Memes that made me laugh 291

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

'Tis the season for Christmas music - but not the ghastly commercialized muzak that bombards us from every direction.  Let's go back to 1912, and Vaughn Williams' "Fantasia on Christmas Carols".

Much more seasonal (not to mention spiritual!).

Peter

The biggest security threat to our nation, and others

 

former British Secretary of Defense Liam Fox points out that debt is the single greatest security threat facing the Western world.

Against a background of increasing cooperation between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, the threat to the free world and its values – the rule of law, democracy and human rights – has never been greater in living memory. Yet a much more subtle and sadly self induced crisis corrodes our ability to confront our enemies.

Debt levels in the West, driven up by consumption and welfare that we cannot afford, means that our ability to raise defence and security spending to meet the level of the threat is seriously, if not yet fatally, compromised.

Last year the UK spent £105 billion on debt interest compared to just £65 billion on defending our country. We are not alone. In 2024 the United States spent around $882 billion on interest payments, overtaking the world’s largest defence budget of $874 billion. Recent policy decisions will likely drive the gap higher. This may explain the selective deafness in parts of Washington to the alarm call of the Russian threat. Given the huge potential cost of carrying on a new Cold War alongside Western allies, who for years have talked a great game with minimal action on defence spending, the US seems to have made a historically wrong call for partially understandable reasons.

. . .

The bigger threat ... is to the long-term stability of our financial system whose largest members are either unwilling to live within their means or incapable of it. In the UK, despite having a huge parliamentary majority, the Starmer Labour government has made it clear to international markets that they neither have the ambition nor the ability to reduce welfare spending and that, despite historically high tax levels, the debt will continue to increase. In France, the merest hint of financial restraint brings large sections of the population onto the streets making effective financial rebalancing almost impossible, while in the US President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is projected to increase the US federal deficit and national debt by around US$3.4 trillion over the 2025 to 2034 period.

The bottom line is clear. Living on the “never never” and pretending we have a right to an unearned standard of living is creating a level of national debt that not only threatens the next generation with a scorched earth economic legacy but is creating a national security emergency. The silent and deadly defence crisis unfolding because of our addiction to debt leaves us in a historically vulnerable position.

There's more at the link.

He makes a very strong case, IMHO.  In command economies such as Russia, China, Iran, etc. the authorities can - by force if necessary - divert the resources of the economy to war production, and dragoon young men and women into uniform (shooting those who don't want to cooperate, to "encourage the others", as Voltaire put it).  In the free world, we can't.  If the public doesn't support the military, resistance would be largely non-viable.  If we stripped bare health care, pensions, power generation, food distribution, etc. in order to prioritize military expenditure, our populations would revolt, particularly those who've become dependent on government handouts to survive.  Even the prospect, not yet implemented, of military conscription has led to unrest in Germany and other European countries.

We are no longer a disciplined, united society.  We are fragmented, divided, opinionated, each faction demanding that its interests be satisfied but no faction willing to subordinate its interests to the more imperative needs that confront us as a nation.  That's what's caused our national debt in the first place, catering to special interests and voting blocs.  Unless we change our attitudes as citizens and as a nation, nothing's going to change.

There's another question.  Given the behavior and attitudes of so many Americans in "blue" states and cities, why should our armed forces die to defend them?  They don't deserve it.

Peter

Need meat for long-term storage? Here's a very useful option

 

A few readers have contacted me asking what sort of meat they should buy for long-term storage and emergency use.  All the usual answers are well-known, particularly a freezer filled with the meat you normally eat:  but in a long-term emergency situation, you may not have power to run your freezer.  That's where dried and/or canned meat comes in.  (Jerky is basically dried meat, of course, although often over-seasoned.)  I also keep a stock of pemmican, as I wrote a few weeks ago.  What else do I recommend?

Some time ago, author and friend Mike Williamson introduced me to Grabill Country Meats in Indiana.  They're an Amish-run company, producing cans of beef, port, turkey and chicken preserved the Amish way, boiled in the can with water and nothing else at all.  The meat tastes delicious and lasts a very long time, so much so that they don't put a "best by" date on the can.  Last Monday I opened a can of pork chunks that I bought from them twelve years ago, and it looked, smelled and tasted just as good as one bought last year.  Delicious!

They sell 13oz. and 27oz. cans in boxes of twelve only.  I make sure we always have some in our long-term storage, simply because I've never found better-tasting, easier-to-use canned meat.  Their cans may seem expensive, but if you work it out on a cost-per-pound basis (particularly considering the quality of their meat), it's not bad.  The larger cans work out considerably cheaper per pound than the smaller ones, of course.  Shipping costs are a bear, but anything heavy has that problem.

So, if you want to keep a few (or more than a few) cans of "emergency meat" around to feed yourself and your family, Grabill Country Meats has my strong recommendation.  Being canned chunks, it can't be roasted or fried, but it makes great stews and soups.  In emergency, it can be eaten cold out of the can with a spoon.  Good stuff.

Peter

Heh - seasonal edition

 

I do enjoy the "Foxes In Love" comic strip.  The author/artist gets so much right about human relationships.  Here's his entry for December 17th:  click the image to be taken to a larger view at the comic's Web page.

I would say "heartwarming", but I think "footwarming" is more the pursuer's intention!

Peter

"At the beginning of the credit destruction cycle"

 

That's where Ed Dowd says we are.

Former Wall Street money manager and financial analyst Ed Dowd of PhinanceTechnologies.com warned in September we were at the “Beginning of Panic Rate Cut Cycle.”  Since that prediction, the Fed has cut interest rates three times.  Looks like Dowd called it correctly.

So, when does the panic kick in?  Dowd says, “The panic kicks in when there is some sort of banking wobble or stock market wobble, which is in the process of setting up.  Private credit is the first to show problems.  We had Tricolor Holdings (subprime auto lending bankruptcy) go poof.  We had First Brands (bankruptcy) go poof.  This is all private credit.  We have had other lenders like PrimaLend (bankruptcy) starting to go poof.  Private credit is just like subprime.  It not a very big part of the Jenga credit chain, but it’s enough to start a daisy chain of knock-on effects.  So, this is where we are, at the beginning of the credit destruction cycle.  We are seeing consumer credit card delinquencies nearing all-time highs, auto loan delinquencies and, next up, we will be seeing mortgage delinquencies.  People stop paying their credit cards first, then their auto loans and stop paying on their homes last.  As the layoffs accelerate, and we are already seeing more high-profile layoffs at Amazon, UPS and you name it, once those begin, we will be seeing higher delinquency rates.”

Dowd sees much lower prices for homes.  Dowd says, “There is a distinct problem between homes for sale and homes sold, meaning there are a lot of people wanting to sell their homes and not a lot of people buying them.  The inventory continues to grow. . .. The only way this clears is through price.  The price of homes is going lower.  We had an overbuild in multi-family housing because of the illegal immigrants.  Those deals are going sour and rolling over.  Rents are coming down. . .. It’s all slowly going the wrong way, and it will become a mainstream topic in 2026.”

In past interviews, Dowd points out there was massive fraud in the Biden Administration, especially in unemployment figures.  That, too, will all be revealed.  This is why Dowd pointed out last year that President Trump “Inherited a Turd of an Economy.”

. . .

There is much more in the 45-minute interview.

There's more at the link, and in the full video interview, which I highly recommend making time to watch at the above link, if possible.

(If you'd like to know more about the private credit market, which is at the root of many of the issues discussed above, see David Bahnsen's article "Private Credit Fault Lines" in the November 28 edition of "Thoughts From The Frontline".)

The thing is, it's not just private credit and consumer debt that are the problems, and the reasons why the "credit destruction cycle" is under way.  They're a microcosm of the national debt problem in many countries around the globe, including the USA.  Almost everyone, from individuals to households to corporations to bureaucrats to politicians, has been spending money that we don't have, behaving like drunken sailors with little or no financial discipline or sense of responsibility.  Credit has, to a large extent, replaced income in order to finance buying what we need or want.  John Mauldin points out:

In the early 2000s we were on the way to actually reducing or at least stabilizing this debt growth. The post-Cold War “peace dividend” and higher tax revenue from the 1990s tech boom, along with some small but helpful fiscal reforms, had us on the right path. But in short order we strayed from that path and fell off the cliff.

Let’s also note this is a bipartisan problem. In the period shown here, we had both Republican and Democratic presidents. Both parties controlled the House and Senate at various times. Both parties had “trifecta” periods of full control when they could have forced change. Neither did so.

The reason neither did so, in my view, is they are responding to voters and donors who, even if they say the right words about “fiscal responsibility,” don’t really want fiscal responsibility. They want their share of the action, whether it be defense contracts, welfare benefits, agricultural subsidies, free healthcare, loan guarantees or whatever. There is no significant constituency for actually making the kind of changes that would alter our debt trajectory. Just a few old curmudgeons like me.

Unfortunately, this won’t stop the changes from coming. They will come. They’ll cause a lot of pain we could have avoided. Then eventually, we’ll come out better on the other side. But getting there will be tough.

Again, more at the link.

I'm seeing very troubling echoes of the months before the last financial crisis in 2008.  In particular, I'm looking at how many banks are over-extended in supplying credit to the markets and to private credit entities.  Remember what happened after 2008?  Some countries and banks in Europe were forced to rehypothecate customer deposits in order to remain financially viable - in other words, they confiscated part of the deposits of many customers in order to pay off their bad debts.  They called it a "haircut" or a "capital levy" or any of a number of names, but the end result was the same - a lot of depositors lost a lot of money.  The best-known example is probably Cyprus, about which we wrote at the time, but it was far from alone.

Right now, I'm looking at the private credit sector and wondering how far we are from a repeat performance.  In fact, I'm wondering how much I should pull out of our savings account (which we built up to pay for medical expenses, as discussed at greater length a few months ago) and keep handy in cash, just in case . . . If banks close down for a few days or weeks, or limit withdrawals, or if a "levy" by whatever name is taken out of our deposits, it'll be useful to have enough cash on hand to keep going.

YMMV, of course.  We're told that the age of miracles has not yet passed - but I'm not sure our financial markets are miracle fodder, if you follow me.

Peter