Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

At the nexus of most of America’s current crises, the diversity/equity/inclusion dogma can be found. The southern border has been destroyed because the Democratic Party wanted the poor of the southern hemisphere to be counted in the census, to vote if possible in poorly audited mail-in elections, and to build upon constituencies that demand government help. Opposition to such cynicism and the de facto destruction of enforcement of U.S. immigration law is written off as “racism,” “nativism,” and “xenophobia.”

The military is short more than 40,000 soldiers. The Pentagon may fault youth gangs, drug use, or a tight labor market. But the real shortfall is mostly due inordinately to reluctant white males who have been smeared by some of the military elite as suspected “white supremacists,” despite dying at twice their demographics in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they are now passing on joining up despite their families’ often multigenerational combat service.

The nexus between critical race theory and critical legal theory has been, inter alia, defunding the police, Soros-funded district attorneys exempting criminals from punishment, the legitimization of mass looting, squatters’ rights, and general lawlessness across big-city America.

The recent epidemic of anti-Semitism was in part birthed by woke/DEI faculty and students on elite campuses, who declared Hamas a victim of “white settler” victimizing Israel and thus contextualized their Jewish hatred by claiming that as “victims,” they cannot be bigots.

There is a historic, malevolent role of states adjudicating political purity, substituting racial, sex, class, and tribal criteria for meritocracy.

They define success or failure not based on actual outcomes but on the degree of orthodox zealotry. Once governments enter that realm of the surreal, the result is always an utter disaster.

After a series of disastrous military catastrophes in 1941 and 1942, Soviet strongman and arch-communist Joseph Stalin ended the Soviet commissar system in October 1942. He reversed course to give absolute tactical authority to his ground commanders rather than to the communist overseers, as was customary.

Stalin really had no choice since Marxist-Leninist ideology overriding military logic and efficacy had ensured that the Soviet Union was surprised by a massive Nazi invasion in June 1941. The Russians in the first 12 months of war subsequently lost nearly 5 million in vast encirclements—largely because foolhardy, ideologically driven directives curtailed the generals’ operational control of the army. After the commissars were disbanded and commanders given greater autonomy, the landmark victory at Stalingrad followed, and with it, the rebound of the Red Army.

One reason why the dictator Napoleon ran wild in Europe for nearly 18 years was that his marshals of France were neither selected only by the old Bourbon standards of aristocratic birth and wealth nor by new ideological revolutionary criteria, but by more meritocratic means than those of his rival nations.

Mao’s decade-long cultural revolution (1966–76) ruined China. It was predicated on Maoist revolutionary dogma overruling economic, social, cultural, and military realities. An entire meritocracy was deemed corrupted by the West and reactionary—and thus either liquidated or rendered inert.

In their place, incompetent zealots competed to destroy all prior standards as “bourgeois” and “counter-revolutionary.” It is no surprise that the current “people’s liberation army,” for all its talk of communist dogma, does not function entirely on Mao’s principles.

Muammar Gaddafi wrecked Libya by reordering an once oil-rich nation on Gaddafi’s crackpot rules of his “Green Book.” At times, the unhinged ideologue, in lunatic fashion, required all Libyans to raise chickens or to destroy all the violins in the nation. I once asked a Libyan why the oil-rich country appeared to me utterly wrecked, and he answered, “We first hire our first cousins—and usually the worst.”

There were many reasons why the King-Cotton, slave-owning Old South lagged far behind the North in population, productivity, and infrastructure. But the chief factor was the capital and effort invested in the amoral as well as uneconomic institution of slavery.

After the Civil War, persistent segregationist ideology demanded vast amounts of time, labor, and money in defining race down to the “one drop” rule—while establishing a labyrinth of segregation laws and refusing to draw on the talents of millions of black citizens.

Yet here we are in 2024, ignoring the baleful past as the woke diversity/equity/inclusion commissars war on merit. Institutions from United Airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration to the Pentagon and elite universities have been reformulated in the post-George Floyd woke hysteria. And to the delight of competitors and enemies abroad, they are now using criteria other than merit to hire, promote, evaluate, and retain.

The greatest problem historically with hiring and promoting based on DEI-like dogma is that anti-meritocratic criteria mark the beginning, not the end, of eroding vital standards. If one does not qualify for a position or slot by accepted standards, then a series of further remedial interventions are needed to sustain the woke project, from providing exceptions and exemptions, changing rules and requirements, and misleading the nation that a more “diverse” math, or more “inclusive” engineering, or more “equity” in chemistry can supplant mastery of critical knowledge that transcends gender, race, or ideology.

But planes either fly or crash due to proper operation, not the appearance or politics of the operator. All soldiers either hit or miss targets, and engineers either make bridges that stand or collapse on the basis of mastering ancient scientific canons and acquired skills, training, and aptitude that have nothing to do with superficial appearance, or tribal affinities, or religion, or doctrine.

The common denominator of critical theories, from critical legal theory to critical social theory, is toxic nihilism, which claims there are no absolute standards, only arbitrary rules and regulations set up by a privileged, powerful class to exploit “the other.” Yet, not punishing looting has nothing to do with race or class, but everything with corroding timeless deterrence that always has and always will prevent the bullying strong from preying on the weak and vulnerable.

Defunding the police sent a message to any criminally minded that in a cost-to-benefit risk assessment, the odds were now on the side of the criminal not being caught for his crimes—and so crime soared and the vulnerable of the inner city became easy prey.

Another danger of DEI is the subordination of the individual to the collective. We are currently witnessing an epidemic of DEI racism in which commissars talk nonstop of white supremacy/rage/privilege without any notion of enormous differences among 230 million individual Polish-, Greek-, Dutch-, Basque-, or Armenian-Americans, or the class, political, and cultural abyss that separates those in Martha’s Vineyard from their antitheses in East Palestine, Ohio.

Moreover, what is “whiteness” in an increasingly intermarried and multiracial society? Oddly, something akin to the old one-drop rules of the South is now updated to determine victims and victimizers—to the point of absurdity. Who is white—someone one half-Irish, one half Mexican—who is black—someone one quarter Jamaican, three-quarters German? To find answers, DEI czars must look to paradigms of the racist past for answers.

Moreover, once any group is exempted and not held to collective standards by virtue of its superficial appearance, then the nation naturally witnesses an increase in racism and bigotry—on the theory that it is not racist to racially stigmatize a supposedly “racist” collective. And we are already seeing an uptake in racially motivated interracial violence as criminals interpret the trickle-down theory of reparatory justice as providing exemption for opportunistic violence.

Throughout history, it has always been the most mediocre and opportunistic would-be commissars that appear to come forth when meritocracy vanishes. If there was not a Harvard President and plagiarist like Claudine Gay to trumpet and leverage her DEI credentials, she would have to be invented. If there was not a brilliant, non-DEI economist like Roland Fryer to be hounded and punished by her, he would have to be invented.

The DEI conglomerate has little idea of the landmines it is planting daily by reducing differences in talent, character, and morality into a boring blueprint of racial stereotypes. Punctuality is now “white time” and supposedly pernicious. The SAT, designed to give the less privileged a meritocratic pathway to college admissions, is deemed racist and either discarded or warped.

In its absence, universities are quietly now “reimaging” their curriculum to make it more “relevant to today’s students” and, of course, “more inclusive and more diverse.” Translated from the language of Oceania, that means after admitting tens of thousands to the nation’s elite schools who did not meet the universities’ own prior standards that they themselves once established and apprehensive about terminating such students, higher education is now euphemistically lowering the work load in classes, introducing new less rigorous classes, and inflating grades. In their virtue-signaling, they have little clue that inevitably their once prized and supposedly prestigious degrees will be rendered less valued as employers discover a Harvard, Stanford, or Princeton BA or BS is not a guarantee of academic excellence or mastery of vital skill sets.

Toxic tribalism is also, unfortunately, like nuclear proliferation. Once one group goes full tribal, others may as well, if for no reason than their own self-survival in a balkanized, Hobbesian world of bellum omnium contra omnes. If our popular culture is to be defined by the racist hosts of The View, or the racist anchorwoman Joy Reid, or members of the Congressman “Squad,” or entire studies departments in our universities that constantly bleat out the racialist mantra, then logically one of two developments will follow.

• One, so-called whites in minority-majority states like California will copy the tribal affinities of others that transcend their class and cultural differences, again in response to other blocs that do the same for careerist advantage and perceived survival.

• Or two, racism will be redefined empirically so that any careerist elites who espouse ad nauseam racial chauvinism—on the assurance they cannot be deemed racists—will be discredited and exposed for what they’ve become, and thus the content of our character will triumph over the color of our skin.

Finally, do we ever ask how a country of immigrants like the United States – vastly smaller than India and China, less materially rich than the vast expanse of Russia, without the strategic geography of the Middle East, or without the long investment and infrastructure of Europe – emerged out of nowhere to dominate the world economically, financially, militarily, and educationally for nearly two centuries?

The answer is easy: it was the most meritocratic land of opportunity in the world, where millions emigrated (legally) on the assurance that their class, politics, religion, ethnicity, and yes, race, would be far less a drawback than anywhere else in the world.

The degree to which the U.S. survives DEI depends on either how quickly it is discarded or whether America’s existential enemies in the Middle East, China, Russia, and Iran have even worse DEI-anti-meritocratic criteria of their own in hiring, promotion, and admissions—whether defined by institutionalized hatred of the West, or loyalty oaths to the communist party, or demonstrable obsequiousness to the Putin regime, or lethal religious intolerance.

Unfortunately, our illiberal enemies, China especially, at least in matters of money and arms, are now emulating the meritocracy of the old America. Meanwhile, we are hellbent on following their former destructive habits of using politics instead of merit to staff our universities, government, corporations, and military.

Our future hinges on how quickly we discard DEI orthodoxy and simply make empirical decisions to stop printing money, deter enemies abroad, enforce our laws, punish criminals, secure the border, reboot the military, regain energy independence, and judge citizens on their character and talent and not their appearance and politics—at least if it is not already too late.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Progressive nonsense is incessant. My hoot of the day is AOC and Bernie Sanders have teamed up for a new green housing deal. I explain where we are and what’s on deck.

Common Dreams is out with another economically insane idea. Please consider AOC, Sanders Renew Fight for Green New Deal for Public Housing.

Backed by dozens of progressive groups and congressional Democrats, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday reintroduced legislation designed to tackle both the affordable housing crisis and the climate emergency.

The New York Democrat and Vermont Independent are leading the renewed fight for the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, which would invest up to $234 billion over a decade into “weatherizing, electrifying, and modernizing our public housing so that it may serve as a model of efficiency, sustainability, and resiliency for the rest of the nation.”

Joining the pair in backing the bill are 55 other House Democrats and Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Peter Welch (D-Vt.).

Markey, who has spearheaded the broader battle for a Green New Deal with Ocasio-Cortez, said that “in the five years since its introduction, Green New Deal advocacy has catapulted environmental justice to the top of the national agenda, helped deliver historic victories, and charted a course for a better future.”

Green Housing Deal Summary

• Expand federal programs to provide residents with meaningful work investing in their communities, to own and operate resident businesses, to move toward financial independence, and to participate in the management of public housing;

• Expand resident councils so that public housing residents have a seat at the table for important decisions regarding their homes; and

• Replenish the public housing capital backlog and repeal the Faircloth Amendment, which limits the construction of new public housing developments.

• The legislation would also create two grant programs for deep energy retrofits; community workforce development; upgrades to energy efficiency, building electrification, and water quality; community renewable energy generation; recycling; resiliency and sustainability; and climate adaptation and emergency disaster response.

How Much Would This Cost?

AOC says the bill would invest up to $234 billion over a decade into “weatherizing, electrifying, and modernizing our public housing”.

The real goal is everyone has a right to affordable housing.

Don’t kid yourself, the whole policy would cost many trillions of dollars of which $234 billion is not even a down payment.

Once you issue guarantees with government involved costs soar out of sight.

Even most Democrats recognize this. The bill is so idiotic that it only gathered support 7 Senate advocates and 42 House advocates.

Faircloth Amendment

The real threat is not that the above insanity passes in one fell swoop, but that its starts with a repeal of the Faircloth Amendment, which limits the construction of new public housing developments.

The Faircloth Amendment was a provision of the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998. It amended the Housing Act of 1937, which authorized federal financial assistance to help states and housing authorities provide housing for low-income people. The amendment says, “a public housing agency may not use any of the amounts allocated for the agency from the Capital Fund or Operating Fund for the purpose of constructing any public housing unit, if such construction would result in a net increase from the number of public housing units owned, assisted, or operated by the public housing agency on October 1, 1999, including any public housing units demolished as part of any revitalization effort.” In other words, the amendment prevents housing authorities from ever maintaining more public housing units than they had in 1999.

The amendment was named for its sponsor, Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth, a successful hog farmer from South Carolina who served one term in the Senate, from 1993-1999.

The Faircloth Amendment, and the rest of the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act, were enacted amid a broader movement for welfare reform that was pushed by Congressional Republicans and co-signed by the Clinton White House in the 1990s. The movement was grounded in a belief that public assistance programs were detrimental to people’s ability to achieve economic independence, and that welfare recipients themselves were either overly dependent on the government or outright abusers of taxpayer money. Most lawmakers saw public housing complexes as crime-infested, unhealthy places that kept people trapped in poverty. Running against Clinton in 1996, former Republican Senator Bob Dole, said that public housing was “one of the last bastions of socialism in the world,” and called for its elimination.

“It was essentially viewed as a failed program,” says Susan J. Popkin, director of the Urban Institute’s Housing Opportunities and Services Together (HOST) Initiative and author of a series of books about public housing in Chicago and around the country.

Since the 1980s, the restriction of federal funding has had a much bigger impact on public housing than the Faircloth Amendment. The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that the U.S. loses around 10,000 public-housing units a year to demolition or disposition because of accumulated maintenance issues.

As Jenny Schuetz argued in her recent post on the Brookings Institution website, the Faircloth Amendment is only a paper obstacle to an expansion of public housing. Other obstacles include the availability of land zoning rules that prevent the development of any new housing in many areas, and existing housing authorities’ relative ineffectiveness as real estate developers, she wrote.

But the biggest challenge to expanding public housing is a lack of federal funding. The Green New Deal for Public Housing, a proposal introduced in Congress in 2019 by Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, calls for the federal government to spend $180 billion repairing and retrofitting every existing public housing unit in the U.S. Restoring the 200,000 public-housing units that have been lost would require billions in federal spending and an abrupt departure from the trend of pulling away from publicly owned housing, even without repealing the Faircloth Amendment. Politically, though, repealing the amendment could be powerfully symbolic. As Ross Barkan wrote in the New York Times, “repeal would be a vital signal that America is back in the business of expanding public housing.”

Urban Institute Research

The Faircloth Amendment is one the best amendments in history. Thank you Senator Lauch Faircloth!

Yet, the amendment is somewhat symbolic.

According to research from the Urban Institute, there were 2,156,625 people living in 1,067,387 public housing units as of 2016, and Popkin says the U.S. has around 200,000 fewer public-housing units than it did in the mid-1990s. Many housing authorities have un-funded maintenance and rehabilitation needs, including the New York City Housing Authority, which needs to spend an estimated $45.2 billion in the next twenty years just to keep its existing units habitable. 

The Philadelphia Housing Authority is limited to 20,133 units but only owns around 14,000 units. The Chicago Housing Authority is limited to 35,453 units but maintains fewer than 21,000. The Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta owns 3,500 units out of an allowed 11,965.

Government is the Problem

We do not need the government back in the public housing business. The costs of government programs soars out of sight.

New York with its damn rent control legislation needs to spend $45.2 billion in the next twenty years just to keep its existing units habitable. 

Let New York and Chicago fix their own self-made problems. Federal and sate governments are the problem, not the solution to any alleged housing crisis.

Congratulations to NY, IL, and CA

Meanwhile, congratulations are owed to anyone voting with their feet to get out of socialist hellholes.

For discussion, please see Congratulations to NY, IL, LA, and CA for Losing the Most Population

Absolute Basis Losers

• New York: -631,104

• California: -573,019

• Illinois: -263,780

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A former Trump secretary of defense revealed that he was pressured by the House Jan. 6 committee into staying silent about claims that then-President Donald Trump authorized the deployment of National Guard troops before the breach at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Speaking to the Daily Mail on March 23, former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, who was only on the job for about two months, said that members of the Democrat-led panel used “aggressive” tactics after he spoke to several media outlets about the Trump authorization. The final report from the Jan. 6 subcommittee, which was dissolved after the current Congress took over, claimed that President Trump did not authorize the deployment of the National Guard.

In 2022, Mr. Miller appeared on a Fox News segment along with former Trump national security official Kash Patel in an interview that he said “hit a nerve.”

“The two of us were on [the Fox News show] and the next day my lawyer got a call from the Jan. 6 staff director. … I forgot exactly who it was, but basically saying, very legalistic, ‘Well, if your client has additional information he wants to share, we’d be happy to have him re-interviewed,’” Mr. Miller told the Mail.

“It was more that latent threat of, ‘If you want to keep going on TV, we’re gonna drag you in here again for additional hours of hearing testimony.’ So that was the nature of that whole thing. It was the latent threat of the government continuing to intrude into my life.”

The former defense secretary added that he did not have the “resources to continue the battle” with the Jan. 6 committee and didn’t want to face any more depositions. Instead, he kept to himself and did not discuss how the panel allegedly targeted him.

“I didn’t talk about it with anybody else because of the fear or the concern,” he told the outlet. “I wasn’t communicating with anybody, because I knew any interactions I had on it would result in me having to … acknowledge that I’d been in communications with other people. And then that just sort of opens up a whole can of worms with the investigators that I just didn’t want to do.”

The former secretary said, “It was much easier just to not be involved with anybody or talk to anybody about this stuff because it was going to cause conflict and difficulties with the investigating team.”

Mr. Miller added that it was clear that former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) was running the Jan. 6 panel even though she was one of only two Republicans on the committee. He said that he believed that Ms. Cheney, who lost the 2022 Wyoming Republican primary to the pro-Trump Harriet Hageman, was not happy with the “optics” of Mr. Miller’s appearing on television and going against the panel’s anti-Trump narrative.

Ms. Cheney and other members of the Jan. 6 panel will likely attempt to downplay his claims about the National Guard authorization, Mr. Miller said, adding that the committee was engaging in “political theater.”

But his recent remarks contradicted statements he made in 2022 when he told the Jan. 6 panel that President Trump did not order the 10,000 National Guard troops before Jan. 6.

“I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature,” Mr. Miller said at the time. “There was no order from the president.

“We obviously had plans for activating more folks, but that was not anything more than contingency planning. There was no official message traffic or anything of that nature.”

The Epoch Times contacted Ms. Cheney for comment on March 23 but received no response by press time.

New Report Released

The former acting secretary of defense’s claims come as House Republicans released a transcript that the Jan. 6 panel kept hidden from the public.

Anthony Ornato, who was the White House deputy chief of staff during the breach, told the committee that he overheard Mark Meadows, who was then chief of staff, on the phone with Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser. According to the transcript, Mr. Meadows wanted to ensure Ms. Bowser “had everything she needed.”

Mr. Meadows “wanted to know if she [needed] any more guardsmen,” Mr. Ornato testified, according to the transcript.

“And I remember the number 10,000 coming up of, ‘The president wants to make sure that you have enough,’“ he said. ”You know, ‘He is willing to ask for 10,000.’ I remember that number. Now that you said it, it reminded me of it.”

But the committee said in its final report that it “found no evidence” supporting the idea that President Trump ordered 10,000 National Guard troops to be ready for Jan. 6.

“The former J6 Select Committee apparently withheld Mr. Ornato’s critical witness testimony from the American people because it contradicted their pre-determined narrative,” Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who released the transcript, said in a statement this month.

After the report was released, Ms. Cheney wrote that people should read the committee’s report, which included the 2022 Miller interview in which he denied that President Trump ordered the troops.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.

Russia attacked the Ukrainian capital of Kiev on Monday morning, with US Ambassador Bridget Brink writing on X that she observed “Loud explosions in Kyiv” as “Again this morning Russia is attacking Ukraine with hypersonic missiles. Loud explosions in Kyiv. Over the last five days, Russia has launched hundreds of missiles and drones against a sovereign country.”

So far at least seven people have been reported inured, and a three story building in the central part of the city has been severely damaged.

A teenage girl was among the injured. Among the group of casualties, “Two of them are hospitalized. Others were treated by medics on the spot. Rescuers continue to clear the debris,” Mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote on Telegram.

“Next to the destroyed premises of the state educational institution is a dormitory where there were many people. Fortunately, there was no damage, and no one was injured.” Russia’s use of hypersonic missiles against the capital remains very rare, showing that Moscow intends to escalate in light of recent Ukrainian cross-border attacks.

A report in Kyiv Post strongly suggests this may have been an attempted so-called decapitation strike which aims to take out Ukraine’s military and intelligence top echelons: 

Kyiv Post’s sources within the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) have confirmed that two ballistic missiles were launched from Russian-occupied Crimea toward Kyiv on Monday and were aimed at the SBU offices.

Today, March 25, Ukraine is observing the Day of the Security Service of Ukraine. According to sources from the Kyiv Post, the missiles were aimed at the premises where high-ranking SBU officials are located.

🚨 BREAKING – Russian army launched several hypersonic missiles from occupied Crimea. They covered the distance of 580 km to Kyiv in 3 minutes at an estimated speed of 11,600 km/h (7,200mph).

Hence the air raid siren system did not turn on in time. Suspected to be Zircon cruise… pic.twitter.com/wlaWRSSRIK

— MonitorX (@MonitorX99800) March 25, 2024

The major strike also appeared a retaliation attack coming on the heels of Ukraine’s military declaring a successful attack on two Russian warships and a communications center in Crimea on Sunday. That attack had also involved Russian anti-air defenses downing at least ten inbound missiles over the port of Sevastopol as the Ukrainian operation unfolded.

Ukrainian air force commander Mykola Oleshchuk wrote on social media while hailing the attacks, “The sky and the sea are of the same color! I thank the pilots and navy for their successful combat work! Crimea is ours! To the victory together!”

Unconfirmed videos quickly circulated thereafter, which CNN described:

A video posted to a local Telegram channel shows a series of large explosions in the city, sending fireballs and thick black smoke into the air. Another fireball can be seen in the far distance.

Ukraine said the vessels hit were two amphibious landing ships, the Yamal and the Azov. The extent of the damage was not immediately clear.

More clear footage of Sevastopol strikes. pic.twitter.com/WNANxDZawh

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) March 23, 2024

CNN estimates that over the course of the more than two year long war, at least 20 naval vessels have been destroyed or damaged enough to become disabled, which marks one-third of the Black Sea fleet.

More large-scale Russian airstrikes deeper into Ukraine are expected given the ongoing Ukrainian strikes against Russian oil refineries, with the latest such attack happening Saturday but coming to light in international press via Reuters on Monday. “Rosneft’s Kuibyshev oil refinery in Samara, Russia halted CDU-5, one of its two primary refining units, Reuters reports, citing two people familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg reports of this latest.

Samara lies deep inside Russian territory, over 500 miles from the Ukraine border, making this another very long-range strike by Ukraine…

Regional Governor Dmitry Azarov described that a large a fire broke due to direct impact by Ukrainian drone attack over the weekend, per statements in Interfax, damaging the primary oil refining unit.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Awakening from the dream of painless financial / political solutions, we find the status quo is not the solution, it is the source of our decay.

Our situation as a society is akin to awakening from a dream of loved ones to the realization that they passed away long ago. Our economy and politics are broken, yet we continue dreaming that they are functional.

Let’s start with politics. American politics now bears an eerie resemblance to pre-collapse Soviet politics: a geriatric, sclerotic, stuck-in-the-past leadership, five-year plans (four year plans in the U.S. with one goal–get re-elected) that do nothing to change the trajectory of social decay, and a populace increasingly opting out of political engagement as people realize the pointlessness of the entire charade: the commoners are powerless and the elites are incompetent and disconnected from reality.

Recall Smith’s Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic authoritarian government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

Take a look at the charts below and tell me how transferring power from one party to the other changed the trajectory of social decay, kleptocracy, authoritarianism or the predations of the financial Aristocracy. You can’t, as “business as usual” politics is incapable of changing the trajectory of inequality, debt and social decay.

The two-party “Business as usual” politics offers us a false choice, as neither party has the means to identify or address the fundamental sources of our decline as a society. What we’re offered is histrionic claims that one policy or another will fix the symptoms of decay rather than the sources of decay.

Historian Christopher Lasch (who died in 1994) saw that the either-or mindset of left-right, Progressive-Conservative was already a dead-end in 1990 when he wrote The True and Only Heaven: “We need to ask whether the left and right have not come to share so many of the underlying convictions, including a belief in the desirability and inevitability of technical and economic development, that the conflict between them, shrill and acrimonious as it is, no longer speaks to the central issues of American politics.” (page 23)

Look at the charts below and identify the great sea changes in trajectory caused by changing the party in power. There are none. The Imperial Project continues apace regardless of what party claims power. This is the result of a broken political system that offers up a false choice while society careens toward a precipice.

Federal debt: where’s the big reversal of trajectory caused by switching parties?

Total public and private debt: where’s the big reversal of trajectory caused by switching parties?

Wealth of the top .01%: where’s the big reversal of trajectory caused by switching parties? The spot of bother in 2008-2009 that briefly interrupted the trend of rising concentration of wealth in the top few was the result of a catastrophically unstable, corrupt, exploitive financial system almost collapsing, not of political change.

As for the economy, where do we begin? With the dependence on skyrocketing debt to duct-tape the appearance of normalcy and the the all-important veneer of “optimism”?

How about the rise to dominance of extreme speculation, as the only means left to get ahead in an economy ruled by monopolies, cartels and their regulatory partners?

What about the decay of ethics to the lowest level: the normalizing of “pay-to-play” and “everyone has a price”?

How about the reality that we’re all held hostage to monopolistic technological / corporate platforms that relentlessly increase profits by crapifying goods and immiserating services?

How about the reliance on the monetization and commodification of addiction as a reliable profit center? As Lasch so presciently observed: “The model of ownership, in a society built round mass consumption, is addiction.”

As for social decay, perhaps we can start with the reduction of all the bonds of an authentic social order to a series of “market transactions”–the sale of attention and engagement, the purchase of distractions, the endless scrolling and clicking, the attendance at a protest that goes nowhere because it can’t possibly lead to any real change–the scope and diversity of transactions generates the illusion of being connected as we drift into disconnected spheres of loneliness and anxiety as we sense, despite all the phony optimism and distraction, that our society is coming apart at the seams, and we’re powerless to so anything but opt out of the madness.

Awakening from the dream of painless financial / political solutions, we find the status quo is not the solution, it is the source of our decay. The status quo generates crises by its very nature and structure, and then claims that papering over the symptoms will magically resolve the sources of crisis and decay. But symptoms are not causes, and so this illusion has a very limited shelf-life.

New podcast: Self Reliance & The Importance of Choice (24 min), Part 2 in a three-part exploration of self-reliance.

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Tonight at 7pm ET – on the day that NY Attorney General Lettita James said she was prepared to begin seizing buildings from Donald Trump unless he paid over a hundred million dollars because “Justice” – ZeroHedge will host our latest live debate on the former President’s past and present, and whether America would benefit from his return in 2024.

In the “anti-Trump” corner, former George Bush ethics lawyer and vehement never-Trumper Richard Painter will join independent journalist Michael Tracey, an ardent critic of Trump and Biden alike.

In the “pro-Trump” corner, veteran political operative Roger Stone joins former Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos.

The discussion will be moderated by David “Viva Frei” Freiheit and sponsored by Goldco.

Among the topics to be discussed, we will cover:

• Did Trump “drain the swamp”? Will he next time?
• Foreign policy: China-Taiwan, Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine
• COVID/Vaccine policy
• Fiscal spending
• Can he win or is the system rigged?

We’ll cover all these topics and more, so tune in live on ZeroHedge, X, or Rumble at 7pm eastern.

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

The National Guard is only supposed to be deployed in emergency situations.  But these days the National Guard is being used for all sorts of things.  For example, hundreds of National Guard soldiers are being used to check the bags of those riding the subway system in New York City.  That sets a very alarming precedent, and I don’t understand why more people aren’t upset about this.  And now we have learned that National Guard troops will be deployed during the Great American Eclipse on April 8th.  What in the world do they expect to happen during this eclipse?

Without a doubt, it will certainly be a historic event.

As I have discussed previously, it is being projected that it will be the most viewed astronomical event in the entire history of our country.

And virtually everyone in North America will be able to view at least a partial eclipse…

Almost everyone on the continent will see at least a bit of the eclipse. The further away you are from the path, the less of the eclipse you’ll see.

Even in places like Seattle and Portland, Oregon, which are far from the path, about one-third of the sun will be hidden.

On April 8th, millions of Americans will be traveling to locations where they will be in the path of the total solar eclipse.  Oklahoma is being touted as one of the best states for that, and it is being reported that the Oklahoma National Guard “will provide first responders as well as units with hazmat response capabilities”…

Oklahoma’s National Guard is set to be deployed for the upcoming total solar eclipse, when as many as 100,000 people are expected to visit one county.

In a statement on Tuesday, the guard said it would assist emergency management to cope with “an unprecedented number of tourists” on April 8 in McCurtain County, in the southeast of the state.

The guard will provide first responders as well as units with hazmat response capabilities in case of an incident like an industrial fire.

I can understand that they feel the need to be prepared.

But bringing in the National Guard is overkill, don’t you think?

Residents of Oklahoma are being urged to “stock up on gas and groceries” prior to the eclipse, and they are also being instructed to have “multiple forms of communication besides cellular”…

To prepare for the eclipse, the state laid out some tips to plan ahead.

Oklahomans should schedule errands and appointments a few days in advance before the eclipse as well as stock up on gas and groceries. The state also recommends having multiple forms of communication besides cellular, being careful on the road and staying updated on weather conditions.

Seriously?

They want people to do all this for an eclipse that is only going to last for a few minutes?

Actually, Oklahoma is not the only state that is issuing such warnings.  According to a Newsweek article entitled “Map Shows Warnings for People to Stock Up on Food Ahead of Solar Eclipse”, at least four states have now warned their citizens to stock up on food…

At least four states within the path of totality have urged residents to stock up on groceries before the eclipse. Some officials have already issued disaster declarations ahead of the event, and some schools have decided to close, citing student safety.

Texas officials have issued a slew of warnings, including that people living within the path of totality should stock up on groceries and gas and run any errands—such as filling prescriptions—in the days before the eclipse. One official also urged pet owners to stock up on supplies for their animals.

I realize that the areas that are in the direct path of the total eclipse are anticipating large numbers of visitors, but it feels like authorities are really going overboard.

Just look at what officials in Hays County, Texas are telling their residents to do…

• Parking issues – lack of parking, fees for parking, having to park and walk to your destination (Please park only in designated areas and not on private property or in areas that cause safety issues)

• Traffic delays and road closures

• Longer wait times for restaurants (consider cooking at “home” instead or bring a small cooler with ready-to-eat food)

• More congestion (pedestrian and vehicles)

• Delayed emergency/911 response

• Cell service interruptions/lack of service

• Higher than normal stress levels and/or heated tempers

• Credit card machines not working (bring cash)

Why would credit card machines not work?

And why would phone service be interrupted?

I don’t understand.

In Arkansas, they actually held a “live training exercise” that simulated emergencies that might happen during the eclipse…

With less than a month remaining before the Great American Solar Eclipse, the Arkansas Division of Emergency Management (ADEM) took a significant step by conducting a live training exercise. This exercise was designed to test ADEM’s response to issues that may arise as visitors flock to Arkansas to witness the event. ADEM responders and other state agencies looked at possible scenarios, such as severe weather, traffic, medical emergencies, and communication challenges.

Taking part in the exercise were county emergency managers and representatives of the National Weather Service, Arkansas National Guard, Corps of Engineers, Arkansas Hospital Association, Arkansas Wireless Information Network, and Arkansas Departments of Health, Transportation, Energy and Environment and Human Services.

Personally, I am not expecting a major disaster or emergency on the day of the eclipse.

But you never know, I could be wrong.

And it is certainly inevitable that there will be a lot more “surprises” as this year rolls along.

In fact, during his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, former U.S. Representative Ron Paul specifically warned about the potential for a black swan event…

Ron Paul, recognized for his consistent principles and foresight into economic and foreign policy, used the platform to express his concerns about unexpected, significant events that could catch the world by surprise.

“I think we’re reaching this point where some sudden thing is going to happen. I believe in that theory of the black swan. Yes, it’s going to pop up, and it’s not going to be controllable,” Paul said.

I don’t think that there will be a black swan event on April 8th.

But this eclipse will be a very big deal.

The giant “X” over America that the Great American Eclipse of 2017 started will be completed by the Great American Eclipse of 2024.

And as the Great American Eclipse of 2024 moves across our nation, the sun, the moon and the other seven planets in our solar system will all be lined up in the sky.

Our entire solar system is literally screaming that this day is important, and you would think that more people would be talking about the giant “X” that is about to be completed directly over the New Madrid fault zone.

Sadly, most of the population will quickly forget about this eclipse once it has passed, and that is extremely unfortunate.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

With bitcoin ETFs relentlessly buying the digital currency/commodity/devaluation hedge for the past two months (despite the relentless liquidations taking place at the fee outlier GBTC)…

… and the infamous “Mr. 100″ buying up all the bitcoin mined in the last 2 days…

🧮 $120m in 2 days👇 pic.twitter.com/tZl4ZWFot0

— HODL15Capital 🇺🇸 (@HODL15Capital) March 23, 2024

… some were asking: who is selling?

The answer, as those who follow us know very well, was the futures market where as we first discussed last night, the latest week saw the largest Bitcoin CME non-commercial futures shorting/selling since last October.

Where is the selling coming from? Biggest weekly dump in bitcoin futures since October pic.twitter.com/wIxiFpQtpG

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 24, 2024

But there was more: as we revealed last night to our pro subscribers in great detail late on Sunday, Goldman’s Futures desk observed record after record in bitcoin futures: indeed, as prices hit a record high above $73k, total open interest did as well this week above 33k contracts outstanding or nearly $12bn, as “the total number of organizations holding the contract (in size above the CFTC reportable-trader level) is at a near-record also.”

Goldman also observed that in the most recent week – 5-12 March – institutions, a category which is likely to include ETF product usage of Bitcoin futures, were more than 3x std-dev buyers while hedge funds or Leveraged investors, and those who panic cover the moment there is even a modest sustained move higher to avoid margin calls, were offsetting, more than 3x std-dev net sellers.

Finally, Goldman noted that institutional net long and hedge fund net short lengths are at record levels, and the concentration of longs – the percentage of total open interest held by the top 4 net long traders at nearly 60% – is well above average levels. Alongside this, the futures implied funding has also remained elevated, at commonly above 10% annualized since Q4 last year during Bitcoin’s price runup – it started 23Q4 below $30k – and sometimes above 15%.

Putting it all together, late on Sunday predicted that “another epic squeeze was coming”…

Goldman: “The institutional Bitcoin net long and hedge fund Bitcoin net short lengths are at record levels”

another epic squeeze coming pic.twitter.com/l9G2tGitp0

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 24, 2024

Just a few hours later, an “epic squeeze” in the futures market, where hedge fund shorts confirmed just how much they suck at HODLing their shots following a sharp move higher, is precisely what we got.

More in the full Goldman note available to pro subs in the usual place.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

Beware the Ides of March,” Shakespeare quotes the soothsayer’s warning Julius Caesar about what turned out to be an impending assassination on March 15.

The death of American liberty happened around the same time four years ago, when the orders went out from all levels of government to close all indoor and outdoor venues where people gather.

It was not quite a law and it was never voted on by anyone. Seemingly out of nowhere, people who the public had largely ignored, the public health bureaucrats, all united to tell the executives in charge — mayors, governors and the president — that the only way to deal with a respiratory virus was to scrap freedom and the Bill of Rights.

What Happened to This Document?

In addition, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a classified document, only to be released to the public months later. The document initiated the lockdowns. It still does not exist on any government website.

The White House Coronavirus Response Task Force, led by the vice president, will coordinate a whole-of-government approach, including governors, state and local officials, and members of Congress, to develop the best options for the safety, well-being and health of the American people. HHS is the LFA [lead federal agency] for coordinating the federal response to COVID-19.

Closures were guaranteed:

Recommend significantly limiting public gatherings and cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances and public and private meetings that cannot be convened by phone. Consider school closures. Issue widespread “stay at home” directives for public and private organizations, with nearly 100% telework for some, although critical public services and infrastructure may need to retain skeleton crews. Law enforcement could shift to focus more on crime prevention, as routine monitoring of storefronts could be important.

A Blueprint for Totalitarian Control of Society

In this vision of turnkey totalitarian control of society, the vaccine was pre-approved: “Partner with pharmaceutical industry to produce anti-virals and vaccine.”

The National Security Council was put in charge of policymaking. The CDC was just the marketing operation. That’s why it felt like martial law. Without using those words, that’s what was being declared. It even urged information management, with censorship strongly implied.

As part of the lockdowns, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was and is part of the Department of Homeland Security, as set up in 2018, broke the entire American labor force into essential and nonessential.

They also set up and enforced censorship protocols, which is why it seemed like so few objected. In addition, CISA was tasked with overseeing mail-in ballots for the November election.

Congress passed and the president signed the 880-page CARES Act, which authorized the distribution of $2 trillion to states, businesses and individuals, thus guaranteeing that lockdowns would continue for the duration.

They wanted zero cases of COVID in the country. That was never going to happen. It’s very likely that the virus had already been circulating in the U.S. and Canada from October 2019. A famous study by Jay Bhattacharya came out in May 2020 discerning that infections and immunity were already widespread in the California county they examined.

What that implied was two crucial points: There was zero hope for the zero COVID mission and this pandemic would end as they all did, through herd immunity, not from a vaccine as such. That was certainly not the message that was being broadcast from Washington.

The growing sense at the time was that we all had to sit tight and just wait for the inoculation on which pharmaceutical companies were working.

Different Sets of Rules

By summer 2020, you recall what happened. A restless generation of kids fed up with this stay-at-home nonsense seized on the opportunity to protest racial injustice in the killing of George Floyd.

Public health officials approved of these gatherings — unlike protests against lockdowns — on grounds that racism was a virus even more serious than COVID. Some of these protests got out of hand and became violent and destructive.

Meanwhile, substance abuse raged — the liquor and weed stores never closed — and immune systems were being degraded by lack of normal exposure, exactly as some doctors had predicted.

Millions of small businesses had closed. The learning losses from school closures were mounting, as it turned out that Zoom school was near worthless.

It was about this time that Trump seemed to figure out that he had been played and started urging states to reopen. But it was strange: He seemed to be less in the position of being a president in charge and more of a public pundit, tweeting out his wishes until his account was banned. He was unable to put the worms back in the can that he had approved opening.

By that time, and by all accounts, Trump was convinced that the whole effort was a mistake, that he had been trolled into wrecking the country he promised to make great. It was too late.

Mail-in ballots had been widely approved, the country was in shambles, the media and public health bureaucrats were ruling the airwaves and his final months of the campaign failed even to come to grips with the reality on the ground.

(In this interview, I discuss how the censorship industrial complex is working to end free speech in America. I also discuss what I see coming in the November election. Go here to watch it).

Didn’t They Say Vaccines Would Prevent Infection?

At the time, many people had predicted that once Biden took office and the vaccine was released, COVID would be declared to have been beaten. But that didn’t happen and mainly for one reason: Resistance to the vaccine was more intense than anyone had predicted.

The Biden administration attempted to impose mandates on the entire U.S. workforce. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling, that effort was thwarted but not before HR departments around the country had already implemented them.

As the months rolled on — and four major cities closed all public accommodations to the unvaccinated, who were being demonized for prolonging the pandemic — it became clear that the vaccine could not and would not stop infection or transmission, which means that this shot could not be classified as a public health benefit.

Even as a private benefit, the evidence was mixed. Any protection it provided was short-lived and reports of vaccine injury began to mount. Even now, we cannot gain full clarity on the scale of the problem because essential data and documentation remain classified.

What Exactly Happened?

After four years, we find ourselves in a strange position. We still do not know precisely what unfolded in mid-March 2020: who made what decisions, when, and why. There has been no serious attempt at any high level to provide a clear accounting much less assign blame.

Not even Tucker Carlson, who reportedly played a crucial role in getting Trump to panic over the virus, will tell us the source of his own information or what his source told him. There have been a series of valuable hearings in the House and Senate but they have received little to no press attention, and none has focused on the lockdown orders themselves.

The prevailing attitude in public life is just to forget the whole thing. And yet we live now in a country very different from the one we inhabited five years ago. Our media is captured. Social media is widely censored in violation of the First Amendment, a problem being taken up by the Supreme Court this month with no certainty of the outcome.

The administrative state that seized control has not given up power. Crime has been normalized. Art and music institutions are on the rocks. Public trust in all official institutions is at rock bottom. We don’t even know if we can trust the elections anymore.

In the early days of lockdown, Henry Kissinger warned that if the mitigation plan does not go well, the world will find itself set “on fire.” He died in 2023. Meanwhile, the world is indeed on fire.

The essential struggle in every country on Earth today concerns the battle between the authority and power of the permanent administration apparatus of the state – the very one that took total control in lockdowns – and the enlightenment ideal of a government that is responsible to the will of the people and the moral demand for freedom and rights.

How this struggle turns out is the essential story of our times.

A few weeks ago we looked at the current state of M&A play in the US shale patch, and concludes that with most E&P companies – from small to XXX-large – either set acquire (or be acquired) and/or have opted for an independent future for the near-term, it was only a matter of time before the burst in oil production that defined late 2023 and early 2024, and was meant to window-dress the books of various potential acquisition targets, was about to dry out with a whimper.

The shale turbo boost has peaked with the E&P merger wave over.

It’s all downhill from here pic.twitter.com/UaUGDqlVwE

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 3, 2024

Fast forward three weeks, and what we predicted would happen has happened, along with Brent jumping to a 2024 six-month high on its way to going far higher…

Overnight, in Goldman’s weekly Oil Tracker note, the bank’s commodity team showed in its “chart of the week” the striking observation that – at a time when everyone and their grandmother is expecting US oil production to keep rising while OPEC+ slashes its own – pipeline implied US L48 crude production has declined nearly 0.4mb/d since December to 12.6mb/d, with a 160kb/d week-on-week drop in Genscape data (14DMA). Furthermore, the 3-month moving average US crude production growth slowed to 550kb/d YoY, with softness in the Gulf of Mexico.

And just like that the biggest bear case brandished around by the oil bears crashed and burns.

Which is not to say that US shale production is about to crater to 0 and oil will hit $200 overnight: as Goldman writes in the report, other key trends of the week were mixed, with lower Russia production on the bullish side, but softness in Goldman’s China demand nowcast and the crude basis, and the sharp rise in positioning on the bearish side.

Before we turn on China, let’s first take a closer look at what’s taking place in Russia; Here Goldman notes that the bank’s Russian liquids production nowcast slipped by 0.2mb/d this week to 10.4mb/d on lower refinery runs following drone attacks that continued over the weekend.

• Russian refinery runs decreased by 0.3mb/d since the first string of drone attacks on Russian refineries in January.
• Russian production is now roughly in line with the pledged cuts of 1mb/d from February 2023 average.

Speaking of the plunge in Russian refinery runs, last week we learned that none other than Joe Biden himself slammed Ukraine for daring to attack the heart of Russian oil infrastructure as the guaranteed outcome are much higher gas and oil prices, which make it less likely the Fed will be able to cut rates, and thus ensure that Biden’s already abysmal approval rating will slide even further. No wonder the FT said that the “White House had grown increasingly frustrated by brazen Ukrainian drone attacks that have struck oil refineries, terminals, depots and storage facilities across western Russia, hurting its oil production capacity.” An NSC spokesperson told the FT that “we do not encourage or enable attacks inside of Russia.”

Translation: we encourage them not to attack Russian refineries.

But wait, there’s more: not only did Rosneft halt the primary unite at its Kuibyshev oil refinery in Samara after the latest Ukraine drone attack, but sensing that Biden is suddenly extremely vulnerable to further Russian production cuts, Reuters reported this morning that Russia’s government has ordered companies to reduce oil output in the second quarter.

While the stated reason is to ensure they meet a production target of 9 million barrels per day (bpd) by the end of June in line with its pledges to OPEC+, three industry sources said on Monday, Russia never before made a big stink about cheating on its OPEC+ promises, until now.  Why? Because suddenly every incremental dollar in oil costs means Biden’s approval rating drops by (at least) 1%.

And just like that, the fate of Biden’s re-election is now in the hands of the two things he hates the most: US shale companies and Vladimir Putin… as is the price of oil and gas, and expect both to keep rising for the foreseeable future crushing any last hope Biden may have had of being re-elected.

Going back to the Goldman report, the bank next turns to China where it says that its oil demand nowcast remained soft week at 15.7mb/d, and adds that “the risks to our forecast of a 350kb/d deficit in Q2 are balanced as the misses in our US supply nowcast and our China demand nowcasts are roughly offsetting.”

Finally, Goldman’s OECD total oil landed commercial stocks nowcast — the key variable in the bank’s crude pricing framework — remains about 19mb below its March expectations at 2,723mb.

More in the full Goldman note available to pro subscribers.