The Individual Mind

Just finished a great one! Excellent and often laugh-out-loud satire of the follies of war. Written by Czech Jaroslav Hasek in the aftermath of WWI. He mocks the Monarchy, bureaucracy, military, church and the throngs of their ridiculous adherents. Hasek was a Twain of Eastern Europe as satirist and humorist, with a very interesting biography through his phases as vagabond, political dissident, anarchist, conscripted soldier, Russian prisoner of war, communist, socialist and apparently back to anarchist. He gave them all hell and made political enemies in every circle as a result of his perpetual pranks and uncomfortable-for-most observations. God love him. Wish I’d known the man.

Link for Amazon

TED talk. Michael Vlahos, PhD, professor at both the  US Naval War College and Johns Hopkins, consultant for both the Dept of State and the CIA, national security commentator, etc. His predictions for US Empire seem about right. It will fall apart. Some excerpts from the embedded John Batchelor interview: “The empire will be replaced – in the meantime, there is savagery. Americans need to embrace their identity and new things. New things can be remarkable, yet not to be found in the currency of elite conversations of today – not in political correctness, not in the empty ideological coinage and currency of today. As the elites collapse – it will open up new space in which the people can approach the world differently. There is no ultimate hope that the current system in the United States can continue. Things like $500 billion deficits are just metaphors for the impoverishment of the system itself. It is the spiritual core that will come down. The system is absolutely hollowed out – incapable of offering anything to the world or to its own American people. No possibility of revival through the current system exists. It will eat itself out in the civil war that is coming. Nothing of it will remain. Without the elites being sensitive to the needs of the larger society, this has to happen.”

Vlahos describes well the historic cycles of control by elites, increasingly imposed order to serve themselves at the expense of the rest, increased stratification and rigidity, increased militarization to maintain the imposed order, decreased social mobility among the rest of society leading to increasing levels of general poverty while the rich get richer, increasing controls justified in order to “protect civilization” by which the elites mean “their order which benefits them,” people stop believing in the leadership and system as external triggers foment a destructive event (climate change, wars, migration, famine, epidemic disease,…), a void is left after the system falls in which humanity is able to grow/advance and meet previously unmet needs/desires, people find meaning in themselves and their communities,…. Then, the cycle repeats. At the end of the TED talk, he says to the select Johns Hopkins university audience: you are the elite, and the revolution is coming for you.

I advocate freeing people to live how they want, to work how they want, to keep what they earn, to move freely, to stop protecting and bailing out and legislating in favor of elites and politicians and corporations that use societal controls and levers to benefit themselves at the expense of others, to stop militarizing for domestic controls, to stop intervening internationally in affairs that do not serve the interest of individuals and which lead to massive costs and blow back, to stop putting people in prison and ruining their lives over things that they put in their own bodies, to legalize competition in everything: schools, medicine, employment, transportation, currency,…, to stop the facade of “protecting society” from threats that really only threaten an imposed order which requires great external pressure and cost to maintain – be those exaggerated threats domestic or foreign. By reducing the external pressures of the artificial system now, by reducing controls and permitting mobility, perhaps the adjustment to a level of more natural homeostasis will be less violent, deadly, destructive, destabilizing. The correction may not have to be severe if it is proactively defused and permitted to evolve in voluntary and mutually beneficial fashion.

Of course, no elites throughout history have voluntarily given up their ill-gotten power and wealth. As history shows, they will resist and control till your last breath – which has not been uncommonly caused by those that “just follow orders.” Censorship, police presence, surveillance, conscription into their wars, social isolation, political prisons, labor camps, expulsion, employment controls, intimidation, property and wealth confiscation, currency manipulation,… – so many tools at their disposal. Fortunately, the energy and cost required to maintain such systems and controls are high and eventually self-limiting, as typically is the tolerance of the controlled. But as Dr. Vlahos points out, these cycles tend to run in temporal terms of centuries. So, buckle up, ‘Murka. It’s sure to be a bumpy ride.

Additionally, realize that you can never own your property. Even after you pay off the mortgage to the bank, you will continue to rent your property from the government via property taxes that for a median home value of about $250K will equal roughly the rent of a small apartment: ~ $500/month in Missouri… on top of every other tax you pay. Property tax also applies to your “owned” vehicles, boat, trailer,…. You can never own your home or property. Not in the Land of the Free where private property and self-ownership are so vocally touted by your government schools, institutions and officials while those principles are so blatantly violated. The unsuspecting, mind-numbed, unprincipled, thought-molded public herds right along with gov’s hand in its pocket. Simultaneously, the public has its hand sticking out for the “freebies,” undeliverable promises, and unfunded liabilities to receive from gov (i.e. their fellow taxpayers). Quite an inefficient and immoral system which perpetuates the politicization of everything, the distortion of the economy and incentive structures, and the entrenchment of the power class as the enlightened, self-important, benevolent, central planners. One of my favorite quotes: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design.” – FA Hayek.

And as Frederic Bastiat said, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

(See the Bloomberg article on Fed interest rate manipulation.)

The Fed (your totalitarian financial Gov Sponsored Enterprise) forces interest rates artificially low, which means you can make no money by lending your savings to banks and other corporate entities through savings accounts or bonds. So, people “chase gains” in the stock market. It also means that borrowing money is so cheap that corporations take out tons of debt, buy back their own stocks, show great Earnings-per-Share (now with fewer outstanding shares) which make it look like they are super healthy. The stock market indices go up without any true valuations or growth to support them, and the bubble becomes ripe for major correction. Thus, the Fed’s policies to juice the economy end up creating instability, robbing people of income and stable investment avenues, and worse of all, the credit expansion/money printing erodes the value of the dollars that people are able to save. Central planners! My favorite Hayek quote: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

Article by Carmen Elena Dorobăț at Mises Institute today.

In my opinion, economists are politically-motivated behavioral scientists – sociologists that crunch numbers. Their soft science of behavior observation does not give them an ability to plan economies, create monetary policy, or allocate societal resources. While they may make predictions, they cannot control an economy, which is the aggregate of billions of individual human decisions regarding their own resources via complex value judgments, the individual responses to subjectively-determined incentives and disincentives, the movement of services and products in numbers and ways that cannot be finitely understood by anyone. Economists – just another set of snake oil salesmen. Dorobat’s article supports this view.

(Graphic and data from article sourced here from CNS news)

US Gov took over $600B from individuals in the month of February – a record. Regardless, it still cannot meet its obligations without the continual creation of debt: a roughly $350B budget deficit in the first five months of the fiscal year – which will be added to the roughly $20T outstanding national debt. Vote harder? You silly, silly Americans. You cannot fix this system. You certainly cannot do it at the ballot box. Perhaps you opt for state secessions as a partial improvement. Perhaps you reach the enlightened awareness that all Govs eventually fail and perpetually do harm. Or perhaps you just keep ignoring it, as the Empire Parasite outgrows its food/tax source, spreads the globe in unsustainable patterns of influence and manipulation, creates wars and control systems which require continually increasing expenditures and management to maintain them in extremely unstable and disequilibrated states, and, as it must, as Empires without exception have suffered throughout history, it collapses (e.g. the Romans, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French, British,…).

You can hope for a quick Soviet-style collapse wherein the separate states splinter without violence and starvation. Or maybe you’ll get a Venezuela which has been dying for decades through a state-imposed suicide, which has controlled every aspect of life until they now stand in long lines to get into empty grocery stores to buy a scrap of anything with the money that is worth considerably less at the checkout line than it was just a few hours before when they formed the line with their poor, unfortunate comrads, thinking, “Si Dios quiere, quizás pueda encontrar hoy la leche y pan para dar de comer a mis hijos.” While they’ve been hoping, in complacency, for centuries that God wills them good, real men have done them ill. Your religion of statism will serve you equally well. Good luck.

Book recommendation. I’d read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago years ago, never realizing how much more he’d written. That one work is an incredible revelation of his personal history with Stalin’s political prison system in the 1940s-50s, but he wrote so much more great stuff. This small book of autobiographically-based fiction stands with Orwell and Huxley, not as another warning of dystopian fiction, but as an exposure of a centralized state, dystopian, genocidal reality that was hidden from the world for decades. (Perhaps democide would be the better word?)

The book came to my attention a few weeks ago as I was listening to a Tom Woods podcast with the president of the local historical society of Cavendish, Vermont – the site to which Solzhenitsyn emigrated after his second Soviet exile. Do yourself a favor.

“Would you like the $9,400 CT scan or the $450 CT scan?”

     We’re not all careful. Some of us ride motorcycles on the highway,… recklessly. A nephew ended up at a Level I trauma center in Houston, Texas, in March of 2016 as a result. He was patched up and lived to ride another day. Ten months later, his dad gets the final itemized hospital bill. As doctors in the family, my wife and I opine on medical matters with some frequency. The dad texted us a picture of the bill. As you are sure to expect, the charges were for ridiculous amounts that no one really pays. Most people probably think that these matters just get handled somehow, somewhere, between insurance companies and hospitals, then the patient pays some reduced amount of that massive charge, bewildered but happy to walk away still financially solvent after the threat of a bankrupting and indecipherable hospital bill. For most people, that vague understanding (and narrow fiscal escape) seem to be enough to be able to put the experience behind them. For others, though, we want to understand what the *expletive* is going on?!

Click here for full article.

Mr Scheuer is an insider, ex-CIA, an expert for decades on anti-terrorism, even prior to the attack on the Towers in 2001. He says things, and critiques in ways, that the Establishment does not tolerate from others because those critics do not carry the desired “insider” status. Of course, they reject his insights, as well, but the gnashing of teeth is less vehement, perhaps.

The book, while still too supportive of many government polices and persons, in my opinion, offers excellent insights into the multiple and entangled root causes of terrorism, of the very poor outcomes of decades of bad US foreign policy and interventionism, and the misguided and erroneous visions of US “leadership” which perpetuate continued loss, failure, instability and blowback. He asserts and defends very well the argument that terrorism is not an attack on American values or freedoms, but rather it is deliberate retaliation for a long series of US actions and presences in lands and among peoples where the US had no business inherent to its own defense or sovereignty. Although written in 2003-4, nothing has fundamentally changed in the still-losing War. Over a decade later, the same failed beliefs, policies and interventions persist at great cost in blood, treasure and international goodwill.

There are many great quotes to be pulled from the book, some of which I will add in the comments section, but this excerpt may be among the most insightful and representative of the work (from pg 251-2):

Perhaps the best book I read while writing this study was Ralph Peter’s Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? In it, Peters makes a suggestion that still stuns, haunts, and encourages me. “We Americans must avoid fantastic schemes to rescue those for whom we bear no responsibility,” Peters said. “In dealing with nationalism and fundamentalism we must be willing to let the flames burn themselves out whenever we are not in danger of catching fire ourselves. If we want to avoid the needless, thankless deaths of our own countrymen, we must learn to watch others die with equanimity.” Peters is right, brutally updating the guidance of Washington and Adams. Can any U.S. official, academic, politician, or pundit credibly claim to know what is going on in Iraq’s sectarian and tribal politics, Afghanistan’s tribal and ethnic rivalries, or the tribal-religious-ethnic politics of the Balkans, Rwanda, Liberia, or Congo? Can anyone honestly believe the claim that Washington will broker a “just peace” between Israel and Palestine is anything other than a thirty-year-old, mindlessly repeated mantra? Can anyone even describe the basic elements of the Islamic faith and their impact on world affairs? More to the point, can it be proven that it would make a substantive – vice emotional – difference to U.S. security if every Hutu killed every Tutsi, or vice versa; every Palestinian killed every Israeli, or vice versa; or if Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians exterminated each other to the last person? The brutal but correct answers are: we do not understand these conflicts, and none of them, regardless of who wins, endanger U.S. interests. All evoke empathy and stir emotion, but it is, as always, a cruel world, and each nation’s one mandatory duty is to care for and defend itself.

“For our own welfare and survival, we must watch others die with equanimity” and help after ‘the flames burn themselves out” by focusing our overseas intercourse on trade, sharing knowledge, and donating food and medicine. America must not commit abroad unless genuine national interests are at risk, and she must go to war only for survival and then act to annihilate the enemy. We must let our efforts to perfect self-government and ensure equality for all at home be the example that spurs democracy abroad. We must unflinchingly let foreign dragons devour each other without expending American lives, treasure, and self-respect on an endless series of fool’s errands.”

I’m referencing an enlightening zerohedge article on the topic today: “‘There’s Chaos Everywhere’ – Indians Angry As ATMs Run Dry After Cash Ban”

This is Governments’ and Big Banks’ continued war on cash, India version. As powermongers and money-lusters continue the thrust to push people into their fee and surveillance-ridden systems, people are strangled in their ability to engage in commerce with one another outside of the purview and parasitism of third parties. Who benefits? The tired refrain from the statists is that getting rid of cash will reduce corruption(!) as large transfers will be documented. Sweet baby Jesus. The corruptions aren’t happening in the markets in India or the trade days in middle America or the garage sales or the used car purchase. Those corruptions happen at corporate and government levels, in the hundreds of thousands and millions of dollar denominations. And it doesn’t really matter if those are documented or not because the “Justice System” is beholden to the politicians and big donors. No. These are simply efforts to control, to tax, to extract electronic transaction fees, to drive money into the banks to attempt to make them solvent (which they can’t be in a fractional reserve system of artificial zero and negative interest rates). Wakey, wakey. Coming to a country near you,… yours to be specific.