Since nuclear weapons made wars unfashionable nation-states have been forced to explore over avenues to display their national pride. High on the list of national pride PR ventures are hosting the Olympics and the World Cup. However hosting such an event does not improve national characer traits. It only reveals those traits.

This brief update is a follow up to my 3rd May 2014 Observations report "Vladimir Putin is a Thug."That report traced the timeline of the transformation of Russia under Putin from communism to fascism.

Here we survey the events in the Ukraine from the perspectives of behavioral economics, European and Ukrainian history, and the role of a collective mood of fear and hopelessness as the fountainhead of both acts of aggression and of major bear markets.

In a 16 January 2014 report I explored the law of adverse consequences, or blowback, in the context of the QE program of the Federal Reserve. Just a few weeks later we have been gifted with a perfect example of how QE creates blowback.

The sheer magnitude and unrelenting insistence of the Quantitative Easing program of the Federal Reserve strongly suggests that we should view it as yet another attempt to force the world to improve. History shows us that the more forceful the efforts to make the world a better place, the more dramatic and harmful the blowback. In this report we explore QE from the perspective of the law of adverse consequences.

The Federal Reserve Act passed on 23rd December of 1913. Comparing the stated goals of the Federal Reserve with the actual history it is not too difficult to spot 100 years of failure.