Hostility

I've been feeling increasingly hostile recently and I think I may have figured out why that is. I'm frustrated that I don't understand what's going on with the world's economy these days. I can sort of understand individual pieces but I don't understand what the otherall plan is or how it's supposed to work. It's kind of like having a basic understanding of atomic energy, but you don't know whether the guys who are messing with it are building an atom bomb or a nuclear reactor. I suspect the world's leaders think they are building a nuclear reactor, but what they are doing might very well blow up in their face.

Managing the world economy has got to be a tricky business, all these powerful interests pushing and jockeying for position, trying to maintain a certain amount of stability, trying to forestall anything that might threaten established interests because those interests are the bedrock of stability.

So it kind of seems that to the guys who run the world, the new Russia, the one that has emerged from the ashes of the old Soviet empire, now looks like some kind of threat to the established world order. You wouldn't know it from the way the media portrays Russia as being weak, broke, corrupt and near collapse. If they are so weak, why are we willing to sacrifice Ukraine and umpteen billion dollars to wage this war of attrition against them?

The rest of the world does not share the West's view of how things should be run and so they have started their own club - BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). China and India are big, and while they have some technically sophisticated people, they don't have the wherewithal to deploy vast numbers of cutting edge weapons. They're building their own aircraft carriers now, or at least China is, but they both got their start by buying used aircraft carriers from Russia. The USA has the biggest and most developed armaments industry. It takes talent, organization and money to keep it going. China and India are learning how to do this, but they have a lot of catching up to do. The Soviet Union was right up there with the USA until they collapsed, but Russia still has most of what they had, except money. The important part is the have a deep pool of talent, including the widespread knowledge on how to organize a giant armaments industry.

Anyway, the West has decided that Russia is the leader of the pack (BRICS) and needs to be taken out. If they can do that, the pack will be much weaker and the West can continue to run the world as they see fit.

My problems are two fold. The first is that I am not sure that taking out Russia is going to be a net benefit to the world. The second is that if Russia and BRICS become powerful enough to stand against the West, am I personally going to suffer? Because the US dollar is the world's reserve currency, it means we conjure up money out of thin air and use it to buy real goods and services from the rest of the world. I think everyone benefits from that. America, because we get all kinds of stuff dirt cheap, and the rest of the world benefits because they are earning money. Weird. We make money from nothin' but as soon as we spend it, it becomes real. I suspect this all part of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

I suspect that the people in the southern hemisphere have a hard time building and maintaining large organizations that are capable of getting things done. Don't know why that is. It might be because people are naturally crazy and it's only when you can get a core group of non-crazy people together that you can actually get things done. So anywhere outside of the northern temperate zone, a non-crazy person is liable to get frustrated dealing with all the crazy people and says 'I'm going north to the land of the not quite as crazy people'. So gatherings of non-crazy people continue to grow slowly while the hordes of crazy folks grows exponentially.

Greg Hunter got me started with a summary of an interview with Catherine Austin Fitts. This bit is ominous:

In short, the Fed will defend the dollar and the world reserve currency status no matter how hard the stock market crashes, no matter how much the economy crashes, no matter how much the bond market crashes and no matter how much the housing market crashes.

Hour long video of Greg Hunter interviewing Catherine Austin Fitts.