Fewer than 29 days to go: state of the nation

With fewer than 29 days to go before Brexit Day, here's a brief list of current developments, in no particular order and no particular completeness.

Toxic Debt: 2006 all over again

Toxic debt on the rise again, and it feels about ready to go pop (sources: Strategian, the MoneyGPS, Epic Economist, background from the Corbett Report; note the absence of mainstream media sources).  In particular, the Chinese people appear to have gone into the buy-to-let market... in a market where renting properties isn't mainstream.  So, this means buy-to-leave-empty-and-have-no-income.  Yet the muppets buying these flats - to hoard empty properties! -  are doing so by borrowing.  Debt without income to service it!  In other words, bad debt.  Really?!  Really???!!!!

Worse, the properties being built are con-jobs: knocked up so quickly that they fall down of their own accord (source: ADV China).

The sources above have all the relevant numbers, so I won't repeat them here, suffice it to say that the unmeasured growth of unmeasured bad debt in China is likely to be as large - if not larger - than the sub-prime debt crisis of America in 2006.  The impact on the non-Chinese world is likely to be significant, because although Chinese financial instruments might not be as embedded in Western banks like American sub-prime securitised debt was in the 2000s, virtually every aspect of Western economic life depends upon Chinese economic activity in some way shape or form.  Cut the funding from those activities - very few of them are truly autonomous from the Chinese Communist State - and they will collapse.  This shall include even Vietnam, to which a number of Chinese industrialists are sub-contracting... because China has become too expensive!

Meanwhile, a growing number of Americans cannot service the loans on their cars.  The lower-end of the American income scale is borrowing simply to feed the kids.  Even without securitisation, the incestuous nature of cross-borrowing between financial institutions makes for a very uncomfortable process of contagion when the truth about bad debt is "officially" recognised.

All governments have, to varying degrees opted to drown in debt, to make themselves beholden to the globalist banksters, encouraged by the corruption of Davos Man.

The end-game ain't looking pretty.  Although there is clearly air hissing from the debt bubble, the slow-motion burst will gather pace quickly as contagion kicks in.  Epic Economist reckons that we'll see the big bang in "summer or autumn this year [2019]", which I interpret to be 2019Q3.

Italy and France: a marriage of debt

As Bernard Connolly predicted in 1997 (source: Moneyweek), ignoring the demos is the sure-fire way to populism, a point which Nick Clegg inadvertently re-prove to Merryn Somerset Webb in 2015.

A common trigger point is recession, especially one that feel's self-induced (even though it's probably down to banksters fleecing the system to enrich themselves at everybody else's expense).  One country in which financialisation has ripened beautifully for the banksters to shake the tree is Italy.  And the Italian economy makes itself very close to that point (sources: Wolf Street, ZeroHedge).

Debt is a major part of the Italian problem, compounded by the tradition of retail investors being investors of their banks.  The banks are, in reality, bankrupt, but officially can continue to report that everything is lovely (this scam is common throughout the Eurozone: the truth must be suppressed at all costs).

And guess who piled into Italian debt?  Like they piled into Greek debt?  Yes, that's right, the masters of interpreting every toxic opportunity as a "buy" signal: French banks.

This is thus evidence that either Italian & French banks won't learn, or that the French government still hasn't realised how banksters have played the French state.

Italy doesn't seem to be as encumbered as France, although its current leaders have a lot to learn about powerless they really are.  While Macron is proposing the measures of the Ceaușescu state to brutalise the gilets jaunes, Italy voted for a populist government which seems set to roll back the excesses of globalism (co-ordinating its efforts with Austria and the Visegrad Four).

But how?  To take a small example, there was a suggestion - exaggerated into an international coprophagous media feeding frenzy - that the Italian government reminded the Italian central bank (what's left of it) that Italian gold belongs to the sovereign state of Italy, not the banksters.  Problem is, this might not be factually correct: some reports from the industry state that the bank does indeed own the gold, not the state (source: Bullionstar).  Ouch.  Whether this makes Salvini a target for bankster-sponsored assassination remains to be seen.

At the point where somebody in Italy suffers a loss of confidence, Italy and France are likely to descend quickly into a financial death spiral.  As they are both members of the Eurozone with Germany, that leaves Germany taxpayers on the hook to fund it, or to fund loans from banksters to bail out Italy and France.  Either way: banksters 3-0 taxpayers.

The Germans have banned short-selling of one particular company

Never willing to miss any opportunity to be as cretinously stupid as possible, the German financial regulator BaFin has banned short-selling of Wirecard (source: Moneyweek).

BaFin reckons it's protecting a new entrant from the harshness of the market.  But this, of course, is garbage.  What BaFin is actually protecting is a dodgy, opaque business model.  Typically European, BaFin addresses the symptoms, not the root cause, and provides relief for the people running Wirecard to keep on being as opaque as possible with their use (waste?) of investors' money.  The stench of corruption is overpowering.

This is thus evidence that BaFin won't learn.  Ever.  How very European.

Contraction of the car market, especially for diesel-fuelled engines

With the dieselgate scandal continuing its erosion of diesel-flavoured vested interests, demand for car has collapsed.  The two events are unlikely to be directly linked, but the co-incidence is more than merely a surprise.  Car manufacturers are retrenching, reducing production as marginal costs exceed marginal revenue, in part because of the increase of marginal costs imposed by the state(s) for emission controls.  In the American market, there even appears to be a shift by consumers away from cars and towards plush trucks (SUVs, 4x4, "Chelsea Tractors") (source: WolfStreet 1, WolfStreet 2).  Not so in Europe (at least, there's no evidence so far); if so, one has to question what economies of scale in manufacture could be possible at all.

Britain's mainstream media created its own feeding-frenzy fake-news fodder out of the story when Honda announced the closure of its factory in Swindon (I would link to a sample, but for the Corporate Communist Copyright Directive, see below).  In reality, with the Japanese very nearly in the the European Union's as-yet uncodefied equivalent of the European Economic Area, Honda probably finds it cheaper to manufacture in Japan and ship directly to the European continent, rather than to have production facilities in the European Union (especially the relatively-expensive and under-skilled UK).

Of course, the retards in the mainstream media whitter on about this being a consequence of Brexit and blah blah blah.  Issue-illiterate nonsense.  As one would expect.  The mainstream media is there only to lie to us.

Corporate Communist Copyright Directive

The European Parliament is still progressing with making the proposed Copyright Directive a de facto method of censoring the internet, using copyright law as the means to abolish-by-stealth freedom of expression.

The root issue, as explained by Billboard, is that the music/artist industries remain as deeply issue-illiterate as they always have been.  Essentially rent-seekers by nature, the artistic industries believe that if they have a right to intellectual property, then they can use it to print money just like a central bank can.  So anybody else who uses the alleged intellectual property is, in their minds, guilty-without-defence of theft.  So when social media platforms provide the tools by which ordinary plebs can do so without recourse, this is systemic theft.  On an industrial scale.

This, of course, is the same stupidity of the industry that had the industry wanting ban video recorders and cassette recorders.  They lost those two battles and to their "surprise", demand rose: the economic catastrophe they wrongly foresaw never happened.  But, having refused to learn the right lessons from those two battles, they are back at the table demanding money-making censorship... and this time the European Union is more than ready to listen to them.  (Offers of well-paid consultancies presumably help to open the appropriate ears.)

So much for the parasitic rent-takers of the artist industries.

But what Billboard judiciously omits is the impact of Article 11, the "link tax" (opinion from pressure group: Electronic Frontier Foundation).  Some artistry is written.  All written material has some sort of copyright behind it, including output from artists.  This blog, for example, links to copyrighted sources that the rights holders have chosen to publish for free on the internet.  Nevertheless, Article 11 requires the platform of the blog to pay the rights holders a fee for having linked to the copyrighted material (with fatuous exemptions).

This is state-sponsored parasitism.  This is crony, corporate communism at its most disgusting.  (Technically, it is a fascist state, but we can't say fascist state because loads of ignorant, issue-illiterate, snowflake Lefists think fascism is something to do with a man adorning a pencil moustache sending people to gas chambers).

The Copyright Directive is law that remain voters ultimately want to see happen, hence why they voted to remain.  They voted for it.  Bear that in mind, if the UK ever undergoes a truth and reconciliation process.

Man-made global warming

I read Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (no link, it'll be taxed).  I'll admit, I was ready to be taken in by it, and I was.  For years, I believed that I understood how man-made "carbon emissions" cooked the planet.

But when I started to question the honesty of the mainstream media, I challenged just about everything I thought I know about politics, philosophy and economics.  And the sinister dogma of man-made global warming was one of the major causalities.

It's amazing what a little bit of learning can achieve.

• We now know that the "97% of scientist agree" is a fiction invented by a cartoonist.
• We continue to know that we have no means of measuring: i) what percentage of climate change is caused by mankind; and ii) what percentage of climate change is caused by natural forces.
• We now know that peaks of carbon dioxide levels in the relevant layers of the atmosphere follow peaks of temperature, not the other way around.
• We continue to know that there is a very strong co-relation between sunspot activity and the "average" measurements of temperature around the world.
• We know that carbon dioxide is the 5th least-significant greenhouse gas (the most significant is water vapour).
• We also know that humankind's carbon dioxide emissions are very, very small compared to natural sources of carbon dioxide emissions (e.g. volcanoes) (yet we still can't link human activity to a percentage of climate change).
• We know that only one of the many models for climate change are consistently wrong, with no attempt to make the models relevant (the one that works is a Russian model, but, apparently, anything Russian is fake news, so we're not allowed to believe it).
• We know that just about any study promoting or advocating or trying to measure the human contribution/cause of climate change typically rests upon very selective/cherry-picked interpretations of comparable "baseline" data.
• We know that any graph looking like a hockey stick is normally a falsehood, because statistically it cannot stack up.  Yet, the infamous hockey stick graph has become a touchstone for the alarmists because it says what they desperately want to believe.  But the graph's co-author, Michael Mann, was held in contempt of a Canadian court in 2017 when the court demanded Mann's workings to prove that the graph was not fraudulent, but Mann refused.  What has Mann got to hide?  It demonstrates just how without credibility, honesty and integrity the alarmist crusade is.

And this is just the stuff I can grasp.

Yet there's more.  The next thing for me to get my head around is the possibility that the models used by climate alarmists are so demonstrably fake that only an utter moron would believe anything a climate alarmist would say.  Publicised by The Red Elephant's Vincent James and Newsblaze, astrophysicist Joseph Postma (who made it onto the Denier's List, which thus enhances Postma's credibility in my eyes), Postma's idea is that alarmists' models assume a flat earth.  Yes, a flat earth!  They also assume that the heat from the sun hits the surface of the flat earth at the temperate of -18°C (yet, negative eighteen degrees Celsius, below the freezing point of water).  Somehow, this "heat" "radiates" into the single-layered atmosphere and gets trapped by something causing a greenhouse effect which eventually boils the planet and kills everything.

Interestingly, this means that every time a climate alarmist whitters on about the "ozone layer", they are talking off-script from the models that they use to prop up their superstitious propaganda.

What is the obsession with carbon dioxide anyway?  The answer turns out to be very simple: carbon dioxide emissions happen when humans generate energy and when humans consume energy.  With the right "regulation" in place, it thus becomes possible to tax both sides of the energy transaction.  And if it's possible to tax it, then it's also possible to charge a price for each event.  All that is required is the same raft of "financialisation" law to be imported into the energy sector.

And this is what it's really all about.  To control the carbon dioxide "supply" is to control the entire energy sector.  And as energy is as fundamental to human life as you can get, the control of the energy sector is control of everything.  It is perfect corporate communism.

And, of course, the European Union is fully on board with the mission to save the planet from carbon dioxide.

The vast legions of journalists, Leftist, pseudo-scientists, taxpayer-funded non-governmental organisations/lobby groups who support the underlying Malthusian theories of man-made global warming are just really useful idiots to help to prop up a narrative that the idiots themselves don't understand.  By the time they'll figure it out, it'll be too late: they'll be stitched up, like the rest of us.  An Inconvenient Lie, indeed.

A shift in empire: from America, but to where?

The demise of the British empire in favour of the American empire took a long time coming, but it was ultimately the Suez Crisis of 1956 which was the final nail in the coffin for any chance of Britain reprising its imperial ambitions.

A similar story appears to be panning out for America.  The runes are reading in a similar way.  America, under President Trump, is probably less social-justice-warriory than at any time in the past 30 years, yet the neo-liberal and neo-conservative agenda continue to push out bile which undermines America's domestic agenda and, when involved in foreign wars, undermines America's international agenda.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the Iraq Wars, Afghanistan, responses to Russia's re-annexation of the Crimea (contrary to American demands that Crimea be part of the sovereign state of Ukraine), America's ruthless fleecing of Russia in President Yeltsin's era, America's bombastic economic sanctions against Russia in President Putin's era, America's dogmatic economic sanctions against anybody who trades with Iran, America's destabilising presence in the Middle East, the Foreign Account and Tax Compliance Act (which led to some American ex-pats to renounce their citizenship just to get hold of a bank account in their host country, just to feed the kids) and, just to cap it all, America's forceful fake choice to Europe regarding NATO, "America or Russia: choose now."  Coming up soon: a fake-flag "war" in Venezuela.

America and Europe have both allowed the rule of law to become the law of rules.  This is perversion of what should exist to support a democratic state, but it is a necessary step for the increasing control freakery of the Leftist, globalist super-state (of which the European Union is the first major prototype).  Yet, if the European Union moves away from the United States of America, then it's likely that the whole house of cards collapses (not least because the banksters who rig the system will spot an opportunity to fleece the underlying taxpayers and private savers to the advantage of the banksters, literally taking any potential gains of control freakery from under the noses of the globalist Left).

And yet, America defies its own the rule of law at will.  It now smells very likely that the "private server" run by Hilary Clinton was necessary to protect the sources of funding for the Clinton Foundation from investigation under money laundering rules.  The benefit of hindsight makes it quite clear that the second Iraq war (George W Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney) was most likely a marketing campaign for the arms industry (and who cares about the consequences?).

Some argue that the Chinese empire is the next one to watch.  Perhaps.  Although China has many strategic interests around the world, so strategic that it would embarrass the feckless idiots of the Western ruling classes, The President of the People's Republic of China was converted in 2018 to a job-for-life.  This is the classic measure of the imperialist dream.  The incumbent is President Xi Jinping; it is too early to say what his longer-term plan might be, but we know from Chinese history that crap policy choices are equally likely in China than anywhere in the Western world.

Mao Tse Tung starved a chunk of his own population to death based on the false belief that sparrows ate grain.  He ordered peasants to rattle cans in fields all day, killing sparrows.  Without sparrow to eat insects, insects ate the grain unimpeded.  China starved.  It's a classic example of why centrally planned economies never work.  Jinping must know this, and yet there is no clear evidence of how he is going to approach the debt bubble that smothers his country's embryonic middle classes.  Jinping's only effective "solution" is the usual shortcut: to allow the Western bankster mentality to take over, wipe out the middle classes, revert the whole population to peasantry and penury, under usury, a form of neo-feudalism (or, perhaps in China, "back to normal", "恢復正常", translated via Google Translate).

China clearly has military ambitions and is ready to test America's military resolve.  China has deployed its military to play stupid little games in the South China Sea, illegitimately claiming rights over the Spratly Islands (amongst others).  America is also there, playing its role in the same stupid game.  And China, like Russia and Iran (allegedly), support the incumbent socialist President of Venezuela, standing opposite the view of America.  Moreover, there look to be a number of parallels between China's policy deployments today and those of Japan in the 1930s.

I'm not convinced yet that China is going to be the next empire.  As at today, the next empire feels likely to be an unstable coalition of Russia, China and India against a fragmented, bankrupted disarray of Europe and America.  The root cause of the instability of the coalition empire shall be who carves up the spoils of Old Europe and the Disunited States of America.  Through this transition, I suspect that both old and new empires are going to have to deal with the irritant of Islamic Fundamentalism, although all parties need Islamic Fundamentalism to ensure the Middle East remains paralysed by its own factions (and thus keep the oil flowing!).

The next few decades are going to be extremely messy.

Brexit

And somewhere in this quagmire of international tectonic political plate-shifting, there is this Brexit thing.  Oh yeah, that's what this blog was supposed to be about, wasn't it?

All of a sudden, Brexit seems quite trivially academic.

Breaking out of the European Union offers the UK a great deal of freedom... supposedly.  In all probability, the maximum freedom in the foreseeable future is to cherrypick bits of globalist stupidity that i) the European Union has been implementing for years; and ii) still benefit the UK.

Yet, hope is vision on the horizon.  Although globalisation shall likely continue - and for good reasons - globalism is looking very ill.  Globalism is the Leftist campaign for One World Socialist Government.  Many of us ordinary plebs are waking up.  We are "woke", but not in the way that Leftists want us to be.

In another whisper of hope, America has appointed David Malpass as the President of the World Bank, which some pundits reckon is potentially a game-changer (opinion: American Thinker, note the contrast between expectations on Malpass and the issue-illiterate social justice eco warrior mentality of Obama's choice Kim.  Note also some choice quotes attributed to Malpass, offered by ZeroHedge).

A Brexited Britain will need to be patient while the rest of the world's democracies catch up, and make their own opportunities to destroy their globalist overlords, the self-serving monopolists and banksters who seek to impose neo-feudalism.  In reality, a Brexited Britain will need to be equally patient with its own idiotic ruling classes.

Since the referendum, us ordinary plebs have little to do but watch the stupidity of the British Prime Minster Theresa May see Brexit as "damage limitation" exercise that results in a Withdrawal Agreement far more abominable than membership of the EU.  We've watched the stupidity of a self-serving Parliament, which desperately wants to turn the clock back to the pre-referendum days, so it can continue to juice the gravy train to which it had become overly accustomed.  We've learnt not to watch the deceitful mainstream media that has so disserved its customers/readers in all policy areas for decades.

The overwhelming and fundamental change that British society needs is one that most British are genetically pre-disposed to ignore.  The mindset of the typical British voter is all about solving challenges with the most breathtaking of issue-illiterate complacency, denial and arrogance, in particular a pathetic faith in the "reasonableness" of others, with not a jot of political literacy to accept just how sick in the head Leftist control freaks really are.  In this mindset, change is incremental, honest, reasonable and never, ever radical.  Unsurprisingly, this is the mindset that allowed the ruling elite (howsoever branded) to cause the UK to drift into the evil grip of the European Economic Community, wilfully deceiving the population along the way.  Membership of the EEC was very radical, and the ruling elite got away with it by lying to a population who was happy to be lied to, because the lies sounded comforting.

While the world is undergoing further significant, if incremental, changes in the next 50 years, the British population is probably best served by riding the waves of these changes.  To do this, we require issue-literate leaders and implementors to keep a hawk's eye on developments, being ready to deploy the right policies to protect our interests.  None of our current ruling elite meets this requirement.  Yet, to change the ruling elite requires overturning the mindset of the typical British voter.  It means the typical British voter getting off his lazy, fat arse, and getting involved, even to the extent of fighting hard against deeply entrenched, bullying, threatening, potentially violent vested interests who's much prefer to impose neo-feudalism, thank you very much.  The fight of the French state against its own gilets jaunes is instructive.

Brexit on its own does not solve this, but it is a necessary step to building the solution.  Brexit is the last throw of the dice for freedom of the British people from the tyranny of Britain's own state and other supra-national "regulators" that conspire to move us towards the socialist, globalist, neo-feudalism beloved of the military industrial complex.  It sounds all very conspiratorial and, sure, there are some forces which attempt to fight the tyranny.  But it will all amount to nowt if ordinary plebs continue to sit on their arses and watch mainstream telly, pretending that the fight above their heads about who owns the plebs' resources doesn't really matter to the plebs.

After all, the 48% who voted remain voted in favour the Copyright Directive and the Single European Army, whether they like to admit it or not.  How many of these 48% will come to their senses is an open question.  But, just as they voted in favour of their democratic, political and economic suicide within a neo-feudalist European Union, they shall likely continue to vote for the same moronic objectives whenever the opportunity arises.  And all of them will wrongly reckon that it'll do them good and give them lots of future opportunities.  Tell that to the long-term unemployed youth of France, preferably because the French police beat the long-term unemployed youth to death for wearing a gilet jaune.