#kind of have the same crisis whenever DRAMA starts unfolding. which is why i should stick to crackier longfics i suppose.

[nostalgia-tblr]

i am catching up with my 'chapters i have written ahead point' on this car fic and this is alarming as i don't want it to suddenly get stuck. i need to write the rest of it fast but i have talked myself into thinking it's a bit overwrought and cringey. so now i can't get words written. fuuuuuuuuckkkkkk.

[kinetic-elaboration]

March 19: 2x11 Friday’s Child

Finally watched this week’s TOS. This was a hard day again and I’m tired and basically as soon as the ep ended my mood deflated again but I think I can write up a few notes and then crawl right back into bed again.

Another episode about negotiating for a mining treaty, huh? (I’m keeping track of all of these, roughly, for my own Nefarious Purposes).

The aliens are seven feet tall and they wear silly outfits.

Wow, what a dumbass red shirt. You’d think Starfleet would train people NOT to just randomly draw their weapons in diplomatic situations.

I honestly forgot there were Klingons in this.

DC Fontana wrote this!! I forgot that too.

Lol Kirk just drops the deceased red shirt. And then keeps holding his hands out like ‘what am I to do now?’

“They want to negotiate for our rocks. Our stupid, useless rocks. Everyone wants our rocks! So weird.”

I’m actually kind of surprised DC Fontana wrote a Klingon ep but like... I guess it’s not that surprising given this guy doesn’t even have a name and is also really dumb lol. At least he’s not in brownface.

When Kirk and Spock disarmed I didn’t realize they were throwing down their communicators and I was a little confused as to why they had to carry so many phasers each.

Kirk’s pretty upset about the crewman’s death, which I get, he always goes feral when one of his people dies and I appreciate that about him... but that guy really did fuck up lol.

I like seeing Scotty in command.

Oooh mood lighting in the tent. And Spock is meditating I think.

Emotion is “inefficient and illogical.” No wonder Kirk thinks they can never be in love!!

And yet jealous is also inefficient and illogical and I detect some of it in Spock when the blonde Cappellan comes in.

“They consider combat more pleasurable than love.” Hmm sounds like someone else I know.

... Honestly I wish the Grounders had been like this. I feel like there’s more thought in creating this society in one episode than in creating that one over 7 seasons.

I love Bones in this and his role as cultural translator.

The Federation believes in self-determination.

“The sky does not interest me.”

I really do dig the world building here. There’s so much going on in this one ep, even just in part of an ep, and you really get the sense that this is a whole world with its own rules and customs and values, and its own complex political machinations that our mains have really just wandered into.

Also the soundtrack today is NOT messing around. TV composers just don’t go this hard anymore, sorry.

Oooh now the Klingon’s afraid at the prospect of fighting Kirk.

The Enterprise just walked into a coup I guess.

Lots of fighting! Kirk must be having fun.

Scotty is so commanding! I feel like he and Uhura were already friends at this point. Like whenever he’s in command she seems really comfortable just wandering up to his chair all the time.

Also why are they ALWAYS signing stuff?

Yessss silent triumvirate communication.

“To live is always desirable.” I mean she’s not wrong but so much for being willing to die without a fuss lol.

It’s kind of wild how this ep started out being about a mining treaty and drama with the Klingons and all of this alien political drama and then basically becomes all about saving one (1) pregnant widow (and themselves) from huge, ,hostile aliens in funny feather boas.

Sulu insulting Scotty’s knowledge of ships lol. Not smart.

Can’t believe the Klingon couldn’t get his weapon back but Kirk got his communicators back no problem. Who is the smarter alien?

They’ll find us BY SCENT ALONE what a detail to just throw in there!

Lol this whole scene with McCoy and Eleen is hilarious and ridiculous in equal measure. Like I can’t entirely blame her for not wanting to be touched intimately by a strange alien man (rude!!) but also I do enjoy McCoy’s gruff insistence that he WILL care for his patient. This is what AOs didn’t get about “Grumpy Bones.” He’s not mean, he’s just...not up for niceties when he has a healing to do. He WILL care for you dammit!

And he has soft hands.

Spock is loving this.

Kirk’s subtle reverse psychology. “Well if you don’t think the communicator plan can work” and then Spock like “I didn’t say that exactly...”

They aren’t human, they’re humanoid!

And again, the subtle taunting/goading of Bones: “Well if you can’t do it...”

I’m a doctor, not an escalator! One of the best lines.

Detective Scotty. Kind of ridiculous how he solves the case of the taunting Klingons luring them away from the planet...but then sticks around a bit more just in case.

The child is McCoy’s!

Spock is so uncomfortable with this giving birth thing. “Oh look Captain, vegetation!”

“Just repeat ‘The child is mine.’“ “Yes, the child is yours.” Lol.

Arts and crafts with Kirk and Spock! I love that this is a McCoy ep with subtle space husbands in the background.

Favorite moment though is McCoy trying to teach Spock how to hold a baby. “I would rather not, thank you.”

“Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on...won’t get fooled again.”

I love that Chekov is consciously messing with them about everything being from Russia.

Also the absolute GALL of the Klingons trying the exact same ship luring technique a second time.

Can’t believe that Bones wants to go off and have fun with the boys and just leave the baby alone in the cave. You’re a dad now McCoy!! Be responsible!

“Small patient.” Yes very small!

Cool little robot battle station unfolding at the helm.

I feel like when Kirk and Spock have that exchange about cavalry coming over the hill and Spock says "if by that you mean..." Kirk should have answered, "I thought I just said that." But then that wouldn't be very Kirk of him. He never makes fun of Spock.

This Klingon is not having a good day!

Scotty and the redshirts here to save the day.

I guess Maab wasn’t so bad after all. And Elaan is perhaps a little confusing, but I admire her desire to both save herself and adhere to her people’s traditions, even if those are incompatible desires.

Spock absolutely IS going to consult linguistics about baby talk. Probably Uhura specifically.

LEONARD JAMES AKAAR. Absolutely one of the top 5 final bridge scenes. They really missed an opportunity to return to the planet in a later movie or series and interact with the Teer.Captain Picard meets Leonard James Akaar.

This was a good ep! I really only remembered the Bones and Elaan parts with the baby, so I forgot all of the political machinations and stuff in the beginning of the ep. It’s a pretty solid world building episode and of course, lots of McCoy, can’t go wrong with that.

I actually think it makes a lot of sense for Bones to be the child’s “father” tbh. Like, I know everyone thinks it’s funny but like... in our culture, we assign pseudo-parental roles to people who aren’t blood relatives of children based on the adult’s relationship with the child’s blood relative and that’s arguably weirder. Like you can be a kid’s step father by marrying his mom even if you really don’t have any relationship to him, so why shouldn’t McCoy, who saved Leonard���s mother’s life and delivered him, and convinced her to actually desire to raise him, be considered his “father”? ESP given that this society seems to have no place at all for fatherless children. They just can’t conceive of such a thing. So “father” has to encompass something other than, or not strictly limited to, biological father. She was so quick to assign McCoy fatherhood status, I have to assume this happens a lot, that people take on that role for non-bio children.

Not a lot for Spock to do today but I think he had fun. He got to explode some rocks and make some bows and shoot some arrows. And Kirk got into a lot of fights so I think he enjoyed himself.

I don’t know if I believed the Cappellans were 7 feet tall but they did look broad and alien so I will give them that.

It was nice to see Scotty in command again. I’m so mad at AOS still for making him comic relief. I think he’s actually quite a serious person. Talking with my mom, I’ve decided that the crew can be grouped into ‘cracks jokes through a crisis’ and ‘generally gets very serious in a crisis, reserves humor for calm moments’ and while Sulu, Chekov, and Spock are in group 1, Scotty is definitely in group 2 with Kirk and McCoy. (Uhura seems generally lighthearted and fun loving but not funny per se so I don’t know how to group her.)

Also this is one of the early filmed Chekov episodes (as you can see by the hair) and he spends it, again, at Spock’s station. It’s so obvious he was introduced as Spock’s protege, not as the navigator, which I think is very interesting. Like I want to hear the backstory on that.

Next week’s episode is The Deadly Years, which I remember as being very solid.

[goldrolloverira]

Historical inevitability and gold and silver ownership

In the end, it’s the times that need to be hedged.

by Michael J. Kosares, USAGOLD

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial writer, Daniel Henninger, registers some very important observations in the wake of the troubling events in Charlottesville.  Charlottesville, he attempts to point out, is symptomatic of something much deeper ingrained in the American psyche. “Some may say.” writes Henninger, “the Charlottesville riot was the lunatic fringe of the right and left, with no particular relevance to what falls in between. But I think Charlottesville may be a prototype of a politics that is drifting away from traditional norms of behavior and purpose.”  Aptly, the editorial is titled, “The Politics of Pointlessness.”

Any thoughtful individual who has witnessed the chaos in Washington would say that something has gone fundamentally wrong with our system of governance and it began way before Donald Trump entered the White House.  Through all of this I keep coming back to the seminal book published in 1997 by William Strauss and Neil Howe titled The Fourth Turning.  In that book the authors predicted much of what has happened in America over the past twenty years.

Fourth turnings are a time of crisis that can last 20-23 years

The fourth turning is a time of crisis – an overturning of the existing social and economic order. The start date of the current fourth turning, according to Neil Howe, is 2008.  Since turnings typically last 20-23 years, it will end sometime between 2028 and 2031.  So a lot of water will run under the bridge before its all over.

I listened to a compelling, recent interview of Neil Howe at the MacroVoices website – a thorough review of the ideas in the book and a lengthy look at what might be next. (The full interview transcript is linked below.)  To elaborate on my short description immediately above, here is Mr. Howe’s own description  of a fourth turning along with a few other important quotes from that interview:

 –– “The fourth turning is the final season of history, if you will, the final generation. And that is the period of crisis. That is the period when we tear down institutions that we’ve built, everything that’s dysfunctional. And we sort of rebuild things from scratch again. And it usually follows a period where—it’s bound up in a period where there’s complete disgust, complete distrust with what we have.”

–– “And I would say these are strong parallels that we see between the decade we’ve been living through and the 1930s. Because it isn’t just what happens to/in the economy. I mean, you consider so many ways in which this last decade has recapitulated the 1930s, starting off with a financial crisis, worries about deflation, worries about declining fertility rates, and currency wars, and beggar thy neighbor policies, and radical attempts by monetary and ultimately fiscal policy to remedy the situation.”

–– “I think we can be too mesmerized by the fact that the last fourth turning we had started with the Great Depression and ended with World War II. I think there are more possibilities. We could be defeated on a fourth turning. We could completely unravel on a fourth turning, giving the amazing popularity of these dystopian or alternative history drama shows on HBO and Netflix today really spelling out those scenarios.”

–– “And then the crisis, when all of these problems begin to coalesce into one huge problem. It’s when the Great Recession met all of these—the rise of fascism both in Asia and in Europe, and everything came together, currency wars, everything became part of a huge problem. Which, by the resolution, you see—and this is what happens at every fourth turning. All the little problems come together into a giant problem. And the giant problem gets completely solved.”

–– “So in politics we see volatility is incredibly high. If there were a political index—there is a political index, there’s a political uncertainty index which actually you can go on FRED and look at it, which is amazingly high levels compared to where it was for the last 20 or 30 years. There is a political index, but it’s very high right now as opposed to the market index which is very low. So, if you’re doing valuation divided by some measure of volatility, which is kind of your basic complacency index, that’s at record high levels now in markets. But you’d have to say complacency is at record low levels in our political and civic life. We’re totally nervous. We even, I think, to some extent, fear that we’ve lost any kind of public square, the ability to even have a public discourse on every issue. I think that that is a real problem.

[End quotes]

Historical inevitability and portfolio preparation: Gold and silver ownership

There is a certain amount of inevitability in Howe’s analysis that a good many will have a hard time accepting, but I am among the group that believes that we are carried on great waves of history whether we like or not.  That is why cycle theory has always appealed to me since my early days in the investment business.  I chose to become a gold and silver broker (back in 1973) because I have always believed that there are good and bad times economically, and when the bad times roll around, that is when you want to be sure that you have made preparation, and most advisedly well ahead of the trouble. Markets cycle.  Politics cycles.  Economies cycle.  Nature, by the way, cycles.  And when you really put on your thinking cap, that tells you why everything else cycles.

Gold and silver, unequivocally, remain the best choice to preserve capital during the secular downslopes – in times like these.  Whenever we watch what’s going on out there and you can’t seem to figure out why people are behaving the way they are, just remember that we are in the grips of a fourth turning and this is the way it is going to go and, as Howe points, it could get considerably worse.

If you have an abiding interest in the kind of analysis you are now reading, you might appreciate our monthly newsletter compiled and written by Michael J. Kosares, the author of the popular investor guideline,  The ABCs of Gold Investing: How to Protect and Build Your Wealth with Gold (Third Edition).  You can sign-up for it here.  Always timely.  Written for gold and silver owners or for those thinking about it.  Thank you.

My concern is getting across the bridge between the great crisis that may still be ahead of us and the resolution that comes at the end of fourth turning.  That is why I own gold personally and why I think every thinking, well-established individual financially should own it as well.  The name of the game is to protect wealth and not leave your life work on the table when the crisis hits with full force.  A diversification of about 10%-30%, in my view, will get the job done. How high you go within that range depends upon on how strongly you feel about what is going on.

Why I put so much stock in the book, The Fourth Turning

You may wonder why I put so much stock in Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning.  Besides making a great deal of sense as a view of how we as human beings move through history from one generation to the next, the authors presciently predicted the 2008 financial crisis eleven years before it happened.

From The Fourth Turning:

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire.”

Talk about hitting the nail on the head.  The last two sentences tell it all as we now live through the experience.  I have always said that the gold and silver owner can afford to sit back and watch the show with a certain amount of detachment and comfort knowing you have done your best to protect your assets.  Gold certainly worked for its owners during the first stage of the fourth turning when gold went from roughly $700 per ounce to nearly $2000 at its peak before working back to current price levels. Silver did equally well going from roughly $16.50 to over $50 at its peak.

It is likely to work in the next stage of the cycle as well.  As we watch the social, economic and political implosion unfolding around us, you begin to wonder whether or not it has come time for the great middle of America to kick back a bit and take a more detached approach to the problems, and that is what Daniel Henninger is driving at in his editorial.

Neil Howe in his interview mentions a “political uncertainty” chart in the final quote in that section above available at FRED.  I think he may have been talking about this chart, but even if it isn’t it tells the same story.  As you can see in the following chart, economic uncertainty has been running at a high level since the year 2000 and in direct correlation to gold’s secular bull market. Since 2008, for good reasons, the uncertainty has been running at consistently high levels and on a hair trigger. The current lull might simply be the calm before the next storm which, in my opinion, is already visible on the horizon.

I will end by returning to Daniel Henninger’s thoughtful editorial this morning and recommend that you read it in full along with Neil Howe’s interview.  Howe’s interview transcript and Henninger’s editorial are both linked immediately below.  Unfortunately, Henninger’s full article is not published in the clear, but Fox posted the beginning with a link to the full article.  Here is the thought with each he ends the piece.  It’s a good one.

“Amid the torrent, an odd paradox emerges:  People are consuming more content and detail about politics than ever and more content and detail about politics than ever, and more people than ever are saying, “I have no idea what is going on.” Someone is at fault here, and it is not the absorbers of the information.Charlottesville is being pounded into the national psyche this week as paroxysm of white nationalism.  On current course, the flight from politics is going to look like rational behavior.”

Neil Howe interview (Courtesy of MacroVoices/Audio version can be accessed at the MV link.)

Daniel Henninger editorial (Wall Street Journal, 8/17/17)