Converted or Deleted
The choice of the Crusades as a model for a modern defense chief is strange and unsettling. Disorganized, cruel, and ineffective, the Crusades were a monstrous failure.
Monday, December 9th, 2024
Bill Bonner, writing today from Baltimore, Maryland
We did well under the first Trump Administration. We did better under Biden. I think we’ll do even better in the next administration.
Palmer Luckey, co-founder of leading defense firm Anduril
When Dwight Eisenhower was elected, he promptly cut military spending by nearly 30%. The war was over. Eisenhower understood that the nation should return to a peacetime military.
No more!
Mr. Luckey let the cat out of the bag. Now, it doesn’t really matter who is in the White House, or what the public wants... or what the press reports... or what Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy get up to...
The Primary Political Trend is towards more firepower.
Investors are dizzy with dreams of riches... now that the dynamic duo — Musk and Ramaswamy — are on the case. We can’t remember anything like it... unless it was when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980... or Trump himself in 2016. Finally, the back of the Deep State is broken, say the optimists. Now, it’s full speed ahead. Nothing to worry about, right? MarketsInsider:
The stock market’s ‘fear gauge’ is trading at lows...
The stock market has been acting jubilantly over the past month, with the S&P 500 up about 6% since the U.S. election and all three major U.S. stock indexes trading near all-time highs. Throughout the optimism, Wall Street’s so-called “fear gauge” has been trading near lows for the year.
But the disappearance of fear is itself an alarming signal, While it is always possible that a new boom is coming, the most likely thing would be a bust. That’s just the way it works. When investors forget to be afraid, stocks get too pricey, and the returns over the following years tend to be disappointing.
A sell-off in stocks would engender many unwelcome phenomena, most likely including new stimulus from the Fed — in the form of lower interest rates and QE (bond buying... money printing). These, in turn, would send the economy and its markets into another wingding of bubbles, inflation, and crashes.
But with so much fearlessness afoot, no one is in the mood to think about a bear market, so we will continue wondering about where the Primary Political trend is taking us.
“I’m all about lethality,” says the nominee for head of the defense department. ‘Lethality. Lethality. Lethality.’
Really? No strategy? No Efficiency? No mercy? No peace?
Any reasonably competent high school janitor would probably have a more nuanced approach. But Pete Hegseth wears his cartoonish worldview, permanently inked on his body. Like an impressionable teenager in a hill-country Bible school, he believes in a crusade between good and evil... between the forces of Christianity and those of barbarity.
He can think what he wants, of course. But this is not a view that is likely to find favor with America’s, Moslems, Jews, animists, gnostics, agnostics, non-believers Hindus or Rastafarians.
Nor does ‘fighting’ or ‘lethality’ have a prominent role in Christendom. Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you does not usually include bloodshed, And yet Hegseth... even without so much as the brush of angel wings against his delicate cheeks... is ready to open fire.
In any case, the choice of the Crusades as a model for a modern defense chief is strange and unsettling. Disorganized, cruel, and ineffective... the Crusades were a monstrous failure.
In the first one in 1095, for example, crusaders marched down the Rhine Valley, on their way to the Holy Land, and massacred every Jew they found. No military geniuses they... when they finally left Constantinople, they were tricked by the Turks and destroyed at the battle of Civetot.
More experienced troops in subsequent crusades actually got to the Holy Land and took the town of Antioch... where they massacred the Muslims and Jews, along with Greek Orthodox, Syrian, and Armenian Christians.
Crusaders quickly figured out Saladin’s professional troops were no pushovers. So, they turned their violence against civilians at home. The Albigensians, in France, were all but exterminated. Later, crusades were launched against the proto-protestant followers of Jan Hus. The pagan Wends in Germany were also a target. Bernard of Clairvaux explained the goal: “They shall either be converted or deleted.”
And so it went for 200 years.And at the end, as at the beginning, the crescent moon hung over the Holy Land, not Hegseth’s cross of Jerusalem.
We are trying to imagine the look on Dwight Eisenhower’s face if someone such as Pete Hegseth had been recommended to him as Secretary of Defense.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Research Note, by Dan Denning
It’s been over six years since the infamous ‘Volmageddon’ incident of 2018. Investors, lulled by all-time highs on the S&P 500, became enamored with earning extra income from Exchange Traded Funds (ETFS) that bet on lower volatility. The ‘short vol’ trade was seen as a ‘can’t miss’ way to boost returns. But but as the chart of the VIX below shows (Wall Street’s ‘fear gauge’) volatility can’t make lower lows forever. The spike in the VIX in early February 2018 led to a more than 10% drop in the S&P 500 in under two weeks.
Ah, Bill, Bill, Bill! Ready to trash Hegseth by taking a few words out of context. Hegseth is also a champion of the soldier and doesn't want to see them used as cannon fodder for useless wars. Ah, but just a minor detail, huh Bill? You don't even have a clue concerning your own hypocrisy. On the one hand, you admonish Hegseth for not turning the other cheek, a religious sentiment, and quickly pivot to the Crusades, war initiated for religious reasons. Then you seemingly connect both to Hegseth as some sort of juvenile mentality, notwithstanding his service in Iraq and Afghanistan and his degrees from Princeton and Harvard, and with no recognition of the obvious contradiction. Quite remarkable, Bill! Take your meds, Bill. Don't forget the meds!!!
Assad is removed from Syria and some kind of islamic terrorist group has taken over. I forgot how this started when obama and his sec of state clinton started the arab spring wars. NATO bombed Libya and Qaddafi into oblivion and a decade later there is endless chaos there with different islamic groups fighting for power. Obama withdrew from Iraq when the military said it was too early and isis emerged which obama in his idiocy called the JV which we still are fighting there and in Syria. Trump was the only prez to not start wars in a long time. Maybe Trump can reign in the deep state and NATO from starting new wars. I doubt it because the deep state elites and their stooges in the press are already out in full force.