See, the Conqu’ring Hero Comes!

Just when you thought the British ruling classes could not stoop any lower or more avidly play Limelight Leapfrog to the detriment of their electors’ well-being, we lately witnessed a deluge of fawning, flash-lit, choreographed adulation over the petty, proxy-war despot masquerading as a paladin of liberty – the fearless defender of ‘our values’  – who was not seen as the importunate beggar he is, but as some holy guru, come to grace them with his sainted presence. Continue reading

We Must Rise

Though a long standing critic of the EU and a vocal supporter of Brexit, I never harboured any illusions that it was going to be a panacea for the UK’s more deep-seated ills. Rather, the practical element of my advocacy was that it ought to have meant that neither the mistakes nor the malice of the domestic government could continue to be conveniently blamed on others. That way, it was to be hoped that the escape from the Brussels Bonapartes might afford the electorate a heightened means of demanding accountability from their so-called ‘representatives’.

Alas, our homegrown politicians – whether bullied, bribed, blackmailed, brainwashed, or simply backroom Berias – have since shown the utter depth of my folly on that score.

In essence, ‘We took back control’ from Brussels only to hand ourselves- bound hand, foot, and facemask- to a far more sinister – if not an actively satanic- clique.

And now we are truly lost.

The chains with which to bind us, our children  – and indeed all of future Mankind – are being forged, link by link, hour by hour. They are being woven into an inescapable mesh of unblinking surveillance, pervasive control, human livestock-farming, bodily violation, spiritual subjugation, social deracination, immiseration, and chafing constraint.

And yet, we mostly stand by and do nothing to resist our coming enslavement. After all, Malaga beckons, now that we’ve meekly enlisted in the genetech experiment. United are at home this weekend. And that woman did s-o-o well on ‘Strictly’ last night, didn’t she?

Pan(ic)em et Circenses prevails while the plutocrats and praetorians openly parade their power and mock our feeble struggles, interrupting their scornful displays of unmasked mirth only to extinguish our voices permanently and to mark us down for a subsistence-level Social Credit score in the Digital Gulag now being erected around us.

Parliament is defunct. The judiciary sleeps. The media has been suborned. The churches preach the Gospel of Lucifer. “ScienceTM” is become our graven idol and “The Planet”, the stepped pyramid on whose blood-stained summit we must sacrifice our offspring in expiation for the sin of once being free, prosperous, and largely self-reliant.

Where is the end? What chance have we to escape this Hell?

The one, faint hope, is that the sneering hubris of the Davocracy and the utter, weaselly mendacity of their Pawns-in-Office (Yes, that means YOU, Prime Minister!) finally stirs enough outrage in us, the supine masses, that we look up from our smartphones, switch off Netflix, take out our earbuds, and awaken to our peril.

But what then? What are we to do, if we are to clamber back out of the abyss before its walls reach insurmountably far above the depths to which we have already fallen?

I suggest that the answer lies before us in the antics of those twin street-theatre troupes of state-endorsed energy poverty – Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain. We should learn from their irritating example and ask ourselves this question: if a clutch of raggedy vicars and a gaggle of metromarxist matrons can bring those lawfully travelling the nation’s highways shuddering to a frustrated halt, what could hundreds – thousands – TENS of thousands – of peaceful protesters not achieve, in their place?

If we are to ward off the impending evil, we need a liberation movement akin to that which toppled and humiliated the awful despotism of Red Communism. We, too, must act en masse if we are to avoid being enveloped in the enduring misery promised by that former tyranny’s new, Green instar. We must quickly rein in the Medico-Media Industrial Complex which otherwise threatens to crush us into expropriated atoms.

We therefore need to take inspiration from Solidarnosc and mimic its resolute stand of four decades ago against the awful and then seemingly insuperable might of the Soviets.

Solidarity, the movement, we clearly need. But it would also greatly help our cause if we had a figurehead, a leader, a spokesperson, a personification of the struggle, a voice of the people – our very own Lech Walesa.

Where can we find such a one? Among the few honest MPs who have vainly striven to hold back this Juggernaut and hold the Junta to account? Among the courageous handful in the media who have refused to parrot the narrative of fear or to intone top-of-the-hour demands for further craven servitude? Or is there someone as yet unknown to the public stage – a conscientious doctor, an outraged mother, a working man of keen intellect and cast-iron scruples? Does anyone know?

Surely someone among us must possess the requisite character, the moral backbone, the ability to articulate the aspirations of the Silent – or rather, the Silenced – Majority: someone willing to grasp the flag of freedom and lead us over the barricades to win back our God-given liberties?

We must earnestly hope they do exist and, existing, that they can be persuaded to stand up bravely before the basilisk glare of the Deep State and the venomous breath of its ravening corporate cronies. For without our enlistment in this Army of Passive Resistance and without him or her to help mobilise and guide our struggle, the corrupt institutions under which we suffer will continue relentlessly about their wicked schemes until they reduce us all to digitised, sanitised, lobotomised serfs, each anxiously flashing our short-expiry Health Passports; hoping the value of our newly-programmable digital currency will not dwindle too quickly in our hands; and ever fearful that our personalized, good-behaviour carbon-rations will not be enough to fill our bellies or to allow us to warm our homes.

Be under no illusion, that last, bleak vision of a technocratic Dystopia is no longer a matter of science-fiction. It has long since moved from ‘conspiracy theory’ to avowed intent. If this is not the legacy we wish to bequeath to our children, we must rise – and rise soon before the prison walls about us become impregnable.

 

Faites vos jeux!

Here we are, the day of the US election: a vote which follows an unusually rancorous campaign in a nation more than normally divided by culture, ideology, and notions of ‘identity’ – real or affected.

To the extent we believe what their advisors have told them to say on the stump or promote in their slick, slanted advertising slots, Trump is the man who wishes to preserve as much of the status quo as possible – for good or ill – while Biden stands as the front half of a curious pantomime horse: a half-century veteran, machine politician who seems to aspire to eke out his dotage as head of the student union of some awfully Right-On, Liberal Arts college. Continue reading

MMT Vessels Make The Most Noise

As a sort of Keynes-manqué, Stephanie Kelton’s moment in the limelight is being granted her for much the same reason as was that of her more illustrious predecessor: she is telling free-spending politicians what they always want to hear – viz., that their habitual incontinence is statesmanship of the highest order. Continue reading

Chasing the Dragon

As is by now widely reported, China stocks have been on something of a tear in the past few weeks, with the CSI300, for example, up by around 20% in that time. The usual suspects have been at work as the PBOC has encouraged a renewed money flood into being and those desperate for an income – and possibly with little else to do, at present – are enticed back into what is merely the latest in the nation’s rolling series of mania and speculative booms. Continue reading

Hoping for Growth. Searching for Value.

Thanks very much to my old friend, Steve Sedgwick at Squawk Box Europe for the chat this morning. We looked at Growth v Value, the US v ROW, we touched on bonds and borrowing, money supply, inflation, lockdown, commodities & gold – all in under 10 minutes!

 

To fill out what all might seem a bit rushed on the soundfile, here are the notes I sent to accompany our chat, complete with a little extra gloss for you to read at your leisure:-

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Saturn Devours His Children

A recent Wall St Journal article gave vent to a scare-story full of Underconsumptionist claptrap, carried under the catchy headline: “The Coronavirus Savings Glut”. Ironically, and only a day later, the paper ran a second piece entitled “How Coronavirus Upended a Trillion-Dollar Corporate Borrowing Binge and Kicked Off a Wave of Bankruptcies”.

Huh? Does the Journal think we have too many savings or too few? Who can say? The only thing that is clear is that editorial consistency comes a distant second to clickbait and column inches.

Meanwhile, politicians everywhere have been urging those they have at last let out of Lockdown to get out and ‘spend’ as a means of speeding the recovery. Nor have the various banks’ Talking Heads been slow to chime in with predictably supportive exhortations for their various home governments to adopt policies aimed at ‘driving demand’.

[A version of this article is also available as a PODCAST] Continue reading

After the Fall of Caffa

While politicians anxiously check the shifting weather-vanes of public opinion and scientists squabble over facts as well as interpretations, central banks are resolutely doing what they do best – wildly exceeding their briefs and trying to drown all problems in a flood of newly-created money. As ever, the underconsumptionists worry that a lack of demand will usher in deflation, in spite of all such efforts. Some of us, however, worry more about what it will do to supply. Here, we explain why [For those who would like a podcast version please follow this LINK]:-

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Free Lunch Finance

The poster girl of the voguish crankdom that is Modern Monetary Theory (“MMT”) – Stephanie Kelton, has been out pimping her new book – “The Deficit Myth” – with a great deal of help from the unofficial PR department which she seems to have, nestled within the House Organ of Davos, the execrable FT.

Here, Professor Kelton – for all the puffery about how fearless and radical is her approach – is pushing at an open door: a gaping aperture in the last bastion of economic rationality that is being held open by no less than Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, a man who recently went on record to boast: “We will never run out of money.”

[Also available as a podcast]

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Green Illusions

A recent, long post on Linked-In relates the story of how an attempt to set up a business recycling aluminium cans in the city of Toulouse in France failed for reasons of cost, lack of customer appetite, and ultimately out of the sheer technical impossibility of achieving the desired 100% ‘Green Loop’ for which the enterprise – ‘La Boucle Verte’ – was named.

Having delivered a fairly detailed case history of the business itself, the author – ‘Founder and President’ Charles Dauzet – then gives way to an even lengthier disquisition on what he himself describes as ‘the illusion of green growth’; a diatribe in which all the usual tropes of denialism are themselves lovingly and painstakingly recycled, complete with a supposedly telling graph showing that world GDP per capita tends to move in rough correspondence with total oil consumption (a relation which, in fact, shows we are collectively becoming more sparing in our usage).

Since oil is held to be a finite resource (and passing over the issue of whether, if it truly is so in any meaningful sense, it is the only one at our disposal), the righteous M. Dauzet jumps straight to the conclusion that we must abandon the very idea of material progress itself since, one day, we must inevitably exhaust the means to fuel it.

Oh dear!

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