Beet L. Jooz

A series of missteps has primed California for the wildfires ravaging the state

‘So now we have I.C.E, the crisis of I.C.E, we have people trying to protect their family members from being snatched from them’

(BREITBART) — The CW network has announced that actress Ruby Rose will star as its lesbian superhero Batwoman in an upcoming treatment of the DC Comics character.

Rose, who claims to be “gender fluid,” will star as Kate Kane who first appeared as Gotham City’s Jewish, lesbian Batwoman in 2006. Batwoman took over the stewardship of Gotham City during a storyline that took Batman off to another galaxy and out of his beloved city.

CW announced that it was pursuing a Batwoman series and plans to introduce the Kate Kane in an upcoming cross-over event among three of its superhero shows, Arrow, The Flash, and Supergirl.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Consider how a "balanced portfolio" yielding "balanced returns" worked out for middle class retirees in Venezuela.

The fantasy that a "balanced portfolio" yielding "balanced returns" will fund a stable retirement for decades to come is widely accepted as a sure thing:inflation will stay near-zero essentially forever, assets such as stocks and bonds will continue yielding hefty income and capital gains, and all the individual or fund needs to do is maintain a "balanced portfolio" of various asset classes that yield "balanced returns," i.e. some safe "value" lower-yield returns and some higher risk "growth" returns.

This fantasy is based on the belief that yields will exceed real inflation for decades to come. That is, if inflation is 2%, and the average yield of a "balanced portfolio" is 6%, then the inflation-adjusted return is 4% annually--not great, but enough to secure retirement income.

What few dare ask is: what happens if inflation is 7% and yields drop to 2%?Then the retirement fund loses 5% of its purchasing power every year. In a decade, the fund's value will decline by roughly half.

Oops. Analysts such as John Hussman have been pointing out that historically, eras of outsized returns such as the past decade are followed by eras of low or even negative returns. So assuming a "balanced portfolio" of corporate and sovereign bonds, growth stocks, index funds, etc. will yield 6% to 7% like clockwork is essentially betting that this time is different: high growth will never pause or reverse.

But let's say things really unravel, and inflation is 8% and yields are negative 2% for a few years. Retirement funds will lose 10% of their purchasing power every year. In a few years, the fund will lose half its value.

What happens if the current "everything" asset bubble pops, and inflation starts running away from policy makers? It's worth recalling that declines on the order of 75% to 80% are common when bubbles finally pop--for example, the NASDAQ stock index post-2000.

If inflation (i.e. the currency loses purchasing power) gets out of hand due to excessive money creation to fund interest on debt, entitlements and obligations, the only cure is to raise interest rates significantly. Higher rates destroy the value of existing bonds and they strangle speculation and debt-dependent projects and spending.

Higher rates means corporations, governments and households must pay more each month in interest, leaving less income for spending and investment.Unfortunately, the global economy is largely dependent on rapidly expanding debt for its survival. As this chart shows, the tiny reduction in debt expansion in 2008-09 very nearly collapsed the global financial system.

Only the conjuring of $20 trillion out of thin air by central banks saved the day and the decade.

Counting on endless real returns of 5% or more essentially forever is embracing a fantasy. Never mind what asset mix is considered "balanced"-- bubbles pop, and when the "everything" bubble pops, it means stocks, bonds and real estate will all experience significant declines, and if history is any guide catastrophic declines in some asset classes.

That central banks and governments can create endless mountains of new money to fund soaring obligations without triggering a decline in purchasing power is also a fantasy. As I've explained in the past, it seems like central banks have created a financial perpetual motion machine: the government borrows $1 trillion to fund obligations, and the central bank "prints" $1 trillion and buys the government debt.

It seems so painless and perfect--who cares if the central bank balance sheet balloons to $100 trillion? We owe it to ourselves, the government can't go broke since it can always print more money, etc.

The grim reality is printing trillions and pumping that newly issued currency into a stagnant, dysfunctional economy reduces the purchasing power of the currency, i.e. inflation. To use a health analogy, we've been gorging on doughnuts, pizza and beer for a decade, and since we're still apparently disease free, we assume we can keep enjoying this diet for decades to come.

The consequences of systemic sclerosis are non-linear, meaning they pile up unseen until the major organs give out and the apparently disease free individual collapses in a heap.

Consider how a "balanced portfolio" yielding "balanced returns" worked out for middle class retirees in Venezuela:

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My new book Money and Work Unchained is now $6.95 for the Kindle ebook and $15 for the print edition. Read the first section for free in PDF format. If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

'Received a free pass'

A Metairie coach accused of spooning juveniles has been indicted, according to court documents. 

What passes for “journalism” today? Washington Post reporter Eli Rosenberg contacted my organization, the Government Accountability Institute, at midnight to comment on an incendiary piece challenging our groundbreaking work on voter fraud. For some strange reason, we were unavailable at that time.

(RELIGION NEWS SERVICE) — Willow Creek Community Church announced it will commission an independent investigation of sexual harassment allegations against founding pastor Bill Hybels, a day after one of the two pastors who succeeded Hybels resigned over the church’s handling of the matter.

Heather Larson, lead pastor at the influential evangelical Chicago-area megachurch, announced the investigation Monday (Aug. 6) in an email to church members. The inquiry will be led, Larson said, by an advisory council of Christian leaders from across the country and funded by an anonymous outside donor.

Steve Carter, who was named lead teaching pastor alongside Larson in April, announced his resignation on his blog Sunday (Aug. 5) over differences with how the church has handled the allegations against Hybels. Carter did not appear at Sunday services at Willow Creek’s main campus in South Barrington, Ill.

The terrorist Ernesto “Che” Guevara met his karmic end, executed without a trial in a muddy hut by CIA-trained Bolivian operatives, in 1967.  Since that moment, however, his life has been endlessly romanticized by the Left—a trend that doesn’t seem to be abating.

His life isn’t only idealized by Communists or Cuban tyrants, but by old-fashioned American liberals who have a longstanding practice of whitewashing socialist history. The cult includes authors; retail clothing chains; filmmakers like Robert Redford, who watched his romantic ode to Che with the murderer’s widow in Havana; pop icons who vacation in Communist Cuba; commemorative Irish postage stamp designers; a parade of intellectually stunted zombies walking around your local campuses with idealized portraits of Che their T-shirts; and a number of media outlets, which now include BuzzFeed.

The newest entry into the genre is a Vox-style 9-minute explainer, which is to say a grossly misleading history called “Che Guevara Becomes A Legend After Death.” It’s a biography tantamount to producing documentaries about the lives of Augusto Pinochet or Benito Mussolini without mentioning their vicious suppression of political opposition.

Although the BuzzFeed viewers will learn that Little Ernesto suffered from debilitating asthma, they do not learn that Che took the lead in creating a secret police and gulag in Cuba, where thousands of people guilty of nothing more than thought crimes— including priests, innocent bureaucrats, and anyone with homosexual mannerisms—were sent to spend decades as slave labor.

Scaled for population, the Castro-Guevara police state rivaled any tyranny in history. As Humberto Fontova points out, Cubans “qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period THREE TIMES as long in Che Guevara’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenytzin suffered in Stalin’s Gulag.” It’s worth mentioning that it would have been far worse if tens of thousands of Cubans hadn’t fled Che’s glorious revolution.

We also learn that Che was tasked with running Cuba’s national bank after the revolution—his entire job description innocuously boiled down to “signing new notes” by BuzzFeed documentarians. What we never learn is that in his short stint as lead socialist, nationalizing Cuba’s banks and expelling foreign ones, turned into a massive economic disaster for the Cuban people. Che didn’t merely visit the Soviet Union and China. He went there begging for money. “We want to build socialism,” Che told the world in his 1964 United Nations appearance. And they did.

Viewers of BuzzFeed will also learn that Carlos Puebla wrote a hit song extolling Che’s revolutionary activities (we even get to hear a snippet of “Hasta Siempre Comandante”!) Yet, the editors couldn’t shoehorn in a single mention of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Cubans who were executed on Che’s orders after the rebels seized power. “We don’t need proof to execute a man,” the Argentine once explained. “We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.” Che didn’t even bother giving most his victims—some of them women and children—a Soviet-style show trial for their troubles.

Did you know “Che” is an Argentinian slang that can be roughly be translated to “dude”? I do, because I watched the BuzzFeed’s mini-documentary. What I didn’t learn there was that Che dreamed of creating a revolutionary movement driven by “hate.” Che promised “to march the path of victory” even if it cost “millions” of lives. Put it this way: one of the reasons Che had an icy relationship with the Soviets was that they had abandoned Stalinism. The American socialists abandoned Stalin in 1939. The Soviets did in 1956. Che was still a big fan until his death.

BuzzFeed’s biodoc teaches us that famous Marxists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Neruda wrote hosannas to Che. Sartre, soon to be an apologist for genocidal movements around the world, claimed that Guevara was not only an intellectual, but “also the most complete human being of our age.” Unmentioned by the noted intellectual was that Che was also a warmonger, who not only lamented that Soviets hadn’t been able to place nuclear warheads on an island 300 miles off the coast of the United States — “[i]n the end, Khrushchev struck a compromise,” BuzzFeed explains — but if they had “we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City.”

It seems unlikely that such inconvenient facts (and many more) could be accidentally left out of any honest biography of Che’s life. Instead we learn that Che had a life-long concern for the poor. But few outside his revolutionary buddies were ever made less poor by Che’s revolutions and terrorism. Only less alive.

A 50-year-old Baton Rouge man who shot two men and burned their bodies in 2007 because he apparently thought they had laughed at him was sentenced to life behind bars Tuesday.

Dixie Beer is back, and in a big way.

The recent exposure of anti-white comments by New York Times editorial board member and bigot Sarah Jeong on Twitter prompted  Wikipedia editors to attempt to mention the controversy on Jeong's page. After repeated removals led to the page being locked, leftist editors rigged discussion about the controversy, leading to a summary favoring Jeong.

'Being good stewards of taxpayer funds'

Forty-three percent of Republicans think President Trump "should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior," while only 36 percent disagreed with the statement, according to an ...

Went from 28.6 percent to 34.2 percent from June 2017 to June 2018