Cultural Marxism and the Red International Women’s Day

Global civic demonstrations as practiced by young and compass-less anarchist hordes have become the latest expression of cultural Marxism, an “unseen plague which corrupted America” and now threatens the rest of the western world, including small, formerly communist countries that allegedly overcame Soviet satellite status.

To understand why I use the term “allegedly,” you must understand the nostalgia of older generations, for the good ole simple days of communism, the longing for the days when they were dependent on the meager rations doled out to them monthly by the communist party apparatchiks in order to keep them compliant and willing to be subjected to the utopia of “communist freedom,” a form of mental and physical enslavement.

Insidious cultural Marxism has affected; Academia, Liberal textbooks, books in general, movies, main stream media, Internet, television

The insidious cultural Marxism has affected the minds of millions, how they think, how they perceive the world around them, life in general, and how humanity evolved.  Academia, liberal textbooks, and books in general, movies, the main stream media, Internet, and television have shaped a new generation of drones who worship at the feet of cultural Marxism.

Karl Marx and the Bolsheviks in Russia tried to unite the proletariat by force under the Soviet banner but countries resisted, they cared more about their nationalism, their borders, about their economic freedom than the Bolshevik’s envy and desire to destroy capitalist success. But Antonio Gramsci’s idea, lesser known to the western world, was to change the western culture, the American and European culture slowly, so that the new generations will be willing and eager to accept Marxism.

The Marxist-Communist Party in Germany established in 1923 an institute later known as the Frankfurt School, to overturn the accepted societal standards and replace them with Marxist ideals. When Hitler rose to power, these “scholars” were chased out of Germany and they sought refuge in America, at Columbia University in New York – George Lukas, Antonio Gramsci, Charles Reich, Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Wilhelm Reich.

George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and other NGOs, injected the virus of Cultural Marxism into societies around the globe

So far they’ve been quite successful in destroying Christian morals upon which the west was founded, replacing Christianity with values such as “cultural pessimism, sexual revolution, destruction of marriage and family, feminism, gender identity, transgenderism, bathroom use by biological opposites, and same sex marriage.”

George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and other NGOs, injected the virus of Cultural Marxism into societies around the globe, with large infusions of cash that produced generations of followers at universities, high schools, middle and elementary schools, in the mass media, and Hollywood’s militant actors who fancy themselves the ultimate scholarly authority.  Generations of politicians, actors, lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists, professors, and other intellectuals have graduated from this school of thought in the last 25 years.

Many advisors to presidents in Europe and the U.S. have been brainwashed as well into the Cultural Marxism school of thought. A very high percentage of my former high school and college students were products of Cultural Marxism and its intolerance for divergent opinions and belief systems.

Europe, by virtue of its location, is more advanced in its acceptance and total embrace of Cultural Marxism but we are not that far behind.

Communists who call themselves progressives today have co-opted language and invented Political Correctness, a form of language censorship, among other things, to indoctrinate the pliable youth into Marxism.  You could say that language matters.

Somehow, by hook or by crook, all of you are going to live under the Democrat’s brand of communism/Islamofascism

The slogan Forward, used in the past by communists and fascists alike, is a good case in point. Forward to what? The Chinese under Mao went so forward with Marxist exploitation of the masses that they starved their own people to death. The Soviet people starved to death under Stalin, often by design as was the case in Ukraine, other times because the economic five-year central planning of the Communist Party was a disaster.

Hillary’s campaign used the slogan Forward in recent times. Her young and old supporters cheered like the sheep they were. How forward did the Democrat states and cities go? Look at the financial disaster that the state of California is and at the impoverished Detroit and other Democrat-ruled bastions, and you will understand the Democrat’s communist brand of Forward.

Democrats and the virulent left have totally appropriated terminology in political discussions. Ordinary people hear sound bites, over and over, and believe them because most people take their information from the main stream media.

Progressives are now involved in “resistance,” they “resist” through violence a duly-elected President they do not like by calling him “Hitler.” The man has done absolutely nothing to resemble what Hitler did to millions in Europe during WWII and in his concentration camps. Progressives are using “resist” as if they are fighting against injustice or some kind of oppression that does not exist. The term, however, has now spread around the world because the communist left is well-funded by globalists who want to make sure there is a pliant populace in the entire western world. The young people “resist” through street demonstrations paid by the same Soros-sponsored NGOs.

The Illusion Of Progress

Via Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

This is precisely what you"d expect of a self-serving elite that was desperate to cloak the unhappy reality that the relative few are benefiting immensely at the expense of the many.

The core narrative of politics everywhere is progress, i.e. "moving forward." If progress isn"t being made, politicos and the system are failing.

In the past, "progressive" movements sought to advance both social and economic opportunities for marginalized groups.

For a variety of reasons, social progress has been decoupled from economic progress.

In broadly disintegrative eras such as the present, the stagnation of economic opportunity is masked by redefining progress in purely social terms: progress is defined as the social advance of a marginalized populace into the mainstream.

When the marginalized populace is comprised of many millions of individuals, social progress and economic progress are mutually reinforcing dynamics: opportunities for social advancement in the mainstream created economic opportunities, and vice versa.

Now that social/economic progress has lifted the major marginalized populaces--ethnic and religious minorities, gays--substantially into the mainstream, those remaining marginalized populaces are modest in size. Estimates of the trans-gender populace, for example, are generally less than 1% of the total population.

The marginalized groups" advances that are markers for "proof of progress" have decoupled from economic advances. Few if any social-justice promoters of trans-gender rights, for example, claim any economic gains will accompany this social progress.

The reason why social progress has been effectively decoupled from economic progress is that the woeful lack of economic progress for the bottom 90% proves financial progress is now limited to an elite comprised of Oligarchs, Nomenklatura, the Technocrat Class and a relative handful of entrepreneurs.

Everyone else has been losing ground in wages, wealth and opportunity. If we measure progress in very broad terms such as participation in and ownership of the most productive parts of the current mode of production, then this chart forces us to conclude that movement for the vast majority is now backward, not forward.

To mask this disquieting and politically discordant reality, the status quo of the Corporate Media, academia, state functionaries and technocrats has redefined "progress" to exclude hard financial data that reflects widespread, systemic stagnation for the bottom 90% in favor of "feel-good" social-justice virtue-signaling.

This is precisely what you"d expect of a self-serving elite that is desperate to cloak the potentially explosive reality that the relative few are benefiting immensely at the expense of the many. So please take your social-justice "progress" with a grain of salt the size of the iceberg that sank the Titanic: if we measure progress solely by participation in and ownership of the most productive parts of the current mode of production, a much different snapshot emerges: economic stagnation is not progress.

Ihre Papiere, Bitte!: Are We Being Set Up For A National ID System?

Via John Whitehead of The Rutherford Institute,

You can’t have it both ways.

You can’t live in a constitutional republic if you allow the government to act like a police state.

You can’t claim to value freedom if you allow the government to operate like a dictatorship.

You can’t expect to have your rights respected if you allow the government to treat whomever it pleases with disrespect and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

If you’re inclined to advance this double standard because you believe you have done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide, beware: there’s always a boomerang effect.

Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now - whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America great again - rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

Nothing is ever as simple as the government claims it is.

The war on drugs turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with SWAT teams and militarized police.

The war on terror turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention.

The war on immigration will be yet another war on the American people, waged with roving government agents demanding “papers, please.”

So you see, when you talk about empowering government agents to demand identification from anyone they suspect might be an illegal immigrant—the current scheme being entertained by the Trump administration to ferret out and cleanse the country of illegal immigrants—what you’re really talking about is creating a society in which you are required to identify yourself to any government worker who demands it.

Just recently, in fact, passengers arriving in New York’s JFK Airport on a domestic flight from San Francisco were ordered to show their “documents” to border patrol agents in order to get off the plane.

This is how you pave the way for a national identification system.

Americans have always resisted adopting a national ID card for good reason: it gives the government and its agents the ultimate power to target, track and terrorize the populace according to the government’s own nefarious purposes.

National ID card systems have been used before by oppressive governments—in Nazi Germany against the Jews, in South Africa against black citizens, in Rwanda against the Tutsis—in the name of national security, invariably with horrifying results.

In the United States, post-9/11, more than 750 Muslim men were rounded up on the basis of their religion and ethnicity and detained for up to eight months. Their experiences echo those of 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were similarly detained 75 years ago following the attack on Pearl Harbor, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to declare illegal.

Fast forward to the Trump administration’s war on illegal immigration, and you have the perfect storm necessary for the adoption of a national ID card, the ultimate human tracking device, which would make the police state’s task of monitoring, tracking and singling out individual suspects—citizen and noncitizen alike—far simpler.

A federalized, computerized, cross-referenced, databased system of identification policed by government agents would be the final nail in the coffin for privacy.

Granted, in the absence of a national ID system, “we the people” are already tracked in a myriad of ways. This informational glut—used to great advantage by both the government and corporate sectors—is converging into a mandate for “an internal passport,” a.k.a., a national ID card that would store information as basic as a person’s name, birth date and place of birth, as well as private information, including a Social Security number, fingerprint, retina scan and personal, criminal and financial records.

The Real ID Act, which imposes federal standards on identity documents such as state drivers’ licenses, is the prelude to this national identification system.

At some point, however, it will not matter whether your skin is black or yellow or brown or white. It will not matter whether you’re an immigrant or a citizen. It will not matter whether you’re rich or poor. It won’t even matter whether you’re driving, flying or walking.

Eventually, all that will matter is whether some government agent—poorly trained, utterly ignorant of the Constitution, way too hyped up on the power of their badges, and authorized to detain, search, interrogate, threaten and generally harass anyone they see fit—chooses to single you out for special treatment.

You see, the police state does not discriminate.

It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from allowing government agents to stop and demand identification from someone suspected of being an illegal immigrant to empowering government agents to subject anyone—citizen and noncitizen alike—to increasingly intrusive demands that they prove not only that they are legally in the country, but that they are also lawful, in compliance with every statute and regulation on the books, and not suspected of having committed some crime or other.

It’s no longer a matter of if, but when.

In the case of a national identification system, it might start off as a means of curtailing illegal immigration, but it will end up as a means of controlling the American people.

We have been down this road before.

Reporting on the trial of Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker in 1963, Hannah Arendt describes the “submissive meekness with which Jews went to their death”:

…arriving on time at the transportation points, walking under their own power to the places of execution, digging their own graves, undressing and making neat piles of their clothing, and lying down side by side to be shot—seemed a telling point, and the prosecutor, asking witness after witness, “Why did you not protest?,” “Why did you board the train?,”

“Fifteen thousand people were standing there and hundreds of guards facing you—why didn’t you revolt and charge and attack these guards?,” harped on it for all it was worth. But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken, for no non-Jewish group or non-Jewish people had behaved differently.

The lessons of history are clear: chained, shackled and imprisoned in a detention camp, there is little chance of resistance. The time to act is now, before it¹s too late. Indeed, there is power in numbers, but if those numbers will not unite and rise up against their oppressors, there can be no resistance.

As Arendt concludes, “under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that ‘it could happen’ in most places but it did not happen everywhere.”

It does not have to happen here.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we do not have to condemn ourselves to life under an oppressive, authoritarian regime.

We do not have to become our own jailers.

We do not have to dig our own graves.

We do not have to submit.

What's So Bad About Globalism? (Spoiler Alert: Everything)

Via Jim Goad of Taki"s Magazine blog,

As far as I can tell, globalism is a scheme concocted by the rich to destroy the working and middle classes through worldwide financial imperialism.

I have a strong hunch that globalism is also a plot hatched to obliterate indigenous cultures and real human differences under the deceptive ruses of “multiculturalism” and “diversity.”

This is why I’m confused whenever I hear someone say they hate “the rich,” oppose “imperialism,” and support “the working class” while being an unquestioning cheerleader for open borders and global government.

Like Marxism’s pipe dreams about an eventual and irreversible dictatorship of the proletariat, the most seductive hook about globalism is the idea that it’s inevitable. Technology has made us an increasingly interconnected planet, and therefore the only logical and moral thing to do is establish a benevolent global governmental authority with the power to tax and imprison and torture and abuse.

But communism proved to be far from inevitable. After peaking last century, it has retreated from much of the globe. I’d like to think the same is true about the one-world-government schemes that underpin what is cheerily referred to as “globalism.”

I suppose that if you fetishize some dimwitted internationalist abstraction of the global “working class,” globalism may suit your emotional needs and your complicated bourgeois psychological issues regarding “wealth guilt” just fine. But if you support the American working class—and more importantly, if you happen to be a member of the American working class—you’d realize that globalism is your sworn enemy.

Those who’ve lived most of their lives with a sad and simple choice between working and starving can feel the disdain that the sneering global elites have not only for them personally, but for their culture and their humanity and their very existence.

Whatever jobs these wealth-crazed control freaks couldn’t pack into wooden crates and send overseas, they are more than happy to undercut wages here by importing “migrants” both legal and illegal who have nothing in common with you culturally and are trained to deride you as an evolutionary throwback if you dare to complain that the elites are laughing in your face as they pull the rug out from under you.

Globalism replaces First World workers with Third World workers and calls them “racists”—the modern equivalent of “niggers”—if they dare to make a peep about it. While it may be a boon for transnational financiers and manual laborers in Malaysia, for workers throughout the West, globalism has been a trapdoor through which they are likely to hang swinging at any moment. For the Western working class, globalism has meant retreat and defeat and dislocation.

After November’s election, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon described what had happened:

The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get fucked over.

But as many of us are learning, the mere act of realizing you’re being fucked over—much less trying to stop it from happening—automatically makes you a Nazi and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist and a toothless, low-information rube who needs to be replaced on the assembly line by someone with more melanin and less money.

As the world’s financial elites grow more rootless and international, they no longer even pretend to find a common bond with the peasants and the pissants in the countries who host them. Instead, they openly deride them.

But to the horror and dismay of the ultra-arrogant cosmopolites, the rural rubes in flyover country are waking up to the fact that at the very best, they are viewed as obstacles to progress. At the very worst, they sense that the global planners would have no problem bulldozing straight over their corpses in order to pave the way for such “progress.”

Those who constantly slam “the rich” while naively embracing globalism and every attendant butterfly-chasing PC delusion fail to realize that almost without exception, global finance, global media, and global corporate culture are solidly behind this daffy, one-world movement of free trade, open borders, and PC thought-policing. The charitable foundations and the think tanks and the NGOs have all signed up for this mission that purportedly will uplift the masses and bring the rich to heel, yet very few people seem to find this even remotely suspicious. “The rich” are backing a movement that superficially demonizes “the rich” yet only makes them richer, but if you say anything about it, you’re a Nazi.

But beyond the galloping economic hypocrisy, the most loathsome thing about unbridled globalism is the toxic contempt its peddlers have for indigenous cultures, specifically European ones. For all the lip service they pay to the alleged “rights” of men who think they’re women to take a dump in the ladies’ room, they are blithely unconcerned with the fact that their unhindered financial and cultural predations are wiping out whole cultures across the globe in the service of creating one bland, deracinated, medicated, propaganda-addled, compliant consumer culture.

But in their blind quest for uniformity, they will never eradicate conflict. Globalism will only replace wars between nations with wars within former nations. It takes battles that formerly took place on borders and spreads them from street to street. It’s possible that rather than global harmony, endless and irrevocable conflict is globalism’s true end game.

Whether by accident or design, a sick irony about globalism is that it often poses as a humane antidote and a form of ongoing karmic retribution for European colonialism. As the argument goes, the fact that France unfairly colonized parts of Northern Africa means that the righteous thing is for Northern Africans to culturally and demographically colonize France. Apparently these dreamers’ parents never taught them that two wrongs don’t make a right and will likely lead to more conflict and bloodshed.

As an anti-collectivist by nature, I find something nightmarish about the specter of a global government with unelected officials overriding my will—and very often the raging majority’s will—at every turn. I don’t care to have every particle of my life micromanaged by people 5,000 miles away whom I wouldn’t trust to pick my nose.

John Lennon can be fairly viewed as the first pop-star globalist, and his naïve 1971 hit “Imagine” is venerated as a globalist anthem. He imagined a world with no countries, no private property, no murder, and universal cooperation. While he was imagining all this, a crazed fan pulled out a gun and blew Lennon’s brains out. Lennon sang that all we needed was love. What he needed that night was a gun.

A Two-State Solution... For The West?

There"s a cold war raging.

No, not the one between the US and Russia. That’s old news.

We"re talking about the NEW cold war: the one for the soul of the West.

On one corner we have the globalists, basically political and financial elites who after the disasters of World War II decided that eliminating borders was the way to ensure a peaceful future. Increasingly diverse (multicultural) societies would now be governed by supranational institutions, the only way to confront problems that are global in nature: environmentalism, terrorism, epidemics, consumerism and so forth. And much of this has become mainstream, with the powerful backing of the liberal media, the entertainment industry, much of academia and influential think tanks.

While people from all political persuasions support this ideology, it appears to be more closely associated with the political left, sometimes from the hard left even, as shown by the picture above taken in a very progressive US neighborhood.

On the other corner we have the nationalists (also known as patriots, populists, and deplorables). They took a good look at the downsides of that brave new (open) world and said to heck with its ongoing destruction of national identities, borders, traditional cultures and religion, and constant foreign military interventions especially when they are incapable of protecting their own borders from mass immigration.

There is no question that 2016 was a pivotal year in this struggle, which is now playing out in the open.

First the British voted to pull out of the European Union, against all odds. Then the Americans elected a brash Republican outsider for President, also against ‎all odds.

After ceding cultural and political terrain for decades, the nationalists seem to be making a comeback. And now the cracks within Western countries are visible for anyone to see.

Take the United States, the leader of the Free World. Here is a recent survey of the approval ratings of that outsider, President Donald Trump:

Source: The Washington Post, ZeroHedge

Notice the huge disparity between Republicans and Democrats. It could not be any more striking than this – and just a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration.

This reflects of what is going on across much of the US, down to family and friends. It is clearly not confined to just “millennial snowflakes”, although these tend to be the loudest. Try walking in that very progressive US neighborhood wearing a "Make America Great Again" cap and see how that cold war can turn ‎hot very quickly.

The two sides no longer seem to agree on what a country is: if it should have borders, who has the rights and obligations in their societies and what it should stand for. Those are pretty basic – and fundamental – differences that look more and more irreconcilable by the day. Heck, there isn’t even an agreement on who is a woman and who is a man.

So what can be done about this?

Well, since everyone seems so keen in implementing a two-state ‎solution in the Israel-Palestine conflict, why not do the same across the West?

With one key difference: these two “states” would remain formally linked through a very limited federal/national government. Mainland Chinese public officials even have a name for it: one country, two systems.

If people in New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Oregon and California want to become openly multicultural and consistently vote accordingly, why stop them? Let them welcome anybody they want and implement whatever education system, gender identifications and values they desire. Good for them. Provided of course that all this should be funded strictly by their own state and local taxes, which is only fair (no doubt very rich globalists like George Soros, Bill Gates and Richard Branson will gladly pitch in).

On the other hand, if Texas and all others in flyover country believe they are entitled to bear arms, speak however they like in one language only, promote their values and culture and fully decide on who can live in their communities, what’s wrong with that? If you long to hear church bells on Sunday morning, sing the national anthem and use gender-segregated bathrooms you can always visit or move to those communities.

Source: Prof. Mark Newman, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan

And that arrangement can be fined tuned further by going down to the county level, such that the views of local communities would be more accurately represented. In that case the map shown above provides an indication of how a two-state US could look like, with red being a proxy for the nationalist counties (i.e. majority Republican voters in the 2016 Presidential election).

Similarly, the same concept could be implemented across the European Union. If Germans, Swedes, French and the Dutch want their countries or municipalities to go full multicultural, good for them. What they shouldn"t do is impose their vision of the world through the supranational mechanisms of the European Union on the Poles, Hungarians, Finns and many others who do vigorously want to retain their culture and identities.

And that’s what we have in every election cycle, with one party seeking to push its values onto the rest of society, which is increasingly divided and at odds with each other. So the pushback from either side is predictable. New “populist” movements across Europe already threaten the very existence of that federal government (except that in Europe’s case it is anything but limited), and they will not go away any time soon.

This two-state system might be a seemingly fair way to achieve the best of both worlds, allowing both ideologies to coexist within a common governmental framework. A large scale version of Belgium if you like. But the reality is not so simple (just look at Belgium!)

First, Western nations for the most have accumulated debts at the supra-regional level so large that apportioning them ‎between the two “states” is likely to be extremely contentious. With their sustainability already dubious in many cases, and without even considering all the crushing healthcare and retirement contingent liabilities, any division would be really problematic. As such the federal/national government would likely continue to be much larger than what would be desirable to disentangle differing political views.

Second, transitioning into a multicultural society can be very problematic, as evidenced by the debate on Sweden’s immigration policies that has now gone viral, at least until a consensual set of rules and behaviors can be forged. The inherent security risks could force some parts of the other “states” to curtail the free flow of people. This is already happening in many parts of Europe as a result of the recent refugee crisis.

Third, Western alliances would likely have to be redrawn along this split in Western aspirations. Donald Trump has more in common with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán than Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, who will likely never welcome him in his city despite the special relationship between his country and the US.

Indeed, Trump proposes core nationalistic values not too dissimilar from his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin (a key reason why the globalist media and intelligence are so keen to demonstrate a formal connection between the two). On the other hand, German Chancellor Angela Merkel – a hardcore globalist – could not be farther apart from either one.

Fourth, how can each “state” coordinate on international commercial policies with the other one, as many companies have extensive operations across the two? This cold war is now spreading to the corporate sector, with some employees feeling alienated and consumers on each side threatening boycotts and sanctions. It has come to that.

And finally, a divided West is a weak West. China is not worried about any of these existential social issues. Neither is Russia, Turkey or Iran‎. There aren’t any mainstream cultural hesitations in any of these countries (although each has its own fairly large share of dissidents, with good reason). As such, this split is a sure way to accelerate the erosion of the West"s standing in global affairs, although the current state of affairs is not exactly helpful in that regard either.

Let"s have no illusions: this is a deep division and it"s unlikely that we will ever return to a level of unity and understanding in Western societies like we had in the recent past. We"re at a major crossroads in History.

Will we be able to live together even if our backs are turned against each other, or will one side try to impose its will on the other with backlashes turning more violent each time? This will not be solved with simple calls for unity since the two sides are so far apart at this point.

More importantly, which “state” will YOU choose?

California, Nestle, And Decentralization

Authored by Antonius Aquinas, annotated by Acting-Man"s Pater Tenebrarum,

Goodbye, Socialist Paradise

Nestle USA has announced that it will move its headquarters from Glendale, California, to Rosslyn, Virginia, taking with it about 1200 jobs.

The once Golden State has lost some 1690 businesses since 2008 and a net outflow of a million of mostly middle-class people from the state from 2004 to 2013 due to its onerous tax rates, the oppressive regulatory burden, and the genuine kookiness which pervades among its ruling elites.

There has been a remarkable reversal of flow of people and businesses – but California’s ruling elite seemingly remains utterly clueless as to why this is happening and/or doesn’t seem to care. When people and businesses flee from such a well-developed region with such a favorable climate, one should realize that something is probably very wrong. Here is a link to a comprehensive study of the flight of businesses and a million middle class people (net) since 2008 (PDF).

 

A clueless Glendale official is apparently unconcerned about the financial repercussions of Nestle’s departure saying that it was “no big deal” and saw it as an “opportunity,” whatever that means!

The stampede of businesses out of what was once the most productive and attractive region in all of North America demonstrates again that prosperity and individual freedom are best served in a political environment of decentralization.

That the individual states of America have retained some sovereignty, despite the highly centralized “federal” system of government of which they are a part, has enabled individuals and entrepreneurs living in jurisdictions that have become too tyrannical to “escape” to political environments which are less oppressive.

The routes people aspiring to become small businessmen in California can take….

This, among other reasons (mainly air conditioning), led to the rise of the Sun Belt as people sought to escape the high taxes and regulations of the Northeast to less burdensome (and warmer!) southern destinations.

This can also be seen on a worldwide scale.  The US, for a long time, had been a haven of laissez-faire economic philosophy, which, not surprisingly, became a magnet for those seeking opportunity and a higher standard of living.

No longer is this the case as increasing numbers of companies and individuals are seeking to avoid American confiscatory tax and regulatory burdens and move “offshore” or expatriate to more favorable economic climates.

2016 state income taxes – to this one must add a more than 8% sales tax in California, all of which comes on top of federal taxes, plus onerous regulations and extremely litigation-happy “activists”. The only area in which California’s citizens got lucky (via referendum) are property taxes. On the other hand, the state has become extremely real estate bubble-prone, and low property taxes are probably not offsetting the drawbacks of the enormous, malignant housing boom-bust cycles the population centers are experiencing – click to enlarge.

Decentralization – the Key to Liberty and Progress

The idea of political decentralization as a catalyst for economic growth has become a part of a “school of thought” in the interpretation of how Europe became so prosperous compared to other civilizations.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe for centuries was divided politically among numerous jurisdictions and ruling authorities with no dominant central state on the Continent.

The multitude of governing bodies kept in check, to a large degree, the level of taxation and regulation.  If one state became too draconian, it would lose population to less oppressive regimes.

Just as important, Europe’s governing system was aristocratic and monarchical which has proven to be far more conducive for economic growth than democracies.

Germany shortly before its unification in 1871 –  a patchwork of competing small states. Note that this was well after an initial wave of consolidation and centralization – a century earlier, Germany actually consisted of more than 370 independent territories! We previously discussed why highly decentralized polities are the best possible political dispensation for the common man and how extremely conducive they are to liberty and the progress of civilization in this brief missive on secession.

Map via genealogy.net

While the economic oppressed can escape among the various states, there is no avoidance from the wrath of the federal government unless through expatriation and that option has become less viable with those leaving still subject to tax obligations.  This, fundamentally, is the crux of the problem and has been since the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789.

The chance that a totalitarian state such as California or the Leviathan on the Potomac would actually reform themselves or relinquish power through legislative means is a mirage.  Nor will revolution work as revolutionaries while appearing altruistic, typically get a hold of the machinery of government to plunder society for their own self interest on a far grander scale than the supposed despots which they replaced!

The only viable option for the productive members of society to seek redress of state oppression is to argue, work, and eventually fight for political secession and the fragmentation of states as much as possible.

Decentralization is the only hope for those opposed to the modern, omnipotent nation state.  Moreover, any notion or effort to salvage the current centralized political system must be abandoned.

After Donald Trump’s election, many on the political left in California have begun to talk about secession – normally an idea libertarians (and some conservatives) are more likely to be sympathetic to. One thing the presidential election showed quite clearly was that regardless of the winner, about half of the US population was always going to be deeply unhappy about the outcome. In a patchwork of numerous completely independent territories, people would be free to move to whatever area had the political dispensation they preferred. We confidently predict that socialist experiments would be few and far between if they had to depend entirely on voluntary participants. It should be no surprise that Europe’s socialists are all in favor of centralization and “harmonization” (the latter is new-speak for “let’s introduce the most onerous taxes and regulations everywhere, then no-one can escape our clutches”).

 

Conclusion – The Ideological Battle Comes First

Naturally, before the breakup of the nation state can become a reality, the ideological case for political decentralization must be made.  Public opinion must be convinced of the superiority of a world consisting of many states.  Such a cause, however, will be considerably difficult after generations have been raised and made dependent upon social democracy.

When Nestle and other oppressed businesses and individuals can easily escape the clutches of totalitarian entities like California and, more importantly, the most dangerous government on the face of the earth for freer destinations, then will individual liberty and economic growth be assured.

The $74 Trillion Global Economy In One Chart

The latest GDP numbers from the World Bank were released earlier this month, and today’s visualization from HowMuch.net breaks them down to show the relative share of the global economy for each country.

As Visual Capitalist"s Jeff Desjardins explains, the full circle, known as a Voronoi Diagram, represents the entirety of the $74 trillion global economy in nominal terms. Meanwhile, each country’s segment is sized accordingly to their percentage of global GDP output. Continents are also grouped together and sorted by color.

Here is the data for the Top 20 Countries in table form:

Bill Gates Embraces "Tax The Robots" Socialist Idiocy: Four Questions For The World's Richest Man

Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

I am unsure who first came up with the idea of taxing robots, but the proposal has been embraced by academia, socialists, and in general, the radical Left.

Today, entrepreneur Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, endorsed the idea.

What does Gates want to do with the money collected? Here’s the answer: Flush it down the toilet.

In a Quartz interview, Bill Gates proposes The robot that takes your job should pay taxes.

Robots are taking human jobs. But Bill Gates believes that governments should tax companies’ use of them, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment. It’s a striking position from the world’s richest man and a self-described techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, one of the leading players in artificial-intelligence technology.

In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes. The idea is not totally theoretical: EU lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robot owners to pay for training for workers who lose their jobs, though on Feb. 16 the legislators ultimately rejected it.

“You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed” of automation, Gates argues.

Quartz: What do you think of a robot tax? This is the idea that in order to generate funds for training of workers, in areas such as manufacturing, who are displaced by automation, one concrete thing that governments could do is tax the installation of a robot in a factory, for example.

Bill Gates: Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.

Fortune on Robot Tax

Fortune discusses the proposal in Bill Gates Says Robots Should Be Taxed Like Workers.

The idea of what amounts to a tax on efficiency would seem anathema to much conventional economic wisdom. For decades, the dominant line on automation has been that displaced workers shift into more productive roles, in turn growing the total economy.

 

But that thesis has begun to show cracks—as Gates puts it, “people are saying that the arrival of that robot is a net loss,” demanding greater active engagement with job retraining and other programs that target impacted communities.

 

While Gates resolutely comes down in favor of government’s role in managing automation’s impacts, he offers two points that should be at least slightly compelling to free marketeers.

 

First, Gates says, the impact of robotics and artificial intelligence in the next 20 years will be a much more concentrated version of the steady, incremental displacement that was common throughout the 20^th century. The market alone won’t be able to deal with the speed of that transition—and, Gates further suggests, much of the potential for putting free labor to better use will be in the public sector.

 

Second, and probably even more importantly, Gates says automation won’t be allowed to thrive if the public resists it.

Tax on Efficiency

Good grief. It’s hard to know where to begin rebutting such idiocy. But the article does raise an important construct regarding a  tax on efficiency.

Four Questions for Gates

1. Retain workers to do what?


2. How will the government, Bill Gates, or anyone else know the correct retraining field?


3. How will the government or anyone else know the number of people needed?


4. Who pays the robot tax?

No one can possibly answer the first three questions, accurately. But I can answer the fourth.

Robots will never pay a tax. And if the owners of robots have to pay a tax, they will have to jack up prices accordingly.

What Gates is Saying

1. Too much efficiency is a bad thing.


2. Money that buys more goods and services is a bad thing.


3. The government knows better what to do with your money than you do.

Ultimately, consumers will foot 100% of any robot tax.

More accurately, consumers will foot far more than 100% of any robot tax collection because government bureaucrats will waste at least 50% of the amount collected while putting funds deployed in wrong areas or by overpaying contracts awarded.

Convoluted Thinking

Curiously, Gates argues we need to tax efficiency to the point it’s no longer efficient or the efficiency will die on its own accord because “automation won’t be allowed to thrive if the public resists it.”

Army Preps For Urban Warfare In MegaCities: "Mass Migration, Disaster, And Inner-City Turmoil"

Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

There will be war in the streets of America. Things have been engineered that way.

The scenarios are many, the issues are complex. The current anger from the left, who are violently protesting against President Trump, is just one aspect of it.

But the Pentagon and the U.S. national security structure is increasingly looking towards the shifting demographics around the globe – people have moved from rural areas, and shifted into cities. Where ever conflict stirs, there will be a need for military and SWAT response to the call. Entire cities will be locked down; door to door sweeps will often have violent ends.

Baghdad could be brought home to the streets of America, and the military already knows it.

The powers that be are deeply concerned about the unfolding situations with migrants, illegal immigrants, potential terrorists, political factions, violent protests, arson and riots.

Increasingly, they are training for and expecting a homegrown conflict that will call for them to restore order in a major cities – and even hunt down suspects block to block, like in the Boston Marathon bombing incident, while making some significant infringement of our civil liberties.

During the past several years, there have been reports about unannounced urban warfare drills in major U.S. cities, sometimes in coordination with major events; there have also been military training scenarios that have maintained a consistent theme of civil unrest, economic breakdown and widespread riots.

As Intellihub reported:

For years the alternative media has warned about the US military possibly being used against the American people in a time of economic collapse or any sort of martial law scenario.

Drills such as Vigilant Guard 2010 have brought widespread attention to the fact that portions of our own military are training to take on crowds of American citizens demanding food and Constitutional rights in a time of crisis.

Now, a new release by the website Public Intelligence, once again confirms that as recently as February and March of 2012, US troops at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington were conducting training scenarios for a civil disturbance domestic quick reaction force.

A series of photos of the drills shows US troops with crowd control riot shields on the opposite side of actors portraying what can only be described as American citizens.

What do the elite know that we don’t?

Now, a major military scholar is calling for the creation of “megacities combat units” – a proposal that is a major and drastic departure from warfare of the past, which has been designed away from cities. Now, military and paramilitary units, as well as local law enforcement, much engage the population itself – with all the unpredictability afforded by a real life, complex situation filled with combatants, non-combatants and friendlies behind any and all doors, etc.

With a heightened focus on terrorism and reigning in undocumented immigrants, there will be a tendency, if we are not careful, for a heightened militarized and police state atmosphere to arise – both at home, and in everyplace that they take the fight.

Major John Spencer, a former Ranger Instructor and scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute called for an armed unit ready for megacities deployment in an op-ed:

Every year, more and more of the world’s population moves into cities. The number of megacities is growing exponentially. Both of these global patterns and their inevitable consequences for military operations are well documented. Yet we still do not have units that are even remotely prepared to operate in megacities. If we want to find success on the urban battlefields the US Army will inevitably find itself fighting on in the future, that needs to change.

Throughout history, military forces either sought to avoid or simply had no need to engage in urban combat. Most military doctrine, and the strategic theory it is built upon, encourages land forces to bypass, lay siege to, or—if required—isolate and slowly clear cities from the outside in. The great armies of the world have historically fought for cities rather than in cities, a distinction with a significant difference. In cases where military forces had no choice but to operate within cities, the environment, almost without exception, proved very costly in both military and civilian casualties. Today, many armies have accepted that global population growth and urbanization trends will increasingly force military operations into crowded cities, and military forces must therefore be capable of conducting the full range of operations in large, dense urban areas.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley recently remarked that the Army “has been designed, manned, trained and equipped for the last 241 years to operate primarily in rural areas.” But that is about to change. Milley continued:

[…]

The conclusions of the SSG research are clear: megacities are unavoidable, they are potentially the most challenging environment the Army has ever faced, and the Army is unprepared to operate in them.

[…]

One ongoing military study of megacities is the NATO Urbanization Project. […] In the project’s most recent experiment, the NATO team conducted a wargame to determine the capabilities needed to achieve the goals of three likely missions in 2035: response to mass migration, natural disaster, and inner-city turmoil. Within these missions, the wargame specified that a brigade conduct three operations in a megacity—joint forcible entry, major combat, and subsequent stability operations—without unacceptable levels of military or civilian casualties.

[…]

Of course, urban warfare is not exclusively a future phenomenon. Much has been learned from urban battles in recent history: the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–95); the Battle of Mogadishu (1993); Russian operations in Grozny (1994–95 and 1999–2000); US operations in Baghdad (2003) and Fallujah (2004); Lebanese operations in Nahr al-Bared, Lebanon (2007); and the Second Battle of Donetsk (2014–15). But the broad lessons of these cases have yet to truly inform Army training for urban combat, which for most units consists mainly of tactical training (e.g., room clearing drills with four-man teams). The Army would be much better served by the creation of an entire unit dedicated to preparing to operate in dense urban environments, particularly megacities.

Any way you slice it, the military and the national security infrastructure are watching for cracks in the system.

People are at their wits end, and many are on the edge of poverty – and for many, it just won’t take much more to set them loose, and let riots erupt. Whether the system wants those to spread, or wants to suppress and contain them, they know they are coming.

Population pressures, and clashing groups within growing city centers are creating more problems, and compounding old ones.

If the economic stability of a given region were to give way, nearly every megacity would spiral out of control and descend into absolute madness – whether or this continent or any other.

via Nicholas West:

 The following Pentagon video was featured by The Intercept and portrays the chilling atmosphere presented by sheer numbers and those who would enter such environments in the pursuit of order.

Rather than trying to guess what specific crisis may spill over into violence, or bring things to a stand still in traffic or electronic commerce, just consider the piling pressure that is growing in the techno hubs and swelling urban population centers.

New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and dozens of enormous cities around the world are all completely vulnerable. Depending upon the political situation, unrest, violence or whatever else could spread across the entire Eastern half of the U.S., and the entire country could face collapse as it has never before known it. It is only a question of timing and circumstance.

Preppers should take all this into account. Modern life may make a connection to the city unavoidable prior to the collapse, but being insufficiently away from major urban centers is definitely a liability in times of crisis. Even outlying neighbors can be subject to looting, natural disaster, grid shutdown, riots, and many other situations. Make arrangements to shelter away from the city, and make sure you can get there safely and quickly when something goes down.

Do not rely on the services or goods of these cities, and get out while you still can. There are some very major crises brewing right now. They are preparing; you should, too.

h/t Nicholas West, Activist Post

"There's A Global Riot Against Psuedo-Experts" Nassim Taleb Exclaims "This Is Not About Fascism"

Economist-mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb contends that there is a global riot against pseudo-experts

After predicting the 2008 economic crisis, the Brexit vote, the U.S. presidential election and other events correctly, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the Incerto series on global uncertainties, which includes The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is seen as something of a maverick and an oracle. Equally, the economist-mathematician has been criticised for advocating a “dumbing down” of the economic system, and his reasoning for U.S. President Donald Trump and global populist movements. In an interview in Jaipur, Taleb explains why he thinks the world is seeing a “global riot against pseudo-experts”.

I’d like to start by asking about your next book, Skin in the Game, the fifth of the Incerto series. You do something unusual with your books: before you launch, you put chapters out on your website. Why is that?

Putting my work online motivates me to go deeper into a subject. I put it online and it gives some structure to my thought. The only way to judge a book is by something called the Lindy effect, and that is its survival. My books have survived. I noticed that The Black Swan did well because it was picked up early online, long before the launch. I also prefer social media to interviews in the mainstream media as many journalists don’t do their research, and ‘zeitgeist’ updates [Top Ten lists] pass for journalism.

The media is not one organisation or a monolithic entity.

Well, I’m talking about the United States where I get more credible news from the social media than the mainstream media. But I am very impressed with the Indian media that seems to present both sides of the story. In the U.S., you only get either the official, bureaucratic or the academic side of the story.

In Skin in the Game, you seem to build on theories from The Black Swan that give a sense of foreboding about the world economy. Do you see another crisis coming?

Oh, absolutely! The last crisis [2008] hasn’t ended yet because they just delayed it. [Barack] Obama is an actor. He looks good, he raises good children, he is respectable. But he didn’t fix the economic system, he put novocaine [local anaesthetic] in the system. He delayed the problem by working with the bankers whom he should have prosecuted. And now we have double the deficit, adjusted for GDP, to create six million jobs, with a massive debt and the system isn’t cured. We retained zero interest rates, and that hasn’t helped. Basically we shifted the problem from the private corporates to the government in the U.S. So, the system remains very fragile.

You say Obama put novocaine in the system. How will the Trump administration be able to address this?

Of course. The whole mandate he got was because he understood the economic problems. People don’t realise that Obama created inequalities when he distorted the system. You can only get rich if you have assets. What Trump is doing is put some kind of business sense in the system. You don’t have to be a genius to see what’s wrong. Instead of Trump being elected, if you went to the local souk [bazaar] in Aleppo and brought one of the retail shop owners, he would do the same thing Trump is doing. Like making a call to Boeing and asking why are we paying so much.

You’re seen as something of an oracle, given that you saw the 2008 economic crash coming, you predicted the Brexit vote, the outcome of the Syrian crisis. You said the Islamic State would benefit if Bashar al-Assad was pushed out and you predicted Trump’s win. How do you explain it?

Not the Islamic State, but al-Qaeda at the time, and I said the U.S. administration was helping fund them. See, you have to have courage to say things others don’t. I was lucky financially in life, that I didn’t need to work for a living and can spend all my time thinking. When Trump was running for election, I said what he says makes sense to a grocery store owner. Because the grocery guy can say Trump is wrong because he can see where he is wrong. But with Obama, he can’t understand what he’s saying, so the grocery man doesn’t know where he is wrong.

Is it a choice between dumbing down versus over-intellectualisation, then?

Exactly. Trump never ran for archbishop, so you never saw anything in his behaviour that was saintly, and that was fine. Whereas Obama behaved like the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was going to do good but people didn’t feel their lives were better. As I said, if it was a shopkeeper from Aleppo, or a grocery store owner in Mumbai, people would have liked them as much as Trump. What he says makes common sense, asking why are we paying so much for this rubbish or why do we need these complex taxes, or why do we want lobbyists. You can call Trump’s plain-speaking what you like. But the way intellectuals treat people who don’t agree with them isn’t good either. I remember I had an academic friend who supported Brexit, and he said he knew what it meant to be a leper in the U.K. It was the same with supporting Trump in the U.S.

But there were valid reasons for people to be worried about Trump too.

Well, if you’re a businessman, for example, what Trump said didn’t bother you. The intellectual class of no more than 2,00,000 people in the U.S. don’t represent everyone upset with Trump. The real problem is the ‘faux-expert problem’, one who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and assumes he knows what people think. An electrician doesn’t have that problem.

Is the election of Trump part of a global phenomena? You have commented on the similarity to the election of Narendra Modi in India.

Well, with Trump, Modi, Brexit, and now France, there are some similar problems in those countries. What you are hearing is people getting fed up with the ruling class. This is not fascism. It has nothing to do with fascism. It has to do with the faux-experts problem and a world with too many experts. If we had a different elite, we may not see the same problem.

There are other similarities, to quote from studies of populist movements worldwide: these leaders are majoritarian, they build on resentment, they use social media for direct access to their voters, and they can take radical decisions.

I often say that a mathematician thinks in numbers, a lawyer in laws, and an idiot thinks in words. These words don’t amount to anything. I think you have to draw the conclusion that there is a global riot against pseudo-experts. I saw it with Brexit, and Nigel Farage [leader of the U.K. Independence Party], who was a trader for 15 years, said the problem with the government was that none of them had ever had a proper job. Being a bureaucrat is not a proper job.

As a businessperson, you have a point about experts and pseudo-experts who you say are ‘left-wing’. How do you explain the other parts to the phenomenon that aren’t economic: the xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, etc.?

I don’t understand how a left-wing person can defend Salafism, or religious extremism. In a democracy, you can allow people to have any view, but they can’t come with a message to destroy democracy. Why should people who come to the West come with a message to finish the West? This is where the discourse goes haywire. So in Yemen, the [Saudi] intervention is good, but the intervention [by Russia] in Aleppo shouldn’t be allowed. I don’t think Trump was racist when he said Mexican criminals shouldn’t be allowed into the U.S.; he was targeting criminals. If you are Naziphobic, you are not against Germans. If I oppose Salafism, I am not an Islamophobe. Obama also deported Mexicans and refused to accept immigrants.

Is anti-globalisation a part of this sentiment?

I am not anti-globalisation, but I am against big global corporations. One of the reasons is what they cost. Today, every project sees cost overruns because these projects have to factor in global risks as well. In nature there is an ‘island effect’. The number of species on an island drops significantly when you go to the mainland. Similarly, when you open up your small economies, you lose some of your ethnicity or diversity. Artisans are being killed by globalisation. Think of the effect on so many artists who have been put out of work while people are buying wrinkle-free shirts and cheap mobile phones. I’m a localist. The problem is globalisation comes through large global corporates that are predatory, and so we want to counter its ill-effects.

Where do you see the world moving now? Further right, or will it revert to the centre?

I don’t think it will go left or right, and I don’t know about the short term. But I think in the long term, the world can only survive if it lives like nature does. Many smaller units of governance, and a collection of super islands with some separation, quick decision-making, and visible implementation. Lots of Switzerlands, that’s what we need. What we need is not leaders, we don’t need them. We just need someone at the top who doesn’t mess the system up.

55% Of Europeans Agree With Trump: "Muslim Immigration Should Be Banned"

President Donald Trump’s executive order to ban citizens of seven Muslim-majority states from entering the US for 90 days, and temporarily freeze all refugee arrivals (including Syrians indefinitely), has been interpreted widely as an attempt to curtail the inward migration of Muslims, which Trump and his supporters argue pose a threat to national security. It has also been challenged legally, and today a showdown between the DOJ and a San Francisco Court of Appeals is scheduled for 6pm, at which point the Trump order may be formally rejected, forcing Trump to engage the Supreme Court.

While the Trump order has unleashed a firestorm of legal retaliation in the US, Trump’s policy has also generated a backlash among some of Europe’s leaders. Angela Merkel’s spokesman said the chancellor had ‘explained’ the Geneva Convention to the president in a phone call discussing the order, while London Mayor Sadiq Khan argued that the invitation to the president for a state visit to Britain in 2017 should be withdrawn until the ban is rescinded. Meanwhile, leaders of Europe’s populist parties, including Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage and Matteo Salvini, have heaped praise on Trump.

And while the political elite"s positions are clear, a more relevant question is where does the public in European countries stand on the specific issue of Muslim immigration.

Surprisingly, there is evidence to suggest that both Trump and Europe"s right-wing parties reflect an underlying reservoir of majority public support.

According to a new Chatham House survey of more than 10,000 people from 10 European states, we now know what people think about migration from mainly Muslim countries, and as Chatham House notes, "the results are striking and sobering." They suggest that public opposition to any further migration from predominantly Muslim states is by no means confined to Trump’s electorate in the US but is fairly widespread.

In the survey, carried out prior President Trump’s executive order was announced, respondents were given the following statement: ‘All further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped’. They were then asked to what extent did they agree or disagree with this statement. Overall, across all 10 of the European countries an average of 55% agreed that all further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped, 25% neither agreed nor disagreed and 20% disagreed.

Furthermore, majorities in all but two of the ten states agreed, ranging from 71% in Poland, 65% in Austria, 53% in Germany and 51% in Italy to 47% in the United Kingdom and 41% in Spain. In no country did the percentage that disagreed surpass 32%. In short, more than half of Europeans agree with Donald Trump.

Some further details:

Public opposition to further migration from Muslim states is especially intense in Austria, Poland, Hungary, France and Belgium, despite these countries having very different sized resident Muslim populations. In each of these countries, at least 38% of the sample ‘strongly agreed’ with the statement. With the exception of Poland, these countries have either been at the centre of the refugee crisis or experienced terrorist attacks in recent years. It is also worth noting that in most of these states the radical right is, to varying degrees, entrenched as a political force and is looking to mobilize this angst over Islam into the ballot box, either at elections in 2017 or longer term.

The polls also reveal how, across Europe, opposition to Muslim immigration is especially intense among retired, older age cohorts while those aged below 30 are notably less opposed. There is also a clear education divide. Of those with secondary level qualifications, 59% opposed further Muslim immigration. By contrast, less than half of all degree holders supported further migration curbs.

Support is also fractured by where one lives. Of those living in rural, less populated areas, 58% are opposed to further Muslim immigration. Whereas among those based in cities and metropolitan areas just over half agree with the statement and around a quarter are less supportive of a ban. Opposition is also more prominent among ‘left behind’ voters, with nearly two-thirds of those who feel they don’t have control over their own lives supporting the statement. Similarly, 65% of those Europeans who are dissatisfied with their life oppose further migration from Muslim countries. There is also some evidence that public opposition crosses political boundaries, with three-quarters of those who self-classify themselves as on the right of the political spectrum and more than a third of those on the left supporting a halt.

These results echo other similar surveys exploring attitudes to Islam in Europe. In a Pew survey of 10 European countries in 2016, majorities of the public had an unfavorable view of Muslims living in their country in five countries: Hungary (72%), Italy (69%), Poland (66%), Greece (65%), and Spain (50%), although those numbers were lower in the UK (28%), Germany (29%) and France (29%). There was also a widespread perception in many countries that the arrival of refugees would increase the likelihood of terrorism, with a median of 59% across ten European countries holding this view. This mirrors some attitudes in the US.

Study details: the Chatham House Europe Programme, with Kantar Public, surveyed nationally representative samples of the population aged 18 or over in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK. Fieldwork was carried out online using quota sampling (age, gender and region) between 12 December 2016 and 11 January 2017. The total number of respondents was 10,195 (c. 1,000 per country).?

U.N. Official Admits Global Warming Agenda Is Really About Destroying Capitalism

Submitted by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,

A shocking statement was made by a United Nations official Christiana Figueres at a news conference in Brussels.

Figueres admitted that the Global Warming conspiracy set by the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, of which she is the executive secretary, has a goal not of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity, but to destroy capitalism. She said very casually:

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

She even restated that goal ensuring it was not a mistake:

“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”

I was invited to a major political dinner in Washington with the former Chairman of Temple University since I advised the University with respect to its portfolio. We were seated at one of those round tables with ten people. Because we were invited from a university, they placed us with the heads of the various environmental groups. They assumed they were in friendly company and began speaking freely. Dick Fox, my friend, began to lead them on to get the truth behind their movement. Lo and behold, they too admitted it was not about the environment, but to reduce population growth. Dick then asked them, “Whose grandchild are we trying to prevent from being born? Your’s or mine?

All of these movements seem to have a hidden agenda that the press helps to misrepresent all the time. One must wonder, at what point will the press realize they are destroying their own future?

Investors.com reminds Figueres that the only economic model in the last 150 years that has ever worked at all is capitalism. The evidence is prima facie: From a feudal order that lasted a thousand years, produced zero growth and kept workdays long and lifespans short, the countries that have embraced free-market capitalism have enjoyed a system in which output has increased 70-fold, work days have been halved and lifespans doubled.

The Great Rotation Ends: Largest US Equity Outflows In 4 Months; Biggest Treasury Inflows Since July

While the S&P500 market may remain pinned just why of all time highs, this appears to be from ongoing short covering, and is not - at least in the latest week - the result of new money entering the market. Quite the opposite: according to the latest BofA fund flow analysis based on EPFR data, in the latest week, US equities saw $6.3 billion in outflows, the largest weekly redemption from US mutual funds and ETFs in four months, since before the presidential election. And as investors pulled cash out of US stocks, they quickly reallocated it back into bonds, with all major classes seeing inflows, with notable mentions for government bonds, which had the biggest inflows since July 2016, and TIPS, where the demand for inflation protection is now the highest since the great China reflation scare of 2011 (it proved quite transitory).

Here are the details from BofA:

Bottom-line: investors continue to position for reflation via TIPS over munis, HY over gold & Japan over US equities; but the re-positioning feels grudging and flows have yet to show big asset allocation capitulation out of bonds into stocks

The first week of Trump: flows show largest weekly bond fund inflows in 4 months ($8.6bn), tiny equity fund inflows ($0.2bn) and precious metal outflows ($0.2bn) On bonds: inflows to HY bond funds in 8 of past 9 weeks; inflows to bank loan funds in 25 of past 26 weeks; inflows to TIPS in 31 of past 33 weeks (Chart below)…all reveal relentless bid for yield & inflation-protection; but note this week’s govt bond fund inflows were biggest since Jul’16

On equities: largest EM equity fund inflows in 3 months ($1.0bn); largest 3-week inflows to Japan equity funds in 16 months ($8.8bn); inflows to materials funds in 11 of past 12 weeks = clear bias towards reflation/inflation BofAML GWIM ETFs: last week our private clients added to risk (bank loans, financials & HY) & inflation plays (precious metals, TIPS) and sold down defensive/yield-plays (lowvol, dividend-income, munis, REITs & staples)

* * *

Asset Class Flows

• Equities: tiny $0.2bn inflows ($5.5bn mutual fund outflows vs $5.6bn ETF inflows)


• Bonds: $8.6bn inflows (largest in 4 months) (5 straight weeks)


• Precious metals: $0.2bn outflows (outflows in 10 of past 11 weeks)

Fixed Income Flows (Chart 2)

• Inflows to HY bond funds in 8 of past 9 weeks ($1.5bn)


• 5 straight weeks of IG bond inflows ($3.6bn)


• 11 straight weeks of inflows to bank loan funds ($1.1bn)


• 7 straight weeks of inflows to TIPS funds ($0.5bn)


• First outflows from EM debt funds in 4 weeks ($0.4bn)


• Largest govt bond fund inflows since Jul’16 ($1.4bn)

Equity Flows

Japan: strong $3.1bn inflows (inflows in 4 of past 5 weeks)

EM: $1.0bn inflows (largest in 3 months)

Europe: small $0.2bn inflows

US: $6.3bn outflows (largest in 4 months)

By sector: largest healthcare outflows ($1.0bn) from healthcare in 10 months (outflows in 8 of past 9 weeks); largest tech inflows in 14 months ($1.0bn); inflows to materials in 11 of past 12 weeks ($0.6bn)

Trump "Hope" Gap Nears 400 S&P Points

The trend in "actual" earnings has been dismal.. but the trend in "hope" has been exceptional. Will hope prove right?

The gap between "history" and "hope" is now almost 400 S&P points (and almost 5,000 Dow points) - With VIX heading towards single-digits, the market seems very sure that earnings will realize the "hope" in a straight line.

The Fake News of Fakebook: Welcome to the Machine

Sometimes we need to take a step back and gain some perspective.  As we explain in our book Splitting Pennies - the world isn"t always as it seems at first glance.  What"s happening now, is much a result of what was planned and started 50, 60, and 70 years ago by a previous generation.  Modern history and especially regarding USA really should be looked at since @ 1950, at the wind up of World War 2.  And, the most significant element in global society, is quite possibly the first form of Artificial Intelligence: The Machine.  The Machine, as referenced by Eisenhower on his farewell address as the "Military Industrial Complex" and later referenced by Pink Floyd as simply "The Machine" - is a form of AI that is very dangerous for the survival of mankind itself, let alone the waste of economic resources and others.  Economically, looking at the military, it would seem that there really is an Alien conspiracy controlling powerful countries because the Military only destroys, it doesn"t create.

This battle between The Machine and "The People" you can say took hold in America in the 50"s and peaked in the 60"s during the civil rights movement.  Sides were formed, society was polarized.  Common interests aligned themselves.  Big business sided with The Machine as they saw new opportunities for profit and consumer control.  It"s important to have this perspective; often we write about the CIA, about the big banks, they are all cogs in a larger entity "The Machine" which has an intelligence of its own.  It is not a complex intelligence, such as developed recently in computing - but nonetheless, as any intelligence is defined, it is a form of artificial intelligence.  It has a simple goal - expand, survive, grow, evolve.  Human collatoral damage, is irrelevant.  Destruction of society, destroying the planet, doesn"t matter to the survival of The Machine.  War profiteers are like hosts to a virus, that perpetuate its operations.

Of course, the best example of one of the many parts of The Machine is the CIA, but it is not the only one, nor the most significant part of the machine.  Hosts to this virus like the forces behind Black Lives Matter, and other social destructive forces, are possibly even more significant, due to the fact that they are "on the front lines" stopping any change or taming The Machine.  The best explanation academically and intellectually is provided by Noam Chomsky, you can checkout his latest book here and see trailer from recent documentary below:

The Machine is now in it"s 3rd or 4th generation depending on how you calculate but in any regard, the current agents working for The Machine clearly don"t even understand their own jobs, they are just mindless government workers raised on a violent culture programmed by Quentin Tarantino, like the Rick Perry that didn"t know what his job would be, that he accepted.  The government has become so bloated and inefficient, 90% of it could be deleted and we"d still function fine.  But remember, the Government is no longer "for the people" it"s "for The Machine".  It"s unfair to say that specific people, or specific groups, are the sole cause of America"s decline - it"s not Globalists, it"s not "offshoring" - it"s a lot more complex than that and frankly, USA is irrelevant too for The Machine.  It just so happens that the USA has had and does have the most funded, technologically advanced military in the world.  It"s just strategic positioning.  America isn"t the most powerful country in the world because of "freedoms" or "ideals" it was simply a geo-strategic advantage during World War 2, on a number of levels, that enabled Superpower status, and the creation of The Machine which now operates on a global level.

Fakebook is the new "tool" of social control.  During the 60"s, 70"s, and 80"s the CIA popularized street drugs in order to control and quell the population, as well as various diseases (AIDS) and more modern methods (Chemtrails) and other tools.  Fakebook is the current "drug" of the era - what will be next?  We can get a glimpse at Darpa.

This is what TRUMP is up against.  And while politically, he"s a nobody, a rogue from the "forest" who as Gingrich said "Didn"t go to the same schools, isn"t part of a secret society;" in the final analysis, TRUMP is still part of The Machine, although a failed one - relying on his persona as a reality star to build his "brand."  Maybe this is why the common man can relate to TRUMP so well, he"s also been spit out by The Machine in different ways, in business - except he did it while part of the "haves" and not the "have nots" - probably TRUMP doesn"t know what he"s up against in the coming days and weeks ahead.  We must remember especially regarding the mindless zombies that burn down bank of america branches and McDonalds drive throughs, what is at stake for bettering the lives of all Americans is not political, it is not about liberals and their idiocy - The Machine is something far greater, it is employed by both parties, Democrat and Republican - Rich and Poor.  These are the dividing lines the Elite do not want you to understand!  As long as blacks are fighting whites, women are fighting men, homosexuals are fighting heterosexuals - the divide and conquer plan of the Elite is easy to implement.

This generation"s war for the machine is being fought in the battlefield called "social media" - and the platform hosting the Fake News - Fakebook.

Welcome my son, welcome to the machine
Where have you been?
It"s alright we know where you"ve been
You"ve been in the pipeline, filling in time
Provided with toys and "scouting for boys"
You brought a guitar to punish your ma
And you didn"t like school, and you
Know you"re nobody"s fool
So welcome to the machine

Welcome my son, welcome to the machine
What did you dream?
It"s alright we told you what to dream
You dreamed of a big star
He played a mean guitar
He always ate in the Steak Bar
He loved to drive in his Jaguar
So welcome to the machine

To learn about how this works regarding the financial markets, checkout Splitting Pennies - Understanding Forex, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.