Looking Backwards …
LB #1
We told you about the military coup that just took place in America and while Joe Biden thumbs through the phone book to determine where he can order ice cream sprinkles, the real leader of the country ahs been busy. This from ZeroHedge, “Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin arrived in Ukraine’s capital by train on an unannounced visit Monday, at a moment Ukraine’s forces are getting steadily pushed back in the east, and as President Zelensky expresses frustration at the lack of large-scale new military aid.
“It’s been absolutely remarkable that Ukraine has been able to do what it’s done,” Austin told reporters as he went into Ukraine Sunday night. “It’s been able to do that, of course, because of the fact that we have supported them from the very beginning, and we’ve rallied some 50 countries to be a part of that support.”
In Kiev, Austin announced $400 million in new arms for Ukraine but did not acquiesce to the Ukrainians’ main ask – the greenlight to strike Russia with US-supplied weapons.”
Now, isn’t this interesting? An unplanned visit, no weapons with which to strike Russia, but he brought more aid to the table. As the man in charge of the military, he wants to keep his people employed, he wants them to buy arms from our defense contractors, and he wants this proxy war to continue. All things that I don’t want, but I am very happy he is in charge despite disagreeing with his policies. Yes, that is still allowed in America. Do I want the war over in Ukraine, yes. Do I want us to stop spending money we don’t have, yes. Do I want Austin stepping in and saving us from Biden igniting a nuclear war? Yes, I do. With the election ahead we need to trust our own judgement and what we see not what we are told. We would do well to remember that we don’t get everything we want and should be thankful for what we have.
LB #2
What we have is the WNBA! Hurray for America. I’ve been watching WNBA headlines creep into places where it has never been before, and I am wondering why. My sources continue to tell me that Caitlin Clark is the reason to watch. Here are the real reasons from ZeroHedge, “Women’s game performance and abilities are far behind those of their professional male counterparts. They are two separate universes in terms of entertainment. This is an issue which no one in the mainstream wants to address – The women’s games are mostly terrible to watch.” Whoa! That kind of talk won’t get you invited onto the View. But it continues, “Claims that the WNBA is “skyrocketing” in popularity are greatly exaggerated and the fact of the matter is the league has never been profitable. Recent reports indicate that the WNBA lost over $40 million this season and now investors are growing impatient.
“The WNBA owes the NBA so much we won’t see any windfall for years,” an NBA team executive told The New York Post.
The reality that undermines the pay gap theory for women’s basketball is simple: The ladies don’t sell enough tickets. Nor do they sell any merchandise, video games, jerseys, banners or much else for that matter. Their huge loss this year is concrete proof of that. The WNBA only exists because it is subsidized by the NBA and some private (and mostly male) investors; they take money from the male league in order to fund their games, and they have been losing that money consistently for over 25 years… The latest profit reports should lay to rest any future arguments from the woke crowd over pay for female athletes. They have no more excuses left. It’s not the patriarchy, it’s not lack of marketing, it’s not lack of investment – It’s lack of public interest in the WNBA on every level.” We are back to trusting our own eyes and judgment. All the media hype in the world won’t make the WNBA exciting, they are like the green peas of the buffet table.
LB #3
One of my biggest hopes for this presidential election is that we have a successful transition of power from Joe Biden to either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. After the Jan 6 clown show that was American democracy, other countries looked at us and said, they are the most dominant country in the world? How? The answer is that we are the only country to use nuclear arms in war. End of story. It may have given us a great 75 year reign but it doesn’t guarantee us another 75 year hegemony and with actions like that it almost guarantees that we won’t, at least how our founding fathers envisioned it. We seem to have more in common with Third World countries now that ever before. Our Debt to GDP is banana republic status, we have our capital stormed for Tiktoks, and we have had one assassination attempt and another surveillance attempt at the minimum on Donald Trump. Bolivia just had the same thing. This from ZeroHedge, “At a moment the South American country of Bolivia is already on edge due to rising inflation and shrinking gas production, ex-president Evo Morales said his car was shot at on Sunday.
He and officials close to him say a pair of vehicles forced his to stop in the middle of a freeway, and that’s when heavily armed unidentified gunmen fired on his car, with a bullet reportedly passing “centimeters” from his head. There are reports saying that Morales’ driver was wounded.”
We need to realize that we have greatly benefitted from stability. If we look at Cuba and their on-again off-again power grid, Bolivia’s presidential candidates being shot at, and the European protests where the farmers dump manure all over the country’s leaders buildings. We should strive to be better, have a better money, have a better economy, and make sure that we have a very high standard of living and that requires stability.
Looking Forwards…
LF#1
In order for stability to happen, we have got to get rid of or simply not fund these stupid strongholds of the Democrats. We have pointed out Chicago, San Francisco, Portland for the better part of three years as examples of what not to do when running your society. Allowing theft and not prosecuting criminals punishes your own citizens. In what world is this allowed? The answer to that is a Democrat world. This from the Daily Mail, “Residents of Vermont say their famously beautiful, verdant state is increasingly blighted by homelessness, crime, drug addiction and other social problems in its bigger towns and cities.
Downtown areas of Burlington and Brattleboro, among other cities, were too dangerous to walk at night, following reports of passers-by being attacked by thugs, locals told DailyMail.com.
Some blame the crises on costly social programs in a Democrat-leaning state that has Bernie Sanders as a senator and gave President Joe Biden a 36-point landslide win in 2020.
Meanwhile, downtown store owners complain of a spike in retail theft.
The CVS on Church Street recorded as many as 20 thefts every day in August.
Café workers complain that even their tip jars have been swiped by thieves.
Mark Bouchett, the owner of Homeport, a downtown gift and household items store, said he recently hired security because his annual losses from shoplifters hit $75,000, in an interview with YouTuber Peter Santenello.”
Now folks, I hope you noticed those quotes were from a Republican candidate and one of them was from Fox News. These are conservative organizations, and they are reporting on this story, but the Democrats never seem to say anything. I would encourage you to see for yourself and make up your own mind. I have seen the damage in other cities and municipalities that have almost a century worth of Democratic led local leadership and they have taken great cities and reduced them to rubble morally. Without morality, a city cannot stand.
LF#2
One of those cities so destroyed by liberal policies that it almost disappeared from the map. Detroit, Michigan had block after block after block of buildings bulldozed because the residents voted with their feet and left. The houses were for the drug users, homeless, and lawless. The city took the most prosperous city in American and destroyed it into nothing in less than a century.
Now Detroit is making a comeback, and it isn’t due to blue or red but green. Capitalism has appeared in this most unusual place. Led by Dan Gilbert, the Ford family, and Ilitch family, the city is finally seeing signs of life as the population has increased for the first time in 7 decades.
“Gilbert, Ford Motor Co.’s Ford family and the Ilitch family, which built a fortune through the Little Caesars pizza chain, collectively have invested billions in Detroit — so much so that they or their companies have amassed about 70% of the downtown office space, according to data from Colliers and company filings. They’re filling properties with their workers and have attracted employers including Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which moved to downtown from the suburbs. This week, Ford will open Michigan Central Station, where the automaker and Alphabet Inc.’s Google will be taking offices in an overhauled train depot that had been an edifice of razor wire, graffiti and broken windows for decades…The city’s improving fortunes have lured yet another billionaire: real estate mogul Stephen Ross, a Detroit native better known for his developments in New York and, more recently, South Florida. He and the Ilitches have hatched plans for a $1.5 billion development that starts with a University of Michigan graduate and technology campus along with more offices, hotels and housing.
“Anyone who looks back to 2013 with the bankruptcy, it’s night and day,” Gilbert, 62, said in an interview. “The city has an energy it never used to have…At the time, downtown Detroit’s crime wasn’t policed as well as it is today and basic services like street lights and snow plowing were spotty at best. The city’s government had a balance sheet that was on a path to bankruptcy. After decades of flight, the population had dwindled — it’s now about 633,000 people, a third of what it was at its peak in 1950.
“Downtowns have always been places where the rich and powerful accumulate property,” said Conrad Kickert, a University of Buffalo professor who studied Detroit’s comeback. “Downtown Detroit is one of the most extreme examples. In this case, no one else wanted it. No one in their right mind would have financed Gilbert’s acquisitions.”
I am very happy for Detroit, and I hope it can see a resurgence. I think it can as long as those that knocked it on its peanut are kept out of decision-making areas. Capitalism is rebuilding, and Detroit hasn’t been capitalistic since World War II. We shall see if the fortune favors the bold.
LF#3
The Market Ear put out a very cleverly titled piece, Scylla and Charybdis, that sums up what we have been talking about for the last 6 months. Scylla and Charybdis are from Greek mythology and means the lesser of two evils or between a rock and a hard place. My definition is that both candidates suck, but let’s see why. “Bond traders seem to think both presidential candidates are as poor as you & I also think. This from Ed Yardeni, “The Bond Vigilantes may be voting against Washington, figuring that no matter which party wins the White House and the Congress, fiscal policies will bloat the already bloated federal government budget deficit and heat up inflation. The next administration will face net interest outlays of over $1 trillion on the ballooning federal debt. And Steven Blitz summarizes it thusly, Harris and Trump have lots of tax and spending proposals that add up to a larger deficit beginning in fiscal 2026 and for 10 years after. Looking at a middle trajectory, as tabulated by the Committee for a Responsible Budget, the Harris budget mix adds $3.5 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, Trump adds $7.5 trillion. Or as Bloomberg reports, the U.S. National Debt has increased by $473 BILLION over the last three weeks. It now stands at $35.8 TRILLION.”
I’ve seen what four years of Don Trump does to deficits and I have a pretty good idea about what Kamala plans to do. These numbers have gotten so big and so many people are so callous to them. Lloyd Austin might have kept us out of a nuclear war, but not even he can save us from our own financial blowup. I can only say this, they don’t matter until they matter, and when they do, they are the only thing that will matter.
Sincerely Yours,
C Thomas Printer
The Dow Jones finished trading …at 42,114.
The 10-year Treasury bond is at …at 4.276%
The price of Brent Crude is … at $72.98 per barrel.
The price of gold is … at $2,746/oz.
The price of silver is … at $33.76/oz.
I leave you with this from the information superhighway, a friend of mine went bald years ago, but still carries around an old comb. He just can’t part with it.
Thank you for listening today and you can find all of our articles and more on our website cthomasprinter.com.