Addicted to Dollars
Carmen Reinhart
. .

Addicted to Dollars
Carmen Reinhart
. .
A Nearby Terror Attack in London
By George Friedman
Such events force us to think of how close we came to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
My wife and I are in London this week, and we have spent the last few days enjoying the city.
Yesterday, at about 2 p.m. London time, we thought we would take a walk to the Imperial War Museum. Our hotel is on the corner of Hyde Park, and the museum is across the Thames. We debated whether to go by Parliament over the Westminster Bridge, across the Lambeth Bridge directly to the museum or take a cab. It was chilly, so we took a cab. We thereby avoided a likely encounter with danger. At the same time we were planning our outing, a man was planning what could well have been our death.
The purpose of terror is to force each of us to think that there, but for the grace of God (or the temperature), go I. The night before we had gone to a play in the West End. People crowded the streets. That could have been the place where a car sweeping the sidewalk could have killed many, including us. Tonight, we are going to a concert at the Barbican Centre. There will be crowds. Now I wonder whether someone is planning an attack there too. I’m writing this on Thursday afternoon in London, so by tomorrow we will know.
Police officers stand guard by a cordon around Parliament on March 23, 2017 in London, England. Jack Taylor/Getty Images
Terrorism is a game of probabilities. The probability of any one of us being in the wrong place at the wrong time is very low. But terrorism creates an intimacy between terror and us. It causes us to think of where we were at the time of an attack and how close we came to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Its power is contained in the possibility that the plans of someone unknown to us intersect with our own plans. In the military, they speak of force multipliers. This is the force multiplier of the Islamic terrorist: He compels you to be aware of his power over you. It is his decision whether some will die. I have taken risks in my life, but this is different. Terrorists want to cause a kind of fear that compels you to think of what might have been on an afternoon intended for pleasure.
This has not become corrosive to everyday life yet. It is a quantitative matter. The fewer the attacks, the lower the probability that they will affect you. The higher the number of attacks – even if they are still few – the greater the perception and reality of danger. And as a result, more people are forced to adjust their lives.
Terrorists try to use minimal strength to crush the morale of their enemies. Terrorists are few in number, which is necessary by the covert nature of their activity. The more there are who know each other, the more likely they will be betrayed. And the lone wolf attacker is the least likely to be caught before the attack. The Islamic State and related groups have crafted the most effective form of terror.
They have asked individuals to act with few, if any, collaborators, and to strike without warning, using equipment at hand: a car or a knife. The intent is to let everyone know that their lives are in the hands of invisible enemies. Even though we are not likely to be victims of terrorism, after each attack we are forced to think, “What if I had made a different decision?” In time, each of us will brush up against the possibility. Indeed, my wife and I had spoken, on the way to Covent Garden, of how we would hear screams before we saw an attacking car, and what we might do to save ourselves.
This is the real strength behind IS’ strategy. The lone wolf attack by Muslims is relatively rare. But knowing that Muslims are carrying out such attacks in unpredictable times and that no one can really detect the intentions of others, we wonder what the intent of any Muslims we meet might be after an attack like the one in London. Will he be the agent of our death? The brilliance of this strategy is that it drives a wedge between the Muslim world and the rest. The Muslims are feared, in turn treated unjustly, and the conflict intensifies.
The usual bromide is that we should not take counsel of our fear. I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Does it mean that I should not dwell on the fact that, by chance, I avoided being caught up in the incident? Does it mean that I should ignore the fact that attacks likely will not be carried out by Swedish grandmothers, but more likely by Muslim males under the age of 30? Should I pretend that this is not a movement of Muslims, by telling myself that most Muslims would not do this? I can’t ignore the fact that some would do this, and that one brushed lightly by our lives on Wednesday. Of course, I should take counsel of my fears. My fears are real and reasonable, and the demand that I should not be afraid is unreasonable.
At the same time, if I take the position that all Muslims are killers, we dramatically increase the chance that the enemy – those Muslims who would kill on a chilly Wednesday afternoon in London – will win. There are 1.6 billion Muslims, and if all were willing to do what the man on Westminster Bridge did, our civilization would be, if not transformed into a nightmare, then constantly afraid. It is the solemn hope of IS that we treat all Muslims as terrorists, to bind together the Islamic world under the jihadist banner.
Some will say that terrorism should not be viewed as Islamic. At this point in history, that is an incomprehensible position. Some will say that all Muslims are potential enemies. That is a prescription for an endless war Euro-American civilization might well lose. In dealing with an enemy, dividing them is the only viable strategy, and the Islamic world already has deep divisions. Muslims are not all alike, and some are hostile to others.
In this, as in all wars, realism and prudence are required. The attacks are part of a movement of Muslims whose numbers are substantial but far from encompassing all of Islam. Our allies must be those Muslims who oppose this movement. Just as the key to undermining communism was the American understanding with communist China, so the key here is allying with Muslim enemies of radical jihadism. If none exist, we will be in trouble. But there are many. However, to apply this strategy, we must admit that this is a war with Muslims. Not all perhaps, but many. As long as we are oblivious to the fact that we are at war with Muslims, the situation is hopeless. As long as we are oblivious to the fact that many Muslims hate the jihadists, we have no strategy. And we must remember that many of the enemies of jihadism do not like us much, either. But as with the communist Chinese, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
It is odd that a late winter walk in London should end in these thoughts. But then it was Winston Churchill who said, “If Hitler invaded hell I would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Some in England said Germany should not be confused with Nazism. Others said all Germans should be annihilated. Churchill regarded the first statement as fatuous and the second as brutishly stupid.
In the meantime, we are in a strange but real war, and a walk in Covent Garden now must involve a discussion of what to do if death approaches.
What The Hell is Going On?
By: The Burning Platform
"The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."
- H.L. Mencken
"The older I get the less I listen to what people say and the more I look at what they do."
- Andrew Carnegie
"What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so." - Mark TwainSince the start of this year I've found myself in a mental funk. I'm tired of the lies. I'm tired of incessant media propaganda. I'm tired of politicians. I'm tired of economic experts. I'm tired of hucksters touting their "the end is near" tale to sell me something. I'm tired of faux mainstream media journalists and their whining about Trump being mean and threatening the First Amendment.
"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure." - H.L. MenckenThe dissonance between what I have been observing and what is being flogged by the establishment mouthpieces in the corporate mainstream media has never been greater. Some of my observations are anecdotal, others are based on real unadulterated truthful data, a few are based on simple common sense and the rest are based on my understanding of what happens during Fourth Turnings.
"The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage." - Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las VegasIn Part Two of this article I'll show how the Deep State/establishment/ruling class/status quo have utilized their mastery of propaganda techniques to convince the masses inflation and debt are beneficial to their interests and why Trump's election is the pushback by a citizenry who are beginning to awake and are mad as hell.
Eton Park to Shut Down as $3 Trillion Hedge Fund Industry Faces Turmoil
By MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN
The Dawn Of The New Financial Age With Bitcoin
by: Shikha Kothari
Americans Are Richer Than Ever, But They Don’t Feel That Way
U.S. household net worth is expected to hit another record, but that won’t mean much to most people
By Steven Russolillo
North Korea Is Approaching the Red Line
The regime appeared to be bluffing about nuclear weapons, but has that changed?
North Korea is a despotic regime in the full sense of the term. It is a regime run for the benefit of the leadership. It is also a hereditary despotism. Kim Jong Un, the current despot, is the grandson of the regime’s founder, and by all evidence his right to rule derives not from any particular skill, but simply because of his bloodline. Like all true despotisms, the country’s fundamental interest is the perpetuation of the regime. North Korea justifies its political system by invoking Karl Marx, but its actual connection to Marxism is that the Soviet Union installed Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, on the throne.
Also like all other despotisms, the despot sleeps uneasily. There have been reports of members of the Kim family being executed by packs of wild dogs and anti-aircraft guns. To some extent this may be South Korean propaganda. But it all becomes more credible after the recent killing of Kim Jong Un’s half-brother in Malaysia by two women who smeared VX nerve agent on his face. Given that he killed another relative, once more by a novel means, it is becoming likely that Kim Jong Un feels insecure. His therapy for insecurity, like all despots, is killing anyone – including relatives – who might threaten him.
This all goes along with a theory I developed on North Korea years ago. I said that North Korea’s goal was to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union and decrease any ideological bond that might remain with China. In order to do this, the North Koreans adopted a strategy focused on convincing the world of three somewhat contradictory things.
The first was that North Korea was an extremely dangerous country, and that it was powerful and likely to strike a devastating blow at any action. This would deter any attempt to attack North Korea or destroy the regime. Second, the North Koreans sought to project an air of insanity. Random, pointless acts of violence and bizarre pronouncements were designed to convince the world that not only is North Korea dangerous, but it is also quite mad. This was intended to persuade everyone that they should not try invading North Korea, or even consider it. Even the whiff of danger would push the North Koreans over the edge. Finally, and paradoxically, North Korea sought to appear weak.
Widely publicized famines, ancient factories and the other accoutrements of misery indicated that trying to destroy North Korea’s regime would be pointless. It might topple any day.
A nuclear program firing random ballistic missiles (as we saw this week), insane threats, and evidence of extraordinary poverty and political instability all combined to prevent any action that someone might want to take, assuming anyone wanted to take action. North Korea appeared to be powerful, quite mad, and about to collapse. These are incompatible notions, but they gave everyone good reasons not to attack. Those who feared North Korea, those who believed North Korea was a lunatic bin, and those who felt North Korea was close to collapsing all drew the same policy conclusion: Do not attack North Korea. It was a brilliant ploy, and a regime that had no business surviving the 1990s did.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in an undated photo released in March 2016. Korean Central News Agency
In my view North Korea was not particularly dangerous, not at all crazy, and not weak enough for the regime to fall. It was simply running a hustle so that the Kim family could continue to rule. But a picture out of North Korea, having nothing to do with dead relatives, and a statement by former President Barack Obama to President Donald Trump warning that North Korea will be his biggest problem have forced me to re-examine our position.
That picture, released in March 2016, is of Kim Jong Un standing by a ball, which experts have said might very well be a miniaturized nuclear warhead for a missile. I have never taken North Korea’s nuclear program seriously because it is relatively easy, given enriched uranium or plutonium, to trigger a nuclear explosion underground. However, creating a deliverable weapon is another matter.
The nuclear device has to be miniaturized, made small enough to fit on a deliverable missile. In addition, it has to be ruggedized. An intercontinental ballistic missile launches at 10 Gs, vibrating like crazy. Then it enters a vacuum with wild swings of temperature and re-enters the atmosphere at scorching temperatures. At that point, a precision instrument must trigger an explosion. Exploding a nuclear device on a stable, solid platform is a lot easier than exploding one after this wild ride.
Before it can be ruggedized, it must be miniaturized. And what the picture of Kim Jong Un seemed to show was a miniaturized warhead. It is impossible to know whether it has also been ruggedized. My belief continues to be that North Korea built the weapon to deter attacks, both overt and covert. But what used to be a bet about the future is turning into a more immediate matter. My confidence about my understanding of North Korea’s strategy may shift. I don’t think I’m wrong, but the cost of being wrong is pushing the red line.
The North Koreans appear to be pushing themselves into the space between not having a weapon and having one. I would like to think that U.S. intelligence has a very clear view on the state of the nuclear program. But even if they think they do, in intelligence the question is always, do you really know or are you missing something? Have the North Koreans created an illusion, and could U.S. intelligence actually have no idea what’s really going on?
I have assumed that the North Koreans are acting like lunatics because they are trying to intimidate us. A casual look at Kim Jong Un does breed comfort that this is the case. But assume that I’m wrong and that they are acting like lunatics because they are lunatics. If Kim Jong Un is crazy and the North Koreans are actually moving closer to a deliverable weapon, the odds shift. Previously, doing nothing was a low-risk bet. Now doing nothing becomes a high-risk bet. At this point, an error in judging the North Koreans’ mental state would have enormous consequences.
It is easy to say that action will be taken when reconnaissance shows that the warhead has been married to a missile. But failing to see the marriage, seeing it and not understanding it, or seeing it and having meetings instead of taking action can lead to disaster. The intelligence community believes a strategy so finely timed cannot fail, but anything can fail. Thus, if we assume U.S. intelligence is infallible, and we assume that the United States can know and act on information at a split second, then we are fine. If we have any doubts about that, we really aren’t.
I continue to believe that Kim Jong Un understands that crossing the red line of a deliverable nuclear weapon would mean disaster. I don’t think that he will risk an American action that might involve a nuclear strike to ensure that all facilities, above and below ground, are destroyed. I still believe he is bluffing that he has that ace. But given that I called that bet one night many years ago when I was still an optimist, I can’t risk the chance it might be wrong now.
This is the point where geopolitics gets dicey. Geopolitics would dictate that Kim Jong Un is using his program to deter action against North Korea. He has nothing to gain from carrying out a nuclear strike against anyone. But in a despotism, where relatives turn into pink mist, the notion of systemic constraints becomes dicey. He may be as crazy as he looks. And he might not realize the U.S. can’t risk Los Angeles on the quality of intelligence we are gathering, or my dismissive attitude.
If that picture was of a miniaturized warhead, then it has to be assumed that a ruggedized one will follow shortly. Then Trump will have to face the dark night of decision that every president must face.