Category Archives: History

The Truth About Gold and Silver, by Jeffrey Tucker

Posted on January 2, 2023 | Leave a comment

Gold and silver are real money; everything else is credit. Gold and silver are not debt obligations (see Real Money, SLL). From Jeffrey Tucker at dailyreckoning.com:

The Truth About Gold and Silver

In the midst of all this incredible political and economic chaos, I was tasked with packing up my mother’s things to prepare for her move to assisted living. It’s a gravely emotional experience for anyone, as I’m sure you know.

I adore that woman. It’s hard to see her get old. Also, that house contained 100 years or more of family history. All this stuff takes up space. With everyone on the move, it’s hard to find a good home for things anymore. We had to make some hard choices.

Anyway, along the way, I opened a small safe and found a lockbox, and opened it. It was my father’s collection of coins. What was in there hadn’t been seen by anyone for perhaps 25 years (he died rather young).

It was startling and amazing to see. It was like finding buried treasure. There were coins from all over the world, gold, and silver. I’m not sure that I knew that he was a collector.

There were all the usual gold and silver bullion coins from all lands, all worth the price of their metal content. All are vastly up in value from when he bought them. There were also hundreds of silver dimes. And there were plenty of numismatics too and because I don’t know my way around this world, I’ll let the experts determine their value.

Good as Gold

I won’t tell you the total value for reasons of privacy but I will say that he made a very good investment. Stocks are fun and swing this way and that but these coins are stable, true, and always faithful. Dad knew that. He was right.

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Posted in Currencies, Debt, Governments, History, Money

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2022… The Year That Marked the End of America’s Hegemony, by the Strategic Culture Editorial Board

Posted on January 1, 2023 | 1 comment

The war in the Ukraine will mark the end of the American empire. From the Strategic Culture Editorial Board at strategic-culture.org:

The war in Ukraine has dominated the past year. Other global crises of soaring energy and food costs are collateral damage from the conflict in Ukraine.

The war in Ukraine has dominated the past year. Other global crises of soaring energy and food costs are collateral damage from the conflict in Ukraine.

The conflict is not simply a localized one in the center of Europe on Russia’s doorstep involving a reactionary anti-Russian regime in Kiev. The conflict represents a historic showdown between the United States and its allies in the NATO military alliance it leads, and Russia. The showdown has been a long time coming.

It didn’t have to happen in this violent, atrocious way.

Russia had long warned the United States and its NATO partners that the expansion of the alliance towards Russia’s borders was an unacceptable strategic security threat. Moscow’s warnings went unheeded year after year.

Almost one year ago, Russia offered a last-ditch diplomatic way to avoid conflict by appealing for a comprehensive security treaty, one based on the previously accepted principle of “indivisible security”. That diplomatic initiative was dismissed out of hand by Washington and its European allies.

Moscow had repeatedly warned that it would not accept the further militarization of the NeoNazi-espousing Kiev regime. Eight years of low-intensity war against Russian-speaking people in former Southeast Ukraine had to stop. Ukraine’s militarization by NATO and its touted membership of the alliance was Russia’s red line. It was the United States and its NATO partners who chose to cross that line. In that case, Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to take military-technical measures. The military defanging of the Kiev regime that began on February 24 was the result.

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Posted in Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Military, War

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Russia’s Neo-Byzantinism, by Laurent Guyénot

Posted on January 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

Here’s a crazy idea. Maybe before the U.S. gets fully involved in war with Russia, we should learn a little bit about Russian history and culture. It couldn’t hurt. From Laurent Guyénot at unz.com:

There is something irresistibly attractive in Russia’s defense of traditional and religious values (what might be called Russian neo-conservatism if that label had not been usurped by American Jewish warmongers). But where does it really come from? We tend to assume that it is a reaction to Western post-modern decadence. But there is more depth to it.

What is Russia? How does Russia define herself, and how does she conceive of her relationship to Europe? Specifically, from what tradition do Russia’s current ruling elites draw their vision of Russian civilization? I wanted to learn about the Russian thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the Russians themselves have rediscovered since the fall of Communism, and who are said to have a strong influence on Vladimir Putin and his entourage. Here is what I found.

Let’s start, quite logically, with three authors whose books were offered by Vladimir Putin to governors and members of his United Russia party for the New Year 2014 (see here and here):

  • Vladimir Solovyov’s The Justification of the Good
  • Nikolai Berdyaev ‘s The Philosophy of Inequality
  • Ivan Ilyin’s Our Tasks

All three authors are deeply religious and patriotic, and as such committed to Russian Orthodoxy. All three are passionate about Russia, and hold her as “an original and independent civilization,” in the terms used by Vladimir Putin in his October 27, 2022 speech at the Valdai Forum.

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Posted in Culture, Education, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Religion, Society

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Awakening From The Narrative Matrix: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on January 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

Those who truly desire understanding and who earnestly seek it will find it, but it’s a struggle. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

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Western analysts spent years warning that western actions would provoke a war in Ukraine, westerners spent four years being propagandized into hating Russia, then Russia invades and now western imperialists say the war is advancing US interests. But remember: it was an “unprovoked invasion”.

The official narrative is that western aggressions played no role in provoking the invasion of Ukraine, but if that’s true then how come so many western experts spent years warning that western aggressions would provoke an invasion of Ukraine?

Then in the years leading up to the invasion, westerners were hammered with media-induced panic about Russia, a nation they hadn’t thought much about since the early nineties. These mass media narratives all had their origins in the US intelligence cartel, which happens to have sought the destruction of the Russian Federation since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Oh, and don’t forget the 2019 Pentagon-funded RAND paper which found that US geostrategic interests could be advanced by provoking Russia into overextending itself in areas like Ukraine. And now western imperialists are merrily boasting that this war is being used to advance longstanding US strategic interests.

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Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, History, Horseshit, Intelligence, Media, Military, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny, War

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A New Year’s Meditation, by Paul Rosenberg

Posted on January 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

New Year’s wisdom from Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

If you could go back in time a thousand years, you’d find people who were shockingly similar to those you presently love. The same is true for people who will live a thousand years from now. Some of them will be nearly identical to the people you now love, and you would care as deeply for them as you do for their present-day counterparts.

Please understand this: The men, women and children we would love in the future can advance only in the same way we have: by the benefaction of their predecessors.

Can you imagine how long it took for ignorant men to learn the rules of metallurgy? Or crop rotation? Or a hundred other things we can barely imagine being without? Our lives are advanced only because they created new ways of living and passed them down to us. Hundreds of generations lived through dark times, fighting toward whatever bits of light they could find, opposed by others nearly the entire way, to bring us where we are now.

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2022 Same Shit, Different Year: 55 Years Of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions, by Myron Ebell and Steven Milloy

Posted on January 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

Consistently wrong environmental apocalyptic prognosticators  are cut even more slack than consistently wrong economic prognosticators. From Myron Ebell and Steven Milloy at zerohedge.com:

Thanks go to Tony Heller, who first collected many of these news clips and posted them on RealClimateScience. 

SUMMARY

Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today.

None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.

What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.

More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science.

While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited.

1967: ‘Dire famine by 1975.’

Source: Salt Lake Tribune, November 17, 1967

1969: ‘Everyone will disappear in a cloud of blue steam by 1989.’

Source: New York Times, August 10 1969

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Posted in Environment, Governments, History, Horseshit, Media, Politics, Propaganda

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How an Occupied Twitter Ruined Countless Lives, by Jeffrey Tucker

Posted on December 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Covid and vaccine dissidents who were shut out or suppressed by Twitter and other social media were mostly right, far more right than the official narratives. And that brings up the monstrous question: how many lives were ruined or lost because of the suppression of scientific inquiry and accurate information? From Jeffrey Tucker at brownstone.org:

Twitter files

From the beginning of the Covid panic, it felt that something was very wrong. Never had a pandemic, much less a seasonal pathogenic wave, been treated as a quasi-military emergency requiring the upending of all freedoms and rights.

What made it more bizarre was how alone those of us who objected felt until very recently when Elon Musk finally bought the platform Twitter, fired all the embedded federal agents, and has started to release the files.

As Elon said, every conspiracy theory about Twitter was true and then some. And what applies at Twitter pertains equally to Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all platforms associated with those companies (YouTube, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp).

The proof is all there. These platforms colluded with the federal government’s administrative arm to craft a particular Covid narrative, throttling and censoring dissidents and boosting any credentialled expert who was willing to toe the line.

At this point, it is wise to trust no one and nothing but those who fought against this nonsense. As the crisis began, I was blessed with an unusually large reach on most platforms. But I sat by and watched it dwindle to nothingness as the months went on. Yes, I had posts pulled but I was never banned. It’s just that my channels of communication shrunk dramatically by the months and weeks.

This was tragic for me simply because I watched the population gradually fall into a medieval-style disease panic that tore families apart, kept loved ones from traveling, wrecked businesses and churches, and even violated the sanctity of the homes. This “invisible enemy” about which everyone in government was going on about shredded the whole social fabric.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Economy, Governments, History, Media, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology, Science

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2023: The Future Has Arrived: The End of 500 Years of Conquistador Civilisation, by Batiushka

Posted on December 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

Most of the world does not want to be colonized, de jure or de facto. That’s not that difficult to understand. From Batiushka at thesaker.is:

Foreword

It is often said that the systemic Western European superiority complex, a disease which consists of the self-justified domination and exploitation of the surrounding world, began with the First ‘Crusade’ (1096-1099). Technically, this is true, but before it there were other events which we may call ‘Pre-Crusades’. For example, there was the massacre by the barbarian Frankish leader Charlemagne of 4,500 Saxons at Verden in 782. This bloodbath was the foundation of Frankish Europe, which still survives as the core of the lies of the EU today. After the collapse of Charlemagne’s Europe and a period of consolidation, 200 years later there came the events of the earlier eleventh century which did exactly presage the First Crusade at its end. First, there was the Frankish ‘Reconquista’ Crusade which began to accelerate in the eleventh century in Iberia. Then came the ‘Norman’ (in fact they were the collective campaigns of all the Frankish-made scum of North-Western Europe) Crusades or Conquests in Sicily, Southern Italy and in England in 1066.

Like these ‘Pre-Crusades’, the genocidal ‘conquests’ of the First Crusade essentially took place inside Europe, or else close by in the Near East. These Viking-type raiding and trading military expeditions, led on horseback and operating from castles, were expanded into Western Europe (the Celtic lands invaded from the Frankish base in England) and into Eastern Europe (the Baltics and Russia). However, the revolution came with the export of this aggressive Eurocentric mentality to distant lands through the ‘Conquistadors’ (same word) in what we now call Latin America 500 years ago. They were the fruit of Columbus’ imperialist and capitalist venture of 1492 and were followed by da Gama’s money-seeking ventures to southern Africa and India in 1497. They triggered a global revolution because they led to the worldwide genocide and plunder of other peoples and the destruction of their civilisations. Clive of India, Rhodes of Africa, Clinton of Serbia, Bush of Iraq and Biden of the Ukraine were only the conquistadors of later times. However, today we are seeing the end of their Conquistador Civilisation.

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Ron Paul: Ben Bernanke Wrecked the U.S. Economy and Won a Nobel Prize

Posted on December 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

Ron Paul is a pretty fair armchair economist and would have been a far more suitable recipient of the Nobel Prize than Ben Bernanke. From Paul at theburningplatform.com:

Ron Paul: Ben Bernanke Wrecked the U.S. Economy and Won a Nobel Prize

Recently, the Nobel Foundation awarded Ben Bernanke (along with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig) the 2022 Nobel Prize in economic sciences because they “significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in the economy, particularly during financial crises.”

I already knew that Ben Bernanke was a student of the Great Depression. I wasn’t aware of his exact perspective, though, or his claim that bank failures were the cause of that brutal decade. The Nobel Prize committee explains:

…the [Great Depression] became so deep and so protracted in large part because bank failures destroyed valuable banking relationships, and the resulting credit supply contraction left significant scars in the real economy.

Now, at least, we can gain some understanding of his actions during the Great Financial Crisis. That understanding comes at a price, though – the cost is 40-year record-high inflation, and both you and I, along with every other American, are paying for it.

Here’s a real quick lesson in recent economic history, courtesy of Christopher Leonard’s masterful work, The Lords of Easy Money.

Between 1913 and 2008, the Fed gradually increased the money supply from about $5 billion to $847 billion. This increase in the monetary base happened slowly, in a gently uprising slope. Then, between late 2008 and early 2010, the Fed printed $1.2 trillion. It printed a hundred years’ worth of money, in other words, in little over a year, more than doubling what economists call the monetary base.

And:

The amount of excess money in the banking system swelled from $200 billion in 2008 to $1.2 trillion in 2010, an increase of 52,000 percent.

Keep in mind, this is what Bernanke’s Federal Reserve did. (We aren’t even talking about Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s term.)

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Posted in Banking, Business, Debt, Economics, Economy, Government, History, Horseshit

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Modeling Gone Bad. By Robert W. Malone, MD, MS

Posted on December 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

From the fatality rates of Covid, the fear and paranoia generated by the disease is akin to the fear generated by a mouse in an elephant. However, unlike elephants, you’re supposed to be able to reason with human beings. From Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, at rwmalonemd.substack.com:

A new paper documents that the pre-vaccination case fatality rate was extremely low in the non-elderly population.

Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly population

Environmental Research, Volume 216, Part 3, 1 January 2023, 114655

Abstract

The largest burden of COVID-19 is carried by the elderly, and persons living in nursing homes are particularly vulnerable. However, 94% of the global population is younger than 70 years and 86% is younger than 60 years. The objective of this study was to accurately estimate the infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 among non-elderly people in the absence of vaccination or prior infection. In systematic searches in SeroTracker and PubMed (protocol: https://osf.io/xvupr), we identified 40 eligible national seroprevalence studies covering 38 countries with pre-vaccination seroprevalence data. For 29 countries (24 high-income, 5 others), publicly available age-stratified COVID-19 death data and age-stratified seroprevalence information were available and were included in the primary analysis. The IFRs had a median of 0.034% (interquartile range (IQR) 0.013–0.056%) for the 0–59 years old population, and 0.095% (IQR 0.036–0.119%) for the 0–69 years old. The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years. IFR increases approximately 4 times every 10 years. Including data from another 9 countries with imputed age distribution of COVID-19 deaths yielded median IFR of 0.025–0.032% for 0–59 years and 0.063–0.082% for 0–69 years. Meta-regression analyses also suggested global IFR of 0.03% and 0.07%, respectively in these age groups.

The current analysis suggests a much lower pre-vaccination IFR in non-elderly populations than previously suggested.

Large differences did exist between countries and may reflect differences in comorbidities and other factors. These estimates provide a baseline from which to fathom further IFR declines with the widespread use of vaccination, prior infections, and evolution of new variants.

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