You Better Start Swimming, Because Drowning Is Bad For Your Health

ThE HoUsE oF CaRdS iS fALLiNg DoWn…

“It seems plain that “the Market” cannot sort this.”

And with this psychopathic regime, it will of course be left to the market.

Rationing would mean the Poors get food and resources that should be hoarded by the rich and powerful.

The only thing that this regime will give to the Poors (which will soon include the remaining middle class) will be lead. Out of the end of a gun…

What do you think ICE is for?

‘How the Global Crisis Will Unfold’
Steve Keen and Michael Hudson via the David Graeber Institute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIypIDWQAQw

Inflation — perhaps hyperinflation — alongside demand destruction, and therefore deflation., paradoxical as that might sound. Simultaneously and certainly in quick succession.

Those in the most tenuous situation of all are the Gulf States. Knock out their ability to produce and destroy the desalinization plants, their respective populations will revolt and/or flee.

The refugee crisis will be cataclysmic. Populations will be running to and fro seeking refuge where none exists.

Needless to say, this is a orgasmic fantasy come true for the worldwide oligarchy. A real Hunger Games. Karp already has a erection. Soon enough, he will be starching his shorts with his baby batter at least a dozen times a day as he watches the carnage from his comfy bunker, pud in hand.

Bruce was correct about No Kings. Soros-backed and Israel-backed. Oligarch-backed. Containment of dissent. I knew it logically and intuitively. It stands to reason, right?

No Way Out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t1Bd5SEXaw

Transcript for the Hudson-Keen talk ‘Inflation First, Deflation Next’

https://michael-hudson.com/2026/03/inflation-first-deflation-next/

Sarah Taber (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13gQAt7OzxE) in her video and in the YouTube comments says fertilizer is manageable. Ammonium phosphate is the most popular because it requires the least labor but it can be replaced by manure, which takes a lot of labor. There’s a lot of cow shit here in North America and India. And there’s a metric tonne of pig manure.

The problem is diesel, insofar as I have inferred from various sources. If countries can’t transport food long distance via refrigerator trucks, then food will become localized. So, countries that have been replacing their cities’ surrounding farmlands with suburbs, beware.

Taber also notes in her comments section that the problem will become multiplied for non-Western countries if America bails out its farmers for fertilizer and diesel costs, as they’ll outcompete smaller nations for ammonium phosphate and diesel, which will raise food costs in those countries.

“There’s a lot of cow shit here in North America and India. And there’s a metric tonne of pig manure.”

If it is not already being used as fertilizer is is being converted to biomass. There’s no play left in the supply, that’s why other fertilizers are needed to maintain current crop levels and qualities.

Samuel Conner:

see the imbeciles jimmy carter, and paul volker.

What ails us today is the result of human error. Significant human error on myriad levels.

Chastise JIT (Just In Time) inventory all you like but you are simply shooting the messenger.

JIT dovetailed with TQM (Total Quality Management) and TPM (Total Preventive Management) works. (For the record, I am an industrial/systems engineer by education, training and experience with 30 years experience all over the globe. JIT/TQM/TPM saved the manufacturing economy, at least until those Wall Street Bozos decided to “financial engineer” beginning in the late 80s, but I digress.)

Additionally, JIT seems to be working splendidly in China, despite the Trumpian debacle we currently face, leaving only one question to be answered:

When will the rest of the world turn their backs on America and move on without us?

I suspect that day is fast approaching.

Wonder what the Trumpie’s will do when there’s no gas for their Suburbans and F-350s?

We shall see.

Six Sigma was Welchian BS.

I studied under the godfather of statistical design and analysis of experiments, Doug Montgomery at Georgia Tech. I can do more on the back of a postcard than a hundred GE engineers with laptops. Give me a sample size of n=30 normally distributed data points and inside a day my data analytics can have your process producing a capability index (Cpk) above 2.0 (this is old school stats).

A funny aside about Six Sigma. In 2001 the American Society for Quality (ASQ) offered their first Six Sigma professional exam. It was scheduled for October so I was unable to take it as I was deployed for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

The next exam was the first weekend in March 2002 and I finagled my way home to sit for the exam. All I had to study for the exam was my old college texts by Montgomery and a few other dense reliability engineering texts. A prep course arrived in Thursday before the exam on Saturday, so I dogeared a few pages and headed for the exam.

On Saturday I ended up sitting next to the local ASQ Chapter President. I had been asked a year before to teach classes in the local chapter but she had vetoed me, stating I was “…an outdated relic from a bygone era…” mostly because I carried an abacus and slide rule with me at all times (and still do).

I took the exam that Saturday and returned to Afghanistan on Monday. About six weeks later my wife received the ASQ professional rag which listed me as the only person in our chapter to have passed the exam.

Naturally, I wrote the current Chapter President and expressed my delight at having passed the exam with almost no prep work – while asking how she did, ha!

She was miffed.

Having passed it on a lark, I decided when I returned and officially retired from the military to use my quant skills to study for the CFA exam. THAT exam helped me see the 2008 crash well in advance, take precautions, and pounce back into the market the same day in March 2009 that the late Mark Haines of CNBC said it was the bottom.

Summarizing, stats really work – but only if one truly understands them on the same level as Kipling’s Six Good Serving Men.

if you watched the hilarious setting up of the pigeons to be plucked. the stock market soared today on the hopes that iran is open to negotiations, they have already been open with demands that they will not deviate from, and those demands we will not accept because it means total defeat, it means the cleansing of the middle east of all financial leeches and parasites from the west, and their arab boot lickers, and the dismantling of the zionist state.

there might be be some nice selling tomorrow, as the rich pluck the pigeons.

SPUD:

JIT works in Japan, the Five Tiger nations, China, S. Korea, and Germany….right up to the moment we, as a society, decided that “financial engineering was more valuable and important that the most fundamental law of economics – that the scarcity of resources drives economies.

I knew this at age 11 when I earned my first award in Boy Scouts, SOAR, Save Our American Resources. My father, a nuclear engineer, had no answer to my simple question: what are you going to do with the spent uranium.

In college my classmates and I built a battery powered car.

Reagan tore the solar panels off the White House.

Had we followed Carter’s model towards energy independence we would have obviated the need for an expansive global military apparatus, become energy independent, and obviated the number one driver of inflation since the end of WWII, fuel prices.

JIT is NOT the problem.

The problem is we employ systems that are biased towards power and money.

My suggestion is everyone become a Stoic and get off the grid like someone observed – and then did – 40 years ago….

TacJack:

china stockpiles and diversify sources. these guys did not.

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/reliance-on-gulf-oil-exposes-south-korea-and-japan-to-looming-energy-crisis

Reliance on Gulf oil exposes South Korea and Japan to looming energy crisis

“SEOUL – Iran’s blocking of the Strait of Hormuz is threatening an energy crisis for South Korea and Japan, both of which are industrial economies that rely heavily on the Middle East for their crude oil supply.

Neither South Korea nor Japan has significant domestic oil production, leaving them almost entirely reliant on imported crude to sustain their energy needs, even as their economies depend heavily on export-oriented manufacturing.”

they also rely on other peoples markets that practice just in time. so the reverberations will explode all through out the the crank economic driven western economies.

your question to your father was correct.

solar and wind have a long ways to go yet to be viable full time. that’s why china really does not practice just in time, stockpiles and has a diversity of sources.

you have defined our system correctly.

An Economist “hammering on the same old lessons he wants us to draw from it”!??

You don’t say.

The actual political economy may be an emergent compound system too complex to fully comprehend. In my experience, most economists arrogant enough to believe themselves more knowledgeable than the common man or college sophomore about either the theory of economics or the working of an actual economy subscribe to some version of “the noble lie” — the belief that as a superior mind they should assume responsibility to nurture in the minds of lesser folk some ennobling fiction or mythos that might serve to better maintain and legitimate the social order for the greater good of all.

Mainstream economics functions as a kind of civic religion, in case you haven’t noticed.

Hudson is pretty up front that he hopes to legitimate some form of debt jubilee, by repeating and elaborating his ancient history of debt, combined with 19th century rhetorical attacks on economic rent.

Most economists have such “noble lie” agendas, but keep different noble lies in mind. And in the textbooks.

Steve Keen, to his credit, does not seem to be as determined as most economists are, to control or determine what ordinary people think about economics or the economy. Keen’s agitated by the poor quality of economics pedagogy that results from economists lazily “waving their hands” in front of impressionable sophomores in their day job and preaching the gospel of capitalism in their side hustle.

Where I would fault Keen is that his manic determination to debunk the faulty arguments of the introductory textbooks does not leave much room to teach or curate genuine insight about economics and the way the economy works. He’s latched on to a few home truths, like the energy basis of productivity, but he isn’t patient enough with careful reasoning to appreciate or assemble a fuller account. He couldn’t write an adequate economics textbook, which imho is desperately needed to displace the current agnatology.

I think Keen and Hudson are on the side of angels, as is Yves Smith. I don’t mean to be hypercritical.

But, as the world hurtles forward toward massive crises — economic and financial crises to a large extent — the age-old question — malevolent or incompetent? — is only a question because our shared understanding of economics and how the political economy does, can and should work as a system is so poor. As a species practically, we are stuck in Dunning-Krueger land as far as economics is concerned.

As for whether there is a grand conspiracy to create a global crisis? On some level — several levels of varying competence and malevolence — of course there is. There are always factions jockeying over the power to remake the rules of game in various domains. Probably no one faction yet dominates — that’s a prominent reason we are having wars.

One thing that seems to me to be missing are more-or-less idealistic factions pushing for a workable architecture to contain the chaos. There’s rarely any thing positive, more definite than a declaration of faith in cheap solar panels or unfounded optimism about a multipolarity of dictators.

As one example, Keen, again to his credit, has recalled Keynes’ bancor proposal at Bretton Woods as a way to suggest that maybe the world should deliberately choose a financial architecture to follow the dollar and to allow the dollar a controlled demolition. Powerful forces, without countervailing advocacy for the global public interest, will choose chaotic collapse on the way to climbing the ladder of chaos to an eventual emergent system they can benefit by cheating. Is that malevolence or incompetence? Perhaps the malevolence of some making use of the incompetence of most.

This is the pattern, step-by-step on the path to global crisis, of legacy investments in stabilizing institutions being broken and squandered, while (well-meaning?) ignorance looks on, apparently not comprehending the implied consequences.

A couple of tips:
Blue Boy in the fifth and
stay out of dark alleys

TacJack

“financial engineering was more valuable and important that the most fundamental law of economics – that the scarcity of resources drives economies.

This was a result of Reagan’s deregulation. The FDR economy wisely knew that paper manipulation and “financial engineering” always would provide easy “profits without adding value, profits without work” so set up roadblocks to keep would-be “drivers” from going that way. Reagan was the first to really start taking those roadblocks down.

And there’s just no way that companies in competitive markets making real products or delivering real services (i.e., not rentier capitalism) can ‘compete for capital’ once Wall Street fraud and ponzi schemes became legal; they just cannot achieve the same profit margins. JIT and all the other corporate strategies that aimed to cut costs were just expedients that eventually failed, so we saw consolidations until we had non-competitive markets. (Again, the Fair Deal and the New Deal tried to prevent consolidations, but Reagan ended anti-trust).

JIT was actually the milder offense against manufacturing; because after that, it was all about cutting muscle and bone (actual technical and manufacturing competency). US companies today don’t have the institutional knowledge of companies a generation ago, and often don’t have the equipment or hardware to boot, because the the people and hardware were kicked out the door for short-term profit. The leadership of these companies that used to be engineers and technical types (my old company included) were all replaced by MBA financial “geniuses”.

As someone who holds both domestic and foreign stock, I see the foreign stocks are much more stable (so far) than domestic stock. I think the Reagan/Rand/Friedman/Hayek/von Mises types see US market volatility as GOOD THING, as it feeds “useless eater” day trader types who try to either guess (or use insider information) to “buy low/sell high” but actually do NOTHING to contribute to actual productive capacity, and in fact, are the chief cause to its eventual detriment. I’ve always favored highly punitive taxation on short-term gains, and my definition “short term” would go far longer than a year. Force traders to not gamble on “what’s this going to be like next day or week?” but force them to think of “next five years” or better yet, “next ten years”.

It works in particular ways right now because of the institutions people built to make it work that way. If they built different institutions it would work differently.

Or, fail to work at all.

The economists talk nonsensically about a “natural” and “self-regulating” “market economy”. The economists are misleading themselves and others much of the time, sometimes deliberately and sometimes out of their own embrace of willful ignorance.

The political economy is an emergent system. The creation and management of the institutions and “rules of the game” that order that system are contested politically and subject to a kind of evolution by trial-and-error. People try something while other people basically try to stop them or screw it up and what we have is what survives for the time being.

GOTTERDAMERUNG, here we go!

I wonder why some people believe that Trump can only be blackmailed by one group OR another, rather than both at once or both in rotating succession or even more than two blackmailers.

The Leftanons believe in Mossad blackmailing Trump. The Blueanons believe in Putin blackmailing Trump. Why not both? What if the FSB has spies deep inside Mossad? After all, FSB is said to be very good at its job, especially with all its inherited KGB knowledge and traditions.