As a $60 billion a year investment bank engaged in market making and asset management for equities, fixed income, commodity and derivative securities for large institutional clients, Goldman Sachs, having been founded in 1869, is arguably the world’s most recognizable name on Wall Street. Known for attracting some of the best financial talent, it is…
Food Security, Supply and Shortages – with James LaFond
With a spate of recent news stories about fires and other incidents forcing closures of over 20 food processing and distribution centers in the United States, Canada and Europe this year, people have started wondering if there has been a concerted effort to undermine food security in and around the industrialized world. Comparing to previous…
The End of History and the Last Man
Published in 1992, political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ described a world in which he saw the 70+ year struggle between the authoritarian styles of government meeting an unequivocal end with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. What triumphed – principally the American system of ‘liberal democratic…
Boeing – Troubled Skies
In 2019, Airbus surpassed for the first time Boeing as the largest aerospace company in the world, as two crashes of Boeing’s 737-Max airplane forced a grounding of the fleet and a halt in sales, eventually costing it $20 billion in associated fines and delays. While Boeing maintains a relatively strong overall safety record as…
The Ukraine Crisis – After Dark
Following our interview with Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson on the crisis in Ukraine, we wanted to do a brief follow up on the potential long-reaching supply chain implications of the broader conflict between the West and East. Russia, being targeted now by nearly all Western nations with sanctions aimed at its financial payments infrastructure, telecommunications,…
The Ukraine Crisis
The Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine on February 24th, 2022 surprised many around the world for its speed and scale, making it the largest military operation in Europe since World War II. Western media was quick to condemn the action as a flagrant act of aggression on the part of Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, while…
Tiananmen – The Gate of Heavenly Peace
In the founding myths of the Chinese Communist Party, youth and student movements play a crucial role, with the Red Guard and Cultural Revolution being ideological tidal waves that transformed the nation. In the founding myths of post Cold War neo-liberalism, it was another student movement – the one that took place on June 4th,…
The Iliad – After Dark
The history of the Trojan War, assiduously studied and thoroughly documented today, was passed down through the centuries not by academic text, but by oral tradition. The conduit for communication, rather than scholarly prose, was the campfire poetry best told in the Iliad by Homer, author of the other great Greek epic The Odyssey. How…
2021 – Year in Review
In terms of sheer drama and trauma, few years in recent memory compare to 2020, with the CoViD scare and BLM riots reaching worldwide. In 2021, by comparison, the past year was really more a continuation and consolidation of the last, as the Kyle Rittenhouse trial came to a surprising end, and the power elite…
The Crowd – A Study of the Popular Mind
The great upheavals which precede changes of civilization, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the foundation of the Arabian Empire, seem at first sight determined more especially by political transformations, foreign invasion, or the overthrow of dynasties. But a more attentive study of these events shows that behind their apparent causes the…
Soviet Cybernetics – Red Plenty
“Cybernetics attempts to find the common elements in the functioning of automatic machines and of the human nervous system, and to develop a theory which will cover the entire field of control and communication in machines and living organisms.” -Dr. Norbert Wiener writing in The Scientific American. Taken slightly less literally, in communist Russia, central…
Timber Country
Since the early days of European colonization in North America, the great abundance of natural resources was apparent to settlers and their colonial sponsors alike. Timber was chief among these, as the tremendous size and unspoiled nature of the forests that spanned from Canada down through Florida provided fuel, building materiel, and a source of…
Myth of the 20th Century 