It's appalling to hear a small number of liberals call Thanksgiving an occasion for "mourning."
Descendents of the native Americans of 1620 complain about white Europeans seizing land that was not theirs!
Winston Churchill once said that when the present goes to war with the past it is the FUTURE that suffers.
Today we hear a complaint from a small band of descendents of
the New England native Americans of 1620 that Thanksgiving should be
called a day of mourning because the white Europeans simply sailed into
Plymouth Harbor and took the nearby land.
In olden times American Natives didn't have a concept of
land onership. They perfectly understood hunting and other practical
means of harvesting the products of nature. The natives of
Manhattan, for instance, would never have sold the island for a
handfull of trinkets if they understood the true relative values of the
items exchnged.
In 1620 the native Wampanoag were not
particularly afraid of the Pilgrims. A few had actually been to Europe
and could speak some English. They had some trouble with the rival
Narraganset natives and saw an alliance with the Pilgrims as possibly
helpful.
The famous "First Thanksgiving" didn't gain fame
until the Civil War when President Lincoln called for a national day of
Thanksgiving. It didn't become a federal November holiday until
December, 1941...signed into law by Franklin Roosevelt only two weeks
after Pearl Harbor was bombed.
We were born in Plymouth County, MA and exposed to a
great deal of Pilgrim lore in our youth. One fact that sticks in our
mind is the Pilgrims weren't Puritans. The did not wear dour black
clothing as shown by several famous artworks. They favored bright
colors, like purple.
The Pilgrims also mistakenly tried to
establish themselves as a communal society, turning in a large share of
their produce to a central warehouse from which everyone could receive
their necessaries. It was a swell deal for the less productive, but a
real drag for the efficient producers. It was soon abandoned.
Nobody speaks of the 'Miracle of Compounding Interest' any more.
Doug Casey: "It’s really, really serious. I
previously thought it was metaphysically impossible to have negative
interest rates but, in the Bizarro World central banks have created,
it’s happened. Negative interest rates discourage saving. Saving is what builds
capital. Without capital you wind up as an empty shell—Rome in 450
A.D., or Detroit today—lots of wonderful but empty buildings and no
economic activity. Worse, it forces people to desperately put their
money in all manner of idiotic speculations in an effort to stay ahead
of inflation. They wind up chasing the bubbles the funny money
creates." END OF THE WEST. Doug Casey believes the trend toward a
cashless society is heading our way. We see signs of it everyday. In
fact, we recently got a letter from our neighborhood bank branch asking
us to call for an appointment to come into the bank to conduct
business. One can still use the drive-up window at will, but for those
of us with no need of an automobile this presents a problem. So, for
us, it has become lessconvenient to cash a check. "What do you need
cash for?" you ask. "Just use your debit or credit cards for
transactions."
Because the law declares Federal Reserve notes to
be legal tender it suits us just fine for small run-of-the-mill
purchases . If mugged we'd rather lose $50 or so of cash than a wallet
full of credit cards. We only have one credit card, which we've
held for fifty years, and we rarely carry it unless facing a hefty
expense.
This card company (American Express) sent us a gift
of two wine glasses from Tiffanys last week to celebrate our 50th year
with them. A daughter helped us wnwrap the gift box and she checked the
value on Tiffany's web site. $40.00 each! They're
beautiful, and much appreciated.
|
|
This 2020 graph is already
out of date. It shows the public debt as barely more than
$23 trillion. The debt is rising at $100,000
per
second and as of 9AM today it had risen to $27.3 trillion.
Not until the Reagan administration did the public
debt ever top $1 trillion. The 1982 budget deficit was nearly
$128 billion running the accumulating debt to more than $1 trillion for
the first time in history. We have been told not to worry about
the soaring public debt because we "only owe it to ourselves."
This is true but we know of no one who intends to pay into the U.S.
Treasury his/her share of the debt.
The fact is we have piled up
this huge sum of IOUs for our posterity to deal with - only they are
not aware
of it yet. They will be more angry than wet hens when they discover the
plain facts.
The graph shows exactly when the public debt
total topped $1 trillion for the first time. The United States
government, and a large percentage of its citizens, have been on
a borrowing binge ever since.
One of our children remarked yesterday,
"But Dad! When the car dealer offers a new car at comfortable
instalments at ZERO interest why wouldn't you want to take advantage of
that?"
Because of the uncertainty of the
future. In this pandemic period we cannot count on uninterupted
health. Illness or death can destroy the family's income. Too many
posessions carrying mortgages....house, cars, boats and what not can
seriously damage one's net worth. Likewise, an excess of credit card
and other debt can ruin one's balance sheet.
Ben Franklin and other Colonial sages suggested that
people "live within their means" and try to set aside a little money
for the future. "A penny saved is a penny earned."
** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
From
U.S. Statistics, 1792...the new federal government ran a budget deficit
of $1,410,000. It ran several surplusses over the next 10 years
and the public debt was roughly $3 million less than in
1792. Needless to say the American dollar was
substantially stronger in terms of content and purchasing power in
those days!)
|
We're 10,000 above the patient peak last Spring and heading
higher.
Who's paying the tab
for all this?
Charles Hugh Smith has been studying and
writing about professional sickness care for some 15 years and his
opinion regarding the present virus pandemic bears scrutiny.
Large sectors of the population are frightened by the threat and assume
they have a right to hospital care whether they can pay for it or
not. Demand and prices for medical care are running off the
charts.
Says Smith: "The hollowing out of financialization has been
accelerating for over a decade.
In effect, there are two tiers of healthcare: the 'sickcare' system
managed by profiteering,
predatory, parastic corporations and their non-healthcare
managers/shareholders who are seeking the $30 million payday, the $300
million payday or the $3 billion payday.
"The second tier is composed of the
overworked, over-regulated healthcare professionals trying their
best to provide care within the hollowed out, unaffordable
dysfunctional, unsustainable 'sickcare' system of rapacious cartels,
compliance managers, debt deals, lobbyists, unsafe medications passed
off as 'safe,' off-patent medications brought back under patent
protection via pathetically
transparent formula tweaks, billions of dollars of pharmaceutical
adverts directed at patients, a practice that
was illegal a generation ago, and so on in an endless profusion of
skims, scams, rackets and corruption." HEALTHCARE IS UNRAVELING
Can inflation ever
end?
Of course. But,
monetary inflation has never been known to end conveniently.
The Federal Reserve has done a phenomenal job of
keeping price inflation rising every year since 1940, excepting for the
little hiccups to the downside in 1949 and 1955. That's eighty
years of price inflation! It's time to stop.
Mainstream media are still busy
promoting the cracks and crevices in the political and social scene,
ignoring - for the most part - the dangers of crumbling monetary
issues. Lost entirely to journalists, and therefore the general
public, is the fact that the Federal Reserve has driven the purchasing
power of the U.S. dollar of 1914 to a mere 4 cents. The Fed is on
the
record as promoting price inflation...a minimum of 2 percent per
year...and flies into a panic at the thought of a deflationary
deflation.
There is some minor static out there
asking for consideration of a return to "honest money" but the connection of honest money to
justice
is only dimly understood by a minority of monetary experts. The
general public is being sold on the notion of getting rid of paper and
metal fiat currency and relying almost entirely on currency created
entirely in computers...such as bitcoin.
Cryptocurrency.
Christine
Lagarde says her people are "looking at it."
Lagarde is
president of the European Central Bank and stated Thursday that ECU is
looking at the creation of a digital currency and it may be introduced
in two to four years. As a youth she was a synchronized swimmer
and seems to be swimming in synchrony with other central bankers who
have been muttering in public about the possibility of introducing an
official currency that exists only in the bowels of computers. This
would curtail the use of printing presses at the U.S. Bureay of
Engraving and Printing. What will BACK this new digital currency has
not been discussed. Probably nothing more than the "full faith and
credit" of the national government. Bring a $100.00 Federal Reserve
note into a bank and ask that it be exchanged for some full faith and
credit and you will be be greeted by a blank stare. You could insist on
exchanging the paper note for a hundred dollars' worth of
quarter-dollar coins, but banks have been suffering some shortages of
U.S. coins because the mint experienced a production slowdown owing to
the coronarirus pandemic.(Coins are not IOU's.They are made of base
metal and have limited intrinsic value. Paper notes, on the other hand,
are strictly IOUs - promises to pay. Fiat money.)
"Why not adopt bitcoin?" you ask. Among the things that
give a medium of exchange reliabilty and value is SCARCITY. With the
federal government borrowing from the future at the rate of more than
100,000 dollars per second - and with the Federal Reserve empowered to
monitize the debt as necessary,there is little motivation to put the
brakes on money inflation. This money flood invariably leads to
heavy price inflation in
popular sectors of the economy.
The Age of Inflation is an economic trap. Going on
an all-digital money standard is not going to eliminate that.
Why was John Adams so
resistent to the idea of forming a democracy?
Because he explored the historical record
and found no instances of democracies that failed to destrory
themselves.
A
majority of the of the attendees at the 1787 meeting to amend the U.S.
Articles of Confederation chose to toss it in the wastebasket and
construct a representative republic. We still refer to a
constitutional republic when we recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
It was ratified by the several states ("these United States") in
1789,
but since the early 20th century the constitution has been largely
abandoned and the republic morphed into a socialist tainted welfare
state ("THE United States"). Modern politcians are eager to
get their hands on the modern American democracy and "fine tune it" to
make it work as they believe it should.
Note: The original constitutional form
created a purposely weak central government controlled and supportd by
the people. After the representative republic was replaced by the
present democracy the government is expected to support the people,
even if it has to send a multi-trillion dollar debt to posterity.
But therein lies the seed of destruction. When the people must
petition their central government for more handouts, and the government
must borrow from the future production of the young and unborn, the
system is terribly askew.
Neither of the major presidential candidates
had a plan to do anything about it.
Would-be candidates for 2024 ought to get busy on scripts. People are
on the edge of revolution and won't brook any nonsense.
How
to pronounce "Kamala."
The
Vice-president elect and her family say "COMMA-lah."
How to pronounce "Biden."
The
president-elect and his family say "BIDE'n."
The rest of us, including professional broadcasters, are all over the
place. We hear "BI-den " most frequently and "KAh-mah-lah".
What to do?"
As a youngster we were taught that if Mr. Smith pronounced his name
"Smythe" then Smythe it was. If a French person preferred to
Anglicize his or her name we were obliged to do it, too.
The famous French economist Jacques Rueff, however, was content with
the
pronunciation of his name in French. It still presents a
problem for English speakers.
After the election of 1932 many Americans had a terrible time mastering
the pronunciation of "Roosevelt." One very popular
mis-pronunciation was "ROSE-AH-velt."
We'd like to see educators expand their
curricula to not only include the correct SPELLING of words but
their proper
pronunciation as well. If we all spoke the same
language our understanding of each other may improve.
