Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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The Three Stages of Empire

2016-09-21

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2016-09-21

US Defense Budget
I consider it self-evident that we are in the third and final stage of self-serving Imperial decay. Though Edward Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century CE to the Third is not specifically on the rise and fall of empires, it does sketch out the three stages of Empire.

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The ZIRP/NIRP Gods and their PhD Priesthood Have Failed

2016-09-20

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2016-09-20

The priesthood's insane obsession with forcing people to spend their savings by punishing savers with ZIRP/NIRP has failed spectacularly for a simple reason: it completely misunderstands human psychology. Let's start with a simple chart of the Fed Funds Rate, which the Federal Reserve has pinned near zero for years.

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How About Presenting the Facts and Letting Voters Decide Who’s “Fit to Serve”?

2016-09-16

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2016-09-16

Ministry of Propaganda
This simple two-step process would greatly diminish the Ministry of Propaganda's influence. Here's a radical idea: how about presenting the facts and letting voters decide who is "fit to serve"? Consider the context of this presidential election and the judgment call as to who is "fit to serve":

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The Mainstream Media Bet the Farm on Hillary–and Lost

2016-09-15

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2016-09-15

The MSM has forsaken its duty in a democracy and is a disgrace to investigative, unbiased journalism. The mainstream media bet the farm on Hillary Clinton, confident that their dismissal of every skeptical inquiry as a "conspiracy" would guarantee her victory. It now appears they have lost their bet.

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It’s Time to Bring Back Bernie

2016-09-13

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2016-09-13

This tells you everything you need to know about how Hillary will operate as President: there will be no honesty, transparency or truth, ever. Hillary's bid for the presidency is no longer defensible; it's time to bring back Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee.

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If Everything Is So Great, How Come I’m Not Doing So Great?

2016-09-12

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2016-09-12

National health expenditures, Gross Domestic Product, Wages
While the view might be great from the top of the wealth/income pyramid, it takes a special kind of self-serving myopia to ignore the reality that the bottom 95% are not doing so well. We're ceaselessly told/sold that the U.S. economy is doing phenomenally well in our current slow-growth world -- generating record corporate profits, record highs in the S&P 500 stock index, and historically low unemployment (4.9% in July 2016).

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Control What You Can and the Asset Ownership of the Wealthy

2016-09-11

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2016-09-11

Our society does not make it easy to control what you can control. Assets are controlled increasingly by a smaller and smaller part of our society. Here's a couple of thoughts on productively controlling what we can control.

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Our Selfie Society Is Incompatible with Democracy

2016-09-08

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2016-09-08

Now that the U.S. is a neoliberal selfie society, we have the worst of all possible worlds in terms of a failed, doomed democracy. Each individual's liberty to do whatever you want, be whatever you want, go wherever you want, etc. (within the legal boundaries set by the state) is the core of the American Dream. The individual's civil liberties and right to the unlimited pursuit of happiness is sacrosanct.

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Our Impoverished, Pathological Society

2016-09-06

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2016-09-06

If asked what's intrinsic to human happiness, most people in consumer societies will offer up answers such as money, status, a nice house, etc. But as Sebastian Junger observes in his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, what's actually intrinsic to human happiness is: meaningful relationships within a community (i.e. a tribe); opportunities to contribute to the group and to be appreciated; being competent at useful tasks and opportunities for...

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The “Secret Sauce” of the Byzantine Empire: Stable Currency, Social Mobility

2016-09-01

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2016-09-01

One of my reading projects over the past year is to learn more about empires:how they are established, why they endure and why they crumble. To this end, I've recently read seven books on a wide variety of empires. The literature on empires is vast, so this is only a tiny slice of the available books. Nonetheless I think these 7 titles offer a fairly comprehensive spectrum:

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Central Banks = Welfare for the Wealthy

2016-08-30

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2016-08-30

The fact that central banks provide welfare for the wealthy is now entering the mainstream. The fact that all central bank policies since 2008 have dramatically increased wealth and income inequality is now grudgingly being accepted as reality by mainstream economists and the financial media. The central banks' PR facade of noble omniscience on behalf of the great unwashed masses has cracked wide open.

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Trump By a Landslide?

2016-08-29

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2016-08-29

If we believe the mainstream media and the Establishment it protects and promotes, Trump has no chance of winning the presidential election. For starters, Trump supporters are all Confederate-flag waving hillbillies, bigots, fascists and misogynists. In other words, "good people" can't possibly vote for Trump.

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China’s Great Divide: A New Cultural Revolution?

2016-08-26

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2016-08-26

In Asia, it's generally seen as unpatriotic to criticize one's country in public, even if you disagree with its direction and leadership. The cultural norm is to maintain the "face" of one's country by hiding its ills from outsiders. This reticence is especially evident in China, which suffers from the memory of being subjugated by the Western imperialist powers in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

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What Are the Odds that the 2020-2022 Olympics Will Be Cancelled?

2016-08-24

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2016-08-24

In the modern era (1896-present), the Olympics have only been cancelled in wartime: 1916 (World War I), 1940 and 1944 (World War II). But world war is not the only circumstance that could derail the Olympics; a global crisis in energy, finance or geopolitics could send the risks and costs of the Olympics beyond the reach of most participants.

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The Deep State’s Catch-22

2016-08-22

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2016-08-22

What happens if the Deep State pursues the usual pathological path of increasing repression? The system it feeds on decays and collapses. Catch-22 (from the 1961 novel set in World War II Catch-22) has several shades of meaning (bureaucratic absurdity, for example), but at heart it is a self-referential paradox: you must be insane to be excused from flying your mission, but requesting to be excused by reason of insanity proves you're sane.

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What the Fed Hasn’t Fixed (and Actually Made Worse)

2016-08-19

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2016-08-19

The Fed has not only failed to fix what's broken in the U.S. economy--it has actively mad those problems worse. The Federal Reserve claims its monetary interventions saved America from economic ruin in 2009, and have bolstered growth ever since. Don't hurt yourself patting your own backs, Fed governors past and present: it's bad enough that the Fed can't fix the economy's real problems--its policies actively make them worse.

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It’s Time to Abolish the DEA and America’s “War on Drugs” Gulag

2016-08-18

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2016-08-18

It's difficult to pick the most destructive of America's many senseless, futile and tragically needless wars, but the "War on Drugs" is near the top of the list.Prohibition of mind-altering substances has not just failed--it has failed spectacularly, and generated extremely destructive and counterproductive consequences.

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The Odds of a Global Food Crisis Are Rising

2016-08-17

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2016-08-17

Given the current abundance of food globally, confidence in permanent food surpluses and low grain prices is high. Few worry that the present abundance of food could be temporary. But the global food supply is more fragile than we might think, despite historically low grain/agricultural commodity prices.

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Why Wages Have Stagnated–and Will Continue to Stagnate

2016-08-15

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2016-08-15

Mainstream economists are mystified why wages/salaries are still stagnant after 7+ years of growth / "recovery." The conventional view is that wages should be rising as the labor market tightens (i.e. the unemployment rate is low) and demand for workers increases in an expanding economy.

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