It's not her fault

Events in Ukraine  have cost me $20,000 in investment losses over the last 2 weeks (the smart money having flown first, before the news broke), and i expect it to continue.

 "...a clear picture of events in Ukraine" (Celebrity baleen)

if a clear picture were ever to emerge, it would be the first time such a thing has happened within 2000 years of a military event happening.  The true causes of WWI are still not out in the open, let alone WWII; the only thing that can be said with any certainty about the latter is that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbour in advance, because it was the real-life James Bond

Lord William Semple

who was tasked with persuading the Japanese High Command that they could get away with it, and all the US aircraft carriers sailed out of the harbour a few days before a bunch of old superannuated ships were air-bombed to sway American public opinion 180 degrees away from its anti-involvement in Eurpoean squabbles miles away across the pond position, over to the gung-ho "get the Krauts" rhetoric of Churchill (so he could get his own Blenheim Palace).

several years ago, i forecast in print that the next financial crisis would be bigger than the last (2008) one. 

i didn't know how they would engineer it (i only knew the 1929 and 2008 crashes had both been engineered by the same basic technique: a decade of super-low interest rates (eg the Roaring Twenties) followed by a sudden major selloff (or synchronised call in of Margin Call loans), triggering all the lemmings to rush off the cliff so the sharks could move in and hoover up real assets like farms and businesses for pennies in the dollar, widening the wealth gap and cementing their grip on power by strengthening their grip on the throats of wage slaves.

covid came along - whether that was engineered or not, i don't know; perhaps it was just a coincidence that a US army sports team had been in Whuhan, leaving just before the first news broke.

perhaps Ukraine is just another coincidence; for after all, its language war had been going on since 2014, and no-one forced Putin to take action (did they?); perhaps it will all blow over as fast as it's blown in;

or perhaps it's the second of a new row of dominos that have been stacked up on the QT, just as the row of just 3 GFC dominos were stacked up on the QT over a period of 10 years, waiting for George Bush to go on telly and say "Every American should own his own home" to set up the smallest (subprime mortgages) domino, ready to fall and push over the middle CDO domino, to fall and push over the big CDS domino, which was pulled (as in Silverstein's "pull it") by the Banque de France, whose chairman Christine Whatserface was promoted to head the IMF as her reward for being a good girl and doing what she was told, just as Janet Yellen was given a smaller pat on the back for doing what she was told too.

Stephen Fry, on a BBC tv show called Qi, demonstrated that a falling wooden domino can push over one 3 times its size.

Quite a coincidence, i'm sure they didn't get the idea from me, as no-one reads anything i write. 

 

But a falling financial domino can push over one 3000 times its size...

 

Fairy Story Physics

The 18th century in France saw blind faith in State Authority seriously challenged for perhaps the first time in human history, rooted in recent discoveries in science. 

But it didn't turn out too well in the short term though, with the idealistic aspiration of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity quickly turning to the Terror of Madame Guillotine, only repeating the crudities of the Crusades and setting the scene for even worse atrocities in Nazi Germany and American Imperial adventures in the oil-rich Middle East. 

In the former case, the great unwashed German public were persuaded to meekly go along with it, whatever private reservations they may have harboured, swayed by the unscientific argument that one race was superior to another, and that they, the blond-haired blue-eyed ones, were God's own Chosen People. 

The inanity of this unenlightened argument should have been laughed at by the hoi-polloi, if for no other reason that it's public face belonged to a failed painter with black hair, brown eyes and a Charlie Chaplin moustache.

But it wasn't. 

When God made Man, He must have done it on a Friday afternoon, because He made so many basic mistakes in the design of the human brain that it's a bloody miracle we haven't already let ourselves be blown to Kingdom Come by Dr Strangelove.

For Heaven's Sake, only a nation of halfwits could vote in a Billy Bunter buffoon as their own Great Leader!

This year, in September, it will be the 21st birthday of an even more egregious transgression of Common Sense, so egregious that one can only conclude that Sense is anything but Common, for every schoolkid in the physics block should have been marching in the streets demanding that f = ma be given a hearing.

But they didn't, and it wasn't, and it still isn't.