Category: Uncategorized

Only Cowards Don’t See Color

A lot of white people, particularly Boomers, proudly proclaim that they “don’t see color”. They seriously believe that’s not a character defect, but a virtue of some kind. The problem is that an unwillingness to recognize racial and ethnic identities is not a virtue, it’s a hideous and cowardly vice.

I wonder if the self-righteous colorblind can manage to see any color here?

A group of blacks attack a white couple in Maryland. These sickening attacks have become more and more common and the media remain tight lipped.

This sort of vibrant attack on a white couple is far from an isolated incident.

White woman tries to save her boyfriend from a black man, and he knocks her out cold. The hostility towards Whites is accelerating.

And they’re not going to end until whites decide that they can, after all, see what everyone else clearly can. Because, ladies and gentlemen, you’re the Indians now.

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Playing the Divorce Hand

From a discussion of an incipient divorce on SocialGalactic:

Son’s wife is definitely going to divorce him. Said they could do 50/50 custody. Son taking Vox’s advice, says he’s not going to play the custody game and argue over every little life decision with her. If she wants her “freedom,” he wants full custody, if she won’t give it to him, then she can have full custody and responsibility for the two kids 24/7/365. Says she was shocked to hear it, thinking she was going to have a nice set up. Says she’ll take full custody then. I think she thinks he’s bluffing.

My wife is aghast that he’s taken this position, but I agree it’s the right course. His wife can’t manage without him pitching in considerably. No way she’s going to do it without him in the picture helping out, working full time, and trapped at home every night as the kids sleep. She has no local support network. Even if she goes through with taking full custody, I can’t see her keeping it.

It’s a brutal and difficult decision, but it is the right one in the situation of a wife-driven divorce. Given the way the legal deck is stacked against men in the USA, she will have de facto full custody regardless of what the court-ordered custody structure is, only she will also have effective practical control of him as well.

This all-or-nothing approach leaves him a mostly free agent who has room to operate when she slips up somehow or tires of bearing the sole burden of single parenthood, as she probably will. A positive outcome is absolutely not guaranteed, but the probability of one is in his favor given what is known of her character.

The fact that she was shocked is good. It means she never even contemplated what is now the most likely outcome. And the possibility of turning all the responsibility for the children over to her ex-husband is going to grow more and more tempting to her over time, especially when she wants to pursue men who will be actively dissuaded by her having children.

Son’s wife definitely is not getting it. She made a list of what she wants in the mediation agreement. After listing several household items, she included “100% legal and physical custody” of the children. She then went on to list that visitation will be decided at the beginning of each month, with her getting at least one weekend with the girls. My son is resetting her expectations that she will have them every weekend, all weekend, and every evening as well.

Notice the wife’s incoherent desires and her inability to understand what 100-percent custody means. It’s simply not wise to base one’s strategy on such a creature’s ability to recognize, let alone be reasonable about, the best interests of the children.

As Sun Tzu says, to win, one must know the enemy as well as knowing oneself. This is why Deltas so often lose in situations they could easily win, as they make no effort to understand or anticipate their opposition, but are more concerned about being seen to be doing the right thing. Howeve, the last thing a woman who is ending her marriage in search of fun and freedom wants is to be tied down full-time by her children, with even less time for fun and games than she had when she was married.

It may sound callous and counterintuitive, but the observable fact is that in certain situations, the best way a man can protect his children is by demonstrating that he is willing to walk away from them.

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A Decade of War

Germany is prepared to support Ukraine through 2032, even if that means fighting to the very last Ukrainian.

Germany is not daunted by the prospect of a protracted conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and will back Kiev for the next decade, Brigadier General Christian Freuding has said. He added that Berlin is seeking to ensure that Ukraine retakes all the territory within its 1991 borders.

Appearing at the Yalta European Strategy (YES) forum on Sunday, Freuding was asked whether Germany was prepared to support Ukraine if the hostilities with Russia ended up becoming a “long war” spanning several more years. The German military official replied by saying it was unrealistic to expect the conflict to end in the near future.

Freuding went on to claim that “we’ve got the support of our parliament… for our military support for our Ukrainian friends up to the year 2032.”

At the current rate of economic contraction and casualties, another nine years of proxy war with Russia will see Germany’s economy further devastated and virtually every Ukrainian male between the ages of 15 and 70 dead. Especially when Russia is quite clearly prepared for an extended war against NATO and the USA.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday indicated he was bracing for a long war in Ukraine, saying that Kyiv could use any ceasefire to rearm and that Washington would continue to see Russia as an enemy no matter who won the 2024 U.S. election.

Speaking for several hours at an economic forum in Russia’s Pacific port city of Vladivostok, Putin said Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russian forces had so far failed and the Ukrainian army had sustained heavy losses of 71,000 men in the attacks. Only when Ukraine was exhausted when it came to men, equipment and ammunition would it talk peace, he said in reply to questions from a Russian television presenter acting as a moderator.

Russia controls about 18% of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea which it annexed in 2014, and a swathe of eastern and southern Ukraine which it seized after invading Ukraine on Feb. 24 last year in what it called a special military operation.

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Genius Trumps Expertise

There are two important business lessons here in this story about the success of a humble kitchen tool:

Richard Grace, inventor of one of the greatest tools the kitchen has ever seen, neither knows how to cook nor cares to learn. In the mid-’90s, he set out to make a wood-carving rasper and ended up with a culinary masterpiece called the Microplane: a cheese-grating, citrus-zesting, nutmeg-dusting revelation that today costs as little as $12 on Amazon. He’s an inventor in the truest spirit of the word, someone who treats ideation as a profession, not a calling. He doesn’t speak in buzzwords and has never hosted a TED Talk. He simply makes things and finds uses for them later.

Lorraine, a baker with an affinity for Armenian orange cake, wasn’t happy with her old kitchen grater. So she slid her husband’s Microplane over an orange. She was so astounded by the results, she had the description of the product changed in the store catalog to include its effectiveness at this seemingly niche kitchen task. This is how the story, “Test Kitchen; A Gift for the Cook, or Carpenter,” published by The New York Times four years later, began.

Before the Microplane brass could blink, they had become a kitchenware company — whether they liked it or not. Penned by Amanda Hesser, who later cofounded the award-winning food publication Food52, this 516-word story was to become Microplane’s crossing of the Rubicon, from carpentry to culinary.

“After the Times article, basically everybody who sells anything contacted us,” Arivett told me. “Williams Sonoma; Bed, Bath & Beyond; Sur La Table — everybody. It was almost too much to keep up with.”

Before the Microplane brass could blink, they had become a kitchenware company — whether they liked it or not. Within the first month following the article’s publication, the brand saw its kitchen customers eclipse its woodworking customers ten times over. Microplane, the wood rasp, sold between $300,000 and $400,000 a year; by 2002, Microplane, the kitchen gadget, did that in a month.

Then came an even bigger boom, one fueled by the power of the original kitchen influencers: celebrity chefs. Martha Stewart, Ina Garten, Rachel Ray and virtually anyone that mattered used a Microplane on their shows, calling it out by name for their audience. Julia Child liked the product so much, it earned a permanent spot hanging on the wall of her kitchen, which was later replicated at the Smithsonian. And Oprah’s personal chef, Art Smith, once called it “the most coveted tool in chefdom.”

But for all the brilliance of the original invention and the Grace family business savvy, they still weren’t sure what they were selling. “None of us were cooks,” Chris said when I asked him if the Grace family was culinarily inclined.

Lesson One: The experts know what has been done before. That’s what makes them experts. However, they do not know what is possible nor are they usually psychologically inclined to explore the various possibilities and tangents related to their knowledge. So, if you’re doing something new, do not permit yourself to be guided solely by their expertise. This is something we’ve been learning with regards to the bindery operation.

Lesson Two: Don’t be married to your business plan. I would bet that less than one-third of the most successful companies are actually successful doing what they initially started out to do. For example, Castalia intended to avoid doing print editions and focus on selling ebooks through Amazon. My favorite example, however, is the Connecticut Leather Company, which started out making leather goods in 1932, and later began producing plastic wading pools, which led to it making children’s plush toys, and eventually, the home video game system called Colecovision.

Of course, Coleco offers another lesson, which is the danger of success. Despite average sales of one million Colecovisions a year for six years, the company that started in and survived the Great Depression collapsed in 1988 after digging a hole for itself with its attempt to produce its own computer.

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Desperately Seeking Allies

The US appears to have made at least a modest amount of headway in signing up Vietnam for its Asian NATO after Biden’s recent visit:

Vietnam and the US have agreed to dramatically upgrade their bilateral relations and strengthen defense cooperation, while hailing several major deals worth billions of dollars. The announcement comes amid strained relations between both Hanoi and Washington with China.

In a statement released on Monday following a meeting between US President Joe Biden and Vietnamese leader Nguyen Phu Trong, the White House said that the two countries elevated their relations to ‘Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’ status, the highest tier in Hanoi’s hierarchy of bilateral ties, “for the purposes of peace, cooperation, and sustainable development.”

On security, the US and Vietnamese leaders welcomed “further cooperation in defense industry and defense trade in accordance with each side’s conditions,” according to the statement. In addition, the US said that it “is committed to continuing to assist Vietnam to develop its self-reliant defense capabilities.”

Vietnam is more than happy to acquire some outside assistance, and certainly, the Vietnamese diaspora in the USA makes the rapprochement easier in some ways. However, there is no way that the Vietnamese are going to sign themselves up as a Ukrainian-style proxy army in service to the West.

Also, it is the Vietnamese, and not the Chinese, that the other Asian nations have historically feared. As Lew Kwan Yew described it, they are regarded as “the Prussians of Asia” and fundamentally more warlike and aggressive than their neighbors. China, for all its power and population, is generally not feared because the Middle Kingdom has historically been uninterested in anything outside its borders. Even the limited Chinese invasion of Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia in the 1970s was instigated at the repeated request of the other Asian nations, led by Singapore.

The Chinese are not particularly concerned, but neither are they confused about Washington’s intentions.

“Let’s be honest, if there were no China-US tensions, Washington wouldn’t be so interested and have such strong intentions of upgrading its ties with Vietnam to this level,” Lü Xiang, a US studies research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Monday.

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The Two Faces of Economics

Michael Hudson explains the difference between Western neoliberal economics based on prices and debt, and historical economics based on actual production of goods and services.

Economics is not really a science as it’s taught. It’s a lobbying effort by the finance, insurance, and the real estate sector: the FIRE sector. It’s a lobbying effort by the parts of the economy that don’t produce goods and services, that only collect income without playing any productive role at all. Empty prices – that is price without any underlying value. And that is being promoted as economic growth.

And basically, it’s as if economics is like a criminal case in court where you have two opposing attorneys.The 19th century attorneys were prosecutors for the landlord class. They said, “Why should we have to pay the heirs of the warlords who conquered England and France to collect ground rents without producing anything? What possible function do they play? Why should we have to pay banks money for creating interest for creating credit that actually the governments can simply create their own money, or at least create credit for a productive purpose? And why do we permit monopolies, most of which were created by the government to sell off to creditors because it couldn’t afford to pay them their debt, why do we have to do anything of that? We don’t need it. Let’s get rid of the rentier sector.”The rentier sector being landlords, and bankers and monopolists.

Well, by the end of the 19th century, the rentiers fought back. And they developed what a defense attorney would do in a trial. They said, “There’s a whole different reality. There is no such thing as unearned income. There is no such thing as economic rent. Everybody deserves what they have. The landlord produces a valuable service in renting out the land and the housing and deciding who to rent to. And the bankers make a wonderful service when they charge interest. And especially when they charge a penalty fee because that helps make people pay their debts on time and that’s essential for productivity. So of course, we charge penalty fees as part of the gross domestic product. And monopolies are also part of the GDP, because after all, the monopolist is simply creating an orderly market.”

So, the problem is that instead of economic students getting both sides of the prosecution and the defense of the rentier economy, they’re only getting one side of the picture. They’re getting the defense of the rentiers, not the classical economics. And that’s why in graduate economic courses they no longer teach the history of economic thought. They no longer teach economic history. Because if you had the history of economic thought, you’d know that contrary to what Margaret Thatcher said, there is an alternative, that things don’t have to be this way.

There is a reason why China is growing so rapidly, and the American economy is being squeezed tighter and tighter. And that’s because its basically using its revenue to create new means of production and create a broader environment.

It’s true that it provides education freely, instead of charging $50,000 a year, which is what people have to pay in New York. But if you would say what if we credit China with every person with a degree of having paid $50,000 a year, obviously, that would be much bigger.

It’s true that the Chinese people do not have to pay $4,500 a month rent, which is the average rent here in New York City. Does that really make them poor? Or does paying the $4,500 a month rent that increases America’s GDP, actually turn out to be an economic burden?

This is why the Great Bifurcation between The Empire That Never Ended and the growing BRICS movement was both inevitable and unavoidable. The masters of the shell game can only keep winning as long as the suckers keep playing. But Russia has been kicked out of the game, China refuses to play the game except on its own terms, and their resultant success is encouraging dozens of other nations to stop playing the game.

Call it what you will, but Samuelsonian or Neo-Keynesian economics have always been nonsensical; so too is Friedmanite monetarism, because it is impossible to meaningfully quantify anything in a metric that is so readily expanded at will. One can only base social policies on “economic growth” so long before the reliance upon a myth results in insane and deleterious consequences.

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