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When Will There Be An 'Alternative For Canada'?

Zero Hedge -

When Will There Be An 'Alternative For Canada'?

Authored by Mark E. Jeftovic via Bombthrower,

On Sunday, Germany's Alternative für Deutschland won Saxony-Anhalt, which shouldn't really surprise anyone, but is being treated by the media like some kind of Black Swan event, blindsiding us all.

The AfD won 43.8% of the vote, more than doubling its result from five years ago and crushing Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU, which came in at 17.2%. Apparently, if it wasn't for mail-in voting they would have had a majority.

As it stands, they're within three seats of an outright majority (maybe they can follow the Liberal Party of Canada playbook and induce a few other MPs to defect).

Naturally, practically every headline describing the result contains some variation of the words "far right".

We've been through this before.

A few years ago I wrote "What Does 'Far Right' Even Mean Anymore?" and came up with a working definition:

"Far right" is basically anything that contests the Establishment narrative.

That definition has held up remarkably well.

Because if you listen to the political establishment and its media organs, there are basically only two possible views around the problems facing Western countries.

The first is to double-down on what we've been already doing, irrespective of hard data showing that the policies of the last decade have made Canada the poorest performing country in the entirety of OECD nations, not to mention that the track we're on will keep us there out until 2060...

Here in Canada that means some variation on the policies we've pursued since 2015, many of them mirroring the European model: historically unprecedented immigration volumes, an ever-expanding temporary resident population, increasingly cumbersome restraints on energy and resource development, and a kind of managed degrowth dressed up as environmental stewardship.

Door #2 is that anyone who has an issue with this is a "far-right extremist", or more recently "a maple-MAGA".

There is apparently no middle ground.

Stipulate that immigration is a overall a good thing but that the volume and calibre of the migrants matters? Far right.

Suggest that a country has both the right and obligation to decide who gets to live there and optimize for higher quality immigrants? Far right.

Expect that people who immigrate to this country should integrate into it, obey its laws and be a net contributor economically, instead of a perpetual drain?

Careful now. You don't want to sound like you're "noticing things".

Which raises an interesting question after yesterday's result in Germany:

When will there be an Alternative for Canada?

How Canada's immigration system used to work

Canada was the first country in the world to adopt a merit-based immigration system, in 1967.

The underlying concept was remarkably simple: select for people who were likely to succeed here.

Education. Language. Skilled work experience. Age. Adaptability. Ability to support yourself.

There were family reunification and humanitarian streams alongside it, of course, but the economic immigration system was unapologetically selective and we unabashedly skimmed the cream across all ethnicities, countries, races and religions.

For awhile there, we had it: The Golden Age of Multi-Culturalism - and Canada was, in fact, a classically liberal paradise. For a while.

This is the system under which my parents, my wife, her mother-in-law, our daughter and my entire extended family came to Canada.

All immigrants. Most of them non-white.

It works fine.

For decades we brought in skilled, educated and motivated people from everywhere. While they retained homages to their cultures and religions, they also worked hard, obeyed the law, they opened businesses, raised families, integrated into Canadian society and, over a generation or two, became part of our "Canadian Mosaic".

What Changed

That basic architecture continued for decades and eventually evolved into Express Entry, which was launched under the Harper government in January 2015. Express Entry actually made the selection process more competitive, ranking eligible candidates against one another instead of simply processing qualified applicants in chronological order.

What changed after 2015 wasn't that Canada suddenly abolished the points system, but the Trudeau Liberals made changes to the volume and the pathways.

Permanent immigration targets climbed from roughly 250,000 to 280,000 annually during the Harper years to nearly half-a-million annually by 2024. At the same time, international students, temporary workers and other temporary residents expanded far faster (places like Conestoga College became veritable "diploma factories").

And somewhere along the way, "temporary foreign worker" stopped conjuring up an image of an agricultural worker filling a seasonal shortage and started meaning practically everybody behind the counter at Tim Hortons.

The Temporary Foreign Worker Program was never designed as a mass pipeline for cashiers and fry cooks, but successive rule changes, plus a much larger companion program that does not require a labour-market test, made low-wage service jobs a normal use of temporary labour.

What makes it worse?

As many of those living in the GTA area are aware: home invasions are up, car thefts are up, assaults are up, so is firebombing Christian churches and anti-Semitic violence. The streets of Canada's major cities are routinely taken over by Islamic and far-left extremists who openly hate this country and pine for it's downfall...

(One wonders, why is she here then?)

And when non-citizens commit crimes, get caught, get released again, commit more crimes, and eventually, finally are convicted...

The final catalyst: The immigration discount on criminal sentencing

This may ultimately be the issue that causes the pot to boil over.

Canadian citizens watched citizens getting tackled by cops grocery stores for not wearing masks, people got tazed at outdoor hockey rinks. The federal government imposed martial law and seized your bank accounts for donating to the Freedom Convoy.

And now, they open the news and encounter an endless procession of home invasions, carjackings, sexual assaults, human trafficking cases and violent crimes where some variation of the same phrase seems to invariably appear:

"The accused was already out on release for previous unrelated charges."

...and they end up being released again, and people can't help but notice, that many such cases turn out to be, "Brampton men" (IYKYK).

This has become common enough that Ottawa has finally had to respond. This year the federal government enacted more than 80 changes to Canada's bail and sentencing laws, specifically targeting repeat violent offenders, home invasions, human trafficking, auto theft and accused persons carrying numerous or serious outstanding charges.

So the problem wasn't some imaginary, shared hallucination that came out of a far-right echo chamber.

More corrosive still is the perception that non-citizens who commit crimes have been receiving so-called "immigration discounts" precisely because they are non-citizens and the Supreme Court, in R. v. Pham held that judges may consider the immigration consequences of a sentence.

This has lead to examples such as:

  • A Kitchener man who battered his girlfriend was given a conditional discharge to avoid deportation to India
  • An Ontario court of appeal reduced the sentence of a man convicted of assault and multiple probation violations by one day in order to prevent a "potentially devastating immigration consequence". The Crown did not object.
  • A foreign resident on a work permit who was working as a Bell Technician who exposed himself to a woman in who's apartment he was servicing was granted no jail time because doing so would result in deportation. The man feels "stigmatized" and laments that he had to leave the area.
  • Finally, this guy, who was caught in a Peel Regional Police sting operation, because he thought he was soliciting sex from a 15 year-old minor. He was convicted, then argued that his immigration status should not be impacted by his sentencing because he still wants to bring his wife to Canada (who presumably still wants to be with him, for some reason). Justice Paul O'Marra concurred,

    "A conviction could lead to severe collateral consequences, such as jeopardizing his immigration status, delaying his citizenship, and preventing him from sponsoring his wife, which would likely result in their separation"

Uh, yeah, no shit. That a conviction could lead to severe collateral consequences is the entire point of having a legal system.

The far-right extremist in me can't help but notice, can't restrain myself from wondering out loud...

Do we really want anybody here who can't govern themselves accordingly before they even become a citizen?

Shouldn't this be the most obvious filter available?

By all means, come to Canada, build a better life, work hard and follow the fucking rules.

Otherwise, don't come, or get deported.

Too simple.

But try explaining the optics of that to a Canadian citizen who has just watched the state demonstrate zero reluctance to use its full powers against him and tell him that noticing the discrepancy makes him "literally Hitler".

At what point does "far right" simply mean "normal"?

One of the more revealing moments in CNN's coverage ahead of yesterday's German election came when correspondent Fred Pleitgen described the AfD's supposedly radical immigration platform.

'The AfD openly calls for mass deportation of undocumented foreigners and foreigners who have committed crimes"

Narrator's note: "undocumented foreigner" is someone who is there illegally.

When a person enters your country as a guest, commits a serious crime against somebody who lives there, they should, as a consequence, lose the privilege of remaining.

Holding this opinion will get you branded "far-right" extremist.

I suspect a fairly large percentage of Canadians would consider it common sense.

Living in Canada should be considered a privilege for non-citizens, and citizenship should mean something. It should be earned through some combination of productivity, commitment, integration and time.

None of this has anything to do with race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference.

In fact, Canada's old system demonstrated precisely how unnecessary those criteria are.

This is where the "far-right" branding becomes dangerous

The problem with reflexively branding every objection to the current system as "far right" isn't simply that the label eventually becomes meaningless.

There is a much worse consequence.

For starters, you eliminate the legitimate middle.

People who simply say "immigration levels are too high" get called racists.

People who say temporary workers shouldn't displace Canadian teenagers from entry-level jobs are deemed xenophobes.

People who think convicted non-citizen criminals should be deported are branded as extremists.

Eventually some of those people stop caring what you call them.

That's when some truly unhinged egregores can arise.

I've been warning about this phenomenon for years, including in my book, Unassailable: when legitimate grievances are declared impermissible, they don't just go away.

They go underground, they tend to mutate, and they resurface as increased polarization, siege mentality and, eventually, real extremism.

We're already seeing the emergence Canadian groups openly espousing ideas that really are extreme, including ethnic cleansing, as though removing entire populations based on their skin-colour is the only remaining solution to problems the political system refuses to confront honestly.

As I lamented in my earlier "Canada Was A Liberal Paradise" piece, racism in Canada was for the most part, a thing of the past.

It was over.

Aside from the fringes and the individual Archie Bunker types, Canada was, for a brief, bygone age, a largely colour-blind meritocracy.

Then we made race central to practically everything again: post-nationalism, colonialism. Settlers on stolen land - this isn't coffee house Marxism by purple haired they/them's from affluent families anymore - it's literally baked into the curriculum, it's being taught in our schools and our universities by an academia overrun with Fabians and Malthusians.

Meanwhile, any criticism of immigration policy is synonymous with racial animus.

Is it any wonder that there are populist backlashes occurring in Germany, Ceuta, France, the UK?

The Alternative for Canada is not what you think.

I'm not here to tell you that some manner of nationalist, populist party is going to save Canada - I don't even think the AfD or any of these reaction movements will "save" their own respective countries.

The reason is that I think this is part of a much wider issue: the collapse of the global debt-based monetary system and a Fourth Turning-style destruction of our Industrial Age institutions. The dysfunction we see here in Canada and abroad isn't the result of the wrong political party or bad policy tracks. Those are symptoms of something much larger.

Populations vote in the wrong political parties, who embark on horrifically bad policy tracks, because there is no workable or tenable solutions to the current problems. Only emergent, alternative systems that are better suited to operating in world's network-shaped topology and hyper-accelerating pace will persevere, and a big part of that is just staying out of the blast radius of the failing machinery (much more on this in my new book, The Blueprint: Survive and Thrive in an Overclocked Timeline - my premium membership already has access to it)

However intractable the problems of building a global financial system atop debt-based money, the situation is even more acute here in Canada, where the older generations still believe everything the CBC tells them, and the younger ones are indoctrinated to hate this country from pre-school onward.

In other words, Canada is cooked, and the "Alternative for Canada" is not having a different party in power, it isn't having some establishment outsider like Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke entering politics (although that would be refreshing), or a firebrand like Kevin O'Leary taking over the CPC (which also would be awesome).

Nor is it becoming "the 51st State" or merging with the US (although anybody who's ever read Dianne Francis' book on the topic would find themselves agreeing with a lot of it. It was written before the rise of Trump and TDS infected the majority of the Canadian "Elbows Up" contingent).

For our cousins out in Alberta, it's not even separation.

All of these things might forestall the inevitable, add a decade or two onto the long descent of The Industrial Age - but the real solution in an era where politics is just institutionalized grift and the masses are intentionally dumbing themselves down, the way forward is through radical personal sovereignty, critical thinking skills, financial independence, and optionality. Lots and lots of optionality.

The Alternative for Canada is you.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 15:40

New York Officials Lied About Air Quality After 9/11, New Documents Show

Zero Hedge -

New York Officials Lied About Air Quality After 9/11, New Documents Show

Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

New York City has agreed to release new documents showing that officials lied about the air quality in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.

The more than 170,000 pages of documents are being released by NYC in response to the transparency organization 9/11 Health Watch, which had sued to force their disclosure.

According to the New York Times, the documents reveal that higher-than-acceptable levels of asbestos and other contaminants were in the dust and air in other parts of Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11.

"An audit from November 2001, prepared by a private firm and submitted to the federal E.P.A. based on data collected by New York City and state agencies, showed other troubling findings," the Times reported Monday.

"That audit demonstrated that air concentration of the carcinogen benzene was still spiking near the towers' footprint, and that the concentration of asbestos in the air at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island had increased after the attacks."

Despite having information about the poor air quality, government officials, including then-EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, said the air around ground zero was safe to breathe.

Whitman has since apologized for her misrepresentations.

The Times warned that the disclosures could reopen NYC to new litigation at a time when New Yorkers who were in the city at the time are dying of lung and blood cancers, as well as heart and respiratory diseases.

Denise Verzi, whose husband, Michael, was a firefighter who suffered from lymphoma after responding to the attack, criticized the city for its lack of transparency.

"I don't understand hiding it to begin with," Verzi told the Times. "That was horrific. But 25 years in, there's people that are still getting sick."

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 15:20

Mamdani Turns City Hall Into A Socialist Union-Organizing-Machine

Zero Hedge -

Mamdani Turns City Hall Into A Socialist Union-Organizing-Machine

New York City has established a government office to assist worker in unionizing, following an executive order announced by Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Labor Day. The Mayor’s Office of Worker Power aims to help workers “get informed, connected and organized” to facilitate union formation. City Hall has not yet released information on the office’s budget or staffing levels, both of which are important considerations when creating a new government entity.

 "Every day, working New Yorkers show up, do their jobs, and keep this city running. Too often, they have no say in the conditions they work under," Mamdani said in a statement.

"The Mayor's Office of Worker Power will make sure workers have a seat at the table before exploitation becomes a crisis and violations become routine. We're connecting workers to their rights, to each other and to the organizations ready to stand with them. Because when workers have power, this city works better for everyone."

The office's stated functions include holding hearings on workplace issues, drafting policy proposals based on employee testimony, distributing information about workers’ rights, and connecting employees with outside groups equipped to help them organize.

Tony Perlstein, a former dockworker, union organizer, and deputy director of communications for the Center for Popular Democracy, will run the office. He will report to Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su.

“This office allows us to get ahead of exploitation instead of simply responding to it," Su said in a statement.

"By building relationships with workers, unions and worker centers, we can understand what is happening on the ground and act before problems become crises."

The City Reporter, which broke the story, said the office follows the blueprint of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a joint project of the Democratic Socialists of America and United Electrical Workers. 

Critics have zeroed in on a provision in the executive order that goes well beyond hearings and pamphlets. It directs city agencies, including the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and the Commission on Human Rights, to develop "directed investigation procedures" for workplace violations. These agencies used to wait for a complaint before opening a case. Under the new order, they can target businesses that employ large numbers of low-wage workers, carry a documented history of labor violations, or show other signs the city considers evidence of poor compliance, whether or not anyone has filed a complaint against them.

And that has plenty of people concerned.

 "It's remarkable that the Mamdani administration conflates being forced to pay a union with being protected from exploitation," Manhattan Institute fellow Ken Girardin said. "The city shouldn't be putting its thumb on the scale to squeeze more dues out of workers."

Ashley Ranslow, New York State director for the National Federation of Independent Businesses, called the office "deeply concerning.” 

"Federal laws already protect workers rights to organize," Ranslow said.

Her larger worry concerns what proactive enforcement looks like in practice: small businesses facing scrutiny, she said, "even if there are no complaints filed against them."

Ranslow argued City Hall has inserted itself into a relationship that was never its business. "City government should not be interfering with a process that is between employees and the employer," she said. "Small businesses should be supported, especially in a place like New York City where it's unaffordable to keep the doors open and lights on, instead of having the deck stacked against them."

A recent CUNY report has discovered that the level of unionization in the city is more than twice the national average, revealing the office to be nothing more than a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, a structure designed to create grievances even though the labor market has already clearly shifted in favor of organized labor.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 14:40

Israel Shutters UK Consulate For Leading New European Sanctions Against West Bank Settlers

Zero Hedge -

Israel Shutters UK Consulate For Leading New European Sanctions Against West Bank Settlers

The UK is a lead nation among a dozen countries that jointly announced Tuesday they are imposing sanctions on trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The additional nations are Ireland, Denmark, Finland, France, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband informed parliament about the new measure, saying "Today I announce that the official view of the British government is that the occupation [of the West Bank] is unlawful."

AFP via Getty Images

"The government believes the unlawfulness of the occupation should be reflected in the economic relationships we choose to have with the occupied territories," he added.

Miliband declared that Israeli "terrorists" are conducting ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, which follows a series of deadly incidents involving fanatical settlers widely reported over the last weeks and months. He sought to demonstrate that the sanctions action would underscore that "Britain is not silent in the face of deep injustice and nor is it powerless."

Israel's response was almost immediate, with Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar quickly announcing the closure of the UK consulate in Jerusalem. Saar blasted Miliband for what he's calling "outrageous lies" and charged that London was "systematically working against the state of Israel."

While the United States is not expected to sign on to this European initiative, or voice political support for it, Washington does have sanctions on some individual Jewish settler leaders and groups. However, various international bodies and rights groups have long seen such prior US designations as a positive, but largely symbolic step.

According to an outline of Miliband's words before parliament, he listed the following new legal actions impacting Israeli West Bank settlements and associated entities:

  • An import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories.
  • A comprehensive sanctions regime against providing services such as construction or financing for Israeli settlements.
  • A ban on the advertising in the UK of illegal settlement properties.
  • Personal sanctions against key individuals accused of promoting settler violence.
  • A new ban for arms licenses and other exports that “materially contribute to the occupation”.

Another key part of Israel's retaliation has been to list a dozen British election officials who will now be barred from entering the country. 

According to Israeli media:

The list includes 11 members of parliament... and a lawyer, Fahad Ansari, who has represented Hamas’s political wing in court in the UK as it attempts to remove itself from the list of proscribed terrorist organizations.

Responding to the Foreign Ministry’s announcement, Ansari says on X that he is “neither British nor an MP but do take this as a badge of honour.”

The banned MPs are listed as follows:

  1. Jeremy Corbyn, Your Party co-founder
  2. Zarah Sultana, Your Party co-founder
  3. Naz Shah, Labour Party
  4. Diane Abbot, Labour Party
  5. John McDonnell, Labour Party
  6. Richard Burgon, Labour Party
  7. Hannah Spencer, Green Party
  8. Carla Denyer, Green Party
  9. Sian Berry, Green Party
  10. Ellie Chowns, Green Party
  11. Adrian Ramsay, Green Party

All of this is likely going to ratchet the pressure on the US Embassy and the State Department. Last week, even US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee last week called out Israeli settler violence in the West Bank an "act of terror."

It's unprecedented and unexpected that a self-identified outspoken Zionist and Evangelical pastor like Huckabee would make such an announcement.

He's lately been touring some West Bank areas, describing this as on behalf of US citizens "who live in Turmus Ayya and other communities across this region" who are "disturbed by people who have created extraordinary challenges that are unfair and illegal."

Also, while most Americans might tend to assume that the entirety of the West Bank is Muslim, it has also long had an ancient and significant minority of Christians, chiefly Palestinian Orthodox Christians.

The Christian town of Taybeh has been under repeat attack all summer...

The last all-Christian West Bank town of Taybeh has also this summer come under repeat attack by Jewish settlers. The Israeli government itself has had to send IDF troops to protect the enclave from settler attacks. Perhaps such instances have started to get the attention of US officials, but it's also likely that they will stop at just paying lip service to the issue.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 14:20

More Investing Myths Dismantled

Zero Hedge -

More Investing Myths Dismantled

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

“Investing Myths Dismantled” is chapter 4 of a 5-part series examining the narratives around “investing for the long run.”

Chapter 1: Think Like An Investor

Chapter 2: Investor Psychology

Chapter 3: Why Crashes, Timing & Valuations Matter

Chapter 3 of this series, linked above, ended with a simple question. If the math so plainly says avoid big losses, respect valuations, and mind your timing, why does so much of the industry preach the opposite? Why are you told to stay fully invested no matter what, that you cannot beat the index, so do not try, that the great investors are magic and cannot be copied, and that the only thing worth worrying about is fees?

The reason is that those messages are comfortable, and comfort sells. Each one is an investing myth that sounds like wisdom and quietly talks you out of managing your own money. In this article, we take three of the biggest ones and run them through the same unforgiving logic we used on the math. These articles are not meant to scare you out of stocks, but rather to hand you back the judgment the myths are designed to take away.

Investing Myth One: You Have To Beat The Market

From your first day as an investor, you are handed a scoreboard. The S&P 500 index. If you beat it, you win; but if you trail it, for any one of a million different reasons, you lose. Wall Street loves this scoreboard because a scoreboard keeps you comparing, and comparing keeps you moving your money, chasing whichever fund topped the index last year.

Perhaps it is inevitable that, as social animals, we have an urge to compare ourselves with one another. Such is particularly the case since the rise of social media, where we are constantly bombarded by images of how well “everyone” else seems to be doing. Here is an example.

Assume your boss gave you a new Mercedes as a yearly bonus. You would be thrilled until you learned everyone in the office got two. Now you are upset because on a “relative” basis, you got less than everyone else. However, are you deprived on an absolute basis by getting a Mercedes?

Comparison-created unhappiness and insecurity are pervasive. Social media is full of images of people showing off their lavish lifestyles, giving you something to compare to. It is unsurprising that repeated studies show that social media users are terminally unhappy.

The flaw of human nature is that whatever we have is enough, until we see someone else who has more.

Therefore, it should be unsurprising that comparison in financial markets can lead to awful decisions, so investors have trouble being patient and letting whatever process they have work for them. Chasing that scoreboard does not just set you up for disappointment. It makes you behave badly. You lag the index for a year, so you fire your fund and chase last year’s winner, usually right before it reverts to the mean. You buy high and sell low on a permanent loop, all in the name of keeping up with a number.

But here is the part you may not know – the scoreboard you are comparing yourself to is rigged, and not in your favor.

“There are many reasons why you shouldn’t chase an index over time and why you see statistics such as ‘80% of all funds underperform the S&P 500’ in any given year. The impact of share buybacks, substitutions, lack of taxes, no trading costs, and replacement all contribute to the index’s outperformance over those investing real dollars who do not receive the same advantages. More importantly, any portfolio allocated differently than the benchmark to provide for lower volatility, income, or long-term financial planning and capital preservation will also underperform the index. Therefore, comparing your portfolio to the S&P 500 is inherently ‘apples to oranges’ and will always lead to disappointing outcomes.“ – Absolute vs Relative Returns

One of the most important points to consider is what “substitution” really means. The index you admire is survivorship bias sold as a product, and it quietly buries its dead. Every company that went bankrupt, got acquired, or simply fell out of favor is deleted from the record, so the smooth line climbing across the page is the winners’ bracket with all the losers erased. Your real portfolio never gets that “magic eraser.” You must live with your mistakes, and you pay to fix them, while the index just pretends its mistakes never happened.

So what should you measure against instead? The only benchmark that actually matters is your own goals. The rate of return your financial plan requires, at the lowest risk that gets you there. Your portfolio is specific to your life, so a thirty-year-old and a sixty-year-old should not own the same things, and neither should be graded against an index that has no age, no goals, and no end date.

Reaching for the index’s return means reaching for the index’s risk, and as we saw in the last article, higher returns demand an exponential increase in risk. That is a fine bargain at thirty and a potentially ruinous one at sixty. I dug into this in “Relative Returns or Absolute“ and again in “The 5 Reasons Benchmarking Works Against You“. 

The investing myth of comparing to a benchmark index is dangerous. The reality is that you cannot eat relative returns. Say the market falls 20% in a bad year and your portfolio falls 19%. You beat the index, so you should be happy about that. But you still lost nearly 20% of your portfolio. In real life, nobody has ever felt richer for losing slightly less than an index. The relative game feels like winning right up until the moment you actually have to spend the money.

It comes down to one honest question. What matters more, matching the index in a bull market, or protecting your capital in a bear market?

You cannot have both.

Critically, since you can replace lost money but never lost time, protecting capital is almost always the trade worth making.

Investing Myth Two: Just Invest Like Warren Buffett

The second investing myth wears a friendlier face. If investing is hard, just do what the greatest investor alive does. Buy good companies and hold them forever. You will even hear that Buffett himself says to just buy an index fund and never look at it again. It sounds like permission to stop thinking. It is also a caricature of the man, and following the caricature will hurt you.

Here is what Buffett actually does, and why you can’t replicate it. He is a value investor to the bone. He estimates what a business is truly worth and then refuses to buy until the price offers a wide margin of safety, a discount deep enough that he can be wrong and still not lose. Furthermore, he buys quality businesses with durable advantages, and he is famously willing to do nothing for years; when he cannot find value, he does not force it. He can sit on an enormous pile of cash and wait, sometimes for years, for the fat pitch. Most importantly, he sells. The buy-and-hold-anything-forever story is the opposite of a man who is ruthlessly disciplined about price.

Watch what he does with that cash, and you see the entire philosophy. His cash pile is not random, and it swells when the market is expensive and shrinks when it is cheap. He even has a favorite yardstick for measuring that, the total value of the stock market compared to the size of the economy, a ratio now known as the Buffett Indicator.

When the Buffett indicator runs hot, as I covered in a piece on that very gauge, he stops buying and waits. The greatest investor alive is the living opposite of “stay fully invested no matter what.” He calls cash oxygen, cheap and unexciting, and absolutely necessary, held precisely so he can act when everyone else is forced to sell. Sitting on your hands with dry powder is not a failure of nerve for Buffett. It is the strategy.

It is also important to notice what he is not doing. He is not buying the benchmark index. When Buffett does invest, specifically in the public securities side of the portfolio, Berkshire holds around 40 names, but the vast majority of its value is concentrated in just a handful of high-conviction bets. That is the opposite of spreading your money across five hundred companies by size and hoping it all works out. Buffett’s edge was never breadth; it was judgment, patience, and the discipline to concentrate only when the odds were overwhelmingly in his favor.

Then there is the part that the investing myth never mentions. Buffett is not even playing your game. He invests permanent capital that no client can yank at the wrong moment.

  • He has spent decades using cheap insurance float as leverage.
  • He buys whole companies and shapes how they are run.
  • His horizon is measured in decades, and he has no retirement date and no tuition bill coming due.

However, you have a finite life, a real deadline, and money that might be needed at any time. The gap between you and Buffett is not mostly talent. It is structural.

So no, you cannot be Warren Buffett; however, there is a part worth keeping, and it is the whole reason his name is worth invoking. You can copy his discipline, even if you can never copy his position.

  • Refuse to overpay.
  • Demand a margin of safety.
  • Hold cash when nothing is cheap and,
  • Treat that patience as a strategy, not a personal failing.
  • Sell when the reason you bought is gone.

Buffett himself says the most important quality in an investor is not intellect but temperament, which means the real Buffett lesson is not a stock list at all. It is everything we covered in the first two articles. The self-control to think like an owner and to do nothing when there is nothing worth doing.

Investing Myth Three: Passive Investing Always Wins

The reason this third investing myth is the most seductive is that, for a very long stretch, it has looked to be absolutely true. Just buy the index, keep costs low, and you beat almost everyone. Let’s be fair, low costs and staying out of your own way are genuinely powerful, exactly as we covered in the first two articles. But “passive always wins” hides a mechanism that quietly builds risk into the market, and understanding it changes how you think about that index fund.

The problem is that an index fund does not buy good companies; it typically just buys big ones. Because the S&P is weighted by size, every dollar that flows in gets pushed hardest into whatever is already the largest, regardless of price or quality. That creates a loop.

Follow the loop, and you see the problem. The biggest companies get bigger not because they earned it that year, but because they were already big and the flows had nowhere else to go. They come to dominate the index by default, not by merit. You can watch the machine at work in the numbers. The ten largest stocks have swollen to more than a third of the entire index, nearly double their share a decade ago. A tiny handful of names now sets the direction for nearly every retirement account in the country, whether the people who own them ever chose them or not.

And that hollows out the one thing you thought you were buying. Diversification. If you own an S&P index fund, a Nasdaq fund, and a technology ETF, you do not own three different things. You own the same handful of giant companies three times over. I laid this out in “Why Diversification Is Failing In The Age Of Passive Investing.” Your portfolio may look diversified, but in reality, it is a concentrated bet with much higher risks than you realize. Therefore, in a real crisis, the little diversification you have left tends to vanish, because correlations rush toward one and everything falls together at once.

There is a deeper problem hiding beneath this investing myth: “Passive money never asks what anything is worth.”

Passive investors simply buy in proportion to size. As an increasing share of the market moves this way, fewer participants remain to price companies on fundamentals. The market drifts away from being a weighing machine and toward being a pure momentum machine, where prices rise because money is flowing in, not because the underlying businesses have gotten any better.

The stocks most owned by passive funds become the most sensitive to those flows. As long as the market rises, passive flows come in. Those flows are consumed by the companies with the heaviest index weightings at the top. However, when it eventually falls, and it will, those same companies are dragged down the hardest and fastest. This is because the selling is mechanical and indiscriminate, hitting the crowded names in unison. I made this case in a piece on the fragility that passive flows create. Simply, a market that goes up together tends to come down together.

None of this means that index funds are evil or that you should never own one. There are real truths to the indexing story. For example, low cost is real, and for many investors, a broad fund is a perfectly reasonable core. However, that also means an index fund is not the safety blanket of diversification that the marketing brochure says it is. Yes, own an index fund if you choose, but own it with your eyes open.

Knowing what you actually hold and how concentrated it has quietly become is crucial. Critically, that is a very different thing from buying an index as a substitute for thinking.

Passive is not a free lunch. It is a bet that the flows never stop, but they always eventually do..

What All Three Myths Have In Common

Step back and look at the three together.

  • Beat the market.
  • Be like Buffett.
  • Just buy the index.

On the surface, they say different things. Underneath, they deliver the exact same instruction.

  • Stop thinking.
  • Hand your judgment to a scoreboard, a guru, or a formula, and
  • Just hold on, no matter what.

That message is comfortable, and it is enormously profitable for an industry that would rather you never question it.

But notice the thread running through every rebuttal. In each case, the answer was not a better guru or a cleverer index. It was always you, doing the work.

  • Measuring against your own goals instead of a scoreboard.
  • Copying Buffett’s discipline instead of his ticker symbols.
  • Owning an index fund with your eyes open instead of as a substitute for judgment.

Remember, it is your money. These are your goals, your risk, and your finite, unrecoverable time.

Outsourcing your judgment to a comfortable story, but it will not serve you well.

  • You do not have to beat anyone.
  • No one is asking you to be a legend.
  • And it is okay, in fact, you have an obligation to manage your own risk rather than pretend it does not exist.

The myths want you to be passive. The math wants you awake.

The Bottom Line

We have spent four articles clearing the ground. We learned to think like an investor rather than a speculator, to beat our own psychology and conditioning, to respect the hard math of losses, valuations, and timing, and now to see through the comforting myths that tell us to stop managing our money. That is a great deal of what NOT to do. It raises the obvious question. So what do you actually do instead?

In the final chapter on investing myths, we will provide you with the rules and guidelines to win the “long game” in investing. How to actually manage risk in a portfolio, the three practical ways to run one depending on who you are, and the timeless rules the greatest investors leave behind. We have torn down the myths. In the last piece, we built the thing that replaces them.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 14:00

TSA now search inside Cars Parked at Airports

Financial Armageddon -





http://www.whec.com/news/stories/S310...
Rochester, N.Y. -- She says she had no warning that someone was going to search her car after she left to catch her flight. So the woman contacted News10NBC.

We found out it happened to her because she valet parked her car. Those are the only cars that get inspected.

So if security feels it is necessary to search some cars in the name of safety, why not search all of them?

Laurie Iacuzza walked to her waiting car at the Greater Rochester International Airport after returning from a trip and that's when she found it -- a notice saying her car was inspected after she left for her flight. She said, “I was furious. They never mentioned it to me when I booked the valet or when I picked up the car or when I dropped it off.”

Henry Kissinger : Those Who Reject the New World Order are Terrorists

Financial Armageddon -



Henry Kissinger actually publicly stated that those who oppose the New World Order are "terrorists".

Henry Kissinger in a speech given in Istanbul, Turkey on May 31, 2007, while the Bilderberg conference was simultaneously underway, just a few miles down the road.

Henry Kissinger"In the Middle East, we live in a different world. The nations do not represent historic entities in the same sense that European nations did. Turkey of course does, and Iran in a considerable extent does. But in the region in between, the borders were drawn by the victors of World War I on the basis largely of what would facilitate their influence. So therefore, the identities of these countries, and of their borders, can be challenged more easily."

"What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system, and they're trying to regroup it to a radical Islamic fundamentalists kind."

Detroit files for biggest US City Bankruptcy

Financial Armageddon -

Detroit has become the largest city in Unites States history to file for bankruptcy after decades of decline and mismanagement rendered the city insolvent. Michigan's governor, Rick Snyder, said on Thursday that there was no other option to tackle the city's $18.5bn of debts. Al Jazeera's Caroline Malone reports.

Detroit has become the largest city in Unites States history to file for bankruptcy after decades of decline and mismanagement rendered the city insolvent.William Black, a professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, talks to Al Jazeera about Detroit filing bankruptcy.

Fox News Interviews Adam Kokesh From Jail

Financial Armageddon -




7/18/13 - Anti-government activist Adam Kokesh, who is currently jailed on drug charges and is facing a firearms charge in D.C., says he will someday run for President on a platform of abolishing the federal government. Since July 9th, 31-year old Adam Kokesh has been incarcerated in a cell in the Fairfax County jail which measures seven by seven-and-a-half feet.

On Independence Day, Kokesh had a colleague record a video of the pro-gun activist loading a shotgun on D.C.'s Freedom Plaza. The District has strict gun control laws that generally forbid the carrying of firearms. U.S. Park Police and D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department opened an investigation.

Several days later, U.S. Park Police used a flash grenade when their SWAT team served a search warrant at Kokesh's home in Herndon, Va. Kokesh was arrested when officers said they found hallucinogenic mushrooms at the house.

In an exclusive jailhouse interview, Adam Kokesh denies any connection to the drugs. Here is part of the transcript of that interview with Kokesh: "If they found a stash of magic mushrooms in my house, they were not mine. ANY IDEA WHOSE THEY WERE, OR WHY THEY WERE IN YOUR HOUSE? I'm pretty confident that, whether or not they found anything, the full paper bags that [U.S. Park Police] brought into my house would insure that they had charges to bring against me. ARE YOU IMPLYING THAT THOSE DRUGS WERE PLANTED? Yes."

Kokesh, who has been arrested several times before by U.S. Park Police, says that agency has a "vendetta" against him, but he believes the evidence in the drug case is weak.

Federal officers have now filed a weapons charge against Kokesh for wielding the shotgun in D.C. on the Fourth of July. Here's more of the interview: "WAS IT A REAL SHOTGUN AND WERE THEY REAL SHELLS GOING INTO IT? Yes. ON THE VIDEO YOU POSTED? Yes. YOU DID KNOW THAT WAS ILLEGAL IN D.C.? It's called civil disobedience."

Adam Kokesh believes the Second Amendment to the Constitution will provide him a successful defense against the D.C. gun charge.

The former U.S. Marine who served in Iraq plans to someday bring his anti-government views before voters. "ARE YOU RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT? Yes sir, in 2020 on the platform of: orderly dissolution of the United States government. WHY IS THAT A GOOD IDEA? Why is having a federal government a good idea at this point?"

Adam Kokesh believes the U.S. military is more harmful than helpful to American security, and the government -- as a whole -- has burdened its citizenry with debt.

Adam Kokesh is 70% disabled from his term of military service. He says he lives only on that money.

His supporters, through their website, adamvstheman.com, are asking supporters to send money for bail and send money so a private attorney can be hired. Kokesh is currently being represented by a public defender.

Kokesh remains in custody in the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center, and, if he is freed on bond, he faces extradition to D.C. to face the gun charge.

Donald Trump on Bill O'Reilly Interview, Talks Economy, China and Obamacare - July 18, 2013

Financial Armageddon -

July 18, 2013 - Bill O'Reilly Interviews Donald Trump on Economy, China, and Obamacare



Trump would be a hell of a lot better president then Obama, at least he is willing to do what needs to be done instead of creating some BS healthcare system .He's a businessman, he knows how to make deals, he will get tough on China (even if he has ties made in China in which I don't think he knew or maybe he thought we're a screwed country so why not just sell them to stupid people who will only buy them anyway), I don't believe what they say about his net worth (in which they say isn't worth much). Trump has a big fat heart inside I believe it.

BREAKING NEWS ~ Detroit Files for Bankruptcy

Financial Armageddon -

Here it comes Detroit about to be largest Bankrupt City .The city of Detroit files for Chapter 9 federal bankruptcy protection, making the automobile capital and onetime music powerhouse the country's largest-ever municipal bankruptcy case. WSJ Global Autos Editor Joe White reports.


This news really ruined Obama's golf game today ... ya America is crumbling apart , but we have 15,000 Russian soldiers to help fix it I hear!!

Steve Keen Exposes Financial Fallacies and Debates the Mortgage Debt Jubilee!

Financial Armageddon -

Steve Keen Exposes Financial Fallacies and Debates the Mortgage Debt Jubilee!


"I don't understand gold." Yes, that's what our beloved Fed Chairman actually told Congress today. Maybe that's why Germany wants 300 tonnes of it back. That would be gold the Fed is holding on its behalf. We have just one word for you Finance Minister Schaeuble: tungsten. But don't worry, Chairman Bernanke assured the S&P 500 -- now at all time highs -- that the monetary QE stimulus will continue until the economy can stand on its own feet. Such anthropomorphization is quite quaint for an econometrician, isn't it? We debunk the likes of Bernanke and talk about the mortgage jubilee with economist Steve Keen.

And, Jamie Dimon can't seem to find a chair that isn't the hot seat. JP Morgan is about to shell out a few hundred million in a settlement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. That would be for allegedly manipulating energy markets in California, Enron style. Barclays already settled for $435 million. And a similar settlement for JP Morgan would amount to -- well just one sixtieth -- of its $26 billion in revenues reported last Friday. No word yet on how much it actually profited from allegedly bilking Americans.

Finally, subprime is back. The Consumer Financial Protection Board just strengthened mortgage underwriting standards. But if you don't fall under the new rules, don't worry. Because the guy who helped write the rules at the CFPB just went private -- and started a company that will service the very market his old regulatory body now excludes. And, yes, they're even providing interest-only financing -- because that worked so well in 2008. You can't make this stuff up! Perianne breaks down the boom-bust cycle.

Secret Government & Dulce Base ~ Norio Hayakawa

Financial Armageddon -




Unorthodox ufologist Norio Hayakawa presented his views and research on UFOs, clandestine government activities, and the mysterious Dulce, New Mexico area, rumored to house an underground base. The state of New Mexico itself has been a hotbed of paranormal and UFO activity going back to 1947, he reported. Starting with the Roswell Incident, "the year 1947 was the beginning of a conditioning of belief systems...carefully orchestrated for future events," he commented.

He believes the Roswell crash was staged "by an unknown intelligence" in collusion with an elite part of the US government. UFOs are neither flying nor objects, but rather part of an intelligence that co-exists with us and has the ability to materialize, he explained.

Hayakawa was one of the first to bring Project Bluebeam to public attention in his 1995 documentary video Secrets of Dreamland, which suggested that a covert government would have sufficient technology to artificially simulate a UFO threat in order to bring about a forced global unity.

Regarding Dulce, he has not found direct physical evidence for an underground base there, yet, there have been many strange reports and sightings in the area which encompasses the Jicarilla Apache Reservation. "I think there's a reality on another level that we may not be able to see with our physical eyes" and a base could exist at Dulce in a non-physical realm, he shared.

Biography:

Norio Hayakawa calls himself an unorthodox ufologist and activist. He has spent almost 10 years specifically investigating Area 51 in Nevada. He says that there is much more to Area 51 than just superficial facts made public about this well-known base. In 1990 he also began to investigate the strange goings-on at Dulce, New Mexico. After more than 45 years of researching the UFO phenomenon, he says that a conditioning of belief systems have been orchestrated since 1947 by a manipulative force that is preparing mankind for a near future mysterious scenario. The ingrained and "altered" realities behind both Area 51 and Dulce will play a role in that scenario. In March of 2009 he organized the first-ever Underground Base conference in Dulce, New Mexico.

Wikipedia
The term shadow government (also cryptocracy) besides its party political meaning can also refer to what is sometimes called "the secret government" or "the invisible government," an idea based on the notion that real and actual political power does not reside with publicly elected representatives (for example the United States Congress (or the Cabinet of the United Kingdom) but with private individuals who are exercising power behind the scenes beyond the scrutiny of democratic institutions. According to this belief the official elected government is in reality subservient to the shadow government who are the true executive power.

Conspiracy-oriented literature postulates the existence of a secret government who are the true power behind the apparent government. Examples of such literature include works by Dan Smoot, William Guy Carr, Jim Marrs, Carroll Quigley, Gary Allen, Des Griffin, David Icke, Michael A. Hoffman II and John Coleman. Some of these authors believe members of the secret government may represent or be agents for groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, The Royal Institute for International Affairs, The Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, CIA and MI6 in co-operation with international banks and financial institutions such as the World Bank and the Bank for International Settlements. Also popularizing the idea was the hit US television show, The X-Files.

In his novel Coningsby, Benjamin Disraeli stated that "The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes". One definition of a shadow government is a "secret government within the government". This secret government is the "real" government that controls the legitimate and visible government's agenda. The network of people constituting this secret government are bound by some common agenda known only to each other and/or the people they represent. The agenda may be that of a secret society who have infiltrated the government (examples include Freemasons, Skull and Bones men or Illuminatists). In this case the agenda of the network is known only to those members who are bound by an oath of secrecy.

The shadow government is also considered by popular authors[who?] to be behind black budget projects and covert operations.

One of the most popular conspiracy theories about a shadow government is the notion of a "Zionist Occupation Government

SPY WARS, IS YOUR Iphone SAFE?? Police to track ALL calls and data usage

Financial Armageddon -

Travelers on their way to Britain might want to leave their phones at home after it was revealed they could be seized and browsed through by police. And amazingly it's totally legal, as Tesa Arcilla reports.


Thanks From Wall Street, gold price and US finance to conspiracies, latest global news, Alex Jones, Gerald Celente, David Icke Illuminati, a potential World War 3, Elite government cover - ups and much more

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