Flatly stated, evidence confirms the employment of lethal military power that we have relied on for the past fifteen years has failed to protect America. It is important that the creators and practitioners of U.S. foreign policy at the State Department and the White House do not merely cease these counterproductive actions, but discard the martial philosophy that spawns these actions and replace it with a superior product.
The default foreign policy mentality of using lethal military power to solve violence and instability overseas has been exposed as a near-total failure. While no strategy can guarantee success, there are common sense alternatives that offer a rational hope for success. It’s time to stop doing what we know doesn’t work and try something that has a chance.
FLASHBACK VIDEO: Lt. Col. Davis has been sounding this alarm for some time:
James Freeman of the WSJ writes some inspiring news. His focus is on the recent fire-ravaged Canadian province of Alberta and the “much-maligned” oil companies that spontaneously helped in the recent rescue effort by providing food and shelter to more than 25,000 people.
As St. Lawrence University economist Steven Horwitz notes, “That shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows what Wal-Mart did after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005. The company shipped thousands of trucks of water and other supplies into the area, well ahead of the lethargic Federal Emergency Management
Agency.”
Do you want to know what investing is to me? It’s a feeling. To have a feeling for the market, like sailing a boat, is to separate the good investors from the greats.
Why is it important to get a feel for the market? Because the knowledge we seek is not always available in reports, and often it’s distorted by reporting bias.
It’s why I personally favor anecdotal evidence for the truth about the markets.
For example, nothing in the world can replace conversations I have with my clients or emails from you. They give me on-the-ground intelligence I never, ever find in daily stock quotes.
Let me share with you what I mean by this.
Recently, I had a wonderfully informative conversation with a client involved in a family gun business. I told him I was constructing an index to measure the overall investing landscape and tone of the country—my RAGE gauge. The idea being to provide you with a wide array of data in an easy to understand format.
I asked my client about the tone of his customers. What are they sayin’ and what are they buyin’?
There wasn’t even a pause.
He said, “E.J. I can’t keep single-stack handguns on the shelves. As soon as they come in they’re sold. When customers tell me they are concerned for their safety, they buy handguns and preferably ones that can be easily concealed (single-stack).”
That’s it.
That’s all I needed to hear.
As soon as we hung-up I looked up the FBI background check data for handguns. Background checks give a pretty good indication as to an eventual sale.
And sure enough, they’re way up.
For the month of May 2011 background checks for handguns were 307,929. This May they were 512,406. You and I know tension is high in this country.
We now have some more data points for the index—a tool to help give us a better feeling for the markets.
Say what you will about him, Barry Goldwater would never be found among this cut-and-run crowd that is deserting Trump to appease an angry elite.
These Republicans seem to believe that, if or when Trump goes down, this whole unfortunate affair will be over, and they can go back to business as usual.
Sorry, but there is no going back.
The nationalist resistance to the invasion across our Southern border and the will to preserve the unique character of America are surging, and they have their counterparts all across Europe. People sense that the fate and future of the West are in the balance.
While Trump defies political correctness here, in Europe one can scarcely keep track of the anti-EU and anti-immigrant nationalist and separatist parties sprouting up from the Atlantic to the Urals.
Call it identity politics, call it tribalism, call it ethnonationalism; it and Islamism are the two most powerful forces on earth.
According to the New York Times, Trump identified the potential wave of non-politicians at the event in Cleveland as “a winner’s evening,” adding, “Our country needs to see winners. We don’t see winners anymore. We have a bunch of clowns running this country. We have people who
don’t know what the hell they’re doing running our country.”
FLASHBACK VIDEO: Trump: If I’m president we’ll win so much, you’ll get bored with winning.
Where do you buy gold coins? For non-collectible coins, I’ve done repeat business with Blanchard and Co., Inc. and I like how I’ve been treated. I would expect the same for you. And, I say non-collectible coins because I’m not a coin collector.
How many gold coins should you buy? When you buy gold coins do it as if the price is going to be cut in half tomorrow. Ask yourself how much you can comfortably afford to buy if that were to happen. That’s one way to make the right choice for you and your family.
This was my thinking when I was establishing my gold coin position:
What I set-out to do was to create a 50/50 hedge for any gold/cash storage. For example, ten years ago I wanted $5,000 cash so I matched it with a purchase of $5,000 worth of gold.
The idea being that with my cash and gold collecting dust, I wanted to at least have a chance to win the war against my lazy cash. And I did. Both are still collecting dust.
It’s a simple strategy no doubt. But it has worked for me. The key is not to not buy the gold for appreciation. If you do it will drop by half the next day. It’s simply an unwritten law of investing.
Think about it as a way to be your own banker. All your cash is backed up in your safe with gold.
FLASHBACK VIDEO: Blanchard Sells Brasher Doubloon Gold Coin for Record $7.4 Million
To look at US policy toward those two countries over the past five years, the general view seems to be that things couldn’t get worse, so Washington has pushed for change. In both countries, change has come, and things have gotten worse. And while it’s solipsistic to suggest that those
countries’ politics turned on what the American president said about them, the Obama administration’s rhetorical and material support for the revolutions may have made things worse, on net, for citizens in those countries by prolonging the wars.
This is not something that is easy to suggest in the policy/pundit world in DC. “X would put Qaddafi back in power” or “X sides with Bashar Assad in Syria” is a demagogic debate-stopper. This sort of argument was the last refuge of a neocon when it came to Iraq. Nobody wants to be accused of supporting or even minimizing the crimes of dictators. But the fact remains, life under dictatorship is one thing, life under an extended,
stalemated civil war is another.
Consider Syria: A report from Freedom House in 2010, the year before the civil war started, detailed the state of affairs in the country. Ranking it Not Free, Freedom House went on to detail the usual catalog of
Arab authoritarianism. The Assad regime banned a wide array of political parties and publications; persecuted opposition leaders; used graft widely; ran a brutal secret police; and did an array of other nasty things.
But juxtapose that against what has ensued since: the regime has fought a ruinous war against the revolutionaries, but failed to defeat it. Similarly, the opposition appears nowhere close to victory.
Assad has gratuitously pummeled civilian populations, ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra have grown from nothing into regional insurgencies. Somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 people have been killed, at least 100,000 of them civilians, and more than 7 million have been driven from their homes, with more than 4 million fleeing the country entirely. This in a country that started out the war with just 22 million people.
In Libya, the before part of the before-and-after is similar, but instead of a brutal and inconclusive civil war, Qaddafi was deposed and replaced by…well, it’s hard to say. Just last December, the UN brokered a deal between Libya’s two governments to form one government so that it could effectively fight ISIS, which had seized control over
some of the more valuable parts of the country. Despite this deal, however,
Continuing armed clashes have displaced hundreds of thousands of people and interrupted access to basic services, including fuel and electrical power. Forces engaged in the conflict are guilty of arbitrary detention, torture, unlawful killings, indiscriminate attacks, disappearances, and the forceful
displacement of people. In addition, armed groups that pledged allegiance to the extremist group Islamic State (also known as ISIS) are also summarily killing people in areas under their control.
A revolution is always a gamble. Win and get a hand in forming a new political structure. Lose and die. Drag on inconclusively, and lots of people die. So it’s not for me, sitting in Washington, DC, to tell Syrians or Libyans whether they should or shouldn’t have supported revolutions
against their terrible governments. But it does look like a plausible case can be made that reverting to the pre-war status quo would be better than any likely outcome in either country, other than a miracle.
And in rhetorically supporting the revolutionaries (“Assad must go”) and in fighting on their side (bombing Libyan government forces in Libya) it seems likely that the Obama administration prolonged wars that might otherwise have been won more quickly by the
incumbent governments. Time will only tell what emerges in the wake of Qaddafi and Assad, but one has to wonder just how much worse the status quo ante will look once the costs of the wars to change them have been factored in. In both places, the butcher’s bill is appallingly high, and what it’s purchased is still unclear.
A man who worked with Omar Mateen at an international security company said he made repeated formal complaints about his colleague’s aggressive behavior and alleged family connections to al Qaeda, but eventually quit his job when G4S refused to fire Mateen.
Daniel Gilroy, a former Fort Pierce police officer, told Florida Today he had raised concerns with his G4S supervisors after Mateen talked about killing people. Gilroy said his complaints were ignored by his superiors because Mateen was Muslim.
“I quit because everything he said was toxic and the company wouldn’t do anything. This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people,” said Gilroy, who worked with Mateen at a gated community in South Florida where the company oversaw security operations.
Gilroy, a trained law enforcement officer, said Mateen also made homophobic and sexist comments that were “inflammatory and contradictory.” The Orlando killer also claimed, according to Gilroy, that he had family connections to al Qaeda.
On Sunday, after the savage slaughter in Orlando, President Obama talked about the need for gun control, the effect of the
attack on the gay community, and the FBI’s investigation of the shooting as an act of terror.
What President Obama did not mention, neither this time nor after the attacks in Fort Hood, Chattanooga, Garland, and San Bernardino, were the words Islamic extremism.
James Woolsey was director of the CIA under President Bill Clinton. After Obama’s statement, Mr. Woolsey opined, “Facts don’t seem to matter to this administration, in this matter. This reluctance is doing real damage. You can’t effectively fight something if you can’t discuss it.”
It’s time to show the kind of solidarity and moral clarity that the French have against ISIS. The war that Islamic extremism is waging is, yes, against gays and, yes, against women. But it is also one against the West and indeed civilization itself. It’s time to call out the source of these terror attacks. Instead, the Obama administration continues to declare war on the English language by falling back on bureaucratic bafflegab.
To look at US policy toward those two countries over the past five years, the general view seems to be that things couldn’t get worse, so Washington has pushed for change. In both countries, change has come, and things have gotten worse. And while it’s solipsistic to suggest that those
countries’ politics turned on what the American president said about them, the Obama administration’s rhetorical and material support for the revolutions may have made things worse, on net, for citizens in those countries by prolonging the wars.
