MONTEZUMA’S CASTLE
When American explorers came upon this extraordinary cliff dwelling in 1860s Arizona, they dubbed it “Montezuma’s Castle” on a whim. The Aztec ruler had nothing to do with it, of course. The Anasazi people built a number of these marvelous structures in the Southwest, high up on cliffs above a river that seasonally flooded.
For hundreds of years the Anasazi flourished, skilled agriculturalists and brilliant at constructing vast irrigation systems. Yet it all came to naught with a devastating megadrought with no rain for many decades, culminating in the collapse of the Anasazi culture and abandonment of their cliff dwellings by the early 1500s.
Another lesson that it is nature that control’s the Earth’s climate, not us. You’ll find Montezuma’s Castle above Beaver Creek south of Sedona. It’s a marvel not to be missed. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #194 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
THE DOOM OF RUSSIA
[This Monday’s Archive, “The Doom of Russia,” was originally published on March 18, 2004. Appended to it, as in the original, is “A Short History of Russia,” written for the Reagan White House in 1985. Together, they provide a historical context not only for Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, but more widely, its inability to join the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union, choosing instead to remain its adversary. Your thoughts are welcome on the Forum.]
TTP, March 18, 2004
Last week, Vladimir Putin was re-elected President of Russia with over 70% of the vote. Does this portend the re-animation of the Soviet Russian Empire, led by a man with an unchallenged grip on power, possessed with a deep nostalgia for the glory days of the USSR, and determined to bring back those days again?
No, it means that Russia has taken itself out of the global game. It means that Russia has no future. It means that Russia is resolutely determined to screw itself.
Monopolies of power rarely work in today’s world – especially ossified ones. Putin may look young and energetic, but worked his whole life for the KGB – and every member of his cabinet now is a former Soviet apparatchik. There isn’t a single new thinker among them.
All of them are trapped in their past. In the Kremlin and in the totality of influential academic and journalistic thought in Russia today there is a complete absence of rational analysis of Soviet-Russia history and why the Soviet Union collapsed. There is never an accounting or realistic appraisal from anyone in government or academia.
There is only nostalgia. There is nothing but nostalgia. As Lionel Barrymore would say at the end of a play: “That’s all there is – there isn’t any more.”
This thinking is not imposed upon the oppressed Russian masses whose yearning for freedom is stifled by the tyrannical elite. No, it is reflective of common thinking. The recent elections demonstrate that Russians as a whole simply do not want a real democracy like those emerging in their former colonies of Eastern Europe, with real pluralism, small business growth, and economic freedom.
Americans have a naïve tendency to look upon the world as a place where everyone wants the political and economic freedom that we have if they had the choice and opportunity to have it. Maybe in a lot of countries, but not in Russia.
Let’s draw three bottom lines from this.
THE LESHAN GIANT BUDDHA
Carved out of a cliff face of red sandstone on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau over 1,200 years ago by Buddhist monks, the 233 ft-high Leshan Giant Buddha is the largest and tallest stone Buddha statue in the world.
I took this picture from a boat on the river that runs past it. As you can see by Buddhist pilgrims working their way down the stone steps on the side and in front carrying umbrellas, it’s raining. Rain is so frequent here that a sophisticated drainage system was incorporated into the statue when it was built. It is still in working order. Behind the Buddha’s head, between his two ears, and scattered throughout his body, there are several hidden gutters and channels carrying out the rainwater that have kept the inner areas dry and prevented the Buddha from eroding since the 8th century.
Knowing this adds to the wonder of beholding this extraordinary achievement. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #268 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
HALF-FULL REPORT 06/23/23
The Global Authenticity Problem
This week saw the loss of a tourism submarine in the vicinity of the wreck of the Titanic. The U.S. Navy determined what happened last Sunday but supported the psyop of a significant search for survivors to control the media narrative for a few days.
The White House desperately needed to divert public attention away from Hunter Biden’s legal troubles and the special privileges awarded high-profile Democrats. After last week’s assassination of Trump’s character in court, the two-tier justice system would have been too easy to see.
The submarine failure and loss bring to light the continuing problem of computer simulations and how the scientific, engineering, and medical fields are being gutted as organizations hire for everything except merit. The big assumption that talent is redundant in the age of sophisticated computer algorithms is widespread but dead wrong. Just ask the passengers on the sub.
Five years ago, Greta Thunberg, the autistic niece of a prominent Rothschild and financed as such, predicted that today would be the day that life perished on Earth. It seems that the math was wrong.
The world locked down three years ago based on a faulty epidemic simulation at East Anglia University. The science, it seems, means the Narrative is propped up by computer output.
Ukraine is finding the Spring Offensive more challenging than the wargames predicted. German software failed to account for many hurdles that would have been visible if conventional red-on-blue wargames were conducted. The problem is not initiative, logistics, or similar things. The problems Ukraine faces today appear to have been baked into the cake by the simulation designers. This must be fixed.
Russia and China face a similar problem: they simulate their plans, commit them to action, and then move without a corrective feedback loop to their central planners. The head of the Wagner Group calls the failure to give Putin accurate damage assessments an outright lie. Russian forces are not destroying masses of Leopard II tanks, nor are the casualty numbers nearly as low as RT.com tells the world.
Our Deep State is a mess, and our economy faces serious problems. But we have feedback loops forcing the woke to go broke and the public to abandon support for corrupt politicians. We have these mechanisms. Russia and China do not.
In the end, the self-correcting culture wins.
THE WALLS ARE CLOSING IN, JOE!
FLASHBACK FRIDAY – SLEEPING IN AN IGLOO
April 1990. When our oldest son Brandon was six years old, I took him with me to the North Pole. It was my 14th expedition there, and as always, we stopped to visit friends at Canada’s northernmost community, the Inuit hunting village of Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island. Brandon thought it would be cool to sleep in an igloo, which the Inuit do only when they’re hunting seals or walrus far out on the ice.
So the villagers happily complied, showing him how they built one, carving out blocks of wind-blown snow, shaping and placing them in an inward-sloped spiral with one block on top, and packing snow as mortar between the blocks. When it was bedtime – still daylight with 24-hour sunshine by April – they lined the inside with caribou skins, which shed like crazy with hairs everywhere but sure are warm. Snuggled into our arctic down sleeping bags, we slept like stones.
It was an experience both of us will never forget. Never pass up an opportunity to have an adventure with your kids they’ll always remember. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #50 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
SKYE’S LINKS 06/22/23
Trump Against the Narrative
Merrick Garland’s DoJ continues to throw everything imaginable at Trump, including some very sketchy interpretations of the Insurrection Act. The stink of Desperation is everywhere as the government unites against Meritocracy. Trump must run the table in the courtroom, but the likely outcome is the SCOTUS eventually finding the Insurrection Act unconstitutional.
The Narrative is collapsing everywhere. It turns out that Fauci fabricated false studies and used his influence to place them in leading journals at the very start of Covid-19. This was a cover-up of epic magnitude, and the healthcare industry slurped it up wholesale. Even if the peer-review process had not been falsified, data was not fabricated from thin air, and major medical journals were not corrupted, the scientific establishment should have detected the fraud.
But the fraud went undetected by the majority. The few doctors and scientists calling it bunkum were attacked like injured fish in a shark-feeding frenzy.
Our government lies, and so do most institutions. Dishonesty might be a feature of bureaucracy.
So how is the world responding to highly credible whistleblowers through highly credible attorneys, disclosing that the United States government has alien technology? And has been studying it for more than 80 years? Is this yet another psyop? Or is it true?
Unless they slap the evidence down on the proverbial pickle barrel, the alien technology is just another narrative. A.I. can make anything appear real, even if the evidence is presented openly. Hollywood is throwing out the green screens made obsolete by A.I.
But then again, it might be true…
ESG, on the other hand, is falling like a lead balloon. Fifteen Trillion Dollars has been pulled from ESG funds since the start of the Bud Light protest. That is a Trillion with a T.
Larry Fink of BlackRock might not be the Gnostic immortal and enlightened divine being that he fancies himself. ESG is not over, but the smart money is bailing out before Woke goes full broke.
China is failing too. A handful of U.S. Navy destroyers in the Indian Ocean can stop their fuel imports from Iran and Saudi Arabia. A Ukrainian drone can blow their pipeline from Russia.
China lacks food, fuel, water, and labor. Like Japan during the 1980s or BlackRock gorging itself on cheap credit, economic bubbles are eventually exposed as foolish and destructive.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET TOO CLOSE TO A 6,000 POUND ELEPHANT SEAL
The Antarctic island of South Georgia is one of the most extraordinary places on earth. Square miles of king penguin rookeries, thousands of fur seals, hundreds of gigantic elephant seals amidst a backdrop of massive glaciers and snow-capped mountains.
All of the animals here have no fear of you whatever and ignore your presence – except if you make the mistake of getting too close to a bull elephant seal for his comfort. It’s a mistake I made as you can see. Luckily, with several tons of blubber to carry, this fellow can’t move as fast as me, so I hightailed it quickly. That satisfied him, and all was soon back to placidly normal again. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #62 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
CAN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SOLVE THE SOCIALIST CALCULATION PROBLEM?
I was recently told that humanity is “rapidly advancing” toward solving the socialist calculation problem. I wasn’t told why, but around the same time, economist Daron Acemoglu suggested that artificial intelligence could be the solution.
To get literary, perhaps we are on the verge of creating the Machines, the artificial intelligences that plan the global economy in Isaac Asimov’s short story, “The Evitable Conflict” (which became the last chapter of his book, I, Robot.)
The Machines perfectly calculate the needs of humanity and organize the economic order to best provide for them, in keeping with the first law of robotics, that “a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.”
Given Asimov’s insistence that the Machines were mere calculators of unimaginable speed, not “super-brains,” artificial intelligence could be a further step beyond Asimov’s robotic brains. So could artificially intelligent Machines, at last, prove the central planners right?
No, they could not, and I’ll answer the question in three ways.
RUSSIAN ECONOMIC DELUSION AND MILITARY ATTRITION
The summer economic forum in St. Petersburg used to be a vanity fair of Russian opulence and corruption as “Russia’s Davos.” But last week’s (6/14-17) modest, if not frugal, event was rather an exercise in self-reassurance of sustainable stagnation.
The international profile of the event was seriously curtailed, and the guest of honor was Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who was eager to agree “with everything Comrade Putin said” and to sign the declaration of an “enhanced strategic partnership” between the two countries (Kremlin.ru, June 15).
Putin’s speech was entirely devoted to amplifying positive news about Russia’s economic performance, which according to his estimates, is still capable of delivering the volume of weapons necessary for sustaining the “special military operation” and providing broad prosperity (Kommersant, June 17).
Unemployment is indeed low, due to extra-high out-migration, but as for the alleged decline of poverty, that has been achieved primarily by doctoring the data (The Insider, June 16).
Economic statistics have indeed become scarce and carefully “improved,” thus enabling Putin to assert the diminishing dependency on oil revenues and the benefits of high war expenditures without any concern for a seeming departure from reality (Moscow Times, June 16).