You May Read Me on Unz Review Too.

Here is the full list of articles by me at Unz Review. 

               Andrei Martyanov Archive at Unz. 

A Little Milestone.

Ha, I only now noticed that my little bloggy is past first million of views. What do ya know. As you may have guessed already--this blog is purely a personal outlet and I deliberately do not promote it in any way. Only seldom I provide a link to specific posts when, usually, posting at Unz discussion boards. Yet, people continue to find this blog, sadly, damn advertisers do it too. I don't know, do they track blogs by number of views to insert their damn commercials? Anyhow, this blog is now a millionaire. 

Per some news--a superb piece by Phil Giraldi at Unz, absolutely spot on. 

The reckless calibrations employed to set American policies in other parts of the world are also playing out badly. Russia has been hounded relentlessly since the 2016 election, wasting the opportunity to establish a modus vivendi that Trump appeared to be offering in his campaign. Russian and American soldiers confront each other in Syria, where the U.S. has absolutely no real interests beyond supporting feckless Israel and Saudi Arabia in an unnecessary armed conflict that has already been lost. There is now talk of war coming from both Moscow and Washington while NATO in the middle has turned aggressive in an attempt to justify its existence. The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Russia is now worse than it was towards the end of the Cold War while the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s doorstep has threatened the Kremlin’s vital interests without advancing any interest of the United States.

Read it, this is Phil Giraldi at his best.  

Fred Reed's Excellent Piece.

For a change--a piece of good journalism. Excellent piece by Fred Reed at Unz Review today.

 

Notes of a Reformed News Weasel:Understanding the Vacuity.

 

I, however, disagree with Fred in one thing. He writes:

Journalists are not stupid, running to well above average in intelligence. You could form a large chapter of Mensa by raiding newsrooms in Washington. However, with a fair few exceptions, they are not intellectuals, not contemplative, not studious. They are high-pressure fact-accountants, competitive, comfortable under tight deadlines, aggressive, combative, quick but shallow. This can be a serviceable substituent for stupid.  

I have to correct Fred here: stupidity is not defined by IQ metric alone. Real intellect is defined by self-awareness and understanding of own limitations, which, in the end, is a moral category. The world is filled with all those "through-the-roof IQ" and "Mensa level intelligence" failures and losers, who never achieved anything in their lives--I personally know several of them. US main-stream media "journalists" fail every metric in a framework which values knowledge, competence and truth. Life is complex and so are the outcomes. Other than that small note, the piece by Fred is superb and he nails it when he writes:

 They don’t know America, and they don’t much like it.

I see nothing intellectual about that and may add only that they know nothing about Russia, China, the rest of the world, about war, peace, culture, morality, common good, people in general and the list goes on, and on, and on. So much for "intelligence" of ignorant hacks.  

      

I Said It Many Times Before.

A superb piece by Dirk Bezemer and Michael Hudson in today's Unz Review. Couldn't miss it: Finance Is Not the Economy. I couldn't miss this insightful, albeit fairly long, piece since one of the major premises of my blog's existence is my both academic and empirical understanding of finances as merely a tool servicing a real economy, which, in the end is based around manufacturing of actual goods and services. That is also where the real GDP is. There are many wonderful insights in this article but I want to leave you here with one quote which I find particularly important:

"Asset prices can rise only by debt creation or by diverting current income. The recognition that such debt-fueled inflation of asset prices is a form of rent extraction is central to our analysis of its unsustainability. By contrast, the now conventional economic models give us no handle to even start addressing these phenomena. By viewing capital gains as transfers instead of as income, we define the long-term sustainability of capital gains and asset prices in terms of trends in disposable income plus debt growth. Just as a Ponzi scheme must collapse with mathematical certainty (even though the timing of the collapse is uncertain), so it is with asset markets that expand faster than income growth. The divergence between income growth and rent extraction (asset price growth and financial transfers) is unsustainable, although, by going global, asset markets can be kept inflated over decades."

In general, don't spare your time and delve into this important piece by Bezemer and Hudson. This will also give a new impulse for continuation of my  Military Power series.