Missive #161

9. NASRUDDIN’S FLYING DONKEY

Nasruddin decided to teach his donkey how to fly.

“Look at the bird! Just do that!” Nasruddin would say. “It’s going to be harder because you don’t have wings, but I know you can do it.”

Finally, the day had arrived. Nasruddin took his donkey up to a high cliff. “Fly, donkey, fly!” he said as he pushed his donkey off the cliff.

The donkey sailed through the air, but only briefly. He hit the ground and died.

Nasruddin blamed himself. “I got so excited about teaching him how to fly that I forgot to teach him how to land.”

This Tale is from “Tiny Tales of Nasruddin” by Laura Gibbs. The book is licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. © 2019-2022 Laura Gibbs.

The second novel in an alternate history series where Teddy Roosevelt is president once more right before WWI breaks out, and on his side is the Black Chamber, a secret spy network watching America’s back.

I have not liked the first two books of this trilogy as well as the Nantucket series but will read the third book. Will then move on to some of the authors other series which I think are all alternate history which I enjoy. After foiling a German plot to devastate America’s coastal cities from Boston to Galveston, crack Black Chamber agent Luz O’Malley and budding technical genius Ciara Whelan go to California to recuperate. But their well-deserved rest is cut short by the discovery of a diabolical new weapon that could give the German Imperial Navy command of the North Sea.

Luz and Ciara must go deep undercover and travel across a world at war, and live under false identities in Berlin itself to ferret out the project’s secrets. Close on their trail is the dangerous German agent codenamed Imperial Sword, who is determined to get his revenge, and a band of assault-rifle equipped stormtroopers, led by the murderously efficient killer Ernst Röhm. From knife-and-pistol duels on airships to the horrors of the poison-gas factories to harrowing marine battles in the North Sea, the fight continues—with a world as the prize. — Book promo @ goodreads.com

As you know, the last time when we closed we were scheduled to do our fourth and final show on the subject of dedollarization. However, as you know, the best laid plans can be thrown awry by, as Harold MacMillan said, “Events, my dear boy, events.” Since we published the fifth show we’ve had what looks like the biggest financial crisis since 2008 and 2020 on our hands, with the usual flurries of bailouts and emergency actions, which in other words amounts simply to a socialism for the rich.…
So we’re going to talk about how this crisis is no isolated crisis but really another chapter in the long unraveling of the US financial system — an unraveling in which the really public character of banking — that is to say, the fact that banking is always meant to be a public utility becomes manifest under the pretense that it can be maintained as a private system. — The Treasury Privatized by Michael Hudson