Commencement Address at American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963

Today is the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's Commencement Address at American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963:

I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived--yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

Guest Post on "The Road to Revolution" and the Spanish Civil War

Spain (1931 - 1939) and the Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939) are valuable models for understanding the communist revolution that is unfolding in the United States. Two of the best writers about the Spanish Civil War are Hugh Swynnerton Thomas, Baron Thomas of Swynnerton (21 October 1931 – 7 May 2017) and Stanley G. Payne (born September 9, 1934), American historian of modern Spain and European Fascism, and Professor Emeritus at its Department of History, the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

I was born after the end of the Spanish Civil War. I began reading about the Spanish Civil War during college. I started with Thomas. Lately, I read a lot of Payne and other writers, especially writers who were Spanish Civil War observers or participants. I see parallels between Spain and the US. Here are two sections from a current article by Payne.

The Road to Revolution
by Stanley G. Payne
January 2021

"A threshold was crossed at the beginning of October 1934, when the centrist minority government broadened to include four moderate ministers from the Catholic CEDA, establishing rule by a parliamentary majority and respecting civil guarantees. The socialists responded by launching a revolutionary insurrection in fifteen of the fifty provinces of Spain. This insurrection, much more serious than the activities of the anarchists, produced martial law and two weeks of fighting in the mining province of Asturias. Nearly 1,400 people were killed in the conflict, much of the center of Oviedo was destroyed, large sums were stolen from the city’s banks, and about fifty people were murdered by the revolutionaries, including a group of Catholic seminarians. The troops who put down the revolt also shot a number of prisoners out of hand. More than fifteen thousand revolutionaries were arrested, doubling the country’s modest prison population, though many were soon released. Full constitutional guarantees would not be restored for fifteen months.

This was the most violent, broad-based revolt in the turbulent history of Europe from 1924 to 1939, and it drew considerable international attention. A massive campaign, financed partly by the Comintern, denounced not the wanton violence and destruction by the insurrection but the repression that followed it. In fact, the republican government enforced the mildest repression after a major revolt in Europe since the Paris Commune of 1871. But the revolutionary insurrection was justified in the press as an act of defending democracy against fascism. This agitation, international in scope, marked the beginning of the mythification of the revolutionary process in Spain, an attitude that persists in some quarters to the present day. The portrayal of revolutionary insurrection as a defense of democracy followed Trotsky’s maxim in his History of the Russian Revolution: To have the best chance, revolutionaries must appear to act on the defensive when seizing power.

The failure of direct insurrection required a change in strategy. The left began to seize absolute power through the democratic process itself, advancing revolutionary aims under the cover of legality."

"The elections of February 1936 registered extreme polarization. The liberal center was virtually wiped out, with most of the vote divided almost evenly between the Popular Front and the Catholic right, which, despite renewed violence from the left, continued to respect the rules of the game. The voting was calm and regular at first, but on the evening of election day Popular Front mobs began to gather in the larger cities, in some cases breaking into polling places. Disturbances continued for the next three days. A recent study by Manuel Álvarez Tardío and Roberto Villa García has shown that the results were falsified in at least ten provinces, handing a decisive victory to the left. The centrist caretaker government in charge of elections resigned precipitously, and the hapless Alcalá Zamora, his plans in ruins, found no other way of controlling the rioting than to hand power to a minority government of Azaña and the republican left. Electoral fraud was the decisive step in renewing the revolutionary process. It was followed by three further phases of electoral manipulation, which by May had secured an overwhelming Popular Front majority in parliament."

Forty-thousand foreigners went to Spain to fight in its civil war. Most of these foreigners were leftists. The ones from the United States showed a nostalgia about the Spanish Civil War in US mass media that lasted until the mid-1990s and beyond. Ernest Hemingway made a career of it.

Q&A with @CalvinFroedge on Emigration from the U.S.

[As a follow-up to our correspondent considering emigrating from the US with his family, and our July post with @halifaxshadow on the same topic, another CBS reader offered to share his own emigration experience in the form of a Q&A. You may follow him at @CalvinFroedge on the twitter.]

How old are you and where did you grow-up?
I’m 31. I grew up in a small town in Kentucky called Tompkinsville. I walked through the woods and fields to my grandmother’s house and my dad’s welding shop. My nearest neighbor was a few hundred yards away. I wrecked my grandpa’s truck when I was 12. My grandma made apple pie nearly every week. Cornbread and beans were included with dinner most nights. My parents were both scientists and our house was filled with books. When I was young we were poor and my mom volunteered at a Montessori school 40 miles away so I could get a head start. I was a country kid with smart parents and lots of learning opportunities. I dropped out of high school and never went to University. One regret has always been not dropping out sooner.

How long have you been an American ex-pat? Have you been in Panama the whole time, or did you do some amount of traveling before settling on Panama?
I left the United States for the first time when I was 19 to do mission work in the Philippines. I was making websites and doing videos at the time and sort of fell into a charity called Little Children of the World. They ran an orphanage and a school. I felt a strong motivation to do some good and to see the world. That was the first time in my life I got to see just how detached from reality American opinions generally were. I was there a few months and interviewed kids who had lost both their parents and were forced into selling drugs or stealing to survive. It was a life changing experience.

A few years later I was running a software team in Crimea (Western Russia) and got a second round of foreign exposure, this time for a year. I met a lot of smart people who didn’t speak English, and a lot of smart people who spoke five languages. Some of the guys who were working for me were better at programming, yet were charging a fraction of the price. It humbled me, motivated me to work harder and learn more, to invest in myself. Ukraine can also be a very dangerous place, and a few experiences like close calls with the local mafia, dealing with multiple robbery attempts, and discovering that locals thought I was CIA taught me a lot about how the world worked.

When I was 25 I was living in a slummy apartment paying tens of thousands of dollars in taxes and thought, “there’s something wrong here”, so I did all the tax optimization I could do: IRAs, self employed 401k, health savings account, etc. I kept maxing out what I could defer taxation on. When I learned about the FEIE (Foreign Earned Income Exclusion) and realized I could take another big chunk out of my US tax burden. I decided to go for it. I moved to Panama at 27. By that time I had been doing freelance IT work, or running a small software shop, for nearly 15 years. Panama had the cheapest immigration program and I knew some Spanish. I picked a little mountain town where the weather was nice, sold everything and moved.

Do you retain your US citizenship, or have you paid the exit tax and broken all ties?
Not yet. I’m probably about two years from having Panamanian citizenship.

Being abroad or mobile for most of your relatively young adult life, I assume you started for reasons liking travel and adventure. It appears as time went on your motivation morphed following that of an engineer's proclivity to maximize the solution to a problem: in this case tax burden. Since this series of posts originated with a CBS correspondent's political motivation to emigrate, may I ask whether political concerns such as woke-progressivism figured any into your decision?
I went to the Philippines because I wanted to help. I’ll never forget the advice of the president of the local rotary club: Go make your fortune, then come back. You’ll be able to do a lot more good.

I haven’t been solely focused on making a fortune. For a long time my focus was on becoming a great software developer. I’ve also spent months at a time outdoors – I hiked the entire Appalachian Trail one winter –  and I’ve had bouts of focusing on women. However, I have dedicated a lot of time and energy into making money. By the time I was around 25, I was starting to figure out that my greatest expense by far was what I paid in taxes, and if I wanted to maximize what I’d be able to earn and invest that was the first problem to deal with. That’s most of why I left so early in life. The woke-progressivism scared and enraged me and gave me a kick in the butt to get out, but it wasn’t the primary motivation.

Could you share a little of your family situation... have you gotten married? To a local or bring a girl with you from Kentucky? Any kids?
I am still single but have a girlfriend I love. She’s a local. Incredibly kind, hard working, curious and intelligent. No kids.

Many readers would need employment in whichever country they were to move to. You were doing remote-work contracting when you moved there. On twitter you've mentioned owning a hotel and of course you recently started TankerData.com. I take it you're not reliant on the local job market?
Correct. I have multiple income streams. I own a small hotel in Panama. I was the first investor in an ISP in the US. My TankerData.com project is my newest source of income, but the fastest growing by far. I also make a little money in the markets and from managing my other investments. I recently applied for a job in the maritime sector as well, mostly to improve my access to information.

Tell us more about the hotel. Sounds interesting.
It's more a boutique apart-hotel. There are seven apartments. 8 bedrooms, 7 kitchens, 8 bathrooms. I bought it because it was a good deal (neglected for five years fixer upper) with an amazing view and I had cash burning a hole in my pocket. I've experimented with a few different business models and kept extremely detailed financial records. What I can tell you is this: A place really needs someone on staff full time for maintenance and improvements. If you're doing short term you also need someone handling reservations and guests, you also need cleaning services.

I've experimented with bringing coders from other countries for medium term stays. I've made some great friends this way but it doesn't make a lot of sense from a financial perspective, at least at the scale that I've done it and the rates I've charged. However, having coders who could come and pay long term rates did cover the majority of my opex during the pandemic. I've never tried doing long term leases, but with the exception of the one apartment, all of my apartments are studios, so it's not really suited to the local long-term rental market, which mostly consists of retired Americans and Europeans who typically want a lot of space.

The best way to make money with my place is via short term rentals, i.e. hotel market. I swore off short term renting before because I really don't like dealing with people, but from a financial perspective, it's the most profitable way to do things. To give readers a few stats, in January, February, and March (pre-pandemic), my place grossed 10k, 14k, and 7k respectively. I had a few units during that time which were rented long term. Net operating income was $3-5k per month. On the other hand, April through September I lost a few hundred bucks a month, but all of my coder tenants with SaaS or other consulting income paid their rent. In October and November when things opened up those guys moved on and I started renting short term again. Gross revenue for November was back to 7k and December looks like it might break $8k.

It takes three people for the business to run without my involvement. It's not a business that will make someone rich, but it's a great income for Panama. It took me a few years to get it there. The first year was lots of capex with an operating income of ~8% of my initial purchase price, the second year was my experiment in only renting to coders with operating income around 4% of total invested capital, and 2020 looks to be similar despite the pandemic. I think from 2021 onwards I should be at 10-12% return on invested capital, and that's with plenty of money budgeted for maintenance and new projects. All of these numbers are unlevered returns.

Do you think expatriation is practical for a family man with a modest 6-figure nest egg doing it on his own, ie. does not have a multi-national, NGO, or State dept job? If not, what do you think a viable exit nest-egg would be for someone looking to live modestly, but somewhere safe and with good schools/peer-groups for his children?
There are some decent jobs in Panama City with banks, tech companies, multinationals, and NGOs. I recently saw a CTO position at 400k/year. The UN jobs pay really well. Some of the banking / multinational exec positions are six figure. I think the executives of the companies who are only headquartered in Panama and do not pay taxes are also exempt from income taxes. So there are some opportunities here, but only for the elite.

For me, I avoided the traditional route, avoided big companies, and never went to university. I've always assumed that side of things wasn't even open to me. I also hate dealing with company politics and/or having a boss, so it's mutual. But yes, those opportunities do exist.

I think the right strategy if raising kids here is to make them international citizens. Private school them or home school them. Make them internet natives. Why limit them to Panama? Panama simply provides nice weather, lower cost of living, and a tax-friendly domicile.

I think if you’re single and have the ability to generate even $1000 per month in continuing income, you could move to Panama. You’d be making more than the average local. That amount of money could cover an apartment, food, communications, public transportation and a little beer money. You can rent a bed in a hostel for under $10/night while you get your feet wet.

If you’re talking about taking the family with you, one thing to keep in mind is you’re not going to be able to get financing on real estate here unless you have local employment history, which obviously you won’t have. A few thousand a month will cover a decent life for your family as a renter. If you want to own a home for a small family, there are cinder block houses in residential developments where all the houses look the same for $50,000, or you could buy for example a small hotel where you could live and generate enough income to support your family for $500k-$1M.

It’s good to keep in mind that in Panama and many developing countries there a huge disparity between the costs of living in the city (where renting a house with a yard in a decent neighborhood is a few thousand per month) versus living in the country (where perhaps you could rent a villa on a small farm for the same price).

Panama in general is pretty safe and I’ve found the average person knows how to do more and is much more trustworthy than the average American. However there are narcos and thieves here, and crazy things happen. It’s still Latin America.

Conversely, for older and younger readers, what are some of the practical considerations? I assume there is completely different calculus for 20-somethings vs. retirees, and singles vs. couples, and maybe even men vs. women?
I think as a young single man, leaving the US or Canada for Latin America (or pretty much anywhere else, really) is literally the best decision you could make. I was blown away with how much easier it was to date here. On the other hand, I think it is harder for single women.

You’re going to pick up a new language much faster as a young man. As a retiree or a couple, the adjustment process may be a bit harder, but there are many who make it work, they just tend to stay within the communities of other expats, whereas I feel I’ve truly integrated with the local population. Speak the language fluently and you’re going to have a far easier time.

In your estimation, what are the marriage prospects for young people of European descent in Panama?
If you’re a young, good looking guy with a little bit of money, you can date and marry virtually anyone you want. Just don’t let it go to your head because there are a lot of girls who will be with you for the wrong reasons. Of course that’s true anywhere, but I feel it’s especially true here.

OK, as we asked in the first interview, are these even the right questions to be asking? Anything you want to add?
These are the right questions. Regardless of whether or not you want to renounce US citizenship, moving abroad is going to reduce your tax liability by probably $30k/yr if you have a $100k/yr in self employed income. Panama is great because they don’t tax income earned remotely, and the US doesn’t tax you on income you earn while living in another place until it goes above the FEIE threshold, assuming you follow all the rules.

For Panama in particular, these are the things that could potentially drive you crazy: Traffic, Lack of urban planning (some places), Poor infrastructure (some places), Lines / forms / make work culture.

I think overall you’ll have a better quality of life here, but some things that should be easy are just hard in Panama. Opening a bank account can be insanely difficult. One friend hit a snag in her immigration process because there was no certified government translator who could translate her Lithuanian birth certificate. The government here is slightly dysfunctional. On the  other hand, it’s also much easier to get through and connect with a real human who can help you with something. It can be as simple as giving someone a piece of candy, flirting, or just looking someone in the eyes and asking for help. Manana culture (forever pushing back on engagements due to laziness or lack of planning) is present in some individuals, punctuality as Americans know it is not a widespread cultural norm here. Nonetheless, I’ve found the people in Chiriqui province to be especially industrious and honest.

Thank you, Calvin. This was excellent intel and very generous of you to share. Before you go, how about a quick plug for your hotel?
De nada!
(I also have my own website for long-term rental inquiries.)

CW II

Even liberal normies are noticing that a second U.S. civil war is brewing.

Q&A with @HalifaxShadow on Emigration

As a follow-up to our correspondent considering emigrating from the US with his family, a CBS reader offered to share his own emigration experience in the form of a Q&A. You may follow him at @HalifaxShadow on the twitter.

How old are you and where did you grow-up?
I'm Generation X.  I grew up in a Midwest suburb - fairly nondescript in the sense it would have been similar to the suburbs of many American cities in the 80's and 90's.  Not very diverse. Crime free. But outside a city that had and still has quite a few problems surrounding the urban core.

How long have you been an American ex-pat? Have you been in Singapore the whole time, or did you do some amount of travelling before settling on Singapore?
I've been abroad for nearly 20 years.  I have lived in several countries across Europe and Asia and traveled to nearly 30 (most for work, with some vacation travel too).  I came to Singapore around 15 years ago for a job.  I had no specific intentions of settling here permanently, but that was a decision that would seem natural after a few years here.

Do you retain your US citizenship, or have you paid the exit tax and broken all ties?
I have renounced my citizenship and resolved my tax obligations, yes.  I did so before it was fashionable.

Being abroad for 20 years, I assume you started for reasons of being young and liking travel and adventure, rather than concerns over woke-progressivism that our correspondent wrote of. On the other hand, political reasons have been with us for a long time. Before woke-progressivism we had the “War on Terror” over which to emigrate. The obvious reason back then would have been the tax reporting & financial burden that came out of the Patriot Act, and perhaps since then the political angle has reinforced the fortuitousness of your decision. But maybe there is more to it?
Yes, my initial foray abroad was youthful adventure, which morphed into tax minimization as I started to earn, and only later became politically-motivated.  I was fed up with leftism by Obama's inauguration which put me a little ahead of the curve on this stuff.  Was reading Moldbug at that point.

As our original correspondent wrote of his children's future being a large part of his motivation, could you share a little of your family situation... married? To a local or bring your wife with you? Any kids?
I am married but for the sake of opsec I won't share much more than that.  However, I can say that I don't think renouncing citizenship is a disadvantage as such. There are trade offs to be mindful of.  For example, in Singapore your boys must serve in the Army (mandatory military service).  This personally doesn't bother me, but for those who have a problem with it, that obligation is probably a deal-breaker.

While I could go on about this, I see the US education system as pretty poisonous, so I wouldn't send kids there for university under any circumstance. I would recommend anyone living in the USA to homeschool your kids or identify a sufficiently dissident boarding and/or religious school that you feel confident is not infiltrated by woke progressivism.

As our original correspondent wrote about eventually needing employment in whichever country he were to move to, are you employed? Local company, multi-national, or remote-work contracting?
For the most part I have been employed in MNC's during my career. Depending on what unique skills someone brings to the table, and where you want to be, you will need to figure out the most practical way to fit in economically and visa-wise.

For example, if you are a great dev and have contacts to freelance/remote, you probably don't need to think too much about visas on day one. You can hit the road in southeast asia if that's what you like (I favor Thailand), and just change countries whenever your visa expires.  Later, you can figure out what you like.  If you are someone like me without specific qualifications, it might be easier to work your way up the ladder a bit at an MNC with an office in one or more of your target destinations, and work out a deal to be relocated.

If you're not married w/ kids yourself, do you think expatriation is practical for a family man with a 6-figure nest egg doing it on his own, ie. does not have a multi-national, NGO, or State dept job? If not, what do you think a viable exit nest-egg would be for someone looking to live modestly, but somewhere safe and with good schools/peer-groups for his children?
I think you can expatriate with a 6 figure nest egg.  I know people who have done so to Thailand and other countries in this region.  I don't think you can do that to Singapore on 6 figures and anyway I don't think there is a route to the visa you'd need unless you are working and have a sponsorship that route.

If I were going to hit Thailand with a 6 figure nest egg I'd say work out what you think your local income could be (do something generic like a real estate broker, perhaps) and then you can back into what you'd need in terms of nest egg with a retirement calculator.

6 figures is a broad range and you can be in Thailand living very well for the long-term with little concerns about monthly income in the upper end of the range and need to economize carefully at the lower end and live pretty much like a local.  There are great international schools there and that's where to send your kids (so plan accordingly in terms of cost).

Conversely, for older and younger CBS readers, what are some of the practical considerations? I assume there is completely different calculus for 20-somethings vs. retirees, and singles vs. couples, and maybe even men vs. women?
So you don't want to pay exit tax if you can avoid it. So, I'd urge the younger readers to get abroad and bottom out whether they want to expatriate before they hit the thresholds for accumulated capital gains etc that put them on the exit tax radar. For older people it is more about whether they want to live abroad for cost and lifestyle reasons but stay in the US tax umbrella, or whether the exit tax is 'worth it' as a one-time hit to be over and done with it. Each person is different but these are the broad considerations.

In terms of men and women, I think the thought process is probably similar. That said, if you are single, you will both be more open to which location to end up and also need to think about where you can meet your future spouse.  If you aren't into asian women, you probably don't want to move to Vietnam.  In theory you could move to Singapore where there are single western women, but the pool will be pretty small.  Not every place is filled with people who will be your cup of tea, so you may want to start off with a destination you already know a bit, and move on from there if you get the urge.

The original correspondent wrote he wanted to choose a place with good marriage prospects for his children. In your estimation, what are the marriage prospects for young people of European descent in Singapore?
Europeans are prized on the marriage market throughout Asia. You probably won't see your kids date or marry into the wealthiest Chinese families here, but your kids will have the pick of the strivers / nouveau riche types, and there is nothing wrong with that.  If they attend one of the international schools, they will also become friends with amazing people from all over Europe and the USA and have the chance to marry a fellow European too.

To step back a little, is there anything more fundamental you think the original correspondent is missing. In other words, is he even expressing the right concerns? Are these questions even the right ones for me to be asking?
These are the right questions. I would add that the most important factor is actually "whether you want to live in the USA again?"  You can't reverse course on renunciation. So if you renounce it is a one way ticket. We missed the USA greatly in my early years abroad and still do, sometimes. However, we ultimately decided we have no desire to live and work there again, and that's the moment at which we were able to proceed with renunciation with no doubts.

Perhaps I will leave with you with a list of countries in this region that I think are interesting for both short/medium term expat living as well as permanent residence:

Thailand - great people , moderate cost, great weather
Vietnam - cheap in the right areas, amazing western food
Singapore - career opportunities and low tax
Hong Kong - like Singapore but better for singles
Laos - have only been once but wow it was cheap, vibe is vaguely like Thailand but a little more closed

Thank you, @HalifaxShadow, for taking the time to share your experience with us. I would say your experience comes across as fairly typical. Emigration is not the same as going on an extended vacation by any means, but it seems to be a viable option for sufficiently motivated individuals and even families. The real difficulty appears to be selecting a destination, something that can probably only be solved by visiting a country (or a few countries) and deciding for oneself if it is a place one would wish to permanently reside.

CBS Correspondent Asks "Where to Emigrate?"

A CBS correspondent writes in with thoughts about the "Amerikanskiy Zones" mentioned in the June 22nd Links:

The ‘Amerikanskiy Zone’ in the June 22 link round-up struck a nerve. I remember reading that article when it was first published and largely rolling my eyes. It struck me as the usual Internet mental masturbation aimed at an audience of single, 20-something males. However, recently I’m seeing emigration talk coming from a much broader, and much older and wiser cohort. It seems to be slipping into the zeitgeist and it’s gotten me thinking.

Remarkably to me, I now have a new-found, practical desire to emigrate that I never had previously. By practical, I mean it’s more than just a wish for something to do if everything were perfect… rich enough, kids old enough, family entanglements dis-entagled enough, etc. — it is more than merely something I have on my bucket list. It’s now something I’m considering seriously as necessary.

So what’s changed? In short, I think US immigration policy — and Trump’s inability to move the needle on it — has holed the country below the waterline. The bald race-baiting by radical progressives aimed at dis-enfranchising white Americans is unique in American history. The rioting we’ve seen the last month is unique from prior radical outbursts due to our multi-ethnic composition. Time may heal all wounds, but speaking from experience it does not heal low human-capital immigration.

Growing up outside of Detroit in the 1970’s, I know well the social dysfunction brought on by bad immigration is a difference in-kind from what one gets with normal economic cycles which people outside the Midwest do not appreciate. If you are from there and look at the lasting effects of the Great Migration on the upper Midwest, it is heart-breaking. It is the difference between secular decline and cyclical decline.

The heavy-lifting of the 1980’s and 1990’s tech boom was done by considerable poaching of Midwest engineering talent. (H-1B scabs were, relatively speaking, a much later phenomenon that did not begin until the mid 1990’s.) There are a lot of reasons for geographical specialization that takes place, and why we have the Silicon Valley, not the Silicon Prairie. One reason not discussed is that growing up in the Midwest there was a clear undertone that the best and brightest left for college and never came back. It became a self-fullfilling prophecy… if you didn’t leave you clearly weren’t among the best and brightest. What enterprising young man looking to stake his claim on the world wants to be thought of less than among the best and brightest? My point is there was no shortage of talent in the Midwest. The Midwest brain drain was a result of wanting to escape the civic dysfunction brought to the region by the Great Migration. This was irrespective of the manufacturing decline that took place.

In the 70's & early 80's many people at the time thought that the US was in a secular decline. The late 80's and the 90's challenged that conclusion and I think for the last 20 to 25 years when recessions hit the public met them with a certain equanimity. Each recession was a bump in the road but the arc of economic growth inevitably yielded to increased prosperity.

Seeing a second Great Migration, this time not from the South to the Midwest, but from every "shithole" country to every mid to large size city in every state in the Union from Maine to California, and the complete failure of the Trump administration to roll back any of it, leaves me black-pilled on the future of the country. Like the upper Midwest, I don't think it can be recovered from. Worse, if Biden wins this November, there is going to be a complete doubling-down by Obama retreads. They'll be in the Executive Branch feeling like they have to make up for 4 years of lost time. I fear it will be like when Central Banks decide 10 yrs of (faked) 0% inflation need to be made-up for in the next 4 years.

Previously I always wished for an escape country. Many times when challenged by my wife with “well, where should we go!” I lamented that Globalism had done the same thing to every English-speaking country and that there wasn't any place to go. Now, to show how much more serious I am about the situation I'm of the mind that English isn't important. I am now of the mind that any country with a deep enough European gene-pool for our children to marry into is sufficient.

Speaking of our children’s future, it brings up another consideration in which I have changed my thinking 180 degrees. It is roundly purported American women are the most entitled, least marriageable women on the planet. Ironically given my prior reservations, maybe I would be doing them a great service moving to a foreign country while they are still young enough to culturally assimilate and find love and a marriage partner. This changes everything. If the best hope for my children’s future lies in a foreign, non-English speaking country time is essential. We cannot wait for everything to be perfect. We would need to emigrate as soon as practicable.

While we live in California, I have not won the options lottery and we do not own a home from which we can cash out several 6 figures of equity. We are not at all wealthy enough to leave the US and maintain our standard of living in any form or fashion into the indefinite future. Maybe that's for the better too. Maybe that's how it has to be... cut all ties and go.

What I don't see happening is how the country can pull back from the brink it finds itself at. Indeed, there are plenty of indications to suggest we've actually gone over the edge. There may be no going back.

The last decade has cost the 1% nothing. The last 6 months have cost them nothing. If anything bad that happens to the country costs them nothing, there's no reason to believe that they think there is anything that needs changing. From their perspective nothing is broken. The rioting in the streets they rationalize as Trump's fault and their social bubble all nod in agreement.

The question I have for CBS readers: Am I wrong? What country has the brightest future that is also reasonably accessible to an American family of modest means?

Coronavirus And Our Post-Democratic Future?

Glenn Chan wrote a post this morning, "healthcare systems in developed countries have been surprisingly inept compared to China." Everything that has happened over the past two months in the West has been surprisingly inept compared to northeast Asia. I believe that this episode is an inflection point in the fortunes of Asia vs the West, and also points to a post-democratic future of the West.

There are three examples on Twitter that capture the superior northeast Asian response in a stunning way. First, only Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan were able to get their coronavirus outbreaks under control swiftly enough to matter. (China's may be under control, or they may be lying.) They did this using masks, contact tracing, and quarantining that I am not sure this country is going to be capable of managing.

Read Scott Gottlieb's paper, "National coronavirus response: A road map to reopening". It is a sensible three step plan, but it is also a list of things that this country is poorly prepared to handle. Remember, New Orleans has a major outbreak and they also have a hotel in the French Quarter that collapsed during construction and still has "among the collapsed building’s twisted remains and rubble, the dangling legs of a wedged corpse". The Congress and Trump's administration have been insider trading and looting (also) instead of thinking about how to quickly implement these measures.

Second, I was astonished by this March 10th tweet from Taiwan showing that people under fourteen day quarantine got a nice bag with "goodies from the municipality," including "rice cakes, face masks, milk powder," to "cheer up the spirit." Again, you just can't imagine this being done in the U.S. except possibly in Mormon communities. Small, rich enclaves would have the resources but not the neighborliness.

Third, doctors and nurses in the U.S. do not have the masks and gowns needed to protect themselves against infection so they are reduced to wearing garbage bags. Nurses wearing garbage bags is a de-legitimizing moment for the state. The U.S. experience with coronavirus is reminiscent of Chernobyl, except it has already been far more lethal than Chernobyl. But the minimization and lying are the same. Telling people that "masks don't work" was just a way to hide the lack of masks that came from offshoring manufacturing.

How did we get here? In short, giving low-IQ people the vote. Everything follows from that. The future has been mortgaged and cannibalized to buy votes from those with high time preference. I've been writing about this on the blog for thirteen years. Everyone warned that democracy would end this way, and it is going to:

• "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." - John Adams
• "Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." - James Madison

So it has been interesting to watch the social media accounts of the U.S. military. The U.S. Army's Twitter account posted a video of the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, giving a briefing on rapid expansion of hospital beds in New York.

Under democracy there is a false choice between Trump and Biden. Middle class U.S. "kulaks" can have a guy who sacrificed thousands of lives to prop up his stock market bubble for a couple extra weeks or the totally demented figurehead of the political coalition seeking to dispossess them. Biden's base hates kulaks so much that he still insists we would have to have open borders bringing in more coronavirus cases if we got our epidemic under control.

Maybe people will sign up for one more round of this false choice. (The choice itself is an alarming signal of U.S. decline.) But check out the biographies of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military as well as those of the unified combatant commanders. The CJCS was a Princeton Army ROTC student, the VCJCS attended Harvard University where he studied engineering and applied sciences on an Air Force ROTC scholarship. These guys look the part, and they tend to be engineers in the model of Chinese government and not our system of lawyer government. It's eventually going to take governance by engineers to not be crushed by engineers. (Lawyers can lie about how great things are while the wheels are coming off.)

The deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history was the 1900 Galveston hurricane that killed ~10,000 people. The 1918 flu killed something like half a million Americans, and of course the Civil War killed between half a million and a million people. There's a death toll here - maybe in the low six figure range - where the civilian government would be deposed to everyone's relief.

It may not get to that level this time. There are some promising treatment ideas: azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine, convalescent blood therapy, possibly remdesivir. (Low carb diets might reduce ACE receptor expression!) It ought to be possible to stop the air travel and get quarantine lodgings set up so that people do not spread the disease to household members. I have a bad feeling that attempts to do a coordinated effort of antibody testing, PCR testing, and contact tracing will turn out like the Obamacare website. We should be able to get people wearing masks.

But the military has been the most competent part of the response - civilian entities like FDA, CDC have been useless obstacles - and it is the credibility that they will gain from this which will have everyone ready for them to take over in a subsequent crisis. That could be a worse second wave of the virus, another Chinese bioweapon attack, an economic collapse or something unexpected - like this was.

The military would have good instincts. Instead of UBI, I would predict they would favor WPA-style reindustrialization: rebuilding infrastructure, returning the production of all medical goods, machine tools, and electronics. Again, engineers who know where "stuff" comes from and who know about the importance of logistics and supply lines. The military definitely knows how vulnerable trade with China makes the U.S., and they will be watching after this episode as the civilian government continues to do nothing about it.

P.S. Three other thoughts:

• For those who have been buying the dip, I have also been asking, "what happens when the most overvalued asset bubble ever hits the biggest economic shock in history?" (A "panic" is not the right word for it.)
• The other bright spot besides the military has been the 100% capitalist system of food production and distribution. Read about the H-E-B grocery store in Texas. But I'm worried we have a false sense of security about this based on how well it has done so far. What happens if food warehouse and grocery store workers have enough of the risk? The military would step in but it would be a big shock and there might be shortages.
• Notice how many of the links in this essay are to Twitter. It's the world's best source of information, although it is a bad investment because the owners would rather we not talk about the topics in the essay, instead just silently read celebrity press releases. The eclectic mix of Twitter users that I follow saw this coming. Will "TSLAQ twitter" be vindicated too this year?

Correspondent Writes Regarding GHW Bush's Vote For Hillary

There is no practical difference between the Democrat Party and the Republican Party. Both are agents of the Rothschild/Federal Reserve/IMF loan shark operation.

The Democrat Party is a collection of groups distinguished by envy of high-functioning white men. None of these groups is in on the real purpose of the Democrat Party, which is to extend and protect the power of the Rothschild loan shark operation.

All of the rage against Trump and all of the anti-Trump coverage in mass media owned or controlled by the Rothschild operation is because Trump is busting up the Rothschild's sweet deal with the two political parties. He is depriving Republican Party hustlers of their base and assembling a coalition to beat the Democrat Party.

The Republican Party are the designated losers who seldom get friendly publicity in the Rothschild media. Its members are content with various hustles, tax write-offs, an occasional kind word, a chance to sell unneeded, poorly-designed, over-priced weapons to the armed forces, and more.

One of the best parts of this election is the chance to see Republican hustlers like George H. W. Bush out themselves as parasites of white people.

You probably don't know it, but George H. W. Bush was photographed at the scene of the assassination of JFK, at the time it happened.

The Fake Coup

A correspondent writes,

The coup in Turkey was a fake meant to facilitate the arrest, removal, and replacement of its western-oriented legal system by a fundamentalist Muslim shariah law system.

The coup ended too quickly, with little real combat. It did not unfold like a normal coup, but like a staged drama. For example the regime was ready much too soon with arrests of a long list of judges and prosecutors who could not have had anything to do with military activity, but who were a barrier to imposition of shariah law.

The logic of coups has been worked out. There is an extensive literature and most any coup plotter would have read some of it.

He surely would have read Edward Luttwak's 1979 book, Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook. He would have known to arrest or kill the present head of state and, nowadays, to shut down the internet.

Correspondent Comment on Brexit

The EU was the mini-empire established for Germany to keep it from reconciling with Russia and to keep it within the US Empire for the benefit of the Rothschild private banking nexus.

The British common people never wanted to be part of the EU. It was in their face all the time. For example, the British were forced to let many of their cherished varieties of apples go because they were not listed in a Brussels directive. This sort of aggression happened all over Europe until people were fed up.

Now, Britain is going to exit. See this map of British search queries about Brexit.

The actual Brexit may be delayed temporarily by electoral fraud, but it will come soon because of the flooding of Europe with Muslims.

France does not like being a junior partner of Germany. It is attracted to Russia. It will exit the EU soon after Britain. So will Italy and Greece.

All of these will begin integrating with an entity extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

High Plateau Drifter on the Republican Presidential Primary

As I watched that first Republican presidential debate the obviously opinionated interrogators from Fox spent far too much time talking and appeared to be attacking all the Republican candidates if not equally, nevertheless significantly. I wondered if Fox, which I never watch, must have switched sides and want Hillary to win. But realistically it seemed like a price Fox was willing to pay for thin cover over the hatched job they were doing on Trump. Also Mehgan Kelly set a new high in arrogance and obnoxiousness which I guess Roger Ailes thought she could get away with because of her looks.

But the message that resounded loudest with me was the effort that all candidates other than Trump expended to avoid giving any offense to anybody and the lengths to which they went to convince the audience they were nice guys. It was a stunning portrait of all that is wrong with American politics. Politicians want to avoid giving offense, primarily to actual and potential political contributors and secondarily to blocks of potential voters.

The candidates behavior at the debate screamed that our ruling oligarchs do not like controversial candidates. They love bland and boring. And of course political candidates hand out political favors, oligopoly legislative benefits and lots of government cash and profits to all comers. Why make enemies? And that is why the federal budget and federal debt is expanding at exponential rates. Its everyone gets a trophy day every day in DC and that is why the debt balloon, which can never be repaid, is expanding at an exponential rate.

And next behind bland and boring in order of preference is mediocre and stupid. Heaven forefend that someone might get elected who can visualize the secondary effects and collateral consequences of legislation they are passing and also have a conscience and strength of character and get elected. That would be a nightmare for our ruling oligarchs.

I have been opining to CP in our private conversations that we will never get meaningful change until the oligarchs realize there is not enough skim left to keep them all happy and begin fighting among themselves.

And therein lies the good news. We have billionaire oligarchs breaking ranks. Trump out front, with billionaire Mark Cuban wanting to be VP and Carl Icahn wanting to be his secretary of Treasury. Something is brewing beneath the surface here. Likewise the political advisor and campaign management industry is caught with its pants down, completely clueless about the anger of the Republican base out here in the Red States, and also clueless about the anxieties building among the oligarch class that knows the party will end at some point and want to control the process.

Personally I have a hard time believing that Trump could put up with the BS that a modern President must put up with for more than 8 or 9 months, but then that is not the point. The marker is down and the oligarchs are beginning to think about their plan B options, now that they may not have a safe field of nice guys fearful of offending any of them.

Stay tuned.

Indiana State Police Pension Trust v. Chrysler LLC

Hardly anyone even remembers or thinks about Indiana State Police Pension Trust v. Chrysler LLC.

During a May 29, 2009 interview with Human Events, Mourdock said, "This is the first time in the history of American bankruptcy law when secured creditors received less than unsecured creditors." Mourdock also stated, "The Chrysler deal is a clear violation of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and more than 150 years of bankruptcy law." Mourdock also stated that under the Fifth Amendment, private property cannot "be taken without due process of law. That clearly has not happened in this case. There has been no process of law consistent with long-standing precedent whatsoever."

On May 26, 2009, while speaking in front of U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa, Mourdock stated, "As fiduciaries, we can't allow our retired police officers and teachers to be ripped off by the federal government. The Indiana state funds suffered losses when the Obama administration overturned more than 100 years of established law by redefining 'secured creditors' to mean something less... The court filing is aimed not only at recouping those losses but also reasserting the rule of law..."

During a May 21, 2009, interview with Reuters, Mourdock stated, "They bought according to the rules, and then the rules got changed," and, "Our portfolios are no longer going to buy the secured debt of American corporations that are accepting bailout moneys. It is an unacceptable risk for us to purchase that debt."

The ultimate outcome

On December 14, 2009, the Supreme Court granted the cert petition in Indiana State Police Pension Trust v. Chrysler LLC and vacated the underlying Second Circuit opinion, but remanded the case with instructions to dismiss the appeal as moot. While the Court had declined to hear the case on June 9 which allowed the Obama administration's wealth redistribution BK plan to proceed without ruling on its merits, its Dec 14 action effectively de-legitimized the BK plan, yet the Court did not issue a ruling to explain its actions. This was far from the ideal outcome for the Indiana pensioners who sought equitable relief from the high court, but the vacatur of a flawed lower court decision is nevertheless an important development that will maintain the integrity of bankruptcy law going forward.

Does the absolute priority rule apply with respect to secured claims at union labor companies when a Democrat president is in office? Who knows.

Gene Quinn On the Less and Less Predictable Supreme Court

Putting aside the two highly contentious ones, there were some really odd Supreme Court decisions this week, which is part of a broader trend that Gene Quinn describes in his piece:

The Supreme Court doing whatever they want without repercussions or consequences is not new. Indeed, those who oppose Obamacare and who find the Supreme Court ruling in King v. Burwell impossible to justify are just now having to come to terms with what those in the patent industry have known for many years. The Supreme Court does not let the statute stand in the way of reaching the decision they think is best. Neither does the Supreme Court allow precedent, even their own precedent, influence their decision making process. That is, of course, unless they choose to ignore substantive arguments and claim for some reason that in a particular case their hands are tied because of stare decisis, which they actually recently did in Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment. Given this Court’s track record it is practically comical to see them cite stare decisis.

In Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court issued another intellectually challenged decision. In a unanimous decision authored by Justice Thomas the Supreme Court held that because the claims are drawn to a patent-ineligible abstract idea, they are not eligible for a patent under Section 101. The problem, however, is that the Supreme Court has never defined the meaning of the term “abstract idea.” Furthermore, not once in the decision did the Supreme Court even use the word “software,” although the patent in question was undeniably a software patent and the Court’s decision has been used at the USPTO, PTAB, in Federal District Courts and at the Federal Circuit to either deny issuance of software patents or declare previously issued software patent claims invalid because the subject matter is patent ineligible. Everyone in the industry knew this decision, one way or another, would have major impact on software patents and the Supreme Court didn’t even use the term once? Are they that hopelessly out of touch?

"A Big Little Idea Called Legibility"

This is a review of Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed:

"The book is about the 2-3 century long process by which modern states reorganized the societies they governed, to make them more legible to the apparatus of governance. The state is not actually interested in the rich functional structure and complex behavior of the very organic entities that it governs (and indeed, is part of, rather than 'above'). It merely views them as resources that must be organized in order to yield optimal returns according to a centralized, narrow, and strictly utilitarian logic. The attempt to maximize returns need not arise from the grasping greed of a predatory state. In fact, the dynamic is most often driven by a genuine desire to improve the lot of the people, on the part of governments with a popular, left-of-center mandate. Hence the subtitle (don’t jump to the conclusion that this is a simplistic anti-big-government conservative/libertarian view though; this failure mode is ideology-neutral, since it arises from a flawed pattern of reasoning rather than values)."

George Gilder On the Welfare State, and the Implications For Treasuries

New Republic:

George Gilder, a pro-family conservative who was the person most often quoted by President Ronald Reagan, believes that welfare “usurps the male role as chief provider and undermines the foundation of families. His provider role is absolutely central to the family; if the state replaces the male provider, you don’t have families. The welfare state cuckolds the man.” In other words, if the state provides women a source of income that doesn’t require marriage, Gilder surmises, women simply won’t marry. Worse yet, in Gilder’s parlance, welfare constitutes state cuckoldry, as though food stamps steal sexual access men are rightfully entitled to. Thus, in the words of once and likely future Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee, Uncle Sam becomes “Uncle Sugar.”

The original Gilder interview:

Religion is primary. Unless a culture is aspiring toward the good, the true, and the beautiful, and wants the good and the true, really worships God, it readily worships Satan. If we turn away from God, our culture becomes dominated by “Real Crime Stories” and rap music and other spew. This is the most fundamental point. When the culture becomes corrupt, then the businesses that serve the culture also become corrupt.

The legitimate purpose of public debt is to borrow money to build infrastructure improvements that have a positive net present value. However, a vast portion of federal expenditure now leaves nothing tangible, leaves no collateral. A treasury bond is a certificate that money has successfully been expended on section 8 housing, or on make-work military "jobs".

The lack of collateral makes these treasuries creatures of social mood. In a way, they are as valuable as tulip bulbs or south sea shares.

What is a treasury going to yield when mood darkens, and a distressed investor who looks over the enterprise for scrap value is the marginal buyer?

25th Anniversary of USSR Collapse

Printing money isn't a solution to bankruptcy if no one wants what you print. Eventually, it comes down to being able to produce goods [pdf]:

"On August 22, 1991, the story of the Soviet Union came to an end. A state that does not control its borders or military forces and has no revenue simply cannot exist. The document which effectively concluded the history of the Soviet Union was a letter from the Vneshekonombank in November 1991 to the Soviet leadership, informing them that the Soviet state had not a cent in its coffers."

Maybe two evil empires can disappear in one lifetime...?

"The Cannibal Warlords of Liberia"

Get Out Of Dodge?

A correspondent writes in about "another liberal hypocrite. Do as we say, not as we do" from banana republic New York City:

"Mayor de Blasio's SUV caught on camera running two stop signs and speeding just days after he announced crackdown on dangerous driving"

Smart people I know are selling their California and New York real estate and getting out of Dodge. Gary North says:

"Lesson: if you can read a map and draw conclusions, you can do quite well in bad times."

People have a great deal of inertia in their affairs. But as Gary says, "the emigrant plans an escape route before his peers think there is anything seriously wrong".

"We Win the NY Times Prize"

Mises:

"We don’t back down and apologize when we’re smeared by the state’s media. We relish it as an indication that we’re doing our job. We tell the truth about the state: its wars, its expropriations, its militarized police, its propaganda. We don’t peddle the elementary-school propaganda that the state is a public-service institution seeking the public good. We believe that the great products of civilization — indeed civilization itself — are the result of spontaneous human cooperation. The parasitic class that holds the levers of power in the state apparatus may try to condition the public to believe that central planning and threats of violence — the hallmarks of the state — deserve credit for human progress, but our scholarship proves the opposite."

The NSA Raven

Once upon a database query, while I pondered weak security,
And many avenues of access via backdoor,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a wiretapping,
As of some one gently sniffing, sniffing at our server's door.
“‘Tis some hacker,” I muttered, “tapping at our server door
Or just a virus, nothing more.”