1. IMO the US Navy will be doing a good thing if it persuades Trump to restore Captain Crozier to command of USS Theodore Roosevelt. He did a very foolish thing by appealing to the whole wide world to support his position, but he did have the best interest of the ship's company in mind and as he said, we are not at war in the Pacific. This would also be a humane decision on the part of the navy toward an officer in command, something unusual for them.
2. IMO the medico bureaucrat academicians who insist that their group think about how to stop a pandemic are going to be discredited as it becomes clear that COVID-19 is wildly infectious but at the same time not very fatal except for the old, infirm and others compromised in health. That would include HIV/AIDS sufferers. You don't hear much about that, but IMO that is because such people are typically members of the LGBTQ "community" and therefore members of a protected group. In pursuit of the power of policy dictation the doctor philosopher kings have contributed mightily to the near death of the greatest world economy in history (ours). Let us hope the more sensible state governors can do enough to remedy this disaster to bring back some measure of prosperity. I hope that Trump realizes that he does not have constitutional power over the governors. As I have previously written he would have to declare states he targeted to be in rebellion or say that they had lost the power to govern themselves in order to have a claim to that sort of power.
3. US foreign policy in the greater ME remains the shambles that Zionist and/or neocon infiltration of government and manipulation of election funding have made it. There is little difference in responsibility for this in the two major political parties. As a result of Trump's continuation of the Israel inspired policy of meddling in the affairs of the Islamic culture continent the US now finds itself in a position in which policies of domination have caused us to have a thousand or so US military "hostages" scattered across NE Syria and all over Iraq where they are completely vulnerable to attack from Iran and its allies.
4. This potential hostage posture is a major inhibition to US freedom of action in the Gulf where Iranian aggressiveness is targeted toward a withdrawal of the US Navy from the Gulf. IMO such a forced withdrawal caused by a minor power like Iran because we are afraid to fight would be a major milestone in the decline of America's power in the world. Our enemies would rejoice. IMO the navy can easily defeat any Iranian enemy but the hostage situation in Syria, and Iraq is a major impediment to naval action. We should get out of those two countries. We should not have been there in the first place. I am clearly on record about that from 2001 onward. In the case of Afghanistan the hinge of fate swung in 2009 with Obama's disastrous decision to let the COIN generals persuade him to try to build a new and modern Afghanistan. The resulting state has expenses for its security forces that are greater than its GDP.
5. Some constitutional mechanism must be developed in the US for forcing the retirement from office of old people who are judged to be demented. The ice cream interview comes to mind. pl
Isn’t it strange that special ops get their grievances aired on national TV without negative consequences, but the commander of an aircraft carrier gets fired after it was leaked that he was trying to protect his men? If I recall, no special ops forces got held accountable for going public about protecting Kurds after a withdrawal from Syria.
I guess Kurds must be more important than sailors!
Sir
I’m very interested to learn about the real impact to the global economy of these lockdowns. And how investors perceive the explosive growth in the Fed’s balance sheet to now over $6.5 trillion.
My only hope is that the Deplorables wake up soon enough to recognize that their political, corporate, financial and governmental leadership have been selling them down the river for decades. The primary focus of both domestic and foreign policy IMO should be to restore Main St with the immediate implication to strongly incentivize reshoring of productive capacity. We can’t be dependent on the CCP who it is clear is an enemy of the United States.
It is well worth listening to Dr. Lacy Hunt, the manager of the Hoisington Treasury bond fund. He has had an enviable investment record over the past decades.
His clear insightful views have been spot on for years.
https://thesoundingline.com/lacy-hunt-deflation-not-inflation-is-coming/
I agree which 4.5/5 of your statements.
But COVID is more deadly in the population that I see and they are not HIV patients.
One does not hear of midlife, otherwise healthy physicians ending up in ICU, after the flu. One just never sees it (it happens but the incidence is so low that I have never seen one not heard of one in my direct environment).
During the last month, I have direct knowledge of one such case and heard about another.
Two doesn’t sound much but this never happens with influenza.
I also have seen much more rapid decline in the sub-population that ended up in the hospital. Everyone in this country has some disease or another by the time they are 50, 60-70. COVID is not only a disease of the Octogenarian.
I suspect, if we look at the actual number of life-years lost, we would be impressed with the mortality of the virus even more.
All the above is based on personal frontline observation, within a few miles of where you live and not on rigorous scientific or epidemiological research.
Btw HIV, if well treated, has become like diabetes regarding it’s effect on mortality and morbidity of the patient. It is a chronic condition and well manageable. Your immunity is basically restore when (not if) the decline in CD4 cells count is reversed by antiviral meds.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-disease-2019-vs-the-flu%3famp=true
Amazing after 3.5 years with the opposition party screaming Russia, Russia, Russia as if was still supposed to mean something, now you tell us it was China all along?
I concede the final word to (of all people) a cruise ship enrichment lecturer who stated it so simply many years ago: “the worst thing that recently happened to America …was winning the Cold War. How perplexing when he first said that. How prescient he was today.
I am all for taking to heart & reason the issue of aged, demented leaders. We have evolved into a gerontocracy via the mechanism of our long-past- shelf-life political parties.
The challenge of course is the selection of Judges & their criteria. If it is informal, we get “the media” making the calls. If it is formalized, such as through our Supreme Court, we get aged & possibly demented people making the calls. Personally, I could go with the Yale Psychiatrists that have been informative on the mental state of the current potus – but that wouldn’t go over big with either constituency, while Liberty University could gin up a worthy alt-panel of judges.
I think an effective panel would best be formed by random selection of teenage girls. They cut to the chase, can be cruelly honest, see through the BS of old men & don’t care what anyone else thinks. Would certainly improve what passes for the selection process of our political parties.
Seems like every time that the subject of term limits has been brought up, it has had cold water thrown on it by one side or another. One term in the Congress, and only one time in the White House by either a President or Vice President? Again, every time that this subject has been broached, personas from both sides of the isle have thrown cold water on it.
Colonel,
On another note, it appears IMHO that there is an agenda underway by the Communist/Socialists/Marxists that have ‘infiltrated’ both side of the isle for some 20 years, is their destruction of our ‘Republic’. Our Republic is a threat to their desire for their totalitarianism. The Communist-Socialist-Marxist 5th column agenda has been one of its pillars that if you control a nation’s health system, you control its population/citizenry. And if you look at how the U.S. health care system has gone against the man-made intentionally fabricated COVID pandemic, you will see fraud, massive health fraud taking place with how the dollars are being funneled to the top medical personas and not down to the actual workers, the doctors and nurses.
This op at play if you will from what I’m seeing is that has been introduced into our U.S. through different means, by human agents, and by purported defective equipment. Case in point all those human agents allowed into our U.S. at the early stages of the staged pandemic. And those infections only worked so far and flat-lined. The you have stage two — the interjection of defective items in question, the testing swabs. What better way to keep the virus going than having virus-laced swabs being used to test the populace, you then have even more spreading of the virus. Just something to consider.
Jack
Thanks for the link, I agree that the Dr Hunt interview is well worth a listen.
Of particular interest for me is the distinction he made between the Fed’s actions and the British approach. Whereas the Fed, by law, can only provide financing to the Treasury with the expectation of repayment, the BoE has recently given the UK Treasury £500 billion of newly minted money with no strings attached. Dr Hunt described this as “crossing the Rubicon”.
The mild deflation he forecasts in the US will surely be preferable to where the UK is headed if the BoE continues to debase the pound.
Barbara Ann
Productivity driven price deflation is good. It increases the standard of living. We’ve seen how price deflation in the 19th century America increased the standard of living of the median household. The Bernanke Fed of course misused the notion of disinflation to grow its balance sheet. They of course were in reality concerned about debt deflation which would have hurt the financial class who have ruled the roost for several decades.
The debasement of the monetary unit is as old as Rome. My friend Rudy Dornbusch studied currency crises and in every case it was due to monetization of government debt. In every case from the Weimar Republic to Zimbabwe this has resulted in the destruction of the monetary unit. But of course modern day Ph.D economists don’t study economic history. They too like most social studies suffer from Physics envy and lean on mathematical models that are rife with assumptions and can never seem to be able to model human frailties. They also use technical jargon and sophistry to obfuscate from the majority of the citizens their snake oil.
As financial leverage has increased and as “innovation” in financial structures have increased further increasing leverage, the debt edifice continues to grow relative to real capital. Additionally the modern financial system has increased the “moneyness” of credit instruments with perceived liquidity. As Lacy Hunt notes rising debt suppresses the economic growth potential. We’ve seen the decline in debt productivity over the past four decades worldwide.
Central banks and regulatory authorities have directly fostered this unprecedented growth in financial speculation. Naturally this has increased the financialization of our economy favoring Wall St at the expense of Main St. Barring a few successful entrepreneurs, mostly in tech the pendulum has swung to wealth generation in finance. Now to prevent losses of the movers and shakers in finance who have extraordinary influence on political power the central banks and the treasury of nations are taking on these losses, ultimately socializing them.
The BoE’s direct monetization of government debt will not be the last. We will see pressure on our politicos to modify the Federal Reserve act to do the same here. With QE the Treasury can borrow for free as all interest payments are credited back to the Treasury. Of course the primary dealers on Wall St can also make a buck selling these securities to the Fed. To quote Rudy. “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.”
Barbara Ann, we are not in similar situations.
The BoE is fully owned by the UK Treasury, that is it is part of the Government, just one hand giving it to the other.
On the other hand the Fed is a standalone body owned by its shareholders none of whom are the US Government, in effect it is the USG’s bank lending money to the USG, at interest, on the request of the USG, with the loans secured, as I understand it, on the US tax base.
Jack
Thanks for your comprehensive comment.
Dr Hunt is evidently an exception to the rule and when he mentioned the Romans debasing their currency the young interviewer’s immediate involuntary laugh spoke volumes. No doubt he is unused to economists citing such an old example of the law of monetary gravity unchanged for millennia. Dr Hunt’s characterization of MMT as “not modern and not a theory” made me smile too.
A reckoning is coming and I agree that the urge to change the law so as to take the money-printing route out of debt will be very tempting. Rome did not take the deflationary route out of debt, are we any wiser?
IMO the navy can easily defeat any Iranian enemy but the hostage situation in Syria, and Iraq is a major impediment to naval action.
It remains to be seen (lets hope we never find out) whether USN shipboard layered air defense systems can defend against coordinated saturation cruise/ballistic missile attacks.
Depending on the number of hostile missiles leaking through the US 5th Fleet may be billion dollar targets.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/we-need-talk-about-irans-missiles-they-could-strike-us-navy-57832
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1449/MR1449.ch3.pdf
Colonel,
Seems the former FDIC chief Shelia Blair is in bed with the CCP. She sts on the board of China’s biggest commercial bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, ICBC. The bank is owned by the Chinese government and controlled by the CCP.
And she is eyeing a position on Biden’s cabinet.
Colonel,
Military personnel are now deployed to food banks around the nation.
Delaware NG deployed to food banks in Delaware.
Texas NG deployed to several locations in Texas.
Arizona NG deployed to the Navajo Nation to assist with their food banks.
Oklahoma NG helping Regional food bank pack food items.
Washington NG deployed to food banks in Washington.
Ohio NG deployed to locations in Ohio to assist food banks.