Latin American country,” Alvarado said in an interview.

Putting this inflation in monetary equivalents, one million bolivars is currently the equivalent of a mere 29 cents.

Maduro, who was reelected in May in a vote that virtually all foreign observes described as rigged, promised to take measures to improve the situation. So far he has failed to do so, and instead insists that the problems are the result of an “economic war” led by the opposition business leaders who arbitrarily raise prices. There was no mention that this is the inevitable outcome of a corrupt government controlling all means of production.

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Authored by Michael Cembalest, JPMorgan Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy, via LinkedIn.com,

Chinese handcuffs part 2: the risk of military conflict

In a prior post, we illustrated how in-country sales of US subsidiaries operating in China are almost as large as Chinese exports to the US, leaving the US highly vulnerable to retaliation by China if trade wars escalate. These trade tensions are just one part of the broader Chinese-US relationship; some observers expect military conflict between the US and China as well:

* In a 2017 survey by C100, 50% of Chinese citizens, 33% of Chinese business leaders and 35% of Chinese policy experts responded that war with the US was “very likely” or “somewhat likely”. The percentages were only slightly lower amongst US respondents to the same question

* Harvard’s Thucydides’s Trap Project found 16 cases over the last 500 years in which a major nation’s rise disrupted the dominant state. Twelve of these rivalries ended in war and four did not. The project is directed by political scientist and Presidential advisor Graham Allison, whose recent book is entitled “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?”

* The Chinese state-owned newspaper Global Times wrote in 2015 that “if the United States’ bottom line is that China has to halt its activities, then a US-China war is inevitable in the South China Sea”

Perhaps, but there’s also enormous economic pressure on China and the US to find common ground. Compared to adversaries of the past 100 years, economic linkages between the US and China are much larger.  The chart below is something I’ve been working on for the last few months. The idea is to measure the economic linkages between adversaries of the past and present. To do this, we add the outstanding stock of bilateral foreign direct investment, the amount of bilateral annual trade, and the amount of government bonds owned by the other country’s Central Bank. Compare China/US today to Europe and Asia in the 1930’s, to US/Russia in the 1980’s and to India/Pakistan.

 I’m not by nature an optimist, but I believe these economic linkages will eventually push the US and China toward compromise and away from a shooting war or a full-blown trade war.

When I say “full-blown trade war”, I’m referring to across the board tariffs on both sides that move the needle on overall US tariff rates. The next chart illustrates the magnitude of Trump’s trade wars so far. 

For the last 75 years, tariffs on dutiable goods imports into the US have been declining. Trump administration tariffs mark the first increase in decades, although so far, the increases are small. 

Should Trump follow through with tariffs on an additional $100 bn in Chinese imports and on $275 bn of US auto and auto parts imports, the change in tariffs would start to have more of a Hoover-esque feel to them, creating more serious risks to the global trading system.

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It appears that government and intelligence agencies throughout the world did little or nothing to change their policies for personal fitness app and tracker usage as for the second time this year a massive data breach has exposed sensitive locations and the daily routines of government personnel, all accessible to the public. 

And like with Strava’s interactive online fitness tracking map that made headlines last January, which we detailed revealed clandestine sites in places like Syria, Iraq, and Africa, including for example a CIA “black site” in Djibouti, the new breach allows easy access to view the daily habits of millions of users going back years. 

Yet now in some instances even the names and addresses of intelligence and military personnel are able to be known. 

Image via ZDNet/Boston Mail

This time it’s the fitness app Polar Flow, created by a Finnish-based company with offices in New York, at the center of controversy after an investigation by Dutch news site De Correspondent confirmed that the app “lets anyone find names and addresses for thousands of soldiers and secret agents.”

This can even include profile pictures and often actual names of users shared via the publicly available “Explore” feature; but as researchers also found this data can potentially be accessed through a design flaw in the privacy setting. 

De Correspondent actually demonstrates just what can be known by examining one particular Polar fitness tracker near Erbil’s international airport in Iraq. The results, found through quick open source searches, are startling:

The man – let’s call him Tom – is a Dutch soldier, part of the Netherlands’ Capacity Building Mission in Iraq. The CBM is encamped near the Erbil airport. Since 2015, this base has been one of the key locations from which the war against the terrorist group Islamic State is being waged. 

We are absolutely not supposed to know who Tom is and where he’s stationed. And we most definitely shouldn’t know where Tom lives.

Yet the activity tracking map in Polar’s fitness app lets us see that many of Tom’s runs start and end near a cluster of homes in a small town in the northern Netherlands. A little Googling gives us his exact address. We also find the names of his wife and children, and photos.

Though as the Dutch journalists note, exposing identities of intelligence agents is illegal in the US and many European countries, “we still found the names and addresses of personnel at intelligence agencies including the NSA and Secret Service in the US, the GCHQ and MI6 in the UK, the GRU and the SVR RF in Russia, the DGSE in France, and the MIVD in the Netherlands.”

Dutch news site De Correspondent, working with the open source analysis site Bellingcat, produced infographic maps based on the Polar app, demonstrating how easy it is to locate home addresses of users via the Polar “Explore” feature:

“We found the names and addresses of personnel at military bases including Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, Erbil in Iraq, Gao in Mali, and bases in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Chad, and South Korea.” De Correspondent says this also included “the names and addresses of personnel at nuclear storage facilities, maximum security prisons, military airports where nuclear weapons are stored, and drone bases.”

Other journalists have since found names and addresses for what are believed to be intelligence and military personnel at sensitive government locations throughout the US as well, and noted that “Although the existence of many government installations are widely known, the identities of their employees were not.”

In the case of the Polaris app, as the tech site ZD Net explains, this can be done even if the user’s settings are set to “private”:

With two pairs of coordinates dropped over any sensitive government location or facility, it was possible to find the names of personnel who track their fitness activities dating as far back as 2014.

The reporters identified more than 6,400 users believed to be exercising at sensitive locations, including the NSA, the White House, MI6 in London, and the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, as well as personnel working on foreign military bases.

…they also found they could trick the API into retrieving fitness tracking data on private profiles.

Who knows how many times either foreign intelligence services or terrorist groups have already used this and possibly other apps to pinpoint the exact locations US government agents operating abroad? After all the journalists testing the online system explain how easy it was to cull the data: “Because there were no limits on how many requests the reporters could make, coupled with easily enumerable user ID numbers, it was possible for anyone — including malicious actors or foreign intelligence services — to scrape the fitness activity data on millions of users.”

But a few of the examples, names withheld by the journalists, are as follows:

• ZDNet was able to trace one person who exercised nearby to NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade. The user later started his exercise tracking as he left his house in nearby Virginia. Through public records, we confirmed his name, and his role as a senior military official.
• Another person, also believed to be an NSA staffer based at Ft. Meade, was found exercising close to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
• The Dutch reporters also found the fitness tracking data of several foreign military and intelligence officers near sensitive installations in the US.
• De Correspondent explained in an additional report how easy it was to follow around one Polar user, believed to be an officer at the Dutch state intelligence service, across the world, and even locate his home address.

Polar has since taken its tracking map offline and put out a statement: “While the decision to opt-in and share training sessions and GPS location data is the choice and responsibility of the customer, we are aware that potentially sensitive locations are appearing in public data, and have made the decision to temporarily suspend the Explore API” — the company posted on its website.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which oversees America’s 17 intelligence agencies, issued the following predictable and somewhat vague statement to ZD Net while saying it was “aware of the potential impacts” of personal fitness devices: “The use of personal fitness and similar devices by individuals engaged in US Government support is determined and directed by each agency and department.”

Based on this official response from the ODNI which is essentially an admission that we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing, we fully expect more massive classified data and identity breaches to follow.

No doubt action will finally and belatedly be taken if and when the first “Fitbit tracker-based kidnapping” of a government employee takes place.

* * *

Below are some of the open source satellite tracking images that the multi-part De Correspondent investigation produced based on Polar fitness tracking app data:

NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, MD. De Correspondent/ZD Net

British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)

Tracking a single user who entered Britain’s GCHQ headquarters. Via De Correspondent

General Directorate for External Security (DGSE, France’s foreign intelligence agency) headquarters, Paris. 

Guantanamo Bay detention camp. 

Routes run by Polar users at a military base in Gao, Mali.

Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan

Bellingcat: “Exercises tracked at a military base in the Middle East. Red squares with white dots are clusters of many more sessions which started at that location.” (airbase in Afghanistan)

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Authored by Hunter Lewis via The Mises Institute,

Can the entire story of the worst economic disaster in American history really be told from just eight words in a political party’s platform?

In this case, yes.

Here are the fateful words that introduced the second section of the Republican Party’s 1932 platform, right after a waffling plank on prohibition:

“We believe in the principle of high wages.”

This was Herbert Hoover speaking. His most cherished economic belief was that wages could not be allowed to fall, and after the Crash of 1929 he vigorously jawboned business leaders to keep wages up. It was not just a question of persuasion. He made it clear that if businesses did not do as he demanded, legislative wage controls would swiftly follow. Business leaders were afraid to defy this edict, and did their best to keep wages where they had been.

The results were utterly disastrous. Since the prices of products and services were in a deflationary downward spiral, the most effective way to avoid bankruptcy would have been to cut wages and other costs. This had been done in the Depression of 1921 with impressive results. That depression, chronicled in an excellent history by Jim Grant, The Forgotten Depression, was over in a year and a half. Nor did workers in aggregate suffer from lower wages. Their lower wages bought the same amount of goods and services at reduced prices.

Confronted with rapidly falling prices following the Crash along with frozen wages, business owners resorted to the only expedient left: massive layoffs. It was their last resort and the only possible way to try to save their businesses. As a direct result of Hoover’s twisted logic, millions of workers were fired and immediately faced penury and even starvation, while those still employed, especially union members and government workers, enjoyed a windfall. Frozen wages with falling prices in effect doubled their real wages.

Murray Rothbard explained all this in America’s Great Depression, but you won’t find it in high school history textbooks. Nor will you read that Franklin Roosevelt just doubled down on Hoover’s tragic policy mistake by enacting wage and price controls. In a celebrated incident, a poor tailor was sent to jail for charging a few too many pennies for pressing a pair of pants.

This was almost a century ago, but the public and politicians still fall for the same twisted illogic…

In his 2014 state of the union address, President Obama said that “ I ask America’s business leader to raise your employees’ wages.”

In her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton said the same thing: “It’s a pretty simple formula: higher wages lead to more demand, which leads to more jobs with higher wages….”

Hillary did not explain why, given her premise, she was only asking for minor wage boosts. Why not mandate 100X higher wages? And while she was at it, why not also mandate 75% lower prices. The truth of course is that even modest wage and price controls hamper the free price system and sooner or later lead to unemployment and misery for those least able to protect themselves, the poor and the middle class.

The Democratic Party platform of 1932 also makes for interesting reading. It describes itself as a “covenant” and a “contract” with the American people, claims that voters can rely on its candidate to follow the promised policies, and includes among those policies an elimination of expanding and contracting credit “ for private profit,” a sound dollar, a cut of federal expenditure of no less than 25% together with a balanced budget, and elimination of government activities that could be handled by private enterprise and of subsidies to private interests. This “ contract” was of course immediately jettisoned by FDR.

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Michael Cohen’s lawyer, longtime Clinton friend Lanny Davis, fired off a curious tweet Monday morning that appears to be an insult wrapped in a veiled threat.

In response to Rudy Giuliani suggesting that Cohen, Trump’s former longtime personal attorney, should “cooperate with the government,” and that “We have no reason to believe he did anything wrong” – Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis responded at 7:18 a.m. Monday:

“Did @rudygiuliani really say on Sunday shows that @michaelcohen212 should cooperate with prosecutors and tell the truth? Seriously? Is that Trump and Giuliani definition of “truth”? Trump/Giuliani next to the word “truth” = oxymoron. Stay tuned.  #thetruthmatters”

Did @rudygiuliani really say on Sunday shows that @michaelcohen212 should cooperate with prosecutors and tell the truth? Seriously? Is that Trump and Giuliani definition of “truth”? Trump/Giuliani next to the word “truth” = oxymoron. Stay tuned. #thetruthmatters

— Lanny Davis (@LannyDavis) July 9, 2018

Davis, co-founder of Davis Goldberg & Galper PLLC and contributor to The Hill and other outlets, was special counsel and spokesman for Bill Clinton between 1996-1998 and met Hillary Clinton in 1970 while attending Yale Law. 

Mr. Davis has known the Clintons since he befriended Hillary Rodham at Yale Law School. (”I was the married guy who a lot of the women confided in about their male problems — I was safe.”) –NYT

When Clinton left the state department, Davis wrote of her in a farewell letter: 

The fact that she may be the most popular Secretary of State in U.S. history is no surprise.

…

As Secretary of State, she traveled to 112 countries and transformed the way America conducts diplomacy and development — with historic focus on linking women’s rights around the world to U.S. national security interests. She took full responsibility for the failures in the State Department that led to the tragic death of the U.S. Ambassador and three other Americans.

Before Davis published his tribute to Clinton, he emailed it to her for review, saying in a personal note: 

I hope you enjoy the memories – especially mom remembering your sparkling yellow pants suit!

I sent you my best wishes thru cdm when I heard about your fall. Happened to me once – faint and hard knock on marble
floor. Scary.

Take care of yourself – and look forward to a long rest as I wrote at the end. -Lanny Davis

Davis supported Hillary Clinton’s 2008 run for President until she lost to Barack Obama in the primaries, at which point he backed Obama. 

He was also revealed to have been deeply involved with Hillary Clinton’s server “matter” by WikiLeaks.

John Podesta sent the message to Cheryl Mills the evening of March 2, 2015, hours after the New York Times reported that Clinton might have violated federal records requirements by using the server, according to the latest batch of Podesta’s hacked emails.

“Not to sound like Lanny, but we are going to have to dump all those emails so better to do so sooner than later,” Podesta told Mills.

Mills responded: “Think you just got your new nick name.”

The “Lanny” mention is an apparent reference to lawyer Lanny Davis, who served as special counsel to then-President Bill Clinton. –NY Post

When Davis called for transparency in the Clinton email case, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook wrote Podesta on March 8, 2015 “We gotta zap Lanny out of our universe. Can’t believe he committed her to a private review of her hard drive on TV.”

So are Michael Cohen and Lanny Davis the missing link that will finally help Mueller put Trump away for good? Find out soon.

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One week after former Prime Minister Najib Razak was arrested and charged with misusing state funds over the 1MDB scandal, the Wall Street Journal (the news outlet that originally broke the 1MDB story) is reporting that the former Goldman Banker who arranged the three bond offerings that helped fill Razak’s slush fund is in talks with US prosecutors over a potential guilty plea in connection to the scheme, which resulted in billions being looted from the Malaysian treasury.

According to WSJ, Tim Leissner, a former Goldman partner and Southeast Asia chairman who earned the bank $600 million in fees for arranging the offerings, could strike a deal that involves him pleading guilty to a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors in their investigation of Goldman. Prosecutors are actively examining whether the bank broke any laws, as the billion raised in the bond offerings organized by the bank were almost immediately routed to bank accounts connected to key figures in the investigation.

The US Department of Justice alleges that Razak siphoned off $4.5 billion from the 1MDB, which was used both as a political slush fund and to buy real estate, art and other luxuries from London to California. The DOJ has already seized many of the assets purchased by Razak’s associates in the US. Leissner, a German national who is married to American fashion designer Kimora Lee Simmons, reportedly forged a close relationship with Jho Law, a Malaysian businessman who US prosecutors believe masterminded the scheme. Low hasn’t been charged and declined to comment to WSJ.

A Goldman spokesman said “we continue to cooperate with ongoing regulatory investigations.”

According to WSJ, investigators are trying to determine what Goldman knew and when:

U.S. investigators have sought to determine whether Goldman had reason to suspect that money it helped 1MDB raise was misused and, if so, whether the bank was obligated to report any concerns to authorities, the Wall Street Journal has reported. The Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and New York state’s Department of Financial Services also are examining some of the bank’s actions, as are Singapore authorities, the Journal has reported.

Goldman’s big profits on the bond offerings, and their timing – one closed mere weeks before Malaysia’s 2013 presidential election — raised eyebrows throughout Wall Street. Some of the money raised in the offerings, investigators have said, was used to help fund Mr. Najib’s campaign, the Journal has reported.

Goldman has said it did nothing wrong and had no way of knowing there might be fraud surrounding 1MDB. The bank has said its main role was raising money it thought would be used for the stated purposes. Goldman had repeatedly denied Mr. Low’s request to open personal accounts at the firm.

Still, no one flagged the 1MDB transactions to regulators, the Journal has reported. “We have found no evidence showing any involvement by Jho Low in the 1MDB bond transactions,” the firm has said previously.

Mr. Leissner met Mr. Low in 2009. That year, Goldman became an adviser to the oil wealth fund. The fund evolved into 1MDB when the prime minister gave it the broader goal of spurring economic development.

Goldman advised 1MDB on two 2012 bond sales, raising $3.5 billion, and a third offering underwritten by Goldman in 2013 that raised another $3 billion. But if the past is any guide, Goldman will emerge from the scandal with a modest fine, and the top officials who ran the bank at the time – who may or may not still be employed at the bank when the punishment is handed – will avoid any serious penalties. Leissner quietly bowed out of the firm two years ago, before much was known about the bank’s role, and was barred from the US securities industry late last year.

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Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“The greatest want of the world is the want of men — men who will not be bought or sold; men who in their inmost souls are true and honest; men who do not fear to call sin by its right name; men whose conscience is as true to duty as the needle to the pole; men who will stand for the right though the heavens fall.” – Ellen G. White

The world becomes more chaotic by the day. Good luck finding a politician, business icon, or religious leader who is not bought and sold by corporate or special interests. Finding truth telling honest leaders in today’s world is virtually impossible. Charles Foster Kane, a quasi-biographical portrayal of William Randolph Hearst, is a fine representation of the billionaire clique that pull the strings in our warped, deceitful, greed driven, materialistic world.

Citizen Kane’s thematic portrayal of the American Dream is far more germane to our society today than it was when made in 1941. Financial affluence, material luxury, wielding power over others, and controlling the opinions of the masses through propaganda media, did not guarantee happiness or fulfillment for Kane or todays oligarchs. Kane was happiest as a poor child, living with his parents, playing in the snow on his sled – Rosebud.

Life is a tragedy, with the richest and poorest dead in the end. The only thing that really matters is your character and integrity. The societal hollowness created by those pushing the delusion of a materialistic American Dream based on an ever-growing pyramid of debt has left a society morally deadened, psychologically damaged, living lives based on deception, and willfully ignorant of the truth.

Until individuals in this country choose to tell the truth and insist on being told the truth by the leaders they choose, chaos and ultimate collapse will be our destiny. Our economy, our currency system, our banking system, our political system, our mass media, and our public education system are built upon nothing but deception, lies, misinformation and falsity. The entire fetid cesspool of lies cannot withstand the glare of truth, as explained by Ron Paul:

The daily dose of deception doled out by the despicable Deep State denizens of decadence, debt and debauchery is depressing to critical thinking truth seekers. I’ve made it my mission in life to only follow rational thinking, honest, straightforward, fact based people who have not been bought off by a party seeking to cheat, mislead, or steal from average Americans. The number of politicians who meet this criteria can be counted on one hand.

Very few corporate executives at S&P 500 sized companies meet this standard of honesty. The criteria for reaching the corner office is insatiable greed, backstabbing, lying, and a sociopathic personality. Despite the Wall Street/Fed rigged financial systems and fake news propaganda spewing mainstream corporate media, there are still independent, non-corrupt, truth tellers as the lone voices of reason in this empire of lies.

These authentic purveyors of reality, based on facts and evidence, are scorned and ridiculed by CNBC spokesmodels and highly compensated intellectual but idiot talking heads. When a nine year Fed engineered bull market in everything is sold as proof of economic recovery, propagated by media mouthpieces, and substantiated by government agencies producing fake economic data, then a populace begging to be misled, because they can’t handle the truth, turns off anyone telling them the truth.

I sense disillusionment among many of the financial analysts who have correctly assessed the present-day insanity and expect a reckoning for the ages when this debt bubble blows like a super-volcano. Facts and reality are meaningless when the madness of crowds, built on delusions of debt, and a financial system engineered by banker psychopaths, keeps the bubble growing to heights not thought possible by rational thinking people.

Many of these truth telling realists are in the business of selling newsletters, books, mutual fund investments, or other financial products. That does not automatically make their analysis suspect. Everyone has to make a living. What separates shills from honorable men is their use of facts, historical data, and rational thought to make their case. Deciphering the bullshit narratives spewed by the majority of faux journalists employed by the corporate fake news media versus straightforward non-slanted analysis from the reality grounded men is crucial to retaining integrity in a deceitful corrupt world.

I continue to respect the writings and analysis of Taleb, Shiller, Hussman, Mauldin, Jesse, Kreiger, Rosenberg, Bonner, Casey, Martenson, Kunstler, Schiff and lately Jordan Peterson, among many others. As the “everything bubble”, inflated by the Fed and their central banker brethren across the globe, has grown to epic proportions these men have endured heaps of scorn and ridicule from the small minded non-thinking momentum cowboys who arrogantly confuse easy money with their own financial brilliance. I continue to have the utmost respect for their ability to ignore the lure of following the crowd and sticking to the facts. It’s not easy stating the truth when 95% of so called financial journalists are bought off and captured by the Deep State.

The Wall Street cabal puppeteers have had their Federal Reserve puppets dancing to their tune for the last nine years as bailouts, QE, and free money for feckless financiers has propelled their latest bubble to epic proportions. The bubbles in the stock market, bond market and real estate market are all built upon a vaporous foundation of easy money debt. It took 219 years for the country to accumulate a $9.6 trillion national debt, but our fearless leaders have managed to add $11.6 trillion since September 2008, all geared to enrich Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the sick-care complex and mega-corporations, while leaving Main Street to fend for ourselves with stagnant wages and rising costs for necessities. With government, corporate and consumer debt levels at all-time highs, a financial collapse is inevitable. Hundreds of billions of student loan, auto loan, mortgage loans, and credit card debt are unpayable, especially in a rising rate environment.

As the chart above factually details, the “everything bubble” has put the previous two bubbles to shame. The thing about bubbles is they always pop. An unsustainable dynamic will not be sustained. The reversion to the mean will leave millions of delusional Americans destitute, dependent on the government, enraged, and looking for someone to blame other than themselves. Go to any 4th of July picnic and your average neighbor or relative will tell you how much their 401k and house value have soared as they have been convinced the economy is booming and on a sound footing.

They won’t tell you their credit card balance, mortgage balance, auto loan debt, or student loan debt obligations. The value of their stocks and real estate can plummet by 50% in a matter of months (as they did in 2001 and 2008), but the debt will remain, wrapped around their throats, choking them to death. They have willfully chosen to be ignorant of why asset values have soared and ignored the warnings of truth telling analysts. Human nature never changes, and people never learn from the past, even when they’ve been clubbed over the head with 50% losses twice in the last seventeen years.

I keep pondering whether this “everything bubble” is just another mass hysteria event like many before throughout history (Tulips, Roaring 20’s, Dot.com), or something deeper and more disturbing. I’m reaching the conclusion it is more than mass hysteria. It’s mental illness infecting a wide swath of the population. Normality in financial markets, government deficit spending, journalism and central bank interventions began to dissipate drastically at the turn of the century and accelerated rapidly after 9/11. Annual deficits have averaged over $900 billion since 9/11, versus $175 billion per year in the eight years prior to 9/11. We have been living in profoundly abnormal times, but few question the abnormality. They have been led to believe this is normal.

Arguing annual deficits of a trillion dollars, zero interest rates for eight years, a Federal Reserve colluding with Wall Street banks and the U.S. Treasury to manipulate stock markets, and a corporate media spewing misinformation, fake news, and propaganda is a normal state of affairs is an example of the Big Lie theory. Making these arguments is a false declaration of such outrageous magnitude, employed by the powers that be, as a propaganda measure in the belief that a lesser falsehood would not be considered credible by the masses.

The Big Lie has worked thus far, as government controlled education has dumbed down the masses, people are told what to think by the media propaganda machines, and individuals have chosen to be distracted by igadgets, social media, and modern day bread and circuses. Huxley thought mental illness of the populace was rampant in 1958. He’d be outraged by the level of willfully ignorant, abnormally normal people living in our profoundly sick society today.

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

Who is to blame for the current state of affairs? The Deep State? Shadowy oligarchs? Politicians? The Jews? The Russians? There is one commonality – human beings are the members of each group. Humans have created the problems plaguing the world. Humans choose to act in a good or evil manner. Humans decide whether to lie or tell the truth. Humans decide whether to be driven by greed, power seeking, selfishness and hubris or generosity, citizenship, sacrifice and humility. The truth is humans commit unspeakable atrocities, steal, cheat, kill and destroy. They are also capable of generosity, self- sacrifice, acting with integrity, and behaving courageously. As Solzhenitsyn realized while imprisoned by the Soviets, good and evil passes through all human hearts.

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Today’s level of violence, mass murder and evil have not approached the monstrous deeds of Hitler, Stalin and Mao within the last century – Yet. Anyone who dismisses the possibility of bloodshed on a grand scale within our borders and the likelihood of a global “winner take all” war is ignorant of human nature, history, and the dynamics driving the course of events during this Fourth Turning. The seeds of evil are planted within each human soul and under the right (or wrong) conditions, can blossom into a full-blown landscape of hate, violence, cruelty, inhumanity and retribution.

Cooperation, peace, and mutually beneficial deeds have not been the default setting for human interaction throughout history. They are the exception, not the rule. But, the mass of humanity is willfully ignorant of history and naively believe their benevolent leaders and media thought police when fear is used to keep them under control. As Jordan Peterson points out, once people wake up to the realization of their potential for evil, they can resist being led to slaughter by their Deep State controllers.

“When once-naïve people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially) their fear decreases. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise, feeding on their resentment, transforming it into the most destructive of wishes. To say it again: There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.” ― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

In Part 2 of this article I will delve deeper into Peterson’s assertion we need to tell the truth in order to change ourselves and change the world.

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While UK Prime Minister Theresa May is losing control, Turkish president Erdogan is solidifying his, with traders closely watching the cabinet Erdogan would appoint after he was officially sworn in. What happened next shocked traders when Bloomberg reported that Erdogan has appointed Berat Albayrak, the former minister of energy and his son-in-law as Minister of Treasury and Finance.

Albayrak gained some prominence in late 2015, when a CHP lawmaker Eren Erdem accused Albayrak of being linked to ISIS oil smuggling, saying “I have been able to establish that there is a very high probability that Berat Albayrak is linked to the supply of oil by the Daesh terrorists”

Other appointees include:

• Foreign Minister: Mevlut Cavusoglu
• Vice President: Fuat Oktay
• Defense Minister: Hulusi Akar
• Interior: Suleyman Soylu
• Energy: Fatih Donmez
• Transportation: Mehmet Cahit Turan
• Trade: Ruhsar Pekcan
• Industry, Technology: Mustafa Varank
• Justice: Abdulhamit Gul
• Education: Ziya Selcuk
• Health: Fahrettin Koca
• Environment, Urbanization: Murat Kurum
• Agriculture: Bekir Pakdemirli
• Culture, Tourism: Mehmet Ersoy
• Sports: Mehmet Kasapoglu
• Labor: Zehra Zumrut Selcuk

Erdogan also announced that he had reduced the number of ministries to 16, including the VP post.

But today’s surprise double whammy came when Erdogan left out from his cabinet the current Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek who as Bloomberg writs, “was practically the economy czar of the government.”

The market response to this bizarre example of nepotism was a plunge in the Lira, which tumbled from 4.60 to 4.688 in the manner of seconds…

… while the Turkey ETF tumbled 3.7%…

… as investors expressed their dismay that in addition to taking over government, Erdogan now appears set to also subjugate the economy, making it her personal fiefdom.

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