Peak government is upon us

An admission of limitation of powers by one of the most powerful and feared US government organization, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency/Despot Enablement Agency) would be yet another evidence point in the ongoing move by the herd away from liberal centralized control of everyone and everything back toward distributed and even self government.

In a move that was the drug control analog to the gun control idea that scary looking guns make guns more dangerous, the DEA proclaimed that canabis oil (CBD) is a schedule 1 drug.  What does that mean?  It means that because the substance sounded druggy by including the word "canabis" in the technical description, the DEA decided that it should be a significant crime to make or posses even though it has only trace amounts or even zero THC in it (THC is the drug in pot that gets you high).

Instead of just taking it lying down, those who are running businesses that involve CBD are loudly questioning the DEAs right to randomly criminalize substances like this.  I predict that the DEA will be forced to back down from this clownish overstep. 

In the past, once DEA had spoken it is like another line was added to the stone tablets in addition to the original 10.  The DEA was and still is that powerful.  They can violate constitutional rights of anyone not willing to take up arms against them in the name of the war on drugs.  Of course, South American drug despots have risen on the back of this so called war and it has been the cause of many pointless deaths.  So the DEA should really be called the Despot Enablement Agency. 

Government is not going to stop people from taking drugs if they want to and lack of government rules is not going to cause society to break down into a drug induced stupor.  Every thinking person knows that drugs can cause a lot of problems outside the law and if you abuse them you are your own impediment to the pursuit of happiness.  We do not need government throwing hundreds of thousands of people into jail for nonviolent drugs crimes.  Especially when government taxed pot is now legal in several US states.  The rise of liberalism enabled the thinking that government is God.  The rise of conservatism will reverse this.

As I write this, many of my readers will certainly wonder if I got this one wrong.  After all, the war on drugs, the DEA, big government - it all just seems too powerful to reverse.  Well, here is the truth of the matter which I write not for those reading today as much for those reading 10 to 15 years from now: government never really controls an armed populace.  Yes, that's right, I'm back to the theme that might makes right (regardless of whether or not this notion impinges upon the brains of liberals - we conservatives have always known it to be the truth).  A people which is heavily armed to the point where a popular uprising is not only possible but damned near likely unless something changes can only be controlled by its own consent.  The people, in aggregate, have to actually agree with what the controlling force is requesting otherwise something different is going to happen.

When times are good, the herd doesn't care about those who get mowed under by big government oversteps.  And who is it that gets mowed under?  Yup, the poor.  Yup, blacks and Hispanics.  You know, the constituency of the liberal ruling class.  In the name of protecting these people, the ACTIONS of the liberal ruling class are clearly anti poor, anti non-white.  Did the wealth divide get better under Uncle Tom Obama??  No it did not.  It got faaaaar worse and in fact bad to a historic level.  The blazing moron liberals who are all in tears about the political death of Hillary are wailing about the the death of their oppressor!!  Flapping idiots!  Educated white people know what is going on.  So do educated, thinking, observant minorities.

When times are not so good and when the people have lost hope, that is when real change can occur.  We have damned near lost a whole generation of productive workers due to the liberals infecting their minds with something-for-nothing thinking.  That is now about to change and I think the change will occur with speed - we will see real change under Trump simply because things are so bad right now that the herd is ready for the reversal regardless of who the clown in chief is. 

The change will come less because of government policies than the government policies will change because of the demands of the people.  It's akin to the fed recently raising interest rates by 1/4 point.  I've always argued that the data shows that the fed does not control long term interest rates.  The market (AKA the people) does/do.  Those who tried to debate me on this issue in the past must now admit that I was right.  The interest rate on the 10 year treasury has nearly doubled since July.  It is up 150 basis points in that time frame while the fed just sat on its hands. But now the con men at the fed are looking at the slope of this move and they realize that the market is taking rates up without them and so they had to raise rates else the world will know what I and many other conservative thinkers already know which is that the market controls the long term interest rates, not the fed.



It will be the same with government policies in any society where the population is sufficiently armed.  Government will be a fast follower of the will of the people.  When the population is disarmed, massive distortions are possible in relationship to government policies because of the force multiplication of arms.  But even in those cases, the will of the people eventually emerges as the controlling force of the herd.

The new morality messaging team.

Since the vaaaast majority of our political leaders are completely corrupt pieces of shit, they cannot serve as morality models to the American public.  Because of this obvious morality vacuum in leadership, young people are stepping up to do for themselves (in-sourcing) what the aging generation had chosen to outsource to government. 

This move back towards more localized, less formal government and even self government as opposed to centralized government living in granite buildings and wasting huge amounts of cash is part and parcel of the new conservative wave.  Expect to see more and more of this kind of thing happening going forward.  Younger people with the drive to lead and who are disgusted with the way that the so called "greatest generation" have sold their souls into the chasing of fake green paper will be the core drivers of this move.  I applaud these people and I think it shows that the evil elite have not won the war and in fact are now on the defensive.  As I have written many times, you will know that the conservative wave is upon us when we see people doing things that are less and less motivated by the love of money and more and more things that are motivated by the love of life.

Venezuela near civil war

The assholes running Venezuela tried to play the same game as the assholes running India - sudden declaration (by fiat) that their major fiat currency notes would lose their value and thus had to be swapped out on short notice to the people.  Of course, the corrupt bastards running the fake money game did it in the name of hurting corrupt citizens.  They said that if you are honest then you would just happily put up with the abuse.  So often we see that the real criminals in government call the honest man a criminal in our world which has been turned upside down by the acceptance of fake money.

But instead of just accepting this new decree, the disarmed Venezuelan people formed into mobs and had a few riots.  This was enough to put fear into the government because they expected their sheeple to just accept it the way the people of India did.  So now the government is backpedaling but at some point if it doesn't follow through and do this, the herd will smell the weakness and it will go very badly on the bureaucrats.  A civil war could be just around the corner there.  I'll bet the people will wish they had a few guns if that happens.

For a disarmed people it is very hard to push back on government until things get very, very bad.  That's because conditions that are broadly bad are needed in order to get a lot of people working together, coordinating efforts, taking risks in order to go up against someone who has guns.  That's because guns are a force multiplier and all governments which enforce the use of fake money rule by force.  They have to otherwise they would all be killed because unfair money leads to unfair actions and those affected by said actions would not need to exist in large numbers in order to kill all the leaders.

How much of a force multiplier are modern guns, anyway?  Well just think about it.  Let's say we had two men standing 1000 yards from each other who were looking for a fight in the next 10 minutes (i.e. no siege tactics).  They are free to arm themselves with rocks and sticks and the like.  They run at each other and tussle and one of them ends up victorious but perhaps quite injured himself.  OK, now let's repeat the contest but we give one of the guys an AR 15 with a scope and one 10 rd clip of ammo.  If the man armed with sticks gets within 100 yards of the man with the AR15, contest is over with a loud bang and 9 bullets to spare.

OK so that was obvious.  Now, let's go 5 on 1.  If the man with the gun has instead a 30 rd magazine then again, there is no amount of strategy that those 5 men can put together that will win them the day (again assuming we rule out siege tactics).  How about 10 on 1?  I'm still wanting to be the guy with the gun here.  The best strategy for the 10 would be to surround the gun guy in a 200 yard diameter circle and then on command and in unison charge the center as fast as they can.  They can close the distance in about 13-15 seconds.  That is an eternity for the experienced shooter whose task only gets easier as the targets approach.  And that is only possible if all 10 opponents are willing to go on a suicide run.  A good shooter could easily rotate 360 degrees on his heel in that amount of time, killing every person (up to 10) within 100 yards as his barrel sweeps past the target. 

Let's take a more realistic scenario from history.  It's July of 1863 and you are in the battle of Gettysburg.  The troops have formed lines just beyond range of their muzzle-loading rifles.  Instead of a caplock or a flintlock, you have an ar15 with the TrackingPoint option installed.  Hitting a target from 200 yards away is simple.  Even 500 yard shots are commonplace for you.  While everyone else is sitting there simply because shooting their old rifles at that range would be a waste of time.  You are busy picking off the enemy at the rate of 1 man every 5 seconds with 100% 1 shot per kill.  The force multiplier could be a LOT higher than 1:10 in that scenario because if the enemy charged, all the others with old guns would begin shooting as well.  So that leaves you with essentially uncontested kills; a force multiplier only limited by the amount of ammo available.

The bottom line is that this is the force ratio that government enjoys over unarmed people - nearly unlimited.  That is why paid mercenaries called police do what they do.  You will see that whenever the fight between police and "bad guy" is anywhere even in force, the cops get their asses kicked.  That's because they are not fighting for their convictions, their freedoms or anything else other than a paycheck.  Believe you me, if the people of Venezuela hit the streets armed with real guns and real bullets there would be no riot police on the street.  They would be smart enough to run away.

I strongly believe that any people which is disarmed is on its way toward slavery.  It could be a slow road but it is always a slippery slope.  North Koreans are enslaved by their despotic government.  So are the people of Venezuela and India.  When the government just does whatever it wants to without fear of revolt, that is a good sign that the people have been enslaved. 

But when the people have guns in large numbers it simply makes no sense to try to wage war on them.  You can take advantage of them if you can trick them into agreeing with you but you will find it very difficult to make a heavily armed population do something it does not want to do.  According to Wiki, the US military has 1.4 mn active service members and 800k reservists.  That's 2.2 million total military people.  Now, I was in the military so I know that only a small portion of these people would ever be called upon to pick up a weapon.  Most are logistics and support.  So let's say the actual gun toting military is 1 million people (and even that is very high, the actual number available to wage a ground war on American streets is probably far less). 

Forgetting all other non-member gun owners, the NRA claims to have around 5 million dues-paying members which is only about 5-7% of all the gun owners in the country according to wapo.  Now, WaPo claims that the remaining non NRA gun owners probably don't believe in the same things as NRA members.  Maybe that is true, maybe WaPo is an a$$ rag.  I don't care to argue it.  But that still leaves 5 million people who pay money each month in order to belong to a group who believes that a big part of its charter is to maintain social justice via the use of deadly force.  I mean, look at their commercials. They clearly see themselves as armed protectors of social justice.  So the US military would be outgunned 5:1 if it ever tried to break down the constitution and just impose a dictatorship.  And that doesn't even speak to the fact that many police and military are patriots who would probably side with the NRA in a civil war against the government.  That is why I know that the people who think that America is going to be a dictatorship or that massive overt tyranny will occur are wrong.  The criminality in the USA cannot be overt.  It all has to be a con game.  The con men have to trick the people into being controlled; it cannot be accomplished by force.  This is truly the only thing that is exceptional in any way about the USA.  But it is damned exceptional to the point of being just about the only thing that matters at the end of the tyrannical day. If the people are armed then nothing else matters; overt tyranny on a massive scale is not possible.  Conversely, if the people are not armed then there is nothing that will ever save them from overt tyranny (such as currency destruction with 3 day time limits on swapping it out).

By the way, I'm not a member of the NRA.  I see no need to make that affiliation.  But if the people needed to rise up and take back the USA you can bet I would do my part.  It is this credible threat and nothing else that practically assures that Americans will never have to make good on it.  It would not be the first option and in fact it would be the last option.  But with a heavily armed populace it would always be an option that disarmed nations do not have.   Sorry Venezuela.  Sorry India.  Sorry N. Korea.  

So who is really the crazy fool here, we "gun crazy" Americans or everyone else in the world who is completely incapable of stopping their governments from running roughshod over their freedoms should the need become apparent?

British values oath proposal shows that politicians know something must be done

While the people have not yet either played camel (just lay down because the load is too heavy) or Camelot (take up arms against evil) for this cycle, the politicians clearly fear that one or the other is at risk of happening.  This is when you begin to see ridiculous stunts like the proposal of so called "value oaths" for holders of public office.  The goal: do whatever it takes in order to regain the confidence of a herd that is voting "no confidence" on current leadership regimes the world over.

I say that this is a ridiculous thing to do because quite honestly, an honest person doesn't need to take any oaths.  Whether you are religious/Christian or not, you have to admit that the Bible holds many truths about the nature of man.  In fact, it is the definition of wisdom.  Forget whether you think it was written by man or God.  Just look at it as if it were an instruction manual for a smooth running and happy society:  Don't murder.  Don't steal.  Don't be jealous of your neighbor's wife or possessions.  In fact, I think Matthew 7:12 sums it up best with the mention of the golden rule.  Just treat others as you would have them treat you.  If that was the only law of the land then we could get rid of hundreds of thousands of pages of specifics which essentially cite on a case by case basis what you would not like others to do unto you (and thus you should not do unto them).  That is essentially what the penal code is.

If you accept that the Bible has wisdom (knowledge in the ways of men) to teach which is quite separate than any religious topic, you might recognize "let your yes be yes and your no be no...".  This bit of wisdom assures us that the public recitation of oaths is a complete waste of time because the politician will already have told you what he wants you to think he stands for when he was stumping for position.  All he has to do is be true to that and you will know what you are getting in him.  The reason for fake, lying-ass oaths is that so few politicians are there to serve.  They are all there to cash in and if the people don't trust them then the people are watching them and so it becomes much harder to cash in at the people's expense without getting caught.

That's all the oaths are: Jedi mind tricks to get you to believe in them even though they have never done anything worth believing.  If you believe then you will go back to sleep and they can continue ruining everything with their greed and corruption.

I'm here to tell you that I will never believe a damned thing that any politician says unless they are saying that fake money, which in our case consists of fiat currency and especially fractional (fictional) reserve banking are the root of 99.5% of all evil in our society.  Whatever other thing they say is noise.  That goes double if the ass hat saying it tells us it is for the chillllldreeeennnn. 

Whatever other thing they do except work to rid us of the evil parasitic engine of economic slavery known as dishonest money is blue smoke and mirrors bullshit which is best left for the consumption of people who still don't have a clue.

Fade the sheepskin

Another of my long standing predictions about the pendulum swing that is now in process (away from liberalism and back toward conservatism) is that fancy but useless college degrees will collapse because most of them are a waste of time and money.  Why?  Because having them does not easily equate into real life productivity.  In fact, some of the most decorated academics are just useless on the job.  They get bored with doing real work and their liberal elitist mindset means they don't think they should be accountable for actually producing anything.  Their biggest skill is jawboning (and they tend to be very adept at this to the point where weak minds are easily swayed by their hypnotic bullshit).  It used to matter quite a bit which school you went to and what awards you got when you were there.  But college is a big waste of time for most people who actually produce something every day on demand in order to make the economy go.

Don't get me wrong.  We need high thinking people.  But not every fool is a high thinker.  Calling yourself a thought leader without anything to back it up simply makes you a legend in your own mind.  Some people really do benefit from college but most, even those in high tech, would be just as well served doing internships or apprenticeships or even self taught learning using a cheap computer and a free download of the ubuntu Linux build tree.  The Internet has broken the elite knowledge club that you used to be locked out of without an expensive college education.  There is so much help available online these days either in video form on YouTube, etc. that if I had a 12 or 13 year old child who showed tech aptitude and drive then I could guide them into receiving a fully functional technology education without ever paying a dime for formal tuition.

But wait, how can you get a job without the sheepskin??  Well to be honest, it used to be very difficult.  I know because that is the route I choose.  I had to work my way up from the very bottom.  But it took me about the same time to get paid like a college degree engineer as they had to spend in college.  In other words, for their college years they paid to learn and at the end they got a corporate job with a good salary.  In my case, I supported a family on what I got paid to learn albeit at a low rate at the start, as a manufacturing line worker at IBM's Boca Raton PC manufacturing operation.  It was not very technical but I was around high tech all day.  Computer parts and terminology were commonplace.  Over time the tech permeates you and you lose fear of it.  By doing a kick ass job in the lowly manufacturing area and showing aptitude and drive, I  was then offered a lab tech doing hardware debug under the oversight of a professional engineer.  After a few years of that I took some internal training at IBM and was made a junior programmer.  4 years after starting in manufacturing at IBM I had worked my way up to associate programmer, the same level that new college hires onboard.

And that was before the Internet even existed.  Nowadays a young person who graduates high school and then lives with the parents can, in two short years, learn enough computer tech via Internet based resources that are all free such that he/she can develop an android app.  And if the app is any good in terms of vision and execution, that is all you need to show up with at a corporate job interview with.  That is the new sheepskin.  That is far more than most college grads have ever done on their own. It shows that the applicant has what it takes to be successful.

While this is a tech perspective it is no different for any other field.  A person wanting work in mechanical fields can go learn Autocad 360 - a free online solid model development tool.  He can build a makerbot for low dollars and then bring his model portfolio with him to the interview.  Who needs a damned piece of paper when you can review actual work output.  Budding electrical engineers can design boards from scratch using online schematic capture and layout tools, all free, and then have simple boards built for $100.  A few small boards accompanied by a portfolio of larger board designs and layouts is all that it would take for a young person to impress a would be employer for an entry level EE position.

As we swing back toward conservatism, what people have shown that they can actually do is going to count for a Hell of a lot more than a piece of paper that suggest they are probably capable of actually doing something.

Eurozone day of reckoning

Mish discusses The Italian Job in a recent post.  In it he quotes Wolfgang Münchau of the Financial Times.  It's worth a read IMO because at some point Mish will be right in that some leader will eventually step up and campaign on the promise to default on all foreign debt.  Let's face it, once the debt gets so big there are only two reasons to continue making payments on it:
1) You want to appear to be well behaved so that you can qualify for even more loans in the future.  Those loans will be needed, after all, to make payments on the existing loans...
2) Your creditor will come and try to kill you if you don't.  You know, just like any other organized crime family would do if you stiffed them.  But this crime family would have tanks, subs, and perhaps even nukes.

While Mish will probably be correct about how it will happen, I will likely be correct about why it must happen and the root cause of it that a debt based economy is not a real economy.  In a debt based economy, he who goes into the most debt the quickest wins.  What do I mean by this?  Well, look at the US spend on weapons.  It's far far more than everyone else in the world.  Combined.  Why do we need all that?  The answer is simple: we know that one day the thin veil of civility will be pulled back from the collapsing debt Ponzi and nice words won't matter anymore.  It will be survival of the strongest.  Sadly for the rest of the world, the money they loaned to the US largely went into weapons development.  So the US has an out-sized military capability that we did not earn.  We essentially conned the rest of the world out of their fair share of military spending.  We have the expensive weapons, they have our fake green paper that we "paid" for it all with.  What a scam.  Or, as US officials would call it, "long standing official policy".

I am on record long ago saying that when the collapse happens we will find that Germany and France are even bigger PIIGS than the PIIGS.  It is going to fall onto the heads of the German people like the sword of Damocles got cut loose.  They are going to be absolutely shocked to see their own banks collapse simply because Italy and others defaulted on the loans made to them by their fellow German busisnessmen.  Instead of putting the blame where it belongs: on German industrialists who borrowed money in order to create factory capacity to build products for people who could only afford it using debt, the German people will blame Italy, Greece and anyone else whose economy collapses to the point where they declare default.  It was France and Germany who so badly wanted the EU but it had nothing to do with the reasons they said they wanted it.  It had everything to do with running out of credit worthy customers to sell to and using the scam of the Eurozone in order to reset everyone's credit to AAAA++++ even though the countries in question have a long history of soft default through inflation.  It was an obvious plan right from the start by elitists to steal decades worth of labor from common people who know nothing about history and very little about economics.

Corrupt governments all roll from the same playbook

Just weeks ago, India announced a sudden swap out of this currency for that with the justification that it would force tax cheats to either come clean or lose their ill begotten cash horde.  Of course only an ass stores long term savings in fake paper currency which is why so much of Indian private wealth is stored in gold.  Still, many were affected negatively by the move as the corrupt Indian government tried to find someone, anyone to blame for their failed government.

Now the despots running Venezeula have announced roughly the same thing. In order to provide cover for a currency exchange that they hope will cover some of their hyperinflation woes, high denomination paper bills are now being pulled from the economy to be swapped with coins which are just as worthless.  Again, the action is to take place extremely quickly.  If you don't get your exchange done in 72 hrs, you lose your money.  This rapid move is being done in the name of catching drug cartels holding lots of cash that they can't account for and thus cannot exchange.  I say again, the smart drug operations are big and they are global.  They store their money not in hyper-inflating Bolivars but rather in metals and in Euros and in Dollars. 

Let's think about this for a second.  A drug operation makes drugs in Venezuela.  Then it sells them in the USA or in Europe.  What currency does that drug operation now hold its profits in?  That's right, NOT Bolivars.  So the paper thin excuse of government does not hold to even the most pithy analysis.  They are just making up shit as they go along now, trying anything to gain a few more months in power, trying anything to keep the confidence of the people up so that the people don't finally band together, grab their "leaders" by their necks and pull them down into the street to be Khadaffied. 

These 3rd world shit holes are canaries in the global meltdown coal mine.  They are marginal players and thus getting hurt the first and the worst.  But their situation is indicative of where every nation is heading because the root cause of problems in Venezuela, India and everywhere else is the fact that their peoples labor under a fake money supply which is now on its deathbed.

I want to be clear about that since Americans do not believe it could happen here.  Most Americans look at what is happening overseas and say, "that is because they are a backward people with no common sense, we are too educated and exceptional to allow that here".  I am specifically telling anyone who is reading this that such thinking is not just flawed in the extreme, it is also the height of ignorance.  How can Americans actually be better off than anyone else when we owe more absolute debt than anyone else?  The fact that we still ARE better off is an illusion because all of our prosperity is borrowed from the future.  When the day arrives that we are called upon to pay this debt back, our fake debt-driven illusion of prosperity is going to collapse.  Its as simple as that.  The illusion will suddenly, and I mean rapidly folks, suddenly be burst.  It will happen like a Venezuelan currency exchange.  One day things will just not be very good and the next day that condition will gap wave 3 down into a steaming pile of shit.  Supply chains will be interrupted and stores will be ransacked by the herd.

Maybe you are in the upper middle class or higher.  If so, your first problem is likely to not be your government but rather your fellow citizen who suddenly has no food, no shelter, no hope.  Don't count on FEMA to save these people because there are just too many to save.  These people will eventually be left with the decision to just starve or to go take what they need from anyone who still has something.

The whole world is going to have to deal with this because every major nation in the world has adopted fake currency/Mammon Money and all have bought into the great debt Ponzi.  No Ponzi ever lasted forever and no it won't be different this time.  These signs around the world are not the death of local currencies folks.  What we are witnessing is the death of all fake money in the world.  At some point all nations will be in turmoil at the same time because all of the fake currency will have lost all confidence at the same time.

As these fake money supplies die, who do you think is going to win and who do you think is going to lose?  In Venezuela, is the person holding his life savings in gold coins worried about what is going on?  Nope.  In fact, his stock is going up.  He's not only not losing buying power that was stored in fake money, his gold is worth many more Bolivars than it was last year.  All debts that are owed by gold holders are now being paid off with a 40% discount.  In 3 years it will likely be a 98% discount or more.  Once confidence is lost in the fake money, it always goes into a death spiral from which it can never escape.