The Credibility Mirage

Moreover, both Republican and Democratic administrations have helped turn Moscow hostile with an aggressive, expansionist military policy. Washington treated the Soviet Union and then Russia as defeated foes with the expansion of NATO, despite multiple assurances to the contrary. The U.S. also inverted the Monroe Doctrine, insisting that everything up to Russia’s border was in America’s sphere of interest, and promoted “color revolutions” and street uprisings within Moscow’s neighbors. Washington also invaded and dismantled Yugoslavia/Serbia with nary even a nod to Russia’s historic interests in the Balkans.

Unsurprisingly, members of the blob, as the foreign policy establishment has been called, insist that they are virginal public servants dedicated to all that is good and wonderful in the world. Most Washington policymakers deny the obvious: that their militaristic policies encouraged Putin to invade. Although he remains responsible for plunging Europe into war, he almost certainly would not have done so without the succession of U.S. and European decisions flouting Moscow’s security interests. After all, who imagines Washington policymakers accepting what they attempted to impose on Russia—expanding the Warsaw Pact northward through Latin America, promoting a street putsch against Mexico’s elected, pro-American government, and promising Mexico membership in the Soviet-dominated military alliance. The result in Washington would be wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments on a Biblical scale, and likely a modern Cuban Missile Crisis.

Link here.

War Budget Leaves Netanyahu Caught Between Markets and Politics

So the U.S. wants to give taxpayer money to Israel for a war, all while Israel continues to fund religious schools and land theft in the West Bank. Brilliant.

"Built into Israel’s expenditure program are so-called 'coalition funds,' or discretionary spending earmarked to the five parties comprising Netanyahu’s government, the most religious in Israel’s history. A record 14 billion shekels ($3.6 billion) in transfers approved last May will partly go toward religious schools — some exempt from teaching subjects like English and math. Other favored projects include the development of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

While the special allotments are a fraction of the total budget for 2023-2024, they have become a marker of competing priorities at a time when Israel confronts its worst armed conflict in half a century."

Link here.

The American Origins of the Russo–Ukrainian War

"U.S. policymakers and foreign policy commentators routinely assert that NATO expansion has nothing to do with the Russo–Ukrainian war. This disregards the historical record, which establishes that NATO’s post–Cold War expansion, and specifically the prospect that it would incorporate Ukraine as a member, contributed importantly to the war’s outbreak. In a real sense, the Russo–Ukrainian war’s origins trace back to the 1990 negotiations on German unification and, even farther, to the origins of the Cold War itself.

NATO expansion was part of a flawed American approach to building a post–Cold War security order in Europe. Major wars, including cold ones, can end with either vindictive settlements or magnanimous and far-sighted ones. The classic example of the former is the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, which left Germany justly aggrieved and vengeful. On the other hand, there have been high-minded peace accords like the 1815 Congress of Vienna, which ended the Napoleonic wars, and America’s enlightened policies toward Germany and Japan after World War II.

The U.S. did not deal with Russia in the same spirit as it dealt with Japan and Germany. Instead, Washington drew a new dividing line in Europe that isolated Russia, ignored its legitimate security interests, and sowed the seeds of future conflict. As Stent writes, Russia felt doubly humiliated by the Cold War’s outcome. The Kremlin lost sway in places that historically had been part of Russia’s sphere of influence, and Moscow was expected to conform to an international order based on America’s unipolar power. Washington should have been more sensitive to the historical, political, and cultural dynamics that shape Russian foreign policy. Instead, the United States brushed aside Moscow’s concerns in what Samir Puri, a security affairs expert at King’s College London, has dubbed 'Operation Ignore Russia.' This was an avoidable policy blunder that predictably created a resentful 'Weimar Russia.'”

Link here.

George Orwell’s 1984 in Washington (on Syria)

"Yet Washington continues to waste American lives, materiel, and credibility for barely discernible objectives in the Middle East. Intervening in Lebanon’s bitter civil war cost hundreds of U.S. Marines their lives. Backing Israel’s colonization of Palestinian lands has made Americans a terrorist target. Invading Iraq resulted in the deaths of thousands and wounding of tens of thousands of U.S. and allied personnel—and turned the country into a charnel house with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

Deploying faux humanitarian claims to oust Libya’s Muammar Gadaffi left that land a wreck, violent and divided a decade later. Support for Saudi Arabia’s aggressive war against Yemen ravaged the region’s poorest nation, leaving hundreds of thousands of dead. And America’s botched attempt to oust Syria’s secular dictator led to a de facto alliance with brutal jihadists, including al-Qaeda’s local affiliate. The Syrian people ultimately faced rule by either the despotic Assad regime or terrible variants of bloody Islamists.

Although this civil war is largely over and the Islamic State, an outgrowth of Washington’s Iraq invasion, has been defeated, the U.S. continues to occupy Syria. The country serves no American security interest. Damascus was long allied with Moscow but is of minimal strategic value. Although Syria is no friend of Israel, the latter is a nuclear-armed power more than capable of defending itself."

Link here.

A Case for BlackRock’s New Defined-Maturity TIPS ETFs

"I highly approve of these new funds. They not only meet a need, being the first target-date TIPS funds, but at 10 basis points per year in expenses, the price is right. Plus, the launch is very timely, as TIPS now sell at their lowest price in more than a decade."

Link here.

How much money does the U.S. piss away on Israel every year?

The chart is informative.

Link here.

From December 2021, another warning - "Acting too aggressively on Ukraine may endanger it — and Taiwan"

"Get Ukraine horribly wrong, and a true strategic nightmare could result: two crises, and perhaps two wars, against two great powers at once. Ironically, the United States would have gotten there for fear of facing exactly the dual catastrophes it brought about."

Link here.

Value, Value Everywhere – Disparate Markets Magnify Opportunities

"Most of this spread in the capitalization weighted performance and excessive valuation this year can be attributed to the outperformance of the growth style, which is dominated by the information technology sector. Exhibit 2 shows the forward PE for the S&P 500 Index, the Russell 1000 Growth Index, the Russell 1000 Value Index, the Russell Midcap Value Index, and the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Index as compared to their respective PE averages over the last 10 years. As you can see, the value and dividend indices are trading at much more attractive valuations than the S&P 500 Index and the Russell 1000 Growth Index. In fact, the Russell 1000 Growth Index is trading more than one standard deviation above its own 10-year median PE. Said differently, the Growth Index has only been more expensive about 15% of the time over the last 10 years."

Link here.

When officials say the quiet part about Russia and NATO out loud

“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement,” Stoltenberg told a joint committee meeting of the European Parliament on September 7. “That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invade [sic] Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that.”

“He went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite,” Stoltenberg reiterated, referring to the accession of Sweden and Finland into the alliance in response to Putin’s invasion. Their entry, he later insisted, “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he's getting the exact opposite.”

Link here.

Jeffrey Sachs: NATO Expansion & Ukraine’s Destruction

Why does Russia oppose NATO enlargement? For the simple reason that Russia does not accept the U.S. military on its 2,300 km border with Ukraine in the Black Sea region. Russia does not appreciate the U.S. placement of Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania after the U.S. unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

Russia’s Reasons

Russia also does not welcome the fact that the U.S. engaged in no fewer than 70 regime change operations during the Cold War (1947-1989), and countless more since, including in Serbia, Afghanistan, Georgia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, and Ukraine. Nor does Russia like the fact that many leading U.S. politicians actively advocate the destruction of Russia under the banner of “Decolonizing Russia.” That would be like Russia calling for the removal of Texas, California, Hawaii, the conquered Indian lands, and much else, from the United States.

Link here.

Neoconservativism in a Nutshell

If I were asked to boil down neoconservatism to its essential elements—that is, those that have remained consistent over the past nearly 50 years—I would cite the following:

• a Manichean view of a world in which good and evil are constantly at war and the United States has an obligation to lead forces for good around the globe.
• a belief in the moral exceptionalism of both the United States and Israel and the absolute moral necessity for the U.S. to defend Israel’s security.
• a conviction that, in order to keep evil at bay, the United States must have—and be willing to exercise—the military power necessary to defeat any and all challengers. There’s a corollary: force is the only language that evil understands.
• the 1930s—with Munich, appeasement, Chamberlain, Churchill—taught us everything we need to know about evil and how to fight it.
• democracy is generally desirable, but it always depends on who wins.

Link here. 

A Basic Buddhist Meditation Synthesis

Meta-Attention: Of all meditation skills, this is the most important. All it means is being aware of what you’re paying attention to: to what your mind is doing. If you’ve ever started walking or driving somewhere you usually don’t go and realized that you’d spent the last few minutes heading to work or home even though that wasn’t your intention, you’ve experienced what happens when you don’t know where your attention is, or what your mind (and body) are doing. Every time you drift off in thought without realizing you have for a while, you’ve lost your awareness of what your mind is doing.

May I be happy. May I be well. May I be safe. May I be peaceful and at ease.

Link here.

How politics can destroy your soul – confessions of a former Tory candidate

"MPs, ministers, civil servants, special advisers, think tanks, quangos, NGOs, industry groups, unions, MSM, charities, lobbyists, consultancies and more are all the ‘crooked timber’ of humanity.

They need to be accepted. To belong. They are greedy. Angry. Ambitious. Fearful. Vain. Vulnerable. Most of them are utterly enslaved by ego. They want what they don’t have. They don’t want what they do have. They are easily manipulated.

But how? Huge incentive levers. Emotional, financial and moral. We all want power, status, popularity and wealth to some degree. We are all vulnerable to peer pressure. Many are attracted to ideas that promise a better tomorrow. That is why the Labour Party can rely on so many youth activists. Our ability to deceive ourselves knows no bounds."

Link here.

The Real History of the War in Ukraine: A Chronology of Events and Case for Diplomacy

"The only way to save Ukraine is a negotiated peace. In a negotiated settlement, the US would agree that NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine while Russia would agree to withdraw its troops. Remaining issues – Crimea, the Donbas, US and European sanctions, the future of European security arrangements – would be handled politically, not by endless war.

Russia has repeatedly tried negotiations: to try to forestall the eastward enlargement of NATO; to try to find suitable security arrangements with the US and Europe; to try to settle inter-ethnic issues in Ukraine after 2014 (the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements); to try to sustain limits on anti-ballistic missiles; and to try to end the Ukraine war in 2022 via direct negotiations with Ukraine. In all cases, the US government disdained, ignored, or blocked these attempts, often putting forward the big lie that Russia rather than the US rejects negotiations. JFK said it exactly right in 1961: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” If only Biden would heed JFK’s enduring wisdom.

To help the public move beyond the simplistic narrative of Biden and the mainstream media, I offer a brief chronology of some key events leading to the ongoing war."

Link here.

All Sides in the Ukraine War Have Been Using Cluster Bombs Since 2014

Russia’s invasion in February 2022 exponentially escalated this war, but it didn’t begin in 2022. It began in the spring of 2014, when a US-backed uprising overthrew Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych. The overthrow triggered a counter-uprising in the eastern region of Donbas, where Yanukovych was popular, and which saw the unelected new government as illegitimate.

By the summer of 2014, the situation devolved into warfare between the new, US-backed Kyiv government on one side and Russia-backed rebels as well as Russian fighters on the other.

Within months, the Donbas—the industrial heartland of Ukraine and home to 3.6 million people—was transformed into a postapocalyptic wasteland framed by matching rivers of crocodile tears gushing out of Kyiv and Moscow.

Link here.

For those who think the Ukraine-Russian war is about anything other than NATO

See this video at 1:20, where Biden says:

"The very first time I met with Putin two years ago in Geneva and he said I want commitments on no Ukraine in NATO . . ."

That's the Russian concern - Ukraine in NATO.  Every other reason given by the media is smokescreen and bullshit.

Paul Keating labels Nato chief a ‘supreme fool’ and ‘an accident on its way to happen’

Keating said that Asia’s “promise” after its recent development “would be compromised by having anything to do with the militarism of Europe – and militarism egged on by the United States”.

“Of all the people on the international stage the supreme fool among them is Jens Stoltenberg, the current secretary-general of Nato.

“Stoltenberg by instinct and by policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen.”

Link here.

Will the Ukraine war be the undoing for the European Union?

The 27 EU members hold the majority among NATO members and could, or better yet, should have used their influence to prevent this war and, once it had broken out, to end it as quickly as possible. In the conflict over NATO's eastward enlargement, which had been brewing since 1994, the EU, in its own interests, should have tried to mediate between the geopolitical ambition of the USA in expanding its global dominance and Russia's fears of being militarily encircled by NATO and cut off from its access to the Black Sea. After the war broke out, the EU should have supported the Russian-Ukrainian peace negotiations in March or April 2022 and attended the Istanbul peace summit. It could have ended the war one month after it started. However, the EU didn’t do either.

Instead, the EU aggressively supported NATO's eastward expansion as well as its own eastward enlargement. It must have been clear to EU politicians that with their support, Europe has been put on a path of confrontation, a confrontation that has now led to war with Russia. There were ample warnings, not only from Russia but also from Western political personalities, about the possibility that this could lead to war. The EU decided to ignore them. Now, with the outbreak of the war, the EU has failed to calm the situation. On the contrary, after some hesitation, the EU pursues a military escalation of the war, which today surpasses even that of the USA. Several EU countries, for example, have described the Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory as legitimate, although the USA has strictly opposed them. And while the US tends to hold back on the supply of such sophisticated weapons systems, it is the EU countries that, together with the UK, are supplying the most advanced tanks, war drones, long-range missiles, and uranium munitions. It is also a European coalition that now plans to provide F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. Even the EU Commission has become an arms dealer; its multi-billion-dollar ammunition purchases for Ukraine are ironically financed through the European Peace Facility (EFF).

Link here.

Review Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands by Richard Sakwa review – an unrivalled account (from 2015)

The second crisis arises from the internationalisation of the struggle inside Ukraine which turned it into a geopolitical tug of war. Sakwa argues that this stems from the asymmetrical end of the cold war which shut Russia out of the European alliance system. While Mikhail Gorbachev and millions of other Russians saw the end of the cold war as a shared victory which might lead to the building of a “common European home”, most western leaders saw Russia as a defeated nation whose interests could be brushed aside, and which must accept US hegemony in the new single-superpower world order or face isolation. Instead of dismantling Nato, the cold-war alliance was strengthened and expanded in spite of repeated warnings from western experts on Russia that this would create new tensions. Long before Putin came to power, Yeltsin had urged the west not to move Nato eastwards.

Even today at this late stage, a declaration of Ukrainian non-alignment as part of an internationally negotiated settlement, and UN Security Council guarantees of that status, would bring instant de-escalation and make a lasting ceasefire possible in eastern Ukraine.

The hawks in the Clinton administration ignored all this, Bush abandoned the anti-ballistic missile treaty and put rockets close to Russia’s borders, and now a decade later, after Russia’s angry reaction to provocations in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine today, we have what Sakwa rightly calls a “fateful geographical paradox: that Nato exists to manage the risks created by its existence”.

Link here.

NATO: Expansion Critics Write To Clinton (from 1997)

Washington, 27 June 1997 (RFE/RL) - Americans opposed to NATO expansion are stepping up a campaign to win public support for their concerns and writing to President Bill Clinton, asking him to reconsider his NATO policy.

Two senators of Clinton's own Democratic party -- Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Paul Wellstone (D-Minnesota) -- sent a letter to Clinton this week, requesting "comprehensive responses" to more than two pages of questions they raise about the enlargement process.

Another letter was sent to the White House Thursday by more than 40 former senior officials, ambassadors and government experts, asking Clinton to halt the expansion effort.

They called it "a policy error of historic proportions" and urged Clinton to explore other options for European security through the European Union, arms control, and NATO's Partnership for Peace program.

Link here.

Consumer Checkpoint Higher-income pullback

"The highest 40% of the households by income account for over 60% of overall consumer spending (Exhibit 7)."

Link here.

Muslim-Majority Countries Doubt U.S. Motives (4/7/23)

"Twenty years after the U.S. launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, despite stated U.S. desires, relatively few Iraqis or people living in 12 other Muslim-majority countries view the U.S. as committed to supporting democracy in their region or empowering them to chart their own political futures."

Link here.

Arab Youth Survey

"Now in its milestone 15th year, the annual ASDA’A BCW Arab Youth Survey is largest study of its kind of the Arab world’s largest demographic – its over 200 million youth. The survey presents evidence-based insights on the hopes, attitudes and aspirations of Arab youth, informing governments, the private sector, multilateral institutions and academics on policymaking, business strategy and emerging trends."

Link here.

How Cheap (or Expensive) is the Stock Market Right Now?

"Fair relative to what? Historical data? Other markets? Earnings? Sales? Free cash flow? Interest rates? Taylor Swift concert ticket prices?

The problem in trying to nail down fair value is there are so many different valuation measures to choose from."

Link here.

Why Putin Will Use Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine

"In fact, the evidence is strong that the problem is urgent and I argue that Putin will use a tactical nuclear weapon in his war in Ukraine. Western leaders need not wonder about Putin's nuclear-use red lines and how to avoid crossing them while supporting Ukraine, in my view. Putin is not waiting for a misstep by the West. He has been building the conditions for nuclear use in Ukraine since early in the war and is ready to use a nuclear weapon whenever he decides, most likely in response to his faltering military's inability to escalate as much as he wishes by conventional means. This article will not consider exhaustively what may prompt Putin's decision, but we should not fool ourselves by thinking we can prevent it. Instead, we should prepare responses for a new world in which the nuclear genie is out of the bottle."

Link here.

Keeping America close, Russia down, and China far away: How Europeans navigate a competitive world

Summary

• Russia’s war on Ukraine has shown European citizens that they live in a world of non-cooperation. But their cooperative foreign policy instincts are only slowly adapting to this new reality.
• Europeans want to remain neutral in a potential US-China conflict and are reluctant to de-risk from China – even if they recognise the dangers of its economic presence in Europe. However, if China decided to deliver weapons to Russia, that would be a red line for much of the European public.
• Europeans remain united on their current approach to Russia – though they disagree about Europe’s future Russia policy.
• They have embraced Europe’s closer relationship with the US, but they want to rely less on American security guarantees.
• European leaders have an opportunity to build public consensus around Europe’s approach to China, the US, and Russia. But they need to understand what motivates the public and communicate clearly about the future.

Link here.

The War in Ukraine Was Provoked

In 1998, William Burns, then the U.S. ambassador to Russia and now the C.I.A. director, sent a cable to Washington warning at length of grave risks of NATO enlargement:

“Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

Link here.

Visualizing the Assets and Liabilities of U.S. Banks

This infographic visualizes all of the deposits, loans, and other assets and liabilities that make up the collective balance sheet of U.S banks using data from the Federal Reserve.

Link here.

Why Are We in Ukraine?

"From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington’s NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests—or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington’s message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests—the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War—was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States."

The whole piece is awesome.

The Ukraine-Russian war didn't have to happen.  The U.S. and NATO wanted it.  They're responsible for all the destruction it's caused.

Link here.

A list of recent high-profile shootings in the United States

The attack is the country’s 22nd mass killing — in which four or more people died, not including the assailant — of 2023, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.

Link here.

Where You Need More Than $1 Million To Retire

As the golden years near, many become hyper-focused on how big a nest egg they need to retire. Not surprisingly, the size hinges largely on where that nest is needed, as the cost of housing and other living expenses vary widely by locale.

Our latest LendingTree study calculates how much people need to retire in each U.S. metro using different methods: based on the amount retirees spend in a year and on the median annual earnings of people ages 55 to 64.

We found that it takes more than $1 million to retire with an average lifestyle in nearly 40% of the 384 U.S. metros based on the former assessment, but significantly less on the latter assessment. (By significantly, we mean just one metro.)

Link here.

Breakaway Momentum call on 1/12/23

We'll see.