On beer, milk, cars and weapons

For smart money, every crisis is an opportunity. Major investors ride the waves of crises; at the lows, they buy new assets; at the peak of the approaching tsunami, they offload shares before the crisis really strikes. They know exactly when it’s coming. Perhaps they are even the ones who trigger the crises – the smart money. The architects of history?

January 1920 – the US government decided to introduce a ban on the production, sale and transport of alcohol. In response to the government’s measures, brewery owners, who already had the infrastructure to chill their products, started producing ice cream (very ‘smart’), and bar owners began selling it on a massive scale to avoid having to close their businesses. People were no longer allowed to meet in pubs, yet they still needed a shared social ritual that would serve as an excuse to get together, so a visit to a pub was replaced by a visit to an ice-cream parlour.

The flow of money, which had previously been directed towards producers of ingredients used in alcohol production, such as hops, was redirected towards dairy farmers. This enabled farmers to base their income on milk production, which was highly profitable at the time. However, the transport of dairy products took place mainly at a local level, as the global transport of chilled foodstuffs still posed a technological challenge.

Help came from the Anheuser-Busch Vehicle Department, which began selling refrigeration units for lorries fitted with the ABC (Automatic Brine Circulation) system to ensure the safe transport of chilled products. This system was innovative as it could transport dairy products over previously inaccessible distances without the need for electricity.

The heyday for the largest US ice cream companies of the pre-war era came with the Second World War. Ice cream scoops were the tool used by the US command to maintain high morale amongst its troops, and ice cream was regarded as a safe substitute for alcohol, as the youngest generation of soldiers had grown up surrounded by ice cream parlours. At one point during the war, the US Navy Command even decided to spend a million dollars (by comparison, a Sherman tank cost around 45,000 dollars) simply to convert a cargo barge into a floating ice cream factory. It was intended solely for the production of ice in the Pacific theatre of war and for delivery to aircraft carriers and soldiers on the islands. It was so huge that it could produce 38 litres of ice every 7 minutes.

The end of the dairy era seemed to come with the end of the war. The oversupply of dairy products led to the bankruptcy of many companies, a situation the US government sought to prevent through intervention and subsidies for the industry. The Agricultural Act of 1949 cost American taxpayers billions for many years after the end of the war. Every successive government in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s did the same: it bought up dairy products on a massive scale and stored them in huge underground warehouses. It was not until Ronald Reagan, who was known for cutting spending, that this practice was brought to an end. Initially, he wanted to have 254,000 tonnes of cheese dumped into the ocean; in the end, he handed the stocks over to the poorest members of society. To this day, the term ‘government cheese’ is associated in the American consciousness with social welfare cheese that is considered better than that bought in shops. And even today, through its funding of Dairy Management Inc., the US government continues to influence consumer behaviour not only in America – for example, by having this non-profit organisation encourage restaurant chains such as McDonald’s to include as many dairy products as possible in their meals (coffee with milk, cheeseburgers).

What sits at the top of our hierarchy of values determines our behaviour.

Ever since Volkswagen marketed its success thanks to Goebbels, many Germans – and, absurdly enough, Poles and Bulgarians too – still believe that Volkswagen and BMW are the best cars in the world. Well, it turns out that it is Japanese cars that have topped the ADAC’s list for decades. Later came the Koreans, and now Chinese cars such as BYD are well on their way to conquering the European market. Hey, you old mythomaniacs in Poland, in Germany, in the Balkans, in your Porsche – a company that’s going bust: cars with slanted eyes are the best! At some point, you’ve got to face reality.

And look: just as the car manufacturers began to face their first serious difficulties, war broke out in Ukraine. They weren’t as flexible as the beer producers in the US in 1920. They couldn’t switch to producing tanks that quickly. Unless, that is, they’d had a dictator like the one in 1934 who’d ordered them to do so. But those in power in the West were ‘smart’ too: ‘Yes, okay, the industry might be on the decline, but we’ve got Rheinmetall and other arms manufacturers, so we’ll redirect our funding there.’ NATO’s eastern flank has been strengthened, billions are being poured into rearmament, and even the Greens in Germany are in favour of compulsory military service. So the European economy somehow carries on, and even if GDP is rising only slowly, there is no collapse that would threaten the ruling class.

Yes, the West is facing problems in supporting Ukraine in the conflict, but look: there are clever people here too, just like those at Anheuser-Busch back in the day with their cooling systems for transporting ice: the Ukrainians are building the world’s most effective combat drones themselves, and at a bargain price at that – you fools at Rheinmetall!

But every war ends eventually, and we’ll be left with the old cheese and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary soldiers, whilst our children and grandchildren will have to pay off the debts from this war farce for many decades to come with their taxes and meagre pensions.

Property – a huge problem in the US

The US has been battling the property crisis for years, and it is coming to a head.

According to the report by the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers, there is currently a shortfall of 10 million homes in the US. One of the main causes is the growing disparity between income and expenditure on rent or housing costs. Almost half of the country’s tenants spend more than 30 per cent of their income on housing. More than a quarter of American households who rent spend more than half their income on housing, and recent surveys show that most Americans consider housing costs to be too high.

The difficult situation in the housing market is also reflected in the eviction figures. The number of evictions is rising steadily, leading to an increase in homelessness. A distinctive feature in the US is that the reasons for eviction vary according to tenants’ ethnic background. Whilst only 7% of white tenants fail to pay rent, the corresponding figures for Black and Latin American tenants are 19.5% and 14.5% respectively.

The housing crisis not only poses a growing threat of homelessness but also contributes to the impoverishment of society. When property prices rise (relative to income), people have less money left over for other goods and services. As a result, some citizens will never be able to buy their own home. For this reason, some young people are forced to return to their parents’ home or never leave it at all, preventing them from starting an independent life and raising a family.

The shortage of affordable housing is causing a decline in economic productivity. Employees find it difficult to live in metropolitan areas where demand for skilled workers is rising or where well-paid jobs are being created. High property prices are also having a negative impact on fertility – many couples are postponing the decision to have children.

The report also points out that the climate policy decisions taken by former US President Joe Biden have contributed to higher costs for house building. These relate to energy-efficient building regulations that imposed an obligation to install more efficient air-conditioning systems and water heaters in buildings. The document cites a 2021 analysis by the National Association of Home Builders, which concludes that the installation of environmentally friendly appliances can increase the price of a house by 31 thousand dollars. It can take up to 90 years to recoup the costs associated with purchasing these solutions.

Added to this are the American bureaucracy, which is in a state of disarray, and restrictions on land-use planning that prevent the construction of denser housing. The consequences? The most difficult situation is in California (where 187,000 people are living without a roof over their heads) and in the State of New York (with 158,000 homeless people).

Welcome to America, the land of opportunity.

The Treasure of the Appalachians

The US Geological Survey (USGS) has published a report that could have a significant impact on the geopolitical dynamics between the US and China. It turns out that the Appalachian Mountains contain 2.3 million tonnes of lithium oxide. To better understand the significance of this information, suffice it to say that such a quantity would meet the US’s demand for this rare metal for around 328 years. To date, the country has operated only one small mine, and more than 50% of its lithium is imported from Chile, Argentina and Australia, whilst the raw material itself is still sent to China for processing. Indeed, China processes 60% of all lithium, which serves as a means of exerting pressure on other countries, including the US. In recent years, Beijing has repeatedly introduced export controls on, among other things, lithium processing technology, the manufacture of LFP cathodes (which contain directly recycled lithium) and high-energy lithium-ion batteries. As a result, Beijing has a real influence on the cost, availability and delivery times of battery components worldwide.

The discovery by the US authorities now appears to mark a breakthrough, but the devil is in the detail. The first problem is the nature of the deposits found. These are so-called pegmatites, i.e. hard rocks, from which the extraction and processing of lithium is much more expensive and difficult than from brine. What matters, however, is that mining would be economically viable. The greatest hopes lie in the Kings Mountain region, where companies such as Albemarle and Piedmont Lithium are already developing their projects. The biggest problem, however, remains time. The construction of mines and the commissioning of lithium extraction and recycling plants is a process that will take at least 10 to 15 years. Consequently, the significance of this discovery remains moderate in the short term.

So where exactly do the real benefits for the US lie? First and foremost, we need to adopt a longer-term approach here in the context of competition with China. This competition will not end in two or three years. A new world order will emerge over the coming decades, and from that timeframe, the discovery of such vast lithium deposits is already significant. This is a milestone that completely transforms the US’s vision of raw material security in relation to lithium and offers real hope of weakening Chinese influence, even in the area of control over battery production. It is also a positive signal for American companies in this sector.

Every gift discarded, every device rejected

Such is the final symbolic act of the American state visit to Beijing (13-15 May 2026). Nothing gifted by the Chinese diplomatic counterparts was allowed on board Air Force One. The measure of mistrust just cannot be higher. The ostentatiousness of the act boggles the mind. The symbolic failure of the gesture cannot be overestimated.

Gifts may be poisonous. No doubt about that. Think about the cell phones that Palestinian leaders purchased, the cell phones that were tampered with by the Israeli secret services, the cell phones that were detonated, killing or maiming the users of those cell phones.

Think about the notorious infected blankets that the European conquerors of North America presented to the Indians. The purpose was to do away with the indigenous peoples in a surreptitious and efficient way. Or, for that matter, think about the alcohol generously sold to the same Indians for the purpose of weakening their health and paralysing their will.

Why, think about China itself, about the opium that was forcibly sold to the Chinese in the 19th century. Two protracted wars were waged over the right of the Europeans to bless the indigenous people with this good!

Think about the Trojan Horse. Legend or no legend, the principle was known and well established in antiquity. Gifts may be dangerous, and oftentimes they are.

Hence an interesting development of the meaning of the German word Gift, whose initial sense overlapped with that of the English word gift, but with time came to denote… poison!

Think about drug dealers who gift or give freely the first few doses of a drug to hook the person on the substance, to make him addictive.

Also the English language has an expression showcasing the troublesomeness of receiving gifts. The expression is to receive a white elephant, i.e. to get a gift that costs a lot to maintain but provides no usefulness (white elephants were considered sacred, hence one could not use them for any kind of work, but one, obviously, needed to feed them).

So, who knows, the Chinese may have concealed spying malware or whatever malicious things in their gifts, down to biological material. The American delegation acted verbatim on the old maxim: Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, which in our context would be: Timeo Sinae et dona ferentes, meaning: I fear the Chinese, even those bearing gifts (The Aeneid, Book II).

How should that act on the part of the American delegation be construed? A message of mistrust of the Chinese? Real, palpable fear of being threatened by Chinese technology? How was that gesture perceived by the managers of the Middle Kingdom?

Almost a century back the Chinese were American allies in Washington’s fight against Japan. After the war came a split: Americans backed Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of China’s nationalists, against Mao Zedong, the leader of China’s communists. Chiang Kai-shek lost to the communists and found refuge on the island of Taiwan. Americans recognized Taiwan as ‘China’ and tried to ignore mainland China in the hope of reversing the historical process. Nothing came out of it. Communist China, poor and backward as it was, showed no signs of disintegration, so much so as it was backed by the Soviet Union. But then the fate smiled at Americans: Nikita Khrushchev, the USSR’s leader, fell out with Mao Zedong, which later even culminated in border skirmishes. That was something that Americans had been waiting for. Washington reversed its political course and did its best to win Beijing over to its side against Moscow. Americans withdrew recognition for Taiwan and recognized mainland China as… China proper. Much later came the years of economic cooperation in that American businesses were for a large part outsourced to China. The fall of the Soviet Union – history’s another gift for the United States – seemed to seal the fate of the globe: the United States emerged as the only dominant power, Russia – the Soviet Union’s political heir – was assigned the role of the provider of resources, while the Middle Kingdom was supposed to happily accept the role of the world’s manufacturer.

Things may have stayed that way till this day but for America’s greed and arrogance. Gradual military encirclement of Russia in terms of expanding NATO and engineering unrest in the post-Soviet area (Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan) along with a simultaneous political assault against China as America’s most dangerous political and economic rival pushed Moscow and Beijing in their mutual embraces. Khrushchev’s political mistake has been corrected: Moscow and Beijing have begun to cooperate against the West, against the United States, though openly no such declaration has been issued.

The political sine wave for the United States could be traced something like this: from friendly China (Chiang Kai-shek) to unfriendly China (Mao Zedong), to friendly China again (Prime Minister Zhou Enlai), and again to a rather unfriendly China (Xi Jinping). The discarded gifts and the rejected devices merely illustrate the current state of affairs.

May 2026 – a look at some countries

USA

Trump’s greatest achievement is that he kills or kidnaps presidents. If he merely killed or kidnapped presidents, that would somehow be fair in the world of gangsters. But the fact that he kills primary school girls as collateral damage, causes inflation, lowers people’s standard of living across the globe through the energy crisis, and stubbornly sticks to his ideas is, to put it mildly, a sign of a penchant for dictatorship and the mindset that the best course of action is to turn everything upside down, without a second thought.

And so a void is emerging in the USA, because if the Democrats come to power again, America will once more be destroyed socially and spiritually, ethnic replacement will continue, and fentanyl will be made ever more popular. The Dems (read: the demons) will resume their gender and climate change nonsense, will incite hostility towards Russia, and so on and so forth. The void is emerging because people have no sensible candidate to vote for. I keep asking myself: how is it possible that such a great nation can produce something entirely new? OK, the big tech firms, AI and their achievements have been breathtaking, but Europeans, Asians, South Americans and, above all, North Americans are waiting for breathtaking new leadership in Washington.

UAE

The United Arab Emirates is leaving OPEC because:

their so-called friends, such as Saudi Arabia, did not come to their aid during the Iranian attacks;
they have the largest oil production capacities in the Persian Gulf and want to exploit them as quickly as possible before they run out of oil. They want to sell it now at the highest possible price, and today’s price levels of over $100 a barrel represent an opportunity for them to hoard money in a stagnant global economy.
they follow Trump’s lead: away from multilateralism. Participation in international alliances and cooperation is pointless. This may well be the start of a potential avalanche of withdrawals: the US from NATO, Eastern European countries from the EU, and so on.

Hungary

Peter Magyar’s victory delighted the Brussels elite, but they don’t understand people, and Magyar will disappoint them, because:

Magyar is not a pro-Ukrainian leader. Like Orbán, he opposes direct military support and the dispatch of weapons from Hungary. Furthermore, he is strongly opposed to a fast-track route for Ukraine’s accession to the European Union.
Likewise, the new Prime Minister supports the strict protection of Hungary’s borders and firmly rejects any mechanism for the compulsory resettlement of migrants within the EU.
The same applies to social policy, where pensions are not being cut in 2013 and 2014. Hungary’s budget deficit is therefore growing ever larger.
Although Magyar has expressed his desire to gradually move away from Russian oil, he is continuing his predecessor’s policy on nuclear energy. The new government has stated that it will not halt the controversial expansion of the Paks nuclear power plant, which is being carried out in close cooperation with the Russian state-owned giant Rosatom. The key to the issue of energy resources from Russia seems to lie in these words from Magyar: “Russia will be here, and Hungary will be here. We will try to diversify, but that does not mean we want to part ways.” Everything suggests that the new Hungarian Prime Minister is, in fact, a ‘light version’ of Viktor Orbán, which may seem surprising at first glance, but when a country is so heavily dependent on Russian energy supplies, the room for manoeuvre is truly limited.

Israel

The country under Zionist rule is waging a merciless war against other religions. The Zionists want to reach the Euphrates and, who knows, perhaps establish a thousand-year empire. Their targets are not only Islamists, whether Sunni or Shia, but also Christians. The demoralisation of Israeli soldiers has reached such a point that they are destroying and burning down entire villages. Recently, everyone was shocked by a photo of an Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon destroying a statue of Christ with a heavy hammer.

Source: X

The hatred and the scale of Israel’s attacks on Iran mean that Tel Aviv is already running short of air defence missiles. It seems that the Israelis are overplaying their hand and that this could end badly for them.

Thou shalt not say no to Donald Trump!

To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God – these are the words that Christian minister Paula White-Cain – the White House Senior Advisor and head of the White House Faith Office said in 2025. These words stirred much uproar among Christians of many denominations. They rightly stated that no man can be adored like God, no man can be looked up to like he is a deity.

The White House’s main resident – Donald Trump – a psychological reincarnation of Benito Mussolini – received a powerful boost for his ego from this female minister. Paula White-Cain is said to have been contacted by Donald Trump many years ago, before his first presidential term. He is supposed to have been struck by the profundity of her preaching. No wonder: like draws like. Paula White-Cain is every inch as narcissistic as the American president is. She was heard (and recorded) on an occasion to say: “Wherever I go, God rules. When I walk on White House grounds, God walks on White House grounds. I have every right and authority to declare the White House holy ground, because I was standing there and where I stand is holy.” Her self-esteem is just staggering!

Paula White-Cain, born in 1966, a Christian minister, has been married three times (to Dean Knight, a musician, with whom she has a son; to Randy White, a preacher; and Jonathan Cain, a keyboardist and songwriter). She herself is from a broken family, with her father being a suicide. Despite those life hardships she managed to amass a fortune, complete with a real estate and a private jet. She generates money through her evangelism (including televangelism), book writing, and various business ventures.

Why, Donald Trump has also tried his hand at various enterprises and – what a coincidence! – he also has had three spouses (Ivana Trump, the mother of his three first children; Marla Maples, mother of one of his daughters; and Melania Trump, mother of his youngest son).

Paula White-Cain’s evangelism attracts thousands of followers. She makes believe she “speaks in tongues” and she delivers people from bad spirits causing the people to fall on the ground during the process and behave in uncontrolled ways. She acts self-assured and – you guessed it right – she does all those things for the good of the poor, including the poor in – yes! yes! – Africa. (You will have noticed, dear reader, that all the philanthropists of the world are somehow concerned with the Dark Continent, but never mind.)

Isn’t Paula White-Cain just the right person to accompany somebody like President Donald Trump? They both look for narcissistic supply of admiration from the masses of people, they both know how to ingratiate themselves with the common man, and they both have been extremely successful in enriching themselves and gaining social status.

One can wonder which is worse: a Leonid Brezhnev taking cues from Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx’s political-cum-philosophical tenets or Donald Trump being influenced by Paula White-Cain’s ministry and hr interpretation of the Holy Scripture. One can also legitimately wonder whether Leonid Brezhnev really cared about Marxism-Leninism, and, similarly, whether President Donald Trump really cares about religion, any religion. Rather, both leaders use(d) the ideology or religion for their self-aggrandizement. When Ivanka, Donald Trump’s daughter (from his first marriage) married Jared Kushner, she converted to Judaism, her husband’s religion, which shows that she was not raised by a genuinely Christian father.

President Donald Trump needs a bunch of ministers in the White House precisely for the purpose of raising his status in the eyes of still believing American Christians. The words said by Paula White-Cain that you cannot say no to Donald Trump because that would be like saying no to God himself turn the American president into a Caesar-like figure. We know that Roman emperors enjoyed the status of being divine. The United States is an echo of the Roman Empire: we have the senate and the senators, we have the Capital, we have the eagle as the national emblem (all the trappings derived from ancient Rome) and Latin inscriptions like the familiar e pluribus unum (out of many – one) seen on coins and paper bills.

Roman emperors were not deified within a day. It was a process. Are we witnessing something like that in the case of present-day America?

Christians, as said above, were enraged by what Paula White-Cain said about President Donald Trump, but some of them – and we think about Christian Zionists – had done the same long before they heard those words from the female minister. It is the Christian Zionists who notoriously deify the nation of Israel. They are used to saying that ‘who touches Israel touches God’, which is a loose quotation of Zechariah 2:8, which says: ‘For he who touches you touches the apple of His eye.’ It is then the Christian Zionists who have long ago equated one ethnicity with God himself. Why should they be bothered so much when the deification is extended to Donald Trump? After all the incumbent American president is Israel’s best friend, waging wars at the behest of Tel Aviv. If Donald Trump is doing his best to Make Israel Great Again, why deification should be withdrawn from him? Doesn’t he deserve it?

But jokes apart. Deification of a nation or an individual is a path into the abyss. History knows of such deifications and the results they entailed. Woe to the world in which a nation or a man is equated with God.

Would you like to be the American vice president?

The talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, have come to a grinding halt. 21 hours bore no fruit. Americans, despite having lost the war to Iran, raised their demands and obviously sought no settlement. It is highly likely they are trying to regroup and strike again: they are playing for time. They have done so twice before so we may rest assured they will do it again. They will strike while the negotiations are in full swing if they are resumed, and most likely they will be resumed.

Yet, it is not the negotiations that we’d like to focus aur attention on. It is the person of the American vice-president JD Vance. He was sent by President Donald Trump to Islamabad to carry out the talks. One might think JD Vance is the second most powerful man on planet earth. Sadly, far from it. JD Vance had absolutely no empowerment to conduct the negotiations. He called Donald Trump eleven times during his stay in Islamabad – a sure sign he had absolutely no leeway, or – worse – Donald Trump did not trust him enough.

Second, JD Vance was accompanied by Jared Kushner (Trump’s son-in-law) and Steve Witkoff (both of Jewish extraction), who were certainly sent to guide the vice president and see to it that he does not depart from the direction that is satisfying for Israel.

Third, JD Vance, while still on board the plane bound for Washington on his way back from Pakistan called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ‘reported’ (that’s precisely the word that Benjamin Netanyahu used giving account of the call to the journalists) about the talks. Let this sink in: the American vice-president reported over the telephone to a foreign head of state even before he did so in person to his superior, the president of the United States.

The position of the American second-in-command is unenviable! For all the splendour and what not, JD Vance is compelled to play a role he certainly – if he is a man of ambition – does not enjoy playing. Unless, of course, JD Vance is not a man of ambition, unless he only cares for the trappings of power. Who knows?