Look, it’s not that I *necessarily* think that none of this is true, or that your underlying thesis might not in fact be fundamentally correct.

To state it more succinctly than the above reply, I guess I’d just be interested in an update, and if you concede the need, some scientific self-correction…

I’m a stupid, small person, Mike. I don’t say that casually or thoughtlessly. That doesn’t mean that I believe that I can’t or won’t know more or become more than what I am at the moment. I have accomplished essentially nothing. I have essentially no meaningful life experience that I can apply to the interpretation of the broader world around me.

But, at the very least, I know that I know a little more than some people about some things. One of those things happens to be the geopolitical assessments that you’ve made over the past decades, which are (thankfully) on the record and available for public dissemination.

I agree that there likely a wealth of circumstances in which you would indeed “know it when you see it.” It does not seem to me that this is one of those circumstances.

You’re not the first person to “figure it out,” Mike, and you won’t be the last. You see, there’s something to be said for ignorance; I can “call it like I see it,” too.

I have no predilection for the status quo, and I’m not sure I am compassionate enough to worry about whether or not it withers and dies…were it not for the prospects of my own survival.

Of course we’re fucked. No one who’s bothered to give a second thought to this century would deny that it’s going to be a fucking shitstorm (sadly, however, there are plenty who don’t seem to realize that the shitstorm has already begun).

But it’s not going to happen exactly this way, Mike. Not in 2011, not in 2012, not in 2013. Your financial advice is not reflective of reality.

I understand that you mean well (good God, do I know that).

….so anyway, how much time do you figure we have left? It’s been over a year, so I guess we did have “such luck” after all. Guess I’ll keep hop-scotching on in blissful ignorance towards doomsday while the credulous cap their video game purchases and hunker down for the “essential conflict.”

Like I said, I’m fairly stupid. But that, in and of itself, has nothing the fact that, years from now, someone will look back and see that you were wrong; I only hope that the first person to do that will be you.

Nevertheless, nothing that’s happened regarding global markets should have been of very much surprise to any serious student of economics. Despite the hocus pocus of self proclaimed wisemen, market fluctuation is essentially random at the narrowest range; zoom the camera out, and you’ll see large peaks and valleys (sometimes there are sheer cliffs). Nevertheless, the long, gradual climb of indices is relatively steady *over the long term.*

Perhaps you want to err on the side of caution, Mike…after all, you can’t score a run unless you get on base…but there’s something to be said for plate discipline, at not taking a swing at every pitch.

You start this (mercifully brief) post with a picture of the Dow Jones Industrial Average; on the date this was posted, it closed at 11240 points. As of the exact time of my post, the Dow Jones is at 13065. That’s growth of a little under 21% over the course of the last year. If the picture you posted was supposed to be some kind of exclamation point to your vague warning, it seems to have flopped.

“…immediately stop all non-essential expenditures and save everything you can. When you need to convert those savings into non-cash commodities, of one kind or another, will become apparent in due time. If you have modest and manageable debt, pay it off. If you have large debt, begin to position yourself to walk away from it with as little injury to your assets and psyche as possible.”

It wouldn’t be hyperbole to say that this well-meaning advice may have been injurious to anyone with substantial stock holdings.

Hindsight is 20/20, but no non-idiotic financial adviser with a non-hysterical temperament would have given people similar advice in August of last year.

A year ago, the advice I was giving friends was the same advice I was giving college buddies on campus in the early 2000s. NEVER *EVER* ATTEMPT TO PREDICT THE TIMING OF SIGNIFICANT MARKET FLUCTUATIONS. NEVER *EVER* BE LURED BY WHAT YOU PERCEIVE AS TRENDS. *IGNORE* individuals who appear to have divined some special or uniquely profitable insight into the markets. Acknowledge and accept the incontrovertible reality of your own IGNORANCE.

Contribute regularly (as you can) to a diversified portfolio of index funds. If you do this, I can guarantee but one sturdy prediction from the crystal ball; given enough time and patience, YOU WILL be richer than the aspiring “failure analysts” around you; YOU WILL be richer when the market falls; YOU WILL be richer when it rises.

The prediction racket is limited in its usefulness, perhaps, to systems no more complex than a professional baseball team. The only thing that’s doomed with any certainty is the application of your predictions to a system as complex as the entire human race. Like I said before, you have a bad track record on this front, Mike.

Not if I drink enough cryoprotectant during the next couple of generations!

One problem with reading history, as opposed to living it, is that you often lose that all important sense of “reality” and proportionality that truly explain what happened. You can sometimes get a feel for it, and maybe even capture it, by reading a large and representative cross section of the ephemeral literature of the time. I have done this, to the extent possible for me as a monolingual reader. It has taken me countless hours sitting in libraries here and in Europe (mostly the British Library). What happens in such situations is that marginal, often insane alternate realities develop in the culture. Because they are insane and because they are not politically correct, they are almost invisible to the mainstream media (then and now). For instance, if the major newspapers, news outlets, blogs and websites right now were used as representative of the beliefs and thoughts of the whole culture, a very skewed and inaccurate view would result. The Tea Party is, of course, news and there is commentary and coverage. But this coverage is “removed” and “distant” from both the intellectual and emotional reality of how that demographic really feels and thinks. In Germany and Italy, as the Depression deepened an increasingly large segment of the population wanted to blame someone. They were mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore. Savings, homes, retirements – all were all wiped out by both WWI and the Depression. SOMEBODY HAD TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT!!!!

You can see this now with the blame game here – particularly the blaming of Obama. When Obama was elected, I told just about everyone I talked to that felt really sorry for him because, short of being god almighty, he was fucked from the get-go. Nobody could be CEO of the USA now and not be anything but unable to deal with the problem. And I mean this literally, because a) Congress would not cooperate, and b) the President would be impeached. Lincoln had it easy by comparison, because the radicals who were frothing mad and willing to do anything, were on the abolitionist side, which is where Lincoln ultimately came down – mostly because he was unwilling to lose union and risk the Balkanization of the US. I’m not saying Obama would do anything effective if he could, just that he seems a nice enough guy for a politician and that regardless of whether he was empowered to do, he will be UNABLE to act. That’s why I said they will go on printing money. THEY HAVE TO. In a few months 16 million people will have NO INCOME. They alreafy have no savings and are at most 30 to 60 days away from being on the street. If they stop being able to buy food, shelter, the occasional movie ticket… then you will have 4 to 8 million MORE people out of work…and so it goes. I’s a vicious, vicious, cycle of unemployment and decapitalizatioin breeding more unemployment and decapitalization. AND SOME OF THEM KNOW THAT. So, they HAVE to print more money and they will.

In Germany, the situation was made more complex and much worse by the facts that they had lost the war, suffered a humiliating and economically excoriating armistice, and were long afflicted with both a pernicious form of patriotism and a manifest destiny that included annexing half the world, for openers. All of that is evident in the primary media of the time. However, by the late 1920s the primary media no longer reflected the views of the people who were going ultimately going to matter. To get a feel for that, you have to look at issue after issue of the alternative newspapers of the time – as well as books and political pamphlets.,AND YOU MUST READ THE FIRST HAND BIOGRAPHIES ON ALL SIDES. Imagine, if you will, that in ten years, the ideology of Chronosphere (which actually represents a fairly deep and decades long ideology created by cryonicists thinkers from Ettinger to Perry) has become the ideology of the ruling party in the US, or in any of the great powers. You would see almost none of the events happening that made that possible until the very, very tail end of the process. If such a thing happened in the era before the Internet, all you would have would be the equivalent of things like Cryonics magazine and various ephemeral broadsheets and small newspapers – newspapers printed on horrible quality paper and that no one, including those who published them, took seriously enough to archive and preserve. In short, you lose access to the REAL dialogue and decision taking that actually shaped the cultural and ideological change. This would be much more the case with the personal correspondence.

I badly want to meet Debo Mitford, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. She is one degree of separation from Hitler, and she is highly intelligent and socially acute. She is a tremendous Elvis Presley fan, and some years ago she was asked who she would choose to talk to, at length, if she had the chance, Adolph Hiter or Elvis Presley? Without a moment’s hesitation, she matter-of-factly replied, “Why Elvis Presley, of course.” She was not being clever or provocative (though she can be both). Rather, she was saying something really important: “I met Hitler several times, I had tea with him, I LIVED through his time and I understand it, I GET Hitler. I don’t GET Elvis Presley, I have a lot questions for Elvis Presley… Often the most valuable people to talk to are those who have no interest in talking about that time. They understand it, they find it unpleasant, and they know that the grasping and well meaning questions that almost everyone probes them with about that era are beside the point, and will never communicate what really happened. To understand this, all you have to do is wait until you find yourself saying . “Man, you really had to be there!” That feeling of helplessness about communicating what really happened is at the core of what really makes history tick. This is because the information is hard to come by, doesn’t make much sense out of context (and the context is gone) and most importantly, because you do not have the emotional or intellectual perspective to even SEE it, let alone understand its importance.

The Germans had a long list of people to blame, and the Jews were understandably near the top of it. While it is horribly non-PC today, the fact is that the Jewish financiers and bankers in Germany, and more generally in Europe, did what any thinking businessmen would do: they got their capital out of Dodge! They move their assets first to gold and then out of the country. Just think about the seething anger in the US and the UK towards the bankers and investment firms today. I have seen people here red faced, with their external jugulars distended and about to burst, as those sorry fools continue to collect BONUSES, and have the government defend them lest they “quit their jobs and the extraordinary talent they represent become lost to us!” They enjoy (in part) one advantage that the Jewish bankers didn’t, and that is that they are “us” and not “them.” And of course, right now it’s still only just about the money. When the bankers, primarily the Jewish bankers, gauged that the war (WWI) was not going to be concluded in German’s favor, they moved their capital elsewhere and en masse. This undoubtedly hastened German’s loss of WWI. In pretty much any country, that is treason – and it broke the laws of the time – it was a criminal act. That the Kaiser’s Germany was a lunatic state and that you or I would almost certainly have done the same thing was IRRELEVANT to men like Hitler who had suffered unspeakable horrors in the mud of trenches – and been gassed, as well. These men were uber-patriots and they would have, and in fact DID give everything for their country, not once, but twice!

Now, think about the people holding all that bad paper and remember that from their perspective, we are “them” and they are “us.” –Mike Darwin

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904007304576498683254344262.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

For every person the world ends for, another person the world begins.